#might as well get some shit done on here
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foli-vora · 5 months ago
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✨ your somewhat mentally unstable and flaming hot dumpster fire mess of a writer will be returning very soon ✨
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carnivalcarriondiscarded · 1 year ago
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rough day...
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cluescorner · 6 months ago
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I cannot imagine being a Damian stan right now. You've got both Zdarsky's bullshit (where he clearly doesn't give a shit about your boy) and The Boy Wonder (where Juni Ba clearly gives so many shits about your boy) coming out on the same day. The whiplash must be insane. I hope y'all get some nice warm soup for your efforts jfc
#damian wayne#damian al ghul#damian al ghul wayne#batman#batfamily#for all of the issues that come with having Steph as your fave having too much wild shit happening at once is never one of them#btw I quite like The Boy Wonder Issue 1. wow shocker an artist and writer who I have liked everything they've ever done#has once again written something that I am enjoying with art that makes me want to be part of its world.#it's almost like Juni Ba is really freaking talented or something#like I have some problems with it but it seems like many of those are part of the point. Damian is learning that his siblings are more#three-dimensional than he realized and that is part of this 'coming of age' story merged with fairytale#so I can't be mad at the oversimplistic defining of Dick and Jason and Tim until the conclusion of the series. that might be the point.#I hope that the series will address Steph as a Robin but if not then frankly it's not an issue unique to this series.#I'll be annoyed and disappointed but ultimately roll with it like I am with Babsgirl being here. There's too much good stuff here to get#hung up on shit that seems to be almost an editorial mandate at this point. at least that's where I'm at.#I am also very sorry that Chip Zdarsky is massacring your boy. he has 'X (Tim for him) is the best Robin so everyone else must suck' diseas#where a writer really likes one specific Robin and in trying to uplift them demeans all of the other Robins. instead of like...just writing#for that one character only or alternatively not demeaning the other characters in order to make his blorbo look good#it's wild because I actually think his writing for Tim is pretty solid. but he's not writing a Tim series. he's writing a Batman series.#and if you are going to write a Batman series and include other Batfamily members you need to actually write them well.#instead of assigning them like 2 personality traits while Tim gets to be a whole character#I accept that behavior in fanfic where I have lesser standards because it's fucking free. not a comic run that wants me to pay#tens of dollars in order to understand what the fuck is going on. he's been going for a while now it's gotta be a lot of money.#I can buy Steelworks with that money. I can see John Henry and Natasha Irons in a trade. Fuck you Chip.#it's why it takes such a special person to write a good ensemble story/a good Batfamily story. you have to be good at writing a LOT#of different characters. which I don't think most people are. I sure as hell am not. I can write maybe 3 at a time confidently well.#and you also have to give all of them at least SOME love or else people will be upset that you aren't focusing on their fave#and also the writing as a whole will suffer. Chip Zdarsky is a pretty good Tim writer. I'd maybe read a Tim solo written by him.#I would not read a story focusing on multiple characters that I like written by Chip Zdarsky. because every character who isn't Tim#is at least a bit weak/inconsistent/out of character INCLUDING FUCKING BATMAN. THE NO. 1 GUY MOST ARE HERE FOR
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rainbowtvz · 6 months ago
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*grits teeth*
i do not want to discourse here or anywhere anymore but it does kind of affect me as a transmasc bi person when i see shit that indirectly misgenders me and implies that bisexuality is an icky no good word and identity and you have to be bi and gay and bi and lesbian and bi and straight at the same time or support them or you're an evil stinky stinky terf like... hello where am, i
#it makes me feel othered by an otherwise inclusive community bc how dare i think that men aren't involved in lesbianism#or how dare i think that bisexuality is a whole and valid sexuality#or how dare i think that any and all nonbinary genders are included in every single sexuality by default#or that trans women are women so no fuckin g duh theyre included in lesbianism and if your knee jerk reaction to seeing:#men cannot be lesbians is to think of trans women then you are the transphobe here#or how i dare think that trans man and transmasc aren't the exact same thing#that genderqueerdyke person is also a transadrophobia geek and theyre buddies with genderkoolaid#which like. do i HAVE to say it?#IF U IGNORE THE TRANSMISOGYNY (WHICH U SHOUDLNT) THEYRE ALSO A ZIONIST HELLOW?? WHATS NOT CLICKING WHATS NOT CLICKING#OK IM KINDA MAD ABT THAT LIKE... SORRY BUT HOW ABOUT WE DONT PLATFORM IDIOTS NO MATTER HOW GOOD THEIR RHETORIC MIGHT SOUND#BC U WANT TO BE TOTALLY INCLUSIVE AND NOT GATEKEEPY#ive BEEN around the fucking block ive BEEN on tumblr when the resident terfs here coined bi lesbian#if you scrolled back far enough in certain keywords you wouldve seen that shit in the early 2010s being discussed in their circles#to mean lesbians who are attracted to trans women#you cannot reclaim that or recoin it#yes ive done the research too#i looked at every single piece of evidence of that label existing in the past 50~ years#its just bisexual women back when lesbian spaces also included them#plus like may i also fucking ssay that bisexual also used to mean being of two sexes (transsexual/gender and/or intersex?)#this close to fully believing that the pushback against bisexual being it's own whole and valid sexuality is some kind of psy op#i sound schizophrenic well Maybe I Am#i feel like im going to end up deleting this post bc i dont want to argue with people who disagree with me because there is no getting#through to any of you#tbd.
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ereborne · 9 months ago
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What is a Monday? A miserable little pile of obligations.
semester turnover restructure
generate/send out error reporting
figure out how to separate out unique counts
create polite reply to Massive Dick Move email
finish the bad book >:(
bò kho (not an obligation. dinner)
laundry
lizard bath
#yapping tag#I spent my weekend trying to sleep and now all my chores are due today and I wanna complain. grump grump grump whine.#the semester turnover restructure actually is a pet project so that part I like! I wish I could take my time with it though#the error reporting is. well it's easy to generate (it's actually running now) and it's tedious but uncomplicated to send out#but then I'm going to spend the rest of the day getting passive-aggressive responses from everybody#in a just world my coworkers would respond to careful itemized lists of all their fuckups with 'thank you Alexis you're so helpful#we really appreciate you flagging our mistakes two weeks before the system final-saves them forever into stone. have a cookie!'#but alas#if I'd been any less stressed and frantic when I first established the error reporting I'd have set up a separate address to send them from#write up some template emails and let the reporting all come out of the mythical 'automatic system thing'#--every 'automatic system thing' in our college is me or IT on my behalf. even the people who hired me for this don't seem to realize#if only I'd known from the beginning that nobody would ever connect me and my systems! I'd be exploiting the shit out of it--#the unique counts is going to be a headache. no idea how I'm going to structure the coding for it. might be fun to invent? we'll see#the Massive Dick Move email response also will be an invention. 'hello Mr Massive Dick I am karma here to smite you' but polite#the bad book >:( I don't want to read any more of but the deal I made with my friend is he sends me free books and I report back#we did not discuss a special 'get out of book free' card for when the main character is a godawful shit sibling. (should've done though)#beef stew is good! mostly it's on the list so I don't forget to set the timers#laundry and lizard bath can wait until tomorrow if they must but they shouldn't wait any longer than that. lizard and I will get stinky
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trying to decipher if the overwhelming dread & Thoughts are cause of the state of the world or cause i need a shower.
vent post in the tags. idk. do whatever 👍
#sorry bros im about to ventpost in these mf tags 👍#im so fucking tired man. im already suicidal to begin with but the Everything happening is making it Worse. Yippe Yahoo Hooray.#therapy in a week though so ive got that at least.#this is the worst time of year for shit to go south.but Uh Oh saying that makes me feel like a selfish fuckass because other people -#- have it worse. like. god fucking damn. i get Extra suicidal around september -> march range sure. but other people are literally suffering#like as we fucking speak. and ive done fuckall to help cause i dont know HOW to help. but thats not a fucking excuse#im just being comfortable in my lazy ass depression spiral cause im a selfish fucking prick. “i cant spare the energy to vett things”#other people are fucking dying and im over here like “noo im too tiwed :( i cant do anyfing so im not gona do anyfing cuz im wazy and tiwed”#what the fuck is wrong with me lmao. knowing me im not gona change shit anyway despite fucking complaining about it cause im just. fucking#Like That.#idk. i was reblogging some of those “hold in there dont kill yourselves” posts cause like. yk. suicide bad or fucking whatever. but someone#on this site said something along the lines of “ok but how many people reblogging/posting these told jews to kill themselves” and like.#i dont know. i dont fucking know dude. so i guess im not reblogging Those anymore.#theres bigger issues out there and here i am focusing on some queer people who might kill themselves. idk. i should just join them yk#cause i never fucking focus on the bigger shit cause “i dont know how” and “i dont want to make things worse so i just wont do anything” so#im not doing fuckall other than just being part of the fucking problem here.#i should probably just delete social media for a while and see from there.#or just fucking drink about it thats the other option. its worked for me before (lie) so i may as well do it again am i right#im sorry i never like. boost gofundmes or fundraisers and shit i just.#i dont have a fucking excuse. im just a lazy fucking bastard in my own stupid fucking comfort circle.#“oh no seeing that people are dying makes me uncomforyable :(” ok well people are fucking dying you self absorbed douchebag. why cant you#get off your stupid fucking ass and do something. get a job so you can fucking help people or *something#its not like you have to pay rent and shit.#<- all about myself. cause yk. self centered douchbag. hooray.#i dont pay rent and i dont have to pay for my own food. i still live with my parents. im fucking useless to society so i may as well get a#job and send the money i dont fucking need to somrone who DOES need it. but here i am.#in.my stupid fucking bed til noon cause “the world is scary and jobs are hard :(”#its fucking retail. retail isnt as fucking hard as like. construction and shit but here i am anyway “unable” to do shit.#i fucking could if i just fucking ballsed up and put up with shit. but no. here i fucking am going “nooo i should just kill myself instead”#vent post
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iceeericeee · 1 year ago
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I wonder how many tags i can add on to this
#there must be SOME kind of a limit otherwise posts would get suuuuuuper duper long like is it just 30?#idk but i'm going to find out by simply maxxing out the character limit for each tag and finding out the limit of tags for each post lololo#this is gonna be great. i just have to remember to type without ever using the comma. it shouldn't be too hard right? fuck i almost typed#the comma i'm already bad at this smh my head. also if your still here i commend you. you have a better attention span than i do.#i'm already starting to get bored holy shit this is not happening. i gotta power through this. FOR SCIENCEEEEEEEEEE. or somethinggggggggggg#but fr idk what else to say. maybe just saying that i don't know what to say will be good enough? but does that even count?#I don't even know anymore. ffffffffuck. this is gonna be a while huh? also holy shit if you're still here omg u deserve like. a prize or#something because u definitely didn't have to stay and read all of this bull shit. lololol i typed out bs but decided to just spell the who#thing out just to make it go by faster. i'm so lazy. this is only the nineth tag HOW will i make it to 30. i am sobbing the adhd is adhding#very hard rn. are you still here? bruh this is insane. i have somehow managed to keep ur attention this long and it's just me spouting#absolute balderdash. wait do you know what balderdash even means? i don't care if you do already i'm gonna tell you anyway. balderdash is#basically just another word for nonsense. boom. you learned something new today. balderdash equals nonsense equals this damn post.#why did i decide to do this in the first place. it was a dumb idea. i don't know if i can even keep going. this is only the *counts tags*#it's the 14th tag. we've got a long way to go boys. men. soldiers. comrads. friends. besties peeps. marshmallows.#where was i going with this? oh yeah. trying to max out the limit for tags. dang i almost typed a comma there. i haven't done that since#i think the third or fourth tag. dang that feels like such a long time ago. not for you guys probably. it feels longer because i have to li#type it all out and stuff. so it's definitely gonna feel longer for me. are you still here? good lord don't you have better things to#be doing than reading all of this? we're already on tag number 18. it feels like i should be on the thirtyeth by now. or however it's spell#'toast' you might be wondering 'why are you typing out the names of the numbers instead of say '9' or '5'?' well you see. young one.#this is a strategy i'm using to make each tag slightly longer. even if i don't know how to spell it. it'll make it just a little bit longer#anyway. i got off topic. not that there was ever a topic to begin with. unless it's about making this as long as i can.#which i am apparently good at doing. i guess. are you STILL here? do you seriously have nothing to do? i guess i'm flattered you stayed thi#whole time. instead of reading something else you stayed here. with me. listening to me talk. on the twenty-third tag. oh yeah its tag 23#except now it's tag twenty-four. how crazy is that. this little talk is almost over. only 6 tags away if memory serves right. this's strang#i kind of don't want this to end. but i know it should. after all there is a limit. but all things must come to and end at some point i gue#i'm running out of things to say. it's probably a good thing it's almost over. hahahahah............... but i don't want to go. i don't wan#to leave this post. i've worked so hard on it. and for what. just for it to end. are you still here? yes? good. i'd hate to end this alone.#thank you for indulging me and my craziness. the end is only 2 tags away now. you can go ahead and leave. i'll be okay on my own. really...#...you're still here? i- i don't know what to say. i suppose a toast is in order. perhaps. for this journey. this stupid dumb post i though#would be fun. i'll make it short. it's the last tag after all. this was fun. but i will never do it again. so long as a i live. i'll miss y
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medicinemane · 7 months ago
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#I get tired of people trying to explain what lens I should view the world through; what way I could think that would make everything better#forgive me but I don't care; I do what I do and I do what I can and you don't see the work I do under the hood#I don't want advice on self validation or whatever; I want... I want someone to hold a mirror up so I can actually see myself#by which I mean I want input on how I'm doing; if it's good enough; if it's worth anything; if anything I make is good#everyone things I'm nice; everyone has always thought I'm nice#but given nice leaves me profoundly isolated I don't think I care#not to mention in my opinion what nice in this instance means is that I'm capable of listening#it's mostly that I have manners rather than some quality about me#I'm well behaved and polite and can listen; and that's perceived as nice or even sweet#and it's not like I'm offended by people seeing me that way; but maybe you can get why... I can't do anything with that information#but if I'm doing enough... if I provide any value to the world... I might have heard that less times in my life than years I've lived#that's where I'm totally blind#people don't tend to offer any input; and also people don't tend to let me know what they're thinking#and I in fact am not a mind reader; I can often accurately infer things; but no of that means a thing till it's confirmed#and... well... hopefully no one reads the stupid shit I say and especially not the tags so this is safe and hidden#but truthfully people just like to hear that stuff they're doing is wanted and matters#and I do not#I don't know... gotta go do more cleaning cause I need to#and I have no idea if... I've got a reason for fighting so hard to clean; but I get very little input so... I expect... well...#and thankfully I don't think they read my tags so I can say this#but I really expect they won't take me up on my offer to come out here and get away from their parents; so there will be no pay off#not that I blame them in the slightest... it's just the only possible pay off for this cleaning would be helping someone I like out#and a scrap of company#but then again... in many ways anyone coming out to live with me is the worst thing they could probably do#sorry... I have a rather bleak outlook on many things surrounding myself purely cause of what I infer from the past#there is never pay off; only more shit I need to get done#I will never be loved; I will never be wanted; I will always just kinda be an afterthought that's occasionally worth venting to#no one will ever be particularly interested in anything I'm interested while I'll chase their interests or at least try to#certainly let them talk about them when they want#...though I take that over my normal total isolation... better to at least be permitted to follow in someone's shadow than have nothing
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ofcowardiceandkings · 2 months ago
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the sinus headaches are already not great but Extra Shit has been added to the pile and im just sat on that right now trying to figure out what the fuck to do
#ive uh not processed it yet and it also wont really shake out for a little while now i guess but .. yeah#long story short my friends who ive been A Trio with since we were 11 might be done with each other#theres a LOT of additional factors but theyre splitting a house share so one can go live with a boyfriend#and in the process it sounds like theyve made a lot of selfish choices for some unknown reason#ngl theyve pissed me off a little bit for being so weird and reclusive since theyve had the boyfriend as well but only with us#its ... yeah i dont know what alls happened because i dont live with them#but i just cant fathom how they got to this point quibbling over the contents of their shared house of 5 years#over a boyfriend whos been around for 2 or 3 years ..... to ruin a friendship of 18 years ????#again i dont know the whole story but i trust what the friend whos still good at talking to us to not lie about them being screwed around#i just dont get it at all how to reconcile what ive been told with who ive known over half my life#theyve felt off .. or wrong for a while now tbh ... i miss them#i havent seen the other one since before may ...#the thought that mightve been the last time we all hang out is kind of killling me inside lol#and it was also pretty weird and stilted again because it was very boyfriend-centric#this always happens to me lol ive lost count of all my school friend groups who end up basically fighting over me after they fall out#its a MAJOR trauma point for me and i thought we kind of grew past that but i guess i was wrong#ive been catching myself with a weepy eye or a single sob all day#i dont know what to do i wanna know what the fuck happened and what was worth doing this for#i wanna confront everyone and ask for a fucking explanation as to why my single life solid bedrock is falling apart#i mostly wanna dig a hole and die in it ... im fine im safe but im bothered by like ...#what a total fool ill look like if i just melt down at work ... i might find the mental health first aiders list and write an email lol#im like not okay cksbdkssj fucking hell#i have some hope but its ... its hard out here#i need to go to bed fuck#id dont neeeeed thiiiiisss im gonna choke on life agaaaiiinnn#the battle to keep my shit together enough to at least not self-sabotage ??? its testing my patience#rory's ramblings
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hella1975 · 1 year ago
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this isn't meant to like. make you give your opinion on Discourse™️ or anything I just wanted to ask, but I keep seeing people upset about taylor dating mr. 1975 and I can't figure out if it's bc he's a terrible person or just a greasy alcoholic 😭😭😭 do you know what's up with that guy??? like on one hand I like not knowing things about celebs and I should keep it that way. but also
i, unfortunately, do know what's up with that guy and it's that he's said something problematic about every faction of society at least once. for me i have some weird, reluctant fondness for him because he is just a train wreck and he's such a twat all the time that at least it's nondiscriminating, and i also like that when he sings about mental illness it's bc he's actually BEEN THERE and been publicly a mess bc of it and been addicted to drugs and acted like a dick, and he ACKNOWLEDGES THAT, but also at no point am i gonna jump on the 'he's an amazing person' parade bc generally he is just a sleazy idiot. it is weird watching people suddenly dragging up every single thing he's ever said to be like 'look! this is why he's bad for our tay tay!' when the running joke with matty healy is that he's just a prick. like u dont need to expose his moral fibre. u can just say he's a prick. and also as funny as the jokes are she's still a grown woman who's been around the block a few times when it comes to dating. i think she will be okay maybe
#idk that's just what i think though. like he's been cancelled more times than he has songs and yet a lot of us are still here#and he acknowledges it like there's a running gag at his live shows where he goes to say a very explosive sentence and then he gets cut off#by the band with a random song it's so funny. like he'll go 'i just think that immigrants- *LOUD GUITAR*' & i think that's a part of it too#is that a lot of people don't get that sometimes he's being ironic? he takes it too far and these days he's annoying#but idk ive seen certain instances where im like. that went over so many people's heads#idk i just dont think he's Evil and Malicious i think he's just a prick. like people can just be pricks even if they're super famous. wild#he's so fucking pretentious but he got famous for being REAL and his music has helped a lot of people because of how real it was#like i made a post a while ago about his song 'give yourself a try' and how the concept of it is literally#'life is a little bit shit to be quite honest with you and you WILL get fucked over by it and fuck yourself over but you're here anyway#so you might as well give it a go' like???? so many mental health ballads are like 'the world is So Beautiful and So Are You'#but matty healy ALWAYS has gone actually it isnt and you arent. whatever though#and i just really like that#ask#also big disclaimer that i dont have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the dumb shit matty healy has said ive just been listening#to the band for a while and have picked shit up along the way. if it turns out he's done some actually reprehensible shit that ive missed#then that's literally bc i do not actively run in 1975 circles and do not intend to ever start <3 so dont yell at me LMAO
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my5hiningstars · 5 months ago
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#i know i won't shut up abt 5sos but the real question is will i ever go to a better gig than darren criss in [redacted] 2023#like i didn't even know half his songs before i went and i still had the best time i've ever had at a gig#literally the energy in that room was insane#and like... better than any gig i've ever been to in melbourne like#smth about being in a smaller place that artists don't often come to Especially not internation acts#everyone was so like... polite?#like they were doing concert so well they weren't being assholes and yelling when it wasn't their turn :')#which is so annoying i hate when a crowd is so roudy that it feels like a classroom and the teacher is waiting for everyone to shut up#like we can still have a good time if u respect the fact that some of us are spending hundreds even just Getting here#idk maybe i'm a music snob i just think there's something so magical in a quiet room full of people#like when something really beautiful has happened you can sit in it for a second#the pressure to cheer like... the idea that a moment of silence will somehow offend the artist who created the moment#i tried to find another concert on the tour where the crowd was as in the moment as we were for the line#'i believe there is music in the silence' and then he like#puts the guitar down and heads to the piano to do the rest#but it was so gorgeously quiet it was breathtaking i cried#it might have helped that he played the first half entirely accoustically no mic no amps#bc the venue was small enough and also designed to amplify naturally#but we all had to be so quiet to make sure everyone heard it so it just#the music hung in the air so magically y'all art is so good i'm still crying nothing will ever beat that concert i'm still chasing that hig#luke was nearly that magical but tbh..... the audience kinda ruined it for me at times :/#also he was nervous and kept cutting off the moment by saying 'thank you' like we get it ur a humble king but like#you have to let a song like place in me Breathe when it's done#you have to give the crowd a chance to go holy fucking shit what the fuck and THEN start screaming and Then thank them#but i'm truly such a snob it's the worst#honestly thinking abt how those lads are always improving tho he'll get there#by the time he's darren criss' age he'll be killing it even more they all will
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iamfuckingsorry · 1 month ago
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god this is when me avoiding all the fucking admin shit bites me in the ass.
trying to finally sort out all this fucking bullshit with my home country (where i havent lived since before i turned 18 and have no intentions of ever permanently returning to), and of course they're stuck in the 80s or something so everything needs to be signed, stamped, officially translated, approved by three different agencies etc etc etc. and of course i live in an extremely digitalized country now so everything has digital signatures (not accepted by my home country) and i can't even /get/ everything
#herr's personal tag#ugh#fuck this shit. seriously.#i possibly owe them like tens of thousands of dollars in health insurance payments#even tho i havent lived there for years and ive been covered in my current country of residence#and it's illegal to be insured in 2 EU countries at once#and also i counted as a full-time student until about a year ago and full-time students are exempt from having to pay for insurance#and of course my mother was like#“yeah i got it all sorted”#well#turns out im so fucking stupid i cant even believe it. because of course it's fucking not#and like i know she's full of shit sometimes and i've heard her say stuff related to this that i know was incorrect#i so should have known better. but here we are#so now i gotta#1. fucking finally deregister from both the country and the insurance company so this doesn't keep getting worse#(at least this should be doable tho there might be a fine included for not doing it earlier)#2. get a bunch of documents from my high school and uni#and get those approved as equivalent to full-time studies of the appropriate level#which is gonna be fun because not all of these even exist over here and also my degree was an integrated masters#so there's no clear undergrad/grad division#3. try to retroactively apply to have my insurance payments from all these years forgiven#also 4. get proof that i've been insured over here for the past 10 years and shouldn't owe any insurance payments anyway#because being insured in two countries is impossible under EU law#and also try and get the payments forgiven that way#ughhhhhhhhh#and there's no guarantee they'll accept any of this as i'm doing it all retroactively#and i don't know what my mom has/hasn't done in relation to this as she's definitely faked some power of attorneys etc in the past#and she will 100% lie about this#srsly fuck all this shit. i'm also moving to yet another country in 2 weeks. it's gonna be sooo much fun
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opens-up-4-nobody · 1 year ago
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#ay ay ay. i dont wanna do my job so bad. it makes me so unhappy also i fucked up a thing by letting someone take part of a culture when i#shouldnt have. it happened so many months ago that i fucking forgot abt it and then the person emailed me abt when we received the stain and#i thought it was someone from another project so i cc'd my boss who was like. wait. what the fuck is this? and now its like oops sorry but#like wtf am i supposed to do abt it now? she askrd me to take some when i was rushing out of someone else's lab and i was like what? sure.#whatever i dont give a fuck i feel like im dying every second i stand in this room. i didnt even think to ask to share it which is what i#should have done. oops. cant do anything abt it now other than feel abt abt causing drama between labs. ugh.#i just wanna cut all ties with my old work. theres no joy there. only pain and anger. which makes it hard to work with it but the sooner i#do. the sooner i dont have to fucking deal with it anymore. ugh. also i really need to find a therapist but my insurance changes in like 18#days so i might as well wait for the semester to start. ugh. like i can feel the pull of my bad habits trying to drag me down and i dont kno#how to stop them. like its weird. i noticed while my parents were here. they can just do things and enjoy stuff. and everytime i do#something i feel like im holding my breath the entrie time waiting for it to be over and for what? its not like i had other stuff to do#i just needed to kno when things were gonna end and i dont deal well with flexible situations. which makes it hard to do things. so its#like do i succumb to my control freak lil bubble of not doing anything and being miserable or do things outside my comfort zone and be#miserable? one of those things is way easier. plus i dont even kno anyone here so its like wtf do i do?#try to make friends with my sometimes roommate maybe. i just need to corner her and be like hey i need to establish a dialog with u so i can#tell u that if i seem like a weird hermit im not trying to b standoffish i just dont kno how to do human interaction well. can we b friends?#id like to b friends but if i dont talk now then ill get stuck not talking ever. which is whats happened with past roommates... god my 1st#roommate must have thought i was so fucking weird. ugh. point is. these bad habits must stop. and i really need to get work done so i can#never think abt that shit ever again. at least now that ive moved i can run up the side of a mountain when im frustrated#unrelated
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dullahandyke · 1 year ago
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-_-
#11 days to the leaving and only now am i drawing up what all i need to study#chronologically it makes sense to leave latin n music to the last bcos i have like a whole week after history to study for just them#and before that all of my exams are basically in the same week with allowance for the weekend#so i should focus on eng n maths particularly#n then bio and irish and history#but like. my history latin n music teachers r the only ones assigning work. for the exams i have the most time for. lol#like i can ignore the history n music teachers for the most part but like my classes w my latin teacher r one on one i CANNOT brush that of#so im here studying me fucking virgil ig instead of figuring out what im doing w the comparative#sigh. ok priorities ill make up that list of shit i gotta do for each subject#gotta suss out which movie im watching for eng and what poems n stories im studying for irish n what modules im doing for history! lol!#can u tell ive not been paying attention for like. 4 months.#remember kids: cramming is a cool and fun thing to do <- is in a pit#when the leaving cert ends i am going into my room never to be seen again for like a week.#and im getting me mam to buy me something for it. maybe a binder if i come out to her by then#oh well thats future talk. for now. figure out what to study. as ive already said twice#im playinh kh bgm to indulge in the hyperfocus while still getting study done n its kinda working#but mostly i just wanna play kh again...#i havent wrapped up the hades cup n i wanna restart com bcos i think i might know how it works better now#watched a one card deck challenge for recom and its the remake so some shits different but like. i get it now maybe#if nothing else gba com looks rlly rlly cute. the pixel art <£
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oceaneyesinla · 10 days ago
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oops i did it again i ran out of tags pls read those then read this! (this might end up longer than the last one i apologise in advance)💖
the DING of the BELL reminds her of him 🥺 i love them 🥺
'you'd be lying if you said you haven't enjoyed seeing the world in technicolour again' BANGER after BANGER after BANGER line! i know i said it before but you're getting her feelings across SO WELL
yes girl go treat yourself you deserve it
there is something special about existing in a city, even when you know it's a little rough around the edges (okay my city is NOT THIS BAD but it has a bit of a reputation ya know but i love it anyway)
i love the way you write about the city and how they feel about it - she knows its dangerous and it's shit but there's some kind of deep seated attachment nevertheless, even if it's to nothing more than the memories of what was
MITSURI MY SWEET ANGEL BABY GIRL
her voice is scratchy from lack of use 🥺 oh sweet girl
she does still have a sense of humour about the situation though, good for you girlie
oh i know who this BITCH IS STAY AWAY FROM HER BITCH BOY
run girl run he's a bitch and he sucks
omg did i SAY you could touch her bitch boy?!?!??! girl you are right to run and evade and dodge he is bad news
not wanting to cut ties completely with her parents just so SOMEONE confirms she's alive 😭
oh this girl is going THROUGH it rn
yes sanemi please acknowledge that your brother figured this out before you, he's a good boy and not a dummy like u
'given your responses to his bullshit in the past, assault and battery are very real possibilities' I LOVE THEM honestly boy she deserves to hit you with a book just a little .... gently .... as a treat
oh sanemi she won't leave you any more than you could leave her
OH NO sanemi bby he assumes the worst but her phone is just in her couch bc of him
HE WOULD TEAR THE CITY APART FOR HER!!!!! oh i feel awful for him bc he's so scared for her but also protective devoted sanemi do be looking good 👀
HIS YOU?!?!??!?! screaming, actually screaming i've read this twice now and this line IS STILL GETTING ME
he hasn't seen her in over a week (since he did a fuck and run!!!) and this is how he greets her
also i love that she's just following him around smacking him while he checks the place out they're both such idiots i adore them
this whole mini argument is so funny she just calls him a stupid 😂 the drama of them honestly
he nearly breaks down her door, takes her keys and LEAVES boy you are a chaotic mess you didn't even EXPLAIN anything indignant spluttering is the LEAST you deserve
he went to buy snacks and period stuff for her 🥺 oh he is down so bad at this point she could ask him to bark and he would 100% he would be sassy about it but he would do it
he accurately predicted shit being thrown at him 😂 he knows her so well - the visual image of this scene is SO FUNNY
i said it before and i'll say it again - being a shit is one of his love languages!
i adore this scene so much - it fits their dynamic SO MUCH - there's so many feelings at play but underneath it all they just want each other - it's absolutely MASTERFUL
the KEY oh he loves her so much THEY LOVE EACH OTHER SO MUCH
he sees her for everything she is and LOVES HER ANYWAY HE CAME BACK
closing his hand around the key - 'i'm yours' !!!!!!! 😭
'it was inevitable' YES THEY ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER
and of course they're right back to sassing each other
'you can't help but nuzzle into his palm' i will cry i stg 😭
cocky confident sanemi my beloved 🫶🏻
i would also be worrying about the oven, what if the pizza burns????
he was willing to let the oven set itself on fire but not willing to let her go hungry ?????? 🥺 HE LOVES HER
the CUDDLING, the AFFECTION .... YOUR sanemi !!!!!!
'you're his woman now, after all; that means it's on him to take care of business' OH MY GOD I THINK I JUST PASSED OUT hdjowodfjejjd
oh fuck the hand over the mouth, the confidence !!!!!!!
uM making her hold her shirt between her teeth?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?
he's SO FOCUSED on making sure she's comfortable 🥺
'you're drawing him in like a magnet, your body his North Star' something something magnetic north, something something COMPASS oh god the symbolism i'm in LOVE
'it's you. it has always been you' my HEART
'you ain't gotta do a thing but take it' 😳 i would say something but it is not appropriate for polite company AT ALL just know i will be thinking about this for WEEKS
the praise THE PRAISE the possessiveness i might pass out
i adore that he blurts out everything when he's balls deep does her 😺 produce truth serum or does his brain just short out ???
he's so GENTLE with her like yeah he's fucking her hard and fast but he's so focused on her and her pleasure and her comfort truly she is the centre of his universe they've always been orbiting each other they were destined to crash together like this
the WAY he talks her through it
the brand - he likes her touching it because he can pretend just for a moment that he can escape, that the only brand he has is the one she's leaving with her touch - that the only brand that matters is the one she's left on his heart
their banter is everything to me (and also sanemi being a freaky lil horndog)
'under the beast's mask lies the endless beauty that makes up Sanemi Shinazugawa' this line is beautiful and this metaphor is incredible and *incoherent squeaking*
their intimacy is everything - their love is so earnest and genuine, they're just two people and they've got so many hang ups and issues and traumas and problems but they love each other BECAUSE of all that
oh her not knowing if anyone would notice if she disappeared i have some experience with this and you have got it across SO WELL you have absolutely nailed it in every imaginable way
'home is wherever you are' i have arbitrarily decided that Where I Want To Be is compass sanemi's song in my head
oh boy here it is! i'm pretty sure this is longer than the last one and about as coherent (i.e not at all)
this chapter was INCREDIBLE and i am so excited to see what comes next for them! this world you're building is so rich and intriguing and i am so proud and happy and grateful that i get to call someone so talented my friend!
COMPASS / CHAPTER 3
bad boy! Sanemi x Reader ✦ gang AU
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A/N: eat up, loves. Enjoy the filth and domestic bliss of this chapter now, because we’re right back to the seedy violence of the Corps in Chapter 4.
CW: explicit sexual content • MDNI • period sex • grinding • lots of tit play • brief cervix fucking • creampie • Sanemi is a certified yapper in bed • light angst • humor • two idiots helplessly in love • mentions of a gun • mentions of gang violence • bookshop AU • gang AU
MASTERLIST HERE
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COMPASS – CHAPTER 3 
It’s hard to notice the way time stops when you aren’t paying attention to it; when you have no reason to bother. 
Life hasn’t always been this way – lonely. In fact, your upbringing had been on the cushier side of comfortable, and you’d thought you’d been surrounded by love, from both family and friends alike. High school hadn’t been any different, You’d had a social circle, you’d been involved in extracurriculars, and you had a good relationship with your parents and siblings. 
Or, so you’d believed. Because then you graduated and everyone moved on while you were left  behind. 
That was when time stopped. 
Not literally, of course. Birthdays came and went, as did Christmas. Your hair changed, and so did your living arrangements. Six weeks after you graduated, you moved out of your parents’ place into your current apartment, and enrolled in the local university. Your siblings continued growing up and apart, each making their way through school and setting out on their own. At the time, it felt natural. They each had their own lives, as you did, so you hadn’t paid it much mind. 
That’s the tricky thing about it; it wasn’t something that happened all at once. It was slow, a trickle of sand in an hourglass you didn’t know had been turned. Only when the last grain fell did you realize the clock had been running at all, and by that point, it was too late. 
It started as an exodus of sorts from the city, right after graduation. Leaving home behind in search of greener pasteurs elsewhere wasn’t uncommon, so it hadn’t seemed all that surprising that communications with those you’d once called your friends, dwindled. But then, those who left never came back, even to visit, and the few who did never lingered for long. 
Had there been signs that the cancer was spreading? It’s hard to remember. Violence and crime has always been a party of life in the City, just as it is in any metropolitan area. The adults in your life always claimed such things were contained, an epidemic confined to the Silo and its poverty. As though the destitution of the neighborhood was somehow justified, a punishment befitting of those who had the misfortune of being born on the wrong side of a junkyard. 
Growing up, you’d eavesdropped on more than your fair share of adult conversations. At least, enough so to know that income lines did not curb misdeeds; it only changed them, gave them modifiers like white collar and organized, as though somehow that softened the brutal reality. As though the covert whispers behind the hands of adults at school functions or neighborhood gatherings whenever a family came into a sudden abundance of wealth or someone sported an injury they couldn’t explain, changed anything at all. 
If the crime in the Silo was the pot, then the crime bubbling under the sruface of neat shrubs and cobbled streets in your area of town had been the kettle. And the Corps had its hand in both. 
In hindsight, you often find yourself wondering whether your former friends had simply been lucky to get out before the empire began to crumble, or whether they’d simply seen writing on a wall you hadn’t known to read. Because once the turf wars between rival gangs began to escalate and spill over from their confinement in the Silo, those visits from friends fizzled out all together, and you never heard another word. Not from any of them. 
Your family, apparently, also had sensed whatever metamorphosis lingered on the City’s horizon, even if they hadn’t bothered to warn you, too. Once your youngest sister set off for university in a distant town – the very one who’d brought Sanemi to your family’s stoop that day, years ago – your parents swiftly packed up the townhouse you’d grown up in and put it on the market. 
They only told you they were moving after the place sold. 
They didn’t offer to take you with them, and you didn’t bother to ask. You didn’t even have their mailing address until that Christmas, when a festive little card arrived in the mail, bearing only Season’s Greetings from Mom and Dad.
Sure, maybe you’d realized a hair too late that you were only a transient presence in the lives of those you’d once considered friends, but the relegation to the background of your own family’s portrait had stung. Not important enough to be remembered, but too significant to forget. 
You tried, for a while, but it hurt even more that they never bothered to check in. After the second birthday without so much as a card or a phonecall, you stopped altogether. 
Alone, with nothing but a semi-failing bookstore to keep you busy, you quickly faded into the skyline of the city you’d once loved. And even it couldn’t keep itself from rotting. You tried not to resent it; decay, at least, still meant change. You just remained stuck. Frozen. 
When monotony is your only companion, it doesn’t take long to lose the senses that risk breaking it up. After a while, your eyes learned to stop seeing. Sounds folded together and became muffled, fading to little more than a single, dull buzz humming in ears that forgot how to pick out the chirping of morning birds or the incessant honking accompanying morning rush hour. 
Some days, you wondered whether you might be a ghost; others, you had to convince yourself you weren’t. 
And then he came along. 
———
“Come again!” 
Your farewell falls well short of the customer already halfway down the street, instead smacking right into the wood of the door as it slams shut behind him.
Sighing, you slouch against the top of your counter, your fist propped underneath your cheek. Great. Of course the first customer finally to grace your store after a whole day’s worth of nothing ended up being as dull as the hours you’ve spent bored behind the cash register. From the moment he’d stepped inside, he’d barely acknowledged your existence. Your helpful inquiries into whether he was looking for anything in particular, or how his day was going as you rang him up when unanswered, save an odd chuff.
And so, out the door goes your first brush with human contact in several days. Pathetic, but even more so when you consider how long it might be until you saw another person again. The hours spent laboring at the store didn’t offer much in the way of free time, and you don’t really have a social life capable of filling in the gaps, anyways.
Well, maybe you did. You had, up until a few days ago, at least. Whether that is still true now, however, isn’t something you’re particularly interested in unpacking. 
Thus, you’re left alone. Again.
Disheartened, your head slumps against your arm. You could always go back to your novel. It’s a crime fantasy; a latest release from an author you’d gotten into a few weeks earlier, the first book snagged off the shelf right before you closed up for the night. Rolling your head to the side, you eye the book, face down on the other end of the counter.
You scrunch your nose before rolling your head back the other direction, ignoring the book. Reading is the last thing you feel like doing right now, considering it’s all you’ve been doing. Once, you would’ve been thrilled at the prospect of having an entire day to spend behind the counter, flipping through a novel or two, completely undisturbed by the ringing of the store’s bell. But that was before you’d grown accustomed to a certain impish, foul-mouthed gang member who enjoyed hanging around the bookstore almost as much as he relished being a pain in your ass.
What you wouldn’t give to hear a snarky comment or scoff from him, now. 
Without Sanemi loitering around, a disquieting stillness has settled around the store. The distant howl of police sirens almost feels welcome, if nothing more than for how it breaks up the nearly suffocating silence of the store. 
Maybe it’s time to harass your boss about store advertising again. If you have to endure another week of silence this loud, you might just shove your head through the wall.
Realistically, you only have to tough out the summer slump for another month or so. Foot-traffic tended to pick up in the last weeks of August, when grouchy parents dragged in their children to buy the listed assigned reading books conveniently forgotten until the dwindling days leading into a new school year. And even once the back to school rush finally subsisted, you only had a few weeks to catch up on all the cataloging and ordering you’d missed fielding pissy parents before the holiday season began. As though the sudden shortage of certain titles was your fault, and not the consequence of their snot-nosed kids’ procrastination. 
But August is still weeks away. June has barely settled, the summer heat only just beginning to ramp up. The days have already become unbearably warm, the only relief coming at night, but even that would soon come to an end. Before long, everything would be intolerable — the weather, the silence, the lack of anything and everything that had made life for the last year enjoyable.
You crane your neck around to squint at the old-fashioned clock hanging beside the front door. It’s only half-past four, and the store doesn’t close until eight. 
Groaning, you thud your head against the counter. Three and a half more hours to go. 
You could scroll endlessly on your phone, but that would require looking at it, and that would be pointless. You know there are no missed calls; no texts, no pictures of a recent read with a scarred hand giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. If you look at it, you know you’ll see nothing and you will still be disappointed. Might as well save yourself the trouble, even if you can no longer avoid acknowledging the root cause of your terrible mood.
What a stupid asshole he is. What a stupid, idiotic, moronic asshole. 
When Sanemi Shinazugawa first exploded into your store last summer, you’d known you’d have to contend with a number of possible consequences as a result of getting involved. There’d been the obvious: the potential for arrest as his co-conspirator, for example, despite having not seen him in the three years following high school graduation. You’d devoted plenty of hours at the store reading crime novels, enough to know the police weren’t particularly careful about who got caught in their crosshairs. It would be almost too easy to deem you guilty by mere proximity to the scowling criminal you’d stuffed under your counter, even if the only association you’d ever had with him had been a decade earlier, when he’d been playing hero. 
Of course, that outcome hadn’t been the only slot on your bingo card, and once you’d pulled off your little stunt of hiding him away, you’d been forced to consider other options. Perhaps he would demand free pick of your store’s inventory with the same casual arrogance he’d had striding out that day, book in his hand and not a damn dollar paid for it. Maybe he’d want your shabby bookstore to become a front for whatever nefarious dealings he did on behalf of the Corps. 
As time went on, the fallout options from your budding friendship with Sanemi began to evolve. The closer you grew to him, the more dismal the potential ending: maybe you’d end up seeing something you shouldn’t, and he’d have to cut you out to prevent any further harm. Hell, you’d even grappled with the very real possibility of getting tangled up in something you shouldn’t, only to disappear without a trace, right alongside him. 
Years spent in relative isolation meant you had an imagination that could outpace most others, so really, there was no shortage of possibilities that getting involved with Sanemi Shinazugawa might entail. It was pragmatic, on your end. Know what to expect and that way, you wouldn’t be caught off guard in the event whatever you had with him ended in a blaze of glory. Or gunfire. 
As wild as your imagination could get, not one damn time had it accounted for you falling in love with the stupid asshole. And yet, here you are, just as much an idiot as he is, but with nothing to show for it. 
Not entirely true, you think with a small snort as you start up the store’s computer, clicking through a catalogue of upcoming releases eligible for the next shipment. He’d left you that morning with a dozen knots in your hair and a soreness between your legs that lingered for a few days afterward, even when he didn’t. Now, here you are, six days out from Sanemi taking your virginity, and you haven’t heard a god damn word from him. 
Not that you’re bitter about it. 
As you scroll through the website of the store’s main distributor, one title manages to catch your eye. It’s newer, but it’s only you’d already stocked a few days earlier, having reserved a handful of copies the moment the publisher opened up preorders to smaller retailers. 
You’d created an alert on your phone for that very reason, one set to go off the second the order window opened, so you could be sure the early releases arrived as quickly as possible. All because of a certain, low-life felon and his fat mouth. 
Whaddya mean I gotta wait another four months ‘til the next one? Sanemi had whined, tossing his book onto your counter. It was the third installment in a fantasy series you’d turned him onto, and he’d rapidly devoured it with the same veracity as he’d had the other two. That’s bullshit.
That’s publishing, you’d snipped back, shoving his arms off the freshly wiped-down surface of the store counter. 
Undeterred by your roughness, Sanemi only winked and re-settled himself, a preening smirk tugging at his lips as he plopped his elbow right back where you didn’t want it. Guess you’ll have to think of somethin’ else to occupy me with, Princess. 
Oh? You leveled that insufferable smugness with a sly grin of your own. What do you suggest? 
You got brains that match all that beauty. ‘M sure you’ll come up with something. He’d replied, tapping your nose with your finger, and snorting when you jerked away. 
In retrospect, the blatant flirting made you want to crawl under your counter and never emerge again. He’d been so damn obvious, and you’d eaten every bit of it up. Perhaps that’d been his plan all along, and you’d fallen for it, hook, line and sinker. 
It’s hard not to let insecurity gnaw at you but you’re only human, and your edges are becoming more jagged. 
You exit out of the web browser, unenthused. Nothing had particularly caught your eye, but then again, not much was capable of holding your attention, lately. Nothing, save the constant replay of that night and the next morning, and you’d picked that particular bone clean. There was nothing left to dissect, not even the marrow, but that didn’t stop you from returning to it, again and again. 
You roll your shoulders. The best thing you can do for yourself is to find a distraction. 
The back stock room sits full of new releases, and it’s been a few weeks since you updated the store’s colorful display of fresh titles. A bonus of having nearly total control over the bookstore is that you get to decide how displays are arranged, and it’s something you’ve grown to take pride in. With a sigh, you grab the circlet of keys from its peg beneath the store counter and head for store room. Might as well speed along the last two hours of the store’s operation, and give yourself something else to do that isn’t this – feeling hopelessly, pathetically sorry for yourself. 
Two trips between the back room and the store’s merry front later, and you set to work. At first, the chaos in your head is smoothed blissfully over as you focus on clearing the shelf of its its previous New Releases, stacking the books up in neat piles to be shelved in their proper sections later. But your concentration is weak, at best, and a task as tedious as this makes your mind go blank, leaves behind a clean slate upon which it can map out all your insecurities. 
Logically, it isn’t hard to imagine why Sanemi’s giving you the cold shoulder.  He made it obvious that night, when he tried putting on the airs of a big, scary monster he imagined himself to be, though you’d long since learned how to see right through the facade. Even if he’d made good on his empty threat to handle you roughly, he would’ve regretted it — so much so, you doubt he would’ve been able to keep the charade up through the end. Sanemi didn’t seem like the type who got off roughing up his partners.
Given how gentle he’d been in the hours that followed, it seemed you’d been proven right. If only he could realize it, too. Maybe then, he’d figure out how to get his head out of his ass. 
Sighing, you toss the last of the previous display’s books aside, and set to work on dusting down the shelves. The venom in your thoughts has less to do with your scar-speckled best friend and more to do with the bruise to your ego you’ve spent the last five days nursing. For all the ways Sanemi’s experience between the sheets greatly outpaces yours, it’s also limited. Affection wasn’t something he’d been known to give. In fact, you’d spent a fair deal of time wracking your brain, trying to remember whether you’d ever heard of him being in a relationship – as teens or otherwise – only to come up empty-handed. 
In this respect, at least, he’s no smarter than you are. Actually, he’s probably more of an idiot for it, given how he seems to lack the tact to send a basic courtesy text. A casual, hey, talk soon. 
Casual, you snort, as you begin restocking the New Arrivals section. Sanemi Shinazugawa might be better known for his casual dalliances, but nothing about what transpired between you had been casual. Not even fucking close. 
An hour passes, and you almost feel at ease, finally left alone by the constant whizz and whir of intrusive thoughts you know better than to indulge. You’re nearly finished with a row of new romance titles, when the title of one in particular snags your attention. 
Only Casual. A resounding fuck you from the universe if you’ve ever known one. You wouldn’t have been more surprised if the letters leapt off the book’s glossy front cover to smack you square in the nose. 
The longer you stare down at the title, the more doubt threatens to creep back in, lapping at the shore of your mind with its seductive hiss. Maybe you haven’t heard from him because you never will again. Maybe it was only casual. Because that’s Sanemi’s nature, and you’d given it up for someone who would never be capable of anything more than that. 
“Stop it,” you chide yourself, taken aback by your own venomous thoughts. That’s not him; at least, you’re almost certain it isn’t. Sanemi’s no-strings attached reputation had been well-known, and that has to mean he was transparent with his past partners about his intentions. If you truly were another notch in his belt, he would’ve said something, and he’d never struck you as the dishonest type. But Sanem’s persistent silence has bred a foreign sort of doubt in you that you haven’t quite figured out how to shake. “Where’s spiraling going to get you, stupid?” 
Casual wouldn’t have been Sanemi trying desperately to scare you away when you’d asked the most of him. It wouldn’t have made him insist – quietly, resignedly – that you deserved someone better than him. And somehow, you don’t think it was very casual for him to fuck you without protection or sleep naked with you in your bed. 
I love you, Sanemi. 
That certainly hadn’t been very casual, either, nor was the torturous look in his eyes that followed. The pain could very well have been born from a place of rejection, sure. Another punch to an already throbbing bruise because you were again crossing a line you’d already asked him to blur. That, despite the sheer possession embedded in every movement of his body and lips, he could not and would not love you back.
Books fully stocked, you turn your attention to the pile of titles that need to be assigned to their proper sections. Your eyes flick to the clock on the backwall, and with joy, you see that it’s already five-past closing. Satisfied, you flip the Open sign in the front window to Closed and turn the top lock on the door. The pile will have to wait until tomorrow morning. It’s time for you to get the hell out of this asylum. 
Closing time at the bookstore is a monotony you never mind, because it always means you’re leaving. You complete your tasks with ease, cashing out the register and taking the funds to the safe in the storeroom, to be picked up by the owner at the end of the week. 
As you gather your water bottle and bag, you chew absently on your thumbnail, mind still working through the mess your isolation has created. 
It’s only been five days. In the grand scheme of your friendship, that was nothing. Sanemi said you’d hear from him, and he’d never given you a reason to doubt him. 
So, you’ll continue doing the only thing you know how to do, where he’s concerned.
You will wait. 
———
Waiting, as it turns out, is far easier said than done. Or, maybe, Sanemi is just more of an idiot than you gave him credit for. 
Either way, your phone is still silent and you are still alone. 
Perhaps your self-assurance that you need only wait for Sanemi to come slinking back had been too optimistic. Because as five days become six, seven, eight, that certainty becomes tainted by doubt. Admittedly, it’s only a little, but it’s still substantial enough to form a pit in your stomach. One that gnaws at your edges just enough to irritate you, an itch you can’t quite scratch.
At first, it’s easy to ignore; after all, gaps in Sanemi’s communication aren’t uncommon. In fact, you’re fairly used to going days or sometimes even more than a week without hearing from him. Usually, he broke his silence with some dumb meme or an abrupt you eat yet? that let you know he wasn’t dead in some ditch. 
But the more days that pass leaving you with nothing but your thoughts for company, that sourness festers. Because, beneath your irritation lingers the faintest trace of insecurity. 
Is it irrational? Maybe. And you’re not so stupid that you can’t draw the very obvious connection between his silence and your anxiety. No, you’re painfully aware that your insecurity has everything to do with how the two of you left things after that night. 
You don’t bother wondering whether you might feel differently had you not blurted out those three words that meant nothing between you would ever be the same. That particular ship sailed the moment you fell back against your sheets, naked, and begged him to make you his. The moment he agreed.
The constant reminders of him aren’t helpful, either. Every ding! of the store bell sends your heart pounding only for the bitter taste of disappointment to fill your mouth when you realize the newest patron is without the mop of silvery white hair or priggish smirk you so desperately long to see.
Does your ridiculous pining inspire you to reach for your phone? Of course not. Sanemi’s the one who owes you that; it’s his rules that have dictated whatever it is that’s blossomed between you in the last year. You can’t make his choice for him, not when he won’t so much as clue you in on the options. The why.
But god, do you wish you knew. 
The ninth morning arrives just like the previous eight: hot, humid, and without a goddamn word from Sanemi. 
The day passes like all the others. You rise at six, dress, and try to pretend there isn’t a headache blooming behind your right eye. You make it to the store by seven, and do your opening duties, make shitty coffee in the store’s shittier coffee pot, and settle in behind the counter. Customers trickle in throughout the day and you greet them with the same, plastered smile, carefully perfected over the two years you’ve spent shackled here.
The hours whiz by, and every tick of the clock hand becomes duller. Even the sirens that set off every so often in various directions around the store seem muted, despite their persistent wailing. The faces of shoppers blur together, and by midday, you’ve forgotten how to see them at all.  
You wonder whether you’re falling right back into that frozen stasis in which you’d lived before Sanemi exploded into your store, dragging in with him a string of felonies, his foul mouth, and the sun. It’s a frightening thought, but not frightening enough, it seems, to keep the color from leeching out of the world around you.
You shake your head. No, you won’t do that again. Whatever you’d been doing before Sanemi hadn’t been living; it was barely more than existing. As bright as your world had been since he’d become a part of it, you can’t chalk your happiness up to him. It isn’t a burden he asked for, and it would be unfair for you to dump it on him. After all, he must’ve been just as lonely, if he’d sought a friend in you.
You’ll survive without him; you know you will. After all, you’ve managed just fine, these last few years. 
But you’d be lying if you said you haven’t enjoyed seeing the world in technicolor again. And that is enough to make you hope (desperately) that Sanemi might think of his world as a little brighter with you in it, too. 
By the time you close up for the night, your dull headache has blossomed into a raging migraine that threatens to split your skull in two. A perfect shit cherry to top off this wonderfully shit day. 
Of course, your headache could have everything to do with the fact you’ve gone the entire day without a meal, but it’s easier to blame Sanemi and his silence, so you do. Still, the thought of cereal yet again churns your stomach. 
Twilight has settled over the city skyline when you leave the store, dark and locked up tightly.  The neon lights of the city have already switched on, bathing the sidewalks in their artificial glow. The air has thankfully cooled, but it’s still sticky, and sweat beads around your temple before you’ve made it down the block. 
There are few things in this city that make life enjoyable. The closet you loosely call home is egregiously overpriced and in the summer, damn near uninhabitable. The bookstore pays far too little to justify the amount of work you do. And, it’s not like you have ties to anything or anyone here, save a criminal who can’t be bothered to shoot you a goddamn text. 
But the diner on Twelfth Street? That dingy hole in the wall with the best breakfast menu in town is almost enough to make up for all of the City’s shortcomings. 
The promise of buttery pancakes and salty bacon makes your mouth water, and that alone is enough for you to change course. Home can wait; you deserve to treat yourself, for once.  
You make the turn down Market, treading the familiar path toward the diner. Sanemi once told you that the safest times to walk these streets was dawn and dusk — the transitional periods of the day, when regular nine-to-fivers went about their daily commutes. For one, blissful hour at sunrise and sunset, the City returned to the bustling metropolis of your memory. Office workers crowded the streets, stopped in at shops lining the sidewalks for last minute errands or quick dinners, as they pretended to not hear the distant sirens over the honking of impatient cars and beeps from the crosswalks. 
Though, you think as you eye a group of young adults crowded around a table outside one of restaurants, perhaps none of them are pretending. Maybe they’re painfully aware that they’re stranded on a sinking ship. Maybe they’ve decided to just enjoy what few precious moments they have, before it all goes down for good. 
Or, maybe they haven’t noticed there’s any water rising, at all. 
In fairness, it’s not like you’re any better than they are. Here you are, playing at a cozy (albeit, boring) life, working at a bookstore that has no connection to either the Corps or its rivals. No protection. 
Arguably, that means you’re worse; you know all too well of the danger life here poses, but here you are, clinging to the fraying vestiges of normalcy like it might be worth salvaging. 
Oh well. If the merry twenty-somethings gathered outside and toasting to overpriced wine haven’t caught on by now, they never will. Not until their favorite restaurant goes up in flames, or the sharp crack of gunfire shatters their pretty stemmed glasses. 
Just as it happened in the other boroughs of the City, like the Western Wing. The Kizuki, you recalled Sanemi saying, spitting the name like a curse. Don’t fuckin’ go near the Western Wing, you hear me? Off limits. Silo, too.
If he eventually came back, how long before he’d be warning you about your own small corner of the world? Where else could you go, once the bones of the City finally went up in flames?
The place Sanemi would: its ashes.
—-
The diner is teeming with rush hour patrons, and you have to force your way through a gaggle of teens to reach the pickup counter. Despite how cramped the inside is, one of the waitresses manages to spot you, calling out your name in greeting. A few seconds later; and she appears just behind the counter in a whirl of pink and green, and hands off your to-go order with a beaming smile. You pass her your money, and waive her off when she tries to give you change.
She could use it; you’re all too familiar with the strain of meager wages.
You make to depart the diner with a cheerful “thank you!” called back to your waitress, though you can’t tell whether she heard you. Your voice is hoarse, your throat, scratchy from days of non-use, and your farewell barely rises above the hum of the other patrons. The lump of self-pity sitting that’s been sitting in your gut hardens. You’d anticipated the mental toll from your utter lack of human connection, but you hadn’t expected any physical effects from it. If nothing else, let Sanemi’s absence be your very obvious sign from the universe that you need to find yourself a friend. Preferably, one who isn’t habitually involved in illegal activity that may or may not land you in jail as his unwitting accomplice. 
Takeout secured, you work to squeeze through the thick clusters of dine-in patrons, eyes fixed on the exit as you dodge an odd elbow here and there. Right as you reach for the metal bar on the door, your foot stubs into something hard. It’s enough to nearly send you flailing, your hands crinkling the brown paper bag containing your dinner before it can spill all over the sticky tile.   
You barely have time to finish sputtering your curse when a hand grabs your forearm, steadying you. The thing responsible for your collison is a man, one apparently trying to decide whether he wanted to order or chance somewhere else, given how he lingers in the doorway.
Inwardly, you know he’s in the wrong because he’s blocking the exit, but that doesn’t stop you from rushing to apologize, anyway. To his credit, he waves you off. Eager to make your escape, you ready some nicety that will allow you to slip out the front door.
The moment he meets your eyes, any platitudes you might have offered dry right up on your tongue. 
Here, in a city surrounded by skyscrapers and streets lined with buildings jam-packed together like sardines, there’s little room for space, and it’s not something you’ve ever particularly missed. But as you stare into his eyes — black and cold — you finally realize what it means for something to be empty; how it feels, to look into an abyss.
Perhaps it’s because this man has within him, a void, that his eyes reflect the neon signage cluttering the diner’s walls. That’s the only explanation you can ration, given the way they seem to blend and swirl together in those depthless pools, creating an odd blend of colors. Unnatural and unnerving. He grins and it’s sharp, wicked thing. His mouth is too wide for his face, hungry and full of teeth that gleam far too bright. A wolf ready to rip into its prey.
Some deep, primal part of you waits for him to do just that, to sink those too-sharp teeth into your skin and shred you apart. Instead, he only inclines his head toward you, a mocking sketch of civility. 
“Ladies first.” 
You fumble around your words, searching for something — anything — to say, but there is only cotton in your mouth. Worse, the longer your paralysis persists, the more you’re forced to study him, even though everything about him — from his pale hair to his unusual eyes — sets your teeth on edge. 
A too-red tongue flicks out to wet his lips, and the sweat gathering at your temple freezes. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, or maybe your nerves have you searching for shadows that may or may not exist, but you swear there’s something on his tongue. A tattoo of sorts, perhaps. 
Whatever it is – light tricks or you own over-imaginative mind – it’s nothing you need to look harder into. If anything, your friendship with Sanemi has taught you there’s no safety measure more important than minding your business. And, it’s getting late. You need to get home, before it gets dark.
Sanemi hates when you walk alone in the dark. 
“Sorry again,” you manage with a squeak. You try and push by him once more, doing everything in your power not to brush up against him, when a hand grabs at your forearm.
If your heart could somehow unstick itself from your throat, you might have been brave enough to demand to know what his problem is; but it won’t, so you aren’t.  
All you can do is stare into those soulless eyes.
“Pretty girls shouldn’t rush,” he chastises with a saccharine smile, and his fingers squeeze your arms. His skin is cold and clammy.  
At last, you find your voice and you imbue it with all the steel you can muster. “My boyfriend is waiting.”  
The lie rolls easily off your tongue and gives you enough courage to wrench your arm free. The man lets you go, easily, that too-sweet smile never once faltering as you hastily push through the diner’s exit.
The air outside opens up, yet still, you find it difficult to breathe. Every one of your senses is on high-alert, trained toward the door at your back and the unshakeable feeling of eyes watching you as you hurriedly cross the street. 
You don’t dare look back.
Iron pumps hot in your legs as you half-walk, half-jog toward home. You still feel him watching you even as you reach your street, and you won’t dare to let him see where you live in the event your paranoia proves correct. 
You walk around the block — twice — and feint down a side alley, not caring for the food steadily growing colder in your bag. Only when you confirm the man is no where in sight, only when you’re certain you can’t feel eyes bearing into your back any longer do you finally loop back around to your building.
The deadbolt on your door is a comfort you’d never thought to appreciate until now, and you hurry to slide it into place the moment you step inside your apartment. Door locked, you slump back against the lacquered wood and sink to the ground, your heart thumping uncomfortably in your chest as you work to steady your ragged breath. 
For once, Sanemi’s paranoia doesn’t feel like a burden.
All your life, you’ve known that anxiety is an ailment best cured by food. Twenty minutes later, you sit at your kitchen table and eat your takeout in silence, save the odd squeak of your fork scraping against the plastic bottom of the container, the encounter at the diner, forgotten.
Instead, you’re left to chew on bits of scrambled egg and your own loneliness. You’ve never had a roommate — never wanted one, for that matter. Your apartment has always been your space, a place where you could go and just be, without a thought or care in the world. Your perfect sanctuary where you could fill the emptiness of your life with books, the lovely stories so delicately crafted by those perhaps as lonely as you. 
Overpriced and temperamental as your apartment could be, it’s still home. 
And yet, somehow, home feels emptier than you remember, despite the fact you’ve always lived here alone. 
Normally, you’d turn on the TV or listen to something in order to distract from the utter stillness in your apartment, but tonight, you can’t even bring yourself to do that. Not when the repetitive cycle of commercials and the same four reruns airing seemed only to amplify the monotony of your solitude.
So, you continue to eat in silence.
Later, after you’ve shoved your empty takeout containers to the side, you sit at your kitchen table and fiddle with your phone. 
It’s been a few days since you’ve bothered to look at it. It has remained on Do Not Disturb, shoved to the bottom of your bag, with you too unwilling to look at the hateful little reminder that without Sanemi to talk to, you are utterly and completely alone. 
You have few contacts saved, so finding Sanemi’s name takes little time – but not before you scroll past the entry marked simply, “Mom.”
You don’t even want to know how long it’s been since you last talked to her – or your dad, for that matter. Somehow, you doubt your phone has kept any record of those few and far between calls. They barely ever lasted long enough to make a dent on your phone bill, anyway. 
Oh, Mama, you think bitterly. What would you make of me, now? 
Knowing her daughter had fallen helplessly in love with a season criminal might very well do her in. She’d have a conniption, at the very least, especially if she learned of Sanemi’s reputation among women. There’d be no chance to deny what you’d let him do – what you’d asked him for, and it wouldn’t matter that you loved him any more than it would that he’d rescued her other child, once upon a time. 
Though, you suppose you’re getting ahead of yourself. All of your spite rests on the presumption that she remembered to care.
She doesn’t, so it doesn’t really matter. 
You snort. Maybe you should mention it to your parents somehow, even if through a lie. Perhaps in your next Christmas card; a cheerful, Merry Christmas! I’m dating a known gang-banger – talk next year!
God, their faces when they realized you were nothing more than some felon’s whore. You’d be written off faster than the ink on the card could dry. That alone might be worth it, if only to not have to continue playing this tedious game of pretend.
But, if Sanemi never speaks to you again, you’d rather not have all your bridges burned. At least the annual check-in with them confirmed you were alive – if those ended, you’d truly have no one. 
So, you scroll on, finding the object of all your ire – and heartache – and tap on its entry.
Your thumbs hover over the keyboard as the cursor in the blank text box blinks at you, Sanemi’s name just above it. 
Hey. You type before deleting it with a wince. 
That book you’ve been waiting on just arrived. I’ll leave it on the restock shelf for you. 
No, no, that won’t work either. You don’t want him to think you plan on ignoring what happened, and neither do you want to give him the out. You two will have to talk about it eventually, even if it’s to establish it can never happen again. 
The thought of losing him makes your heart crack, the fissure spreading across your chest until you’re not sure whether you can keep yourself together. 
If you’re cutting this off, I at least deserve to know. 
Your thumb hovers over the arrow to send, your cursor blinking expectantly at you. 
You don’t want to be hateful any more than you want to appear insecure. After all, Sanemi said you’d hear from him, and it’s only been a week. He’d promised you would hear from him. 
 He’d promised. 
With a frustrated grunt, you hurl your phone at your couch, anger melting into numbness as you watch it slide between the cushions and out of sight. You do not retrieve it; instead you throw your takeout into the garbage with more force than necessary and strip yourself down to your underwear. 
Summer has arrived fast and hot, and you know that the ancient air conditioning unit groaning and guttering in your window is due to short out on you any day now, as it does every year. Already the air in your apartment had become sticky and warm; it’s only a matter of time before sleeping became downright unbearable. 
Though no one is around to hear, you snort. Figures that Sanemi’s sudden disappearance from your life coincides with your yearly descent into renter’s hell. If the universe has decided to you need to be dragged through shit, it’s doing a thorough job of it.
As if on cue, a familiar pang of pain shoots through your lower stomach. You glance at the date on your phone, and groan. Great. The last row of this month’s birth control card should’ve been your warning. Your  already shitty mood is about to get even worse. 
Your new prescription is already in your drawer, and you half-contemplate skipping the half-row of sugar pills, but you hold off. You’d already suffered a stern lecture from your doctor for doing that in the past, and you know it’s not good for you. No matter how great the temptation to spare yourself from debilitating cramps, you’ll just have to suffer through it. 
Besides, this period probably isn’t the one to try and skip, anyways. Not after the events of that night. You’re better off making sure you’re getting your money’s worth out of birth control that, admittedly, costs more than you reasonably can afford. If nothing else, it’s worth it to avoid having to eat crow and admit you should’ve taken Sanemi up on his offer to get you the morning-after pill.
You tie your hair back as best you can, grateful to get it off your sweat-dampened neck and glance toward your couch. Perhaps you’ll muster up the courage to text him tomorrow, but for tonight, you’ll remain a coward. So, you leave your phone there, straddled somewhere between the cushions, and switch off your kitchen light before burying yourself in bed, the ache blooming in your lower belly matching the one in your heart.
—--
The first ray of morning light streaking through the cracks in the cardboard stuffed in his window is nearly blinding, but Sanemi is already awake. He has been for a few hours now, unable to find much peace in a night filled with distant sirens and plagued by thoughts of you. 
God, he feels like shit. It’d been after midnight by the time he’d cruised back through city limits, and it was nearly two before he returned to his apartment, Sanemi having gone out of the way to drop off Rengoku’s car so he wouldn’t have to deal with it come sunrise. 
Despite the emotional taxation of his visit with Genya, however, Sanemi had been hard-pressed to find sleep. Now that the sun’s up, though, he can’t avoid facing it any longer. His phone has been blissfully quiet all morning, and he has to take advantage of that silence while he can.
Today is the day, he decides between splashes of tepid tap water against his face once he forces himself out of bed and into his bathroom to wash up. 
Today is the day he muscles up the courage to talk to you. 
Not like he’s really got much of an excuse to put this off longer than he already has. Genya had told him as much. 
The bristles of his toothbrush flatten against his teeth under the force of Sanemi’s brushing, toothpaste foaming in the corners of his mouth. Embarrassing. So fucking embarrassing. His teenage shithead of a brother — who couldn’t even talk to girls, let alone date one — had been able to see the obvious answer to the very predicament Sanemi had spent the better part of a week running around like a headless chicken.
Then again, nothing in Sanemi’s life has even been simple, so it figures he’d try and complicate something as straightforward as this. You.
A hearty spit into the sink later and Sanemi wipes his mouth clean with the back of his hand. 
He supposes it was inevitable; he can’t avoid you forever, and he owes you some sort of explanation, an in-person one, at that. No matter how new this is to him, he at least knows you deserve more than a measly text or phone call. 
The bones of the Silo give way to the rusted shipyard marking its outer limits, the landscape whizzing by in a blur of rust and decay as Sanemi speeds past. Though the wind tears and whips at his cheeks, it hardly offers much in the way of relief from the heat of the sun bearing down on him from high above. 
Sweat rolls down his back as Sanemi guns through the city’s East Wing, opting to zip down back roads instead of dealing with the traffic on the main streets. It feels strange, to be speeding towards a decision that will fundamentally alter everything in his life, when everything right now feels the same as it did a year ago. Here he is, gunning down the same path to the bookstore he’d taken then — down an alley, out of sight from laying eyes. Summer in the City carries the same, weighted heat from year to year, and this one is no exception: oppressively hot, the air soupy and thick with humidity. 
And Sanemi is still as hopelessly shackled to the Corps as he was then – as he’s always been.
The brand between his shoulders itches.
Still, he supposes he can count his lucky stars that he’s not on the run from the cops as he’d been last summer – at least, not currently. And he takes comfort in knowing that he won’t find himself being pushed and shoved under your store counter, your lip curling in disdain even as you made good on a decade-old favor.
At least, he hopes that’s the case.
In all honesty, Sanemi knows he may very well find himself on the receiving end of that cold, unforgiving stare just as he had last summer. Only this time, the daggers you shoot his way might actually shred his heart to bits.
You have to be pissed at him. You’d be stupid not to be, and while your unfathomable affection for him suggests otherwise, you are smarter than he is – infinitely so. He’s ghosted you for more than a week, and you can’t possibly think you have to accept that kind of idiocy on his part, no matter his excuses. That means this talk has to be about damage control – however much of it you’ll allow. 
He should start with an apology, that much is obvious. And he’ll follow it up with something he never deigned to give anyone who didn’t have the name of the Corps’ boss family attached to them: an explanation.
Though, he notes with a grimace, an explanation supposed you’d give him long enough to make it through his apology without lobbing a well-aimed book at his head. Given your responses to his bullshit in the past, assault and battery are very real possibilities.
The closer he draws to your bookstore, and the gnawing pit in his stomach grows wider. If you’re angry, then he’ll let you be. You can curse him all you want, throw as many book-bound projectiles at his head as you’d like, as long as you’ll hear him out.
There is another possibility, however. One that he can only label as a worst-case scenario, one that he hasn’t dared let himself consider even though he knows it’s a very real — and very understandable — outcome. The one where you have no reaction at all, only utter indifference to him and his absence. After all, you’d only asked one thing from him, and he gave it to you. Even if you’d told him you loved him, you hadn’t asked him to love you back. 
Maybe you’d said it knowing he was a lost cause, and now that you’ve gotten what you wanted — the loss of your virginity and the weight of your confession off your shoulders — you could move on from him, even if that meant taking the misshapen lump of his heart with you as you left him behind.
Deep down, as devastating as that outcome would be for him, indifference is the best option for you. You’re better off without him; he knows this. So, he’ll pick up the pieces of himself and he’ll figure out how to glue them back together on his own.
Mind spiraling, Sanemi turns onto the street leading to you, a nauseous mixture of dread and anxiety churning in his gut. 
About two doors down from the bookstore sits a coin laundromat and a repair shop. It’s here that Sanemi’s bike gutters to a stop, his eyes sweeping the streets for any out-of-place faces, anyone who might seem too interested in his movements.
All is quiet.
He stashes his bike in the gap between the two buildings. Normally, he’d pull into the alley behind the bookstore and come in through the back exit, but he doubts you’ve left the door unlocked for him. Not when he’s dropping by unannounced. He can’t imagine you’d take kindly to him pounding on the emergency exit, and the fewer opportunities he has to piss you off, the better. He’ll have to use the front door.
Kickstand in place and key tucked safely in his pocket, Sanemi shuffles along the sidewalk. Anxiety twists his stomach into knots, and it takes effort to force himself to breathe normally. But when he reaches the shop’s entryway, Sanemi stops cold. 
The store is dark; there are no lights on inside, and even the way the door sits shut seems uncharacteristically cold.
He frowns. Perhaps you’re in the back, dealing with some delivery issue. Sanemi reaches for the door’s knob, ready to call out your name —
It’s locked.
Sanemi’s heart begins thudding uncomfortably in chest. The store is never closed. In the year he has known you, you are at the bookstore seven days a week, except for Christmas. But it’s midsummer; the store should not be closed. The lights shouldn’t be off, it shouldn’t be empty.
You should not be missing from behind the clerk’s counter.
Some semblance of sanity remains and encourages him to hurry around to the back alley, where he knows you accept deliveries. But the alley is as dark and as barren as the inside of your store, and the emergency exit is locked tight.
No store. No you. No sign indicating that you might have stepped away for a moment, or detailing some issue with the store and apologizing for any inconveniences to your customers. No explanation. 
Sanemi’s hands are dialing your number before his mind can fully process the action.
“Answer your fucking phone.” His voice trembles as the phone rings and rings. “Now.”
It goes to voicemail.
He tries again. Voicemail.
Again.
Voicemail.
Voicemail.
Voicemail.
His body breaks into a run even before his mind can fully piece together the action, his bike forgotten. Riding it would require a coordination Sanemi doesn’t have anyway, not while his thumb is busy jamming repeatedly at the call function on his phone, as Sanemi sprints for your studio. 
The line rings and rings but his desperation goes unanswered. And each time he hears the automated machine instruct him to leave a message, Sanemi grows more frantic. The burn in his legs barely registers; he is consumed only by the need to move faster, to close the distance between him and your apartment as quickly as possible.
Answer your phone. He wills you, pressing the green phone icon yet another time, and then another. Answer your phone. Answer your goddamn phone.
You never do.
He makes it to your place in record time, his fist hammering on your door. His panicked call of your name echoes around the empty halls outside your apartment.
You don’t answer.
Sanemi does not relent; one hand finds your name on his phone while the other continues pounding away at your door. He brings his phone to his ear and listens for the sound of your voice.
It does not come — but your ringtone does. Faint; muffled from its place inside your apartment, but unmistakable.
The sweat on the back of his neck turns to ice.
Sanemi’s breath comes hard out of his mouth in short, panicked gasps. Of all your eccentricities, Sanemi knows there are exactly two things you’re never without: lip balm and your phone.
His chest constricts. Your phone ringing inside means only one of two possibilities. Either you are in your apartment, hurt or captive, or you’ve been taken.
Swearing viciously, he jerks against the locked knob of your apartment door, a frustrated growl tearing deep from his throat. He spins away, a frantic hand raking through his hair, before he turns back.
Eyes wild, he considers your door.
It really is a flimsy piece of wood. Even if your deadbolt was somehow latched, Sanemi wagers he could kick it in fairly easily.
Whatever has happened to you, it’s his fault. Whether someone had figured out who and what you were to him, or whether it was because you simply lived in a shitty part of town and he hadn’t taken enough steps to ensure your safety, your blood is on his hands. That means it’s his responsibility to fix it — even if he has to tear this rotting city apart, brick by crumbling brick.
He backs away with a crazed expression. Fuck what your neighbors might think. Fuck what you might think, he thinks, getting into the stance he needs to rip your doors from its hinges. He’ll fix your door after he finds you and makes sure you’re safe. After he takes care of whoever dared to lay a hand on you, his you —
Just as Sanemi is readying his leg, he hears the distinct rattle of a chain unlatching, and then the door swings open.
Shocked eyes, blissfully familiar, blink at him, standing posed to kick in your door just as he stares back.
Sanemi doesn’t think; his hand seizes tightly around your wrist and he yanks you into the hallway, slamming your door shut with the other hand.
“What the fu —?” You start but you’re cut off with a muted oomph! as Sanemi whirls you behind him. An indignant half screech squeaks out of you as Sanemi kicks your door open, one arm keeping you at his back.
His other hand has his gun drawn and cocked.
Your eyes bulge. “Sanemi, what —?”
“Who else is here?” His voice has a deadly sort of authority you’ve never heard, and it makes a lump of cold fear lodge in your throat. “How many?”
He flashes a quick look at you over his shoulder. “Are you hurt?”
“What are you talking about?” you snap, following closely behind and pounding at his back as Sanemi systematically makes his way through your apartment, gun pointed and ready. But your flailing fists do little to stop him. “What are you doing, you psychopath?”
He doesn’t answer; not until he clears your kitchen, that deadly hunk of metal still braced before him.
“The store was closed.” He says shortly, eyes scanning the shadows. “You weren’t answering your phone. I called and called and you didn’t answer —“
“I’m on my period!” You burst, hands dragging down your heated cheeks. “I’ve been here dying from cramps, you idiot!”
The hand holding the gun drops limply to his side, as Sanemi turns to blink dumbly at you.
“I told you, you imbecile, that my periods suck!” Your face feels hot and your voice has taken on a distinct squeakiness in the wake of your mortification. “I have pain meds to manage my symptoms, so I’ve been in and out of sleep all fucking day! I wasn’t answering my phone because I didn’t feel well enough to answer it, you — you —“ Your eyes screw up as you wrack your brain for something that can express the depths of his idiocy. “You — stupid!”
Your lackluster insult is enough to break Sanemi’s blank stupefaction. “I didn’t know.” He finally offers after a long moment, a hint of pink rising in his cheeks.
“So, your first instinct was to do what — act like a goddamned maniac?” You demand as Sanemi hastily puts the safety back on his gun and tucks it into the waistband of his pants. “You don’t speak to me for more than a week, but you think it’s a good idea to come beat my door down? Because I don’t answer a few texts?”
“Not a few texts,” Sanemi spits back. “I called and messaged over and over -- I was worried —“
“You were about to kick my door in!”
He squares his shoulders at that. “Yes,” he says hotly. “Yes, I was. Because I was fuckin’ terrified for a moment that something had happened to you. Because of me. Do you know what went through my mind when I heard your phone ringing, after I’ve spent the last half hour trying to get a hold of you? What the fuck else was I supposed to think?”
“That you would decide I was sick or busy or maybe dealing with something and couldn’t respond, like a normal fucking person –”
“You say we’re friends and you still haven’t figured out that there ain’t nothin’ normal about this? About me?”
Something flashes across your face, your eyes tightening at the word friends, but it’s gone before he can blink. Sanemi doesn’t let himself linger on what it means. Nor does he listen to that small voice in his head that coolly whispers that he knows damn well you two are more than friends, no matter how deeply he tries to bury his head in the sand.
You open your mouth, ready to unleash of slew of insults or perhaps give him the good verbal lashing he knows he deserves, when you double over with a wince.
“Oh, fuck me.” You groan, pressing a hand to your abdomen. You wave him off, dismissive. “I’m going back to bed. You know I’m not dead, so do whatever you want. You know where the door is.”
With that, you shuffle miserably back to your bed, hunched over in on yourself, your arms wrapped firmly around you middle. Sanemi watches, bemused, as you crumple into your mattress in a resigned heap, your knees drawn nearly to your chest.
He stares hard at your bed, nostrils flaring as he works to calm his breathing. Safe. You’re safe, nothing is wrong, you’re okay. He repeats this, again and again, a mantra that slowly eases the tension in his shoulders, soothes the violent fury in his veins. 
A groan of frustration sounds from beneath your blankets and pillows, slightly muffled. “Well? What do you want?” 
He considers you for another moment before he rocks back on his heels, clicking his tongue.
Fuck it. Fuck the Corps, fuck the rules, fuck it all.
“Where’re your keys?”
“Huh?” You lift your head just in time to see him start rooting through your bag where you’d left it looped it over the back of your kitchen chair.
Sanemi pulls out the woven keychain you used to attach a cluster of mismatched keys – ones to the store, the register, and most importantly, your front door. He tosses them in the air, triumphant, before snatching them up tight, pocketing them without so much as a look back at you.
“Later.”
Silence, and then, “you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me —“
He’s out the door before you finish your indignant sputtering.
—-
If any doubts lingered as to what exactly Sanemi’s decision was when it came to you, he’s fairly sure they’re resolved here, in the pharmacy’s period care aisle. Because, really, what else can he call this – him, standing before shelves lined with an array of boxes and tampons and pads, trying to figure out what the fuck he’s supposed to get – if not a commitment to you? 
A clear choice as any, he supposes. It’s you, or it’s nothing – no one – else. Whatever it is the two of you are though, is another matter. 
Rule Three: don’t get attached. 
Admittedly, that rule went right out the fucking window the moment he decided to pursue some sort of friendship with you, all those months ago. Even if it somehow survived the fall, he’d funcationally ran it over, again and again until nothing remained, the second he put his dick in you. 
Whatever the label, he supposes he at least has to pretend to give some semblance of a shit about Corps’ rules, if nothing more than because of his title within it. Plus, that caution probably serves to protect you as much as it does the Corps. And that means he can’t outwardly call you his girlfriend anymore than he can openly date you. 
He grimaces at the thought as he peruses the snack aisle, tossing a random assortment of your favorites into his basket alongside the variety box of tampons he’d settled on. Leave it to him to mull over shit like what to call you, now, when he’s got far bigger fish to fry. Never mind that for all the ways he’s decided he wants you to be his, he doesn’t yet know whether you want him. 
He did ditch you for over a week. Eleven days, to be exact. 
Oh, well. If somehow you don’t throw him out on his ass, then it doesn’t really matter what he calls you. It’s not like he’s particularly attached to labels, anyway. Not when girlfriend is far too casual a way to describe what Sanemi feels for you. 
He tries ignoring the pang of want in his heart as the word boyfriend flits through his mind. While he can’t call you his girlfriend to anyone within city limits, you don’t wear the same shackles that he does. You’re not bound by the same code. And damn, what he wouldn’t do to have you call him your boyfriend; to finally belong to something – someone – other than the Corps. It’s the sort of brand he’s gone his entire life craving even if he didn’t quite know it. One he’d wear proudly on his heart, even if no one else would ever see it. 
Finally, he reaches the front of the checkout line and tosses the contents of his basket onto the counter. Though, if you do decide you want his sorry ass, you’ll have to be careful enough to not link boyfriend to his name. While Sanemi may not give a shit about his own safety, yours is his priority. He won’t let you put his target on your back. 
Whatever labels do or do not await him, nothing changes the fact he cannot be a normal – whatever – to you. The only way you stay safe is if Sanemi lets his paranoia dictate the lines of your relationship, and even then, he can’t guarantee it’ll ever be enough. 
He pays for your stuff, gathering the bags in one hand while he rummages his pockets with the other until he finds your keys. So many uncertainties remain, far more than what makes him comfortable. Yet, in spite of it all, the bubbling, hot panic he’d felt sprinting to your apartment has given way to an unfamiliar lightness. One that makes him feel like he’s floating even as he stops at a small kiosk near the pharmacy’s exit and feeds your apartment key into the machine. 
Yeah, he’s fucking attached to you even though he knows better. But if you accept the metal the kiosk spits back out after a moment of whirring, it’ll be worth it. 
—-
Less than an hour after his dramatic exit, Sanemi slips back into your apartment. The plastic handles of his shopping bags looped unceremoniously around his wrists dig uncomfortably into his skin, and he dumps his bounty on the floor just inside your entryway. 
A soft thump against the wall to his right snaps his head up. 
Years of training to dodge fists, projectiles, bullets, enable Sanemi to duck right before one of your ridiculous little throw pillows smacks into his head.
Across the floor of your small apartment, Sanemi spies you sitting perched at the end of your bed, eyes wild and hair a mess, another pillow cocked in your hand, ready to be launched his way. 
Bewildered, Sanemi demands, “The fuck is your problem?” 
“You!” The fluffy cushion sails through the air, but Sanemi knocks it easily aside. His casual avoidance of your targeted rage only serves to infuriate you more, and he watches, with some amusement, as you whip your head from side to side, searching for something else to chuck at him. 
Finding nothing, you jab a finger toward the door. “Get out!” 
“Nah,” he folds his arms across his chest and levels your fury with a cool stare of his own. “Don’t feel like it, and I know you don’t want me to go, either.”
Your right eye twitches and Sanemi smirks. If you really wanted him gone, you would’ve fought harder when he took your keys. Probably would’ve chased him out the door, hurling all kinds of venom his way. If nothing else, you would’ve blown his phone up, calling him every name in the book, leveling every threat you could concoct.
You’ve forgotten, it seems, that he’s spent the past year learning you; being your friend. He’s far too used to your stubbornness; he knows when you’re full of shit. 
“You’re impossible.” And with a huff, you turn your back to him and throw yourself back down on your mattress, yanking your blankets up to your chin. 
He stomps over to your side of the bed and glowers down at your back, put stubbornly to him. 
Fine. You wanna play this way? Sanemi can deal in pettiness, too.
An edge of your blanket peeks out near your feet, a small sliver you hadn’t managed to tuck into place. A mistake, on your end, given that it only takes Sanemi hooking his fingers under it to rip the blanket clean off you.
He tries not to linger on the whiff of your scent that slaps him in his face. An intoxicating mixture of your perfume and shampoo that socks him in the gut. 
While the loss of the blanket’s security forces you to curl in tighter on yourself, you offer no reaction. Not even a spiteful little glare over your shoulder, or some half-hearted insult, and for some reason, that pisses him off even more.
“You’re not ignorin’ me,” he growls, balling the quilt in his hands.  “I can be a bigger pain in the ass than this.”
Still nothing. 
After a moment, Sanemi’s irritation finally boils over. “Can I just fuckin’ hold you, please?” 
You flip over to gape up at him, returning his pinched glare with outrage of your own. If Sanemi’s silence since that night was a bruise to your ego, the earnestness belying the arrogant annoyance in his eyes is a finger jabbing mercilessly at it. 
Because he actually means it.
Part of you wants to laugh at the absurdity of his request, and another part wants to launch every obscenity you can dream of right at his stupidly handsome face. 
You go for the in-between. “No!” Your voice is shrill. “No, you can’t hold me. You ghost me for almost two weeks, nearly break my door in half, steal my keys and fuck off for over an hour, and you think you get to hold me?” You throw your hands up over your head in exasperation before dragging them down your face, exasperated. “Are you stupid?”
Never mind that’s exactly what you want to happen — it’s all you’ve wanted, actually. But Sanemi’s idiocy has to cost him something, and despite the way your stomach dipped in excitement when you heard him sliding your keys into the door’s lock, he owes you an explanation. And until you get one, he can keep on sitting at the very top of your shit list, all by his lonesome.
Some of the hardness in his eyes softens as your words hit their mark. In its place emerged a shadow of disappointment, one that has you reconsidering your previous stance, your hands itching to reach for him.
Gently, Sanemi tosses your bunched up blanket to the foot of your bed. “Fine.” He gestures vaguely behind him. “But I’m still gonna put all this shit away, and then you and me are gonna talk.” 
That makes you sit up. “What shit?” 
Sanemi doesn’t bother dignifying you with an answer; doesn’t so much as spare you a glance as he stalks back toward your door. He totes the plastic shopping bags to your shabby kitchen table as you trail behind him, your curiosity outweighing your desire to remain rotting in bed. 
“Wait,” you frown, reaching for his arm. You try and still him as he unloads aspirin followed by a fresh box of tampons. “Sanemi —“
“Just shut up and let me take care of you.” He pulls a frozen pizza out of the shopping bag and glances at you. “Did you eat?”
You hesitate but then you slowly shake your head.
He snorts, depositing the box on your counter. Figures.
Bemused, you watch as he lugs the rest of his bounty into your kitchen and sets to work organizing his purchases. It’s a strange sight. Sanemi bustles around as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. He navigates your cabinets with a confidence that only comes from familiarity, his movements more akin to something like muscle memory. 
His comfortability makes sense, given how much time he’s spent here over the last year. Still, you never imagined a hardened criminal could look so…domestic.
What doesn’t make sense, however, is why. From the moment he’d thundered into your apartment in a murderous rage to his abrupt exit with your keys and sudden reappearance with groceries, Sanemi’s erratic actions have you in a tailspin you can’t begin to find your way out of. Because none of it makes sense.
Too much; this is all too much. 
“Stop, stop, stop!” Your hand snatches around his forearm, stilling him. Annoyed, Sanemi huffs down at you only to be met with your own frosty glare. 
You cut your eyes to the spread of snacks and period products atop your kitchen counter. “What is all this, Sanemi? I mean,” you gesture helplessly between him and the bags. “What are you doing?” 
Sanemi grabs the frozen pizza box and turns it over, eyes skimming the instructions. “Taking care of you.” He monotones, like it’s supposed to be obvious. Like him sifting through a bag full of snacks — all your favorites, you note — was normal, part of some unspoken ritual.
You know better; because the sidelong look he casts you is one of remorse; guilt. 
He’s stalling. And it’s precisely because of his own hesitancy that you can’t be the first one to give in; to open the very obvious can of worms that sits between you. 
You will not make his decisions for him; you won’t shoulder the burden of any blame should this go tits up.
“Why are you here, Sanemi?” 
He busies himself with your oven’s settings, fiddling with the knobs until it clicks on, preheating. Wordlessly, Sanemi slides the pizza into the oven and sets the timer.
“Sanemi.” You press.
Instantly, the rest of his arrogance deflates. He turns back to you, shoulders heavy, slumped forward with something like shame. 
“‘M sorry, I just…” he trails off with a helpless shrug. He drops his head, staring hard at the cracked linoleum of your floor.
You shift, settling in against the empty doorway to your kitchen, arms folded across your chest. After another moment, he raises his head, and takes a tentative step forward.
“For months, I haven’t been able to think about a damn thing but you.” Sanemi begins, his expression uncharacteristically grave. “Can’t sleep, can’t eat, can barely fuckin’ breathe without thinking about you. Without thinking of how fucking badly I want you.”
A tired hand runs through his hair. “Haven’t even been with anyone else in months. Not when all I can think about  is you.” He snorts, though it’s without humor. “Started picturin’ you when I was with the others and everything. Nearly called out your name with one of ‘em one night, and knew I couldn’t do it anymore.”
That little revelation nearly knocks the wind right out of you. Since your friendship with him began, you’ve kept your ears steadily tuned toward any mention of Sanemi’s name. Part of you rationalized it was out of concern for his wellbeing, but in truth, you’d been nosy.
Not once had there been a whisper of the infamous Sanemi Shinazugawa settling down, of him slowing his antics. 
Then again, the moment you’d begun catching the details of his wild reputation among the women of the Silo, you’d tuned out all the noise, too embarrassed to admit your own interest.
“I was selfish, kissin’ you.” Sanemi’s hoarse voice calls you back. “Swore it was only gonna happen once, and couldn’t even keep that promise. And then, what we did that night — that only made it worse. D’you know why?” 
He chances another step toward you and the air between you thickens. Suddenly, there’s little space left between your bodies, and you’re all too aware of the heat rolling off his body, drawing you in, a moth to a flame. 
A hand reaches for you, his fingers nearly grazing your hair, but his arm drops back limply to his side. “‘Cuz I shouldn’t have been able to have you. Not like that. But I did, and —“ he swallows, hard. “I knew I wanted more before I slept with you. Knew that if I ever crossed that line, I wasn’t coming back from it. Couldn’t.”
Your lips part. “Sanemi —“
“I can’t be your friend, Y/N.” Sanemi says heavily. “I just can’t. I knew that way back when I first started comin’ around, but I wanted to try. But I sure as hell can’t be your friend, now."
A crack splinters across your chest, and by the way Sanemi’s eyes tighten, you wonder if he heard it; the sound of your heart breaking.
It was only ever going to end this way. You should’ve known — a part of you did know. But that hadn’t stopped you from trying, from loving him, anyways. 
You open your mouth, ready to voice your resigned acceptance; to cut him loose, save yourself the devastation of any further explanation, when Sanemi shifts. 
With a gulp, he shoves a hand into his pocket, rummaging. Whatever it is he searches for, he finds and holds out his closed fist before letting it drop.
A glint of light bounces off the object dangling from his fingers and from your periphery, you can tell it’s metal. Frowning, you tilt your head, inspecting.
Your heart gutters to a halt as its shape takes form.
A key. A single silver key, plain and unassuming, yet somehow, the entirety of your future rests somewhere between the neat little grooves you know perfectly match the hardware of the lock on your door.  
“I had it made while I was out.” Sanemi’s confession is breathless, and he swallows hard before adding, “If you don’t want me to have it, then take it. It’s yours.”
For a long moment, you say nothing; you only stare at the key hanging in the air. Half a heartbeat ago, you’d believed this — whatever it was — with Sanemi was over. That whatever brightness he’d brought to your dreary little life had faded, and he’d leave you behind, just like everyone else you’d dared to love. 
“If I tell you to keep it,” you start carefully, gaze trained so pointedly on the key dangling from his fingers that you don’t notice the way his eyes round. “Then what does that mean for us?” 
He needs to say it. After a week of nothing from him, he at least owes you this. A label. 
His throat bobs. A beat passes, and then, “It means I’m all yours. Only yours.” 
Not good enough. “My what?” 
Sanemi’s fingers tense in faint agitation and your eyes cut to his. 
“Yours,” he insists again, more hotly. “Your boyfriend, your partner, your whatever-the-fuck-it-is that you call someone who’s all in and wants to be with you, and only you.”
Air hardens in your throat, forms a lump you don’t know how to swallow around. 
He says it so simply, as though it’s obvious; like he hadn’t avoided you without a damn word for more than a week, leaving you to fight against insecurity you hadn’t known to have, before him. 
I love you, Sanemi.
He hadn’t said it back, then. Initially, you thought it was because he didn’t feel the same. Sure, he cared for you, that much was obvious, but perhaps that consideration didn’t rise to the level of devotion you held for him. You were okay with that; you hadn’t said it out of expectation, anyways. You’d only wanted him to know your heart, to know that as long as it was beating, it would be his. 
Now, this key is his answer to your admission that night. And while it may not be the three words part of you longs to hear, it’s just as much as a confession on his part. 
You could kick him out; tell him no, tell him that he, under no uncertain terms, could fuck right off after leaving you on silent for more than a week. You could. 
You don’t. 
Because, he came back. Maybe in a whirlwind of murderous, seething violence, but Sanemi came back. No ulterior motives, no conditions; he came back for you and you alone. 
He saw you and all your monotony, all your inexperience, and he came back anyway.
He was the only one who ever had. 
Quietly trembling fingers latch around his wrist and for a moment, Sanemi thinks you’re going to take it from him. All at once, the earth crumbles and faces beneath him, plummeting him right into the hell he knew he was venturing into the moment you looked him in the eyes and asked him to do the impossible. 
A buzz settles in his ears and Sanemi braces for the rejection he should’ve known was to come. He’d screamed it at himself that night, his head warning his stupid heart that this was precisely the only way this could go. You’d gotten your fill of him, loved him even, but this — he — is too much. He should’ve known better, he did know —
Your fingers close his fist around the key and squeeze it tight. Wide-eyed and breathless, Sanemi finds that for once, he does not resent the way the metal presses into his skin. 
“Keep it.” Your hands are warm where they embrace his. “I’m yours.”
It takes him a moment to remember how to speak; to realize the static in his head has quieted. His world comes back together just as quickly as it fell apart, its pieces realigning with you at its center.
Relief, he thinks, has never felt so fucking sweet. “Thank fuck.” 
The key clatters to the floor but no one pays it any mind; Sanemi is too busy surging forward, his hands planted firmly on your cheeks as his mouth crashes eagerly — desperately — into yours. 
The kiss is little more than a frantic clash of lips and teeth, but everything about it is so fucking right that neither of you can be bothered to care. 
You fling an arm around his neck, anchoring yourself to him as Sanemi’s enthusiasm threatens to send you stumbling back. Some small, distant voice hisses that you should’ve made him work for it a little longer, should’ve made him grovel for forgiveness. But then his hands are dragging down your front, and he’s pulling you into him by your hips with a possessive grunt and suddenly, you can’t remember why any of it matters.
Neither of you are aware that you’re moving, not until your back bumps up against the entryway of your kitchen. Even then, your small gasp of surprise serves as nothing more than the chance for Sanemi’s tongue to sweep into your mouth, branding you with his claim. 
It was always going to end this way — him, pressing you into your kitchen doorframe, his hands shoved under your t-shirt to rest on your bare waist while you pull him closer, your fingers twisting in his hair. Sanemi is a weak man; no matter how his better judgment snipped and snapped at him, all roads led right back here. It was inevitable.
Even if he hadn’t chosen your bookstore to hide in that day, somehow, the universe would’ve found another way to throw him into your life.
Sanemi breaks away with a pant. “Fuck, Y/N,” he moans against your lips. “You don’t know what the fuck you do to me.” 
“Took you long enough,” you chastise between quick pecks. “I was beginning to think your head was perma-lodged up your ass.”
A sound of exasperation accompanies the nip of his teeth at your lip. “God forbid the Princess has to wait on anything.”
You hum into his mouth. “Not anything,” you correct, breaking away from his lips in favor of brushing your nose against his. “You, asshole.”
This time, it’s Sanemi who moans. “Bullyin’ only turns me on, sweetheart. Thought you knew that already.”
“And deflecting doesn’t help your cause. You still have some making up to do.” You scoff, lowering yourself back down to your normal height. Sanemi’s hands linger, cradling your face, and you can’t help but nuzzle into his palm.
“Yeah, well,” Sanemi murmurs, his thumb stroking your cheek. “‘M here now, and I want you. And I’m a fuckin’ idiot for thinking this is a good idea, and so are you for wantin’ me, but that’s where we are. Can’t go back.”
The corner of your mouth twitches up. “You mean, you can’t unfuck me.”
“Nah,” he agrees, though his eyes darken. He takes your chin between his thumb and forefinger, tilting your head toward his. “Wouldn’t wanna take that back, anyways. Not in a million years.”
Not when you’re his. 
This time, when Sanemi recaptures your lips with his, it is slower; more sensual. His tongue slides seamlessly into your mouth, languidly stroking yours.
Raw desire, sharp and electric, shoots between your thighs when Sanemi moans again. Despite the neediness of his lips, his touch, Sanemi quickly recovers some of his self-confidence, the excitement of his kiss giving way into something more measured, more fervent that already has you panting for more. 
Oh, he’s far too good at making you melt. 
Large, warm hands skirt down the back of your thighs, gripping you under your legs. You gasp when the floor disappears from beneath you as Sanemi easily carries you deeper into the kitchen.
The pizza baking in the oven goes forgotten as Sanemi sets you on the ledge of your counter, his hands sliding up your sides, bunching the fabric of your shirt between his fingers.
The warmth of his hands makes you gasp and arch into him, and he huffs a quiet laugh against your lips.
“Yeah? You want me to touch you?” He teases, pausing only to trace the tip of your nose with his, before he leans back in. “Tell me where.”
You’d love to, except the greedy asshole’s greedier lips are right back on yours, and you don’t have the willpower to argue. You sigh into him, and Sanemi’s tongue sweeps easily into your mouth, flicking against yours. 
Those damn hands of his manage to sneak beneath your t-shirt again. “Mmm. Here?” He teases when you arch, his thumbs brushing along a sensitive part of your waist that makes you squirm.
He kneads against your ribs. “How ‘bout here?”
Your nails scratch the nape of his neck in warning. “Sanemi —“
Those devilish fingers of his inch higher beneath your shirt until he’s cupping your bare breasts. 
“My bad. Here, right?” He smirks, catching your lower lip between his teeth. 
He palms at your chest until you’re whimpering into his mouth. The tender, swollen ache of your breasts is soothed by Sanemi’s clever touch as he teases you with alternating flicks and pinches. He breaks your kiss to whisper your name, each syllable dripping with a reverence that makes you feel damn near sacred. He murmurs it again and again as his lips trail down your cheek, your jaw, his hands pushing your t-shirt higher and higher —
The oven timer buzzes. 
Your head snaps toward the sound, hands fluttering against his chest in a reluctant effort to push him away, but he pays you no mind. Sanemi’s lips are still teasing under your jaw as he grips your chin between his thumb and forefinger and turns your head back toward him. 
He silences your building protest with another kiss. “Let it burn,” his teeth nip at your bottom lip. “We’re busy.”
You give into the persuasion of his lips for a moment, too greedy for his kiss. But the beep of the timer seems to grow louder by the second, and you find yourself too distracted by its noise to continue ignoring. 
“‘Nemi,” you murmur between heated kisses. There’s a low vibration in the back of Sanemi’s throat in response, something akin to a growl of approval at the way you shorten his name. His hold on your waist tightens as he pulls you harder into him. “The oven —“
His tongue licks at the roof of your mouth before his lips break away from yours. “Fuck the oven,” he moans before he claims your lips again, his kiss every bit as needy and possessive as touch. 
He can’t fathom stopping now — not when you feel so damn good in his hands, not when he’s so giddy that he gets to keep you all to himself, selfishly.
He feels like a teenager again, feels that same excited flutter in his stomach he used to get from sneaking off with girls between classes to make out, to let hands explore under shirts in the dark corners of abandoned classrooms or under the bleachers, more thrilled by the prospect of being caught than of actually succeeding in getting into one another’s pants. Only now, Sanemi’s got the girl of his dreams moaning with a few clever movements of his fingers as he explores your mouth with his tongue, your hands just as greedy as they roam the planes of his chest and tug at his hair.
He’s about to suggest moving to your bed, eager to continue because he can, you’re actually his --
A loud rumble from deep within your stomach slices between you like a knife. Sanemi’s hands freeze, right atop your bare breasts. 
A beat passes, and then he murmurs against your lips, “when did you last eat?”
Before you can feed him your bullshit, he adds, “a real meal.”
You fiddle with the ends of his hair, wincing. “…Last night?” 
Even if you could protest, could claim that you weren’t all that hungry, your traitorous stomach roars again. You snatch your hands away from him, pressing them to your middle as though you can silence the way your belly gurgles with hunger.
Busted.
“Sorry,” you mutter, too mortified to meet his eyes. “Ignore that, we can keep going –”
“I’m not competing with your stomach. If I’m gonna have you moaning, I want to hear you.” Sanemi kisses the tip of your nose and untangles himself from you, dragging his fingers teasingly along the bare skin of your thighs before he steps back entirely. “’Sides, you need to eat.” 
You rub a hand over your grumbling belly. “It’s not that bad –” 
“You’re an ass when you’re hungry.”
You can’t fight him on that, no matter how your cheeks warm. Sanemi has experienced your hungered wrath far too many times. Still part of you itches to wipe that triumphant smugness right off his face as he dons one of your frilly, thrifted oven mitts and fishes the pizza out of the oven.
Once he’s ensured you’ve eaten enough and washed your dishes, Sanemi sets to work on your bed, righting the mess he’d made of your covers. The moment everything is back in its place, even the obnoxious throw pillows you’d hurled at his head, he turns to you, expectant. 
“Well?” He pats your newly remade bed. “Come on. You said you don’t feel well, so get over here and rest.” 
For once, you don’t fight him, nor do you so much as attempt to snark back at him for trying to boss you around. You simply slink back to your bed and flop down without a shred of grace or care. 
Sighing, Sanemi kicks off his shoes and slides in behind you. Admittedly, when he’d played out the number of ways tonight could go in his head, he hadn’t envisioned nursing you against the debilitating side effects of your period as one of those possibilities. 
Still, Sanemi can’t imagine any place he’d rather be. 
His body fits against yours with ease, and the way his arm winds around your waist feels natural; automatic. For so long, he’d been navigating the world, unaware that something was missing; that he was incomplete. Sure, maybe he’d felt off to some extent — like there was a gap somewhere among his parts, one that he never knew quite how to fill. 
But here, in your bed, his body half-draped over yours, his face, tucked into the crook of your neck, Sanemi finally knows what it means to feel whole. It fills him with such giddiness, such joy, he almost can’t quite figure out what to do with it. There’s a lightness in his chest he’s never felt before, a weightlessness to his limbs. He is floating, and there is nothing to bring him back down to earth; no chain, no binds, no obligations. There is only his desire to be here, with you, however you want him. 
Your hands reach back and latch around his wrist, tugging his arm over you. You then slide his hand beneath your shirt, pressing it flat to your lower belly.
Sanemi smiles against the nape of your neck as you sigh in relief. “What’s that about?”
“You’re warm,” you groan, snuggling back against him. “Heat helps cramps.”
He squeezes you close and presses a kiss against your ear. “Use me as much as you need, then.”
Your soft laugh is intoxicating. Finally, some of the tension in your limbs eases and you relax into him, seemingly having found the right position to quell the throbbing ache in your stomach.  Happiness. This must be happiness. Because here, he finally gets to just be Sanemi. Your Sanemi.
——
For a long while, you lay together in comfortable silence. The fading light streaming through the great, arched windows over your heads is his only measure of time, and soon, the lighting of your apartment dims. Now, there is only the soft, yellow glow of your various lamps and strings of fairy lights that coat your studio, creating a cozy cave he never wants to leave. 
Curled behind you as he is, Sanemi can’t quite tell whether you’ve finally succumbed to sleep. Your breathing is slow, and while you haven’t spoken in a while, you could just as easily be basking in the relaxed comfort of his arms, lingering somewhere in between sleep and consciousness.
It’s how he wishes he could be; at ease, half-heartedly fighting a losing battle to keep his eyes open. But no; Sanemi is wide the fuck awake, his body stiffer than a board.
Despite your tentative relaxedness, you still squirm every so often, 
struggling to find a position that will allow you the most relief from the throbbing ache in your lower stomach.
He doesn’t think you’re doing it intentionally — in fact, he’s almost certain you aren’t. But if you don’t stop grinding your ass against him, Sanemi might just snap.
He’d already had to quietly fight off the pain in his groin after getting hot and heavy with you in the kitchen, before he’d realized he needed to take care of your grumbling stomach at the expense of his blue balls. But here you are now, rotating your perfect ass right into his crotch as he grows harder than a fucking diamond, with no relief from the onslaught of your wiggling in sight.
It just feels cruel.
“Knock it off,” Sanemi finally grumbles into your ear, arms squeezing once around your waist in warning. “You tryin’ to make me cream my pants?”
“It’s not my fault,” you groan miserably. “I can’t get comfortable.”
“Don’t you take meds?”
Another groan. “Already did.”
Sanemi fights the swear building on his tongue. He’s acutely aware that you’re not at fault for the way his traitorous body reacts to your movements, but he finds himself wavering dangerously close to losing mind. Each twisting movement of your ass is barely more than a whisper of the contact he craves and yet somehow, it’s just enough to make his cock throb for more.
It takes a great deal of self-restraint for Sanemi not to grab your hips and grind you back against him properly. But he manages to cling to that fraying thread, almost proud of his astounding commitment to his self-control, when you swivel your ass right against the crotch of his pants, groaning in frustration.
That’s when Sanemi snaps. 
With a disapproving click of his tongue, he flips you to your back and under him. You’re his woman now, after all; that means it’s on him to take care of business. 
“You still got cramps?” He hovers close over you, nose nearly bumping yours.
Wide-eyed and blushing at his proximity, you nod.
“You took your meds already?”
Another nod.
“And they ain’t helping?”
This time, you slowly shake your head.
A smile, a wickedly devious smile, spreads across his lips. “I know what will.”
Sanemi sits back on his knees and grabs a fistful of his shirt. In a single, smooth movement, he yanks it clean over his head. 
“What are you --?” You sit up on your elbows, cheeks heating as your eyes roam the rocky planes of his chest and abdomen. Your mouth waters. “What are you doing?”
Sanemi crawls back over you, shutting you up with another kiss. Before you can break away to repeat yourself, he presses his hips to yours and grinds. 
He’s harder than stone.
Silky lips dance down your chin before sliding to explore your jaw. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“I told you, I’m — oh — on my period!”
“So?”
“So, it’s — it’s — messy!” You stammer, your cheeks turning crimson as Sanemi’s lips continue their heated path down your neck.
He snorts against your collar bone. “You got towels, don’t you?”
The cockiness of his tone stuns you silent. Sanemi huffs in triumph and busies himself with sucking a bruise into your skin, right over your throat.
“Sanemi,” you squirm under his mouth, hands tugging at his hair, though even you don’t know whether you’re trying to command his attention or push him back.
With an annoyed grunt, Sanemi tears his mouth away from your skin to glare at you. “If you want to say no because you’re uncomfortable with it, then we can stop.” And, despite the faint, irritated twist of his mouth, his eyes are sincere. “But if you’re only complaining because you think I’ll mind —“
“I’m not uncomfortable,” you murmur, shyly looking away. “But, Sanemi —“
Your protest is smothered by a warm, firm hand closing over your mouth. Sanemi leans down until his forehead nearly touches yours. “Do you want me to stop?”
You blink up at him. After a moment of hesitation, you slowly shake your head, eyes wide.
“Then shut up.”
His hand slides away from your mouth and skirts down the length of your arm. His fingers close around your wrist and he wraps your arm around his shoulders. 
He leans in to resume attacking your neck with his mouth, descending down your body with heavy, open mouthed kisses. When he reaches your navel, he shifts his hold to your waist and in a single, swift movement, he flips you atop him. 
You gasp into his mouth as you settle against him, his hardening bulge pressing into the apex of your thighs. A deep, gravelly moan vibrates in Sanemi’s throat when you begin pushing your hips down to meet the hardness protruding into you, your movements out of your control. 
For a moment, you remain like that, your body pressed flush to his as you gasp and grind against each other, your kisses little more than a desperate clash of lips and teeth and tongue. Sanemi is the first to break away, his mouth trailing hotly down the column of your throat. 
One arm stretches up the length of your back, his broad hand curling around your shoulder as the arm locked around your waist tightens. His hold on you sufficiently sturdy, Sanemi forces you to grind harder against him, his teeth nipping across your collarbone as you whimper above him. 
The ache between your legs is sharper, more intense than usual; closer to a burning throb than a mere flicker of desire. 
The hand he’d kept on your shoulder slides down your back, his fingers dragging teasingly along your spine until he reaches the waistband of your shorts. He snaps it once, twice, savoring your little jolts each time the elastic bites at your skin, before he pushes below it to grip your bare ass.
Your fingers fly to his hair as he fondles the plush curve of you in his hand, alternating between gentle massages and rough squeezes. Each pleading little mewl that slips past your lips only drives him wilder with need, his cock throbbing where it strains against the seat of his pants. 
He sucks a bruise into the juncture between your neck and shoulder. He will not give in; not yet, not before you beg him for what he’s been itching to give you for the last week. 
With a fierce whine, you circle your own hips, unsuccessfully trying to maneuver his hand away. Your own hand drops from his hair to cup his jaw as you pant against his ear.
He hides his smirk against your collar bone. “You got somewhere you want me to be, Y/N?” He croons, bucking harshly into your clothed center. His fingers dip to the crease between your ass and the top of your thigh, playing dangerously close to where he knows you need him most.
He can feel the heat radiating from you, beckoning him to closer, a beacon meant only for him. “You just gotta ask, Princess. I’m right here, waitin’.” 
“S-Sanemi —“
Without warning, Sanemi sits up, forcing you to scramble to lock your legs around him for support. He scoots to the edge of your bed, his grip on you firm, until his legs drape over its side. With you in his lap, he throws a steadying arm behind him as you sit perched atop his thigh.
“There. Wanted to see you properly.”
He traces the tip of his finger around the tightened bud of your right breast, just over your shirt, eyes bright and crinkled in amusement as you squirm.
It’s not enough; not nearly so.
With a wicked grin, he leans in, resuming his torturously slow exploration of your neck. Your reaction to him is instant, as you grind and squirm atop him, your fingers fisting at his hair. 
But, even he grows tired of this constant teasing. Impatient, he plants one hand at the base of your spine, pressing your body flush against his, while the other slides down your front, his fingers playing with the hem of your top. 
Right now, there’s only one thing – well, two things – he wants, and your damn shirt is getting in his way. 
The moment you shudder against him as his fingers brush the skin below your nazel is the moment he yanks your t-shirt up, revealing your peaked, aching breasts right to his hungry gaze.
He presses its hem to your lips. “Hold this.” 
Your pupils blow wide at the cockiness of his demand. Slowly, you part your lips and allow Sanemi to latch the bottom of your shirt between your teeth.
He gives you only a warning look, a stern narrowing of his eyes that says, don’t even think about dropping it, before he turns his attention back to your chest, pausing to whistle appreciatively at the sight of you, bare before him. 
In addition to being stuck with murderous cramps, one of the other terrible side effects of your period is how damn sore your breasts get. Often, you can hardly stand to wear a bra, the burning ache in your chest damn near unbearable. 
And there his mouth is, so close yet so far. The memory of just how expertly he’d navigated you the last time with his mouth makes your nipples stiffen, adds gasoline to the fire burning hotly in your lower belly. 
With a whimper, you thrust your chest toward him. 
“Oh?” Sanemi raises an eyebrow in mock surprise. Idly, his index finger traces a circle around your right nipple, followed by another. “Sensitive are we?” He smirks. “Looks like you’re achin’ for some attention, sweetheart.” 
His breath fans hotly across one of your stiff nipples, and you swear it throbs as Sanemi exhales against your skin again, teasing.
You could cry. Aching, indeed.
He smirks against your breast. “I can help with that.”
His lips part and Sanemi sucks your breast right into his mouth, groaning between sloppy, wet smacks of his mouth. The ache between your legs intensifies with every suck, every graze of his teeth and flick of his tongue.
“Pretty,” he hums against your nipple, and the vibrations from his mouth make your thighs clench together. He takes the breast not occupied by his mouth into his hand, lavishing it with the same worship as he gives the other, squeezing and rolling it until you’re whimpering over the mouthful of your shirt.
He pulls back, a thin strand of saliva connecting his lips with your nipple that breaks when he speaks. “Prettiest I’ve ever fuckin’ seen, just like the rest of you.”
Sanemi’s mouth is wet and hot as it trails across your sternum, taking your other soft mound into mouth while his hand migrates to the other, his fingers swirling the saliva he’d left behind into your flesh. He pinches your nipple in time with the graze of his teeth over the one sucked between his lips.
It’s too much; the pulsing ache between your legs has grown too riotous, too incessant, and you’re desperate for relief. The muscles of his thigh notched between your legs flex like he knows; baiting you.
You fall for it, hook, line and sinker, just as he wanted, your hips beginning a tentative grind against his leg.
Drool leaks from the corner of your mouth as you find a steady pace, rocking and grinding against him. It soaks the fabric of your shirt as you fight to keep from loosening your jaw. Everything Sanemi is doing feels so fucking good, and you’ll be damned to mess that up for yourself.
There it is again — that familiar knot in your stomach, one that rapidly pulls tighter and tighter the more you circle and grind against his thigh. Through your lashes, you can see Sanemi’s gaze locked heatedly on your face, a ravenous hunger in his eyes.
“You gonna cum just from this, sweetheart?” Despite his attempt at derision, his voice is rougher than gravel. His hands latch around your hips, shifting you until you’re perched right over the rock-hard bulge that has formed beneath the seat of his pants. 
In answer, you grind even harder against him, riding him with abandon as your nails dig into his shoulders. Moaning, Sanemi wraps his lips back around your tender nipple, and soon, he’s bucking up into you with equal fervor, the two of you gasping into one another. 
The hand pressed to your ass squeezes, Sanemi pushing you harder into him. You might just come like this, grinding against his bulge, Sanemi, mouthing hotly at your swollen breasts, tugging and nipping at your skin with his teeth. Everything feels heightened, your senses overwhelmed by him and his mouth until you buzz with the need for more. The knot in your stomach tightens, tightens — 
The stiffened seam of his pants catches your clit at precisely the right angle, and you fall apart. The whine that vibrates in your throat is nothing short of pathetic; a keening little plea as you fist at his hair, pressing his face into your chest while you grind desperately into him.  Your orgasm sweeps over you, both a relief and a taunt; a hollow echo of the release you crave, the high he’d given you that night that you’d pathetically chased since without success.
Sanemi only sucks at you harder. He finally releases you when the last feeble wave washes through, when he feels the tension in your limbs, settle.
“God damn,” he says roughly, imparting a final few flicks of his tongue across your nipple. “That was fuckin’ beautiful.”
With a last, harsh suck, Sanemi’s mouth leaves your sore chest with a soft pop. You barely have time to push the dampened hemp of your shirt from your mouth before the muscles of his arms ripple and flex around you. In an instant, you’re back under him, caged against your mattress by his hulking mass.
It’s thrilling, how easily he manhandles you, his touch firm and assured. Yet, no matter how capable he is of throwing you around — no matter how easily he can overpower those ever bigger and meaner than you  — his gentleness with you never wavers.
Sanemi wastes no time guiding your shirt over your head, throwing it somewhere over his shoulder. His mouth trails after his hands, and faster than you can blink, he rips your shorts down your legs, tossing them carelessly off the side of the bed. 
His fingers slide over the front of your underwear, circling. “There,” he marvels with a satisfied click of his tongue. “You’re fuckin’ soaked.” 
You don’t bother to tell him the wetness he feels might very well be from your period – after all, you’re wearing your speciality underwear, the kind that doesnt’ require you to wear tampons or pads. But you also don’t think Sanemi would care much either way, given how he continues circling your clit, savoring the way your legs spasm and jerk beneath him. 
Moaning, your thighs widen for him and Sanemi continues the languid turn of his fingers. You think he means to make you come again, and it’s embarrassing how quickly your body commits to that effort, but he pulls his hand away. 
Your whine needles some remorse out of him. He ducks to press a sweet kiss against your knee. “Be right back.” 
His weight on your bed lifts, and Sanemi quickly vanishes around the corner of the wall that blocks your bed from the view of the small hallway containing your bathroom, one cabined by your laughably tiny linen closet.
He reappears a few seconds later, one of your towels in hand.
“Hips up,” he orders, motioning for you to lift yourself from the mattress. Wide-eyed, you obey, your heart fluttering in your throat.
“For the record, I don’t care if we use a towel,” Sanemi tells you as he spreads it beneath you, creating a barrier between your body and your blankets. “I’d wash the sheets for ya once we finished. But if you prefer to use it, that’s fine by me.”
His hands guides you back down against the bed and linger once you settle, his fingers teasing along the jut of your hip. “But a period ain’t gonna stop me from helping my girl feel good.” He bends down to seal his promise with his lips against your thigh.
Off the side of your bed, Sanemi straightens, his movements easy and self-assured in every way you aren’t. Keeping his eyes locked with yours, he unbuckles his belt, the click of metal sending an electric current right between your legs. Wordlessly, he shucks his pants and briefs down his legs.
Your mouth runs dry; his cock looks somehow bigger, more imposing than it had that first night. Ramrod straight and leaking, the thick head of him smacking up against his abdomen. 
He pauses in front of you, close enough that you can feel the heat rolling off his body, and yet he maintains the smallest distance between you, holding back just enough to drive you mad.
You want to snap at him; to demand he ease the fire he’d ignited in your blood, to touch you in that way only he knew. But your desire for him makes your mind blank, and though you know your vocabulary is better than most, you can’t remember the words necessary to form your demand.
For Sanemi’s part, his eyes are locked heatedly on your face, alight with the hint of a challenge; baiting you to see how long it will take before you crack. 
His voice is as coarse as gravel. “Come here.”
Normally, you’d balk at his attempts to order you around, and instead offer him some snappy retort or a petulant roll of your eyes. Here, however, Sanemi has the upper hand, and your need is too great to try and wrestle it back from him. 
Careful not to disturb the towel spread so carefully atop your mattress, you rise. Sanemi watches your every movement with a hunger he doubts can ever be fully sated. His fingers find yours, and slowly, he pulls you into him, your chest squishing lightly against his abdomen. 
You gaze up at him through heavy-lidded eyes as his hands slide over your hips, marveling at the silkiness of your skin. With a teasing languidness, he loops his fingers under the band of your underwear, one at a time. Slowly, he drags them down the length of your legs, lowering himself to his knees  as he slides it over your feet. All the while, his gaze remains locked with yours, pressing his lips reverently to the fleshy part above your knee while his hands run up and down your calves. 
Your scent makes his mouth water: a sweet musk, tinged with the faintest trace of iron, and utterly intoxicating. The temptation to lean in and taste the paradise between your thighs is strong, but Sanemi resists. Instead, he rises back to his full height with the same slowness as before, his nose nearly touching yours.  
His eyes drop to your mouth right as your tongue flicks out to wet your lips, and Sanemi descends upon you like a tidal wave.
“Fuck.” He growls, hand closing around the back of your neck as he jerks you forward and crashes his mouth down against yours.
Whatever remained of your self-doubt and uncertainty fizzles under the weight of his intensity.  All at once, you feel like the most alluring creature ever to grace the planet, a temptress worthy of the great epics gathering dust at the store. Sanemi’s kiss is feverish and urgent and all-consuming; he kisses you like a man parched, your lips his only salvation.
Eager hands wrap under your thighs and haul you up, up, up. Your gasp of surprise at your sudden weightlessness is swallowed up by Sanemi’s tongue sweeping into your mouth.  
Down the two of you fall, a breathless heap of tangled limbs and shared moans landing on your bed. This time, your legs part for him without his guidance, and Sanemi settles easily into the cradle of your thighs. 
Only your second time and already, your bodies are moving together like it’s the most natural thing in the world. You’re drawing him in like a magnet, your body his North Star. 
What a fucking idiot he was, to not have realized it sooner.
Your kisses turn sloppy and he feels you draw your legs up, your knees braced against his sides. He hisses as his bare length grazes your wet center, the head radiating from you making him throb.  
He rubs his cock against your damp heat again and again, his nails biting into your sheets as he resists the urge to thrust forward before he’s properly lubricated for you. 
Beneath him, you tense. “N-now?” You squeak, your nails digging into his shoulders as he rubs himself against the slick heat of you.
He almost groans. “Yeah, now.” If he has to wait any longer, he might go insane.
“But — but — don’t you want a condom —?”
Sanemi scowls as he drags his tip up and down your slit before pressing against your entrance. Fuck no, he doesn’t.
“Shhh. What’d I say?” He quells your worrying with a mighty thrust of his hips. The coppery slickness of you mixed with your arousal means there’s no resistance, and so, Sanemi sheathes himself to the hilt inside you in a single, fluid movement. “Shut up and let me take care of you, yeah?”
You answer him with a high-pitched cry, one that almost borders a small scream, and he’s hard-pressed to restrain himself from joining you.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Sanemi grinds out. “Holy shit, sweetheart.”
He thought he’d been close to losing his mind that first time, but the feeling of you now, tighter and hotter than before, and so fucking wet, threatens to untether him from reality all together.
In fact, he realizes as his hips begin moving on their own, he’s likely already lost control. He begins with slow, shallow thrusts, but his movements quickly melt into hard, deep rolls of his hips that are little more than base instinct. He is driven only by the need for more, to push himself as deep as he can possibly go until the two of you fuse together as one.
You’re writhing beneath him, toes curling against your mattress, too overwhelmed by the feeling of him being buried inside you. Not that Sanemi is faring much better. It’s taking him a surprising amount of self-restraint to keep himself from coming right then, too lost in the heaven of your body. 
Amazed that he’s still able to form a coherent thought, he manages to ask, “You still on that pill?”
He has no intentions of using condoms ever again, not after experiencing the euphoria that is your bare pussy. But your answer will determine where he comes.
He feels you nod as your teeth catch his bottom lip, beseeching him for a kiss he’s only happy to oblige. He grunts into you, a needy, guttural sound as he works to set his pace. “You want me to pull out?”
You pause for a moment and then with wide eyes, you slowly shake your head.
Sanemi smiles against your mouth. “Good. Me neither.”
Sure, his rule against having children while still entrenched within the Corps’ operations threatens to go up in smoke, but you’re on birth control. And, as he’s learned, he can’t follow rules for shit when it comes to you.
He nudges your head to the side, burying his face against the exposed length of your neck.
“Jesus Christ,” he inhales deeply, mouth pressed to your skin. “I fuckin’ missed you.”
For the past week, his body has been rebelling against him, too restless to sleep, to think, to do anything but roar its discontent with him. But here, buried to the hilt inside you as he is, a calmness trickles through his veins, steadying him, bringing him back into himself.
He should’ve known, he thinks as he rolls his hips with yours, working to set his pace. It’s you. It has always been you.
Beneath him, you fare no better, just as overwhelmed by your reunion with his body as he is with yours. That burning stretch is still there, just as it had been that first night, but it’s nowhere near as sharp as it had been then. Still, it takes a moment to adjust to his intrusion, despite how ready you’d been to receive him. After all, Sanemi is on the larger end of the scale; not that you have anything in particular to compare him to. But his cock is a little longer than the length of your hand, and thick. 
And god, does he know how to use it. No wonder he’s so insufferably smug all the time. He’d earned his bragging rights a hundred times over.
You’re both panting, his forehead pressed to yours as your noses bump together. Your fingers twist in his hair, desperate to find an anchor the more Sanemi threatens to to send you over the edge of your sanity.
You try, bless you, to meet his movements, your hips tentatively jerking to meet his thrusts, to help him plunge deeper.
Your effort makes him melt. “Just let me do all the work, sweetheart.” He coos, pressing you firmly into your bed, limiting your movements with his weight. “You ain’t gotta do a thing but take it.”
Truth be told, Sanemi is dreaming of the day you’ll ride him. In addition to reminiscing how fucking good your pussy tastes, Sanemi also hasn’t been able to stop thinking about how you will look perched atop him, your hips rolling and dropping frantically against his, tits bouncing. But right now, you’re the one who needs to be taken care of, and he’s more than happy (if not downright insistent) that he’s the man for the job.
You give into him easily, sinking into the mattress and letting your legs spread wider, relaxed. Sanemi smothers his throaty hum of approval into your neck, sucking and biting his claim into your skin.
The air between you grows thick with the scent of iron and sex, clouding his head and further loosening whatever hold he pretends to have over the monstrous, feral thing inside him. The one that only wants to pin you down and take you harder, rougher, until you can’t fathom being anything else but his.
He’s only able to cling onto that last bit of self-control because he’s so focused on you, all too aware of your limits. Those big, watery eyes of yours are pools he can drown in, and the wobble in your lower lip as he hits deeper nearly drives him insane. God, he can’t believe he denied himself of this for so long – of you, of the privilege of taking care of you, of making you cry out his name and beg for more.  
“God, you’re perfect.” He moans out in praise. “You’re fuckin’ perfect.” 
Though it’s only your second time, your bodies slide together like it’s the most natural thing in the world; easier than breathing. You are an extension of him as much as he is of you, and he can’t even chalk it up to his eye for detail. The observations he’d made of you last time had nothing to do with survival. It was instinctual. Sanemi hadn’t needed to work to memorize you; he’d known you the second your skin met his. 
It’s this familiarity that guides him now, Sanemi’s lips and teeth and hands finding every spot that makes you moan, gasp, bite your lip until it nearly bleeds while you scratch at him and urge him closer. 
Though he’s admittedly half-fucked out of his mind with euphoria as you clench and pulse around him, Sanemi does note that some of your uncertainty toward your own body has returned. Your hands drift from his hair to his face before dropping to clutch at his shoulders. As Sanemi’s movements gain momentum, making you bounce against the mattress, your nails lightly – hesitantly – crest into his skin.
He chuckles against the shell of your ear. “You can cling to me as much as you want, darlin’. I don’t mind.” He rolls his hips more purposefully this time, the arm around your waist tightening, forcing you to arch harder into him. “I’ll take good care of my girl.”
His knees shift forward and Sanemi pulls back to study you. It’s hard to know where to rest his eyes; you look fucking incredible under him like this, hair fanned out, framing your head like a halo; your breasts, peaked and mouthwateringly full, bouncing perfectly in time with his movements.
But it’s your face that catches his attention; the way you tug your bottom lip between your teeth, coupled with how your inner walls flex around him, as though in answer, your pupils blown wide with desire.
His free arm pushes under your knee and your pretty mouth falls open at deepening the reach of his cock. “You like it when I call you that, huh? My girl.”
Tears cling to your eyelashes. You manage only a hurried, jerky nod of your head, incapable of making any sound more intelligent than a few whimpers.
“Yeah?” And he pins you down harder into the mattress with a snarl, his arm pressing your leg nearly to your shoulders. “Good, ‘cause you are.” 
The lewd squelching of Sanemi’s cock bullying relentlessly against your swollen, aching walls grows louder. He untangles his arm from under your leg to move above your head, bracing his weight on his fist where it’s balled into the mattress. He uses his new position to increase the force of his thrusts, his legs straightening out behind him, his feet digging into the bed as he draws his cock nearly all the way out of your heat, before plunging right back in.
“And this is all mine, too, isn’t it?” A free hand wedges between your bodies, Sanemi slapping lightly at your clit. You cry out as he repeats the action again, but when he presses down at the next contact of his fingers and circles them, a howl of his name rips free.
He tucks his dark chuckle into your throat, his teeth nipping just above where your pulse flutters. “Yeah, it is. ‘Cuz you’re my girl. My good fuckin’ girl.”
Your cunt clenches around him in steady pulses, every fleck of your slick warmth fogging his brain. It’s unreal, the way you respond to the filth pouring from his mouth. It nearly drives him insane; here he is, someone who has only ever known hell, yet he’s managed to steal away his own piece of heaven. 
Rough fingers tighten around your hip, pulling you harder to meet him. Sheer desire may have clouded his head in those first moments, his delight in getting to have you making him over-eager to get you naked, but the fog is rapidly dissipating. Instead, as he moves, Sanemi’s dizzying pleasure becomes edged by solemnity. 
Sure, sex has always been an easier way to work through emotions he wasn’t allowed to feel, but that sort of self-distraction can’t fly anymore. Not with you; not when you mean everything.
He was your first and he wants to be your last. Your only.
None of this is temporary; he hadn’t told you he was all in until he got bored, or until one of the thousand reasons couples break up came along to give him the first pass to skip town. He didn’t attach any strings to that key. You need to know. You need to know how fucking serious he is about this. You. 
But in case any ambiguities remain, let him clear them up now.
“Can’t believe I wasted all that fuckin time on the others when I could’ve had you. You used to smile at me, you remember that?” Sanemi draws his hips back, leaving only the tip of his cock inside before slamming back into you. “When we were in school. Used to make me go dumb in the head when ya did.”
The wet, sticky squelching where your bodies connect only grows louder as Sanemi increases his pace. “And then I’d see you smile at others and it drove me nuts. But then I realized you were smilin’ special for me — and not just because you were bein’ polite. You meant it.”
He tucks his head into the crook of your neck, his mouth sucking a harsh bruise into your skin that he soothes with his tongue. “Should’ve made you mine back then.” He growls, and below him, you tense. “Should’ve made you my girl and taken you far away from here. Might’ve even become a better man, if I had. I would’ve, if I’d known. That you were fuckin’ made for me — fuck!” Sanemi throws his head back as you squeeze tighter around him.
He drops his gaze back down to your face. Though your eyes are glassy with pleasure, there’s recognition there, an understanding that parts your lips as the weight of his words settles.
I would’ve wanted you, then. 
Judging by the dent that appears between your eyebrows, he knows his silent confession isn’t lost on you, even as a sharp cry tears from your throat. 
Sanemi leans down and kisses you, roughly, in confirmation. “And I don’t just mean your body,” he breaks away from your lips with a pant. “You were fuckin’ made for me. Wish I’d known it back then.”
He gives a sharp twist of his hips on his next plunge in, making you bow away from the bed and into him with a cracked moan. But Sanemi lets his weight press you right back down, your bodies rolling together as one.
There’s a limberness to your body that hadn’t been there that first time; a relaxedness in your limbs now that you know what to expect, one that has you opening your thighs a little wider, an invitation for him to hit deeper that he’s only too happy to accept. 
“Oh fuck — that’s it, baby. Yes.” He can’t be bothered to feel embarrassed by the way his voice strains as he shouts, “Fuck!”
As tight as you’d been when he’d first entered you, nothing compares to the way you’re squeezing his cock, now. You’ve sharpened the arch in your spine, smushing your breasts into his chest as you offer him to take more and more. So firm is the hold of your body over his, that Sanemi finds it increasingly difficult to thrust, and he resigns himself instead to holding hard by the hips and grinding. 
A too familiar tingle at the base of his spine prickles. He going to come and soon, and that’s unacceptable. His entire sexual history has been predicated on two rules: no unprotected encounters and no cumming before his partner.
He’d thrown the first rule to the wind with enthusiastic ease; but he’ll be damned if he starts reneging on the second. Not when he’s promised to take care of you.
Sanemi’s hand unlatches from its place above your hip to push between your bodies. Your eyes roll back into your head and your jaw goes slack when his thumb finds your aching clit and swirls, coaxing you to relax into the bed and ease some of your iron-tight grip.
“S — San —“ you try, but whatever thought you’re trying to string together dies in your throat under a keening wine as Sanemi shallowly thrusts into you.
He grits his teeth. Not enough; he’s still too damn close. His balls have become painfully tight, and the electric prickle he feels has bled into his stomach, forming a know that’s becoming tauter by the second.
He won’t be able to hold off for much longer.
“C’mere, baby.” He manages with a croak. “Need ya to cum for me.” And with some remorse, he withdraws his hand. It joins the other in smoothing down the sides of your thighs, bending each leg at your knee. “Keep ‘em up. I’m gonna get real deep, okay?” 
He anchors himself against your sheets and settles. The adjustment pushes him deeper inside your warmth and a small moan escapes your mouth. Sanemi begins rocking into you, gentle at first, but gradually faster. “Might feel a bit strange, but I need ya to trust me. I’ll take care of you.” 
Knees nearly to your chest, you nod. Tentative whimpers soon melt into steady cries that pace with his movements. Before long, your hips are rolling up and away from the bed with his, your toes curling in the air.
The hand he has braced next to your head fists at your sheets. This new position means you’re even tighter than before, and the extra slickness from your period has him bumping up against all the right places in record time. 
Below, you squirm and claw at him, but your moans only grow louder as Sanemi continues to reach deeper within your swollen, tender walls, searching for the spot he knows will have you unraveling.
“S-Sanemi,” you whine, your nails digging into the corded muscles of his back
“I know you’re feelin’ sensitive, baby, but you’ll feel better if you cum. Can you do that for me?”
Eager to ease you into agreement, he rewards you with a trail of slow, open-mouthed kisses down your neck. The knot in his stomach tightens, but Sanemi resists; his self-control used to be a source of pride, and he’s determined to cling onto whatever thread of it remains.
Thankfully, you flutter and clench around him, a broken moan lilting out of you in answer.
Relief courses through him. “Yes, baby — that’s it. Shit.” His eyes squeeze shut and he focuses on the sharp sting of your nails raking down his back, willing the pain to ground him as he fights off his own orgasm. “You’re close, aren’t you? I can feel it.”
He hasn’t dared forget how it feels when you’re at your breaking point; sweet, slick walls pulsing and clenching wildly around him, every muscle in your body strung tight as you wait for that coil in your gut to spring.
It’s all he’s thought about for the last eleven days.
And when you confirm with a jerky, frantic nod, Sanemi leans in and presses his lips to your forehead. “Let’s make it a big one, yeah?”
Without waiting for a response, Sanemi drops his head to the pillow below. Slowly, he allows his weight to sink into you, pushing him further into your warmth. You cry out when his tip kisses a spot deep within you, a slight tinge of pain sparking through your lower abdomen that intensifies when he hits it again and again. Your nails rake down his back and tears well hot and fast in your eyes as Sanemi begins rutting hard and fast into you, no sound leaving your mouth but a series of strangled, choked gasps.
It hurts, the way he hammers away at that spot. You can’t deny it. But it also feels so fucking incredible that you can’t fathom him stopping now. Ever.
He churns harshly with every brutal snap of his hips, the coarse, rough hairs of his base scraping right against your clit, until that coil behind your navel cinches impossibly tight.
“Sanemi —“ you squeak, but nothing else follows, save a single, choked gasp.
It’s over and he knows it.
“Go on, sweetheart.” His voice husky and warm, murmuring in your ear. “Show me who you belong to.”
That’s all it takes; with a guttural gasp, you seize around him like a vice. Your limbs tense even as a warmth bursts deep from within your stomach. 
Your first orgasm with him had been powerful; this one is a cataclysm.
Climax rips through you like a hurricane; an explosion of pleasure that fractures you apart, shatters you into hundreds of fractals that all sing one name until your throat burns. 
Sanemi only fucks you harder.
Everything falls away; the industrial iron piping on your ceiling, the faint golden glow of the fairy lights woven around your headboard, even the rough fabric of the towel spread beneath you. All of it fades to white as you freefall into an endless ocean that’s precisely the color of the eyes you love most. 
Thick fingers close around your jaw, urging your face towards his. Far away, in the deep throes of your own ecstasy, you hear his soft whisper of your name, a string tugging you through the waves. You follow it all the way back to where you lie, sandwiched between your bed and his body. Through pleasure-bleary eyes, you find him watching you with a hunger that only intensifies the harder you come around him.
Somehow, despite the fact he has now seen every inch of your undressed body, the way his eyes hold yours has you feeling stripped to the bone. Beneath his ravenous, dark gaze, you are flayed open, no part of you left hidden. Truly naked. 
He has to see it, you think even as you continue to wail his praise. He has to, spread beneath him as you are. He has to know every corner of you bears his name. 
A brutal snap of his hips sends Sanemi’s cock right into that wonderfully painful place, your back arching hard off the bed as another great wave picks you up and slams you against the shore that is him. Tears leak from the corners of your eyes as you continue to sob from the force of your orgasm until finally, the tide recedes, sending you plummeting back to the mess of blankets below.
Sanemi’s arms catch you before you land. 
He lets your legs drop from his shoulders and replaces them with your arms. Though limp, you manage to summon your residual strength to tighten your hold around his neck, clinging to him.
Satisfied, no longer does Sanemi try and hold back his ragged moans and grunts as he chases his release. Not that he’d given much of a shit about it before, but Sanemi finds that he really can’t muster one now.
His hands curl around the edge of your mattress above your head, Sanemi using his grip for leverage, deepening the reach of his cock until he can’t tell where you end and he begins.
“Oh fuck — oh fuck —“ Sanemi can’t stop the filth pouring from his mouth as the familiar prickle at the base of his spine grows hotter, more electric. 
He’s going hard; the entire bed creaks and rocks with the force of his movements, the bedposts rhythmically knocking up against your wall with pronounced thumps.  “Fuck, I’m gonna come — baby, I’m gonna come —“
Beneath him, your moans have resumed though they now carry the faint cadence of a whimper. Somewhere, in the back of his pleasure-addled mind, Sanemi knows you’re probably overstimulated, but his pace only increases. He can’t stop, doesn’t want to stop, not when he’s so fucking close, not when it’s been so fucking long —
Unintentionally, you graze the raised skin of his brand, and Sanemi tosses his head back, hissing in approval. More, he wills, fucking into you harder. Do it more, carve your own claim into him. The Corp’s mark doesn’t mean shit to him, now.
Whether you understand the bruising demands of his hips or whether you’re simply reacting to their quick, hard snaps, you comply, your hands raking down his spine, Another powerful thrust throws your arm up his back, and you fumbles for purchase right in the dip between his shoulders.  
Gasping, you sink your nails right into his mark, and Sanemi loses control. 
With one last mighty push of his hips, Sanemi comes undone with a roar, his balls flush against your ass as his climax slams into him.
A strangled cry of your name is all he can manage before stars explode behind his eyelids. His jaw slackens, and his lower body moves on its own, his hips canting as his release barrels through him and into you, hot and thick. He’d sworn the first time he finished in you had been the hardest he’d ever came in his life. But then, your legs jerk around his waist, your shins locking together at the base of his spine as your thighs squeeze his hips, and his vision goes white.  
For someone who has spent most of his sexually active years doggedly refusing to consider the idea of barebacking any of his former partners, Sanemi has a bitch of a time trying to remember why that is. Because nothing, not a goddamn thing at all, will ever compare to this. 
Below him, you begin to mewl and whine, your hands clawing lightly at his chest in an effort to push him away. A voice blooms in the back of his head, a faint reminder that you’re likely overstimulated to the point of discomfort.
But it just feels too fucking good.
“Sorry, sweetheart, I’m still —“ Sanemi struggles against the deep groan vibrating in his throat as he continues to fuck you through his release. “Not — ngh — not done yet —“
He shifts, allowing his full weight to sink into you and still your squirming. He pushes your arms away from him, his hands wrapping around your biceps, pinning you down in place.
If you truly wanted him off, Sanemi would have obeyed, regardless of how badly he wanted to finish coming inside you. But though he has you held down, you still manage to rock your hips with his, your walls pulsing around him as his cum continues to fill you.
His cock twitches one last time, leaving Sanemi lightheaded and trembling as he finally finishes spending himself in you. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” he drops his forehad against yours, panting. “You got me fuckin’ shaking.” 
He unlatches his grip from your biceps in favor of bracing his forearms against your mattress, mindful to ease his full weight off you. Your fingers sweep through his hair, your other hand resting against the side of his neck, scratching at him until his eyes flutter open to reveal you craning your head up, a silent request for his kiss.
Sanemi obliges, and once he starts, he can’t stop. He doesn’t break the connection of your lips even as he pulls out, soothing your responding wince with a flick of his tongue. He stretches out on his side next to you, no room between your bodies as his arm nestles in the valley between your breasts, his hand cupping your cheek, kissing you all the while.
He lays with you like that for several moments until wetness graces his cheeks. Sanemi pulls back to see tears sliding down your face, more clinging to your eyelashes like tiny, glittering jewels. 
Worry, hot and frantic, surges in his gut. “Hey, hey,” he kisses away the tracks staining your cheeks. “Was that okay? Was I too rough?”
You shake your head, turning it away from him to face your ceiling, your hand wiping tiredly at your eyes. “Not at all. I feel better – so much better. Less achy.” You roll your head back toward him, your eyes still watery but bright. “It’s just that – that was so fucking good. I didn’t expect it.”
That does little to assuage some of his concern. “What, it wasn’t good last time?”
You roll your eyes. “Not what I’m saying. I mean, I know I’m more sensitive than usual on my period. I’ve used toys before to help, but nothing has ever reduced me to tears from how good it felt.”
Instantly, his anxiety is washed away with a surge of pride that wells in his chest; a smugness that comes from the knowledge he’d fucked you so well you cried, but he keeps his boasts to himself.
Instead, Sanemi snorts. “Told ya I’d take care of you.”
You click your tongue, fidgeting as another gush of his cum leaks out of you. “Feels like you needed to be taken care of, too.”
“Haven’t jacked off in almost a week. Too much shit goin’ on.” He frowns before adding, “Plus, you’re all I wanted. My hand couldn’t compare to you.”
You roll your head back to face your ceiling, your eyes sliding closed and a blissful smile spreading across your lips. A smile that makes Sanemi’s own mouth part, his eyes growing wide, his cheeks, warm.
He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to your beauty.
Sanemi settles back down next to you, his body slightly lower on the bed than yours. He remains on his side, eyes tracing every detail of your serene expression as he presses kisses along your bare shoulder.
Moments pass, or maybe hours, and still, Sanemi does not tear his eyes away from you. Eventually, your breathing slows under his adoring gaze, and Sanemi knows you’re moments away from sleep.
He whispers your name and you crack an eye open. “You feel up for a shower?”
Sleepily, you nod, but you make no effort to rise from the plush comfort of your bed.
Sanemi sighs through his nose. “Need some help?”
“My legs don’t work anymore.” You can’t hold back your giggle as you roll to watch Sanemi shake his head at you before rising, his hand rumpling his hair. The blankets fall away from his lower hips, giving you a premium view of the world-class ass of Sanemi Shinazugawa, and you can’t help but smirk at the faint, red crescent marks dotting his skin, left behind by your nails. But the remnants of your post-sex haze dissipate the moment Sanemi and turns back to you, revealing the extent of the mess you’d left behind.
You blanch; his groin and cock are both covered in a sticky redness, a residue of your period blood mixed with both your cum and his.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Your hands flail as you try and wipe away all traces of blood from his groin and his softening cock, desperate to erase the evidence before he can see, before he can be disgusted by it, by you —
“Hey, hey — watch it —“ he growls as you brush your hand against his overly-sensitive cock. Sanemi’s hand snatches your wrist away from him, halting you mid-air. “Cut it out.”
Your cheeks burn with shame. “But —“
“Will ya stop worrying about it?” His fingers loosen around your wrist, and you retract your arm. “Look — see —“
Sanemi swipes his own hand through the mess you’d left behind and holds it up, your blood smeared on his fingers. “I don’t give a fuck. Kinda hot, actually.”
There is a mess of pink between your thighs, a combination of crimson mixed with his white that leaks out of you, staining your skin and the towel beneath you. He knows he’s wanton because he can’t stop thinking about how fucking pretty your pussy is. 
Especially when it’s covered with him.
His tongue flicks out to wet his lips. “Definitely hot. And you’re gonna let me have a taste next time.”
Your thighs press together at the very obvious hunger in his stare. “Sorry my period interfered with your oral fixation.”
“Didn’t interfere with shit. When I say ‘next time’ I mean, next time you’re on it.”
You gape at him. “You’re not serious –”
“Very.”
Heat creeps up your neck. “Sanemi, it’ll be bloody –”
“I told you, I don’t give a shit. Only reason I didn’t do it tonight was ‘cuz I was worried you might stroke out.” He shoots you a naughty wink. “I’m still breakin’ you in, after all.”  
The smugness in his tone ignites a fire in your cheeks, but before you can respond, the bed and blankets disappear from beneath you.
“C‘mon,” Sanemi grunts as he gathers you up in his arms. “Let’s get cleaned up.”
There is a stark contrast between sleeping with Sanemi Shinazugawa and showering with him. 
Moments before, he’d been committed to fucking you senseless, seemingly not satisfied until you were reduced to a soggy, pleasure-drunk mess, only capable of gasping his name in stilted syllables. 
None of that ferocity is present here, under the warm spray of the shower. Instead, Sanemi’s touch is soft, almost hesitant, as his arms encircle you, locking you in against his chest. His hand finds your face, and then his lips, and you melt into him. His kiss is not the passionate, possessive clash of tongue and teeth that it had been only moments before; this time, it is gentle. Chaste.
Any doubts which might have lingered in you as to the status of your relationship with him are quickly washed away, sliding down your legs with the water before mixing with the bubbles that slip down the drain. This is not a speck of softness marooned among an oasis of lust; this is not a temporary moment of affection between two people desperate to know it. 
This is intimacy.
It is tenderness which warms Sanemi’s eyes as his mouth breaks from yours, that turns them into twin pools of amethyst as he brushes a wet strand of your hair away from your face. It’s adoration; a vulnerability he’d never dare show to just a hookup. This — he — is meant for you and you alone. And it is that silent understanding which passes between you that your hand moves to lay against his cheek, parrroting his gentle touch. And it is what makes you surge up boldly on your toes, your mouth slanting over his once more.
—-
By the time Sanemi wrenches your bathroom door open sometime later, allowing the steam from the shower to billow out into the open area of your studio, both of your fingers have turned wrinkly. He wagers you would’ve stayed in there longer, had your hot water supply not run out, your shower head dousing you both with water he reckons was dangerously close to freezing. 
He’s the first to step out, though only because your bathroom is laughably small. He’s lucky the two of you managed to stand comfortably in your tub, but he doesn’t think that good fortune extends to you both drying off in the narrow space between your toilet, counter, and tub. Better he peel away now, and avoid starting a fight because you can’t mind your elbows.
Sanemi pads back to the bathroom, towel looped around his waist. “Took care of the towel on the bed. Threw it in the wash.” On cue, you hear the familiar click of your washing machine as it settles into its cycle. “Nothin’ got on your sheets, but I know some people can be picky. You okay sleeping on ‘em?”
“It’s fine,” you call from the bathroom. “Can you do me a favor? Top drawer of my dresser — there’s a row of black underwear. Throw me a pair?”
He returns a moment later, smirking as you hover in your bathtub, wrapped in an overlarge towel, waiting for him to bring you your panties. Like some internal code of decency prevents you from traipsing around your apartment in your towel like he does, even though he’s seen every inch of your body.
You emerge from the bathroom a moment later, still wrapped in your towel, right as Sanemi fishes something dark from its place on your floor.
He tosses his shirt to you. “You can wear that to bed, if you want. Not that you’ll hear me complain if you decide to sleep naked.” He shoots you a wink as he towels his hair. Pride wells in his chest at the sight of you slipping his tee over your head, and it soothes that hot, possessive streak within him. “Hope you don’t mind if I do, though. I’m not big on puttin’ dirty clothes back on after I’ve showered.” 
“You’re —?” The surprise in your tone stills his hands, and he lifts his head. “Are you staying?” 
Sanemi quirks an eyebrow at you. He’d thought it obvious he was, given the shower and how you’re now wearing his shirt. He studies you for a moment, notes how your hands twist together and the anxious shift of your weight from foot to foot.
A sudden sobriety settles over him. Of course; you’ve said you’d never been in a relationship before, which means all of this — having him over, showering with you, and sleeping in your bed — is brand new. As ready and committed as he is to you, perhaps this is all too much, too fast. It’s only natural for you to want to hit the brakes; to feel out this unfamiliar road. 
“I don’t have to.” Embarrassment creeps up his neck. “We can slow this down, if that’s what you want. I’m not in any rush.”
Dumbass, he chides at himself. Granted, this is new territory for him as well. He at least thought his years of rotating partners in and out of his bed would’ve meant he had some tact, but here he is, jumping the gun. 
Your eyes widen in alarm. “N-no! That’s not what I meant. I want you to stay -- I do. I just didn’t want you to think you had to.” 
He can see how your cheeks darken as he draws near, can see the bob of your throat as you keep your eyes firmly glued to his, a concerted effort to keep from looking down, as though you haven’t seen, touched, felt every inch of his nudity. 
A small smirk settles at the corner of his mouth. 
Silently, Sanemi takes your chin between his thumb and index finger, keeping your face tilted up towards his. He leans in and feels your eyelashes flutter against his nose in anticipation of his kiss. 
Only millimeters separate your lips when he pauses. “Who else is gonna slobber all over me ‘til I fall asleep?”
Your eyes fly open. “Y-you—! I —!” 
He silences your indignant sputtering with a quick peck to your lips. “Yeah, I’m stayin’. That key wasn’t just some empty gesture, idiot.”
You smack his chest half-heartedly, but laugh as you kiss him again. “Just get back in bed. I’ll make tea.” 
Sanemi steps back with a cheeky smirk and lets his towel drop to the floor. “Yes ma’am.”
He must know your eyes are glued to his ass as he walks away, for he offers you a little wiggle as he retreats back to your bed.
“Don’t forget to pick your jaw up off the ground, sweetheart.” He calls smoothly over his shoulder, focused on meticulously peeling back the covers of your bed, layer by layer. “Can’t make tea if you’re drooling everywhere.”
Rolling your eyes, you disappear behind the half wall of your kitchenette. Maybe you should kick him out, naked ass and all. 
Out in the main area, Sanemi has settled back into bed, his arms folded behind his head.
“There’s another reason it took me so long to see you, you know,” Sanemi stares up at the black pipes striped across the high ceilings of your apartment as you busy yourself with the kettle in the kitchen. “I went to see my brother.”
“Genya?” You poke your head out from the doorway. You disappear only when the kettle beeps, mugs clinking together as you pull them from one of your cabinets.
“Yeah.”
You reemerge a moment later, two steaming cups of tea clutched delicately in each hand. “He doesn’t live with you, right? He’s someplace far from here?”
Carefully, you set the mugs on your small bedside table. You crawl back into bed beside him, Sanemi’s arms opening to allow you to settle in against him, your head coming to rest against his pectoral.
“He’s enrolled in a boys’ boarding school.” He puffs his chest out in pride. “A damn good one, too.”
Boarding school. You’d known that Genya attended school in another city, and spent most of his time there at Sanemi’s insistence, but you’d assumed he’d had his brother stay with a friend or a local family.
Now, you think of Sanemi, with his patched-up leather jacket and worn boots; of the apartment you know he keeps in the Silo that he never lets you visit, and try and square that with the Sanemi who pays for his brother’s private education. “Do I want to know how you manage to afford boarding school tuition?”
“He’s on scholarship — wasn’t hard to get, considering our family’s finances. Found the proof easily enough.” Sanemi stares off into the empty space of your apartment with a shrug. “But I also started saving as soon I started makin’ money. The minute I had enough put aside, I sent Genya away. Paid for his uniforms and school stuff. I send him cash every month now so he can do extracurriculars and shit. I want ‘im socializing. The more friends he makes, the more connections he’s got.”
Sanemi’s voice then softens. “The more chance that he’ll stay far away from here, y’know?”
You trace your index finger along one of the jagged, silvery scars that cuts across his chest. “Was this before or after your father died?”
“Tch. After.” Sanemi snorts. “The old man’s death was never reported to the cops, so there ain’t a death certificate for him. I forged his signature on the transfer paperwork.” He thinks before adding, “had someone I know get me the paperwork to become Genya’s legal guardian, once I hit eighteen. Not like it changed all that much. It’s always been me ‘n him, even before our old man bit it.”
A year ago, you hadn’t imagined Sanemi Shinazugawa was capable of anything other than brash self-service. He’d been so good at pretending to care about nothing, acting as if the only thing keeping him tethered to this world was a heart that refused to quit beating.
Time and again, Sanemi has proven that his actions are far louder than even his most obnoxious words. While he shrouds himself in arrogance, it’s a cloak that’s flimsy, at best. Once again, all it takes is a little effort, a little more initiative, to see what lies beneath it. 
Under the beast’s mask lies the endless beauty that makes up Sanemi Shinazugawa: all his selflessness, all his fierce love and devotion. So gentle, so pure, and so worthy of the love he won’t let himself believe he deserves.
Emotion prickles behind your eyes. As if anyone on earth could be more worthy than him. 
“‘Sides, I like havin’ someone to fuss after. Reminds me that some part of me is still human.” He continues, oblivious to the way your throat works to swallow around the lump lodged in your airways. “Now, I’ve got two people I get to care about.”
His hand holds up yours and he turns it over in his palm, admiring the shape of your fingers; the softness of your skin. He smiles and it’s the most devastatingly beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. “I’m pretty fuckin’ lucky, if you ask me. All things considered.”
Your silence shakes him out of his indulgent appreciation of your hand. But when his eyes find yours again, it’s his turn to be stunned silent. 
You’re doing it again — looking at him as though he is the sun; such adoration feels nearly impossible to accept, especially by someone like him.
And yet, he wants to try; for you, he’d try anything.
For a long moment, the two of you hold each other’s gaze, neither daring to break the bubble that’s formed over your heads. What passes between you has a name, and both of you know it. It’s what slipped off your tongue that first night together, the confession whose weight you could no longer bear. 
It remains unspoken, for now, but it’s there. Both of you know it; both of you feel it.
“I think the tea has cooled.” You murmur shyly. But you make no effort to reach for it, so neither does he. Instead, Sanemi leans forward and presses his lips softly against yours.
He can’t get enough of kissing you. This small act of intimacy was one he’d always left confined to the bedroom. Something he only ever did in the heat of the moment, when clothes were being shed, or when his hand was wound in someone’s hair, wrenching their head back to tease their lips with his as he pounded into them from behind.
Not since he was a teenager has he kissed anyone for kissing’s sake.
And he’d certainly never had anyone of his own to kiss whenever he wanted; with whom he could give into his desire for physical affection. But now that he’s tasted your lips, Sanemi finds he cannot get enough.
Minutes pass, or maybe hours. Time doesn’t seem to matter here, wrapped up in each other, kissing and talking and being together. As tired as you are, you can’t fathom falling asleep now. 
Chin propped on his upper abdomen, you reach for him. Your fingers brush through his bangs, and Sanemi’s head bows into your touch. His hand smooths up and down your spine, charting your skin. 
Your head suddenly lifts up, a playful smile on your pretty lips. “What do I call you now, anyways? You never answered.”
Sanemi’s fingers pause their lazy exploration of your back. “What do you mean?” 
“I mean this. Us.”
A dent appears between his brows. “I’m your fuckin’ boyfriend. What else?”
That smirk widens into a full, teasing grin. The mirth in your eyes is beautiful, but Sanemi can’t help but feel like you’re making a joke he’s not in on. “What?”
“Nothing, it’s just — you don’t seem like the type to care about labels, that’s all. In fact, I thought you’d be against them.” 
Sanemi’s tone turns indignant. “Why the fuck wouldn’t I want a label?” 
“I don’t know.” You reply drily. “Maybe I assumed you didn’t want your bad boy image to take a hit.”
“What fuckin’ bad boy image —?”
You settle your head back down against him, your lashes tickling above his abdomen. That faint smile lingers for a second longer, but it disappears when you twist to press a kiss against his skin.  
Instantly, Sanemi’s griping quiets and his knuckle ghosts over the curve of your cheek. For a moment, he studies you. He traces over every detail of your face, as though you’re nothing more than a fleeting indulgence. Like he needs to savor you, before someone comes and plucks you away. 
“It’s weird, y’know?” His fingers play absently with the damp ends of your hair. “‘M not used to going to sleep with anyone. My bed’s always cold.”
You snort against his chest. “That’s not what the rumors said.”
“I didn’t let them spend the night,” you can hear the faint defensiveness in his tone. “Didn’t even cuddle with ‘em, either.”
“Yes, I heard you were quite the gentleman,” you reply airily. “Gave them just enough time to get dressed before you pushed them out the door.”
He chuffs. “You’re makin’ me sound like some sorta player.” 
“Name one person you’ve slept with besides me.” 
He taps his finger to the tip of your nose. “A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell.” He tucks a stray lock of your hair behind your ear. “And besides, there’s only one who matters.” 
This time, it’s you who flushes, heat pooling in your cheeks. “You don’t have to seduce me. You’ve already talked your way into bed with me.”
“You’re the one who cornered me, Princess.” Sanemi counters. “In fact, you were pretty damn insistent about it. You haven’t seen all the ways I know how to seduce a woman — not yet, anyway.”
“Oh?” Your hand teases down the length of his torso, your fingers pausing just at the edge of the blanket, where it’s pulled over his lower half. Lightly, you drag your nail over his skin, and Sanemi bites his tongue to keep his hips from twitching under your touch. “Care to share with the class?”
“I might.” And he snatches your hand by the wrist, stilling you before you can sneak below the blanket and start something he knows you can’t finish. “But I think you’d prefer it if I showed you.”
Your giggles are intoxicating as he flips you back under him, his lips peppering your skin with kisses everywhere he can reach. 
It’s incredible; he’s never felt so at ease with another. But the weight of his choice soon settles over him once more, and his face turns serious.
“I can’t be here every night,” and there’s something like regret in his eyes as they search yours, and the thumb stroking your cheek feels repentant. “My…job won’t let me be, as much as I might want to.”
His expression darkens. “And I don’t want to risk anyone following me. No —“
“No patterns,” you finish with a small, understanding smile. “I didn’t think that part would change, even if you decided to come back.”
“It’s not fair to you,” Sanemi admits, his mouth thinning into a hard line. “Nothin’ about this is fair to you. I can’t take you out on dates. We can’t move in  together. I can’t even see you everyday. I—.”
He cuts himself off with a sign, and the hand that was playing with your hair falls to your back and stills. “I don’t blame you if you decide it’s too much. I told you, you deserve better —“
A press of your finger against his lips stifles his self-loathing. “And I told you, I don’t want anyone else.”
Sanemi’s hand closes around your wrist and he presses your hand more fully to his mouth, but he does not speak.
“I told you how I felt about you, and I meant it.” And then, you add more quietly, “I know what I signed up for.”
He winces at that. “No,” he reaches to stroke your cheek with his knuckle. 
“No, you don’t. I know you think you do — and I’m gonna do my damnedest to keep you far away from my shit — but there are risks to bein’ with me, Y/N.”
Risks he never should’ve brought to your door to begin with.
“Like what, to my safety?” The bluntness of your words is softened by the inquisitive tilt of your head. “I don’t know if that’s as bad as you might think.”
“But —“
“Do you think I was somehow safer when I was all alone? Do you think anyone would have noticed if I’d just disappeared one day?”
Your fingers trace circles in the dip between his pecs, toying with the faint smattering of pale hair that lies there. “My siblings don’t call. I haven’t seen my parents in over two years.” You give him a wan smile. “At least now if something happens to me, there’s someone in this damn city who would give a shit.“
The thought makes his gut turn, and yet, the nausea he feels at the prospect of anything happening to you pales against the sorrow he feels that you’ve been left alone for so long.
It made sense, he thought, for someone like him to have no one. Until you, he’d been a staunch observer of the Corp’s creed; he’d sent his little brother as far away as he could, and resigned himself to an existence of self-imposed isolation. He’d known his future – how little of it likely existed – would be too hostile to forge any bonds, the soil of his life too acidic, too toxic for anything real to take root. The idea that he could have anyone to love and to keep had never been his to claim and so, he’d not known to mourn its loss.
But you hadn’t been raised the same way he had. By his own observations, you’d grown up safe and warm and loved in a nice house that sat situated on a row of other nice homes. Ones built with brick and mortar; where you never had to worry about the lights shutting off or whether you would be warm come winter.
And your parents seemed like they’d given a damn. He’d never forgotten the relief on their faces that day, when he’d returned your little sister to them; how they’d clung to her, tears of relief and gratitude shining in their eyes. That was something else Sanemi hadn’t known: the love of a parent. Not apart from his mother, but she’d died not long after Genya was born, leaving her two boys saddled with a man who couldn’t spell the word father, let alone understand the duties of one.
You’d been given everything he hadn’t, and yet, you’d ended up exactly like him: alone. 
Worse, Sanemi realizes, he’d secured more than you had in his adulthood. He’d grown a network. His position in the Corps meant he had comrades who would at least know if he turned up dead. Who might even secure justice down the business end of a steel bat or the barrel of a stolen gun.
You didn’t even have that.
You shrug. “I don’t know. I think you knowing and caring I exist makes me a little safer.”
How could he not? You’re the axis upon which his world now turns, the only stabilizing force in his life.
A lump builds thickly in his throat. His arms form a protective cage around you, tightening until you lay your head back down against his chest.
His hand cups the back of your skull. “Alright,” he says hoarsely after a moment. “As long as you’re fine with someone like me, I won’t push it.” His fingers comb gently through your hair.
“Mmm. I’m pretty content with my choices.” You hum sleepily against his skin. Sanemi glances down to see your eyes fighting a losing battle against sleep. “’Specially when you do that.”
A ghost of a smile forms on Sanemi’s lips. “You can go to sleep, y’know.”
You nestle into his chest. “Will you be here when I wake up?”
He huffs a quiet laugh. “Yeah. I promise. The felonies can wait.”  He settles in deeper against your pillows, his fingers still stroking along your scalp. “‘Sides, I wouldn’t leave my girl before kissin’ her goodbye.”
You snuggle happily into his skin, and before long, your breathing slows and you grow still, your fingers curled limply on his chest. He didn’t think it would take you all that long to fall asleep, and here you are, safe and sound and his. 
“Sleep, baby,” he murmurs quietly against your hairline, though he knows you can’t hear him. “I ain’t lettin’ you go, now.”
For a long while, he holds you, his fingers continuing to drag up and down your spine. It’s strange to be touched with such affection; such reverence. He hadn’t the words to quite sum up how he’d felt that night, but now, Sanemi realizes just how starved for intimacy he’d been. 
He hadn’t let himself do this with the others – quietly lay in bed, letting hands roam for something other than lust as he breathed them in. Relax. This is a side of him for your eyes only; a byproduct of him now being yours. 
Besides, why shouldn’t he relax? He’s home. Because home, as he’s come to realize, is not some dingy box in the SIlo or even some place far, far away from the Corps and everyone in it. 
Home is a woman he’d known for most of his life, yet not at all, not until the universe forced him back into your orbit. Home is your fingers twitching against his chest, still guided by the compulsion to touch him with the same gentleness he shares with you; the warmth of your body curled around his. 
Home is wherever you are. 
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REBLOGS, COMMENTS, AND LIKES APPRECIATED!
#peach my angel my love i am finally here#i have MUSIC and MULTIPLE SCREENS and i am ready to SCREAM#oh yeah if you hear incoherent screaming its just me ✌🏻#YOU HAVE DONE IT AGAIN#oof reader being just a tad too relatable rn#i wanna wrap her in a blanket :(#you've nailed the feeling so well#that loneliness that comes with drifting away from your family#on a more positive note WORLDBUILDING#exploring how the city seems to an average person#'whether they'd simply seen writing on a wall you hadn't known to read' i LOVE this line!!!!#'some days you wondered whether you might be a ghost; others you had to convince yourself you weren't#<- a strong contender for my favourite line ever!#i know sanemi is having a crisis and is traumatised but i wanna smack him rn#poor sweet girl#she's a little bit broken too#just in a different way#she misses him so much 😭#'thus you're left alone. again' OW MY HEART#she's much better adjusted about the situation tho#sanemi is seconds away from a breakdown and she's at least trying to be rational#she SET AN ALERT to order the book for him 🥺#i love cocky sanemi#being a shit is one of his love languages clearly#hmmm i seem to remember you saying you listened to casual while writing#I THINK I FOUND THE BIT 😂#yeah bestie nothing you and him did was CASUAL#'where's spiralling going to get you stupid?' ME IT'S ME literally how i talk to myself fr#yeah she is definitely handling this better#she's waiting for him to walk through the bookstore door 🥺
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problemeule · 3 months ago
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love when someone’s like “not [character] friendly” and it’s clearly just because this character had the audacity to be imperfect and also a woman
#idk maybe I’m jumping to conclusions when I’m not even a quarter into this fic#but so far all this chatacter has done is be a woman and date one half of the author’s ship#like she’s not behaving perfectly. she’s flawed and ultimately I think the relationship doesn’t work out precisely because of the#incongruence between the woman(TM) and her love interest#*the relationship fails due to this in congruence in canon not in the fic. is what I wanted to add but forgot bc Tired#and like. yeah she’s not behaving perfectly well but so far she seems fairly reasonable. jumping to some conclusions (incorrect and a bit#whack) but??? how’s that make her a bad person#her love interest in this fic is explicitly (!!!) aware he has feelings for someone else and dates her in spite of it!!!!#he dates her out of a feeling of obligation mixed with a dose of comphet#that’s a fairly shit thing to do to someone#and she explicitly asks. in this early part of the fic I’ve read sos far. if there’s even room for her in his life#because a lot of it is occupied by the guy he’s in love with. and he basically goes ‘yeah we’ll just have to take it slow :)’#my brother in Christ. what are you expecting to happen here.#I get that that’s The Whole Point of the Fic#but by god. I wish it wasn’t at the cost of this woman whose only real crime so far is existing and thinking this guy is hot & nice#lmao. listen I’ve slept 8 hours total in the last two nights I’m not doing great so I might be over interpreting here#especially since I’m still not far into the fic.#but it’s Giving Misogyny so far I gotta be honest
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