#my tired migraine and i are going to go paint

[happywitch416]

Talked my family into doing christmas next wednesday a few days ago. Last night mom goes on about how everything is bought and ready to go to do christmas on christmas eve. And then is offended and upset when I am like no, we decided on wednesday. But because i didnt answer the phone the other day, while in an appointment for my kid- her boyfriend decided that was an agreement to do everything christmas eve.

Like fine I will be the asshole, its not a family thing if my husband isnt there. I dont care that she did things without my dad when he did shift work. Maybe thats why they were miserable (so many issues) but we aren't them.

Especially not when we bought stuff for homemade nachos and want to have a little quiet christmas for once. If the options are go and be miserable and not have him there and him feeling like hes not wanted, or having an enjoyable not stressful night building legos with the kid and then watching my favorite christmas movie together? Thats a no fuckin brainer.

You see, marrying my best friend is never a problem for me, the problem is the fact it gave me the ability to look at people who can only love me conditionally and then tell them no. Which is only a me problem when I decide to be a problem.

And right now I am this close to being an exploding nuclear reactor's worth of a problem because trying to manipulate me does not go over well.

[borbealis]

It’s still 77 days until school is out. 79 days till i fly home. 80 days till I’m home again.

I’m so tired tonight…

[dreamsofminnie]

“Ethereal Paintings”

25~ Do not perceive my impending doom☔️

Scaramouche X reader smau | word count: 1,632

Anxiously they all huddle around a single lit-up home screen, occasionally murmuring to each other to shove over cause they can't see.

The wait for the ding of the following message took up seconds they couldn't bear to sit still for.

“How can a single message be an excruciating pain to wait for.”

“Maybe they got old fingers to type fast.”

“Okay, zoomer. Have you ever SEEN them??!? They are in their prime!! And still go on dates!!!”

“The ideal parents…”

“Okay but still…what’s taking so long??”

“I bet the other two aren’t even there yet.”

“Expected though. He probably needed a few dozen pep talks.”

“....and how was Ayato the one to do that and go with him??”

“Probably so Scara isn’t forced out….Ayato has a third key just in case…”

An unrelevant message popped up from scara on Kazuha’s phone. He reads it out loud.

“Do not perceive my impending doom. I’m likely to get shut out.”

Layla frowns and she shakes her head. “Her parents will warm her up first.”

“As long as they tell us they got in though…it’s been a while—”

*DING*

The phone lit up and the awaited message popped up. The blue-haired Kamisato grabbed her phone fast and opened it up for all 8 pairs of eyes to see.

“They’re in!!”

☔️☔️☔️☔️☔️☔️☔️☔️☔️

The door creaked open afraid to startle the resident and make a mess of the situation.

That was proved to be unnecessary as the pair peered past the dark and dimly lit studio. She wouldn’t have noticed at all. Only two large white eyes stared up at the intruders, its tail swishing as it sat over the resident like a gargoyle.

The woman’s lips frowned and eyebrows furrowed in apprehension and anguish. She waves her hand and the man gets her message.

The flutter of thick curtains draws open loudly, the room now getting beat with the rays of moonlight and the twinkling of the city underneath the building's height.

The noise couldn’t even wake the slumbering resident. Too drawled out in her vicious unhealthy cycle of mourning from an act of betrayal.

“Honey….” The woman’s voice was laced with worried concern for the view of her daughter sprawled across the carpeted floor.

But now that light is in the large studio did they see what lay beneath her was actually a canvas she scrawled all over in dark purple.

illumi darted away as her mother approached her body. Father looked at the cat and dug through his pocket, bending down he poured the cat treats into a bowl on the ground.

“Courtesy from your owner.” He smiled as he watched the cat eat happily and he scratched her head before joining his wife beside their main concern.

Father picked y/n up and the three of them headed to the bedroom upstairs. The only place that seemed untouched by her crazed despair.

Concern grew as they saw how rigid her body was in his arms. “She’s much lighter than her average weight…”

“...I saw convenience store snacks in the kitchen. Oh, my baby…” He lays his daughter down on the bed as the couple sits beside her next to each other.

Mother touched Y/n’s forehead and sighed in relief. “No fever at least. I’m betting on large migraines instead.”

“How should we wake our little darling artist?” Father grunts out as he watches y/n furrow her face restlessly.

Mother smiles nostalgically, Father gets the memo and they both place their palm on either of y/n’s cheeks stroking her face, she bristles and her face relaxes.

Deep bagged eyes blearily open in a daze. Her night terrors had dissolved from a familiar warmth as she took moments to recover her awakening.

“Our go-to way of waking you up when a nightmare consumes you. Better than getting terrified awake.” Mother giggles as she softens her voice and eyes. Leaning in she kisses her forehead which astonishingly melts the throbbing migraine, somewhat.

“Mom…dad…’m so tired. And numb…” Y/n struggled to sit up as her parents helped her up.

“Darling, you have no energy at all. Drink this, hot rejuvenating soup. 100% mother-made and she had the whole pot put in containers for you to save for later on.”

Father passes a thermos while the three get comfy and close to hold each other. Y/n sat in the middle.

Mother watched her gulp down the warm soup and waited till she was halfway done. Make sure she has enough nutrients for the heavy topic.

“Now…y/n. Why are you destroying yourself… Are you tryingg to have a more rough love story than ours?” She lightly teased to try and pry a smile from your sunken lips.

Having no energy to move a muscle and only lying on their shoulders, her lips mumble.

“I don’t...love him. He’s my enemy. Stole from me…my life’s passion. Didn’t consent to a.i feeding…Falsified his affection and…broke my heart.”

“Darling, have you ever gotten his viewpoint–“ Father got smacked on the head lightly as mother cut him off.

“We’ve chatted with the boy, albeit over text buutt, I can see him trying desperately to get you back. This is no story like ours, but I do think it’s time to return and face him once again.” Her words provided an unfounded warmth.

“You don’t have to accept any apologies, answer him, or force him to conform, just listen to his story. How else would you be able to debate with him?” Mother gives her a secure pat to go forth and face it.

“If I knew from the beginning I would've asked Papa to sue him...making a mess of art’s history…” Y/n whimpers and keeps her head down, he eyes puffy from lack of sleep and the sinking spirals of despair.

Mother quirks an eyebrow, curious and suspecting the real motive of all this. “My little artist…do you think you have to hold up the grandiose history of the art world I had a part in? All alone?”

Father's eyes understood but y/n scrunched up her face and body. She thought about it too much subconsciously that it was her job to parade around history like it was her legacy to maintain.

The berating thought of sheltering the traditional art from the wrongful social norms, she took it on herself. Building herself around a castle she wanted to protect, her walls having a gaping hole from a purple wrecking ball caused a collapse.

The wall feels lacking in her way of protection and slowly rebuilds. Her art castle is her only safe space and requires all her attention. The cracking walls tremble in another collapse, begging to open up the castle.

“And the walls have chipped y/n…I never asked you to uphold my reputation in history, nor will I ever carry such a weight. Sure I was important, but it’s the past now, oh my sweet color child.”

Tears welled up in y/n’s eyes. She couldn't let it go. Her mother was her idol, her inspiration. To let others mindlessly trample her past work was horrifying.

“Fear of A.I art covering up traces of the beautiful art I’ve founded, your fear drives hatred, dear. You’ve let it consume you. And you’ve let it destroy you.” Mother pulled your trembling body close and sighed lightly as she latched onto her.

“Do you hate how he tempted you, what he used against you, or the sinking feeling that he’s left the morals you silently pleaded him to follow?” She placed a kiss on her head while holding father’s hand behind her as she bawls.

Father ruffled her hair and followed mother to kiss her head as well.

“Let me tell you my view of our story. When your mother went off the radar, I was restless and worried. I didn’t dare ask one of her friends the whereabouts of her. I cared and soon enough my mind raced so often with missing her. Then I thought of a possibility of me driving her away permanently because of my ignorant bickering and debating. I didn’t want to be her cause of giving up and destroying her foundation.”

Father’s mouth curls bitterly following with a softer voice.

He feared he was the problem, that his stubborn rebuttals caused her to get tired of him. He hated how he was like that. But he couldn't help it. It was in his nature.

Is that what Scara’s feeling…?

“So when I saw her again, all shining in that much deserved spotlight and passion, I knew I loved her creative spark with each time I've ever thought about her in the 3 years she's been gone.”

He didn't want to leave that spotlight where she was the star. She shone to him in a way he knows he’ll never get to experience again if he lets her go.

Y/n listened, just like all the times she’d pay clear attention to their stories.

This time was no different, no matter how the tale was meant to free her, she wanted to be guided by her parents she loved so dearly.

So she opened her heart and head to these experiences; a gateway to guide her own turmoil.

But… How does he feel? Was I like a shining light to him…?

That thought made your heart wrench.

“She came back, with much more vigor than the last time I saw her. And it filled my soul. It meant I didn’t crush her spirit, and she thanked me for pushing her past her limits.”

“I was her revelation.”

“Her reason to start again."

“You are your mother’s daughter Y/n, pursue that soulful feeling again."

Now… did I have a right to go back to him after anguishing him as he did to my unwarranted goal.

Would he still. . . Pursue me with this obstacle i made. . .

Previous | Masterlist | Next

Synopsis{3}-> Scara decided to stop his a.i art creations when he realized that you are really his fav artist—as long as you were the one to teach him how to paint and draw. Facing multitudes of slip of the tongue from your friends; you figured out that he was your mortal nemesis; hatred brewed and twisted your view on him.

Lmaoo, i write Scaramouche’s name so much it autocorrected

Yayyy done, now to the fun part😚

Male POV🤤🤤

//Taglist//

@akagism2 @pokidot @feiherp @kyouzki @rmiyuki @infe-risk0 @sakurapeach @bluebelony @kichiyoshi @mikctp @kur44pika @cupids-chamber @crucnhice @neigesprincess @scaramoo @gojoandelsalovechilde @childeslegstrap @sakiimeo @d4y-dr3am3r-blog @m3gitsune @scarletttcroww @sashiette @beriiov @rizakari @xiaossocksniffer @lxry-chxn @bryai003 @eunchaeluvr @goj0h @the-ghost-0f-t0m0 @sketcheeee @ozzierenato @ohmyfinggod @kiyomi-hoku @ynverse @featuredtofu @reinoodle @angeilix @keizuk @sayokeshii @liuaneee @scarasbaby @peaceindreams @samyayaya

[doumadono]

Hii I saw that you do emergency fics, and they're very awesome, so is it okay if I send one too? It's been quite stressful with senior year of high school, entrance coaching and the pressure from myself and my family, and the stress gets so bad to the point of migraines (which I always complain about) so I wanted to request a Bakugou comfort fic for the stress?

Sparks of solace - Bakugo x Reader

A/N: I'm really sorry to hear that you're under so much pressure right now. It sounds incredibly tough, but remember, it’s okay to take a moment for yourself when things get overwhelming. You're doing an amazing job juggling everything. Hang in there, and be sure to care for yourself too. You've got this!

EMERGENCY REQS MASTERLIST - PART 2

The final bell at U.A. High School didn't so much signal the end of the day as it did the start of another battle for you.

As the other students streamed out the door, eager to shed the weight of their responsibilities, you remained seated, your head cradled in your arms against the cool surface of the desk. The familiar ache of a migraine pulsed behind your eyes, exacerbated by the relentless pressure of senior year, entrance exams, and the towering expectations from both yourself and your family.

The classroom door banged open with a force that only one person in the school could muster.

Heavy footsteps echoed across the room, coming to a halt beside you. “Still here? You planning to move in or what?” The voice was unmistakably Bakugo Katsuki's — abrasive, impatient, and impossible to ignore.

You lifted your head just enough to give him a weary look. “Just trying to make it through the day, Bakugo.”

“Tch, you’re letting that crap knock you down? Seriously?” Bakugo scoffed as he dragged a chair beside you, the metal legs screeching against the floor. His approach was neither gentle nor tiptoeing around sensitivities. “You’re tougher than this, aren’t you? Migraines again?”

“Yeah, and everything else. It’s all too much sometimes,” you admitted, hoping he’d tire of your company and leave you to wallow in your misery.

Instead, Bakugo huffed, his brow furrowing. “That’s because you’re letting it pile up until it crushes you. You’re stronger than this crap, you know.”

His attempt at encouragement was as subtle as a sledgehammer, yet it held an undertone of genuine concern. Bakugo wasn’t known for his soft side, but his presence, strangely, was somewhat comforting. His attempt at motivation might have been wrapped in layers of impatience, but Bakugo had chosen to stay, a fact that carried its own form of comfort.

“So, genius, got any better ideas?” you challenged, your voice tinged with both sarcasm and a hint of curiosity.

“Obviously.” He stood abruptly, grabbing your arm to pull you to your feet. “Get up. We’re going out.”

“Out? Out where?” You stumbled slightly, caught off guard by his sudden decisiveness.

“Somewhere that isn’t here, dumbass. You need a break, and I’m not watching you turn into a complete wreck. We're going out to get some damn fresh air. And ice cream. It helps, believe it or not,” Katsuki declared, leading the way with a certainty that left no room for argument.

The streets of the city buzzed with life around you, a stark contrast to the stillness of the classroom.

Bakugo’s confident stride was uncompromising as he led you to a small, local ice cream shop. The choice was yours, and you opted for something simple, while he chose a fiery flavor with spicy chocolate chips.

“Sit,” Bakugo commanded, pointing to a bench. He plopped down beside you, arms crossed, watching the sunset with a grunt. “Look, I get it. It’s tough. But you’re not doing yourself any favors by pushing too hard. Learn to recognize when you’re at your limit. Being strong isn’t just about pushing through the crap. It’s knowing when to take a damn break so you can fight another day. That’s what real strength is.”

Your eyes drifted from his face to the horizon, where the sky was painted in strokes of orange and purple. “I didn’t expect to hear a pep talk from you, of all people.”

“Tch, it’s not a pep talk. It’s common sense,” he muttered, though the harshness in his voice had lessened. “I deal with the same crap. But I figured out that sometimes you just need to explode a little less… and breathe a little more. I’m just making sure you don’t fall apart. Someone has to.”

You chuckled softly, the tension easing from your shoulders. “Explode a little less, huh? I’ll try to keep that in mind, boss.”

Bakugo’s mouth twitched, almost a smile. “Yeah, well… just don’t forget it. And if you need to — whatever, just come find me or something. I’m not gonna let you crash and burn over something stupid like stress.”

The simplicity of his declaration, the gruff concern laced through his words, struck a chord within you. Here was Bakugo Katsuki, known for his fiery temper and relentless ambition, offering a lifeline.

“Thanks, Kats. I mean it,” you said, turning to meet his gaze.

He shrugged, his eyes softening just a little as he looked away. “Whatever. Just don’t make me regret this.”

[deadboyfriendd]

Stains in the Granite

Summary: Throughout the years, Steve has undergone multiple head traumas. You knew this much when you were together. The migraines, the forgetfulness, moderate hearing loss in one ear, vertigo. The list was expansive. When you were together. It’s been over a year since you had last spoken to him, but an unexpected call from Hawkins Regional sends you reeling back to him. A forgotten emergency contact, he probably just never bothered to update it. You would let Robin know and be back to your regularly scheduled activities, sans Steve. A dead line turns the spigot, worry plugs the drain, and your inability to let him go drowns you in the tub. When he wakes up, he falls in love with you again. And again the next day. And again the day after that. They say he’ll regain his long-term memory storage eventually. They say the amnesia will wear off soon, but, for now, this is who he would have to be. He may only have to live through losing you once, but you’re not sure if you could handle losing him again every day until he regains his memory. You wouldn’t have the heart to tell him.

Content Warning: My content is 18+, Minors DNI, head trauma, mentions of hospitals and the things that go in them, smut, fluff, angst, exes to lovers, hurt/comfort, alcohol

Word Count: 14.2k

Author’s Note: This is dedicated completely to @dr-aculaaa I have had this piece in the works for months before getting it to the version that you are getting. Drac has tirelessly loomed over my docs like God beta reading, helping out with dialogue, and brainstorming these characters with me. This is as much her baby as it is mine, and I love her very very much.

Drac, I love you.

Find the Playlist Here!

Granite, noun, gran·​ite ˈgra-nət 

: a very hard natural igneous rock formation of visibly crystalline texture formed essentially of quartz and orthoclase or microcline and used especially for building and for monuments

: unyielding firmness or endurance

the cold granite of Puritan formalism.

the cold granite of your heart.

You were sullen, eyes unable to focus on any one speckle of the countertop in front of you. You ran your hands over it in a grounding motion, forcing tired eyes upon skin instead of stone. You blinked and it settled. The warmth of your palm could feel the slight unevenness of the surface, where the natural stone had been polished down just slightly too much. You watched it catch the light, glitter beneath your fingers snuffed out by the shadows of your touch. You watched the way the light cast a glowing square onto the ground in its early-morning iridescence. You had not slept, only watched the sunrise before you went to sleep. 

You missed the nonchalance of high school, when being sad was not an inconvenience, in the same way you missed the grandeur of college, where being sad was an art. Now, though you took comfort in the blanket of sadness, it was more obnoxious than anything. Your sighs held a certain bitchiness to them now, less sad than they were unimpressed. 

But you couldn’t help the way the hogs-hair bristles from your years-old, overused brushes stuck in the too-thick paint. You couldn't help the frustration that bubbled through when the linseed oil seeped through too thick and thinned the pigment of your paint so thin the underpainting shone through. It was hard enough to paint your heartbreak, without the added interruption of frustration and all of its woes. You wanted to pick at the scabs of old wounds, reopen them and let the blood drip down onto self-stretched canvases with ragged edges. You wanted your art to feel as raw as your heart did. 

Sometimes you wish you could go back, study something practical like education, be something stupid like an art teacher and talk about fulfillment with dead eyes, but you were too ceremoniously tortured for that. You thought about easy, but you didn’t want it. You craved goddamned difficult. You were goddamned difficult. 

But people bought it. Commissioned it to hang in their ugly suburban sprawls. Ugly art in ugly homes. Maybe people liked the subjectivity, felt like they could see their own heartbreak in it. You weren't so pretentious that you felt like the only person in the world to experience it. You certainly weren’t. Maybe there were people that were introspective, that wanted to feel the heartbreak when they dissociated into the white walls of their cookie-cutter homes. Maybe heartbreak was the only emotion they could force themselves to feel. 

Maybe they took comfort in it, too. 

You didn’t exactly know who you were anymore. Yes, at whatever bullshit ice breaker you could define yourself as an artist. An even more bullshit mediocre descriptor that served as a face to the sacrifice of self you went through for the sake of it all. That was usual, it just came with the territory. It was your only redeeming personality trait. You traded your sense of self for an established style that put cans in your cupboard and secondhand clothes on your back. 

Everything was covered in a wax sheen, the desensitization taking over your personage and casting a vignette across everything you saw. Not even sex was good anymore. It hadn’t been for a while. It had reduced itself to nothing more than another school of art— another subject of  heartbreak. Another thought process and another complication. Your entire sense of self came from academic validation. You were a bachelor of fine art, consistently praised by professors and featured in student exhibitions, graduated magna cum laude from your university. But now? You were lost in a vapid attempt to redefine yourself outside of the college community. This was the real world now, and sucked even worse than college had. 

Your studio apartment overlooked the heart of the historic downtown district of Hawkins, Indiana. It was gray this time of year, rain a near-constant promise over the thick smattering of clouds overhead. You paid entirely too much to live in eight-hundred square feet, but you could justify the cost with the stone hearth and floor-to-ceiling windows, even if that meant sleeping in a twin-sized mattress sprawled on the floor in the corner of the room. Your clothes hung messily on mismatched hangers over a laundry rack beside it. Your few enamel dishes cast drip-drying across the countertops in their own choreography. The rest of the place was barren, save for paint splatters over tarps, stacked canvases, and easels. Maybe it was too indulgent to live in-studio, but poverty would argue and win nearly every time. 

The tortured artist persona was trendy while you were in college, but you were just plain insufferable now. You didn’t even want to associate with yourself. You guessed that’s why you had Robin. She was just as insufferable as you were. 

She was the embodiment of everything you hated, a humbling experience in a flesh box wrapped with a short bob and a beret and adorned with a nose ring. You had met her in an Art: History of the French Renaissance class. She was a linguistics major with all of the subtlety of a clapped-out Honda Civic. She heavily romanticized the greater works of Van Gogh and made her brief year in a study-abroad program in Paris a personality trait. Though, you supposed, her redeemable feature was that she was loyal to a fault, albeit mean. Like a small, white dog that haunted your home instead of offering companionship and happiness. 

Though you, for the most part, kept it to yourself, you had made it known in the past that the Italian Renaissance was far superior to the French. You didn’t understand how she could so  heavily romanticize the ritzy portraits of those aristocratic jerk-offs when she had the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait directly in front of her. Maybe you just didn’t think Van Gogh was all that great. Maybe you hated him altogether. Maybe you hated yourself and you were just projecting– or you were jealous that he could be a tortured artist and people left and right seemed to romanticize his work but when you did it, you were just annoying. You knew, for a fact, that you hated yellow. And she sure liked to wear a lot of it.

The weathered oak was hard and uneven against the curvature of your spine, but you refused to move, the numbness in your fingers happening were the beginnings of the best high you had gotten in ages. There was a resonant patriarchal tenor shrill in your ears as you attempted to focus on the beams and exposed plumbing on the ceiling above you. She spoke it again, louder this time, 

“What are you gonna do with an art degree? Be a tortured artist forever?” You could hear her arm slap coldly against the ground next to yours and echo throughout the emptiness of your apartment. 

You groaned, though it was only proving her point, “I don't know, what are you gonna do with a linguistics degree? Be super fucking annoying?”

“At least I have a job.” 

And she did. She was a translator who rotated on call-circuit to Indianapolis for international business meetings, sometimes they even paid her fare to other countries, in essence getting to vacation on some company’s dime between meetings. The grandeur of it all was sickening. 

The ring from your land-line was shrill and echoing, shattering the silence of your own discontent like tempered glass, fragmenting and exploding into millions of little pieces. No one called here ever, and the suddenness of the tone made both Robin and yourself jump. You gave her a shove to the shoulder, a wordless gesture meaning, go get that. 

Her Hello was tepid, in the same meek demeanor she twirled the line around her finger. Her face registered from confusion to concern, a quick contortion that took place over the course of seconds, “Is he okay? What do you mean you can’t disclose that?” 

You sat up, propping your arms underneath you like the kickstands on a bike, brows knit together in question. She looks to you, holding the receiver out towards you, 

“For you.” She says, then silently and exaggeratingly mouths, About Steve.

What? You mouthed back.

Just– Pick. It. Up. She insisted in silent accuse, shaking the receiver towards you once again, 

You took the plastic receiver from her, fingers drawing the skin of your temples back and rubbing your eyes, “Hello?”

You don’t recognize the voice on the phone. A woman you know is older than yourself by the way she sounds, officiating and knowledgeable, but carrying a certain morosity with her. She held the kind of tone you know brought bad news. 

It feels like a fog, hearing his name again. Hearing that he is a person who is alive and living a life separate from you. It wasn’t right, and that unease turned itself in your stomach as you repeated back her medical jargon to yourself in layman’s terms. Steve fell off a ladder and hit his head. Again. He was unconscious but stable. The neighbor found him and brought him in and gave them your name and phone number 

“And why are you calling me?” You finally asked, followed by a long pause. You cursed yourself mentally, realizing the harshness of the statement after you had said it.  

The nurse sounded displeased, “You’re his wife, aren’t you? You were listed as the primary emergency contact.”

You hadn’t spoken to Steve in over a year, not since you broke it off with him. You trailed your thumb over the webbing between your middle and ring finger, still feeling the phantom sensation of the ring that sat there just a year prior. The dissidence churned in your stomach, and you couldn’t help the worry that filled you. 

Steve was the embodiment of everything you loved. He was smooth like linseed and fell into all of your texture. He didn’t understand it, but he agreed on the superiority of the Italian renaissance. If you hated the romanticization of Van Gogh, then so did he. Steve was agreeable. Steve was easy in all of the places you weren’t. 

Steve cared about people in the way that you didn’t. 

When you broke it off, your families, both found and biological, were shocked. Robin especially. You’d felt bad for her, caught in the crossfire between two of her best friends. You and Steve had both agreed not to make her choose. She was the sentient being of pure neutrality. It was as if she was a separate entity on two different timelines. If she was present in your reality, Steve did not exist. You assumed the same of her relationship with Steve. Though, a part of you still hoped he’d ask sometimes. 

Your brain is a flurry of Steve. His migraine medication, his medical history, his eyewear prescription, fuck his shoe size. You card through the rolodex of head traumas he had undergone through the years, recounting them between relationship markers. You don’t allow yourself the time to think, slamming the phone back down on the stand with a quick, I’ll be there. 

The drive to the hospital is sombering, though, you selfishly are less worried about him being okay than you are about what he would think of you showing up after they thought you were his wife. 

The smell of the hospital is pungent. Horrendously human and unnaturally sterile wrapped up into one fragrant demise. There are people buzzing, both physically and metaphorically, yet despite the controlled chaos the women at the front desk seem unnaturally calm. Uninterested, even. You tell them your name and who you are here to see, and yet, despite the fact that they had just reached out to you over the phone, they still attempt to validate your marriage. 

You knew it was nasty when, “If you don’t think I’m his wife, then why did you call asking if I was his wife?” rolled off your tongue, but you knew Robin would smooth the turmoil with an apology on your behalf. Frankly, you didn’t care. They buzzed you in without another word. 

There was an older man in a white coat standing in front of the room, flipping through a chart with Harrington across the top. The embroidery on it read neurology. You figured he would have to undergo a few whirring uncomfortable scans with any head trauma, but his face remained stoic. You couldn’t read him, and, personally, it was terrifying. 

“Mrs. Harrington?” He asked, holding a hand out. 

You took it as an appeasement, tried to let his old man charm seep into your bones and put you at ease. If he was old, that means he’s done this before. “Yes.” You knew it was a lie, but who else was going to claim him? Not his parents. There was no one else remaining in Hawkins but you and Robin, and she wasn’t family. Technically, you weren’t either, but you weren’t cruel.  

“I wanted to formally speak to you before you saw him. There’s a few things we need to discuss.” This sent a panicked chill through your bones. You expected to step into the room and they would ask you for permission to pull the plug or something. 

“Is he..?” Your face must have registered as panicked, because the neurologist quickly backpedaled with a grounding hand on your shoulder. 

“Oh, no. He’s fine ma’am, we weren’t seeing any bleeds or swelling that he can't recover from.”

That he can’t recover from. Meaning that there is, in fact, something wrong with his brain. You figured that much, with maybe six concussions within the last ten years, but you wouldn’t dwell on that fact too much for now, “But?”

“There is a small amount of swelling in the temporal lobe, which is responsible for short-term memory storage. Your husband is suffering from a form of fixation amnesia that is pretty uncommon…”

You zone out listening to him talk, trying to piece everything together. Steve is okay. He lost his short-term memory for a while. Words like retrograde and anterograde and Transient Global are thrown around and bouncing back with a resounding tenor in your phonetic loop. Steve has forgotten the last year, he cannot store new memories for the time being. He forgot your breakup. He still believes you are together. He needs around the clock care. 

Steve was awake when they opened the door and pulled back the curtain to the room he had already been admitted to. At least someone in this administration was competent enough to get him into a room instead of keeping him in the ER. 

“Baby.” A large, flat palm reaches itself towards you. You stood in the corner in silence, waiting for someone that wasn’t you to speak. But, it just so happened that you were the only person in the room. You don’t realize he’s talking to you, so he says it again, a little more firmly, and you walk up and sit at the chair next to his bed, avoiding the hand outstretched towards you. 

Though, in all of his firmness, where the weight of your elbow finds a dip in the bed, his hands finds your arm. It searches for your hands and finds them with a firm grip. They’re warm like you remember. Steve was always warm. 

“Hi, Steve.” You keep your voice quiet, remembering the days of migraine management. Barely-there decibels creating resounding, echoing pain around his skull. 

“What happened?” He asks you, “ –-head hurts.” He manages, burying his face into the polyfilament of the pillow below him. 

You tried to make your explanation concise, only giving him the cause and not the prognosis. You’d deal with that at a later time. “You fell off a ladder, hit your head pretty hard. Cullen brought you in.” You explained. 

“The dentist? With the labs?” He asked you, and it made you laugh. Steve always remembered people by their cars or their dogs. 

You agreed with him nodding your head despite his closed eyes, “Yes, the dentist with the labs.”

“He’s a really nice guy.”

“He sure is.” 

+

The discharge process was long and rigorous the next morning, swarms of insurance and neurologists and shrinks and case managers. All faces to a crowd that apparently had never communicated with the other department a day in their sad, corporate lives. 

Steve had no car, no means of getting home, and, quite frankly, no recollection of the year leading up to the accident. So, you loaded him into your car, pulling out as slowly as possible and driving at least ten under the speed limit the entire way. He seemed chipper as his hand found yours resting over the shifter, hands meeting your movements as your gears moved up and down with the rhythm of traffic– almost as if he was driving the car himself. You silently thanked him for the movement, already distracted by the constant fear of rattling his already tenderized brain any more than it had been. 

The street looked like it had frozen in time as you slipped past its residents unscathed. The dentist, surrounded by the flurry of yellow labs, waved as you drove by. The house sat in a caul de sac, the one you used to call yours, the third one in from the end between a vacation home and a stalled fixer-upper. It was a smaller Victorian built at the turn of the century. Your selling point was the turret at the front end of the house, sporting floor-to-ceiling windows and housed by oak buttresses. 

You pictured Steve carrying you through the threshold of your home the night of your wedding as you half-dragged him from the driveway to the bedroom. Some of your spring daylilies were coming out of dormancy, the pertinent blooms bulbous and waiting to open. You remembered picking the pink ones, to match the pink peonies and coneflowers that you had planted alongside it. 

This house was a dream. Actually, this house was his dream. Encased in dark oak and copper plumbing. You just wanted a place to paint – and, for this, he had spared no expense either. 

You remembered the day he’d surprised you with the keys:

You had felt soggy, the stale coffee and milk drying into the stomach of your apron and hardening into a sugary breast plate. You knew you’d never be able to get the smell out, instead understanding that was just a part of life when you were a barista. Along with the burns and odds-and-ends scrapes and bruises. 

Steve had been waiting for you on a barstool in front of the door, looking like he had something to say. You knew he had most likely been pacing back and forth from the couch to the barstool as he had waited for you to get home. You weren’t a stranger to his mannerisms. Living with him had been a front-row ticket to The Steve Harrington Show. Sometimes you joked that David Attenborough should join you for dinner, narrating Steve in his natural habitat. 

He had greeted you with a kiss, saccharine sweet like everyone before it, grip on your waist like a vice and a smile that he couldn’t help on his lips. 

“I picked something up today,” He mumbled against your lips, “for the house.” 

The incomplete set sat freshly unwrapped in its paper casings. The Blue Willow china was beautiful nonetheless. Steve had taken a liking to it almost more than you had. You didn’t mean to get annoyed, you had just had a long day. Though Steve knew it, your defensiveness caught him off-guard. 

He would never admit it, but he took after his mother in his eyes and in his shopping addiction. You knew you were moving, house-hunting on weekends and late evenings. You didn’t want to begin your life together in this apartment, which had been filling quickly with heirlooms and antique pieces collected from both shops and family members, “for the house” and, “as an engagement gift”. 

“Steve, what happened to saving money?” You had asked him, reaching behind you to untie your apron to throw into the basket that needed  to be dragged downstairs to the wash. “We’ll never get a house if you keep spending the money as soon as we get it.” 

“Actually,” He said to you, pretty lips turning into a smile as he dug around in his pockets, “We already have a house.” 

He watched the cogs turn in your head, your face exchanging confusion for shock as your eyes widened and you brought your hands up to cover your mouth. You couldn’t help the small years that spill from your eyes and you jump on Steve, laughing along with him as he spun you in a circle. 

You remembered buzzing the entire way there, only remembering to pull your apron off once you tried to buckle your seatbelt. It was dark out, and the streetlights in the historic neighborhood were sparse, if present at all. 

The house was a great cathedral in front of you, rickety and crumbling in nature. 

“The bones are good.” He reminded you, “We can take care of the rest.” 

“I love it!” You squealed to him, throwing your arms around his neck. It caught him off guard, your enthusiasm. 

That night, he refused to carry you through the threshold of the house. He said he wanted to save it for the wedding night. Only do it once so it stays special.  

You sat alone at the dining table, cigarette in hand. You rarely smoked anymore, but you figured this ordeal permissed one. He kept the binders of your wedding planning, all of the stuff you bought, the cause of your cold feet. They were tucked away next to the dining table in the built-in for easy access. They looked like they had been untouched save for a finger print along the spine of the binder that remained bare of any dust or particles– like he had gone to take them out, but hesitated. You looked up and around at the main living space. 

He was going to build you a new life and it didn’t look like he had touched it for a year. 

+

The first day is just playing the game. You were aware he would have temporary, moderate-to-severe memory loss. You attempted to recall the words that swirled around your phonetic loop. Words from neurologists and trauma doctors and nurses alike. 

Steve knows he was in the hospital and knows desperately how horrible this migraine was. He spent it in the dark, on his regular dose of sumatriptan, supplemented wonderfully in a vicodin-induced haze. You did not expect him to remember today, nor did you expect him to care. You know he is alive from barely-spoken words between exchanges of water and his prescription, which, thank God, hadn’t changed in the last year. 

You sleep on the couch. 

The second day, you are up before him, sifting through the pots and pans you’d let him keep to try and feed both him and yourself. You are surprised when he gets out of bed before 9:00, and even more surprised when he asks, 

“So, what are you going to paint today?” Through squinted eyes, lean arm braced against the counter to support the weight of his body. He sips idly from the orange juice glass he used to take the sumatriptan, but not the vicodin. 

It’s not like it was a question that strayed away from the mundane, however, it had been almost a year since you’d heard it last. You’d tried not to let the surprise register on your face as you’d continued to stir the eggs around in the pan. You let the corner of the wooden spoon scrape some of the dried remnants of soft egg from the sides of the pan where the butter hadn’t reached. You shrugged with a soft, I don’t know, unsure of how to answer. 

As Steve retreats back to the master bedroom, you hear the kick of the plumbing and the steady stream of water rattling through the house. You thanked him silently for buying an old place, the plumbing was loud enough to drown out your own thoughts. 

The knock on the window sends you reeling back like the crack of a gun. Your ménage-a-trois with a nose ring and encased the ugliest yellow beret like some gay French Alp paratrooper stood guard outside the bay seating of your kitchen window. You hated yellow, but, for today, you would keep it to yourself. She came bearing gifts. The only suitcase you owned was filled with the only clothes you owned, and as many art supplies as she could carry with the promise of more. Today, she bore her yellow beret as a barrel full of brandy around her neck– a drooly Saint Bernard to your avalanche. You propped the window open on its stakes, cinnamon color mixed with dirt crumbling from its unused hinges. 

She looked around in secrecy, “How is he?” 

“Better today. He just got in the shower.” You shrugged, looking back over your shoulder. 

“How’s the…” She circled her splayed hands over her head, signaling amnesia. You wish she would just say it instead of tiptoeing around the subject. 

You shrugged again, running a hand over your head, “I’m not sure yet. He knows who I am, but, ugh, I don’t know.” You sighed, sitting down at the bench and burying your face in your hands.

Robin leaned against the windowsill, reaching a hand through to push your hair back out of your face, “What’s wrong? Why is that bad?” 

“He still thinks we’re together. Like– doesn’t remember that we’re not together.” You said through your palms, knowing that her linguistics degree also covered your dramatics and mumbling. 

“Oh God,” She gasped to you, not quite able to contain herself, “What are you gonna do?” 

“I’m just gonna have to roll with it, I guess.” You slurred past your arms, willing back the onslaught of stress-tears beginning to pool against your tightline. You couldn't abandon him now, not when he was like this. 

Your former studio, nestled at the base of the turret within the house, surrounded by windows encased in stained-glass embellishments and flying buttresses, remained the only room in the house that was finished. You sat on your spinning stool, ignoring the creak from the way you pushed yourself back and forth on the balls of your feet. Your eyes fixated on the piece in front of you. It had been sitting on this easel for a year– the only one too heavy for you to move on your own, however, you were past asking for Steve’s help. So here it sat, holding your work once again, arms open in waiting. 

“Woah, you work fast.” Steve’s voice startled you, the stool squeaked again as you jumped. 

He walked up behind you, hands smoothing over your shoulders in apology– his skin still shower-warm and tacky from the water, “What are you talking about?” 

Your voice was much softer than you initially intended it to come out as. It resonated under the guise of a smile rather than the initial annoyance you turned to as a defense mechanism. 

“Didn’t you start that painting last week?” He asked, smoothing a broad hand down the exposed expanse of your upper arm, turning his face to look at the painting, “It’s done now.”

You tried not to let the confusion register on your face. You had finished the painting well over a year ago. The oil had long-since cured. You thanked the universe softly for Steve’s untrained eye. 

“I guess I just got really into it.” You shrugged, feigning your own insufferability for his well being– just this once. 

You had forgotten what it was like to be held by Steve. He lingered around your proximity in a near-shroud of constance. You had forgotten the soft feeling of nimble fingers as they grazed across any exposed skin you had. You had forgotten about warm hands cupping your cheek or twirling the ends of your hair. You had forgotten what the warmth of his felt like, in the same way that you moved away from the slow-creeping sun square that beamed from the windowsills. You didn’t realize how long you had been fighting any warmth after him. 

That night, his broad hands lured you to bed with the promise of warmth. You try to remember the way it felt a year ago, if it resounded in the same way. His hands were still a comfort as they encased you in a tight embrace. His breath still felt the same coming from his nose and traveling across your shoulder, dotted intermittently by haste staccato kisses. 

You tried to hold on to that feeling after he had long been asleep, and held on to it again as you peeled his hands from your waist. You let it slip from your fingers as you slid from the bed and let your feet pad across the hardwood flooring. You laid it to rest next to you on the couch, let it fold into itself and hibernate once more. 

By the next morning, Steve’s brain had pistoned back into his regular routine, which consisted of a god-awful early morning jog. It was almost obnoxious how perfect he was for this neighborhood, golden skin glowing against the rays of morning, efflorescence in nature and ugly, heinous perfection. By the time he gets back, it’s still ungodly early. The sun only casts a blue haze into the atmosphere in its feigning presence. 

You could guess by the way he tried to control his heavy breaths as he walked through the door that he was dewy, shirt tucked into his jogging shorts and hair raked back with sweaty fingers. You would not force your eyes open to look at him, leaving any feelings of adverse adoration back in the white quilt you had abandoned over a year ago. He walked up to you, feat unabashedly heavy against the hollowness of the floor despite the carpet muffling them. His hand was warm and heavy against the exposed expanse of your hip, riding your shirt up further.

“What are you doing out here? You know this couch kills your bac-” He started, pausing abruptly in surprise,  “Where did that come from?” 

“What?” You mumbled through closed eyes, still only barely awake. 

He traces the tattoo on your back, rough fingers tracing over the thickened lines of ink, “This.”

You didn’t bother to crack an eye open, instead folding your arms in further on yourself and readjusting against the couch cushions, “Gee, Steve, you must've hit your head really hard.”

“What?” 

“What?” You asked him, finally waking up enough. You pushed your arms underneath you, squinting at him as best you could through the haze of the morning light. 

“I hit my head?” He asked, confusion– then terror– registering on his face. 

You sat up fully, realizing then that, in your daze, you had effectively put your foot in your mouth. The look on your face, supplemented by the look on his face tells you that there is no way that you could backtrack now. 

“... Yeah-” 

“When?”

“Three days ago.” You started, and he let out a deep exhale, almost in relief that it hadn’t been longer. 

He turned to look at you, and you reached out to grab his hand. He took it, gripping yours like a vice, but never enough to hurt, “What did I do?”

“You were up on a ladder, doing something with the electrical. You fell and hit your head pretty good. Cullen brought you in.” You shrugged, trying to play it off. 

“Where were you?” He asked, it wasn’t accusing. He just tried to piece everything together. Still, you couldn’t help the pang of guilt that pooled in your chest after he said it. 

You weren’t going to break his heart, not now. Not while he was already fragile like this. You hated lying, but anything was better than a category five meltdown. He shook now, acting too tough to hide it. Steve was strong for everyone, too strong for too long. 

“Am I okay?” 

“Yeah, Steve. You’re okay.” You reassured him, no matter what. 

+

That night, you put a band-aid over your neck, despite the itching, burning sensation from the adhesive, it would live there for now. You said it was to save yourself the trouble. You didn’t know why you’d thought to care so much. You also don’t know why you felt so guilty. Maybe it’s because you weren’t there. Maybe it’s because you were here now and you shouldn’t have been. All you know is that you can’t break Steve’s fragile psyche now, not again. 

Steve’s routine was stone-set and rigorous, you’d remembered that much. He was the kind of person that thrived off of routine and egg-whites alone. You’d envied him for his discipline. 

He started out of bed every morning at the heinous, ungodly hour of five. Every morning, without fail, he rose silently, rubbed his hands over his face, fought the urge to disturb you and lost every time. He would smooth a tender hand over your hair and slip out the door with a soft, waking kiss, and proceed with a jog. Every morning, he would run his 3.1 miles, 5,000 kilometers, and every morning, he would slip back through the front door. 

Every morning, you woke to the smell of a better-than-cheap cup of coffee with a sweet kiss, and he would whisper to you that he achieved the run in thirty minutes– a personal best, and you wondered if one day it would slip below that number. Without missing a beat, he would place the coffee on a coaster placed there for that specific purpose on your antique bedside table, and your body would roll into the dip in the mattress where his body sat, his warm hand circling waking patterns across your bare back while you sifted through the prevalent swarm of too-little sleep. 

Because, every afternoon, Steve would take his Saturday (which was actually a Tuesday) and  paint that heinous yellow wall in the guest bedroom over with an earthy green tone– one that, without fail, would remind him of you enough to where he would seek you out to tell you. 

And every night, without fail, you would slip from the bed in silence, pull the heinous yellow paint bucket delivered thankfully by Robin out of the bushes from the window that was set just slightly too high to be comfortable reaching over, and paint that lovely green wall back to that awful, ugly yellow. 

There were no discrepancies to his routine. He was an unfortunate creature of habit, and it was so dreadfully painful that you indulged him in this routine. Because, every day, he would pull those old wedding binders out– no longer covered in dust and forgotten memories– and pick the same three options for wedding china that you never saw the point of anyways. Every day, he would try to cheekily pull you in for a shower, and you would make up the same excuse over the same dishes from the same meal that you had eaten to the point where you were just choking it down. 

And you would do it all over again. 

Because, if that same meal and awful yellow paint and ungodly six o’clock wake time would be enough to stop him from feeling like that again, you would keep doing it. 

Your nightly decompression was your saving grace. The only way you felt like a human again. Because every night, Steve would sit and read the same chapter out of the same book, and you would get in some still-life practice. 

Steve was pretty always, even in his blissful unawareness. Even in his ignorance. Even in the fact that he was no longer yours. Steve was pretty by fact. Pretty by nature. You had gotten good at drawing him, you knew where to block the square of his head and the triangle of his nose. You knew where his glasses rested against his face and exactly where to place every mole. You knew where the bone beneath would ebb and flow and where the warm light from that stained glass bowl-lamp would accentuate and valley against them like rivers. Steve was a topographical map and you had explored every inch in these moments of blissful dissonance. You did not need to waste your time getting the likeness correct by now, only getting in the fine details. 

Every night, your wonderful moment away from the catatonic nature of this ordeal would end when Steve would finish his chapter. You would act like you didn’t notice, like you weren’t staring at him. He would act like he didn’t know you were. He would press a tender kiss to your shoulder, smile at the work in your hands, tell you how talented you were, and finalize the ritual with a kiss to your cheek– an invite to bed. 

You know there will come a time when there will be a deviation from this routine, and you try to prepare yourself for this by running every possibility through your head. Calming tactics in the event that he has a category four meltdown, the words you would say and the explanations you would give him, but nothing prepared you for this deviation. Not in the slightest. 

You are unsuspecting as you wipe down the kitchen counters, melancholy with your towel in hand. Your hair is still wet and dripping uncomfortably down your back. You breathe deeply, enjoying the smell of kitchen lemon multi-surface cleaner. Steve approaches you. You feel his presence before you see him or feel his arms around your waist. You indulge in his warmth before he even touches you, before he reaches for your hand. You bask in his radiance before you feel the cold smoothness of gold scrape across your ring finger. 

“You forgot this after your shower.” He whispers through a kiss against the tender skin beneath your ear. He does not understand the devastation his words have caused you, not in his innocence. 

You reconstructed the scene in fragments of memories:

They were lawn seats, and you had no idea how he scored them. This concert had been sold out for weeks. The Tragic Kingdom tour was potentially the greatest album to ever grace this earth, and Steve agreed– potentially more than you did. 

When your eyes turned to get a good look at his face, it was hard to tell where that light sheen of sweat ended and the glitter that wafted in the air began. He was so fucking beautiful. You could look at him forever, put him in a jar on a shelf to admire for a lifetime. He was more blonde than brunette at this time of year, gold-skinned and eager. The July rays had set minutes ago, yet seemed to settle their clinging remnants in his eyes. 

His eyes that shone when they met yours, the eyes that gripped on to your hands, met your mouth, and settled within your gaze. 

You came in with the breeze, on Sunday morning…

You almost missed his words over the ambient concert sounds around you, louder now as Gwen started the beginnings of the song. Had you not been staring at him, you figured with your mouth open like a trout, you would have missed the two quiet words he mustered. 

“Marry me?”

You didn’t say anything back, you didn't need to. You remember the feeling of your knees sinking into the grass beneath you, wet against your skin. You remember how his body was too-warm in the staleness of the July air and the hardness of his body pressed tight against yours. Any qualms he had about saying more than those words disappeared in an instant, your hand willingly accepting the modest diamond encased in a gold band the only answer he ever needed. 

You thought back on that time, on the I love you’s and the please hold me’s. 

You remembered the I can’t do this anymore.

The problem was never committing to Steve. He had you. He had all of you. He could take you whole or in pieces in any slice or interval or fracture that he could have ever dreamed up. Though, that was the problem. You had committed yourself to him fully, never to the idea of committing yourself to anyone else, never thought of having to share him or change what you had. You lived in comfort, willful bliss. You’d never wanted anything more. 

But you saw that hopeful glimmer in his pretty eyes. The ones that looked like chunky baby legs and bubbly giggles. The distant memories that sounded like mimed laughs and raspberries against new skin. You were not maternal, not by nature nor by instinct. You felt broken, not wanting that. 

And knowing how well Steve was made for it. 

How he mapped rooms in the house with oak cribs and baby-pastel paint colors. How he pointed out names he liked and stared for just a little too long at happy families in passing. 

That night, long after Steve had fallen asleep, those dusty old wedding binders called out to you, screamed your name in birdsongs and infant wails. You clung to them, still covered in that awful yellow paint on the floor of that awful yellow room, and you cried awful tears that stained the pages of the awful thing that could have been. 

Except that could have started to feel less awful. It felt more like a should have now. 

You kept the wedding band on, convincing yourself it was more for him than yourself. 

+

“Hello?”

The shrillness of the landline still rings in your ears despite picking up the sound of a voice on the other end. Instinctively, you twirl your fingers into the cord. 

“Hey.” Her voice is scratchy on the other line. You know who it is, yet you still ask. 

“Who is this?” 

“Bill fucking Clinton.” You can hear the way her eyes roll in her voice. You almost find it endearing. 

You roll your eyes back, knowing that she can’t see it. You hope the sentiment is the same. “Hi, Robin.”

Silence on the line. You know what she will ask. She asks almost every other day or in the in-betweens where you can catch each other and she doesn’t have to fake a conversation on the phone with Steve. 

“How is he?” 

You feel like she knows the answer by now, she knows every part of his routine and exactly where you fit into it, “He’s fine. He just got into the shower.” 

There was a silence again, this time slightly more deafening. It felt like she was thinking, pondering the exact thing she was going to say and how exactly she planned on saying it. 

“How are you?” You hated it, despised it. It almost made your blood run cold. You didn’t do feelings, you were just a pawn in this big, fucked up game. It was your obligation to live in this lie. You had already hurt Steve once, the least you could do was keep him safe now. 

“Fine, Robin. I’m good.” You willed, regurgitated it like a curse. 

She sighed, hoping she wouldn’t have to pry but knowing she was going to, “Ha-ha. But really?”

“Really what?”

“How are you?”

You fell silent, the static basso of the line between you buzzing like a flatline as the tears welled up and over your lash line. The first sob you choke out is louder than you expect, and draw your knees up to your chest in the bay as you cry over the phone, unable to find words and unable to speak if you had then anyways. 

For once robin shuts the fuck up. For once she doesn’t have anything to say. Somehow you wish she would. Instead, she lets you cry for a few minutes in silence. She lets you let it out. 

“Do you need me to come over?” She asks, voice a welcome comfort not that you can breathe through the snot and tears running down your face. 

“No.” You sniffle, wiping the stream of facial fluids across your sleeve like you didn’t disgust yourself when you did it. 

“Do you need a professional?”

“No.”

There was a sigh, followed by another moment of silence. She didn’t know how to help you, though, she didn’t really think you needed help. 

“Hey, Robin?” You finally spoke up, eyes finally dry and your throat finally clear enough to be coherent. 

“Yeah?”

“Tell Monica Lewinsky I said hi.” 

+

You have a headache, simply put. That you could supplement. The ache and the pressure behind your eyes could be solved with acetaminophen and a glass of water and a bath. The ache in your chest was less tangible, and would have to wait until the ache in your head was fixed to even be evaluated. 

You’d managed to slip past Steve getting dressed in the convex opening of your walk-in closet, light spilling yellow against the dark floors in the dim lighting of the master bedroom. The one thing you’d greatly missed about this house that your apartment did not have the luxury of was the cast-iron tub, in its claw-footed, wing-backed glory. The water spilled steam from the mouth of the faucet as it spilled down the white porcelain glaze, hot enough to turn your skin red and draw the overage of blood from between your temples. You dimmed the lights, shoulders lax as you slumped your arms sideways over the edge of the tub, water tinged green from both the reflection of the seafoam walls and the capful of eucalyptus epsom salts dissolving in the water around you. 

You close your eyes, focusing more on the crisp smell of the water instead of the pounding of your head. You rest one arm beneath your head as a barrier between your temple and the porcelain, allowing the other to hang off the side. 

You don’t miss the way Steve slips in, nearly silently. The change of air pressure that came with his presence was what gave him away– that and the soft click of the chair legs against the hexagonal tile as he rotated it to face you. 

His touch is so gentle. His touch feels like the only inherent good in the world around you. His touch is soft enough to bring you to tears. And it does. 

You cannot help but let two roll down your face, not upset enough for it to scrunch up in the ugly sobs that you heaved on the kitchen floor to Robin. They splat quietly on the tile beneath you, and you sigh like an exasperated hound. One deep, shuddering breath beneath Steve’s hand. 

You cannot confide in him, even if he asks. You wonder if that fact hurts worse than understanding that he is going to wake up eventually. 

Steve does not pry. He’s really good at that. Instead, he rakes his fingers across the grain of your hair, thrown upwards with reckless abandon– fingers both a consolation and a devastation. He wishes desperately to know. Wishes desperately that he could fix it, but he knows this sadness. Knows the pain of forcing you to talk. The only thing that hurts worse than not knowing is the pain of seeing you cry. 

But he’s so tender, and he’s so endearing. You can’t help but want him. 

“Can I get you anything?” He says to you, just above a whisper. He even dips his head down closer to yours so you can hear, but you’re already clawing at the collar of his shirt. 

“Wanna be close.” You mutter, words muffled against your arm. He understands it anyway. 

His skin is hot. Hot enough to still be felt under your hands despite the temperature of the water. You missed the texture of it, smooth, interrupted by soft constellations of moles and bone. Quickly, and with grace, he stands– pulling your hands from his body for a mere few, painful seconds. He strips his clothes quickly, and you watch the muscles of his shoulders ripple as he maneuvers to pull his shirt over them. 

Silken skin glides across your back, the hot water squelching between your bodies as he slides into the tub behind you, arms encircling your waist in an iron-clad grip. Caring and grounding all at once. 

His lips are soft as they press a hot path against your neck and you sigh, tilting your head further away to allow him the affection you so desperately need. 

“That’s it, honey. Let me give you what you need.” It’s a low growl, not quite a whisper. His voice keeps that resonant patriarchal basso that vibrates against your neck and settles in your coccyx. His kisses turn to soft nips, as he takes the suppleness of your flesh between his teeth– never enough to hurt. 

His hands reach up to cup your breasts, squeezing tenderly as he runs a thumb over a pert nipple. He leaves one hand on your chest, gently pinching and rolling the flesh between his thumb and forefinger, another hand sliding over the hills and valleys of your body to find a home between your legs. 

Despite the water surrounding you, there is a much more distinct slickness that has gathered there in decadent anticipation of him. When his thick fingers finally breach the threshold of you, it is both a devastation and a need. Slowly, he finds the bud of your clit, circling it slowly. 

You suck in a breath, accompanied by a soft whine. When you arch your back, you feel him press against your back, hard and heavy against your flesh. 

“Come on, honey,” He urges, a heeding groan fans across your shoulder disguised as a breath, “I’m gonna get you there. Just gotta let me do it.” 

His middle and ring finger circle your core, easing their way in. You relinquish the new, subtle stretch. His other hand leaves its place on your breast, coming down to hold the soft flesh of your lower belly, creating a soft pressure that soothed the ache in your core as he held you there, relentlessly pumping in and out of you with his fingers. The other hand crept lower, the other two fingers continuing the rhythmic circling of your throbbing clit. 

You cried out, the coil in your core hitting that vapid crescendo and tumbling over the edge with shaky legs and breaths. Steve continued working his fingers within you, easing you through the climax of your orgasm and slowing when you whined. His arms remained around you like a vice, holding you in your place against him. 

He nibbled at your ear softly as you came down from that wonderful, floaty place, and whispered softly, “You did so good.” against your neck. His hands rubbed the insides of your thighs in slow, soothing circles. You felt the water from the tub rush over his arms and create whirlpools over the valleys of your skin. 

It was then that you turned, your arms locking around his neck and your lips crashing into his. Your body fell against his with enough force to push a wave across the edge of the tub, but the wet floor was an issue for another time. Your own carnal desire to have him seated within you was far worse than your desire to maintain the grout in the bathroom floors. This much you knew. 

The stretch was welcome and familiar, albeit foreign to you, now. You cried out, as you slid down to the hilt and seated yourself firmly atop his thighs, either one of your thighs bracketing around his. You felt the scrape of hair from his thighs scratch against your skin, broad hands planted firmly on the plush of your waist, and deep, guttural groan fan out across the crevice of your neck where he buried his head. 

Your hand clutched the nape of his neck for purchase, fingers burying themselves in the damp locks there and tugging softly. It draws a gasp from pretty pouted lips as his head tilts back in reverie. He looks at you through dreamy, half-closed lids, reminding himself to draw himself back and forth again, now that you have adjusted to the sensation of him filling you. 

“Oh, baby. Honey.” He cried, pistoning his hips upward, more rhythmically now. It was more of a cry now than it was a plea, and a rosy blush crept its way across the bridge of his nose, spread over his cheeks, and kissed the tips of his ears. He was ethereal as it spread across his chest and he heaved whines into your mouth like he needed to feel himself inside you to survive. You caught the way his dark lashes kissed the apples of his cheeks, and the way the space between his brows scrunched as he huffed breaths towards your face. 

There is a realization in the impending vapid crescendo where Steve attempts to push you over the edge a second time. Your body is on fire as he rubs fast, sloppy circles around your already sensitive clit. He falls from the edge first.

“O-oh, fuck.” He cried out in pleasure as a tear rolled from beautifully crinkled eyelids. Though, he desperately urges you to continue bouncing with fingers buried into the plush that accumulates where your hips fold. His thumb is still relentless over your sensitive bud until he pushes your already teetering form over the edge as well. 

He holds you close, strong arms around your shaking frame and wet hands smoothing back your flyaway hairs. He presses a kiss to your forehead, guiding your head between his palms and trailing them down your nose. He lands his final kiss, longer this time, against your lips and fans his palms across the expanse of your cheeks and neck. 

You whine when he pulls himself from you, suddenly empty. Steve soothes you with a, “Shh. It’s okay honey, ‘ve got you.” as he pushes water up from the tub and over your cold, drying shoulders. 

You cannot tell if you feel better or worse, having him in this way again. You think of the way he slid the ring back over your finger, and relived all of the gilded moments of your past. You’d always felt like a ghost in this house, haunting the remnants of what the life that should have been. But this did not feel like the life that you walked out on. This felt like the life that you chose. 

Steve felt like your husband when he kissed the skin of your shoulder in the early mornings after his runs. He felt like your husband when he sprinkled the feta into your spinach omelet in the morning, and when he sat behind you to watch you paint like you couldn’t sense him behind you, and when he gave you that goofy smile and wave when you caught you peering at him from the bay curtains while he tended to the lawn, 

And he certainly felt like your husband when he helped you from the tub on shaky legs, while he dried your legs with fresh towels and planted sweet kisses against your ankles and knees as he did so. He felt like your husband as he held your hand and guided you with soft hands to bed. He felt like your husband when he pulled your head to his chest beneath the sheets, sneaking a not-so-secret sniff to the crown of your head and smiling a not-entirely-concealed smile. 

Steve may not have been yours anymore, but he was yours for tonight. 

+

The morning light is dappled when you wake, and the way it sparkles hurts your eyes. You half expect to see Steve, feel his lips against your shoulder and relinquish the warmth that radiates from his skin like the sun as he invades your waking space. Instead, you find him sleeping, golden and beautiful under the dappled light, white linens draped over the oiled ellipses of his hips and legs tangled in the sheets. You bury your nose into the valley of his spine and he jolts awake. You can’t help but to giggle. 

“Jesus, what the fuck?” He starts, pushing himself up on his elbows, stomach pressed to the bed. 

“Oh, good morning, Steve.” His brow furrows as he looks at you. Steve does not look happy to see you. Steve looks confused. 

“What are you even doing here?” He asked, more towards the sheets than you. He buried his face in his hands, groan echoing in his palms before he asked, “Oh, God, how drunk did I get?”

Your heart sinks. He is awake. There is no retrograde and anterograde and Transient Global to worry about anymore. It is just you, and him, and your new sense of impending doom. Though, how impending could the doom really be if it was staring you in the face this very moment? Impending should have been reserved for when you decided to move back into the house you tried to build. Impending was reserved for the phone call from the hospital. No, this was doomed from the start, and now, it was blowing up in your face. 

You can tell he doesn’t know what happened, and that he has a throbbing headache. 

“Here– let me–” You start, turning over to grab his prescription from the drawer in your– Steve’s bedside table. He stood, suddenly. 

“No– ugh,” He pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to apply some pressure there, “I think you need to go.” 

“No, Steve, let me explain–”

“Just, go. Please.” He pleaded. 

You would not argue. You especially would not cry in front of him, not now. Instead, you scrambled the bathroom floor for your clothes that were shed before your bath, pulling them on, scrambling for your purse and car keys on the counter, and promptly leaving with those items to your name. It was foolish for you to build another home there, to leave remnants of yourself and reminders to him of just how fucked you were around his house. You don’t remember breathing on the drive back to your apartment. The air in this place is stale and, if you owned more things, you figured they’d be shrouded in a fine layer of dust from your negligence. 

When Robin answers the phone, you are incoherent. At first, she figures it is the shoddy signal from her company-issued brick phone, though she eventually realizes that it is not the faulty technology. You are in fact, choking on words and hot tears. Robin has a nagging feeling that she knows what happened, and your few words, “Steve” and, “fucked up” both confirm her suspicions and are reminiscent of a time where she was caught in the crossfire over a year ago. 

Robin’s car zig-zags in and out of the morning traffic, shaving both minutes off of her commute time to your apartment and her life. Her entrance to your apartment is dramatic, tired screeching and door hitting the wall so hard you can almost feel the security deposit solidifying in you landlord’s bank account. She greets you with a hug that you don’t ask for– you don’t need to. She doesn’t ask what’s wrong. 

Instead, she stands there, in the nearly empty room where your studio once stood, and she holds you. And you cry. And you want to scream and want to throw things and want to curse the universe and ask why me? But you know why you stand here. You know that you are shitty. So instead, you sit here, and feel sorry for yourself, and let Robin hold you. Because, no matter how shitty you are, she won’t say anything about it. 

This ugly nostalgia rears its even uglier head when the phone rings shrill, deafening against the brick walls that encase you in this place worse than they had when there were paintings occupying this space. She slides across the concrete on the floor just slightly so she can grab her phone.

“Hey– you busy?” Steve asks, and she can tell he’s been crying. 

You look at her, eyes red and confused. 

“No,” Robin lied to him, it was small and white, “What’s going on?” 

Who is it? You mouth. 

Robin is inherently a bad liar. She could say it was her boss, or her mom, or a telemarketer. Instead, she stares back, contemplating the lie and the inevitable conversation she would have to make up on the spot. She decides it is not worth the effort, and mouths back, 

Steve. 

You sit up, looking at her with wide eyes. You will not ask to eavesdrop, though, there’s a small, shitty part of you that wants to. 

“Something happened.” He started, and she knows exactly what happened, “but I don’t exactly know what.” 

What’s he saying? You mouth back at her, though, she holds a pointed finger up at you in waiting. 

“Are you in trouble?” She asks, “Do you need help?” 

“Look, I don’t know. Can you just come over? I’ll explain everything.” He asks, voice small. He sounds like he is on the precipice of a breakdown. She hangs up the phone, knowing you know what she is going to ask next. 

“Hey, are you gonna be okay? I’ve gotta–”

“Yeah, I’m fine. You can go.” You tell her, pointedly, though, she doesn’t fully believe it. However, your nosiness outweighs your ability to be this hurt for this long, “Look, can you just give this back to him? It doesn’t feel right.” and it's not right, it never was right. 

You slide the ring from your finger, closing Robin’s palm around it. She opens her palm once again, twirling the diamond between her fingers. She slides it over her middle finger, diamond side in to protect it. 

“Yeah, I can.”

“Thanks, Rob.” 

“Call me.” She says to you, and It is both a threat and a consolation. 

“Okay.” 

+

There is an aura that has overtaken the house since this morning. It was threatening. Robin had sensed the shift from her car, clear up the avenue. There was something frighteningly wrong here. 

Her knock on the door was poignant, scared almost, and she held her breath as Steve turned the knob. He looked tired. He looked spent. He looked like he wanted to cry, and yell, and throw things, and curse the universe, but was too morose to perform any action but stare blankly at Robin. 

“What happened?” She asked, taking the invited, but welcome, step through the threshold of the front door. She knew what had happened already, there were remnants of you strung about this place like shrapnel. Steve avoided them like landmines, even though the explosion had already happened. 

“She– she,” She meaning you, he started, but didn’t know where to begin. He sat on the couch, bouncing back with the weight and force of his body thrown against the cushions. 

“You don’t remember anything, do you?” Robin finally asked.

Steve looked up at her, red eyes slick with freshly fallen tears, “What?” 

“Steve, you hit your head. You fell off a ladder and knocked something loose.” Robin explained to him, voice soft as she said it, “You couldn’t remember anything that happened in the last year.” 

Robin wished you were here to help her explain. She wished she could remember the big words you remembered to describe what was wrong with him– maybe it would help him understand better. Maybe you should have come. She could have been able to act as a buffer between the anger– 

“You fucking knew about this?” Steve interrupted her thoughts, he had stared for a few seconds while he figured out his thoughts. 

Robin went quiet, more quiet than she already had been, “Yeah. I did.” It was a statement riddled with shame, though she didn’t quite know for what. 

“Steve, you were sick fo–”

He stood, rage apparent in his eyes as he poked his finger into Robin’s shoulder, “No, Rob, I wouldn’t put it past her to lie to me like that but you?” Robin didn’t say anything to him. Instead she just looked up at him, “Whose side are you even on?”

“Steve, you know goddamned well I’m not picking a side.” She was angry, standing now to match his posture, “You brooded for months fucking haunting this house like a ghost, Steve. You. Were. Miserable– and you were making me miserable too! All you did was talk about how you were gonna get her back, and now that you had her, you decide you don’t want her?” Robin started. It was Steve’s turn to stare, now.

“I get that you’re mad, and I get that you’re confused, and I’m sorry that this happened to you, but this isn’t my fault.” She continued. She was a republic of voices tonight, and unfortunately, that republic was Italy. 

“Oh, and here’s your stupid ring back. It’s ugly, anyways.” She finishes, shoving the ring back into his chest. He holds it in his hands, stunned. 

There is an immediate regret that fills him up and drowns him in it. Robin was right, it was not her fault. “Ugh, Robin. I’m–”

She turns at the beginning of his apology, scooping her back from the doorway, “Don’t. I’m not the one you should even be apologizing to.”

“Rob–”

“Bye, Steve.”

He is alone now. The house is quiet and stale, the walls sing in silence, speak their truths, tell him how awful he was. He was so quick to anger, wore his father’s anger like a hand-me-down coat. It hung loose in the wrong places, did not cling to him like his father and looked silly while he was wearing it. He twirls the ring in his hands, watching the light refract white off the brilliant-cut diamond. 

He should call Robin, should. He knows that, even after this, that she will forgive him. You, however, would not be so easy, though, he can’t exactly fathom how badly he wants your forgiveness when he has not quite forgiven you himself. 

He twirls it in his hands as he gets into his car, runs his thumb over the cluster of diamonds in his pocket as he drives down the road, in search of your apartment. It burns a hole in his pocket as he parks, burning hotter and hotter until he swears it scorches his skin the closer he gets to your door. 

When you answer, door swinging open in reprieve and eyes holding the morosity of several generations, he feels a pang of guilt begin to choke him, though it is not big enough to not be swallowed. Something else burns there, still hot and still angry and still confused. It takes over the forefront of his mind. He should not have come here. It was not right to come here. 

“Seriously? This? You still had it?” It is an ugly statement, it's the first thing that he can think of. The angry coat was still tied tight around his waist, the anger was still bubbling in the forefront of his temporal lobe. He holds the ring up in your face, the sparkle hurts your eyes. 

You furrowed your brows, confused by both the fact that we was standing at your apartment door and also that you opened your door to him yelling at you, “You gave it back to me Steve–”

“No, the version of me that forgot what you did gave it back to you. And you took advantage of that. You–”

“Steve, I couldn’t–”

“Couldn’t what?” He wouldn’t give you a chance to explain yourself, he took a step forward and crowded your space. It wasn’t entirely fair, but you hadn’t been entirely fair either. There was no winning this battle. 

You stared back at him in silence, willing fresh tears from breaking over the edges of your lash line. His eyes seethed with anger. You had never seen Steve this angry before. 

“Couldn’t what?” He asked again, taking another step closer. He stood over you now, towering and angry. 

You were shaking now, seeping with your own anger and frustration, “Anterograde Amnesia!”

“What?” He stops sudden;y, realizing his closeness to your figure, taking a step back. 

“That’s what you had. Every morning you woke up and it was the same day. Every morning you woke up and you– you–” You were crying now, hot tears running down your face at an embarrassing, unrelenting pace. You could not tell if they were of anger or sadness. Probably both, “You woke up and did the same thing, and then every night you went back to sleep and we started all over again.”

“Why didn’t you just walk away?” He asked, turning and bracing himself on your counter, hand on his hip as he stared you down. 

“I-I I just couldn’t, okay?”

“Why not?” He had a way of backing you into a corner, making you feel small in this confrontation. Steve was rarely angry with you, and never like this. 

“Because the one day you did find out, before all this shit,” Before he felt like yours again, “–you begged me to tell you that you were okay. You fucking begged me to.” Your arms were flailing now, it was your turn to back him into a corner. You hadn’t meant to be this defensive, hadn’t meant for this to end in a screaming match, but no one ever intended that, you supposed, “How the fuck was I supposed to leave after that, huh? Let them institutionalize you? Saddle Robin with you? How the fuck was that supposed to be the better option?” 

His hands were up now too, defenses in a war against yourselves, “Oh so you just did this so you could be a hero? So you could prove to yourself that you aren’t shitty? Prove to yourself that you weren’t gonna fucking leave again?” 

You found silence, suddenly, more hurt and more angry than before. You stare at each other. He knows he’s crossed a line. Several lines actually. You aren’t as forgiving as Robin. 

“Just go, Steve.”

“I–”

“Just fucking go.”

+

This felt like the remnants of a hurricane. You could hear the wind ringing heavy and violent in your ears like screams. You could feel the rain hot and heavy as it rolled across your cheeks still. Yet the air was still, entirely too still. The shrapnel of your reality built back up and torn back down again, and now you were here. Alone. In silence. 

Robin’s pointed knuckle is quiet against your door, yet it crashes and booms a resonant patriarchal tenor across the echoing walls of your solitude. You groan at her, something akin to its open. You hadn’t managed to lock it again after she left this morning. 

“Are you still being insufferable?” She asks you, as if it isn’t clear by the way you seem to enter a state of active decay, melting into the corner piece of your sectional. 

Though you are insufferable, you are not so insufferable that you cannot bite back, “Are you still being annoying?”

She does not answer, instead, the clinking of glass on glass and heavier glass against granite serves as an answer for her.

“Do you want a glass?”

The ruffling of a paper bag wills your head up, and she exhumes the bottle from it. You see that it is red, but don’t say anything about it. You recognize the bottle as Beaujolais Nouveau, from the same region in France in which it is aptly named– the same region in which Robin did her semester abroad. You could have said something about how it is not winter, or how there are better italian wines or better whites or literally anything else from Trader Joe’s, but alcohol seems nice, and you are never one to complain about free alcohol. 

“Yeah.” you say instead. 

“Okay.” 

She serves you a too-full glass on the couch. She had half a mind to bring some snacks over, but did not feel like putting forth the effort into making a snack board. Instead, she pulls a bag of salt and vinegar chips and a candy bar open with her teeth, pointing the mouth of the bag towards you in a peace offering. You oblige, stuffing a handful of them into your mouth as a chaser for this awful, dry red. 

“What a jerk.” She says, and you know who she is speaking about. 

“What an ass.” You say back to her, and she knows who you are speaking about, 

Your body rolls into the dip where hers sits on the couch, and you let the natural flow bring your head to her shoulder. You do not wrestle with the qualms of physical affection, and, if she is surprised by your sudden affectionate nature, she doesn’t say anything. 

“I spilled some wine on your counter.” She said to you, but you’ll clean it up later. 

You have half a mind to let it stain. 

+

You beg Robin to get your stuff from his house. Your heartbreak is scabbed over enough for you to pick at, and you have a desperate urge to smear some goo all over a canvas in an Oliver De Sagazan-esque pity party, but alas, your studio resides in the place of your demise– Steve’s house. 

Robin is more forgiving than you are, and also more willing to brave the walls of Fort Steve for your stuff. Robin is also a saint, and you have let her know ten times over. 

“She wants her shit back. Have it ready on the porch when I get there.” She says to him on the phone, the line aptly going dead seconds later. 

His hands on your things feel foreign when they touch them, like they might blow up. He had been avoiding them like landmines as he haunted the remnants of this home. Nothing had been touched since that morning. The house would not change. 

There is a fine layer of dust that has accumulated over the confines of your studio, and it makes his eyes water as he agitates it enough to send particles swirling through the air. He stacks your canvases in piles according to their sizes and fills your water cups with brushes. He takes extra care to separate the current painting you abandoned midway through, the one where the linseed-to-oil ratio wasn’t quite right and, in turn, the layers of paint would not cure properly. 

When he moves to the last stack, one of a modest collection of books and sketchpads, he loses his bearings, and the top sketchpad slides out with loose pages all over the floor. He sighs in exasperation, and bends down to scoop them into a pile. He recognizes the figure drawn on one page, and then another, and then another. A mirror image of himself, ruched hair at the end of the day, glasses perched on the end of his nose, elbow on the arm chair. In some he can see the tops of his folded knee. In some he is smiling and looking directly back at him. 

Every one of them is dated one a day for eighty-six days in chronological order, yet every paper he is holding has the same headline. 

The final page in the stack is a doodle page, he almost misses it. A series of boxes and riddles. Number two down, number three across. You were creating crossword puzzles, a new one every day, and yet none of the answers vaguely familiar to him. His blood runs cold. He was the ass. 

In a panic, he scoops the drawings up, sliding them as quickly as possible into the sleeve from which they fell and clutching them to his chest like previous gems. To him, this was a lifeline, and he did not have time to wait for Robin, though she is sitting outside waiting for him when he runs out the front door, leaving it open in a panic. 

She is colder when she greets him, colder than he’s ever seen. It's an odd juxtaposition, seeing her be so cold. She adorns black jeans with a black turtleneck. She does not look like herself, she looks like you. 

“And where are you going?” She asks him, watching hum fumble with his car keys and with the drawings in his hands. 

He puts his hands on her shoulders, wraps her in a hug, and gives her a kiss on the forehead. 

“Robin, I love you, and I know you came here for her stuff, but I’m going to talk to her.” 

She is stunned, staring at him with wide eyes at both the kiss and the sudden change in demeanor. She does not have time to ask him what drugs he possibly could have been on or make a back-handed remark about how hard he hit his head. Because, instead, she is standing in his driveway while his car takes off down the road. 

Your ground floor apartment has floor-to-ceiling windows. It was charming, really. It was one of the reasons you chose this place despite its ridiculous cost. Well, that, and the fact that it was the least suburban place you could think of. You are sitting on the kitchen island, scrubbing now at that wine stain on the counter with a rag and granite polish at the forefront of this battle when the first thud sounds off clear against your winder. You thought it had been an unsuspecting bird, but the shadow of a man behind your sheer white curtains startles you. You unfold yourself quickly, going over to pull them back and investigate. 

Steve stands with his feet in shrubs, hands with papers pressed flat against the glass. He pulls more from his chest, switching them out every so often, and then ends the spectacle with a crossword puzzle placed flat to the glass. He looks ridiculous like this, hands splayed across glass, hair disheveled and out of breath from running. He left his glasses on in the shuffle, and they slid down his nose in the commotion. Your confusion registers clear across your face, and he says something adjacent to, “Can I come in?” against the glass. 

You nod, and he shuffles the drawings back into a cohesive, carryable pile. You meet him at the front door, letting him run in and dump them on the counter you were currently cleaning. He spreads them out in front of you, breathless and disheveled. They are in order, chronologically. All of your drawings of him. You are both mortified and embarrassed. 

“That one.” He points to it, moving to stand next to you on the counter to look at it. 

“The first one.” You say, looking at the date. 

“Was that the first day?” He asked, “Of being home from the hospital?” he specified, staring down at you with intent eyes. 

You nod, looking back up to meet him, “Yes, that was the first day. I knew you had amnesia, I knew you thought we were still engaged. Though, I didn’t know the extent of your condition yet.” 

You go through all eighty-six drawings, the things he said to you, the things you did. A lot of them are repetitive, some of them caught you off guard and you are able to  laugh about it now. You talk about the day he gives you the ring back, and the day you realized he was in the same infinite time loop, you talk about the dastardly yellow paint and the vellum crossword puzzles so he wouldn’t get bored even though you knew he wouldn’t remember, and the binders. You talked a lot about Robin and her place in it all. You talked about the dentist up the street, and how Steve, even in his delirium, still knew him as the guy with the labs. 

There is one day where the drawing is missing. 

“Is this the day,” He asks, “The day that I–”

“Yeah, it is.” You answer. 

“What exactly happened then? On that day?” 

You struggle to recall every detail, so you start by giving him the gist, “Well… you saw the tattoo on my back,” You reach up to touch it, running your fingers over the raised lines of ink beneath your fingers. Steve tilts his head back to get a glimpse of it as well, his own fingers calloused as they chase yours across it. 

“Looks nice.” He says, without thinking. 

“Thank you.” You reply back, “And then you got really confused. I was still sleeping on the couch then. We were still figuring it out, and I was still clumsy. I asked you how hard you hit your head, and you didn’t even remember doing it. You panicked so quickly, I– I had a hard time calming you down.” 

The guilt still ate you alive, the guilt at your own clumsiness for letting it slip, and the guilt that you lived in the lie for that long. The guilt mostly for leaving in the first place. 

“You asked me where I was, and I couldn’t answer. I wasn’t there because I was trying so hard to live my life separately from you. We hadn’t been together in a year, but I couldn’t tell you that.” You said, words becoming frantic as you fought off tears. 

His hand is both a consolation as it is a devastation as it rests across your shoulder, broad and warm and grounding. 

“What did you say to me, then?” He asked. 

“You asked me if you were okay. You were so confused.” 

“And?”

“I told you that you were.” Hot tears broke the threshold of your lash line, and spilled in streams down your face. It cut through the dryness there, and you choked on a sob. “I didn’t even know if you were or how to take care of you or what I was doing and, and I’m sorry.” You cried ugly tears now, wet into your own hands. 

He grips your shoulders, pulling you into a familiar hug as your words grow frantic and your breaths become shallow and stuttered. He holds you close to his warm chest, encased in soft arms. He cradles the back of your head like you are encased in glass, and he plants a kiss to the top of your head. 

“I’m sorry.” He whispers into your hair, now rocking your back and forth as you calm down. A wet drop falls on your shoulder, and you cannot tell if it belongs to yourself or him. You would forgive Steve in every life. 

He pulls back from you, hands still planted firmly on your shoulders as he stares at you, amber eyes both piercing and comforting. 

“Listen, you don’t have to take this, not yet. But it would make me so fucking happy if you would.” He pulls the ring, sparkling and brilliant from his pocket, and presents it to you. You oblige happily, sliding it back on to your hands before tackling him into an embrace. His kiss is as soft as it had always been. 

You would do this again, and again, and again if it meant you could have him, because the same day with Steve was better than any of the days you had ever spent without him. 

[patdkoala]

Backseat Serenade

Pairing: Dean Winchester x female reader

Warnings: Pet names (baby), unprotected sex, p in v, fingering, Dean Winchester being a total slut (yes that's a warning)

Sam had found a case for us all last night. Dean drove us halfway and then pulled into a skeezy motel for the rest of the night.

"Alright so, the lady messed up and gave us two beds," Dean said as he handed Sam and me both keys. "I don't see how that is a problem," I said as I took one of the keys and unlocked the door of the motel.

We stepped inside and it smelled like piss, beer, sweat, and menthol. The carpets reeked of cat piss, the curtains were stained yellow from people smoking inside, and the paint on the walls was patchy as if they'd been repainted multiple times.

And sitting on both sides of the room were two twin beds.

"But there are three of us," I said as Sam set his bags down on one of the beds. "I call dibs on the bed closest to the bathroom," He said as Dean and I glanced at each other back and forth.

"I will sleep in the car, you take the other bed," Dean said as he set my bags down on the other bed (He had carried my bags for me from the car to the motel).

"How is that fair to you? You're the one that drove for 10 hours straight. I can sleep in the car," I said as I went to pick up my bag.

"You're both ridiculous, why don't we just share a bed, Dean. Like we used to when dad would try to get the cheaper room when we were kids," Sam said as his older brother nodded and then we all got ready for bed.

The night went on per usual.

Sam fell asleep first, starfishing in his bed next to Dean, I was sitting up in bed watching a really bad romance movie on the tv, and Dean was sitting in his bed next to his little brother with his arms crossed and he sat there watching the movie with me.

"Do you seriously watch these every night?" Dean asked as I shook my head.

"No, only if the motels have cable but sometimes it cuts out and gets all staticky. Then I get a migraine so I have to turn it off," I said as the tv then turned to static and so I reached for the remote and turned it off.

"Why don't we all just try to get some sleep. We have a long car ride again tomorrow and we have to be well-rested for the hunt," Dean whispered to me as he looked at his sleeping brother.

I got under the covers but I couldn't exactly sleep because I wasn't very tired and I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that Dean is sharing a bed with his little brother that is like 5 feet taller than all of us.

I started to laugh quietly in my bed.

"What's so funny?" Dean asked as I sat up and looked at him. He was laying on the very very edge of the bed and the blanket wasn't even covering 25% of his body. Sam Winchester starfishing in bed takes up 85% of the whole dang bed.

"Oh nothing," I laughed as Dean rolled his eyes, and then with one slight move he fell completely out of the bed.

"OH, SON OF A BITCH!" Dean whisper-yelled. "Dean! Shhhhhh!" I whisper-yelled back as I pointed to the sleeping Sam.

"Why don't you just sleep in my bed with me? I take up way less space than him and we both have insomnia so we can just stay up and talk anyway," I said as Dean nodded and then he got into bed with me.

The bed was still pretty small so Dean sat up a little and I rested my back against Dean's chest. He wrapped his arm around my shoulder.

I was pretty close to both boys so our cuddling up close was not a new thing. I'd been traveling with them both for months now.

We stayed up for a good four hours just talking to each other about the case, about Sam, about Castiel, about our past, and about how not tired we were.

"Wanna go for a drive?" I asked as Dean looked over to Sam who was still snoozing hard. "Sure," He said as he put on a hoodie and we left.

I stole one of Sam's hoodies since I didn't bring a late-night jacket.

We drove to a diner. We ordered pie.

"So, why do you and Sam do this?" "Do what?" He asked with a mouth full of pie.

"Why do you guys take these long drives? You could just as easily take a plane instead. You guys are practically loaded with all this credit card fraud," I said as he smiled and chuckled.

"Well, believe it or not, but Dean Winchester is scared of planes," He said as he spoke in the third person. "No, I believe it," I responded.

"What do you mean? I'm way too badass to be scared of anything," He said as he took another heaping bite of his apple pie.

"But, that's just it. You are way too much of a badass to be scared of anything that normal people are afraid of. Like ghosts, werewolves, witches, and demons. Because we fight things like that every day it would only make sense that our fears would be something dumb like planes, clowns, or heights," I said as he laughed at that last bit.

"So, is that what you're afraid of? Heights?" I nodded and he smiled back.

For a full hour of us sitting in that diner, it seemed almost as if Dean and I were a normal couple on a late-night date. It felt almost real.

"We should head back and see if we can get any sleep before Sam wakes up and decides it's time for his run," Dean said as I nodded.

And liked that the dream was crushed.

We drove back to the motel but we just sat in the parking lot.

"I don't want to go inside. I changed my mind," Dean said as I just sat there. "Okay? What do you want to do instead?" I asked as Dean just looked at me like I was the idiot in the car right now.

"Whatcha looking at me like that for?" I exclaimed as Dean then let out a huff.

"I just thought this whole night was you wanting to make a move on me but I guess I was wrong. I guess I've just been wrong for the past 7 months," He said as I looked at him with doe eyes.

"Oh, Dean. You are such a fool. Of course, I wanted you. I just knew that if we fucked early on in the hunting then I would be putting a target on my back and no one would take me seriously in the community. I'd just be the girl that fucked Dean Winchester and lived to tell the tale," I said as he smirked.

"Oh, don't worry. You'll still be able to tell the tale if you want," Dean said as he reached over to me and pulled me into a deep kiss.

We got out of the Impala and into the backseat. Dean took off his sweatshirt and then pulled off his t-shirt.

I removed Sam's hoodie and then my tank top. Only to reveal that I wasn't wearing a bra. "You spent the whole night with me while braless? You are a fucking minx," He said as he kissed my collarbone and then down my throat.

He held my body down as he moved his against mine with such force. I removed his belt and then slide his jeans and underwear down in one movement.

He pulled down my sweatpants and slid a finger inside of me ever so gently. I moaned out and arched my back. Then he slid in another finger.

Before I knew it, Dean Winchester had three fingers inside of me and I was moaning and falling apart underneath him.

"I know, baby. I feel you coming close." He said as he stopped and then he moved closer and pushed himself into me. I moaned at the sudden contact.

His fingers didn't even compare to the feeling of him inside of me like this.

We both moaned and he moved with such vigor. We took turns crying out each other's names.

The sun was rising behind us. He pulled out and came on the leather backseat. He used his t-shirt to clean it up.

He then fell asleep practically on top of me.

We woke up to knocking on the window. Dean used his hand to wipe the window because we had created so much steam that it fogged up the glass.

"Let me know why you guys are dressed and ready to go," Sam yelled outside the Impala. Dean got off of me and pulled his pants back on. His shirt was unuseful at the moment since it was just used as a cum rag.

I put back on Sam's hoodie and Dean put on his own. We got out of the car and went to change in the motel together.

Sam came back from his run and Dean had packed up the car so we checked out of the motel and all climbed in the Impala.

Dean and I were silent.

"So, are we going to address the elephant in the room or just ignore the fact that you two obviously slept together?" Sam asked as Dean looked in the rearview mirror and just gave me a look.

"Well, if it's so obvious then why does it need to be addressed?" I asked as Dean chuckled.

"I guess you're right then," Sam said before changing the topic and spoke about the case instead.

[atiny-piratequeen]

Against the Tide: Eighteenth Dal Segno (Ch. 18 Pt. 2)

Pairing: Poly OT8

•❥ Rating: Explicit (18+)

•❥ Genres: Heavy Angst, Action, Romance, Fluff, Smut, Fantasy

•❥ Series AU Tags: Demon Pirates, Supernatural, Poly Relationship (mxm), Past and Modern Day AU, Mythology Au, Slow Burn, Slice of Life, College Au, Rock Band Au, Happy Ending Endgame

•❥ Chapter Tws: Migraines, Nosebleeds, Blood, Guilt, Nightmares, Panic Attacks, Anxiety, Misunderstandings, Poison

•❥ Chapter Sws: Foursome, Consentacle Tentacles (lets go Whiro!), Temperature Play, Comfort Sex, Finger Sucking, Jacob's Ladder Piercing, Hair Pulling, Blowjob, Frottage, Bareback, Auralism, Scent Kink, Cum Swallowing, Biting, Dacryphilia

•❥ WC: 14.6k+ out of 25.5k

•❥ A/N: The blue hellsite's devs are full of shit and my chapter was too big to post all in one so now I have to break it up into two posts. It would be real lovely for my AtTiny enjoyers to make sure to reblog my work when they're finished :3 This was going to be the reveal chapter but it was already 25k so I decided to break it up. Which...was clearly the right option since tumblr's new posting limitations hates me and my big chapters lmao. Thank you for waiting and stay tuned :) Also, if you haven't yet, maybe check out my new universe Ataraxia while you wait for the next chapter?

•❥AO3 | Taglist Form (Please make sure your urls are updated and able to actually be tagged) | Commission Sheet𓆩⟡𓆪

•❥ ©atiny-piratequeen 2024. do not repost, translate, or use my works.

•❥Network Pings: @kwritersworld​ | @cultofdionysusnet​ | @k-vanity​

•❥← previous dal segno                 next dal segno –>

(banners used created by @cafekitsune thank you sm!)

✣✤✣✤✣✤✣✤♖✣✤✣✤✣✤✣✤✣

April 1st

7:34am

-220 Days Remain-

✣✤✣✤✣✤✣✤♖✣✤✣✤✣✤✣✤✣

“Hold your head up. Keep your back straight. Slouching is unbecoming of a Prince.” 

Seonghwa opened his eyes, looking to his left, and spotting the form of his child self, staring at his old instructor. 

Ah, a dream. 

He watched his child self stand straighter, his grey eyes hardening as stared at his instructor, his jaw, as cherub as it may be, locking. 

“Yes, Teacher. I apologize.” 

“Perfect, Prince Seonghwa. Now, raise your sword. To be a leader, you must never show that you are tired. Never show weakness. Those who follow you will sense something is amiss and if their leader is weak, they will lose hope. Even if you know your back is against the wall, you musn’t show your subordinates. Always remember this.” 

Seonghwa’s child self gripped the practice sword tight, nodding as he once again began to swing at the dummy before him, keeping his posture perfect. 

The current Seonghwa watched his younger self before turning, exhaling gently and heading in the opposite direction. 

He walked through rustling trees and the scenery began to melt into something different. 

Intricate designs on the carpet beneath his feet, expensive paintings lining the walls of rulers before him. Beautiful vases full of freshly picked and tended to flowers. 

The hall stopped on two frames. 

One, burned to cinders, of his father. Through the ash and damage, Seonghwa almost could not recognize him. 

He, however, knew the hilt of that falcata well. 

The very one situated on his hip currently. 

Seonghwa grit his teeth and looked to the final frame in the hall of rulers. 

Staring back at him was an image of himself. Or, rather, his other self. 

Inky black hair, piercing ice blue eyes, the deep crimson streaks on his eyes and along his lips. A crown of ice sat atop his head. 

Seonghwa approached ‘himself’, staring into his own eyes. The painting smiled back at him, tilting its head slightly before leaning out of it and towards him. 

The ex prince did not shy away, even when ‘he’ reached out, grabbing his wrist and smearing paint all over Seonghwa’s it, right over his compass stone. 

Seonghwa glanced down before looking back at ‘himself’. 

Crimson lips opened. 

“Come. It is not these halls you wish to walk through, now is it?” 

Seonghwa opened his mouth to question ‘him’, but was yanked through the painting. 

He fell through the painting, careening downwards, eyes widening as the color began to fade around him. His ‘other’ self gripped his hand tight, a wild smile on his face as they fell. 

“Where are we going?” Seonghwa hadn’t opened his mouth, instead he heard his own voice echoing through the space they were falling through. The ‘other’ him glanced over his shoulder at Seonghwa before looking down. 

“The place we’ve been yearning. Even if its for a little bit.” 

Before Seonghwa could reply, the gray blur around him as he fell began to rapidly fill with color once more until it cradled him like a blanket. He could no longer feel ‘him’ holding his hand. 

Seonghwa did not know when he’d closed his eyes again, but when he opened him, he was…home. 

No, not the castle, not the house in Seoul…he was home. 

The scent of salt from the ocean filled his nose first, then the rhythmic sound of water splashing along the hull of The Utopia. 

Seonghwa felt his throat tighten as he looked around. 

“I’ve never cooked swordfish before, but I’m excited to try!” 

He turned his head, watching as Yeosang stood with his hands on his hips, admiring the giant swordfish Jongho and Whiro had hefted aboard. San and Wooyoung stood not too far off, with Wooyoung singing a song they’d picked up in the last port town, slowly forming a new set of knives for their beloved chef to hack apart the fish for easier transport down into the galley. 

“I don’t care what ya do with it, just make it good for all the damn effort it took for us to bring this big ass fish up here, yeah?”

“Don’t be so fucking rude when asking for something, jackass.” 

Yeosang smiled patiently as Whiro rose from Jongho’s skin, growling and starting another one of their usual arguments. 

“Thanks so much, Doc. I drank that concoction you gave me yesterday and I feel leagues better than I did before!” Sana cheered, slapping Yunho on the back before she rushed over to get to work, tying her hair back as she did. 

Yunho watched her go with a smile, muttering thanks to Geb as he checked his watch and startled. 

“Ah! I’m late! I have to feed Atlas.” He rushed past Seonghwa, smiling and waving at him before hurrying below the deck. Seonghwa waved back and continued walking, finding Mingi seated on a barrel, glasses balanced on his nose as he scanned whatever was on the report in his hands. 

Seonghwa felt his heart clench for a moment. 

He stopped in front of Mingi. His presence drew the boatswain’s attention in an instant, with Mingi peering up at him over the rim of his glasses. Once he realized who it was, he set the report down. 

The dark-haired man sent him a big, genuine smile. 

“Hey! We’re lookin’ good. I think I finally got the hang of the numbers Cap’n wants to keep while also being mindful of resourc-Oh!”Mingi stopped short when Seonghwa threw his arms around his frame. 

He looked at the First Mate with concern before closing his eyes and rubbing his back. 

“It’s not like you to slouch, Seonghwa.” 

“I just want to hold you again, it’s been so long. Please…please let me just hold you a little longer.” Seonghwa almost didn’t recognize his own voice as he pushed it out. Mingi hummed before looking towards the sky, exhaling a small, good-natured laugh. 

“You’ll hurt your back if you don’t stand up straight.” 

“To hell with my back. To hell with it all. I just want to fix this. I miss…I miss this. I miss us. All of us.” 

Mingi gently pulled him away, smiling at him and cocking his head. 

“I know you do. After all, if it were just him you cared about, wouldn’t you have run into him first?”

Seonghwa watched as Mingi hopped off of the barrel, standing taller than him and cupping his face. His rough thumbs wiped Seonghwa’s cheeks of tears that had yet to fall. 

“I need to get stronger.” 

“I agree with you.” 

Seonghwa stared at Mingi, his heart pounding as the boatswain leaned in. Instinctively, he closed his eyes, expecting to feel the phantom brush of lips against his own. 

Instead, Mingi placed his lips near the shell of his ear. 

“We are in the past, Seonghwa. Nothing is going to change that. You can only change the future.” 

Seonghwa exhaled shakily, holding Mingi tighter. He pulled the ex prince closer and set his chin on his shoulder. 

“Regardless of what has happened, what will happen. I want you to know something. Take it to heart, okay?” Mingi ran his fingers over the fabric of Seonghwa’s clothes, admiring it as he spoke. 

“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you…that all pales in comparison to what lies inside of you, Seonghwa. And this goes for all of us.” Mingi pulled away for the last time, stopping to steal a long awaited kiss from Seonghwa’s lips. He kept their heads together, staring into Seonghwa’s teary eyes before grabbing his report and turning. 

“Go on, you should see him before you wake up.” 

With that, he walked away from Seonghwa, leaving the ex prince there to collect himself. 

It took the blonde longer than he would like to admit, but once he did, he exhaled and turned on his heel, rushing through the bodies on the ship. 

He did not care for the fact that he ran through some figures, with them blurring into vague aberrations before returning to the familiar faces of his old crew members, going about their business as if they hadn’t been disturbed. 

He found him on the quarter-deck, his back to him as he checked the compass in his hand. 

Seonghwa flew over, hugging him tight, burying his face into his back and letting the tears he’d barely reeled in freefall from his eyes. 

The man grunted before he glanced back, chuckling softly and placing a hand on Seonghwa’s.

That laugh, that beautiful sound. 

“It’s not often I see ya cryin’. Can’t say I’m a fan of seein' ya all messed up like this when yer not feelin’ good.” Captain Hongjoong turned in his arms, kissing the top of Seonghwa’s head and then laughing when the prince pulled him into a desperate kiss with no fanfare. 

“Please, stay with me. All of you please don’t go again. I…I don’t want to wake up please just let me stay.” 

Hongjoong looked at him before he glanced off towards the sea. There was a pained look in his eyes, but it was gone a moment later, as he turned his attention back to Seonghwa. 

“I know it’s unfair, but I’m askin’ ya to stand up straight and be strong.”

Seonghwa felt pain in his chest as he stood up, watching as Hongjoong leaned over the monkey rail. He wanted to scramble to grab him, to yank him back into his arms, but the rational side of him knew if he panicked, he’d awaken from this much earlier than he was willing to risk. 

Not now. Please, not now. 

He just wanted to talk for a bit longer. Just to hear his lover’s voice. Seonghwa focused when Hongjoong’s voice carried over the sound of the splashing waves. 

“What do you think it means to be a Captain?”

Seonghwa stared at Hongjoong’s back for a long time, watching as he gazed down to the deck below. Occasionally, someone would look up, notice the man's watchful eye, and give him a respectful nod, a wave, a fist pat across their own chest in acknowledgment.

Seonghwa watched them silently. 

“I haven't the slightest clue, putois. I don’t…I don’t think I’ve done you any justice in your… absence.” Seonghwa cringed, glancing at the deck below his feet. 

Hongjoong laughed and leaned on the wooden rail, the wind sweeping his hair. A smirk pulled at the corner of his lips. 

“Ah, after all of this time, you’re still thinkin' with that Princely mindset, eh?  C’mon, Seonghwa, think out of tha box!”

Seonghwa’s lip curled but he held back the tongue lashing he had for him, instead watching Hongjoong shift from foot to foot, humming. 

“To me,” he started. “Every breath I take is for my crew. I would do anything for them. No pain is too great. No injury too grave. As long as I can move, I will ensure my crew is protected.”

Seonghwa looked down at the men shuffling about, lips slightly pursed. He could see Daniel gently motioning in a direction, followed by half a dozen members trotting down below the deck in mismatched harmony, carefree smiles on their faces. 

His eyes drifted back to Hongjoong.

“And what about you?”

Hongjoong glanced over his shoulder.

“What about me? I have this gift now. And with it, I protect my crew. My ship. I can be cut to pieces, but the moment I mend myself back, I will come back. Better. Stronger. This is what a Captain does. At least to me. No matter how much it hurts, no matter how much sleep I lose, I pledged to do right by my crew.”

Seonghwa hummed, closed his eyes, and let out a shaky exhale.

What it means to be a Captain, huh?

“I don’t think I have what it takes.” 

“I think that’s bullshit.” 

Seonghwa opened his eyes, and all seven of his lovers stood before him.  He looked around, his brows pinching together as his lip wobbled again. Hongjoong walked over to him, cupping his cheek. 

“I have to go, Seonghwa. It’s about that time, eh?” 

“No! No wait, please!”

“It’s going to be okay. I believe in you. I wouldn’t have trusted my crew with you if I didn’t. Don’t give up. Not when you’ve found me. Keep going.” 

“Hongjoong, I can’t, okay?! I’ve..I’ve ruined everything. Mingi hates me…you don’t remember us, please. Just…just let me stay-”

“It’s time to wake up, Seonghwa.” 

Seonghwa watched as the man before him changed, the shaggy chestnut mullet now a well trimmed and fluffy black and white nest of loose curls. Soft, honey brown eyes stared up at him and Seonghwa looked down at the image of the current Hongjoong. 

“I…I don’t want to wake up-”

The musician placed his hand on the center of Seonghwa’s chest. 

“Get up, Seonghwa.”

“No! No, no, no, just a bit longer-”

“It’s time to get up.”

Hongjoong pushed him, and Seonghwa found himself powerless to stop it, falling back with the image of his lovers staring back at him being the last thing he saw before he fell through the deck. 

Once again…the color around him began to fade to gray as the ship got further and further away.

And then-

“CHEESE WILL PERFORM LIFE SAVING MEASURES! EVERYONE STAND BACK!”

Seonghwa jolted up, the sensation of falling the second time triggering his instincts. In an instant, Cheese came storming towards him, knocking him out of his bed and onto the floor before pressing onto his chest. 

“Live, Master Captain Seonghwa!!! LIIIIIIVE!”

“C-Cheese, he’s immortal, he doesn’t need you to do chest compressions-” San frowned, brows furrowed. Whiro cackled from where he’d pulled himself up from Jongho’s skin. 

“No, no, please let him continue, this is fuckin’ hilarious.”

Jongho rolled his eyes and made his way over, picking Cheese up and frowning down at the oldest immortal. 

“Hey, you alright?” 

Seonghwa sat staring at the ceiling in shock for a moment before he pushed himself up into a sitting position. 

Jongho and Yunho stood closest to his bed, worried expressions on their faces. Wooyoung was not too far off, holding a bowl of cool water as Yeosang wrang out a rag, paused mid-way as he stared at Seonghwa, bewildered. San sighed, setting aside the smelling salts he had fished out of Yunho’s room, pursing his lips in concern. 

Mingi stood in the doorway, quietly observing. 

“You were…screaming and crying in your sleep. We couldn’t wake you at all. Are…are you alright?” Yeosang inquired, rushing over to place the rag on his head. Seonghwa momentarily forgot the nature of the very powers inside of him, instead relaxing the instant the cool rag touched his head. 

He was covered in a fine sheen of sweat and his eyes and throat stung, proof of the aforementioned screaming and crying episodes. Yunho ducked down and picked him up, setting him in his bed and holding a hand over his body. A faint green glow emitted from it as he seemed to check Seonghwa’s body with his powers. 

“Your vitals are good. It seems it was only a nightmare. However, I am detecting traces of-” Geb’s tender voice sounded from Yunho’s lips and Seonghwa shook his head, cutting him off. 

“I’m fine, Geb, please don’t worry.”

Yeosang clenched his fists.

“You’re doing it again. Why?”

Seonghwa’s gaze lifted to Yeosang, blinking in surprise.

“Doing…? What am I-”

“Did you know? Your scent changes when you lie. When you tell half truths, even. Everyone’s does.” Yeosang walked up, eyes blazing. Seonghwa stared up at him, pressing his lips together. There was a flash of something in his eyes, Mingi knew it well. The oldest of their group of immortals didn’t like to be challenged, and would usually respond accordingly. 

However, this time, as quickly as the look crossed his face, it was gone, replaced with a stone-esque poker face, albiet a bit too late for those who knew him well.

So…everyone in the room. 

“Yeosang, there is no need to be concerned.”

“Show me your side. Lift your shirt up, actually.”

“....”

“If there’s no need for concern, there’s no reason to not show me, right? My nose can just as easily be playing tricks, right?” He pointed to Seonghwa, eyes bleeding to crimson.

“Explain to me why I smell your blood, since there is no cause for concern, Park Seonghwa.”

A silence fell over the room that instantly made the air stifling. Seonghwa rubbed his tired eyes and let out an exhausted sigh before sending his lovers a smile that didn’t convince a single one of them he had pulled it together. 

“I…truly do not wish for any more fighting between us. I’ve been the reason for so much, already. They will heal. I’m sorry to disturb everyone so early. Thank you for checking on me. I…need to organize my thoughts and I will be alright.” He ran a hand through Cheese’s fur as he spoke to them. 

San looked down as he did. Seonghwa’s hand was trembling. 

“Seonghwa…” Yeosang realized his out of character outburst had made the man put up his walls again. A pang of guilt struck him hard and reached for him. Seonghwa caught his hand, turning it in one fluid movement and placing a kiss to his knuckles. 

“I’m sorry for worrying you.” He spoke softly, a sense of finality in his tone. 

Drop it, please.

“We’re gonna get him back, Hwa.” San sat on the edge of the bed, putting his hand over Seonghwa’s free one. The ex prince let out a small exhale. He turned his hand up, taking San’s in his and raising it to his lips like he had done with Yeosang’s. San didn’t move, his expression softening as Seonghwa brushed his lips over his knuckles and pressed San’s palm to his cool cheek. 

“I…I know. I won’t stop until I do. I want…to be a man worthy of guiding and loving all of you.” His normally sure and bold voice came out as a mere whisper. 

Wooyoung came to his side quickly. 

“Of course you are!” 

Seonghwa could sense out of his peripheral that Mingi was still there, watching quietly. He had the hindsight not to glance in his direction and risk sending the wrong message. Instead, he closed his eyes, speaking clearly as he held San’s hand in place. 

“Do not misunderstand. I do not say these words because I wish for any of you to feel pity for me. I say them because I have made grave mistakes and I wish to atone for them. Until I do, how can I look any of you in the eyes and call myself a leader? How can I call myself an adequate lover when I have let you all down so tremendously?”

Jongho glanced at Yunho, who seemed to have a comment on the tip of his tongue but refrained. A guilty look settled on his face instead. 

‘I’ve pushed him too much, Geb.’

‘Perhaps.’

“My actions and…the harm they have caused are my own. It is on me to right these wrongs. My body will heal from these wounds in time. With that being said,” Seonghwa got out of his bed, looking around everyone in the room. 

“I wish to try that trial once more. But I don’t want anyone to feel rushed or pressured into doing it instantly like we had before.” he ran a hand through his hair and nodded. 

“I will be down for breakfast soon, I just…I would like to shower first, I'm covered in sweat. Thank you all for checking on me.” He stood, gently maneuvering around Cheese so the canine didn't fall. 

His remaining lovers exchanged concerned glances at one another before Jongho reached for him, catching his wrist and sending him a smile. 

“Mind if we join?”

Seonghwa’s lips parted, before he glanced down, finding a shadow subtly looped around his ring finger, tugging gently. 

The ex prince looked up, pressing his lips together to hide the small wobble. Gods, was he not done with the crying? Did it follow him into the waking world?

“C'mon.” Even Whiro regarded him with a tender tone, and Seonghwa found himself nodding, his feet slightly dragging along the cool floors. 

Mingi stepped out of the doorway as Jongho and Whiro ushered Seonghwa out.

“Seonghwa,”

The blonde perked, looking over his shoulder at Mingi. He rubbed his arm slightly, looking to the floor. Cheese had appeared at his side, rubbing against his leg before sitting at his feet.

“...Make sure to wash your face. It's…puffy. And, um. Drink water. So you don't get a headache. From the…crying and all.”

Seonghwa slow blinked at him before he let out a small exhale, the tears he'd been trying to force back down flowing from his face at the clear-albeit a bit awkwardly executed-words of concern.

“Thank you, Mingi. I'll be back soon.” Seonghwa’s voice somehow remained stable despite his tears (and the occasional laughs as he tried to wipe his face)

Jongho ducked down, looping his arm under the taller immortal's legs, picking him up.

“I got you. Just put your head on our shoulder and let us take it from here.” Jongho’s voice grew further from everyone as he carried Seonghwa down the hall.

Yeosang looked at the floor, guilt tearing at him. He quietly excused himself, cursing in several tongues as he maneuvered past his lovers. 

“I…I’ll make breakfast…”He trailed off, the usual excitement in his voice to do so gone as he jogged downstairs.

It wasn’t like him to lose his cool like that, but he could see the clear hurt on Seonghwa’s face and it was like watching a horrible accident in slow motion.

Still in the doorway, Mingi glanced into the room at the remaining occupants before ruffling Cheese's fur.

“Come on, let's go help Yeosang.” He nodded towards the stairs and Cheese happily trotted after him. 

In the bathroom, Seonghwa watched as Jongho and Whiro spoke back and forth to one another in Māori, moving about the room and grabbing different items. 

“Should we do a bath or shower?”

“Shower. I don't know if he's going to want to sit and be in his own head in a bath. Plus, foxy is making breakfast. It'd be rude to let it get cold by spending all day in the tub.”

Seonghwa couldn't understand a word they were saying, but he could tell they were working harmoniously, probably bouncing ideas off of one another.

“It's…nice seeing you two like this.” He softly spoke. Jongho perked for a moment before he extended his hand.

“We love you.” 

Seonghwa took his hand without hesitation, leaning into his space and holding his forearms gently. He pressed their foreheads together, staring into Jongho’s eyes. 

He noticed the right one had gone red, and his gentle smile grew as half of Jongho’s silken locks went blonde. 

“Couldn't wait your turn?” Seonghwa tried to jest but both of them cupped his face.

“I'm okay with sharing.”

“Just enjoy the pampering, pretty boy.”

Seonghwa ignored the latter response, closing his eyes and letting both tug him into a kiss. 

The two of them kissed him with a sense of gentleness foreign to Seonghwa. He was used to the demanding push and pull energies Whiro often put into his kisses, fighting without pause to control every aspect. 

Kissing Jongho was like approaching a newborn fawn in a way. He was far from the most delicate of the bunch. Still, Seonghwa always held in his subconscious the boundaries that the youngest had set in regards to his personal space and what did or didn't make him uncomfortable in moments in intimacy, even if he insisted on it being 'okay because it's you'.

Now, in this moment, Seonghwa felt he was being lead through the kiss. Their lips moved against his, and once he closed his eyes, he found he couldn't tell if it was Whiro or Jongho kissing him when the two had begun to switch off every now and again. 

A shadow wrapped around his hip, pulling him closer until Jongho wrapped a strong arm around his midsection, pulling him into the shower and pressing him against the wall under the overhead spray. 

Seonghwa cracked his eyes open, staring through a half lidded smolder. He was met one deep crimson eye and one dark brown one staring back at him, two toned silken locks clinging to Jongho/Whiro's body. 

"You two weren't kidding about sharing, huh? How long has it been since I've seen this?" Seonghwa spoke softly, a cool hand coming up to touch what was now Whiro's cheek as he kissed under Jongho's eye. 

"We'll take care of you. Don't worry ‘bout it." 

Seonghwa smiled softly and let the two pamper him, relaxing and giving himself up to them. 

For a little while, he’d just let his mind shut off. 

“Seonghwa, do you want to tell us what happened to cause these?” Jongho touched the purple splotches littering Seonghwa’s body, frowning at the wounds the ex-prince had been hiding underneath his clothes. 

“Training,” Seonghwa answered, cringing slightly as Jongho’s fingers brushed over some of them. He hissed slightly before avoiding the sharp gaze the Maori man (and Whiro) fixed him with. 

“Who did this to you?” Both of them growled out. Seonghwa shook his head and laced his fingers with theirs. 

“Aren’t you supposed to be taking care of me? If that’s your intention, how about you make me forget instead?”

The two of them leveled him with a stare before they moved in for a kiss. 

“Consider it done.”

Down in the kitchen, Yeosang stirred his pot with a conflicted look on his face. 

Everything around him seemed to be caving in on itself and he still felt they were leagues away from actually being ‘on the same page’. And he’d hurt one of the loves of his life.

How much longer was he going to be a useless backdrop while everything happened around him? If he stood aside and let the others do all the heavy lifting, he was nothing but a bystander.

He should know, more than anyone, the harm that causes.

The kitsune grit his teeth and set the handle to his spoon on fire.

“Y-Yeosang?!” Mingi’s voice made him focus and he put the fire out in an instant. 

“Sorry, I just…” He let out a frustrated sigh and took the apron off, tossing it aside.

“Mingi, most of it is ready, you only need to stirr it in ten minutes and then let it simmer for another five and then you can all eat. Don’t wait for me.” 

He spoke with an authority they weren’t used to as he made his way upstairs. 

He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he had to do something. Had to say something. Seonghwa was doing it again, taking so much on his plate in order to take the chaos off of the others.

But he wasn’t making it any better, putting him on the spot, lashing out at him…it broke Yeosang’s heart watching those icy walls go up. 

‘Communication, Yeosang. By the gods, talk to each other’ 

How much longer was he going to sit on the sidelines passively, hoping a ‘positive attitude’ and his cooking would continue to put bandaids on the problem?

Gods, he could hear his sister laughing at him in back of his mind. 

“Look at you, a big crybaby with no backbone. This kingdom can’t be led with anyone like you.”

The kitsune marched directly up to the bathroom, opening the door abruptly and coming face to face with Seonghwa covering his mouth, stifling noises as Jongho and Whiro washed him probably a lot more thoroughly for it to be considered ‘innocent’. 

“Gods above and fucking below-What is it?” Whiro grunted, barely hiding his annoyance. Jongho was a lot more understanding, turning his head towards Yeosang. 

“What’s wrong? Do you need us?”

Seonghwa seemed to have been sobered out of his daze, body tensing despite the swearing from Whiro at the immediate reversal of what he and Jongho had tried to do. 

“I…” Yeosang’s ears got hot as he stared, losing track of what it was he exactly wanted to articulate. Whiro noticed and rolled his eye, picking Seonghwa up unceremoniously. 

“Fuck’s sake, Foxy. If you’re gonna interrupt when someone’s in the middle of somethin’, at least have your shit together. Come on.” he stopped in front of Yeosang and tossed him over Jongho’s other shoulder. 

He carried the two ex princes unceremoniously down the hall to his room and opened the door with a shadow, dropping them both to the bed. 

Both Seonghwa and Yeosang bounced and Yeosang opened his mouth to let out a flustered serious of noises before he caught sight of purple splotches all over Seonghwa’s body and slowly-healing wounds. 

“My gods they’re worse than I thought-”

Seonghwa looked at them before looking away. 

“They’re from training, I’ll heal back up. Really, it’s not that bad.”

“What the hell training are you doing that you haven’t healed up the next day? You heal faster than I do; if it were a simple cut, they’d be gone. Who did this to you?” He panicked, looking at the splotches. Seonghwa glanced away. 

It’d cause a lot of trouble if he said he’d been poisoned by Hongjoong’s brother, wouldn’t it? He didn’t want anyone getting mad at Yuta. As much of a little shit as he may have been, he still only fought Seonghwa at his request. 

“I’ll be alright, please do not worry. These are just healing slower.”

Yeosang cupped his face and forced their foreheads together, staring into his eyes. 

“Why won’t you lean on us? Why do you keep putting yourself through hell alone?” 

Seonghwa’s eyes widened before he sighed. 

“Yeosang-”

“I hate to interrupt, I really do, but Whiro and I were trying to get his mind off of things and I don’t want things to spiral back into that right now.” Jongho cut in, moving to grab some bandages and salves from his dresser. Geb and Yunho had made sure every room in the house had it stocked. 

It was polite, but the message was clear; 

Get out if you’re going to upset him again.

Yeosang looked at Seonghwa and pressed his lips into a line. 

“Give me the salve, I’ll help.”

Seonghwa blinked in surprise as Yeosang began gently rubbing the salve onto various parts of his body, his concern shining on his face. 

“Let me know if I’m hurting you.” Yeosang muttered, hand shaking as he looked at the wounds. 

Now that he was focusing, they were slashes caused by some sort of blade…the edges of the torn skin were glowing faintly, and Yeosang worried his lip between his teeth. 

“I…I’m sorry…I lashed out at you and that was not…even remotely appropriate.” He spoke softly. Seonghwa’s shoulders lost a bit of their tension and he hummed, only hissing slightly at the sting of the salve.

“I understand. I’m sorry for worrying you.” He hummed. Yeosang pressed his lips into a line, eyes bouncing from wound to wound.

Who the fuck did this? Who the hell had….what he assumed was poison strong enough to slow down an immortal’s healing? Seonghwa’s healing was a league of its own, coming only after Yunho, Jongho, and their Captain. 

“Raise your head, Seonghwa.”

Seonghwa tilted his head back and let out a muffled noise of surprise when Jongho cupped his face, kissing him deep and slow. Yeosang’s ears twitched, glancing up a the men kissing above his head. Jongho held him firmly, tilting his head once and keeping Seonghwa locked in the intimate kiss without pause.

He could smell the way Seonghwa’s scent changed, sweetening subtly as he leaned into it a few moments after realizing Jongho was not giving him a mere peck.

Yearning. Need.

Yeosang liked this a lot more than the wilted scent that had clung to Seonghwa as of late. He’d…figure out what to do later in regards to easing the conflict in his partner’s heart. For now, he shifted his focus, wanting to match Jongho and Whiro’s energy when it came to distracting the blonde from his troubles, even if for a few moments.

His tails appeared and he curled one against Jongho’s waist, pulling him close before he leaned over to one of the gashes, pressing a warm kiss to Seonghwa’s chest. 

Each kiss left a lingering warm tingle to the ice prince’s body and he arched into both kisses, droplets of water rolling down his body. 

“S’pose we should dry him before moving on, hm?” Whiro reminded them, smiling devilishly at the dazed and needy look that had once again graced Seonghwa’s face. 

Yeosang waited until the Maori men moved away from Seonghwa’s lips before he leaned up, cupping his face and kissing him breathless, pushing him onto his back.

“Yeosa-mmff-” Seonghwa groaned, his hair clinging to his forehead and his neck as Yeosang poured all of his emotion into the kiss, tails stroking his arms, abdomen, and legs, leaving feather-like trails of warmth in their wake. 

“H-Hold on, wait-” Seonghwa blushed, cheeks ignting as he broke the kiss. Yeosang panted, holding his gaze, worry shining in his expression. 

“Did I hurt you?”

Seonghwa laughed gently, an alluring and sticky-sweet scent drifting off of him. 

“N-No.”

Yeosang tilted his head before a shadow worked its way between them, lifting him enough to get Seonghwa back in a sitting positon. 

“If that’s the mood you’re in, I’m happy to oblige. Let’s get you wrapped up, first.” Jongho’s voice cut in. Yeosang glanced down, his cheeks going beet red when he noticed Seonghwa had gotten aroused from the touches and kisses. 

“You don’t have to-”

“We want to, pretty boy. Trust me.”

Seonghwa’s lips parted in surprise before he looked down at Yeosang, a rare embarrassed expression crossing his face. Yeosang grabbed the bandages and began patching Seonghwa up, leaving kisses after each one. 

“I want to, as well. If you’ll have me.”

Jongho smiled and put his head on Yeosang’s shoulder.

“Now we’re on the same page.”

It took minutes before Seonghwa was splayed across Jongho’s lap, his chest rising and falling quickly as Jongho’s shadows stroked and caressed along his skin, tugging gently to leave him spread open for Yeosang to kiss and caress down his body. 

“Y-You don’t have to be so ge-gentle with me.”

“Really? Because you’re enjoying it just fine.” Whiro taunted, rising off of Jongho’s arms, taking his spot beside Yeosang between Seonghwa’s legs, kissing and biting at his thighs. 

Seonghwa let out a startled gasp before feeling Jongho’s fingers turn his head to kiss him, pressing flush against his back. 

“It’s okay. We got you.” Jongho muttered between his lips. Seonghwa whimpered before his hips jerked upwards, engulfed by the soft warmth of Yeosang’s mouth. 

Yeosang’s tails swayed and wagged gently, brushing along all three of the men. He kept his eyes up on Seonghwa, crimson eyes gleaming as he studied Seonghwa’s face. 

How long had it been since he’d seen this look?

The one the ex prince and First Mate wore well. The utterly ruined yet sultry expression that fit so well. His eyes rolling back, brows pinched together, tongue flicking out of his mouth-

Jongho reached around and tapped two of his fingers against Seonghwa’s lips, smiling in approval from behind him and kissing his shoulder as Seonghwa closed his lips around his fingers, licking and sucking as he spread his legs wider.

‘Gorgeous….’ Yeosang mused, swallowing around Seonghwa as he stared lovingly at the two. Whiro shifted from beside him, trailing rough fingers through his silken fur before he grabbed the base of them.

Yeosang jerked, nearly choking on Seonghwa’s cock as the deity turned his attention to him. 

“Stay focused, Foxy. Look at how good you’re doing.”

Yeosang shivered, feeling Whiro’s big hand tangle into his hair, guiding him up and down on Seonghwa’s length while holding him at an angle where he could see both Jongho and Seonghwa peering down at him. 

Yeosang felt himself throbbing before he moaned, sinking deeper and keening when he felt the head of Seonghwa’s cock brush against the back of his throat. 

“F-Fuhhh-”Seonghwa whimpered, drooling around Jongho’s fingers as he twitched. The shadows tightened around his thighs slightly before Whiro smirked, holding his head down for a few moments as he casually spoke to their blonde lover. 

“You’re making a mess, pretty boy. Been that long since you had something occupy your mouth?”

Seonghwa shuddered, body hyper sensitive. 

Gods, how long had it been?

“That’s not good. Knowing you, you haven’t even touched yourself, either?” Jongho sighed softly, biting and suckling his shoulder until a splotchy mark was left on the side of his neck. 

“H-Hadn’t crossed..nn..my mind. Been…occupied-”

“And that’s enough of that for now.” Jongho cut him off, using his free hand to come around and tease his nipple, making eye contact with Whiro across from then and tilting his head towards Yeosang.

Being connected like this had its perks and one of them was that they didn’t have to share their thoughts verbally. 

Yeosang hadn’t even realized Whiro’s hand was out of his hair until it returned to his tails, pushing them up and out of the way as he kissed and bit along the curve of his ass cheek.

Yeosang gasped and jerked, feeling those shadows tug his knees apart so he had better access. 

He glanced back at him, flushed and embarassed when the god spread him wide without hesitation. 

“Don’t worry about me, Darling. I’m just having breakfast. You focus on making our favorite blondie feel good.”

Yeosang’s tails flexed and trembled before curling around the three men in some way, shape, or form as Whiro’s tongue delved into him. 

Seonghwa cupped his jaw, sending him an adoring gaze as he moved his thumb lower, brushing his fingers over the slight bulge of Yeosang’s throat. 

“My darling fox. N-Ngh, thank you so much.” He praised him softly, thighs twitching and flexing in the shadows’ grip. Jongho smiled and moved his lips to his ear. 

“Your drooling all over yourself, Hwa.”

Seonghwa glanced over at him out of the corner of his eye, his teeth grazing along his fingers before sucking suggestively, curling his tongue around the calloused digits before sticking his tongue out between them, letting a bead of his saliva fall between them. 

Jongho narrowed his gaze at him, throbbing at the display. 

“I’m supposed to be gentle with you this morning, don’t make this harder on me.” 

Seonghwa’s lips quirked, challenging him with a subtle cock to his head. 

“I’m in your care.”

Yeosang’s voice drew their attention back between Seonghwa’s legs as he arched his back and let out a loud moan, trembling as Whiro’s tongue curled deep inside of him. 

‘Almost forgot how cute this one sounds’ Whiro’s voice echoed in Jongho’s head and he smiled, watching Yeosang’s eyes shine brighter, his tails twitching and wagging, going back and forth between clinging to them and jerking with each breathy and muffled gag and moan that came from his muffled lips.

“C-Close, hold on-” Seonghwa moved to reach for Yeosang’s head, trying to pull his hips back in a feeble attempt to still him so he didn’t cum down his throat. 

Two of Yeosang’s tails flew up the moment he did, grabbing his wrist and keeping him from stopping him as he looked up at him once more, holding his gaze as he sped his head up. 

“He’s doing his best to make you feel good, Seonghwa. You don’t have to hold back right now.” Jongho coaxed him, reaching down and cupping his balls, speaking into his ear once more. 

“Look at how desperate he looks, are you really going to keep it from him?” 

Seonghwa arched, body shuddering. Whiro rumbled from behind Yeosang, pulling away from the mess he’d made of his ass to lean over him, partially pinning him in place and grinning wildly up at Seonghwa as he took one of the kitsune’s ears between his teeth. 

“Don’t waste a drop, Foxy.”

Yeosang arched and swallowed hard the moment he felt Whiro’s canines clamp down on his fluffy ear. Everything was dizzying for the kitsune, the scent of arousal, need , and desperation along with everyone’s voices was driving him mad. 

Did none of them think about his poor heart? He could smell and hear everything tenfold because of what he was. 

If the deep, growling chuckle coming from the god currently pressing his cock against his ass as he suggestively caressed his throat where Seonghwa had made him bulge was anything to go by, he was sure they all knew exactly what the hell they were doing to him. 

The moment Yeosang and Seonghwa locked eyes again, the older of the two ex princes cried out in delight, arching his back as much as he could in Jongho’s strong grip, thick, sweet ropes of cum coating Yeosang’s throat. 

The smaller man let out a muffled moan, cumming messily onto the sheets below. Yeosang mewled, eyes fluttering momentarily as he swallowed each drop eagerly. It took a colossal effort for him to keep them open, but he wanted to drink in every expression on Seonghwa’s face. 

He slowly pulled off with a wet pop when he was sure Seonghwa had finished his first orgasm. 

The blonde sat there in a daze, panting with his legs spread wide by the shadows. Jongho kissed his shoulder, tracing patterns and symbols on his abs as he throbbed against the small of Seonghwa’s back. 

“Did that feel good? Your voice cracked for a moment.” He rumbled, leaving a biting kiss on the top of his shoulder. Seonghwa groaned and looked behind him. 

“You haven’t came yet. Don’t stop. Please,”

“We’re not done, Hwa. Far from it.”

While the two spoke and changed positions so Jongho could stretch him properly after getting lube, Yeosang felt a firm grip turn his head. 

He found himself staring deep into Whiro’s crimson eyes, and his breath caught for a moment. 

“Now, what’s a position fitting enough for the cute little cook that keeps all of us nice and fed mm?”

Yeosang shuddered and scanned his expression, lips parting before he closed them, shyness overtaking him. 

“Oh no no. You’re gonna tell me. Go on, tell me how you want it. I’ll do it, Yeosang.”

Yeosang would later reflect and curse himself at the way he’d gasped at Whiro calling his name. His eyes widened for a moment before he bit his lip and leaned close to his ear, shakily whispering to the god. 

In hindsight, he wasn’t sure why. The only one who couldn’t hear him would be Seonghwa. 

He was preoccupied with other matters, though, his cheeks going bright red when Whiro easily picked him up, setting him on top of Seonghwa with his knees at either side of Jongho’s hips.

The first thing both men realized with the new position was the temperature . 

Due to the nature of their powers, Seonghwa's skin and tongue always ran cold, while Yeosang was opposite of him. Both of them being chest to chest like this created an immediate back and forth between their body temperatures that made both of them writhe. 

Said writhing lead to both of their cocks rutting against one another. 

Both of them jolted again before Seonghwa reached out and grabbed Yeosang’s face, kissing him sloppily. Yeosang could tell he’d chilled his tongue on purpose and he responded in kind, raising the temperature of his own tongue slightly as he humped the older immortal. 

“Can’t have you forgettin’ about us, can we?” Whiro’s deep growling voice made Yeosang’s ear flick backwards, though he found himself unable to break the kiss. Instead, he subtly spread his knees wider, lifting his hips and raising his tails to present himself to the fractored deity. 

If the growl he was met with was anything to go by, his display was well appreciated. 

‘I’m going to fucking ruin him’ The god growled, still taking care to make sure he was properly lubricated. Jongho watched the two kiss on top of him and guided his own cock to Seonghwa’s prepped entrance, meeting Whiro’s gaze over both of their shoulders. 

There was a mutual understanding as they pushed into their respective princes at the same time. 

Yeosang groaned, nearly breaking the kiss if Seonghwa didn’t cup his cheeks, kissing him with renewed fervor as he clenched around Jongho’s cock. His eyes fluttered as each piercing rubbed against his rim before massaging along his walls once the ex gunner was fully settled inside. The kitsune rutting against him was equally delighted by the additional pleasure the piercings caused as Whiro’s cock mirrored Jongho’s, throbbing inside of Yeosang as he bit down on his ear again. 

“N-Ngh! S-Stop biting them, they’re sensitive-”

“That’s exactly why I’m gonna continue. Especially when you sound like that afterwards.” Whiro teased against the fur, grinding deep into him as he gripped the base of his tails. 

Yeosang’s eyes widened and he bucked, his cock drooling messily against Seonghwa’s as he swore in a different tongue. 

Jongho, on the other hand, reached around to hug Seonghwa’s midsection, keeping him from moving too much and possibly sliding his cock out. 

“You’re clenching me s-so tight. Mmm…fuck, I’m not going anywhere, Seonghwa, don’t worry. I’m right here.” He coaxed the ex prince into relaxing with his honeyed words, his hands roaming, calloused fingers mapping out Seonghwa’s body like it was the first time. 

Seonghwa finally broke the kiss, reaching behind Yeosang and fisting a handful of Whiro’s blonde locks, yanking him down roughly to kiss him as feverishly. 

Yeosang squirmed, effectively pinned between the god and the First Mate. His ears flicked, hearing every growl and groan directly beside his head as Seonghwa and Whiro bit and kissed at each other. 

“Y-Yeosangie~ Mmm-”

Jongho’s voice drew his attention and he looked down, finding the man had raised his chin, staring adoringly at him as he subtly puckered his lips. 

Yeosang didn’t hesitate, maneuvering around and eventually settling for pushing Seonghwa’s thighs up and folding him with his weight as he sought out Jongho’s lips.

Seonghwa’s moans rose an octave at the stretch, though his body was flexible enough to accommodate the new position, his heart pounding and his cock throbbing as he broke the kiss for air. 

Whiro growled, wrapping shadows around Seonghwa and Yeosang’s cocks, keeping them trapped together as he stroked them in time with his thrusts that began to steadily increase in speed until he was pounding the kitsune into the First Mate. 

“Yes! Yes yes please right there yES! ” Seonghwa had nearly began crying below them, his face screwed up in pleasure as different languages tumbled from his lips. Yeosang matched him, arching his back when he felt the shadows stroke them both faster. 

“L-Look at you two,” Jongho grit out, his grip on Seonghwa locking the taller man in place as he thrusted deeper and harder into him, searching for that sweet spot inside of him. 

“Pretty fuckin’ sight, yeah? Two pretty Princes moaning and makin’ a mess out of each other. And we get to see it from both sides~” Whiro’s voice was a deep, near feral purr as he tugged at the base of Yeosang’s tails, striking his prostate with one of his powerful thrusts. 

In an instant, Yeosang felt his vision go nearly white, arching his back sharply as a LOUD cry spilled from his lips, followed by him cumming all over himself, Seonghwa, and the shadows that kept their cocks together. 

Seonghwa’s eyes rolled, and he nearly arched and squirmed out of Jongho’s lap, had it not have been for the way the younger man tightened his grip, keeping him still as he rocked into him. 

“Don’t go anywhere, nn..right there, stay right there please please-”It wasn’t nearly as loud as the two (even three, Whiro was rather vocal with his growled out groans), but Jongho’s heated begging had shined through. Seonghwa’s hips bucked, thrusting against Yeosang’s as he clamped down on Jongho. 

“G-Give it to me, I’m here I won’t waste a drop c-cmon-” Seonghwa began babbling in his lust-drunk daze, grabbing Yeosang’s ass and keeping his cheeks spread for Whiro to see his own cock sliding in and out of the younger prince before he felt heat flood into him. 

Jongho bit down on his shoulder, eyes rolling as he came, the muscles in his thighs tensing as he felt it wash over him. 

Yeosang glanced down, watching the mess begin to coat Jongho’s cock. Whiro pressed against his back, the growl that left his lips vibrating through Yeosang’s very being as he chuckled. 

“Don’t worry, Foxy. I got somethin’ for you, too.”

Yeosang made the mistake of nearly questioning the got before he felt his prostate getting struck full force. He choked on his own breath for a moment, arching his back and crying out as Whiro looped his arms through Yeosang’s pulling them behind his back so he was arched and on display for Seonghwa and Jongho to see. 

Yeosang noticed this face and whimpered, his ass bouncing with every powerful thrust, unable to keep his eyes open as Whiro rocked up into him. 

“That’s it~ Mmm, such a pretty little fox for us, look at them, they’re practically drooling over themselves for ya~”

Yeosang still couldn’t open his eyes, drowning in the pleasure of each calculated thrust before he felt heat flood into him. His tails tensed, and he nearly passed out from the second sudden orgasm that slammed into him. 

It took a few moments…minutes…? For him to realize he had passed out momentarily from the pleasure. When he was able to focus again, he found Seonghwa was caressing his face lovingly, smiling at him. Yeosang stared up at him, panting as he cupped his hands over Seonghwa’s to keep him flush against him. 

“I love you.”

Seonghwa’s gaze softened and he leaned down to kiss him softly. 

“I love you too. Can you move or do you need a moment?”

Yeosang rose his head in confusion. 

“A moment?”

A slow, seductive smile crossed his face. 

“Darling, we’re not done.”

Downstairs, Yunho glanced up from his bowl, cheeks beet red. 

“Should I bring them some water…?” He muttered. Geb rumbled inside of him, considering making them some cucumber water or-

“We should let them have this time to themselves,” San spoke, washing his dishes. Wooyoung stood beside him drying them while Mingi ate quietly at Yunho’s side, eyes fixed on his plate, pushing around a piece of food. 

“You’re right.”/ ”We will need to see Seonghwa afterward, though. He may be convinced he will just power through, but I am concerned over the potency of the poison in his body.” 

The other three men in the room froze, eyes widening. 

“The what? ”

Upstairs, Seonghwa kissed the space between Yeosang’s shoulder blades as he held his hips, grinding deep into him at a near methodically slow pace. 

Jongho caressed the Kitsune’s face, his gaze soft and loving as he guided his head up and down his shaft, making sure he didn’t choke between his muffled moans. 

Whiro wasn’t too far off, claiming Seonghwa’s lips in a demanding kiss that made him lose his tempo several times before he’d reaffirmed his grip and continued. 

It had been…many moons since Seonghwa had been intimate with any of the loves of his life and Yeosang was quickly remembering that the taller prince was quite insatiable when he slipped into the waves of passion. 

Every mood was calculated, and every motion Seonghwa made when he was like this felt like a master chess move. 

He knew all of their limits and stamina, knew who could match his energy, who could surpass it, who may fall behind. Everything he did, it was to maximize their time together and leave them satisfied and honestly? Craving more. 

“Where is your mind, my love?” the chill of his breath fanned over Yeosang’s ear and he bucked, swallowing around Jongho in surprise. When had he and Whiro stopped kissing?

 Seonghwa chuckled, cold fingers roaming his body. 

“I can feel you tightening up, why don’t you let go for me? For us? We got you.” 

Yeosang had half a mind to remind the blonde that they were supposed to be doting on him , but all that came out was a pathetic whimper in need as he once again fell apart, sending a pleading look at Jongho that made him follow suit. 

Yeosang would be flustered to admit later that he’d lost track of how many different positions they’d shifted in and moved to before all three (or, rather, four) of them were satiated enough to collapse in a pile in the center of the bed. 

Yeosang panted, his hair unkempt, and bites covering his body. As he turned his ruby-eyed gaze to Seonghwa, he smiled, finding the man had actually been properly tired out and also was covered in the same bites (and scratches). 

Jongho ran a hand through his hair, looking at the two ex princes with a gentle look. He didn’t verbalize what was on his mind but Yeosang noticed the serious settle in his features as he idly ran his hand through both of their hair. 

Whiro returned to his skin, only after placing surprisingly tender kisses to each of them and holding a stare with them that was rife with words unsaid before he settled along their ex gunner’s skin. 

I love you

They knew the words well, even if the god hadn’t uttered it. It was in his eyes, it was in Jongho’s eyes as he continued to stare at them before he rolled his neck. 

“I should get Yunho and Geb in here. Have them get that poison out of your system.” He looked like he didn’t actually want to get up but he still did, stopping only when Seonghwa reached out to him. 

“Please….have him leave the marks be.” 

Jongho’s lips quirked for a moment. 

“I wouldn’t dream of telling him to get rid of them. If they’re healed in the process, We’ll just have to give you some more of them.” 

Seonghwa blushed before letting him go, closing his eyes and letting his eyes close. 

“Very well. Thank you.”

He left the two prince’s in the room to fetch the doctor. Yeosang gently rolled over, running his hand through Seonghwa’s damp hair and watching as he took a moment to open his eyes again, exhaustion clear on his features now that he wasn’t putting on the front of ‘everything being fine.’

“...I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to…be helpful. To try and walk beside you instead of behind you.”

Seonghwa’s tired expression began to sharpen, and he lifted his head. 

“Yeosang-”

“I won’t be walking behind any of you anymore. I swear.” Yeosang laced their fingers together and gave his hand a squeeze. 

“Standing on the sidelines being passive is everything I hated one of my sisters for. I…have done no better than her in that right. I will work harder to never, ever be that man again. So…let me take some of the burden, okay?” He gently caressed his knuckles. 

Seonghwa’s gaze softened, brows pulling up. 

“That goes the same for us.”

Seonghwa turned his gaze to the doorway, finding Yunho walking in quickly with Jongho in tow. Seonghwa moved to push himself out of bed, but Yunho placed his hand on his chest and pushed him back down, shaking his head. 

“Stay there. We’ll get the poison out of your system and heal the wounds your body has been trying to close.”

Seonghwa laid back down, watching as Yunho took a pair of bandage scissors to the wraps around his midsection, narrowing his gaze at the wounds. 

There was an unfamiliar noise that left the man’s lips has he stared at the wounds. He summoned a gerbera daisy and let it over over the wounds, his eyes trained on each one as the magic coming from the flower drew the poison out of each gash. 

They all watched as droplets of purple absorbed into the petals of the daisy. 

“It’s a poison that continues attacking. It’s no wonder your healing is slowed. It’s trying to attack even us through the flower.” Geb rumbled, looking over a the wilting petals of the daisy with a narrowed gaze. Seonghwa’s brows rose in surprise before he looked away from him the moment both the earth god and Yunho fixed im with a stern gaze. 

“When we find out who poisoned you-”

“That won’t be necessary, puppy. Truly.”

Yunho looked unsatisfied, lips pressed into a fine line as he stared at Seonghwa, drawing the last of the poison out and setting the daisy aside. 

He cupped Seonghwa’s cheeks and sighed, pressing their foreheads together. 

“You’re still doing things all on your own, you know.”

He lightly scolded him, though nothing but concern shone in his eyes for the blonde before him. Seonghwa stared back at him, his thumbs gently rubbing patterns in the blanket below him. He wouldn’t bother wasting his breath denying it, especially when they all knew it was true. 

Yunho heard Geb rumble in concern inside of his head and he sighed softly, pulling away from the blonde. 

“Seonghwa, I owe you an apology.”

Seonghwa’s brows furrowed. 

“Seriously, you all do not need to keep apologizing-”

“I told you you weren’t working hard enough and suddenly you’re out here doing reckless things, getting hurt all alone , keeping yourself awake for ungodly hours of time, all in the sake of ‘trying harder’, aren’t you? Is that not a direct result of me unfairly forcing my own inadequacies on you instead of acknowledging we all failed and we all need to try harder? Be better? I fucked up, and I’m sorry.” he pressed a kiss to Seonghwa’s head before pulling away, rubbing his thumbs over the man’s cheeks.

“We can…sit down and hash it all out a bit later. For now, you need rest. Between the poison and….your activities this morning, I imagine you’re exhausted, right?”

Seonghwa flexed his fingers, looking at his compass mark for a moment before he nodded, laying down and pressing his cheek to the pillow. 

“Then…if its all the same to you…I’ll rest a bit more. If you need me, please wake me.” He muttered, letting the threads of exhaustion and sleep finally lace into a net, pulling him into sleep not too longer after Yunho nodded at him with a tender smile. 

Once he was sure Seonghwa was asleep, his smile fell and he turned to the others. 

Yeosang looked equally exhausted, but he perked when he saw the frown cross his lover’s face. Jongho was alert and standing not too far off from the bed, a pair of sweatpants settled loose on his hips as he watched the three of them. 

“You all can rest. I…I’ll work on a plan-”

“Nah. How about we wait until we’re all up and about and make a proper plan of action this time?” Jongho and Whiro cut him off bluntly, finger tapping against one of Jongho’s biceps after he crossed his arms. 

Yunho paused for a moment before he looked down at the exhausted blonde sleeping soundly, his brow occasionally twitching every now and again. 

“....Yeah. Actually, that sounds like a better plan. I’ll leave you two to rest, as well. Do either of you want any food?” 

While the three of them chattered, San made his way down the hall in the opposite direction, slipping into Seonghwa’s room and glancing around. 

He probably should wait until the blonde was up and about to do all of this, but San knew the ex prince well enough to know they would continue to dance around everything if he did so. 

San tried not to make it a habit to revert back to his old behaviors from centuries ago when his street smarts and quick hands could get him into whatever locked box or door he needed them to.

Tried to , did not mean he was above doing so. 

San scanned the room carefully before he found a box with a few papers sticking out from it. He made his way over to it, scanning the contents inside before humming and grabbing the papers, laying them out and reading through them. 

His lips pressed into a fine line the more he read before his eyes widened. 

He glanced behind him at the door as if he could peer through it before having a seat at Seonghwa’s desk, reading everything with increasing amounts of worry settling in his being. 

Outside, Mingi passed by the First Mate’s door, casting a sidelong stare at it. Cheese perked, sniffing once, twice, before wagging his tail, seemingly unbothered. 

Mingi, however, stared at the handle for a long time before he let out the smallest scoff and continued his way down the hall. 

✰✰(¯`*•.¸,¤°°¤,¸.•*´¯)✰✰

2:30 pm

✰✰(¯`*•.¸,¤°°¤,¸.•*´¯)✰✰

“Can…I ask your advice on something?” 

Miyavi looked up, stopping mid guitar pluck to look at Hongjoong as he stood in the doorway to his and his wife’s room. 

He sat up in an instant, setting the guitar aside and nodding. 

“Of course, little one. C’mere. What’s up?”

Hongjoong plopped down across the foot of the bed, his legs dangling over the edge as he stared at the ceiling. Miyavi looked at him curiously, waiting for his son to gather his thoughts. 

“I…I’m confused.”

“Okay, about what?” 

Hongjoong paused again, worrying his lip between his teeth. He wanted to blurt out to his father that he’d been having dreams that feel like memories, about the fact that he’d seen at least two men with some form of supernatural powers, gods are real and one of them is inside of his boyfriend and-

-instead, something else tumbled from his lips. 

“I only just started dating Yunho but I also feel an attraction towards some of the others.”

Miyavi blinked. Hongjoong blinked. 

It took everything in him not to facepalm. 

“...It must be overwhelming, yeah? All of these new emotions so suddenly.”

Miyavi hummed quietly, reaching over to ruffle his son’s two toned hair. Hongjoong let him, nodding quietly. 

“I…don’t know what to do…”

“What does your heart want?”

“Yunho’s the only boyfriend…the only partner I’ve ever had. I can’t just go ‘hey, we’ve been dating for about a week but your boyfriends look fine too’, y’know? That’s just…”

Miyavi laughed, smiling down at his son and tilting his head. 

“So be honest with Yunho, but also take your time. You know where your heart is tugging you, but you’ve got a good enough head on your shoulders to know that Rome wasn’t built in a day. It takes time. But the first step is to make sure you’re clear and on equal footing and understanding. Misunderstandings and secrets are the downfall to any relationship.” He pressed his index finger lightly to Hongjoong’s forehead until the younger musician met his gaze, nodding with a small sigh.

“You’re right…”

“Yunho looks like an approachable man, just be honest with him and reassure him your gaze isn’t wandering…it’s simply…mm…expanding? Yes, that makes sense.” He chuckled having paused to find the words for his analogy.

Hongjoong laughed lightly before he looked at him. 

“You….don’t think it’s weird?”

“Polyamory? Not at all. I just care first and foremost that you are safe and happy . You’re my son, I’d give my world to make sure you and your siblings are smiling and happy. I’ll be with you every step of the way to make sure that happens.” He smiled and watched as Hongjoong sat up, fixing his hair before a bit of the tension he was holding in his body was lessened. 

“I….I have more I’d like to talk about but I….don’t know how to word it yet. It kind of makes my head hurt when I think about it.” Hongjoong rubbed his neck. 

It wasn’t a complete lie, but still. 

Miyavi watched him silently. He had a good hunch on what it was, but that would be a far more treacherous conversation to wade into than relationship advice on rekindled feelings. 

“Whenever you’re ready, your mother and I are here to listen. Just let us know.” Miyavi stood and rolled his shoulder before setting his guitar back in its case. 

“C’mon, let’s head out for a walk, it’s a beautiful day out.”

Hongjoong glanced outside, blinking in surprise at the sunshine that had begun to peek through the clouds. He could’ve sworn the forecast said it was supposed to be overcast all day. He stood and nodded, smiling at his father as they made their way to the door. 

“Let me get my shoes, then!” Hongjoong darted out and Miyavi laughed, sticking his hands in his pockets. 

“Slow down, we have time.”

✣✤✣✤✣✤✣✤♖✣✤✣✤✣✤✣✤✣

April 3rd

5:30am

-218 Days Remain-

✣✤✣✤✣✤✣✤♖✣✤✣✤✣✤✣✤✣

Seonghwa sat up, rubbing his neck and sighing. Today was the day. The scent of cinnamon off to his left nearly distracted him from his thoughts.

He had to go train with Jaemin and see if he could come up with a method to-

“Oh, good, you’re awake.” 

Seonghwa’s eyes snapped to the corner of the room, landing on San as he smiled from ear to ear, his eyes crescents. 

“San…?”

“Good morning, handsome. Slept well?” 

Seonghwa’s brows furrowed as he looked to the man sitting at his desk, a bright smile on his face. 

“What…?”

San held up the papers, head tilting. 

“Planning to go train all on your lonesome today, hm? Do you even know what today is?” He inquired. Seonghwa’s lips pressed together, racking his brain. 

It didn’t bother him that the younger man had gone through his papers nearly as much as it did that he had missed something important. 

April, it was April, he’d been in his own head so much, had he missed someone’s anniversary or-

“CHEESE CANNOT WAIT ANY LONGER. HAPPY BIRTHDAY CAPTIAN PRINCE SEONGHWA MASTER SIR!!!!! CHEESE HAS COME WITH GIFTS!”

Seonghwa had a sense of dejavu as Cheese threw himself onto his bed once more, landing on his chest. A muffled groan came from his left and Seonghwa finally clued in to the others in the room. 

Yeosang was beside him, ears twitching as he rubbed his eye. The groan came from his left, as Yunho lifted his head, squinting into the room at the excited dog. 

“Cheese, its so early….”

“Why is everyone in my room?” Seonghwa inquired, sitting up more and spotting Wooyoung curled up in Yeosang’s arms, still asleep. 

“To make sure you don’t try and do something silly like go off fighting whoever it is you’re fighting on your birthday .” San set the papers down and sighed, leaning on the table.

“I’m sorry for snooping, but I don’t…like seeing you with these dark circles and slumping from exhaustion. You’re…working really hard, aren’t you? At least for a day, let’s all take some time and decompress. We can talk about your findings and train together, I’m still pissed I got my ass kicked so easily…but above all else, we need to do better to take care of each other.” He tapped his finger against the table and smiled at Seonghwa. 

“So, will you join us for the totally not at all planned birthday celebration?” 

Seonghwa laughed softly, petting Cheese and nodded. 

“Where’s Jongho and…?”He trailed off, leaving the tail end of his inquiry open ended. San’s smile faltered slightly, brow ticking in subtle annoyance before the look cleared up. 

Seonghwa caught it.

Ah, Mingi probably didn’t want to share a room with them, so Jongho stayed with him so he wouldn’t be alone.

He sighed, shoulders dropping before he was immediately distracted by Cheese thrusting his snout in his face.

“CHEESE HAS TRAVELED OVERNIGHT TO GET THIS.”  

Seonghwa tilted his head and watched as Cheese nudged his palm open. Once Seonghwa obliged him, he dropped a spear-tip shaped piece of ice into it, tail wagging. 

The ex prince cocked his head, looking at it in wonder. 

“There’s some kind of…power surging through this. What is this, Cheese?”

“CHEESE TOOK A TRIP TO THE LAND OF FROST GIANTS AND ASKED LADY SKADI IF CHEESE MAY HAVE SOME ICE! Cheese is friends with Kaldr so she said yes. She is a very nice lady.”

“I’m sorry, did you say the land of the frost gi-”

“ HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”

Seonghwa stared at the dog, aghast. He really needed to keep track of him when he went running off. In the meantime, he looked down at the shard, rolling it around in his palm. 

“....thank you, Cheese. You’re a very good boy.”

Cheese’s tail stopped wagging in an instant and he stared at Seonghwa for a while before pressing his head to Seonghwa’s. 

“Cheese…is not the smartest Cheese, but Cheese loves his masters very much and will do anything to make them happy. Happy birthday!”

Seonghwa laughed softly and made room for the dog to lie down on his chest. 

“Fine…if you insist, I’ll take the day off. We should sleep in.” He nuzzled the canine and San smiled, moving to lie beside Yunho. 

“That’s a lot more like it.”

✰✰(¯`*•.¸,¤°°¤,¸.•*´¯)✰✰

    10:30am

✰✰(¯`*•.¸,¤°°¤,¸.•*´¯)✰✰

“You look handsome.”

Seonghwa smiled softly, looking at himself in the mirror. Yunho, San, and Wooyoung had bought him a new outfit. 

Wooyoung adjusted the black turtleneck on the taller man, brushing his fingertips over Seonghwa’s jawline. There was a matching black thigh-length pea coat that was left open. His pants were form fitting-also black-, with shimmering chains dangling from his belt hoops and pockets. 

“You look like a model.” San nodded in approval and Yunho held his hand out, creating an ice blue flower to tuck into his chest pocket. 

Seonghwa smoothed his hands over the clothing, smiling. San had styled his hair, brushing his bangs out of his face before smiling and pointing to the seat. 

“Yeosang said he’d do your makeup, then we can get going.”

The blonde would be lying if he said it didn’t feel good, to be doted on by everyone. It reminded him of when he was a prince, the days he’d spend seated on a cushion between his mother’s legs as she gently combed and brushed his hair. 

“Mon bebe, such beautiful hair. Not a knot in sight. One day, you won’t need your mother to brush your hair.”

“No, Mother, I will always want you to…it feels nice and you always have this pretty smile when you do.”

Seonghwa felt himself tearing up, startled as Yeosang paused with a brush hovering over his cheek. 

“S-Seonghwa…?” He frowned, leaning away from him. Seonghwa blinked before straightening up. 

“Apologies. I was…thinking of my mother.” He smiled and sat down, pulling Yeosang into his lap. 

“I will sit still, continue.”

Yeosang straddled him, wiping his tears and carefully doing his makeup. He’d learned a lot in the time they’d spent with Hongjoong and his friends. 

Honestly, he was surprised Seonghwa agreed to let him do this for him. The older immortal held his hips and sat in silence, his eyes trained on Yeosang. 

“It's truly amazing.” 

Yeosang blinked down at him. 

“What is?”

“It’s been centuries, and my heart still flutters when I’m this close to you all.” He reached up and caressed Yeosang’s cheek with the back of his knuckles. 

“No matter how many moons have came and went, I still love the seven of you with my whole heart.”

Yeosang bit his lip, feeling his eyes get misty before he stole a kiss from Seonghwa. 

“D-Don’t make me cry, dammit. I’m trying to dote on you.”

Seonghwa chuckled and nodded, not saying much else as he stared at the kitsune.

When they were finished, Seonghwa walked downstairs, looking around subconsciously, counting the heads. 

He paused, eyes landing on Mingi, and he perked.

“Are you coming?”

Mingi cast a glance at San, arms crossed. San stared back, cocking a single brow at him.

‘Someone wouldn’t leave me alone until I did’./ “Yes. It is your birthday.” He answered, rubbing his ear and toying with the strap to his satchel.

Seonghwa fought back the way his smile nearly faltered from his face. Everything in his body language screamed that he didn’t really want to go out. 

He took a breath and pushed down any of those emotions and walked up to Mingi. 

“I appreciate you getting dressed. I…know you’re not very fond of me anymore, if you don’t want to come out, it’s alright. We can…reschedule? Or maybe I can break the day up so you’re not left alone?”

San bristled behind him and Jongho frowned, pushing himself off of the wall he’d been leaning against. 

“Hold on-”

“I’m not going to force him to come. I know Mingi has been hurt the most by me in these years, he has every right to not come with me.” Seonghwa spoke firmly, glancing at the others one by one before looking back to Mingi. 

Mingi held his gaze for a long while before sighing softly and rubbing his neck. He felt the gaze of everyone land on him and it immediately made him feel ill.

“I’m going. I…don’t have a gift for you, though. I’m sorry.”

Seonghwa’s smile softened. 

“Are you sure? I will not take offense if you don’t want to?”

“Staying cooped up in the house isn’t going to help me get out of my own head, either.” 

Seonghwa smiled wider, gently touching the back of Mingi’s hand for a brief moment. Mingi didn’t pull his hand away and Seonghwa took it as a small victory, turning to the others. 

“Alright, gentlemen, where are we going?”

Yunho placed his hand at the small of Mingi’s back, making sure he was truly alright before smiling at Seonghwa. 

“Let’s get in the car. We got an idea from Hongjoong and the others.”

One by one, the men walked out of the home with Cheese faithfully trotting beside them. 

San followed Mingi with his eyes, pressing his lips together in a frown before taking his place at Wooyoung’s side as they piled into the car.

✰✰(¯`*•.¸,¤°°¤,¸.•*´¯)✰✰

12:30 pm

✰✰(¯`*•.¸,¤°°¤,¸.•*´¯)✰✰

“Woo~ Well hello handsome~” Yeonjun whistled, their hands on their hips as the group of immortals walked up to their human friends. 

Seonghwa bowed in greeting, smiling at the others. 

“Oh, are you all going to enjoy this day with me?” 

“Of course, you’re our friend now!” Moa beamed, handing him a wrapped gift. 

“What is this?” He inquired. She smiled and put her hands on her hips. 

“It's a set of earrings! We all pooled together and had them made for you in a jiffy!” 

He opened the box, surprised by the green stones. He took a close look at the pattern in the snowflake-shaped stones and blinked in surprise.

They looked like feathers.

“It's a seraphinite stone. They bring out the color in your eyes.” Chungha told him, rocking on the balls of her feet. Seonghwa’s eyes softened as he put the earrings in. 

“Snowflakes, eh?” He smiled. 

“I suggested it.”

Seonghwa turned his attention towards the back of the group, watching as Hongjoong came up to him. His heart squeezed and he looked down as Hongjoong stopped in front of him. 

“Snowflakes. And why did you choose that shape?”

Hongjoong scratched his cheek, his free hand barely hiding a different bag from you. 

“Something about you just…reminds me of the night of a fresh snow. It’s cold, and for some people, it appears to not be very welcoming but it's actually one of the most beautiful gifts nature gives us. Ah, sorry, that sounds really cheesy-” He went beet red and handed him the bag, his ears burning in embarrassment. 

Seonghwa blushed, as well, looking down at the bag. 

Inside, bold red letters stared at him. 

“What is a…’Lego’?”

Chan looked at Hongjoong in confusion. 

“You got him a Lego set?”

Hongjoong blushed as Seonghwa pulled out one of two boxes. 

“I got him two, actually.”

Seonghwa stared at the first set. There were over 300 pieces to the set and a bunch of small little…animal mascots?? on it.

“This is…cute? I never expected something like this as a gift. Do I just assemble-”He choked on his own words as he looked at the second box.

Seonghwa’s hand shook subtly as he picked it up, staring at the second large Lego set. 

It was a pirate ship. 

“It…felt right. Sorry if its childish.” Hongjoong muttered. Seonghwa bit the inside of his cheek, his lips trembling as memories hit him like a brick. 

-”This ship is my pride an’ joy, Hwa. Everyone aboard it is essential to her smooth sailin’. Tha’s why a good Captian needs to take care of his crew like he does his ship.” 

Seonghwa rolled his eyes, listening to the short Captain once again boast about his ship to him. 

Seonghwa’s kingdom had more impressive ships, that much was for sure. He also found it interesting, a ship being ran by women fleeing their lives in lieu of one on the great blue sea. 

One misstep and they’d all be hunted down and destroyed, but oddly enough, Seonghwa had never seen a happier bunch. 

“Putois, you don’t need to sell me on this ship. I’ve already agreed to sail with you on it. I wouldn’t still be on it if I thought it would fall apart.”

Hongjoong laughed and leaned over the rail, the wind blowing his bangs wildly.

“Maybe, but I’ll keep singin’ her praises until you love her, Seonghwa.”

The blonde stared at him for a long time before coming to his side, arms brushing as he leaned against the rail.

“....I suppose she is quite beautiful, Captain.”-

Hongjoong let out a noise of surprise as Seonghwa pulled him into a strong hug, tucking his face into the crook of his neck. 

“It makes me very happy to know you got me gifts despite knowing me for such a short period of time. I will cherish them for the rest of my life.”

Yeonjun pouted from behind them and Changkyun cleared his throat. 

“We should go inside. We have a lot to see.”

Seonghwa looked up at the art museum and smiled. 

“Let’s go. Its been quite a while since I’ve been to a museum.” 

“We found one that will allow Cheese, too. Are you excited, little dude?” Felix inquired, petting Cheese. Cheese wagged his tail, walking directly beside Seonghwa, ears perked and alert. 

“THIS PLEASES CHEESE GREATLY, HUMAN.”

The boys bit back their laughs at the energetic hound and walked inside. 

Seonghwa found himself enjoying the pieces between scanning the crowd, making sure he had laid eyes on all of his loves and their friends. 

“You’re supposed to be enjoying yourself.” Wooyoung’s soft voice drew his attention as he stopped beside him, looking at a set of blown glass animals. Seonghwa looked down at it, humming. 

“I can’t help it. No matter where I go, I find myself looking for the seven of you.” He answered honestly. Wooyoung glanced over at him, gently taking Seonghwa’s free hand, rubbing his thumb over his knuckles. 

“There’s always been something so…inspiring about the way you say things, Seonghwa.” He rocked on the balls of his feet, guiding Seonghwa and Cheese to the next painting. The three of them looked at the goofy art, with the card beside it explaining that it was made by the art director’s pet cat running across their paint and then the canvas. 

“There have been plenty of times, especially as of late, where I find myself at a loss for words or lacking the proper ones to say.” Seonghwa spoke honestly but Wooyoung shook his head once. 

“You still have this…unwavering determination I’m honestly jealous of. It takes me so long to get the words out for things I want to say and by time I’ve gathered the heart to do so, the words get caught in my throat.” 

Seonghwa put his arm around Wooyoung’s shoulders, pulling him closer. 

“If its about not speaking up when Mingi and I would argue, do know I do not hold it against you, or anyone. My behavior, the cause and effect they have created, are my own fault and its no one else’s fault but mine. If there’s anything our Captain has instilled in me, it’s an unwavering, bullheaded and sometimes idiotic determination to charge forward towards what you believe in.” Seonghwa ran his cool fingers over Wooyoung’s shoulder, putting his head above his. 

“Even if it hurts, even if I get tired, I won’t ever give up. You all are worth fighting for, and come Hell or high water, I’ll repair what was lost.”

Wooyoung looked up at him, lips parted, before he closed his mouth, standing on his tip toes to press a small kiss to the corner of Seonghwa’s lips. 

“I…have a lot to learn from you all. But I’ll get the courage and get on the same level as you one day.”

Seonghwa chuckled and guided him to the next one.

At some point, Hongjoong beckoned them over, pointing to a painting of a large wolf in a snow storm that was made entirely of different shades of blue.

Yeonjun stared at the painting in delight, chattering about different painting techniques to Chungha. Seonghwa stopped beside them, the art reminding him of the painting he had made for his beloved all those centuries ago.

“This one grabbed my interest,” Hongjoong explained, looking up at it with a gentle smile. Cheese carefully approached, nuzzling Hongjoong’s hand and wagging his tail when the pianist gently gave his head a pet. 

Seonghwa took in the brush strokes, staring into the eyes of the wolf for a long time before he nodded. 

“It is quite eye-catching, isn’t it? I wonder what kind of story it has to tell.”

“Cheese thinks Cheese is a more handsome doggo than the painting doggo. Though Cheese wonders if the blue doggo has blue toe beans.”

Seonghwa snorted quietly, looking down at the dog incredulously. Yeonjun perked, tilting their head. 

“Your dog is very chatty today. Isn’t that right?” They grinned, bending to pet Cheese. To them, it simply appeared to be gruff dog babbel. Cheese’s tail wagged and he licked Yeonjun’s face. 

“You have no idea! Cheese can talk faster than any doggo!”

Seonghwa smiled fondly at them before noticing Hongjoong’s hands, slightly wringing the bottom of his jacket as he stared at the painting. 

“Hm…would you like to go on a walk with me, Hongjoong? I’m a bit famished.” Seonghwa offered. 

Hongjoong perked and nodded, smiling. 

“Have you not eaten yet? C’mon, there’s a food court around here somewhere.” He looked towards Wooyoung and Yeonjun, but the former waved a hand kindly. 

“Go, go. I’ll bring Cheese over to the others so he can keep looking at exhibits.” He beamed. Yeonjun arched a brow at their friend, but Wooyoung hooked an arm under their arm, dragging them off before they could say a word. 

Seonghwa watched the trio go before turning his attention back to Hongjoong. 

“I’ll follow your lead.” 

Hongjoong walked through the art exhibit, only a few paces in front of Seonghwa. He slowed after a minute or two, rubbing his neck. 

“I…want to ask you something.”

“I figured you wanted to speak with me. What is it?” 

Hongjoong stopped, reaching and touching Seonghwa’s wrist over the compass mark he knew was there. 

“I…know you all, don’t I? Somehow…and you all know me.”

Seonghwa could see the frustration settle in his brow, and he knew the smaller man had probably been having the beginning pulses of a migraine. Seonghwa hummed, flipping his hand and taking Hongjoong’s. 

“I am learning a lot about you, yes. It’s very pleasant.” 

Hongjoong looked at him in confusion, staring at their hands. 

“But…That’s not what I mean. Not ‘me’ but-”

“It doesn’t matter much to me if I knew you before or if I’ve just met you now. My feelings are the same.” 

The two toned man’s eyes widened, staring at him in surprise as Seonghwa chuckled and brought his hand up to his cold cheek. 

“It’s my birthday, yes? May I be selfish and ask to enjoy this time with you without stress and worry? Even if its only for the day, whatever hard conversations may come, they can come on another.”

Hongjoong cleared his throat, feeling flustered as he moved his hand. 

“I’m going to get flustered if you talk like that.”

“Is it the worst thing if you do?” Seonghwa laughed gently and moved to the vendors selling food. Hongjoong watched him before he snapped back to reality and shuffled after him quickly. 

The two sat together, quietly people-watching as they ate some rather generously sized crepes. Hongjoong’s eyes were fixed on Seonghwa’s side profile more than the people around him, though. 

He really did look like a prince. His face was all sharp angles, yet they had a…soft quality to them that had the musician idly thinking he’d be a great idol.

“Did you do your makeup today?” He spoke without thinking and Seonghwa cut his steel gaze at him, humming as he licked creme from his lips. 

Hongjoong would admit to no one that he followed the motion like a hawk before looking back into his eyes. 

“Yeosang did. He’s learned a lot from Chungha, it seems. He was happy to try it on me so I let him. I’m not displeased.” 

“You look… really good.” 

Seonghwa chuckled and took another bite of his crepe, chewing thoughtfully. Hongjoong felt embarrassment creep into him once more. He’d asked Seonghwa to come with him, but now he was at a loss as to how to proceed now that Seonghwa had gently steered him away from prying on this whole…memory business.

Instead, he shoved a bite much too big to be considered polite into his mouth to keep himself from blurting out anything else in embarrassment. 

Seonghwa stared at him before he covered his mouth to keep himself from possibly spitting out any food as he laughed. 

“Dun lauf at meh!” Hongjoong struggled, cheeks round as his face went beet red. Seonghwa laughed harder still, joy shining in his eyes as he looked at the goofy two toned man in front of him. 

“Ah, apologies apologies. You just…you look very cute.” He smiled, one that reached his eyes as he put his head in his palm, staring at Hongjoong in a way that certainly didn’t help his flustered demeanor.  Seonghwa took in his appearance, cheeks rounded and his mismatched hair falling over his forehead as he tried to avoid his gaze.

"Küçük çizgili sincap~” 

Hongjoong blinked in confusion, swallowing his food before he squinted. He had recognized when Seonghwa had called him a small ferret before, but whatever he had said a moment ago went right over his head. 

“What did you say just now?” 

“Oh, nothing.” Seonghwa stood, a triumphant smile on his face as he turned away from him. 

“Shall we head back, küçük çizgili sincap ?”

“What are you calling me? Hey! Park Seonghwa-ya, wipe that smile off your face, what did you call me?!” Hongjoong complained, following close behind the blonde as he walked away. Seonghwa smiled, glancing at him out of the corner of his eye. 

“Oh, just something just for you.”

“What does that mean? Seonghwa? Hey, don’t speed up your paces! God, why are your legs so long- Seonghwa!!”

✣✤✣✤✣✤✣✤♖✣✤✣✤✣✤✣✤✣

Meanwhile…..

✣✤✣✤✣✤✣✤♖✣✤✣✤✣✤✣✤✣

“THAT ASSHOLE FORGOT ABOUT OUR ARRANGEMENT!”

Jeno watched as Jaemin cursed and swore up a storm, referring to the blonde ex prince. He glanced at Renjun and the man waved a hand, indicating he’d pay Jaemin’s ire no mind. 

“I’m sure there’s a good reason. Take the time to prepare.”

“I’m gonna wring their damn necks, wasting my damn time!”

Renjun rolled his eyes. 

“You’re the god of it. Just make more time.”

“Easy for you to say!”

✣✤✣✤✣✤✣✤♖✣✤✣✤✣✤✣✤

Taglist----

-----

@jacksons-goddess-gaia @kimnamshiks @atiny-dazzlinglight @angel0taiyo @gettin-a-lil-hanse @aeyla @eversionic @itsatinyworld @unatempesta-dipensieri @lonely10vely @yunhosblackgf @not-majestic-bluenicorn @moonmin-miya @snowstaytiny @delphinium3000 @just-a-starfruit @skmoonchild @allthestarsrcloser @im-what-iam @stayatinyfics @smallfrye @atinyteez @bangteezbaby @seomisaho @kirisimpma @chaos-ground-writing @daniblogs164 @yunhofingers @stormiestories @billboard-singer @asyamonet22 @perfectlysane24 @drunk-on-hwa @shingisimp @xuxibelle @twistedsiren @heesuncore @dreamyinception-world @justatiredhuman @serialee @eribear23 @spooo00oky @shymexican @stardragongalaxy @horizonmoonfics @ateezswonderland

[samayla]

I'm tired already and not really looking forward to going back to work drama after break, and the glue I used to apply a backing to my homemade moss rug (pics coming after I bind the edges this weekend) gave me a migraine, BUT I have the cutest new boots to wear today --

They're the Emberblossom boots from Rogue+Wolf, and they were my Christmas present to myself! They have such a pretty, hand-painted vibe in person. I love them so much!

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

WIBTA for taking everything I can from a former friend?

I 20 met this guy J 24M last year through a mutual friend, and since we happened to live in the same neighborhood we hung out more. For context, during this entire time I am/was also supporting an unrelated person financially, so I need every penny and have way less than J.

J has borderline personality disorder and does not go to therapy. I don't want to vilify anyone in the same situation, I'm just bringing it up because J's bps deeply impacts every aspect of his life.

He'd been going through some tough times, with his love life going to shit, cutting off his toxic family and having to find his own apartment etc, so I helped him often.

Since neither of us have much, we shared stuff regularly, e.g. he'd buy me food sometimes and I gave J my skateboard, among other things. I painted his walls & decorated, because I have the skill necessary and he doesn't. I went out to look at furniture with him. I asked my parents to give him furniture they were selling (he got it free). I frequently went to his place in the middle of the night, whether he had splitting migraines or thought someone had tried to break in. I helped him organize a Christmas party, even though he cancelled it because he got angry at someone or something. I cooked for him a few times (he doesn't cook). I let him use my washing machine after he moved into his new apartment without one, even though he owned a cat so all his clothes were covered in cat hair and I have a severe cat allergy, meaning I couldn't do my laundry normally & sometimes it came out with cat hair no matter how hard I tried (this lasted 8 months and would have gone on indefinitely if not for following events). Btw I did all of this without asking for anything in return.

Earlier this year, because of his ridiculously high expectations, he dumped his best friend at the time (the mutual friend), and assigned me his new best friend. After a few months, they became friends again anyway but I kept the "best friend" title.

In July, he hurt his dominant hand during an angry outburst. I was there when it happened but he seemed fine at the time. When he came to do his laundry the next day, Sunday, he told me that his hand was sprained and we talked about how he'd need to see the doctor the next day. He agreed to go. He promised to go to the doctor.

I know he's not good with going to doctors, especially on his own. So I texted him the next day and asked if he'd already gone. He responded "Nope, don't feel like", and upon asking why, he said that "it'll heal on its own anyway". Which to me read as 'I don't care.'

This pissed me off. I blocked him. I planned to unblock him once I'd calmed down, probably in a few days. I was really upset about this because it happens regularly. Him not going to the doctor when he should is a pattern, a bad pattern. He's gotten me sick that way.

The next day he texted my partner, asking if I was okay. They explained that i was upset at him for telling me he'd go to the doctor but then not going. He blew up at them that it was none of my business anyway whether or not he went to the doctor. Whined about his medical anxiety (which is valid but wasn't the point). Said that the sprain was healing so he didn't have to go. They argued for a while until my partner got tired and stopped responding.

Apparently I am now no longer his friend. He asked our mutual friend to tell me to pick up my stuff. I'm busy these days, so I haven't done it yet.

When I pick up my stuff, it's gonna be a whole list of things: a seat/cushion, a stovetop, 75€ worth of comics, a measuring tape, the skateboard, a box. I'll also bring him laundry detergents that are laying around at my place still.

Now WIBTA if I ask him to also give me pain medication to replace all the meds I gave him and money for the furniture I got him for free at the time (I'll ask 40€ even though they're worth more)?

What are these acronyms?

[thatmexisaurusrex]

Hi! If you haven’t been asked yet, I’d like to hear about your Sam Wilson P|/Bucky Barnes Art Thief AU please!

wip game

Ooh, well, technically, yes, I have answered this, but you know what? I'll give one more snippet from the series because I have been telling people for like years that I'd publish this damn thing on AO3 😂 So, you're getting one more snippet from the fic. Enjoy! 🥰 :

But as Sam stepped into the narrow diner, Sam saw him.

Completely and utterly focused on some monster of a laptop in the farthest corner of the room, drinking what looked to be a milkshake.

There was something breathtaking about it. How everything in Bucky was in what he was typing with one hand, as if he could tune out the entire world.

Sam got it.

He did spend a good seven hours measuring and looking at a card.

Sam walked over to the table, feeling almost mournful that he had to break the guy’s concentration as he said, “Hey. Is this seat still open?”

Bucky jumped, stumbling and fumbling and falling to the side of the booth he was sitting at. He scrambled up and closed the laptop to be polite, trying to gain some semblance of cool probably, and Sam had to stop himself from smiling too big.

So, Sam wasn’t the only nervous person here.

That was nice to know.

“Hey. Sorry. I just – when I’m working, I really get into work, you know?” said Bucky.

“I can’t complain,” said Sam, shrugging, “I just spent my entire work day and most of my night staring at a card. I might have lost some of my sanity in the process, so I apologize if I don’t make a lot of sense. But I wanted to see you, so I hope you’re fine with me as is.”

Bucky smiled sweetly.

“I’ll take you any way I can have you,” said Bucky, the two of them just… staring at each other for a moment.

“Shit. I’m being weird,” said Sam, wiping his face, “I’m sorry. It’s been a bit of a day.”

Sam was about to take the seat across from Bucky when Bucky scooted over, patting the seat next to him, “No, over here. You look tired. Rather you fall asleep on me than fall over onto the ground or something.”

Sam decided yes please, glad to have an excuse to sit so close to the guy. And there was something electric about sitting thigh to thigh with the man, Bucky’s face so close.

“What are you drinking?” asked Sam, glancing over at the milkshake.

“I think it’s called an Appalachian Breakfast?” said Bucky, offering Sam a sip and –

“Oh wow, there’s bourbon in that,” said Sam, a little surprised.

“Yeah. You make me nervous, so I needed something for that,” said Bucky, Sam snickering, “You’re a very handsome man. And charming. And smart. It’s all very intimidating in a very hot way.”

“I’m intimidating?” asked Sam, not really believing that, “You’re the mysterious, suave graduate student who convinced me to come to a secondary location.”

“I mean you say that, but this isn’t really like me,” said Bucky, curling in on himself a bit, looking away from Sam, “I don’t talk to a lot of strangers and I rarely get along with people instantly like this.”

“You could have fooled me,” said Sam, feeling their arms close, hands closer, so close their hands could just fold into one another but neither taking the plunge yet, “I don’t really click this easily either with people. Something about being with you, though… It’s just so easy.”

“It helps that we both have a very specific set of skills that we both appreciate,” said Bucky, relaxing again, “My art history knowledge has never helped me pick anyone up before you, I can tell you that.”

“Yeah, you’re probably the first person I’ve tried to date who hasn’t looked like they were going to get a migraine as I talked their ear off about the travesty of the paint being washed and chipped off Greek statues,” said Sam, forever mad at the idea that plain white marble statues were somehow preferable to what they actually were, how the malpractices of the past impact future exploration and understanding of ancient lands.

Bucky glanced down to his laptop, then to Sam.

“Lemme show you something,” said Bucky, opening his laptop, typing in a very long password.

“You do this with all your first dates?” asked Sam, trying not to think about Bucky’s thighs and sort of failing.

“Only if I like them,” said Bucky, the fucker winking, “And only if they might know what I’m talking about when I talk about my work.”

“What, here to honeypot me? Use me for information on the exhibit since I was allowed in today?” asked Sam.

Bucky laughed.

“Oh, I’d seduce you whether or not you had any information to give. Trust me,” said Bucky, his smile teasing, “Information? A rare bonus while finding a cute guy at a random coffee stand. And it probably isn’t even pertinent to your consulting work, I just thought you might find what I’m doing cool.”

[courtofmatchups]

hello, i’d like to request an obey me matchup if thats okay <3

my name is bee, i’m an infp, aries, lesbian (okay with fictional men tho 🤭) and use she/they pronouns

personality: i’m very introverted, shy, and soft spoken, but with people i’m very comfortable with i tend to be a bit silly and say whatever i’m thinking. i’ve been told i’m quick with witty responses. i rarely get angry and try my best to be patient and understanding with the people around me, looking for the good in everyone i meet. due to my adhd i tend to space out a lot and forget what i’m saying easily, but i’d like to think all of that daydreaming has turned me into a creative person. art and drawing has been a huge passion of mine for as long as i can remember, and i specialize in pen and ink drawings. i’m currently working as a barista, but i plan to go back to school in the future to study art. i mainly express my love through gift giving and acts of service, and i prefer to receive words of affirmation and physical touch.

hobbies/interests: drawing, napping, gaming, horror (books, movies, games), lovecraftian/cosmic horror, bloodborne, souls series, elder scrolls, dark fantasy, history, historical dramas, metal music, annoying the shit out of people by telling them bloodborne lore

some of my favorite things: sunflowers, soft things, plushies, pens, naps on rainy days, soft lighting, electric wizard, garfield, sleeping in, cats, frogs, opossums, strawberry lemonade, doom metal, pompompurin

dislikes: loud noises, bright lights, and strong smells (they trigger my migraines), crowds, tomatoes, hot weather, spiders, opening shifts, acrylic paint, neon colors

appearance/aesthetic: 5’6, a little curvy, soft features, blue eyes, short and shaggy burgundy (dyed) hair, septum piercing, faint freckles. i usually wear grunge fairycore outfits, long skirts, lots of rings, crystal necklaces, and a little bit of makeup. at work my style leans more towards dark academia if i’m not feeling lazy in the morning. i mainly wear my doc martens everywhere as well. (easier to deal with if i accidentally spill at work.)

a few characters i relate to: sawako (kimi ni todoke) nell (haunting of hill house) kisa (fruits basket) asa (chainsaw man) lady maria (bloodborne)

i apologize if this is unorganized. have a lovely day! <3

It seems to me you've captured the heart of...

The Avatar of Lust

Asmodeus!

"What a cutie!" - Asmodeus

Asmo loves seeing your silly side and he will never tire of seeing you go from shy and soft spoken to outgoing. And your quick witted responses are good enough to give Satan and Belphie a run for their money. Like you, Asmo likes to find the beauty in everyone and everything, and there is just so much to admire about you. Your creativity is one of them. He appreciates that you like him for him.

If there is ever a time your mind wanders, he'll be there to get your mind back on track. ADHD can be a struggle to live with, especially since the world seems to be against you, but Asmo's here to support you, and cheer you on. He enjoys your artwork, and he appreciates the work you put into your work as a barista, and will support you all the way: before art school, during art school, and after art school.

Asmo's heard plenty of Levi's infodumping on his interests, so he's quite used to this kind of thing, and with you, he'd look forward to it. And seeing that you're into horror, he'd find an excuse to cling to you when something scary pops up.

A lot of your interests lines up with his, so that's also a plus. He'd love to take you shopping for clothes and accessories. And don't worry if you get overwhelmed by the environment, he'll get you out of there.

Overall, a happy relationship

[notalostcausejustyet]

As I’m settling into this whole academia business, I thought I’d share one of my first ever tumblr posts. Which turned out to be the basis for my first ever college essay. I’ll share the essay here after it gets graded later this week. Cheers.

On asking questions and public spaces

This is what happens when you have to take a dose of Excedrin for a migraine only a couple of hours before bedtime, because CAFFEINE. Sorry, not sorry! (Please note that for those of us who are gifted with brains of the divergent sort, caffeine only works as it ought when you need it not to lol.) So. Libraries. Libraries are magical. Always have done, even before they became a safe haven for the dispossessed members of our society (which is a brilliant bit of miracle working in its’ own right) but why? And the simplest answer is the obvious one. Books of course. Digging deeper for context here is important though. Before the internet was a thing (yes I’m plenty old enough for that) libraries were where knowledge lived. And not just the academic kind, knowledge of the world outside of what is permissible. I frame a lot of things around religious trauma. And it might seem like old hat, but it was a fundamental (pun intended) part of what shaped me into who I am now. I am 40, I am tired, I am STILL learning who I could be without the behavior patterns imposed by that upbringing. My very small town finally got a library when I was around 10. It was about a mile and a half away. Close enough to bike to, which meant I could go unsupervised. And I did. Volunteered in fact, one of the first summers they were open. Which is important. Because, yes I could check out books, but there was never any guarantees that what I checked out wouldn’t be inspected at home. Volunteering meant I could stash something in the office to read while I was there. And this is where knowledge comes in. I had read every copy of the National Geographic we had at home, the entire second hand set of outdated encyclopedia Brittanica, every bit of Christian fiction I was gifted. I read it all. But it was, for the most part, a carefully curated version of the world. Safely inside the boundaries of my fundamentalist bubble. Allowed. And then for one brief and glorious summer, I had the world at my fingertips. Any book, about anything I wished. No novel was out of bounds, no titillating synopsis had to be ignored. I could read it ALL. And I did. I read about evolution, I read about the Big Bang, the conception and gestation cycle in humanity, I read about the history of medicine and colonization, I dove headlong into fantasy and science fiction and read about queer attraction and love for the first time as something beautiful instead of seeing it painted as something unholy and wrong. I read about morality. And not the starkly envisioned morality of religion, but questions, hard choices, true acts of courage and sacrifice, shades of grey and unimaginable nuance in the world around us. I learned that I was not alone in my discomfiture when I pitted the world I was raised in against the world as it actually was. Knowledge. Direct from the tap, and I drank from it as a person dying of thirst. That summer took the tiny seed of questioning in my mind and planted it firmly in the fertile grounds of my imagination. Each new book was sunlight and rain to a rapidly growing NEED to better understand. I took many years after that one before the tree planted there grew tall enough for me to climb to the top and really see the world around me. I didn’t fully escape religion and begin the work of healing until my late 20’s. But it never would have been possible without that one summer. Without that library. Access to knowledge and storytelling is one of the most precious keystones in humanity’s development. It’s how we make sense of the world. It’s how we gain empathy and understanding outside of our own experience. It’s how we reconcile the questions we have against the world we live in. And like all things, it isn’t perfect. There exists as much capacity for deceit and evil within the pages of a book as there does in humanity itself, but without them we would be lost entirely.

[twink-between-worlds]

I'm like dealing with migraine or something and shouldn't be on my devices but I actually adore your Sims designs. They're so them

Legend deserves those pink sparkly cowboy boots

Please give me the reasons for the choices (if you'd like too, no pressure) I love ur rambling

i hope u feel better soon dawg :(

and hehe thank u. theyre so silly. legend DEFINITELY deserved those boots and if i wanted 2 we could have given him a pink cowboy hat 2 match,,,,

anyways!

we gave wind hearing aids because. that kid got launched out of a canon. that HAD to have done something to lil mans hearing. he has them in both ears. hes also just very....i always imagine him with green eyes! not sure why, but he just seems the type to have green eyes. lil cat kid. his bracelet and necklace are both ones that look like they were made by Aryll

Four's hair is dyed black at the ends to replicate shadow. (Shadows hair, while not the same length or style as fours, has the same thing going on just swapped. black hair + blonde dipdye) their glasses are just because i feel like if anyone in the chain has glasses? its four. the big tattoo they have is more to connect the colours a bit more. in all of fours outfits, it switches which colour is most prominent. their everyday is the only one thats got all of them + a neutral grey. they also get the green scrunchie because if any of them have scrunchies it is ABSOLUTELY going to be four

twilight gets the dog-tag earring because it was funny. his eyes are also a yellowish gold because ill die before thats taken from me. his hair is the way it is because i cannot imagine twi with symmetrical hair. he would love the asymmetry.

wars is another one who i just feel like has green eyes. his hair is also dyed blond, and he's naturally got brown hair (like four!). the beauty mark was just a fun little touch. i also dont think its very noticable, but he has dimples ! his earrings being, like, a swatch-pad of blue is just more relating to a headcanon we have about him being into design and art

legend remains as the character i will never see as white. his hair was our FAVOURITE dawg....it just fits him so fuckin well....his outfit is also my favourite. the cowboy boots, again, were a must. (there was a swatch of them that was pink and purple but we decided on just the pink). his nails are painted but his nail polish is chipped, unlike the rest of the chain that have nail polish on. the necklace reminded us of a beehive / honeycomb. the bandage on his wrist is because i think legend is the type to always be injured. literally always. there is not a moment where this boy is not injured in some way.

skys earrings are just to reference crime since there are no birds in the sims :( thas his friend. he gets the comfiest looking outfit because i truly think he would not like the way jeans and such feel. he just wouldnt like how they feel at ALLL. he would be the comfiest mfer on the scene and he does not care what u think about him. no cares in the world, hes COMFY !! thats all he cares abt !!

rulie was never white to me either tbh. all his clothes are patchwork, and i like to think either he patched them together, or legend patched them together for him. he doesnt see the point in buying new clothes when he can just put stuff together and call it a day. he has the curliest fuckin hair of the whole group. his hair is naturally like that.

we literally just found the most dad-oriented outfits for time and mixed it with tired farmer. tired farmer dad aesthetic. im really lucky we fuckin had the heterochromia that made his eye white or else we were in TROUBLE haha. his hair hides it but he has little ear hoops in. he also has his wedding ring on. its not special its just a golden band but u never see him without it. his hair is also just cool to me i like it and dont get to use that one much !

god i love these sm. theyve all got little things thrown in to relate to things abt them (twi being covered in dirt bc he is the ultimate farmboy, legends earrings (although hidden) being pink and purple, legends nails being painted green bc of ravios eyes (ravios r painted red 4 the same reason), fours hairclip + choker being holographic for their colours, their nails being painted black for shadow, wind wearing jewellery that looks like his sister made it, etc.) and i could explode over it HAHA

[zombeesknees]

life updates

things are still pretty Not Great at work.

had an interview at the eureka public library today. interview itself went well, but the cons of the job (long commute, less pay, only part-time so i'd have to stay part-time at barnes and therefore work more hours per week total/never have a day off again) outweigh the pros so i don't think i'll take it if they offer it to me next week.

still haven't heard back from normal public library, which would be an ideal job (50k+ a year, full-time, office work, ten minutes away from my condo). not expecting to get a call from them at this point.

word completely shit the bed on my computer last night, leading to several hours of panic and desperation as i tried to uninstall/reinstall it several times. thank god for my buddy jason, who sent me an invite into his family plan for office suite, so now i've got access to my novels again.

because of the word debacle, did not get this week's b-list written/submitted in time. wrote it this morning, tho, so hopefully it'll get printed next week.

uploaded the ebook of hazeldine vol. 1 that julie designed for me onto both amazon and b&n. within the next three days, those should be available for purchase. really hoping this brings in a wee bit more money and makes my stuff more accessible for new readers. (julie is gonna continue to format my stuff into ebooks whenever she has time/i have the money to spare for them).

started hammering out details with my buddy rayne to get my own dedicated author website up and running. high hopes with that.

supposed to go to a steampunky party thing at a local oddities shop (the painted wraith) on saturday with my new pal kara (who is VERY into lolita and offered to lend me something from her extensive closet for the event). hopefully i feel up to it; i'm very exhausted and migraine-y today after All of The Above.

then delia is having a going-away bonfire at her family's farm out in the boonies on sunday, weather/mood willing.

i'll be back on here at some point to reload my queue. rn, i'm just Very, Very Tired and trying to cross-stitch more stuff i can sell for extra cash. *le sigh*

[pbandjesse]

I have had a migraine for hours and hours. It is finally starting to go away. But it was kind of a rough day because of this head ache. But I tried hard to not let it ruin my whole day.

I slept weird last night. I woke up in the middle of the night all confused and in pain. I let myself sleep an extra half hour. James was there and being sweet. They had to leave for work a little before I did. But I got myself together and headed to camp.

It wasn't a bad drive. And when I got there I went right to the art building. I would spend my first hour or so resetting the fibers boxes because Sarah will be leading a few different programs next week and I want it to be easy for her.

This would take me a while. But once I was done I would do some general cleaning. I can't wait until summer to clean the building for real. But it's very hard with all the tables and chairs stored in there.

I would set up for my bead program later in the day. And I made a small bead lizard to add to my bag. I checked outside and saw that everyone else was in now so I would pack up what I was doing and drove my car down there to park for the day.

It was a nice morning. I would spend a little time emailing and looking at some stuff. Joe would come ask if we could move some paint for him. And once I was done typing up my list of program things for Alexi, me, Joe, and Sarah took the gator to the lodge.

Sarah got rid of the recycling while I moved the paint, and Joe checked the aed. And after that I worked on putting away some of the art in the bedrooms down there. There wasn't time to hang them before the wedding this weekend so we wanted to make sure it was at least neat.

We all were supposed to go on a walk to discuss program areas at 1130. So I would eat some of my lunch before it was time. And it was a long walk. Almost 3 hours! But it felt productive.

I think one of my issues is that I don't know what is possible. Both in what can be changed to the landscape of camp, what we are budgeting monetarily, and physically what we have the manpower for. So this was eye-opening. Talking about taking down trees and leveling the ground. It was honestly really interesting. And for the first time in a bit it felt like we were making real, tangible progress on what we want to have done this summer and an idea of what we want for next year too.

Me and Sarah were getting pretty tired. I'm sure everyone else was too but me and her were commiserating about it. At least at the Adirondack and at the lodge we could sit down. But my attention was waning and I wanted to go eat before our late 4pm programing.

I would go and help feed the chickens during this walk around. And had trouble catching them to give them a hug. They are not being socialized enough and are super skittish. I hope Sarah and Chloe work on that, since this was their idea. They are very pretty chickens though and I enjoyed holding them.

A little after 230 we were free. And I went to eat but then I was texting James to check in about our flight on Sunday. I had been asking about the meal on the flight and how to request a vegetarian meal. And Paul didn't know. So I started looking into it and that is when I discovered they spelled my name incorrectly on my ticket! I freaked. I was franticly texting James, who was apparently in a meeting and away from their phone, for the next hour because they won't let me on the plane if my ticket and passport don't match. And I worked myself up so bad. I was so upset.

James would get back to me and called Paul and he said he will get it fixed. I hope it's as easy as he thinks it will be. I had to reset and calm down. My head was hurting so bad from stress and probably dehydration. But I had to pull it together.

I didn't feel like myself. I still don't really. But I tried to be pleasant event if I wasn't as loud of a personality.

The group today did an 8 mile hike and we're exhausted by the time it was time for our programs. So I had a much easier time getting some of them to come do art. And we were making bead lizards. And they did so good. Some tried to do the more intense and complicated things and I was so proud of them. I worked to make sure I could help when needed. And I gave away the lizard I made. it was fun. A good hour.

Even though my head hurt.

I was ready to go home. Getting them out of the building was tough but it was fine. I chatted with the chaperones a s we all got the table clean and then we were off.

I stopped at the office and said goodbye to everyone and went home.

The plan was to get James and we would go pick up their tux and we would get dinner and then we would go drop off our new key with Callie. A busy evening.

There was a lot of traffic. And when I got home there was no where to park. And I was stressed. I called James and they would just come out and take over and we would just leave right away.

My head hurt and it would only get worse. We started with the tux. And it was so good. I did not take a picture but James looked so handsome. The jacket was a little bigger on the shoulders then I'm used to seeing on my husband but they looked really good.

We left there and went to friendlies for dinner. Where we got sandwiches and fries and shared a fribble. That we discovered is a milkshake made with soft-serve. Sure. It was good and we had a lot of laughs. Even though my eyes were trying to pop out of my head.

It was decided James would take me home and they would run to drop off the key with Callie. This was the right call. I felt terrible.

Being home helped. I was feeling really nauseous and was afraid I was going to throw up. But I would take a cool shower and that helped a lot.

I sat on the floor in our room and drank water. And tried to perm my lashes. Very mixed results. My right eye went great. My left eye went terribly. But it is done and I think it still looks good.

Ja.ss got home and they would hang out downstairs and have the free ice cream they got from friendlys (they got rocking Poppin cotton candy with fruity pebbles on top. Which is objectively a hilarious name and combination for a 30 year old person). But once they were done they joined me upstairs.

Drinking water helped. And I am feeling a lot better now. Now I am just really tired.

Tomorrow should be a good day. And then tomorrow evening I'm taking a painted screen class at creative alliance and I'm really looking forward to that.

I hope I feel a lot better tomorrow. And I hope you all have a great night. Sleep well everyone. Take care of yourself.

[x-heesy]

#Imfreakingthaphuckout 🇫🇷

-What do you think of punks?

- Well they are good for nothing

-Oooh... Yes I don't really like those people

Droogz Droogz Droogz Droogz Droogz Droogz Brigade!

Dac dac! Dac dac! Dac dac!

Like a cinder block fall

{Verse 1: Staff the unstable}

I come like a cinder block fall (beng)

Sir listen to the harpsichord

Her skull was scattering like a tatin pie

It's exquisite, this cloud of drizzle in the stands

Yes breathe in this sweet perfume perfume, the smell of Evil

Anarchic public

Sound is sharing, son

Here is some attractive barbarism, AL'BRATCHNI

Quick, my fine blade rhymes with your rifle

I want you active as long as it squirts on the battery

Come ! Come and drink the moloko from the barrel

Go ahead, roll a beefy joko, you understood the story

It quickly ends up in shavings, like a lamb faced with crocodiles

All your big dreams that are too beautiful end up being pecked at by crows

In life when you pass a course you stop chasing

If you push the sound of the infamous four you will have your holes dilated

In concert we release flames to see the crowd grimacing You hear the crew of pirates, it's Staff the unstable the Droogz brigadier!

{Chorus: Al'Tarba}

It's for the punkettes, the keupons

Pogote with your Nodz!

Forget the slaps, the pom shots

Pogote with your Nodz!

If there are hippies in the room

Pogote with your Nodz, bro!

And kreukreu! Stable! Stable!

Pogote with your Nodz!

It's for the punkettes, the keupons

Pogote with your Nodz!

Forget the slaps, the pom shots

Pogote with your Nodz!

If there are hippies in the room

Pogote with your Nodz, bro!

And kreukreu! Stable! Stable!

Pogote with your Nodz!

{Verse 2: Al'Tarba}

Me, I want the crowd to ignite like a dirty crack cake

Hey yo taff, taff, pull a latte then you slap

Dream during the day, nightmare when I sleep

Truce of colors, black wins

Zen gets clogged, the liver smells strong

Test the pulse I'm already dead!

And to believe, and to believe, that I'm sick in my head

And in the evening, and in the evening, I walk non-stop

And sometimes, and sometimes, I'm seriously dirty, I feel the hate

The black lady, the black lady, opens her pussy to me, I have to fuck her

There's ass and drugs

It's like a gonzo psychedelic

Hippies eat shots

Return these gonz' to the selective sorting

I dream that they die and rot in the ground

I have migraines, dental problems

I like drunkenness and smile when I shower

(Bwaaah!) too much whiskey in the glass!

{Bridge}

Pogote, pogote, pogote, pogote!

Dac dac! Dac dac! Dac dac! Dac dac! Dac dac!

{Chorus: Al'Tarba}

It's for the punkettes, the keupons

Pogote with your Nodz!

Forget the slaps, the pom shots

Pogote with your Nodz!

If there are hippies in the room

Pogote with your Nodz, bro!

And kreukreu! Stable! Stable!

Pogote with your Nodz!

It's for the punkettes, the keupons

Pogote with your Nodz!

Forget the slaps, the pom shots

Pogote with your Nodz!

If there are hippies in the room

Pogote with your Nodz, bro!

And kreukreu! Stable! Stable!

Pogote with your Nodz!

Pogote with your Nodz!

Pogote with your Nodz!

Pogote with your Nodz, bro!

Pogote with your Nodz!

{Verse 3: Sad Vicious}

There's a voodoo expert from the streets of Toulouse

A kind of Bernard Werber worshiping Cthulhu

(Dac!) my raps leave craters

(Dac!) it's war in my brain

I rant and it scares you

I have alien patterns, adversaries

Struggle and stop believing it

When I catch flies with chopsticks

To tell the truth, after ten tarpés I am amnesiac

Tired of this life destroying me, that doesn't make me happy

I have the Shabazz album, yo I know the good dope

And then I don't see myself honoring your big crap

Oh! Oh! It's the Droogies on the attack! (Dac!)

We come back in force like Old Boy or Guy Mariano

You will say bravo to us since we are the most karacho

Burn your radio you see the painting be crazy it's not a thalasso!

In short when I bark like Sergeant Hartman must

Groove until you regain your composure, like gazpacho!

{Chorus: Al'Tarba}

It's for the punkettes, the keupons

Pogote with your Nodz!

Forget the slaps, the pom shots

Pogote with your Nodz!

If there are hippies in the room

Pogote with your Nodz, bro!

And kreukreu! Stable! Stable!

Pogote with your Nodz!

It's for the punkettes, the keupons

Pogote with your Nodz!

Forget the slaps, the pom shots

Pogote with your Nodz!

If there are hippies in the room

Pogote with your Nodz, bro!

And kreukreu! Stable! Stable!

Pogote with your Nodz!

Pogote with your Nodz!

Pogote with your Nodz!

Pogote with your Nodz, bro!

Pogote with your Nodz!

{Outro: sample}

I'm not dramatizing Mary, I'm not drunk. Do you think, do you think I dwell on my shitty spell? Absolutely not, I was fucked like a whore...

But you know, I believe that one day a man will come and love me...

We are super happy together, we find each other, as we are well...

@luna-zylum 🐺🐺🐺🐺🐺🐺🐺

Pogotte avec ton nodz by Droogz Brigade

https://genius.com/Droogz-brigade-pogote-avec-ton-nodz-lyrics