#someone always has the episode files

[starsteemer]

okay fr though where are people watching Miraculous Ladybug season 5 (the finale episodes) because its for dang sure not on youtube

[favesgrave]

blurr deserves a vacation but honestly i think he'd be the guy who can't fucking relax and would keep finding problems to solve

[asahicore]

fast forward - pjs

pairing. jay x fem!reader

synopsis. After yet another romantic disappointment in the form of one Jake Sim, you go to the well you’ve always believed to grant wishes and ask for your one and true love to appear. That night, you go to sleep in your bed but wake up in a strange house. When you head downstairs, you find a man washing the dishes and telling you your favorite meal is waiting on the table for you. You’ve spent hours glaring at the back of that head, you could recognize it anywhere—it belongs to none other than Park Jongseong, your high school sworn enemy... and future husband, or so it seems.

genre+warnings. high school au, the type of e2l where they never really hated each other to begin with, they act like they're academic rivals even though they're not particularly academically gifted, jay has a thing about german the language, sunoo and kazuha besties, heeseung is a loser, jake and sunghoon are assholes sorry, ive liz is german, 02z get into a white-boy locker-room fight, attempts at banter etc, they're a little bit silly

word count. 26.6k

a/n. had the idea for this listening to fast forward by somi LAST SUMMER... and only wrote it this summer and only posting it now <3 i hope u guys enjoy reading this as much as i enjoyed writing it !!!!! jay is an absolute cutie here pls love him as much as i do.... as always let me know what u think and remember to vote for @zreamy president in the upcoming elections, shes the only one i trust to beta-read and hence to run a country <3 no it doesnt matter that shes scottish put this woman in the white house

There is only one thorn on the otherwise immaculate rose that is your life.

Every morning, you wake up feeling refreshed from eight hours of restful sleep. You go downstairs to the kitchen, a boiling cup of milky Earl Grey tea already waiting for you, and eat breakfast with your brother Jinwoo and father. Your mom dashes in, placing a kiss on your and Jinwoo’s foreheads, and on your dad’s lips, saying she’s late for work but will see you in the evening. “Have fun at school,” she bids every morning without fail. Your dad teaches Korean Literature at your school, so the three of you drive there together. He watches amusedly as you and Jinwoo bicker light-heartedly on the way there—even in the pits of his puberty, you and your brother get along like two peas in a pod. He still tells you about everything he learns at school and fills you in on the drama in his class, up-to-date with everything even though he pretends not to be interested.

You’re always one of the first to arrive at school, so you scroll through your feed or finish up some homework as you wait for your classmates to file in. Your friends circle your table and you chat about the last episode of the show you’ve been watching until the bell rings and they leave you for their assigned seat.

Class starts with your teacher handing out the math tests you took last week. “Jay and Y/N, great job, keep it up,” he says as he walks past you and the boy in front of you, and hands you your paper. Relief floods your body as you take in the bright red 82 in the top right-hand corner—not the best of the class, but enough for you to be satisfied. 

Good friends, good grades—nothing extraordinary, but it’s a life you dare say any high school senior would want.

There’s just that one thing. The thorn in your side that won’t stop poking.

You glare at it as it whips around in its seat and takes a peek at the grade on your paper before you get to snatch it away from view. It only gives you three seconds to rejoice over your grade. 

“Aw, Y/N. Good effort! Maybe you’ll do better next time!” Jongseong coos, holding up his test for you to see and glare even harder at. 85. Not that big of a difference, but it makes you want to punch the faux sympathetic pout off of his face. 

You’re about to spit something just as petty back at him, but someone whispers your name, and you turn your head in their direction. Beside you, Jake is smiling at you as he asks what grade you got. Your attention is swiftly taken off of Jongseong, whom you don’t even notice dramatically rolling his eyes, huffing in annoyance, and turning around. 

“82,” you whisper back, holding up your paper for Jake to see. His friendly, absurdly handsome smile makes your ears burn. “You?”

The corners of his lips fall down into a sad pout—the kind that makes your heart melt rather than gets on your nerves like someone else. “68,” he says. Leans in over the gap between your tables. Your heart jumps uncontrollably around your rib cage. “Do you wanna go over it together during the break? I think I need some help.”

One-on-one time with Jake Sim? You don’t need to be asked twice. You nod silently, almost mesmerized by Jake as his grin widens. He leans back in his chair. “Perfect. I’ll see you in the library, then.”

“Library, yeah,” you echo dumbly, but thankfully, your teacher tells you to all quiet down and starts the lesson. 

You’re antsy all throughout the rest of your morning classes and lunch break, so nervous that you barely manage to finish your yogurt. Of course, your friends, Sunoo and Kazuha, have a field day with this, and even you can’t help but laugh along as they jump between reassuring you that it’ll be fine, slapping your shoulders with excitement and making fun of your uncharacteristic quietness.

Jake arrives at the library five minutes after you, looking around the room before he finds you at the big round table in the back of the library. Your brain is too riddled with anxiety for you to make more small talk than “Hey,” “Hey,” “How was your lunch?” “Good, yours?” “Good.” And so you just jump straight into it.

You’ve only had a couple minutes of quiet explanation on your part and heavy nodding on Jake’s when Jay appears at the entrance of the library. He spots you and Jake immediately, and without any hesitation whatsoever heads towards you and sits down at your table, right across from the two of you.

“Hey, Jay,” Jake greets in a friendly manner, but Jay only responds with a nod of his head.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” he says when he notices you glaring. “I won’t bother you.”

As if he could be anything other than a bother, you think, but courteously keep to yourself. The childish rivalry you and Jongseong have got going on has no business spoiling a rare hour of alone time you get with Jake. As you go over the exercises he had the most trouble with on the test with you, your eyes often drift over to Jongseong as if to check on him—you’re cautious like he’s a spider in the corner of the room that might spring on you at any moment.

And indeed, the moment your gaze leaves him for more than a minute as you explain an intricate theorem to Jake, he’s out of sight, and panic shoots through you. Where the hell has he suddenly gone off to? you wonder, but not for long.

“There’s a much easier way to do this, really,” says a voice from behind you, and of course, it’s none other than Jongseong himself, quite literally butting his way into your tutoring session. Right between you and Jake, he bends over and rests his elbows on the table, taking Jake’s pencil from him and describing the theorem in a way that isn’t that much simpler. Your eyes shoot bullets into the side of his face while he, unbothered, explains this and that to Jake, who glances at you a couple of times but otherwise does not seem so perturbed by the sudden change of tutor. Either Jongseong doesn’t notice your glare or doesn’t care, because he doesn’t budge.

Just when they’re done with the exercise and you think you’ll get Jake to yourself again, another voice appears from behind, a much higher, girlier one. You notice the hand on Jake’s shoulder first, until slowly, your eyes drift to the face—you recognize Yunjin, head of the cheerleading squad, and she’s smiling at you, a smile that at once tries to cover and betrays her surprise at seeing you and Jake together. She doesn’t acknowledge you any more than that, gaze going back to “Jakey,” asking him if he wants to head to class together. You check the time—five minutes before the first bell rings. What do they need so much time getting to class for? It’s not like any room in this school is more than a three-minute walk away.

But Jake doesn’t even look back at you, just says “Sure!” with far too much enthusiasm for your taste as he packs his stuff. “Thanks, you two,” he says, looking at Jay first, then at you. You think his eyes linger on you for a second, but just like that, he’s gone, him and Yunjin walking side-by-side.

You watch them leave—they look good together, the cheerleading captain and the soccer team’s star. The white Vans she’s wearing have a bunch of red love hearts on them that look drawn on, and you think, Of course, Jake is the type to date someone cute, someone fun, someone who would draw on their shoes. Not someone like you, whose idea of a good Friday night is lighting up a scented candle and reading your favorite novel for the nth time. When they’ve left the library, you slump in your seat, crumpling the sheet of paper you had drawn a bunch of graphs and formulae on to make things clearer for Jake. Jay awkwardly clears his throat and finally returns to his seat, looking at you with his lips pressed in a tight line.

“Y/N?” he asks tentatively, and the sound is too much to bear, so you pack your things and head to your next class early, too. Your mind is racing with a million thoughts a minute—who is that girl to Jake, how come you’ve never seen them together before, how come he was so eager to leave with her, what was that smile she gave you about? In the fifty-five minutes of your biology class, which you uncharacteristically don’t pay any attention to, you’ve convinced yourself that they are crazy in love and that none of Jake’s actions or words towards you had ever meant anything, that you’d liked him so much you’d dreamt up the possibility of his liking you back, too.

Your next lesson starts—the smile Jake gives you as he walks into History is so bright, it dissipates any clouds hanging over your head. You do believe in male-female friendships, but despite yourself, you can’t help but think that anyone in a relationship wouldn’t give someone else such a perfect, warm smile. It just wouldn’t be right. And so, you reason with yourself that simply walking to a class together didn’t mean two people were a couple.

For an hour, you stare at the back of Jake’s head, and although you do eventually come to the more sensible conclusion that a smile may just be a smile, you also think it's unlikely that he and Yunjin would be a thing. If they were, why would they hide it? Jake is so nice, you wouldn’t be surprised if he’d exaggerated his enthusiasm upon seeing her. You’re sure you still have your chances. He even says see you tomorrow when class is over and slips out of the room to go to soccer practice. 

You feel like you’re walking on cloud 9 as you head from History to your next class—but when you remember that the next class is German, your mood drops significantly. Because the universe has it out for you, you and Jay are two of just ten students in your year taking German as your second foreign language option, everyone else having gone for either French, Japanese or Spanish. Your reasoning for it is that your dad has had an obsession with Germany since his year abroad in Bavaria, and twelve-year-old you had wanted to make him happy. Eighteen-year-old you regrets it slightly, but at least now your dad is ecstatic every time you tell him in German that the dinner he made was really tasty. Why Jongseong decided to take it beats you—he’s probably just insane.

But because you don’t really know anyone else in the class, and because it’s your last period of the day, you have no friends to run off with once the lesson is over, and he gets to bother you all the way from the classroom door to the staff parking lot. 

You’ve barely finished bidding Auf Wiedersehen to your teacher and Jongseong is already harassing you. “So, I didn’t take you as the type to be into guys like Jake Sim.” He says Jake’s name with such disdain, like he thinks he’s so much better than him, or like he hates him. It confuses you just as much as it annoys you; Jongseong didn’t seem to have a problem with Jake earlier at the library.

“And that’s your business, because…?”

You don’t look at Jongseong, who’s quickened his pace to keep up with yours, but you can feel the smirk on his face. It’s insufferable. “Oh, it’s none of my business. I’m just surprised, is all. You guys are so… I don’t know, different.”

You scoff. “If you think I’m not good enough for someone like Jake, I’d rather you tell me straight up, Jongseong. Or actually,” you say, looking up at him with a dry smile. “Keep it to yourself and leave me alone.”

He looks offended by your words, and it only adds to your already immense annoyance—he’s the one who just insulted you, so why is he looking at you with those stupid furrowed eyebrows?

“I never said that.”

“You didn’t need to.”

“No, Y/N.” He grabs your wrist and makes you face him, your stomach flipping in surprise that you quickly cover up. When he releases you, you cross your arms over your chest and wait for him to speak, keeping your eyes trained on a spot behind him. “I don’t think he’s too good for you.” 

This makes you look at him. You have to admit, your curiosity is piqued. Not like Jongseong to say anything even vaguely in your favor. “He’s just…” He sighs, searches for the right word. “Well, he’s just a bit of a dick, isn’t he?”

You freeze for a second. You’re so taken aback, your scoff comes out more as a laugh—Park Jongseong, king supreme of all dicks at this school, just called Jake Sim a dick?

“I’m sorry?”

He sighs again, as though you’re the unreasonable one. “He’s so… smug. A wannabe class clown and thinks he’s the shit because he’s on the soccer team. Have you seen the way he swaggers around school?”

You look at him with fake sympathy. “Jong, are you jealous?”

“Pfft. No way. I just think it’s a shame you keep going after these dudes who are not even worth your time, or whatever, so yeah…” he says, voice trailing off and looking down at his feet as he speaks. Hands in pockets and blank expression on his face, you can tell he’s trying to look cool, but the way he’s avoiding your gaze is a dead give-away. Even his ears have turned red. Jongseong is having one of those shy moments he has when he’s trying to be nice to you. Clearly, a simple act of kindness towards you is so hard for him that it radically changes the way he behaves. 

Like when you were fifteen and you just couldn’t get this stupid art project right, so he stayed behind for three hours after school with you, helping you draw and paint and cut and glue. 

Like when you were sixteen and your grandma just passed away, making you miss a week of school, and without a word, barely looking at you, he gave you a stack of handwritten notes of all the lessons you missed. To this day, you’re not sure how he did it—you weren’t in the same class that year.

Like when you were seventeen and Park Sunghoon rejected you in the middle of a crowded hallway. You’d run off to the girls’ bathroom to cry it out, but Jongseong quickly found you and spent the entire period cursing Sunghoon out instead of being in English, like you were both meant to be. He was uncharacteristically nice to you for a few days after that, never starting an argument for no reason or interrupting you when you spoke. When you snapped at him, telling him it only made you feel worse that he treated you differently, he smiled and told you how stupid you looked when you cried. It made you laugh more than it should’ve.

Like now, when he suddenly decides that Jake Sim is also a wrong choice for you. “Him and Sunghoon are good friends, you know that?” he says. “Birds of a feather, and all…”

So you know that Jongseong is not all bad. He has his redeeming qualities. He can even be nice sometimes, when he so wishes. But those moments are so few and far between that when he returns to his usual insufferable self, you wonder if you’d dreamt it all up. Which is why you can’t quite take him seriously right now. You roll your eyes and resume walking towards the parking lot, but of course, he continues to follow you. “Why do you even care who I go after?”

“I don’t-”

“You clearly do, otherwise you wouldn’t be bothering me like this.”

“Well, if all your attention is taken up by that douche, who am I going to go up against?”

“That’s what you’re worried about? That I stop arguing with you?” you say, disbelief clear in your voice.

“I’m offended, Y/N,” he starts, his sarcastic tone making you roll your eyes again. “That our little rivalry matters so little to you.”

“We’re not even the top students of our class, for God’s sake, we’re not fighting over anything.”

“I’ve actually got the best grades in German, thanks very much.”

“Whatever. I wouldn’t call it a rivalry so much as a mutual dislike of each other, because one of us woke up one day and decided to start going against everything the other said.”

“At least you’re self-aware.”

The exit to the parking lot now appears to you like the gates of heaven. You don’t even bother replying to him, thinking that he’ll just leave you alone now that you’re here. But as you step outside, he places himself in front of you and blocks your path, arms splayed out, eyes wide like he’s just seen a ghost.

“What are you-”

“Have you done the German homework for tomorrow?”

The sudden change of subject gives you whiplash. “What? No, Miss Schumacher assigned it just now-”

“Well, given your tendency for getting the word order all wrong, I can already tell you you’re not gonna have fun with it-”

You pinch the nose of your bridge, trying to calm yourself down before you lose what’s remaining of your mind. “Jongseong, were you actually dropped on the head as a baby? Go away. My dad’s gonna be here any second.” You try to walk around him, but he steps in front of you again. You peer up at him, undisguised annoyance in your eyes. Where are your dad and brother when you need them?

“I’m just saying, you’ll probably need help with it-”

“I won’t. And if I do, I’ll just use Google. Now get out of my way,” you say, and manage to duck under one of his arms.

Then you see it.

Well, actually, it takes you a second to understand what it is you’re seeing. At first, you think it’s one of those horny couples thinking they’re being really discreet by going to the staff parking lot to make out, when in reality they could be caught by any one at any time. They’re just far enough that when you do a double take, you realize that you do know the back of that head; that fluffy mop of brown hair. You sit behind it every History period, next to it every Maths and English period.

The girl is up against the wall, and you can’t really see her, what with her and Jake’s tongues being down each other’s throat and his body blocking her from your view, his hands on her hips, her arms around his shoulders. All the works. She’s wearing a cheerleader uniform, so she could be any of twenty girls—but you’re pretty sure only one of them wears a pair of white Vans with red love hearts on them.

Your heart sinks to your stomach.

You’re frozen in place when a whistle rings in the distance, and Jake and Yunjin separate, giggling to each other as they jog to wherever the sound came from. The sports field, probably. It’s Monday; the cheerleaders and the soccer team share the field for their practice. 

Jake spots you and Jongseong staring at them. He waves quickly, awkwardly at you, still smiling even when surprise coats his features. Yunjin tugs on his hand and just like that, they’re gone. 

“Y/N-” 

Jay’s voice fades in the background. You want to get away from this situation as quickly as possible—it’s embarrassing enough seeing the guy you like and thought you had a chance with kissing a girl that is arguably much more on his level than you are, but having Jongseong of all people not only witness it, but try to protect you from it, God knows why, makes it impossibly mortifying. You speed-walk to your dad’s car, huffing as you plop in your seat and slamming the door behind you. Your brother is already sitting in the passenger seat, and you don’t even argue with him about it. When you only give single-word replies to his questions, he shrugs and returns to playing Clash of Clans on his phone. 

The moment you get home, you fish a five cent coin from your purse, change into mud boots and grab your dog’s leash. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

After half-an-hour of trudging through leaves and soft ground, muddy from many a rainy November night, you and Pablo, your massive, fluffy airhead of a German Shepherd, find yourselves at the well in the middle of the forest. Ever since you were little, you have attributed magic powers to the well—not that anyone told you any sort of myth about it, but you remember reading a story about a magic well and decided that your well would be magical, too. You’ve never wanted to abuse its powers, so you’ve used your wishes conscientiously: things like getting a certain present at Christmas (when you were nine and the most important thing ever was getting the Monster High doll you wanted) or not stuttering during your presentation in class (when you really didn’t want to embarrass yourself in front of Park Sunghoon and his cool friends). Every wish you’ve made has come true. Whenever a faint voice of reason tells you that it’s because you always ask for very realistic things, you squash it and continue to believe in the well.

Because today, you’re not asking for something realistic. 

Today, you’re asking the well to show you the way to love.

You’ve grown up watching The Notebook and Pride & Prejudice. Your parents are high school sweethearts who are still, twenty-five years later, happily married. You devour romance novels and binge-watch Asian dramas, the more unrealistic and romantic, the better. You are convinced that soulmates exist, that love always finds a way, that it is there for anyone to see. That it can take form in a childhood friend, an archnemesis, a total stranger.  

But for some reason, it hasn’t shown itself to you yet, no matter how valiantly you’ve looked. 

You’re absolutely sick and tired of it. It is Jake kissing another girl, it’s Sunghoon leading you on for months and then rejecting you in front of everyone, it’s your ex-boyfriend-who-shall-not-be-named, your first love and first heartbreak, dumping you after a year and getting with the girl he had told you not to worry about a week later. At a party a few months later, he’d said, word for word, “At least I didn’t cheat on you.”

Coin lodged between your hands, you interlace your fingers and press your palms closely together, eyes screwed shut in desperation. “Hey,” you start simply, because you and the well are good friends. “It’s been a while since I’ve asked for anything, so I hope you can indulge me… This is gonna sound so cliché, but I’m really tired of getting fucked over by boys — excuse my French — and I just wanna meet the person who’s right for me, you know? Mom’s always reminding me that I’m only eighteen, and that I’ve got plenty of time to meet someone, but I just feel like if I don’t find someone now, I never will. And if I get fucked over again — sorry — I’ll just lose hope and write off men for the rest of my life. So help a girl out, will you? I’ll leave it to you how you wanna go about it, but… just show me that there’s someone out there. Please.”

When you open your eyes, you need a few seconds to adjust to the darkness. You toss the coin in the well. It doesn’t make a sound as it hits the bottom, as if it has been absorbed within the old brick walls. You know better than to question it—the well works in mysterious ways.

You’re quiet that entire evening, making up an excuse of a tiring day at school when your parents ask. Really, you’re just thinking about your wish, whether it’ll work, what might happen. You half-ass your homework—Jay was right, the German exercises throw you into a bout of despair, so you quickly close your textbook and bury yourself in your sheets, falling asleep hours earlier than you usually would.

--

For some reason, the first thing you notice when you wake up is that it’s still dark outside. It must be the middle of the night, you think. It takes you a few seconds to realize that you’re in a completely strange room.

Instead of your floral-patterned sheets, you find yourself covered by delicate silk sheets that your parents would never agree to buy you, no matter how adamantly you argued for the benefits of silk for your skin. If skincare experts online had convinced you of one thing, it was that silk would do wonders for your obstinate acne. You slide out of bed and find a pair of slippers on the floor, as if waiting for you. Even the pajamas you’re wearing are fancier, more grown up than the ones you have at home, a set composed of a pinstriped button-up and shorts. You look around, for some reason more surprised and curious than panicked. You could’ve been kidnapped, for all you know, but all you care about right now is this room. Rather than the pink and white walls that have surrounded you since childhood, covered with pictures of you and your friends, postcards of artwork bought at museums, and posters of your favorite movies, the walls here are beige and mostly bare, except for a painting of Japanese cherry blossoms above the bed and a family portrait on the opposite wall, above a wooden chest of drawers. 

The family portrait. A woman, a man, and what you can only assume are their children. They look like twins—two girls. Can’t be older than three years old. Out of the four faces, you recognize two of them. You recognize them far too well. One of them is yours, of course. You look slightly older, by a decade, maybe? You’re glad to know that you won’t fall off after twenty-five, like much of social media has led you to believe. 

The other face you recognize immediately, too, but it takes you a few seconds to truly believe it.

It belongs to none other than Park Jongseong.

A dry chuckle falls from your throat, as if someone has just made a very insulting joke at your expense and you have to pretend you find it funny. The well has a very odd sense of humor, you think. It’s probably just a prank, a magic-induced nightmare before the real thing. Except this already feels real, disorientingly so. The fabric on your skin, the picture, the room. It all feels too real, more tangible than any dream you’ve ever had.

You take a step closer towards the picture, as if looking at it harder will make Jongseong’s face fade into that of another man, the real man that will become your husband and father of your children. But alas, his features remain the same, frozen in time by the photographer’s camera. He, too, looks older—and not only does he not fall off after twenty-five, he becomes all the more handsome for it.

Is this how you find out that Jongseong was handsome all along? You stare at it until the familiar face becomes practically unrecognizable, like repeating a word so much it stops feeling like one. The straight nose, the almond-shaped eyes that seem to have softened overtime, whereas his jaw has remained as sharp as ever. Have his eyebrows always framed his face so perfectly? Has that dimple always been there? 

You look around again, and the bright numbers on the bedside alarm clock catches your attention. They read 9:57 p.m., but it’s the date that makes your stomach sink—today is still the 18th of November, but ten years later. You stare at the clock, at the unfamiliar number, a date so far into the future you can’t wrap your head around it. You could barely envision life after high school.

Downstairs, the sudden clang of pots and the sound of a tap running manage to rip your gaze away from the alarm clock. An overwhelming curiosity tells you to follow the noise. This is all a dream, so there are no consequences if you explore a bit more, right? 

You’ve never been in this house before, and you have no idea where your feet are taking you until you find yourself in the kitchen. It’s the only lit room in the house, and you’re creepily standing in the dark under a wide archway that connects the kitchen to what looks like the dining room. A man has his back to you, washing dishes and putting them out to dry on a rack next to the sink. He’s wearing a white cotton sweater, one that you feel you recognise without ever having seen before, and a brown apron is tied around his neck and waist. 

The first thing you think to yourself is Oh, his haircut hasn’t changed. In almost every class you share with him, Jongseong has made it a point to sit either next to you or right in front of you, so you’ve spent a lot of time glaring at the back of his head. You wouldn’t be surprised if he started developing two eye-shaped bald spots there. His hair is still short and spiky at the back and on the sides, longer on the top. When he lets it grow too long, it sometimes covers his eyes, and he obnoxiously keeps having to push it back like a heartthrob in an 80s movie. 

Something like a memory flashes through your mind, blurry like those images you aren’t sure came from a dream or from real life. Your surroundings are unclear, but Jay’s face is nestled against your neck, your hand in his hair. You can feel the softness of the close shave against your palm as clearly as if you were touching it right now. You ask him why he’s always kept it that way, and he replies that it’s simple to maintain. Then in classic Jay fashion, he adds, “And it makes me look awesome.”

Another memory, a clearer one, this time—this definitely happened. It’s halfway through sophomore year, a random Tuesday, and Jay walks in, holding his head high and looking smugly around himself. The bastard got a new haircut. Long gone, his messy, unorganized flop of black hair that looked like it didn’t know what it was doing; hello, sleek undercut. It accentuates all of his best features, which is terrible news for you. You had never even thought of Jongseong as someone having “best” features, but now they’re being thrown in your face. His nose. His jawline. His smile.

It ruins your day, and a few after that. You can’t quite put it into words when your friends ask what’s wrong at lunch—or rather, you don’t wanna face the humiliation of uttering something along the lines of “Park Jongseong looks good with his new haircut, and it’s bothering me.”

Here, it’s a familiar sight in an unfamiliar environment, the back of his head. Without really thinking, you take a step forward. Jongseong starts at the sound of your slippers against the marble floor tiles, but his face relaxes into a smile when he sees you.

“Oh, it’s just you, honey. I thought you were sleeping.”

Just you. As if the two of you being in the same kitchen is normal. You guess it must be, to this version of Jongseong. To him, you’re not the annoying girl he strives to best in every class—you’re honey. 

“I was,” you say, walking around the kitchen island to join him by the sink. Something in you needs to look at him, really look at him, maybe pinch yourself or pinch him to be sure you’re not going crazy. Maybe you caught wafts of some ancient algae that lives in the well and made you hallucinate?

“I left a plate out for you in case you woke up. Made your favorite. The girls weren’t so happy, seeing as it’s the third time this month,” he says with the special kind of smile reserved for parents talking about their children. The girls. A mention so casual, so obvious, your heart hurts. “But I think I got it really right this time,” he continues. “Honestly, it might even be better than the original.”

He goes back to washing the dishes and you watch the sponge in his hands as it scrubs away tomato sauce, the soap as it runs from the plates into the sink. A knot forms in your stomach, something like a deep sadness that overwhelms you all of a sudden, and tears form in your eyes, threatening to fall any second.

When you haven’t budged in almost a minute, Jongseong starts to say, in an intimate, almost worried voice, “Aren’t you going to eat, honey?” but when he sees your wet eyes, the tremble in your lower lip, he shuts the water immediately and dries his hands. With his thumbs, he wipes away the tears that have started falling from your eyes. “What’s wrong?” he whispers.

You can’t reconcile the man in front of you with the image you have of the boy that torments you in every class you share. You can’t reconcile the genuine concern in his voice with the snarky tone you’re met with every day. And yet, they respond to the same name, their features are identical, if not for the years that separate them, the stress of adulthood on one and the carefreeness of youth on the other. 

Your body reacts automatically to the soft touch—never in a million years would you let the Jongseong you know come near you like this, but here, nothing feels more natural than his hands on your face, your shoulders, your hair, as though they’re just as much his as they are yours. You realize the emotion in your stomach is not sadness—tears fall, but you’re not sad. You’ve never felt as home as you do now, and if one thing romantic novels have taught you, is that this must be love.

You look up at the man in front of you, eyebrows furrowed as you search his face for confirmation or some sort of an answer. There’s a tremble in your voice when you speak next. “I just… I think I love you, Jongseong.”

He chuckles. “Well, we established that a while ago, didn’t we? What with getting married and having kids. But I’m glad you still feel that way.”

The mention of marriage and children doesn’t faze you nearly as much as it should. You’ve only got one thing on your mind. “Do you love me too?”

You expect him to laugh—not out of cruelty, but because the answer is so obvious, it almost doesn’t deserve to be answered seriously. Like when your brother asks if he can have one more of your cookies and you tell him you’ll cut his hand off. Sometimes you think it’s easier to be sarcastic than be unabashedly nice to someone. Especially with Jongseong, whom you don’t expect kindness or patience from, you wait for him to stay something like, “No, that’s why I’ve stayed with you these eight years.” 

So when instead, he says, “More than anything on this Earth,” voice low and vulnerable, tears flow even harder. 

“Sorry, it’s probably just my period,” you say through sobs, although you have no idea where in her menstrual cycle this version of you is.

Jongseong chuckles again, pressing a kiss to your forehead. “You do get emotional around this time.” And you cry more, because you can’t believe someone other than your mother knows you so well that they know what your period symptoms are.

Rubbing soothing circles against your back and whispering soft words in your ear, he holds you for as long as you need to calm down. When you finally do, he tells you to go sit on the couch, that he’ll finish up the dishes then heat and bring your food for you. You think you’ve got your emotions under control, but the moment you bite the pasta, cooked to perfection with the most succulent tomato sauce you’ve ever had, sweet with a little kick of spice and a generous amount of parmesan cheese, tears start to fall again as if you had an endless stock of water behind your eyes.

“This is so good,” you mumble.

Jongseong smiles, his gaze full of affection miraculously directed at you as he tucks away strands of your hair so they don’t get in your eyes or in your food. “I’m glad, baby.”

You react to the nickname viscerally, words tumbling out of your mouth before you can even understand them. “You haven’t called me that in ages.” You widen your eyes at yourself, wondering how this was something you even knew. But when you look at Jongseong, all he does is smile more.

“You’re right, I haven’t. I guess I was reminded of college. You cried all the time back then. As much as it pained me, I can’t say I wasn’t happy to be the one you always came to for comfort.”

You haven’t been through college yet, so you should be unable to tell whether this truly happened or not—and yet, the memories of the body you’re in all confirm what Jongseong just said. But it feels impossible—going to university with him, letting yourself be vulnerable enough with him to not only cry in front of him but let him comfort you. Whatever could have happened in the years between the present you know and your time at university for things to change so drastically?

But before you can make sense of any of it, Jongseong speaks again. “Why? Do you like it when I call you baby?”

Your stomach flips. Heat rises to your face at his words, the tone with which he said them, the things he was alluding to—you know that having children means you’d popped your cherry at some point, that you’d had sex with Jongseong specifically, but to be confronted with the fact was something else. 

“Maybe,” you mumble, and proceed to stuff your mouth with pasta so that you can’t incriminate yourself further.

He puts on a recent movie, something you should arguably be paying attention to, since you’re literally getting a glimpse into the future of cinema—you could steal the idea, go back to your present and sell it for an outrageous price.

But Jongseong’s presence next to you makes it impossible to concentrate on anything but him. The warmth emanating from him, the scent of his perfume envelop you, give you a sense of just how real this all is—despite how comfortable being with him like this feels, you’re still not convinced you’re not just in an unsettlingly vivid dream. You take one of his hands in yours, examining each finger, turning his hand over, tracing the lines of his palm, smoothing your thumb over his nails—it’s an undeniably human hand. Warm against yours, slightly rough. He’s started using hand cream, you think, all these winters when his dry hands would crack because of the cold coming up to your mind, teenage Jongseong’s hard refusal to wear any sort of cream to protect himself. Memories bob up to the surface: fixing his cracked hands up with a plaster, your tear falling on his hand, the both of you in your school uniforms in what looks like the school infirmary; awkwardly gifting him some hand cream the Christmas of that year, not looking at him as you hand him the small package. Saying, “It’s a waste of plasters for something that could be fixed so easily.” Him treating you to warm, spicy tteokbokki because he felt bad for not having gotten you anything, even though this was the first time either of you had ever given the other one a present.

As your fingers trail up from his hand to his forearm, his shoulder, his jawline, more memories flood your mind. Clumsy first kisses; squabbles of the kind you were already used to; lazy mornings in bed; hours spent in your kitchen or his, before you shared one, cooking dinner together; the way you felt when he proposed, a feeling so intense remembering it is almost unbearable now. Your eyes and fingers examine his face in detail—even though you’ve seen him almost every day since the start of high school, this feels like the first time you really perceive him. The delicate bow of his lips, the strong nose, the softness in his eyes when he looks at you. Your heart beats uncontrollably as you hold each other’s gazes, but you feel inexplicably relaxed at the same time, two nearly opposing realities fighting each other inside of you—one in which you and Jongseong regarding each other with such affection is unthinkable, the other in which it is daily routine.

“Movie not to your taste?” he asks, voice gentle, breaking you out of your stupor.

“Hm?”

He nods towards the TV screen. “I see you’re not paying much attention.”

“No. I have… things on my mind.”

He raises an eyebrow, a smirk slowly growing on his lips. “Yeah?” You think your heart might actually flatline when he brings you in closer to his chest, and, face buried in your hair, says, “You know, I’ve been thinking that the twins might want a younger sibling to play with soon enough…”

You’re not sure whether he actually wants a third child or if this is weird dirty talk that apparently turns parents on—all you know is that this is something future you will deal with, not high school senior you. 

You whip up your head at him, eyes wide in panic that he mirrors immediately. “Or—or not. Later. Later?” You nod fervently, and the worry dissipates from his handsome features. “Okay, later,” he whispers, kissing the top of your head before returning his attention to the movie. 

A couple hours later, you’re laying in bed in the dark together—you can tell Jongseong is falling asleep by the regularity of his breathing and his stillness, but you’re wide awake. You don’t know how you’ve managed to spend all this time with him, acting like the wife he knows and loves, without imploding. But suddenly, the idea of waking up in your childhood bed, surrounded by your pink-and-white walls, going downstairs to be greeted by your brother and parents, sends a wave of panic through you. You haven’t felt this comfortable in a long time—Jongseong’s arm draped over your waist, the fact that you could reach over and feel his skin against your palm if you wanted. You don’t want to go back to a time where you hate him. In fact, you don’t know if you could hate him after this.

“Jongseong?” you say softly, the syllables unfamiliar on your tongue, even though the name rings brusquely through your head for the best part of every day.

It takes a few seconds, but he reacts eventually. “Hm? Did you just call me Jongseong?” he murmurs sleepily, as if you’d just called him Robert or Christopher and not the name his own parents gave him.

“Yeah.”

He chuckles. “Now that’s something you haven’t called me in ages. Makes me feel like you’re mad at me,” he says, turning over and burying his face in the crook of your neck. His hair tickles your skin, and one of your hands comes up reflexively to feel the softness of his close shave.

“...Jong?” you try.

“That’s a step up, but not quite what I want,” he mumbles.

You’re silent for a few moments. “Honey,” you say tentatively, voice a mere whisper.

“That’s better.” You can hear the smile in his voice.

“Will you be here in the morning?”

“Mh-hm. It’s Saturday tomorrow.”

“No,” you say, feeling out of breath. “I mean, will you be here?”

You’re aware you’re not making much sense—and yet, Jongseong needs no further explanation. “Of course, baby,” he starts, voice soothing. “I’ll be here tomorrow, and the day after that, and every day afterwards. ‘Til death do us part, remember?”

You let out a shaky breath. “Okay.”

“I love you, Y/N.”

“I love you, too,” you find yourself saying, and, more importantly, meaning. It’s the last thing either of you says before falling asleep.

--

Tears are streaming down your face when you wake up the next day. When you open your eyes, pink and white obnoxiously stare back at you. The clock reads 7:12, just three minutes before your alarm goes off, and unfortunately for high school you, the night hasn’t given in to Saturday morning—it’s Tuesday, and you have to go to school and act as if you hadn’t just had the weirdest, most realistic dream of your life. You don’t even get a weekend to shake this weird feeling in your stomach off, you’re going to have to face Park Jongseong full force. At least, this will become your friends’ favorite bit for the foreseeable future.

They’re already sitting in the classroom when you get there, animatedly chatting to each other. You plop down in your seat in front of them, and when they see the sullen look on your face, ask you what’s wrong.

“Did you wake up during the night to play Hay Day again?” Kazuha asks, eyebrows knotted with genuine worry.

“I’m not that person anymore,” you reply. “No, I just had a really weird dream. More like a nightmare, really. It feels like I didn’t get any sleep.”

“What was it about?” Sunoo asks.

Your eyes dart back-and-forth between the two of them as you brace yourself for their reactions. Not wanting anyone else to overhear, you lean in conspiratorially. They mirror you. “I was married to Park Jongseong,” you whisper. As expected, they burst into laughter immediately, and you lean back in your seat, crossing your arms in annoyance. “It’s not funny.”

“It’s very funny,” Kazuha retorts. “It’s ironic, even, considering how much you hate the guy.”

“Exactly!”

“But I guess even you know how ridiculous it is that you hate him, if your brain is able to imagine yourself being married to him,” Sunoo adds, shrugging. “It’s a good reminder that you’re literally the only person in this school with a vendetta against him.”

Kazuha nods energetically. “He picked up a pen for me, once. He’s a nice guy.”

You look around the room in panic. “Keep it down, will you?” you hush, despite the fact that no one is paying any attention to the three of you. You sigh, resolving yourself to telling them the entire truth. “But guys, I’m scared. I think this might be a sign.”

Their eyebrows perk up. “A sign that your hatred of him has actually been disguising a crush this entire time?” Sunoo asks, feigning innocence.

“No—what? Where did you get that idea?”

“Nowhere. Go on.”

“Whatever. Come here,” you say, gesturing for them to huddle again. “It’s the well.”

“Oh my God, Y/N, you’ve actually lost it,” Kazuha says, fascinated by your stupidity.

“I’m not going to tolerate any well slander, this is serious. I just wanted it to reassure me that there was someone out there for me. And then I had that stupid dream.”

Kazuha and Sunoo exchange a look like they’re parents trying to announce to their daughter that she’s adopted. “Y/N…” Sunoo starts.

“This is crazy. Like, love philters and writing Park Sunghoon’s name a hundred times are one thing, this is…”

“Crazy,” Sunoo said, nodding along. “This is crazy. There’s no other word for it. Your eighteen years of boyfriendlessness have finally caught up to you.”

“You guys don’t get it. What about that time I asked it to give me a good grade on our Literature exam and I literally came first out of our class? Or when I told it I missed Jung Hae-in and his military discharge announcement came the next day?” you say, aware that the look in your eyes is only confirming their suspicions—but you need someone to believe you, or at the very least understand you.

“One, you’re a good student. Two, that was pure coincidence,” Sunoo explains.

“But girl, if you want to marry Jay, that’s fine. You’ve got our blessing,” Kazuha says, shrugging.

“Yeah. He picked up her pen, once,” Sunoo adds.

“And you know, you guys clearly have some sort of chemistry.”

You scoff. “If you think that him refuting my every word and finding every opportunity to make fun of me, then yeah, I guess you could say we have chemistry.”

“You guys have banter,” Kazuha says as if it’s obvious.

“Oh, please. Banter is cute. I want to kill him every time he opens his mouth.”

Your friends both roll their eyes. “While I understand that most men are better off staying quiet—no offense, Sunoo—”

“None taken.”

“You have to admit Jay is not nearly as insufferable as you make him out to be,” Kazuha says.

“Are you kidding me? He’s always acting like a child. Rubbing it in my face when he gets a better grade, trying to start arguments for no reason, sucking up to teachers, stealing my erasers, for God’s sake, you’d think he’s twelve. I know that I’m not on the majority's side, but I seriously cannot understand how other people tolerate him at all.”

Sunoo sighs. “Because he’s nice to everyone. He never hesitates to help people, he’s even funny, sometimes, and—well, look at him.” He nods his head towards the door, and when you turn around, Jongseong is indeed walking in the classroom. “He’s not a bad-looking boy.”

“Gosh, Sunoo, maybe you should marry him,” Kazuha says, but since you laid your eyes on Jongseong, you’ve stopped listening.

You feel weird. You look at him, and you feel weird. It’s the same feeling you had during your sleep last night, a feeling that paralyzes you from head to toe, that starts in your stomach and spreads to your entire body, weighs you down in your chair. 

“Hey, guys,” he greets simply, and his voice wraps itself around your heart and squeezes. You can’t do anything but watch him as he takes his seat next to you, plopping his bag on the table and taking his notebook out. He looks at you, watches you watching him, then swivels around in his chair.

“What’s wrong with her?” he asks your friends.

“She had a dream that she m—”

“Do not finish that sentence, Zuha, if you want to live to see another day.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she replies, a satisfied little smile on her lips.

Despite yourself, you’re still staring at Jongseong, trying to figure out what the hell these emotions are that are raging up a storm inside of you. Instead of ignoring you, he turns to face you, resting his elbow on the table and his chin in his palm as he stares back at you, smirking. “What’s up, Y/N? Has it finally dawned on you how devastatingly handsome I am?” he asks, and you frown, because he’s not so far off from the truth.

“Please, kids, it’s 9 a.m., don’t flirt right in front of us,” Sunoo says, despair in his voice.

“She’s the one who started it,” Jongseong replies, still looking at you, his smirk growing.

For some reason, this startles you out of your trance, and you look away from him like you’ve been burned, preoccupying yourself instead with your notes for this class. “In your dreams, Jongseong,” you mumble.

“More like in yours,” Kazuha says, her and Sunoo giggling.

“Zuha!” you exclaim. Jongseong looks at you with raised eyebrows, and with his infuriating capacity to put two and two together, you’re scared he’s figured out what she meant, but you’re literally saved by your teacher who walks in at that moment and starts the class. 

The second the bell rings to signify the end of the class, you hurriedly pack your things and mutter an excuse about needing the bathroom, trying to get as far away as possible from the boy whose all-too familiar scent had messed with your thoughts all class, whose every brush of his arm against yours had made your heart race uncontrollably.

--

It hadn’t just been a dream. It couldn’t have been.

Just like there was no doubt the 28-year-old Jongseong from last night had once been the annoying boy you knew, the 18-year-old Jongseong was sure to one day become the husband of your dreams. A devoted partner and father, his presence comforting, his good looks indeed devastating, unwavering.

There was no mistake to be made. The well had worked its magic.

Whether you liked it or not, you would end up marrying Park Jongseong. You, of all people; him, of all people.

Was there already something of your future husband in the boy that snickered when you mixed up your genders in German class, or would he one day spring out of nowhere? Apparently, you’d be around to find out.

But for now, how to act around him? It felt unfair that you were privy to this knowledge of your shared future while he was ignorant of it. Blissfully, perhaps. You couldn’t imagine that he would rejoice much at this news.

Your mind is somewhere else the entire day. At lunch, your other friends try to get the thing that’s obviously bothering you out of you, but Kazuha and Sunoo are there to tell them not to bother. You’d needed to tell someone about it, but you don’t want the entire school to know about your marital premonitions. The two knuckleheads you call your best friends are already doing a good enough job teasing you about it—”There’s your husband, Y/N,” when Jongseong walks past; “So have you thought of baby names? Kayleigh and Mackayleigh, perhaps?” unsolicited, during Physics. You turn around to check on the culprit — because yes, Jongseong is the culprit here, you, a mere a victim — and when he notices you staring, nods at you as if to say, What’s your problem?, trying to look threatening in his white lab coat that’s three sizes too big and protective goggles.

It doesn’t help that Jongseong has a way of hovering around you. Even in classes in which your teachers assigned the seats for you, he’s never far from your seat. The two of you sit next to each other in German, your last class every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. But today, the seat next to you is empty—what would’ve been a cause for celebration just yesterday is now a source of worry. You’d seen him just two hours ago in your previous class together, so where the hell was he now? He’s lucky that your teacher is an old German lady who always spends the first ten minutes of the lesson rambling about something in dialectal German no one understands but nods along to anyway. When he walks into the room, five minutes late, she just says, “Hallo, Jay,” and continues with her story. It’s about her first school trip to Berlin when she was fifteen and the country was still divided. You think.

He winks at you when he takes his seat and you roll your eyes. You pretend to listen to your teacher for thirty seconds, then hit him gently with your elbow. “Where were you?” you ask without looking at him.

He doesn’t answer immediately, probably surprised you initiated a non-hostile conversation with him for once. “I was just hanging out with my friends, something you clearly wouldn’t understand.”

And your friends wondered why you hated him?

“Still having imaginary friends at eighteen is really concerning, Jongseong. You should see someone about it.”

When you glance at him, he’s already looking right at you, smiling. You’ve never felt so conscious of your side profile. 

“Why? Were you worried?” he whispers, kicking your foot with his.

You look at him, horrified—where the hell had he gotten that idea? How was he so spot-on? You scoff, trying to diffuse the tension inside yourself. “No.”

He kicks your foot again. “I was five minutes late and you started to worry?”

“No. Stop.”

“I didn’t know you cared about me so much, Y/N.”

This time, you give him a harsh look, one that lets him know you really mean your words—“Stop it.” Finally, he relents, getting the assigned homework out now that the teacher has actually started the lesson. Your face softens—he looks hurt. Guilt tugs at your heartstrings.

Despite what you might say, you like the way things are with Jongseong. If some people always need to be crushing on someone, you always need to have someone you perceive as an enemy—it was Na Jaemin in elementary school, because he’d once made fun of your incapability to climb the monkey bars; Shin Ryujin, in middle school, for kissing your crush during a game of spin-the-bottle at your own birthday party; Park Jongseong, since freshman year, for simply existing. Your reasons for disliking him are trivial, you’ll admit. You weren’t sure you could even place a finger on what had first triggered your disdain towards him—one too many awful jokes, one too many times raising his hand in class and rattling off a perfect answer, then looking around himself proudly, one too many roars of laughter heard throughout the entire cafeteria. The fact that no one else seemed to be bothered by him only added to your aggravation. He just got on your nerves, and it seemed that you openly showing your dislike of him — him, who was so used to being loved by everyone around him, pampered by his family, praised by his teachers, popular among his peers — was enough to make him dislike you, too. So, after a few failed attempts at trying to be your friend, because Jongseong was unable to not be friends with everyone he met, he didn’t simply give up. 

If he couldn’t be your friend, then fine, he’d be your enemy.

At least, that’s how it appears to you, still now. It’s never gone dangerously far, but if there’s an opening to tease you or get on your nerves, he’ll do it. Not passing you the ball during soccer, or conversely, only aiming for you during dodgeball, not sharing his textbook with you when you forgot it unless you beg, loudly clearing his throat when you speak in class. And, lately, pouring salt on your wounds in the form of reminding you how impossible you and Jake Sim are. His motto must be if there’s a will, there’s a way. And when it comes to making your life hell, his will is infinite.

Everything is upside-down now. The question of how your relationship can possibly go from this to that obsesses you. It feels like you’re more capable of sharing a funeral, dying at each others’ hands, than a wedding. 

“Jong, your textbook.”

He squints at you. “Funny how I’m Jongseong when you hate me, Jong when you need a textbook,” he says, sliding his book closer to himself.

“It’s not my fault your name is a mouthful,” you retort, trying to pull it back to the middle of the table, but he’s quicker than you.

“Then maybe you should call me Jay, like everyone else on Earth.”

“Where’s the fun in that? Now give it here. Please?” you ask, mustering your best smile. Any other teacher would’ve scolded the two of you by now, but Ms. Schumacher is peacefully going on about the importance of word order and punctuation in the German sentence, oblivious to her two students bickering in the back row. Jongseong usually never sits at the back of the classroom—only here.

He gives in, smiling back, but there’s something behind it, something that tells you nothing good is brewing in his brain. “Only because you’re so pretty.”

Normally, this kind of remark would’ve warranted a slap on the arm or an array of insults, but if today is anything, it is not normal. You look at him like you’ve been stung, visions of your not-dream coming to you in flashes like you’re the titular character on That’s So Raven—the affection in your husband’s eyes, the kindness in his words, the sincerity in his smile. Again, you’re left to wonder if this man is already taking root inside of the boy next to you, if Jongseong’s future capacity to love you presently exists in his heart.

Does your future capacity to love him already exist in your heart?

You watch as his smirk softens into a grin, your flusteredness and lack of a response clearly amusing him, then as he circles the exercises Ms. Schumacher is assigning for the lesson. She seems to have forgotten there was homework due—Jongseong will be sure to remind her of it quickly.

He kicks your foot again, tells you to focus. His ears have turned red.

You wonder if those capacities haven’t existed from the start.

--

As much as you love a good friends-to-lovers story, characters hiding their feelings out of fear of ruining the friendship have never failed to frustrate you — just tell her, you dummy, it’s obvious she likes you too — and yet, you’ve never related more than now.

Whatever it is that you and Jongseong have, you don’t want to lose it. It adds entertainment to your otherwise average life. 

“Good thing she didn’t pick on you while we went over the homework, ‘cause you clearly put zero effort in. And I wouldn’t have helped you, even if you’d asked, by the way.”

You hum absent-mindedly as you put your notebook and pencil holder in your bag. Are you sure that these are even your feelings in the first place? Just because the well put a silly idea in your head doesn’t mean you have to believe it like it’s scripture. If what you saw is real, then it will happen in its own time. Things don’t have to start changing right this instant.

“Gosh, Y/N, what’s up with you today? You’re so boring,” Jongseong continues, following you out of the classroom. 

“Just tired,” you reply. Wouldn’t it be unnatural if you were to radically alter the way you behave with Jongseong? Love should come about organically. Sure, his presence has always provoked some kind of reaction within you, but that’s usually been annoyance. Whether he’s stealing the fifth eraser you’ve bought that month or running on the soccer field, beads of sweat running down his temples, hair sticking out everywhere, victoriously smiling when his team scores—you’re annoyed. Whether he’s sticking up his hand higher than yours or going to the school dance with Ahn Yujin—you’re annoyed. When you learned that she’d been his neighbor since infancy and that she had a boyfriend, who went to another school and only trusted Jongseong to take her to the dance, you were still annoyed—this time at yourself for feeling even the tiniest bit relieved that nothing was going on between them.

And this — his quick steps trying to keep up with yours, his dumb story about yogurt coming out of Heeseung’s nose today at lunch when they were laughing too hard — yes, you’re still annoyed. But you realize you’re not annoyed at him.

You’re annoyed at how he makes you feel.

“Y/N?” he says, but you’re too deep in your thoughts, only vaguely registering the sound until he repeats it, louder this time, and grabs your hand, making you abruptly stop walking. “Are you sure everything’s okay?” he asks with genuine concern in his voice. “You’re barely listening to me. I mean, it’s not like you usually really do, but you’d have told me to get lost, like, five minutes ago now…”

He chuckles self-deprecatingly, but despite his words, you’re focusing on something else yet again. His hand on yours, his loose hold on your fingers. Your brain is yelling at you—hold his hand, hug him. It’s like there are still traces of the 28-year-old version of you you visited yesterday, urging you to behave like her and not 18-year-old you. 

So, the well had let you know that you need not look much further to find what you wanted. Here it is, in the form of a boy you have convinced yourself you hated, and hated you, and yet, he’s holding your hand, asking you if you’re okay, worry knotting his eyebrows together. 

Hold his hand. Hug him. Instead, you retract your hand, let it fall limply by your side. Jongseong’s eyebrows shoot up.

He’s so close, the supposed love of your life. You don’t know how to reach out to him.

For now, you smile. “Get lost, Jong.”

--

you guys how the hell do i act around jongseong now that i know our fates are romantically intertwined

kazuha i think not treating him like the number one public enemy would be a good start

you so what… be nice to him? how do i do that

sunoo oh my god y/n when she has to treat another person like a regular human being

you he’s not just another person!

sunoo okayyyyy i see you little miss repressed feelings

you i hate u

kazuha just don’t roll your eyes at everything he says anymore and don’t start arguments for no reason

you he’s the one who starts them… but okay i’ll try

--

“Let’s pair up for the reading analysis today. You can stay with your deskmate or pick a partner, I don’t mind as long as you get the work done. I’m talking about you, Chaewon and Yuri. This is English class, not a gossip session.”

The second your English teacher has finished speaking, Jongseong swivels in his chair. “Let’s partner up, Y/N?”

“What about me?” Jake asks, eyes darting back-and-forth between the two of you.

“You can partner up with Minju,” Jongseong replies, pointing to the girl he’s usually seated next to. “Look. You guys will be great together. Say hi, Minju.” Minju waves shyly at Jake, braces on display as she smiles ecstatically. It’s not everyday that she gets to talk to one of the most popular guys in school.

Jake reluctantly switches seats with him, glancing back at you and Jongseong who just grins at him, fake friendliness plastered on his lips, until he turns around again. Your new partner’s smile softens and reaches his eyes when he looks at you. “Hi.”

You have to look away—you feel your face burn under his gaze. “Hi, Jong.”

He tilts his head. “What? Do you hate me so much that you can’t even look at me now?” he asks, and you can’t tell whether he’s joking or genuine.

You frown. “I don’t hate you.”

“Oh? That’s a recent development.”

“I guess,” you mumble after a few seconds. Is it really? You suddenly can’t remember if you ever really hated him, or if you’d exaggerated your own feelings.

His smile widens. “Well, good. I mean, you were going to have to realize at some point that I really am funny, smart, endearing, handsome-”

“Back to hating.”

“Let’s start the assignment.”

You agree on reading the passage first, but you realize halfway through that not a single word has been absorbed. “Hey. Why did you switch seats with him?” you ask, whispering so as not to be overheard.

Jongseong shrugs. “I thought you wouldn’t want to work with him, considering…”

“Right.” You’re silent again, but only for a bit. “What’s it to you?” you mumble. 

He scoffs. “Sorry for trying to be considerate.”

“That’s not—”

“Let’s just focus on this.”

His sudden coldness vexes you. You know you should let it go — don’t start arguments for no reason, and all that — and you know it’s childish, but you can’t help yourself. You have certain reflexes you’re not particularly proud of when it comes to one Park Jongseong. “Let’s just focus on this,” you repeat, mocking his grumbling tone of voice and shaking your head like a puppet.

He glares at you. “Can you not act like a toddler for once?”

“Can you not be a dick for once?” you bite back.

“Y/N, Jongseong, I’m sure you’re having a fascinating conversation on the use of chiaroscuro in the text?” your teacher asks, a look of warning on his face.

“Yes, sir,” you reply, embarrassed.

“Yes, so much chiaroscuro,” Jongseong mumbles, resting his cheek on his knuckles. When the teacher has turned away, he kicks your foot. “See, you’re getting us in trouble.”

“Do you even know what chiaroscuro is?” 

He hesitates. “That’s not the problem here. You are.”

“Well, maybe if you didn’t-”

“Y/N, Jay, final warning.”

“Sorry,” you both say at the same time. With one last glare at each other, you finally get to work.

So your plan to start getting along with Jongseong isn’t in full-force yet. On the drive back home that afternoon, you reassure yourself that these things take time. When the moment is right, the two of you will grow closer.

--

But increasingly, it feels as though the right moment will never come.

Two months have passed since your visit to the well, and things between you and Jongseong have not changed. Not really, at least.

You still bicker like cat and dog — it goes without saying that you’re the cute puppy and he’s the heartless cat — and he gets as much on your nerves as ever, especially now that you know that the potential to be nice to you, to love you, even, exists somewhere inside him. Somewhere deeply hidden perhaps, but somewhere nonetheless. Of course, after telling yourself that what must come will come of its own accord, you haven’t done much to change the dynamic between the two of you. But if you used to see your retaliations against him as necessary to your survival, you now find some sort of enjoyment in them—some might call it Stockholm Syndrome, you perceive it as a step in the right direction. You’ve followed one of Kazuha’s pieces of advice: you don’t roll your eyes at him anymore, simply because you don’t feel the need to. You argue with him with a smile on your face, his attempts at insulting or annoying you have started to make you laugh.

He doesn’t say anything but seems to gladly welcome this change. If you get a lower grade than him on a test, he doesn’t try to stick the knife in further, but genuinely offers to go over it with you later. If you give in after two hours of tearing your hair out over a German exercise and text him for help, he doesn’t make fun of you. If he says something particularly arrogant or makes a really bad joke, all you need to do is give him a look, and he’ll mumble an apology. 

Could it have been like this the entire time? you wonder, watching him across the schoolyard as he and Heeseung hunt for Pokémon. Just a couple months ago, you would’ve scrunched your nose at the sight, making fun of him for his childish interests. Now, you notice the way he laughs, audible all the way to where you sit with Kazuha and Sunoo, the way he jumps excitedly and points at things only he and his friend see, and all you feel is endearment.

“Look at you, look at that,” Sunoo says as he hits you on the forehead with his metal spoon, startling you. He tuts. “You’ve got love dripping from your eyes, sweetie.”

“Sunoo, that’s disgusting.”

“Love? I know.”

“No, your spoon. Your saliva’s all over that,” you say, and all he does is eat another mouthful of his yogurt while staring wide-eyed right at you. When you look back at Jongseong, he’s high-fiving Heeseung. You wonder which creature he’s caught now. In the library yesterday, he spent thirty minutes showing you every single one he had captured so far instead of revising for the upcoming Physics test.

“Yeah, we know you’d like someone else’s saliva more,” Kazuha chimes in, and the two of them snort.

“It’s not like that,” you say, biting into an apple slice.

“Oh yeah? What’s it like, then?” Kazuha asks.

“We’re… becoming friends,” you say, but you’re not sure who you’re trying to convince more.

“Y/N, I’ve had to watch the two of you giggling to yourselves in the library one too many times to believe you’re friends. I know your homework’s not that funny,” Sunoo argues.

“Friends can giggle with each other!” you exclaim, but your friends are inflexible.

“I would tell you to get yourself together if you giggled at me like that,” he says.

“I saw you twirl your hair the other day,” Kazuha adds.

“I never—When?!”

She shrugs. “The other day.”

You deflate, crushed under your friends’ accusations. “I wouldn’t twirl my hair…” you mumble. You decide to busy yourself with your apple slices, not even bothering to find out what Kazuha and Sunoo start snickering and elbowing each other about.

“Hey,” a familiar voice greets, making you look up. Jongseong smiles at you and steals an apple slice from your tupperware as he sits down next to you, Heeseung across from him.

“Hi, Jong,” you say, sitting up straighter. You offer a piece of fruit to Heeseung but he declines, saying he doesn’t like apples without peanut butter.

In front of you, your friends exchange a look, and you’re immediately terrified of what they’ll do next. Leaning in, they place their elbows on the table, and Kazuha starts them off. “Jay, you and Y/N know each other pretty well, right?”

Jongseong glances at you, eyes wide. “Uh, sure.”

“Have you ever noticed her, say, twirling her hair?” Sunoo asks, tilting his head innocently at the poor boy by your side.

You’ve never seen him look so confused. “Um, yeah, she does that when she’s concentrating on something, sometimes…”

They lean back. “Huh,” Kazuha says, studying Jongseong’s face.

“Interesting. Very interesting,” Sunoo says, slowly nodding.

You glare at your friends. “See, that’s different,” you tell them. “I was concentrating on something, not doing… whatever you guys had in mind.”

Jongseong looks at you. “What did they have in mind?”

You answer before either of them can dig your grave any deeper. “Nothing. It’s nothing. We were just having a stupid conversation.” You muster your most convincing smile, and the subject is finally dropped.

No one says anything for a few moments, until Heeseung decides to speak up: “You should’ve seen Jay earlier, Y/N. He caught this super rare version of Pikachu earlier, it was awesome.”

“Dude…” Jongseong murmurs.

“What?” Heeseung asks, his enthusiasm quickly dissolving into confusion. Jongseong just shakes his head. Thankfully for all of you, the bell rings then, and you head to class. The three of them walk in front of you while you and Jongseong fall back a step.

“Why were you guys sitting outside? It’s freezing today,” he asks you. Walking side-by-side like this, you can’t help but notice the inches he has over you, the broadness of his shoulders in comparison to yours.

“They turned the heat way too high in the cafeteria, so we came outside for some fresh air,” you explain. He’s right, the air is chilly today—it’s a few days into December, and the temperatures have been accordingly low.

“Aren’t you cold?”

Your heart skips a beat. One of the side effects of not being at each other’s throat anymore was that you got more and more often to be privy to this side of Jongseong—attentive, considerate, kind. What you once thought were his moral attempts at not being so mean to you all the time, you found out was actually his real nature. He wasn’t a prick who was sometimes nice, he was a nice person who turned into a prick with you. Whether the fault lay on him or you was another debate.

“No, I’m alright,” you say, but your body decides to betray you and makes you sneeze three times in a row.

“Bless you,” Jongseong says, laughing. “Here.” You try to stop him, pushing his hands away, but he takes his gloves off and forces them in your palms.

“I’m going to be inside for the next four hours, Jong, I’ll be fine. Keep them.”

“No, it’s okay. Just so you can warm up quicker.”

You eventually give in, putting the gloves over your hands, laughing at the extra fabric that hangs off the tip of your fingers. But when you look at Jongseong’s now-bare hands, something catches your attention. Stopping in the hallway, you grab one of them, examining the cuts on his knuckles. “You need to wear hand cream, Jong, your hands are too chapped.”

He lets you turn his hand over, smooth over his skin, do the same thing with his other hand. “Men don’t wear hand cream,” he says, a grin on his lips.

You burst out laughing. “I think that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

“Seriously, though, I don’t like the way it feels. Too sticky.”

“You just need to get a quick-absorption one.” Then, you make the terrible mistake of looking up from his hand and meeting his eyes—you gasp silently, his gaze and soft smile transporting you right back to that night, the images of 28-year-old and 18-year-old Jongseong mixing into each other, becoming indistinct from each other. Your gaze drifts down to his lips — chapped, too, when they’re usually plumper, rosier — and his hand, still in yours, balls into a fist. The second bell rings and you both take a step back, eyes meeting again for a brief moment before looking down at the floor. With uncharacteristically shy, embarrassed words of parting, you make your separate ways to your next classes.

“That was beautiful, Y/N,” Sunoo says, waiting for you by the door, and you walk past him without so much as a glance.

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

--

sunoo jay and y/n almost kissed earlier

kazuha WHAAAAT

you KIM SUNOO.

kazuha WHEN?????

sunoo right before class after the lunch break y/n was sooo embarrassed afterwards lol

you we did NOT almost kiss you’re talking out of your ass

kazuha i can’t believe i missed this fml

you YOU DIDNT MISS ANYTHING NOTHING HAPPENED

sunoo be serious u guys we’re standing inches apart

you were* and no we weren’t

sunoo oh stfu it was autocorrect i saw it w my own eyes y/n… you WERE literally holding his hand and staring into those beautiful eyes of his

kazuha sunoo…?

sunoo what can’t a man acknowledge another man’s objective attractiveness if i was y/n i would’ve folded the moment i saw him

you literally one of the first times he talked to me was to make fun of my handwriting

sunoo yeah he’s on his tsundere shit i fw it

you …

sunoo anyways zuha you shouldve seen it when the bell rang they practically leaped away from each other and u didnt know what to do w yourselves afterwards likeeee it was so obvi what you both were thinking of

kazuha cuuuute

you i resent these accusations.

sunoo istg if u dont kiss him next time i will

kazuha ???

you SUNOO?

sunoo WHAT

--

Something happens a few days before the start of winter break.

Ms. Schumacher is absent, gone off to Germany to visit her family there—she has enough seniority in the school that they let her abandon her responsibilities as a teacher once in a while. A week is too short a period of time for them to bother finding a substitute. It’s usually your last class of the day, but you have to wait around for your dad to be done working, so while most of your classmates have gone home early, you sit with about six other people in the unsupervised study room, absent-mindedly jotting down tid-bits of dialogue for your new story idea, too preoccupied with Jongseong’s absence to really pay attention to anything else. It’s fifteen minutes after the hour, but he’s nowhere to be found, although you know for a fact that he takes those weird Molecular Gastronomy cooking classes your Chemistry teacher offers for extra credit every Thursday after school, so he should be here. And anyways, if he’d gone home, he would’ve texted you something like, Have fun sitting around for an hour, I’m gonna go do awesome stuff with Heeseung, even if awesome stuff meant playing Mario Kart or drinking Sprite and holding a two-person burping contest.

You’re so engrossed in your own thoughts that you pay no mind to the sudden ding of a phone in the room, followed by some gasps and heated whispers. The exchanged words go through one ear and out the other—There was a fight? In the locker rooms? It must be bad if they were sent to the nurse before the principal… Huh? Over who? So he took both of them on? Damn, I didn’t know Jay got like that. He seems so well-behaved.

Your head whips up at the mention of your friend’s name. “Jay? Did something happen to him?” you ask out loud, the whispers dying down immediately as everybody stares at you. 

Gaeul, who was in your class last year, is the only one who answers you. Holding up and waving her phone, she says, “They say he got into a fight.”

Jongseong? A fight? It sounds like a practical joke. He admitted to you he once started crying watching Heeseung playing Call of Duty, it was so violent. You shake your head. “He-he did? With who?”

Gaeul and the girl next to her exchange a concerned, almost guilty look. “Jake and Sunghoon.” The crease between your eyebrows deepened. You don’t need to ask anything else before she adds, “They’re at the nurse’s station. It sounds pretty bad…”

That’s enough for you to leap out of your chair and run to the nurse’s station. It seems the news has spread impossibly quickly among your year group—even Kazuha and Sunoo are already blowing your phone, asking you if you’ve heard, if you know how Jay is. You ignore them, reminding yourself to text them back later, until one message from Sunoo in particular catches your attention: It apparently started because Sunghoon said something about you, Y/N. They’re saying Jay got angry.

The nurse is busy on the phone when you get there, her back to the entrance, so you’re able to slip in unnoticed. You head to the adjoining room where the beds are, all three of them taken—you walk by Sunghoon first, his arms crossed over his chest and pointedly not looking at you, then by Jake, who calls out your name. You glare at him and pull on the white plastic curtain that separates his bed from Jongseong’s. They’re already going to hear you, you don’t need them seeing you on top of that. 

Jongseong sits up with a grunt when you appear at the end of his bed. The sight of him makes your stomach flip, and not in a good way, for once—his left eye is swollen and circled by a deep purple bruise, shiny with ointment, there’s a cut on his cheek, his lower lip is busted, his right hand is wrapped in bandages. “Oh my God,” you whisper as you help him up, voice breaking. He stares at his hands, jaw locking when you gently place one palm on his good hand, the other on the side of his face, moving it this way and that so you can take a better look at his injuries. He winces, and you let go, resting your hand on his shoulder instead. “What the hell got into you?” you whisper vehemently, unable to decide if you’re worried or angry or both as tears form in your eyes.

He tries to shrug, but even that seems to hurt. “Don’t shrug, Jongseong, tell me what happened.”

“I’m Jongseong again now?” he says, attempting a smile, but only one corner of his lips rises.

You sigh. Even in this state, he has to be a smart-ass. “You’re Jong when I need a textbook, Jongseong when you get into stupid fights,” you reply, and he smiles wider but immediately winces, hand coming up to the cut on his lip. You notice that his hand is still riddled with cracks, and whether they’re due to their dryness or to this fight doesn’t matter—”Wait here,” you say, and go rummage through some drawers for plasters. “She forgot some spots.” You feel Jongseong’s eyes on your face as you patch him up to the best of your abilities.

“I don’t want to tell you what happened. I’ll do the job of hating these idiots for the both of us, so don’t concern yourself with them,” he says, apparently not caring that the idiots in question can hear his every word.

He keeps his promise—you never hear another word from him about the cause of the fight. 

Later, you find out through other means, namely Sunoo’s questionably remarkable ability to unearth any and all gossip, that in the locker rooms after Phys Ed, someone had started Jake on the topic of Yunjin, who had been recently revealed as his girlfriend. They’d apparently kept it secret because it was just fooling around at first, and only later had gotten serious enough for them to parade around the school as the couple. 

It had been an unremarkable conversation until Jake said, “You guys know Y/N from our class? She saw us in the staff parking lot once, and I was sure we’d be busted then. But she didn’t tell anyone.” And just like that, the conversation turned to you, someone who was usually never a topic among these boys, jocks, soccer players, “the kind of people who peak in high school and still have a superiority complex at forty,” as Sunoo describes them. 

He has a harder time explaining what happened next, can’t quite look you in the eye as he recounts what was said. “So, this is what they say, apparently someone said that you used to be obsessed with Sunghoon, then with Jake, and Sunghoon said you… Well, he said you were pathetic, that asshole, and that you had been so easy to lead on, then Jake joined in, saying the same things, basically, how funny it was seeing you so obviously in love with him when he would never give you a chance…” He looks at you worriedly, but you tell him to go on. “And so that’s when Jay got up and just straight-up punched Jake in the face. And while Jake was trying to figure out what happened, Jay punched Sunghoon, and then they both got on him, pushing him, but when he wouldn’t stop throwing punches, they started fighting, too. I think they all got some good ones in before the other boys were able to break them apart and the P.E. teacher arrived…”

But that would be later. Now, sitting with Jongseong in the nurse’s station, tears falling onto the plasters you place on his hand, nothing matters but him. You don’t need the details—he’s hurt, he got hurt over you, you feel as though every cut on his body may well have been done by your own hand. You’ve never felt so guilty for something you didn’t do. Your voice trembles when you speak; you’re unable to look at him, at his busted eye. “I just don’t want you to get hurt for me.”

Without missing a beat, he says, “What else would I get hurt for?”

You can only meet his eyes for a split second. Even like this, he manages to look at you with the same softness that has haunted you since the night you met 28-year-old Jongseong, that has rendered all thoughts of anything other than him meaningless since the day your gaze drifted down to his lips just weeks ago. “Jong…” is all you can mutter as you look down at your hands holding each others’, your lips trembling.

He raises his bandaged hand, still not used to his dominant side being ineffective for now, then lowers it when he realizes. Clumsily, he pats your hair with his left hand. “Don’t cry, please…”

Jake’s head pops out from behind the curtain. “Y/N, I’m really sorry—”

“Not right now, man,” Jay quickly interrupts. Jake pathetically disappears behind the curtain again.

“Just promise me you won’t do this again.”

“Y/N…”

“Promise me,” you say, more demanding this time, sticking out your pinky finger. Jay, hesitant, looks between your outstretched finger and your face a few times, but eventually gives in.

The nurse, upon coming to check on the boys, catches you with Jongseong and chases you out immediately. You sulk back to study hall, where everyone’s head perks up the moment you walk in. “They’re okay,” you reassure vaguely, and unenthusiastically answer their many questions. It’s only a few minutes until the bell rings, and you’re free to go then.

--

jong so… guess who got a five-day suspension

you you idiot what did your parents say?

jong they’re not happy i have to do all the household chores for a month

you boo-hoo

jong not sure why i came here thinking i’d get some comfort…

you … are you feeling better?

jong a little bit the nurse gave us some really strong painkillers but i’m okay because there’s a pretty girl that’s going to drop off the homework for me after school every day :)

you oh did you ask chaewon to do that?

jong um no i was talking about you ..if that’s okay

you haha i know i just wanted you to say it straight up

jong ykw maybe i should just ask chaewon

you i’ll see you tomorrow jong!!

jong :) see you tomorrow pretty 

 --

The months that separate your return to school and graduation come and go in the blink of an eye. Jongseong can’t come to school the last day before the holidays or the first four days after, and he’s grounded in-between. Things change bit by bit with every day you visit him—To give him the homework, you tell his parents, although there isn’t much to do when the semester isn’t in full swing, and you could’ve easily sent him pictures. The first time, you spend more time scouring the pictures and trinkets in his room than actually talking to him, and awkwardly give him a half-hug when he tells you he won’t be able to hang out at all during the break before practically running out of his house, your heart beating a thousand miles a minute from the innocent contact. By the fourth time, you lie together on his bed and talk about your plans for college, your hands sitting centimeters apart on the navy sheets. You haven’t dared touch his hand since that day in the nurse’s station.

You’re window-shopping with Kazuha when you spot the hand cream you had seen yourself gifting Jongseong in your well-given vision. Buying it is one thing, actually giving it to him is another, an awkward, stuttery situation in which the wrapping done by the store employee suddenly seems over-the-top and out-of-place. But Jongseong seems to like it—it’s the last day of his suspension, his black eye is now a yellow-ish color, he can smile without risking splitting his lip in two. He applies it immediately, tells you he’ll make sure to wear it every day until the end of winter. You find yourself wishing there was something you could give him for every season so he wouldn’t go a day without thinking of you. When you leave, he bashfully thanks you for making sure he doesn’t fall behind and says he’s excited to see you at school the next day. You hardly know what to do with yourself, so you squeak out a “me too” and slip out the door.

His first day back is a Friday. It starts with Mathematics, a class in which you sit by each other. You remember the first week of classes when Kazuha and Sunoo had ran to sit with each other, expressly because they knew that if he saw you were sitting alone, he’d take the seat next to you, just to better torment you all year. You’d resented it then; it couldn’t make you happier now. Your body is humming with nervous energy, your foot tapping relentlessly against the tiled floor. When he appears in the doorframe, you wave at him as if he’d forgotten his seat in three weeks of absence. His elbow brushes against yours as he sits down.

Between the two of you, friendship blossoms over these months. To the detriment of everyone around you, you continue to bicker as you always have, but it’s now clearly done out of habit, out of affection, even, than out of actual dislike of each other. He and Heeseung slowly integrate your small group of three, and before you know it, it feels as though there have always been five of you. Together, you welcome spring.

In January, to thank you for helping him to pick out his mom’s birthday present, Jongseong treats you to some tteokbokki, which you said you’d been craving all week. He orders the spiciest one, then has to take a sip of water between every bite. You laugh at his teary eyes and red face while you devour the bright red rice cakes easily. 

In February, he makes a show of giving you and Kazuha and Heeseung and Sunoo some homemade chocolates, saying it’s a friend thing. You find out that evening that the others each have five in their box—there are twenty in yours. It’s one of the things that makes you second guess what sort of feelings he has for you. For years, you’ve been convinced he harbored strong feelings of disdain for you; now, he seems to enjoy your friendship. You’re scared to read too much into anything, because if Jongseong is well-liked throughout school, it’s for a reason: he’s nice. To everyone. Even to you, too, nowadays. But if nice is giving five chocolates, what is giving twenty?

A sudden realization hits you in March—Jongseong appears at your door, drenched from the rain, a bag of your favorite snacks in hand. “You weren’t at school today. I had to find out you were sick from Kazuha,” he says as if she was a random classmate of yours and not your best friend, as if he should be the first to know about these kinds of things. Your mom rushes him in, finds him so charming in the five minutes they converse that she decides he should stay over for dinner, and as you watch him laughing with her, you think, I haven’t thought of 28-year-old Jongseong in ages. I’ve only thought of you. And although you can trace the start of your feelings to that dream-like experience you had, you can now say with confidence that it’s not the only reason for them.

College application results come out in April, right on his birthday. The five of you celebrate together at an American-style diner, gorging yourselves on crispy bacon and chocolate chip pancakes. Kazuha is going back to Japan, almost a decade after moving to South Korea—”I’m gonna miss you guys, but I miss takoyaki and my grandma more right now.” Heeseung has been accepted into the Engineering department at the country’s top university. You, Sunoo and Jongseong are all heading to the same place: you for Screenwriting, which you’ve known since you were one of the winners of the scholarship contest last October, Sunoo for Communications, whatever that is, and Jongseong for European History and Literature with a minor in German, that freak. It’s a good university, and it’s not far from home. The way Jongseong tells you about his acceptance sticks with you: he doesn’t say, They accepted me, too, or, I’m going to the same university as you. He says, We’ll be together.

May is filled with afternoons at the park when you should all be studying for exams. Your mom keeps asking when she’s going to see “that wonderful boy” again. Your friendship with Jongseong has given him new ways of teasing you—after four years of near-kleptomaniac tendencies, he’s finally stopped stealing your erasers and has instead started to let his gaze linger on your face, to call you pretty when you least expect it, to tuck your hair behind your ear. You hate it most when he asks you whether there’s something from your romance novels or movies that you want him to recreate. “Is there a field big enough nearby that I can walk through at the break of dawn, Mister Darcy-style?” he’ll say, or “I’ve always wanted to try that upside-down kiss from Spider-Man. It’s a classic, really.” 

Summer comes early in June. You need to bring a two-liter water bottle and a hand fan to your exams, and you’ve never felt such relief as when it was all over. After endless pictures with your parents and siblings, just your parents, just your siblings, then Kazuha and Sunoo, together, then separately, then with Heeseung and Jongseong as well, Kazuha forces you and Jongseong together, watching with a smile as he shyly wraps an arm around your waist and you awkwardly throw up a peace sign. It’s your first picture of just the two of you.

In July, you and Jongseong unlock a new first: saying goodbye. He’s leaving to stay with his American family as he does every summer. You show up at his house the day before at four p.m. “to help him pack,” you say, but it’s Jongseong, and he finished packing two days ago. So instead, you sit on his desk chair, he on his bed, and you fight back tears. “You’re coming back, right?” you ask, like he’s leaving to go to war and not Seattle. Amusement and affection flicker in his eyes. “Of course I am. I wouldn’t throw four more years of being a pain in your ass away, would I?” he says, and you smile, because you know it’s going to be much more than four years.

But he doesn’t just leave you with a few nice words. Avoiding your gaze, he hands you an envelope. Inside is a single ticket, a two-month membership for your city’s arthouse cinema that you can only go to when they have student deals or when your parents have had enough of your begging. You can’t even begin to imagine how much this must’ve cost. “Jong…” you murmur, in awe at the thin slip of paper between your hands. “This is incredible. Thank you so much.”

Jongseong looks down at his feet, fighting a smile as he kicks the invisible rocks that obviously litter the floor of his bedroom. “I thought you’d get bored without me around, so, that way you can entertain yourself, I guess… And if you run into any film bros next year, you’ll have seen as many pretentious movies as them.”

You burst into laughter then, and, without thinking, wrap your arms around his neck, thanking him over and over again. It takes him a second, but he wraps his arms around your waist and says it’s no big deal.

As you walk down the path from your house, he calls out your name. “Don’t be a stranger,” he says.

You smile. “Never.”

So, he’s not here for summer. Kazuha is working in her parents’ ramen restaurant to make some money before leaving, even Heeseung leaves two weeks into July for Seoul to visit some relatives there and get accustomed to life in the big city. You only get to laze around with Sunoo, but even he eventually leaves for his grandparents’ house by the sea, making you promise you’ll come visit him at some point, otherwise he’ll “die of boredom.” 

It’s August now, and your brain and body alike buzz with restlessness. You go to the cinema almost every day, making the best of your subscription. If you’re not going around your house looking for spider webs with your vacuum cleaner, you’re riding random bus lines and discovering parts of your town you’ve never set foot in before. If you’re not making your way through your never-ending pile of unread books, you’re creating your own stories, finally taking the time to properly outline and draft the one-line ideas you’ve had sitting in your Notes app, preparing yourself for the start of your degree. Your mind is taken up with love stories. From Romeo & Juliet to Dirty Dancing to Book Lovers, you can’t get enough of the genre. You become particularly obsessed with stories involving time travel, rewatching After Time and Lovely Runner like they contain some precious knowledge. By the end of the month, you’ve turned your life into an eight-episode TV series—a desperate girl makes a wish on a star only to discover she is fated to marry the one boy she hates most. You know you’d watch that. You send Sunoo and Kazuha the pilot, and after calling you insane numerous times but also heaping on praises, Sunoo says this: lol your going through jay withdrawals.

It shakes you so much you’re not even compelled to message back you’re*.

But he’s not wrong. The more you let yourself admit it, the more you realize how true it is: you miss Jongseong. You text once in a while, you’ve even stayed up late talking on the phone a couple of times, but you miss him, his corporeal form, having his gaze on you, having the possibility but never the courage to touch him. Every day, there’s something you want to tell him about. The cats huddling around a young neighborhood kid as he pours milk into a bowl, the clearance sale at your local library, most books for one buck only, the actor from an 90s Hong Kong film you swear has the exact same smile as him. You don’t want to bother him, so you write letters instead. Some you send, some you don’t—the ones you keep hidden in your drawer usually hint too obviously at your feelings for him. Some of them don’t just hint and contain lines of your declarations: I miss you, everything I see reminds me of you, I want to check that your bruises have healed completely even though the last trace of them faded months ago. You keep these letters a secret, even from Sunoo and Kazuha, who would never let you live down such woebegone, down bad behavior.

You do it because it feels good, getting all of your feelings out on paper. You’re a romantic at heart, so you’re prone to over-exaggeration when it comes to things like these—but everything that you write remains based in truth. You’d started with a postcard of your hometown, jokingly writing, Don’t forget where you came from. How is it over there? and he’d actually replied with a postcard of his own, filling it from top to bottom. You easily went from these small postcards to multiple pages of stream-of-consciousness-like writing. You think it’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever done—although you’re not sure he feels the same way, considering he still writes to the German pen pal Ms. Schumacher had assigned him in your first year of high school. No one else’s correspondence had lasted more than four months because she’d immediately forgotten to make sure you kept in touch regularly.

I ran into Jake Sim at the city library, you write one day. You’ve replied to everything in his latest letter, so you’re now catching him up on your recent adventures. He was checking out some books about Linguistics, of all things—he bought me bubble tea afterwards and told me that the injury he got last April was actually a relief. Did you know his father was a big name in soccer here? Apparently, he never wanted to be a soccer player that badly, and he wants to do Linguistics and Social Anthropology, who would’ve guessed it. He’s like Troy Bolton if High School Musical was about Humanities and not singing. Anyways, you probably don’t want me to go on and on about him, so I won’t, but we did talk about that fight you guys had back in December. He apologized for it, to you and me both, although he didn’t go into much detail — Sunoo is still the only one who’s had the balls to tell me exactly what happened, and he wasn’t even there! — and I was reticent at first, but he seemed genuine. He said he didn’t even hang out with Sunghoon or Yunjin or any of those people anymore, that it was only out of convenience really, and that he hopes starting university will be like turning over a new leaf. Well, he could be full of shit, who knows. As I sat there listening to him I wondered what it was I used to see in him. He’s nice enough, but we only spoke about him for the entire hour. He asked me no questions that weren’t “and you?” so it was a bit exhausting. 

But it got me thinking about your fight again. Reflecting on it now, I can say that it was a turning point for me in my perception of you.

You look at your words, smiling to yourself—this is one of the times where you find yourself erring from the topic at hand, instead indulging in sappiness and nostalgia. You write about how your opinion of Jongseong has changed over these months, how it wasn’t seeing him as your husband in all those years that had really shaken things up, but rather that day in the nurse’s station, the frightening colors around his eye, his attitude like it was natural that he would get hurt like this for you. You write, Have I been wrong about you this whole time? I thought you harbored the same negative feelings towards me as I had you since the moment you’d laid eyes on me, but all of a sudden, here you were, bloody, bandaged hand holding mine. Even with your busted eye, you looked like an angel next to all that white in the nurse’s station. I’ll never forget your words that day. Would you really not get hurt for anything else, Jong?

“I’m going to the Post Office for a package soon, Y/N. Are you done with your letter?” your mom calls from the staircase landing.

“Give me five minutes!” you call back.

You forage through your drawer for a new sheet of paper and re-write your letter, making sure to leave any compromising parts out and fold both letters into neat squares—one that will cross the seas and reach Jongseong, one that will live out its days in the darkness of your crowded drawer. You’ve run out of envelopes, so you go look for one in your parents’ office. Your mom calls out your name again, impatient to leave — if she sends her package off before twelve p.m., it will get to the receiver tomorrow, and she’s hell-bent on getting perfect five-star Vinted reviews — so you hurriedly put your letter in the envelope, close it, stamp it, and write Jongseong’s name and address on the back. The other letter you absent-mindedly throw in your drawer with the dozens of other letters in which you’d crossed the line.

--

A few weeks later, like an apparition, Jongseong stands before you again.

He’s tanner from months under the Washington sun, from afternoons spent at his family’s lake house, on their boat. His hair is slightly shorter and suits him even better; you don’t recognize any of the clothes he wears. He grumbles as his mother goes back-and-forth between hugging him, staring at him worriedly and reminding him to call at least twice a week while his father unpacks the trunk. “I’ll only be a thirty-minute train ride away, Mom,” he says. 

He’s still Jong.

You moved in yesterday, and you’re now waiting for your new roommate, who, after five minutes of deliberating whether she should bring a jacket or not and finally decided against it, changed her mind the minute she stepped outside. 

It’s been two months since you last saw him. Shortly after sending your letter, you’d gone to stay with Sunoo’s grandparents for a week, just a day before he was set to come back from Seattle. Amid packing and other preparations, you haven’t had time to see each other. Is it okay if I respond to your letter in person? I think I’ll be too busy these two coming weeks, he texted you. You replied that it wasn’t a problem, you told him which dorm you’d been assigned and found out his was the one next door.

When he notices you staring, he does a double-take. You wave at him, and even from this distance, you see the blush that creeps up his neck and takes over his face as he shyly waves back. You’ve never seen him like this—he’s always been either arrogant or friendly, never… flustered. He makes a motion as if to say, I’ll text you, and heads inside the building with his parents and all of his luggage.  

Indeed, he texts you some hours later while you’re sharing a piece of strawberry and matcha cake with your roommate Liz, whom you find out is half-German—Jongseong and your dad would probably love her for that simple fact. Some of the first things she’d asked you were what your astrological signs were and whether you wanted her to pull tarot cards for you when she was all done setting up her side of the room. Between that and her dyed blonde hair, you’d felt comfortable telling her all about Jongseong, the well and your dream. Unlike your skeptical and sarcastic friends, she’d nodded along to your every word, a serious expression on her face. “A sign from the universe,” she’d called it, and she gasped in excitement when his name appeared on your screen.

He sends you a link to a freshers’ week event, some potted plant sale happening on the main campus square, and asks if you’re free to go with him tomorrow. I need something to liven up that depressing room, he writes.

So that’s how you find yourselves among green plants of all shapes and sizes, searching for one that’s both low-maintenance and appealing to the eye. You’re glad that you have something to actually do—if you were just sitting at a café and having a conversation, you’re not sure you’d be able to stand the awkwardness. You’d chalked up his behavior on the day of his move-in to nerves, or to surprise upon seeing you so unexpectedly. But apparently, it wasn’t a one-time thing. He keeps clearing his throat as if he were sick with some cold, won’t look into your eyes for more than split seconds at a time, and in complete opposition to his usual confident, deliberate speech, talks in a quick and disorderly manner. And he’s either really caught a cold, or his ears have just permanently turned red. You ask him if something’s wrong a couple times, but he violently shakes his head, says, “No, what could be wrong?” then looks at you as if you might tell him what’s wrong.

When you’re alone again, you wonder what on earth could have happened over the summer that could make him change his behavior with you so radically. Did something happen in Seattle? Maybe he met someone there and doesn’t know how to tell you. Maybe you went overboard with your letters, he doesn’t want to be friends anymore, he wants to let you down easy but doesn’t know how to tell you. Or maybe—maybe you got impossibly pretty during those two months, and absence does make the heart grow fonder, as they say, and every thought you have about him, he has about you, but he doesn’t know how to tell you.

In any case, he’s hiding something.

The theory that he might want to stop being friends soon falls flat—the invitations to other freshers’ events keep coming, be it free wine & pizza taster sessions from the Wine Society, karaoke nights with the Taylor Swift Society or a shark movie marathon with the Bad Film Society, and he never turns you down when you tell him there’s something you want to visit in this new city of yours, even when the thing you want to visit in question is a bakery you have to queue in front of at seven a.m. if you want to get a pain au chocolat. In your defense, they turn out to be the best ones you and Jongseong have ever tried—although, to be fair, neither of you has been to France.

Things progressively return to normal. He’s able to make eye contact for more than three seconds again, he listens carefully and laughs along when you tell him about your week by the sea with Sunoo, he fills you in on what Heeseung’s been up to. One thing remains different, however—when you throw quips at him, he usually would’ve delighted in coming up with a better, wittier response, but now, he’ll roll his eyes at best, look at you amusedly and stay silent at worst. “Won’t you even entertain me?” you ask him once, to which he replies that you’re doing a good job entertaining yourself as is. 

Instead, he becomes more earnest. As per usual you badger him with questions like Aren’t I so pretty right now? or Isn’t my outfit so cute today? to get a reaction out of him, and if during your high school days he’d either fake a puking sound or look you up and down and grumble I guess, he now smiles and simply says Yes, you are, Yes, it is. It seems impossible to keep track of his attitude: one day, he’s one thing, the next, he’s another person entirely. 

It annoys you. You take his changing demeanor to mean that now that he’s a college student, he won’t indulge in your childish squabbles anymore, as though he was above all of that now, when just three months ago he was stalking your parents’ Facebooks to find unfavorable photos of you from when you were thirteen and using them as reaction pictures in your friends’ group chat. You think of your graduation day, of the box he’d given you, all done up in wrapper paper and a bow—he had filled it with every eraser he’d stolen from you over the years, he’d even gone so far as to date every single one of them, from the second of October freshman year to the twenty-eighth of November of your senior year. You didn’t count them, but there had to be at least a hundred. At the time, you’d just thought it was funny—but what if the gesture had meant something deeper than you’d realized? What if he was marking the end of something with that box? No more playing around, we’re adults now. But classes have barely started, you don’t know your way to the off-campus library, you aren’t a different person to who you were just weeks or even months earlier. Why is he acting like he is? You look at him, and you see the boy whose fault it was you had to buy a new eraser every week—who knows how many books you could’ve bought with that money. But when he turns to look at you, too, and your eyes meet, you’re suddenly assailed with the memories of that night, the kind eyes, the soft smile. 

Does his future capacity to love me already exist in his heart?

Your heartbeat speeds up and you have to look away.

--

From your letters, it seems to be much hotter back home than in Seattle—you talk of sunburns, of afternoons spent inside with the fan on maximum speed, of ice melting instantly and watering down your Coke Zeros, whereas Jay can walk around the city pleasantly and needs to bring a jacket if he’ll be out until late after sundown. And yet, as he reads your latest letter, his skin prickles feverishly, from the top of his head to the tip of his toes. He’d excitedly torn the envelope open the second it arrived in the mail, heart thumping as he counted the pages, at least three more than usual — he was always happy that you wanted to talk to him at all, so the fact that you had this much to tell him sent him over the moon — but he would have never expected what was awaiting him inside.

With a smile on his face, he read your replies to the questions he’d asked you last time, your reactions to everything he told you about, the live Mariners game, the lake house, the rides on the boat. He imagined you as you sat at your desk in your room he’d only seen once, when you’d held a small party for your birthday and he, having arrived first, was honored with a tour of your house. He imagined your smile, the way you played with your hair when you focused on something, wondered whether you pondered every word before you wrote it down as he did or whether you poured your thoughts out onto the page without hesitation. His smile faltered when Jake Sim’s name appeared in your neat handwriting, but he was relieved to find out your description of him now was miles away from the one at the start of the school year. 

Then you start writing about him. Him, Park Jongseong, and your words startle him so much, it’s like he’d forgotten he was the recipient of this letter in the first place.

But it got me thinking about your fight again. Reflecting on it now, I can say that it was a turning point for me in my perception of you. 

He’s been lying comfortably in his bed, but he sits up the moment his eyes take in these words. If there is one topic the two of you have practically never broached, it’s this exactly: your relationship, the changes it’s gone through this past year. Except for a few mentions made in jest here and there, you’ve always conveniently ignored the fact that not so long ago, you were at each other’s throats. At least, you were at his throat, and Jay let you be, let you think the hatred went both ways, when in reality all he wanted was to keep you close one way or another. To him, anything was better than indifference.

But here you are, writing about how you feel about him, not in hints, not in jokes, but actually telling him black and white what goes through your head when you think of him—in other words, everything he’s been dying to know ever since he met you and especially ever since you started warming up to him a few months ago.

I have never told you about that night because I know it’ll just be more fodder for you to endlessly tease me, and I haven’t even mentioned it in these letters that I write and don’t send. Sometimes I debate the ethics of it—if I know something about our futures, isn’t it right that you know, too? But then again, I still hesitate whether what happened was real or not. As with anything, the more time passes, the more I forget about it. What kind of cheese you’d put on the pasta, the movie that played in the background, whether the stairs were carpeted or wooded—these details have evaded me by now. All I clearly remember is your face and how I felt, seeing it then, seeing it the next day at school, ten years younger, the same exact person in what felt like a different universe. As much as I tried to deny it, I know now that it was no coincidence—I was talking about it with Sunoo and he said that sometimes, we want something so badly, we conjure it up for ourselves. He’s not always a dimwit. And he’s right, the kind of love I felt from you in that dream — or not-dream — I’ve yearned for it ever since I first watched Pride & Prejudice, the 2005 film to be precise, when I was ten. But with you? That was what I couldn’t believe at first. I don’t think I need to explain why—you were there, I think you knew how I felt about you for over three years, it’s not like I tried to hide it.

Then you turned up and the sight of you was enough to bring back all the feelings from that dream. You must’ve wondered why my behavior with you switched so suddenly—well, a glimpse into marital bliss is sometimes enough for a girl to make some changes in her life. Yet I valiantly tried to convince myself that any flutter of my heart around you was due to this stupid dream, to a version of you my brain had conjured up because it was starved for affection, and you happened to be at the forefront of my mind, even if not for the right reasons. But it was no use. I had entertained the possibility that this future was really mine, and I couldn’t go back to seeing you as the boy who annoyed the living daylights out of me.

But Jong, if you weren’t you, I would’ve been confused for a week and then I would’ve gotten over it. I stayed confused for a while, and everything you did only served to confuse me further. I started to notice you more, to see you for who you were and not for the idea I had constructed of you in my head, I stopped taking note of only the things that reinforced this idea. And that changed everything.

Let’s get it out of the way: as much as I hate to admit it because it proves you right, I saw that you are indeed devastatingly handsome. It devastates me every time I have to look at that stupid, wonderful face of yours. And if aging is something you’re worried about, don’t be. I’ve seen you at 28, and let’s just say that your jaw somehow only gets more chiseled. I’ve realized that you don’t just participate in class to be a prick — except for when you contradict me in Literature, I know you only do that to piss me off, and yes, it works — but that you actually care about what we learn and that you don’t want the teacher to feel like they’re talking to a classroom full of students made out of bricks. I’ve also realized that you didn’t specifically pick German to be the one subject where you must beat me at all costs, you just actually really like German, even if I’m still undetermined as to why. And I can finally admit to myself—you are funny. Sometimes. There were so many times I had to stop myself from laughing at one of your idiotic puns because I could not bear to give you the satisfaction. That feeling when the worst person you know makes a funny joke, and all that. And as much as I’ve mocked you for it, I do actually like your laugh. I like that you’re only loud when you laugh, or sneeze, or get excited over something. You don’t scream, you don’t get angry, and I think that’s a lot for a boy fresh out of puberty. Or for any boy, really. 

But above all, you’re kind, Jong. I think it’s the best thing about you. I think it’s the best thing anyone can be. I see it in your patience with Heeseung when he starts one of his rants better reserved for Reddit than real life, I see it in the way you took Sunoo and Kazuha in stride, even though they’re a bit rough around the edges sometimes, I see it in the way you guide the freshmen at the start of every year, when all anyone does is complain about them, I see it in the gentleness with which you let down the girls who confess to you, even the more persistent ones. I used to think they were crazy, but I understand them more than ever now. I also used to think that all those kindnesses meant that the ones you occasionally showed me meant nothing more than that—occasional kindnesses. You were just a nice guy, occasionally so to me. But you sort of ratted yourself out when you gave me those twenty chocolates for Valentine’s.

Or, really, what made things clearer was that fight in December. I guess I was wrong—you do get angry. I remember a thought I had at the time: just when I think I know you, you do something to shake it all up. You punched two of the star soccer players of our school in the face because they said some mean, unimportant things about me. Thinking about it now, I still don’t understand it. Was it another one of your acts of kindness? 

And then I thought of those other times you helped me out. Do you remember them—the art project, the handwritten notes after my grandma passed away, you tearing Park Sunghoon a new one in the girls’ bathroom. I’m sure there are many more that I’ve dismissed simply because I did not want to see you in any other light than the one I’d decided to shine on you. 

Maybe I’m rewriting the past here, but I’ve been thinking about something lately. The theme today seems to be honesty, so I’ll lay myself bare and tell you something I haven’t told anyone yet, not even myself. The more I write, the more I become aware of its truth. I like you, Jong. I think I have for a long time, longer than either of us thinks. Maybe that’s why I kept buying erasers.

I don’t have the best memory — I suspect iron deficiency, it runs in my mom’s side of the family — but I do remember this. The first time I saw you. I haven’t noticed your face changing in real time, but I’m sure I’d laugh at how much of a baby you looked back then. Although I didn’t fare much better, I’m sure. Well, you’re the one that has all these embarrassing pictures of me, you freak, so I’m sure you could tell me. Moving on… 

I found you really cute. You were chatting to the person next to you, maybe it was Heeseung, I didn’t look properly—I only looked at you. Don’t laugh at me. It was the first day of high school, there was a nervous energy in the air, but you seemed happy to be there. You know I don’t have hordes of friends like you do, I don’t walk through life with people naturally gravitating towards me. I’m okay with it now, but it was something I struggled with back then. Kazuha, Sunoo and I have had each other since our elementary days, and I never needed more than that—but fifteen is the prime age for comparison, and as the weeks passed and we got used to being high schoolers, I listened to everyone sing your praises, I watched as you talked with all of our classmates, even our teachers, like you were old friends. But we sat next to each other in a couple of classes, and you wouldn't talk to me outside of partnered work. I, who wanted to be easily charmed by you like everyone else was, who thought maybe you’d help me come out of my shell. But it felt like sitting next to me was torture to you, like the boy whom I watched speak with ease to everyone else disappeared when I was around. And so — and I’m not proud of this — every smart remark in class, every joke that had the entire class roaring, every high five you gave out in the hallway, I started to despise them. And by association, I started to despise you. After that, it was easy to find fault in everything you did, my contempt was only enhanced by everyone’s admiration. But I’m not alone here. It went both ways, didn’t it? I don’t think you liked that I didn’t like you and openly showed it, so used to being everyone’s favorite person you were. I remember how you showily tried to be nice to me after that, maybe you just wanted another friend, but I didn’t let you. I don’t blame us for how we acted, only for taking so long to get our heads out of our asses.

(I have to say, I also have a thing for hating people. Remind me to tell you about Na Jaemin and Shin Ryujin one of these days.)

Anyways, I think it’s because I had liked you so much at first that I could then seemingly hate you so much. But I never hated you, Jong, not really. I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. Can I take it all back now? 

Now that we’re entering university soon, I can’t help but look back on high school. This is what I want to know, but I’m not sure I’ll ever have the courage to ask you, because if your answer is the one I suspect, I don’t know how I’ll handle all the regret in my heart.

Have I been wrong about you this whole time? I thought you harbored the same negative feelings towards me as I had you since the moment you’d laid eyes on me, but all of a sudden, here you were, bloody, bandaged hand holding mine. Even with your busted eye, you looked like an angel next to all that white in the nurse’s station. I’ll never forget your words that day. Would you really not get hurt for anything else, Jong?

Your letter abruptly ends here, no concluding remarks, no wishing him a fun time in Seattle and looking forward to his next letter, no sign-off. It was as if someone cut you off before you could say everything you wanted, but then why send him this seemingly unfinished letter? It is all the more bizarre since your letters are usually meticulous: you write on every other line, it looks like you take your time with every single letter, the only disturbance in your otherwise perfect handwriting is your going back-and-forth between cursive and script s’s. But this particular letter looks rushed, your lines are sloppy, some words need to be read a few times over to be understood. What kind of state had you been in, writing these words? Jay’s heart swells, thinking that you were as moved writing as he was reading. He even looks through your letter again, wishing to find a tear stain somewhere, but there are none. Maybe he’s been watching too many of these romantic period dramas you always go on about.

He has to pace his room when he’s done reading your letter, but he feels trapped inside these four walls, so he dashes outside, saying that he’s getting some air when his relatives ask him where he’s off to in such a rush, and walks around the block five times. When he’s back in his room, he rereads your letter, eyes taking in each and every word slowly and carefully, making sure he doesn’t misread anything.

You like him. You, Y/N, like him, Jongseong, it’s a fact, it’s real, you said so yourself, you went into quite some detail about it, he can’t believe it, but it’s real, it’s written right there on the page, if anyone dares tell him he’s fooling himself, he can prove them wrong, you’re the one who said it.

The smile doesn’t leave his lips for the rest of the day, he can barely eat, he’s already full of happiness. He reads your words over and over before falling asleep, committing them to memory, dreaming about them, about you.

You. How should he respond to this? Are you even expecting a response? You seem to know he’s not impartial to you, either, although that’s an understatement. 

In the following days, the thought that you hadn’t meant to send him this letter nags at him. The abrupt ending, the absence of your usual Love, Y/N. The fact that this had come out of left field—none of your previous letters had even a romantic undertone, no matter how he tried in his own to hint at his missing you, the most reference to seeing each other again you would give him was It’ll be better to show you this in real life. The act of sending letters itself didn’t feel very platonic, but you never went there, so he didn’t, either. He had secretly yearned to have you this close all these years, he would never forgive himself if he ended up chasing you away now with his over-eagerness.

You had landed on something very real in your letter: I don’t think you liked that I didn’t like you and openly showed it, so used to being everyone’s favorite person you were. I remember how you showily tried to be nice to me after that, maybe you just wanted another friend, but I didn’t let you. He cursed his fifteen-year-old self, that idiot who couldn’t even speak to a girl no matter how much he wanted to, just because she was so pretty, he was afraid of saying something stupid and messing it up before it even had a chance to start.

On days when you’d had particularly nasty or petty arguments — it could get pretty bad, at the start, before you both started maturing and realized how ridiculous you were, especially with your classmates telling you to keep it classy — he’d stay up all night, wondering why you hated him so much in the first place, what on Earth he could’ve done to warrant such vitriol. Now, finally, he knew, and he could only resent the fact that no one had invented time machines yet, so he could nip his useless ego in the bud; so he could tell younger Jay not to take it personally, that you had your reasons for disliking him, that even if you hadn’t, the world won’t end if someone doesn’t like him like everyone usually does. 

Because, he hates to admit, that was what had done it for Jay. He couldn’t stand that someone — not just someone, but one of the prettiest girls he’d ever seen, a girl he’d been hyping himself up to talk to every day, but never found the courage to — didn’t immediately fall for his charms. And not just that, but even showed just how much she disliked him. You looked him up-and-down with disdain, made disgusted faces at his jokes, rolled your eyes when he spoke up in class. It made him burn with anger, but he also weirdly enjoyed it—at least, you were paying attention to him. So, he amped it up. Talked louder, laughed louder, hovered around you. He even stole your erasers, wrote the date on which he’d taken them, kept them in a box on his desk that he looked at every time he studied at home. He aimed to beat you in every class you shared, even though neither of you cared that much about grades—the annoyed look on your face when he boasted about the two points he’d gotten over you was enough satisfaction.

All in all, he behaved like a child, and you reciprocated in like.

Until you didn’t.

It was a random Tuesday when something in your attitude towards him shifted. It wasn’t a complete 180, but he noticed everything about you, so even a slight change of your tone was obvious to him. You started using your nickname for him more often than his full name—he never told you, but of course he loved that you didn’t call him Jay like everyone else, that you had your own way of addressing him. It was a sign to him that the two of you had something special, even if it was on the opposite end of the spectrum of what he wanted with you.

He again spent sleepless nights wondering what had caused this change: was it something he had done, or something within you? It was a welcome change, that much was sure, but he was initially too confused to take it in stride. He’d long made peace with the fact that he’d never have you the way he really wanted, so he was fine with whatever this was—but now, you were changing, your interactions were tinged with something like shyness, the distance between you felt greater than ever. He tried to keep up his smart-ass appearances around you, but you only indulged in your old habits once in a while, as though you had grown tired of arguing with him, even of giving him the time of day.

So he resolved himself to adapting his behavior to yours. If you stared at him intently like his face was a puzzle you were trying to solve, he let you, rested his head on his palm and smiled as he stared back at you. Finally, he had an excuse to look at you without you threatening to punch him or saying a picture would last longer. He knew they did, he’d had to resort to scrolling through Sunoo’s and Kazuha’s Instagrams to find any photos of you. Yours was private and at the time, you would’ve probably cursed him out if he’d sent a follow request. If you seemed too annoyed or upset over something, he’d leave you alone, he’d do something nice to let you know you didn’t need to have your guards up at all times around him. If you seemed to silently call for a truce of hostilities, he easily complied.

Then, after a few weeks, your petty arguments resumed, but those too were different—if before they felt filled with real disdain and irritation, they now seemed to be a comfortable habit to fall back on, almost like a fun hobby. Those, too, Jay readily welcomed.

And so things changed in a direction Jay had never thought would one day be possible. You gave him no explanations, nor did he ask for any, and soon he stopped losing sleep over the why’s and the how’s and simply let himself enjoy the fact that you now had the semblance of a friendship, that he could compliment you and pass it off as amical teasing, that he could learn things about you like what you spent your weekends doing, what your relationship with your family was like, whether you were a dog or cat person, whether you wanted to visit his farm in Stardew Valley. 

Unsurprisingly, this only enhanced his already pathetically strong feelings for you. He worried over how to make sure this wasn’t some sort of 30-day friendship trial you had wanted to test out. He reveled in the fact that his top university of choice was the one you had already been accepted to. He now knew what it felt like to have you smile at him, smile because of him, and he never wanted again to live in a world where this was not a daily occurrence. 

He now sort of has an answer—your letter doesn’t make it very clear, it makes him think again that you really had not meant to send it, but you seem to have had a dream. A dream of him, 28-year-old him, to be precise, of your life together—he’s not sure. At this point in time, he doesn’t care much, either. Whether it was a dream or a real vision of the future that you had, all that matters is that it allowed you to see him in a new light, a light which he had hoped for years would one day appear to you, and it had changed things. And now, you liked him.

You said so yourself.

He’s at a loss for words. He can’t concentrate for long enough to put all his thoughts in order, he can’t make himself calm down and write his feelings down. He has to pack to go home, once he’s home, he’ll have to pack for university. But it’s only two weeks from now to the day you meet again, and it’ll be better to say what he wants to say in person, anyway.

Is it okay if I respond to your letter in person? I think I’ll be too busy these two coming weeks, he texts you.

And then those two weeks pass like two seconds and you’re there, a few meters away from him. All the speeches he’d prepared in his head, from grand declarations of love to laid-back admittances of Yeah, I like you too, you’re cool, I guess, they all vanish from his head. For fourteen days he’s been going through scenarios upon scenarios of your reunion, what you’d look like, what he’d say, how you’d react. But now that he can actually see you, now that he would just have to walk a few steps if he wanted to touch you, hug you, kiss you — hoping that was something you wanted to do — he freezes. He forgets how his body works, the part in his brain that’s meant to manage language ability fails him. HIs mom calls him over, urging him into his new dorm building, and all he can do is wave back at you like an idiot.

When finally he musters the courage to text you, what he hopes will be the day that starts your romantic relationship turns into the day Park Jongseong realizes how much of a loser he is. For the first hour, he can’t look at you, he can’t get through a sentence without stuttering out half of his words, he runs out of things to say in record time. All he can think of is how easy it’d be to grab one of your hands, hold it in his and walk around this stupid potted plant sale as if the two of you were two halves of a whole. He doesn’t even want a potted plant, his roommate already has five, he just wanted an excuse to see you. He steals glances at you when you’re looking elsewhere, and he notices everything about you tenfold now that he can, now that caring about you doesn’t need to be in vain any longer. He tells himself that he just needs to calm down a bit, even when you have the confirmation that the person you’re about to confess to already likes you, revealing your feelings to someone is always nerve-wracking, the two of you haven’t seen in each other in a while, he’ll talk to you once his heart gets out of his throat.

But you’re acting normal. Suspiciously so. You’re acting like you never told him you liked him, like nothing has changed between you. He rereads your letter the second he gets back to his dorm. He’s not crazy, it’s written right there, I like you, Jong. I think I have for a long time, longer than either of us thinks. He knows the words by heart now, but he checks them anyway. So why are you acting like you never said anything? Had you really not meant to send that letter? Did Jay actually intrude on your private thoughts by reading words that had never meant to be seen by another soul?

You continue to behave as you usually would around him, but if he couldn’t go back to vicious bickering when things changed the first time, he can’t go back to friendly bickering now that things — for him — have changed a second time. He doesn’t even want friendly to be in your shared vocabulary anymore. 

So he stops giving in. If you make fun of him, he just stands there with an unimpressed if amused look on his face. If you pedantically correct him on something, he just nods his head and accepts it. He can tell you’re bothered by it, but he needs to show you that he doesn’t want to go on being just friends with you—he wants to compliment you without having to pass it off as teasing, he wants to stare at you with hearts in his eyes without having to look away when you catch him, he wants to spend every waking second of every day with you, he wants to hold your hand, hold you. 

He could wait for things to change slowly again, but why wait when he could help things along?

--

It’s nine p.m. on a Saturday and you’re sneaking Jongseong into your dorm. Liz is away for the weekend, gone back home to celebrate her aunt’s birthday, so you have the room to yourselves. It took some convincing to get him to come — What if we get caught coming in, What if your T.A. sees us, What if I get reported to campus police — and so when your verbal reassurances failed to work, you resorted to blinking up at him through your lashes and that did the trick.

Jongseong was in many ways unlike any other man you’d ever met; in some other ways, he was the exact same.

Plastic bag of the tteokbokki you’d asked for in hand, he looks around the deserted hallways like someone might jump out of nowhere and beat him to a pulp at any given moment. At this time of the week, everyone’s out partying or holed up in their dorms, presumably either to rest or because of a lack of friends so early on in the semester. You grab his free hand and hurry him along to the elevator—once inside, it takes you a few seconds before you realize you’re still holding it, and you retract your hand quickly while he just smiles. 

You settle yourselves on the floor—comfort is not worth getting gochujang sauce on your white sheets. You sit criss-cross in front of each other, the food between the two of you, and catch up on your first week of class in-between bites of spicy, gooey rice cakes and fish cakes. You wonder, if one day you and Jongseong are no longer friends, how long you will keep associating tteokbokki with him.

When you tell him that you and Jake share a class, Introduction to Film Studies, he gives you a look. “What’s that face for?” you ask.

“Did you guys sit next to each other?”

You chuckle. “Of course. We only knew each other in that room, it would’ve been weird not to.”

He continues to stare at you. After a while, he muses, “You’re not…?”

You halt in your tracks, rice cake at the end of your plastic fork hanging in the air, halfway between the container and your mouth. “Whatever you’re thinking, the answer is no.” Still in love with him, interested in him again, you don’t know the exact details of Jongseong’s thought process, all you know is he has nothing to worry about—if it’s something he worries about.

When a smile slowly grows on his lips and he nods, saying, “Okay, good,” you let yourself think it might be.

Later, you’re ten minutes into a senseless blockbuster movie when he suddenly pauses it. It snaps you out of a trance—his hand was awfully close to yours, so is his shoulder, his thigh, his knee, everything, really, and you haven’t been able to concentrate on anything but the warmth radiating off his skin and the intensity with which you crave to feel it intentionally rather than accidentally. When he speaks, there’s something serious in his tone that makes you nervous. “Y/N,” he says as he turns to you, and now his face is awfully close, too. There’s still many centimeters separating you, but in this tiny, barely lit-up room, he feels closer than ever before. “Do you remember when I said I’d reply to your letter in real life?”

You tilt your head. “Yeah, that was ages ago.”

“Well, I thought I’d do it now.”

“Now?”

He takes a deep, shaky breath. “Now.”

And then those safe centimeters suddenly disappear, and Jongseong’s lips are on yours. It’s a brief, chaste kiss, so quick you wonder if it even happened when he leans back again.

“I like you, too,” he says, and your heart stops.

“W-what?” is all you can say back, eyes wide like he’s just admitted to killing someone rather than reciprocating your feelings.

His confident facade quickly crumbles. “God, this was so much cooler in my head, I-I’m sorry.” He pulls something out of his sweatpants pocket, pages folded over and over into a tiny square. As he unfolds them, you recognize your paper, your handwriting—but what do your letters have anything to do with him kissing you, of all things? “I don’t think you meant to send this. But I’m glad you did.”

He hands you the pages and your eyes skim over the words, not detecting anything out of the ordinary, until—But it got me thinking about your fight again. Reflecting on it now, I can say that it was a turning point for me in my perception of you. You remember this line, because you had made sure to strike it and everything that came afterward out when you rewrote the letter that you would actually send Jongseong. So how was he giving you this? 

“I-How do you have this?” you ask, voice trembling. You feel as though your heart overflows with all kinds of emotions, and so your eyes follow, tears staining your lower lashes. 

But Jongseong is not one to let you hide things from him. “Hey, no, it’s okay,” he says, warm hands coming to cup your face. “Look at me.” You have no choice but to oblige—his gaze is somehow both soft and stern, a mix of concern and determination. “Did you mean what you wrote in here?” You nod. “Then everything’s okay. You don’t know how happy I was reading this.”

The tension in your body slowly starts to fade. “Really?”

“Really. I cherish every single word in there.”

“Really?” you repeat, and he chuckles.

“Really.”

Your heartbeat speeds up as you gaze into his eyes, as you let yourself bask in the affection and endearment you find there. You can’t quite comprehend what’s happening. The letter, the kiss, his confession, your inadvertent confession, it’s all a mess in your head; so sudden, but such a long time coming at the same time. You never imagined that things would change so quickly—less than a year ago, you thought Jongseong was the most irritating person on this planet. After meeting his 28-year-old self, you thought it’d take ages for the two of you to be on such good terms. But now, just a week into your first semester of university, belly full of tteokbokki and Sprite, you like each other enough not only to be in the same room without hurling insults at each other but to actually be smiling at each other, willingly at that.

Your eyes drift down to his lips, just like in the hallway all those months ago, and the words slip out before you can stop them. They’re a mere whisper—”Kiss me again.”

Jongseong doesn’t need to be told twice. Still cupping your face, he bridges the gap between the two of you again, and this time, when your lips meet, they don’t come apart so quickly. It’s your first kiss, and it’s nothing short of magical, better than any romance novel could’ve prepared you for. His lips are warm and soft against yours, moving slowly, gingerly; as if he’s scared to take any wrong step, he lets you control the pace, follows every tilt of your head this way and that. It’s a relief that he seems to know as little about this as you do—his hands haven’t moved from your face, yours are on his knees, all you can do is focus on the movement of your lips, to think of anything else at the same time would be overwhelming. 

“I’ve liked you from the start,” he suddenly says, face still so close you can feel his breath on your lips as he speaks. 

“Hm?” you hum, body reeling from the kiss.

“I’ve liked you from the start,” he repeats, grinning—he looks relieved, like he’s been waiting to say these words for a long time. “I can’t believe this is happening after all these years. Or at all, really.”

“I think I did, too.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that in your letter.”

Your eyes widen and you bury your face in your hands as Jongseong laughs. “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?” you mumble.

He smooths over your hair with one hand, brings your face back up with the other. “Don’t worry. I won’t ever make you regret this.”

Your brain and heart are too all over the place for you to come up with a coherent answer, so you lean in and reconnect your lips to his. It’s already becoming your favorite sensation, feeling him smile into the kiss, threading your fingers in his soft hair.

Time passes delicately like this, the two of you on your single bed, in the sheets that you bought three weeks ago. A lot of it is spent kissing and learning how to fall into each other’s rhythm, but you also spend hours talking, comparing situations and how you’d experienced them. You thought his occasional acts of kindness were done out of guilt, evidence that he did have some morals; he was trying to show he cared about you. He thought you’d despised him from the moment you saw him; you reiterate in more detail than your letter what really happened, you say you wish you knew then what you know now. 

“But I never hated you, Jong. I think I wanted to believe that I did, but I never actually did.”

“You glared at me everytime I walked past like I killed a member of your family.”

You groan, ashamed of yourself. “I did, didn’t I?”

“You did,” he says, chuckling, placing a kiss on your forehead. His arms are around you, your head rests atop his heart—you’ve never felt more comfortable in your life. “But it’s okay. We’re here now, and I don’t want us to have any regrets about high school. We had a good time, didn’t we?”

You tilt your head up to look at him. “I’m sure you did, stealing all my erasers.”

He lets out a hearty laugh. Clearly, he’s very proud of his feat. “Hey, I gave all of them back.”

“And what am I going to do with a hundred erasers, Jong?” you ask, laughing too, pecking his cheek aggressively—your way of punishing him for a grave deed.

“Keep them as a token of my love for you,” he says, and your breath falters at the mention of that word. “In fifty years, it’ll be a sign that I’ve liked you since the beginning, I just had a funny way of showing it.”

“Fifty years, huh?”

He grins. “Fifty, a hundred, whatever. You’re not getting rid of me.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

You’re both smiling so wide, you can barely manage a kiss. He trails kisses from your lips to your ear. Holding you close, he whispers, “It’s always been you, Y/N. Always and only you.”

There may be thorns on the otherwise immaculate rose that is your life, but Park Jongseong was never one of them—all along, he was a bud waiting to bloom.

--

The more time passes, the more you wonder whether that night you had seen in your vision will ever come. There’s been evenings similar to it—crashing the minute you came home from a long day on set, telling yourself you’d take a fifteen-minute power nap only to wake up three hours later and coming downstairs to find your husband cooking dinner, cleaning the kitchen, taking care of your son or simply watching TV, but waiting for you, always waiting for you. He seems as happy now watching you come down the stairs as he was then finding your face among all the students flocking out of lecture halls. 

The details are blurry now, but many small things seem to be different from what you’d seen. He still tries to recreate your favorite meal, but it’s not pasta all'arrabbiata, it’s laksa, because your first date as an official couple was to a Malaysian restaurant, not an Italian one. He’s still the best father you know, but you have one son, not twin girls—although that offer to “give him a younger sibling to play with” is always on the table. Even the house you live in is different from the one in your dream, which has now become nothing more than a funny anecdote you share with people when they ask you the story of how you and Jongseong met.

You think of Sunoo’s words from all those years ago: Sometimes, we want something so badly, we conjure it up for ourselves. Had 18-year-old you been in such denial over her feelings for Jongseong that she’d had to convince herself a magical well had bestowed a crazy dream upon her to admit that, yes, there was something there, something other than childish hatred?

It doesn’t matter anymore. Months pass without you thinking about that well, anyway. 

Tonight, you come home late from work after having had to do last-minute changes to the script for your current project, a movie that starts shooting in a few days. Jongseong texted you that he was going to bed an hour or so again, so you’re greeted by a plate of japchae covered in film paper. The post-it note stuck to it reads, I’m afraid of the repercussions of too much curry consumption on our son, so no laksa tonight my love. Hope you like it. Come to bed quick. You were starving a second ago, but you decide food can wait—other things can’t.

You tiptoe up the stairs and into your son’s room, breathing in the scent of his hair and placing a kiss there. His hair is still worryingly sparse, but if he’s anything like his dad, it’ll come in a bit later than the other kids. You always thought babies with a full head of hair were freaky, anyway. He doesn’t budge a bit, sleeping like a log—his dad is another story, shuffling in bed the moment you step into your shared bedroom. He opens his arms wide, a silent invitation.

“You’re home,” he says as you attach yourself to his body, your leg hiked up over his, your face buried in the crook of his neck, your thumb caressing the start of stubble on his cheeks.

You smile. “I am.”

© asahicore on Tumblr, 2024. please do not repost, translate, or plagiarize my works. support your creators by reblogging and leaving feedback!

permanent taglist: @zreamy @sunghoonmybeloved @lalalalawon @sd211 @w3bqrl @raikea10 @wntrnghts @moonlighthoon @4imhry @rikisly @loves0ft @iamliacamila @theboingsuckerasseater9000 @chaechae-23 @baekhyuns-lipchain @hyuckslvr @vernonburger @amorbonbon @fluerz @jakeflvrz @enhastolemyheart (ask to be removed/added!)

[i-like-what-this-says-about-you]

every episode of house md part 3

high school teacher: alright class settle down, it is time for chemistry!

the students moan

random student #1: please mr roberts can we just use this period to do homework

mr roberts: no, chemistry is important, you see-

mr roberts starts choking

random student #2: oh my god! someone get him some water!

mr roberts stops choking

mr roberts: sorry about that folks, moving on-

mr roberts falls to the ground, unconscious

*** house and wilson are walking together

house: wilson, my guy, you are wearing a nice tie. you must be cheating on your wife

wilson: you’re just trying to find a way to compliment my tie without seeming nice. so, thank you. anyway, i have this case. high school chemistry teacher keeps randomly choking on nothing.

house: so? he has anderson’s choking disease

wilson: no, it doesn’t only occur when he’s sleeping. not anderson’s.

there is a brief moment of homoerotically staring and grinning at each other

house: ok, i’ll take it.

he grabs the file

***

house: ok people, new case. man can’t stop choking!

cameron: hmmm… can’t be andersons…

foreman: could it be cancer in his throat?

house: that only shows up for a minute or two every few days?

chase: longmedicalnameadocis!

house: good thinking, test for that, in the mean time start him on fancydrugname.

*** in the clinic

house sighs, pops a few vicodin, and enters a clinic room

clinic patient: my knees hurt.

house takes a good hard look at the patient. he’s ancient. every inch of him is wrinkled. his head has only a few surviving white hairs. next to him is who house assumes is his daughter.

house (sarcastically): hhhmmm… now this is a hard one.

daughter: please take him seriously! just a week ago it seemed like he was way younger! he had barely any wrinkles, he was running 4 miles a day- he was healthy and fit! something’s up!

the patient coughs and begins to struggle to breathe. he takes out an inhaler.

daughter: a week ago he didn’t need an inhaler. now he’s using it multiple times a day!

house (not sarcastically this time): interesting… i want to run a few tests.

*** in the office

foreman: fancydrugname made him worse.

house: chase you idiot you were way wrong.

chase: 😣😣🥺🥺

house writes the new symptoms on the board

foreman: i think it’s neurological.

house: okay, what neurological disorder could cause this?

foreman thinks in contemplation

cameron: insertanotherlongmedicalnamehere?

chase: there’s no treatment for that.

house: wrong. we can do surgery

foreman: surgery?

house: take out part of his brain

*** cuddy’s office

cuddy (angry): NO! you cannot cut into this man’s brain with no proof! it’s a rare condition, most people with it die and this treatment has never been used for the condition before!

house: i have proof.

cuddy: oh really?

house: yes. i think it will work and i’m always right.

cuddy shakes her head

cuddy: no.

*** in the clinic, same patient as before

daughter: please tell me you know what’s wrong with him.

the patient has a bag of almonds in his hand. he is shoveling handfuls of them into his mouth

house: jeez, that’s a lot of almonds- **epiphany moment** house: i have to go!!

daughter: what? what about my dad!!!

house (from out the clinic room): get him to stop eating all those damn almonds!!

*** mr roberts’ room

house: have you been exposed to large amounts of almonds recently?

mr roberts: yes, my son just started working at an almond factory.

house: aha! my proof!

house leaves, leaving mr roberts confused and in distress

*** mr roberts gets the surgery and is cured

once again, wilson and house are walking together. wilson is eating almonds

wilson: want one?

[rebelspykatie]

Steve comes from a long line of only children. He’s the last one standing after his mother dies, left alone on a barren family tree. This deep longing for an extended family made a home in Steve’s soul at a young age. For so long, it was only Steve and his mother. She raised him as best she could, but Steve never wanted that lonely existence. 

Finding someone that would want that life with him didn’t pan out the way he thought it would. Dating in Hawkins was limited and if he wanted to be truthful with people, also dangerous. Robin was the best dating app mishap turned best friend Steve could’ve hoped for, and she encouraged him to look into solo parenting, promising to be his platonic coparent every step of the way. 

Before his transition, he started a grueling IVF journey. Wanted to quit more times than he wanted to carry on. It didn’t take the first time, and Robin was there to hold him when he wasn’t sure he could handle another round of it. They didn’t know how lucky they’d get the second time. 

Dustin was born just after Thanksgiving that year, and he turned into a precocious toddler faster than Steve could blink. He had this mass of hair that Steve was in awe of, the height definitely coming from him but the curls were a mystery gift from their donor. Steve loved his chubby cheeks and toothless smile more than anything on earth. 

Everything about Dustin brightened up Steve’s world, even when his screams kept Steve and Robin awake all night, or he spit up on Steve’s shirt right before work and he had to change into a questionably dirty shirt because he hadn’t had time for laundry. Steve loved it all. He especially loved how smart his kid was, shooting straight to the top of his class, reading above grade level, doing math equations faster than Steve could comprehend. Robin joked that the donor must have some strong nerd genes to come from Steve and be that much of a math genius. 

He doesn’t actually know much about the donor, other than the recording he has from the interview and a brief profile of his family’s medical history. It might be silly, but Steve ended up picking this donor because of his laugh. It was melodic, ringing in the air long after he finished laughing, and something about it pulled at Steve’s heart in a way the others didn’t. 

Steve doesn’t hide much from Dustin, there’s no point really when your kid’s a genius, but he doesn’t give Dustin the file until he turns 11, doesn’t even hint at it. While Dustin is a curious kid, he’s also got a knack for knowing when to press an issue or not. He had a lot of questions about the process, but always shied away from asking more about how Steve chose or who his donor was. When they finally talked about it as Steve handed over the file to Dustin on his eleventh birthday, Dustin said he always knew Steve chose to have him and that was all that mattered. 

But once he gets his hands on that file, the curiosity voyage sets sail and Dustin’s chasing leads on who this man is like he’s in an episode of scooby doo. The agency will only give them the contact information they had on file 12 years ago. It’s a long shot, expecting someone’s number to be the same, but it’s all they have. A single phone number. 

When a gruff voice answers the phone and Steve explains the situation, the man on the other line agrees to meet them. The address he gives is for the Munson ranch about an hour outside of town. He knows about the ranch in the same way everyone in a small town knows of each other. He’s never been there, but the owner brings a lot of money into the town and mostly keeps to himself. His nephew was a few years ahead of Steve in school, but they never crossed paths. 

It turns out there’s only one Munson left in Hawkins, and Steve’s pretty sure the bald man that’s twice Steve’s age and looks down his nose at Steve and Dustin, isn’t the donor. Recognition sparks in his eyes, though, when Dustin starts talking, some of that defensiveness melting off his face. It’s softening into the same fondness Steve has when looking at Dustin, that inescapable way he pulls you into his orbit and snatches your heart right up. He lets Dustin take the reins, watching Wayne fall under Dustin’s spell.

His first words after Dustin’s long rambling opener about their predicament are, “Your hair looks just like his at that age.” 

Hope blooms in Steve’s chest. He’d been afraid that they wouldn’t find anything, or what they found might disappoint Dustin. But there’s someone out there that’s half of Dustin. Someone that might have given him all these little quirks that Steve’s so fond of. Someone that might want to be a part of his life, even if Steve isn’t sure he’s ready for that. 

Wayne explains that his nephew is out of town with his band, touring somewhere until the end of the month when they come home for the holidays. That’s only two weeks away and it doesn’t give Steve long to prepare for meeting someone that helped bring the best thing into his life, but it’s enough time for Wayne to welcome them into his home with an open heart.

It’s just long enough for Steve to find out that Eddie grew up on the ranch with Wayne and his father, who abandoned them when Eddie was about Dustin’s age. To find out that Eddie always loved music more than the horses and took off the first chance he got once he had the funds. To see pictures along a mantle of another precocious kid with a wild mane of hair that looks about as unstoppable as Dustin. 

Robin comes with them the night they’re going to meet Eddie. It’s a few days after he’s returned from tour. Wayne wanted enough time to prepare him before getting Dustin’s hopes all the way up. When they got the okay, Steve wasn’t sure he could do it alone, so Robin is glued to his side when they pull up at the ranch and come face to face with Edde Munson. 

But Steve relaxes when he sees the same wide grin on Eddie’s face that he sees on Dustin’s every day. And he doesn’t know it yet, but maybe he’s finally filled out that family tree and found the home he never knew he needed, with branches for Robin, Dustin, and maybe two Munsons.

[thestarrynightslover]

Discreet Not Detached

Pairing: Harvey Specter x Fem!Reader

Word count: 1,397

Warnings: None, really.

Summary: Mike goes to Harvey's apartment to deliver some files only to be proved wrong about his boss being a lonely workaholic.

Disclaimer: I don’t own the show Suits, or its characters, also not associated with it in any way, or know anyone involved with it.

A/N: My first Harvey fic in a while, I had the idea based on an episode (I don't remember exactly which) and tried to elucidate to it here. Anyways, I hope it doesn’t suck and feedback is appreciated as usual!

(y/n) = (your name) (y/l/n) = (your last name) (y/n/n) = (your nickname)

| masterlist |

Another day in the office, another drama for Harvey Specter: this time it was his associate, Mike Ross, wanting to tell his girlfriend the whole truth about the terms of his employment and Harvey couldn’t let him do it, for obvious reasons. But, as you’d expect, namecallings happened and it all ended with Mike throwing in Harvey’s face his being an alleged workaholic in lack of a personal 一 and, in this case, love 一 life. Emphasis on alleged, cause what Mike didn’t know was that his boss actually did have someone to go home to…

It had been a long day but at least you got to go home to your excentric puddle of comfort of a boyfriend: New York City’s best closer, Harvey Specter. Once you got to your place, where the two of you lived together, you were welcomed with the smell and the view of a freshly cooked dinner that Harvey probably had someone making for the two of you.

As you started taking off your coat and shoes by the door, Harvey came out of your shared bedroom wearing nothing but sweatpants and looking like he’d just taken a shower. “Oh, hey, honey!” He greeted you with a smile on his face. “Sorry I didn’t wait for you to shower but I mingled too much with people of dubious hygiene today, so I kinda really needed to get clean.”

“Ah, that’s okay,” you said while pouting cutely at the same time. “At least dinner is ready, 'cause I am starving!”

“Ha! You say it like it’s cutting-edge news!” He tells you, as he puts on a shirt 一 much to your disappointment. 

“What is that supposed to mean?!” You ask feigning offense while putting away your bag, shoes, and coat.

“It means that you’re always starving, sweetheart,” Harvey answers nonchalantly like it’s nothing.

“That is not true! Or at least it’s not entirely true: I’m always starving if it’s past mealtime and I haven’t eaten!”

“Sure, whatever you say, baby!” He says it already knowing that your hunger and all the pet names will only soften you.

“You know what? After today I don’t even have the energy to bicker with you…”

“That bad, huh?”

“The ED was a complete chaos today, apparently all hospitals were swamped, which is why they called more surgeons downstairs to help out. I’ve been on my feet the entire day! I’m basically dead.”

“Dramatic… But I’m sorry you had a shitty day, baby.” He said coming to hug you from behind in your bathroom. Looking at your reflex in the mirror 一 both of you, together like that 一 filled your heart with love and your mind with peace. Harvey was definitely your happy place.

Some time later, after you’d had your dinner, gotten ready for bed, and watched a sappy rom-com you chose, you and Harvey were already cuddling, almost asleep when you heard insistent knocking on the door.

“Stay here, honey, I’ll go see what that’s all about.” You sorta heard Harvey say to you as you lost your personal space heater.

Out in the living, Harvey opened the door only to find his associate Mike Ross standing there looking all tired and disheveled. Before his boss could even say anything, he went ahead entering the apartment mumbling about the case they were currently addressing in the office.

“Harvey, you’re not gonna believe what I found about our not-so-innocent school teacher!” He said to the older man with such energy that sounded like he had had a few too many energetics.

“What the hell, Mike?! Why are you showing up on my doorstep this late at night?”

“Because I knew you’d wanna see this as soon as possible, besides, it’s not like you’d have anything important going here, would you?” Mike asked sorta mocking Harvey.

Ignoring his employee’s last comment, he took the papers Mike was offering and said: “This better be good, Ross, otherwise you’re gonna meet a whole different side of me.

As Harvey started reading all the documents, Mike started having a look around, cause when would he have another chance at taking a peek at his boss’s house like that again? And he couldn’t believe what his eyes were seeing, he would definitely be making a few thousand jokes about it in the near future: there was a romance novel lying on the table, one of those with drawings on the cover that were becoming so popular then.

“Oh my God, Harvey, when were you gonna tell me about your love for reading?” He asked while pointing at the book with his head. 

As Harvey’s eyes emerged from the papers in his hands with a confused look to them, Mike continued: “You know you could have told me, in fact after seeing the kinda genre you like I might actually ask for some recommendations, you know, to get my grandmother a few as presents.” The younger man said already starting to laugh loudly.

“That’s not mine…” Harvey began to answer with his mind still on the documents at hand.

“Oh no? You know there’s no need to lie to me, I promise I’ll try not to judge!”

“Funny. But that’s actually-”

“Mine!” You said as you came out of the bedroom wearing nothing but one of Harvey’s expensive dress shirts. “I don’t think we’ve met yet!” You exclaimed, already extending your hand to shake Mike’s. “I’m (y/n), Harvey’s girlfriend.”

“Girl- g- girlfriend?” Mike looked so shocked he almost choked on his laughter.

“Yes, but it’s doctor (y/l/n) for you.” He answered instinctively moving to your side. “What are you doing out of bed, sweetheart?”

“Sweetheart?” Mike murmured to himself in disbelief of the version of Harvey he was seeing, especially after their argument in the office and the things he’d said to Harvey.

“Well, I assumed it was something work-related when I noticed how long it was taking you to come back and came to drag you back to bed!” You announced to your boyfriend entangling your bodies with certain disregard for the other man standing there in shock.

Only then did Mike notice a framed picture on the sideboard behind him and it displayed both you and Harvey looking at each other with love in your eyes as he carried you bridal style into the water on a beach. Which was another surprise to the young attorney since he didn’t even know that Harvey was a fan of beaches.

“So you’re the famous Mike Ross, then?” You asked, catching his attention again. “You know, it’s very rare for someone to impress Mr. Specter here like you did!”

“Oh, honey, don’t do that, or he’ll spend an entire month finding new ways to subtly bring up in every conversation-”

“Oh, there won’t be anything subtle about it, Mr. Specter,” Mike said mockingly, finally coming out of the shock he had been on. “But I’m curious now, how long have you two been together?”

“About three years, isn’t it, babe?” You answered quickly not paying any mind to the mockery on Mike’s voice.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Wow, I never would’ve guessed it. Harvey never talks about you. Like ever.” Mike impolitely announced. “I mean, I didn’t even know he had a girlfriend and it’s been months since we started working together.”

“Well, that sounds about right since we don’t like to display our personal lives at work.” You said nonchalantly.

“But do Jessica and Donna know?”

“Of course they do. Must I remind you that you’re not a Donna or a Jessica, Mike?”

“Ouch. But do Lewis and Rachel know?”

“No, and no. And as interesting as your findings were, it’s time for you to leave. We’ll talk more about it tomorrow at the office.”

“But-”

“Mike. Now!”

“Oh, Harvey, don’t be like that.” 

“He needs to go now and we need to go back to bed, so bye, Mike!” Harvey said while shoving Mike out the door.

And after he was gone, just like in the picture, Harvey picked you up from the floor and started carrying you back to the bedroom.

“Harvey!” You squealed out. But he didn’t mind it as he tossed you on the bed, got on top of you, and started kissing you. Apparently, Mike’s visit had put him in a good mood. And, apparently, it was going to be a long night.                                                                 

[marilynthornhilllover]

I know that you love me, you don't need to remind me,

Emily. P x Jennifer. J x Fem!Reader

Warning: talk of drug consumption, reader is high, mood swings, use of guns (weed) , bad flirting, mommy kink, praise kink, teasing, cringe kiss etc .

A/n: I saw that new jennifer and emily episode where Emily was high and they were so cute! Had to make a fic😌

It was that quite long awaited time of the year where criminal agents are given two weeks off from work. You were beyond exhausted but nevertheless was very happy to finally be able to take off your FBI vest and feeling relieved that you won't have to be picking it up for another week or so.

You soon realized that you literally didn't have plans arranged for the upcoming two weeks ahead, or even tonight. Everyone was pairing up as they packed up their office stuff and headed out. Spencer and Derek laughed and gave eachother a high five as they made their way downstairs to sign out while Emily and jj were already giggling about some random joke as they continued to pack up.

You nervously decided to walk up to them standing in the corridor like a shadow making sure not to seem creepy— but maybe you were doing the opposite. Ever since you joined the team, yes you did make friends but no one ever went the extra mile to offer to hang out with you. Only Emily would now and then eat lunch with you at her desk.

Jennifer wasn't bad either, she did offer to help you with a case file once, you went over to her house which you complimented her for the cozy interior, and yes the boys were also good to you but on a employee holiday like this no one was paying any attention whatsoever to you. They already plans of their own.

You on the other hand, had none, all you were gonna do was shower, eat, sleep and repeat for the next week or so. Nothing productive, not as if you had anything to do either. Prentiss and Mantegna had insisted that someone help you with case files so its not as if you have a major cade to crack over the holiday.

You were as free as a bird and your energetic self needed something to reinforce that energy into. If you could have went on a cruise for two weeks you definitely would have.

Emily scoffed at Jennifer's joke before turning around and spotting you cuddled up in the corner like a little mouse. She tilted her head to the side before approaching you with a warm smile.

" hey hon, you got any plans for the holiday?" She asked chewing a piece of gum that she had been for the entire day — somtimes you wonder if any flavour at all is still existence in it.

" uhh nope, but I'll sure my couch has plans for me though" you said sarcastically and of course she laughed, because Emily laughs at anything and everything which you did find cute. Emily always made sure that she kept everyone at a level where they felt at their absolute best when around her.

She was never mean to anyone really. Always funny, ambitious, smart and talented she was everything. Sometimes her aura was just too high, but she was always still approachable and not prideful.

Emily was like one of those drugs that you couldn't stop using because it feels too good, and when you do take it, it altars with your entire brain function and chemistry.

And speaking of chemistry, that was something you and Emily had alot of. Everytime her eyes made contact with yours, you felt as if your body was thrown into the deepest pits of hell. You'd get shivers everytime she passed you or called you a pet name. You'd go completely weak in your knees when she made the littlest amount of psychical contact with your skin — it was absolutely ridiculous just how easily she could get under your skin.

Or the time when you were making coffee in the kitchen and she needed to grab something from the top shelf and she moved you by putting her hands on your hips, with her chest pressed so closely against your back with face by your neck.

Emily made you question things. You knew you always had a thing for older women, always, since highschool and it never seemed to go away. And Emily was exactly your type, you just weren't sure if she felt the same way in return and you didn't wanna ruin the amazing friendship you both had by letting your stupid emotions and hormones get the best of yourself.

" well I'm sure you'll find something to entertain yourself, JJ and I are hooking up at her place tonight for snacks and a movie" she placed hands on her hips are she turned to look at jj who was texting away on her phone before turning back to you. You gaved her a akward smile, before a breathy nervous laugh escaped your mouth.

" hooking up huh" you saw as her eye brows quirked before a sly smile came into evidence on her face and quickly glanced at Jennifer who was now angrily texting before taking a step closer towards you, closing the the last gap space that was there. Her body heat and perfume over took your senses making your breath hitch.

You pressed your palm against her chest sneaking a quick glance at jj and the camera above. Emily was looking at you with a teasing smirk, she leaned down besides your ear and whispered.

" do wanna hook up with me as well?" She pulled back to see the reaction on your face and just as she imagined it was absolutely priceless. She chuckled before pulling away completely.

" oh my God emily would you leave poor y/n alone, let's go already" Jennifer said with a tint of exhaustion and annoyance her voice. Emily chuckled before gently caressing your cheek. The both women waved you goodbye before departing and going their way.

You sighed before picking up your bag and leaving, you locked your office door and went home. You did decided to walk with a few case files home and evidence objects to keep yourself busy during the holiday to stop yourself from going insane from the intense boredom you were prone to have.

— — — —

Emily and Jennifer had just sat down and were about to enjoy their late afternoon with wine and salt and vinegar chips when a continuation of loud knocking could be heard on jj's front door. Both women looked at eachother with utter confusion on their faces — the weren't expecting anyone. Jennifer decided to get up and go check the door, Emily following closely behind with her hand placed tightly on her gun.

The door bell soon started ringing along with the knocks which triggered Jennifer even more. Unlocking the door Jennifer threw it open, not caring what stood on the opposite side of it, after all emily was ready to protect her best friend at all cost, even if it meant shooting someone in their foor.

" if I had my way I swear I would—" as soon as she saw you she stopped talking, her eye brows quirked as she squinted her eyes to make a better appearance of your face in the dim moon light. Emily let out a soft sigh when she saw you but quickly went back into a state of worry at the same time.

Now you had both women wondering what you were doing at their house.

" y/n? I didn't know you were coming over, did Emily invite you?" Jennifer turned around hoping to get a confirmation nod from Emily but she shook her head and pursed her lips, letting her know she was just as confused as her.

" Well aren't you guys a bit rude, aren't you gonna invite me in?" You muttered but before they could react you let yourself in. You carefully walked down the long fancy corridor switching off some lights on your way because they made your eyes burn, making your way to the living room area, having knowing your way around jj's house since the last two times you were there.

You stumbled over the coffee table and landed right onto the sofa, face first with a soft groan. You dropped the ziplock bag of cheese puffs you had brought onto the floor.

She walked up to you and you and sat beside you on the couch, she picked you up by both your forearms and made you look at her.

Both women side eyed eachother, both in desperate need to know what on God's green earth was going on. Jennifer leaned against the wall to further scrutinize you. Emily on the other hand was just worried how you got here on your own with no car or phone.

" hey y/n sweetie are you..... drunk?" Her voice sounded like when water got into a phone speaker and you tried to play a song— you couldn't understand it. You rubbed your eyes and glanced at the table to which your face instantly lit up when you saw the salt and vinegar lays chips.

You grabbed them ferociously then took out some chopsticks you had stuffed in the back pocket of your jeans and started eating the chips. At this point both women were flabbergasted, mouths open, jaws dropped. Jennifer took a deep breath before she turned around and went to her fridge to grab you a drink to help you sober up because it was crystal clear that you were beyond drunk, drunk was an understatement.

" what time is it?" You suddenly asked putting the chips down and dusting off your hands.

" time for some hydration, here you go" Jennifer said as she passed you a bottle of cold cranberry juice. Once again your face lit up like a child on Christmas day.

" ohhhh, it's got what plants crave!" You exclaimed. The look on Jennifer's face when you said that was priceless as Emily silently continued to look at you with a completely blanket stare.

You placed the bottle of juice at the side of your head as if it was an ice pack and burped. You cleared your throat before speaking up again.

" have you guys seen that movie! Idiot city!.... wait city Idiot... wait... yeah" it's like your body was replaced with a child's and this called for huge concern. Emily sighed heavily and took the bottle from your hand.

" Idiocracy?" Jennifer whispered and you nodded.

" I knew I liked you! Ohhh, I and on my way here I saw a cat jumping off your house roof then it turned into a dog and flew away as a mosquito" you said before the loudest laugh took you over that you almost started crying.

Emily whispered " oh good lord" before she shook her head, Jennifer was still completely and totally lost for words. Jennifer had a feeling that being drunk would not cause someone to behave like this— well of course she knew, she's a profiler. She had a feeling you were high, but she didn't want you to act out and she would need proof for Emily because knowing her she wouldn't believe for a minute you would do drugs.

" umm y/n what's in the bag?" Jennifer asked and your eyebrows quirked, you placed your finger at you ear urging her to repeat even though she was so damn close to you.

" What's in the bag" she repeated as she dragged her words this time. You shrugged.

" I don't know what time the supermarket closes" emily stood up and walked towards to kitchen to grab her phone, you had the agent stressed. Jennifer just took it upon herself to grab the bag of " cheese puffs" before she walked towards emily.

" look I know you may not believe but I have a pretty good feeling that, that girl right there is literally the profound definition of what we call high" emily scoffed.

" Oh come on, she probably had too much wine I mean weren't we just about to drink wine as well?" She restated trying to convince Jennifer, but honestly to this rate she just couldn't, Jennifer was already convinced from her own opinion.

" emily elizabeth prentiss which wine do you know makes someone this drunk?" Jennifer asked, emphasizing on the last two words of her sentence. Emily shrugged before looking back at you, who was now sniffing the air every two seconds like a curious dog. Jennifer rolled her eyes before opening the bag of cheese puffs and taking a sniff.

She gaged before pulling away quickly.

" this smells like straight up weed!" She swiftly turned to let Emily have a sniff, to which Emily pulled away as well. Jennifer closed the bag and turned it around where there was writing in black. " DO NOT OPEN, CONTAINS CASE 101 EVIDENCE".

" you ate the case evidence! Oh my god!" Jennifer looked like she was going to erupt like a volcano and her high pitched tone of voice was making your head hurt and ears ring.

" I was hungry, and I didn't know that they were edibles" you whispered as you squinted your eyes since it was getting harder to see. Jennifer looked at you in disbelief as she turned to Emily for back up. Before Emily could utter a word Jennifer was already furious.

" Emily, don't even! She basically ate the entire bag!" She shouted. She saided pacing the room with her fingers gently massaging her temple to calm her.

" what are we gonna tell hotch, or even worst David" Jennifer covered her face with her both her hands before leaning over the kitchen counter.

" Well I mean, she probably just ate the backup stash, it should be fine, we should really be worrying about is her health" emily muttered scratching her head. Jennifer looked up at emily as her jaw dropped.

" your defending her?!" Emily raised her hands in defense but before she could reply Jennifer took the chance.

" I seriously cannot believe you right now!" Jennifer once again, started pacing the room, this time even more quicker.

" Oh come on jj, what are the odds that people make silly mistakes like these?" Jennifer stopped, and looked at emily with wide eyes.

" Well with the odds as high as her I'd say zero!" She said angrily before picking up her phone.

Emily sighed before looking over at you who was now eating the chips and gnawing your teeth wildly making crumbs fall all over the place. In a way Emily felt bad for you, mostly pity because she knew what you did was down right stupid but Jennifer was being a tadbit too harsh on you in your current position — knowing you couldn't properly comprehend the situation or what was going on.

" ok I'll take her home and we can speak to the team about this tomorrow when y/n is a better state of mind, ok?" Emily said in a reassuring voice. Jennifer sighed in frustration before biting her lip and nodding approvingly.

Emily carefully picked you up off the couch and wrapped her arm around your waist as she insisted to take you home safely. Her body warmth was comforting and her perfume was like a lullaby putting you to sleep this time. You melted in her embrace as she took you outside.

Your vision was blurred and the cold air on your skin — although you had a jacket on, was making you shiver. Seeing this emily hugged you tighter. She opened the door to her wagon and assisted you into the passenger seat and putting on your seat belt for you. You looked at her, she looked like one of those ancient paintings,the ones you can't withdraw your eyes from, the Renaissance ones.

You weren't sure if maybe it was the drugs or the hormones that came after taking the drugs but you felt the need to kiss emily, your eyes flicked down to her lips that were slightly parted as she concentrated on getting the seatbelt to adjust to your liking. Her smooth skin and wrinkled lines that ran across her forehead and eye line area, her little cute eye bags from all the hard work she does.

You couldn't resist the urge, she was a drug, she was your drug. You licked your lips and leaned in. Your lips connected with hers in a slow soft kiss. You closed your eyes and allowed yourself to enjoy the moment. Emily didn't pull away, she was surprised yes, but she didn't pull away. Emily couldn't cover up the feeling she felt for you but she also didn't want to take advantage of your drunken state.

Taking it that she was enjoying it as much as you, you tried to force your tongue into her mouth but that's when she pulled away. Your brows furrowed and for a moment the drugs may have returned your common sense and you realized what you did — what you were trying to do. And soon the embarrassment and cringe settled in.

" sorry, oh God I'm so stupid!" You whispered as you fought back tears, you covered your face with both hands and started sobbing. Emily sprinted around to the drivers seat to comfort you. She gently peeled your hands away from your face, holding your palms in hers she caressed them with her knuckles softly. You sniffed and shook your head in denial before looking out the window.

" hey, sweetheart look at me please" her voice was as soft as an angel and so gentle as if you were something valuable that could be broken, that's something you loved about emily, she was so comforting in all circumstances, no matter what. She placed her hand under your jaw and turned you to look at her. She stared at you with her cute Bambi eyes so filled of love, and she so badly wanted to say " I love you" but she knew you wouldn't be able to comprehend them.

" look y/n, i wanna— kiss you back but I can't. That doesn't mean I don't want to, I just want you to be able to give me your full sober concent." She spoke as slowly and clearly as possible so you won't misinterpret anything.

" and your not stupid, we all make mistakes my love. Once I accidentally— well I got drunk the morning of my Law exams and failed them, and that did set me at a disadvantage for my career but I still made it into this job" she continued to rub your knuckles and wip every tear that fell from your eyes.

" and this joke takes y/n, but it also gives.... it gave—" she took a deep breath before exhaling heavily. " it gave me you." Hearing these words made your heart flutter souly. Your little smile came across your face which emily mirrored.

" now, my sweet girl, my I take you home?" She spoke in a old French accent waving her hand a fancy motion, You both laughed until you were out of air. after the laughter died down She chuckled and placed a hand on your thigh squeezing the tender flesh which made your breath hitch.

The drive home was long but certainly not quiet at all, you and Emily blasted high 2000s music all the way until she arrived at your home. You knew there was gonna be alot to discuss the next day but you should be fine once you have emily by your side.

[boldlyvoid]

Snowed In

18+ Aaron Hotchner x Fem Reader

Summary: what happens when you're the last two in the office on Christmas Eve and the roads are closed due to an unexpected blizzard?

Warnings: divorced touch starved hotch, Agent reader, blizzards, alone at Quantico, cuddling, flirting, making out, face sitting, munch hotch, teasing, p in v smut, soft dom hotch, spit, biting, fluffy aftercare

word count: 5.3k

The weather forecast for Christmas Eve didn’t look nice… but you can’t really call out of work at the FBI for ugly weather when there are terrible people out there to catch. And, unlike everyone else who thought it would be smart to head home before the storm, she had paperwork to do.

So by the time her last file was closed, the roads were too. 

The power was still on, and it would stay on thanks to the generator at Quantico and the best part was that the kitchen was newly stocked with snacks. 

She wandered down to the floor 6 break room, which just so happened to be in the BAU bullpen. Everyone had gone home, the desks were empty and the only lights on were in the kitchen area. She took out a mug, flicked on the kettle and started to make herself some toast with one of the many Jams in the fridge. She’s so caught up in her snack that she doesn’t hear a door open, or someone walking down the steps towards her until he's taking a deep breath and scaring the daylights out of her. 

“Oh god,” she jumps, hand on her chest as she turns to him. “Agent Hotchner…” 

“Agent Y/L/N,” he smiles. “Sorry, I thought you knew I was still here.” 

“I figured you went home to your wife—

“Ex-wife,” he sighs, showing his ringless hand. “She has our son this year, I thought I’d catch up on some work and then the snowstorm got… well, you see,” he points to the big glass windows covered in snow. 

“It hasn’t snowed like this here in years,” she shakes her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe we're stuck here…” 

“Well, it’s not like there’s nothing to do,” he teases. “We have a TV, lots of snacks, the power won’t go out on us so it’ll stay warm in here and Daves got a cot in his office if you need a place to sleep…” 

“Oh, thank you,” she’s shocked he’s thinking about her like that. “I didn’t even think about that part.” 

“you’re just hungry?” He teases. “What are you making?” 

“Tea and toast… you want some?” She asks, hopeful he’ll say yes. 

He nods, “I’d love some.” 

They work around the kitchen like a team. She makes the toast, he makes their tea and they share exactly how they like theirs done… and there's a hope in her heart that maybe this is just the first time she makes him a breakfast meal. She’s always found him handsome, everyone in the bureau had, honestly. Not only is he good-looking, he’s strong and smart and kind until he can’t be anymore. And when he’s mean, even that’s a little sexy.

He invites her up to his office where she finds he’s been sitting on his couch, his laptop on his desk, watching old episodes of Fraser… “seriously?” She can’t believe it. 

He blushes a bit, “it’s a good show. I have every season on DVD and this laptop has a disk drive, so…” 

“Honestly, I’ve never really watched it,” she shrugs. “What season are you on?” 

“The first one, I can start it from the beginning again?” 

“No, it’s okay,” she waves it off. “I think I can catch up, you’ll just have to explain some things to me.” 

And so he does, he gives a rundown of the first few episodes. Who Fraser is, his weird brother, his dad and their dad's helper— who his brother eventually falls in love with. It’s a good show. It’s funny, she gets to see Hotch smirk and sometimes, actually, giggle… it’s something she’s not used to. 

In the handful of times she’s worked with the BAU on things, Agent Hotchner has never cracked a smile. Episode after episode, he gets happier and friendlier and she takes that as an invitation to move in closer and closer until their shoulders are touching. And then he lifts his arm to rest it on the back of the couch and she’s even closer to him. His tie is off, his first two buttons are undone… he’s comfortable and handsome as ever and it takes everything in her to watch the show and not stare at him. 

“Do you want to watch another?” He asks in a hushed tone, just for her to hear— as if they weren’t completely alone here. 

She nods, “I can do another.” 

“Cool,” he smiles ever so softly and goes to get up so he can switch the disk to access another 4 episodes.

She watches him take out the old disk, put it back in the case and take out the new one. He places it in the tray, closes the disk drive and watches as it loads up to the title screen again. He hits play, and makes his way back to the couch with a sigh, placing his arm on the back again, just as close to her as last time. 

“This is really nice,” she compliments. “Thanks for making this night fun for me.” 

“I’m actually really glad someone else got snowed in here too,” he teases. 

“I really thought I was alone in here,” she sighs. “I’m so happy I’m not…” 

“Are you happy it’s me?” 

She can’t help but smirk, “Yeah… alone time with Agent Hotchner wasn’t something I ever expected to get.”

“Would you want more?” He asks, staring at her lips. “I mean—

“Yes,” she cuts him off. “If I knew you were single I would’ve asked before…” 

“It’s only been 6 months, we haven’t worked together since then,” he reminds her. “I haven’t— I haven’t even tried to spend time with someone else, yet.”

“But you think you’re ready?” 

He shrugs, “I— I think you’re pretty and you’re nice and we’re here and we’re having a good time…” 

“So are you asking me on a date hotchner, or do you want to bone in your office?” 

He laughs, “Bone? Seriously?” 

“Canoodle, bang, bump uglies, fuck,” she lets out all the slang and he laughs again, good and hard and it’s beautiful. 

She cups his face and he pauses for a moment, “I think I’d like to start with just kissing you.” 

“Okay,” she breathes out as she leans in to kiss him. 

He’s so gentile. His lips are soft, and he’s tentative and reserved. He keeps his hands to himself and lets her set the pace. She never would’ve guessed that making tea and close proximity would lead to kissing the most handsome man she’d ever known in her entire life. When their tongues meet, he finally reaches out for her. Holding her side, he grips her just enough to make her crave more. She moves in closer, desperate to throw her leg over him and sit in his lap… but it’s him who initiates it. 

He tugs her in, helps her settle in his lap and wraps both his hands around her to cradle her body against his. She sighs against him, making him smile into the kiss. She smiles too, coping his face she pulls back to look at him, “I didn’t expect Frasier to be the show that rials you up like this…”

“Well… tossed salads and scrambled eggs are both euphemisms,” he teases.

“How so?” 

He lets out a deep breath through his nose like he doesn’t want to explain it. “The phrase ‘toss my salad’ is slag referring to rim jobs— or really any kind of oral pleasure, I guess…” 

“Oh,” she wasn’t expecting that in the slightest. “And I guess scrambled eggs is how he likes his eggs done in the morning?” 

He nods, “who knows, really? The theme song has never actually been explained but… how do you like your eggs in the morning?” 

“Why? It’s not like you can make me some in the morning,” she teases. 

“Maybe, when the roads are better we can go get breakfast?” He offers. 

“I thought the whole point of the saying was that you’re supposed to make them for me?” She stares him down, hoping to make him laugh… she gets a smirk and a shake of his head as he tries to hold it in. 

“I will make you breakfast, at one of our places, the first chance I get,” he assures. “If… if that’s something you’d like?” 

She nods, “Yes, Aaron, I would love to get to know you more, and spend time with you and see where this goes… I’m literally in your lap right now dying to see what we get up to.” 

“Dying to?” He couldn’t believe those were her words. “Why?” 

She runs her fingers through his hair and then traces down the side of his neck and watches her hands as they trail over his shirt to rest on his chest. “When you look in the mirror in the mornings, do you plan on being the sexiest agent in the building or is this all just a happy accident?” 

He blushes, “I mean, I don’t really plan it— I just put something on and come to work.” 

She just shakes her head and sucks her tongue, “Well I guess now I have to show you just how handsome you are every single day.” 

“And how would you do that?” He asks, gripping her hips a little tighter. 

She leans in and kisses him softly, “You’re so handsome.” She kisses his cheek, “And pretty…” She kisses his jaw, “And cute…” he starts to smile and blush uncontrollably. 

As she goes lower with her kisses, she works on his third shirt button, exposing a bit more of his chest so she can drag her tongue over his collarbone— which makes him toss his head back and whine. “Oh god, you’re so sexy,” she praises. “I want to hear more of your pretty noises.” 

“So we’re doing this?” He asks, looking nervous.

She smiles softly and looks him in the eyes. “Only if you want to, baby,” she whispers. “We can do whatever you’re most comfortable doing, I’m sure this is going to be weird venturing into a new experience for the first time in so long, but we can go as far as you want and stop the moment you don’t want to do it anymore, okay?” 

He nods, “Thank you.” 

“And if you want to stop we can go right back to cuddling and watching the show and we can still go on that breakfast date,” she assures him. “I’m going to want to do that no matter what happens, okay? I like you, not what I can get from you.” 

“You’re so nice,” he swoons a bit. “Seriously, why are you so nice to me?” 

“you’re a good man, I’ve enjoyed working with you… and looking at you,” she teases. “But in all seriousness, you deserve someone to be gentile with you, you’re only so stone-faced at work to protect yourself, I get that, but you deserve some softness too.” 

“I had a feeling you’d be sweet to me,” he whispers, breaking his walls down for her. “I’ve wanted to do this… I’ve wanted to break out of my shell and be with someone new and forget about how much my wife—my ex-wife broke my heart, but I’ve been scared.” 

“It’s a scary thing,” she sympathizes. “But if you want me to be the first one you're with, I’ll be so good to you. I’m going to take care of you and make it fun and easy and soft and-and even if you get emotional or it’s too much, I’m not going to hold it against you.” 

“I want to do this,” he nods, staring at her lips. “I want it to be you who I start over with.” 

“I want to be that for you,” she cups his cheek again and smiles. “Thank you for picking me, Aaron.” 

“Um… I don’t have any condoms,” he warns. “There might be some in Dave's room… maybe Derek's desk?” 

She laughs, “I have some in my purse upstairs, I can go get them?” 

He nods, “Yeah, that would be good and then I can turn this sofa into a bed while you’re gone.” 

“Okay,” she goes to get off him but then stops herself, she leans in and steals on last kiss and he smiles into it. “Sorry, I needed another.” 

“You can have a million more when you get back,” he keeps smiling, overjoyed with his choice. 

—

He has about 6 minutes of freakout time while she goes to get her purse. He turns the couch into a bed, having a sleeper sofa in here was a blessing for nights like these… and when his wife kicked him out. He untucks his shirt and then re-tucks it and pulls it out again, he thinks about unbuttoning it and laying on the couch or maybe waiting for her at the elevator doors— he’s so nervous he has no idea what to do with his hands or his body. 

He wanders around the room and talks himself into meeting her at the bullpen doors just as she’s walking up the couple stairs to his office. “Oh, hi.” 

“Hi,” she smiles so beautifully. “You know you can still back out?” 

He shakes his head, “I don’t want to… I’m just nervous. I haven’t done this in a while.” 

“How long?” She asks.

“Since the last time with my ex-wife or with someone new?” 

“Either?” She’s simply curious. 

“My ex-wife was my first and only… and I haven’t been with her in almost 8 months now.” 

“You know you could have anyone in this office in a heartbeat if you wanted to,” she reminds him. “You’re the most handsome agent in the whole FBI— just don’t tell Morgan I said that.” 

He laughs, “Thank you.” 

“This is cute,” she motions over to his sleeper sofa. “You want to cuddle and make out a bit, again?” She asks while kicking off her shoes and she does the same thing, making it easier for when they shed all their clothes later. 

He nods and pulls her in close, “Kissing you has been the best part of my day.” 

“Well, let me make it even better,” she teases, leaning in and connecting their lips once more. 

It’s just as heated as before, only now his hands are on her lower back and he’s so tempted to grab her ass… so he does, he hauls her up so she can wrap her legs around him and he knees on the end of the bed. He lays her down, still kissing her while he attempts to hover over her— but she wants more. 

She grips his hips and pulls him down flush against her, so she can wrap her legs around him once more. And by wrapping herself completely around him, he suddenly feels at home. His nervousness dies off, his apprehension to experience something new and different and unlike himself diminishes to nothing and he’s able to enjoy this. 

He wraps his right arm around her, trapped between her and the mattress, while his left-hand cradles her head. He kisses her with passion and care and she gives the same energy right back… if not more so as she moans into his mouth. He pulls back with a smile, “you like kissing me that much?” He teases with his newfound confidence. 

“I mean yeah but do you not realize how hard you are against me? It feels amazing,” she explains, her legs wrapped around him still, she pushes him down against her core and has him grind against her once more. “You feel so good, baby.”

He was so in his head he didn’t even realize his other one was so active… he blushed a bit, “You like it?” 

She nods, “If grinding with you all night is all I get, I’m going to leave a very happy camper.” 

He leans in and kisses her cheek and then her jaw right up to her ear, “Oh, you’re getting more, believe me… so much more.”

She moans again and he takes that as enough incentive to keep kissing her there. He bites her earlobe gently and sucks on her neck just enough to stimulate her and yet not enough to leave a mark. Her hands search his back, feeling him up as he tenses from hovering over her and then releases when he drops his body weight against hers once more, and she sighs when he does that. She loves the feeling of him on top of her. It’s like he was meant to always be there. 

He withdraws his hands from under her and grips her hips as he sits up, “can I unbutton your shirt?” 

“You may,” she says, a look of excitement plastered over her face. 

“I want to just rip it open but I know you don’t have another shirt to wear home tomorrow,” he teases. “and it’s just too pretty to ruin.” 

“Hopefully you don’t feel the same way about me…” 

“Oh no, that’s precisely why I need to ruin you,” he assures, making haste on her buttons, he leans back in and starts to kiss the newly exposed skin of her chest. Right between her boobs and down her tummy until her shirt is completely unbuttoned and all he has left to pop is the button on her pants. 

Her tummy is so soft, that he gets inside her shirt and wraps his arm underneath her back to feel how warm she is and uses it as an excuse to undo her bra in the process. He pulls her forward and gets her out of her shirt and her bra and can’t help but stare down at her chest and then back up to her eyes, “mesmerizing.” 

“My turn,” she whispers, “let's flip.” 

He listens, laying on his back, she straddles his hips and leans down to kiss his neck while she undoes his shirt. Button by button, she gets him exposed just to press their naked chests together and kiss him right on the mouth once more. She hauls him forward so they’re both sitting up and she pushes the shirt off his shoulders so they can feel each other up. 

He grips her hips and tugs her in, grinding her against his bulge once more. She breaks the kiss to kiss his jaw and down his neck, “mm, Aaron,” she pulls his attention from the kiss. “Lay back.” 

“Okay,” he listens, leaning back and she reaches for his belt. 

“Can I?” 

He nods and so she starts to unbuckle him, she pops his button and pulls the zipper down so she can reach into his pants. She feels over his bulge, watching as he tosses his head back and bites his lip to hold back a moan. “Let it out baby,” she whispers. “A touch-starved man like you… come on, let me hear you.” 

“It’s not the only thing I’m starved for,” he jokes, blushing again. 

Her eyes widen as she pulls back, “oh yeah?” 

He nods, he wants to go down on her so bad that his stomach flips with anticipation. “Please?” 

She sits more on her knees and reaches for the button on her pants, “how do you want me?” 

“Would you— if you want, I mean, you can pick but I’d like to—

“I can sit on your face,” she knows exactly what he was trying to ask. 

In the same way, she liked feeling his weight on top of herself, he wanted to feel completely smothered by her pussy and thighs. 

She pushes him back so he’s lying flat and climbs off the bed so she can take her pants and underwear off, shoes long gone, she’s in nothing but her socks as she climbs back onto the bed and straddles his chest. 

He’s a little impatient, pulling her forward and wrapping his arms around her thighs, he gets her right where he wants her and kisses her right where her thigh meets her cunt. He eases into it, kissing her gently, whispering praise about how beautiful she is and how lucky he feels. 

But then he looks up at her, “don’t be afraid to really sit, I can take it.” 

“Tap me twice if you can’t,” she agrees and within seconds he’s going at her. 

“Fuck,” she gasped as she leans forward to rest her arm against the wall behind the couch, grinding against his face, exactly the way he wanted it. 

His tongue deep inside her, his nose nudging at her clit, he savours the way she tastes as if she hasn’t said she would be willing to do this again… and from her noises, he knows this experience just makes her want it again soon.  He wants her to enjoy it, he’s always been more into making his partner enjoy it. This time it feels a bit more selfish, as the more she enjoys it the more she’d be willing to come back and the more he can do it. And he wants to eat her out for the rest of his life. 

Her sounds are a price, her weight on top of him is magnificent and she’s absolutely delicious. And he hasn’t even gotten to the best part yet. Making her cum on his face is going to change his life. 

When he inserts a finger, her legs start to tremble around him. She’s so close, he can tell. Sucking on her clit while he massages that wonderful spot inside of her with his middle finger, she moans so deeply it vibrates her whole being. She starts to chant his name, right on the edge of her orgasm, so he adds a second finger and the damn bursts. 

She trembles harder than before, and a beautiful elongated moan leaves her mouth as she cums on his face. He’s quick to withdraw his fingers and replace them with his tongue, gathering it all with the most disgusting sounds he could ever make— but fuck, if she wasn’t the most delicious woman in the whole world. 

He was so into her, so transfixed on getting her off that he didn’t realize he was grinding up against nothing and the largest precum stain had marked his boxers and surely was on the inside of his work pants. 

“Aaron, Aaron, oh my god, stop, stop, holy fuck,” she makes him stop by pulls off him and sits down on the pillow beside his head. Hand to her chest to catch her breath, she melts against the mattress, “sweet Jesus?” 

“I need to do that every chance I get,” he muses, so in love with how it went down. “You’re delicious.” 

She laughs, placing her hand on his big bicep as she looks down at his glistening face, “I’m going to take you up on that all the time.” 

“Merry fucking Christmas to me,” he teases as he sits up, noticing just how close he was that whole time. 

His cock is strained against his boxers, soaking them around the elastic band, darkening the gray fabric so much that he feels a little embarrassed. She notices it too, but she smiles, “Oh, you really liked that, didn’t you?” 

He nods, unable to say much. 

“Come on, get your pants off, I think I’ve calmed down enough to take care of you now,” she assures. 

He doesn’t have to be told twice. He gets off the bed and starts to take off his pants while she looks around for her own, “can you get the condom from my pocket?” 

“Yeah,” he goes right for her pants right after his are off. 

She just looks around the room, avoiding eye contact with his cock even though he knows she wants to look, “I didn’t even ask if you have cameras in here…” 

He laughs, kneeling on the edge of the bed with the condom between his fingers, “No, I don’t. With all the confidential material I see in here and the conversations had in here, they didn’t put a camera in here. But there is one directly outside my office so they know you’re in here but they won’t know what you’re doing.” 

“And who is this they you speak of?” She teases. 

“Whoever watches the tapes but probably also Penelope… if she learns I was here all Christmas she will go back and look to see what I did,” he shakes his head with a loving smile. “She just cares a lot.” 

“She’s the sweetest,” she agrees. “But thank fucking god no one can see what we’re doing… I’m glad this is just for us.” 

“Mhm,” he hums, he gets between her legs and tugs her down the bed a bit so she’s lying with her head on the pillow, “they don’t need to see what’s about to happen.” 

“although someone should teach more guys how to eat like that…” 

He laughs again, leaning down to kiss her, “Then you’d have any guy you want and I'd rather be the only one for you.” 

“Very true,” she says against his lips before pressing her lips against his. 

They just kiss a couple times before he pulls back and sits on his knees once more, opening the condom and rolling it on. She finally takes a look at what he’s got going on between his legs and he sees her lick her lips while taking in a deep breath. “Fuck sake, you really are going to ruin me…” 

He smirks, “Do you want me to? We could just have a sweet and slow—

“No, I need a good fucking, like the fuck my brains out kind,” she assures. 

“It’s your lucky day,” he teases, running his hand over her inner thigh as he helps her spread them. “I can do that for you.” 

“Do your worst—

“Oh no, it’ll be my best,” he says, gripping his cock and tapping it against her pussy. “You ready?” 

“Please?” She begs, pleading with her beautiful eyes. 

He slips in ever so slowly, letting her adjust to his girth as he leans over her. He caresses her face with one hand, holding himself up with his lover, watching her take it all in. Head tossed back, she bites her lip and then lets out a blissful sigh. She grips his sides, wanting to desperately pull him down on top of herself once more, but she waits until he’s fully inside. 

“Oh my god?” She whines, “please move, I need more, please?” 

He smirks, leaning in to kiss the side of her mouth as he starts to rock his hips. He wraps his arm under her as she pulls him in closer and moves her mouth so they can kiss for real. She moans against him as his rhythm changes, his hips speed up and she wraps her legs around him to get him even deeper inside her. 

She feels so amazing, he almost forgot what it was like to fuck something other than his own hand. The way she flutters around him and grips him so tight, the feeling of her nails in his back and her tongue on his own. He’s in absolute heaven. So good in fact, he’s afraid he might not last as long as she deserves. 

He reaches between them and rubs her clit with his thumb, moving his kisses to her neck and just below her ear, “doing so good, baby.” 

“Holy fuck, Aaron,” she moans, tossing her head back and pushing her chest up. 

He looks between them and can’t help himself, he kisses her chest and she looks down to see what he’s doing, he looks up to her for permission only to hear, “suck on them, please? Please, oh my god?” 

He takes her nipple in his mouth and swirls his tongue around it before gently running his bottom teeth over the nib. She gasps, tightening around him which makes him moan with her nipple in his mouth. He brings up his other hand, using it to pinch her other nipple and she absolutely flutters around him, it’s everything. 

When he lets go of her nipples, he reaches his hand under her knee and pushes her right leg up. The angle changes, he’s so much deeper now, hitting her right where she wants him again and again, he kisses the inside of her calf gently as she tosses her head back. She moans, tightening around him to the point he’s so sure he’s about to lose control. 

He may be out of practice, but he’s not out of manners. He needs her to finish first. 

Using all the power he has left, he keeps her leg up like that but adjusts himself so his pubic bone can rub against her swollen clit with each and every thrust. “More,” she spits out. “Please? ‘M so close.” 

His hand slips down her leg, “I know baby,” he coos, keeping her stretched open, he just needs to get his thumb on her clit. 

He stills for just a moment, gathers some spit in his mouth and drops it between them so it lands right on her clit to release the friction but then he picks right back up. She whines, sweating and her head tossed back, getting ruined just like she asked to be. 

She somehow tightens around him again, and he’s so fucking close he feels like he could go insane. “you’re right there, sweet girl, let go when you’re ready,” he says through bated breath. So fucking close. 

And that does it, she starts to tremble again, her core tightens and so does her grip on his arm. “Oh, Aaron!” She moans out a string of incoherent words follow as she lets go and gets lost in her pleasure. 

He keeps going, helping her ride through it before his rhythm changes. He’s right there, dropping down onto her and kissing her shoulder as he pile-drives into her for the home stretch. Her hands roam his back, caressing him, “Fill me up, Aaron, you deserve it,” she whispers in his ear. “Cum for me, come on, baby.” 

He whines, right there, scared of what noise is going to come out of him when he does cum but he also doesn’t really care at this point. He whimpers and groans, biting her shoulder slightly as he fills the condom and stills against her, “Oh my god? Oh, my god… holy fuck?” 

She wraps her arms around him once more, tighter like a hug this time, still panting, she agrees. “I know, Jesus.” 

He laughs against her, high on endorphins and feeling completely invincible, “You’re amazing.” 

She grips his hair at the nape of his neck and pulls him up off of her shoulder, “You are incredible, that was the best sex I think I’ve ever had.” 

He can’t help but smile as he leans in to kiss her. She brushes his hair off his forehead, it’s sweaty and slicks right back. Their kissing is softer this time, lazy and less lust-filled— more loving. Thankful. 

He kisses her one last time before going to sit up on his knees and pull his soft cock out of her but she pulls him back in, “No, can we just cuddle like this for a bit?” 

“Yeah,” he nods, not expecting her to want this but so glad she does. 

He settles back against her shoulder, hand on her boob while she traces shapes over his back, “this is my favourite part,” she whispers. 

“Me too… but I’m never usually on top,” he admits. “Or still inside…” 

She lightly laughs and he can feel it all over, “What, your wife wasn’t a big fan?” 

“Not really, she was quick to go get cleaned up and then she would cuddle into me and go to sleep… but I don’t want to talk about her anymore,” he admits. 

“That’s okay,” she coos, soothing her hand down his back. She rests her cheek against the top of his head. “This has been the best night. Who thought getting snowed in at Quantico would end like this?” 

“Not me, but I’m so glad it did.” 

General Taglist 

@ncsls0515 @stevesmunsons @reidsbookclub @sweetyyhippyy @manuosorioh @mrs-dr-reid @k-k0129 @squishyturtle @katsukis1wife @buckleyhans @mrs-ssa-hotch @ssavanessa22

[campoverlook-if]

Progress Update #6// 6/22/24 - Episode 1 Full Release

[Episode 1 is now fully released! + the intro for Episode 2!]

|| DEMO LINK - [96K - W/Code] [23K - Average] ||

Well folks, we're finally here. Episode 1 of Camp Overlook has been fully released. (Did I say I'd release it last month? I did, but let's forget that.) Also included with this update is the intro scene for episode 2, right before your group is meeting the campers.

Unfortunately, we will once again have to start from the beginning, since I changed some wording on the beginnig questions and anwsers. But this will be the last time I do that for a while, even I'm tired having to re-read the beginning of episode 1, get it off my eyes.

Personally, episode 1 is still not complete in a way that I am fully satisfied with. There's a whole section that I ended up removing because it was just way too much. But I'm planning to add it back in when I finish episode 2, it's just gonna have to cook a little bit more in the oven.

But anyways, let's get into what exactly I've included in this update.

A scene where you can either walk alone or with your group to the cabins.

Your cabins! Pick what bed you sleep in, wondering how exactly this will affect the story.

Engage in a scavenger hunt with people outside (or inside) your already assigned group. Pick wisely, you'll be seeing these counselors more than others.

Be accosted by someone you weren't expecting to see, especially when they have something you want.

Hang around the campfire and enjoy some marshmallows with your peers.

Leave your cabin.

I hope you all enjoy this update as much as it beat me to a pulp to get out. I'll be jumping right into episode 2 after this, I just wanna get my hands on it and get these scenes out of my head and onto the file or I'll combust.

As always, please let me know if you encounter any bugs or scenes that aren't quite adding up, or anything that you personally want to suggest to be changed or altered.

And for those who still have asks that haven't been answered, apologies, I just wanted to focus on finishing this update before anything else. But I will be answering them.

Until next time!

[bluestarlett]

Hey! So, uh...

One of my family members used to work for this old animation studio, I'm pretty sure it was called, like Calamity Animations, or something?

But anyway, the studio closed down maybe in the early 2010s, and the family member who used to work there has this big box of old concept sheets and storyboards, and I found a pretty neat one!

Seems like the show was called something like, "Chonny's Charming Chaos Compendium"? It kind of looks like a Ruby Gloom knockoff at first glance- which is probably why it never aired.

The main character is this little devil girl, and I'm not all too sure what her name is, since in some of the concept sketches and scripts she's referred to as Soul, and other times she's referred to as Atlas. She's also got a chicken named Scarell, which I'm pretty sure is just a dumb play on the name Darell.

She seems pretty adventurous from what I can tell but she's always having to deal with her sister and brother getting into some kind of problem.

I think these are her siblings, Heart and Mind? But sometimes they're called Artem and Polly, which I guess is a play on Artemis and Apollo. Afaik they're always bickering and annoying Soul (or Atlas?) with their arguing. Seems like the plot of every episode is that Soul has to find some way to get the two to make up and usually it works, until the very next episode where they have another petty fight. As someone who grew up with siblings, its honestly funny asf.

And then there's... this guy?

He's called the Showhost or Storyteller a lot, so I guess he is this 'Chonny' dude in the title? What's weird about him is that in all of the storyboards, his face is always cut off by the screen, kind of like Ms. Bellum from PPG. There's not really much said about him, he's kinda just a weirdly cryptic and out of place character for a kids show.

Apparently, there are still a few files of early episodes out there somewhere and I think even a physical copy, but we couldn't find any in the box that my aunt (the one who worked at the animation studio) brought home, so we're guessing someone else is in possession of them. So, hey, if anyone out there knows anything about this show, you should hmu! It seems cute and I honestly want to know the story behind it.

Bye for now!

[dunmeshichilchuck]

For That One Guy On Tumblr

Chilchuck x !fem ! halffoot Reader

So this starts off during the sauna episode. I'm changing it a bit to where that floor has been that cold since the dungeon was created. There will probably be more installments but right now it's just setting things up. Anyway, enjoy.

The last thing you remembered was cold, leeching into your bones. Cold, and the certainty that this would be the last thing you'd ever feel. Your party had left you to die rather than try to heal your wounds, and this floor was too deep for someone else to come along and take pity on you before your body rotted. You were going to become a ghost, haunting this dungeon without ever being able to leave. 

And then you opened your eyes again, and you were all too warm. 

You took a few shuddering breaths, coughing and gasping. Your lungs burned like they were on fire and your whole body ached. You curled up into yourself, shivering. And then you became aware of what was going on around you. And also that for some reason everyone was wrapped in towels instead of normal clothing.

"YOU MEAN YOU HAD NORMAL RESURRECTION MAGIC THAT COULD DO SHIT LIKE THIS THIS WHOLE TIME???!!! ARE YOU STUPID? WE COULD HAVE AVOIDED THIS WHOLE THING!" 

Another....halffoot? Shouted. 

"I already EXPLAINED why I couldn't have used normal magic!!" A blond elf woman shouted back in an exasperated high pitched squeal. "It wouldn't have worked! The thread between body and soul was too tenuous! And we'd never have been able to get enough regular meat down there! Anyway I don't understand why you're so against it, I didn't see you arguing against it at the time!" 

A blond tall man, blindfolded? For some reason? Interjected. "Marcille is right! Even though the body was in a not so great condition the ice kept it from rotting so all the component parts were still there! We just got lucky that we were able to gather them all together! Once the body thawed resurrecting it was a simple matter! There was no need for special magic like with Falin." 

They continued to argue violently while your recently unfrozen brain attempted to make sense of the situation. 

Had the half foot somehow had enough pull in the party he'd been able to convince them that they should revive you? You weren't much use on this floor and presumably deeper ones where small traps gave way to larger monsters, so you couldn't work out any reason they had for reviving you. You looked around the small, actually extremely hot room you were in. It was...a sauna? Was it really a sauna? What the fuck? 

You smelled something delicious and you looked around to see a dwarf with long black hair and a massive bushy black beard peacefully tending to meat cooking over what looked very much like a wok. What the fuck? They were a high enough level party to have fresh meat down here? That would explain why they'd been able to spare the revival for you. 

There was also what looked like a beast girl crouched next to him, watching the squabbling party members with a bored expression on her face. Well. That was just another one of the things to file away and deal with later. 

Almost instinctively you staggered to your feet and crouched down by the dwarf to watch him cook. Your stomach grumbled insistently. Even in normal circumstances getting revived made you ravenous. Now you felt dizzy with hunger. 

"Ah, hello there!" The dwarf looked up at you and beamed. "Always nice to have new folk eat with us! You must be hungry after getting revived, food should be ready in just a few minutes."

He continued cooking, humming softly to himself. 

"Would you...like some help?" You managed to rasp out. Throat hoarse with disuse. 

At this point it seemed like the other people there remembered your existence. 

"Ah! So sorry, you're awake!" The elf said. "You were out for a long time, I didn't know if the magic would fully take with how long you'd been in the ice."

"How...how long?" You said, almost dreading the answer. 

"At least a couple of years, based on the state of your organs and bones" the blindfolded tall man said enthusiastically. "You were lucky! The extreme cold preserved you extremely well and there aren't any monsters down here that would go to the trouble of digging you out of the ice." 

You blinked at him. 

"How did you get all the way down here?" The elf asked. "Was your party wiped out? We looked but we couldn't find anyone else."

"I'll bet they left her behind." The halffoot interjected dourly. "She probably got injured and they didn't want to waste time resurrecting her or bringing her along." 

"what!" The elf gasped. "that's terrible, no one would do that! Why would you even think of that Chilchuck??" 

"Like I keep telling you guys, halffoots are treated as expendable! It'd be totally within the realm of possibility! Especially since she didn't sign on with the union or we woulda recorded when her party came back without her or she just never came back at all!" He frowned. "That's why I started the damn thing in the first place but if not everyone uses it it's not fucking good to anyone."

he (chilchuck?) turned abruptly to you. "Anyway, why didn't you use the union? We would have been able to look out for you so this didn't happen."

You stared at him in utter confusion. "....union?" 

[soothinglee]

| shitty 808s - kim jongseob x gn! reader - 1.2k wc✔︎

my notes⎯ sorry for not writing in a bit- I got hit by a scooter and lost hearing in my left eye. anyway- enjoy! (ilovejongseobsm). also the reader is younger than jongseob- so they're the maknae! warnings⎯ lowercase intended, cursing, not really proofread, I don't know jackshit about making music- I do make it just for fun but I don't know it on a professional level. songs⎯ "take you there x no bs" | dj short and "trillions" | alicia keys

“dude this sounds like shit.”

“it’s literally only 808s. it’s not going to sound good.”

“tell that to carti.”

jongseob groans and relaxes his body into the creaky studio chair. from where he's at; body slouches and neck bent, he feebly grabs for the mouse, each time he reaches he just barely misses it- giving a pitiful grunt every time.

you slap his hand away playfully, scooting your chair over in his place to play with the track. in the 30 minutes you've been in the studio you only managed the 808s. ass, in your opinion but something to start the song off as a base.

"what are you doing?" he mutters, looking towards the desktop screen. the black background of the software lights up every time you move around tracks. the purple and blue sections reflect off his glasses, "stop pressing stuff, you're gonna mess it up."

a scoff leaves your lips absentmindedly, choosing to replace the pre-made 808s with a original. you play it back for a spilt second- nodding to yourself feeling content in your work.

"you should be thankful I'm helping you," you start, adding a few high hats some measures into the song, "today is my off day and youngji just came out with a new episode."

he rolls his eyes and reaches over to grab his water bottle, he uncaps it and throws the lid on your lap. you make no effort to move it, "you would've had to come in eventually. jiung needed you today to record your verse."

you reach over to twitch your hand infront of his bottle, as if faking him out. he jerks his body away from you quickly, the water shakes in his hand- some even coming from the top and onto his sweater.

"bro." it comes out weak and quiet, a frown forming on his lips but you're quick to talk over him;

"for him, I wouldn't have complained. it's different when I have to do it because it's scheduled then come in to help someone work on his song." you spilt the back ground voices you added from files and slip in theo's guitar solo along with a 4 bar bass drum.

at this point you haven't listened to what has been added, jongseob still hogging the headphones. though you have enough confidence in yourself, and as one of the main producers, to know that the song will be somewhat decent- and way better than whatever he had before.

"what even is your inspo?"

"'bambi', baekhyun."

he makes a face, "sexy, no?"

you shrug, clicking around on the application to add some reverb, "piece will love it, fnc will tolerate it, intak will be happy. what more is there?"

he doesn't respond.

the difference between the software when jongseob had it compared to it in your hands is insane. infront of you the screen decorated with rainbows of colors, the static lines tracking the sound range from lengths and size. it's beautiful.

you feel a heavy weight on your left arm and look down to see jongseob leaning on you, he lets out a tired breath, and reaches up to fiddle with the loose string on your sleeve.

"are you almost done yet? you're hogging my equipment and I have other stuff I need to do."

"is all you do is complain?" you ask, titling the song with a random phrase and saving it, "because if that's the case I'll just get keeho."

his grip on your sleeve tightens as he tenses. for some reason jongseob is afraid of keeho- the latter always picking on him and fighting him. you would ask why and how it started but in all honesty, you couldn't really care.

"no no no, it's okay. you can keep working."

a proud smirk graces your lips as you reach over to slip the headphones off his head. he lets you, reaching forward to give you better access, smiling when he feels your hands pat down the mess they left.

you bend down slightly, apologizing when his head falls from your shoulder, and blindly reach for the tower to unplug the cord from its socket. "alright," you mess with the setting once more, turning the volume up enough so it can be heard. "you ready?"

jongseob yawns, "about time." you smack him upside the head.

the song is only about 3 minutes long, but in that three minutes it sounded wonderful. even though you were on playing around with it, something to keep jongseob satisfied until he could figure out what he really wanted to do with it, you think it could actually be the final product.

as the song plays you would take a look at his face to gauge his opinion. he seemed to like it; bobbing his head with the melody, a soft smile on his lips. it made you feel somewhat better about missing youngjis' show.

"okay, what do you think?" you ask as the beat fades out, you pause it so it doesn't play again and turn your body towards him, knees knocking each other.

he doesn't say anything for a minute, staring at the poster on the wall behind your head. his face is back to neutral. you think about snapping your fingers infront of his face to wake him up.

after a while he takes in a breath and says, “buns, actual buns.”

“you’re only saying that because it’s not jiung working on the song.”

he doesn't say anything but nods in agreement. there's a cheeky smirk on his face. "if that's the case, I'll just delete the song." you move the mouse to press erase before a hand catches you before you do.

"don't." he says, a mild glint in his eye as he pries your fingers from the mouse. he gently places your hand back in your lap while maintaining eye contact, moving the device to his side of the table.

"so it's not 'buns'?" you ask, the smirk back on your face.

he hesitates and then says, "no it's still ass, but why would I delete it just to start over, waste of time."

you laugh and go to answer but your phone vibrating catches you off guard. you use your face to open it to read the message;

멘토르 (mentor) come to floor 4 pls, we're ready for you :)

"uh oh," the chair beneath you slides backward as you stand up to collect your belonging. the bottle cap falls from your lap as you hand jongseob his headphones, "duty calls, i'll be gone for about an hour or two, if you need me, don't. I'll be busy."

he laughs, watching as you put on your shoes. you places a kiss on his head as you retreat for the door. you hear the clicking of a mouse and muffled music from behind you.

as soon as you reach for the door knob a voice calls out. "yeah?"

jongseob, hood pulled back so that you can see the bangs of his brown hair, his glasses that reflect the sparkle in his eyes, and the big smile on his face says, "I know I give you shit but thank you. you saved me a lot of trouble."

you smile back at your elder, a content look matching his own, "hey, anytime."

you close the door and head towards the elevator.

⎯if you want to be apart of my taglist let me know!

→ thank you for reading!

[authenticaussie]

Alright so I just finished Batman:TAS recently and started watching Superman:TAS and it delights me that the first episode is literally just: superman??? Who dat. This is aliens :)) (even if Brainiac does say "human error, Jor-el"). So obviously I do now have aus. Obviously <3 shout-out to @midnightluck for the Justice League, @cer-rata for Terry and @suzukiblu for Jordan + putting up with the initial ramble

So anyway Brianiac's satellite upload gets fucked up by Jor-el either in petty revenge or as an accident, and a part of Brainiac ends up on Clark's ship. The vague explanation I have is that Brainiac is the AI for everything and in TAS, Jor-el also does not realise he is "evil" and thus still uses his help as a navigator for Clark's ship while he is initially building it. The ship, however, is offline to prevent the Kryptoninan council from finding out about it, and thus, that section of Brainiac does not get taken back into the satellite upload.

As it is BARELY the 90's when the Kents find Clark after the crash, Brainiac is summarily useless thanks to the current lack of wifi, but manages to mostly teach himself English and Kal kryptonian, and decides that. >:( since they're BOTH there, they can BOTH be vestibules of kryptonian knowledge. And also Kal can get him more earth knowledge. The vibes entirely are: "Weird aspects of kryptonian culture taught by an unbodied dickhead historian" and while the argument is "but brainiac is evil!" Main brainiac is. But this is a subsection of Brainiac :) he learnt more stuff + Clark loves him soooo much.

Unfortunately. That is His baby now. He is not impressed with his baby. His baby bought him a growing chick the other day, with big sad eyes, and said the kryptonian word for fluffy!!! in such a mournful tone that Brainiac resigned himself to teaching kal about how growing up worked and that the chicken needed feathers to fly. This explanation ends with Clark collecting feathers and trying to jump off the barn roof, and he thus resolves to extend further co-parenting issues to the Kents. For his own personal convenience, of course.

It does of course ALSO mean that Brainiac, who has a loose definition of the words "surveillance state" absolutely gets in at the ground floor when the internet first starts up. Clark's influence relegates him to the background, but he is good at hiding ! So they don't realise they have an AI in the wifi! But ohhhh boy does brainiac scare a few people at first. Potentially tries to do his "i am helpful" schtick before realising he is not useful in this because he's basically just. Seems completely like a troll? He's some random person who's invaded the internet!!

However he is also the inspiration for google 😂 and calls it his younger, stupider sibling. It is also funny to me to think about earth compsci engineers having NO idea why sometimes the internet acts SO DAMN WEIRD <- brainiac's fault.

As a result though, when Clark starts up as Superman, Brainiac does NOT let the Kr project off the ground. Files are misdirected and blackmail is gathered. Until one day Kal says something sad about how he'll never be able to have a great romance, because he's terrified of telling anyone the alien thing, and that he's always thought about kids but he's kinda terrified because what if he hurts someone- and Brainiac is like ah yes wait. I shall fix this for my Only Kryptonian.

TWO kids for the price of one?!? he finds, after he goes searching, and then further prodding finds THIRTEEN children, extraordinary. Not all of them are viable because the earth scientists truly are incapable but Brainiac can fix the issues with their technology to ensure Kal has the children he wants.

"How many children did you think of, kal-el?" he asks, and Clark laughs at how kindly his friend/uncle/grandfather figure treats his silly selfishness.

"Oh, man, sometimes I think: as many as I can carry! But then- I don't want Superman to get in the way of being a good dad. Too many and I won't be there for them like I should, you know? I worry about that, I guess."

"As many as you can carry is a significant amount," Brainiac says dubiously, already imagining teaching these numerous children kryptonian culture and Also that they are Not chickens. "I do not think that can be fulfilled effectively."

Five minutes later Clark has five children and has realised his matchbox apartment and budding romance with Lois Lane are both complicated things he will now have to resolve. He's basically commuting daily to the Daily Planet from Smallville, thank god for superspeed and his endlessly patient parents, jfc

(Children I was thinking of: the destablised kon!clone from SB94/The Ravers, Kon, Match, Bizarro, and Mia. Alternatively they went old-school with Biz so Brainiac didn't get a chance to help him/he's older than the other kids when Clark finally mentions wanting kids, to Brainiac, and thus Biz ends up like. The kids' uncle. There ARE technically twelve clones before Kon. I could've given you thirteen-fifteen kids, Clark.)

Anyway this does mean that either a) when Lois finds out Kal is superman this is not his biggest secret, b) Kon rocks up as Superboy and Lois, once she finds out Clark is Superman, immediately goes: WAIT BUT SUPERBOY'S YOUR KID. ARE YOU MARRIED??? or c) everyone at the Daily Planet thinks Clark just. Got really unlucky with different people he slept with and someone in the world's wildest stroke of luck they all ended up pregnant. Because Clark Does Not mention a partner when it is eventually revealed he has kids.

He probably does keep them a secret for a while though. A) He doesn't want them to have to try and be "normal" since they're only just out of the pod and B) I feel like, weirdly, Clark is somehow that co-worker that people like. barely know anything about. You like them and they're so helpful! and good-natured! and then you get him in the office secret santa and realise you're not even 100% what his favourite colour is or if he has a pet.

Anyway, Lois: he is NOT expecting Lois to get pregnant and they have to have a Long talk about it because Brainiac is. :) Being an asshole about species compatibility and the fact that it is "not natural" for Kryptonians to be created biologically rather than properly, in a pod, and also: Clark already has five freaking kids. That's a lot of kids! Are they going to be okay having a brother that much (at least five-ten years I'm thinking, depending on if we go: Brainiac gives him multiple children of multiple ages, or multiple young children of the same age,) younger than them??? And then there's Chris, too, who rocked up just after Clark and Lois started dating, and is still pretty high needs because he only mostly speaks Kryptonian (and is lowkey terrified of Brainiac, so Clark's main babysitter is out) (also please please imagine how freaking cute the subplot of "chris realises this brainiac is not the nightmare his stories told him about; watching his new siblings do things that Brainiac would have killed them for, terrified for them because he heard the stories of how long Brainiac bided his time--)

But this is also: how many kids can we give clark, the fic, and thus they have Jon, and then Jon exhibits so many kryptonian characteristics and Lois doesn't mean to but she's a little wine drunk and says, "i love them, you know, they're all perfect, Jon's perfect, I was just- I'm terrified for him. If we raise him right he's gonna be just like his dad…and you know what? I was wanting my own little Lane. Someone to follow my footsteps. I'm feeling a bit outnumbered here, haha!"

Brainiac: hm. I will amend this. (Makes and artificially grows human!Jordan so he displays more human genetic characteristics As Lois Wants)

Brainiac: I have created Jon-el's twin for you, Lane. You are welcome.

Lois: um what

Clark: honey no you can't talk about children with Brainiac he will make more

Lois: WHAT.

Lois: OUR CO-WORKERS KNOW I DIDN'T HAVE TWINS, KENT.

Clark: …. you're gonna have to be one of those weird "I didn't know I was still pregnant" stories…. 😂

Lois: 😭 Clark you know those are only funny when they are NOT HAPPENING TO ME

Clark: you didn't know you were pregnant….. literally

Lois must engage in the gaslighting of all of her coworkers <3 What do you mean you didn't realise she had twins she's shown you both of them? Of course they look the same they're babies. Of course she always had twins. She carried them. Did you carry her babies? Of course she would know. Isn't that right, Clark? …. isn't that right, Clark?

Clark: "Where else would she'a gotten a baby from, guys? An alien?"

Brainiac: hello i have delivered the child. Where is my thanks? It has still not been conveyed? I am doing the Literal Best as the Literal Best AI ever? Excuse me? You ignore Brainiac?

Brainiac: death for one thousand humans-!!!

Martha: 🥰 Brainiac I'm so proud of you for always making sure these kids are taken care of. Giving us Jordan! Oh, you marvellous robot

Brainiac: …. acceptable, Matriarch Kent

either that or Lois shoots herself in the foot and everyone thinks Clark is STILL the man with the world's worst luck and the strongest genetics ever:

"Lois, honey…how are Jon and Jordan so close in age? If they're not twins?"

"Uh- Jordan is adopted!"

Everyone: looks at Jordan, who is Jon's splitting image

Everyone: …..okay

Anyway because this AU is wildly cliche, very obviously the Bit of Brainiac that helped Clark grow up re-integrates with Brainiac prime during a Big Dramatic Battle where all of the Superfam are getting hurt, and manages to stop/halt Brainiac prime from hurting Clark and the Kryptokids at the cost of his existence.

Jordan gets to punch it in the circuits cause he's the only one not affected by kryptonite but still has the general invulnerability. (And then Jon and/or Kon and meeting the LoSH and they realise their grandfather Brainiac has very much been continued in Brainiac 5's code :3 for an open-ish happy ending of "hey good exists forever and always regardless of heritage")

GRANDPA LEARNS LOVE AND AFFECTION.

GRANDPA CHANGES FROM GENERAL SELF SERVICE AND SELFISHNESS AND REALISES HE LOVES KAL AND THE KENTS AND HE WILL PROTECT THEM

GRANDPA ALSO WANTS ACCESS TO THE INTERNET. There is a constant battle and it does work for a while because he is elected babysitter of the kryptokids and he is only a small part of Brainiac, five kids does stretch the circuits he developed from Clark's pod, but it's a constant cycle.

"Kal-el, son of house of el, I demand google, I have not finished investigating the 'man of Bats'. Why are there two variations of his name?"

"You mean Dark Knight?"

"THERE ARE THREE? KAL-EL, PROVIDE ME WITH THE WIFI IMMEDIATELY--"

Also when Brainiac finds out that Clark's birthday falls on a human holiday he. He tries. He tries to do pranks. Most of them are vaguely and accidentally evil (Chris cries when Brainiac takes over the internet for the day and makes every search engine answer questions wrong), but he tries. He knows Clark likes pranks! He is trying to participate! It's family bonding!!!

Braniac: It is your 33rd April fool's day.

Clark: Yep!

Braniac: I have finally decided to assist you with a prank.

Clark:...oh?

Braniac: Behold! (Small boy with dark hair, blue eyes and a square jaw walks in, dressed in a decent little suit.)

Clark: Braniac you CANNOT keep making...Wait. No. No you didn't--

Braniac: A prank to share with your closest friend!

Braniac: I have been calling him "Bruce" for my records, but you may want to pick something else for clarity.

Clark: 😦😳😬💀

(And thus we have Terry)

Also, while Clark is pretty secretive about his kids, when/if any of them go out with a Superfam name, and/or after he gets closer with the Justice League, there are little slip ups. He does really love his kids!!! And at the point where he's joined the JL he's been with Lois for a few years now and is used to mentioning them every now and then at the Daily Planet/trauma sure does bond you together :) and he trusts the core members of the JL pretty well. Someone makes fun of Bruce for his "hoard" of children and his "adoption problem" and Clark snorts and then chokes. Bruce has barely adopted Tim and/or has only just gotten Cass. Four? Please, Clark's almost at double digits.

Or Hal is talking about the fact that he doesn't know what to get his niece for her birthday; Clark asks how old she is, and goes "Seven? Oh, yeah. Go for Monster High, it's really big right now. The dolls are pretty cool."

"Lol why do you know so much about dolls, you have a secret collection-"

"What? No, my daughter likes them."

Hal:

Barry complains about how many birthdays he has to go to and Clark laughs. "Oh, tell me about it! Mia, Mark ((Match)), Chris and Mara all had birthday parties for their school friends in the same week - thank god for superspeed, right?"

Barry, who was talking about volunteering to visit kids' birthday parties at different orphanages in Central: Clark what are you talking about.

Also, Clark's an idiot and decides to introduce Brainiac's "prank" to Bruce on the watchtower because hey! It's neutral ground! And none of his kids can hear into space, thank fuck.

Clark: so....Bruce....you know how you were complaining about being an empty nester. Now that Damian's gone to college. Well. Hm. (pulls Terry from behind him) Surprise!

Bruce: .......You have a new child.

Clark: er. Well. sort of!

Terry, staring at Bruce like the autism creature: O_O

Bruce: .....I have a new child.

(also probably terry's backstory then includes some amanda waller induced kidnapping and potentially a bit of amnesia and adoption by another family but hey, he finds bruce again eventually!)

(also match does try and be the badboy of the family and does hang out with thad, when thad comes up to kill Bart, but. they both just. accidentally vaguely rehabilitate each other? They're not good, but they don't murder, at least. It's a low, low bar. When Clark tries to disappointed-face him, Match just says he's following in Grandpa Brainiac's footsteps and does Clark REALLY expect him to disregard a family legacy-- and you can give him some suicide squad angst or whatever, but the fam is still. there for him.)

(Mia and Kara get into a fist fight when they first meet; then they are best friends. Mia's not great at 'being Kryptonian', especially because she was one of the first attempts, and as per canon is technically a human who they tried to overwrite with Kryptonian DNA, and thus doesn't entirely understand Kara's connection to their 'home', but as a result she also ends up being Kara's confidant in it, because unlike Kal she does understand being taken away from your home and not being able to go back to it, and yet does not have...the same connection the way the other members of the Superfam do, and the disconnect allows Kara to actually talk about Kyrpton instead of mourn)

(Kon does try and grab the spotlight; Clark is trying to let him have freedom, after both Mia and Match went a bit....bitey at his attempts to keep them safe until they were older, but he's still the more naive of his siblings. Thankfully for Clark, he does get to introduce Kon to Robin, and while they don't hit it off, it is enough to mitigate the worst of the fallout of Rex's sleazy bs and Knockout's crimes ): When he joins YJ Clark is both proud of his heroism and a little scared that one of his kids is actually deciding to follow in his footsteps.)

(Mara is Kon's destabilised clone, from when he learns about paul westfield. We did not have enough girls in this family and thus part of their journey of self-identity was the fact that in a family of loud personalities they weren't great at speaking up; it takes a while for them to admit they want a new name and to use she/they pronouns, but by the time Jon and Jordan are five everyone's used to the change. Mara and Kon are closest, even though Kon and Mark/Match are technically sort-of twins; they clash waaay too much in temperament and personality. Kon was much better at playing protector to his little sibling, especially after they came out, and Mara shares "Supergirl" with Kara - she's only a backup member of the titans, though, and has the compassion and strength for heroism but sometimes too much empathy. Does a lot of relief work and peaceful outreach programs. They love a lot.)

(Chris?? no self sacrifice here!!! He has a bunch of fucking siblings with TTK, he is NOT going into that portal)

(There are two Nightwings; every now and then they debate who should switch to Flamebird, jokingly, and yet both of them have perfectly valid arguments - it's kryptonian! / I look good in blue! - and thus it never comes to fruition. When Mia and takes on Flamebird they give it up entirely; it helps that Chris ends up doing a lot of intergalactic work, so there isn't much confusion on earth with the call sign.)

When Jon is old enough to want to switch from Superboy he 100% puppydog eyes Chris into giving him the Nightwing handle so he can give it to Dami, and snags Flamebird from Mia. Dick decides he can live with that and is trying to take care of his own kid so is semi-retired (and can snag it back from Dami if he ever gets too bored).

For a bit there are def still two Flamebirds, but then Mia and Chris decide to team up for intergalactic stuff and to bully Mara into more fistfights, so then they're Trio and just go by Mar-El, Lor-Zod, and Mi-El. I know that is not how female names work on Krypron but I also think Lois Lane, who kept her name and also gave both Jon and Jordan her last name, hyphenated, heard of that shit and went "absolutely not". Either that or Mara decides to keep her Kryptonian name as Mar-El and Mia is Mia Kal-el, or copies her mom and is like naw Fuck This, especially considering her.....lack of general connection to Krypton? Could be fun for any :3 (Or maybe in space she just goes by Lane; time for her semi-mom to get recognition. Mara is already showcasing the house of El, Chris is rehabilitating the house of Zod, she's gonna kick butt for the house of Lois.)

....Though this does potentially mean i have accidentally called Match "Mat-el" and the Barbie jokes from that. Would be. Iconic.

Anyway that's the Grandpa Brainy au! Tune in next week when I force Cerata to watch Arthur and the Invisibles with me and start talking about bug-prince Kon-el and Lois' adventure to save her husband from a tiny evil overlord.

[lemotmo]

As a standalone episode I think it was good. One of the best we've had in a while. What I think is throwing some people off is just where it landed in the season. After last week, I can get why there's frustration at the lack of any movement in some arcs. It does feel very much one step forward, two steps back by interrupting the flow of some of those arcs and not addressing them at all. I get it. It can feel like emotional whiplash. Investing and then expecting viewers to pause that for a silly fun filler can throw people out the plot.

But isn't this a classic 911 thing to do though? We as a fandom, have been complaining about this problem for as long as I remember.

911 has one or two character driven episodes that give us some insight into the character's minds. And then the next episode when we all expect something to happen? Nothing.

I'm used to that rhythm by now. So I kinda knew, going into this episode that it wouldn't give us anything big. It's just the nature of 911 and... most network shows to be honest.

I grew up on network shows, before the streaming era. I remember watching 'NYPD Blue', 'ER', 'The Practice', 'Law & Order', 'Ally McBeal', 'JAG', 'Third Watch', 'The X-files', 'Stargate Atlantis', 'The West Wing', 'Without a Trace', 'Star Trek - Voyager', Star Trek - DS9', 'Castle', 'Bones' and so many other shows, and being frustrated sometimes with the fact that we got filler episodes after a really emotionally intense story arc. It's ensemble shows on network TV. That's the way it works.

Yes, we all want to see these character's personal storylines progress, but we can't see all of them progress at the same time.

Does it feel like an emotional whiplash sometimes? Especially because we love certain characters so much and we finally want to see some progress in their storyline? Well yeah, it does. But that's how it's always been.

And to be fair, we did get to see major character growth in this episode. We got to see a new facet of Athena. She is starting to realise that she's getting a little older, no longer able to do it all by herself and she wants to pass on all of her knowledge to a rookie. That's major progress for her and I'm willing to bet the Athena fans had a blast watching this episode. As they should. Next week it'll be time for someone else to have some character growth. Again, that's the way this works.

So, I'm here, I'm sat and willing to wait it out. And in the mean time? I'm just enjoying my show. You know? 🤷‍♀️

Anyway, this is just my two cents you guys. Feel free to disagree with me and ignore this. You know I don't mind. It's all good. This is just the way I see it.

[actual-changeling]

i love all the UST to RST arcadia fics but i look at them and see the most uncomfortable situation ever.

mulder is having fun playing house and it's kinda cute, but scully? if we go with this being their first case back on the x files (and i'll always go with that) they have solved exactly none of their issues.

the "you're making this personal" is a month old at MOST, and scully probably has to struggle with the thought that the only reason mulder is her 'full-time' partner again is because diana ditched him.

(which is funny in a dark and painful way)

after weeks upon weeks of mulder basically being a rude stranger that no longer trusts her—someone she can no longer rely on—he just, what, expects her to bounce back and pretend none of it ever happened? 'cause that's what they usually do?

but this was not usual. this was mulder taking his love confession and twisting it into a knife to repeatedly stab her with. "your science saved me and made me a whole person" yeah great! love that. would be a shame to use it against her a few weeks/months later.

"your science is wrong" after she more or less repeated his speech and the strong implication that he no longer abides by what he told her.

"you've given me no reason here [not to trust diana]" after she did what she always does—giving him the facts. if i start talking about the "you're making this personal" line we will be here for an hour so i won't. we all know it's there and what kinda damage it did.

all that and more. refusing to trust her. ditching her. walking away from her. and, knowing them, they did not come together and talk it out.

so we have scully stuck undercover as his wife in a freaky murderous suburban community and mulder is getting his ya yas out doing what he does.

he touches her and she immediately shrugs him off, steps away from him, and she looks at him with raised hands and a glare that says "back off". early season 5 scully would be having the time of her life but by now she very much hates it.

whenever mulder initiates something personal, she plays along just enough to keep them as a team going but is visibly uncomfortable. we know what it looks like when she's happy and relaxed in his presence and this ain't it.

and these are from the BEGINNING of the episode. it doesn't get any better. it's work and she is treating it as such, she won't risk a case because of her own emotional situation.

mulder is. trying to get them back on track. i can give him that much. but as we see in monday and agua mala, he is STILL keeping shit from her (not giving her an explanation in monday, for example) and comfortable ditching her.

personally, i don't think arcadia is the turning point in their relationship that a lot of fics write it as. doing so is perfectly fine, don't get me wrong, i love reading them.

i just don't see any major progress between one son and arcadia that indicates they actually talked about some shit. playing house with mulder is about the last thing scully wants to do at that point, and yet she does it without complaint.

arcadia, to me, is mostly about two things: mulder being forced to acknowledge that they can't just ignore it & he screwed up and scully (very very slowly) beginning to rediscover how to be comfortable around mulder again. i don't think his frequent jokes are particularly helpful, they don't lighten the mood, they make it worse, if anything.

somewhere between arcadia and alpha, and then alpha and trevor, they readjust, and while cc never showed us (bc he is a fucking coward) i am 100% certain they actually managed to talk.

in trevor, there is none of the tension we see in arcadia. they're comfortable joking and flirting as usual, he does his lovesick puppy impression when she talks about spontaneous human combustion. they're them again.

not perfectly so, that takes them longer with the whole biogenesis thing disrupting their balance again, but we have the baseball date and that episode in general (thank u david for ur service).

anyway this got away from me, but my point is that scully should be allowed to need longer to trust mulder again after how horribly he treated her. she's allowed to hold a grudge and be upset, angry, sad, whatever she wants.

let that woman scream a little, she desperately needs it.

[qveerthe0ry]

The D-Files

Summary: Something weird happens when Dieter tries to post his X-Files fanfiction Word Count: 14,941 Pairing: Dieter Bravo x Fox Mulder x Dana Scully Rating: 18+ mdni Warnings: threesome, oral (m & f receiving), vaginal fingering, unprotected PIV, rimming, d/s undertones, poor explanation of time travel and quantum physics, it's a little cracky tbh Beta: the one and only @for-a-longlongtime obviously A/N: listen. I have ten episodes left of the whole series so if something is totally off and not accurate to x files canon just ignore me :) Also I'm absolutely aware of how completely ridiculous this fic is but I heard the voice of Dieter Bravo speak to me and could not ignore it Ao3 link

Curled up under at least three blankets, in just his underwear, stoned out of his mind (just weed— he’s California sober now) Dieter watches Mulder and Scully shake hands for the first time. 

The first time for them. 

He’s had to have seen this episode at least a thousand times by now. 

He’s in one of those funks again. His therapist calls it a depressive episode, but that’s so dramatic. He’s just a little bit down in the dumps thinking about how worthless he is and how no one’s ever really loved him before, not even his own parents, and how he hates himself so much he’s not sure if he would ever get rid of the guilt of letting someone else love him because he knows he’d just be a waste of their time.

It’s no big deal. Nothing an X-Files rewatch, weed, and a footlong Subway sandwich can’t fix.

Except this time, the way Scully and Mulder instantly mesh so well kind of makes him feel like he smoked too much pot. His stomach’s a little queasy as he watches him give her his undivided attention, and fuck, maybe this is a job above these FBI agents’ pay grade. 

He eyes that stupid notebook on his nightstand, still wrapped in plastic from the Amazon order. 

His therapist told him to start writing his thoughts down in a journal. He doesn’t like writing. It’s not what he does. He can’t stand those actors who think just because they’ve starred in a few movies means they should start writing them, or scrawling down some convoluted, conceited novel. Just fucking act, y’know? 

But as Scully throws herself into Mulder’s arms after knowing him for only a few days, and they both look so comfortable, Dieter rips open the packaging and swallows down the bile threatening his esophagus.

—

I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be doing here. What should I even write down in this thing? How lonely I am? Get in line, right? I’m not the only one. Even though sometimes it feels like I am.

Maybe it feels so bad because I know I did this to myself. Everyone always told me I’d always be a piece of shit. Even when I was young. And I just let their narrative take over and now here I am. The biggest piece of shit. 

It’s like Mulder. Everyone always called him Spooky and said he was too ‘out there’ and he ended up in the basement chasing Bigfoot. 

Except I don’t have a hot redhead in my life to balance me out or slowly fall in love with me.

And I’m not a tall, boyishly handsome, charming FBI agent. 

I’m just a washed-up actor, and a slob, and a drug addict. That’s probably why.

Golly gee, doc, this sure made me feel better.

—

He writes in his journal a bit here and there. He also slowly rots away in his bed, takes far too little showers and far too many THC gummies. He talks to his therapist two weeks later and tells her he’s been writing down his thoughts and her impressed hum and “That’s very good, Dieter” has him riding a high the rest of the afternoon. 

So he keeps it up. 

He doesn’t leave the house much, and when he does, he just wants to get back into his permanently affixed blanket fort to watch more X-Files and get high. 

He writes a little about his day, about what he’s mulling over in his mind. But as he reaches the end of season two, he’s out of his funk enough to start feeling horny again. 

Who wouldn’t, watching the world’s hottest FBI agents on a near constant loop?

So who can blame him when his journal thoughts get a little spicy?

—

God, Mulder’s such an idiot sometimes. So is Scully. They waste so much time getting on each others’ nerves. This entire show is just years-long foreplay. I swear they get off on irritating each other.

I irritate so many people, why aren’t any of them ever turned on about it? 

They should have just let them kiss in the first season. There could have been so much sex. All the motel rooms these two wasted! On the government’s dime, too! 

Rental car sex, alleyway sex, OFFICE sex. The Sex Files. That’s what this show should have been. 

I wonder if Mulder’s better at eating ass or pussy. I just know he’s freaky with all the porn and phone sex hotlines. And the auto erotic asphyxiation thing, can’t forget about that. I’d choke the shit out of him if he wanted that. With my hand or my cock, his choice. 

I wonder if Scully is freaky, too? I think she’d deny it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she was filthy kinky. She always has to be in control. I wonder if she’d be like that in bed, too? I wonder if she’d get off on torturing me and making me beg. Or maybe she’s always so in control that she wants to relinquish all of it when she’s in bed.

—

Dieter remembers that fanfiction exists shortly after that. 

His dick is raw and he hasn’t even made it through half of the explicit entries on archive of our own. But everything’s so… Vanilla. 

Don’t get him wrong, he’s a total sucker for tender, missionary love-making. But where’s the experimentation? Where’s the creativity? And why the hell does everyone think Fox Mulder is such a dom?

Just look at him.

He’s pathetic. Scully could have him begging on his knees with nothing but the snap of her finger and one of her sexy, stern glances. Maybe he’s projecting a little bit, but not much.

He gripes to his therapist about this while he avoids the topic of his greatest fear being dying without ever having a meaningful relationship in his whole life.

“Have you ever thought about writing your own fanfiction?”

And no, he truly never has. It seems like something so far away from appropriate given his profession. But then again, when has he ever been totally professional?

So he starts writing. At first he finds himself falling into the popular tropes— love confessions and sweet, romantic first times. Just little blurbs in his journal he ends up scrawling out with his pen. There’s enough of that already. He needs to explore the fun stuff with these two.

One night/early morning, he finally grabs his laptop from his rarely-used office. He snuggles up under all the blankets he can find, turns on The X-Files, and gets down to business. 

—

“I’m sorry Scully—”

“Don’t.”

Her icy blue stare pins Mulder in place. His pouty lips close and his sharp jaw clenches as he looks down at his feet.

“You almost got us killed!”

“I wouldn’t have let you get hurt, you know that.”

Scully doesn’t know what comes over her, but she crosses what little distance is between them to grab the back of Mulder’s hair and tug.

His jaw drops and as hard as he tries, he can’t stifle the whimper that slips from his lip. 

“You were reckless with your own life. You can’t— Do you know what I would do if anything ever happened to you?”

Scully’s sharp gaze softens. Tears prickle at Mulder’s eyes, partly from Scully’s death grip and partly because of the way her voice wavers. 

“Scully—”

“Get on your knees.”

——

Dieter fights the heavy, sharp arousal in his gut as he writes Mulder on his knees for Scully. He just knows he’d eat pussy like a champ, what with those sunflower seeds he’s always got between those pillowy lips. He’d be great at sucking cock, too. Dieter thinks they would look so fucking pretty around his own dick.

Or Scully’s strap. 

Perfect.

He stays awake for way too long, writing about Scully trapping Mulder between her thighs for hours, and then making him choke or her strap, and then making him beg and whimper and cry for it as she teases his prostate with her fingers. 

Scully’s so dainty, but the idea of her fucking into her big, tall partner with fury has Dieter leaking into his boxers as he types away. It takes all of Dieter’s willpower to write the sweet aftercare scene. Scully gently cleans up his cum and sweat and tears, telling him what a good boy he was as she pets his hair and kisses his face. 

As soon as Dieter writes the last words, he’s fumbling for his lube and dildo in the bedside drawer. He’s too worked up to prepare properly, and it burns, and he hears Scully’s disappointed tuts in his head as he fucks himself into a mess. 

He whines her name, and Mulder’s name, as filthy images of the two fill his head. 

He comes without even touching his dick. He makes an absolute mess of his sheets and just grinds into the puddle beneath him as he fucks himself through the aftershocks. 

And if he cries a little bit at the thought of two beautiful FBI agents telling him how good he was as they stroke his sweaty skin, that’s between him and his open laptop. 

—

“Do you think I should post my fanfiction?”

His therapist’s perfectly shaped eyebrows perk up. 

“Do you think you should post it?”

“I dunno. Probably not.”

“Why not?”

“Wouldn’t it be a little weird? An actor writing fanfiction about characters his peers portrayed?”

His therapist hums. He knows that’s his cue to keep talking, but they just sit in silence for a bit. 

“Do you want to post it?” She asks. 

He huffs. 

“I don’t know. What if everyone hates it?”

She shrugs and nods at him to continue.

“I’m afraid no one’s gonna read it. Or if they do, they’ll hate it. And leave mean comments.”

“Would that bother you?”

“Well yeah, duh.”

She hums again. Dieter rolls his eyes, half at her but half at himself. 

“I know, I know,” he sighs, “I’m a walking contradiction. I crave praise but I’m too afraid to put myself out there to receive any.”

“That’s not necessarily true. You’re an actor. It’s your job to put yourself out there and be consumed and reviewed.”

“Yeah but that’s not me, it’s just the guy they tell me to play.”

His therapist smiles. 

Shit. 

“I think you know what you need to do, Dieter.”

He does leave that therapy session crying, thirty minutes later. If he had a tail, it would be between his legs. 

It takes him six days to work up enough courage to even make an account. And then another two days to pour over every single word he wrote, change it, change it back, wash rinse and repeat. 

When he finally works up the nerve to post it, his laptop dies just as he’s about to press the publish button. 

You gotta be kidding me, he thinks, maybe this is a sign.

But then he thinks about what his therapist would say, that things that are worth it rarely come easy, and that he should probably stop assuming everything is a sign, and so he plugs his laptop in and waits for it to charge enough to come back to life. 

It’s the longest four minutes of his life. 

He stares at the black screen in silence. He blinks at his reflection as he listens to the storm brewing outside his window, only flinching slightly as lightning illuminates his dark room. 

His heart leaps up into his throat when the screen lights up again. Everything’s right where he left it. All he has to do is press that little button. 

He takes one, two, three deep breaths with his finger on the trigger and then—

CRACK

—

Everything hurts. Like, bad.

Dieter groans and tries to blink his eyes open. It’s bright. He’s no stranger to waking up in an unfamiliar place with a terrible headache and no recollection of how or why he’s there. However, he hasn’t touched a party drug in a year and a half, and hasn’t even been to a party for even longer than that. 

He finally blinks away the sleep in his eyes. He’s on the cold ground. The grass is plush and dewy under him. When he sits up, the world spins around him for a few moments and he just barely keeps his stomach from emptying. 

He checks his pockets. At least he has his phone on him. No wallet, though. And he’s in his pajamas, which is fine, not unusual attire for most of his outings. 

He goes to unlock his phone but of course it’s dead. 

Shit. 

He looks around a bit more and all this scenery does not look like Los Angeles. There are hills in the distance that are much more rolling than the jagged peaks in California. The smell of campfire fills the air and it’s humid, he realizes. Stiflingly so. 

He stands up. His joints ache even more than they usually do, stiff and popping. When he runs his hand through his hair he’s got wicked bed head. 

At least he can make out a dirt path amongst the grass and trees around him. He follows it for a while, and just as he thinks he might be wandering to his own death out in the boonies he sees a little shack in the clearing just by what seems to be a lake. 

It looks… Strangely familiar, despite the fact that he’s certain he’s never been here before. There’s a sign that reads “Bait & Tackle” that’s seen better days and a big giant inflatable… something tied down to the roof. 

He scratches his head as he stares. He has the feeling of something being on the tip of his tongue, but it’s on the tip of his brain instead. 

As he approaches, a high-pitched growl startles him out of his daze. His eyes frantically search for the source, and as he walks closer he spots it.

A tiny little yappy Pomeranian, tan and fluffy. 

It hits him all at once. 

He gasps and moves toward the fiesty little thing as his heart pounds. There’s no way…

It snarls and yaps at him as he crouches down to greet it— him. 

Once he starts giving the dog butt pats and head scratches, it warms up to him pretty quickly. He searches for the dog tag hiding under all that fur and gasps as he reads it.

QUEEQUEG

“Oh my god, Queequeg, I thought I’d never see you again, buddy.”

The pup wags his tail at the sound of his name and Dieter goes down on his knees to accept him into his lap. 

“How are you real? What’s happening?”

Tears well at Dieter’s eyes as he holds this fictional dog in his arms, who’s been dead since season 3. Sue him, he’s very confused and vulnerable and it was the most devastating death of the series by far.

As he pets the derpy little thing, he tries to wrap his head around everything that’s going on. Last he remembers, he was holding his breath and clicking the mouse pad and now he’s here, in the middle of nowhere Georgia if he remembers his X-Files trivia correctly. 

Which means this sweet little pup is going to die in this… episode? And if he’s in the episode, that means—

“Hey! What are you doing? That’s my dog!”

Dieter’s heart pounds, heavy and fast, like he’s done way too much coke. He looks up with wide eyes and it’s unmistakable, her bright red hair and sexy scowl and the lanky handsome man attached to her hip. 

“Scully?”

Dieter watches her face twist up in confusion, and watches Mulder’s eyebrows raise with a smirk on his face as he looks between him and his partner. 

“You know this guy, Scully?”

She squints at Dieter as they walk closer. He feels very warm under her gaze. He pets Queequeg’s head for comfort.

“No, I don’t. What’s your name?”

Dieter clears his throat. 

“You don’t recognize me?”

Mulder presses his lips together, trying to hide his amused smile as he nudges Scully’s side. 

“Should I?”

“Wait… what year is it?”

Scully’s face turns from annoyed to concerned. She kneels down in front of Dieter and looks into his eyes, and her gaze is too heavy, it spears right through him. 

“It’s 1995. Are you concussed?”

“No, I don’t think so. I mean— Maybe. Probably, to be honest. It’s 1995?”

“Has been for five months, now,” Mulder supplies. 

Dieter nods. 

“Do you know where you are?”

“I think so… listen. You guys aren’t gonna believe this— well, Mulder might believe it— But I’m from the future.”

Scully’s concerned gaze turns right back to annoyed very quickly, and she stands back up to cross her arms. 

Mulder just chuckles. 

“How do you know our names?” He asks.

Dieter feels a little weird on the ground while they’re staring down at him, in a horny way, so he gently places Queequeg back on the gravel to stand up himself.

“Would you believe it if I said I’m from an alternate reality where you guys are the main characters in a cult classic sci-fi television series?”

Mulder blinks at him. Dieter shrugs with a sheepish grin.

“Honestly? That’s more believable than the time travel.”

Dieter smirks. 

“That’s such a Scully thing to say.”

“That is such a Scully thing to say,” Mulder agrees. 

“Oh my god.”

“I can prove it! I swear. C’mon, let’s get this little guy safe and sound in your cabin and I’ll prove everything.”

Mulder shrugs, and gives Scully one of his looks, the c’mon, let’s see where this goes look that Dieter’s so used to seeing. 

She just scoffs.

“Mulder, we don’t have time for this. People are dying left and right, you’re on a wild sea-monster chase, and half the town is—”

“Wait, Scully, look at this guy. He’s going to tell you another body’s been found in the lake. Well— half of a body.”

They all turn to the man running up from the docks, and sure enough, it plays out almost exactly how Dieter remembers from the episode. Scully’s very focused on the legs floating in the lake, but Mulder keeps eyeing him in a way that makes him wish he was wearing something more than just flimsy pajama pants. 

“Scully…” Mulder mumbles as they walk back toward their car, “I think we should hear him out.”

“Hear him out!? We should be shoving him in handcuffs, he’s the only suspect we have that isn’t mythical.”

“I’d be into that, actually,” Dieter says, holding his hands out toward them, wrists pressed together. 

Scully grimaces and Mulder smirks but he drapes an arm around her shoulder in a way that seems suspiciously protective. 

“There’s not enough evidence to cuff him, but we can at least keep him close and see what else we can get out of him.” 

“Mulder—”

“If anything, he can just dogsit for us.”

The way they’re talking about him like he’s not even there makes the tips of his ears burn.

“I’d love to dogsit! I miss Queequeg.”

“What do you mean you miss him? He’s right here.”

Dieter winces. 

“Actually that’s a big plot point in this episode,” Dieter whispers.

They stop at the car and Scully glares at him, and Mulder looks a little bit like he’s just brought a stray dog home without her permission. Dieter kinda likes it.

“You never told us your name,” Scully grills.

“Dieter. Dieter Bravo.”

Mulder huffs. 

“What kind of name is Dieter Bravo? Do you do adult films?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know, Fox?”

The way the giggle bubbles up out of Scully’s chest makes him preen. 

“Alright. Where do you live, Dieter?”

He winces and scratches the back of his neck.

“Los Angeles.”

“Oh brother,” Scully grumbles. 

“How did you get here then?”

“Y’know, it’s the weirdest thing. I was writing a fanfiction about the two of you and when I went to post it, I think lightning struck my house and sent me here.”

The two agents stare at him in silence for so long that Dieter has the time to question every single moment that has led up to this. He determines that this is all his therapist’s fault when Mulder finally clears his throat. 

“You can bunk with me until we get everything sorted out, alright?”

Dieter straightens up and salutes him.

“Yes, sir, Agent Mulder.”

Scully rolls her eyes and turns to open the car door for him, but Mulder smirks.

“I think I kinda like this guy, Scully.”

——

Mulder’s nice enough to let him shower and lend him spare clothes that aren’t caked in mud and grass stains, once they’re back at the cabin. He cleans up in silence trying to wrap his head around this entire pickle he’s in, and how to go about making them believe him.

He’s got his work cut out with Scully, he knows this. But he works over every bit of information he can remember from each season, each episode, to remember something that couldn’t be denied. 

They’re doing their Scully and Mulder thing when he comes out with damp hair and Mulder’s clothes on. (He definitely had to will away a half-chub at the thought of being wrapped in his things.) 

They sit around the small living room with photos and paperwork all sprawled out and Dieter feels like geeking out a little bit. This is like the world’s greatest and most interactive X-Files museum. 

“Okay. I’m going to try to do this in the best way I know how. Just— Bear with me.”

They sit back in their seats, and Dieter lifts Queequeg onto his lap to take his place on the couch. He waits for them to give him a go-ahead, but neither of them are responsive. He tries not to feel so aroused by their focused gazes. Maybe he should have jerked off in the shower, as a precaution.

“Okay then… let’s see… this is Season 3, Episode… 22? So. You guys just went through the whole Skinner thing, right? With his— his bad dreams lady killing that prostitute?”

“How do you know Skinner?”

“I told you, it’s a TV show. Skinner’s always busting your balls. Big tough assistant director business. He’s actually just a softy though, I think.”

Scully looks disinterested and a little annoyed, but Mulder’s starting to shift forward in his seat.

“What’s the show called?”

“The X-Files.”

Scully snorts. 

“How creative.”

“Okay, okay, I know. It sounds whacky. But I’ve seen the show a billion times over, I’ve been unknowingly preparing for this moment since the pilot aired.”

He takes a moment to determine what to say and how to word it before he continues.

“Okay… Well… Your first case together was that weird kid in Oregon that kept helping aliens abduct his classmates. Scully conveniently missed the UFO though. Ever the skeptic. Then… let’s see… Deep Throat turns up in the next episode. Scully, he ended up dying in your arms and his last words were trust no one.”

“Mulder, we’ve been bugged for 90 percent of the time we’ve known each other, this doesn’t mean anything.”

Dieter huffs and Mulder shrugs. 

“Keep going. Give us a deep cut, man. You gotta try harder than that.”

“When did you become the skeptic, Mulder?” 

The agent shrugs and raises his eyebrows to urge him to continue. 

“Okay… Scully, when you were at your god son’s birthday party, you told your friend that Mulder is a jerk.”

“Hey, what the hell, Scully?”

“No, I said he was just—”

“Obsessed with his work, yeah. After you called him a jerk though.”

Dieter hates to see the way Mulder’s eyebrows draw up in the middle. It’s kind of funny to see Scully so embarrassed, though. He figures he’ll keep what else she said to himself, about him being cute, because it looks like she’s praying that he doesn’t blab about it.

“You wound me, Scully.”

“Oh, yeah, and there’s the time you shot Mulder in the shoulder.”

“You’re kind of a bully, y’know?”

Scully shoves at his shoulder to prove their point, and Mulder just laughs and leans into it. 

“Do you want to know what happens in the future? Wait, if I affect the future will the show be different? I dunno how I feel about that… new X-Files episodes in 2024 would be incredible. But what if the new episodes suck, though?”

“2024? That’s what year you’re going with?” 

Dieter nods. 

“It kinda sucks. We have smartphones and streaming services and stuff but also, you wouldn’t believe who the last president was if I told you. Also there was a global pandemic. Still kinda is one, but everyone’s just ignoring it. Actually, come to think of it, you guys would thrive in 2024.”

“Do we die before then?”

“Oh, no, no, the show just finished. And then came back and then— it’s a whole thing. But neither of you die.”

“Hmm.”

Mulder hums, and Dieter knows exactly what he’s thinking. Scully too, by the faraway look on her face. Total idiots. Why couldn’t he have landed at least after the first kiss. Or even the almost-kiss?

“Well, I’m tired, and this case isn’t going to solve itself. And Queequeg needs to go potty, so, I think we’re done here.”

Dieter’s whole body feels hot, like the time he was stabbed in the chest with that epi-pen. He shoots up off the couch so fast that Queequeg yelps and hops down to cower behind Scully’s ankles.

“Wait! It’s an alligator. Literally. It’s just an ordinary alligator killing these people. And if you let Queequeg walk into the woods he’s going to get eaten and if there’s one single thing you believe me about it has to be this, okay? For Queequeg’s sake.”

Dieter’s got his hands clasped in front of him, pleading. Scully looks startled and Mulder looks awed, but he’s desperate to drive this point home. 

“…Okay. I’ll keep him close. Thank you.”

They think he’s crazy. Scully does, at least. Mulder’s just quiet, uncharacteristically so. 

“Thank you.”

“Alright,” she sighs, grabbing Queequeg’s leash and hooking him up, “goodnight guys.”

“Goodnight Scully.”

Dieter sighs and sits back down. 

“She thinks I’m insane, doesn’t she?” 

“Welcome to the club.”

Dieter chuckles and looks to Mulder. He’s still got that pensive look on his face. It suits him, all brooding with that fucking jawline and those plush lips and sad eyes. He wants to kiss him so bad. He almost says it out loud, so used to his horny musings while watching this guy on TV that his filter is a little out of whack. 

Dieter doesn’t even realize he’s staring until Mulder tilts his head at him, confused. He opens his mouth and takes a breath but the door ripping open cuts him off. 

“Mulder, there’s something in the woods; Dieter was right. I think we should check it out.”

Mulder jumps up at her beck and call and seeing it in person is even more overwhelming, how he follows her without question and trusts her, so eagerly. 

“Queequeg?”

“He’s here, can you watch him?”

Dieter nods.

“Me? Yeah, yes ma’am, Agent Scully.”

He doesn’t miss the amused look on her face just before the door slams shut behind them. 

He lies on the couch with Queequeg on his chest, enjoying the silence after the… everythingness of his day. He really wishes he could smoke some pot, but even if he could get his hands on some, he’s sure it would be weak as hell. And there’s the FBI agent thing. 

Dieter’s not sure how long he’s been staring at nothing and snuggling Queequeg when the cabin door finally opens again. 

“Did you catch the alligator?”

The eerie silence he’s met with makes him whip his head around. Scully and Mulder are staring at him. He’s pretty sure 80 percent of his X-Files fantasies have started exactly like this. 

“… We did. We caught it just in time to save Ted Bertram.”

“That’s the guy with the lake monster feet, right?”

They both nod slowly. 

Queequeg hops down from his perch on Dieter’s chest, so he sits up. 

“I told you. You guys believe me now?”

He watches as Mulder nods his head yes and Scully shakes her head no. All he can do is shrug and start wondering what’s next for him, in the year of 1995.

“Hey, do you guys need an assistant? I could tell you how to solve the next case! I think it’s the one with the mind control cable. Mulder, are you really red-green color blind? I think that was a major plot hole. How do you tell the difference between human blood and alien blood if one is red and one is green, then?”

“Mulder’s not colorblind,” Scully says. 

“Uhh… Actually, yeah. I am.”

“What? How did you pass the color vision test?”

“I’m colorblind, not an idiot. I can still tell them apart, they just look different to me than they would to you.”

“I— I can’t believe you’ve been colorblind this entire time.” 

Mulder shrugs. Then his brow quirks up.

“Why does that matter?”

“I’m not sure I should tell you. It might mess with the space-time continuum and— quantum physics, you know?”

Scully’s clearly had enough. She sighs and finally kicks off her shoes. 

“I’m grabbing a shower and clearing my head,” she says, “don’t— don’t let him out of your sight for now, Mulder.”

Mulder nods and half smiles at her. They both look pretty tired. He wants to remind them that he’s the one who traveled 29 years into the past today, but it seems like a pretty sore subject. 

They stand still and silent in the living room until Scully closes her bedroom door behind her, Queequeg in tow.

“You heard the woman. There’s a TV in my room.”

Mulder nods toward the other bedroom door and Dieter follows dutifully.

“Does it get the good channels?”

He hears Mulder chuckle and watches from behind as he sheds his jacket. He admires all those lean muscles in his back, now that he’s not wearing one of those god awful baggy suits. Maybe he should suggest a tailor, he thinks, and wonders if the later seasons would be filled with more eye candy if he did. 

“You know about that?”

“All the video tapes that aren’t yours? And the hotline lady that leaves messages on your answering machine? Yeah. You wouldn’t believe what porn is like in thirty years. You’re gonna love it.”

Dieter’s torn between looking away and staring shamelessly while Mulder unbuttons his fly. He settles for nonchalant, hoping his eyes don’t pop out of their sockets like a cartoon character when he notices the outline of Little Mulder. This is even better than the gray sweatpants in the Humbug episode. 

“I was hoping to kick the habit in thirty years’ time, actually.”

Dieter shrugs and his staring contest with Mulder’s crotch ends abruptly as he slides into a pair of pajama pants. Which is weird, because usually Mulder sleeps in his underwear. Must be the fact that he’s sharing a cabin with Scully.

Mulder throws Dieter the remote and settles onto the bed. There’s no couch in here, not even a cuck chair, so Dieter settles next to him. His whole body burns. God, if 20-year-old Dieter could see himself now, he’d ruin the pants he was wearing. 

The silence feels a little awkward, so he turns the TV on. Nineties TV is so simple. It’s easy to settle on a channel playing Invasion of the Body Snatchers and sink into the mattress under him. 

It only takes a few moments before he realizes Mulder’s staring holes into the side of his face. 

“What’s up?” Dieter asks. 

There’s so little room between them it’s making Dieter’s entire body throb along with his pulse. 

“You’re telling the truth.”

Dieter nods and tries to give him a reassuring smile. Mulder sighs and throws his head back onto the pillow. His eyes close and his brows furrow and his jaw does that sexy clenching thing again. It’s all Dieter can do to not bite at it and soothe the sting with his tongue. 

“What happens to us?”

Dieter clears his throat.

“I mean— I know, you shouldn’t affect the future, yadda yadda. I just…”

Fuck it, Dieter thinks, if I’ve already solved the case way before the episode is supposed to end, I’ve thrown everything off anyway.

“You end up together.”

Mulder lets out a big, long breath. His face instantly relaxes. His hands flex by his sides and Dieter goes out on a big giant limb and grabs one of them.

Mulder starts at the touch, but lets it happen. 

“When?”

“Way later than you should have shacked up, in my opinion.”

He grumbles. 

“My opinion, too.”

“You should make a move, then. I’m pretty sure at this point she’s only waiting for you to make a move.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Oh, it’s a whole thing involving a shapeshifting guy with a tail. Trust me. She’s got it just as bad.”

They’re still holding hands. Mulder hasn’t moved a muscle. An idea so bright pops into Dieter’s head that he’s certain there’s a lightbulb floating above him. 

“You know when you met Bambi on that cockroach case?”

Mulder nods. 

“She was so jealous. Didn’t you pick up on that?”

“I— I thought so. But I also thought she was just annoyed with me, y’know, how she usually is.”

Dieter squeezes his hand. 

“She was annoyed because she’s into you, dude. It was envy. Very, very clearly.”

He hums. 

“So? What now? Do I apologize for something that happened months ago? You apparently know Scully as well as I do, how do you think that’ll blow over? ‘Hey, sorry I made you jealous because you have a big fat crush on me.’ She’d deck me.”

Dieter shakes his head. 

“No, man. You need to make her jealous. So jealous she can’t deny why she’s upset with you.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, and I mean, why not just start right now, y’know? Get a head start on the whole thing. I mean, you’re here, I’m here, there’s only one bed…”

“If I didn’t know any better I’d think you were coming onto me.”

“I would love to come on you, actually.”

Mulder laughs, and Dieter deflates a little at the sound. But when he goes to pull his hand away, Mulder cinches it in his own. 

“Dieter…”

“Mulder.”

“We’re doing this, then?”

Dieter nods like an overexcited puppy wagging its tail. Oh my god. Oh my god. Fox Mulder in his prime, how fucking lucky can one guy be?

Mulder glances at the door to make sure it’s open. The faint sound of running water can be heard from Scully’s room, and he thinks he smells her shampoo wafting out with the steam. 

Like two nervous teenagers, they shift to face one another. Dieter brings their joined hands together on his own hip. Mulder’s palm is warm on his skin where his shirt rides high, and it makes Dieter’s breath hitch. 

Slowly, Dieter urges him to keep his hand still with a squeeze before mirroring Mulder’s, creeping his hand under his shirt and feeling his solid, trim waist.

Mulder hums into his touch and Dieter realizes this man is possibly just as touch-starved as he is. He starts swirling circles into his skin with his thumb and inches forward, but those beautiful hazel eyes hold apprehension in their timid gaze.

“What if this blows up in my face?” Mulder whispers.

“It won’t. I guarantee it. I’ll make sure of it. Trust me?”

A soft grin tugs at Mulder’s lips and he nods, and it’s all the permission Dieter needs.

Christ, his lips are soft. Soft and plush and exactly how Dieter imagined only a million times better. He doesn’t think he’s ever felt this good, not on any drug, and they’re just kissing. 

It’s chaste until he feels Mulder’s tongue prod at the seam of his lips and then it’s filthy. As soon as Dieter opens his mouth to him, Mulder takes it with a grunt. His blunt nails dig into the soft flesh at Dieter’s hip as he traces the arch of his bottom teeth. Dieter tries to keep up, but his brain constantly shorts out at the thought of who’s tongue is poking and prodding around in his mouth. 

He’s a great fucking kisser. His tongue tickles the roof of Dieter’s mouth and it makes him shiver, makes his cock swell against his borrowed sweatpants, against Mulder. 

He doesn’t seem deterred. Quite the opposite actually. He tugs Dieter by the hip and presses his own solid prick right up against Dieter’s, and they both groan into the sloppy kiss. 

“It’s been quite a while,” Mulder says. 

Dieter can’t tell if the huffed little laugh is directed toward the eager way he chases Mulder’s lips, or toward himself for being out of practice. He likes the thought of either. 

“For me, too,” Dieter mumbles. 

Mulder hums and rolls his hips. As their dicks press together and twitch, Dieter decides they are not naked enough by any means. 

He presses his hand up, up, bringing Mulder’s shirt with it and grabbing a handful of his sturdy pec, admiring how stiff it feels under his palm when his lungs inflate. He gets with the program, and Dieter pulls his own shirt over his head, then promptly salivates over all the lean muscles and wiry hair and pale skin in front of him. 

“Fuck,” he breathes.

It’s not until Mulder’s breath hitches does he realize he might actually be into this, not just their plan, but being here in bed with Dieter. His pretty hazel eyes are dark now, pupils blown out, and his chest is heaving, and the tent in his pajama pants is far too enticing to resist. 

Dieter reaches down to cup him through the flannel material and Mulder gasps and falls flat onto his back. His eyes close and his jaw hangs open like an invitation. Dieter wiggles and shifts to press up against the length of his side and to finally press his face into the crook of his neck. 

The hint of aftershave that’s been teasing him all day is now overwhelming his senses, sharp and spicy. Dieter is delighted to know that his skin tastes just as delicious as it smells, salty and heady under his tongue. Mulder’s prick throbs in his grasp and Dieter’s torn between wanting to tease him over his pants and feel the hot skin of his cock in his palm. 

“Feels good,” Mulder whispers. 

“Yeah?”

“Mmm.”

Dieter nips at his racing pulse first, then down to his jaw and the impressive five o’clock shadow he’s always been jealous and in awe of. The prickly hairs there tickle his tongue and lips, and he grinds into the outside of Mulder’s thigh for a bit of relief. 

“You think about Scully doing this?” 

The way Mulder’s dick jolts in his grasp is answer enough, but he speaks up anyway. 

“Yes.”

The admission is so hot it makes Dieter’s brain spin. He himself has thought of it many times before, Scully torturing him with teasing touches, her little sharp canines digging into his flesh, but the thought of Mulder thinking of it too… 

All those heated glances Dieter’s mulled over, he wonders how many of those were fueled by Mulder’s dirty thoughts about her. Wonders how many times he’s seen a flash of something in Mulder’s gaze and it’s been him fantasizing about getting Scully in bed. 

Dieter huffs against the heated skin of Mulder’s neck before he pulls back. His head his thrown back, eyes squeezed shut, and he’s fucking gorgeous. He lightens his touch, teases the underside of his cock with one fingertip, and delights in the pleasure scrawled across Mulder’s face. 

“How often?”

Mulder’s gravelly chuckle is cut off by a low groan when Dieter presses against his sac over his pajamas. 

“All the time,” he confesses, “every time.”

“In the office?”

Mulder whimpers and nods his head. 

“On the job, in the field?”

“God yes.”

Dieter hums, squeezes his balls to goad him into continuing.

“When she— when she’s so serious, it’s hot. She’s so smart, it turns me on.”

Dieter smirks. He completely sympathizes.

“You like it when she debunks you?”

Mulder whines and nods his head again. Dieter tries his hardest not to react to the sound of the water shutting off across the cabin, or Scully’s door creaking open. Instead, he shoves his hand down Mulder’s pants and hopes to god he keeps his eyes closed, hopes Scully’s ever present need to call out his name is tampered down when she inevitably hears him talking. 

Mulder gasps and raises his hips into the circle of Dieter’s hand, and his brows furrow as he shuts his eyes even tighter.

“Why?”

Mulder moans. 

“Because she— she balances me out. Makes me feel even. Whole.”

Dieter chuckles. 

“Aww, does she complete you, Foxy?” 

He scoffs but bites his lip when Dieter thumbs at his head and spreads his slick, sticky pre-cum all around. 

“Tell me what you think about, Mulder.”

His breathing is so ragged that Dieter thinks he should maybe be concerned. But he can tell things are about to come to a head, can hear Scully’s little footsteps inching closer to their room, pointedly quiet. 

“Her, I think about her body against mine. And touching her.”

As if on cue, fiery red hair peeks through the door frame. Dieter’s got his free hand up and a finger at his lips before Scully’s face can even twist up in concern and shock. He gives her a pleading look as she stands stock-still and wide-eyed. 

“Where would you touch Scully, if she was here?”

“Everywhere. Anywhere she wants me to. I just wanna make her feel good.”

Dieter turns his head back to Mulder to confirm that his eyes are still closed. They are, positively scrunched shut as sweat threatens to penetrate his brows and slip into his eyes.

“Do you wanna taste her?” 

Mulder’s breath hitches and his cock pulses and dribbles more against Dieter’s hand. 

“Yes, yes, so bad. I think about it every time I— every time I touch myself.”

Dieter turns back to Scully. Her hair is damp and her silky pajama top is unbuttoned more than it was just a moment ago. It just barely hides her heaving chest and he has a hard time not giving her away when he realizes his plan is working. Her lips are parted and wet, like she’s licked them, and god he really fucking hopes they don’t kick him out once this all comes to a head. 

“You do?” 

“Mm-hmm,” Mulder nods, “I could spend the rest of my life down there and die happy.”

Dieter chuckles then, and Mulder does too, but he opens his eyes. It takes him just a second to blink and adjust but, ever the vigilant one, his eyes jolt toward the now closed bedroom door and Scully standing in front of it. His body goes stiff and still, aside from his prick, which twitches wildly in Dieter’s grasp. 

Mulder’s voice cracks amusingly around Scully’s name. She crosses her arms and lifts one of her perfectly shaped eyebrows as she shuffles to the foot of the bed. 

“Boys.”

Dieter smiles sheepishly at her. Mulder’s staring and gaping like a fish out of water, all tense now, one elbow on the bed so he can prop himself up. Dieter doesn’t miss the way Scully’s eyes trace over his naked torso or the activity going on at the front of Mulder’s pajamas. 

“Is it true, Mulder?”

He’s nodding his head before she can even finish the question. 

“Yeah, Scully. I—” 

He cuts himself off when Dieter squeezes and strokes him, and Scully’s gaze is locked on the movement.

“It certainly feels like the truth,” Dieter supplies. 

Mulder whimpers under him and Dieter swears he sees Scully’s ears perk up at the sound, like some kind of predator. 

“Mulder, c’mere.”

God, the way he follows so readily, like he always does, it warms Dieter’s heart just as much as it makes his dick throb. He kneels on the edge of the bed right in front of her. His cock is protruding obscenely out in front of him, but Scully doesn’t seem to care about that. 

No, she’s focused on his face instead where it’s settled gently between her dainty hands. God, the way they look at each other is so fucking intoxicating. Dieter’s bound by it, physically stuck on the mattress as he watches. 

Her brows furrow slightly as she looks at him, but Mulder’s face is slack, almost dazed as he meets her eyes. 

“What did he tell you, Mulder?” 

Mulder shifts awkwardly from knee to knee. His mouth opens and closes a few times, and she giggles under her breath. 

“You’re not in trouble.”

Dieter laughs, and god, it’s so fucking weird. It’s like he’s watching a director’s cut. 

Mulder sighs, though. 

“We end up together, Scully. You and me. And I— I believe it. I believed it long before this guy showed up, and it… Out of everything I believe, everything I’ve been working toward… it might be the only belief I have that keeps me going.”

Scully’s gaze grows soft as his confession, and Dieter refrains from squealing in delight at how sweet Mulder sounds and how Mulder it all is.

“Why now, then?”

Mulder huffs and tries to turn away, but she keeps his face tight in her grasp. His cheeks are so pink. 

“Just worked up the guts, I guess.”

Dieter doesn’t miss the quick flicker of Scully’s eyes down to his lips. His fingers twitch with the urge to smash their faces together. 

She sighs and brushes some errant strands of hair from Mulder’s forehead. 

“Well,” she says, and her voice wavers with a heavy breath, “I’m glad one of us did.”

Mulder visibly melts. His shoulders slump and he leans forward into her touch. His face loses all of that tension from earlier, and his lips look loose when Scully’s own finally brushes against them. 

He’s so gentle with her, in a way he definitely wasn’t with Dieter. His hands are nearly hovering over her with how lightly he places them on her waist. His lips stay slack and still as he lets her control the kiss. The only thing giving him away is the comical bobbing of his prick disrupting the front of his pajamas, and there’s no way Dieter can blame him for that. 

One of Scully’s hands tangles in Mulder’s hair and produces a beautiful, high pitched sound that Dieter and Scully both react to. 

She pulls away. Mulder chases her lips, but her grip on his hair tightens. He curses under his breath with a face more flushed than Dieter’s ever seen on him.

Her eyes flicker over to Dieter and he feels like a deer in headlights. Why is he still here? Is this weird, is he being a creep for staying? 

“C’mere,” she mumbles, tipping her head to urge him to kneel right beside Mulder on the bed. 

He does, of course he does. He wants to be good for her, for them.

He kneels, shoulder to shoulder with the man panting beside him. He grasps his hands behind his back and waits patiently as she looks the both of them over. 

“What did I walk in on, Dieter?”

The way his name sounds coming from her low, rasping voice makes his spine tingle. 

“It was my idea, Agent Scully. I was trying to make you jealous. I’m sorry.”

She clicks her tongue and the noise makes his cock throb. 

“And you went along with this plan?”

She looks back to Mulder and Dieter shivers. He instantly misses the warmth of her gaze. 

“I— yeah. I did... It worked, didn’t it?”

Scully’s eyes narrow, and Dieter can’t tell if Mulder’s an idiot or a genius for riling her up. He should have known Fox Mulder would be a brat. He thinks if he plays his cards right, maybe Scully will forget the whole plot and he can be her good boy while Mulder gets punished for his smart mouth. 

A whimper falling from Mulder’s parted lips knocks him out of his daze and he notices Scully’s grip all tight in his floppy hair. 

Fuck, he wishes that were him. Maybe he should mouth off too, maybe then he’ll get the attention that he craves. 

“Get on your knees, Mulder.”

“I am on my knees.”

Dieter gasps as Scully tugs on his hair and leaves him no choice but to scramble off of the edge of the bed, lest she rip all that perfectly coiffed hair out of his head. His shoulders rise and fall with baited breath when he’s finally sunken his knees on the gaudy rug on the hardwood floors. Dieter whimpers and no one’s even touching him. 

“You too, time bandit.”

Dieter gets whiplash with how quickly he gets on his knees for her. He breathes out a labored ‘yes ma’am’ and Mulder throws him a look of disbelief. He shrugs, what can I say?

They’re both rock hard for her, on the floor, staring up at her. She looks like an angel, or the devil, or maybe like God herself. Her breathing is suspiciously calm compared to their own, even though her nipples create tantalizing nubs at the front of her silk pajamas. 

“Keep your eyes forward, both of you.”

Dieter nods at her commanding voice. He wants to look to Mulder for— direction? Comfort? Some kind of trauma bonding? But he doesn’t. He wants to be good. 

He hears Scully behind them, bed creaking under her weight, sheets ruffling underneath her. There’s a pregnant pause where all of their heavy breathing can be heard and the anticipation is so much Dieter might explode on the spot. 

“Strip.”

Twin breaths release from both Dieter and Mulder and he swears he hears her giggle behind them. He’s quick to comply, tugging at the drawstring of Mulder’s sweats he’s borrowed and awkwardly shuffling them off while he tries to stay kneeling. 

He notices Mulder still motionless beside him. 

“Scully…”

Idiot, Dieter thinks. 

“Good boy, Dieter, doing exactly what I say.”

He can’t help the satisfied smirk that twists his lips up, or the way the back of his neck burns at the praise. In his peripheral, Mulder hastily shucks his pajama pants. 

He has a pretty cock. Dieter knew he would. Everything else about him is pretty. It’s long and lean, just like he is, and the upward curve of it makes him jealous. It’s going to feel so good for Scully, if she lets him fuck her. 

There’s more shuffling behind them, and he flinches when a pair of satin pajama pants land on the floor in front of both of them. He has to dig his nails into his thighs to resist the urge to turn around. Something nudges his arm. He doesn’t dare move his head, but from the corner of his eye he sees a pale, smooth leg and his breath catches in his chest. 

He hears Mulder curse under his breath and can nearly feel the tension in him vibrating out energy into this rickety old cabin. Dieter feels a gentle hand in the short curls at the back of his neck just a moment later, her nails scraping his scalp just right, and his leg may just start shaking like a dog’s.

“You want to taste me, Mulder?”

“Fuck yes, Scully, please.”

She hums. Her hand in Dieter’s hair stills. 

“Go on, then.”

A lightning flash of movement stirs beside him, but Dieter keeps dutifully still. He’s twitching in anticipation but he doesn’t dare turn to look. 

Scully sighs, all breathy and high-pitched, and Dieter’s never heard a more beautiful sound. Then Mulder whimpers, and it’s muffled by Scully’s thighs, and there’s a wet smacking noise and Dieter thinks this obscene music could be a platinum album. 

Scully gasps, and Mulder groans, and Dieter aches. He can smell her, a sharp and tangy scent of arousal underneath the flowery soap and shampoo. Her hand is still in his hair and it hasn’t moved since Mulder got down to business and he feels forgotten about but in the best way.

“Dieter, honey, you can watch.”

He breathes out with relief and shifts to get a good look of the action. She’s perfect, gorgeous, breathtaking. Her silky pajama top hangs open on her pointy shoulders and her perky breasts rise and fall with her breathing. Her nipples are a brownish pink that stand erect in a way that makes his mouth water like a leaky faucet.

Her toned, porcelain legs spread wide enough to accommodate Mulder’s shoulders. The man is greedy, and Dieter can’t see a thing aside from the triangle of copper curls on her mound. He wants to nuzzle them so bad, he wants to feel them tickle his nose, smell the arousal that catches there. 

“You taste so good.”

Mulder’s words are squished against her center. Dieter whimpers at the thought of her flavor. Her hand soothes through his hair. He wants to touch his cock so badly, but Scully hasn’t told him that he’s allowed. Instead, he balls his hands into fists and bites his lip. 

Scully moans, and Dieter watches her face fall slack with pleasure. 

“Feels good, just like that.”

Dieter can’t help the sounds that eke out of him, desperate and a little pained. He’s so hard that he’s lightheaded, but Scully’s firm grip on his hair grounds him just enough. 

“Don’t be selfish, Mulder.”

He makes a questioning noise between her legs. He looks up at her with wide eyes, mouth open, tongue out and flat against her slit. 

“Give him a taste.”

“Oh fuck, please.”

Dieter can see the reluctance in Mulder’s motions, like he’s struggling to break free from her orbit. He looks so fucking hot, absolutely wrecked. His plush lips are red and shiny and his chin is dripping and his pupils completely usurp his irises. Drunk, drugged off of Scully.

He leans away from Dieter to make room between her legs but she tugs his hair. Then she tugs Dieter’s hair, and their noses are bumping together before either man can put two and two together. 

He can smell her on his breath. It’s so intoxicating that he loses any crumb of decorum he may have had left. He licks a broad swipe from Mulder’s chin to his Cupid’s bow and groans at all the slick he’s able to lap up. 

Mulder’s mouth opens up to him, and he chases the taste of her off of his tongue, his teeth, his gums, anywhere. They’re both panting into each other's mouths, exchanging breath. Dieter feels a big, strong hand on his jaw and neck, and the contrast to Scully’s smaller, gentler touch has him leaking all over the rug underneath him. He feels like he’s drowning, and he just wants to go even deeper, like even death won’t be enough. 

He waits for Scully to say anything about Mulder touching him. When she doesn’t, he takes it as permission to reach up and find purchase in his hair. His fingers tingle when they find Scully’s still there, and his whole body shudders and twitches when she links her fingers with his. 

“You want more?” 

It’s depraved, the way they both pull away from the kiss so fast. Dieter’s nodding and looking toward her, her glistening cunt, her smooth skin and her mischievous gaze. 

“Please, Scully,” Mulder mumbles. 

His head lolls back against Scully’s thigh so he can look up at her. He looks like he’s just run a marathon, the way sweat is beading at his forehead and his chest is heaving. 

“Yes, please, Agent Scully.”

She chuckles. The sound is torture and it’s bliss. She ruffles Dieter’s hair and he hums and leans into it. Mulder whimpers at the lack of attention, so she ruffles his too. 

And then she spreads her thighs even wider, like, gymnast levels of flexibility, and both of their eyes are drawn to the way her lips spread open in invitation, puffy red, her clit all swollen while she drips onto the old comforter under her.

“Think you can share?”

Dieter curses. Mulder whimpers against her thigh.

“Play nice, boys.”

Mulder looks at him with a heated gaze that makes him a little bit scared but really really horny.

“Yes ma’am,” Dieter says, but he’s staring at Mulder. 

Be good, he’s trying to tell him through telepathy, we’ll get rewarded if you’re just good.

Mulder glances up at her, bats his pretty little eyes, and licks his slick lips. 

“Yes ma’am.”

It sounds more teasing than anything, but Dieter doesn’t miss the way she squirms when Mulder says it. He just has that effect, doesn’t he? Such a charming little shit. 

He and Dieter look at each other, assessing, when Mulder finally goes low. It’s a little bit awkward, at first. Dieter’s jaw prods at Mulder’s sharp cheekbone as they find a good position. 

He traces around her clit with a pointed tongue, delicately, so eager to work her up. He can hear Mulder’s tongue fucking in and out of her, a wet cacophony of sounds that make his ears ring. So much so that he nearly doesn’t catch the sounds of Scully’s breath hitching, her soft little mewls as her hips cant up into their faces. 

He’s hyper focused on her pleasure, so lost in it that he doesn’t even recognize how turned on he is until a heavy, warm hand wraps around his cock and he nearly blows his load. His tongue presses broadly against Scully’s clit when he groans. She curses and her hand tightens in his hair and it’s so much. 

He reaches out for anything, really, but Mulder’s cock is there, hard and proud and twitching when he wraps his hand around him. He finds solace in the fact that he’s leaking just as much as Dieter is, sticky and slick all the way down the underside of his shaft. His noises get breathier, and his tongue seeks higher ground just as Dieter’s travels lower. They lap at her folds together, briefly, trapping them between their tongues, trading their tastes as she whines above them. Dieter doesn’t even realize his free hand has grasped Scully’s slender hip until she squirms against it. 

All of a sudden, Dieter feels her go stiff under his grasp. Her hand tightens in his hair just shy of enough to make him lose it. She lets out stuttered little sounds and Mulder hums below him. 

“You like that, Scully?”

“Oh my god, Mulder.”

He groans and shifts and she begs and Dieter’s aroused haze clears enough to make him realize that he’s eating her ass. 

He makes a pained sound himself and sucks Scully’s throbbing clit into his mouth. She shakes, and her stiff body loosens just enough for her to roll her hips into them. 

“Don’t— don’t stop, I’m so close. I’m gonna come.”

Neither of them would dream of stopping, not for anything. Dieter works his tongue in pulses against her clit as he suckles, and he feels Mulder slip a finger in between them just as she cries out, loud, and falls apart against their tongues. 

Dieter drinks up the way her clit jerks and pulses between his lips. He drinks up her gasps and breathy noises. He drinks up the way Mulder’s cock mirrors his own, twitching with pure arousal at the way she’s coming just for them.

They’re both humming satisfied sounds as they work her through it. Their hands on each other’s cocks have stilled completely, just a loose grasp as they coax every last bit of pleasure out of her until she’s lax and shying away from them. 

Dieter pulls away first. He watches with a sticky feeling in his chest at the way Mulder kisses her holes gently, and the skin around them, nuzzling between her thighs so tenderly. Both his hands free, now, Mulder soothes them up the outside of her thighs as they tremble in her aftershocks. 

Mulder’s babbling, Dieter realizes, once the ringing in his ears finally subsides. Just under his breath, a chant, over and over.

“So perfect, Scully, thank you, thank you, Jesus Christ, Scully…”

Dieter settles back on his heels to keep gazing at them. Scully’s hands both pet through his hair as he leaves wet kisses that make her pale thighs glisten in the dim cabin lighting. He’s panting harder than she is, and his prick dribbles and twitches, and he looks up at her through misty eyes. 

“Oh, Mulder,” she sighs.

She bends down at the same time he arches up and their lips meet in a kiss so blindingly passionate that Dieter debates whether or not he should look away. Only for a split second though. Because Scully moans into his mouth and licks herself out of it and Dieter grabs his throbbing dick at the base to chill himself out. 

Mulder’s fingers run through her damp hair so gently, but his jaw works and his mouth takes from her in stark contrast. They look so goddamn good together, it’s insane. He’s torn between holding off to see how this plays out, or coming all over himself in three strokes or less as he watches them together. 

“Come up here, Mulder.”

Her voice is intoxicating, it sounds so fucked out and blissful. She shuffles up the bed some and Mulder chases her, always touching at some point, until she’s lying back and he’s covering her body with his own. 

He dwarfs her. It’s cute, in the show, the way she’s always looking up at him with a craned neck. Now, it’s just filthy, how Mulder’s cock looks so fucking huge lying hard against her small frame. The way he has to scrunch himself up to kiss her so his prick doesn’t go anywhere it’s not supposed to, yet. The way her tiny feet rub up and down Mulder’s calves, only half their size. 

The way his hand eclipses her face when he cradles it and pulls away. How his thumb sweeps so easily from her lips to her cheekbone as he sighs. 

“Scully…”

She hums and closes her eyes and smiles, a sated and relieved grin that makes her look so serenely beautiful. 

“I know, Mulder,” she sighs, “me too.”

Dieter huffs. Chris Carter himself couldn’t have created a more Mulder and Scully-esque love confession. It’s precious. He might cry. 

Unfortunately, the sound makes them both look over. Scully’s all relaxed but Mulder’s hackles are all raised, like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t. Dieter slowly moves his hand away from his leaking cock and feels himself blush from his face down to his nipples. 

He’s caught in their crosshairs, stuck, eerily still and silent. Should he offer to leave? He really doesn’t want to leave. Maybe he can just peek through the keyhole of the door and leave them to it. 

“You too, Dieter,” Scully says, “get up here.”

Relief floods through him and makes his limbs all tingly. He’s nervous as he stands, gently making his way to the side of the bed and settling one knee on, then the other. Mulder shifts to the opposite side of Scully, their legs still tangled, as he watches Dieter with emotion he can’t quite put a name to. 

Dieter practically purrs when he slides right into their space. His cock drags a sticky design onto Scully’s smooth thigh and he apologizes, but she just chuckles and gently scratches her nails along his scalp. 

“Are you both going to be good for me?”

The tone of her voice makes them both shiver. Mulder huffs out a laugh but Dieter gasps as she tugs a little at his messy, sweaty curls. 

“Yes ma’am, Agent Scully.”

Dieter’s voice completely betrays him. He’s so turned on. There’s so much blood pumping to his cock that there’s a real and serious threat of him passing out. He hides his face in her shoulder and tries to even out his breathing and not hump her leg like an unruly dog. 

“I’ll be good for you, Scully.”

Mulder sounds a lot more in control. His deep, syrupy voice is just shy of even, only cracking on the second syllable of her name. Dieter feels the way she starts giggling before he hears it, her shoulders jostling with it. 

“You’re going to play by the rules, Mulder?”

He chuckles and it sounds dark, and Dieter opens his eyes to watch him smirk that irresistible smirk. 

“Hell, Scully, I’d write the rules over and over on the chalkboard to keep this going.”

She rolls her eyes at him, but she’s still grinning. His eyes flicker to her lips and there’s no hesitation this time when they kiss again. It’s tame and loose, until Scully wraps her dainty hand around his cock and he groans. Dieter matches his sound, and he just can’t help it, he rolls his hips into Scully’s thigh as he watches Mulder melt into a puddle against her. She bites at his plush bottom lip before she pulls back. 

“Fuck me, then.”

“Jesus,” they both say in unison. 

Scully bites her lip to keep in her giggles and it’s cute and debauched and insane. She’s insane. She’s going to kill them both, and Dieter’s going to return to his reality with 8 less seasons of The X-Files, and a season finale where Scully gets locked up for double homicide.

Mulder shuffles to straddle her. Dieter watches his heavy eyelids flutter and his jaw hang open and knows he likely looks the same. His cock twitches heavily where it hangs below him, and Scully teases the underside of it with her fingertips. He shivers, and so does Dieter, where he rocks his hips gently into Scully’s smooth skin. 

“You’re sure, Scully?” 

Dieter turns away and hides his heated face in the duvet. It’s too tender and raw and he doesn’t deserve to watch them love each other like this. 

“Positive, Mulder.”

He hears them kissing, wet, smacking sounds that give Dieter goosebumps. And then a whimper, a huff, muffled into Scully’s mouth and he drags his face away from its hiding spot. 

Mulder’s inching inside of her slowly, so slowly, with patience Dieter couldn’t even dream of. He cranes his neck to watch her take him, inch by inch. She looks so tight, and he bets she is, if the way Mulder’s eyes are squeezed shut is any indication.

Scully’s head tips back and breaks their kiss. Her eyes roll into the back of her head before she closes them. Her chest is heaving now with shallow breaths, her nipples taut and inviting.

“Oh my god,” she whispers. 

Mulder’s hips stay flush once he’s all the way in and he pants too. It looks like it takes all the strength he has to just flutter his eyes open and look down at her. His brows furrow and he licks his lips and gasps. 

“Scully,” he whines. 

She smirks, and christ, Dieter knows she’s clenching around him like a menace. Poor Mulder. He’s got the restraint of a god, he thinks, Dieter wouldn’t have made it even halfway inside of her. 

She soothes him by brushing the hair from his forehead, all damp with sweat. She does the same to Dieter and he hums as her fingertips massage his scalp. 

Mulder pulls out just as slowly as he entered her. She‘s soaked. He can hear it so well in the stilted silence of the room. When he pushes back in, she sighs and tightens her fist in Dieter’s hair and he needs something. He rocks against her again, and again, and the steady friction makes him gasp. 

Her hand slides down to the back of his neck and guides him to her breast. His cock throbs, deliciously trapped between his stomach and her silky skin. His tongue tests the waters, swirling around the pronounced peak of her nipple. When she sighs and arches into it, he takes it into his mouth and sucks. 

The noises she’s making are perfect. High pitched, breathy, needy. She’s letting herself go to Dieter and Mulder and it’s gorgeous. He presses his cock against her even harder and closes his eyes and whines around the bud in his mouth. 

Mulder’s starting to pick up the pace. Dieter can tell by the way her breast is jiggling just slightly under his mouth. And the sounds, god, the filthy slick sounds coming from her cunt. He’s leaking all over her just thinking about what it must feel like, how snugly Mulder must fit inside of her, how warm it is. 

As if Mulder could read his mind, he gasps out and his hips stutter against her. 

“It’s so good, Scully.”

Scully arches her back to grind down onto him and moans his name and tells him she needs more and Dieter bites down on her tender skin. 

She jolts and tugs his hair and curses and he looks up at her as he soothes it with his tongue. 

She’s the poster girl of pleasure. Her face is twisted with it, every beautiful feature dripping with tension. The length of her neck is so apparent with her head thrown back, and her skin is pink and looks hot to the touch. She begins to bounce when Mulder fucks her faster and harder. Dieter wants to do something, anything to make her feel good. 

He replaces his mouth with his hand, squeezing her flesh and teasing her nipple with his fingertips. He trails kisses up her chest, little love bites and suction until he reaches just below her ear. Her pulse is fluttering rapidly under his tongue, and she keens just as she turns her head and presses their lips together. 

They’re kissing. He’s kissing Scully. Oh god, her lips are so fucking soft against his. Her tongue ripples in his mouth and it tastes so good, minty with a hint of her arousal straight from Mulder’s lips. He whines and rolls his hips against her like he’s in heat, and he’s so close, and he wonders if she’d be mad if he came all over her warm, smooth, freshly showered skin. 

She jolts against him, against them, and bites down on Dieter’s lip with an almost pained noise. She turns away from Dieter and they both look to Mulder, who’s circling her puffy clit with his thumb as he fucks her. 

He’s looking to her for direction with a glazed expression. He looks like he’s hanging by a thread. 

“Here,” she whispers, and takes two of her fingers into her own mouth. 

Christ. The way her lips look wrapped around her two digits is sinful and debauched. Mulder must think the same, because he grabs her wrist and makes her stop. 

Dieter holds his breath as he waits for his next move. Is he going to pin her arms to the bed? Is he going to stretch them over her head and make her squirm on his cock, make her beg? 

It’s sweeter than that. Of course it is, with these two. Mulder brings her hand to his lips and kisses her palm, and then her knuckles. She sighs his name, and watches Mulder smile.

That soft, dopey smile gets an edge to it. 

“Let me, please,” he whispers. 

Dieter only gets the chance to be confused for half a second when he slips those two fingers into his own mouth. 

Scully gasps and moans and wiggles against him. Fuck, it’s beautiful. Mulder’s full lips take her all the way to the last knuckle and he hollows his cheeks as he sucks them. Scully’s hips squirm and rock and the way she moves against him is a sight. Mulder groans when Scully begins to thrust her fingers in and out, just a little, not enough to choke him but enough to make him close his eyes and sigh and start slowly fucking her again. 

They leave his mouth all wet and shiny. Mulder’s tongue tries to follow them and it makes Scully huff out a weak laugh. 

“You’re too good at that, Mulder.”

He hums, tries to hide his sheepish smile by ducking his head. But Scully grips his chin with her wet fingers to prevent it. His eyes struggle to focus on her, Dieter notices. He can’t blame him, it’s like staring into the sun. 

“Why don’t you show off to your little time traveler, huh?”

He opens his mouth, but no words come out. His eyes dart nervously from Scully to Dieter. 

“I— what?”

“Don’t be dense. Make him come. Make me come. You can multitask, can’t you?”

Dieter lies as still as the dead, afraid that if he moves maybe Mulder will snap out of this horny daze and tell him to get lost. He wouldn’t blame him one bit, either, but god he really wants to see this man’s lips wrapped around his cock. 

Scully chuckles at Mulder’s frozen stature. Or maybe she’s chuckling at the way Dieter’s heartbeat is pulsing through his dick against her thigh, dribbling all over it. 

“I bet you’re so good at it,” she continues to tease him, “with these pretty lips?” 

Mulder huffs and squirms when she rubs the pads of her wet fingers against his mouth. His tongue peeks out to taste them, coax them back inside him, but she doesn’t let him. 

“For me, Mulder?”

And Dieter can’t help but grin, because he’s never seen such a visceral loss of resolve so clearly before. Mulder closes his eyes and whines and nods his head. 

Scully makes a satisfied little noise, and her free hand sneaks down to squeeze Dieter’s slick cock, and he has to bite his own lip really hard to keep from losing it before the fun even begins. 

Then there’s some awkward repositioning and shuffling, mostly on his end. He kneels just above Scully’s head, and when he looks down she’s grinning like the Cheshire Cat from under his cock. He has to reach down to collect some of the pre-cum oozing out of him to keep it from dripping onto her gorgeous face, but she grabs his wrist and licks it from his fingers anyway. 

And then there’s Mulder, who’s slowly thrusting in and out of his partner like it’s second-nature, like auto-pilot, as he surveys the scene in front of him. 

“Mulder,” Scully mumbles. 

The deep, breathy, commanding tone of her voice makes Dieter shiver. 

“Yeah, Scully?”

“Make us come. Then you can.”

He groans, and his hips stutter then slam into her. Dieter’s torn between looking at the blissed-out look on Mulder’s face or the mischievous look in Scully’s eyes. 

“Are you— are you sure?” Dieter asks. 

Like an idiot, looking a gift horse in the mouth. But how can he not? They’re so perfect, so made for each other, and he’s just some weird fucking guy. 

But then Mulder’s expression turns into something darker, determined, and he nods with glassy eyes. 

“C’mon, McFly.”

And that’s all the encouragement Dieter needs, really. He widens his knees to line his cock up with those shiny, plush lips. Mulder gives Scully one last glance before he’s craning his neck forward and closing his eyes. 

Scully and Dieter gasp at precisely the same time, just as Mulder’s tongue swipes at his frenulum. Dieter’s eyes lose focus as he watches Mulder open his mouth wider, then looks past to see Scully’s icy blue gaze fixated on everything going on above her. It’s like an erotic kaleidoscope, the way they’re all blending together in pleasure. 

He suckles on Dieter’s head, a little too hard, but he thinks it might be on purpose. He hisses and grabs Mulder’s hair in one clammy, shaking hand. His tongue works the underside of his cock as he fits more into his mouth, and Scully was right, he is way too good at this. 

Scully curses under them, and only then does Dieter notice she’s touching herself as Mulder keeps pumping into her with a shaky, stilted rhythm. 

“So good, Mulder.”

His responding moan turns into a whimper as Dieter’s prick slides across the back of his tongue and hits his throat. 

“Fuck, yeah, so good,” Dieter agrees. 

It’s more than good. It’s incredible, unbelievable. He watches Mulder’s shiny, puffy lips wrapped around him, so in awe of how gorgeous he is. His pretty eyes are closed, half concentration and half bliss as he slides in and out of Scully’s dripping cunt. 

It takes him a while to find a rhythm that works, but when he finds his groove he fucking finds it. Of course he’d be good at this, too. He fucks in and out of Scully once, twice, and then sinks his mouth down as far as he can on Dieter’s cock (all the fucking way— Jesus christ) and holds there while he pumps in and out of her some more. 

And Dieter’s so, so torn. He wants to be good for Scully, wants to challenge Mulder for her and keep up the show. He wants to hang on so she can crumble as she watches her partner taking and receiving so perfectly at the same time.

But he wants to be good for Mulder too. He wants to come in his mouth and give him the satisfaction of satisfying. He wants to let Mulder prove to Scully how good he is, let him make them both come and writhe under his skill and rapt attention. 

And it’s like Scully can sense it. With her free hand, she reaches up and cups his balls. It makes his fucking toes curl, makes him cry out her name and slam his eyes shut to stave it off. He’s being tagged teamed by the objects of some of his earliest sexual fantasies and it takes him biting his lip so hard he draws blood to keep it together. 

He realizes the noises he’s making are borderline embarrassing. He’s mewling and gasping and whimpering as she squeezes and strokes, as her fingers meet Mulder’s lips every time he takes him deep. He’s shaking with the effort it takes to not fuck Mulder’s mouth. And he’s sweating, and he hopes to god it doesn’t start to trickle down and land on Scully’s blissed-out face.

And then it doesn’t much matter, because those dainty fingers and well-kept nails travel back, across his taint, and press. 

“I can’t— I can’t, oh my god.”

Mulder hums around his cock in an echo of the noise Scully makes under him. He’s teetering on the edge, tensed up, out of his mind as Scully massages that spot and Mulder swirls his tongue around the head of his cock. 

And in sync, like they always are, in a way that takes him completely off guard but should be absolutely predictable, they unravel him. 

Mulder takes him down his throat and swallows, and the pad of one of Scully’s fingers taps his entrance, and he’s done. 

He might scream, if he’s being honest. There was never any hope for a warning, the way they ganged up to play him like a fucking fiddle. Mulder groans as the first explosive spurt of Dieter’s cum shoots down his throat. He pulls back as Dieter continues to spill with each spasm of his muscles, as he tries but fails to suck Scully’s finger up inside him. He writhes and curses and clenches Mulder’s hair a little too tight as he works through his orgasm. 

Mulder dutifully collects every last drop, extremely intent on keeping it from spilling down across Scully’s face. He is such a good boy for her. Mulder whimpers when she tells him so in her breathy, sexy way she does. His hips stutter inside of her just as Dieter slips from his swollen lips. 

He doesn’t get reprieve yet, though. Mulder’s long, lean body arches up, and his arm reaches to grab a fist full of Dieter’s hair and tug and oh, god, he might just come again.

Their lips crash together, and before Dieter can think of how metallic the taste is, Mulder’s pushing his own load into his mouth forcefully. Dieter takes it all, sucks it down and swallows as he pants against Mulder’s mouth. 

Then he thanks him, and he thanks Scully, over and over with baited breath until he collapses to the side of them, completely spent and overstimulated. 

“You did so good,” he hears Scully say. 

Only she’s not talking to him. 

She’s got both her hands on Mulder’s face. Her lips just brushing against his own as she whispers. He watches her hike her legs up to wrap around Mulder’s waist, watches Mulder sag into her so he’s plastered against her front. 

“Scully,” Mulder whines. 

“Harder, Mulder. Make me come.”

He kisses her one last time before he buries his face in her neck and obeys, pulling nearly all the way out of her before driving back in. She’s really vocal now, now that she has Mulder’s undivided attention, now that he can focus on fucking her steadily and deep and fast.

Her head is thrown back and she looks so fucking beautiful. Mulder should be looking at her, shouldn’t miss a moment of the way she looks as he’s making her fall apart. But Dieter can’t blame him, or the concentrated, almost pained look he has on his face that’s just peeking out under her chin. 

It’s crazy how she seems to be fucking him from under all his weight, but she’s doing exactly that. Her toned legs pull him into her, her hips arching to meet his, so frantic and hot. One of her hands is leaving red marks down his back and the other one is petting through his hair, scraping his scalp and pulling so many gorgeous noises from him. 

Dieter couldn’t look away if he tried. His spent cock is twitching, trying it’s damndest to steal what little blood is left in his brain. He wants to help them along, maybe take Scully’s nipple into his mouth, but they’re both crushed under Mulder’s body in a way Dieter’s extremely jealous of. He could touch Mulder, could grab his pert little asscheek and squeeze. But he resigns to the sidelines instead, lets them share this intimate moment with only the intrusion of his eyes and heavy breathing. 

It’s over pretty quickly, anyway. Mulder starts babbling again, a great fucking look on him, there where he’s hidden in the pale crook of her neck. 

“Please, Scully. Come for me— I wanna make you come. I wanna be good, let me make you feel good.”

And she’s grinding her hips up as her back arches off the bed, no doubt catching her swollen clit on that enticing patch of wiry curls above his prick. She’s panting and gasping and then she’s shouting.

“Don’t stop, don’t stop, Mulder, oh my god! So good, good boy— I’m gonna come—”

And she does. Beautifully. She tenses up and then she shakes, convulsing under him, around him. She moans and mumbles through it, with her eyes shut tight and her cute little nose all scrunched and her mouth hanging open. 

It’s so beautiful that she outshines Mulder. Dieter barely even catches his groans, the curses under his breath as his hips stutter and grind into her. They both ride it out for a while, it’s like it’s never going to end. They writhe against each other and Mulder’s panting into her mouth as she tries her best to kiss his open lips. Their rhythm takes forever to slow, and even longer to come to a stop. 

It’s better than anything Dieter ever could have imagined. He’s already half hard again, just watching them be together, and that fact only makes him want to leave, disappear, let them play this out without some stranger in their bed. 

But christ he wants to stay and watch just as bad. 

Their eyes flutter open at the same time, and the smiles on their faces are as nauseating as they are precious. Scully looks like the cat that got the cream, and Mulder has the audacity to look sheepish. 

“I uh—” Mulder’s voice cracks, and he clears his throat, “I didn’t pull out.”

Scully giggles. 

“I noticed.”

He huffs, and she smooths his sweaty hair from his forehead.

“I’m on the pill.”

Mulder sighs. 

“That’s— that’s good.”

Idiots, Dieter thinks. The situational irony is off the charts. His huff alerts them both, snaps them out of their little bubble to look over at him. 

He opens his mouth to say something but nothing comes to mind. Scully gives him an amused little smirk and reaches over to pet his hair. 

“You were so good,” she muses. 

He shivers at her words and her fucked-out gaze. 

Mulder shifts on top of her, and they both gasp a little noise when he slips out of her, but they’re both focused on him. 

Mulder looks him up and down and for a moment he isn’t sure if he’s about to kick him out of bed or kiss him within an inch of his life. 

He does neither, it turns out. Instead he holds the side of Dieter’s face in his big, sweaty palm and it’s so soothing that he closes his eyes and leans into it. His thumb strokes Dieter’s cheek while Scully plays with his hair and he could die happy here. 

“Yeah man, thank you. That was good— you were good.”

Dieter’s eyes open wide at that. They’re both looking at him with fondness— appreciation. His chest swells with a heavy feeling just as his eyes begin to sting. 

“Thank you,” he whispers. 

He just barely catches the confused looks on their faces before he hides his own, rolling over into his stomach to let his pitiful tears fall into the blanket below him. Scully ruffles his hair with a sympathetic coo and Mulder pats him on the back of his heated neck before he hears rustling and feels the bed shift. 

“Oh my god.”

Scully’s voice sounds horrified. For a quick moment, his tiny little pea brain thinks of Queequeg— is he alright, did he get out while they were occupied?

“What the hell?”

Mulder’s voice sounds much more amused. 

Confused, Dieter wipes his wet eyes in what he hopes is an inconspicuous move before he looks over his shoulder at them.

Scully and Mulder are both standing at the foot of the bed, looking equal parts mortified and puzzled. And they’re staring at Dieter’s bare ass. 

His bare ass that he now remembers is tattooed. Tattooed with Mulder and Scully’s face on each cheek, respectively. 

“Oh, ha— yeah. Maybe that could have proved it faster?”

His face feels hot. He’s had these asscheek tattoos for so long he sometimes forgets about them. He was young and drunk and high when he got them, but they still hold up. Full color portraits of his favorite FBI agents. 

“What do the words say?” Scully asks. 

Mulder takes one for the team and leans in closer to Dieter’s ass, and he wonders if his blush goes all the way to his buttcheeks. 

“Mine says the truth is out there, and yours says I want to believe.”

Dieter lets out a nervous chuckle and shifts, a little scrutinized, a little embarrassed, a little bit turned on at the way Mulder’s gaze settles over his body.

“When did you get these?”

“1998, right after the movie came out.”

“There’s a movie?”

“Two, actually.”

Scully shakes her head and looks from Mulder to Dieter’s butt, back and forth a few times. 

“I’ll give you this one, Mulder. Only because there’s no lake monster for you to boast about.”

Mulder preens, a satisfied smirk settling on his handsome face. 

“Finally,” he and Dieter say at the exact same time. 

She rolls her eyes. 

“Brag about it in the morning. I’m tired— and my bed’s clean,” she throws her voice over her shoulder as she leaves the room. 

Dieter stays put. His ankles roll around in an attempt to hide his hesitation. He stares at the empty doorway and avoids Mulder’s lanky form. 

“You coming, Doc Brown?”

He’d be stupid not to follow like an eager pup. 

They all nestle into Scully’s bed. She’s in the middle, wrapped up in blankets, and the guys take either side of her. Dieter rests his head on her naked breast as she kisses Mulder goodnight, as Mulder’s fingers intertwine with his own over her smooth stomach. Their pillow talk lulls him to sleep and he goes to bed happy for the first time in years.

He wakes up alone, on his couch, in his own clothes, with his face smashed against his open laptop. 

A dream. It must have all been a crazy, weed and hormone induced dream. Best dream he’s ever had. He sighs, scratches his head and takes in his surroundings. 

Everything’s normal, exactly how he left it. Except, when he moves to his bedroom to mourn the loss of the day he never had, he sees a red and white trucker’s hat on his nightstand. 

Show us your bobbers