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everythingsinred · 2 years

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Let's Talk About NatsuMikan: Mikan (pt. 9)

Mikan's feelings are officially romantic now which will make this essay much more fun. Hopefully you will think so too. Today we'll chat about how her new crush clashes with Natsume's sudden coldness, as well as further discuss her difficulty confronting him.

I use the TokyoPop versions that I own for these essays. After the 15th volume I'll be left to my own devices, but for now, TokyoPop is what I turn to. If there's differences in translation or something, then I'm sorry. It happens from time to time but I promise I'm not just making stuff up. There might be inconsistencies between versions, that's all.

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Chapter Twenty-Six

You might ask yourself "huh???" But, yes, we did just analyze 26 yesterday. But I was stupid back then. I left out a key detail and I have to talk about it or else I'll combust. It's not a huge thing on the surface, but it's important to me. I couldn't edit the post because by the time I'd realized my mistake, people had already read it! And I couldn't reblog with the new information because then it could be easily missed in the future. This is just the easiest way.

Who is "people," Mikan?

I have to talk about this, the specific way she says this. "Mikan, why is your face red?" And her explanation, even just internal, is "Well, he suddenly started being all serious and using people's actual name." An easily dismissed line, but it shouldn't be!

Obviously, she realizes that she's affected by the fact that he called her by her name. She knows that she's blushing and that it's because of him. But Mikan struggles a lot with actually admitting feelings for Natsume. This explanation is internal, which means she's just thinking it. Of course she'd never say to Anna or Nonoko out loud, "Oh, yeah, I'm blushing because of something Natsume said," But she also can't admit it to herself, either. She distances herself, instead saying, even in her own head, that he surprised her by "using people's actual name." It's not about her, specifically, it's about people.

But Mikan wouldn't be affected like this if he had said someone else's name. It's only because he said her name that she's blushing. She just can't actually admit it because if she did, then she'd have to ask herself why it matters that he said her name, and she doesn't want to do that.

Mikan's obliviousness about her feelings stem from multiple causes.

She has little to no romantic experience. She's never liked a boy before and she doesn't really understand why Natsume is different from her other friends.

Natsume is confusing. We will later see that Ruka, who is much more consistent and straight-forward is able to get his feelings across to Mikan with way more ease than Natsume. Natsume is wishy-washy, hot-and-cold, unpredictable and mysterious. It makes sense that Mikan wouldn't understand that many of his actions are motivated by romance because he does nothing to suggest it.

She doesn't want to think about it. I had mentioned previously that Higuchi Tachibana said once that Mikan was supposed to be a cheerful girl who forgot her issues quickly. Part of that is that she's easily distracted, another part is that she prefers to think positively about things. But she also sometimes simply refuses to think hard about confusing or unpleasant feelings.

Here, it's pretty clear that she doesn't want to think too hard about why Natsume made her blush. She's eager to forget about it. I think her feelings for him make her uncomfortable, so she distances herself from them. She can't come to understand how she feels if she refuses to contemplate the feelings in the first place. So she says that Natsume is using "people's name" to create a space between the event and her consequent feelings.

Well, she can try to ignore her feelings all she wants, but that won't stop them from growing.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

For the Natsume essay, I could immediately start talking about dramatic things like sacrifice and protection as soon as his feelings changed. This essay will be a little slower of a burn. Mikan may have feelings for him, but she’s not entirely aware of that and won’t be for a while, so pretty, fanciful language has little place here at the moment.

It’s time for exams! So Mikan has bigger fish to fry than whatever weird two-syllable names occasionally come from Natsume’s mouth (because she doesn't actually want to think about it anyway). Mikan is stupid and usually doesn’t do well on tests, but Yuu informs her that if she gets the best grade, there’s a chance she could qualify for the Best Student Award, the award Hotaru had previously been coveting. It’s still up for grabs and the exams are going to be the deciding factor.

Since getting his letter from Narumi, Mikan is jazzed over even the smallest chance she’ll see her Jii-chan again, so she throws herself into studying, even though it isn’t exactly fruitful. She struggles a lot with most of the concepts she’s reviewing, so she gets teased by her friends, and the chaos leads her to run into Natsume. He doesn’t say anything, but Mikan, insecure as always and used to him being a jerk, is sure he is judging her harshest of all.

He didn't say that. He probably wasn't even thinking it. Mikan's just incredibly nervous and vulnerable around him, especially now.

Ruka tries to comfort her that Natsume wouldn’t be so cruel, ever the apologist, but she struggles to believe him. Mikan is still very affected by what Natsume said to her at the after-party. She’s more uncomfortable around him than ever because she still doesn’t understand what he was trying to say. He’s always been a conundrum, but he’s outdone himself this time. Additionally, the way he makes her feel is even more confusing, and she's insistent on not analyzing her feelings too closely. She doesn’t want to dwell on it, but she can’t look at him without thinking about it. She doesn’t linger on that topic forever, mainly because her bigger fish have yet to be fried. Maybe that's part of the reason (but the certainly not the only reason) that she focuses so much on studying: this way she doesn't have time to dwell on Natsume.

Because Mikan is determined. It doesn’t matter that her chances are low. It doesn’t matter that the odds are stacked against her. What matters is that she wants to try, so she does. Her incessant refusal to give up or slack off inspires the rest of the class, and by the time exams roll around, nearly everyone is in study mode. Even Natsume is helping some classmates out. Her tenacity is contagious. Class B gets slowly drawn closer together, especially because of Mikan’s insistence on the matter. In the anime, Mikan demonstrates selflessness by sacrificing her own study night to help Sumire out with the home ec exam. Though those moments are missing from the manga, there’s still an emphasis on the entire class getting along for once.

:) Height difference. :)

But ultimately Mikan doesn’t do well. In fact, she does terribly. She tries her hardest and she still fails. Hotaru jokes that the outcome had been obvious from the beginning, but what mattered was that she tried. I think it’s a lovely message to promote trying even in unlikely or difficult situations. Failing when you’ve put your all into something can’t really be a failure, because you still did all you could. Real failure is not even trying. Mikan might not have come even remotely close to qualifying for the Best Student Award, but she still succeeded in amping up her classmates, in connecting with them, in trying her hardest. Award or no, she still studied hard and learned things. That is enough for now. There’s always next year (*stifled screaming*).

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Who is Persona? Mikan isn’t familiar.

Turns out that not only did Mikan do more poorly than she’d like, she earned the lowest grade in class, even after all that studying. She’s feeling down on herself, and it doesn’t help that Natsume is randomly acting even meaner than usual for no good reason. Things are not going well for her.

Was she asking him if he wanted to play Othello with her? I'm gonna cry. It's a 2-player game ;-;

Then she meets Kaname, a charming and handsome middle schooler who is Tsubasa’s best friend and Mr. Bear’s creator. Mikan quickly gets attached to him because he is kind and she is starved for positive affection after being teased by Class B and treated coldly by Natsume. He reminds her of the ideal prince she and Hotaru put together--an image of the perfect boy who is beautiful, kind, delicate, and rich. Naturally, he should also be sickly, Hotaru adds. And that fits, because Kaname--in addition to being the perfect guy on paper--has the life-shortening alice.

I’m gonna ramble about something unimportant for a moment because in the panel where Mikan describes her and Hotaru’s “ideal prince,” Hotaru is the one drawing and listing out all his qualities while Mikan watches in awe. To be honest, I always kind of took that to be Hotaru’s high standard for an ideal man, an almost impossible standard for a normal person to meet. Mikan, who has never had a crush on a boy before and is entirely naive to romance and even the fantasy of it, simply sits and takes the information in. (After all, when Mikan does fall in love, the boy she loves has very little in common with the prince drawing.) Regardless of whether or not Mikan helped form the sketch Hotaru drew, though, that princely form is not based in reality.

But... Hotaru's description also fits Ruka... I'm just saying.

Not even Kaname fits it as perfectly as Mikan imagines.

In the anime, he might be close to perfect. The corresponding episode doesn’t imply that there’s much more to him beyond what Mikan sees at first glance: kind, sickly, handsome, popular. But the manga challenges this. He is all of those things, but he’s more than that too.

Mikan is not the only one to see Kaname as a perfect prince. He has a lot of fans, many of which have commissioned him for a stuffed animal at some point. He knows that he’s attractive and can use those assets to his advantage. His manipulation skills lead to Bear’s cabin being entirely modernized and remodeled by his devoted admirers. I guess my point here is that Kaname is just an example of how perfection can’t exist. He’s as close as it gets, and even he has facets to his personality that could be classified as flaws (like being manipulative, though I think people shouldn’t be punished for objectively funny character flaws).

This aspect of Kaname's personality is so underrated. He's so funny to me.

Tsubasa is a little different in the manga than in the corresponding anime episode as well. In the anime, he’s eaten up inside about Kaname’s alice shape. He struggles with Kaname’s insistence on using his alice, but reluctantly resigns himself to being helpless in the matter. Ultimately, it’s not his alice and not his call, and he can’t force Kaname to give up something that makes him happy. In the manga, Tsubasa is casual. He tells Mikan about Kaname’s alice shape and that he’s in and out of the hospital all the time. She worries about him, naturally, but the focus is more on Kaname than on Mikan’s struggling with the revelation about the fourth form or Tsubasa’s conflicted feelings watching his best friend die.

She gets angry at first, but the truth is that she's hurt! Poor Mikan!

At some point, while she’s concerned about Kaname in class, she makes eye contact with Natsume, who quickly and dismissively looks away. Mikan is initially pissed, because she hates being ignored and she doesn’t understand what his problem is. But then her expression saddens. After the Reo incident, Mikan had been carrying hope that she could stay true to Narumi’s advice and make friends with unlikeable people. She was successful with Sumire, and she’s currently making progress with Bear, but Natsume is still untouchable, almost as if she did something to gravely offend him. She’s hurt, because she catches glimpses of him that she likes and for some reason he refuses to let her see more. It’s not just that he has walls, it’s that the walls have spikes specifically designed to poke her in a way they don’t poke anybody else. It feels personal, and now that she likes him, it hurts even more.

In any case, Mikan and Hotaru--sent on a mission to trap a rumored spirit--stumble upon Bear bringing Kaname anonymous flowers, only to get caught. Kaname tells him that he worries about him, because he doesn’t let people in and might actually be all on his own once Kaname is gone.

(And of all of Kaname’s creations, Bear is the most his. While the other toys seem to be created for commissions, Bear was created for Kaname. All the stuffed toys love him, but Bear is the only one who seems to fully understand him. He is the only one who would bring Kaname his favorite flowers, the only one who worries about him the way he does. And of all the toys, Bear is the one Kaname seems to have the strongest connection with. Not relevant, but something that still makes me cry because their relationship is more than I could ever cope with.)

He finishes off by apologizing to Bear that they won’t always be together.

And Mikan takes that personally. We know from the omake about Mikan’s childhood that she has always felt a yearning for what she never had, that the yearning was strongly connected with the stars and with her complicated feelings about ghosts. She wonders if her parents felt the same way: concerned about her because they were apart, sorry that they couldn’t be together. It’s bittersweet, because Mikan lost out on a love she should have always had. But she never felt unloved, abandoned, left behind. Mikan is sure that her parents loved her, that they wished they could’ve stayed with her. That connection we’ve discussed before is exactly what gives her that certainty. She could feel her father’s presence in the omake and feels connections to the mysterious people brought up from time to time in regards to her nullification (“that woman” and the other person with the nullification alice).

"When I think that [my parents want to hug me from heaven] and look at the starry sky, my heart feels almost like it could break." Yeah, mine too, Mikan.

Over the chapter, Mikan has learned a sad sort of acceptance. Death is scary. But the sadness doesn’t just come from life ending; it’s about leaving behind the people you love. It’s inevitable, and it will always hurt, but that means making sure that the people you love know that they are loved. So she won’t help Kaname use up his alice and his lifespan. Instead, she will try to be friends with Bear, so that when Kaname inevitably can’t be around for him anymore, someone will be.

Even if she can’t stand Bear, she will try to befriend him anyway, because even Bear deserves to have somebody care about him. After all, she was able to overcome her dislike of Natsume, so she has some experience in this sort of thing. (And it’s important to note that her dislike of Natsume is past tense. Even if he is still acting like a jerk to her, she still likes him.)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I've chosen to be really kind and generous and include two more chapters of analysis here for you, even though it is the start of a new arc.

At this point in the Natsume essay, I had just reached 22k words. In this essay we’ve passed 35k. Mikan is the main character after all. In the earlier chapters, Natsume is hardly present, only to occasionally act as an antagonist before he’s firmly transitioned into a member of the lead cast after the Reo arc. And even then, he sometimes doesn't appear for a few chapters. Meanwhile, Mikan is present and central in nearly every chapter.

It's very sad but we won’t be talking about comparisons to the anime from now on. I've compared all I could for the time being. By now, we get it: anime!NatsuMikan is different from manga!NatsuMikan. Time to move on. Let’s get into the Z arc.

It’s November at Gakuen Alice. Fall is in full flush (keep in mind that seasons are important!) and something amazing has happened: Yuu won the best student award and as a result will be visiting his family in Fukuoka for a week. Everyone is excited for him, even if they are a bit jealous of his prizes. He’s especially excited to see his younger sister, who he has never met.

Mikan is a rarity, finding her alice and attending the school later than most of her classmates, who have been here for almost their whole lives. The academy steals childhoods and lives and families from these kids, though that’s not something Mikan is piecing together quite yet. Knowing your family shouldn’t be a privilege awarded to one smart child each year; it should be something these kids all take for granted. But Yuu has waited three years to meet his sister. The Alice kids are all nine/ten/eleven years old now, which means that most of them will either have to lose their alice or wait another decade before they can go home. Not all the kids are like Natsume or Mikan, being singled out in atrocious ways; but they are all abused and neglected, treated like commodities and experiments, ways to make profit and gather power, rather than being treated like children. Not all the kids are treated like child soldiers, but they are mistreated nonetheless, pitted against each other for privileges they should have anyway.

I mention this because we’ll be discussing the idea of “going home,” family, and potential loss of alice in this arc, a subject that is sensitive for each kid in Class B (not just the ones with the life-shortening alice).

That aside, Mikan is visibly happy for Yuu. All the kids are jealous, of course, because they all want to see their families, but none of them resent Yuu for winning. There’s genuine happiness for him, from everybody, but specifically Mikan. Watching a close friend win feels like a win for her too.

She and Hotaru look so genuinely happy for him. I'm gonna cry.

In any case, it’s been a week, so Class B is eagerly awaiting Yuu’s return to school, but other news is circulating around the academy too, particularly about a few “loss of alice” incidents in Japan. Because kids are starting to freak out about it, the staff are addressing their concerns and reassuring everyone that these incidents are only affecting adults outside the academy. These occurrences are odd because they have nothing to do with alice shapes, but the real cause is unclear.

The kids freak out more, but seem to be somewhat calmed by the fact that kids don’t seem to be affected.

They bring up the fact that losing your alice means you can go home, a sore spot for any Alice student. Losing an alice is the only way these kids will see their families again while they are still children. Kids who aren’t academically inclined, like Mikan or Koko, don’t have a good shot at winning the best student award, and other kids like Natsume would never be allowed to leave the school, even if he applied himself enough to win (though that’s not something they bring up). The only chance they have is by losing their alice, either due to the alice shape or these incidents. So even though it seems frightening to lose it, there’s also a clear silver lining.

Sumire, leader of the Alice-supremacy movement, is appalled by her classmates’ discussion. Nonoko chimes in to share that although she misses her family, her alice feels like a part of her, like something precious that she doesn’t want to part with. On top of that, leaving the school means leaving all the people she grew up with, most of whom she only recently started being friends with.

He's ignoring her and she's hurt about it, but he's still one of the most important people to her, still a person she doesn't want to lose.

This prompts Mikan to think of all the people she’s come to know and care for at the academy, and the one person she came here for in the first place. Losing these new (and renewed) bonds would be crushing and lonely. So they all start crying and freaking out again. This is why I had previously mentioned the school’s exploitation of the children and how it takes advantage of them by withholding from them things they are entitled to (like communication with their families). In a better school, this wouldn’t be a debate at all. They’d be able to see and talk to their parents and siblings whenever they wanted and wouldn’t want to lose a part of themselves and all the friends they’ve made in order to do it. But because Alice Academy is a monstrous institution, the children face this terrible catch-22 and have to decide for themselves which is worse: losing your friends or losing your family. It just shouldn’t even be a thing they have to discuss in the first place.

Class is about to start and Natsume just walks right out in the middle of their conversation, with Ruka running after him. Mikan is reminded of what Ruka told her, that Natsume doesn’t want his alice, that she could never understand how he feels. She can understand that, if that’s true, the conversation they were having doesn’t hit him the same way as it hits the others. She doesn’t understand all the nuances of his feelings, but she can see that he’s bothered, which only makes her concerned.

Oh no, he's definitely avoiding you. But it's nice, because you're so busy wondering why he's avoiding you that you're not thinking about why he makes you blush anymore! A victory!

Mikan is in the Special classroom, waiting for class to start, preoccupied with thoughts of her partner. But they’re not all about how bothered he must have been; they’re about how she’s bothered. Natsume seems to be avoiding her and she doesn’t know why. She doesn’t seem angry, just hurt, because she doesn’t know if she did something to hurt him. Mikan has just started to like him, after all, even though she isn’t yet aware of the complexity of her feelings. Having him shut the whole relationship down just as soon as her feelings started to turn around is emotional whiplash and it’s hard for her to understand any of her emotions if she can’t even understand what he’s trying to pull. Though she’s been upbeat and cheerful just like always, it’s obvious that this issue has been plaguing her for a while, something she only lets herself dwell on when she’s given a moment alone.

Which is why her spirits instantly rise when she meets the elusive SA class representative, Tono, who is creepy and uncomfortable to read but generally a good guy. He has the amplification alice, the opposite of Mikan’s, which creates a feeling of connection between them. He, like everyone who meets Mikan, is interested in the fact that she’s Natsume’s partner. Being his partner makes her famous because Natsume is famous, and if Natsume, who is special, got shackled to a partner, that must mean his partner is also special.

Tono asks about Natsume’s health, referencing rumors about him going to the hospital a lot recently. Mikan is instantly concerned again. He’s been avoiding her, so she has no idea what he’s up to, hospital or no, and so she wonders if hospitalization might be why he’s acting so weird. She again connects this news with Noda’s lesson on alice shapes, wondering if perhaps Natsume has the life-shortening alice like Kaname.

She thinks, “Not Natsume,” obviously disturbed by the idea that he could be like Kaname in this way. Of course nobody wants a classmate to die, but the fact that she thinks so much about him despite the fact that they aren’t really on awesome terms makes her concern a little more telling. It’s not just that she doesn’t want a classmate to have the fourth shape; it’s that she doesn’t want Natsume in particular to have it. “Not Natsume.” I'll talk more about this concept later.

The TokyoPop says "Not Natsume!" instead of "It can't be!" I like "Not Natsume!" better. It feels more specific. Because it's the same basic premise, and because I'll mention this sort of thing again later, I'm just going with "Not Natsume!"

She’s thought of him three times in relation to the fourth shape so far, exhibiting that stellar intuition she has. But she shakes the thought off, once again. It’s unpleasant, so she doesn’t want to think about it. She dismisses the thoughts as being residual from her encounters with Kaname and changes the subject to the issue of alice loss incidents.

Tono and the SA class discuss the issue for a bit, but because neither Tono nor Noda can say much without starting a panic, there’s no real information gained, other than that students are being kept on lockdown in the school to prevent alice loss incidents within the academy.

Chapter Thirty

The last chapter was chock-full of info-dumping and set-up for the arc. There was some touch on personal interactions as well, and Higuchi Tachibana is a master at plot threads like these. Especially early in the story, arcs are built, not just around plot points, but character and relationships. In Natsume’s essay, the fact that somebody was stealing alices was vital to his character, where his disdain for his own alice came head to head with his desire to protect his loved ones. There’s also the issue of Mikan’s mother, and his tortured love for Mikan, having no choice but to shut her out. Mikan has threads in this arc as well, things that will be central as we move forward. This arc in particular is incredibly well-thought out, with each central character getting their fair share of development.

Yuu is finally back, having brought back stories and souvenirs for everyone. We meet Pengy as well, Hotaru’s commissioned invention who missed her so much its owner sent it back. It’s established straight away that Mikan and Pengy are like souls, and they get along very well (this will be important).

"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." -Emily Brontë

The mood of the day is ruined very quickly when we discover that Yuu’s alice isn’t working. The scary stories have come to claim a victim, and no reassurances about them being kids apply anymore. Yuu is a kid, and his alice seems to be gone. He is put into quarantine for a couple days and there’s no more fun and games. Nobody in Class B knows what’s going on and the teachers aren’t sharing. Mikan pleads with Narumi to let her see Yuu, just for a visit, since they’d established that whatever’s wrong with Yuu is not contagious. Narumi refuses, so Hotaru steps in, manipulating him through an invention of hers into leading them to Yuu.

Though Mikan is antsy about doing something like this, that might get them into trouble, Hotaru shuts her concerns down. Yuu is all by himself. He must be scared. Mikan was already worried about her friend, but seeing Hotaru display this care as well means the situation must be dire. Even Hotaru is worried, but even more than that: we (and Mikan) can see just how much Hotaru cares for Yuu, how much of an important friend he is to her.

They reunite with Yuu, who starts to cry, both touched that they’d come to see him and scared that he won’t ever see his friends again. Yuu, who is always concerned for others, is now scared for himself. A character who is so defined by his desire to help others and keep the peace being isolated by himself is a key to tragedy. No child should have to deal with being locked up in a room, quarantined on his own even though he isn’t even contagious, with nobody to talk to. It would be scary for anyone, let alone a little kid.

He's only little!!!! Let him out!!!!

So Mikan and Hotaru go back and start a campaign to fold paper cranes in the hopes that their prayers will make him better. Some sticklers start to berate Mikan for going to see him in the first place, accusing her of infecting the classroom and trying to spray her with disinfectant. Mikan is angered by their words, but it’s Sumire who punches one of the bullies. She is Alice-supremacist number one, but that means that they should all be cooperating.

It’s interesting how Sumire was introduced as a villain character, as nothing more than a bully with a superficial crush on Natsume. But once Mikan started to see the goodness in her, more and more instances of her as an ally started to occur. And it’s not as simple as seeing new traits that redeem her. Instead, the traits that made her so terrible at first (her stubbornness, control over the classroom, busybody nature, and Alice-supremacy) were developed as double-sided, as being beneficial too. Characters aren’t black and white. The things that make Sumire insufferable one moment make her kind the next. And part of Mikan’s journey in befriending Sumire is realizing that.

Yuu is finally released from his prison, even though his alice is still gone. There’s a moment of happiness at the reunion, at the hope that he might get his alice back just by going back to his normal routine. But Yuu goes on to detail the questions he was asked, and how he had encountered a woman while outside of the academy who might have the stealing alice and who might be part of Z. All the kids involved with the Reo incident freeze at the name. The loss of alice incidents seemed like scary aberrations before, just random and terrifying events that could take one of their classmates away. But now it’s more insidious, like there’s some conspiracy. Less random, more orchestrated.

Mikan might have gone back to her normal cheery self after the Reo incident, but she was still traumatized by the events, so the idea that it might not be entirely over scares her. It apparently bothers Natsume too, so he leaves the room and once again Ruka chases after him. But this time, Mikan decides to follow him too. She remembers that Natsume, the Black Cat, had been propositioned into joining Z, so maybe he knows something more than she does. Besides, they were both kidnapped together. Natsume is one of the few people who really understands what it was like, so maybe they can talk more about it.

She calls out to him, trying to start a conversation. But he just ignores her, like he’s been doing, so Mikan loses her patience. She’s been putting up with him acting like this for long enough. It’s time for some explanations. So she blows up, demanding to know what his problem is.

She never makes it personal with him. 'Tis too scary!

I find it so interesting that she says he’s been “ignoring people forever” or "disregarding everyone" instead of saying “ignoring me.” Mikan is visibly angry, but she doesn’t want him to know that she’s hurt too. By making it some general thing, instead of something personal, she can distance herself from the situation. He’s mistreating people, hurting people, not necessarily her. It was sudden and without reason, which only makes her more hurt.

But the thing is that he’s not ignoring people. If he were ignoring everyone, she might think there’s something wrong with him, that something is causing himself to turn away. But he’s not withdrawing from anybody (any more than usual) other than her. It seems pointed and intentional and all about her. And she doesn’t want to believe he has a problem with her, which is why she says “ignoring people.” It would be one thing if he had a problem with her and it pissed her off just like before, when they were enemies; it’s another if he doesn’t like her and is somehow also aware that the fact he doesn't like her hurts her feelings because she likes him now. Mikan is an outgoing girl who doesn’t fixate a lot on conflict, but Natsume is different. He’s an enigma and she doesn’t get him, even though she likes him now and she wants to. He keeps himself shut off from her, sure, but the interesting thing is that Mikan shuts herself off from him too. He makes her feel vulnerable, insecure, uncomfortable. She doesn't know why and doesn't really wanna know why. (Do you see why I absolutely had to cover 26 again?)

So she asks him, even though he’s been “ignoring people,” if there’s something he doesn’t like about her, and if there is, then he should just spit it out.

When he finally speaks to her for the first time in weeks, it’s to tell her that he hates everything about her. “Stay away from me.”

Then he just turns around and leaves, like it doesn’t matter.

Mikan freezes for a moment, and there’s two interesting panels of her reacting before she says anything: there’s her hearing the words, just her eyes pictured, shocked but not betraying any particular emotion; and then there’s her lower face, with no eyes, but the beginning of an internal thought, “You…?”

We had “Not Natsume,” before, a refusal to accept that Natsume in particular, not just a classmate, could have the fourth shape. And now we have “You…?” An unfinished thought. Now who knows what that means? It could mean anything! “You suck?” “You’re a jerk?” “You really hate me?” or maybe just “You?” Not just a classmate, but Natsume in particular, hates her?

She screams back after he’s already started leaving that she hates him too, just as much. For a moment, she acts like it’s just another fight, but we can see (and so can Ruka) that it’s more than that. She’s hurt, not just because somebody hates her--because he’s hated her before and it didn’t hurt--but because Natsume in particular still hates her, even though she stopped hating him a while ago, no matter what she says. That pain she was trying to avoid, by saying he was “ignoring people” and not just her, is in full force now. It is just about her. It’s not a misunderstanding; he hates her.

It's one thing when your crush doesn't reciprocate romantic feelings; it's a whole other thing when he tells you to your face that he hates literally everything about you and doesn't want you ever coming near him again.

A moment of silence passes, where we can see a very small panel of Mikan actually crying, before they’re all interrupted by an alarm sounding, signaling that all kids are on lockdown now because intruders from Z have snuck onto campus.

He made her cry!!! Evil!

Ohoho it is such nonsense that Natsume loves Mikan and that she only thinks she reciprocates because she feels guilt. I will destroy that premise, believe me.

Conclusion

Mikan's crush doesn't seem to change things overnight the way Natsume's does. The thing is that she's crushing on a boy who feels he has no choice but to distance himself from her to protect her. That sucks because her affection for him is pretty solid at this point. From her point of view, he's wishy-washy. He was so serious and different at the afterparty and now he's downright cruel. It feels inconsistent. Natsume is never nice, per se, but she's spent enough time with him to be able to discern between Chapter 2 evil!Natsume and Chapter 26 soft!Natsume.

Her feelings are already at crush level! She can't take it back at the drop of a hat! Especially because she doesn't even know she has a crush! It must hurt.

Our next post will discuss the aftermath of this encounter as well as Mikan's inward struggle with her emotions and the expectation that she should always be smiling.

I have been referencing the Z Arc for a long time so I'm sure it's a relief to finally get here. But don't be fooled! I'm still gonna ceaselessly reference future arcs forever until the essay ends. I'm a self-hype machine.

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nereidprinc3ss · 27 days

Text

hourglass

in which spencer disappears from fem!reader's life entirely for three months, right as it seems they were finally about to make things official. when he comes back they reunite, all the while knowing things can't be the same as they were.

18+ (smut, angst) warnings/tags: oh god so many. NOT canon compliant in the slightest, i make shit up, softdom!spence, nipple stuff prob, fingering, oral f receiving, piv sex, unprotected sex, pet names, tara mentioned, depression, mentions of trauma cause its the prison arc duh, passing mentions of alcohol, mentions of spencer losing weight, reader mistakenly thinks spencer tried to kill himself BUT ONLY FOR A SECOND, where is diana reid, nobody knows or cares, probably filming glee, optimistic ending a/n: haven't posted smut in forever but this wip required it and the angst was so angsty i just had to finish it. it was started in jan or feb and subsequently added to and changed months apart and then edited so the writing quality varies from section to section which i apologize for. originally based on good guy by julia jacklin... also the odyssey by homer? can't really explain that one you'll just have to see for yourself anyway byeeee ilysm!!! PLS tell me if you liked it! or if you hated it! but preferably if you liked it! MWAH! wc <12k

It’s been about three months since you last saw Spencer Reid.

About three months since you had an early Valentine’s Day celebration (even though you weren’t a couple) complete with champagne (even though he doesn’t usually drink) and slow dancing (even though you swore you’d be terrible and he spent the first ten minutes laughing at you as you stepped on his toes.)

About three months since you finally settled your head on his shoulder and let the warbling vinyl carry you somewhere distant as the two of you danced slow circles on the parquet floor for what felt like hours.

You’d have liked him to stay later that night. You’d have liked him to stay all night if you were being honest with yourself, but at 11:45 he gently pulled away and told you he had to go.

“Curfew?” you joked, the corner of your mouth lifting a little and you hoped you were hiding your disappointment well.

“Actually, I’m going down to Texas for a few days to speak with one of the leading doctors in experimental Alzheimer's and dementia treatment. I’m going to see if he can get my mom into a clinical trial. I leave early tomorrow morning.”

“Oh my god, that’s amazing, Spencer! What are you doing still here? You should be at home getting ready to go!”

A rosy blush stains his cheeks and he looks down at the ground, laughing that little self-deprecating laugh of his. It makes your heart dance to see him so happy, makes you want to wrap your arms around him and never let him go so that he knows how much you absolutely adore him—but you settle for an affectionate squeeze where your hands have come to rest on his biceps.

“I wanted to see you tonight because I won’t be here for Valentine’s Day... but I still really wanted to spend it with you,” he admits meekly.

If before your heart was dancing, it is now melting.

The dreaded ‘what are we’ talk has been lurking in the dark corners of every conversation you have with each other lately—at least, in your mind it has. What you have with Spencer is not easily defined, and near impossible to explain to your friends—you act like a couple, you go out on dates, he introduces you to his team like you’re his girlfriend without ever putting it into so many words—but this validation that your pseudo-relationship might be evolving is better than any flowers he could have gotten you (although the peonies he brought will look very nice on your bedside table.)

“Four whole days... what will I do without you?” you whisper, brushing a hand along his face, and your chest aches with the heavy truth of it—despite the fact that he often is gone for stretches about that length. They don’t ever start to feel shorter.

“Well, you can start by reading that copy of The Odyssey I annotated for you.”

“Depressing,” you admit. “And a little ominous, considering you’re about to embark on a hero’s journey.”

“I think you’ll like this one,” he smiles.

You chew on your bottom lip, looking up at him as you think.

“Give me something to look forward to,” you say, earnestly.

“I—well, honestly, I just really want to kiss you and I’ve wanted to for a long time now and, you know, if that’s something you’re maybe also interested in then we could, uh, figure out a time to—”

“You want to kiss me?”

“Wh—you couldn’t tell?” Spencer says, like he can’t believe it.

As if on reflex, you lunge up and capture his lips with your own. It obviously catches him by surprise, but when you lower from your tiptoes he follows you, pulling you in closer and holding your face in his hands.

It’s too natural, too right, to be exhilarating. There’s no rush of adrenaline—it's more like stepping into a hot bath or warming your freezing hands at a fire. Like pieces clicking into place. It’s a relief.

You breathe into it, letting more and more of yourself melt against him. He keeps coming back to you deeper and deeper like a rising tide, and you want more than anything to keep getting closer to him—but then he stops. He stays close enough for you to breathe his air, but dodges your kiss gently before supplanting it with a gentle one to the corner of your mouth.

“I really have to go,” he breathes, before moving away from your mouth to kiss your forehead and speak softly against your skin. “If I don’t leave now I’ll be here all night.”

Which is exactly what you want, and the implication does little to make you want him less. But you care about him too much to be so selfish.

At some point, his hands found their way into your hair, and you gently grab his wrists.

“Incentive for you to come home.”

Nearly three months since that night.

At first when he stopped answering texts, you’d assumed he just had too much going on down in Texas. Which you could understand—you knew how stressful this situation with his mother was.

Even when four days came and went without even an alert from him that he was back in town, you thought, okay, maybe he’s been called away on a case. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s disappeared because of his work. But even then, he’d at least text you enough information so that you would know he was alive. Now, radio silence.

So you tried not to be clingy. You tried to act like an adult, to focus on school and your life outside of Spencer, but when Tara Lewis cancelled your weekly meeting due to an “unforeseen work-related emergency”you called her immediately. Tara was something of a mentor, and it was she who had connected you and Spencer to begin with. You had met the other members of his team by that point, yes, but none who you knew as well as Tara.

When she had informed you that Spencer had been arrested in Mexico and was now facing prison time for murder, you laughed.

Laughed until you realized her end of the line was silent.

Realized it was not at all a joke.

In a catatonic state of tranquility, you asked her for more details. Beyond assuring you of his innocence, she couldn’t (or more likely, wouldn’t) provide them. Asked where he was now. Asked all the right things that made sense to ask.

Then you hung up and had a panic attack because Tara said something about 25 years and you saw Spencer evaporate from your future like an apparition.

Slowly, you felt him evaporating from your past, too. Those memories from the night he left, became visions of you swaying with a ghost. Holding nothing but light between your hands as you kissed the peony air of your apartment.

He doesn’t want to see you, she had said into the phone one night, her tinny voice cutting in and out. You’re not on his list of approved visitors.

“You asked him about me?” you had whispered, curled up on top of your made bed in the dark.

I tried. I’m sorry. I’ll call you when I know more.

All your days melded together like a muddied smear of paint. Suddenly you felt you had nothing to look forward to. No anchor, no goal. Yes, a PhD... and then what?

The only thing that punctuated one 24 hour period from the next was the time you spent crying because Spencer was in prison and he didn’t want to see you and by the looks of things you may never see him again. When you weren’t crying, you were thinking about how your life was a big cosmic joke. An unfortunate statistical anomaly that didn’t mean anything to anyone else, and that you couldn’t do anything about.

That copy of The Odyssey, which wasn’t even bound and instead was a thick stack of printer paper organized by a single black clip, became something of a manifesto for you—a tome that your poured over, reading and re-reading each note in the margins, each word beautiful and imbued with meaning because you knew Spencer had selected every single one specifically for you. You traced the letters reverently, because in a way this was the last thing he had said to you—about Lattimore’s faith to the original text, Merrill’s strict use of dactylic hexameter, the stylings of Wilson and Lombardo, and how he thought you would enjoy Hammond’s prose just as much as he did.

Day by day it was becoming more prophetic than fictional, and you allowed yourself to sink into madness. You would rather be a deluded zealot than be nothing at all.

He didn’t want to see you.

He might as well have been dead, for all that you were grieving him. And you started to hate him, because he wasn’t dead, but wouldn’t do you the kindness of proving it. Like a festering wound, scratched open day after day so as not to ever heal, you had to live knowing he was less than an hour away. So no, you weren’t exactly over it. You lived day by day, waiting for the occasional call from Tara to keep you updated on Spencer, but either she didn’t want to share much about how he was doing, or he had specifically barred her from doing so, because she was always sparse on the personal side of things. That thought actually lifted your spirits, because it meant he was at least acknowledging your existence in some tiny way.

But your routine was becoming more regular, and so you staid on top of your classes and your non-Reid related meetings with Tara once a week, and you learned to dip your toes into existential dread and the oily black pool of depression every night without ever fully submerging yourself. You learned hope, because it was pretty much all you had, and the BAU had confidence that they would get Spencer out one way or another so you did too.

So you didn’t really think about it when you missed a couple of calls from Tara some evening in May. You were preparing for finals and had way too much on your plate academically to think about anything else which was a welcome relief so you fully embraced it. I’ll call her back tomorrow, you think, as you clean up from dinner before going back to the living room where your textbooks and papers are completely covering every available surface. Maybe I have no idea what I’m going to do with my life after school, but I’ll be damned if I don’t even make it that far.

Hours later, well into the night, you’d all but forgotten about the calls. A knock at the door takes you a bit by surprise, and you frown as you stand again, tugging your Georgetown sweatshirt down over your shorts as you shuffle to the entrance of your apartment. You’re not expecting anyone, so you crack the door, peering around the edge of it.

And you couldn’t even consider trying to hide that shaky inhalation of dead air when you see Spencer standing on the other side.

Surely you’re hallucinating.

Surely this man in front of you who looks like he just got back from a day of work didn’t spend three months in prison pretending you didn’t exist.

He looks the same. Hair a bit longer, maybe—and gaunter even more than is normal for him.

But it's him.

You can’t think about the apprehensive look on his face—you can’t think about the impossibility of him being here. You can’t think at all. Without your explicit permission, your body surges forward into his, and he’s real, and alive, and warm, and he is an anachronism in the hallway as he accepts everything you pour into the embrace, doesn’t flinch when you move your arms from around his waist to loop around his neck and back to his waist again with crushing force because you just can’t get him close enough.

“I’m sorry,” Spencer mutters into your hair, I’msorryI’msorryI’msorryI’msorry, he keeps saying, rubbing your back as you try to find a solid grip on the sleek material of his suit—try to gather all the pieces of him, already afraid he might fall apart and float away again.

“You—dis—disappeared,” you hiccup after an eternity, pulling away enough to look up at his pretty face. Tears blur your vision and darken the front of his jacket, bending the florescent lights so they form a kind of halo above his head.

Through the surreal haze you can see his throat bob.

“I know.”

He knows?

You scoff.

“You have no fucking idea, Spencer. What the fuck is wrong with you? I—I'm—”

The hot anger is such a relief for a second, boiling the oceans of your despair into a wrathful, scorching fog, but as soon as you try to tell him how you feel, the barbed wire cuts into your throat again. You shove him away, skin burning where his hands had been.

“I’m sorry,” he croaks, hands hanging uselessly at his side. There’s that kicked puppy look about him—and it’s familiar, but now there’s more damage. You don’t know anything about his time in prison, you haven’t heard a damn thing, but beneath the glassy desperation in his eyes there is an unfathomable void that seems to be preventing him from being fully present—and you realize for the first time that he is different.

It chills you.

Before, you and Spencer shared everything. There wasn’t one part of his internal machinations that you didn’t understand, nothing you kept from each other. But as you study him now from a few feet away, you realize there might as well be a yawning chasm between the two of you.

He is so different.

Those eyes look deeper. No gears turning just behind the slashes of gold and brown anymore—only an endless dark corridor that goes places you will never go.

Gone is the perpetual boyish up-turn at the corner of his lips that always made him look slightly vacant in a way that you found incredibly amusing. Something you had been so fond of, even if you teased him.

He seems to have aged ten years—if not physically, then in demeanor. And now you feel like a little kid throwing a tantrum.

You cross your arms, suddenly unable to meet his eyes.

You’re embarrassed. And pissed. And relieved. Everything is worse and better. You want to fall back into his arms, but you have been jarred by the revelation that this might not be the same Spencer. It might not be the same relationship. You have no idea where you stand.

He says your name gently, with so much familiarity you’re briefly jerked into the past. It makes you wish you could look up to find him as he was three months ago. Wish this was just a bad dream. But that’s not fair to him.

“Sorry,” you mutter, studying the grey carpet fibers instead of looking at him.

“Don’t apologize,” Spencer says immediately, “you’re right. I don’t—” he clears his throat— “I’m being incredibly selfish. I shouldn’t have just shown up, I’ll just—I'll leave. I’m sorry.”

A silent moment passes.

You don’t look up as he turns and swiftly begins to move down the hall toward the stairway, leaving as quickly and silently as he had come, like a few bars of a song sighed in and away on a fleeting breeze.

Your bare feet are concretely planted, imagining him jogging down the steps and speed-walking away from your building—

And suddenly you’re sprinting after him, feeling like you might puke because Spencer was just here and you let him go again—and even though you’re still so mad and confused and hurt, the realization that he is leaving again makes the entire building spin and lurch.

“Wait!” You yell, almost wiping out as you run down the stairs and whip around corners in your slippery fucking socks. “Please, wait!”

The lobby is already empty as you spill out into it, and cold dread tightens around your neck like a fist as you shoulder your way through the double doors and right into Spencer.

“Please don’t leave again, you just—I'm sorry, I really need you to not go—” you blabber, lachrymose once more, gripping onto his forearms for dear life.

“I’m not going,” he breathes shakily. “I tried to leave because I think you were right and maybe I should and maybe it would be better for you but I can’t.”

“You can’t,” you agree, more sob than spoken word. He cups your jaw, then your cheeks, wiping tears and brushing away hair like he can’t figure out how to hold enough of you between his hands. The wild kaleidoscope of his eyes, bright and alive and real as he scans you desperately captures your attention enough to slow the tears to a trickle. He notices this and stares back, entranced.

A silent agreement is made, or maybe an inevitable fate is accepted—either way, something was set in motion three months ago and it matters to see it through. Spencer kisses you and you’re ready for it. You don’t need slow or tender. You need to feel how he feels. You need to know what he knows.

You sling your arms around his neck and he pulls you closer until you almost tip backward, chasing the bruising kiss even as you regain your footing. You want to drink him in and you do your best, breathing deeply as he kisses you deeper, backing you inside and toward the elevator.

“Is this okay?” he manages, only after blindly reaching for and mashing the up button on the wall panel.

Ideally it wouldn’t happen like this, but the world you live in obviously isn’t ideal and your personal situations as they coincide are far from ideal, so this is how it has to happen. But it’s hard to explain, and you’d rather not admit that this is so far from what you wanted for both of you and follow up with the fact that despite that you need him like you need water. So you don’t say a word as the metal doors slide open promptly. Instead you pull him in and let him press you to the chrome wall as he hits your floor button, and that very hand comes back to grab your ass like you didn’t think Spencer Reid capable of. It almost aches as his fingers dig into the flesh, but it’s a good ache because it means he’s real and he’s there.

You gasp as he hitches your leg up, arching into him. The shorts that you’re wearing leave very little to the imagination to begin with, but they become downright indecent like this.

Quickly the elevator stops and the doors hiss open. You don’t hesitate to pull Spencer by the hand down the hall. When you notice you left your door wide open, you don’t even care. Neither does he, apparently—once you’re inside he slams it shut, flipping the deadbolt while his eyes are glued to you like you’re already naked. Now Spencer is shameless in the way he drags his eyes over every curve, every place your clothes and hair are disheveled from his touch and eye-fucks you so obviously it makes your face warm. Three months ago Spencer would have at least been bashful about it when he met your eyes again, but this Spencer is far from apologetic as he pins you with his burning gaze once more. His hand stays stuck to the door like he’s holding himself back.

“Is this what you want?”

There’s an undercurrent of sorrow below the gravely arousal, like this isn’t what he wanted for the two of you either. But you’re both at the mercy of fate. This is all you have, and it might be all you can do for each other anymore. So you don’t need to say that, because he understands.

“Yeah. Yes, this is what I want.”

For just a second more he watches you from his place by the door, and there’s an unexpected softness to it. He looks at you the way he would have looked at you before. Like as long as he stays there he can entertain the idea of being that person again.

Need wins out quickly, though, and he surges forward. Immediately you’re caught in the riptide of him, helpless as he kisses you all the way to your bedroom.

He’s never been in here before. You find yourself glad it’s relatively clean—one of the pastimes you’d picked up in his absence was keeping everything tidy. It was something you could control.

A lamp glows at your bedside. You lean against the footboard of your bed, hands timidly behind your back and suddenly shy to have in him in your intimate space. Both of you set aside the heaving desperation long enough to catch your breaths, and for him to scan the room like he too is being forced to reconcile with the innate and unexpected intimacy of the moment. He cuts a harsh, dark gash in your sweetly decorated bedroom, radiating something wild and powerful and unsure of himself like a chained bull as he takes in the soft, pale bedding, the paintings and photos taped to the walls, the woven rug and the sheer drapery. His breathing slows as he studies it all—eyes eventually catching on something behind you. Looking is unnecessary. You’re sure he’s spotted the dried peonies in their ceramic vase. Or maybe the now worn stack of papers that is his Odyssey, marked up and soft around the edges from constant flipping-through.

Then Spencer looks at you, and that softness seeps in again. Along with something like... fear? Grief?

In some other universe your first time with Spencer is sweet and giggly and kind and he smiles at the decor in your room and looks around with wonder because it’s another way he gets to know you. It’s a different way to learn you from the inside.

You sense that he’s caught in between universes right now as well, painfully aware of what he would have given you that he can’t anymore.

He breathes your name like an apology, and foolishly you let a second go by in which you think he might offer you one. But he doesn’t. Not with his words, anyway. His eyes tell a different story.

“It’s fine,” you say unprompted on a whispered exhale, then a little louder as you push off the footboard, crossing the space until your hands are on his chest. You focus on his tie, not making eye contact as you rush to undo it. “It’s fine.”

He lets you do this for a few seconds before finally covering your trembling hands with his own. You still can’t meet his eyes.

“We don’t have to do—”

“No! No, please. I want to. I need—I need us to be okay.”

“Hey,” he murmurs, catching your chin and forcing you to look at him. “We are okay. Me and you are fine.”

It’s a pretty thought, but it’s not true. In fact, it’s a hideous and abject affront to the truth. Sure, maybe you’re fine in comparison to last week. Maybe anything feels fine compared to an eight by six cell. But it would be impossible for you and Spencer, for your relationship, whatever that relationship may be, to be fine. It’s especially impossible for him to make that claim, after all he did or rather didn’t do while he was gone. What you need is for him to stay anyway. What you need is to find a way to be with him, to exist with him, even when you are so clearly not fine.

“I just need you to stay,” you whisper, and he’s already nodding, wide-eyed like he’d do anything for you. You ignore all the bitter venom rising in your throat. You pretend this isn’t all happening after he cut you out of his life with a dirty switchblade. Instead you focus on his hands on yours, the familiar smell of him, which invites you to let go of each and every thought and worry. He must’ve showered before coming here, you realize. How long has he been out? What happened?

“Okay. Okay, I can stay. What else can I do? How do I make it better?”

You sniffle and look back down.

“You can untie that for me.”

He hesitates, then nods some more, fingers working under yours to undo the tie around his neck.

“Okay.”

A moment goes by and after that final whispered word, the tension begins to build again. Spencer senses it in the way your fingertips linger on his chest and you step even closer, dragging them down to his belt. The metallic sound of it unbuckling, despite being your own doing, still manages to flip your stomach. How many times have you pictured this? When was the first time you realized you wanted it? You’re sure you haven’t stopped wanting it even once since then.

Spencer tosses the tie away and is shrugging off his jacket now, then before you see it coming he’s kissing you again, ducking down to do it. He feels taller this close up, and especially in your bedroom, where he just seems rather out of place. But you want him here. God, you want him here.

You break the kiss, forced to look down as you fumble with his belt.

“Sorry,” you gasp, embarrassed by your lack of dexterity. The light is barely sufficient to see what you’re doing, especially when he’s wearing black on black and your eyes are still bleary.

“You’re okay,” he assures you, and it’s so Spencer a fresh round of nerves electrifies the tips of your fingers. That thing is happening—the thing you’d hoped to avoid if you hadn’t lost momentum partway through, where you’re allowing your actual feelings for him to get in the way rather than getting swept up in the pathos of the moment and letting everything be easy and mindless. “Here, can I help you?”

But he doesn’t actually wait for an answer before he’s finishing off the belt for you, tugging it loose from his hips till it’s a leather coil in his hands. Your fingers brush the material and he lets you take it as if it were your prize. It’s heavier than you thought it’d be, and you just feel the weight of it in your hands for a moment, your dropped head brushing his chest.

You have a terrible feeling that if you do this now, it doesn’t mean everything will be alright. Because it can’t just go back to normal. Spencer has told you nothing of what must be an enormous trauma, and you haven’t spoken about it at all, but you sincerely doubt that after this he’s going to be ready to just jump into that committed relationship the two of you had been toying with for months before his absence. You’re almost... scared of him, now. Scared of where he’s been and what he’s endured—things you’re sure you couldn’t have taken. What that does to a person, you can’t imagine. He seems so solid and real in front of you now—but you know that’s not always enough. Maybe you’re just scared that somehow whatever he’s been through will have made him care for you less. That you were too far removed from the whole ordeal, and now you’ll never understand. If you could understand, maybe you could fix it for him. Maybe he’d stick around.

Still—even if you do end up pushing him further away in the long run—won't it have been worth it to have had him so completely, even just once?

You toss the belt to the ground, compressing all of these very complicated thoughts and feelings into a few seconds so short he can’t ask you any questions about them. Instead you find his top button, and just as you manage to undo it with relative ease he’s gently grabbing your wrists. You look up at him, immediately surrendering.

“If we’re going to do this I need you to relax a little bit.”

Gears grind in your chest. You feel need and anxiety comingling in every square inch of your body. It’s a sick buzz—a high on an empty stomach.

“I can’t,” you admit.

“Yeah, you can,” Spencer gently disagrees, slowly lowering your hands. When he’s sure you’re not going to try ripping his clothes off again, he releases, and his eyes lower to the zipper of your hoodie. His fingers follow, warm against the soft triangle of revealed skin at your chest as he grips the small piece of metal between barely shaking fingers. “You can.”

You match his eyeline, breathing shallowly and watching as he slowly drags the zipper down. You wonder if that sound has haunted his fantasies the way the sound of his belt has haunted yours. If he’s seen this hoodie on you and wondered what’s underneath, staring at you and daydreaming during movie night with you none the wiser.

Both of you have your eyes glued to the span of skin as the zipper parts. Spencer stalls with the zipper at your sternum, just below the band of your bra.

Right. No shirt.

You look up and find his eyes already on you, tinged with a curious kind of humor.

“I wasn’t expecting guests.”

The words come out shy. Spencer’s chuckle has its own nervous airy quality as he resumes tugging on your zipper, leaning down until your noses bump.

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

Then he kisses you again, a little sweeter now. Sweet enough to give you butterflies and for them to flutter right out of your stomach and spill from your lips in a little whimper against his.

It comes as a surprise when he pushes the fabric from your shoulders without looking or asking. Not that you’d have said no—you're just underprepared for how assertive he is in this foreign context.

Left just in your flimsy shorts and your thin bra, you feel quite exposed—but Spencer’s hands are as demanding and hungry as his mouth. They skim up your sensitive sides and sweep lower, suggesting less proper placement over your ass and pulling at your bottoms until you gently put a stop to their wandering.

“Wait. We’re... we’re uneven.”

It’s a struggle to get any words out at all when he keeps chasing your lips, nipping at you like he physically can’t stand not kissing you, but they catch his attention and he laughs airily, pulling back to let his gaze pour over your less clothed form. It lingers and catches and lights you up everywhere it touches, drops of heat soaking into your skin and making you feel all fuzzy and needy.

“We are,” he acknowledges, tone low and colored with the faintest smile. “You’re a lot prettier without your clothes on than I am.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The challenge comes immediately and thoughtlessly. Spencer’s golden eyes flash up to yours. He’s breathing a little harder than usual.

“You want me to show you what I mean?”

If that means getting him naked, then yes, absolutely.

You nod, but rather than immediately stripping, he takes your hand and holds his own open next to it. A thick pink scar bisects some pretty significant palmistry lines, but you don’t mention that. Instead you swallow—your thoughts, your words, your nausea.

“That’s new.”

You wonder how you hadn’t noticed it earlier.

He nods.

“A lot is new.”

It sounds almost like he’s challenging you—there's a kind of tremulous force in his voice, despite the perpetual softness there, like he’s inviting you to say it’s ugly. And you realize he’s referring to more than just the glowing scar cutting an asteroid trail against the flesh of him palm. The scars he obtained in prison must form a constellation over his body.

“I don’t care. I wanna see you.”

Spencer swallows, cupping your face with the scarred hand once more. You can’t feel it against your cheek but you know it hasn’t gone away.

“I’m sure you think you do,” he permits, and that’s where the conversation ends for the moment—with his hand on your face and his lips back on yours. “For now why don’t you let me worry about you?”

Obediently, you breathe, “okay.”

This is, for whatever reason, amusing to him. The brief levity dies as quick as it comes like a snuffed-out brush fire as soon as he lets his hands fall back down to your hips.

“I want... I want to give you slow. But...”

But slow is for people who didn’t lose three months of their life. Slow is for people who don’t know what it’s like to be starving. Slow is not for the desperate.

You understand the feeling.

“I don’t need slow.”

You’ll let him use you up like quick-burning fuel if that’s what he needs. You’ll go as fast and as bright and as hot as he tells you.

“But you want slow,” he murmurs, a secret acknowledged into your own waiting mouth. You’d keep it there forever. You could be the object he hides his soul in. “I know you do. You deserve to get what you want.”

“I can go fast. I want whatever you can give me.”

Spencer’s shuddering exhale is like a drug, dizzying as you inhale it and your eyes flutter at the high, pressed head-to-head with him. For so long you’ve needed him so badly. It’s overwhelming to have him now, all over you. If only your walls could breathe him in the way you are, if this room could remember what it feels like to hold him the way you will, if any inanimate object could bear witness to how you’ll give yourself, any part of yourself, over to him, so willingly.

“I’m going to try.” Spencer’s voice is hoarse as he walks backward to the bed, taking you by the hips as he goes. “I want to do it right. I want to do this the way I... the way I imagined it, before...”

Now he’s sitting, and you’re standing between his legs as he finds the clasp of your bra and undoes it, his fingers a comforting pressure where they ghost down the slope of your back. Your heart is pounding at the confession, at the way his tongue darts over his bottom lip and his fingertips journey back up to your straps, looking up at you with haloed irises as if he’d find anything other than the most dangerous kind of smoldering devotion in your eyes—the kind cult-leaders seek and spend years nurturing, and he’d earned with a mere brush over your bare skin.

The fabric slides down your arms, and as it falls to the floor, you watch something like despair flash-flood his eyes. It is a deep, distinctly human grief. The ineffable kind where something is almost too beautiful; so perfect it offends the mortal senses because it should be permanent, but nothing is, and the clash of divine beauty with unstoppable time which oxidizes copper and covers marble with vine is almost as grotesque as metal rending delicate flesh. It is the grief that drove the first poet to write and the first parents to press their baby’s painted hands to the walls of a cave. It is the desire to do the impossible—to capture ephemeral perfection and make it eternal, and the knowledge that it is hopeless. You recognize it because you’ve felt it for him.

“I thought about you all the time,” he whispers, doesn’t bother calling you beautiful but you don’t mind because he’s telling you with his hands and his eyes and the waver of his voice. “When I was gone, I thought about you—”

You’re just as quiet, just as soft.

“Don’t, Spencer.”

He doesn’t get to tell you about when he was gone. Not now. Not after he acted like you didn’t exist.

“Okay.” He swallows the things he’d wanted to tell you like you choked on the things you needed to tell him for three months. “I’m sorry.”

But his hands—his hands are perfect over your waist and his lips are perfect where they kiss your ribs like they’re his homeland. You could forgive a thousand wrongs for each kiss he puts to your skin. Light from the full moon stretches over the room like a blessing from the cosmos, and you have every intention of making the most of that gift, how the silver gilds the planes of his face and highlights curls like they were carved, and invites you to search for something in each shadow.

Some of his kisses land over the sensitive skin of your breasts though you doubt he has much intention or that there is any sort of end-goal with the trail he blazes—in fact, you have to root your hand in his hair and pull gently back when he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s making you wait again. His eyes are glassy and cheeks slightly pinkened—you weren’t expecting this wave of fondness to knock you on your ass but here you are, falling all over again.

“You don’t have to go that slow.”

A slow smile splits the heart of his mouth at your bashful tone and he’s emboldened to bring his hands higher for a moment, thumbs brushing particularly delicate though not downright indecent spots. Nonetheless, your breath catches.

“Impatient girl,” he scolds, and though it’s lighthearted it still inspires heat to dance across your face. Oh, I think I’ve been plenty patient, you itch to say, but you bite it back because it’s only sad and true and unkind.

Still, he gives you the beginning of what you want, really only the tip of the enormous iceberg that is your desire for him, by slipping his thumbs into the waistband of your shorts and tugging them down. His hands slide up the fronts of your thighs, tracing the trim of your underwear, and you’d swear he’s not even breathing. The moment one of his hand loops behind your knee and pulls forward until it’s pressed to the mattress and you’re half-kneeling, half standing, desire begins to truly cloud your mind. Manhandling never seemed like Spencer’s style, but when paired with how softly he reveals your hip, pulling gently down on the fabric of your underwear just to admire you up close, you don’t mind it.

More kisses are littered over your stomach, and he takes you by surprise a second time with a quick maneuver landing you on your back and him on top of you.

“I wasn’t doing you justice with my imagination,” he murmurs against your mouth. “I couldn’t have known.”

“Couldn’t have known what?” you pant as he shamelessly digs his fingers into the plush of your ass. You almost hope it bruises.

“How pretty you would be,” he coos like he means it, and you dissolve, slipping through his fingers like sand in an hourglass. “You were holding out on me.”

It’s a tease, not at all serious, but you manage to hit him with a, “Was not, asshole,” and he chuckles, placating your little hurt with another sticky kiss, and you get another disorienting glimpse of some other timeline where you’re both a little less damaged. Where it’s a little easier.

But in this timeline, his touch becomes starving and ragged and urgent, and you accept the drag of his thumb up your thigh and between your legs, gasping when he runs his knuckles up the center of you. This touch is metal on screeching metal. It does not pretend to be anything more than what it is—brute, powerful, executed to elicit sensation. You get the sense that Spencer’s never touched anyone this honestly, and while you do envy the girls who got to have him gentler, you’ll take this as the compliment that it is. A kind of vulnerability that is nearing primal.

His lips, though—always his lips—are kind when they brush and land on your skin guided by some invisible map. A dip down your neck and chest and then a plunge, his tongue dragging over your hips, chasing the fabric of your underwear as he almost pulls it off and then reroutes, making room for himself between your legs and pushing lace aside to mark the hinge of your inner and upper-most thigh. Your chest heaves and you don’t dare move for fear he’ll stop leaving signs of himself on your body and you won’t be able to reassure yourself that it was real and he was here and it was not another dream.

Because something in you knows, if only consciously recognizing it for the first time now, that he will disappear again. That this may be your only chance.

The desire to make the ephemeral eternal. An impossibility.

He’s clearly losing himself to something, eyes shutting blissfully. You wonder when the last time he let his guard down even a little was. You’re okay with being the thing he gets lost in, even if you’re not exactly okay with him—something you are becoming more acutely aware of as each touch makes a part of you want to cry. Maybe you still have some things in common. A strange pain that doesn’t quite feel like it belongs to you, for one thing.

You slam back into your body as his nose nudges against you through fabric, and his lips catch on cotton as he drags himself up, eventually settling a kiss against the little bow at the waist of your underwear. There he stays, eyes closed, mouth pressed to you.

“Is this okay?”

You swallow, buzzing. Is this really what he wants? After everything?

“You don’t have to...”

“But is it okay with you?”

Nothing more than an airy whisper, you reply, “Yes, if that’s what you want.”

Being emotional at this point seems wrong, but it’s difficult to ignore the fact that you have thought about this before and it’s finally happening but it’s not exactly as you’d imagined it. There is an indelible sadness to it, to the way he’s so hungry for you because he’s been deprived, to the desperation with which he touches you because he’s had everything taken from him.

For a moment, before he tugs your underwear down, he pauses, and you wonder if he’s freezing one moment in time, this moment, and grieving all the other ways it could’ve been, and accepting that this is the way it is going to be. You are.

These higher realms of thought abandon you as he finally pulls the last barrier down your legs and encourages you to spread them further. You don’t have time or energy to be embarrassed, not even by his staring, or the way his eyes dart up to yours and back down again, wide and shining, as if to say, have you seen yourself? Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?

All you feel is the lack of him on you, the pull to have him closer so strong it’s almost sickening because he could be gone at any second. Maybe he understands that because he doesn’t waste anymore time before he’s kissing the most sensitive part of you. The drag of his tongue has you loosing a shuddering cry.

His mouth wanders, making connections you wouldn’t have realized the value of until you feel them on your skin. Your hips buck as he traces you and you’re unable to stop yourself from tangling your hands in his hair. Speech fails you—hell, you can hardly breathe as you watch his with a furrowed brow and parted lips, only expelling air from your lungs in the form of little cries and gasps and failing to hold your hips down to the bed.

The tip of his tongue teases around your entrance and he catches your leg as your foot rises off the bed, slinging it over his shoulder and consuming you more fervently until you have no choice but to moan though you’ve never been one for theatrics. Nobody has done this for you like he’s doing it for you. Locks of hair fall in front of his face and you hold them back for him, shuddering as he shifts his weight and presses the tip of his finger to your cunt.

“Ah—please,” you manage, your first words since he started. Spencer groans against you and the sound is so wonderfully unexpected, so much better than in your dreams. You cant your hips up in further invitation, chirping as he takes it, pushing two fingers into you at once. Your eyes screw shut and you bite back a whine at the slight stretch, unconsciously writhing your hips either to get further away or take him deeper, you’re not sure.

Spencer pulls back, kissing your hips and thighs and pumping his fingers very slowly as you adjust.

“’M sorry,” you pant, “it’s been awhile, I...”

“Don’t apologize,” Spencer says like it’s simple, his own breath coming quicker. “How’re you feeling? Need me to stop?”

“No! No, it feels really good, I feel good.”

He holds your burning gaze, matching it with his own, and his hair is tousled and his cheeks are flushed as he continues to move his hand.

“Yeah?”

“...Yeah.”

This little show of obedience, of call and response, has him smiling before he occupies his mouth with something else once more. It’s a different smile than you’re used to from him, but you decide you don’t at all mind it.

Like that, with his tongue and fingers working tirelessly, your orgasm comes on quickly. The feeling is rare but not entirely foreign, and in that brief moment of utter disconnect between your brain and reality, of sheer white-hot pleasure, you don’t feel you’re missing out on anything at all. How could you be, when you are here and Spencer is here and for a moment all your neurons are lighting up and flashing neon? How could there be anything more to life than the searing feeling of him slowly withdrawing his fingers from you, than your hips between his hands like he’s cradling the world, and his lips, indiscriminate with where they kiss because every part of you is worthy of attention?

You’re reeling, and your legs are gelatinous as he so affectionately sucks the darkest mark yet onto your inner thigh like a parting gift, like he’s signing his trembling work. If you could clamp your legs shut around the almost painful aftershocks you would, but he’s climbing back up your body, so all you can do is wriggle against him and release delayed, stunted little moans. He stops to kiss your neck before he makes it to your mouth and drinks down all your sounds until you’re gentle and pliant for him like you haven’t been yet.

His voice is soft and sympathetic when he speaks. “Better?”

Wordlessly you nod, both comforted and unsettled by how well he knows you. What, exactly, has been made better, you’re not sure. Not trust. You don’t trust him anymore. Something cheaper, but temporarily effective. A sense of permanence, maybe, however fleeting it may be. You’ve completed something with him now, and he’s still here, still sweet.

He looks into your eyes, then, for a moment—and there is just enough light in the room for you to tell yourself that the shadows dancing there as he looks at you are love.

They morph as you watch into haunting, wild hunger. Pained even now.

He sits up abruptly and so do you, scooting back against your headboard and pulling your knees to your chest to protect your pounding heart as Spencer takes you in with darting eyes and quick breaths. His fingers find the collar of his shirt and he begins to unbutton.

“I need you to remember it’s all going to heal.”

He swallows, and you hardly have the wherewithal to study the way he unbuttons his shirt, a way he exists in the world that you had previously not been privy to. The words are too distracting.

“What?”

Sometimes he reminds you of a deer, with those big brown eyes that can’t help betraying anxiety. Moreso in those old pictures he’d shown you from his early days at the BAU—but it shines through occasionally even now. It’s reassuring to know that something inside of his has remained soft.

“Just...” his fingers don’t stop at their task, and you come to the disturbing realization that his knuckles are bruised. “Please don’t freak out, alright?”

Your mouth goes dry, eyes glued to the lengthening span of revealed skin.

And before he even has his shirt fully undone, something isn’t right.

He’s like a Pollack of bruises—starbursts and watercolor blots of discoloration blooming over his side and stomach.

You’re glad the light is off for two reasons: one, being that you don’t think you could handle the bruising in all its glory, and two, you hope the look of horror painted on your face is at least partially obscured from Spencer.

But you can’t. You simply don’t have the gas in the tank to freak out, as he’d said—at least not externally. Those bruises shouldn’t be there, but 96 days is a long time to be gone.

You drag your eyes back to his—nervous, deeply insecure and mistrustful. A deer. Just like those pictures of a 24 year old Spencer in an FBI jacket that was too big for him.

It’s enough to have you scooting on your knees across the mattress to him. Those big eyes stay glued to you as you draw near, falling as you carefully push open his shirt, cautious not to bump any tender spots as it falls to the bed. A flash of white gauze wrapped around his forearm that makes your stomach flip. How? You want to ask. Why?

He doesn’t seem to know what you’re going to do, and neither do you, until you’re grabbing his hands, bruised knuckles and all, and just... holding them for a minute.

“I lost weight,” he says quietly, as if that’s the most shocking thing about his current appearance, though it is noticeable.

“You’re still pretty.”

He smiles at this—a true Spencer Reid smile. Flattened lips, eyes tinged silver with sadness, voice quiet and anxious and wavering.

“I didn’t have a lot to spare.”

A moment goes by.

“I’m not going to ask you about them,” you promise, though you care so much and you want to know but you already understand that he won’t want to tell you.

Another moment. It doesn't surprise you to watch the shiny vulnerability in his eyes to freeze over completely. But he squeezes your hands once in thanks, and you know it’s still the same Spencer.

“Lie down.”

Oh. Right.

This.

You do as he says, taking a deep breath to try and exhale the concern twisting your stomach like a poison. Somehow your room feels so unfamiliar, so new with him in it. Even the whorls on your ceiling look different as you study them, trying to time the pattern of your breathing with the pattern of the paint and plaster and not let the sound of Spencer further undressing quicken your heartrate too much.

Soon he’s coaxing your legs apart again, reverently, and kneeling between them, studying every part of you—lingering not on the parts you’d expect. He traces the scar on your knee with his thumb, follows a line down your thigh to the freckle on your hip. The scrutiny is unnerving and warms you everywhere. Perhaps he senses the microscopic clench of your thighs as you imagine pushing them together, if he weren’t in the way.

“You alright?” He asks, still stroking your hip. Tender again. It’s so hard to keep up.

“I...”

Suddenly your heart beat is a deafening echo in your own ears. The tide of your breathing is too powerful, too in and out and whooshing, leaving you always too empty or too full but never comfortable.

Maybe he’s changed, and he’s harder to know now, but he is the same Spencer. He is the Spencer you’d fallen in love with. The hard part is knowing that now you may never get a chance to tell him that. You don’t know if he’d be able to hear it.

There are things you can’t have with him anymore. Not now, at least. Maybe not ever. But you can have this. It will be different, but you’d rather him be different and here than the same and only in your memory.

You swallow.

“I’m good.”

Tangling your hand in his hair once more, you pull him down into a kiss. It’s hesitant, at first—maybe he can taste your thoughts, where they’d been balancing just on the tip of your tongue. But the uncertainty fades and he kisses you deeper, harder, in a way that is hard to keep up with. You like the messy overwhelm of his lips, teeth, tongue. That’s the only way he knows how to want you.

When you go to wrap your leg around his waist he catches it, running his hands over the soft plush of your thigh. The hard line of him presses against you like memory foam and you gasp and he breathes it in deeply as your brain short-circuits, as you realize this is really going to happen, that you’re going to have him like you’ve never had him before and in ways you’ve only imagined and immediately felt ashamed for.

“Spencer,” you whisper. He ducks to leave open-mouthed kisses along your neck and your eyes flutter shut, craning your neck but not losing sight of your objective as you reach down blindly. When you find what you’re looking for he freezes, groans against your neck at the same time as you breathe the tiniest whimper. Just in your hand he feels impossible, hot and imposing and hard. Your heart palpitates.

Without thinking, you angle your hips up and encourage him closer, until the tip of him is smearing through your folds, and you both go utterly silent like the breath had been stolen right from your lungs. The moment crystallizes, time around you hardening like preserved amber to keep you frozen there forever.

And then he rolls his hips, catching the underside of his cock on the crux of you, and then he does it again, and you choke out a moan and so does he, and it’s beyond perfect—it's nirvana, more than you could ever have conceived of, with his weight pressing you into the mattress, arms caging you in, his heavy breaths hot against your neck and vice versa as you twine together like serpents on a rod, your foot floating in the air as you widen your legs to make more room for him.

And you’re not even fucking yet.

“Oh my god,” you whine, just for him, barely audible under the heavy cloak of night, the thickened air in your bedroom and the sound of panting and fabric shifting. It’s like your heart is trying to reach through your chest to his own where they’re pressed together—that is how hard it’s beating.

Spencer only breathes a long, low curse and shifts so he can grasp himself. Your fingers drift down the shaft of him as he slots himself at your entrance, notching half an inch in and you hold your breath, and you brace yourself—and then he’s kissing you again, but gentler this time. Reassuring. You soften, you can’t not, releasing all your air in a soft gust through your nose, and then he’s pushing in.

Your lips part at the stretch as it fuzzes your mind, but he stays right there, nose pressed to your nose, lips ghosting over your own. He’s not going anywhere, you think, and you’re glad for it, when it burns ever so slightly, and the tiniest whine escapes your open mouth.

“Shh,” he soothes immediately, low and soft, only fractionally louder than you had been. “You’re okay.”

Spencer. Your Spencer.

For a moment, you’re living in that alternate universe. The kinder one. The flash of pain you feel then has nothing to do with the way he’s opening you up.

This is the closest you have ever been, and in some strange way, the furthest apart.

Together, fingers brushing, you guide him until he settles at not quite your deepest point. You can feel that he’s not giving you everything yet, but you’re okay with that, as you adjust to the full feeling. Spencer again senses your desire to close your legs against the deep intrusion, and gives you the best he can by encouraging you to wrap your legs around him.

“Good girl,” he whispers tenderly, nudging at your jaw with his nose and dragging kisses along the ridge of it. Your stomach flips at the moniker and your brain turns to warm sludge as your eyes flutter shut. It makes you feel all light-headed and you flutter around him. Spencer chuckles into the junction of your neck and shoulder and the vibrations send a chill down your arching spine. “I thought you might like that one.”

“Mhm.”

“Mhm. How are you? You okay?”

“’M ready.”

“You’re ready?” His tone is dripping sarcasm and faux-disbelief as he pulls back the slightest bit only to push right back in deeper, this time. Your toes curl, one thigh sliding higher up his waist as you cling to him.

“Fuck,” you manage, a pitiful, high pitched curse tossed to the wind. He echoes the sentiment.

“Oh, my god,” he groans, continuing with that slow pace, “you feel so good, angel.”

You grapple at his back, searching for purchase as your brow knits. “Faster.”

This inspires another breathy chuckle, but he obliges, and you cry out softly. It’s almost unreal, your head buried against his neck, drunk on his scent and the drag of him like a shock felt in the far reaches of your body, again and again.

There’s nothing you can say that will accurately demonstrate what you’re feeling, so you elect not to speak, to remain silent and try to get a grip on this cacophony of sensation and emotion. But it’s too much to be alone with. You feel you have to get it out, to seek understanding. You can’t do it alone.

“Spencer.”

“Hm?”

“I don’t know...” the sentence trails off into a gentle keen. He moves to kiss you, speaking against your lips.

“You don’t know?”

Shyly you shake your head. Spencer sighs wistfully.

“Do you know how much I missed you?”

It’s like he can sense your need for comfort. For something grounding.

And while this topic was off-limits earlier—you're softer now. The stone walls that form your boundaries have been chipped away and lowered.

Spencer continues unprompted.

“I thought about you every day. Every night while I was falling asleep. You were always on my mind, angel girl.”

You whine. Whether it’s pleasure or distress is anyone’s guess—including your own.

“You were gone so long,” you whisper, eyes shut.

At this, Spencer slows again, and the tension that was building settles back to a simmer.

“I know. I wish I could—I wish I could change that. But I’m here, okay? I’m right here with you.”

Then he makes sure you feel every last inch, and it takes your breath away. If your thoughts were any more coherent, they’d be something along the lines of: but for how long? How long until you leave again?

“You’re here.”

You say it like a mantra, once out loud, and then again and again in your head, timed with every clash of your hips. With each repetition he becomes more real. Every little ache, every tingling, head-emptying brush against that most sensitive spot inside proves to you that he could not be any closer. This can’t be faked. It can’t be another dream to wake up in tears from.

“You’re here,” you gasp as it hits you, as it truly sinks in.

“I’m here,” he breathes.

There’s so much you want to say—three months of words you need him to hear, of things you need to talk to him about, things you need to yell at him for and things you can only say crying in his arms and things you can only say laughing or whispering or drunk or half-asleep—and in this moment you can’t manage any of it. Every word condenses into one drop of salt water, drifting away from your eye and down your cheek. Spencer doesn’t tell you to stop crying. He only kisses the tear away, and murmurs I’m here I’m here I’m here over and over again against your skin until he’s not even speaking it out loud anymore. But you feel it. With every brush of his lips, every breath, every movement, you feel it.

Soon he’s adjusting his angle, gradually picking up the pace but retaining that unforgiving depth, and your nails bite into the skin of his back as your jaw drops. Spencer hisses, pressing impossibly closer.

“I’m sorry!” you squeak.

“Do it again.”

“Wh—what?”

“Please,” he begs, low and hot against your jaw, just beneath your ear. “Do it again, honey.”

Honey.

You’d do anything for him if it meant he calls you that again.

When he shifts his weight to one arm and reaches down between your bodies to play with your aching clit in exactly the right way, you don’t really have a choice. You arch and moan wantonly enough to feel embarrassed as your nails scratch down his back. At the same time he’s making noises of his own, and you almost feel guilty for marking him up like this only you think he likes it. The most perfect and troubling tension is building in your core, so taut you almost fear the inevitable rebound when it snaps. But you’re driven to be exactly what Spencer needs right now, and to let him try and be what you need. Even if it scares you. Even if you’re not sure how.

Spencer groans, head tucked to the bend of your shoulder. “I’m not gonna last.”

Any response you might’ve been about to muster is annihilated by a sudden, deep bolt of pleasure.

“’M gonna cum,” you mewl like it’s a secret.

“Are you?” he asks, coming up breathless. If your eyes were open, you’re sure you’d see him above you.

“Mhm.”

“Look at me. Look at me.”

It is unmistakably a command—one you fight to follow.

You cry out as you meet the intensity of his gaze, those shadowy corridors suddenly ablaze and alive. They are not unending, like you’d thought. They are a door thrown open to let the light in, or maybe to let the fire out. They’re open in this moment for you.

No more words are spoken after that—you cum hard, gasping as you fall and spin. Spencer follows very shortly after, like he was holding it together just for you, and your eyes are still locked though everything is a bit bleary.

“Fuck,” you whine as he continues to fuck you for as long as he can, despite your writhing hips, but you’re entranced by him, unable to look away now that you’re hooked. Until he slows to a halt, glances down at your mouth, and you just have time to pray that he’ll kiss you before he does. You whimper against his lips—a plea for understanding. A plea for him to stay, even though this is over. He kisses back so soft and sweet it’s like he can read your mind. Echoes of I’m here I’m here I’m here still buzz across your skin. His eyelashes tickle your cheek. Your heart stops beating quite so quickly, melting and warm like the rest of your body.

Soon the kissing ceases and you’re just breathing together, trapped and faced with the knowledge that it must end just the same as you had waited for it to start.

Eventually the air between you becomes mostly carbon dioxide and you let your head fall to the side, dizzy and giggling breathlessly as you nearly avoid asphyxiation. Spencer laughs too, letting his head fall to your shoulder once more, and you finally let your eyes flutter closed. To do something as simple as laugh with him again is its own small euphoria. It’s unexpected, and a soft landing once all that tension breaks underneath your combined weight.

It can’t last forever, you know that well. But the slow fade of it makes the next parts a little easier.

Spencer presses a kiss to your neck. “Is your bathroom through that door?”

You hum a confirmation and are only slightly disheartened when he pulls out and rolls off of you. You’re further disturbed when you see there’s gauze around his thigh, matching what’s around his arm, and you wonder how you missed that. Spencer scoops up his clothing and disappears into the adjoining restroom, assuring you he’ll be right back and leaving you alone with your thoughts and the whorls on the ceiling which have seemingly shifted into entirely new constellations.

He leaves the door cracked which is oddly reassuring—the sliver of warm light and the sound of the sink running. Only a few moments pass before he’s returning clad in boxers once more to sit on the edge of the bed, pushing away the sheet you’d just pulled over your chest and pulling one of your legs over his lap. Your face warms as he brings a washcloth between your thighs. As soon as he glances up at you and catches your eye you’re looking back to the ceiling.

“I should’ve asked first,” he says quietly as he cleans up the mess he’d made of you.

You speak just as softly, like you’re both afraid of disturbing some peace, of waking some sleeping giant. “It’s okay. I would’ve told you if I didn’t want it.”

His reticence, his unreadable face, make you nervous.

When he’s done, he rises to toss the dirtied cloth in the laundry bin, and with his back to you (as scratched up as it might be) you feel braver.

“Are you gonna, like... hate me now?”

It was a mistake. That’s clear by the way he turns around, brow knit deeply and grimacing slightly like even the suggestion offends him.

“Am I going to hate you?”

Again you pull the sheet up, and again you look away, studying the pattern of moonlight stretching out over the floor and scooting to make room for him when he steps in it.

“Not hate, I just...” the bed dips beside you and you are indescribably glad he’s not immediately running out the door. “I’m not dumb. I know what this was.”

He pulls you into him and you settle against his chest. It feels good. “I never thought you were dumb.”

This is your first real conversation since he’s gotten back, you realize. And how quickly you’re falling into familiar patterns, familiar syntactical beats. You know when to speak. You know when to bite your tongue and keep him talking.

The silence goes on longer than you’re used to. Maybe he got good at not speaking while he was away.

Eventually your eyes wander, falling to the white strip over his thigh where it is parallel to yours on the bed, only over the sheets.

“What happened?”

You said you wouldn’t ask, but that was then, and you’re upset again. You almost want to hurt him. To piss him off. You don’t know.

But it doesn’t work.

“Do you really want to know?” There’s a note of something heavy in his voice, and you look up at him. It’s a privilege to have him this close—his beauty is a constant surprise that you’d become unaccustomed to over the months. You say nothing, and he takes that as the yes that it is. “I... I did it to myself.”

He may as well have reached down your throat and grabbed for fucking heart for all its clenching. Tears well almost immediately, though they’ve been waiting in the wings all night.

“What? Did you—were you trying to—”

His eyes widen.

“No! No, honey, no.” You wilt as he gathers you closer, a deeply confused frown still contorting your features, too heartbroken even to cling to him, or to appreciate the ease with which honey slips past his lips again. “No. I was—it's complicated. I didn’t—I wasn’t trying to hurt myself, but I had to—I had to do it before someone else did something worse.”

The bruises covering his abdomen.

You sniffle and pull back enough to look up at him tearfully. “Why would they want to hurt you?”

Mist fills his eyes even as he’s looking down at you, a layer of separation, as if he’s two places at once. Even as he goes to brush your hair behind your ear, to stroke your cheek.

“I’m... not... the same, as I was.” It’s not an answer to your question—but it’s the beginning of the answer to a question you’d been too afraid to put into words.

“Don’t say that,” you beg, because you know where this is going. He keeps smoothing your hair like it’ll make this easier.

“But it’s true,” Spencer says gently, the slightest waver betraying his own emotion.

“You’re just going to leave again.”

And you’re losing to the tears.

“I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

“But you will,” you insist, like a child crying to a parent come to comfort them after a bad dream.

“Not right now. Right now I’m here.”

I’ll stay until you fall asleep again.

For now, maybe that has to be enough.

You cry on his shoulder. He kisses your head and doesn’t tell you to stop.

Eventually, you sniff and wipe your eyes.

“We were so close. Before you… we were almost there.”

You’re sure of it. You’re sure that if he hadn’t gone when he did you would’ve been a real couple. You would’ve told him you loved him.

“We’ll get there again,” he promises, rubbing your arm. “I just… I need a little bit of time. I think you do too. But we’re going to get there again.”

Maybe it will never be like it was.

But as so often is the case—Spencer is right. Difference doesn’t mean it won’t ever be good again.

You have to believe that, just as you had to believe you’d see him again.

You look to The Odyssey on your bedside table.

The sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world.

But the sun has a habit of rising, time and time again, after the longest nights, after the darkest storms.

You feel the beginnings of its rise, see the golden tips of it lighting the room as he holds you. Even now.

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