#okay uni is gonna extend it for sure but Still | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ncitygirls · 3 years

Text

yours - jaemin x f reader

fluff, smut, bffs2lovers, 3k

before joining you to your cousin’s wedding, jaemin had made a big deal about not being properly invited. as always, mark kept true to his habit of innocently causing trouble when it suited him. ‘i’m like family! where’s my invite!’ but it was hard to fault mark, because of course jaemin had been invited. somehow, his parents neglected to inform him that your cousin had rightfully assumed jaemin would know he was included in the na family’s invite. you said nothing though. especially when jaemin had briefly explained the reason for his displeasure. ‘we deserve our own invite, y/n. one for us together.’ which made no sense at all, because you’re just friends. you’re not together. however you had no idea you were alone in thinking that.

you see, jaemin was more acquainted with your family than some of your own relatives. he was invited to christmases, weddings, birthdays. basically any and all occasions your family saw fit to celebrate, jaemin was in attendance. yet surprisingly, even after having grown up alongside you and mark, a few of your more distant cousins were more than happy to express their displeasure with his more forward placed seat. because, like you keep reminding everybody: jaemin is just your best friend. but apparently, best friends didn’t reserve the rights to things you gave to jaemin. not in your extended family’s eyes. not that yours and mark’s family cared.

yet in the end, like most things regarding you, jaemin knew his attendance tonight had been a mistake. but not because of the petty feud his presence birthed in the lee lineage. oh no. it’s because, unlike most nights jaemin spends in your company - with your hair strewn about, mascara permanently smudged, and a lazy grin etched on - tonight, you were his least favourite kind of y/n. the one where he can’t help but follow you with his eyes, watch the placement of your feet, enjoy the shrill tone of your cackle. throughout the night, jaemin had found himself warmed by the way you drag your balled up fist over your made up eye, how you sing along to songs you don’t know the words to, how you wobble in your heels before you cling to him.

jaemin makes the mistake of enjoying you a bit too much. how you scowl as your relatives chat shit a bit too loud for you liking, how you make a scene of conspicuously covering his ears, unaware of how unbothered he is. how you try so hard to make him happy, in the smallest and largest of ways. so he drags you into a dance when you move to walk over, ready to rip your own blood a new one. “i’m gonna kill ‘em.”

“no,” he states simply, one of his hands slipping from your hand to your waist. “dance with me.”

“who do they think they are!” your voice adopts an unsettling shrillness that he can’t help but chuckle at. it even throws his head back. “why are you so happy? you should be mad!”

“because i don’t care,” he shrugs, tightening his hold on you slightly. “i’m here- you’re here. why would i not be happy?”

“you’re such a fucking leo.”

he still doesn’t know what that means, but he laughs anyway, happy that your deduction seemed to satisfy you. you eventually calm down, a peace settling over you as he spins you lazily around the dance floor. there’s some early 2000s track playing, one definitely unfitting for the way he’s swaying you. but you pay it no mind, speaking softly as he presses his cheek to the crown of your head.

“when do you wanna head up?” up, meaning the hotel room your relatives are also wound up about. it was intended for the bridal party and far travelled guests, neither of which they are. and neither of which you are. but you were your cousin’s favourite. and so was he. so naturally, you two had one reserved. even your parents had opted to stay at a cottage a couple roads over. “i think the boys are all gone already.”

he notes the guilt tainting your tone, knowing how drained jaemin grew from both physical and social interactions of any kind. so you knew well what his answer would be. “when you’re ready.”

“okay,” slipping out of his hold, you drag him over to the newly married couple. you exchange brief goodnights and grateful tidings before he excuses himself to find the jacket of his tuxedo. the search doesn’t take long, his eyes landing on the black coat a few seconds after parting. he does give himself a breather though, his knees cracking as the seat holding his jacket readily carries his weight. he doesn’t dare shut his eyes, knowing full well he’ll fall victim to his fatigue. so instead, he let’s them follow the one thing that always occupies his mind, that can keep him up all night. he finds you far quicker than he did his coat, the pink satin of your dress falling half way down your calf as you skipped over to bid some other guests farewell. he sighs happily, glad you never force him into such tedious pleasantries. you learnt a long time ago that while impossibly affectionate, jaemin’s social clock ticked a few hours faster than any one else’s. so by your timing, it had probably expired a little after the vows. it took a little bit of getting used to, but it also meant for quicker farewells and a speedier exit.

it’s only now jaemin realises this was a mistake. because before he ever gets his breather, less from you, but all the feelings that come from being with you, you’re at his side. he’s learned how not to cease up at your touch anymore. instead, linking his fingers with yours when they rest gently on his shoulder. when he peeks up at you, his eyes blinded less by the party lighting and more by your tired smile, he knows not to sigh, forcing down his body’s natural response to your attention. but when you tug at his hands, bringing him to stand, whispering a-

“let’s go home, yeah?”

he knows this isn’t a mistake. this is torture.

it’s how you pour him a tall, ice cold glass of domesticity with every meal. your hand wrapped in his as you lead him through the hotel. you slip out of your heels somewhere between the lobby and the elevator, grinning up at him as he takes them from you. jaemin even curses himself, his body responding to your needs unthinkingly. he tries to calm his beating heart by counting the floors, his eyes following the analog dial as you lean against his shoulder, fiddling with his cuffs.

“do you want them off?” you ask softly, barely a touch louder than the elevator music. he nods, though your gel nails are already picking at the gold, removing them with ease. “gimme the other one.” he inhales deeply, cursing whoever gave you to him. well, not really. you weren’t really his. but god did you act like it.

your hands slip into his pocket for the room key before slipping back into his hand. he just follows you out, caught in a happy daze as you take him ‘home’. you struggle a bit with the key card, trying it every which way before he leans into you, wrapping his arm around you as he reaches for the card. “the arrow’s pointing this way,” his thumb nail presses on the black arrow indicating the direction you have to push it. he doesn’t see you roll your eyes, but he guesses you do. so he presses his lips to your temple in apology. “you’ll get it next time.”

“piss off,” you laugh, pushing the door open when it clicks. he throws the heels and jacket on a chair by the door before collapsing onto the adjacent couch, his body ready to succumb to his dire need for rest. he can just about hear you rustling through the bags in the bathroom, your feet padding around on the linoleum. when it muffles slightly, he figures out immediately what you’ve returned for when you stop between his thighs. “thank you,” you sigh, his fingers already pinching at the zip on your dress. it sits low at the base of your spine, the back of the dress leaving you completely exposed. he’d taken to placing his hand there all night, his fingers gliding up and down the skin whenever he got the chance. when it’s down, his eyes linger on your hips, the top of your panties peeking out before you slap his knee.

“what?”

“the necklace,” your back is still turned, hair blocking his view. “please?” you add, hand smoothing over the skin of his knee.

“come here,” he pulls you down to sit between his thighs, his legs parting to make space for you. you land with a huff, quickly realising you haven’t sat down all night. jaemin realises this too, your neck craning a bit further to the side than necessary as he tucks your hair over your shoulder. “you okay?”

“mhm,” you hum, squeezing his thigh. “just a bit sleepy.”

“a bit?” he laughs, a little breathless as he gathers the chain he got you one christmas. “i think you’ve earned a good sleep.” he surmises, hands squeezing your shoulders gently. “but you know you were a guest today, right? not the planner?”

“yeah?” turning onto your knees, you glare down at him. “someone had to sort my uncle out, he was steaming!”

“yes, true,” he laughs. “just make sure you’re not doing that at my wedding.”

you feign surprise at that, “i’m invited to your wedding?”

“of course,” his hands squeeze yours earnestly before he whispers, “can’t have my wedding without the bride, can i-”

“fuck off!” his cackles chase you out the room. while you wash up, he makes quick work of his tux, throwing his slacks over the back of the couch, his thumbs slowly unhooking each of his buttons. a true man of leisure, he’s in all but his socks and draws when you return. “all done!” you sing, throwing the dress down as you reappear in an oversized t-shirt. he recognises it almost immediately from uni. it’s his soccer team’s jersey. it has his number on the back.

“finally,” he whines, pushing you aside as he makes his way inside, quickly locking the door to avoid your attacks. he goes to reach for his wash bag just to find the reason he did already waiting unpacked. in a small cup on the side is his toothbrush, resting sweetly beside yours. he ignores the hygienic implications of this and skips right to the romantic. because, while jaemin thinks and often dreams of placing your first name with his last, and while he spends most of his free time with you, and while he would take any number of bullets for you, he still can’t for the life of him figure you out. even after he bombards you with affection, praise, teasing, flirting, kisses. you’re still just you. making him just him.

and that’s fine, if that’s what you want. but he’s not sure he truly knows what it is you want. and this gets him thinking about the little things. how his hand is seldom empty in your presence. how you never think of him second, always first. how you want to be with him always. moments like now, when he returns to find you hanging his tux on its hanger, encasing it in its protective sleeve. his arms slip around your waist, pulling you flush against him. and you melt instantly, resting in his embrace. “thanks,” he mumbles, lips pressing gently to your shoulder.

“‘is okay,” you hum, hanging it over the back of the door before resting your hands over his. see, hands never empty when you’re near. he sways you back and forth, his heart beating gently into your back as you lean into him. “did you have fun?” you ask, squeezing at his forearms, “i know we probably stayed later than you’d like-”

“it was great.” see, always putting him first. “did you want to stay longer?”

“not without you.” see, how you want to be with him always. he wonders how you don’t see it. how you don’t see you’re killing him. “come on,” you mumble, shutting off the light as you blindly drag him to bed. jaemin has an annoying habit of following you in, his body shuffling in after yours, rather than separating and meeting in the middle. it doesn’t allow you much room, by the time you reach your side, he’s encased you in his arms, legs, even his head, his chin slotting itself in the crook of your neck. “nana?”

“hm?”

“i’m sorry about today,” the apology doesn’t shock him, but rather your disappointment. “you’re more like family to mark and i than they ever were. tonight was just proof of that.”

“it’s okay,” he squeezes you a touch harder, trying to decipher whether your words harm or soothe the growing hole in his heart. “i can’t say i don’t see where they’re coming from.”

“what d’you mean?”

“i dunno,” he starts, thinking as his lips press to the back of your neck. “i guess i’d be confused by us too,” he mutters against your skin.

“how so?” you press, turning in his hold, gazing up at him. his eyes are more than used to the dark now as he gazes back down at you. you’re tucked right up to him, the covers strewn over your lower halves. he rests his temple on his palm, elbow pressed into the mattress as you fiddle with his fingers. “what’s confusing?”

he shrugs as best he can, watching his hand in yours. “i dunno,” he repeats, grinning when you huff. “i just- i think it’s hard for people to get that i’m your friend,” he tries, “just your friend.”

“what else would you be?” what else? what else?!

“i dunno,” he repeats for the third time, though he knows exactly what you’d be. but you don’t need to know that. not when you seemed so happy, so satisfied with how things are already. and that’s what’s most important to him. your happiness. and jaemin couldn’t exactly say he wasn’t happy with how things are either, he just knows there could be more to you both, more to this. more to him than being your best friend. but maybe it’s for another night. like he tells himself every time you push a topic you’re not remotely ready to breach. “let’s forget it-”

“no,” he flinches, just preparing to settle down for sleep. “am i missing something? if i am, just tell me.”

“i-” he drops his forehead to yours then. he’s so close, your eyes have to cross just for you to see him. it’s only when he rises you see a change in him. a nervous jaemin isn’t one you’re use to. it’s one that you would rather never see, it truly worries you. especially as he agrees, a small “okay,” leaving him before he kisses the tip of your nose, his lips barely puckered as they meet the skin. he grins as he does, his teeth gleaming in the moonlit room, his eyes open just wide enough to see you. his lips drop to your cheek, warming as your skin does. he hovers there as your hand tightens on his arm, clinging to him. he daren’t move, afraid the slightest jolt will wake him, drag him right out of this sleepless dream. when your grip loosens, he drops his head until he’s right by your mouth, his lips daringly puckering before he presses them to the corner of your lips. he stills as yours do too, your soft lips, now embalmed in his memory, pressing there ever so gently before he rises once more. he waits a second, watching the smallest of shivers rack through you before he dips again, lips falling to your neck. he smiles against your skin, overjoyed as you subtly crane your neck. his teeth drag over your skin as he journeys down the column of your neck, your hands gripping onto him a touch harder when he stops.

his fingers glide along the skin of your side, thumb pressing into the dip of your waist. he stops short of your chest, locked mid motion as he watches you breathe. there is no haste in his movements. no need to rush anything. no need to hurry. all there is, is a beat. a steady one in his chest. one that holds him here, one where he can’t move, can’t bring himself to test the waters you’ve just dared he enter. not even as the pads of your fingers glide along the warm skin of his neck, nails dragging through his nape, silently daring him to move. he pants over your chest, a lazy grin pulling at his mouth as you ask him again-

“what else would you be, jaem?”

he moves unthinkingly. as his dampened lips meet the hardened nub through your t-shirt, sucking on you through the aged material. his rolls his teeth gently, his fingers at your side finding your neglected nipple as you whine out for him. he feels himself slipping into delirium, caught somewhere between a dream and reality, unsure where exactly he’d rather be. he decides it doesn’t matter, not when you’re there. here. with him. letting him touch you in ways he never really thought possible. ways jaemin only ever imagined, only ever let himself surrender to in the dead of night. in the solitude of his own shameful company. he never thought of this. not really.

he had hoped, maybe even prayed, but never truly believed he’d have you whimpering for him. your fingers falling in the gaps between his own, pressing his open palm harder against your thinly veiled heat, your hips rolling against it. jaemin never thought he’d hear your whines, the sound cutting through him like knives, like ice shooting through his veins. he never thought you’d want him. not like this.

“jaem,” he’s with you in seconds, his spit slick lips an inch above yours. he watches patiently as you grind up against his hand, feeling his fingers prod at your desperate heat.

“you wanna know what else i could be?”

you nod. “please.”

“i could be yours.”

#i haven’t got the range #also i have jaemin on the brain and friendship too!#meet me at the altar #ncitygirls #na jaemin #jaemin #jaemin x reader #jaemin smut #jaemin fluff #nct x reader #nct dream #nct dream smut #nct dream fluff #nct smut #nct fluff #needs another proofread #enjoy!

528 notes · View notes

timextoxhajima · 3 years

Text

Not For Sale: Week 15 [Epilogue]

NOT FOR SALE CHAPTER NAVIGATION

Member: Heeseung + Jay [ft. Sunghoon and Jake]

Pairings: [fem] uni exchange student! reader x uni student! HS x uni student! Jay

Warnings: swearing like once

Word Count: 2.7k words

Synopsis/Quote: In which your oblivious ass cannot tell that a popular boy in your class has a big, fat crush on you | “It seems like the one who was ruined was me.”

Taglist: @hyunjaethereal @seasideheeseung @wooya1224 @gratefulmaria @sunshineshouchan @youreverydayzebra @fayqj @witheeseung @haechanhues @w-o-o-y-a-a @miingxuxi @reallysmolrenjun @hrrhmay-primaryblog @rosie112703 @ac-ewow @liliansun @littlewolfieposts [drop me a dm/ask/comment to be added!]

"Are you sure you don't want to stay for another week? I can extend the apartment rental for you."

Taping the final box shut, the only things left unpacked were your iPad and laptop that would go into the duffel bag to be brought onto the bus. Everything else goes into the moving truck that would arrive later in the day you reach home.

You sit back on your heels, knees adjacent to the box before you push it away. "Me staying isn't gonna make Heeseung wake up earlier, so."

With a gentle grunt, you push yourself to your feet and turn to face your father. "Thanks, but I'll just stick to going home tomorrow."

He looks down at you, obviously aware that you would want to stay if you hadn't had a home to go back to; if you knew Heeseung would wake up in the next few days.

"Alright," He nods and gives you a pat on the shoulder. "Let me know if you want to stay, okay? The apartment rental's up for extension until the end of the week, so..."

"Mhm."

“Okay,” Sliding his palm off your shoulder, he turns on his heels and walks out of your room. “I’m heading back to school to handle some administration matters. You’re going to the hospital?”

“Yeah,” With a lack of energy, you reach down to pick your purse up.

“Okay. I’ll see you at dinner?”

“I’m probably eating with Jake and Hoon and Jay if he’s well.”

“Then I’ll come by with breakfast tomorrow morning and you should get your stuff packed by then, yeah? Your bus is at 11am.”

“Mhm.”

“Okay, tell your friends I said hi.”

You give him one more nod before he steps out the door, and lets it close behind him.

It’s bustling at the new ward, now that Jay’s fully awake and shifted to another one. And when you walk in, the entire room dies down as Jay’s attention shrinks onto you. Everybody in the room kind of turns and looks at you, some smirking because they think you and Jay have something going on and some others trying to get the remainder of the crowd out of the room.

They probably know you’re on their special visitors’ list.

“Hi, I hope I’m not interrupting anything-”

“No! Of course not,” Jay manages to sit up, carefully putting away the ‘get well soon’ gifts and fruit baskets his friends have brought him. Jay spots the little card and the bag of cookies (the same brand as the one he bought you earlier in the semester) in your hands, eyes falling but the smile still cemented to his lips.

“Alright guys, out of the room now,” Only now did you realise Jake was in the room.

“Aw, man!”

“Come on!”

“Out,” Sunghoon reiterates as he comes into the ward, eyes on the floor and rolling as he waves the crowd out of the room. You raise your brows, teasingly annoyed at Jay as his friends shift past you, a few of them greeting you and giving you a pat on the back.

The last person to leave is Jake, glancing over to Sunghoon and to you and Jay, then takes the initiative to close the door behind him as he finishes up on the visitors who they had just invited out of the ward.

“Tomorrow right?”

You raise a brow at him, grabbing a chair and sitting down by his bed after leaving his bag of cookies on the little nightstand by his bed. “Thought it was common trivia and knowledge.”

“Wanted to make sure I didn’t make a mistake,” Jay shakes his head and pulls his feet in under his hands. “Have you packed?”

“Yeah, my bus is at 11am tomorrow at the terminal. Movers’ coming to get my boxes then.”

“And your dad?”

“Sending me to the terminal and making sure my stuff gets driven out of the city safely.”

The whir of the machinery in the room and the lights hum when the silence befalls them.

“He’s doing okay, by the way.”

“Hm?” You look up from your hands, meeting Jay’s eyes.

“Heeseung,” He whispers. “He’s out of danger. Doctors say he should be waking up soon. Stay if you can.”

Turning back to your hands and your fingers, you can’t help but reminisce Heeseung’s voice in your head. The scent of cotton candy wafting off him the first day you met him when you had to wake him up from his lecture nap, or having him chase you in the rain when you screwed your test over and when you got rid of that pinch of cream (or was it icing sugar?) off the corner of his lips when you brought the pastries you could finish.

“No,” You mumble under your breath, but obviously loud enough for Jay to hear you - he turns upon the rejection. “Me staying isn’t going to make him wake up any faster so.”

“But you’d be the first person he’d want to see when he wakes up, especially since he knows you’re leaving.”

The weight presses into your lungs.

“Yeah, I- I don’t think I can do that to him. Wait for him to wake up, then say ‘bye’ afterwards?” You shake your head and offer a weary smile. “Nah.”

Jay parts his lips, wanting to say something, but he stops himself. He’s smart enough to know you’d have an argument to his baseless attempt to convince you again.

“Hm,” He offers a weak smile. “Okay then, whatever you think is best for yourself. I say that as genuine as I can afford.”

A pause.

“Will you come back and visit?”

“Sure,” You grin at him, looking up and nodding. “What kind of person would I be if I left and didn’t come back to visit?”

“Good,” Jay smiles, then reaches out in an attempt to nudge your arm.

But the reminder that you won’t get this for who-knows-how-long hits you again, so you instinctively stand and throw your arms around him, momentarily resting your head into the side of his.

“Thank you for taking care of me this sem.”

“Of course,” He lowers his voice and reaches up to brush the hair on your back. “Anything for you.”

Jake and Sunghoon were standing at the bus terminal entrance by the time your dad had gotten you there. Both of them sprung to their feet upon the sight of the car that had been showing up at the hospital once every two to three days in the last week.

“Did not know you two would be here,” You tease, pulling your haversack out of the car with you as they greet your father.

“I volunteered. He’s here in place of Jay,” Jake holds a palm to his chest and slams the other one into Sunghoon’s back.

“Shut up,” Sunghoon rolls his eyes. “Jay couldn’t be here so he wanted us to give you this.”

You look down at the bag that’s held out, and it’s a box of printed polaroids that the group of you have taken in the time spent together. He even threw in a few polaroids with Sunghoon and Jake with their well-wishes written on the back.

“That’s cute,” You smile as you run your fingers through the pictures. “Thank you.”

Jake smiles warmly at you, before hugging you with an absence of hesitance. Then while resting your chin in his shoulder, you look up at Sunghoon and raise an arm, awkwardly holding an arm out to him under Jake’s.

“Don’t say we didn’t invite you into a group hug.”

Jake lifts his arm as well, beckoning Sunghoon in. But then Sunghoon sighs, taking a step forward and allowing Jake to find the material of his plaid shirt, dragging him into the hug.

“Sunghoon won’t admit it but we’ll miss you.”

“Aw, I’ll miss you guys too,” Now slightly breathless from how tightly Jake was holding you, your voice comes out a little strained, and Sunghoon hears it.

“Alright,” He shifts backwards, breaking Jake’s hold on you. “We’ll have to go back soon.”

“Yeah, no, of course,” You pull away fully, smiling at the both of them as you retreat back to your father’s side. “Take care of Jay and Heeseung.”

“We will, don’t worry.”

“Bye.”

“Bye, y/n!” He raises a hand and waves when your father nods you towards the bus.

“Bye, Jake! Bye, Hoon!”

“Bye!”

“You sure you don’t wanna-”

“No, I’m fine.”

You turn on your heels and tighten your grip around your bagstraps, looking up at your father and finally feeling the understanding that’s settled between the two of you. He’s grown to realise you have your thoughts and feelings and you now know that had this sem not happened, you wouldn’t have improved your relationship with him.

Albeit almost at the cost of two new friends, but they’re fine. Hopefully.

“Alright, your mom will be waiting for you at the terminal there, yeah?”

“Mhm. Byeol too,” The bus driver greets you and your father as you pause at the foot of the steps. “Take care of yourself and come home during the holidays.”

“I’ll have that arranged somehow. I’m sure you’d like to come back here to visit too.”

“Yeah.”

“Alright, call me when you reach, okay?” He wraps his arms around your shoulders, dipping his nose into your head and kissing the crown of your head.

“Okay.”

“Bye, hun.”

“Bye, dad.”

The bus was relatively empty, besides a few others your age - probably exchange students too or something - so you easily find a window seat on the side your father was waiting, and in the distance, Jake and Sunghoon were waving to you eagerly.

So you wave back, listening to the doors of the bus hiss shut after the bus driver calls for final checks. Your father finally steps back and walks toward the two boys, awkwardly holding his hands behind his back as Jake grabs Sunghoon to wave his hand right after the latter put it down.

The bus driver pulls the gear into drive mode, and the vehicle jerks off to a start. Gently pursing your lips, you wave to them until they were out of sight.

By the time the bus had exited the terminal, the afternoon sun had covered the roads and trees and the tops of peoples head with bright yellow rays. It feels weird, to be alone after 14 weeks of being accompanied.

If you weren’t with Jay then you were probably with Heeseung and if you weren’t in school studying with either of them, you were back in the apartment probably yelling at Byeol (or the other way round).

Shoving the earbuds into your ears, your first instinct is to play all the songs Heeseung had performed to during the concert. There was the consideration to lean your head against the glass window but the bus was vibrating too much - would probably give you a headache.

The music trances you into sleep, vision behind your eyes only remembering Heeseung in the rain or when he sends you back to the apartment or when he dragged you into the archives room in the staff office. A smile surfaces on your lips before you drift off to sleep.

You’re awoken by the abrupt change in music on your phone - you had set a specific song as your caller ringtone and so when your favourite BTS song had been harshly interrupted by a 1975 song, you’re jolted awake into realising the bus had made it halfway from the city and back home.

Your blurred vision manages to process Jake’s caller ID, and you pick it up after clearing your throat.

“What’s up?”

“...y/n,” It’s a hoarse voice - a familiar one - but not the type you wouldn’t recognise. Your eyes widen and you sit up immediately, vision clearing as the sun billows across your face and the seats.

“Heeseung, oh my God. Are you okay? How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine,” He pauses and clears his throat. His voice is weak and he’s sniffling but he’s alive and that’s all that matters. “Have you reached?”

“Um, no,” You look out the window again and at the road signs. “I think I’m about halfway through actually. There’s gonna be a pitstop soon before they make the hour’s journey back home.”

“That’s good,” He croaks. “I’m sorry I was too late.”

“No, God, no,” You grimace to yourself, part filled with happiness and part upset that you chose to leave as per normal. Had you chosen the evening bus instead, you would’ve been able to hold him before you left. “What’s important is that you’re safe and you’re alright.”

“Yeah, well... I wish I could’ve gotten up faster. At least see you off.”

“No, no, it’s fine. We can like- Facetime or something, video call. Technology’s pretty great nowadays, y’know.”

Heeseung manages a laugh, and you can hear Jake, Sunghoon and Jay in the same room as him.

“A-anyway, I’ve gotta go. Doc want to run some checks. Text me when you’re home? I should be able to get my phone back to life by then.”

“Yeah, sure. Please take care of yourself?”

“Don’t worry, y/n! We’ll take care of him just fine!”

“Great,” You smile to yourself, not realising your eyes had been coated with a layer of tears. “Bye, Heeseung.”

“Bye, y/n. I’ll see you soon.”

And with that you pull the phone away from your ear the same time you can hear more people enter the ward, eyes gleaming in the reflection of your phone screen when you lock it.

The mid-afternoon sun is bright and warm when you reach the terminal back at home, and you’re greeted with Byeol throwing herself onto your back while you were facing the opposite way. She showed up with your mother, so she happily drives the three of you to your favourite cafe for a tea break before heading home.

It feels like a movie - coming home to be with the people you’ve always loved while leaving the ones you find love with - nonetheless, you were happy that everything had seemed to be alright now. It’s what you would’ve liked to have anyway.

[1 MONTH LATER]

“Get matching hairbands with me,” Byeol picks up a red Elmo one then pulls a blue Kookie Monster one off the metal hook.

“That’s so lame and it’s so expensive,” You lock your phone and whine at her, trying to pull her out of the souvenir store. “It’s not like you haven’t been here before.”

“Ugh, you’re such a spoil sport.”

When you finally manage her to get out of the store, there are small crowds moving past, almost like in slow motion.

You glance around, craning your neck over the heads of people (if you can) while Byeol yawns and takes out her phone to take a shot of the theme park.

“So, which one are we going to first?”

You part your lips in a bid to reply, but then your eyes catch sight of a familiar head of hair, and his nose and his lips and your heart swells with glee. His eyes are darting about as well - obviously looking for something - but he catches your gaze through the crowd and stops.

He smiles.

“Hey, what are you looking at-” And the second familiar voice gasps as an interruption to his own words, then he processes the person by you and realises what this day was about.

“Hello? Earth to y/n? What are you doing?” Byeol steps over to bump shoulders with you, and attempts to trace your line of sight. “Wait a fucking minute. Is that-”

“That’s Jay.”

“And Heeseung. What in the world are they doing here?”

“Well,” You turn and smirk at her, knowing that Heeseung was already dragging Jay over. “Heeseung’s here for me and our companies are for each other.”

“What? Oh, Hell no!”

#enhypennetwork #enhypen scenarios #enhypen imagines #enhypen fluff #enhypen angst #enhypen x reader #heeseung scenarios #heeseung imagines #heeseung fluff #heeseung angst #heeseung x reader #jay scenarios #jay imagines #jay fluff #jay angst #jay x reader

69 notes · View notes

viastro · 4 years

Text

third of december | joshua hong

ミ★ synopsis: i still remember, third of december. me in your sweater, you said it looked better on me than it did you. OR: in which joshua gives you his sweater on the first snowfall of the year.

ミ★ genre: slice of life!au, uni!au, fluff, some humor

ミ★ warnings: none

ミ★ word count: 2,922

ミ★ pairings: joshua hong x gender neutral reader

ミ★ notes: hi guys! in honor of it being the third of december, i decided to write this oneshot based off of that line in conan gray’s song - heather. i made this a joshua oneshot because i felt bad... for the wonwoo one... so this hopefully makes up for it :D i also love joshua’s platinum hair. i love him. i hope he’s doing well. as always, make sure to give joshua lots of love! i hope you guys like this one even tho it’s kinda short and i just wrote this in the span of an hour !

It’s cold, you think to yourself as you walk to the next building that holds your class on campus. Rubbing the goosebumps raising on your arms, you glance around at your surroundings as music floods through your Airpods. You let out a sigh to see if you can see your breath, and you purse your lips when it condensates before your eyes.

I should’ve brought an extra jacket, you curse quietly, only to stop when you hear a beautiful laugh resonate through the small crowd of people heading to their next class. Your head perks up, and you look across campus to see a bright head of platinum hair walking in your direction as he talks to his friend. Your heart twirls in your chest when he turns his head, and you find that his beautiful laugh matches his gorgeous facial features.

Immediately you look down at the ground and try to walk faster towards your class, feeling awkward as you were basically just gawking at his beauty. Your face feels warm, but your hands are cold as you walk in the mid-November weather.

You hear his voice as he gets closer, but you continue to stare down at the cobblestone as you walk. You find that his voice is incredibly pleasant as well, and you wonder how a human being can be so beautiful, causing the thoughts of the coldness of your hands to come to a halt.

“Are you sure you wanna work on the melody? I can work on it if you want.” Joshua offers as the two head towards the direction of the cafe. Jeonghan rolls his eyes, having heard this five times in the span of the two hour lecture they just got out of.

“Joshua, I already told you that if you really wanna make the melody then you can do it. I don’t mind writing lyrics.” Jeonghan replies with a grin, and Joshua lets out an apologetic smile. “Sorry Hannie, I just hate writing lyrics.”

“I know Joshua, but sometimes you need to practice...” Joshua tunes out the rest of Jeonghan’s lecture when he turns his head to look forward, only to pause when he lays eyes on you. Time comes to a slow when he sees you glance up from the ground for a moment, and his heart fills with warmth even in this cold November weather.

He stops and turns his head in your direction when you walk past him, watching as you shrink within the crowd as you most likely head to your next class. Jeonghan chuckles when he follows Joshua’s line of sight, knowing that his best friend has just developed a crush. With this newfound knowledge, he nudges Joshua’s shoulder, causing the blonde to snap out of his trance.

“You good?”

“Do you know who they are?” Joshua asks in a quiet voice, and Jeonghan turns his head, seeing that you’re no longer in sight. He shrugs, “I’ve never spoken to them.”

Joshua nods his head, looking obviously disappointed as they turn back towards the direction of the cafe. Jeonghan chuckles, patting Joshua’s shoulder after a moment of his friend staying quiet. Joshua glances at the brunette, and he watches as a grin etches itself onto his face. “Since they were heading in that direction today, it’s most likely that our paths will cross with theirs on Thursdays. You’ll see them next week.”

Joshua lets out a smile after a moment, and nods his head, now feeling excited to see you in a week. Jeonghan rolls his eyes, wrapping his arm around Joshua’s shoulders as they get closer to the cafe.

“You fall in love easily.” Jeonghan tells him, and Joshua purses his lips. He glances up at the cloudy sky, remembering the way your eyes sparkled when you briefly glanced up from the ground. And so he smiles and responds in a soft voice,

“They were pretty.”

I brought an extra jacket, but I forgot gloves. Fucking gloves, you think as you walk across campus once again. You let out a sigh, watching as your breath condensates before your very eyes once again. Beginning to curse to yourself for forgetting the gloves on your table, you pick up the pace so that you can make it to the warmth of your building quicker.

That plan comes to an immediate stop when you hear his voice, and you find yourself walking slower to be able to cherish the sound. Glancing up in the direction of his voice, you see him listening attentively as his friend animatedly speaks to him. You let out a small smile, thinking that he’s rather cute when he smiles.

You suck in a breath when he turns his head and locks eyes with you when your paths are about to cross. You want nothing more than to look away and act as if he didn’t catch you staring fondly at him, but his catlike eyes have you intrigued. He finally lets out a smile and stops walking when the two of you are right beside each other, and he turns towards you.

You find yourself doing the same thing, internally screaming to yourself as you wonder how you were able to muster the courage to not run away when he turned to you. The blonde extends his hand in your direction, “Hi, I’m Joshua Hong.”

Biting the inside of your cheek, you reach out and softly grasp his warm hand with your cold one, giving it a slight shake. “Hi, I’m yln yn.”

Joshua’s eyebrows furrow slightly when you let go, and he reaches into his jacket pockets. You move to apologize for how cold your hand was, only to stop when he holds out a pair of purple gloves for you. Glancing up at his face, you catch the redness to his nose as he mutters, “It’s cold, make sure to wear these.”

You let out a small smile, “Are you sure? These are yours, and you barely know me.” You tell him softly, and Joshua chuckles, nodding his head in reassurance. He pushes them in your direction again, and you shyly take them from his grasp. “Thank you.”

You slide them on, letting out a happy sigh when you feel the warmth of the gloves on your fingers. Joshua smiles, “Want me to walk you to class?”

“I thought we were gonna go to the caf-” Joshua quickly elbows Jeonghan in the stomach, making the latter double over in pain from the impact. The brunette quietly curses Joshua and his powerful elbows, wondering why the fuck his elbow felt so sharp.

Your eyes widen slightly in concern at Joshua’s friend, and the blonde waves his hand at you with a grin, obviously one that’s trying to hold back a laugh. “He’s fine.”

“I’m dying.”

“You’re fine.”

“Fuck you.”

Joshua flashes you a smile after patting Jeonghan on the back, and you end up giggling at the whole interaction. You shake your head ‘no’ at his offer, “It’s okay. It’s all the way across campus, and you already gave me these gloves. You’ve done more than enough.”

Joshua’s heart falls slightly, but he nods his head, respecting your decision. He prepares to say bye, only to stop when you say, “We can hangout some other time, though.”

He nods his head immediately in agreement, and you giggle at the sight of it. So you nod your head back at him, before waving your hand, “See you later Joshua, make sure to be nice to your friend.”

Joshua chuckles as he waves back at you, watching as you begin to walk away “I’m always nice.”

“Say that to my two broken ribs.” Jeonghan wheezes from behind you, and you let out a bright smile when you hear the pair begin to squabble.

You walk towards your class with a happy heart, and warm hands.

“Did you hear that it’s gonna snow tomorrow?” You glance over towards the blonde, finding him playing with your switch on the floor of your apartment as you do homework on the couch.

“December 3rd? That’s kinda early in the month.” You tell Joshua right as he lets out a groan for losing in smash bros. You watch as the pretty man shrugs his shoulders, preparing to restart the round, “Can’t believe you’re more concerned that it’s early rather than the fact that we still have to go to classes.”

“That’s cause I work better when I’m actually in the classroom rather than online classes.” You say, rolling your eyes when Joshua waves his hand away at you.

“Didn’t a girl slip and fall on the icy ground last year?” Joshua nods aimlessly in response before telling you that she’s still in talks of suing the university. Pursing your lips and nodding your head in agreement for wanting to sue the school, you glance back towards your textbook.

You and Joshua did end up hanging out some other time. Almost everyday after classes to be exact. Usually it’s you, Jeonghan, and Joshua, but Jeonghan had an evening class to go to today. You weren’t originally going to hangout with Joshua, but he invited himself to your apartment to be able to play with your switch since Jeonghan broke his.

Jeonghan is still repenting.

You’ve discovered that not only is Joshua incredibly pretty and has a nice voice, but his personality is beautiful as well. Over the last couple weeks, your crush on him has only developed even further with the time you’ve spent with him.

The same goes for Joshua, who has found himself thinking of you more often than not. From the fact that your eyes sparkle when you smile at him, to the way you practically inhale two cups of ramen in a span of fifteen minutes. He’s absolutely amazed by you.

“You wanna order food?” You ask after a few minutes of silence between you, except for the diverse amount of sound effects coming from your TV. Joshua pauses the game and turns towards you with a knowing smile, causing you to let out a laugh.

“Did you even have to ask?” Joshua responds, and you roll your eyes.

“Thai food?” He nods his head in agreement, and the two of you settle on what dishes you both want, as well as what you’ll save for Jeonghan. Once that’s figured out, you place the order and receive the wait time of 30-45 minutes.

“Does this mean you’re gonna take a break from your homework?” Joshua asks after that’s done, and you purse your lips in thought, before nodding your head.

“I’ll beat your ass in super smash bros.” You tease, and the blonde rolls his eyes fondly at you as you settle down onto the floor beside him. He hands you your other controller, and the two of you begin a competitive round of smash bros.

During the middle of the round, Joshua sneaks glances at you, watching as you laugh when you accidentally make your character fall off the platform. His eyes sparkle at the way your face brightens when you fight his character, to the pout of your lips as you begin to concentrate.

Feeling Joshua’s eyes on you for the sixth time, you pause the game and turn to face him with a teasing smile. “Do you think I’m pretty? You keep-”

You freeze at the close proximity between your faces, and you watch as Joshua’s eyes widen slightly. The two of you stare into each other's eyes for a moment, searching for an answer. To what question? At this moment, you can only think of one.

are we about to kiss?

Your answer comes to you when his eyes trail down to your lips. Your eyes slowly flutter shut when he leans in slightly, and Joshua ingrains the visual in his mind, finding you the most beautiful thing he’s ever laid eyes on as he slowly leans in.

bzzz

The two of you jump apart at the sound of your apartment buzzer, and you quickly reach for your phone, seeing that the food is here. Joshua quickly scrambles up off the floor and walks over to your door without another word, and you rest a hand over your heart, feeling it violently pound against your chest.

While Joshua’s cheeks are tinged a pretty shade of pink as he grabs the takeout food, wondering if the two of you would’ve actually kissed if you weren’t interrupted by the Thai food. However, it seems that his question won’t be answered as he walks back into your living room with a small smile.

“Let’s eat.”

Joshua literally told me it was going to snow and I decided to wear a t-shirt and a jacket? Am I stupid? You begin to genuinely question whether or not you have any brain cells as you walk across campus. The snow begins to fall around you as you head to class, and you quietly curse yourself for being so distracted in the morning to have forgotten the weather.

The almost kiss keeps replaying in your head. From the moment Jeonghan came to your apartment after class and began to eat with you guys, to the time he and Joshua left to head back to their apartment. This was all you thought about even until this morning, and it’s all you’re thinking about now.

stupid! stupid! stupid!

Your head perks up when you hear Joshua and Jeonghan laughing, and you find the two dressed warmly as they walk in your direction. Your heart thumps against your chest when Joshua glances up and locks eyes with you, only to internally panic when he immediately frowns.

oh god, he hates me.

“Yn, I told you it was snowing today. Where’s your sweater?” Joshua asks when him and Jeonghan get closer to you. You bite the inside of your cheek, trying to come up with an answer that doesn’t sound like,

oh, you know Joshua. I was too busy being distracted by the fact that you almost kissed me last night, that i forgot to dress like a human being that DOESN’T wanna get hypothermia. haha. hahahaha. hahahahahahahahaha. Pain.

“I forgot.” You mutter, feeling embarrassed about your stupidity. Jeonghan snickers at you, thinking the whole ordeal is rather hilarious, and you shoot him a death glare, to which he immediately stops chuckling.

You turn back towards Joshua when you see him zipping open his backpack, and your eyes widen slightly when he pulls out an extra sweater from his bag. Jeonghan grins to himself, watching as Joshua holds it out in your direction.

“What?” You ask, and Jeonghan lets out a quiet sigh of disappointment at your lack of understanding context clues when it comes to real life scenarios. Joshua shakes the sweater, “Put this on. That jacket won’t help much, you need layers.”

You bite the inside of your cheek, before handing Jeonghan your bag, and Joshua your jacket. You slip on the sweater over your head, and feel your face fill with warmth when you realize how much larger it is on you rather than Joshua.

Joshua’s cheeks turn pink at the sight of you wearing his sweater, and he immediately hands you your jacket. You take it from his grasp and slip it on, before taking back your backpack from Jeonghan. You gesture to yourself, “So, what do we think?”

“Looks better on Joshua-” Jeonghan immediately gets elbowed in the stomach, causing him to double over. Joshua gives you a shy smile, and you bite back a laugh.

“You look pretty.” Joshua tells you softly, taking note of the way the snowflakes rest on your head, and the held back laughter goes away as you feel yourself growing more shy at the fondness in his voice. You look down at the ground, coughing into your shoulder as you prepare to leave to head towards your building once again.

“Thank you for the sweater, Joshua. I’ll see you and Jeonghan after class.” You tell him, and you wave at the doubled over Jeonghan, before turning to go to class. You pause when you feel a hand softly grasp your wrist, and you turn around to see Joshua right behind you. Raising an eyebrow you ask, “What?”

Joshua doesn’t respond, instead biting the inside of his cheek nervously as he stares at you. You move to ask what’s wrong, only to be stopped when he leans in and presses a quick kiss to your lips. “I’ll see you later, yn.”

And with that, Joshua immediately turns around and walks away, ignoring Jeonghan’s teasing from behind him as he follows after the blonde. Warmth floods your senses, and you slowly raise a hand up to your lips, smile slowly breaking itself out onto your face as you watch the blonde disappear.

You feel warm.

“You brought that sweater just for yn, didn’t you?” Jeonghan teases as the two walk towards the cafeteria, and Joshua nods his head.

“I knew they’d forget to dress warmly even though I told them it was gonna snow.” Joshua responds, smiling softly at the way the bright orange complimented your skin beautifully. It was a nice contrast to the white snow surrounding you as it fell from the sky.

“You just wanted to see them in your clothes.” Jeonghan says with a chuckle, wrapping his arm around Joshua’s shoulders as they push through the doors, feeling warmth flood their bodies. Joshua nods his head, not even denying it as he smiles to himself.

“They look better in it than I do.”

429 notes · View notes

heshoes · 3 years

Text

She was his best friend and they shared everything together already anyway. What difference would it make if it were a hat, shampoo, or the same bed sometimes? So what? That's what the Uni Daze were about, having fun, traditions, getting serious, new relationships, friendships, heart ache, break-ups, make ups, secrets, the occasional/casual bajingo here and there, and possibly, just maybe, finding the love of your life and hoping that it all works out.

Warnings: smut, slow burn, angst, mentions of abortion, mentions of verbal abuse

Harry Styles x OC (Face claim Zendaya)

Uni Daze Masterlist

Chapter 2 ( Word Count 6.7K )

Harry

My school day was absolutely long but it kept me busy and busy to me is a good thing. It keeps me balanced though I know Chelle would disagree since he keeps telling me as such over the phone.

"The only reason you think that trying to fit 72 hours in a 24 hour day is a balance is because of your parents. Just because they're work driven arseholes doesn't mean that you have to follow in their footsteps.”

"That's impossible to do, I don't work that much. My parent's aren't arsehole's they're just successful. Is that so wrong to want success?”

"It is when its your last year of uni and you're being a kill joy.”

"I said I would go out for drinks, Chelle. How is my compliance to something that I don't want to do being a kill joy?”

"Because you're not doing it with a smile. You've become boring. Your sex life and your regular life has turned about as vanilla as a middle aged man. We never had to beg you to come out last year or over the summer, Harrow. Think of it as a week of extended holidays. No one does anything the first week of classes anyway. It's all rules and instructions on how to prepare. We've been in uni for three years. We should know the jist of it by now.”

"But it's not summer anymore, Chelle and you know some professors like to give assignments in the first few days. We have two papers already in seminar for fucks sake.”

Michelle sighed in annoyance.

"Yeah, but, those aren't due for ages, Haz. Fun is due right now.”

"This is the year to pull your shit together. Everyone can't not study and get perfect marks like you. Sorry.”

"The phrase 'can't not' is a double edged sword.”

"What?" I spun around in my desk at work, handing a first year her keys. Its only the first day and she's already lost her keys and has to use her spare for a fifty pound charge. She looks nervous as well and her face is kind of red. She grins at me and says a shy 'thank you' before walking away, staring back at me and kind of tripping over her own feet on her way to the lift. I tried not to laugh, but honestly it was kind of funny.

"You know, a double edged sword? A double negative?You can't say 'can't not' next to each other in a sentence. It's repetitive of itself. You should be embarrassed. This is primary school stuff Harrow. Mr. “I have to take the UKCAT this year.”"

"Whatever Chelle! See? That's what I mean. I need a balance. I need to be able to be involved in school. I should have taken it more serious when we first started out.”

"You do realize balance means a good amount of your job, school work, AND a social life which includes parties and pubs and going out with your mates without a grumble?”

"I'm going out for drinks tonight! You're starting to piss me off."

"If the truth is anything it's annoying, Harry." I nodded my head and began to swivel around in my chair. I'd just gotten to work and had three and a half more hours to go. I'm glad I have a job and all but this one is fucking boring.

Speaking of truth.

"Do the boys know about your um...your new team?”

"No. Actually they don’t."

Oh.

“Oh?"

"Yeah, um, I was hoping that it was something that we could keep between me and you for now. Just until I can figure things out. I'd love to say that I'm for sure just this one thing. I know I said it this morning, but I'm still not sure, okay?”

"Yeah. Sure, of course." I stopped spinning in my seat and dizzying myself when I heard my manager's voice,"Look I've gotta go. I'm not supposed to be on the phone and my boss is coming.”

"Oh so there is some rebellion left in you? You're living on the edge now, Hazland. Why can't you use your phone? All you do is sit in a chair and answer phones and make people keys when they lock themselves out of their dorm.”

"Bye Michelle!" I quickly hung up the phone and stuck it into my pocket smiling awkwardly at Professor Forrester as he approached the front desk with someone else right next to him. She had on a Cambridge work shirt much like myself letting me know that I more than likely wouldn't be alone for the rest of my shift.

"Rion, this is Harry," Professor Forrester spoke to her before addressing me, "today is her first day here at the university and working. I told her that she would be in good hands if I left her here with you. Show her the ropes and maybe show her around campus when you're not at work? I've got to go," Professor Forrester turned to face the new girl before he nodded back at me, "any questions you have, ask him. He'll know all of the answers.”

She nodded her head up and down slowly before giving a shy grin and we were left alone as Forrester left the building.

“Hi."

“Hello."

"I'm Harry.”

She laughed to herself before nodding her head at me.

"So I was told. Nice to meet you.”

Rion, I think her name was, sat down in her seat next to mine after speaking back to me, lowering her rucksack down to the ground before pulling out a book. It was a good idea really. Maybe I should have brought one? I barely get the chance to read, especially living with Michelle. She always finds a way to interrupt, either that or my ADD kicks in, all the more reason for me to put in more effort at school. I took out my phone once I knew that Forrester was gone, but I really had nothing to do with it. I had no new text messages besides Michelle.

Chelle: Drinksssssss 🍻🍺🍺🍺🍻🍻🍻😉

I grinned before shaking my head and replying back to her, something just as stupid as she sent me.

To Chelle: Tortureeeeeeee😣🔫🍺😒

Chelle: Dramatic!

Ignoring her last text, I took out my earphones and turned up the music on my phone as I placed them in my ears. I suppose it was a bit loud because out of the corner of my eye I could see Rion scrunching her nose while she tried to read.

"Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to disturb you.”

"No disturbance, I was just trying to figure the tune. Runaway?”

“Wh-what?"

She laughed before she pointed to the phone in my hand and repeated herself.

"Is that Runaway by Ed Sheeran?”

I nodded my head, not able to stop the stupid grin that cut across my face.

"You know Ed Sheeran that’s not on top 40?”

"Who doesn't? The man's a musical genius.”

She smiled at me before she turned back to her book, but I couldn't help but to keep talking to her.

"What school did you used to go to? Um, if you don't mind me asking…"

"Nope, don't mind at all. I used to go to Bristol Uni. How about yourself? Have you been at Cambridge all of your university career?”

I nodded my head and she looked impressed, but I'm sure she wouldn't be if she knew that I was a legacy and that I slacked off for the first three and a half years. Good thing that I'm getting my shit together now.

"Yeah, it’s alright here.”

"Just alright?”

"One of the best alrights I guess. Welcome to Cambridge and congratulations.”

"Thank you.”

I smiled at her and the conversation was on the verge of ending, but before I stuck my other ear bud in I paid closer attention to the book that she had in her hand.

"Scott Fitzgerald."

"Pardon?" Rion raised an eyebrow at me.

"That's F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

She raised her book showing me the spine, shocked that I hadn't seen the cover but still got the author right.

"You know F. Scott Fitzgerald?" She smiled at me while relaying my words back to me.

"Who doesn't? The man was a written genius. Not to mention that the book you're reading happens to be one of my favorites.”

She smiled again.

"Usually people only notice Fitzgerald if The Great Gatsby is involved." She turned her chair towards mine giving me a better view of her.

"Gatsby is a classic, but I think that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has more character.”

We continued to talk and before I knew it the shift was over. No one else needed keys and the phone barely rung. I probably would have stayed beyond the time that I was supposed to get off talking and creating awkward conversation with Rion had it not been for Michelle's reminders:

Chelle: Tonight is gonna be fun 😊

Chelle: You're off work in 1⃣5⃣ min🎉🎊

Chelle: I'm gonna get you so fucked up!😝

Chelle: I'm excited 😬

To Chelle: No 💩. Too excited I reckon 😐

I laughed to myself as I gathered my things to leave the building, not fully believing that I allowed Michelle to talk me into drinking tonight, even though part of me knew that I wouldn't be able to break tradition. Rion put her book away, that she never really got into reading and followed behind me out the door and to the parking lot. She seemed cool from what I got to know about her in the amount of time that I did and since she's new, I figure that it wouldn't hurt to ask.

"Hey, a couple of my friends and I are getting together tonight to The Mill. Its a pub right up the road on Mill lane, if you're not busy, you should, um, you should come.”

"Mill pub? On a Monday?”

"Yeah, it's kind of a tradition that we started when we started here." I rub my shoulder as I wait for her answer. I don't know why I feel nervous about it but I do.

"It sounds like fun, but I shouldn’t, not tonight at least. I wouldn't be able to bear it if I missed class tomorrow because of a hangover, and I kind of also have plans.”

"Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make it like you didn't have anything else to do or-”

"No it's fine it's just... I have a date.”

"Right. Sorry again.”

"I'll see you around though I hope?”

"Yeah, I'll see you at work.”

Rion nodded her head while giving me a content smile before she got into her car and as she pulled off, she waved to me. I waved back but as soon as her car was out of sight, I slapped myself in the face with the palm of my hand. Maybe six months is too long to go without any type of real interaction with the opposite sex besides Michelle, but honestly she doesn't count...or maybe she counts for both now?

I cleared my head of my thoughts as I got into my car that I feel like I'm too tall for. Even with the seat pushed down as low as it can go, I still can feel the top of my head brush against the roofing of it. By now I'm sure I've saved up enough to get a new one. A new car could be my mini treat to myself for cutting myself off from a social life. The more that I think about the way that my conversation with Rion just ended the more that I start to agree with Michelle and the more excited I get for the night of boozy tradition.

As soon as eleven thirty-five hit, my phone rang. When I answered it Michelle's voice came through clear as if she were sitting here next to me in the car, even though background noise and music blares in the room around her.

"Everyone is here but you. Are you en route?”

"Everyone?" I ask her with skepticism in my tone. I would be shocked if everyone showed up.

"Yes everyone. Niall, Darragh, and Zayn. Everyone but you. Are you on your way?”

I don't know why I even asked her if everyone would be there. I knew that Louis wouldn't show even though it was him and Darragh who started this tradition..

"Yeah, I'm on my way. This should be fun.”

"That's the spirit I've been looking for Harrow. It sounds like you've had a change of heart since earlier.”

"Yeah, I think I've been looking at my textbooks too long and not at real people. One night won't kill me I suppose.”

"If one night is done right, then yes, yes it will. And what do you mean you don't see real people? I see you everyday.”

"You're not a real person, Michelle. I'm not quite sure what you are yet.”

"I think I might have an idea by now." Michelle said while chuckling on the other end of the line.

"And what would that be?”

"Getting lucky tonight. Get here soon and I can be your wing-lady.”

The pub was in the early stages of being crowded when I got there and I couldn't deny how excited I was to see the boys, Michelle included even though I saw her only just this morning. The last time that we were all together was in the middle of June, but after that we really hadn't had time to hang out. Everyone had gotten busy and into their own things. Besides keeping in touch over the phone occasionally, we haven't really talked that much either.

The first person that I saw when I got in was Niall. He sat next to Darragh with a cigarette hanging from his lips, patting down his jeans in search of a lighter no doubt. When we made eye contact, he stuck his arms out to the side with his fingers spread wide and a smile on his face. Darragh looked at him as if he lost his mind until he followed Niall's line of vision and then quickly stood from his seat.

"Harry! How are you lad? Drinks are on Liam so order the most expensive thing possible.”

I received two claps on the back from each of them when I reached the table and then a smack on my ass that made me jump and then turn around find the guilty culprit. I should have known who it was straight away.

"Chelle! That actually hurt.”

She laughed at my discomfort with some kind of frothy drink in her hand as I grabbed my bum cheek and rubbed it over my jeans.

"Probably because there's barely any meat there to cushion the blow.”

I shook my head at her and squinted my eyes before I responded, "It's not about what's back there, its all about what's in the front. Girls don't date me for my bum.”

“Well, according to you, girls don't date you at all, not recently at least.”

Niall and Darragh started to laugh and a stream of smoke came through Niall's nose reminding me of an angry bull from a cartoon before he took another drag from his cigarette, this time intentionally blowing a ring of smoke before sucking it back in through his nostrils. I probably could have strangled Michelle in that moment, but it was true. My mind goes back to Rion and work and I can feel my cheeks burn with embarrassment.

"Mitch told us about your six month drought.”

"Stop calling me Mitch!”

Niall ignored Michelle's outburst before continuing, "She says you haven't gotten laid since your birthday.”

"Do you know what a penis fly catcher even looks like anymore?" Darragh added to Niall's teasing causing my nose to scrunch.

"Penis fly catcher?”

"Yeah, it's better than what you call it. What do you say again? Bajango?”

"No Darragh," Niall cuts in, "Django was a movie. He says bajingo. It makes sense to me.”

Michelle scrunches her nose in disgust and confusion at our conversation but doesn't say anything. Really though, what more could be added to this?

"It's not that big of a deal guys." I bring the conversation back to where it was before it drifted into a dark place so quickly. It can't be that bad. Can it? Perhaps it is? I don't even know at this point anymore.

"Oi leave him alone," Zayn chimed in as he walked up to the table with Liam with two beers in hand, passing me one before he sat down, "its alright Harry sex isn't everything...but six months is a long ass time. But enough about that. What has everyone been up to?”

It was almost like a show and tell as we went around the table talking about what we'd missed out on over the summer since we hadn't seen each other. Niall and Darragh went to Ibiza for the month of July staying in hostels and partying until all hours of the morning. Apparently Niall is in love with a girl he met there, but he doesn't remember her name so I don't know how accurate that is

Zayn spent a good amount of time in France with his girlfriend, sorry, fiancé. The fucker got engaged in France. Everyone thought that he and Daphne were gonna be a short lived thing since they met at a club and all, but people find love and fall in it in mysterious ways I guess. Michelle would be a prime example of that...but love is not involved with her apparently. A player not to be played anymore. I still have questions to ask her about that but I guess I'll have to wait until later since she doesn't want the guys to know that she's traded outies for innies. I could out her like she did me and my drought, but that's way more personal and I've decided that I'm not that much of an asshole, if I'm one at all that is.

Liam was arrested and his parents flipped out. For what I'm kind of scared to ask, but I'm sure it was something accidental. Sometimes I wonder how Liam even got into Cambridge, but I guess that they don't test for common sense, only book smarts.

When it got to Michelle's turn, she just talked about how she flew back home for a few weeks at the very start of summer to visit family and then came back here, but of course that's not anything that I didn't already know. When she came back was when I noticed all of the girlfriends that she had. It was odd to me because Michelle generally hated girls and hanging out with them, but then again, she obviously doesn't hate them that much.

When I told them that the most exciting part of my summer had been joining a book club for some work that I had to get ready to do for senior class, studying for the UKCAT that's not until the end of the school year, and sometimes coming here to Mill pub with Michelle I realized that what she said was true. My life had become vanilla, but I'm honestly kind of alright with it.

We continued to talk, share, laugh and drink until it was at least half three in the morning. I was waiting to see if Michelle was going to change her mind and let the lads know about her newfound liking but she kept it private between me and her the way that she said she would and it kind of made me smile. That along with the ridiculous amount of beer and shots consumed brought a goofy smile to my face by the end of the night.

By exactly three forty-five I was seeing double and couldn't drive home. Niall and Darragh had left to go back to their apartment that happened to be a few blocks down from ours, and Zayn and Liam stayed behind at the bar to drink deciding that they were too far gone now and might as well finish strong. They also decided that class tomorrow isn't important.

Michelle would have stayed behind with them I'm sure, but she has the tendency to be this odd motherly type when I get beyond the legal limit. I think she just likes to laugh at me because I start to say foolish things when my tongue loosens up in my mouth and my words slur. I tried to get up from the table discreetly so that I could walk home while Mitch, Zayn, and Liam continued to chat, but I knocked over a chair.

“Oh shit. I'm sorry bro." I chuckled to myself like an idiot as I picked up the chair earning the lads attention.

"Where are you going?" Michelle's eyes seemed to widen as she took in the state of me.

"Home. I've got class in the morrow-morning.”

"Do you honestly think that you're going to make it to class? Look at you, you can barely stand. My job is complete.” Michelle grins in triumph and I squint my eyes at her trying to figure out when she was going to tell me that she was a triplet.

"You're a horrible people and I don't know why we're friends." I think I was looking at her when I said it, but it could have very well been one of her sisters.

"Alright, and that's my cue. We'll see you later guys." Michelle spoke to Liam and Zayn as stood from the table, a little wobbly at best bus still in a better condition than I was in.

"You don't have to walk me home, Michelle. I'm not no kid.”

Michelle laughed as I stumbled, almost tripping on a crack in the pavement.

"Since I live there too I'm not technically walking you home. I'm walking home with you.”

I checked to see if my car was locked before we began our walk. The crisp early morning air sobered me up a bit, but I was still highly intoxicated and grinning.

"How was your first day of classes?" Michelle asked me breaking the silence of our trek back to our flat.

"Hmm, was okay. Good actually... I met this…met this girl.”

"You did? You were holding out on us at the pub! Who is it? Do I know who she is?”

"No, I don't think you do," I paused to hiccup hoping that was all that I had to do, "She's new here and you don't like girls. I mean, well, you know what I mean. You wouldn't know her.”

Michelle laughed while shaking her head.

“So it's a first year? I'm ashamed of you! I know you haven't dated in a while but that's sweeping the bottom of the barrel, Harrow.”

“No not a first year," hiccup "She's around my age, just new to Cambridge.”

“Oh," Michelle spoke putting her key in the door before she opened it "Where'd you meet her?”

“Work. I kind of asked her to come to the pub with me, but she said she had a date and I kind of sounded like a blubbering idiot when I asked her. I don't know.”

“Harry! You can't just invite people to come to the pub and we haven't met them yet! What if she was awful? Good thing she didn't come. That tradition is sacred for us. Whatever you said to her was probably fine. She just had other plans... Do you know why I've recently started calling you Harrow Harry?”

“Because it's one of the many odd nicknames you've created for me?”

“No. Harrow as in the adjective, it just so happens to fit with you. Har•row when used in verbal tense, means to cause distress to. You're causing unnecessary distress to yourself when you worry about things like the UKCAT and assignments that aren't due until the end of the year, and whatever you've said to this mystery bird that you've met at work. Fun. You used to be much less tense and more fun. You need to chill out and relax. You need to I don't know, get some maybe.”

I rolled my eyes before running my hand through my hair and walking into the kitchen, opening the cabinet in search of my favorite drunken snack, grabbing it when I found it and heading for my room. Quickly stripping off into my boxers, I fell against my bed before I turned on my television and got under the covers. I ate my snack in peace before Michelle knocked on my door twice and then let herself in.

"I could have been naked! you could at least wait for me to say come in.”

“Yeah well, its not like I've never seen a penis before and they're not really my main thing anymore you know?” Michelle climbed into bed with me, intruding while I tried to hide my snacks.

"What are you eating?”

“Nothing.” I slowed my chewing in hopes that she would lose interest.

"Harry I see them! Are those teddy grahams?”

“No!”

“They are! They're a snack for a five year old.”

“Teddy grahams don't have an age limit.”

“You should be embarrassed.” Chelle spoke before grabbing the box and taking a handful for herself, moving around too much for my drunken stomach to handle.

"Oohh these are nice. These are new sheets aren't they?”

"Chelle! Stop moving! Why are you in my room? Get out!”

“My room is too hot, so I've decided that we're going to have a sleepover. You get the better ventilation. You should trade with me.”

“What?”

“I'll sleep on the floor. It really is dreadful in my room.”

I sigh before I grab my pillows and comforter and toss them on the ground leaving Michelle the bed as I make my way to the floor.

“Aww Harry you're the sweetest, but I can really take the floor.”

“No, it's fine. Just don't do anything perverted while you're up there.”

“What like masturbate? I'm not you.”

I chuckled turning to face her from my position on the floor.

“Exactly, but if you do at least that I’m asleep first…Thats just common courtesy. ”

“Sure thing, Harlot. I can do that for you.” Michelle responded without pause causing me to chuckle before my head hit the pillow.

****

“ My head,” I groaned, waking up on the floor with my covers wrapped around me too tight much like a swaddling cloth. After successfully the blanket away from me in an attempt to escape confinement, I sat up slowly only to make the headache worse than it already was and add a new pain to the mix. “My back.”

I had almost forgotten that I slept on the floor to be nice and allowed Michelle to stay in my bed, but when I turned around to look at it I quickly discovered that she wasn't there. I could hear fumbling around in the kitchen and when I stood to follow the noise, the pounding in my head grew. When I reached the small space that we mostly use to microwave shitty food and store alcohol and juice, I saw that Michelle was fully dressed. I mean, well, if you can call an oversized sweater and tights with ladders down the legs in random places dressed then thats what she was.

“Morning, sunshine. How do you feel.”

“Like my head might explode all over the kitchen and I still have to get ready for class. Today is going to be long as shit,” my words slurred proving that there was still traces of alcohol in my bloodstream and when I swayed back and forth feeling as if I might lose my balance, I knew, “I'm still fucked.”

Michelle laughed at me before she flipped her pancake onto a plate and ran it back and forth below my nose. I snatched it from her and took a bite of the buttery breakfast cake without using the fork that she offered.

“Don't be such a savage, Haz. I'm not going to take the food from you after I've clearly been slaving over the oven for five whole minutes so that you could eat. Slow down, chew your food, and sit like a civilized human being. If you eat like that you're going to require the heimlich maneuver and unfortunately I don't know it. You'll turn blue and die in front of me on a Tuesday afternoon and that would put a slight damper on my day.”

“Afternoon?” I asked her while chewing around the pancake, “Afternoon?”

“Yes, Styles. Thats what I said.”

I put the plate that I was holding down on our small kitchen bench before I walked out into living room to squint at the only other clock that we had besides our cell phones, only to confirm what Chelle had just said. I rubbed my hands over my eyes hoping that it was just an illusion and what I'd seen was wrong because if it was the truth, I'd missed all of my morning classes for the day.

“Three eleven? It can't be three eleven! I had classes from nine until two!”

“And you slept through them like a baby.”

“Fuck! Michelle why didn't you wake me up? What's the point of having an Ultimate Alarm if it's not going to be used?”

“Harry, remember that little chat we had yesterday about distress and the use of your nickname? And in order for me to wake you up, I would have had to been up too. Even if I was, I wouldn't be using the Ultimate Alarm to save you with the splitting hangover that I had,” Michelle shakes her head in clear disgust before she continued, “too loud.”

My eyes widened as I looked at my friend, bewildered, annoyed, and somewhere deep down, somewhat amused. I waved my hand between the two of us before I gave up and ran it over my face exasperatedly. This is not how I intended to start the year off. My hand ascended from my face to sliding through my hair in distress, “Thats the point of the alarm, Michelle. It's supposed to be loud. It's supposed to wake you up.”

“Harry, calm down. When we got to sleep it was like seven in the morning anyway. I don't know how you expected to be up, awake, and alert in class. Don't you have like seven others that you can go to tonight? Over achiever.”

“If I shower now I can make it to my organic chemistry class.”

“Gross.”

I looked over to Michelle and frowned before I continued, “ Thanks for throwing me off by the way, making pancakes at three in the afternoon and making me think that it was morning.”

“Whatever time of day that you wake up is morning to me. I was feeling like pancakes, so I made pancakes. You didn't seem to mind them by the way that you were eating them a few minutes ago, arsehole.”

The mention of the food reminded me of how dry my throat was and how alcohol will leave your mouth feeling like you'd guzzled sand if you consume enough of it. I felt like a raisin.

“Do we have anymore orange juice?”

"No. Sorry I finished that all yesterday morning when you almost killed me and Alison with that damn fog horn.”

“Alison?” I smirked at Michelle before I started to tease. "Usually a player doesn't remember a conquests name.”

“You would know," she retorted back while squinting her eyes, “ you used to be one. But don't worry, Harry. I'll get so good at it that you won't ever catch one of them leaving the next morning ever again. I'll be like a black widow or is it a praying mantises that kill all other intimacy as soon as they've finished with them? I'll send them on their way so that I can sleep in my bed alone. It'll be like a switch.”

Michelle grinned as she spoke, silently approving her idea as I thought about how lonely it sounded. It actually saddened me. Michelle isn't the type that can handle being cold hearted and callous enough to kick people out of bed. After being in a monogamous relationship for three years, I could tell that she was the type who craved intimacy. She deserved it. What she just explained to me sounded like eventually it would take its toll on her and she would break down like she did before, substituting my shirt sleeves for tissues.

I keep my opinions to myself, not having enough time before my next class starts to really sit down with her and talk about them. If it's one thing that I cherish about Michelle and I's relationship is that we can literally almost talk about anything, if we had the proper amount of time to do so. I shake my head at her before I head down the hall, calling back to her.

“I never was a player, Mitch. I just wasn't steady in my relationships like you.”

"Whatever you say, Harold. Please go put on trousers…I don't want to see your moose knuckle.”

****

I'd made it to my chemistry lecture on time, and though I tried my hardest, it was extremely difficult to keep my eyes open. Even though I'd slept past all of my morning classes, I still didn't get the best rest from sleeping on the floor. Michelle was irritatingly right again. The only thing that was really mentioned today since it was still the very beginning of the school year, was instruction and what the professor expected from us as a class, so when my eyes closed momentarily as I sat at the back of the room, I didn't feel so bad. Before I knew it the lecture was over and I was rustled awake my the movement of students as they gathered their bags to leave the room.

"You've got a bit of dribble there." A familiar voice laughed as I stepped out of the classroom I wiped my mouth sheepishly before smiling at her.

“Rion, hi how are you?”

“I'm good. Getting around campus well enough, but how are you? You look pretty worn out and its only the second official day of the school year. Did your tradition get the best of you last night? You've got imprint marks from your sweater on your face.”

My hand went to the side of my face that she pointed out, the imprints from my clothing giving away my previous position before I flashed her a quick grin and responded ,Um, uh yeah kind of. I may or may not have missed all of my classes this morning. Mitch didn't wake me up, bad influence I guess.”

“Mitch?”

"Oh, um sh- Mitch is just...Mitch is my roommate." I explained in a panic I didn't want to scare her off with the details. I think I might actually have a chance with Rion, if I don't put my foot in my mouth that is.

“Oh I see.”

Rion smiled at me and I didn't even realize that we've been walking and talking this entire time. Conversation flows easily with her even though I stumble over my words. I feel like I'm just remembering how to talk to the opposite sex besides Michelle and feel kind of pathetic, but Rion doesn't seem to mind as she continues to smile laugh and start on new topics of conversation.

“So how long were you out for?”

“I didn't go to sleep until seven this morning and my head was pounding when I woke up. I really have no one to blame but myself. I told my friends that I would only have one drink and ended the night on my ass. I still have to go back to the pub and get my car, because I had to end up walking home. How I got to the right apartment on the first try is a mystery to me.”

Rion giggled in a cute way before tucking a stray piece of hair behind her ear allowing me to see her features more. Her neck was slender and long, connecting to her shoulders delicately. She had a small tattoo that looked to be a ballet flat behind her left ear. Those tattoos placed just there always seemed like they might hurt, like they deserved to be kissed better even though the ache from the needle has been long gone. I could envision my lips on just that spot. I must have glanced at her just a bit longer than I should have causing a rosy hue to make its presence known on her cheeks. It made me smile before I quickly changed the subject this time, not wanting her to think that I was rude or weird for staring.

"How did your date go?"

She took deep breath before deciding if she wanted give a response or not and we ended up in the courtyard right before the student parking lot.

"It came and went, I suppose. Nothing really interesting to report. It sounds like I would have had more fun if I had taken the offer to go out for drinks with you. I'm usually not really big on drinking on the weekdays, but after that date I honestly might have taken a shot or four."

I smiled, selfishly happy that she didn't have a good time. I want to ask her out, but I feel like its too damn soon. I only met her yesterday anyway. Maybe its a good thing that she turned me down. When the time is right to ask her I'm sure I'll know. Hopefully I will.

"I'm sorry it didn't go as planned. Someone should take you out and show you a good time."

"Yeah, hopefully someone will sooner rather than later."

I think the emphasis that she put on the word someone was aimed at me, but I could be wrong. I don't know what else to say so I cap the conversation off with a , "Yeah" and mentally slap myself in the face before I grin awkwardly at her. I look around the parking lot as we come up to a white Toyota and she takes her keys out signaling that the tiny car is hers.

"Oh, well I'll let you go and get on with the rest of your day. Good seeing you."

"Okay, yeah." She responds quietly before she puts the key in the lock to open the door.

This has to be the most awkward I've felt in a while. I radiate awkward and though I don't want to believe it's because of what Michelle and the boys said, I'm kind of starting to think that they might be right myself.

"Wait, Harry?"

"Yes?" I turn my head to look over my shoulder before turning around to face her.

"I can take you to go get your car if you'd like. It looks like it might rain and it would suck if you were to get all wet."

All wet. I blush at her word choice and from that point on I know. Michelle, Niall, and Darragh were right.

"No. No its okay. You don't have to and I mean, don't you have other classes?"

She shakes her head and then opens her other car door, "I'm done for the day. Really I don't have a problem taking you. Get in."

I walk back towards her, thanking her and then giving her directions to the pub from the main campus. When we pull up, sure enough my car is there. Along with a ticket taped to the window for leaving it in the lot overnight. I sigh and rub my hands over my eyes before I get out and thank Rion again. Just as she's about to pull off, I call her name causing her to stop the car and reverse.

"Yes?" She looks at me eagerly with her eyes slightly widened and and traces of a grin on her face. I scratched my head out of embarrassment before I speak while pointing to the passenger side of the car.

"I left my book bag in your car."

"Oh, sorry. Here you go." The grin falls as she unlocks her car door so that I can get my bookbag. This time when she pulls off, I wave an awkward goodbye to her before getting in my car, knocking my head against the steering wheel in defeat causing the horn to honk.

#harry styles #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles smut #harry styles fic rec #harry styles x oc #harry styles writing #harry styles fanfic #harry styles x original character #harry styles au #harry styles fluff

42 notes · View notes

azucanela · 4 years

Text

HOLDING YOUR DRINK [GENDER NEUTRAL HEADCANNONS]

FT. AKAASHI KEIJI, IWAIZUMI HAJIME, SUGAWARA KOUSHI, TSUKISHIMA KEI

HAIKYUU!! MASTERLIST | 1K CELEBRATION MASTERLIST

SUMMARY: In which Y/N needs someone to hold their drink.

WORD COUNT: 1.9k

WARNINGS: mentions of alcohol, mild violence, based on the tik tok trend, one curse word, nothing explicitly mentioned but be weary of the implications of drug use and such [lmk if there are any others i should include]

A/N: this is tik tok’s fault but yeah kjashdkjash

AKAASHI KEIJI

HEADCANNONS

ah. sweet, sweet, pretty boy akaashi

always pretty, but sweet? haha... thats about to change.

this is probably bokuto’s fault, akaashi feels the need to supervise him though, especially after that one time he left him unattended at a party and he jumped off the roof into the pool and nearly drowned because he forgot he could swim

yeah.

akaashi isn’t one for pda aside from the basic stuff like hand holding and maybe the occasional kiss on the cheek and he knows you are perfectly independent and thats all good and dandy, but even when hes being social and talking to his friends he still has one eye on you and one eye on bokuto

when you finally make your way over to him, asking him to hold your drink while you use the restroom, he simply nods to you, takes your drink in one hand, and covers it with the other, nonchalantly.

to say that akaashi, your boyfriend, is shocked when a random person comes up to him claiming to be your boyfriend comes up to him and asking for your drink, would be an understatement

almost instantly he calls out, “bokuto.” his voice is loud and firm enough that bokuto is looking in his direction almost instantly, ceasing his dancing on top of a table. when akaashi waves him over, he gives him a look of confusion but ends up coming over to where akaashi and this stranger is

and he enters the conversation hearing the stranger say, “im their boyfriend and they asked me to get their drink now hand it over.”

bokuto, naturally, is confused goes to say, “wait i thought y/n was—”

“bokuto.” akaashi silences him with a look, extending the hand with your drink to bokuto, much to the chagrin of the stranger and only serving to further confuse bokuto, though he accepts the drink nonetheless.

akaashi wordlessly takes bokutos freehand and places it on top of the drink to cover the top, before turning to the guy, who had started complaining

and then punching him in the face

never in his life could bokuto recall a time in which he was scared of akaashi

until now

akaashi turns back around to bokuto, taking your drink from his hand and shielding it once more, as though he DIDN’T just resort to violence.

you’ll never know this happened until one day someone talks about how akaashi is the calmest and kindest person ever and bokuto is like HA REMEMBER THAT TIME YOU PUNCHED THAT GUY CLAIMING TO BE Y/N’S BOYFRIEND IN THE FACE?

gosh darn bokuto that was supposed to be a SECRET you SNITCH

IWAIZUMI HAJIME

HEADCANNONS

HASDHJGAD

THESE PPL GOTTA BE DUMB TO EVEN TRY LMAO

oikawa probably dragged iwaizumi to another party or something and iwa-chan over here was like bruh there is no way in hell that i am the only person that is going to be sober while dealing with a DRUNK oikawa, thats too much to handle alone

so if oikawa doesn’t make you go, then iwaizumi will, for his sanity please agree to go. he’d never force you but PLEASE, he can’t do this alone.

honestly iwaizumi is the perfect person to hold your drink ngl, he’s definitely sober at whatever party he does to, not the type to drink your drink on accident or on purpose, our boy iwa is perfect per usual

you probably tell him you gotta use the bathroom and ask him to hold you’re drink and he’s like, “yeah, of course. take your time, i got it.” and then you leave, he is now standing alone, leaning against a wall. he’s holding your drink, with his palm covering the top while scrolling through his phone with his freehand AND watching oikawa to ensure he doesn’t accidentally decapitate himself because iwa MULTITASKS

a few people probably try to hit on him and he’s like no <3 im in a committed relationship have a nice day <3

and then some random guy approaches

now iwaizumi is a very intimidating person so im shocked this person had the BALLS to even try but they start spewing nonsense about how you told them to come retrieve you drink from him

at some point the guy probably implies that you’ll be going home with him and thats when iwaizumi sees oikawa passing by, releasing a laugh before calling out for Oikawa, “hey! shittykawa come here!”

oikawa is pouting but he comes over and sees the guy and is like, “oh whos this iwa chan?

and iwaizumi is laughing again as he gestures to the guy and goes, “apparently the guy whos taking y/n home.”

and then he goes, “do me a favor and hold this oikawa.” and oikawa is handed your drink, something that raises questions in him because why iwa chan?

he doesn’t have time to ask of course, because iwaizumi has already rammed his fist into the stranger’s face, effectively knocking him into the floor. ah the power of the ace of aoba johsai :)

he definitely would’ve kept going, threatening the guy as he wrecked his face until the message got through his thick skull, had you not arrived and witnessed the mans bloody nose, stopping iwaizumi from continuing

“he’s not worth it.”

“no, he’s not. but you are.”

i am in love with iwaizumi lol

anywho

you’re drink is very safe with the one and only iwaizumi hajime.

SUGAWARA KOUSHI

HEADCANNONS

IM CANT BREATHE THIS MANS

y’all are visiting home since you’ve been off at uni for quite some time now, the gang is back together, daichi, asahi, kiyoko and a few others y’all met through volleyball in high school

you and suga have probably been in a relationship since you left high school, because it took y’all three years to figure yourselves out. its basically just reminding each other to ya know... take care of yourself mentally and physically

and of course, now that you’re all of age, you go to a club, maybe a college party that a friend of a friend is having

regardless, suga is always going to have an eye on you, he’s gonna know your exact location at all times. though he isn’t going to follow you around or anything, everyone once in a while he’ll drop by, hand on the small of your back while you talk to some old friends—or new ones idk maybe you’re an extrovert. he’s checking on you though! he asks if you’ve eaten, have you been drinking water, is there anything you need, are you feeing okay?

then he’ll press a kiss to your cheek and leave to go hang out with daichi and suga, they’re all just sitting on the couch, maybe with some new friends too, maybe with old ones from his karasuno days

you come over, all like, “babe would you mind holding my drink while i go to the bathroom?”

he’s like yes ofc ofc, and he takes your drink, probably sits with his elbow resting on his knee, holding the drink between his legs with his other hand over the top of the drink. he’s pretty subtle about it, you wouldn’t notice as he just nonchalantly takes the drink from you and carries on the conversation that there’s a small furrow in his brow because why is the world like this, you shouldn’t need someone to hold your drink

everyone would honestly forget the drink isn’t his

now if someone happened to come over claiming to be your friend or maybe even a potential hook up— something sugawara would laugh at as your boyfriend, probably pretending to be intrigued by the idea before revealing who he is — well let me just say...

a lot of people forget that out lovely mom friend and resident king, sugawara koushi, is also so very very very chaotic person.

which is why i KNOW when you hand sugawara that drink, if anyone even TRIES to take it from him, to ask him for it claiming you sent them, he will bark. suga WILL bark, he learnt how to just for this situation. he will also hiss.

moral of the story: i trust sugawara koushi with my drink

TSUKISHIMA KEI

HEADCANNONS

rip to whoever thought TRYING was a good idea

anywho

tsukishima did not want to go to this party, you probably dragged him to said party, and he only went because its you that dragged him to the party.

he’s probably vibing alone in a corner or something, maybe engaging in conversation on occasion if someone he tolerates happens to be at the party, otherwise he’s stuck to you like glue, just following you around, arm over your shoulder, shameless pda as he wraps his arms around you and lays his head in the crook of your neck as you talk to your friends

then you’re like lmao babe free me i need to use the bathroom, also watch my drink, and he’s like okay FINE be that, and he takes your drink and watches as you make your way through the crowd of people

he’ll probably wait by the bathroom for your return because ew people he doesn’t want to have to socialize— especially not alone. and if anyone tries to socialize, hit on him, anything, he’s really just gonna straight up make it clear that he is not in the mood

it doesn’t really occur to him to cover the drink until some random person comes up to him

claiming to be a friend of yours and having come to collect your drink for you

there are several issues here, first of all, tsukishima was fairly sure he knew all your friends and he did not recognize this stranger at all, and he was pretty sure if he asked their name he wouldn’t recognize that either

secondly, tsukishima knows you would’ve come to get not only your drink but him because he made it very clear that if you abandon him at the party to fend for his own he would be rather unhappy

so when tsukishima questions the person some more and realizes his suspicions are correct, they are in fact; a liar. he laughs. he genuinely laughs because wow YOU THOUGHT you could fool him?

idiot.

he’s covering your drink with his palm— because he isn’t going to set it down? that’s just plain dumb, and tsukishima isn’t dumb. no, he’s covering it with his palm, and then using his free hand to grab this stranger by the neck and slam them into the wall he had just been leaning on because he needs to make it very clear that lmao this is NOT okay :D

this guys feet almost lift off the ground but tsukishima probably towers over the stranger because he’s a tall guy, and suddenly he’s threatening them, telling them that if they ever try something like that again they won’t be leaving the party.

“tsukki?”

hey look its you!

tsukishima offers the strange one final, warning of a smile, before patting their shoulder awkwardly and stepping away from them to turn to you, wrapping an arm around your shoulder before nonchalantly just saying, “lets go. this is lame. oh— and here’s your drink.”

tags:

@therainroguefanfiction @beifongsss[girl idk if you even asked to be here but like now you are bc i forgot akjshdsajkdbs oops] @iwaizoom @shawkneecaps

806 notes · View notes

duskholland · 4 years

Note

Okay but fwb!roommate!Tom and you trying to have sex, but Harrison or one of Tom's brothers is staying for the week and no one knows you're hooking up?

au: fwb!roommate!Tom

18+ !!!! contains nsfw material. extended warnings beneath the cut.

warnings: unprotected shower sex. please practise safe sex!! condoms act as barriers against STIs as well as unplanned pregnancy.

---------

When your flatmate Tom had asked if he could let his brother, Harry, bunk down at your place for the week, you’d been quick to agree. What you hadn't realised in your naivety was that you'd just signed up to the week from hell.

It’s not that Harry’s a difficult guest to have. Really, it’s quite the opposite: Harry is a lot quieter and neater than Tom, and he at least knows how to keep the kitchen tidy. He’s sleeping in Tom’s room, and whenever you’re home he’s either stolen away in there or he’s laying out on the couch, but he keeps to himself. He’s nice - friendly and warm, just like Tom - and you guys get along fine.

Just… Harry is an exceptional cock-block, and it’s beginning to get on your very last nerve.

To be fair to him, Harry doesn’t know that there’s anything going on between you and Tom. And really, there isn’t anything going on - you’re just friends with benefits who happen to live together. You’ve known Tom for years, and it had made sense to move in together for your third years of uni… Just like it had also made sense to act on that thick sexual tension that’d been hanging between you like a dark cloud.

So sometimes you and Tom shag. Usually in his room, or your room, sometimes in the shower, a few times on the couch… And it’s electric, and consuming, and completely fulfilling, but now his brother Harry is staying and you can’t seem to find the time or opportunity to jump Tom like your body aches to.

“Stop it,” Tom mutters. You’re sitting beside him on the sofa, watching one of Harry’s latest short-films through the banged-up tv that rests on the coffee table.

“Stop what?” You whisper, a smirk in your voice.

“You know what.”

You’ve got your hand resting on Tom’s thigh, beneath the blanket that covers you both. You’re pulled nicely into his side, his strong bicep keeping you close to him, and the position makes it oh so easy to just...let your hand wander up and down his inner thigh. You wouldn’t risk anything else - not with Harry sitting so close - but you’d be lying if you said you don't enjoy watching Tom’s jaw clench and unclench, his cheeks slowly rounding out with a pale pink blush.

“I miss you,” you mutter, tilting your mouth so it’s near his ear. Your eyes flicker out to Harry, and you note he’s still wrapped up in the scenes on the tv, so you add, “It’s been five days since you’ve fucked me, Tom. We haven't gone this long in forever.”

Tom swallows, his eyes skittering over your face, and his gaze darkens as he takes in the aroused glint that dances in your stare. One of Tom’s hands wanders up from your shoulder to push some hair from your face, and he replies quietly, “You’re going to have to wait another two days.”

You almost release a frustrated groan, but you remember to bite it back at the last minute.

“C’mon, Tom,” you coax instead, fluttering your lashes. “I know you want to.” Your hand twitches further towards his cock, and you can feel the strain on the material of his jeans. “Just one, quick fuck? Please.”

“We can’t. He’s always around.”

“Can’t you just… make him go out?”

“You think I haven’t been trying?”

“Well, can you try a little harder-”

“You guys know I can hear you whispering, right?”

Harry joins your conversation and you startle, an embarrassed smile curling around your lips.

“Sorry, Harry,” you reply, hoping desperately he hasn’t heard the words of your conversation.

“What are you saying?”

Tom clears his throat. “Just, uh, complimenting your camera work,” he lies, giving his brother a forced smile. “Hey, what was that technique just then?”

You tune out the conversation and remove your hand from Tom’s thigh, crossing your arms over your chest instead.

The rest of the evening passes by just as frustratingly. You try to corner Tom in the corridor, only to hear Harry approaching right when your lips were almost on his, and then Tom tries to bend you over the counter in the kitchen, but of course, Harry decides it’s the perfect time to grab a cup of tea. It’s so fucking annoying, and eventually, you call it a night and run away into the bathroom to sulk in the shower.

But you aren’t alone for long.

Just as you’re getting the final shampoo suds from your hair, you hear the bathroom door open and you jump, clutching at your chest. Your eyes make out the familiar figure of Tom through the fogged-up glass, and you relax as you call out,

“Being a creep again, Holland?”

His short laugh brings a smile to your face, and you watch as his blurry figure sheds his clothes in record time. You step aside and pull open the cubicle doors, inviting him into the warm space, and the moment Tom’s beside you, he’s got his lips on yours and you’re being pushed against the tiled wall.

“Shit, you’re eager,” you mutter, reaching up to curl your fingers into Tom's hair. Water droplets spray from the showerhead, loosening up Tom’s hair and causing it to slowly curl up into loose waves, and you enjoy the feeling of his wet strands wrapped around your fingers. He kisses you intensely, his hands running easily over every curve of your soft skin, cupping at your boobs and your hips and grabbing at your ass until you’re moaning quietly into his mouth.

“Shhh, love,” Tom mutters. He kisses you again for good measure. “Harry’s waiting for me next door. Don’t make any noise.”

“Better be quick, then.”

Tom settles closer, and you wrap your arms around his toned torso as you continue to kiss him. It feels so good to have his lips moving over yours, and you enjoy the feeling of him pushing his tongue into your mouth and kissing you messily. After a few moments, he steps in again, and you feel his hard cock pressing against your thigh.

“Fuck, Y/N,” Tom mutters, one of his hands trailing down to settle between your legs. You part your thighs further, allowing him to push two familiar fingers into your entrance. They sink into the knuckles and you whimper, your sensitive walls pulsing around him as he fucks you open quickly. “Missed feeling this fuckin’ pussy. Gonna be so tight for my cock, aren’t you?”

You can only mewl in response as you buck your hips down to meet the tips of his fingers.

“You want me to fuck you, eh? Right in this shower?”

You grab at Tom’s shoulders and nod profusely, your body burning with desire.

“Please, Tom. Fuck me.”

“Shit, of course.”

His hand disappears, but before you can complain about your neglected pussy, Tom’s got his fingers on your waist and he’s carefully turning you around. Your shower has a series of shelves set into the wall, and they make the perfect handholds, so you settle your grip there and press out your ass, arching your back seductively. You throw your head over your shoulder and meet his dark, heady eyes, winking at him cheekily.

“C’mon then,” you tease, grinning wider when Tom runs his cock through your slit. “Made me wait long enough, Tom, might as well- shit.”

Your taunts are cut off as Tom enters you in one slick thrust, and as he bottoms out, you groan in sync. The water drags your sounds away down the sinkhole, and you clench your fingers around the shelf.

“So good,” he praises, his voice a whimper. Tom waits a few moments before pulling out and then entering you again, settling into an easy rhythm that satisfies you both. “Missed this so much, babe.”

There’s water flying everywhere, and the bathroom is echoey and noisy, but you don’t care because it feels so fucking good having Tom inside you again. He bends you over further, one hand on your waist as the other grabs at your ass, and you start pushing back against him to meet his thrusts, loud mewls falling past your lips every time he curves just right and nuzzles up against your g-spot.

“Tom, Tom, shit, I love your cock, keep going.”

It’s messy and he’s rough with you, but you love it. Love the burn of his hands grabbing at you, and the rough sounds of your wet skin slapping together. The sensations of his cock pounding into your desperate cunt makes you whimper, and it isn’t long before you’re bringing your hand down to fiddle with your clit.

“There you go, rub your clit for me, Y/N,” he says, his voice strained. “Getting so close, I want you to come as I fuck you.”

Your bud pulses as you rub it harshly, feeling Tom’s thrusts growing sloppier as his quiet groans fill the room. He pushes you right to the edge, and then you find yourself falling over it, your body rolling around in arcs of pleasure as you try desperately to suppress your moans and whimpers. Tom curses, and you feel his cock twitch inside your pulsing walls as he empties his load into you. He fucks into you until you’re whimpering and panting, and then he’s quick to pull out and grab your waist and pull you flush against him, his lips finding yours as you moan into his mouth from surprise.

“That was so good,” he tells you, his eyes wide. Tom pulls away from your face, his tender gaze skittering out across your face. “I really missed being with you, Y/N. You… You’re incredible.” And there’s a softer tone to his voice that you’ve never really heard before, but you like it.

“You’re not too bad yourself, Tom,” you reply, licking your lips. You reach up and press your hand to his shoulder. “I missed you-”

“Y/N? You alright in there?”

For the second time this evening, you find the voice of Tom’s brother startling you. Harry’s concerned words drift in through the wooden door, and your eyes widen as you realise you’ve been taking a very long shower.

“Yeah! All good!” You call back, ignoring the way Tom looks incredibly amused as you flounder.

“Are you sure? I heard some noises…”

You curse, and you reach back to finally turn off the shower.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine, sorry. I was just… singing.”

Tom’s really enjoying himself now - a big cocky smirk on his lips. You scowl at him and push playfully at his chest, only to have him wrap you up in his arms and press a series of soft kisses to your shoulder.

“Right, okay.” Harry falls silent for a moment, and Tom presses a long, teasing kiss to the base of your neck. “If you and Tom can hurry up, I’d really appreciate it. There’s only one bathroom in this flat.”

Tom freezes, and you exchange wide-eyed expressions of alarm.

“Shit.”

#i would like to apologise to harry holland for throwing him under the bus #tom holland #tom holland x reader #tom holland smut #tom holland x y/n #tom holland blurb #blurb night #tomblurbs #myblurbs #Anonymous #fwb!tom #roommate!tom #tom.filth #smut

686 notes · View notes

b4kuch1n · 4 years

Text

The Future Is In Space! (and so is the rest of you)

Okay, so. Gordon should’ve seen this coming.

And he did, to be fair: Joshua’s always loved space. Joshua loved the idea of flying cars when he was a tiny little thing, if the fact that all of the toy cars he had were thrown with intense force at one point or another meant something, and he clapped at the night sky once when Gordon got them both stuck at a gas station in the middle of nowhere due to… circumstances… which was super, ultra, uber cute as fuck . Especially because Gordon had just applauded him for singing along to a song on the radio when they parked, and that was very possibly the first time Joshua registered clapping as a possible positive reaction to something he likes, or whatever like that. Gordon Freeman has a PhD in theoretical physics and theoretical physics only.

The point is that Gordon loves Joshua so fucking much. No, the point is that Joshua has always liked space. He chose for himself a set of space-themed PJs when Gordon took him to the mall, and he likes food with weird colors because that’s “alien food”, and he has given away all of the toy cars he had to make space for toy space ships of many sizes, and Gordon has had to have a conversation with him once about upending a dusty fish bowl onto his own head so he could look like an astronaut. He doesn’t do that anymore, because Joshua is genuinely a really smart kid who just needs the required pieces of information to put things together by himself.

Gordon loves him so much.

Gordon also has only experienced a single year of relatively radiation-free, sludge-free, organic, non-Black Mesa- poisoned air and also freedom (to an extent) since. You know. Almost dying and also losing his right arm in Black Mesa. Where he jumped into a few portals, one of which leading to an alien world called Xen, where he had to kill what seemed to him at the time a spiteful god against his own existence.

That, and not the Joshua-loves-space part, is the part he didn’t see coming. Hadn’t. Still doesn’t, if he can be honest for a minute. There are days it still doesn’t feel real, just to contrast nicely with the days when what’s left of his right arm and his right shoulder hurt, and days when power outage hit unexpectedly and the lights went out without warning, and days when he fights to not let some stupid fucked up slights against him go because that’s just how the world is that’s how things are now keep your head down and don’t think Gordon just shoot just let your trigger finger pull itself in you are in a comedy of error a laugh track a monkey on a leash just dance just move your feet j

Hey, no digging your heels in there. Throw yourself off your rhythm, Gordon. Joshua. Joshua loves space. Joshua is going to an elementary school now. Joshua just came home from a “career” day, and the parent invited to speak is a retired astronaut.

Joshua said: “I wanna be an astronaut when I grow up!”

Joshua likes numbers. Somewhat. He’s not averse to them, at the very least, and homework’s kind of bullshit from the concept to the execution but when Gordon and Tommy and Coomer sit down to keep him engaged while he does it he has fun with math homework. He likes video games, he likes the puzzles in the youth magazines they signed up for at his school, he likes messing with shape blocks and pulls out some cool combinations Gordon doesn’t see coming sometimes. Joshua is a smart kid that enjoys a fair challenge. Joshua is totally astronaut materials.

Joshua is going to space.

Joshua is absolutely going to space.

Xen is, coincidentally, also in space.

Gordon is calm. He totally has a good poker face. He performs well under pressure, especially very specific types of pressure, e.g. when there are rules in place he can cling to and ground out an appropriate plan of action. He could improvise a presentation in class in a pinch, because he knew what presentations are and what he’s been working on and what the teacher expected. He could jimmy his car out of an ice patch, because he knew how cars work and how ice acts. He can smile and say “That’s great, Joshie! You just gotta work hard for it, and then you’ll be in space in no time.”

Gordon has an image he can provide to show how he feels.

[Picture ID: a drawing of Gordon Freeman standing in front of his son Joshua, cut off at their chest. Gordon is a tall man, a bit heavyset, with tan skin and mid-back length, messy curly brown hair that’s greyed at his temples due to stress from surviving the hellhole that is Black Mesa and Xen. He’s wearing his comfortable worn-and-faded t-shirt, which is orange with a very faded graphic printed on the front. Joshua is a young boy with brown skin and short dark curly hair, brown eyes that’s brimming with light and happiness, and a wide happy smile. He’s wearing a light green t-shirt. Gordon is smiling at him, with another shot of his face enlarged and superimposed on the drawing right next to his head. This Gordon is screaming. This Gordon is screaming his heart out, and his face is scrunched up while his mouth opens wide, and he’s screaming a silent scream and he will never stop.]

---

Contrary to how it appears to everyone, Benrey doesn’t live full time at the Freemans’.

Well. He does “sleep” there. If he actually sleeps. That’s one of the questions that Gordon has had ever since Black Mesa that he never got to or bothered to ask, and then when they had to defeat Benrey in the final boss fight he thought that was it with his chance to ever ask. And then Benrey came back and the situation took a hard left into throw-the-whole-suitcase-out awkwardness and Gordon thought it better to never bring those questions up ever again. It’s. Ongoing. Like his climb back into being a normal, mostly law abiding, neutral good citizen, who has no ties to that research facility that blew up and opened a portal to hell in space.

It helps that Benrey really is just… a dude. Now that he’s not eighty feet tall and clipping through walls anymore, he can definitely pass as someone who just really loves to mess with people for a laugh. Which… well, Gordon’s judgement of character is probably better discarded in the kitchen trash compactor now, but he’s not gonna lie and say that’s all Benrey seems to him. He doesn’t even mess with people for laugh, not really. He is just. Like that. He’s an alien, but in the sense that’s…

Well, to Benrey, humans are alien. So that’s that.

And also Black Mesa did stretch the definition of ‘human’ in the physical sense pretty thin. So, again, that’s that. It all fits together like sliced pita bread.

The other thing that helps is that Gordon has the tendency to forget about risks or consequences when they are not directly in front of him, which he sometimes overcorrects, but this time around it helps move the sentiment into the philosophical window pretty quick, and then he can throw a brick through that one, because philosophy sucks ass. Gordon’s moving along well! He only had to change prosthetics twice because the first two were in order too heavy for his shoulder and too energy consuming, and all three are fully covered by the overlords that didn’t want Black Mesa to become a Thing in history, and now he works remotely for a uni that just lets whatever happen. It’s chill. It’s mostly chill.

He could’ve just chugged along never thinking even an inch deeper about Benrey’s Benrey-ness again, and Benrey makes that easy, because Benrey loves walking around and looking at things and being a bit of a spectacle with a straight face. Okay, Gordon doesn’t know for sure if Benrey loves doing those things, because he’s not Benrey. He just knows that Benrey does those things, frequently, and with an expertise that baffles even him, who knows full well how Benrey is. Well enough. Awkward territory, all of this is, really. The Point Is that Benrey actually doesn’t appear at home too much! He plays games through the night sometimes, sure, and ever since he called second dibs on any cereal in the apartment he always appears at the right time to claim that, but the whole thing is. Balanced. Benrey doesn’t seem to have physical personal belongings outside of the PS3 and four copies of Heavenly Sword he lugged back one day (the rest of the game library everyone kinda chimed in here and there to build up, because console is common ground fair use for everyone, while PC is where Gordon streams and also works, so it’s off limit), and he rarely uses utensils to eat anything, so to anyone but the team it’d seem like he’s barely there at all. Except for his presence of course. That’s… a lot harder to negotiate.

Gordon’s gotten very, extremely good at it though. It’s his life. Things fit together, mostly. He can deal, he has been dealing, and it’s even been fun. It’s definitely really funny here and there.

Gordon’s about to break the equilibrium. Introduce a nasty new specimen into the scene.

“Bro I knocked for a hot minute,” Benrey says, at the same time as Gordon’s blurting out, “I need to go back to Xen.”

“Huh.”

“Wha- Why do you knock? You’ve never knocked. You’ve literally only ever broken in.”

“Wanna… start now.” Benrey intones in that exact way, and then knocks on the door again. It doesn’t even sound good. These doors are all made with the weird thick composite that makes a dull plastic sound when knocked on.

“Don’t do that, just use the doorbell if you want to-” Gordon catches himself. “No matter. I need to go back to Xen. As soon as possible, but anytime in the next… twelve years… will work.”

Benrey just looks at him for a long time. An extended minute. Maybe even two.

Gordon is just staring back.

“You’re at. The door.” Benrey says, in a low voice. Gordon blinks. “Rude… rude little boy Freeman, huh.”

Gordon takes a deep breath. “Benrey-”

“Gonna let me in? Soon? ‘s bad etiquette… greeter… doesn’t even let guests in. Bet your wares aren’t even good.”

“Alright! Alright.” Gordon snaps, but he also does step back for Benrey to walk in, which. Really, that’s never been necessary. Benrey’s always come in and out as he pleases. Usually Gordon just walks out into the living room and Benrey’s already on the couch playing whatever game catches his eyes on that day. The decorum of knocking and walking in is simply never present.

Well, Benrey does knock on Joshua’s bedroom door. But that’s it.

They walk together into the living room, then Benrey situates himself on the couch, and Gordon settles on the carpeted floor next to the table to observe him. He’s never seen Benrey actually fold his limbs up into the position he’s usually already in when walked in on before. It’s mostly normal movements, which still catches Gordon off-guard a bit.

“Nice couch you’ve got here,” Benrey says, and pulls out his phone to fiddle with. It’s a Nokia 2700 Classic, with a theme downloaded from the Ovi Store, and a firefighter-themed 2D platformer that does get insanely hard in places. Tommy got him a snazzier Blackberry a while back, but he refused that one. Gordon didn’t really get it, but. Whatever.

“It’s always been here,” Gordon replies on reflex.

“Liar… Gordon Lie… man.” Benrey seems to need to chew on that one for a second. “Gordon Lieman. This building’s like. Ten years old.”

“That’s practically forever dude. That’s longer than they sent me to MIT for. Joshua’s not even that old.”

“He’s gonna. In… seven… years.”

Gordon remembers what he needs to talk with Benrey about again. “Goddamnit,” he slaps his own face - not with the hard prosthetic this time, thank you very much. Took him six months of HEV training and a year with a prosthetic to get it to heart. “Okay, so. Xen.”

“Wait. Math’s wrong… eleven. Years.”

“Don’t distract me! Xen!” Gordon throws his arms up, finally making Benrey actually look at him proper. “Joshua wants to be an astronaut when he grows up.”

Benrey puts his phone down.

“Yeah,” Gordon scrubs his face, with his flesh hand. “So I need to… do something about Xen. I have a plan. I need to find materials, and then I need a way to Xen…”

“What’s an astronaut.”

“A- no.” Gordon sits up straight. “No, you’re fucking with me. You’re doing this on purpose. I’m fucking about to go nuts, dude.”

Benrey looks him up and down, makes sure his head movement is clear in the dark living room, lit only by the lamppost outside the window. “Yeah,” he says, “no shit. You wanna go back to… Xen… and stuff. Freeman lost his mind.”

Gordon opens his mouth to retort, but then closes it with a click. “Okay,” he mumbles after a moment of thinking it over, “okay. I get where you’re coming from.”

“Haha, get it. ‘cause I’m from. Xen. And shit.”

“Not funny, dude.” It is a bit funny. “But I’m not- okay, so, listen, Joshua’s a determined kid, alright? He’s smart, and he’s healthy, and he likes space. He’s… the chance of him becoming an astronaut is not zero.” Gordon pulls his legs up to his chest. “If it’s up to me, it’s gonna be a hundred percent, ‘cause that’d make him so happy. But even if I’m not the one writing the almighty script I’m still gonna do my best to help him if he’s serious.”

Benrey continues looking at him. “Uh-huh.”

“And… that includes. Never letting him near Xen.”

“Mm.”

“And I know, I know Xen’s like. Ten fucking floating rocks at least a million Texas lengths away from Earth, but it’s still there, y’know? It’s still there. You’re from there! You know it’s still…”

“Yeah?”

“... I. Want to blow Xen up.”

Benrey settles into the draw-me-like-a-French-girl pose. “Sounds good. How’re we doing that.”

“Well, we’ll need explosives that can actually detonate in Xen’s climate, and acquiring that’s gonna put me on so many shitlist-” Gordon almost physically grabs his own hand to yank himself back to Benrey’s answer. “Wait. Are you really just… relenting? Are you actually in this now. Benrey?”

“Say more about the explosive though.” Benrey blinks innocently at him. “Please? Explosive cool. Maybe illegal. Super cool though.”

Gordon is not doing the frog mouth thing. He’s not. He’s totally not. He sighs a long sigh; there, no more rude expression. “I am only thinking about using explosives, because it’s costly and we’re gonna have to transport it. So you have nothing to snitch about. Who would you even snitch to, anyway? Fucking- we are under an indefinite two-way nondisclosure clause, if any of us ever open our mouth to a stranger about that we’re gonna get sacked, but. Wait are you even involved in that? You came back after we signed those papers. Well Tommy’s officially ‘representing’ us, so it’s all tangential kinda, so maybe he can just add you, but why would you-”

“No explosive run huh… What’re you gonna… use. Then.”

“-subject yourself to the law- alright, yeah uh. To be honest I was thinking raw force? Because I do have around twelve years to make this work, and Coomer has insane strength that has leveled a Xen island before, and Bubby is… I think he just isn’t aware that there’s supposed to be a limit to human strength at all. They forget to put that in when they pumped him with knowledge juice. He can- wait, Bubby can just make fire. He can maybe negate the climate conditions for us, so explosives are still in the question here, and- Darnold, last I heard he’s doing some ‘Sour Patch Kids but real’ stuff… sounds like seriously corrosive stuff… We can. We can have a plan.”

Benrey is on his phone again. “Nice.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Gordon dry swallows some dust from the carpet. He realizes he’s gripping on it pretty hard with his prosthetic; he’s close to ripping a chunk of it out. He takes a deep breath and relaxes the plastic hand. “We’re gonna need to make and test the explosives, and we’re. I need to tell everyone. Convince them to help. And we’ll need a portal back to Xen.”

Benrey’s still clicking away on his phone - probably playing that firefighter game again - but he’s looking at Gordon at the same time. Gordon looks up just in time to catch the sharp grin disappearing from his face.

Alright. Maybe Benrey does love doing Benrey things. At least one of them’s actively enjoying this.

---

Gordon’s well aware how ridiculous he is. Is sometimes seen as. Perceived as. Terminologies.

Mostly he copes fine with that. He’s lived it for as long as he’s alive. Most decisions he makes are met with a raised eyebrow at the sublest and outright laughter at the rudest. Transitioning, that was a long, long period of his parents going from “haha funny joke but don’t tell it in public yeah” to “oh shit that’s for real huh? That’s for real” to confused, but silent, silence. Him applying for MIT and seeking a scholarship was definitely the career advisor at his high school laughing uncomfortably for a long time, because Gordon’s never held down a project properly, has he? How’s he doing this? And then him adopting Joshua officially was at least ten separate conversations with Joshua’s grandparents patting him on the back, it’s okay if you don’t! We can care for him. It’s nice to have children around the house again! We know you’re busy! We know there’s things youngsters like you want to do before getting tied down with children. Trust us, we know. You don’t have to .

Gordon knows. He’s never had to make any of the decisions he actively made, but one, that’s why they’re decisions and not punishments , and two, in many ways including cerebral, he did. Kind of have to. In many ways those are the only steps that make sense for him to take. They were the foundation to who he is as a person, with a sense of self that must be supernaturally obscure, because he’s. He’s got a lot of things to balance. A lot of tight ropes to walk.

Gordon’s many things, a lot of those he doesn’t fucking recall himself. Maybe that’s by itself absurd enough. He’s had a lot of time to learn, and a bit of time to relearn, being okay with being absurd.

Black Mesa “helped”, in the same way it spared the rest of him when it got his arm cut the fuck off. It’s a horror comedy. It gave him a bit of a new perspective on absurdity.

“Don’t you dare,” Gordon grouches, because he’s learning. He’s always learning. “Don’t use the a-word.”

Bubby puts his arm together in front of his chest. “I’m not about to! Don’t presume you know what I will do.”

In a way Bubby’s incredulous look stings worse than Benrey’s deflection, Gordon reasons, because Benrey has emotional (?) stakes in Xen’s existence. Maybe he has an external heart or something that’s still beating and keeping him alive on Xen, though Gordon hopes he’d’ve at least been transparent about that when they talked about blowing the place up. Bubby though, Bubby doesn’t have emotional ties to many things altogether. Bubby’s also a tube baby who sets himself on fire with his thoughts. Himself and other people and/or objects. Not as absurd as Benrey being Benrey, but absurd enough to be way above Gordon on the a-scale, and thus has no rights to call Gordon absurd.

“You have to admit though,” Bubby says after a moment of silence.

Gordon takes a deep breath. “No, actually, I don’t have to admit shit,” he says, with what he can call patience with just a little bit of definition stretching, “you ever thought of that? I actually can just never admit that blowing up a whole planetoid system is a bit out-of-the-box thinking of me. I can just say that it’s totally normal and expected behavior of me, and what’re you gonna do with that? Huh? Do go on.”

“Oh don’t be pissy at me,” Bubby huffs, and goes back to staring at the buoy bobbing on the water surface, tied to his fishing line. “You’re scaring away the fish, Gordon. Everyone knows you don’t talk and stomp around on the piers while people are fishing. It’s rude.”

“You’re literally only trying to see if you can set a fish on fire as a prank,” Gordon points out, more for his own sanity than to prove anything to anyone, least of all Bubby.

Benrey looks like he’s ignoring Gordon and Bubby’s exchange, just sitting at the edge of the piers, legs swinging evenly, but Gordon well knows he’s listening in. If not because he’s somewhat invested then because most things that frustrate Gordon is great entertainment to him.

He is, maybe, a bit, somewhat invested though, must be. He brought Gordon to where Bubby and Coomer are camping, afterall. No reasons else to do it, especially when they have time to wait for them to come back to civilization. Twelve years, in fact.

Gordon can wait (he can forget, but in his book that’s the same as waiting, really), and he doesn’t begrudge Bubby and Coomer’s “honeymoon trip”, which has consisted thus far of them trampling about in ~~nature~~ , e.g. deep ends of the world that they do not and should not have access to, but somehow end up in anyway. Gordon only knew because Coomer’s grown fond of taking pictures, and once in a while if they get wifi he sends everyone some. The most memorable one was a pitch black square except for two dots of light in the distance, with the geotag pointing to them being in the Mariana trench.

They’re having fun, and Darnold and Tommy take effort to “decontaminate” them between trips, as well as make them learn wildlife interaction guidelines (Bubby probably already knew, but he didn’t care, and still nobody’s sure if he cares now), so Gordon doesn’t mind. Has no reason to mind. Until now, but only a tiny bit.

They decided to stop in a seaside town somewhere up North three days ago, and wifi’s spotty at best but Coomer still managed to send them pictures again - of him fighting a dolphin and Bubby making fun of a goat skeleton in a museum - and then Gordon got tired of staying up thinking about Xen at night and shot his shot. It took them another day to check their message again, and Bubby replied saying “don’t third wheel other people, weirdo” and Gordon just sighed and resigned himself to staying up way too late for another week or so. But then Benrey asked him to go to GameStop with him, which. Admittedly that was suspicious as hell, but Gordon reasoned Benrey knocked and asked to be let in the other day, so what the fuck, right. And then he stepped through the GameStop’s door, noticing the glass being darker than usual, and ended up on this piers where Bubby’s been trying to have a laugh at some poor fish’s expense.

Bubby made fun of him for third wheeling again, despite Benrey also being right there, and despite Coomer not even being there.

“Did you guys have a fight or something?” Gordon asked, because maybe he can be a little bit spiteful. He’s allowed.

“No,” Bubby grumbled. “Harold impressed Gregory with his punching power, so he’s invited to the Punching Tournament. I don’t like being in water for a long time so I stayed. Their sandwich’s not even good.”

Gregory turned out to be the giant squid that lives a few kilometers off the shore, and another few kilometers under the sea level.

“I’m gonna issue an a-word ban, actually,” Gordon declares, when he comes back to where Bubby’s sitting on his journey to wear a track into the piers. “I think that’s more conducive to real conversations.”

He’s being distracted, he knows. And maybe he’s letting himself be a bit distracted, so he can have a minute to improvise a script. Benrey just fast traveled him here, he did not prepare any materials, he doesn’t even have his notebook with him. That’s where all of his plans are! And his doodles. Mostly his doodles, but that’s a part of his thinking process, so he’s allowed.

“Alright, Mister Fucking-Insane-Person,” Bubby shrugs.

“Doctor.”

“Oh, my bad! Doctor Fucking-Insane-Person.”

“Also that’s a ban dodge and you know it. Also you still don’t have any rights to call me anything! I refuse to submit in this matter.”

Bubby turns around fully to put his hand on crossed legs and stare at Gordon. “You sure, Gordon? Are you very sure about that, when you warp out of thin air to where I am missing my husband very much and not torturing fishes for fun, saying things about blowing Xen up ? Is that not ragingly absurd, Doctor ?”

Gordon takes another deep breath. For his own benefit. For his own wellbeing. “Okay, one, Benrey warped me here, I was not responsible for that. Two, you’re trying to set fishes on fire, and your husband is punching more fishes while a giant squid cheers him on, probably. And three, which part of blowing Xen up is absurd, now? Feel free to elaborate on it. I’m all ears.”

“The very idea of it!” Bubby exclaims, accidentally shoving his fishing rod off the optimal position, chasing away the few fishes not shunned by his radiating malicious intent yet. “Who even thinks of that?”

“Me,” Gordon snaps back, “and you guys kinda ruined what ‘absurd’ even means at all for me, so don’t try me at it.”

Bubby shuts his mouth with a click, but his brows are still furrowed in the exact way that claims, loudly even if soundlessly, that he thinks that’s stupid.

“No, go on, Doctor Bubby,” Gordon presses. “You’ve got the quiz. Try your hand at it again, go ahead.”

“Alright, then, how are we even doing it? If we’re doing it. And there’s no we yet, mind you.”

“I- okay.” Gordon holds his hands up. “I’ll admit I do not have the specifics yet. But logistically at least, it’s entirely possible. We’ll need,” he calculates a number real quick, “thirteen hundred pounds of column charge slurry, but if we have something high corrosive we can wrap up safely until detonation we’ll need even less. We can. Make that much. If we have Darnold’s help. We need access to Xen itself, which Tommy has the biggest chance to get. We’ll need to put the explosives deeper into the ground than surface level, so we’ll need to dig some holes, but with Doctor Coomer’s strength we can take care of that. And then we’ll need to trip it, and that might pose a problem in Xen’s climate, but we can manage a chemical fuse, or. Y’know. Just burn it hot enough to explode, which.”

He ends that speech with a vague and a bit jerky wave of his hand towards Bubby.

Bubby just blinks. “Huh.”

Benrey snickers under his breath, either at a fish or at Bubby’s reaction, Gordon doesn’t know. He wouldn’t even be able to guess, since Benrey still has his back to the entire commotion.

Gordon catches himself holding his breath, so he consciously exhales slowly. It’s okay. It’s whatever. He has twelve years. He can take some detours if necessary. He can forget, even. Maybe.

“That Doctorate turns out to be for something, huh,” Bubby continues. “That does sound pretty plausible, afterall.”

“Huh,” Gordon’s turn to blink. “Wait, that’s it? You’re in now?”

“Yeah, sure,” Bubby swings his arm out, “even though I’d like to be testy for a while longer, I also want to blow things up. Outside is very large, but it severely lacks opportunities to see things explode, so I’ll have to make it happen myself now.”

That’s a tiny bit worrying, but Gordon’ll take it. He’s used to Bubby being a tiny bit worrying anyway. Wouldn’t be Bubby without it.

“Now shoo,” Bubby turns around to fiddle with his fishing rod again, carefully moving it back to the optimal position, “you chased all the fishes off. Gonna have to start my work from the beginning now. It’s hard work tricking fishes, you know.”

“Don’t tell Coomer,” Gordon warns, “I want to let him know myself.”

“Sure, sure.”

“I’m serious.”

“Aren’t you ever.”

Gordon figures he’s done all he can on that front.

Benrey catches up with him when he’s walked away dramatically for a few minutes and is now at the main street of the town. “Rudeman.”

Gordon did forget him at the piers, so that’s on him. “Sorry, but also, do you have a plan to get us home, or what? ‘Cause I don’t have my car and I’m not hitching a random ride if I can help it.”

“Gotta... find a GameStop first. Score some Sports Champions 2 for the. PS3.”

“Alright.” Gordon nods. “Wait, do you need a GameStop to transport us? Is that a thing?”

“Huh,” Benrey just looks at him, and then pulls out his brick phone.

Gordon rolls his eyes, but then catches a glimpse of the screen, and sees the digital clock. “It’s- fuck, it’s almost five! Joshua’s almost home.”

“Oh look, no GameStop on the… roadside. What’re we gonna do.”

“Benrey, you- goddamnit,” Gordon frantically pulls his phone out of his pocket. He tries to yank his right arm out of Benrey’s hold to hold it steady, but Benrey doesn’t yield. “Fucking, let me,” he unlocks it and finds Joshua’s number, which is on top, because he added ‘01’ before his name, because he’s had plenty of experiences with arranging files so they don’t disappear on him, “c’mon, c’mon… Hey Joshie! Are you at school right now?”

“Hi Dad, yes,” Joshua answers, at the same time Gordon registers that he’s walking, Benrey pulling on his arm.

“Sorry I called in the middle of class, buddy, but we’re gonna. I’m gonna be a bit late home, okay? I’m outside right now, but I’m on my way- oh, no, we.”

They’re in his living room. Gordon puts his arm, just released, on top of the couch. This is his couch. The bowl of cereal he finished right before Benrey dragged him out’s still on the table. The PS3 lays silent in the TV cabinet, as it’s always been. He does go around the table to put his free hand on all of these things just to be sure.

“Dad?” Joshua asks from the other end of the line. “Are you okay?”

“I.” Gordon dry swallows. “No, yeah I- I got home. Me and Benrey were out for a bit and we got? Lost? But we found our way back, and I’m. I’m home now. I was really worried I wouldn’t make it back in time to open the door for you, so I called! But I’m home now.”

“That’s good!” Joshua says, even though Gordon can still hear worry in his voice. Sweet kid, his boy is. “Thank you for telling me in ad-advance.”

“I’m sorry I interrupted your class. Dad’ll be more careful next time.”

“It’s okay. What are we having tonight?”

Gordon takes a deep breath, holds it in for a moment, and then breathes it out, slowly. “We can have mac and cheese again, or we can try our hand at naan and make some soup to go with it,” he says, willing his voice to calm down. “We still have the yeast Ms. Juney gave us last month, right? We can go get bread flour when you’re home.”

“Okay.”

“Go back to class, buddy. See you soon, yeah?”

“Yeah. Can we have chowder tonight too?”

Gordon laughs. “We’ll look into it, but sure! If we can find the ingredients for it. Alright, bye now. Love you, honey.”

“Okay,” Joshua says again, and when Gordon’s about to move the phone from his ear, he adds, “Love you too, Dad.” And then he hangs up.

Gordon goes to the couch and sits down. He’s maybe cradling his phone a bit. It’s still warm from him gripping on it way too hard. Deep breath in, deep breath out.

“That went well, huh,” Benrey says, from the hallway. Gordon looks up to see him closing the door behind him, what looks like a copy of Sports Champions 2 for the PS3 in hand.

Gordon laughs, again, for real this time. “That’s- where'd you even get that?

---

They did make naan, or a version of it. Joshua likes messing with flour, Gordon caught him walking his fingers through the bowl, leaving tiny “footprints”. They couldn’t agree on a fish to put in the chowder, so they shelved that plan and bought some canned beef-and-vegetables soup instead. The naan turned out… fine. They tasted enough like naan, and Gordon only burned like two. Which was maybe thanks to the apartment’s stove top burning a bit less hot than it did the last time they used it; Gordon made a mental note to check on the gas or. Whatever one does. When that happened. He just needed to look up a number, call it, and stand next to the (hopefully) professional who would come while they did their work.

Benrey sat at the couch while the Freemans cooked and ate their dinner, either being on his phone or scrolling idly through the PS3’s library. Joshua asked if he could try and throw naan pieces into Benrey’s mouth from the kitchen table, which Gordon allowed, but with the preset limit of only three pieces, and the condition that he picked up the ones that missed himself. He then asked Benrey very politely if he could open his mouth to catch the bread, and then made a lot of mental calculations before throwing each piece. The first one missed, but the other two were snatched up by Benrey in a somewhat shark-like display, which Joshua clapped excitedly for.

Gordon heard Benrey come to the kitchen table, which Joshua was wiping off with the designated kitchen rag (the fourth one this month alone; it feels like someone’s eating them as they’re replaced sometimes), while he was cleaning the dishes. “Hey lil’ gamer dude,” Benrey said, and Gordon could hear him rustle around in a pocket of his puffy vest. “Scored big in the. Minigame.”

“Thank you,” Joshua replied politely.

“Here’s your price,” Benrey said. Gordon assumed Joshua was holding out his hands to receive whatever Benrey gave him, because he couldn’t hear any noise that thing made, just Joshua’s little excited gasp.

“It’s like the... Intarna-Internation… nal… Space Station!”

“Huh,” Gordon could hear Benrey blink, “that’s what it is…”

“Yeah! These are, here, they’re solar panels! They charge the batteries in here.”

“Nice.”

“Thank you Benrey!”

“Yeah, GG.” And then Benrey shuffled back to the couch, if Gordon interpreted the noises correctly.

Joshua held onto the price trinket until he asked Gordon to put it in the tool cabinet, along with the cake moulds and decoration kit courtesy of Gordon’s hectic MIT years. It was… Gordon could see why Joshua thought that was where it should go. It could be considered a cookie cutter, if the shape weren’t kinda suboptimal for a cookie. It also did look like the ISS, with wings and all.

Nobody in this household’s baked anything sweet in this apartment for at least a year, but. Well. Never say no to free, reusable stuff.

Gordon’s phone vibrates when he’s just sat down at the kitchen table again, a mug of garbage instant coffee in hand. He abandons it to go get his phone from where it’s charging on the living room table.

It’s Coomer. “It’s Coomer,” Gordon says out loud. “That’s weird- he’s. He doesn’t call.”

“He’s calling. Now.” Benrey says from where he’s sitting, on the couch. Gordon takes a deep breath and doesn’t deign it worth a rebuttal. He accepts the call instead.

“Hello Gordon! I heard you want to blow Xen up.”

Gordon pinches the bridge of his nose. “Bubby told you.”

“He did! In great details!”

“I- alright, whatever, I didn’t expect actual results with that one anyway.” Gordon remembers about his coffee. He comes back to where it’s waiting for him on the kitchen table, and takes himself a generous sip, letting it burn his mouth. “Fuck!” He sets the cup down maybe a bit forcefully. “Oh that’s a bad decision. What did- what did he tell you?”

Coomer takes a moment to gather his thoughts, leaving a blank minute where sounds of the wind and waves on the shore come through his mic. Gordon hopes he isn’t thinking about sleeping out there tonight, for the full nature flavor or whatever. “ A large part of his speech was about explosion! And how big and grand it would be. And also about how much he fucking hates Xen!”

“Glad we agree on that front,” Gordon mumbles.

“So am I! I also fucking hate Xen!”

“That’s. That’s fair, really, it’s a garbage place. But- did he, like. Have you heard anything about the actual plan? Did he tell you anything about the actual plan I definitely mentioned to him?”

Coomer pauses for another moment, probably to recall. “Nope! Not a word about a plan-”

“I fucking knew it,” Gordon mumbles.

“-though that is very thorough of you, Gordon!”

"Okay, listen,” Gordon picks his mug of coffee up and starts pacing. “I actually don’t… have all of it yet. I know me and Benrey are in,” he flicks his gaze to Benrey again, who does nothing to deny the statement, “and Bubby’s now in as well. I still need to- okay, the plan’s basically that we find or make enough explosive for the ten asteroids on Xen, we bury it at the core of said asteroids, and we blow that up so it blows Xen up. I have- I don’t know the specifics of how to make that much explosive yet, but I’ll convince Darnold somehow, and if he sits this one out then we’ll borrow his lab when he’s not using it. And I’ll ask Tommy about a way back to Xen, his. His dad’s done that plenty. He doesn’t seem to like Xen much, right? That’s the impression I got, so we can spin this into us doing him a favor or something. And then we transport the explosive to Xen, I can borrow a truck for that, I know someone, and then we dig into the ground there, that’s where we can really use your superstrength, and then we put the explosive in and. Set it on fire. Bubby, uh, agreed to take care of that.”

Another beat of silence follows Gordon’s speech. He seems to have been making that one a lot recently, mostly to himself, in his room, while writing things down in his notebook. He finds himself chewing on his own lip, so he makes himself stop and takes another gulp of the coffee, which has thankfully cooled down to gulp-appropriate temperature.

When Coomer speaks again, he seems to have chosen his words carefully. “I will need to ‘sleep’ on this, Gordon. You are right in your assessment that you do not have your plan together yet!”

Gordon takes a deep breath. “It’s okay,” he says, as much to Coomer as to himself. “It’s true. It’s half-thought up right now. I still need to figure out- figure out Darnold and Tommy and Mr. Coolatta. I, yeah,” his voice’s dropped to a mumble by now, “I think I need to sleep on it too.”

“Gordon.” The rustles that accompany Coomer’s voice gives the impression that he’s sitting down onto the pebble-littered beach as he speaks. “I would like to see Xen obliterated, and I think we can get it done.”

“That’s,” Gordon stops on his pacing in the kitchen, “That’s not. It’s okay if you’re not interested, Coomer. You don’t have to walk it back on me.”

“Please do not question my fucking hatred for Xen, Gordon.”

“O-okay.”

“But I am not in favor of hazy dreams anymore. I have gotten to see a lot during my ‘honeymoon’, and now I have broken free, and mere words on a script cannot placate me. I would like to see proof that it’s possible before I participate.”

Gordon takes a deep breath. “Okay.”

“I believe you can do it, Gordon!”

“Thank you,” Gordon says, a little bit dazed, while Bubby’s voice comes through from a distance at the same time, “Are you reciting poetry again?”

“In what distant deeps or skies, burnt the fire of thine eyes?” Coomer answers. “On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire?”

“Stop praising that tiger while I’m right here!”

“I’ll,” Gordon says before Coomer can get fully caught up in Bubby’s antics again, “I’ll come back to you with. The details. When I’ve hashed it out. Thanks for,” he exhales, “thanks for holding out for me, Coomer.”

“So it is, Gordon, so it will be!”

Coomer hangs up there, and Gordon sits down at the kitchen table again. He finishes the mug of coffee in one long gulp. It’s gone a little bit more room-temperature than he likes.

“Sleep on it,” he mumbles, “good advice.”

“You should. Do that.” Benrey says from the couch. “Sleep good for body for soul.”

“You know what, when you’re right,” Gordon says, and stands up and goes brush his teeth. He then sits down at his work table and writes down questions until four in the morning.

---

Gordon used to suck at making phone calls. He’s kind of a champion at it now.

Funny thing is there’s an epiphany to it as well: he didn’t grow up with cell phones, so making phone calls was a hierarchical thing for him until he was like. Twenty years old. Kids used the landline when absolutely necessary only, and adults used it whenever they damn well pleased, because they paid for it and they had businesses to take care of . And Gordon was… not much of a rule breaker, surprisingly enough. Oh he fell short of where rules lay plenty, but he didn’t really intentionally break them. So he took calls when his parents said he could and when he absolutely needed to, and that habit persisted well into his adulthood.

He might also just be not very good at holding his tongue when speaking and. That was no good for phone calls. Kiddies phone calls. ‘cause he just realized one day that adults said whatever the fuck they wanted on the phone really, and nobody chastised them for it, no divine punishment, no sudden death round.

A sermon on self-love, that was; Gordon just takes phone calls now. Worst case scenario, he just turns his brain off and lets his mouth do its work. When people don’t presume they know better than him, they don’t presume he’s talking out of his ass ninety percent of the time.

That’s- that’s what he thought. Gordon’s wrong, a little bit. He can be wrong. Has been wrong plenty before. He can correct himself, here, he’s gonna do it right now: worst case scenario, he has to recite his plan, conceived so far in total isolation from anyone he knows and whose opinions he cares about, to the person who’s the most skittish and averse to what his plan is bringing about among those people, over the phone, where he can’t see and gauge body language and facial expressions.

Gordon would… like to meet Darnold face to face for this. But. It’s work. It’s, well, it’s closer to work than to play, given that he’s gotten mildly stressed out over it, and their lunch at the only Taco Bell in the whole desert is strictly pleasant, not-work talk only. And Gordon really, really enjoys those lunch dates, because he never has to think about damage control or having an identity crisis in the middle of one. They’re just nice, normal, a tiny bit shouty (the Taco Bell is usually packed and the acoustic’s not good, but it’s a Taco Bell, and it’s a ritual now), mostly jovial, lunch with a friend, eating subpar food he’s learned to enjoy. They don’t talk about what happened at Black Mesa, they don’t talk about work in general, they don’t even talk about soda outside of appraising the gaudy color combinations for any new sponsored drink. They talk about Joshua, about Darnold’s cat Lumbar Support, about Coomer and Bubby’s travelling, about new game releases, about Sega vs. Nintendo, about the weather.

Gordon doesn’t want to fall short of where the rules lie, not this time. So he calls.

“Doctor Freeman?” Darnold answers with the title, which sets the tone pretty well. Gordon takes a deep breath and steels himself.

“Doctor Pepper.” He pauses. “Darnold. Hey. I, uh, I’ve got a thing I wanna ask.”

“Go ahead!” Darnold goes quiet for a moment, to finish his sandwich, Gordon’d guess. He’s called in the middle of Darnold’s lunch break. “I must preface however that we’re working outside of office hours, and I can only advise you at the moment. Anything further will have to go through the… official channels.”

“Okay, that’s alright. I just.” Gordon worries his lips. He realizes he’s tugging pretty hard on his left sleeve; he makes himself let go. “I have a. Plan. That’ll need your expertise.”

“I’d be delighted to help then! Feel free to share more.”

“It’s about, uh.” Gordon takes another deep breath. He’s been consuming a lot of oxygen recently. “IwanttoblowXenup?”

Darnold goes, predictably, quiet for a moment. It doesn’t sting less when it’s predictable.

When he speaks again, it’s in a clipped, professional-but-barely tone. “Please say that again, but slowly.”

Gordon closes his eyes against the sunlight streaming in from the window in his bedroom. “I want to. Blow Xen up.”

“Gordon,” Darnold sighs. “Doctor Freeman.”

“I know.”

“Your megalomaniacal tendencies have grown since we last met.”

“It’s not- I’m not doing it for fun!” Gordon throws his free arm up. “Okay, this is genuinely a lot of effort and stress for something I’d do for pleasure, Darnold. I also couldn’t care less about fucking Xen - okay that’s not true, I’ve lost like a week of sleep over blowing it up, that’s not not caring, but like. I can’t. I need it to not be there,” he stands up from his bed and starts pacing, “and I have. A plan. Half of one. About that much. So it’s not hopeless-”

“Gordon, please slow down.”

“-as long as I have your help and- and Tommy’s, okay, I will. uh.” He taps on his thigh with his free hand too, for good measure. Go the whole nine yard with fidgeting, why not. “I. So, Joshua wants to be an astronaut,” he intones, and for the first time in a while he’s reminded again of how this started, how it took over his life for a hot minute, and it almost gives him the hiccups, “and. Y’know. Xen is in space. So it needs to not be there anymore. So I want to. Blow it up.”

Darnold goes silent again. Gordon thinks he can hear the epiphany punch the air out of him. Fuck, he hates phone calls.

“As much as I want to berate you about how you’re treating this matter and yourself,” Darnold resumes primly after a moment, “my lunch break is ending in exactly fifty-two seconds, and this sandwich will take me another two bites to get through. I’ll see you in the Taco Bell’s parking lot at three AM this afternoon, Gordon. Drink water.”

He hangs up. Gordon goes drink water.

Benrey clips into the apartment when Gordon’s on his third mug of iced water. “Whoa, hydration streak,” he says, settling himself on the kitchen table.

“I can go a bit crazy,” Gordon mumbles. “I’m allowed a little bit of funk and insanity. This is my house.”

“It’s… actually. MFA’s.”

Gordon groans. “Don’t fucking remind me. I tried to forget that. Also it actually belongs to the NRC, since they apparently can just scare MFA into giving employees housing, which I’m really fucking horrified by, but I’m choosing to not think about it, and you can’t make me.”

“It can be mine soon.”

“Do not attack and dethrone Nils Diaz.”

Benrey huffs. “Killjoy Freeman.” He shifts his pose so he’s sitting up straighter. “You wanna… try out Premium Water? Free trial for a week, you can manually cancel your. Subscription. After.”

Gordon stares at him. “What’s Premium Water.”

Benrey opens his jaws, wide, showing his teeth. He points inside as if there’s anything Gordon wants to find at all in there at the moment. Then he closes it with a click and stares back at Gordon.

Gordon just sighs. “No, Benrey.”

“Guaranteed beddy bye time, no charge,” Benrey blinks at him. “Black Mesa Sweet Voice™ a hundred percent effective. Five stars… satisfaction… rating.”

“You’re fucking lying, because I’d never leave it five stars. You get three at best.”

“Gonna catch you when you fall off the. Chair. Gonna be romantic.”

Gordon laughs. “No, not allowed.” He sighs and finishes the mug of water like it’s mead and he’s some Dungeons and Dragons elven ranger. He gives himself brain freeze. “Ah, fuck, oof,” he slaps his own forehead, “bad decision. Bad decision. Okay, I. I appreciate you asking instead of just going for it, but that’s the reality of asking, right? The person you ask can say no. And you’ve just gotta learn how to deal with it.”

Benrey just keeps staring at him, but he’s used to that now. It’s only a tiny bit unnerving. “How’s learning’s... satisfaction rate.”

Gordon sighs again. “It sucks ass. Fucking hate learning.”

Benrey grins at him, and then he checks his phone and it’s already time to go.

“Drink this,” Darnold says immediately when Gordon climbs into the shotgun seat of his car, and holds out a beaker of bubbling purple liquid.

Gordon just stares at it. “Darnold, what is this.”

Darnold sighs. “It’s the Potion of Not Telling. I also drank a sample before coming here,” he holds up an empty beaker with some of the same purple liquid at the bottom. “It blows us up if we tell our employers what we’re up to.”

Gordon ponders this very carefully. “Does. Tommy, for example. Does he count as my ‘employer’?”

“No,” Darnold says. “‘Employers’ only cover people and/or establishments you’re currently under an employee contract with and receiving salary from.”

“Alright,” Gordon intones carefully, and downs the whole beaker. It tastes like… the jello packaged like seahorses Tommy brings over sometimes. The red ones, specifically. It makes him feel a bit bloated, immediately, and he rubs his side a bit anxiously when he sits down in the car. “You’re actually under NDAs at all times, huh,” he says, as an opening line.

“Same as you, Gordon.” Darnold takes the beaker back from Gordon’s hand and puts it in with the other one. “Black Mesa seeked me out and offered to find me a position in a brewery, as well as fund any of my independent ventures, as long as I do not say a word about what… transpired… back there. The official record’s that I was stranded on an island with curious dino-esque creatures for four years, instead of worked in Black Mesa’s mixology department, and honed my craft with their help, using the fruits native to that island.”

Gordon laughs, and rubs his face with the prosthetic hand. It’s like putting your face on the car’s dashboard. “Sounds like them alright. At least yours sounds exciting, instead of fucking insane. They said I was ‘chasing an entropy in the desert’ and it ‘ate my hand’. What the fuck does that even mean?”

“We attempted feats of miracle, only it was not under their accountability,” Darnold says, “and we were punished for it. No matter, we have more important things at hand. What is this plan you’ve cooked up, Gordon?”

Gordon takes a deep breath, finding it easier than it’s been for a while, and relays what he’s got down of the blow-Xen-up plan to Darnold. They never look at each other meanwhile, both staring at the cars lined up haphazardly in the lane across from them, Gordon in a barren calmness as words leave his mouth, Darnold with his arms crossed in front of his chest, his whole presence compacted into a contemplative, silent piece.

“That is an intense reaction to a faraway threat, Gordon,” Darnold says when Gordon’s speech is over. “Xen is not only at least a galaxy away, but also a few dimensions over, if I understand the briefing right. I haven’t thought about that wretched place for almost a year.”

“Sorry,” Gordon says, not really feeling any of it, but making the effort.

“You don’t have to. I understand where you’re coming from.” Darnold taps idly on his own arm. “I was… extracted… swiftly from Black Mesa after I met you and your friends. I did not witness what happened after, but I saw… enough.” He takes a deep breath as well. “We can all have intense reactions to anything.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s not maladaptive,” Gordon says. He’s gone to therapy. It was really good for helping him build a system that filters out the things that actually fucks him up and makes some sense of the rest, but it doesn’t lift him out of the comedy of his life itself. It can’t. That’s not what therapy’s for.

“Indeed,” Darnold says. “But I can’t be the judge of that. My domain lies with potion mixing, and I dare say I am a true expert at it, but I can’t claim expertise at other people’s life. Especially not yours.”

“I get it,” Gordon nods. The world kinda bobs a tiny bit when he does that. “I. Know not to indulge my impulse mostly. But sometimes decisions come back to haunt me, and those are usually just about choosing one furniture over another, or tying my shoelaces in the bunny ears way instead of the circle way and having them undone in the middle of a meeting and stepping on them and falling on my face, but this time it’s. It’s Joshua’s life. And there’s just no limit anymore to what can happen, not since.” He swallows. “Black Mesa.”

Darnold nods.

Gordon blinks. “I know it’s a little bit crazy.”

“It might be,” Darnold says, “but as a famous mixologist once said: nothing ventured, nothing gained. Even if that gain is just your peace of mind.”

Gordon lets out the breath he isn’t even aware he’s been holding. “Thank you.”

“You do not need to,” Darnold smiles, “I do stand to gain from this as well, since I really need to test this flavouring that’s supposed to land on pleasantly tart on the taste scale but goes into intestine-destroyingly sour territory instead. I need to know what makes it that corrosive, and testing on humans is entirely unethical.”

---

Gordon got home before Joshua. Benrey’s also not home. He lays down on the couch and takes a nap.

He wakes to a quilt over most of him, light turned on in the living room and in the kitchen, and silent chatter. His sense of smell kicks in a minute or so into him still laying on the couch, blinking up at the ceiling; he smells fish sauce and sugar cooking.

“Tommy’s over,” he mumbles.

“He awakes,” Benrey says, seemingly into thin air. Gordon feels the couch shift minutely as Benrey makes to stand up from where he’s sitting leaning back on it. “Good eatin’. I’ll go get the. Food. Coloring.”

When Gordon’s gathered enough of himself to sit up, Benrey’s nowhere to be seen. Tommy’s shifting something animatedly on the stove, while Joshua carefully carries one bowl at a time to the kitchen table.

“Hey Dad!” Joshua says when he catches Gordon’s eyes. He puts the bowl he’s carrying down to free his hand for waving. Gordon waves back.

“Hey Joshie, hey Tommy. What’re you guys making?”

“Caramelized pork b-belly!” Tommy says from his stove station. “And... sautéed vegetable medley.”

“With rice!” Joshua adds.

“A perfectly balanced meal.”

“I picked the vege-ta-bles!”

Gordon folds the quilt to busy his hands. This one’s definitely not his. He may have one somewhere in the closet, but it hasn’t made an appearance in… six months. He thinks. “What did you get for us, buddy?”

“Carrot!” Joshua holds up a finger. “It has a lot of vita- vitamin… A.”

“Awesome,” Gordon says and goes over to the kitchen table to high five Joshua. “What else did you choose?”

“String beans!”

“Oh?” Joshua hasn’t been much for that.

“Uncle Tommy’s gonna teach me how to eat them!”

“A dash of- of flavour, packed in one Kn●rr’s Complete Seasoning packet, is all you’ll need!” Tommy switches to a lower voice when Gordon peers over his shoulder at the pan on the stove. “That is not true. Kn●rr is only… fit to be- be on the floor.”

“Are- you’re not putting that in then?”

“No, I just use salt and pepper.”

Joshua giggles. Tommy extends a hand that Joshua can slap on in place of a high five.

Gordon gets out the utensils - spoon for Joshua, chopsticks for him and Tommy - and brings the rice cooker to the table once the light’s jumped to orange. He plates the pork, scooping Joshua’s helping into his personal plate first, while Tommy finishes with the vegetables. Tommy lets Joshua choose which vegetables to go on his plate; Joshua bravely gets a little bit of everything.

They eat dinner on top of companionable conversation, Gordon and Tommy taking turns asking Joshua about school and other things.

“I heard you want to- to be an astronaut,” Tommy asks. Joshua dutifully finishes his mouthful before answering.

“Yes! I want to go to space!”

“Do you want to meet- aliens?”

“Yeah!” Joshua’s excitement cools down a little bit as he scoops up another spoonful of rice with a piece of string bean carefully balanced on top. “I read the Wiki-pea-dia about it though. They say there’s no dis-discernable e-vidence of aliens yet. We sent the Voyager Golden Records an’ they haven’t… answered yet.”

“That’s how p-physical mails are,” Tommy smiles while getting himself a piece of the caramelized pork. “It used to take… weeks... before we hear from our friends who are far away. And the- the universe doesn’t have a… an Everywhere Wifi Network yet.”

Joshua shares a conspiratory look with Gordon and mouths not yet . Gordon laughs. Gordon’s clutching his bowl maybe a bit too tight.

“You can become an astronaut and- meet aliens. In space,” Tommy waves his chopsticks with a flourish.

“I’ll teach them what- what e-mails are!”

“It’ll take a- a lot of hard work, and you have to be able to eat string beans.” Tommy takes an exaggerated look at Joshua’s plate, now cleaned of food. “Oh! Would you l-look at that! Mister Joshua Freeman is… perfect astronaut materials, according to… the NASA guidelines.”

Joshua beams with a pride that knocks something loose in Gordon’s chest.

They finish dinner and clean up together, then Gordon sends Joshua back to his room to do his homework, agreeing to an hour of video game after if he can get it done before nine. Gordon cleans the dishes while Tommy puts the kettle on and makes them both hot chocolate.

“I bought some-something for Joshua today,” Tommy prompts. Gordon looks back to see him hold up the exact same cookie-cutter-thing Benrey gave Joshua the other day.

“Oh- oh my god.” Gordon laughs. “Holy shit?”

“Wh-what’s the matter, Gordon?”

“Do you guys have like a hivemind or something?” Gordon pulls off a glove to open the tool cabinet and pull Benrey’s gift out. “Benrey gave Joshua this. I don’t even- what’re these supposed to be? Where d’you guys even get them from?”

“It’s the- International Space Station Biscuit Cutter!” Tommy puffs out his chest, slightly indignant, but definitely bemused as well. “They’re issued by- NASA, cut from the s-scrap metal of the hulls of… prototype spaceships. They’re very rare!”

Gordon stares at the one in his hand. “And now we have two of them.”

“They’re… very valuable! You can sell them for a high price.”

Gordon smiles. He puts Benrey’s apparently rare and expensive gift back into the tool cabinet and puts the glove back on. “You’ve gotta ask Joshua about that. It’s for him, afterall.”

They fall into a comfortable silence, crumbled into grains only by the click-clack of dishes in the sink and the water running from the faucet. Gordon weaves himself into a solid piece of nerve, bracing, bracing.

Tommy’s… better acquainted with the crazies of these things than most, maybe. He’s apparently said “fuck it” to the administrative work that his dad would’ve liked to hand back to him at one point, and just. Got a PhD in nuclear physics instead. Gordon’s been through something like that, and from experience he can tell that it would’ve taken real nerve to do it. He also can tell that no matter what it still rubs off on you, and you don’t recover from that kinda consistent exposure to idiosyncrasies, because you don’t ever feel like there’s anything to recover from , really. It’s just how it is, and the world’s off-kilter, not you. Like Benrey, Tommy’s world runs on a different axis, and he and the rest of them are, in many ways, looking both through strange eyes.

Gordon’s a little bit jealous of that. He’s honestly not sure if he can ever fully get Tommy, but then. Plenty of people never get him, and here he is. He can learn to wear it as well as Tommy, one day.

Right now though. Tommy’s important to the plan. Gordon knows that, in a theoretical way. Ha, theoretical…

“I would like to not be insane,” Gordon says, more to himself, at the same time as Tommy setting his cup of hot chocolate down and saying, “Benrey… told me.”

“Oh… I. That’s? Good?”

“Wha- you’re not insane , Gordon!” Tommy waves his hand. Gordon can hear it, even if he can’t see it. “You’re… creative.”

“Thanks Tommy,” Gordon says with a huff of laughter that he doesn’t think reaches Tommy at all. “I. I get it though. I got Bubby to turn around on it, but everyone else did say that it’s a little bit fucked up that I thought of doing that at all.”

“But they… agreed on helping you anyway.”

Gordon taps on the metal wall of the sink. “That’s… yeah. Well, other than Coomer.”

“Doctor Coomer doesn’t think you’re crazy,” Tommy protests. “He just has... boundaries.”

“That’s fair. He’s allowed that. He more than deserves that.” Gordon blinks. “Wait- why am I arguing down on my side? I need you to be on board for the plan to work.” He laughs, bowing down over the sink. He’s shaking a little bit. “Wow. I’m a little bit gone. Can I be a little bit gone?”

“You’re… totally allowed, Gordon” He feels Tommy tug on his elbow. With a deep breath, he lets go of where he’s gripping on the edge of the sink with white knuckles, and lets Tommy lead him to the kitchen table. He dutifully sits himself down on a chair, lets Tommy take off the gloves, and holds the cup of hot chocolate Tommy pushes into his hands carefully. “It’s your house.”

“It’s MFA’s.”

“It’s yours,” Tommy says, determinedly, and Gordon takes a deep breath and sidesteps every implications that has. “You can have your fears, and… and your plans, and your hopes. For Joshua. It’s your place, Gordon.”

Gordon takes a shaky sip of the hot chocolate. Tommy puts on the gloves and finishes washing the dishes for him.

“Sorry,” Gordon says, mostly aiming at the dishes thing, but. He also just kinda wants to put that out there.

“There’s nothing to be… be sorry for,” Tommy replies, amidst the noises of the dishes and the water running.

Tommy talks while Gordon drinks his hot chocolate; in the end, whether he wants to or not, he’s accepted a bit of the job the Gman holds. Gordon knows this, that’s how Tommy vouched for and kept the Science Team from a much worse fate than relative freedom except for a story no sane man’d believe anyway. Mister Coolatta Senior seemed to be impressed by the choice, aside from all the worries that come with it.

“He’s… he’s proud of me,” Tommy says, softly. “I know he only wants what’s best for me.”

“He’s been awfully accommodating,” Gordon says, remembering about the movie night they had after Tommy’s birthday bash last year. That man pulled a gun on him. As if he’d walk out on Tommy, if Tommy’d asked for him to stay around.

“He… doesn’t involve me… with his problems,” Tommy says. “Some parents do that.”

Gordon can’t find anything to say to that, so he finishes his hot chocolate.

“I got a vote when they brought Xen up the-the other day,” Tommy says, when the dishes have all been cleaned and put on the rack to dry. He pulls out the chair next to Gordon and picks up his cup of hot chocolate. It’s still steaming, somehow. “I-they were thinking it was- it’s too risky to leave a bridging point open like that. They want to… demolish it.”

Gordon chuckles, and then it becomes a full body laugh, and then he’s curling up on himself, the empty cup between his hands. He shouldn’t clutch it like this, it might break. He’s broken the handle off of a mug before, when one of his old prosthetic wasn’t calibrated perfectly. He can’t stop laughing though. Not enough to let go of the cup now.

“Holy shit,” he wheezes. “holy motherfucking shit. We’re doing it. We’re doing it? Xen’s fucking going down.”

“It sure is!” Tommy says, and claps a polite golf clap for Gordon’s victory.

---

Gordon does have shit he needs to do for the online classes he teaches, but outside of it he’s still way too idle. He and Joshua go to the aquarium and the museum whenever the schedule works out, and once in a while they drive by Roswell to catch a plane taking off into the sky, and he does grocery runs and tries to clean around the house and do laundry on a timetable, and there’s always the PS3 Benrey dragged back that’s now public good, as well as his probably too long Steam list, but. Gordon’s shit at talking himself into and out of doing things. Sometimes it just doesn’t feel right to start doing something, so there’s a black hole of time between him thinking “I should get to this” and him actually doing it. And Joshua’s life isn’t just him; his son’s going to school now, and he’s made friends at school, and he talks to them on the phone and goes hang out with them on weekend afternoons.

Gordon’s not as good at holding onto time anymore, now that things’ve. Changed.

So figuring the explosives out’s been good for him. It’s just what he does back in uni again, except without a supervisor, without having to write anything down properly (just legibly’s enough), and without peer review. It’s mostly math, but with the spirit of two middle schoolers stealing sodium crumbs from the school lab to throw into puddles. It’s closer to play than he expected. Closer than playing Horse Simulator 3D on the PS3.

He and Darnold spend the day building the corrosion rate equation, pouring Darnold’s concoction on rocks Gordon figures have the same make-up as the ground on Xen. Benrey doesn’t bring the venture up often, but every other day Gordon finds clumps of dirt and random rocks that weigh suspiciously little for their size in his glove compartment. He brings those in for the pour test as well, and they build a simulation based on them.

Balancing the corrosion with the heat’s a bit tricky; Gordon needs to know how hot Bubby’s ignition can go, since their number’s high. He was about to shoot Bubby a call when Coomer’s latest photo arrived. Gordon recognized the street in it.

They put the project on hold for an afternoon so Tommy and Darnold can have the lab to decontaminate Coomer and Bubby. Gordon spends that afternoon getting the air fryer he ordered last week out of the box while Benrey reads the manual out loud wrongly. He calls Joshua to let him know they’re having guests over that evening, thankfully in the middle of the school recess this time. Gordon tries to remember Joshua’s exact timetable at school, he really does. It’s just not fruitful a task.

When Joshua arrives home, Gordon’s in the middle of arguing with Bubby over how much water’s left in air fried food. “Hey Granpa! Hey Bubby!” Joshua waves at Coomer and Bubby, “hey Uncle Tommy! Hey Doctor Darnold! Hey Benrey! Hey Dad!”

Gordon steals the chance to close the air fryer while Bubby’s joining in with the “Hey Joshua!” chorus and distracted. “We’re making spring rolls and egg rolls!” He calls after Joshua, who’s in his room putting his backpack away. “You can choose the filling yourself!”

The kitchen barely fits everyone, so comes dinnertime they move the living room table up next to the TV cabinet to make space for the spare straw mat, and lay out a tablecloth on top for good measure (Gordon’s had enough experience to remember to do that). They sit on the floor in the living room together, almost shoulder to shoulder, and at some point the conversation gets away from Gordon entirely. He just nods when Joshua points at something he wants and gets some in the bowl for him.

“I’ve heard somebody wants to become an astronaut,” He hears Coomer say at one point.

Joshua puffs out his chest proudly.

“Doesn’t everybody at some point,” Bubby says. “I wanted to be an astronaut too, when I was forty.”

“Oh I have seen the photos,” Coomer continues, a gentle light in his eyes, “It is very beautiful out there.”

Joshua asks for help with his homework after dinner, and Tommy and Darnold sit down with him for that. Benrey joins Gordon at the sink while he’s pouring dish soap into one of the large bowls they used. He doesn’t know what to do but blink at him, dumbfounded.

“Check this out,” Benrey says, and spits lime green into the sink. When the light clears, the dishes have become spotless.

Gordon stares at the sink. “I- you- th- is that- you can do that? ” He points at the plates. leaning on the sink’s edge.

Benrey grins. “New… new skill acquired bro. Just got the EXP for it.”

“You spent your EXP on dish cleaning ?”

“We should conserve water, Gordon!” Coomer declares from behind him next to the kitchen table. “Water shortage is caused by corporate greed, but with certain individual actions we can improve the situation ourselves!”

“Please don’t kill Mark Schneider.”

“Worry not, Doctor Freeman! His death will not be by my hand directly!”

Gordon laughs, helplessly. “Everything happens so much,” he laments, only semi-jokingly, as he takes off the cleaning gloves and puts the plates on the rack.

“Keep up, Doctor Freeman,” Bubby says.

“They certainly do,” Coomer says, much more nicely. “I’ve heard your plan is soon coming to fruition!”

Gordon nods. “Yeah, it’s. Yeah. We were,” he swallows, “Darnold and I, we were about to ask for Bubby to let us test his fire. Figure out if he can reach the ignition point we need.”

“Well now, that sounds like a challenge,” Bubby says.

Gordon finds a price tag still stuck on one of the bowls that he’s very sure wasn’t there when it was brought out. “Benrey,” he groans. Benrey just gives him a shit eating grin. “You’ll need to hold a temperature for about three minutes, and then the mixture takes care of the rest,” he says to Bubby, while swatting Benrey on the shoulder.

“Just three minutes, isn’t it.”

“Do not try and stay for more. I’m serious. When it explodes it’s gonna turn seriously corrosive. You’re gonna be sludge ten seconds after it gets on you.”

Gordon can hear Bubby blink. “Oh- oh. This is serious huh. We are blowing Xen up.”

“We are, darling,” Coomer affirms.

Bubby shifts on his chair. “I’ll need. A minute.”

When Gordon’s done with the dishes, he turns back to the kitchen table to catch Bubby letting go of Coomer after a hug. “Son of a bitch, you went for it, you motherfucker,” Bubby says, a bit too loudly, fixing his glasses.

Benrey sings a very high note over his voice. “Language!” Gordon hisses.

“Oh, sorry.” Bubby pats his own mouth. “Forgive a man, I’m still working through it.” He switches to a mumble, seemingly only to himself. “It’s real. I’m gonna set Xen on fire. Gonna show Black Mesa what for. It’s really gonna happen…”

Coomer pats Bubby on the back lightly, making him almost hit his face on the table. “We’ll finally move fully away from the game, my dear Professor,” he says, and he’s smiling. He’s smiling very wide.

“I can be your Professor,” Bubby mumbles. “I can blow Xen up.”

“ We can blow Xen up,” Gordon corrects him. “Me and Darnold didn’t agonize over a- darn modifier for a week and a half so you can set our work on fire and take all the credits.”

“Hush, let me process things, you rude bastard.” Benrey censors bastard with another burst of pinkish light.

“I can see the other end,” Coomer says, cheerfully. “Now, Gordon, I’ve heard you need help digging into the core of a few asteroids?”

---

They mark a date for the excursion.

He ‘woke up’ early, and made himself and Joshua an actual breakfast for a change while Benrey finished off the box of cereal that was open. “Dad’s got a work thing coming up,” he told Joshua while scooping extra egg onto his plate. “I’m gonna have to stay on site for a night.”

“So you’re not going home tonight?” Joshua asked, taking the plate handed to him by Gordon, but making no move to go back to his chair.

Gordon nodded. “I’ll be home tomorrow though, but you’re gonna have to stay at your grandparents’ tonight. I’m gonna come pick you up at their place tomorrow afternoon. You should pack a spare change of clothes and your pajamas to bring to school.”

“Okay,” Joshua said. And then, “What’re you staying on-site for?”

“I’m,” Gordon said, “Okay, you can’t tell anyone this, yeah? I’m blowing asteroids up.”

He could see Joshua’s eyes brighten. It was visible . “ In space ?”

“Yes,” Gordon laughed. “But it’s very experimental, which means…”

“It’s not ready for the public eye yet,” Joshua whispered, almost reverently.

Gordon laughed again, and took off the mitten on his hand to ruffle Joshua’s hair. “You’re gonna be okay staying at your grandparents’ place? If you don’t like that I can ask someone else to come over instead.”

“It’s okay,” Joshua said, finally content to go sit down again. “Can I bring my skate shoes?”

“Sure thing, put them in a bag.”

Gordon called Joshua’s grandparents to let them know to pick him up at five (Joshua chimed in to ask them to remind him about the roller skates), and then Joshua got his backpack and spare clothes and bag for the shoes and the house was once again vacant.

They don’t have a vehicle, but Tommy sings and Bubby joins in and Darnold keeps a beat and after a while Benrey starts playing songs out of the shitty speaker on his phone. Gordon’s even spent the day before sleepless, but that’s kind of everyday now. He hadn’t anticipated having to get used to a day having twenty four hours again, but well. He hadn’t anticipated anything while going through Black Mesa, really. It wasn’t really ideal thinking-far-ahead environment.

Benrey seems bouncier when he’s on Xen. Gordon didn’t think about it, but when he steps through the portal he has a flash of that image from what feels like a lifetime ago: Benrey giant as the Earth itself, blocking everything else in sight, his form longing to catch up with his already immense, oppressive presence. Taller than any walls, any mountains, any barriers between himself and a measly human’s fleeting existence.

Gordon shakes his head. At his least incomprehensible, Benrey’s said it was “a show”. “Like. Cable TV. A television series,” Gordon’s asked.

“Like a cutscene,” Benrey’s replied, as if Gordon was the one too slow for the course.

Benrey now felt nothing like whatever that was that happened to him and the Science Team last year. Benrey now felt just… like a dude. Doing a barrel roll, while saying “Ooooo barrel roll” with a straight face. While his Nokia 2700’s still crushing whatever song it’s playing into oblivion.

Gordon doesn’t deal in implications anymore, so he starts singing along to whatever everyone else’s singing as well, and focuses on carrying their homemade Xen-specific dynamite blocks to where they’re going to dig their largest hole into the core of this wretched piece of rock.

It takes a day, kind of; he doesn’t sleep, out here in the thin atmosphere of Xen, where the stars don’t blink and red light comes in a hue from inside the dirt. He doesn’t have to force himself to go lay down at midnight like back home, he just sits down, at the edge of the portal, when the explosives have all been installed, and watch Coomer and Bubby ready themselves.

They can hear Bubby’s cackles ringing in Xen’s air and also in their comms, as he lays in Coomer’s arms and they race the fire, starting from the outer ring of asteroids to the main Xen island. They jump from rock to rock, red light trailing after them while the dirt itself breaks apart, not with a boom, but with the sound of bubbles breaking after a wave crashes on the shore. Xen glows brighter than it probably ever has, in its disintegration.

Benrey sings a few vacant notes, standing on nothingness; the light from his mouth blends in almost perfectly with Xen’s dying light.

“You got all of your belongings outta there?” Gordon asks, half as a jab, half serious. “Didn’t leave anything important in your old apartment?”

Benrey doesn’t answer, for a moment. When he does, it’s just to mumble, “oh look, there’s fireworks.”

---

They got home early from it.

Gordon takes a nap on the couch; he only wakes up from Benrey turning the sound up to max and then shooting a rocket at a truck in Far Cry 3. “Dude,” he throws an arm up over his face, and winces when it’s the plastic arm. “What the fuck.”

“Go pick Joshua up,” Benrey says, definitely too conversationally, and barely understandable under the noises from the game. “Gordon. Sleepman.”

“You’re slipping,” Gordon comments as he wrestles himself out of Tommy’s quilt. He forgot to give it back to Tommy, he realizes sleepily, picking up the phone he left charging on the living room table. It’s seven already.

The drive to Joshua’s grandparents’ place is not a long one. He finds Joshua sitting at the porch of the little house, backpack and the bag with the roller skates at his feet. Joshua jumps up at the sight of Gordon’s car, and before he can walk through the gate he’s already found his arms full of his son.

Joshua clings to his neck with a death grip. “I’m sorry I’m late,” Gordon says. “I was tired, so I took a nap, and forgot the time.”

“It’s okay,” Joshua mumbles, “you were tired.”

“I blew up so many asteroids though.” Gordon says, and Joshua laughs.

They drive home after saying goodbye to Joshua’s grandparents (Joshua’s grandpa put a wrapped up pot pie in Gordon’s hands with an iron grip and a gaze that communicated clearly what would happen if he refused it), and Joshua agreed to take a detour to the Roswell airport for the night. Gordon absentmindedly texts Benrey taking the kid to watch airplanes, get your own food , and puts his phone away for the drive. The radio’s on, but Joshua doesn’t sing along. Gordon’s vocal cord’s still tired from Xen (no more, Xen-no-more it is, there’s just a vast of empty space inbetween dimensions there now) so he also stays silent.

They get ice cream at a drive-thru on the way, and then they’re at the highway, parking on the roadside, looking over the rail at the airport. A plane leaves the ground there and goes into the air. Gordon’s struck by how different it is from a bird or a moth; nothing about the plane communicates any internal movement, it just. Moves. Up and up. Like a JPEG sliding across the screen under someone’s puppeteering with a mouse.

Joshua stares at the plane, unblinking. “Is it dangerous in space, Dad?” He asks.

Gordon taps his hand on the steering wheel. “It’s.” He starts saying, but stops to clear his throat. “It can be. There’s a lot of math going into making things that bring a human into space, and a lot of different people doing different parts of that math, and. Sometimes some people do their math wrong. Sometimes they try something new, and we don’t have the good math for that new thing yet. Sometimes new things break into the old math, and we need to. Work around that new thing.”

“What happens if,” Joshua swallows, “someone does the math wrong?”

“We try to catch it,” Gordon says. “That’s why there are so many people doing the math. So if someone gives the wrong answer, they can spot it early, and fix it.”

“What if nobody does,” Joshua says. He’s still looking through the car’s window, at the stroke of cloud the plane’s long flown past.

Gordon puts his hands on the gear stick. “That’s very, very rare to happen,” he intones carefully. “They have to check, over and over, before they send a ship into space.”

Joshua turns from the window to Gordon. He looks at Gordon’s prosthetic hand, on the gear stick. “I’ve only found books about spaceships that have gone to space,” he says, quiet.

Gordon turns over, and holds out that hand. Joshua climbs over the gear stick to give him another hug. “Experiments are important to those ships too,” Gordon says. “They give the people who make the ships important information to make them safe.”

Joshua just buries himself in Gordon’s arms.

“I’m really sorry I came home late and didn’t call you, Joshua,” Gordon says, and hugs his son tighter. “I won’t do that again. I’ll always call when I’m home late.”

“I don’t have to be an astronaut,” Joshua mumbles.

“Oh, no- nononono, listen,” Gordon says into his hair, with all the determination he can muster up. “Listen, Joshua, you become whoever you want to, okay? You don’t have to be anything, but you don’t have to not be anything either. That’s my mistake, you didn’t do anything wrong. You’re good. You’re good. You’ll be an incredible astronaut. You’ll be the first man on Mars. Jupiter, even.”

“Jupiter is a gas giant,” Joshua mumbles. “There isn't any land to land on.”

Gordon nods. “That’s why it’s called landing , I get it.”

---

They drive home after, and Joshua asks to sit with Gordon while he and Benrey play Mario Kart. Gordon agrees, which means he has to clamp down on any curse he almost lets out when someone bumps him off the damn road, while Benrey does some magic or whatever on his screen. Who the hell knows.

After their third match, Benrey elbows Gordon in the arm to signify a break. “Beddy bye hour,” he says, not even looking at Gordon, “for… babies. Hattrick means I make the rules.”

“You didn’t come first in the second match,” Gordon argues, but quiets down when he looks down to see Joshua asleep leaning on him. “Okay, don’t fucking choose Toon Link for me again while I’m away,” he points a finger at Benrey, who’s residing smugly in the to-be-chaos of his own making. “I’m fucking serious.”

He carries Joshua to his bedroom and tucks him in, and then detours to the kitchen for some water.

“Ooh, hydration,” Benrey comments idly.

“What d’you know about it,” Gordon mumbles when he settles back down on the couch. He looks at the TV screen to find Inkling on one of the shitty bikes. “What the hell man, this bike sucks ass. Fucking Shit Taste McGee over here.”

Benrey laughs.

Gordon plays the game, while thinking about the sendoff party they’re throwing for Bubby and Coomer next week, before the grandpas go off gallivanting in yet another forbidden corner of the Earth. Coomer lovingly calls it their “honeymoon”, but Gordon has full faith this is gonna be what they do forever. Or at least until they’re bored of Earth, and start aiming for the Moon instead. Probably not a bad place to be in.

“Thinking Xen thoughts, aren’t’cha,” Benrey says, while sending a shell after some poor computer character.

Gordon grins. “Ha! Sike! I’m not even thinking about Xen.” He pauses, catching the full force of a fireball a Mario shoots at him. “I haven’t thought about Xen at all actually. Since I got home with Joshua.”

“Achievement unlocked,” Benrey says, and extends a hand. Gordon stares at it.

“Wh- huh?”

“High five, idiot.”

“Oh,” Gordon says, and slaps that hand. Benrey’s eyes widen at the noise.

“Yo that’s a. Crunchy noise.” He claps his hands together, and he’s laughing now, light flowing out in a thread of something like baby blue. “This rules,” he says happily.

Gordon smiles, and then some motherfucker flings a shell at him, so he falls off the road again.

He stays up way too late again, and time doesn’t stop slipping, and when Darnold gives him a vial of neutralizer for the Potion of Not Telling at their little party the week after it gives him something like mania and he hugs Coomer like an idiot while the old man slaps his back in a motion that’s supposed to be comforting. He sleeps that off as well afterwards, and wakes up to Tommy surfing the channels on his TV, complaining about lack of daytime talk shows. When he forgets about the scheduled blackout a month after, he still calls the concierge with shaking hands and then climbs into his bed like he’s four again and there’s a storm outside. He still thinks about Black Mesa, and about Xen.

There’s just a little addendum now, that he can remind myself of.

It’s weird how quickly it blends into everything else, but. Well. It’s weird everything .

He makes cookies again, comes the winter, and teaches himself how to decorate cookies, just to have something to do. Joshua throws his pencil onto the notebook one day to go dig out the lumpy, supposedly-ISS-shaped cookie cutters from the tool cabinet.

“Careful,” Gordon calls after him.

Joshua toddles back with the cookie cutters in hand. “Can we have ISS cookies?” He asks.

Gordon says yes. He also looks up a buncha references, prints them out, and tries to get the cookies exactly correct, making two “outside” cookies and an “inside” one, with schematics of the inner chambers of the ISS drawn on. Joshua loves it.

“Here’s where the astronauts sleep,” He points at the spot that’s supposed to be the service module, and Gordon’s proud of getting that part right on the cookie.

He ruffles Joshua’s hair again. “Hey, maybe you’ll sleep there in twenty years,” he says, and marvels at the levity to that sentence. Just a little bit. It’s washed away with Joshua’s smile, and then they busy themselves with folding bags for the cookies instead.

#hlvrai #gordon feetman #joshua freeman #benrey #tommy coolatta #dr. harold coomer #bubby #darnold pepper #fanfiction #ask to tag #+ one art inside but it mostly has to do with the fic #I will. draw more from this fic and put them in as time goes on #the formatting's a bit wack bc I just copied the formatting from ao3 #I will come back to fix stuff up later #okay now I take more naps #have a good day! and also thank you for reading this fic if you do!

73 notes · View notes

harryskalechips · 4 years

Note

Harry and y/n were in a group of friends and harry and yn got married then divorced but the other 2 people in their group is also a couple and have a kid and one day the couple dies in a car crash and it was in their will that harry and yn will take care of their child if they die so the two has to get along for the kid and because of it they end up together again?

Hi sorry, this took so long, I’ve been avoiding long pieces to write but here we have it! I decided that they wouldn’t be divorced but legally separated instead since it would be easier for them to be together for the lil baby!!! enjoy!

word count 1622

“How are you?” Harry silently asks his wife as she unpacks her things in Kelly and Jackson’s room. It’s been three months since their car accident and their best friends coping with their deaths. Harry, Y/N, Kelly and Jackson met each other in university and although they all ended up dating someone in the group, Harry and Y/N couldn’t make it.

They dated for 4 years and were married for 2 but little problems became too big for them to solve. After the separation, they barely spoke to one another but for some odd reason, Kelly and Jackson chose them two to become Matthew’s guardians. Maybe, they forgot to update their will but Harry and Y/N would do anything to protect their son anyways. Since the couple didn’t have any extended family, their best friends were the only family they have. It hurt them so much when the couple legally separated two years ago.

“I’m good.” Y/N looks around the empty room. She starts tearing up again and Harry doesn’t wait for another second to sit beside her and take her in his arms. “It just… it hurts so much.”

“I know love, I know.” He closes his eyes and hugs her tightly. For the past three months, they’ve been moving into the house and moving Kelly and Jackson’s old things in the storage room. They wanted to keep everything so Matthew can have them when he’s older. The court has also been finalizing their adoption for him. Although they were separated they chose to stick together and give Matthew a complete family.

Matthew was just two years old. He was the good news after Harry’s and Y/N’s broke up but now he’ll be the reason to bring them back together. At least, that was Kelly’s last thought when she was dying. “Is Matt asleep?” Y/N asks as she lays on Harry’s shoulder.

“Yeah, put him in bed a while ago.”

“How are you?”

“It’s been tough. Was watching Matt sleep not long ago, he looks like Jackson. I remember Jack when we used to share a room back before.”

“Why don’t you share a room with me? The couch doesn’t look too comfortable.” Y/N suggests as she felt his warmth radiate her. The last thing she thought she would feel was awkward being with him again. She always knew she loved him and she still does. I guess their pain about Jack and Kelly would bring them back together since no one understands how they feel.

“Kelly and Jack should’ve bought a bigger house.” Harry jokes as he looks around the empty room. He’s not gonna lie. It did make him feel a bit uncomfortable being in their room without them. Felt like they were almost trespassing. They changed all the furniture in the room though and repainted the house so it felt a bit more fresh and not a constant reminder of their loss.

“I agree but they have a beautiful view, don’t they.”

“Yeah.”

“So?”

“Alright. You okay finishing up by yourself, I’m gonna bring my things here.”

“Yeah.” She stands up and wipes her tears. “Let me make some space for you in the closet.”

“Thanks.” He can’t help but mumble back as he watches her leave him on the bed. He got instant flashbacks of when they were together. When they were excited to start a family but he was too busy with his job and Y/N just couldn’t understand. Their marriage life was definitely not the fantasy they thought of when they were still in Uni. They started to feel like they grew out of each other.

After moving some of his boxes, he finally laid back on the bed. “I’m so fucking tired.” He yawns in frustration. Y/N just entered the room, coming out of the ensuite.

“Same here.” She throws one of her pillows from home at him. “Here. A pillow.”

“Smells just like you.” He takes a whiff of it and shoves his face in it. “So, would you like me to sleep on the floor?”

“What? No.” She tucks herself under the comforter. “We were together for 6 years, I don’t think it’s weird unless you’re seeing some-”

“I’m not.” He interrupts her with a cold look on his face. He sits up and grabs his toothbrush from his bag. Without a word, he’s already making his way to the washroom. Y/N was about to fall asleep until his voice woke her up. “Are you seeing someone?”

“What?” She opens her eyes and closes the book resting on her chest. She puts it on her nightstand and checks the baby monitor to make sure it’s on.

“Are you seeing someone?”

“No.” She throws her head back on the pillow. “Haven’t found the one yet?”

“The one?” Harry asks with petty. He couldn’t help but feel a bit offended. Weren’t they in love for almost a decade?

“Well after you. I just got really picky about who I should date.” She wanted to pretend she was trying to see other people even though that was a lie.

“Have you dated anyone after our separation?” She shakes her head.

“How about you?” They both pretended to not care but in reality, the curiosity inside them was yelling.

“No.” Harry gets in bed with her. “You know, we’re still married.”

“I know. I remember our deal.”

“Our deal that we would only file for divorce if we meet someone? It’s been two years and we have Matthew. I doubt we would ever.”

“You don’t know-” Harry faces her and takes her chin with his hand so she can look at him.

“You’re still my wife. If you think I’m going to let you go, you’re wrong.”

“Harry.”

“We said we would take time to grow ourselves and come back together. Meeting new people wasn’t on my list.”

“I haven’t talked to you in a long time after we broke up. I thought you were seeing people.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“Why was Lisa your date at Kelly’s BBQ last year?”

“She’s my coworker and she had nowhere to go on the fourth of July.” Y/N pouts and pulls away from him.

“Let’s just go to sleep Harry.”

1 year, 12 months, 365 days since Y/N and Harry finally decided to share a bed again. As new routines were made in the house, Matthew became in love with aunt Y/N and Uncle Harry. Not once, did they encourage him to say mommy or daddy but for some reason, the little boy distinguished the couple as his. His new parents.

Not only was the little baby falling in love but so was the separated couple. Who knew that their nephew could bring them together again? How the sleepless nights and hardworking days kept them working together and used to each other again. They learned to co-parent together and sacrifice for each other. For example, Harry would wake up in the night to get Matty even though it was Y/N’s shift. He didn’t care, he wanted her to sleep as much as she could. Y/N never woke Harry up in the morning as she took care of Matt and made breakfast. Throughout the whole year, they learned to heal from the pain and give Matthew the best. Now the only mood in the house was the tension. Not awkward tension but the tension that gave Y/N and Harry butterflies when they talk to each other. Of course, they began to flirt with each other again but they were scared to talk about how they felt.

“Hey.” Harry locks the front door as he makes his way to Y/N to give her a kiss on the cheek.

“Hey. How was work?” She was laying on the couch, watching a show. Matthew was in bed already since it was late.

“Good. Tiring day but it wasn’t bad.” He takes his shoes off and his coat so he can sit with Y/N on the couch. “You look tired? How was work?”

“Well, working from home isn’t too bad but my eyes just hurt from staring at the screen too much.” Harry takes his hands and rubs her head.

“How about we go to bed now?” “Mhm. I’m too lazy to walk upstairs.” She yelps in shock as she feels Harry pick her up in a bridal shower. “Harry!”

“My wife doesn’t want to walk upstairs so I’m doing it for her.” He watches Y/N turn off the TV before tossing the remote controller back on the couch.

As they make their way into their bedroom, Harry tosses her on the bed in a playful matter, making her laugh. He hovers over her in a teasingly way. “Sorry love, I’m trying to get on my side of the bed.” Y/N just rolls her eyes and grabs his face so she can kiss him. So maybe their issues at the beginning of their marriage were complicated but now she’s ready. She’s ready to love him and accept all his imperfections. That’s why they never got an annulment or a divorce, they just needed time because they knew they weren’t ready to let each other go.

“I’m so fucking in love with you, Y/N.” He murmurs against her jaw as he kisses down her neck.

“I’m so fucking in love with you Harry.” Little did they know that after this night, they would be together again and move houses. They didn’t want to at first since this was Matthew’s home but now with a little girl on the way, they had to buy a bigger home for their growing family.

#harry styles #harry styles fluff #harry styles angst #blurbs #harry styles blurbs #dad!harry #harry styles one shots #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles imagines

253 notes · View notes

artificialqueens · 4 years

Text

When We Went From Friends to This, Part 1: Week 1 (Branjie) - Writworm42

A/N: Fic summary: At the start of their first year of college, roomies Brooke and Vanessa have to quarantine together for two weeks. Fourteen days is a lot of time to bond, but it’s also a lot of time for things to get complicated.

For the lovely Ortega–merry super belated Christmas <3 Thank you Holtz for betaing & suggesting a song for the title, Bean for answering my questions about whether UK stereotypes are true, and Ortega for being patient fdhsjkf

Title from Paper Rings by Taylor Swift

TW for implied weed use

Day 1

“I still can’t believe you gotta go in-person to all these classes, you sure there ain’t a Zoom option?”

Vanessa snorts, and she’s pretty sure that Silky can hear her roll her eyes on the other end of the line. “For dance majors? Bitch, you know that ain’t gonna work.”

But Silky is too stubborn to be fazed by common sense. Instead, her voice gets a little more urgent. “We’re only first year. Start out with something that doesn’t need to be done in-person, then switch majors to dance once this is all over. C’mon, I can’t have my bestie dying Miss ‘Rona here!”

“Christ, you sound like my mom.” Vanessa huffs. “Look, the uni is being very careful, okay? Why else do you think I gotta quarantine for two weeks ahead of the start of term? Plus all clubs have been suspended and meals and showers are booked with time slots for each room. I’m literally seeing no one except the people in my classes and the bitch I’m sleeping next to.”

“But—“

“Listen, I’m at the dorm now, so I gotta go. I’ll call you later, alright?”

“Bye.” Silky’s begrudging send-off brings a flash of guilt to Vanessa’s chest, but only for a moment. Pushing her feelings aside, she hip-checks the door to the dorm building, trying to make her way inside without disrupting the large box she’s holding with one arm or the suitcase she’s trailing behind her with the other.

“Hi, I’m Vanessa Mateo, I think I’m supposed to be room 96?”

The suspiciously stoned-looking guy at the front desk barely looks up from the computer as he slides the keycard across his desk, and at first, Vanessa hovers, waiting for him to launch into a spiel about rules, but a moment passes without him saying anything, so she surges on. The building is a bit of a maze, its cement walls cold and drab despite the colourful posters plastered across it in a desperate attempt to make it more hospitable. By the time she finally reaches her room, she’s almost grateful that she’ll have to stay in it 24/7, given the impression the building and staff have left so far. No matter, though, right now, all she wants is to put down what she’s carrying and collapse onto her bed.

She shifts uncomfortably for a moment, trying to balance her box while also maneuvering her card towards the keypad, but the effort is unsuccessful–when she finally manages to tap the card, she’s met with another obstacle, having to actually open the door without any free arms.

It’s probably not the best impression to kick the door open and promptly drop almost all of your stuff before falling on top of it. Scratch that, it’s definitely not the best impression. Especially when Vanessa looks up at the owner of the voice that’s holding back laughter, asking if she needs help in a soft, calm twang.

Her roommate is tall, blonde, and nothing short of gorgeous. And even as she makes a motion as simple as offering a hand, Vanessa can tell that this girl is the picture of poise and grace.

“What’s your name?” The girl watches with piercing eyes as Vanessa dusts herself off, fighting off a fierce blush as she straightens up and catches her breath.

“Vanessa, but my friends call me Vanjie.” She extends a hand again, and this time, the girl seems rather shy as she takes it, nervously brushing a piece of hair behind her ear.

Huh.

“Nice to meet you, Vanessa. I’m Brooke.”

Day 2

Brooke, as it turns out, is the polar opposite of Vanessa–quiet and reserved, so introverted that Vanessa has to wrestle information out of her. What Vanessa learns about her is interesting - she’s a dance major too, she’s from Toronto, she decided to study here because she wants RAD training as well as to get trained in other styles. She plans to minor in costume design, having an affinity for and attraction to any pattern that involves leather or lace (a kinky detail that Vanessa, much to her shame and embarrassment, files away hungrily). She has two cats back home, Apollo and Henry, that she misses terribly. Everything else Vanessa knows, though, had to be acquired sneakily over their first night together, more observation and speculation than actually asking. Like how Brooke must be a fan of Schitt’s Creek , given that she put out a ‘ fold in the cheese ’ sign on her desk. Or how Lana is probably her favourite artist, because she has a weird habit of not checking if her air pods are actually connected to the school’s shitty bluetooth network and it’s always the first couple notes of Summertime Sadness that play from her laptop before she catches her mistake. Or how her ass is one of the best Vanessa’s ever seen, because Brooke has no shame changing in front of her–

She strikes that part from her mind almost as quickly as she thinks it in the first place. The important thing is, she’s got to spend two weeks with only Brooke to keep her company, and if they stay in this silence, it’s going to get very awkward very soon.

“So… How d’you like Scotland so far?” Vanessa starts, grimacing internally at how stupid the question sounds. But Brooke doesn’t seem to mind; in fact, she smiles kindly as she looks up from her computer, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear again.

“To be honest, I haven’t really seen much of it… Pretty much came right here after I came off the plane.” Her smile turns apologetic as her face flushes pink, clearly self-conscious about the lacklustre answer. That’s okay, though; Vanessa can still work with it.

“Probably a long flight, huh? What’d you do to keep yourself entertained? Or are you a plane sleeper?” Vanessa adds with a teasing grin, and much to her delight, Brooke laughs.

“Nah, I can never sleep on planes. Unless I knock myself out with Gravol or something, at least.” Brooke chuckles, giving a small wink. “I just read a bit, then the airline showed The Notebook, so I watched that.”

“I love that movie!” Vanessa gasps, “I swear I’ve probably seen it, like, three thousand times. It’s just so–”

“Romantic!” Brooke finishes. “The poor guy next to me must have hated me for all the crying I did.”

Her eyes are alight with excitement, and Vanessa can’t help but pick up on it, because finally , the perfect topic, and Brooke likes Vanessa’s favourite movie, and maybe she likes other stuff that Vanessa likes, and they can talk about that together, and–

“So what’s your favourite scene?” Brooke asks eagerly, and Vanessa claps her hands over her face.

“That’s the worst question to ask me, bitch!” Vanessa groans, but grins behind her hands when Brooke laughs, a string of apologies flowing between giggles.

“Sorry, sorry, I should’ve known.” Brooke puts her hands up in mock surrender. “Too many to choose, right?”

“Right.” Vanessa giggles a little too. “Although…” she brings herself up on her elbows as soon as the idea hits her, and for some reason, her heart skips a beat as she formulates the question, a rare flash of nerves hitting her square in the chest.

“Maybe a rewatch would be a good reminder?” Before she can verbalize what she’s thinking, Brooke beats her to the question, blushing again and chewing on her lip.

It’s cute, how shy she is, and Vanessa makes a mental note that she’ll have to help her new roomie break herself of those habits.

“Yeah, lets.” Vanessa smiles warmly, sliding off her bed to grab her laptop from her desk. “Here, we can use my computer.”

She’s only just grabbed the computer and turned around when she falters, realizing with a sinking dread what decision is next.

Either she has to invite Brooke onto her bed, or Brooke has to make room on hers.

It’s just a bed, it’s just a bed, it’s not like you’re inviting her to snog, it’s just sitting down to watch a movie…

So maybe Vanessa’s never had anyone but her friends lounge on her bed before, and her friends certainly don’t make her feel as nervous as Brooke does. Maybe Vanessa’s bed is a little small and Brooke is a little pretty, and the thought of being that close together makes her mouth go dry. And maybe the sudden uncertainty in Brooke’s eyes, too, is imagined, or else doesn’t mean anything that Vanessa thinks it could mean, rejection or reciprocation or suspicion of what Vanessa’s feeling. None of that changes anything right now, because Brooke is smiling again, tapping the space beside her bed to beckon Vanessa over.

“C’mon, let’s watch. If you want, we can even try to find the director’s cut.”

Day 3

Vanessa’s fast-developing fascination with Brooke’s ass isn’t helped by the sight of Brooke stretching on the floor that greets her as she comes back from her shower.

“Oh, hey!” Brooke lifts her leg up into a needle stance, peering between her legs before shifting her weight onto one hand and waving to Vanessa with the other. Her hair is still wet from her turn in the showers, and her current position is causing stray drops of water to trickle onto her arms, making it all too easy for Vanessa to give into temptation and watch as the droplets course over each one of Brooke’s muscles.

Bloody Hell. Vanessa’s got to do a better job of keeping her hormones under control.

“Hey yourself.” She tries to keep her voice casual as she grabs a pair of PJs from her bedside drawer, turning away from Brooke to change.

It’s strange. Vanessa never used to be as shy as she feels now, self-conscious of her nakedness as she drops her robe and begins to re-dress. A few months ago, this would’ve been no problem at all; to be honest, she’s not sure it would be now if she had a different roommate. But with Brooke next to her, watching her or not watching her at all (she can’t decide what’s worse, really), it’s different. She can’t help but wonder what she must look like, what Brooke must see if she’s actually looking. What does it feel like, being in Brooke’s head? What does everything seem, looking through Brooke’s eyes?

But Brooke is comfortable changing around her, and even though there’s no actual rule that says so, Vanessa feels obligated to feel comfortable, too. Partially because if it’s a non-issue, then feeling embarrassed about it might fade. And if that fades, then so will the way she feels every time she lays eyes on Brooke at all.

Right?

Vanessa whips around quickly, the sudden, eerie feeling of being watched making her forget that she doesn’t have a shirt on yet.

“ Christ! ” Brooke hits the floor with a thud, flushing beet red as she scrambles to cover her eyes. “Fuck, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to see–”

“I’ve seen yours, now you get to see mine.” Vanessa rolls her eyes and laughs, hoping that the light tone and faint smirk she forces herself to slap on disguises how secretly mortified she feels. And thankfully, the comment does work; the redness dissipates from Brooke’s face, and she giggles a little, though her gaze stays firmly planted on the ground until Vanessa slides on her t-shirt. Just like that, the awkwardness fades from the air, and things are back to business as usual as Vanessa begins to comb out her hair. Brooke finishes stretching, Vanessa goes to the half-bath to blow her hair dry. Brooke sits at her desk and types intently, Vanessa tries not to peek over Brooke’s shoulder to see who she’s talking to. Brooke stretches out on her bed to look at her phone, and Vanessa does the same to play around on hers.

“Oh, it’s our turn for dinner.” A reminder notification at the top of Vanessa’s screen alerts her to the time, and she shuffles up to slide on shoes and get going, only remembering what she’s wearing at the last minute.

“Gimme a second, we can go out like that together.” Brooke grins, swiping yet another strand of hair behind her ear as she drops her sweatpants and swaps them for a pair of pajama pants.

“Are you sure?” Vanessa frowns, but Brooke just shrugs, a wry smile spreading on her face.

“I’ve seen yours, now you get to see mine.”

Day 4

They do morning stretches together the next day, and Vanessa has to admit that lust gets pushed aside by jealousy the minute they slide into the splits. Vanessa can do them, even if she hates them–it’s not that she can’t. It’s not even that she’s inflexible, she wouldn’t have survived in dance up until now if she were. But Brooke? That girl is on a whole other level. She slides into the splits with no effort at all, falling into position almost instantly and yet extremely gracefully, then does the one thing Vanessa hates, because it’s the one stretch she can’t do. She grabs a high foam block and puts it under her front foot. And then, just when Vanessa thinks she can’t get shown up even worse, Brooke grabs a second block and slides that under, too.

God, Vanessa wishes she could hate Brooke. But Brooke is too sweet, too kind, and too encouraging to even hold her pretzel-like tendencies against her, especially when she turns to Vanessa and taps her foot, offers her tips on how to get herself to that level of flexibility.

Vanessa tries to tell herself that the way Brooke’s eyes seem to linger on her every few minutes is just that generosity, a teacher monitoring her pupil. But even after Brooke helps Vanessa slide a small book under her foot, elevating her leg just enough, the lingering continues, and it’s hard not to let wishful thinking–at least, she thinks that’s what it is–take over. And that feeling only gets stronger as they move to their next stretch, one where they’re toe to toe with their legs spread wide and Brooke is grabbing Vanessa’s hands to pull her hardly an inch away from her chest.

Is it just Vanessa, or is Brooke blushing? And is it just Vanessa, or are Brooke’s hands just a little sweaty under their softness, warm and gentle as if they’re trying to hold Vanessa with as much tenderness as they can? And is it just Vanessa, or has Brooke’s chest gone still, her breathing stopped until Vanessa straightens out again?

“Your turn.” Vanessa offers, pulling Brooke into the position she’d just been in, and from the way Brooke comes to a harsh, sudden, stiff stop, but her muscles don’t shake and her breathing doesn’t change, Vanessa can tell she’s holding back. Almost as if she doesn’t want to get too close.

Vanessa’s imagining it. She has to be imagining it. There’s no other explanation, not a heterosexual one, and Brooke is…

Come to think of it, Vanessa doesn’t know for sure. But she can’t ask, not now; it would be too strange. So instead, she pulls Brooke forward sharply, resisting the urge to giggle when the blonde grunts in surprise at her strength.

“No holding back.” Vanessa shakes her head, smiling far too warmly for Brooke not to know what this is really about. “You can trust me, okay?”

“Okay.” Brooke smiles up at her, and then her muscles relax, and everything feels back to normal.

Day 5

“Truth or dare?”

Brooke turns to look at Vanessa, shifting to sit up as she smiles dubiously. They’re lying on Brooke’s bed together, pressed up against each other in an attempt to both fit in the small space of the double underneath the fuzzy, tickly cushion of Brooke’s top blanket. Vanessa rolls her eyes at Brooke’s skepticism, rolling onto her back to look up at her, grin wide on her face.

“C’mon, you know you want to. We can scroll Reddit later. Truth or dare?”

“Um…” Brooke crinkles her nose as she thinks, and Vanessa has to swallow the thought of how cute the blonde looks like that.

Although admittedly, the fact that she’s starting to hope Brooke keeps thinking isn’t just so she can watch the way Brooke’s brow furrows and muse quietly to herself about how seriously Brooke is taking this choice. Rather, it’s because she knows what she wants Brooke to pick, and the longer Brooke thinks, the more opportunity there is for Vanessa to hope she’ll pick up on the psychic signals she’s trying to send her.

Pick truth, pick truth, pick truth…

“Dare. But I’m not licking anything and I’m not going anywhere naked.”

Damnit.

Vanessa frowns, chewing on her lip as she tries frantically to think of a dare she can ask Brooke to do. It has to be appropriate, obviously, nothing too crazy like she might ask of Silky or her other, closer friends. But it can’t be boring, either—-if there’s one thing Vanessa doesn’t want to be in Brooke’s eyes, it’s boring.

Then, she thinks of the perfect thing. Something that might get at her truth question, that isn’t too high-stakes but definitely still has a bit of an ‘oh shit’ factor—exactly what you want from a dare.

“Dare you to prank call your last ex. On speaker. ” Vanessa smiles triumphantly, sticking out her tongue to tease her roommate. It’s foolproof—depending on the voice, Vanessa will know who Brooke has dated. And if she’s dating someone already, then surely she’ll say that, since admitting it is no problem.

Only, from Brooke’s face, there’s definitely a problem.

“I don’t want to play anymore.” Brooke heaves herself up off the bed, face becoming stony and cold as her eyes cloud over with something that Vanessa can’t quite decipher. Something mixed with anger, sure, but also something…

Crap. Crap, crap, crap. The magnitude of what Vanessa’s just asked of her new friend hits her like a train, and she feels like both the dumbest and worst person in the world at once. She called Brooke out, put her on the spot, and if she is queer? Pretty much just asked her to out herself. Which, unlike someone like Vanessa, who has a pan flag on her desk, not everyone is willing to do.

Brooke isn’t just feeling cornered, she’s feeling afraid.

“Aw, c’mon Brooke, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want—“

“I said I don’t want to play!” Brooke snaps.

There’s a beat, Vanessa’s own heartbeat the only thing she can hear amidst the crushing silence.

“Brooke—“ Vanessa tries again after a moment, her throat going dry as she tries to cut through the sudden tension, but Brooke just turns to her desk, scoops up her things and storms towards the door.

“I’m going for a walk. See you at dinner.”

She slams the door on her way out, and suddenly, getting an answer to Vanessa’s question doesn’t really matter anymore, because there’s no satisfaction in what a reaction that strong might mean. She drops her head in her hands, staying there for a moment before punching the mattress underneath her, rocketing up and grabbing her phone.

“Silk? Yeah, I’m okay, don’t worry, I just… I fucked up.”

Day 6

They don’t talk about it at dinner, nor afterwards. They don’t talk about it the next morning, not during their morning stretches or at breakfast, either. It’s not that they don’t talk; they say good morning, ask each other questions about what time breakfast is, what time Brooke is going to be on a call with her parents. But that’s about as far as it goes; Brooke sticks to business, asking and answering questions in as few words as possible and avoiding Vanessa’s gaze at all costs. It’s torture, the tension eating away at Vanessa’s mind and stinging in her chest. She fucked up, and she fucked up bad , and despite Silky’s advice, she’s not so sure she can fix this.

Still, she supposes it won’t hurt to try.

Brooke is in the shower when Vanessa decides to sneak out, purse over her shoulder and mind ready for a mission. There’s a supermarket open within walking distance of the uni right now, and technically, she’s not supposed to leave campus at all except for emergencies. Which this is, so it should be okay, right? At least, that’s what she’ll say if she gets caught. She’ll have to be fast, and sneaky, and careful not to run into anyone who might ask where she’s going. Come to think of it, she hasn’t been for a walk on the grounds yet, not since arriving–how will it work? Will she have to plan a route? Give it to the front desk? Get a pass or something, to make sure she comes back within the allotted time? This could be dangerous, very dangerous…

“If you’re gonna go to the shop, can you get me a pack of cigs?” The stoner at the front desk doesn’t even bother looking up from whatever he’s doing on the computer as she tries to sneak by, stopping in her tracks at his voice.

Christ, really?

“Sure, whatever.” Vanessa rolls her eyes, a little irritated at how easy this actually is. So much for danger and adventure.

She comes back about an hour later, throws the guy his pack and launches that he owes her eleven over her shoulder, and skips back into her room with a jumbo bag of ketchup Lays in her knapsack.

“Peace offering?” Vanessa grins down at Brooke as the blonde’s mouth drops open first in surprise, then delight as she snatches the snack from Vanessa’s hands.

“Where did you find these?” Brooke squeals with delight as she tears the bag open, breathing in the sharp, slightly-sour smell that makes Vanessa’s nose wrinkle. Still, seeing the look of utter joy on Brooke’s face makes Vanessa so happy that she can’t help but smile, too.

“International aisle.” Vanessa sits on the edge of her bed proudly. “Figured you might like them, seeing as you always say you’re craving them.” She winks, and Brooke rolls her eyes, but giggles despite herself. But the moment passes as soon as it had come, and then they settle into silence again.

Come on, Vanessa. Just face the music. Apologize. She deserves that from you. Vanessa bites her lip, her hands curling into fists as she tries to force her heartbeat even again, because the longer the silence goes on, the more awkward it gets, the more she realizes that it’s now or never for her to make things right.

“Brooke–”

“We don’t have to talk about it.” Brooke says quietly, her voice flat and lifeless and… scared, almost. Vanessa sucks in a breath, her chest sinking as she realizes what’s going on.

“Well… Do you want to?” Vanessa prods, but Brooke doesn’t even look up from the bag of crisps, which suddenly seem to be the most interesting thing in the world despite the dullness in the blonde’s eyes.

“Honestly, I’d rather we didn’t.” When she finally speaks up, her voice is barely above a whisper, and it’s enough to make Vanessa’s heart break.

Not just because she’s lost her chance to apologize–because she knows that tone, knows that look. Knows the hesitancy and caution behind it, the anxiety and the feeling of being trapped and overwhelmed. Knows what kind of revelation that voice and that look are hiding, and how the information Brooke is trying to avoid isn’t actually set in stone yet.

Jesus, she’s fucked up way more than she thought she had.

“Okay.” Vanessa finally nods, sighing deeply. “But if you do… I’m here, okay?”

Brooke hesitates for a moment, but when she does look up, her eyes are full of a gratefulness that’s surprisingly warm. “Okay.”

This time, when silence falls, it’s not awkward, but full of resolution.

“So…” Brooke finally breaks it this time, a slow smile spreading on her face, “They just put up the newest season of The Bachelor online, wanna watch it? We got snacks, after all.” Brooke waves her bag in the air, and Vanessa smiles.

“Shove over, mate. I wanna see what kinda mess the girls are this year.”

#rpdr fanfiction #brooke lynn hytes #vanessa vanjie mateo #branjie #college au #lesbian au #when we went from friends to this #writworm42

15 notes · View notes