#reupload because I don't feel like hunting it down again

[vaaaaaiolet]

You move to the big city in search of bigger and better, so naturally, you get your first place.

You just don't anticipate the roommate that comes along with it.

f / m, strangers / enemies to lovers, slow burn, hijinks and shenanigans, leon is bad at feelings :( but don't worry because there will be so much fluff omg like a romcom, leon being a little shit to a sweetheart pipeline, and banter!! so much banter

inspired by the Japanese drama Good Morning Call!

catch up on earlier chapters // read on ao3

chapter 4: legalese, chimney sweeps, and a partridge in a pear tree

a/n: this is a REUPLOAD bc i've been told my first post didn't show up in tags 😭 thank you so much if you read the original upload, it means the world to me :,)

I KNOW I TOOK FOREVER but i was fighting to get this written omg. so many ideas. my head hurts. if you can find the spiderman scene we are now due for a spring wedding. andrew garfield peter parker >>> but as always, i love u LOTS!! enjoy <3

There are all kinds of upsides to having friends in high places, but when your connections are limited to the four walls of Wok and Roll Ramen Noodle, the best you’ve got is Hikaru Uehara: an unlikely junior-year friend, the owner’s son, and law student extraordinaire. Apron tied with a clumsy knot behind your back, you slip inside the tiny shop only to meet his sharp eyes across the bar. Oof.

Hikaru frowns. “You’re late again.”

“I know, I know, but I’ve actually got an excuse this time,” you try for a winning smile, peeking at the book he’s currently nose deep in. 

“It’s always something with you. Still house hunting?” He slides a bowl of kitsune udon across the bartop, “Number 43, table next to the creepy painting.”

He shoots, he scores! You catch the bowl and head off to the hungry patron.

“You know, my dad finished our basement yesterday and we’ve got an empty room now. I told him I’d ask you.” 

“Because you’re offering it free of rent, right?” 

A not-at-all-subtle grin pulls at the corner of his mouth. “What about an employee discount?”

“In your dreams, Uehara.”

43 asks for an extra pair of chopsticks, which you gladly deposit before taking the barstool opposite the shopkeeper’s son. It turns out he’s reading one of his textbooks for law class. Perfect. You roll up your sleeves and bust out your CEO face again. 

Here goes nothing. “I kind of got myself into a mess.”

“I don’t want to hear about the thing with your fern and the toilet again.”

“What? No, ew,” you wave all associated memories of that away, “no, seriously. I found a place, but I’m kind of…stuck in it. I need you go all Elle Woods and help me because I got scammed.” And also broken into, but you mentally plead the fifth and avoid self-incriminating yourself. “The lease is forcing me and this other guy to share the place and neither of us know how to get out.”

That gets his attention; Hikaru puts down his textbook. “Okay, maybe you do have an excuse this time. What the hell?”

The Sparknotes version is that you and Leon both filed for the same apartment within half an hour of each other.

Number 44: cold soba.

Your landlady’s as good as fled the country. Leon can’t reach his either. Hikaru sucks his teeth.

Number 45: miso soup.

You’ve both agreed to share the apartment for the three months of the lease considering the mini fortune of money blown on the deal.

“$6000? Really?” he gasps. “You do know how much this job pays you, right?”

“Then pay me more!” you shoot back, multitasking refills while balancing a full tray. 

45 again: miso soup on the house. Hikaru hands you a mop for your spill as you glare, but pulls out his laptop all the same.

“Well, if you’re fine with sharing the apartment for two more months…” he hums, typing away and whistling in approval as he finds your apartment listing, “your place isn’t bad at all considering the price. Plus, you can’t request to move back in just like that if we lodge a complaint and you win. What if this Leon turns out to be an alright roommate?”

His question irks you a little. Why would you want the apartment back with a weirdly cagey roommate who shotguns (emphasis on gun) the master bedroom? You’ve got reason enough to want a place of your own after the shitshow that was college last year. You wonder if you should lay out all Leon’s teen boy-esque rules about not touching his things, but Hikaru shakes his head the minute you open your mouth.

“I know it’s not what you want to hear, but maybe the best course of action is to wait the storm out.” 

He sounds sincere for once, turning the laptop screen around to show you a 37-page long document with your building’s name embellishing the top. His fingers just keep scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling, and dear God.

"That's the complaint form?" Your shriek rattles 45’s bowl worryingly.

“The first half, yes. Should I email you the second?”

Number 46 has the nerve to comment on your face looking more blanched than her bok choy.

That evening, you close the Wok and Roll with a heavy heart. Your phone pings as you double check the locks.

[Hikaru]: srsly ur best waiting out ur contract

Well damn, Hikaru. Friend of the year.

[Hikaru]: but since u asked (and rescued that last order)

[Hikaru]: i’ll still look for ways to get u out of there and on ur own

[Hikaru]: after finals tho

[Hikaru]: and once u start coming in on time!!

You pump your fist with a self-indulgent whoop outside the restaurant doors. Hikaru might be a pain to deal with sometimes, but he really did come through when he wanted to. Consider your now-thriving toilet fern that he put together a pot for, and soon with a little bit of luck, your eventual solo apartment life. 

You eagerly text back a thank you. Not even the winter air buffeting your face could put a damper on your mood as you skip back home to your apartment, and consequently, to Leon.

Or at least you thought you were. The apartment is lovely and warm and quiet when you unlock the front door. 

“Hello?” You call out for him, looping your scarf onto the wall hook.

No response. 

Leon’s bedroom door’s cracked open though, and the light looks off. It’s only 7 PM. Did he tell you he was going out? Crap, you realize how ill-prepared you’d been to not get his number or anything before you left. Rookie mistake. This roommate business is harder than you remember.

You toe off your boots and tiptoe toward the master bedroom. 

No messing in each other’s rooms, Leon’s phantom voice prods at the back of your head, but your concern for his wellbeing — okay fine, maybe you just want to peek at his stuff that’s so damn secret — takes over as you push his door open and slip into the darkness that’s making it impossible to see.

So you flick on the nearby lamp.

And then you scream. “What are you doing?”

Tucked in bed as snug as a bug and fully dressed, complete with shearling jacket, is Leon Kennedy with his face dirtied to high heaven. He blinks crossly as the lamp flickers to life. 

“Huh?” His voice is gruff with sleep.

“You’re sleeping…like that?”

He looks down as if registering himself for the first time. “I’m…yeah. Tired.”

“What happened to your face?” you ask, sounding reedy. “It’s filthy.”

“It is?”

You nod sharply.

“Oh? Oh yeah, yeah, I was cleaning the chimney.”

“We don’t have a chimney. Leon, we don’t even have a fireplace.” 

He fumbles out of his covers at your bug-eyed look. His room is absolutely freezing. “I have an explanation, I swear,” he starts as you back into the living room. Leon looks even grimier in the light: soot dusts his shoulders like powdered sugar, ages his hair salt-and-pepper, bruises the knees of his jeans. “Last night, I couldn’t sleep. There was something wrong with the heating so I went to check.”

Your room is perfectly warm. The house is perfectly warm.

He nods. “That’s cause I fixed the rest of the apartment, my room’s sti-” And then stops, narrowing his eyes. Whatever Leon did to fix the heating couldn’t have kept the temperature from dropping several degrees as he hisses, “You came into my room. We had a deal.”

“I had no idea you were even home!” 

“Doesn’t negate the fact that you broke the rule.”

Everything flips in a second; he’s glaring daggers, and the entire situation is so petulantly infuriating that you take his bait. The snow from your coat is making a melted mess on the carpet. Leon’s still in his stupid dirty jacket. The living room is half-unpacked from moving in literally the day before, and you’re already having your first argument with your roommate over stepping three feet into his bedroom.

“What is so goddamn important about the stuff in your room?” you finally explode. 

“You don’t get it.” 

“Leon,” you sound embarrassingly close to pleading now, “you wanted this – this whole sharing thing – but now you’re not giving me a chance?” You let your arms fall to your sides. 

Hikaru wanted to know if you could last three months. But as Leon stares at you, jaw working like he’s having a one-man argument inside his mouth, you wonder how you’ll tell your friend you couldn’t even last three nights. Frustrated tears prick at your eyes. You’ve never been good on the debate team back in high school. How long is it going to take for Leon to snap at you for that too?  

“It’s not you,” he says softly.

You smother a sniffle with your coat sleeve, making him sigh. 

“It’s not you,” he repeats, shaking his head to himself, “God, Hunnigan, you’re never this sloppy…” Shucking off his coat, he drops it on a box labeled Seasonal Decor #2 before heading back inside his room. He appears moments later with a box of tissues. “Take one before I get them covered in coal, yeah?” 

As you hesitatingly accept, you take in his form sans jacket. Leon is – alarmingly built, for one – covered in scratches. Bruises. Real ones. Fresh.

They’re littered along his muscled forearms, right up to the tops of his fitted black shirt sleeves. He’s so close to you that you even notice a silvery scar topping his right cheekbone.

“Are you…okay?”

Mystery swirls around your roommate like the soot he’s covered in. You ball up the tissue in your hand as his brow gradually smooths out, anger dissipating. 

“It’s my job,” Leon reveals. “Everything, this apartment, the stuff I’m keeping in my room, I…I work for the government, okay? This apartment was supposed to be home base for me. There’s stuff in there I can’t have anyone messing with. Stuff that could hurt you.” He pulls out a gleaming badge and lets you inspect it as your hand slowly flies over your mouth. “See?”

The gun in his pocket. The phone call. 

“But you’re not going to hurt me…right?” you dare to ask.

Leon’s eyes go wide, blond head shaking swiftly. “Never, I swear. Trying to do the opposite, actually, but that’s not going too great right now. I’m here to stop somebody from getting their hands on something that could hurt a lot of people.”

It’s a little surreal. Your once-burglar roommate turned government agent blinks at you like you’ll turn any moment, like you’re about to scream and run for the hills, so he can’t help but flinch as you reach for another tissue and whisper, “Can I?”

“Can you what? I can’t let you look at my things, again, I-” Leon tilts his head as you wrap the tissue around your index and middle fingers, and then rifle through the Seasonal Decor #2 box. “What are you doing?”

“Got it!”

You turn around, revealing a modest first aid kit in your hands.

“You keep that with your Christmas decorations?” He lets out a short laugh.

“I drop a lot of ornaments. Should really invest in plastic ones.” Fishing out a small bottle of ointment for Leon to see, you shoot him a redeeming grin. “So can I?”

He smiles. “You may,” Leon concedes, allowing you to settle him on the couch.

Leon’s bedroom seems to drop in temperature as the evening blends into night, falling to a bewildering 38 degrees while the rest of the apartment remains toasty. Ice might be frosting his windows, but thankfully, it only melts between you and Leon as you dab ointment into his cuts and he entertains you with sanitized anecdotes from his work around the world. The living room clock ticks to 10 o’clock as you two share the next best thing to dinner: a stash of rice crackers swiped from the back of the Wok and Roll. 

“There’s no way you’re sleeping with a jacket on.” You jut your chin towards his room, hissing in sympathy as he jerks from the alcohol sting. “It’s just as bad as sleeping outside in the snow.”

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” Leon munches. He holds out a cracker for you to bite, an oddly intimate gesture that he doesn’t seem to put as much thought into as you, “it’s plenty warm out here.”

“And have you spend the night on a lumpy sofa with a million bruises on your back? That’d be evil, Leon.”

He shrugs. “I’ve slept through worse.”

“Yeah, because you were probably halfway across the world in some random jungle!” 

“It was just the one mission, come on,” he protests, his eyes sparkling with mirth. “I’ll be fine, I promise.”

You shake your head. The tail end of his bandage tucks neatly under his arm as you finish patching him up. It’s been an eventful night, and with each genuine laugh you share with Leon, the more you feel like extending an olive branch for everything that’s happened so far. You even feel a little bad for the Lena thing.

“Sleep in my room for the night. Take the bed,” you suggest.

“It wouldn’t be very chivalrous of me.”

“And calling dibs on the master bedroom was?”

“I needed space for my equipment!”

You lift an unimpressed brow.

“Touché.” Leon gives in, chuckling.

So it’s settled. You pull out a mass of blankets from a box next to the fridge (Winter Camp Sophomore Year EMERGENCY SUPPLIES) which Leon insists on expertly fashioning into a nest beside your bed. It’s piled high with pillows from his own bed by the time you come back from brushing your teeth. 

“It makes me feel better about this whole thing,” he admits when you laugh at it. 

It’s either him or his pillows that make you feel warmer sleeping on the floor than you did in your bed last night. Leon's unexpected warmth might be your Christmas miracle to make up for this apartment fiasco. The stars twinkle outside your bedroom window as you drift off to sleep.

Deep in your dreams, you miss the twinkle of something else too. 

A ping to be specific.

[UNKNOWN NUMBER]: Hiding him from me already?

back to the chapter masterlist...

comments and reblogs are very much appreciated <3 take care and i love you!

[therabidjackalope]

Spectral Plumbing

(Old story, inspired by true events)

“Hell no. Never using that again.” I said out loud, trying to bolster my courage with the sound of my own voice. It wasn’t working. Instead of encouraging me, my voice bounced and echoed around the dark and empty bathroom. The soft hiss of falling water the only other sound.

I slowly turned my head toward the only light source in the room, the shower. The blurry black spots were still there, looking back at me. “This is about to become a Clean Up On Isle 3 moment.” I tried again. This time my voice came out as a pitiful squeak that couldn’t even muster the strength to echo.

There were no indian burial grounds or old cemeteries anywhere near my house. I knew this because of hopeful investigating as a kid. Sure, there were times when I felt like I was being watched, but that was always my own paranoia after watching a scary movie. My house had never had any other owners, it was built only a few months before I moved in. So who the hell was that in my shower?

I closed my eyes and began to count, holding onto a childish hope that the old trick still held the magic it did when I was a kid.

One.

I was about to take a shower, just like I did every night before bed. And because I had lived here most of my life, I didn’t need to turn on any of the lights except the one in the ceiling above the shower itself.

Two.

As always, I pulled back the curtain to peek inside, making sure it was empty. This was a habit so old I no longer remember why I started doing it in the first place. Probably because of horror movies.

Three.

The curtain itself was just a sheet of clear plastic covered with little tiny bumps to make it a little opaque. You could see through it, but everything would be blurry.

Four.

I turned on the water, then closed the curtain to keep the floor from getting wet. The water always took a few seconds to warm up and I hated getting hit with it first thing.

Five.

And that was when I saw it, whoever or whatever it was. A form. A body. A body that wasn’t mine. It was pink and blurry, except for two spots of black where it’s eyes stared back at me.

I opened my eyes reluctantly, expecting to see the shower empty. It was all just my mind playing tricks on me. I’d feel so stupid and laugh, a funny story to tell my friends next time we got together. Just a figment of my overactive ima- OH MY GOD! IT’S STILL THERE!

“W-who are you?!” I demanded, trying to sound bolder than I really was. I was terrified. Hadn’t I seen this in a movie once? Didn’t the person end up dead? “What the hell do you want?”

They said nothing. They just stared at me through the curtain with those fuzzy blobs. “Well this is getting me nowhere.” I said out loud again, although I don’t know why I kept doing it. The reverberations of my voice only creeped me out even more.

Slowly I reached down for the plunger, my eyes never leaving the specter in my shower. I had to fumble around a bit before I found it, but finally my fingers felt the smooth hard wood of the handle and I snatched it up, brandishing it like a rapier at the shower curtain.

“N-n-now you get out of there and just… just go away, you hear me?!” I stuttered at the blurry body, mentally berating myself. Yeah, I was certainly intimidating. Fear me or I will unclog your drains, vile fiend!

With trembling hands I reached out with the plunger, hooking the end of the curtain with the rounded rubber, then cast it aside with a swift jerk of my arm.

Nothing was there. The shower was just as empty as it had been when I last looked. Steam billowed out of the opening, wetting my front with tiny droplets of condensation, but there was no one and no thing there. I slowly let out my breath in a loud sigh of relief and slowly lowered the plunger. It must have been some trick of the light, some festering ghoul of my imagination, some… And then I noticed the wet footprints, glistening on the tile floor.

“Oh hell no. I’m getting a hotel room tonight!”

[onewomancitadel]

tbh i love that you arent really the type to...ig 'entertain'? negativity and public crit about other authors 🥰🥰 i dont get the thought process behind going to another author and being like WOW YOURE SO MUCH BETTER THAN THIS OTHER GUY WHO SUCKS!! bc i know id cry if i saw that about myself </3 ALSO im having fun catching up on skimming eye i love your characterization of them <3

do you think youre not really a knightfall fic reader because of your specific tastes for the ship? because i know thats why i dont generally READ fic for the rarepairs i enjoy. its less likely ill find other authors who have the same thoughts and characterizations as me so i just sit in my little corner and write my own stuff. have a good evening 🥰

I do appreciate you saying that. For the record, I think any anons who come to me talking about other fic or fic authors are well-meaning, and I don't hold any ill-will. Truthfully, I generally don't hold ill-will, because I try to assume the best of somebody interacting with me, even if I assume the worst re: my own fic lol.

I just think it isn't immediately apparent it can be extremely awkward for me, so I think handling it with sincerity is the way to go. It's always better to be sincere (:

I also also sort of think that personal/private discussion of fic is different to public. I mean, I was websearching my fic on duckduckgo to see if a reupload of Skimming Eye had been taken down at my request, and I found a Reddit thread where my fic was being discussed. Someone said I read too much into canon and attribute too much importance to intertextual sources - someone actually defended me/disagreed to be fair - but it also makes me crie and I didn't want to ever post online ever again. So I would be a literal and actual hypocrite if I were publically mean.

(On the other hand, I doubt that user ever intended me to see it, so it's not really fair of me to be upset, and that's why I don't feel bad about it now - and who even follows my blog? I really doubt any other Knightfall fic authors, other than my friend Sunset Hunting, is going to see anything, and he knows he's great. I am still trying to be nice though).

Also ideologically, I think that more discourse and more ideas is always better. If you have different opinions about a ship or what it would look like, you're allowed to express that, and it can be meaningful if that's derived from a depiction you dislike.

ALSO im having fun catching up on skimming eye i love your characterization of them <3

Thank you. <3 <3 <3 That's so sweet... I hope you are enjoying it (: What is it like reading it as a sort of non-Knightfall shipper?

do you think youre not really a knightfall fic reader because of your specific tastes for the ship? because i know thats why i dont generally READ fic for the rarepairs i enjoy. its less likely ill find other authors who have the same thoughts and characterizations as me so i just sit in my little corner and write my own stuff.

Delicately, yes.

I was in the corner on my own making my dollies kiss for the better part of a year and a half before I even discovered other Knightfall fic, and given *gestures to my entire fucking useless blog* all of my R/WBY opinions I have a very particular rendering of them in my head, and it can be sort of psychically violent to read things which contradict it. It's an issue I near-universally encounter the minute I start writing for a pairing - not reading - so the moment of real and total commitment.

I didn't have this issue with Reylo mostly because I did manage to find renderings of Reylo that really fit the two of them in my head, chiefly Sword of the Jedi series by diasterisms and anything written by corseque. Chelsea's Reylo is... so perfect it makes my heart hurt.

But that was possible because Reylo is such a huge fucking ship. Statistically speaking someone else is going to have a similar reading.

It's only harder with Knightfall because of my opinions on the show, the smallness of the ship, the varying points of canon at which other fics have been written, etc. and I think it's great that other authors are having fun, by the same virtue I am also allowed to have my pet opinions in the corner.

It is very well-known that my understanding of R/WBY conflicts with some and I maintain the semi-controversial (????) opinion that V8 is my favourite volume. V4-5 are my comfort watch volumes. I'm here for a different thing, lol.

I love Byronic heroine bad wizard Fall Maiden Cinder Fall and sweet but a little mean healer Jaune and that's kind of my thing. I don't want to read Volumes 1-3-era Knightfall because that's not really what I'm there for, for instance. And the Byronic heroism has to be there for Cinder, if she's just a flat femme fatale I'm out.

There is one thing I can comment on though, speaking as a woman, which is that the depictions of Cinder I've encountered in some fanfic - not naming any names - is frankly misogynistic. And frankly, I don't have to read that to be nice.

By misogynistic I mean, like, examples of Cinder's narration that are straight-up not the way women as human beings think about themselves, or reductions of her character, and again in respect to Jaune taking away everything interesting about them gender-wise and making it fulfil romance ideals which are decidedly not my own. And it's repugnant to read.

That's kind of what makes the issue more difficult and is why I prefer not to comment as well. I'll write my own stuff, lol.

So yeah, Knightfall is kind of a special case in some ways honestly. Is it a rare OTP? I think it's rare, at least in terms of people who earnestly and singularly ship it. It seems like multishipping is much more common. I at least don't now how I have attracted the readership I have, for what it's worth, lol.

Now, I hope I haven't stepped on any toes mentioning misogyny in other fic, but I think it's a distinct issue from issues with characterisation (for instance, I don't think the misogyny is a show-accurate rendering).

It's what makes it hard for me, as a female reader, to look at a lot of other Knightfall fic, and to be quite honest I want to remain ignorant. It's not like the boys want me to play with their toys, anyway.

Btw, whilst we're here, I really like your fic. There's a positive note. (: