#that would be a completely different story
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I actually made an alien species that did this, for a project I never ended up writing.
They were an intensely social species that lived in sibling groups of six to twelve members, all born together. From birth, each sibling group would develop their own incredibly complicated language that used sound and pheromones to communicate pretty much everything they were thinking and feeling to each other. This language quickly grew complicated enough that no other group would be able to fully understand it (though it typically shared characteristics with their parents’ language, which allowed for some limited mutual understanding between related sibling groups - which helped prevent inbreeding with close relatives). The result of this constant communication was that each sibling group acted as pretty much a single unit, completely in sync with each other.
However, they still needed to communicate with other sibling groups for trading and mating and negotiations and such. For this they used a language that resembled synchronized dance, basically a whole body sign language. There were different dance languages ‘spoken’ in different regions.
Unlike humans who conceptualize pretty much everything as stories, this species conceptualized everything in terms of maps (including position in time). I.e. instead of “A hit B with a rock” it would be something like “rock proximate to A, rock path vector (rapid movement) (intentionality modifier), rock coincident with B, injury on B [distress pheromone]”.
Here’s what they looked like:
For as popular as the idea of a "hivemind" is we never talk about how it doesn't exist in nature. There's no animal colony that connects and controls all its members through a psychic connection. Even bees, the eponimous hivemind, communicate by pheremones and, more importantly, interpretive dance. My point is when are we going to get a movie about an intensely organized alien race that mainly communicates via sick dance moves, why are we sleeping on this.
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If someone criticizes something, it doesn't mean that they hate it. It also works the other way around. If you like something, it doesn't mean that it's done well from an objective point of view.
I love Jinx. Her design, her story, her personality, her character arc... I was just fascinated by her. Jinx has become one of my favorite characters in media in general. It was the continuation of her story that I was waiting for the most.
Jinx is still my favorite character in season 2. I love almost every scene with her. How she did Sevika's arm and the subsequent fight with the Smeech, the fight with Vi in Act 1, the prison break, search for Vander in the mines, epic appearance during the battle against Noxus.
I got a lot of positive emotions while watching s2 and especially during Jinx's appearance on the screen. But… an emotional response and objective assessment are two different things. And objectively, Jinx's character in season 2 is OOC and poorly written.
Removing very importand part of her story and personality. Her mental issues almost completely disappear. This is a very important aspect of her character. And no, Isha's presence and a "more favorable environment" would not heal her, the whole 2nd act is completely unrealistic and looks stupid, since all her problems with her mental health were magically solved off-screen;
Irrelevant piece of plot. Her arc of "Zaun symbol" passes by her - she becomes a symbol by accident, ignores the consequences and directly encounters all this revolutionary mood only during Isha's saving from Stillwater (at the same time saving her followers - an indirect action, not a purposeful one). So this arc is kinda about her, but she doesn't seem to participate in it herself, and it ends with literally nothing (like the whole Zaun revolution);
Making her more appealing to wider audience. Her hatred of Piltover and Caitlyn just disappeared. Yes, while she was with Vi in the mines she said "piltie goons who murdered mom and dad," but… that's all? Jinx doesn't kill a single enforcer in the entire 2nd season (although, for example, she could have in Stillwater) and tells Caitlyn "I didn't know your mother was there." Let me remind you that Jinx literally giggled in s1 when she killed a dozen enforcers during gemstone kidnapping, killed enforcers on the bridge without any care, she hated Caitlyn fiercely because she "stole" her sister from her, and she couldn't not know that Cassandra was a councilor. It isn't showed how and why she changed her opinion and this is important thing to her character, you can't explain such change with microexpressions or parallels;
Unrealistic happy family reunion. The reunion of Jinx, Vi, and Vander is a spectacular moment from Disney. Do you remember how Jinx reacted when Vi returned? Yes, she was happy but as soon as she spotted Cait she freaked out and immidiately thought that Vi betrayed her. Imagine what would happen if her supposedly dead - bc of her btw - father had returned and now looks like some animal;
Silco mattered much more to Jinx. A very "subtle" replacement of Silco for Vander in the role of father (Jinx calls him father, sniffs Vander's jacket and not Silco's), although Silco played probably a bigger role in this? And Jinx remembers about him like 2 times? Although it's been about 7-10 years since Vi's "death" in season 1, Jinx was still triggered by just a similar appearance. Apparently, Silco wasn't that important to Jinx (which is not true); I could still keep talking about Jinx, but let's leave it at that.
I love Jinx even in season 2. I like watching scenes with her. But my emotional attachment doesn't stop me from seeing that Jinx's character in s2 is not a continuation of Jinx's character of the end of s1. Her image is broken, the arcs are not completed, the relationships with other characters are poorly written.
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isolation caved in, i adore you; the sound of your skin
synopsis: you and minjeong get caught up in a dating scandal — all along, she realises she has been in love with you.
warnings: flufffff
w/c: 3k+
a/n: another short story…it’s 2:30am and i couldn’t really sleep.
✧・゚: *✧・゚:*
the faint buzzing of your phone on the nightstand jolted you awake, the sound cutting through the quiet of your small apartment; the dim light from the screen cast shadows across the room as you reached for it, rubbing the sleep from your eyes.
minjeong’s name lit up on display, accompanied by a string of missed calls that made your stomach twist with unease.
she never called like this, not unless something was wrong.
“hello?” your voice came out rough, still thick with sleep, as you pressed the phone to your ear.
there was silence for a moment, save for the faint sound of her breathing on the other end. you sat up straighter, the worry bubbling up in your chest.
“mindungie?” you tried again, softer this time. “what’s going on? are you okay?”
her reply was a shaky inhale, followed by a soft sniffle that made your heart drop. “i’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “i didn’t want to bother you.”
“you’re crying,” you said, your voice laced with concern. “don’t apologise, i’m here.”
another pause, heavy and suffocating. then, in a voice so small it was almost inaudible, she said: “i’m in another dating scandal.”
your chest tightened at her words. she had faced scandals before — being in the public eye in one of the most popular girl groups in the world meant she was no stranger to baseless rumours and invasive speculation but hearing her cry over it was completely new.
“what’s sm doing about it this time?” you asked, already trying to piece together a plan in your head. “aren’t they handling it?”
“they want me to take a hiatus,” she said bitterly, her voice trembling. “alongside my recent surgery; they think it’s the best way to let things settle, but it’s not just about me this time. it’s affecting other people…people who don’t deserve this.”
your heart ached at the frustration in her voice and the way she sounded so defeated. you hated this; hated how the world wouldn’t leave her alone, wouldn’t let her live without dissecting every moment of her life.
“it’ll settle down,” you reassured gently, even though you weren’t sure if you believed it yourself. “it always does. people will move on to the next thing soon enough.”
“not this time,” she mumbled, her voice quieter now, tinged with something close to despair. “this one’s different.”
you frowned, the weight of her words sinking in. “what do you mean? who are they saying you’re with?”
there was a long pause, the kind that made your chest tighten with dread. you could hear her breathing, uneven and shallow, as if she was trying to muster the courage to answer.
finally, in a voice barely above a whisper, she said, “you.”
the word hung in the air and for a moment, you weren’t sure you’d heard her correctly.
“me?” you repeated, making sure you heard correctly.
“yeah,” she said, letting out a bitter, shaky laugh. “they’ve got all these photos…ones from when we were kids and some from the last time i visited busan. they’re saying we’ve been secretly dating for years.”
your mind raced as her words sank in. you thought of all the moments the two of you had shared, ones that were so innocent but now felt heavy under the weight of her confession.
the time she’d visited you at the restaurant, laughing as she stole bites of your food; the long walks along haeundae beach, where she’d tease you about how much slower you’d gotten since you were kids.
moments that had always felt like yours alone — twisted into something you hadn’t prepared for.
“that’s ridiculous,” you replied firmly, though your voice wavered just slightly. “they’re just making things up like they always do. anyone who knows us would know it’s not true.”
“it’s not about what’s true,” she added, her voice breaking again. “it’s about what they can make people believe. and they’ve done a good job. it looks…convincing.”
your stomach twisted at her words, the dread settling deep in your chest. “have you looked at it?”
“yeah,” she admitted, her voice barely audible. “and it’s bad. really bad.”
you clenched your jaw, anger and protectiveness bubbling up inside you. “minjeong, you know none of this matters, right? the people who care about you, the people who know us, you — they won’t believe it.”
“but it’s not just about me,” her voice trembled. “it’s about you, too. they’re saying things — terrible things about you, digging into your life. our lives in busan. i didn’t want this for you.”
you’d always known the risks of being close to her, of staying a constant in her life even after she became a star but you never imagined being dragged into her world like this; exposed in a way that felt so violating.
“i don’t care what they say about me,” you insisted, though the knot in your stomach told a different story. “what matters is you. we’ll get through this. we always do.”
she let out a shaky breath, her voice softer now. “please don’t look it up,” she begged. “it’ll only hurt you, and i don’t want that. promise me, please.”
the curiosity was already gnawing at you, but the desperation in her voice was enough to make you falter.
“i’ll try,” you answered eventually, though you weren’t sure if you could keep that promise. “but you’re not alone in this, okay? you don’t have to carry it all by yourself. and you’ve done nothing wrong.”
she didn’t respond right away, but you could hear her breathing slow slightly, as if your words had brought her even the smallest bit of comfort.
“can i come over?” she asked after a moment, her voice small and tentative. “i’m back in busan for a week or two.”
“of course,” you said without hesitation. “you can stay as long as you need.”
“thank you,” she whispered and for the first time since the call started, her voice carried a faint trace of relief. “i’ll be there in a minute, see you, y/n.”
“okay,” you hummed with a smile. “be safe.”
when the call ended, you set your phone down and leaned back against the headboard, staring at the faint glow of the streetlights outside your window. your mind was a storm of thoughts — worry for her, anger at the situation…and a quiet, nagging fear about what this would mean for the fragile boundary you’d built between friendship and the feelings you harboured for years.
as much as you hated to admit it; a small selfish part of you felt the weight of her words differently. they thought she was in love with you. and no matter how false the rumour was, it struck a chord in you that you tried to bury a long time ago.
✧・゚: *✧・゚:*
the small kitchen was quiet except for the soft clink of the spoon against the teacup as you stirred the honey into the warm chamomile tea. the warm light above the stove cast a faint glow on the countertop, highlighting the steam rising from the mug.
on the side, you’d set out a small plate of chocolates — the mint chocolate ones she always liked. it wasn’t much, but it was all you could think of in the middle of the night, your hands moving on autopilot.
your mind drifted, as it often did when it came to her. minjeong. winter. her name alone carried a weight in your chest that you’d grown used to over the years but never quite knew how to handle.
you have loved her for as long as you could remember, though you’d never dared to say it out loud — not to her, not even to yourself most days.
it was easier to keep it buried, to cherish the friendship you had without risking everything by wanting more. but now, it felt like the fragile balance you’d built was falling apart.
this scandal, these rumours — they were forcing everything to the surface and it terrified you.
what if she believed it? what if she looked at you and saw the truth you’d been hiding all this time? worse, what if it ruined everything?
the thought of losing her was unbearable.
resting your hands on the counter to steady yourself, you heaved out a sigh. the fear clawed at you; relentless and unyielding. you didn’t want her to think there was any truth to the rumours or make her feel uncomfortable around you. all you wanted was to protect her.
your gaze drifted to your phone on the counter, the curiosity too strong to ignore. she’d begged you not to look, but your fingers moved before you could stop them, typing your name and hers into the search bar.
almost instantly, the top result caught your eye — a youtube link with over a million views. the title read: aespa winter and y/n: secret love through the years.
your stomach dropped as you hesitated, then tapped on the link. the video began playing, a soft piano melody accompanying a slideshow of photos.
the first few were ones you recognised: pictures from your childhood, back when you and minjeong were just kids running around the streets of busan; they were harmless, ones you’ve shared to the public.
then came the more recent ones and your breath hitched. you didn’t even know where the fans had found these photos, but they all told the same story.
the two of you, close and comfortable, looking at each other like no one else existed. in every frame, your gaze lingered on her like she held the universe in her hands.
and then came the details — the matching necklaces, the ones you’d ordered from japan for her 21st birthday, customised with her initials and a small star charm. the video even included clips of minjeong talking about you in interviews, her voice warm and full of affection as she called you her rock, her safe place.
it was overwhelming and your chest tightened with a mix of emotions — fear, longing, guilt. you hadn’t realised how obvious your feelings were, how much they’d been captured in fleeting moments you thought were private.
you closed the video quickly, the knot in your throat threatening to choke you. you couldn’t let her see the truth, not like this.
a sudden, soft knock at the door startled you, pulling you out of your thoughts. your heart jumped as you turned towards the sound. wiping your hands on your toy story pyjamas, you walked to the door and opened it slowly.
there she was.
minjeong stood in the hallway, her small frame wrapped in an oversized hoodie, the sleeves hanging past her hands. a black hat and mask covered most of her face, but her red and swollen eyes were unmistakable.
she looked utterly exhausted and before you could say a word, she stepped inside and crashed into you, her arms wrapping tightly around your waist as she buried her face in your shoulder.
her body trembled as she started crying again, her muffled sobs breaking whatever composure you’d managed to hold onto.
“i’m so sorry,” she choked out between breaths, her voice cracking. “i’m so, so sorry.”
you froze for a moment, overwhelmed by her sudden closeness, but then your arms moved on instinct, holding her tightly.
“hey,” you whispered, your voice soft and steady, though your heart was racing. “it’s okay. you don’t have to apologise.”
“it’s not okay,” she sobbed, her words coming out in gasps. “you don’t deserve this and i don’t know how to fix it.”
you closed your eyes, resting your chin gently on the top of her head. “we’ll figure it out,” you reassured, your voice firm despite the storm inside you. “you’re not alone in this. i’m here.”
she clung to you like a lifeline, her sobs slowly quieting as you held her and closed the door behind you. the scent of her floral shampoo filled your senses, grounding you in the moment. you didn’t know how long you stood there but you didn’t care. all that mattered was her and the promise you’d made to be there, no matter what.
when she finally pulled back, her face was flushed, her eyes red and puffy. she wiped at them with her sleeve, looking small and vulnerable in a way that made your chest ache.
“thank you,” she murmured, her voice hoarse. “for everything.”
you shook your head, offering her a small, reassuring smile. “you don’t have to thank me, mindungie. just…come sit on the couch. i made us some tea.”
her lips twitched into the faintest of smiles; trailing behind you. her presence filled the space with a warmth that was both comforting and heart-wrenching.
as you handed her the cup of tea and watched her take a small sip, you couldn’t help but wonder how long you could keep the truth hidden — how much further you could pretend you weren’t in love with her when every moment like this made it harder to breathe.
✧・゚: *✧・゚:*
the cup, her favourite one; chipped and its colours fading, now sat on the coffee table as she curled up at the far end of your small couch; knees drawn to her chest, her oversized hoodie drowning her small frame. the moonlight streamed through the half-drawn curtains, bathing the room in a soft silver glow.
you just sat beside her, unsure how to navigate the weight of her silence.
finally, she broke it. “i don’t care what happens to me,” she said softly, her voice trembling just enough to make your chest ache. “but you…i’m worried about you.”
you blinked, taken aback. “me?” you said, your voice quiet. “you don’t have to worry about me.”
“how can i not?” she replied, her eyes locking with yours, wide and filled with worry. “they’re going to dig into your life, say horrible things about you. i can’t stand the thought of you getting hurt because of me.”
you sighed, leaning back against the couch. her concern was touching, but unnecessary. “minjeong, i’ve lived my whole life being just another face in the crowd. no one’s ever cared enough about me to say anything, let alone horrible things. i can handle it.”
“you don’t know what it’s like,” she muttered, her voice barely above a whisper. “you don’t know how cruel people can be when they think they know your story.”
“maybe i don’t, but i know this much: i can handle petty comments from strangers. what i can’t handle is seeing you like this. so don’t waste your energy worrying about me, okay?”
her lips trembled and for a moment, you thought she was going to cry again. instead, she looked away, her blonde hair falling messily into her face.
“you’re too kind, you know that?” she began softly. “sometimes i think you’re too good for me.”
you wanted to laugh at the absurdity of her words, but the vulnerability in her voice stopped you. before you could respond, she turned back to you, her gaze hesitant. “can you…can you hold me?” she asked shyly, her voice almost timid. “just for a while?”
your breath got caught in your throat, but you nodded, shifting closer to her on the couch. she leaned into you, her head resting against your shoulder as her body relaxed against yours. you wrapped your arms around her gently, feeling the warmth of her against you and the steady rise and fall of her chest.
the moonlight caught her features, highlighting the soft curve of her jaw, the delicate slope of her nose, the way her messy blonde hair framed her face.
even like this — tired, vulnerable, with tear-streaked cheeks and swollen eyes, she was breathtaking.
your fingers found their way to her hair, running through the strands gently and you felt her sigh against you, a soft, contented sound that made your heart ache.
“sometimes,” she murmured, her voice muffled against your hoodie, “i wish i wasn’t famous. i wish i’d chosen a normal life, stayed here in busan. with you.”
your heart squeezed at her words, but you forced yourself to keep your tone steady. “you were meant to be a star, minjeong,” you said softly. “you’ve always been destined for it. even when we were kids, you had this…this light about you. people were always going to notice.”
“but i didn’t want them to notice this,” she said, her voice laced with bitterness. “i didn’t want them to hurt you.”
you didn’t know what to say to that, so you stayed quiet, your fingers continuing their soothing rhythm through her hair. her words, though, lingered in your mind, intertwining with thoughts you’d been trying to suppress all night.
what would it be like, you wondered, if she truly felt the same way about you? if the rumours weren’t just rumours but a glimpse into something real?
you’d spent so long convincing yourself that she was out of reach — that her world was too far removed from yours for anything more than friendship.
what could you even possibly offer her? your simple life, a tiny apartment and a small restaurant?
there was nothing about you that could ever impress her, nothing that could compare to the glitz and glamour of her world.
and yet, here she was, leaning against you, seeking comfort in your arms. it felt too good to be true and you hated the way your heart clung to the moment, desperate to believe it meant something more.
“what are you thinking about?” her voice broke through your thoughts, soft but curious.
you froze for a moment, your hand stilling in her hair. “nothing.”
she pulled back just enough to look up at you, her face still close enough that you could see the faint shimmer of tears in her eyes. “don’t lie to me,” she muttered, her tone gentle but insistent. “you’ve got that look on your face, like you’re a million miles away.”
you hesitated, unsure how much to tell her. your mind raced for an excuse, something lighthearted to distract her, but the weight of her gaze made it impossible to lie.
“i was just…thinking about us,” you admitted quietly, your voice barely above a whisper. “about how different our lives are. and how…how lucky i am to still have you in mine even though you’re a big star now.”
her expression softened, and for a moment, you thought you saw something flicker in her eyes; something you couldn’t quite place. before you could dwell on it, she leaned back into you, resting her head against your chest this time.
“you’re not lucky,” she smiled. “i am.”
her words settled over you like a blanket, warm and comforting, yet heavy with meaning. you didn’t know what to say, so you stayed silent, holding her with your eyes closed as the moonlight bathed the room in its quiet glow.
✧・゚: *✧・゚:*
the soft chirping of birds filtered through the open window, mingling alongside the morning sun spilling into the room. the first thing you noticed as you stirred awake was warmth — minjeong’s warmth, her body pressed close to yours, her head nestled against your shoulder, an arm draped across your waist and her soft breaths tickled your neck.
you froze, your heart immediately racing as the situation fully sank in. it had been years since you’d been this close to her — the space you’d carefully maintained between you was gone and the intimacy of the moment made your chest tighten with equal parts longing and fear.
as your eyes fluttered open, her blonde hair was the first thing to greet you, falling into her face in strands that glowed golden in the morning light. her cheeks were slightly flushed, lips parted ever so slightly as she remained lost in sleep. she looked peaceful, so beautiful.
for a second, you let yourself admire her.
then reality hit and panic crept in. this was too close, too much. you couldn’t risk her realising your true feelings as you carefully shifted, trying not to wake her, but your movements caused her to stir.
her eyes opened slowly, blinking as they adjusted to the light. when they focused on you, a soft smile tugged at her lips.
“good morning,” she mumbled, her voice still laced with sleep.
“morning,” you replied, your voice awkward and stiff as you immediately shifted away, creating a small but noticeable gap between you. “sorry. i didn’t mean to, uh, get so close.”
her smile faltered slightly, her brows knitting together in a small frown. “why are you apologising?” she asked, her tone soft but tinged with confusion.
“i just…i didn’t want to make you uncomfortable,” you sat up, rubbing the back of your neck; heart still racing. “i’ll make us some breakfast.”
before she could respond, you were already on your feet, making your way to the kitchen. she sat up slowly, watching you with a look you couldn’t decipher.
“let me help,” she offered, already starting to move.
“no, no,” you said, turning back to wave her off. “just sit on the couch, okay? i’ve got this.”
she hesitated but eventually relented, settling back onto the couch with a small sigh. pulling out her phone, she began to tap at the screen, though her gaze kept drifting back to you as you moved around the kitchen.
she wasn’t texting anyone, though — not really. instead, she found herself scrolling through the same photos and videos she’d seen the night before, the so-called “evidence” of your supposed relationship. each image showed the two of you at different points in your lives, some familiar, some she didn’t even know existed. but it wasn’t the photos themselves that caught her attention — it was you.
the way you looked at her in every single one of them. it was so obvious now, in a way she hadn’t allowed herself to notice before.
your gaze was always soft, filled with something she couldn’t quite name but felt deeply in her chest. she stared at one photo in particular, a candid shot of you smiling at her during one of her almost weekly visits to busan. the look in your eyes made her heart flutter.
it can’t be, she thought, her heart beating faster as she lowered her phone — but the thought lingered, refusing to leave. she glanced at you, watching as you moved around the kitchen with practised ease, cracking eggs into a bowl and chopping green onions with quick motions.
the smell of something sizzling in a pan soon filled the room and she couldn’t help but think about how natural this felt; waking up to you, watching you prepare breakfast as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
you were so focused, so determined to make everything perfect for her and the thought made her chest tighten.
her phone buzzed in her hand, a message from jimin lighting up the screen.
‘are you sure you and y/n aren’t dating?’
she ignored it, setting the device aside as her attention drifted back to you. her thoughts were a mess, swirling with confusion and a strange kind of hope she wasn’t sure how to name.
you turned then, catching her gaze, and the world seemed to still. her heart skipped a beat as you smiled, holding up a plate.
“breakfast’s nearly ready,” you smiled, the warmth of your voice spreading all the way to her chest. “hope you’re hungry.”
she nodded, her throat feeling tight as she tried to push down the growing emotions threatening to overwhelm her.
“i am,” she managed to say, her voice softer than she intended. “also sleepy.”
and as she watched you turn back to the stove, the realisation hit her all at once, unrelenting and undeniable.
i’m in love with her.
the two of you sat at the small dining table, plates of warm, steaming food in front of you. you made made simple dishes — scrambled eggs, leftover rice and grilled mackerel with a side of kimchi.
it wasn’t extravagant, but she ate it like it was a gourmet meal, a soft hum of satisfaction escaping her as she took her first bite.
“i missed this,” she said, her voice muffled slightly as she chewed. “your cooking, i mean. it’s so much better than anything i get in seoul.”
“don’t let your manager hear you say that,” you teased, grinning as you poured her a glass of water. “they’ll think you’re living off convenience store meals.”
“i practically am,” she admitted with a laugh, her nose scrunching in that way it always did when she found something genuinely funny. “you have no idea how much i’ve missed this.”
the conversation drifted into easy territory, the kind of nostalgic reminiscing that always seemed to happen when you were together. you found yourself laughing as she recounted a time in middle school when she’d gotten detention for climbing onto the school roof to retrieve a kite you’d accidentally let go of.
you shook your head. “you were always such a shy troublemaker, how you ended up as an idol, i’ll never know.”
“what’s that supposed to mean?” she shot back, mock-offended. “i’m responsible now. mostly.”
“sure you are,” you said, smirking. “remember your first boyfriend? what was his name again? jonghoon? jinhoon?”
“it was junghoon,” she corrected, rolling her eyes but unable to hide the small smile tugging at her lips. “and we were, like, twelve. it doesn’t even count.”
“oh, it counts,” you said, leaning back in your chair with a grin. “you were so serious about him. always writing him those sappy little notes.”
“don’t remind me,” she groaned, covering her face with her hands. “i can’t believe i ever thought that was romantic.”
“hey, at least you had a boyfriend,” you said, unable to resist teasing her. “i’ve got nothing to compare to.”
she dropped her hands, her expression shifting into something more curious. “why is that, anyway? is there no one special in your life? i’ve been meaning to ask.”
the question caught you off guard, your smile faltering for just a moment before you quickly recovered.
“if there was, you’d be the first to know,” you said, nudging her foot under the table. “don’t be stupid.”
her expression softened at your words, a small smile playing on her lips, but you weren’t sure why.
trying to lighten the mood, you added with a grin, “though, if you give me jimin’s number, maybe i’ll reconsider.”
her reaction was immediate. her brows furrowed, and her smile disappeared as she stabbed at her rice with her chopsticks.
“you’re kidding, right?” she said, her tone sharper than you expected.
you blinked, taken aback by the sudden shift. “obviously,” you chuckled, but she frowned deeper. “come on, winter. it was a joke.”
“well, it’s not funny,” she muttered, her gaze fixed on her plate.
“why are you getting so worked up?” you asked, tilting your head to study her. “what’s it to you if i joke about jimin?”
she didn’t answer right away, her jaw tightening as she shoved a piece of mackerel into her mouth.
when she finally spoke, her tone was clipped. “it’s just…weird, okay? she’s not even your type.”
“oh, and you know my type now?” you shot back, raising an eyebrow. “you haven’t even see me with any girl.”
she looked up at you then, her eyes narrowing slightly. “yeah, i do.”
the tension between you was palpable, and for a moment, neither of you said anything. you weren’t sure what to make of her reaction — it was so unlike her to get upset over something so small. but then, as you watched her, the realisation began to dawn on you.
she’s jealous, you thought, the idea almost too absurd to entertain.
you decided to test the waters, leaning forward with a small, teasing smile. “minjeong,” you said, your voice light. “are you jealous?”
her eyes widened slightly, but she quickly masked it, looking away with a scoff. “don’t be ridiculous.”
“you’re jealous,” you said, your grin widening. “oh my god, you’re actually jealous.”
“i’m not!” she insisted, her cheeks flushing as she crossed her arms defensively. “it’s just—ugh, forget it.”
her reaction only made you laugh, the tension between you dissolving as quickly as it had appeared. she glared at you, but there was no real heat behind it, and eventually, she let out a small, begrudging laugh of her own.
“you’re impossible,” she said, shaking her head as she picked up her chopsticks again.
“and you’re adorable when you’re mad,” you said without thinking, the words slipping out before you could stop them.
she froze for a moment, her cheeks reddening further and you felt your own face heat up as you realised what you’d said.
but instead of snapping at you, she simply looked at you, her expression unreadable, and for a moment, the air between you felt charged again, heavy with something unspoken.
“just eat your breakfast,” she said finally, her voice softer now and you nodded, your heart still racing as you focused on your plate, wondering what, exactly, had just happened.
✧・゚: *✧・゚:*
the next few days passed in a quiet rhythm that felt almost too perfect to last. mornings were slow and easy, filled with soft conversations over coffee and the occasional sound of minjeong humming to herself as she wandered around your small apartment.
afternoons were spent watching movies, cooking together, or simply lying on the couch; tangled up in blankets and each other.
it felt normal in a way that was disarming, like the two of you had slipped into a version of life where nothing else existed — no dating scandals and pressure, just the comfort of being together.
it scared you how easily you’d fallen into this routine, how much it felt like home. every small touch, laugh, every shared glance seemed to chip away at the walls you’d spent years building around your heart.
and with each passing day, it became harder to ignore the truth you’d buried for so long — you were still in love with her and being this close to her now was both a blessing and a curse.
for her part, she seemed quieter than usual, her gaze lingering on you a little too often, her smiles softer, more hesitant. she hadn’t brought up the scandal again, but you could feel the weight of it hanging over her, a tension that never quite left her shoulders.
one night, you decided to close things out with one of her favourite movies, tenet. she was practically giddy as she set it up, her excitement a stark contrast to the more subdued moments of the past few days.
“you’re going to love this,” she geeked out, her eyes lighting up as she settled onto the couch beside you. “it’s so clever. you have to pay attention, though.”
“you realise you say that about every confusing movie,” you teased, earning a playful shove from her.
two and a half hours later, the credits rolled, and you found yourself lying on your side, facing her. your arm was wrapped loosely around her waist, her head resting against your shoulder. the movie had been a blur of time loops and action sequences, none of which had made any sense to you, but you couldn’t bring yourself to care.
your attention had been more on her than anything else — the way her lips twitched into a small smile during her favourite scenes, the way she unconsciously leaned closer to you as the story unfolded.
“so,” she began, her voice soft and teasing, “what did you think?”
you groaned dramatically, tightening your arm around her waist. “i think i have no idea what just happened.”
her jaw dropped in mock offense and she pushed at your chest. “you’re kidding! how could you not get it? it’s brilliant!”
“oh, i got it,” you grinned. “something about going backwards in time, saving the world and…i don’t know, doing a little dance?”
“you’re impossible,” she muttered, but the smile tugging at her lips betrayed her amusement.
“you’re adorable when you’re frustrated,” you replied without thinking, the words slipping out before you could stop them as you laughed.
her smile faltered, her cheeks flushing slightly as she stared at you, her expression suddenly turning serious.
the laughter that came so easily from you, the warmth of your skin pressed against hers — it all felt too much and not enough at the same time.
she didn’t know when it started. maybe it had been years ago, back when the two of you were just kids, chasing the tide and dreaming of futures that felt so far away. or maybe it was more recent, in the stolen moments when she would visit you between schedules, sitting in your tiny apartment and making her favourite dishes and feeling more at home than she ever did in her dorm.
but tonight, as the credits rolled and your soft laughter filled the quiet, it clicked.
it was you. it had always been you.
the realisation settled over her like a wave, overwhelming and undeniable. you were the missing piece, the thing she had been searching for without even realising it.
the void she’d felt for so long, the ache that no amount of fame or success could fill — it was simply you.
“y/n,” she said softly, her voice tinged with something you couldn’t quite place. “what are we doing?”
your heart skipped a beat, her question pulling you sharply out of the playful banter. “what do you mean?”
“this,” she said, gesturing between the two of you. “us. spending all this time together, acting like…” she trailed off, her gaze dropping to where your arm was still wrapped around her. “acting like we’re more than just friends.”
you swallowed hard, your chest tightening as her words settled over you. “i don’t know,” you admitted. “but i know that i don’t want it to end.”
her eyes flicked back up to yours, wide and searching. “but what about everything else? what happens when i go back to seoul? what happens if people find out about this and they…they ruin your life?”
“minjeong,” you said, your voice steady despite the storm of emotions swirling inside you. “my life isn’t perfect, but it’s mine. and if being with you means dealing with a little chaos, then so be it. i’ve handled worse.”
“you don’t understand,” she said, her voice faltering. “it’s not just a little chaos. it’s people prying into your life, twisting your every word, making you out to be something you’re not. you have a normal life, y/n. i don’t want to be the reason you lose that.”
you reached up, gently brushing a strand of hair from her face. “you’re not going to ruin anything and my life stopped being normal the second you walked into it. and there’s nothing in this world i’d trade you for.”
her breath hitched at your words, her gaze searching yours as if trying to find some hint of doubt. “but what if it’s not enough? what if i’m not enough?”
“you’re everything,” you said without hesitation, your words filled with a sincerity that left no room for doubt. “you always have been.”
her lips parted as if to respond, but no words came. instead, she watched you with so much adoration in her eyes and closed the small distance between you, her lips brushing against yours in a kiss that was as hesitant as it was certain.
it was soft and gentle, like the answer to a question neither of you had dared to ask.
you responded instinctively, your hand moving to the back of her neck as you deepened the kiss, pouring years of unspoken feelings into the moment. her fingers tangled in your hair and her body melted against yours as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
when you finally pulled back, your foreheads pressed together, you could feel her breath against your lips, warm and shaky.
“i think…” she started, her voice trembling, “i think i’ve been in love with you for a long time.”
your heart swelled at her words, tears prickling at the corners of your eyes. “you’re not the only one,” you admitted, your voice breaking slightly. “i’ve hid how i felt for too long.”
“but we’re here now, aren’t we?”
a soft, watery laugh escaped her as she leaned in again, her lips finding yours in another kiss — this one deeper, more certain, like the beginning of something neither of you had dared to hope for.
and in that moment, wrapped in each other’s arms, it felt like the rest of the world could wait.
✧・゚: *✧・゚:*
the end.
#kpop x reader#kpop gg#aespa x reader#kpop imagines#winter x reader#minjeong x reader#winter#heliooosss#aespa imagines
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tw: sentimental af
it's been a year now since I started writing and posting fanfics after years of reading them. it started as a way to cope with the holidays, incoming heartbreak and general weirdness around mid-twenties. it was suppose to be just a holiday thing
flash forward a year - a fuckin year! and here we are, i write for pleasure regularly and it's become one of my favorite things to do. there is about a 1k of you following, which is MENTAL and i still can't wrap my head around that
this is a homage to my first completed story, with all of it's awkwardness and all. i've grown to love it so much.
this is a thank you to all of those who comment, like and everything - i never thought that connecting with other humans in this way would bring so much joy. F1 community, even with its flaws and fights, is a place filled with talented and skilled writers and I keep finding works that put me in different dimensions with how good they are!
happy holiday to those who celebrate (and to those who cope)
epilogue p2 coming tonight or tomorrow
thank you
That one Christmas flight
summary: Y/N and Lando Norris are seated next to each other on a long flight. Innocent little Christmas tradition that Y/N does every year brings them just a little too close.
warnings: fluff, one-shot (whops a lie!), meet cute
Christmas. Y/N felt like an alien walking among people. It was impossible to avoid it. It was present in songs, in decoration, in fashion, online and on the news. Everywhere.
It's not like she was a grinch or anything. Nor was it because of some tragic incident causing trauma. Just pure fatigue from all the logistics and travel connected, which most kids of divorced parents faced every year.
Flying from Japan back to England, from her mother to her father, was a chore that seemed unavoidable. Her mother was kind enough to splurge on first class ticket for her, which her fancy Tokio job allowed. Ever since fours years ago, she continued a tradition that was introduced to her by a fellow Christmas traveller - the most stylish sassy French woman, who often spend the holidays on a plane. She would get herself and who ever was sitting next to her a glass of champagne and chat them up. Y/N has never laughed so much in her life like she did when she met this woman - so she took the tradition as her own.
Lando's plan wasn't to be on a flight from Japan to London on the 24th of December. He had so little time with his family and friends that this secret work trip to the Honda factory was really pushing him into staying with McLaren for the following years and not switching to a different team. This whole situation was like fuel for his current headache.
Y/N second guessed her tradition when a super gorgeous looking boy, who seemed to want anything but to be bothered, was sat next to her. She was used to having older people sitting next to her. Anyway, tradition is a tradition, so she eventually got up to order the classic. She nearly turned back at the thought that this guy was giving off some serious "I'm a dick" vibes, he had barely acknowledged her since she sat down. Luckily, she ignored this feeling.
When a glass of champagne appeared before Lando, he was sure it was a mistake.
"Well, to Christmas," his neighbor toasted. While he thought that she was a rather good looking girl, he was in no mood for a fangirl.
"I'm very sorry, um...I'll be happy to take a photo with you or something, but I am not in the best mood for a interaction with a fan."
She gave him a baffled look.
He continued. "Look, I'll be more than happy to sign anything. Or a photo, just as long you keep between un on which flight you saw me."
Y/N put her glass down, this was a first one.
"First of all, sorry for invading your private time. I have this stupid tradition of having a glass with whomever I'm destined to spend this Christmas flight. Guess I was mistaken. Second of all, I have no fucking idea who you are. So, calm down." She downed half of her glass. Of course this stupid year would include an asshole like this. Oh well.
Lando was confused for a moment and immediately after that he felt like an idiot.
"Apologies," he slowly replied, somewhat baffled. "I thought you were a fan and I'm just not in the mood for that." Y/N rolled her eyes and downed the rest of her champagne. "I'm Lando, by the way."
"Is that a stage name?"
"No, " he laghed. "I think it was a random decision of my mom."
"Interesting. Y/N," she introduced herself, without looking at him.
There was a weird tension in the air. Lando was determined to break it. Y/N was currently casually offended.
"Let me get you another one so that we can have a toast."
"Great, getting drunk is also an option. Hate flying sober," she joked.
Another glass was brought by a smiling flight attendant.
"So, how does this work?" Lando asked. Y/N was a person easily annoyed, however as quickly this came it also ended.
"Fine. There are rules, btw."
"Of course there are."
"Ehm, ehm, " she cleared her throat. "So, this tradition was started by Madame Tatanova and from now on, if you find yourself on a plane on 24th or 25th of December, you need to toast with your fellow neighbor passenger and answer the following: why and for how long-"
"I will have to write this down, I have a memory of a dead chicken."
"-I'm not finished! And then you follow up by your biggest regret and one thing nobody knows. The purpose of this is to gain or pass on wisdom and use the opportunity you'd normally miss by blasting up your headphones." She's done this for four times now, still the introduction was missing the "Madame Tatanova magic". Maybe one day.
"Ok..." Lando was not following yet, but he was keen on doing so. She raised her glasses, as did he.
"Cheers, to Christmas flights."
"Cheers, " he replied and they both sipped their champagne. "Wait, I have a question - what would you do if I did not speak English? Or if I was deaf?"
Lando was being his cheeky self and Y/N was not having it. She answered the question with a look.
"Got it! Anyway...what was the question?"
"Why."
"Why? Why is the sky dark or....?"
"Why are you on this plane."
"I'm trying to get to London from Tokio."
"I swear to god, I will ask to be seated somewhere else, Orlando."
"Lando, actually."
"If you say so..."
"Huuh, I'm going back from a work trip. And since you claim not to know me, I can probably tell you more than I should. Um, imagine I am in a band, right? I'm singing for a band and every few years they change their lead singer, one of the two actually, and I'm a the lead singer who might go to a different band now. But it's not clear yet and super secret actually. So, please keep it to yourself." Lando felt like someone who has just discovered speech and this was the first time he was using it. "Does that make any sort of sense?"
"Sort of I think. So you're cheating on your band?"
"Uhh, I'd say checking out options."
"Remind me never to date guys like you," she joked and immediately regretted that. Y/N was not good at flirting and did not want to appear creepy.
Lando passed on this comment, still not sure if he could trust this girl. "So, what about you? Why?"
"The curse of the divorced parents. One lives in London, the other one in Japan and I'm a package they pass each year," she said rather bitterly.
"Sorry to hear that."
"Yeah. I get to see mom twice a year and it's all always so planned and predictable. I would kill for spontaneity."
"Take me with you next time, I'm sure she'll be surprised." "Yes, she is a big fan of British guys, that's why she divorced one!"
"Great, happy to follow that route!"
Y/N started to relax a bit. This could be good, actually. "Ok, so now. For long are you staying in London, Lando?"
"Only few weeks. Then our music season starts. "
"Yeah, the one with all the singing, of course."
"Yeeah."
Y/N laughed a bit. He was suprisingly easy to talk to.
"So, how long?"
"A week. Then I'm off to Bologna."
"Uuuh, fancy that!"
"Yeah, I'm studying history there."
"Bologna is the one with the old university?" he asked, pretending he has never heard of that.
"No, not really, they just opened. Last year we did not have chairs, because the shipment got delayed," she replied with a dry tone.
"One does always study better while standing. I believe it was Socrates, who said it."
"Oh, yes. They teach you this at the singing music school?"
"Exactly. We were never allowed to sit."
They continued to chat all the way through the airplane dinner, getting few more glasses of champagne during that. Their laughter was interrupted by a flight attendant, who acted on a complaint from a fellow passenger. They both fell asleep watching a movie. Y/N woke up few times in the night and observed the boy next to her. Knowing this was the best Christmas plane encounter she ever had. Lando woke up as well, feeling strangely happy about the fact she was resting her head on his shoulder.
//
"Wait." Lando stopped her at the entrance to customs hall and pulled them both behind a column, so that they could not be seem by bystanders.
"Yes?" she turned to him.
"This might be weird, but can I kiss you?" Y/N looked at the boy in a hoodie standing in front of her, cheeky guy suddenly appearing nervous. He was absolutely gorgeous. She hated the fact he was random guy on a plane to London and not to Bologna.
"Yes. Must be midnight somewhere. So it could be like a New Years thing."
"Yeah. Just an airport thing." With that he kissed her. Just two young people having a little moment of silence. His kiss was a light slow brush on the lips. He cupped her cheek and her hand brushed through his curly hair. First kiss usually does not take long. For a person passing by, this would appear like kiss these two shared a thousand times before.
When they eventually parted, it all seemed a bit surreal.
"We never got to the second part of your Christmas interview," Lando commented.
"Well. Let's say that the one thing nobody knows is that I just kissed a random guy from the plane. And that my biggest regret is that we will never see each other again." For the first time, she was this bluntly honest with somebody who had just kissed her for the first time. It felt intoxicating.
Lando smiled. "See, I knew we had something in common."
Lando was usually not so open with his crushes, if he could even put her in that category.
"Don't worry. I won't search for you online or anything. I want to keep the mystery of Lando alive."
He kissed her once more, before they parted.
//
Their hearts felt a little more heavier than usual on midnight that New Years Eve. Both standing surrounded by their favorite people, yet with the one they would wish to kiss being impossibly far away.
part 2
_________________________
@superlegend216
#lando norris#lando norris x reader#lando norris x you#formula 1#f1 fanfic#f1 imagine#meet cute#ln4 imagine#lando norris fanfic#lando norris fluff#formula 1 fanfic#formula 1 fluff#ln4 x reader#That one Christmas flight
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Soooo…. what ever happened to the puppets from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? And why was Santa such a grumpy bastard?
Well, the answer to that first question ended up being a much more complicated story than it first appeared, even complete with a twist ending. And while researching it, I stumbled across the tale of a forgotten Japanese animation pioneer who revolutionized animation industries in Japan AND China, made a whole bunch of propaganda during WWII and the Chinese Civil War, and then created the Rankin/Bass "Animagic" animation style and animated all those classically American classic stop-motion Christmas classics that we know and love. Tadahito "Tad" Mochinaga (持永 只仁).
That's right, Rankin/Bass was an anime studio!
Born in 1919, Mochinaga was inspired by early Walt Disney shorts to become an animator. Much like Disney, he built Japan's first ever multi-plane camera rig,
Ari-chan (アリチャン, 1941)
before being contracted to make war propaganda.
Ironically at the same time he was working under Mitsuyo Seo (瀬尾 光世) on Momotarou's Sea Eagles (1943)—a delightful picture about a bunch of cute little animals triumphantly bombing the shit out of those fat, stupid Americans at Pearl Harbor—his biggest inspiration was working on his own exciting propaganda cartoons from the exact opposite side of the same conflict.
But it was during his time working under the Chinese Communist Party that he inadvertently popularized stop-motion puppet animation in east Asia.
Tasked with making a puppet film that satirized the Nationalist Party's leader, but also dealing with an extreme shortage of film in the country, Mochinaga realized that if he stiffened the joints of the puppets, posed them manually and shot them frame-by-frame instead, he could use only the exact number of frames necessary.
He would continue to refine that stop-motion style after returning to Japan,
and eventually catch the eye of an American producer, Arthur Rankin Jr, who had just started a studio with his friend Jules Bass.
The story continues in much greater detail in this video, which completely obliterated my other plans for the month, and which I promise, does actually answer the question at the start of this post. I really didn't expect this project to balloon into an epic that spans an entire century, but in order to understand the ending, you have to start at the beginning!
youtube
Seriously though, I think this is the best video I've made yet and you KNOW I spent an absurd amount of time learning 3D modeling/rigging/texturing/animation to make what amounts to just some stylistic icing on the cake, but it's a bit different from what I usually make and youtube can punish you for that so if you do find the video interesting and feel like sharing it with someone you think would also be interested, I will personally show up at your house with an old satchel bursting with deliciously ripe oranges and squeeze all that sweet, sloppy nectar by hand, one-by-one directly into your expectant, gaping maw.
#animation#history#video#mini essay#rankin bass#rudolph the red nosed reindeer#gif warning#stop motion#Youtube
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NSFW - no minors - smut with plot
Plot: You are the campus sweetheart. A high-class, rich girl who's always following the rules. Super kind and friendly to everyone. You are at the top of every class and put your focus and time on studying and family matters, just like you were raised to.
But what happens when you find yourself in one room with the campus troublemaker himself, letting yourself go for the very first time in your life and let him introduce you to a completely new world? A world full of carefree fun, lust, and love, like you never experienced before...
Warnings: bad boy! Sukuna - rich girl! Reader - drug use (Weed) - first time smoking - kinda forced intoxication? (reader is curious but persuaded into it) - shotgunning - making out - inexperienced!reader - sex under the influence - protected sex - markings (hickeys, biting) - multiple rounds - missionary - doggy - cowgirl - getting caught in the act - after care
Word count: 13.438
Might write more chapters to this. Already have a few drafts in the works...
You are skipping over to the boys dormitory after class to work on a project with Itadori, greeting a few people on your way with a polite smile and short small talk about classes, professors and extracurriculars, denying some invitations to parties and movie dates.
When you arrive at the boys' dormitory, you write down your name in the guest book and make your way upstairs. You knock on the door, expecting Itadori to open it, but to your surprise, you are greeted with the face of his roommate.
Sukuna Ryomen. You only heard stories about him, sometimes seeing him lurking around campus with his shady friends. At first, one could think that Sukuna and Itadori are related, but despite their similar features and the hair color Itadori copied, because he thought it was kind of cool, the two of them share no similarities. Sukuna Ryomen just happened to be a lot scarier than the bubbly ball of excitement that was Itadori Yuji.
“He’ll be here in about 20 minutes or so. You can stay or whatever. Doesn’t make a difference to me. If you do stay though, don’t touch anything on the fuckin’ table.” Sukuna said, rubbing his knuckles against the tattoos on his face tiredly.
You timidly walk into the dorm room. "20 minutes isn't that long, I can wait." You smile politely at him, not wanting to give into the temptation of judging a book by its covers.
The room is barely lit, and it was smelling a lot like weed and sweat. You put your stuff down on Itadori's bed before sitting down on it carefully. You look around the room, not knowing what to do now and slightly swinging your feet. Maybe you should have just come back later, you think to yourself.
Sukuna glances at you for a moment as you sit down on Itadori’s bed. Despite you being polite, there was an obvious air of anxiety surrounding you. He just can’t tell if you are anxious about him… or if it was something else. But he did care to find out.
Sukuna’s eyes flicked down to your legs for just a brief moment before he let out a low, tired sigh and took a drag from the joint he held. “You’re one of the teacher’s pet types, ain’t ya?”
Your head whippes around to look at him, your eyes traveling up and down his body for a second before settling on his face. "We aren't allowed to smoke in the dorms. And I'm sure we aren't allowed to smoke THAT at all." You are referring to the weed he is currently consuming, coughing out a little when the smell hits your nose.
He smirks at the way you look at his body, finding it rather humorous. He thought your comment on smoking was cute, a little on the naive side, though. But hey, he preferred it if you were a little oblivious… it would make things more interesting.
“Yeah, well, we aren’t allowed to do a lot of things here, and yet… we still do them.” He takes another drag, letting the smoke waft through the room before exhaling in your direction. A smirk forming on his lips at the way you cough again.
You only scowl in confusion, trying to think about what kind of things he is referring to. Alcohol, drugs, staying out past curfew? Sex? The thought of him doing sexual stuff in this room makes you blush, your eyes darting from him to his bed for a split second. "No, we don't. Not all of us take joy in breaking rules, you know?”
He sees the way you look towards his bed for a brief, fleeting moment. And he chuckles darkly, taking another drag from his joint and slowly exhales before speaking. "Is that right, princess? I find that hard to believe. Breaking the rules is fun… you’re just too much of a goodie-two shoes to take advantage of it."
He looks you up and down again, taking in your features more closely. You are pretty… and shy, too. A delicious combo, he thought to himself.
You let out a scoff at his words. "And what do you want me to do, huh? Be more like you? Go out past curfew to some shitty bars and get drunk on a weekday? Smoke cigarettes and weed the whole day instead of going to classes? Have Sex in a rather… untidy dorm room and get myself an STD instead of studying?"
It is unusual for you to get so worked up over this. Normally, you are able to hold in your emotions better, but you had a stressful week, and he hit a nerve. Yes, you are a ‘goodie-two shoes��� but you didn't really have a choice on that matter. You had family expectations to uphold and are under a lot of pressure. As much as you wanted to, you can't just do whatever you want. It's careless and reckless, and nothing good would come out of it.
Sukuna is surprised by your little fit, but it is rather fun to watch. He lets out another chuckle as you list off everything you don’t do, listening intently and closely to what you say.
“Yeah… basically.” He says bluntly, taking another drag from his joint. “Life’s short, princess. Live it while you can. You’ll never get to experience this time again, y’know?” He smirks at you, taking a few steps forward to close in on the gap between you both.
He is standing right in front of you, towering over you while you sit on Itadori’s bed. His crotch leveling with your face, making your eyes dart down for a moment. Of course, he notices the way your eyes dart down, and he chuckles to himself, a look of wickedness growing on his face.
You look up at him with narrowed eyes, anger, and frustration clearly swirling behind your orbs. "Could you at least not be smoking weed while I am here? When Itadori comes back, we have a project to work on." You grit out through your teeth.
He took another drag from the joint before holding the smoke inside his mouth and taking another small step forward, closing the gap between you both even more now. “Aww… don’t be such a buzzkill, princess. What’s a little weed gonna do? I smoke it all the time, and I’m still fine.” He leaned down a little so he could be closer to your face.
Again, he is blowing his stupid smoke into your face, and you swear, you could already feel your head getting lighter. Was it the anger, or is it possible to get high this quick from just a few secondhand hits?
"Stop doing that!" You are clenching your jaw in frustration. "And clearly, you're not fine. Your brain definitely took damage already, seeing how you act like a defiant child. You are an arrogant ass AND you are trouble, Sukuna. Stop getting me involved with your stupid games. Get another girl for it." You huff out in annoyance after your little rant.
Sukuna chuckles at your comment, enjoying the way you are so easily annoyed and enraged. It was funny seeing you get so worked up over such trivial things, and the way your cute, angry face scrunches up when you are frustrated is like a cherry on top.
He continues to hold another blow of smoke in his mouth while you rant, not letting himself exhale quite yet. And when you finally stop, he slowly begins to speak again. The smoke leaves through his lips and wafts in the air between you. “Aww… and here I was thinking you were playing hard to get, princess.”
You are swatting the smoke away with your hand, biting back another sassy comment. "Just smoke your stuff on your side of the room." You say while pushing him away by his legs.
You crawl up on Itadori's bed and over to the window, opening it. Unknowingly, giving Sukuna a good view of your ass under the short skirt in the process. You try to breathe in some fresh air, your head buzzing like crazy.
Sukuna allows you to push him away, rolling his eyes and taking a step back, but a smirk grows on his face when you crawl over the bed. He doesn’t move from his spot, enjoying the view and watching you intently, taking in the sight of your ass.
He chuckles to himself and takes a couple more drags from the joint before tossing it into an ashtray. He smirks as he speaks. “Careful… don’t want anyone looking up and seeing you, princess. Imagine the talk around campus when you get caught with the troublesome bad boy.”
You just roll your eyes at him, and silence is falling over you two while you wait for Itadori to come back. But he never did. Not after 20 minutes and not after 30 minutes. In the meantime, Sukuna sits on his bed with an amused smile on his face.
He’s watching you, how you sit by the window, and look outside for Itadori every few minutes. He knows damn well that Itadori isn’t coming over. He had sent him a message as soon as he saw your cute little ass, to not come back until way later.
He smirks to himself and sits still for a few good minutes, just watching you as you begin to grow frustrated and worried. “Think he ain’t coming, princess.”
"Stop saying that!" You hiss, looking outside for Itadori again. "Maybe he forgot? Wouldn't be a first..." You mumble quietly to yourself before returning your gaze to Sukuna.
"Are you just going to lounge around your room for the rest of the day? It's Friday. Don't you have anything better to do?” You raise your eyebrows at him, clearly annoyed by his presence. It's his room, and you could just leave, but this project with Itadori was important, and you have to get this done today or otherwise it wouldn't fit into your schedule. Sukuna is usually out partying every fucking day but not today… something about it seems suspicious to you.
He smirks, watching as you grow more and more frustrated as time passes. It is so cute seeing you this way, completely ignorant of the fact that he is the reason Itadori isn’t here. This whole situation is his doing… and he is enjoying every minute of it.
“That’s exactly what I’m gonna do. Laze around and probably get high. And, I don’t know… have a little fun.” He chuckles again, his smirk widening as he looks over your body, his mind obviously thinking something perverted.
You lean out of the window again before closing it. Sitting on your knees on Itadori's bed, you fumble with the hem of your skirt and think about what you should do now.
You scoff at Sukuna's comment. "Of course you would. Is weed the only thing you love in life? If you weren’t so damn irritating, I would honestly feel sad for you.”
Sukuna chuckles again, a little more darkly this time. He took in your pose, sitting on your knees on the bed like a good girl, your skirt riding up just slightly as you fiddle around with it… it is quite a sight to behold, one that he wouldn’t mind getting used to.
He sits up on his bed, leaning back against the wall and crossing his arms behind his head as he watches you on the bed at the other side of the room, a smirk still on his face. “You say it like it’s a bad thing, princess. Weed is fun. You’d know that if you weren’t so… straight-edged.”
His words aren't really registering. Your mind is still focused on how you would be able to finish this project today if Itadori doesn't show up. "Well, I guess I would have to try it to know..." You say absentmindedly.
That catches his attention. His head perks up when you say that, raising an eyebrow in curiosity as he smirks a little. “Oh, yeah? You have to try it, huh? Well… I got plenty of stuff here I could let you try.” He sat up properly on the bed, looking at you intently as he spoke, waiting to gauge your reaction.
You shake your head out of your own thoughts and look at him in disbelief, your face scrunching in confusion. "What? What are you talking about? I would never take this stuff. It messes with your head." You give him another eye roll. "And even if I would ever try smoking, you would be the last person I wanna hit my first blunt with, Sukuna.”
He chuckles, enjoying the way you react to his suggestion. He watches the confusion and disbelief slowly morph onto your cute face, another smirk growing on his own as he speaks again. “Messes with your head?”
He laughs at that, amused by the fact that you didn’t know the first thing to do with marijuana. “Oh come on, princess… it’s not that bad. And I could take real good care of you… you’d never know the first thing about gettin’ high… Let me teach ya.”
"Take care of me, huh?" You raise an eyebrow at the innuendo behind his offer. Your eyes are darting from him to the ashtray, lingering on the remains of the joint he was smoking earlier. You look back at him, a scowl on your face. "You can't even take care of yourself, Sukuna.”
He shrugs his shoulders at your comment. He couldn’t argue with that. You had a point there. He probably couldn’t take good care of himself even if he tried. But you… he’d take real good care of you… At least he liked to think he would.
“Eh, maybe I can’t. But I think I’m good at taking care of… other people. I’m real good with my hands, y’know.” He smirks again, his gaze lingering over your body.
"I would sure hope so, seeing all you do with your fingers is rolling blunts the whole day." You let out an exaggerated sigh. "Stupid Itadori…" You mutter to yourself.
He chuckles at your comment, knowing damn well that you are right. He did spend most of his time rolling things with his fingers.
Then you suddenly stand up and make your way over to his bed, sitting down on it with a huff. Getting more comfortable next to him with your skirt riding up in the process. "So~, how does this work, huh?”
He has to admit, you are looking real cute, the way you hop up from the bed and sit down on his, your skirt riding up, so that a bit more of your thighs are showing. He’s getting more excited and enticed as you sit down beside him, your body so close to his. “Alright, princess, lemme teach ya a thing or two about smokin’. First off, you gotta come closer. You’re too far away for me to teach you properly.”
He just puts his arms around your waist and manhandles you to sit between his legs, your back flush against his chest. "I don't think this is a proper position..." You state quietly but don't make any attempt to actually stop him.
He chuckles as he grabs you and moves you to his liking, his laugh turning to a smirk as he leans forward a little and puts his chin on your shoulder, his lips right next to your ear as he whispers to you.
“Nah… I think it’s the perfect position for… teaching. It’s so I can show you everything real easily, princess.” He wraps his arms around your waist and pulls you even closer to him, basically trapping you in his hold now.
You look over your shoulder at him. Your faces are so close that you can feel his breath against your lips. "And- and what do I do now?" Your voice is barely above a husky whisper, a little bit of curiosity mixed with anxiety and insecurity lying beneath.
He smirks as his face gets closer to your own, staring deeply into your eyes. You look so innocent, so… naive. You have no idea what you are about to get yourself into. “For now? Just relax. It’ll be a small hit at first. Nothin’ too bad, okay, princess?”
He lets go of your waist with one hand, reaching over to the table beside the bed. He grabs a new joint and a lighter, quickly flicking it on and lighting up the end of the blunt.
He takes a hit and lets the smoke hang in the air between you, your nose crinkles when you take in the smell. You reach out to take the joint out of his fingertips, concentrating on not letting it fall down with how nervous you are. Your eyes flicker to his for reassurance before lifting the joint to your lips.
He chuckles as he watches you try to take your first hit. You look nervous and anxious, your hand trembling a little as you take the joint delicately from his hands. He smirks as he gets a good glimpse at you, you're so cute it's almost unfair to do what he had planned.
When you inhale for the first time, you immediately start a coughing fit and look at him over your shoulder with a pout.
He laughs out loud when you start to cough up a storm and takes the joint out of your hands for another hit. “Oh princess… I know you’re not experienced with this but goddamn, you coughed like crazy. C’mon… try again.”
You are still coughing a little bit, letting out a huff of air and denying the joint he holds up for you to take again.. You try to stand up from your position between his legs, shuffling forward and away from him, your hands on his thighs to stabilize yourself as you scoot forward. "Maybe this wasn't a good idea, maybe I should just-"
He chuckles when you start to stand up from your spot, and the feeling of your hands on his thighs made him grow even more excited for what the night could hold. He quickly reaches out and grabs your hips, pulling you back down so that you were sitting between his legs again.
“Nah… I think you should give it another shot, princess. It ain’t gonna get better if you don’t try more than once.” He wraps his arms around your waist again, holding you in place.
You let out a small whine, clearly embarrassed that it didn't work out well the first time. "Sukuna, please~" You look back into his eyes, your pout only intensifying. "Maybe some people are just not born to do this and maybe I am one of those people..."
Your hands instinctively hold onto his forearm, which is securely placed around your waist, for comfort. You don't even notice you are pressing your back into his chest a little more.
He smirks as you whine and look at him, pouting. You look so good, in every sense of the word, it's almost too much to handle. Seeing how embarrassed you are about trying and failing at something was just… adorable. He loves the way you are so helpless… it gives him too much power over you.
When you begin to nuzzle into his chest, he chuckles at how innocent and adorable you are. He holds you just a bit tighter, your little body now trapped against his own. “Nonsense, princess… you’re not a quitter, are you? C’mon… just give it one more try.”
You try two more times, slowly getting better at it, but your lungs are still not used to the smoke. By the third try, you're coughing just a tiny little bit after your hit. Your mind is a little bit fuzzy and dead set on making this work eventually.
"That wasn't too bad, was it?" You look at him with a bright smile full of excitement, clearly wanting him to praise you for getting better.
He chuckles again, enjoying the way you are so determined to keep going. You are doing better each time, and after some time, you are almost able to hold it in without coughing.
He takes the joint out of your hand and takes a hit of it himself before leaning down and blowing the smoke to your lips, watching your reaction as your mind slowly begins to get a little more hazy. “See? You’re a natural, princess… you’re gonna be smokin’ like a pro in no time.”
You had a pleased smile on your face, your eyes crinkling a little, and a blush involuntarily creeps up your cheeks. You already feel more relaxed and lean yourself back against Sukuna. It feels good to just lay in his arms, somehow safe and secure.
"But still not perfect." You huff out. You are a perfectionist and would not give up until you have this down perfectly. "Let me try another!" You exclaim enthusiastically, turning around a little over your shoulder to look at him. His crimson red eyes are beautiful. You never noticed how much they stand out to his usual appearance and get lost in them for a moment before your gaze flickers down to his lips briefly.
He smiles, watching as you begin to relax. He loves the feeling of your body against his own, the way you were so comfortable and trusting with him. He could get used to this very easily.
He raises an eyebrow when you ask to try again, a smirk growing on his face when you turn around and look at him. He watches your eyes flicker down to his lips and back up, and he couldn’t help but bite back a chuckle. It seems like the weed was affecting you…
"How about we try something to help you hold it in, huh?”
"Yes, I wanna!" He couldn't even finish his explanation on what you're going to do when you interrupt him eagerly.
He is shuffling you around like you weighed nothing at all until you are sitting next to him, pressed into his side and your legs now thrown over his lap, your arms automatically go to wrap around his bizeps. You are looking at his every move intensely and waiting for him to tell you what to do next. Letting your eyes roam his figure in the process.
His smirk grows into a smile when your excitement gets the better of you. He couldn’t help but chuckle to himself when you instantly jumped into the position he wanted. You looked so cute and eager, like a puppy ready for a treat. He looked at you intently before speaking, his voice low and deep as he spoke to you. “Now, all you gotta do is open your mouth, and I’ll help you take that hit nice and smoothly…”
You nod your head ‘yes’ frantically, ready for whatever comes next. Or at least you thought so...
He watches as you nod your head, the look of excitement on your face filling him with a sense of pride. You look so willing to do whatever he told you to do, and he loves that about you. He loves how you listen to him like a good girl, how you want to please him. It is so cute and adorable, and it only serves to rile him up more.
His free hand comes up and holds your chin in between his thumb and forefinger, tilting your face up to make you look at him. His thumb runs over your bottom lip, and you comply immediately, parting your lips for him.
Sukuna takes a hit from the joint, leaning in closer and connects your lips in a slow kiss, shotgunning the smoke into your mouth and making you take it. He immediately slips his tongue between your lips, blowing the smoke towards your mouth and making sure to keep the kiss going. No coughing, no interrupting the kiss. Instead, your hand finds the back of his head, returning the kiss more eagerly.
He couldn’t help but smile into the kiss, feeling you return it with just as much enthusiasm, your hand going to the back of his head to pull him closer. He loves how eager you are. It really was too cute.
The kiss keeps going, the smoke slowly going up between you two when you exhale into his mouth. You shuffle into a new position, straddling his lap and sitting on top of him, your lips never parting.
He could feel himself getting more and more worked up the longer the kiss went on, his hands going to your hips and gripping them as you straddle his lap, sitting on top of him now. He couldn’t believe how eager you are, even making the next step on your own accord. You look so cute and adorable, all hazy and happy.
When he finally breaks the kiss and leans his forehead against yours, you are breathing heavily. Your eyes glazed over with the effects of the drug and a lazy smile spreading across your face. "Didn't cough once. I like this method." You whisper against his lips.
He chuckles and smiles against your lips when you tell him you didn’t cough once, looking into your eyes and seeing how clouded they are. You are really beginning to feel the effects now. "No, you didn’t cough at all… you did perfectly.”
You chuckle at his praise, leaning back with one arm still around his neck and the other taking the joint from him. Bringing it to your lips, taking a deep hit, and blowing the smoke straight into his face. Your eyes holding his gaze the whole time. "So… What's the next step?”
He just watches as you lean back, taking the joint from him and lifting it to your lips, taking another hit, and then blowing the smoke directly into his face. It caught him a little off guard, not gonna lie, and he couldn’t deny that it… really turned him on. Especially with the way you looked at him with that cute, hazy expression on your face.
He smirks at your question, his hands gripping your hips a little tighter and pulling you closer to him. "Next? Well... I think you deserve a little reward, don't you? All of this just made me want one thing, and I know you’re gonna enjoy it too.”
You smile at him, taking another hit and connecting your lips in another kiss again, blowing the smoke directly into his mouth. He returns the kiss hungrily, making you moan into the kiss.
The feeling of your lips against his once more, the smoke entering his system as you push it deep into his mouth, causes him to let out a low growl. He happily returns the kiss, his tongue immediately slipping into your mouth, taking in all the smoke you blew into his mouth as he deepens the kiss. He is craving you, wanting to feel more of you, and he wasn’t about to let this little moment go to waste.
He smirks into the kiss as he takes the joint from you, taking one final hit before putting it out in the ashtray on the nearby nightstand. In one swift movement, he flips you over onto your back, now hovering over you on the bed and staring down at you with a hungry and lustful look in his eyes. "Such a good girl, you deserve a nice, big reward, don't you?”
The one hand that isn't still holding onto the back of his neck comes up to trace along the tattoos of his jawline. Your eyes take in his appearance on top of you, the way his eyes are just a shade darker with lust, his jaw clenched because he has to hold himself back, the way his tattoos are standing out against his skin. He looks mesmerizing, and you wonder how you never noticed how handsome he really is before.
He feels the way your hand traces over the tattoos on his jaw, feeling your eyes roam over his face. He knows you could feel the way he was holding back, how much he wants you, and how badly he was trying to hold himself back from just… pouncing on you right then and there. He can see the way your eyes look at him, and it only made him even more eager to break you completely. He couldn’t help but smirk down at you. "You like what you see, princess?”
You let out a hum, confirming his statement without realizing it, and you have to actively pry your eyes from his features to look back into his eyes again. Your pupils are blown wide from the high, and your head feels cloudy. It was a strange feeling but somehow… For once… everything feels perfect.
"Sukuna?" Your voice comes out in a shaky whisper. "You will take care of me, right? Really good care, I mean? I'm not really experienced in these kinds of things, so…”
He can't help but smirk at your response, the way you don’t even realize that you are so openly admiring his appearance. You are so high already, so gone, that you aren’t even fully aware of what you are saying. He couldn’t get enough of seeing you in this state, so vulnerable and completely at his mercy. It makes him want to do all kinds of things to you… all kinds of things no one has ever done to you before.
The way you ask if he would take care of you, he loves how submissive you are right now. "Of course, princess. I’ll take good care of you, I’ll make sure you’re all nice and safe with me. I won’t be too rough, okay?”
You shake your head ‘no’, your eyebrows furrowing in dislike at the thought of him holding back for you. You don't want that. "No. Don't hold back, please. I don't want you to hold back. You- you can be rough with me. Can do to me whatever you want, Sukuna."
Your mind is clouded, and so is your judgment. You aren't a virgin anymore. You just never went past that first time in high school, and right now, you want to experience more. More with him and act like a normal reckless college girl for once. At least for tonight, you want to let yourself go, not having to think too much about life and its problems and give the power over to someone else. You already got so far. You couldn't back down now. You didn't want to back down now.
The way you shake your head ‘no’, your eyebrows furrowing in disapproval at the idea of him holding back for you, it makes him grin like the cocky bastard he is. He could tell that you are high and probably aren’t thinking straight, but he doesn’t care. He loves that you are begging him to lose control, to give in to his primal side, to take what he wants in a completely feral and rough way. You have no idea what you are getting yourself into…but he was happy to show you.
The idea of you letting him do whatever he wants with you is way too enticing, and he will definitely be taking advantage of it. He is going to make you his. "You sure, princess? You wanna be my little doll tonight?”
"Yes." It is a simple answer that doesn't need much explanation. "Just- just tell me what to do, please." Your voice a hushed whisper.
He smirks as you answer, a single yes being all he needs to know you want this. He knows that your mind is clouded and that you aren’t making the best decisions, that you are under the influence of the drugs, but he couldn’t care less. You are willingly giving yourself to him, asking him to take control, and he is going to make sure you feel it. "Take off your clothes for me, nice and slow. Okay, princess?”
He is removing himself from you, taking his place on the bed with his back against the wall. You slowly lift yourself up, standing in front of the bed and looking around the room for a second. On shaky legs, you walk to the small music box on his desk, putting on some random sultry music and turning around to him with a small smile. You take off your clothes, give him a show in the process, and dance to the music. You're giving him something you could compare to a sloppy first time strip tease, a few cute little giggles and chuckles leaving your lips as you stumble around and lose yourself in the moment, the drugs helping you to relax and take away the pressure of your life.
Sukuna smirks as you stand up from the bed and he couldn’t tear his eyes away from you as you walk across the room, the way your legs tremble from being so high and the little smile on your face. He sits back, resting against the wall with his legs sprawled out in front of him as he watches you, seeing you completely stripping down in front of him. He loves the way you move to the music, completely lost in your own little world as you give him a private show.
He watches you move, laughing and giggling, and he is already getting more and more worked up. When you are completely naked, you walk over to him. He is offering you his hand to take, and you do without questioning while crawling back into his lap again.
When he feels your hand slide into his own, the smirk on his face is growing, and his hands immediately go to your hip, resting on your waist and holding you against him.
Once you are seated, you look into his eyes for a second before burying your head in the crook of his neck, giving him small little kisses along the skin. "Was that nice and slow enough for you? I did a good job, didn't I?" You murmur against his neck, looking for approval.
Your soft kisses along his skin are making him let out a deep breath. "Yeah, you did a good job, princess. Such an obedient little thing, you look so perfect like this, don’t you? Sitting pretty in my lap, all naked and ready for me."
If you had been in the right state of mind, you probably would have been embarrassed. Begging for approval so desperately, and it's kinda sad if you think about why you behave like this. Why you search for approval from the people around you so much and strive for perfection in everything you do. But right now, under the influence of the drug, you don't care about anything but him and his hands on your skin spreading a fire in their wake.
He could tell that you aren’t quite yourself, the good little college sunshine, finding herself all lewd and naked in the lap of someone like him. You definitely wouldn't be in this state if sober. You are so needy and submissive right now, it is nice to see how much you crave him, how much you need his validation but he doesn’t mention it, he knows you are too far gone to even register it anyways. You only care about him right now, and he loves the way his touch feels on your body. It almost makes him feel bad for taking advantage of your fucked up psychological issues, that probably led you into his arms in the first place. Almost…
"Pretty unfair, it seems, don't you think so?" You say, leaning back in his lap and tugging at his shirt, wanting it gone already. Your eyes are roaming over his body, wondering how many tattoos are hiding under that shirt of his.
He couldn’t help but chuckle as you lean back and start messing with his shirt, tugging at it and making it clear you want it gone. Your eyes are still cloudy from the drug, and he could see you looking at his body. He smirks at your comment, tilting his head to look at you with a mischievous grin on his face. "Unfair, hm? What do you mean? Tell me, princess, what’s unfair?”
Nonetheless, he removes his shirt, and your breath is catching in your throat when you finally lay eyes on his bare torso. There are more tattoos than you anticipated, and judging by the lines of ink that are hiding beneath the fabric of his pants, there are even more you haven't seen yet.
It got you excited, the thought of touching him. His touch feels like heaven on your skin. Every sense of yours heightened because of the drug, and you wonder if he would feel like you when your fingers finally make contact with his bare skin.
He can feel your breath hitch as his shirt comes off, your eyes taking in the sight of his bare torso and the way all the tattoos he has on his arms and face continue down and cover a good portion of his chest and stomach. Your eyes are wide as you stare at him, and you obviously want to touch him, to feel him, and he looks at you with a knowing smirk on his face. "Go on, princess, you can touch them, you know?”
Your hand reaches out to touch him but is stopping midair. "Would it feel good for you? My touch, I mean. Would it feel as good as yours on me?" You wonder.
"Your touch feels so different on my skin, like…like electricity running through every vein. It's the drug, I know, but- Would it feel the same for you? Even though you are used to this feeling? I mean, can you even get used to this? Everything is so..." Your eyes roll into the back of your head, and you throw it back with a moan in the middle of your drug-induced ramble when his hands start rubbing up and down your waist. The hand that was still in between your two bodies is now placed flat against his sternum.
He watches as your hand pauses in the air, just inches away from his body, clearly wanting to feel him. He listens to you ramble about how his touch feels on your skin. He loves how you describe it as electricity, running through every vein. He can't help but touch you, feel up the curves of your perfect body. The way your head tips back and the sound of that beautiful moan gets him going like nothing else since quite some time. You are clearly having a great time under the influence.
"Yeah, princess, I’m used to this feeling. But I can still appreciate how good it feels..." He replies in a low voice. His hands continue to slowly roam up and down your body.
After that, your hands instinctively reach out to lay themselves flat against his chest before roaming from his pecs to his shoulders and down to grasp at his bizeps, holding on for dear life. Your hips start to grind down against him, letting out a hiss at the way the fabric of his pants feels against your bare core.
He loves the way you can’t seem to keep your hands off of his body, feeling your hands move across his bare chest and down to his biceps, gripping onto them and holding on like you are scared to let go. He feels the way your hips start to grind against him, your body desperate for friction, and he can’t help but let out a deep, low growl in answer to your needy whine.
"So beautiful~. Like your tattoos so much, S'kuna." You whimper out, taking in all of his flexing muscles and tattoos again. Your eyes are half lidded and glazed over with tears from the overwhelmingly heightened feeling of everything that's happening.
He chuckles at your comment, loving how you are clearly overwhelmed by everything going on, your eyes taking in every inch of him. You are out of it, and he enjoys every second of it. "Yeah, princess?”
"What next? Need more, please~. What am I supposed to do next?" Your hands fly around his neck again, playing with the strands of his hair, and you pull him a bit closer, leaning your forehead against his, taking a deep breath and inhaling his scent.
He can tell you are getting impatient, the way you keep grinding your hips against him and cling onto him, clearly wanting more, asking for more. He loves seeing you like this, so dependent, so needy, unable to think for yourself and needing him to tell you what to do next.
He brings his hands to your hips, gently grasping them tightly and keeping you from grinding against him any further as he leans his forehead against yours. He chuckles at your needy tone and places a soft kiss on the tip of your nose before standing up with you in his arms.
You cling to him like a koala when he suddenly starts standing up and walks the two of you over to his desk, sitting you down on top of it. Opening the drawer and getting out a condom, holding it between his teeth while he opens his pants and leaves them discarded on the floor together with his underwear.
He could see the look in your eyes, the way they dart down to take in the sight of him, and he couldn’t help but feel smug when he saw your reaction. You gulp seeing him bare for the first time, your eyes darting down before he lifts up your chin with two of his fingers, forcing you to look at him and not anything else.
You look into his eyes before they quickly dart to the condom, still stuck between his teeth and up to his eyes again. You honestly don't know where you found the confidence. Maybe it was the drug, but who cares... One of your hands was slowly traveling down from his chest to his abdomen before going even lower and wrapping your small hand around the base of his cock, trying your best to please him with your hands. Your eyes are on his the whole time and you bite your lips when he lets out a groan.
He lets out a low growl as your hand creeps lower and lower, and his gaze darkens as he watches you bite down on your lip while he lets out another deep groan. "Princess, what are you-”
Your other hand snatches the condom from his mouth, ripping it open with your teeth. "Can we please move this further faster? Want to feel you all over me. Just everywhere, please."
You try to convince him with your desperate pleas and a pout on your face, wanting to feel that amazing electric tingle again when he touches your skin. You can only imagine how amazing he will feel inside of you. All over you, clouding every nerve ending in your body with his presence.
He is completely caught off guard when you snatch the condom from his mouth, ripping it open with your teeth. He is about to say something, but your desperate pleas stop him. The pout on your face and the way you plead for him to move things forward makes his mind cloud over with lust and desire for you.
"Sukuna… I'm ready. I just want to feel you, please~."
It's all he needs to hear, chuckling at your eagerness before gripping at your hips, pulling you forward to the edge of the table. His hands are going to part your legs, almost aggressively pushing them apart, before rubbing the tip of his member through your folds a few times. He takes the condom from you, his eyes not leaving the spot between your thighs.
"Yeah, princess, we can move on. You're still sure I don't need to be gentle?" When all he gets is a strangled whine of his name, he takes it as a yes and quickly puts on the condom with practiced ease before lining himself up and with a last cocky smirk, he’s pushing forward while looking at your face, wanting to gauge your every reaction.
The sensation takes your breath away, the mix of pleasure and pain makes you grip tightly at his bizeps again, and your nails dig into his skin, deep. Your vision goes black for a second from the sheer size your body desperately tries to accommodate. Your eyes are rolling into the back of your head, a loud lewd moan of his name leaving your lips, and your head tips forward against his chest. For a moment, you think you're able to see the gates of heaven...or was it hell? You don't know, and you definitely don't care as long as the feeling will stay.
He is taken aback by the sharp sting on his skin when you cling onto his biceps, your nails digging into his skin so deep he is sure they'll leave marks. He can feel your breath hit his chest as you lean onto him, the sound of his name from your lips like music to his ears.
He's lifting your head from his chest with a tight grip on your jaw, looking into your dilated pupils with a smug smirk. He's enjoying how overwhelmed you are. You are beautiful and he can't believe he's actually fucking the good little rich girl everyone around campus adores like a common whore on his desk. He's taking in the sight of you before he bends himself over you, resting his other hand down onto the table to support himself as he begins to move against you, his chest pressed against yours.
He's setting a relentless pace from the start, not caring to give you a minute to breathe or considering your inexperience. You feel so damn fucking tight around him, he thinks he's loosing his mind. You look way too good like this and he shouldn't enjoy this as much as he is. You're just another name on his long list of different girls, a pretty little girl for a quick fuck. But he has to admit, you're a good one.
"Fuck! Feels so good S'kuna" You are not a person to use swear words but in the past minutes of him pounding into your tight walls countless swears, pleas, moans and whines left your lips. You just can't hold back, your whole body feels like it is on fire, every touch of his setting you ablaze. Your hands cling to him desperately, your lips connecting in heated kisses again and again until one of you runs out of breath and you could feel your impending orgasm on the tip of your tongue.
"So good, princess." He mutters against your lips, returning your kisses, each one more frenzied than the last, the two of you only breaking apart when you run out of breath before he's diving back in, not getting enough of you. He can feel your body trembling against his, your desperate hands clinging to him as if you are afraid he would disappear.
He feels your orgasm building up, and he knows you are close, the way your body trembles, and your muscles tighten around him. You're holding him in a vice like grip, almost making it hard for him to move in and out. You really want him to lose his damn mind, don't you? He grips your hips, increasing his pace, pushing both of you closer and closer to the edge.
You fall apart, and he is right behind you, riding out the waves of pleasure for the both of you with shallow thrusts. Your lips are still connected in needy kisses before leaning his forehead against yours.
He watches as your body trembles and shakes, coming undone completely. He feels your lips on his, both of you too desperate to let each other go just yet, not needing to break apart to catch your breath. He drinks everything in, every little reaction of yours. The way your nose scrunches up and your eyebrows furrow together, how your hazy eyes seem to roll back into your head behind your shut lids, your breaths stuttering in moans that he immediately swallows up in another ray of kisses, tasting you like a starved man.
But he still didn't leave you any time to catch your breath. Throwing away the condom in the trash can under his desk before lifting you off the table. He's holding you stable with one hand around your waist and quickly gets rid of all things lying on the table before bending you over it, his hand firmly pressed against your spine to keep you down. Grabbing a new condom and going right back to where you two left off.
Sukuna inserts himself in one swift motion. The stretch is still a pleasurable pain, but with how your wetness is currently dripping down your legs and after your first orgasm, he has it now way easier to bully his length inside you without much restraint.
Everything is so overwhelming. You forget to actually breathe. Your hands desperately cling to the edge of the table for stability, your legs shaking terribly. Your hips are probably bruised already from the force with which they are being pushed against the edge of the table again and again. The only thing keeping you somewhat grounded is his hand on your back.
He could see you clinging to the edge of the table, your legs shaking and trembling in an attempt to keep yourself stable. He knew your hips will most likely show those beautiful bruises in the morning from the force he was using to push your body against the edge and his strong grip during everything that had already happened and will happen tonight. He could tell you are getting overwhelmed, struggling to even remember how to breathe, and he has no plans of making it any easier for you any time soon. Drugs or not, Sukuna was always at the top of his game.
"Breathe, princess. Don't forget to breathe." He said in a low voice, his tone slightly teasing as he continued his onslaught on your poor pussy.
"I try! I really do! I'm trying but-" You cut off your own words with a hiccup, trying to get at least some air into your lungs but the way his hips move and he repeatedly hits that one perfect spot inside your gummy walls has you reeling. He's everywhere. The only things on your mind are his hands on your body and the way he moves against you.
You can feel yourself tightening up again, the pleasure building up incredibly fast and the knot in your stomach tightening painfully and needing release. One of his hands grabs a fistful of your hair and pulls you flush against his chest.
He chuckles at how easy you are, nipping at your ear before whispering in a rough voice. "Cmon, princess. I know you can do it, just a little bit more, don't pass out on me yet."
One of your hands comes up to grab at the wrist of the hand he had currently entangled in your hair. You lean your head back onto his shoulder, moans and strangled breaths, leaving your open mouth constantly, and there is a little bit of drool at the corner of your mouth.
He smirks as one of your hands comes up to grab at his wrist, your head falling back against him as you let out a steady stream of moans and breaths, which occasionally became strangled and hiccupped. He could see the little bit of drool at the corner of your mouth as you try to keep yourself from passing out and he presses a small kiss against the corner of your lips, letting his tongue dart out to lick the drool from your pretty lips before he suddenly shoves two of his fingers inside your mouth.
"Bite me, and I'll bite you back, princess." He warns in a low voice, his tone rough and just as breathless as your own.
His long and slender fingers in your mouth are making you gag, and this is all you need to be pushed over the edge. Before his sentence even registers in your lust and weed clouded brain you bite down onto his fingers, the taste of blood in your mouth makes you hum out as you come down from your high but Sukuna is not stopping and immediately you can feel yourself getting close to finishing again.
He groans as you bite down onto his fingers, the taste of blood seeping into your mouth, making you hum out in pleasure, clearly enjoying yourself and sending a wave of pleasure through him in return. Feeling the way your body trembles and convulses as you come down from your high, but he had no plans of stopping anytime soon.
Sukuna kept grinding in and out of you, hitting every spot perfectly. Your pussy a perfect fit for his long and girthy cock and he doesn't want to stop. He can't, not before he feels you come undone at least a dozen times more and so he pushes you into overstimulation, taking you over the edge again and again.
Your head falls back against the table, his hand still in your hair and pressing your cheek down against it and you think you might actually die from the way he draws out one orgasm after the other without stopping, without giving you time to breathe and recover. His other hand makes its way to your sensitive bundle of nerves, and just the simple action of pressing his thumb against it makes you convulse and cry out in another wave of pleasure. Finally, he comes after holding himself off for an almost painful amount of time, drawn over the edge with you, and a loud and guttural groan leaves his mouth right into your ear.
He gently removes his fingers from your mouth and wraps his arms around you right under your chest, pulling you close to him and whispering in your ear. "You did good, princess.”
Both your breathing is ragged, the two of you collapsing onto the desk in exhaustion and contentment, and his weight on top of you is helping you through the feeling of emptiness after he pulls out. He is pressing light kisses along your shoulder blades until you calm down. "Come on, princess, you need a hit. Nothing's better than a little something after a good fuck, huh?"
He removes himself from you completely, letting go of you and stepping back, making you collapse onto the floor with a thud as your weak and trembling legs are giving out under you while you still try to breathe.
He chuckles slightly at your current state, watching you struggle to breathe sitting on the floor. "You alright, princess?" He asks, grabbing a joint and a lighter.
He stands in front of you and looks down, his head tilted slightly and a cocky grin on his face. He lights up the joint and inhales before squatting next to you. He blows the smoke straight into your face and holds the joint into your direction, a silent invitation to take it. You take the joint with trembling hands and get a deep hit. The sensation of smoke filling your lungs is making you close your eyes for a second. Then he lifts you up, walks to the bed, and sits you down onto his lap again, wrapping his strong arms around your body and holding you close.
You take another hit, letting the smoke out slowly before taking the two fingers he had stuffed in your mouth earlier between your lips, sucking them in and swirling around them with your tongue. Tasting his blood for a second time is making you hum out again. "I'm sorry about that." You say, still kitten-licking his fingers.
He chuckles as he watches you take another hit, the smoke slowly leaving your lips and your body completely relaxed. He raises his eyebrows as you start sucking on his fingers, your tongue lapping at them and swirling around them, tasting the blood again. He lets out a low sigh when you speak, your gentle apology muffled as you continue licking his fingers. "It's alright, princess. A little bit of pain can be good sometimes.”
"You said you'd bite back." You giggle. "I'd like you to, you know? To bite back, I mean… Would be nice to take a mark with me. Something to remind me of today." Your voice gets quieter, your fingers playing around with his.
He chuckles when you bring up the fact that he said he would bite back. "Are you sure? I bite pretty hard, princess. I don't usually hold back." He says in a low, rough tone. He then notices how your voice gets quieter, your fingers playing around with his, and he could sense the vulnerability in your voice. "Where do you want me to mark you, princess? Somewhere people can see it? Somewhere only I can see it?”
Your head perks up at his sentences. "Can we do both?" You ask curiously, your eyes wide and gleaming with excitement. "Would be nice to show it off to others, I definitely want to do that, but I also want to have something for only the two of us. Something nobody knows. A secret…”
He smirks at your eager question, amused by your excitement. "Of course we can do both, princess. I like the idea of you showing off to others, and I like the idea of having something just for us even more."
He lifts your chin up, tilting your head to the side to expose your neck. He runs his strong, rough hand along your soft, delicate skin, his gaze fixated on you. "The question is, where should we put these bite marks? Any specific places you have in mind, princess?”
"How about we choose one each? Would that be okay for you? I think I already know where I want to have the one I can show off to others..." You look into his eyes, just watching him as he smokes the joint.
He nods at your suggestion, finding the idea of choosing one each to be appealing. "That works for me, princess. I like the sound of that. Why don't you go first and tell me where you want your 'showing off' bite mark to be."
He takes another hit from the joint, his gaze still fixated on you as he exhales the smoke and you take his hand in yours and guide it slowly from the nape of your neck to the expanse of your collarbone. "It's visible enough to peek out under the uniform but not enough to get me in trouble with the school board." You giggle at the thought. "Although I suspect that thanks to you, I will get into trouble more often in the future, huh?”
He watches as you guide his hand to your collarbone, the placement being both visible and discreet enough. He chuckles at your question, a sly smirk appearing on his face. "Oh, princess, you can count on it. I have a feeling we're going to cause plenty of trouble together in the future." He says, his tone suggestive and playful.
You shuffle a little closer in his lap. Your core deliciously rubbing against his twitching cock in the process, making you exhale a breath. You take the joint from his hands taking a last hit before stubbing it out in the ashtray. Looking into his eyes again, your hands are sneaking around his neck, playing with his pinkish hair as you lean in and expose your neck for him.
He watches as you shuffle closer to him. The way your lower bodies rub against each other is making him respond with a new wave of desire, and a low growl escapes his lips. His gaze darkens as you expose your neck to him, his lips curling into a wicked grin as he leans in, his breath hot against your skin.
He starts off slowly, the kisses on your skin light and teasing, his lips softly ghosting over your skin, sending shivers down your spine. When his teeth finally sink into your skin, you can't hold back the breathy moan from escaping your mouth. Your hands are tightening in the strands of his hair and pushing him closer, not wanting him to stop until he draws blood, just like you did, until everyone would know what you two did.
The moment his teeth sink into your skin, feeling you shiver and moan, he knows there was no turning back now. "Don't stop. Feels so good..."
You must be a masochist because the feeling of his teeth on your neck, feeling the blood trickling out of the wound just to get licked up by his tongue, made you incredibly aroused. Your hips are starting to slowly grind against him, making his hands on your hips tighten their hold, and Sukuna continues to kiss and suck and bite bruises into your beautiful smooth skin.
He could feel your body responding to his, grinding against him as he lapped at the blood on your neck. "Good girl..." He whispers, his voice low and sultry.
"Need you, Sukuna. Need you again..." Your hips are still grinding into his, and you can tell that you are not the only one getting aroused again. "Can I- Can I take control this time, please?" You had the desperate desire to feel him again, wanting to make him feel good. Make the two of you feel good, hoping that despite his obvious dominant demeanor, he would allow you to stay on top this time.
When you ask to take control this time, he can see the desperate need in your eyes, and he was powerless to deny you. "Of course you can, princess. You can have as much control as you want. Take the lead and show me what you got, hm?"
He leans back, his hands on your hips loosening their grip, giving you the reins. He looks at you expectantly, his expression somewhere between eager and curious, and you don't need to be told twice when he reaches out for a condom from the nightstand and hands it over to you.
“How many of those do you have conveniently laying around, huh?" You ask, slightly amused as you take a hold of Sukuna's cock, slowly dragging it along your wetness before rolling on the condom and keeping eye contact the whole time.
He chuckles when you take the condom from him, a smirk on his face. "Aww, are you jealous?" He teases, his voice lighthearted. "Don't worry, princess, let's just say I have enough to keep us busy for a long, long time." He chuckles, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear.
You're sinking down slowly, teasing the both of you with your slow movement and when you finally sit down on top of him, you close your eyes in bliss, feeling him even deeper inside your gut than in the other positions before.
He couldn't help but let out a low, content hiss as you slid down on him, your movements slow and deliberate. His eyes dark with desire and his hands gripping your hips tightly as he watches you take him fully, the feeling of your body clenching around him sending jolts of pleasure coursing through his body.
You start rocking your hips slowly, gauging his every expression and finding out what would feel good for not only you but him too before falling into a steady rhythm shortly after. The two of you are lost in pleasure, and soon enough, you are consumed by one another once again. Sharing hungry kisses and hands all over each other. "So good, S'kuna. So deep...so big…”
He watches you intently, his expression one of pure lust as you rock your hips against him. He relishes every little movement you make, every sound that escapes your lips, every expression that flashes across your face. Before long, he is lost in a world of ecstasy, his hands roaming over your body, desperate to touch every inch of you, desperate to pull you closer to him. As you whisper those sweet words in his ear, he can't help but respond, his voice low and strained. "You feel so good, princess... So tight... So perfect.”
You are so lost into your own little world that neither of you notice the keys rattling in the lock. The door opens to a rather tipsy Itadori Yuji."Yo, Sukuna, you wouldn't believe what Choso told me, we went out and-." Itadori is standing in the doorway, shocked and watching the two of us shamelessly. Itadori's words die in his throat as he takes in the scene before him. You, riding Sukuna, the two of you completely consumed by each other and the high.
Sukuna looks at him with a cocky grin on his face, just raising an eyebrow. "Can't you knock, brat?”
You look over as well and hold eye contact for a moment while your hips are not stopping their movement. You couldn't stop, even if you wanted to, with the way Sukuna's hands kept grabbing at your hips and helping you move. You bring your gaze back onto Sukuna and his body before demanding his attention back with a whine.
Sukuna doesn't even bother to cover you up before your desperate whine brings his focus back to you, and he couldn't help but chuckle, shaking his head at his younger roommate. Without taking his eyes off of you, he calls out to him. “Close the door, idiot."
As soon as Itadori closes the door behind him, Sukuna's hands on your hips stop your movement. The action makes you let out a frustrated whine. He just stares at you for a moment, his gaze flickering to the mark on your shoulder before a wicked grin spreads across your face.
He flips you over, hovering above you and giving one quick kiss to your lips before moving down the bed, putting your thighs over his shoulders with his face inches away from your private parts. "I'm not done with you yet, princess. Remember when I said I bite hard? Well, let me show you where I plan to leave our little secret.”
Without further warning, he sinks his teeth into your upper inner thigh. The pleasurable pain causes your back to arch from the bed. Instinctively you try to wriggle out of his hold but it was no use, he had you locked in place with his hands around your thighs, one splayed out over your stomach and the other gripping your hips bruisingly. Your hands grip at the strands of his hair and a loud cry leaves your mouth when you come undone from Sukuna leaving his imprint on you, surprising the both of you with just how sensitive you actually are right now.
He still holds you down firmly, not letting you get away as his teeth sink deep into your thigh, leaving behind a bite that will turn into a beautiful bruising mark. Feeling your body writhing in pleasure beneath him, he can't help but chuckle against your skin. "Did you just come from that, princess?”
Sukuna looks up at you, a satisfied grin on his face. The mark he had left on your thigh is already starting to bruise. He runs his tongue lightly over the mark, savoring the taste of your skin and making you moan out again. Only when he is satisfied, he sits back, admiring his handiwork. Your breathing is heavy and ragged, your body quivering with aftershocks, and he leans over you, his lips hovering just above yours, a self-satisfied smile on your face.
"We need to do stuff like this more often." You say with a breathless chuckle. Putting your thighs around his hips, pulling him down a bit with pleading eyes, begging for him to make you feel good again.
Sukuna just sits on his heels and takes in the view of the mark he left on your thigh. It was beautiful, deep and dark, a sure sign that you are his. Your body is trembling, and he smiles down at your words, his chest puffing up with pride. He lets out a low growl of approval, running his hands up your body again before leaning down and connecting you in a deep kiss. "Yeah, we definitely should.”
He immediately sinks back into you, rocking his hips against yours at a harsh brutal pace. His hands are everywhere, and your tongues are tangled with each other, not stopping, not even for breathing. You are both desperate, desperate to feel good, desperate to make the other one feel good, desperate to have more even though it feels like it will never be enough.
Your bodies move together in a frenzied rhythm, his hips slapping hard into the back of your thighs and your mouths and hands never staying still. Both of you are lost in a world solely made for the two of you. The air is heavy with the sounds of labored breaths, the whispers of voices, the sounds of bodies as they come together over and over. His touches are hungry and demanding, his words possessive and primal.
When he feels your body starting to tense and shiver, hinting at your impending release, he lifts your hips up, pressing your thighs close to your chest, the new angle causing you to cry out in pleasure.
It didn't take long for you to fall over the edge, and he is following right behind, collapsing on top of you. The two of you are breathing heavily, and you look at him with a lazy smile, your eyes still dilated from lust and the drug. "I don't think I will ever get enough of this, honestly.”
Sukuna lays on top of you for a moment, your bodies still connected, his head resting on your shoulder and his chest rising and falling, his heart pounding against his ribcage. When he looks up at you, the smile on your face is languid, your eyes still dilated with pleasure. "Me neither, princess. I don't think I'll get enough of you either. You're too damn addictive.”
"More addictive than the substances you throw all day?" You giggle out before giving him a sly, playful look.
A smile appears on Sukuna's face at the mention of his drug use, his arms wrapping around you to pull you closer, not wanting to be apart from you just yet. "Oh, no question about it. You're way more addictive than any substance I've tried so far. You're like this drug I just can't get enough of. Always wanting more, always wanting to have you close to me. I might be in trouble, princess."
A small smile is still on your face when your hands card through his hair and your eyes take in his appearance once again. He is so fucking beautiful. His pink hair is all sweaty and messy, his crimson red eyes dark and dilated from lust, his lips kiss bitten and just as swollen as your own and the black ink stands in contrast to his fair skin.
As you rake your fingers through his hair, he closes his eyes, enjoying the sensation before opening them again and meeting your gaze. There's a look in his eyes that's both intense and soft, a combination that he never showed before, to nobody and something that only you seem to bring out in him.
You just lay in each other's arms in silence for a few minutes. Calming not only your bodies down but also your minds and relishing in the presence of the other as you're replaying the memories of the day.
"I'm kinda hungry... like really, really hungry..." You tell him in a quiet whisper, not wanting to interrupt the peaceful silence more than necessary while still combing through his hair while he leaves small kisses against your shoulder and collarbone.
When your breaths return to a normal pace and your minds slowly come back to reality, you trace lazy patterns on his skin. Sukuna can't believe he actually feels content and somewhat satisfied and…happy? There is no way he would get attached to you, to this. Whatever this is.
As you whisper about being hungry, he can't help but chuckle, his eyes looking down at you. "Of course you're hungry, princess. It's normal to get a little hungry after vigorous activity. What do you wanna eat?”
He sits up on the bed, and you let out a whine at the loss of contact, immediately regretting saying something. He leans over you to reach the nightstand, getting his phone and lighting a cigarette, rolling onto his back beside you in the pillows before holding one of his arms open for you.
You instantly smile brightly and shuffle into his arms again, pressing yourself into him from the side, and he securely wraps an arm around you, enjoying this feeling of having you tucked close to him. "Oh, there is this amazing local diner. They have everything! Pizza, pasta, burgers, and the spare ribs are to die for! We could-" You start talking loudly and all excited about the food before interrupting yourself when you look up at Sukuna and he just stares back with an amused smile, his hands lazily stroking up and down your bare skin.
"I started rambling again, didn't I?" You ask with an embarrassed chuckle, blushing slightly.
"You definitely did, princess," He answers with a chuckle of his own. "It's cute, though. You get really excited when you talk about food.”
"Yeah, that's because this place is really good! You've never been there?" You still start to ramble on and on about how you discovered the restaurant first and tell him a few fun stories you had with your friends at the diner, wether he wants to hear them or not. In the meantime, you two take a look at the menu and place your order for delivery before comfortable silence falls over you. The only sound is the quiet hum of the air conditioning.
"Sukuna, can I ask you something?" Your voice is timid but serious, a hint of curiosity behind your words.
He immediately turns to look at you, his attention fully on you now as he takes a last drag of his cigarette before stubbing it out in the nearby ashtray. "Course you can, ask me anything, princess.”
For a moment, you carefully think over your choice of words, not wanting to make him angry because this question would invade his personal space too much. "Why do you take drugs? I mean, I kinda get the appeal right now..." You chuckle at the thought of yourself being so much against anything that would break a rule just a few hours ago and now you lay in the arms of the college bad boy and are high like a kite.
He can't help but chuckle at the irony of it all. Just a few hours ago, you were so against any form of rule-breaking, and now you're here. The college sweetheart, lying in Sukana Ryomen’s arms, completely wasted and asking about drugs.
You are a little more serious again when investigating further into Sukuna's private life. "But what got you into it? Was it just curiosity, or did something happen or... I mean, how does one find out about all this stuff?"
He listens carefully as you ask your question, his expression impassive but his mind thinking about how he should respond. It's a personal question, something he doesn’t usually get asked by anyone, let alone some girl he hooked up with. But somehow, he doesn’t mind answering you.
"It started out of curiosity. Most of my friends already started smoking weed and drinking at parties, so I tried it out. Soon, I got introduced to more...hard stuff. It was easy to get, and honestly? It took all my worries and stresses away. It made me feel something, pushing away the usual numbness."
"Yeah... I guess I know what you mean..." Your eyes are distant, and your eyebrows furrow as if in deep thought. Memories you keep hidden deep inside of you bubbling to the surface and emotions that are pushed so far back, that you yourself even forgot about them for a moment.
Sukuna can tell that there are memories and emotions buried deep inside, locked away in a place you hardly dare to visit, brought forward in your drug induced state. He just continues to stroke your back, silently telling you it's okay to go on.
“Growing up as a rich girl is not as easy as one might think..." You mumble.
When you speak again, your voice quiet and strained, he can feel the weight behind your words. Your words hang in the air between you two, and he knows there's more to that sentence than you're saying.
You let out a deep exhale and look at him with a small smile. "The next time you need a stress relief, feel free to call me over, okay?"
Your voice is soft, and the vulnerability from a moment ago is gone. The fact that the both of you almost opened up to one another about deep emotional trauma still lingering heavy in the air even though neither of you wanted to admit it. Whatever this thing between you is, it's better if you don't get too personal.
He can tell you're intentionally steering away from the conversation you are having, trying to lighten the mood and keep things casual. Dancing around the edges of each other's emotional walls, with neither of you wanting to get too personal or vulnerable with each other. It's easier that way to keep things nice and uncomplicated.
"Are you telling me that if I ever need to release some stress, you're willing to take one for the team, princess?”
You let out a bright laugh, the sound echoing in the otherwise quiet room. "The whole team might be a bit much, don't you think? I've seen the guys you hang out with, and I don't think that would work well with my body. Like I could actually die, I think." The image of your small innocent self with Sukuna's drugged cocky friends plays around in your mind. Yeah... that wouldn't end well.
Your laugh is like music to his ears, the sound filling the room and making his heart skip a beat. Your playful response about the team made him laugh as well. The image of you with his rowdy friends causes a mix of emotions to stir within him - both a bit of jealousy and protectiveness.
Your hands come up to cup his face, squishing his cheeks lightly, your eyes sparkling with amusement and a small hint of affection that you aren't even aware of. "But for you, Ryomen Sukuna, I might make an exception.”
When your hands cup his face, the light squeezes, and the affectionate look in your eyes makes his chest feel tight. But of course, he plays it cool, as always, a smirk appearing on his face as he leans in closer to you.
"Damn right, you will!" He growls while tackling you down playfully into the sheets, his head buried in your neck and leaving small little kisses that would soon develop into another exhausting round of you being bent like a pretzel underneath him.
You spent the rest of the night together. Eating when the food arrives, talking about random stuff, watching a movie, and just getting down from the high.
You could feel the effects of the weed slowly subsiding, and you are surprised that you are still content with being around him. You would have thought the moment your head cleared, you would panic. But you didn't. On the contrary even, you rather enjoy his company.
In the morning, he sent you home with a kiss on your lips and a promise to call again, a subtle promise that there will be a next time.
#sukuna × reader#sukuna smut#jjk sukuna#jujutsu kaisen sukuna#jujutsu sukuna#sukuna ryomen × reader#sukuna ryomen smut#jjk sukuna ryomen#jujutsu kaisen sukuna ryomen#jujutsu sukuna ryomen#ryomen sukuna × reader#ryomen sukuna smut#jjk ryomen sukuna#jujutsu kaisen ryomen sukuna#jujutsu ryomen sukuna#sukuna ryomen#ryomen sukuna#jjk × reader#jjk smut#jjk#jjk men#jujutsu kaisen × reader#jujutsu kaisen smut#jujutsu kaisen#jujutsu kaisen men#fanfic#imagines#missyonmission
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oh my word THANK YOU!!! i've been trying to say this since the wicked movie repopularized all of the "wicked is canon" stuff, but you've put it in a way i wasn't able to. YES. certainly wicked is allowed to be a derivative work that recontextualizes Oz. assuming that whatever is in wicked retroactively and automatically changes details about the story (ie, that the scarecrow and the tin woodman knew each other before the events of Wonderful Wizard and/or the MGM film) is simply incorrect.
i'm all for incorporating a body of work that may not be fully compatible into a coherent canon that works as an alternative parallel to the original. i think it's completely fine and understandable that people are hooked on wicked and will want to understand some characters through the lens of wicked. but assuming that wicked's popularity makes it truly canon, or assuming that the history it presents is accurate to Baum's Oz, is ignorant to both the original context of the Baum books and the long history of Oz adaptation.
i'm also a bit of a hater, as i personally believe that understanding Wonderful Wizard characters through a lens of wicked, especially the musical but also the book, is a less interesting way of analyzing the text and symbolism present in that story than either the Baum novel or the MGM film presents as each stands alone.
wicked is, certainly, its own thing. of course it exists in the context of over a hundred years of adaptation before it, but that context is simply not known by most people. it must be able to stand on its own, and i believe it does. but when this retroactive wicked lens is applied to that context and history uncritically, we will run into problems.
i almost want to blame the seemingly recent, but really just more visible shift in fandom to a need for everything to be canon and confirmed? like, it can be difficult to reconcile in our minds that so many different versions of oz are allowed to exist and don't have to be compatible. wicked "confirms" things viewers are left wondering about after the mgm film, so therefore it must be canon, and therefore it's appropriate to correct people on facts they "get wrong" when they contradict wicked canon. that's how the thinking seems to work, at least in my observation. and that way of thinking seeps its way into the secondary or deeper oz fandom, which has led to (in my view) a sort of soft shift from Baum-centric understanding of oz as a whole to a binary star system where Baum and Maguire are seen as co-creators of a more true or real world and story. i'm exaggerating, certainly, but i've seen this shift occur over time. i hesitate to bring this up bc it sounds like i'm whining about the fandom's natural changes and how things aren't the way they used to be, and i guess i am. i digress.
anyways, your original point. yes!!! while oz became baum's most profitable endeavor, and throughout the series you can see him sort of wishing his other books were more profitable so he could expand in different directions, that doesn't mean he didn't care about continuity or cohesion at all. i'd argue he cared more about cohesion and telling a story that made sense and continued to make sense as it was expanded, than he cared about maintaining particular canon details through the whole series. oz changed as baum's tastes, needs, and audience changed, and that is just as important as the changes that would be added by adaptation later on. (hell, many oz fans don't think of the 1902 musical or the silent films as canon, despite them being created by Baum, both because they're less well-known and because they do change things up to better fit their respective media and contexts). this sense of inconsistency, whether overblown or minimized, doesn't mean that wicked is canon compliant with the baum novels. wicked directly contradicts baum's work in some cases--which again, is completely fine. it's a derivative work that takes certain aspects of the original books and the mgm film, synthesizes them in a grimdark expansion on especially the political aspects of the world, and seeks to tell a unique story that allows you to think about Wonderful Wizard and MGM in a different way. but it is not itself an explanation for Baum's supposedly undercooked or unfinished world. it is not itself a part of the original story (i mean this in the context of canonicity of baum's work. oz fans know how complicated oz canon is.) but instead is--as it claims to be--another branch on the complex tree of oz adaptations.
tldr. wicked does not "explain" anyone's actions in Wonderful Wizard or MGM. it seeks to provide an alternative context, or an alternative explanation, certainly. but it does not retroactively "fix" the story. it's perfectly fine to think about the original story or the mgm film in the context of wicked, if you like the alternative history it provides. policing others' adaptations and understandings of the story, or implying or directly stating that wicked should be incorporated into others' headcanons or interpretations or adaptations, or claiming that wicked is canon simply because baum didn't care about canon so everything is canon, is not helpful or productive or good. in fact, that actively makes oz analysis less fun, in my opinion. i hope my point is made here i've been trying to say this for months but as usual i was completely unable to get my thoughts across until acted on by an outside force (seeing this post). so thanks!!
I've seen a lot of people lately harping about how "Wicked isn't canon to the Oz universe", "it's just glorified fanfiction", etc., and I can't express how silly that is, and how annoyed it makes me every time I hear it, lol. Baum's original Oz books were never meant to be some canonical series — they contradict each other constantly; Baum called it a "fairy story" with loose cohesion at best; and it only became a series at all because the first one got popular enough that Baum felt a duty to the fandom to keep making more (even after he had wanted to end it). And the 1939 film is every bit as much "fanfiction" as Wicked — it changes the story in both major and minor ways, including a complete shift of framing (i.e., making Oz into a dream rather than a real place).
Maguire's great contribution to the overarching legacy and lore of Oz was to harmonize the very weak "canon" of the older works with a different shift in framing: recontextualizing all of the prior Oz material as a revisionist history (going off of Baum's own idea framing of himself as a "Royal Historian of Oz"), and attempting to tell "the true story" behind the other works (fictively of course — we're never meant to literally think Maguire's version preceded Baum's, irl). In literary studies, this is called an urtext. The Wicked Years and its adaptations are as much "fanfiction" as the 1939 film: it's just self-aware of that fact in a way that earlier works weren't, and uses that perspective to deconstruct the material and explore deeper (and darker) themes — not simply adapting or reimagining the original text (as the 1939 movie did), but actively challenging it; interrogating it. It's not meant to be "canon" as such: it asks you to ask whether (and why) there is such a thing, and what that might say about the stories that we are meant to literally believe in, in real life.
#whuf. that's long. man i hope somebody understands what im trying to say here. please dont just rb op w/o reading at least some of the rest#long post#longggg fucking post lmao#wicked#wizard of oz#toasty talks#analysis#damn i need a tag for specifically my own oz analysis#ummm ->#toast talks oz
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There's this big gripe I have with a lot of television shows that are dramas, which is that they take the formal elements of modern prestige television--very good cast, high-quality cinematography, terrific music, often even a pretty interesting premise--and just fall completely flat-footed on the execution, because the plot has the structure of a floppy spaghetti noodle.
Plot can be just one damn thing after another, but in general this is not a satisfying way to approach plot. Satisfying plots usually have some kind of structure, build logically to some kind of climax (or even series of climaxes, in serial formats like television), often leveraging diverse dramatic techniques so that even if the plot temporarily veers off into some cul-de-sac or subplot, you feel like the overall momentum of the story is moving forward, is coming to some conclusion. In short, you feel like there is a reason for you to be watching this story in particular, that it has some weight or consequence for its characters, that each sub-element of the overall plot, each chapter or episode or what have you, is in retrospect a necessary element in the story the creator wants to tell, and the audience wants to watch.
(Obviously, for more episodic structures, which a lot of perfectly great TV shows have, the rules are different, because the plot of each episode is partially or wholly discrete; but a key element of modern prestige TV is a serial and not episodic format. I don't know why this is exactly, but I assume it has something to do with the long shadow of The Sopranos and the notion that episodic formats are for cheesy sitcoms or cheap science fiction.)
But almost every prestige drama and quite a few other shows I have tried to watch in like the past--I dunno. Ten years? Maybe not that long, but it sure feels that long--has the floppy spaghetti plot problem. The plot really is just One Damn Thing After Another, usually fuelled by characters having to hand off the Emotional Idiot Ball to one another to generate conflict. Hell, one reason Game of Thrones stood out was that it wasn't this: for all I have ragged on George R.R. Martin, I think he has some notion of structure, and though in a long-running book series you can let that structure expand and breathe, the parts of the show that followed the plot he laid out in advance benefitted strongly from having that structure to guide them. Most showrunners these days seem to think only as far ahead as the next episode, and boy, it shows!
I'm not saying all writers need to be J. Michael Straczynski, and plot their shows out five seasons in advance with multiple escape hatches for various characters in case their actor has to leave the show, but I do think I haven't seen a well-structured serial drama television show since around the time of The Wire. And this lack-of-structure problem has even infected a lot of episodic, decidedly non-prestige TV shows that have tried to incorporate overarching plots into their seasons, which I think is in part due to the idea that serial storytelling is somehow, I dunno... like More Serious Television? Anyway, I wish it would stop. I wish writers and showrunners would care more about structure!
(There's also a related problem where a show will start out with some interesting premise or concept, and abandon it like three episodes in to focus on side plots, despite the premise being the whole draw of the show.)
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The Last Drop
|| Sevika x fem!reader
|| Warnings; bar settings, drunk reader, reader gets in a scuffle with Sevika, gambling mentions, drunk flirting, struggles with feelings, short drabble, maybe a series if the people want it
|| Summary; when reader's well into her drinks, she decides to mess with Sevika. Just a little more.
Requests open!!
Started; December 24th
Finished; December 24th
HurtCember2024; Day 21, Afraid
Request; i NEED an enemies to lovers
~~~
The bar was filled with various conversations, loud laughter, and the occasional scuffle.
You were sat down in a booth not too far from the counter. Well into your fourth drink and definitely starting to feel the effects of it. You'd been to The Last Drop enough times to be considered a regular by this point. The bartender knew you by name and your usual go to orders. You'd even been around enough to make some enemies.
The main one was definitely not someone you should have pissed off. Silco's right hand, Sevika. You'd been really drunk one night and after losing to her in a gamble, you'd thrown your drink at her. She did not take well to that. The two of you have kept at a distance ever since. You'd be on one side of The Last Drop while she'd go to the complete opposite end.
Today was no different. You were in your usual spot, while Sevika was far off in the corner. Playing a game of cards. Finishing your fourth drink, you went to the bartender and ordered another. This time going with something a little lighter. As he was mixing the drink, your drunken mind got a brilliant idea.
A grin slid its way across your lips and you marched right over to Sevika, reading off her cards out loud for the rest of the players. They shared confused glances while Sevika's hand crushed the cards she was holding. Turning to you with a glare so sharp that if looks could kill... you'd be a goner.
"You think you're funny?" Sevika asked. Though, you knew it was a rhetorical question. Not that that stopped you from answering, of course. Anything to push Sevika's gears a little further.
"Yeah, I do. Some other people here would agree too," you shrugged. Next thing you knew you were pinned up against the wall. Your heart raced as her prosthetic crossed your face. Keeping your mouth shut. The metal sending a shiver through your body.
There was a part of your feelings towards Sevika you'd always ignored. Being afraid to say anything about them. Probably a smart choice too because you could almost guarantee that Sevika didn't see you the same. Unless pissing each other off was also her way of flirting and honestly, you could see that for her. But you played it safe. For the most part... when you were drunk like this it was a different story.
"We gonna kiss or what?" You asked with a teasing smirk, after squirming your way up just enough to free your mouth. Sevika's eyes narrowed and she shoved you to the floor.
You hit the ground with a thud, a bouncer making his way over to separate the two of you.
Sevika just huffed and sat back down where she had been before. A deeper part of her felt a little flustered by your comment. A fluster she masked with anger. However, she wasn't sure if that was just the alcohol or if a dumb part of her was starting to feel things for you...
#fanfic#x reader#canon x reader#wlw fiction#fem reader#arcane#reader x sevika#sevika x fem reader#sevika x#sevika x you#sevika x y/n#sevika x female reader#sevika x reader#sevika arcane#arcane sevika#sevika#sevika request#enemies to lovers sevika x reader#enemies to lovers#sevika x reader enemies to lovers#drunken fights#reader pissing off sevika#drunk flirting#flirting sevika x reader#fem reader x sevika#hurtcember2024#hurtcember day 21#hurtcember afraid#hurtcember sevika#reneesghostinthelivingroom
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hi op feel free to ignore everything under - all you need to know is i love your writing *shakes head vigorously*
there are several things i think were immaculately done, but that'd require me to churn out an entire research paper, which i don't have the brain cells for anymore post-finals. so here are some scattered thoughts yep and yap
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i don't gravitate towards mysterious or reserved characters because my personality simply doesn't mesh well with them. in fact, when i was watching wbk, i was always so wary of suo, and felt lowkey a lil uncomfortable with him LMFAO
but strangely enough, i think this discomfort became a very integral and driving force throughout my reading experience. of course, this was already the case due to the violent and dark nature of yakuzas, underground sex work, etc., but emphasizing suo's yandere-ness and how he doesn't shy away from it really completed the tone of the story. also, i feel like i came to terms with suo's character, which i rarely ever experience in general. really, this is all to say that it makes total logical sense in my brain to imagine a route where suo evolves into a yandere, and part of me strongly believes his real background in the wbk manga/anime won't be too happy-go-lucky either (otherwise the alternative would be like him wearing an eyepatch for the shtick bc he's a chuuni??? idrk????).
anyway, the reoccurring theme of redirection in suo's tactics really sealed the deal for me, and i think it was a good way to tie in references to his relationship to his master, the martial arts that we know he's especially good at, and how all of these things he's kinda exploited and sullied to "become a worse person for you." suo being very knowing and intentional is so snakey and creepy but also, i get a lil fucked up when it comes to men who are obsessed, so also incredibly erotic LMFAO i also just want someone to buy me a luxury penthouse out of concern for my safety *sad fist bump*
one thing i did find unexpected is suo's leadership within the yakuza. yes, necessary for the plot, otherwise he wouldn't be able to pull any strings. but because source material heavily emphasizes leaders as individuals like umemiya or sakura or even hiiragi, it's interesting to place suo in juxtaposition with them. not sure if it's bc i don't find suo particularly reliable in general, but i think this fic made me realize that he's still wise beyond his years and very, very ruthless. it's def very telling that, throughout the story, suo resorts to fear to assert power. anyway, i j think it was a particularly interesting detail to add in his role in the succession conflict.
btw, i do like how suo's change and transition isn't fully told or revealed. it's not a story meant for us, as it's a truth really for suo and reader. but even reader can't really keep up with him at times, and i find that dynamic really charming, as sadistic as that sounds. i like that reader is so vulnerable. i like that reader is not afraid to be vulnerable around him in the ways that matter, even when she's aware that he's fucking insane. and i really like that reader is aware of how much it takes to be vulnerable, so she doesn't push him. i think reader restrains herself (un)knowingly, and that's her way of loving him. obv less romantic in real life lol (don't try to fix anyone, been there, done that, lost myself, and still finding myself), but i do like how reader is suo's salvation :,,, even if she doesn't think she's particularly patient, she really is - like girl, Fuck Him Already!!!!!!
(could go on and on about how juicy the friction and tension is between suo and reader but that's for pt 2 hehehe)
this is kinda my half-assed transition into talking about reader, and honestly, my thoughts from earlier encapsulate the general thesis i have about her: she's really a lot like suo, way more than she thinks. i think she operates in very similar ways, just goes about it differently.
i think reader is way more reckless. she's very self-sacrificing. she's very good at putting up a front, even when she's internally low in confidence and self-respect. i think she just wants to be happy with suo, and hopefully, with their other friends as well.
and truly, i think suo has very similar end goals. i just think, with how things turned out, suo made the very calculated yet risky (also aggressive?) decision to do the things that he did. making their underlying principals and values and reactions so oddly similar, from my perspective, is sooooo neat, and it adds more depth to why they go so well together.
also, reader is so brilliantly the comedic relief in this whole thing. usually, in storytelling, it's someone else and is used as fodder. i really like how reader is a lil awkward and bad with timing and everything else, cause it makes the reading experience flow so much better. really helped with the pacing of the story, gave it the character + breathing space needed to process everything. i also just like my readers a little fucking hilarious.
anyway, op, so beautifully written - see you in pt 2 gg
TOKYO VICE | part 1
You knew that if you agreed to move in with Suo, you'd be setting yourself up for a life without autonomy. You also knew that these alarming behaviours were all signs that he desperately needed therapy to process his master’s untimely death. Living with a man in constant grief, who refused to talk about his trauma unless he was making up a lie related to the nation of China, was probably not a good decision. Doubly so when this man was clearly paranoid about losing you, and triply so when he was a high-ranking member of a violent syndicate. Unfortunately for you, you rarely made good decisions. (Or: After joining the yakuza, Suo develops the concerning habit of controlling every facet of your life. This is somehow less worrying to you than your uncontrollable lust around him.)
8.7k words. suo x fem reader. deeply unserious yakuza au. yandere suo (not abusive and reader is into it), dark comedy, a little angst, smut. warnings: borderline sex work, off-screen criminal violence. nsft – no actual smut in this chapter, but there are still graphic discussions of sex. mdni. thank you to @sleepyqinfei for beta reading and to @/cafekitsune for the banner!
sequel to sincerity and this sakura/reader wip
part 2 here
You’re not exactly sure why you and Suo have never fucked.
It’s certainly strange, given that you're pretty sure that Suo has expressed at least passing interest in you over the years, and you have felt a lot of interest in him. (By ‘interest’, you mean that you feel an insatiable lust around him that you fight to ignore on a daily basis.) You can't exactly pinpoint why nothing has ever happened despite this mutual attraction, especially given your profession and indifferent feelings toward casual sex.
You can think of a number of probable reasons, which are separate from those you classify as stupid reasons. The latter class comprises silly concerns like a fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, fear of not being pretty enough, fear of not being good enough, et cetera. All very juvenile feelings—insecurities that you had in your teenage years, the days in which Suo ran around Makochi as a delinquent while you worked an honest job at a bar. (It was a girls’ bar in the red light district, but that's neither here nor there.) Your circumstances have since changed, and those anxieties have since faded. None of them have any material consequence for your current life, so you don't see any point in thinking about them.
The stupid reasons, then, definitely don't have anything to do with why you've never fucked Suo. But you can think of a few, more concrete reasons that may explain it. For one, Suo has been your friend since childhood and it’s generally a bad idea to have sex with your long-time friends. He was also your roommate for a while and it’s an even messier idea to have sex with your roommates. And now, in your adulthood, he’s your landlord in addition to being your boss, which makes him the worst possible person you could have sex with. You could lose both your home and your livelihood if things go south—both severe, material consequences that should theoretically keep your lust at bay.
Also, he's also a member of the yakuza.
Now, strictly speaking—you're not really opposed to having sex with violent criminals. It’s definitely not a good idea, but you don't usually have good ideas anyway. But for the past several years, you’ve been pissed at Suo for joining the yakuza in the first place, which actually does keep your blatant attraction to him in check. You simply dry up when you think too hard about all the feelings of betrayal.
When Suo was on the cusp of graduating from Furin and thinking about his future, you’d grabbed him by the collar and made him promise not to join the yakuza. They constantly tried to recruit from Bofurin, and they especially wanted Sakura, Suo, and Sugishita. You were adamant about chasing them off from Suo and Sakura whenever they approached—you had no need to worry about Sugishita, as Umemiya had already said he shouldn't talk to them, so there was no chance he was going to—and you begged Suo over and over not to join. Delinquency was fine, but a crime syndicate was something else altogether.
Suo seemed serious about it when he said he'd listen to you. He even applied to colleges, talked about maybe becoming a teacher and eventually supporting you so you could stop working in the mizu shobai industry. Back then, he often teased you by saying that you should marry him and be his housewife (or he could be your trophy husband, if you so wished). You thought he was joking, but with the way he always talked about his life after his degree, you wondered if he would seriously suggest it.
Of course, it was most likely just teasing, and you were fine with that. You were simply excited that he'd found a career that would make him happy. Nirei had also been accepted to university at that point, and even Sakura had an honest job lined up on Keisei Street. The future had looked bright for everyone.
Then Suo’s master died, and he lost his fucking mind.
The two of you buried Suo’s master in a Chinese funeral. He had never had children of his own, having satisfied his paternal instincts by picking up strays, and he didn't have much in the way of family in Japan either, so you and Suo performed the shou ling yourselves. One person kept a constant vigil over his body while the other searched on Google for what arrangements should be made next. After all, while Suo’s master had immersed his foremost disciple in his culture, he had never taught Suo any funerary customs. He hadn't thought there would be a need.
Suo didn't cry nearly as much as you, but he was probably in more pain. Your master had trained you a little bit when you were a kid, and he'd taken you in for a while after your parents kicked you out, so of course you were gutted. But he had practically raised Suo, so it was naturally worse for him. More shattering.
You often think about the first night you decided you'd sleep with him in the same futon because he was crying so much. He insisted he was fine, but he didn't complain when you got under the sheets with him and started thumbing away his tears. When you took off his eyepatch, you found, to your astonishment, that he was crying from his missing eye as well. Both of you thought the tear ducts had been destroyed in either the accident or the enucleation, but it appeared that not even that prior trauma could mask his grief over this one.
Nevertheless, by the time of the funeral procession, Suo had stopped crying.
“Master supported us and taught us to stand on our own two feet,” he said as the joss paper burned. He took your hand in his and smiled. “So it'll be fine. We’ll be okay on our own. I'll make sure of it.”
At the time, you had found this very comforting. You didn’t think too much of it, as you had a bad habit of relying on Suo for your emotional stability. His master had raised him to be an emotionally intelligent person, so it had been fine, even though you had a track record of reckless decisions. He’d still exercised endless patience with you. He never once got angry with you, nor did he ever force you to do what he felt was the right thing. Instead, he gently redirected your self-damaging behaviours—not so different from the martial art that he practised.
He disapproved of the run-down and lonely conditions of your apartment, so he spent a great deal of time there and helped make it into a proper home. He didn't like how dangerous your job at the girls’ bar was, so he walked you to and from work every night until you never left without him. He worried when you started having sex with your customers, especially when you began having nervous breakdowns over it (you were, after all, still a teenager and really only interested in having romantic vanilla sex with Suo), so he staged an intervention with Nirei and Sakura. In this way, Suo convinced you that you were loved and protected and didn't need to do something you hated so much. They would get you out if you felt trapped. And you didn't feel trapped, per se, so you left on your own—but it was still only because of them. You promised them afterwards that you'd never do it again.
This was Suo’s brand of kindness as a teenager. He always taught people, guided them away from harm rather than steering them—a behaviour he’d mimicked from your master. Your master, in general, had defined all of Suo’s values and his way of living, which was honest and gentle and conscientious. It was one where he used his abilities to protect the weak and care for his friends. He even kept his spiteful and alarmingly violent tendencies under control, though sometimes he slipped when fighting genuine assholes. But he still tried. He tried because he strived to be as kind as his master—who represented everything that Suo wanted to be in his adult life.
Thus, the death of Suo’s master meant the death of his principles. It changed the kind of man that Suo wanted to be. You don't want to say that he became a worse person, but he absolutely became a worse person.
He especially became a worse person with you.
As it turned out, Suo’s idea of making sure that the two of you would be fine on your own was, well, not really fine. It wasn’t that he became cruel to you, per se. It was more that whenever he saw a problem with your behaviour, his approaches to redirecting it became—put as nicely as possible—heavy-handed.
After your master’s death, you got a job at a high end, yakuza-owned club. Two weeks later, Suo broke his promise to you and joined the yakuza. So I can stay close to you, he explained gently, wiping away your tears as you cried hysterically, but you're convinced to this day that he did it partly out of spite. So a few years later, when you started having sex with your customers again and he tried to stop you, you decided to spite him back. I need to stay on top of the rankings, you'd explained dispassionately. The mamasan said it's fine, and the manager doesn't care. He even thinks it's good for business.
Suo’s response was to simply become the owner of your club.
This move was very extreme, but also very effective. Any customer who so much as brushed against you on the premises was instantly thrown out, and the mamasan started watching you like a hawk to make sure you weren’t going to any love hotels after work. Douhan were off-limits. For the first time since your teens, you became completely celibate—not only because of your new workplace circumstances, but because you simply didn't want to find out what Suo would do if you got together with a man he despised (and he despised every man you dated).
His most absurd play was when he became concerned about your living conditions again. Your latest apartment was too plain, too small, and the area was too dangerous. It didn't even have a shower, and the other tenants behaved concerningly toward you when you went to the bathhouse at night. But the rent was cheap, and it was still an upgrade from your last place, so you shrugged it off when Suo suggested that you move. Even when someone tried to accost you at night, you were nonchalant about it. You kicked the shit out of them in a fight and continued your routine unbothered.
The next month, Suo bought a luxury penthouse and suggested you move in with him.
His offer (command) came with conditions. One of the bigger ones was that you'd let him accompany you out at night if you ever needed to run errands in dangerous places. Or—nevermind, actually. He should really just accompany you everywhere at night. Maybe during the day too. And—ah, there was no way you'd be going to work alone, nor coming back by yourself—you were now always to be driven by someone in his organisation, if he wasn't available himself. Rent was a point of contention, when you asked about it: you wanted to pay at market rate, and he insisted that there was no need to pay at all. He ended up proposing a highly discounted price, which would give you ample financial freedom, but questionable financial independence.
These were insane terms. You knew that if you agreed, you'd be setting yourself up for a life without autonomy. You also knew that these behaviours were all signs that Suo desperately needed therapy to process his master’s untimely death. Living with a man in constant grief, who refused to talk about his trauma unless he was making up a lie related to the nation of China, was probably not a good idea. Doubly so when this man was clearly paranoid about losing you, and triply so when he was a high-ranking member of a violent syndicate. Case in point—he was likely connected to the brutal accident that later befell the man who tried to assault you.
“I'm not sure what you're implying, but at least he didn't die,” Suo said cheerfully when you confronted him about it. Which really meant: At least I decided not to kill him. This was a flag bigger and redder than any other you've ever known, and you consider yourself an expert in red flags. You knew you should run in the other direction.
So naturally, you put your arms around him, tenderly said, I'm sorry I've been worrying you, and then you moved in the next day.
While Suo treats you with endless patience, you have personal limits to the patience that you exercise with him. Specifically, your patience with how he treats you.
You don't mind the lack of social freedom, nor the lack of personal freedom, nor the lack of freedom of movement. You also don't mind living with a man full of intractable trauma surrounding the death of every parental figure in his life; in fact, you'd rather be by his side than not, if he needs to cope with something so painful. And anyway, your friendship is otherwise unchanged if you ignore the heavy restrictions he's imposed on every facet of your life. So that's all fine.
But the celibate lifestyle that he's cornered you into? You simply aren't built for it. Holy shit, do you need to get laid.
Nearly two years without sex has brought you close to another nervous breakdown (there have been few better sources of entertainment or validation in your life), and worst of all, it has made your profound lust for Suo incredibly hard to ignore. Waking up every morning to him in a towel, his hair still wet from the shower and his broad silhouette exposed, tests the absolute limits of your self-control. The contours of his lean and muscled form are distracting enough; coupled with the vivid colours and lines of his irezumi, the sight of him becomes maddening. It is a horrible thing to be exposed to when you haven't gotten any dick nor strap in over a year. It gives you thoughts about him that are overtly sexual, which is bad, as you have materially consequential reasons for not wanting to fuck Suo.
Things with him must absolutely stay platonic. But with sexual frustration like yours, being platonic with him means that you need to get erotic with someone else. A boyfriend or girlfriend is out of the question; you don't want to be responsible for yet another brutal accident. So you instead decide to quit your job at his club and start working on Keisei Street. At least this way, you can start fucking your customers again.
It’s a perfect plan. Suo’s oyabun is very indulgent toward him, and everyone else in the family respects him too. He consequently has a tight grip on his organisation and the territory they control, despite his relatively young age. Not a single person is ever to touch Keisei Street—largely because Sakura is part of Roppo-Ichiza, and Suo is nearly as weird about Sakura as he is about you. Plus, many of his other fellow Furin alumni are in the gang as well. If Suo’s men ever started fucking with people on Keisei Street, it would not only have grave implications for gang relations—it would be personally upsetting for Suo. This means you can fuck all the Keisei Street customers you want, and not get a single one of them threatened or killed.
A pretty brilliant idea, if you do say so yourself.
Suo’s expression doesn't change when you break the news to him. He delicately places his teacup—custom-made from Yixing, just like the matching clay teapot—down on the mahogany tabletop, and he looks at you with a calm smile.
“Come again?”
“I'm quitting my job at Red Dragon,” you repeat. “I already gave the mamasan my resignation.”
“And she accepted it?” Suo asks, in a tone that is so carefully nonchalant that you know it means he is actually furious with her. “How interesting,” he muses. “What brought this on?”
“I've found a better paying opportunity on Keisei Street.”
“I'll give you a raise,” he says easily.
“A raise?” You cock a brow. “The pay is mostly commission-based at Red Dragon. You know that.”
“Then it would be unwise to leave. You have a loyal customer base at Red Dragon. All very rich, and”—his smile grows sharp—“very polite.”
Polite. An interesting word. It actually means: None of them will ever proposition or harass you because they know they'll be maimed if they do. An easy thought to use to your advantage.
“It's loyal but it's small. Everyone who's anyone in this part of town thinks that we’re married. Do you know how hard it is to pull new customers in when they're scared shitless of my yakuza husband? And anyway”—you frown, trying to look as pathetic as possible—“I'm lonely.”
Suo stares. He looks surprised, possibly because you absorb every minute of his free time with silly conversation, new restaurants, and skiing trips. (He likes snow, so you ask for these trips more for him to relax than anything else.) You also text him frequently on days he's working, and he very diligently replies, even if he's in the middle of something like a raid or a hit or brokering a massive deal. Suo still very strictly keeps to his rule of never touching his phone when in conversation with other people—unless he needs to text you.
So his suspicion is fair. Suo is very attentive and doesn't allow you much opportunity for loneliness. In turn, you’ve always been very happy spending time with him, even when it's only him.
“Lonely?” he repeats. “Are you, now?”
“Yes. You work so much,” you complain, which is not a lie, “and I don't have any friends to spend time with when you're gone.”
“You have friends from work.”
“No, I have competition at work. The hostesses are so cutthroat about rankings, they hate me. And each other.”
“You like Shuuhei and Hanzo,” he points out, referring to his men who most frequently chauffeur you.
“Yeah, they're friendly, and they're very funny. I like them, but I can't be their friend.” Suo stares at you, nonplussed, so you spell it out: “They're too scared of you to get close to me. What if it looks like they're trying to fuck the boss’ wife?”
“Hm…” Suo studies you, looking thoughtful. Perhaps for the first time, he's contemplating the consequences of restricting your freedoms and marking you as his. That is to say—maybe he's finally realising that you have no friends and no life.
The beads of his earrings glimmer as he tilts his head at you and frowns. Suo almost looks innocent with that confused face of his. “And how would working on Keisei Street help?” he asks.
“Because all our old friends are there!” you exclaim. “Sakura’s in Roppo-Ichiza now so he’ll definitely be coming by all the clubs. Tsubaki too. And Nirei and Kiryu visit them quite often—and even Tsugeura does sometimes, even though clubbing isn't one of his virtues.” You grab onto his arm, pull yourself close, and give him your most disarming, pleading expression. “Please, Suo?”
“Hm.” He strokes your cheek and looks at you fondly, in the way that one would do with an adorable and slightly annoying kitten. “I don’t think so. It’s not very safe there.”
He isn't wrong. Not only are you untouchable on his turf because of your association to him, Suo has also just crushed all the han-gure and petty criminals in his territory with brutal efficiency. His part of the red light district is, quite ironically, one of the safest places in the city, and certainly safer than Keisei Street.
But undeterred, you point out, “Shuuhei and Hanzo can still drive me there and back if you want. But I don't think it's necessary. Do you really think Sakura would let anything happen to me?”
This is the true brilliance of your plan: capitalising on the fact that Suo is as nearly as weird about Sakura as he is about you. He pauses as soon as you bring up the point, and you can practically see the gears turning. “Well, if it's him…”
“I even texted him about it. Look—here!” You whip out your phone, receipts ready. The corner of Suo's mouth lifts at your obviously rehearsed pitch. “He says he'd make sure I'm taken care of. And he says it'd be nice because he misses seeing us. Can you believe it—Sakura actually admitted that he misses us! Typed it with his own two hands and pressed send! I bet he was super embarrassed about it.”
“Huh. He even used a sticker. I've never seen him do that.” Suo smiles as he reads through the chat. He looks like his old self. You suddenly feel a little wistful, and also a lot bad. This started as a ploy to get laid, but it’s made you realise that you really do miss your friends—and Suo probably does too.
“If I worked on Keisei Street, then you would have plenty of reason to visit,” you point out, feeling somewhat tender.
“I guess that's true,” Suo says. Your heart aches a little bit at the look he gives you. It's a platonic ache, of course. Or at the very least, it isn't an erotic one. It doesn't really make you want to have sex with him anyway. But if you could lean forward and press your lips to his—platonically—then you definitely would.
Suo's civilian friendships are complicated by his double life. Quite unusually for yakuza, Suo’s syndicate insists on using pseudonyms and false histories to avoid anti-yakuza laws, on the off-chance that the police decide to do their jobs and actually enforce those laws someday. Lying for comedy is one of Suo’s greatest passions, so he was happy to manufacture an absurd backstory: his name is Yanzhao, and he learned kung fu in a Shaolin Temple before moving to Hong Kong and working for the triads. He wears the eyepatch because he lost his eye in an altercation with the cops, which he won. By the way, you're his criminally beautiful wife who he met in Macau. The two of you had to leave for Japan since he killed a police officer and now he's wanted by the governments of both China and Hong Kong. Also, he's a very devoted husband, so if anyone lays a hand on you, he’ll kill them too.
Somehow, everyone has bought into this story. Every criminal organisation in the red light district now fears a high-ranking yakuza known as Yanzhao, who is easily recognizable by his eyepatch and tassel earrings, and who is also homicidally obsessed with his beautiful wife.
In some ways, his infamy is convenient. No one wants to fuck with Suo, or with you by extension. But it also poses some issues: Suo has to keep a low profile in areas controlled by rival organisations, or else he might be ambushed. It also means he cannot easily go out and see his old friends. Even though he always masquerades as a civvie when he does, wearing stud earrings and a glass eye, it's still a little risky—especially since he likes to visit the strongest member of Roppo-Ichiza. While Roppo-Ichiza aren’t yakuza, they're still han-gure, so some of its more criminally entangled members might recognize him anyway.
But Sakura himself, bless him, has not put two and two together and figured out that Suo Hayato and Gui Yanzhao are the same person. This is partly because Suo lies very convincingly about his fictional career in the tea industry, but you think it's also because Sakura is so gullible it's endearing.
I use the glass eye now because it's better for networking, Suo had explained before Sakura could interrogate him too much, his voice too smooth and too quick for the other man to get in a word edgewise. My business partners find the eyepatch too silly. The tassel earrings too. By the way, would you like some Baimudan tea? I thought of you when I smelled it—I know you like fragrant things—so I picked some up for you on my last visit to China. I was there for business a couple of weeks ago.
He, of course, neglected to mention that said business involved meeting with the 14K triad.
Despite the enormity of Suo's omission (lie), Sakura is none the wiser whenever he meets with you. He thinks you're just a regular hostess who has freedom of movement and various other human rights, and that Suo’s just a regular guy who isn’t homicidally obsessed with you (a detail of Suo's fabricated life story that is unfortunately grounded in reality). All this to say, Sakura doesn't think twice about mentioning the fact that you have a routine of going to love hotels after work.
Suo, as always, remains calm in the face of unsettling information. He sets down his tea (just tea, without shochu), and politely says, “Pardon?” He's once again using the nonchalant kind of tone that suggests mortal danger.
“She's always going to love hotels after her shifts.” Sakura is frowning at you, pink but scowling. “I thought you said you were done with that stuff. You promised us you wouldn't do it anymore. Suo—are you really okay with this?”
On the one hand, you find it exceptionally sweet that Sakura, after all this time, remembers your promise and wishes to hold you to it. He was so worried about you when you started having those nervous breakdowns as a teenager, and he probably still is. On the other hand, you're shitting bricks at the fact that Suo is now aware of your activities. Because sure, he likely won't fuck with Keisei Street—but you realise, as he stares at you, that you can't be certain of this. After all, your fake yakuza husband has very real homicidal urges.
“Um,” you say. “It's just business.”
“Business,” Suo repeats.
“You don't have to do that stuff to keep good business,” Sakura grouses, unaware of Suo’s carefully suppressed rage. “You're real popular already.”
“Are you?” Suo asks, looking right at you.
“I mean—I told you the pay would be better, right?” you reply, voice oddly high and nervous, and this is when Sakura notices that something is wrong.
“Oh,” Sakura says, looking between the two of you. “Suo, you didn't know?”
“I didn't,” he says. “Actually, she told me specifically that she wasn't going to do that if she worked here.” He turns to you, still smiling. “That's the only reason why I allowed this at all, remember?”
A chill travels down your spine. You did, in fact, commit to a perpetually sexless lifestyle in order to be granted some semblance of freedom: Of course I won't sleep with any customers, you'd said. You know I don't really like doing that anyway. I promise I'll behave! I’ll be out of the clubs and right back home. Sakura said he’d make sure I’ll get to a cab safely after the bar closes and everything!
“Um,” you say again, but this time you have no follow-up.
“Wait,” Sakura demands, “what do you mean by ‘allowed her’? What, do you need to give her permission to work now or something?”
Suo smiles disarmingly at Sakura. Without missing a beat, he says, “Generally no. But we’re dating now, which complicates what she’s allowed to do with other men at her job.”
Sakura spits out his drink. You choke on your spit.
“I… um?!” Sakura’s staring at you, so you quickly recover. This is a mortifying lie, but it's better than Sakura finding out just how batshit Suo has become since his school days. “I thought we were going to keep that a secret, dear?”
“Ah, you're right. Sorry, I got too excited.” Suo gives you an endeared look before turning to Sakura. “We were going to keep it to ourselves unless we got serious about it. But we've been talking about marriage lately, so I thought it was fine to mention.”
“...”
You’re going to have an aneurysm. Why does every cover that Suo comes up with involve a marital relationship between the two of you?!
“Oh… holy shit.” Sakura’s expression is complicated—somehow, more complicated than yours, even though you’re the one getting cornered into a fake engagement. It's unbelievable how shy he still is about this kind of thing. Maybe it’s just particularly embarrassing since he's known you two for so long, you reason. Regardless, he remembers his social cues enough to say, “Congrats, guys. That's great. That's really great.”
Suo gazes fondly at you across the table. “We were thinking you could be our best man,” he adds, and you consider violently kicking his leg.
“O-oh. Uh, yeah! Sure! But what about Nirei?”
“Rather than having a maid of honour,” you say reflexively, used to lying through your teeth for Suo, “we’d like him to be our best man as well.”
“Oh. That makes sense.” Thrown off guard, Sakura completely forgets about the love hotel business. He whips out his phone. “When were you thinking of having your wedding? I'll put it in my calendar.”
“I’m not sure.” Suo turns to you. “What were we thinking again, dear?”
You're going to die. You're going to die and it's a good thing because if you survive this embarrassment, your future will be bleak. As soon as Nirei finds out about this, he’ll want to start helping you with wedding planning, and then it would just be too awkward to cancel things. You’ll have to enter a fake marriage with Suo, which will be completely sexless, because even with a vow of everlasting love, there are still too many concrete and materially consequential reasons for not sleeping with him.
Condemning yourself to a lifetime of sexual frustration, you reply, “I think we were talking about a summer wedding.”
The drive home is awkward.
Hanzo and Shuuhei pick the two of you up. Suo mentioned that he wanted to talk to you and you alone, so they bring the Rolls Royce with the privacy suite. The two of them are entirely cut off from you thanks to the soundproofing, which traps you with Suo, who’s drinking a bottle of oolong tea as the two of you sit in complete silence. You think he's waiting for you to squirm—which you do.
You stay like that for five, agonising minutes before Suo finally says, “So you're sleeping with your customers.”
You swallow. “Yes.”
“For business?”
“Yes.”
“How much do you make?”
You blink. “Huh?”
“How much do you get paid for a single night of work, including gifts that your customers give you in exchange for sleeping with them?”
You're halfway through citing your earnings when you realise where he's going with this.
“So you make less than you did at Red Dragon,” Suo concludes, “and you're very smart with your money, so I know you know that, and you probably went into this knowing that you'd end up at a net loss.” He turns to you, gives you a look so sharp that it almost scares you. All made worse by his civilian disguise, which makes him feel unfamiliar. His glass eye shines strangely in the light, and his scar tissue is hidden by the makeup you helped apply. You wish he'd taken it all off before having this conversation.
“So,” he says, “what’s the real reason you changed jobs?”
Already knowing that he’ll figure you out sooner or later, you admit, “I just wanted to start having sex again.”
Suo blinks. “You… what?”
“I wanted to have sex with people,” you repeat. “I hadn't been touched for nearly two years, okay? I needed to get laid or else I'd go insane.” You cross your arms and look away, suddenly feeling petulant. “I'm sure you've noticed that our arrangement makes it impossible for me to see people.”
He doesn't answer, because of course he's noticed. He’d designed his house rules with precisely this intent. If he accompanies you everywhere you go, then you can't exactly go on dates, and you definitely can't meet people for sex. Not unless you feel like having Suo watch as some anonymous guy fucks you, and you don't. As hot as the idea is, it’s definitely not platonic behaviour, and it would probably trigger the whole homicidal obsession thing.
“Do you like it?” Suo asks, startling you. You look at him, confused.
“What?”
“Do you enjoy having sex with your customers?” he asks. His voice and gaze are even. Unrelenting. “Does it make you happy?”
You stare at him, a deer caught in headlights. You didn't expect Suo to actually care about whether you enjoyed it or not, and you didn't really expect to care yourself either. But truthfully, you hated it. You simply weren't feeling it with most of your customers and avoided intercourse with all but one. Then in that one case you let someone earnestly fuck you, it was a complete letdown. Possibly the worst sex you'd ever had. You spent the whole time watching the clock, wondering how long it would take, and it turned out that your hookup had remarkable stamina but absolutely no technique. To pass the time, and in an attempt to feel something, you tried to imagine it was someone else who was inside you. You cycled through a whole list of people, including all of your exes, a few of your past customers, every single member of BTS, and then—finally, inevitably—your long-time friend, roommate, and landlord.
To your complete horror, when you imagined that it was Suo who had you folded in half, his cock so deep inside you that you could feel it in your throat, you came so hard that you drenched the sheets.
You lay there afterward as your customer showered, alone in the bed. Normally you'd be getting dressed at that point, but you were too distracted. You kept thinking about what it would feel like to be held by Suo after having your guts rearranged by him—embraced tenderly like you know he would do with you, kissing him platonically like you've always wanted to do with him—and you realised that you didn’t actually want to have sex with anyone else. Despite all your life experience, sexual experience, and job experience—in that moment, you felt like a lonely nineteen year old girl who wanted nothing more than to have romantic, vanilla sex with her best friend, but who was instead having impersonal, disappointing sex with various salarymen.
This was a feeling so disgusting that you’ve decided to never tell anyone at any cost.
“Yeah, it's fine. I guess I like it.” You pretend to study your nails. “Sometimes I cum, which is all I really want.”
Suo keeps staring at you. “That’s it?” he asks, voice measured and careful. You raise a brow, playing dumb.
“What do you mean?”
“That's all you want? Just to get off?”
You gaze out the window, trying not to look at his lips.
“Yes, that's all.”
No matter how batshit Suo gets, he always maintains a certain kindness and maturity in how he handles conflict with you. It's a lesson that he learned from his master, which has perhaps been distorted over time, but remains important to him nevertheless.
If you do something upsetting, Suo is never forceful about getting you to act differently. Sure, he has fucked up ways of either getting you to behave or making you understand the consequences of your actions, and perhaps he has his manipulative moments. It was probably not a good thing that he coaxed you into indefinite house arrest, for instance. But he never threatens you, and he never hits you, and he never disrespects you. In fact, more than anything, he makes it a point to never let you feel like you aren't loved.
So when Suo abandons you after that conversation in the Rolls Royce, you lose your fucking mind.
Suo doesn’t come home in the days following that evening, without any note nor explanation. For the first time in years, he stops replying to your texts. Your immediate thought is that he's been gravely injured or perhaps even killed, which sends you into a panicked spiral. But every one of his men who's come by to check on you has implied otherwise—but I'm not allowed to tell you anything else, anesan, I’m sorry, they all say. And when you realise that Suo is actually fine and he's just playing a fucked up mind game with you, one that makes you feel distinctly unloved, you feel simultaneously heartbroken and apoplectic. The man is not allowed to corner you into de facto imprisonment and then just fucking leave. In fact, if he tries, you might imprison him.
You spend a few days sitting at home and crying over this, as well as torturing yourself by thinking about useless things (fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, et cetera). But eventually, you get tired of wallowing in self-inflicted misery, and you decide to just track your fake husband down. His men have been adamant about not letting you out of their sight—presumably so you don’t fuck any more of your customers, because Suo can be spiteful like that—so you have to be strategic about your plan to find him.
You decide to do it during work. You tap out in the middle of a shift, feigning illness, so nobody bats an eye when you put on the most shapeless hoodie you own and throw on a face mask. Your chauffeurs (handlers) don't notice as you sneak off—and for the first time in years, you walk through the red light district all alone.
It feels strange not to be protected, and even stranger not to be surveilled. You marvel at the unfamiliar experience of complete freedom, and at the possibility of being able to run off and disappear if you so wished. But you don't, of course. Not only do you care too deeply for Suo to abandon him, you're also pretty sure he has your driver’s licence and ID card locked up somewhere. At least you haven't been able to find them, and Suo was oddly evasive about it when you asked. (I haven't seen them, he'd said, but I don't think you’d need either of those things immediately, anyway, do you? And you nodded in response, because it was true that you liked being his passenger princess too much to care about your licence.)
So rather than bolting for the subway, you head straight to your old workplace. The gleaming doors of Red Dragon welcome you as you cross its threshold, and you're greeted immediately by the scent of luxury colognes and expensive cigars—both evoking a strange nostalgia in you. Even the click of your heels against the marble floor feels familiar. You realise that you've missed the place despite its cutthroat culture and its owner’s authoritarian control over you, which you suppose isn't surprising. This club was more or less your home for years and, thanks to said owner, was the safest place you've ever worked.
And being that you feel you've returned to your very safe home, you don't expect it when you're abruptly stopped by the bouncer.
“Can I help you?” he asks, his arm in your way. You don't recognize him, but you see the edges of his irezumi peeking out from the rolled-up cuffs of his shirt.
“Yeah, actually,” you say. “I'm looking for Gui Yanzhao. Is he here right now?”
The bouncer—or chinpira, you guess—bristles.
“You're looking for who?”
“Yanzhao?” you say impatiently. “Eyepatch, tassel earrings? Owner of the club? Probably your boss?”
The bouncer steps forward and reaches for something in his pocket, which makes you suddenly nervous, and also makes you realise that in a hoodie and a face mask, you ordinarily wouldn't be allowed in this club, let alone into the room of its yakuza owner. You're so used to VIP treatment here that you simply forgot.
You take a step back. “Um. I think there's been a misunderstanding.” You lower your face mask, which doesn't help as you've never met this man, and he must be new. You’ll need to complain to Suo about his onboarding process later, if you aren't killed before you can find him.
It turns out that this yakuza rookie has a knife in his pocket, which is not the worst thing he could have been carrying, but is also not the best. You're getting ready to run in the other direction when a more senior member of the gang comes by. He gives you a startled look, which then turns alarmed when he sees his younger brother’s knife.
“Anesan!” he yells hurriedly, and he snatches the chinpira’s knife straight from his hand. His lunge for the weapon turns into a hurried bow. He pulls his colleague—whose face has turned very white in a very short amount of time—into an even deeper one. They look on the verge of prostrating.
“Oh, Yamashita. Hi! Is this guy new?”
“Yes! My sincerest apologies for my younger brother’s idiocy, and his insolence in raising a weapon at you.” There's a sheen of sweat on the back of his neck. “If you would like him to atone, then he would be more than happy to—”
“No, that's fine. I'd really like him to keep all his fingers.” If you have to see a rookie cut off his pinkie today, you think you might actually change your mind on running away. Fuck your documents—Suo can keep them. Surely life without proof of identity can't be that hard. “By the way,” you say, trying to change the topic before Yamashita can suggest alternative acts of atonement, “have you seen my husband?”
Yamashita hesitates at your question, looks conflicted. You feel a little bad for him, and for every other gang member who needs to worry about accidentally offending Suo. You watch him sweat for a full ten seconds before he says, “You can follow me. But anesan, you might find it unpleasant upstairs. I can find someone to drive you home instead, if you'd like.”
You give him a funny look. This was your workplace for a very long time—you can’t think of many things that would happen here that might seriously upset you. “What, is he cheating on me?” you guess.
“What? No! Aniki would never!” Yamashita seems genuinely shocked at the suggestion. “He's crazy about you!”
“Then I'm sure he’ll be happy to see me,” you say, although given that he's ignored your texts for four days straight, you aren't so sure. Regardless, this seems to be good enough reasoning for Yamashita, and you’re taken to the top floor of Red Dragon. You ponder the whole time, on the elevator ride up, just what exactly Suo’s been up to that's made Yamashita this nervous about letting you see him.
Then the door opens, and you’re given your answer in the form of several body bags—all cleanly zipped up and conscientiously laid out in front of the elevators in a single, neat row. A sight that is significantly worse than a rookie cutting off his pinkie finger.
“Oh,” you say faintly. You try not to throw up. “So this is why he hasn't been home.”
“Exactly!” Yamashita replies, beaming. “See, anesan, I told you. He'd never cheat on you!”
Suo is in the lounge of the top floor, which has been cleared of both civilians and corpses for the night. He's sitting on one of the couches, leaning back with his one eye closed, as if asleep. The golden tassels of his earrings are draped over the expensive leather of his seat, intertwined with his dark hair. A cup of tea sits in front of him, steaming. Even this far away, you recognize it by the scent alone: jasmine, probably from Longjing. One of the most expensive blends he has, and that which he saves for days he’s stressed, though he never admits it when he is.
The sight of him would almost look tranquil, except for all the blood on his knuckles and his cuffs.
Off to the side, two of his younger brothers are chatting away. One is pouring cups of some doubtlessly expensive liquor, and the other is smoking a cigar. There's karaage on the table too. You recognize all of this as part of a ritual that some of the guys like to do after a hit or a shootout, not dissimilar to getting ramen or McDonald’s after going to a club.
You catch a bit of their conversation as you approach. One of them holds up the liquor bottle (Isojiman sake, you now recognise from your girls’ bar days, one of the rarer bottles costing around nine million yen) and asks Suo if he wants to join. “No thanks,” he says predictably, “I'm on a diet.” Then he turns and looks right at you—startling you, because you had thought you were being fairly quiet—and gives you a smile so genuine that it reminds you of his Furin days. “Would my beautiful wife like to drink for me, though?”
“No thanks,” you reply, “but your beautiful wife would like to talk to you.”
The two guys clear out to give you some privacy. You’re left alone with Suo, feeling awkward after several days of resenting him for no reason. (You’d rather die than go to therapy, but the whole fear of abandonment thing is probably something you should start addressing.) You don't even know where you want to sit. Eventually, you settle for placing yourself next to him, which is a decision that Suo quickly overturns by pulling you into his lap.
A flutter erupts in your stomach as he settles you on top of him. This physiological reaction is absurd, as not even ten minutes ago, you were trying not to throw up at the line of corpses in front of the elevator. It should also scare you somewhat that Suo’s hands—delicately adjusting your body—are still covered in blood. But truthfully, you can't help but be happy when he makes you feel so loved.
You take one of the napkins on the table and start wiping at his knuckles. Tenderly, in case they're bruised or skinned.
“You didn't call or come home,” you start.
“I thought it would be too dangerous.”
You frown, thinking of all the bodies outside. “Was this a rival organisation?”
“No. They were ours.” He sighs. “A succession conflict. There are a few people who don't like how I'll run things if I take over.”
You nod. Suo is very old-fashioned in his ideals about the yakuza, which you think is an imprint of his master’s influence, and something that appeals to his current ‘father’. He values chivalry. He likes protecting the weak. His filial devotion to his deceased master has now extended to every member of his yakuza family, especially his oyassan. He’s almost certainly the top candidate for taking over after the oyabun dies, but being that part of his old-fashioned principles excludes lucrative projects such as sex trafficking, you suppose it’s natural that some people in his organisation would prefer him dead rather than in charge.
“You’ve never ghosted me during violent conflicts before though,” you say. “I was worried that something happened to you. Or that you were upset with me.”
Suo’s hand drops to your waist, pulling you a little closer.
“They knew where we live. They tried to get to you, you know.” Your eyes widen in alarm, so he cups your face with a palm. His thumb glides along your cheek, and your response is almost Pavlovian: your heart rate immediately slows at the comfort of his touch. “It’s fine. They won't bother you ever again.” The cheerful smile returns. “And if anyone else ever does, I'll handle them too.”
Your heart swells. Enthusiastic pledges of murder are not a healthy sign of affection, but after so much loneliness—whether from the past several days, or the years before that, you aren't sure—you can't find it in yourself to be disturbed. You feel and sound painfully fond when you reply, “I know.”
Suo’s expression dims a little then. “I thought you'd like the space anyway.”
“What?” You give him a confused look. You have never once given him any indication that you want even an inch of space from him. You'd crawl into his ribcage if you could. “Why would you think that?”
“I thought you felt suffocated. You left my club just so you could have sex with other people.” You blink, lingering on his wording. Other people. He continues before you can ask about it, sighing, “You didn't even ask me who I'd give permission to touch you. You just went ahead and decided on your own.”
“...”
You try not to look disturbed. Suo’s apparent wish to control your sexual decisions is news to you, and somehow more alarming than the murder pledge. And even worse—you immediately clench in response to his words. The thought of Suo dictating who does and doesn't get to touch your cunt is… well, your mind is heading in a distinctly non-platonic direction.
Trying to ignore the heat in between your thighs (but at the same time encouraging it), you ask: “Who would you have been, um, okay with touching me?”
“Sakura or Nirei,” he says immediately. “Though only Sakura would be interested.”
“What.” You gape at him, all arousal forgotten. “Bullshit. He would never.”
“Yes, he would.” Suo tilts his head. “Haven't you noticed?”
“I don't think there's anything to notice? And also—he’s so shy, I don't think he'd ever agree even if he were interested!” You give him a bewildered look. “He couldn't even look at us when we said we were getting married, he was so embarrassed!”
“Embarrassed?” Suo stares at you, an amused glint in his eye. “Is that what you thought was going on?”
“Was there anything else?”
He studies you for a moment, clearly entertained but not explaining why. “Well—it’s fine,” he says. “It doesn't matter for now. Especially since he's helping us plan a wedding and all.”
You make a face. “I still can't believe that's the cover you went for.”
“Are you upset with it?” he asks smoothly, and you huff and say yes, but from his sly look, you think he knows it's a lie.
Naturally, you deflect before he can further interrogate you. “So, given that you are now my fiancé, am I no longer allowed to work on Keisei Street and see customers after my shifts?”
You don’t expect it when Suo says, “No, you can.”
You stare. “What?”
“You can keep seeing customers if you'd like. You said it makes you happy, so why would I stop you?” Suo’s brow furrows, his usual calm replaced with concern. “Do you really think I do the things I do to make you miserable?”
Guilt gnaws at your heart. He looks so disappointed. “No,” you tell him. “I just thought it'd make you miserable that I was sleeping with people without your permission.” It is partly why you hid it from him in the first place, after all. You don't like to see him sad—you’re still haunted by the deep grief he was in, after your master died—and also, his misery tends to bring bodily harm to other people these days.
Cognizant of both concerns, you ask, “You’re really okay with me sleeping with my customers? I can stop, if you want.”
“No, it’s fine. I still don't like it, but you can continue for now if you want.”
Suo’s mouth curls—not in a gentle way, as has been his expression since seeing you walk in, but in a way that sets off your flight or fight response.
“I'm sure we’ll reach a mutual understanding soon enough.”
END PART 1
thank you genuinely if you read all that because this is a deranged au and I still can't believe I wrote it sldfkjsldfkj. please do let me know if you enjoyed my yandere suo delusions. sorry there was no smut in this chapter. I promise there is a ton in the next one (probably too much... lol. it's a 10k chapter and literally half of those words are about orgasm denial sldfkjalskdjdf). it's completely written and I hope to edit and have it up by next week!
also here is glossary of terms and world building notes if you are interested!
tagging @kweenkatsuki-fics !! <3
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Writing Worksheets: People & Parties
Worksheets & Templates People Watching; Things to Love about People; A Better World; Celebrations and Parties
Use the following questions as a story guide, or to "interview" your characters...
PEOPLE WATCHING
Where are you? What are you doing? Who are you with? What is the time & date?
How crowded is it?
What makes someone catch your attention?
What typifies the behaviour of the people you can see?
How do you determine the relationship between people?
What assumptions do you make about people’s social status based on their appearance and behaviour?
What assumptions do you make about people’s occupations based on their appearance and behaviour?
What judgements do you find yourself making about strangers you watch?
How do you think people perceive you as you sit and write?
How does inventing stories about people help you understand their behaviour?
What patterns do you notice in people’s behaviour?
What behaviour do you see people engaged in most frequently?
If someone repeats an action, how does each repetition differ?
What changes occur in the people you see as time passes?
Who do you see who…
is wearing red?
should be somewhere else?
notices you?
is eating?
is annoying?
moves fast
drops something?
is working?
Watching people is excellent practice for learning to describe characters. Their physical appearance, their movements, their speech… Refer to the following questions next time you’re sitting in a café and don’t know what to write.
What do they look like?
What are they doing?
What's their story?
What do they look like?
What are they doing?
What's their story?
THINGS TO LOVE ABOUT PEOPLE
List down ___________ you love:
Traits
Attitudes
Expressions
Behaviours
Gestures
Looks
Skills
Relationships
Complete the following phrases:
I love people who make me feel...
Things I love to know about people...
I love people who have...
To love someone, I need to...
A BETTER WORLD
What do you love about the world you live in?
A better world has more _________. How does it have more of these things?
A better world has less/fewer __________. What are these things replaced by?
How are resources used and distributed better?
How are communities organised better?
How are conflicts resolved better?
How do people live better?
How do people care for each other better?
What's more fun?
CELEBRATIONS, FEASTS, PARTIES
The Occasion
What's being celebrated?
At what time and date does the celebration take place?
How often does this celebration take place?
What happened at the last celebration?
Why is this celebration especially important?
What would make the celebration a success?
What goes wrong?
What happens after the party?
The People
Who organised the celebration?
Who's invited/isn't invited, and why?
How did the guests prepare?
What's the dress code?
Who's pleased/displeased, and why?
Who makes a speech?
How do people act different than usual?
Who doesn't show up?
Who cleans up?
The Location
Where does the celebration take place?
How has the location been decorated?
How is the location symbolic?
What food and drink is available?
What are the entertainments?
How does the location compare to its usual use or appearance?
What breaks or is damaged?
How does the location look after the guests leave?
Source ⚜ More: Writing Worksheets & Templates ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs Writing References: Plot ⚜ Character ⚜ Worldbuilding
#worldbuilding#writeblr#dark academia#spilled ink#character development#writing prompts#fiction#writing reference#writing advice#literature#creative writing#writers on tumblr#writing prompt#writing tips#story#novel#light academia#writing ideas#character building#writing inspiration#julius leblanc stewart#writing resources
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Lance Stroll (Aston Martin) - Happy Hanukkah
Day 24 of Christmas
Prompt: The Differences in Christmas
25 Days Of Christmas
Y/n was filled with excitement as she stepped off the plane, a flurry of anticipation swirling around her. Christmas was just around the corner, and she was invited to spend the holidays with her boyfriend, Lance, at his family home. As she arrived, she took in the lavish surroundings, the elegant decorations, and the warm, inviting atmosphere that enveloped her. As she settled in, she stumbled into the living room, looking confused at how bare it looked and wondering why there was no tree.
"Lance?" She called out, looking around. Lance peeped in. "Where’s your Christmas tree?" Lance chuckled softly, a hint of surprise flickering in his eyes. "Y/n, I’m Jewish, remember?" He replied gently, his smile reassuring. "We don’t have a Christmas tree." Her face flushed in realization. "Oh! Right! I completely forgot." She admitted, laughing at her own oversight. "So what do you do instead?"
Lance was more than happy to explain. "Well, we celebrate Hanukkah instead." He said simply. "It’s a festival of lights. We light the menorah, play dreidel, and eat traditional foods. It’s a little different from Christmas, but it’s just as special in its own way." Y/n listened intently, fascinated by the rich traditions he described. "What kind of foods?" She asked, her curiosity piqued. "Latkes, which are potato pancakes, and sufganiyot, which are jelly-filled donuts." He explained, his eyes lighting up at the mention of the treats. "We’ll make some together!" The thought of spending time with Lance in the kitchen made her heart flutter. "I can’t wait to try them!" She said enthusiastically.
The next morning, Y/n and Lance were in the kitchen, the warm scent of donuts lingering in the air. "I just need to grab something from upstairs." She said, wiping her hands on a towel. As she made her way through the expansive house, she stumbled upon a door that was slightly ajar. Curiosity getting the better of her, she peeked inside. It was Lawrence’s office, filled with books and family photos. One picture caught her eye: a younger Lance beaming as he helped his father prepare food for the final day of Hanukkah.
"Oh! I’m so sorry!" Y/n exclaimed, stepping back. "I didn’t mean to intrude. I was just exploring and got lost." Lawrence looked up, a friendly smile on his face. "No problem at all, Y/n. You can join me if you'd like." He invited, motioning for her to sit down. "I was just reminiscing about those days. Lance loved helping out in the kitchen." Y/n felt at ease as she sat down, her initial embarrassment fading away. "He told me you celebrate Hanukkah. I’d love to hear more about it, I just don't wanna annoy him with all the questions I'm asking about it."
Lawrence was more than willing to share. He talked about the significance of the menorah, the stories behind each night of Hanukkah, and how the family would gather to celebrate together. The conversation flowed easily, and Y/n felt grateful for the insight.
Just then, Lance walked by, overhearing snippets of their conversation. He paused, feeling a swell of pride as he watched his dad share their family traditions with her. “Dad, what are you telling her?” He called out, playfully suspicious. "Just some stories about your childhood." Lawrence replied with a grin. "Did know your girlfriend is curious about our traditions?" Lance smiled, his heart swelling. "I’ll take her to the airport to pick up Chloe and Scotty. She can learn more about Hanukkah from them!"
On the car ride to the airport, Y/n leaned back in her seat, looking out the window as the scenery rushed by. Lance glanced over at her, a content smile on his face. "Are you finding everything okay?" He asked, genuine concern lacing his voice. "Oh, I’m loving it!" She exclaimed, her eyes sparkling. "Your dad told me so much about Hanukkah. It’s all so interesting!" Lance’s heart skipped a beat. He thought to himself, I’ve definitely found the one. They arrived at the airport and helped bring the bags back to the car. Y/n chatted animatedly with Chloe and Scotty as they walked ahead, while Lance lagged behind, soaking in the happiness of the moment.
As they loaded the car, Chloe turned to Lance with a knowing smile. "This is the happiest I’ve seen you in a while." She remarked. "It’s because I’ve realized I’ve found the one." Lance replied, a serious note in his voice. Chloe rolled her eyes playfully. "You’ve said that about the last two girlfriends, and we all know how that ended."
"Yeah, but this time it’s different, and I know I've said thay before too, but I mean it this tims." He insisted, his gaze locked on Y/n, who was laughing with Scotty.
Once they were back in the car, they turned on the radio, and Christmas songs filled the air. Y/n joined in, singing off-key but with pure joy, and Lance couldn’t help but smile at the sight. Chloe watched them, feeling a warmth in her heart, like when she and Scotty started dating and still to this day felt. She finally understood what Lance had been saying; he had found someone special.
*please lmk if there are any mistakes! This is just the understanding I have from my Jewish friend about Hanukkah*
#f1 imagine#f1 blurb#f1 oneshot#f1 oneshots#f1 x reader#f1 x y/n#lance stroll x you#lance stroll x y/n#lance stroll x reader#lance stroll#lance stroll imagine#lance stroll fluff#lance stroll fanfic#lance stroll x oc#f1 christmas#christmas imagine#christmas fanfic#christmas fic#christmas
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Just saw this reblog and I'd like to clarify stuff about my opinions (respectfully of course).
I don't ask anyone casually liking Greek mythology to read every single poem or play and source. Even I myself didn't do that yet. I understand that modern media is more accessible and this style of prose can get tedious (but I still love the stories and content ofc). The plays are easier to read.
Again, I like Epic, I like Disney's Hercules, I like Hades. Are they perfectly accurate? Nope. But I still enjoyed them. So of course adapting mythology and changing stuff around isn't inherently wrong or anything. There still needs to be care, effort and respect for the original source and the new story.
The concept of making character-driven stories out of myths is also a very good idea. Expanding on the lore is also an awesome concept. Going off the rails and making a completely new world inspired by familiar themes is also neat. I like all of those directions.
BUT my problem comes when people confuse modernized versions with ancient legends and the found their judgment of these figures on adaptations. That's what I meant with misinformation. When people mix headcannons with what actual sources state (I almost always find the ancient version more nuanced than most modern takes on mythology, like the ones I listed in my original reblog).
Or when the changes are so big that the main story is unrecognizable, the core themes are absent, the story is taken out of it's culture.
And when some adaptations replace the interesting themes of the original story to put cliche YA tropes instead because "it sells more", now I'm complaining.
These adaptations, even those I don't like, have the right to exist. People have the right to like them. But I also have the right to criticize the aspects that don't fit my personal standard and expecting more in-depth work.
Again, simple fun stuff is cool but if someone wants to apply a deep moral theme or feminism, then I want it to be done correctly and respectfully.
I agree with you on certain points, like letting people enjoy adaptations as a starting point, the beautiful aspect of retelling known stories to not let them die, different versions being as legitimate (though the ancient sources ≠ modern media and we need to make that clear).
Also yeah, if these adaptations didn't use the names of the myths, then I would only criticize them for their own worth and not for the research.
Since that subject seems to piss you off a bit, I hope I didn't come off as too condescending. I'm just some goober on the net expressing my opinion and my want to represent mythology more accurately. But yeah, interpretation isn't evil.
Have a good day.
Greek mythology has evolved over the course of hundreds of years, and with all those… retellings now, it’s gotten me thinking about just how many people have been spreading false details of myths through word of mouth to the point of becoming the most common interpretation, when if you were to look back in history, a great number of them were only recently made up, barely a a few centuries prior. Example of this is King Midas and his turning his daughter into a gold statue. I remember this part having been included all throughout my childhood, only to find out it was never part of the original myth but a recent addition in a book from 1852. (suddenly, the daughter being aptly named “Marigold” makes a lot more sense.) My ask is: which commonly told misconception of this type regarding any Greek myth is most infuriating to you and why?
oh my god misinformation can be INFURIATING smh
Let's start off with the Apollo misinformation.
"He raped Persephone/is a serial rapist!"
First of all, no he did not. LO, toss yourself into an eternal blaze and incinerate.
and secondly- he's not a serial rapist. There's only two accounts of rape, specifically Dryope and Creusa, but that depends on interpretation and the source so if you want to discard it, you can. No one can tell you you can't.
"UwU Apollo's love life is terrible!"
do i even need to say anything?
"Athena hates women!"
hell to the fuck no. the evidence people use for this is the Medusa Myth: Ovid's Version, and CONVIENTLY IGNORE THE ONES WHERE SHE HELPS WOMEN ESCAPE BEING RAPED!! AND THAT OVID IS THE ONLY ONE WHO DOES THIS!!
Even with the ones where she punishes the victim, the older versions do not have that! She made Nicymene her eternal owl companion, for heaven's sake!
"Hermes/Dionysus/Hephaestus is the only unproblematic god! UwU"
uh... *waves Leuconoe/Choine/Philonis around* no matter which version you go with, Hermes/Mercury does rape her...
...and in the Dionysica Dionysus rapes like two women...
...and Hephaestus tried to rape Athena... (oh wow, would you look at that...it's like Athena would have *gasp* sympathy for assault survivors...)
...See the double standards? :/ Ignores Roman/late Greek literature when it's convenient, and then exaggerates it to suit their own needs.
"Demeter is a terrible mom!"
GET OUT OF MY HOUSE NO ONE DISRESPECTS THE QUEEN
"Hades only kidnapped Persephone because Zeus told him too!"
Hades is his own man and wasn't being held at gunpoint to abduct her. He did so on his own merits. From a literal perspective, what was stopping him from just. you know. talking to her. kidnapping was not necessary.
(yes, yes, i know about the symbolic perspective, hence my use of 'literal'.)
"But Hades and Persephone are the only ones who don't cheat!!"
uh, nope. Hi Adonis, Minthe, how're you doing?
"But Adonis was more of a son to Persephone!!"
uh, NO. Even the ancients saw them as a couple!!
"Artemis is a girlboss who hates her brother!"
*kicks open door* OUT!
"Orion's the only man Artemis ever loved!"
how dare you disrespect my boy in this way Apollo was the first man she ever loved and no one will be able to replace him how dare you-
-and how dare you disrespect Hippolytus in this way he did not die in the name of all aroace people to be disrespected like this smh
"Zeus's only quality is how he fucks around!"
look, I've joked about this before but I know that's not all there is too him and that it has a symbolic representation.
Sure would be nice if people focused on that more :)
also anything that villainizes Aphrodite or Hera. god forbid women do anything.
"Clytemnestra is a girlboss who did no wrong!"
OH MY GOD THE DOUBLE STANDARDS.
funny how people fawn over Cassandra one moment and then COMPLETELY FORGET HER EXISTENCE to becry the woman who murdered her!
AND ALSO GO OUT OF THEIR WAY TO HATE APOLLO FOR CURSING HER WHEN THEIR STORY IS LITERAL ABOUT A WOMAN'S AUTONOMY BEING RESPECTED!!
AND GUESS WHAT!! APOLLO AVENGES HER DEATH!!
anything that is "UwU Achilles!" omg i am sick of it.
that bitch had everything coming. he deserved everything he got. Tenes, Troilus, and Hemithea did NOT deserve what he did to them! APOLLO AND PARIS HAD EVERY RIGHT TO TAKE HIM DOWN!
i'm probably forgetting some but here's the one that popped into my head :)
#again let people enjoy adaptations but let others criticize#judge the product not the fans#greek mythology#greek myth discussion#rant
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Christmas with you - Part 1
A/N: Happy Holidays everybody! Hope everyone’s bundled up and safe. A special shoutout to @ccbsrmsf1 for helping me throughout this story, her ideas inspired me to writing this. Thank you 💛
Pairing: Tony Stark x Single Mom! Reader
Warning: Fluff. Tony is adorable 🥹
.
“Shit!”
Punching the bonnet of your car out of frustration, you huffed, watching your breath form a misty, tiny cloud of condensation before dissipating into the cold, night air.
“Shit.”
Your eyes went wide as you heard a quiet repetition of your cuss word followed by a giggle from inside your car.
“We don’t say that word, Noah. Only Mommy is allowed to say it.”
Your three year old made a face that made you smile despite you trying your hardest not to. He had a tendency to do that, make you smile, laugh and giggle at your lowest. He truly was the light of your life.
And right now, he was your only company considering you were officially stranded in the middle of nowhere with an old car that had finally given up. Your phone had run out of juice hours ago, thanks to your attempts at keeping a three year old entertained on a very long drive back home.
Now you had no way of calling for help. Lucky for you, the walk would take twenty minutes, but the down side? It was snowing. A lot.
Getting back in your car, you faced your son and explained him the situation as best as you could.
“We walk home, Mommy?”
“We have to, honey. We can come back for the car tomorrow. Come on, let’s get you bundled up.”
Zipping his jacket up, you secured it in place, putting on his little gloves and beanie as well. Luckily you had his stroller in the car, which took some convincing to get him into it but soon you were off, trudging through snow while pushing the stroller.
Noah hummed to himself the entire way back, making you laugh as he belted out rhyme after nursery rhyme.
Suddenly out of the blue you heard a crash sound as something heavy and metallic landed to your right. Figuring it was someone rather than some thing, you were contemplating going out there and offering help until your three year old began kicking his feet and screaming.
“It’s Iron Man! Mommy, look! It’s Iron Man!”
He was right.
Tony Stark or more famously, Iron Man had just crash landed about a hundred feet from you.
Lifting the face plate, Tony groaned, his body still in shock from impact. That is until he heard a tiny voice screaming his name, diverting his attention temporarily.
“Hi Iron Man!” Noah exclaimed, not bothered about the fact that he had caught his favourite superhero in a less than ideal situation.
With small bruises and cuts all over his face, Tony turned around to see Noah, managing a small wave back until he saw you. Pausing to take you in, he momentarily forgot where he was.
You were beautiful.
The kind of beauty that he wasn’t used to, not the skimpy-clothed, giggly women that usually clung to him in social situations. No. You seemed different.
“Huh?” He blinked, realising he had spent an unnatural amount of time staring at you, and that you had said something.
“I asked if you were alright, Mr. Stark.”
Clearing his throat awkwardly, he looked back to where his suit lay, now completely decimated, he would need a power source to boot it back to life.
“Yeah, uh. I’m—I’ve had a fall. And my suit is well, pretty much useless.” Following it with a small laugh, he shrugged, shifting his gaze from you down to where Noah sat, starry-eyed and open-mouthed having come face to face with his idol.
“This is my son, Noah. And I’m Y/N.” You offering him a small smile.
“Tony.” He knelt down to greet your son, shaking his little hand like a gentleman after yours.
“Very firm handshake, young man.” He winked at him, leaving him more starstruck than before.
“I’d offer to help but our car broke down and we’re walking home, so…pretty much a bad day for all of us, huh?” You chuckled.
“Can he come home, Mommy? I can help with his suit!” Noah piped, looking up at you with expectant eyes, knowing fully well you could never deny him.
“Our house is still pretty far out, baby. But it’s upto Mr. Stark, I mean, I have tools that could help? I don’t know. But you could definitely use some first aid and some warmth?”
As if on cue, Tony shivered, the long-sleeved shirt he wore doing nothing to prevent the cold from seeping in. He was also bleeding from a few cuts and bruises, that pushed him further to accept your offer.
“And hot chocolate!”
“Ah, how could I ever refuse hot chocolate? With marshmallows?”
“Yeah!!”
Both of you chuckled as your son clapped his hands, happy now that his hero was accompanying you home.
Dragging his disabled suit through the snow was a task, but he trudged on, not minding the company for a change. Normally, he’d have been flocked with fans or security but here, nobody seemed to care. Not that there were too many passersby but those that were around, couldn’t care less about who he was.
The conversation flowed easily as you walked home, from formal introductions to your profession, from likes, dislikes to your opinion on world politics. You couldn’t help but notice how easy he was to talk to, and that your first impression of the man had been wrong. Of course, the media had a lot to do with it. Portraying him as a spoilt billionaire at first, then the brash Avenger with a playboy image.
Noah’s singing provided as background music until his voice gradually stopped, meaning he was out cold. A day out with his grandparents had finally worn him out even though he’d just met his idol.
As your house came in sight, you retrieved your keys from your purse, while Tony looked around, frowning when he saw the lights all out.
Did you live alone? Tony kicked some snow with his foot, making an assumption you were already taken but secretly hoping you weren’t.
“Wouldn’t your husband or partner mind if you suddenly show up with an Avenger?” He asked, glancing back at the tracks you’d left along with the ones made due to his suit. One could assume someone had dragged a body along the way.
“Hmm, that’s a good question.”
You continued unlocking the door, your back to the man who was peeking in the stroller to make sure your son hadn’t woken up, partly to distract himself.
“I’m sure if I had one, he wouldn’t mind seeing the great Tony Stark in his house. But I don’t so, I guess you’ll have to do with me and my starstruck three year old.”
Tony’s nervous chuckle held relief as you welcomed him inside your humble space, grateful for the instant warmth your cosy home provided.
Tony took in your smartly done interiors and evident display of a house with a small kid, accidentally knocking over a piece of Noah’s toy in the process.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Stark! Are you alright?”
He picked up Noah’s toy robot, giving it a curious but impressed glance.
“Oh yeah, no harm done. And it’s Tony, please.”
His fingers brushed yours lightly as he passed you the toy, the touch sparking excitement within you. He cleared his throat in attempts to get both your gazes off of your hands.
“Alright Tony, let me get you a first-aid kit and then maybe you can tell me what you need to fix your suit?”
“Right. Sure, thanks.” Giving himself a mental shake, he perched on your sofa and settled.
Right as he leaned back against the plush fabric, a loud noise startled him. Picking out the source, it was yet another toy, an airplane this time which was lit up and buzzing.
“That is not my favourite.”
Noah was awake. And staring at him with wide eyes, still awestruck. Tony found the off switch before placing the toy on the table.
“Oh yeah? Which one is your favourite then?” He asked, watching your son retrieve his beloved toy robot and hand it to him.
“This one!”
“You know I had the exact same one when I was little? Now I just have the suits. I guess they’re the same.” He mumbled, more to himself than to Noah.
You walked in on them having a conversation about how robots are the coolest toys on the planet, a smile appearing on your face at the sight.
Tending to Tony’s topical wounds wasn’t the easiest, especially since it confirmed how truly handsome he was up close, plus your son’s gaze kept shifting between the two of you, going on about showing Tony all his toys.
“Thank you, Y/N. Are all the people in this town so kind?” He chuckled, fingers fumbling with the edges of his shirt to keep them from reaching out and tucking a stray lock of hair behind your ear.
“They are. But given the fact that you’re you, I doubt any of them would have problems helping you out.” You hummed, stepping away after finishing tending to his last bruise, with a small smile that seemed perpetual on your face.
.
He insisted on using your garage for fixing his suit instead of your house, making himself familiar with your basic household tools in the small but efficient little space.
In the meantime, you bathed Noah, negotiating with him since he wanted to run to see what Tony was fixing and how.
“I help Iron Man, Mama!” He said in his best pleading voice.
“It’s way past your bedtime, little man.”
He seemed too busy plotting something that would convince you, his deep brown eyes lighting up as he came up with something that he knew you’d agree to.
“But Mama…hot chocolate?”
“Noah..”
“You promised!” He whined, on the verge of a tantrum. Naturally, you caved.
As you two made your way towards the garage, you could hear Tony mumbling, to himself, you hoped. Like a nervous habit, his leg tapped against the floor as he worked, eyes solely focused on the job at hand before your little knock broke him out of it.
“Got you some hot chocolate.” You announced with a smile, holding out a steaming mug for Tony, topped with little marshmallows.
Noah had already wriggled out of your grip towards the suit which lay against a table, his eyes wide in wonder as he examined the machinery.
“Be careful, Noah.”
“Actually kid, why don’t you hold onto this and press that button over there when I tell you?” Tony handed him a small device, instantly lighting your kid’s face up in delight as he nodded.
You watched as Tony tinkered around for a bit, giving Noah a thumbs up to press said button which booted his suit back to life.
“Mama, did you see that?!” He exclaimed, looking at you as if to make sure you hadn’t missed out on anything.
Watching his ecstatic face made your heart swell as you reached over to kiss the top of his head. It was better than candy-land for him.
As you drank your hot chocolate, your son managed to convince Tony Stark into fixing one of his toys for him which he agreed to, asking him questions about it which Noah was more than happy to answer.
Time went by and Noah grew drowsy, retreating to your lap & making himself comfortable while Tony tended to his suit again.
“So if you’re—”
“How did this—”
Letting out a chuckle, you gestured for Tony to go ahead with his question as you looked down to find your son fast asleep against your shoulder.
“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. I was just going to ask if you’re raising him on your own or…”
Tony didn’t mean to pry, but he couldn’t help but wonder. There wasn’t any obvious evidence that you were married, or that you were raising a child with someone.
“Oh! I adopted Noah three years ago. I was volunteering at a centre at the time and I read he was abandoned by his parents, it broke my heart. I couldn’t get him out of my mind and I ended up filling a form. It felt right.” You murmured with a fond smile on your face as you glanced at his sleeping form.
Tony stared at you in wonder. You couldn’t have been more than…thirty? Maybe lesser? But somehow you had raised a bright little boy and made a decent living for yourself. He admired you.
“Wow, that’s truly something, Y/N. This guy is lucky to have such an amazing mother. Truly.”
Tony’s sincere compliment warmed your cheeks; shaking your head, you excused yourself to tuck your child in bed, while Tony followed you back to the house grabbing the empty mugs for you.
In the kitchen, you whispered Tony to place the mugs in the dishwasher since the sink was already full. It seemed like the guy hadn’t ever been to a kitchen before, he seemed unfamiliar with how it worked, it was kinda funny to watch him clueless with household gadgets.
“Why don’t you hold Noah while I do it? Here.”
“What? No, uh. I’m not sure—”
You already had passed Noah to him before he could process it fully. He hugged him close like Noah was made of precious glass, looking as awkward as ever.
As you placed the cups away, you glanced at Tony, grinning to yourself when Noah stirred a little only to snuggle against the man. The sight made your heart skip a beat.
You’d take him back but Noah’s little arms tightened around Tony’s neck, as if he didn’t want to let him go. Wordlessly, you pointed upstairs where his bedroom was and Tony followed you quietly, worried any sudden movements would wake him up.
Tony’s heart warmed as your kid’s evened out and calm breaths contrasted against his own erratic ones, it was oddly grounding for him.
He placed Noah on his little bed as carefully as he could, looking at you as if waiting for further instructions. Taking over, you made sure Noah was comfortable before tucking Snuggles - his beloved stuffed rabbit under his arm and secured his blanket.
“Sleep well, my love.”
You kissed his forehead a couple of times before standing back up, unaware of Tony watching the whole scene with the fondest smile.
“Let me get you a blanket, Mr. St—Tony. I’ll be right back.”
Tony stopped you right as you were about to turn, placing an hand on your shoulder before you could leave.
“I’m not going to stay, I—I don’t sleep. I mean, I’ve already bothered you too much, it would better if I left. The suit is all ready and I’ve called for a car. And I have trouble sleeping.”
He finished speaking with a heavy sigh, scratching the back of his head as you processed and slowly nodded your head, unable to hide the tinge of disappointment you felt.
“Of course. Um. Let me walk you out then.”
The car he’d hired stood outside your house, steely grey against the blanket of snow that covered the ground. The steps you took slowed down as you reached, the silence between you growing.
“Thank you for the best hot chocolate, Y/N. And for everything, really.” Tony offered his hand, glancing down at the warmth of yours against his colder one.
“You’re welcome, Tony. Happy holidays?”
“Yeah. I don’t know about that.” Tony murmured mostly to himself, still clasping your hand in his.
“I’ll see you around?”
The hope in his voice was unmistakable, he did want to see you, and soon. His overworked brain was already thinking of ways to make it happen. He would figure it out. He needed to see you again.
“Sure. Take care, Iron Man.” You smiled, shifting your weight from one to another.
“You too.”
He drove off with a final glance at you and your house, leaving behind a trail of smoke and a memory you’d revisit often in the future.
Do you think Tony will return? If yes, how?
#tony stark x reader#tony stark x female reader#single mom!reader#tony stark fanfiction#tony stark imagine#the stark squad#tony stark fluff#marvel fanfiction#tony stark#iron man#holiday fic#happy holidays#mostly marvel musings#iron man fanfiction#iron man 3#iron man fic
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that cat’s got my tongue
part three . . .
the reader finds out that satoru and her roommate jada used to have a fling, leaving her to question his intentions. as satoru finally meets her cat lola and they head to the movies, the reader begins overthinking every interaction, wondering if he’s just playing a game with her. jada’s harsh words about the reader’s looks and satoru’s motivations only add fuel to the fire, leading to a tense and awkward hangout.
click here for the other parts enjoy reading !
IMPORTANT: after reading please check out the linked here and at the end of the story
the week had felt slow and draining. between late-night study sessions and the mountain of law assignments piling up, it seemed like there was never enough time to think about anything else. but even with all of that, your thoughts kept drifting back to satoru. everything about him—his teasing, his persistence—had you wondering what he was really after. it felt like he was making an effort, but the more you thought about it, the more it seemed like it could just be another one of his games.
you had planned everything out for today. you’d set aside time to relax after an intense week of school. satoru was coming over to meet lola, your cat, and after that, the two of you would head to the movie he’d picked. It wasn’t much, just a simple hangout, but it felt important. you weren’t sure if it was because of your growing curiosity about him, or if you just wanted to give him a chance to show you who he really was.
but as you waited for him to arrive, your roommate, jada, was acting strangely. she was on her phone more than usual, her eyes darting between the screen and you. you brushed it off at first, figuring she was just distracted.
then, as you started to text satoru to confirm he was on his way, you heard jada speaking in the other room. her voice was low, and while you tried not to eavesdrop, the words caught your attention.
“yeah, i don’t know why he’s suddenly so interested in her… i mean, we were together for a while, you know?”
you froze. the words hung in the air like a weight you couldn’t shake off.
he was with jada?
your heart dropped, and suddenly, you couldn’t think straight. everything that satoru had said and done in the past few weeks rushed through your mind, and now it all seemed different. too casual. too calculated.
“what do you mean ‘together’?” you muttered under your breath, your stomach twisting with unease.
“yeah, you know,” jada continued, completely unaware that you were listening, “we had our fun. but now he’s acting like he’s all about her. it’s weird, right? like, why now? i mean, seriously, she’s not even that pretty. he could do way better than some law student who looks like she’s still stuck in high school. he just wants to brag to people that he got with both of us, you know?”
your breath hitched at her words. you tried to keep still, to keep the anger bubbling up inside from spilling over. did she really just say that? was she really going to talk about you like that?
the rest of her conversation was a blur as you stood frozen, your chest tightening. you didn’t know whether to confront her, to yell, or to just walk out. but you didn’t. you stayed silent, listening to her dismissive tone as she went on about how satoru could have anyone he wanted and that you were just a “stepping stone” in his little game.
you tried to swallow the bitter taste in your mouth, but it didn’t help. so that’s how jada saw you, huh? she thought you were just some distraction for him to show off, something he could use for a story to tell his friends later on.
but then, as if on cue, there was a knock on the door. satoru.
you opened it quickly, plastering a smile on your face that you hoped didn’t look as forced as it felt. satoru stood there, holding a casual grin on his face, his blue eyes lighting up when he saw you.
“hey!” he greeted, his voice full of warmth. “ready to meet lola?”
you nodded, stepping aside to let him in. the tension that had been simmering in your chest only seemed to grow as he walked past you, his eyes briefly meeting jada’s before she quickly buried herself in her phone again.
you led him to your room, trying to act normal, but your mind was spinning. could he really be doing this just to mess with you? was he really trying to get with both you and jada?
when you opened the door to your room, lola, your little russian blue kitten, perked up from her bed. satoru smiled immediately, dropping to his knees to greet her. you watched him interact with her, his hand gently petting her soft fur, and for a moment, you almost believed everything could be as simple as it seemed. maybe he was just a guy who genuinely liked animals and was excited to meet your cat.
but then, when he stood back up, he flashed you a grin that made your stomach tighten.
“she’s adorable,” he said. “she’s even better in person than in your pictures.”
you could barely focus on his words, everything else swirling in your mind.
“you know,” he continued, still looking at lola, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, when do I get to meet the rest of your little crew? you’ve got a bunch of cats, right?”
he didn’t even seem to notice the discomfort creeping into your face.
“yeah, I’ll introduce you to them soon,” you replied, trying to sound casual, though your voice was slightly shaky.
he smiled again, standing up and brushing past you toward the door.
“let’s go see that movie, huh?” he said, as if everything was completely normal.
you nodded, unable to form much of a response.
the walk to the movie theater was quiet, the only sounds coming from the distant hum of city life and the occasional car passing by. satoru tried to make small talk, but you were too distracted by the storm brewing in your mind. his every word felt like it was laced with hidden meanings, and you couldn’t shake the feeling that everything he did—every glance, every touch, even the way he was so eager to spend time with you—had something more to it.
the movie was nothing special. just a cheesy action flick, but you couldn’t focus on it. every time he leaned over to whisper a joke or laugh at something on screen, you couldn’t help but wonder—was he just playing you? was this all some game to him?
he was sweet, charming, funny, and yet all you could think about was jada’s words. you’re nothing compared to me. he’s just trying to get with both of us, for the attention.
when satoru glanced at you, a concerned look crossing his face, you quickly wiped your expression clean.
“you alright?” he asked softly, his voice quiet but sincere.
you hesitated. “yeah, just tired.”
he raised an eyebrow, clearly not buying it, but he didn’t push further.
the rest of the movie passed in a blur, and by the time it was over, you felt a thousand emotions fighting for your attention. you couldn’t shake the idea that maybe, just maybe, this was all some game to satoru.
the thought made your heart ache in a way you hadn’t expected.
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IMPORTANT: helloooo you finished reading reminder to vote on this poll! yes you you get to choose how part four plays out
@purinipod pls don’t steal any of my work
#jjk x black reader#jjk fluff#jjk x reader#jujutsu kaisen x black reader#x black fem reader#x black reader#gojo satoru x black!reader#jjk fanfic#jjk gojo#gojo x reader#gojo x black reader
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Lost In Control | Bad Omens | CHAPTER 24
adult content | minors do NOT interact.
⋆ 𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆. Bad Omens X ex-girlfriend and singer!Reader.
⋆ 𝐒𝐘𝐍𝐎𝐏𝐒𝐈𝐒. You and Noah had a difficult ending but you still need to support each other for the band.
⋆ 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆(𝐒). melancholy, ex-boyfriends, difficult relationships, alcohol abuse, swearing, drug addiction, violence.
It's okay to not agree with the characters' attitudes during the fic. It's good to remember that the story is fiction from the author's sick mind and of course they will make dubious decisions according to my fantasies. Nothing is done to be compared to reality.
NOAH
"It's important to stay well-hydrated, eat properly, and maintain a good sleep routine. It’s not like this feeling will disappear overnight, but a lifestyle more focused on your well-being might help…”
My attention was fixed on the hourglass on his desk, the sand sliding down into the lower compartment at a slow rhythm. If I said I was paying attention to anything, I’d be lying. Ever since I walked into this room, I’d been high on intravenous medication and completely oblivious to what was happening around me, slouched in a position in this chair that would surely give me a backache once I returned to my senses.
I didn’t know it was possible to feel even more apathetic.
“I can refer you to regular sessions with a professional—what do you think?” he pressed, trying to regain my attention again. “Your tests didn’t reveal anything I should worry about, but if these symptoms persist, it would be wise to seek a second opinion. It could help, considering your physical reactions are becoming increasingly severe.”
I let out a scoffing laugh without looking at him.
“Do you think I’m losing my mind?”
“I think your body is sending signals that it needs care. That’s common when patients are going through difficult times or even under pressure.” The deeper he delved into the topic, the more nausea churned in my stomach. I sighed as though trying to reclaim air in a near reflux. “Have you experienced anything like that? Feeling trapped in a state of excessive melancholy that seems to take longer to pass with each episode?”
Absolute silence.
“Do you think I’m planning to kill myself?” I asked with irony. “My contract doesn’t allow that.”
“I think it would be wise to take some time off to rest.”
I had a flight with the band in two hours, two festivals over the span of a week in different countries. Resting was only an option in my dreams—and even then, there was a risk I’d be working in them.
“Can I ask you something?” I finally shifted my attention from the hourglass to the man in a lab coat with graying hair behind the desk.
“Of course, Noah.”
“The girl who brought me here—she’s still in the hospital?” I asked carefully, biting down on my lower lip.
The doctor looked at me for a few seconds as if reading my microexpressions or whatever the hell I carried in my eyes. I felt a faint discomfort, but it wasn’t greater than the curiosity clawing at the inside of my skin.
“I can’t say for sure, Noah, but there’s a girl listed as your contact in your file. I’m just not sure if it’s the same person we’re talking about.”
I hated how my body reacted immediately, as though erasing the entire conversation about the studio and clinging solely to the fact that she might still be here—with me. Nothing else seemed to matter, none of the other things I was feeling, because somehow, she managed to give me the false sense that my heart was at peace again.
Like at the studio, when the touch of her hand silenced the chaos in my mind, even if it was just a fleeting truce, since everything came back threefold the moment she moved away.
I must have been losing my mind. I no longer had any awareness of my actions or control over them. I couldn’t filter my feelings, making them even more confusing each time I smothered them with some new, unrestrained emotion.
As I exited the consultation room, I saw nothing but other patients waiting to be seen. Gradually, I let my shoulders drop while I walked, scanning the reception area with slow steps when I didn’t see any sign of her around. What passed through my head wasn’t disappointment—certainly not.
A sudden jolt from physical contact made me turn sharply, my brow furrowing as I saw a girl greeting me with a hug I didn’t reciprocate, keeping my arms stiff at my sides. I blinked a few times before looking down and seeing the fiery red hair on top of her head.
“Scarlet?” I asked, confused.
“When I returned to the observation room, they told me you had woken up and gone to see the doctor. How are you feeling?” she asked sweetly, frowning as I moved her away from me by grabbing her arm.
“What are you doing here?”
“Are you disoriented from the meds? I received you at the hospital on behalf of the record label’s team and have been accompanying you ever since, silly!”
“But…”
Had I been mixing things up? As far as I remembered, it wasn’t Scarlet who had been with me when I arrived here or when the medication knocked me out. But was I coherent enough to argue? My head was beginning to throb again, and my thoughts were as tangled as the sequence of events.
I definitely didn’t remember this particular cut.
“How about lunch? There’s a restaurant nearby that—”
“I just want to go home.” I interrupted while craning my neck to look around.
“Alright, I’ll drive you!” she replied with unshakable enthusiasm, and I let out a deep sigh.
“Isn’t there anyone else who can do that?”
“Noah, you don’t have to be so hard on me, okay? I know you’d rather have someone else in my place, but there’s not much I can do if she didn’t want it that way!” Scarlet’s tone was almost offended as she shrugged. “Let me help you—I promise that’s all I want.”
Meeting her bright green eyes as she fluttered her long lashes, I just turned around and started walking toward the exit. Scarlet sighed in satisfaction behind me, following like a duckling trailing after its mother.
On the way to the car, I tried to pull as much as I could from my worn-out mind, demanding myself to recall the route from the studio and my time in the hospital, but it felt as though a gaping hole had formed in my memory.
“I have good news for you!” she said, tapping her fingertips together as she closed the driver’s door.
“I don’t like people beating around the bush. Be direct.”
“Well…” Scarlet cleared her throat awkwardly. “Bryan has to miss the band’s trips this week, and I’ll be replacing him as the photographer. Isn’t that amazing?”
I was still searching for the “good” part of the news.
“Since when do you need to take band photography jobs?” I asked, perplexed, shifting my gaze to her. “That makes no sense when you make triple the amount from a single modeling gig.”
“I haven’t had as many jobs lately. This opportunity came up, and since you guys already know me from photographing the band’s collection, I took it!”
“Does everyone know about this already?”
"I thought I only owed explanations to you."
"I'm not a solo artist, and changes need to go through everyone in the band first!" I tried to moderate my tone as I turned back to the dashboard.
"Well, my hiring was cleared by Gerard, and now you're being informed about it. I don’t think anyone else is left on my list." She concluded with conviction after adjusting the rearview mirror to see her own reflection.
The girl lowered her sunglasses and started the car, keeping a moderate speed and playing some generic pop music that scratched at my ears.
I was about to open the door and throw myself onto the road at any moment.
At home, I barely had time to sit and breathe before being bombarded with calls and messages about being late to the airport. Moving at the slow pace I was still processing things, I threw a few pieces of clothing into a backpack and called a taxi to meet up with the band as quickly as possible.
"Hey, man! How are you feeling?" Folio greeted me at the entrance with a light slap on my arm.
"I'm fine," I replied, forcing some enthusiasm into my voice as I followed him. "You seem excited to travel."
"And when am I not?" he said as if it were obvious, raising his hands in the air. "I thought we were all eager to get back on stage after some time."
"You're right..." I felt like I couldn’t say the same. "I am, too."
In the boarding line, I bit the inside of my lips as soon as her perfume arrived first in the air, infecting everything in the blink of an eye as if it wanted to suffocate me. From the corner of my eye, I saw her stop behind me, wearing sunglasses and focused on a piece of paper she was holding, her long black-painted nails adorned with rings she rarely took off.
"What are you doing here?" I heard her voice and turned to see she was speaking to Scarlet, who had taken a spot behind her.
"Didn't Noah tell you?" the red-haired girl replied with raised eyebrows. "I'll be accompanying the band as a photographer."
"No, Noah didn’t tell us..." She smiled slowly and turned to look straight at me. Every word she spoke to Scarlet didn’t require the slightest eye contact—she directed her harsh words while fixing me with a furious glare. "I didn’t know he was hiring just anyone to keep his girlfriend around."
"What are you talking about?" I asked, lowering my voice as if each word pierced my brain, my headache still relentless.
"Listen here, girl, you respect me because I am not just anyone!"
She laughed, covering her mouth with trembling fingers before recomposing herself and gliding her lipstick-coated lips together.
"Thank you so much for the info, sweetheart! Good luck keeping an eye on him backstage."
Like a furious storm, she delivered her acidic words while brushing past me, heading toward our friends up ahead.
"I find her so rude," Scarlet muttered with a dissatisfied grunt. "No wonder if she's high, acting so full of herself."
"Why don’t you just shut up?" I snapped, cutting her words short with a cold sideways glare. "If you found a way to insert yourself into the band through work, then do it. Pretend the rumors about my personality are true—don’t talk to me, don’t sit next to me, don’t ask me for anything, and definitely don’t meddle in my life. I sincerely hope I don’t have to hear your voice until the plane lands, or I’ll ship you off to an island in New Zealand."
"But Noah—"
Before Scarlet could say anything else, I turned my back on her and followed the rest of the team. Fortunately, I was so exhausted that the rest of the trip seemed to promise immediate sleep.
On the plane, however, my mood worsened even more when I realized I’d been assigned the worst seat possible: right behind Ruffilo and the others, who were laughing loudly and joking incessantly with her.
Ruffilo’s loud laugh cut through the air, and something inside me pulsed with growing irritation.
"Could you all keep it down?" I snapped, sharp enough to silence them. "I’m trying to sleep."
"Sorry, Noah..." Ruffilo apologized, pulling an exaggerated pout. "We were just trying to distract her."
I rolled my eyes. "Her fear of flying will only ease if you let her sit by the window. Acting like clowns won’t help. Now stop bothering me."
An awkward silence settled momentarily, soon replaced by careful movement in the aisle. She swapped seats, taking the one by the window. The light filtering through the clouds bathed her face with a softness that, against my will, held my attention for a few seconds longer than it should have.
Her expression was tense, her brow furrowed, almost in agony over something as she looked outside, her delicate fingers tapping quickly against the seat’s side. Her scent lingered in the air—subtle, but impossible to ignore.
I caught myself inhaling deeply, without realizing it, before quickly averting my gaze and leaning my head against the headrest, trying to ignore the silent chaos she caused in me.
The landing was turbulent, both literally and emotionally, as I still struggled to fall asleep. The uncomfortable silence during the remainder of the flight was replaced by the team’s bustle during disembarkation, everyone busy gathering their belongings. I, on the other hand, kept my distance from Scarlet, even when she was just a few steps behind me.
We arrived at the hotel, unfortunately crowded with other teams and bands participating in the festival. The marble lobby reflected the golden light of the chandelier, creating an environment that felt suffocating after such an exhausting day.
Ruffilo led the small line at the reception desk, collecting room keys and handing them out. Everything seemed to be going smoothly until Scarlet cleared her throat loudly, drawing everyone’s attention.
"And my room?" Scarlet asked, crossing her arms, visibly annoyed.
Ruffilo hesitated, glancing at the receptionist before turning back to her. "You… didn’t book a room?"
She rolled her eyes. "I thought someone on the team would do that for me."
My patience, already frayed, was about to snap. "And no one thought to tell you that you needed to handle it yourself?"
"Don’t start, Noah," she shot back, her cheeks tinged slightly pink but her tone sharp. "I can stay in your room."
The suggestion—or rather, demand—made my head turn in her direction so fast I felt tension in my neck. "Absolutely not," I replied, my voice firm as contained thunder.
Scarlet raised an eyebrow, defiant. "Oh, what's the problem? I'm not asking for much."
"It's not happening," I emphasized, gesturing toward the group. "Why don't you share a room with the only other woman here?"
The suggestion was logical but caused a pause in the room. Scarlet looked at me as if I had just gravely insulted her, while the girl chewing gum and inspecting her nails smirked faintly, almost imperceptibly.
"Great idea," she said with false cheerfulness, a lightness that contrasted with the tension in the air. "I don't mind sharing a room with you, Redhead."
Scarlet turned to her, clearly indignant. "You must be joking."
"She's not," I interrupted, more firmly than I intended. "Problem solved."
Scarlet huffed, shooting a final look of displeasure before grabbing her things. I watched her walk away, the sound of her footsteps echoing on the marble as she reluctantly departed.
"Did I mention how much I love your grouchy old-man spirit today?" Ruffilo commented under his breath, barely holding back a laugh. "It's rarely this entertaining."
"I just want to figure out what the hell that girl is doing," I muttered, cutting off the joke as I grabbed my key and headed for the elevator.
"Replacing Bryan, right?"
"That's what it seems…"
But I had a feeling Scarlet's presence was more than just coincidence.
After settling into my room, an uneasiness began to consume me. The hotel was too dull, and the day's tension lingered in my head like an endless echo. I decided to head out in search of something to eat—anything to get me out of that oppressive atmosphere.
I called a taxi, and as I waited at the entrance, the cold night air brought momentary relief. As soon as the car arrived, I opened the door and got in, giving the driver an address I vaguely remembered seeing in a travel magazine. Before the taxi could leave, the opposite door suddenly opened, and a familiar figure climbed in without hesitation.
"Of course," I muttered, already exasperated as she settled in beside me with a mischievous smile.
"How lucky for me," she said, feigning enthusiasm. "Sharing a taxi with the devil himself."
"Seriously? Can't you take another one?" I asked, already considering opening the door and getting out.
"I'm already here; there's no way I'm letting a ride pass by," she retorted, fixing her hair as if that would end the argument. “Besides, I’m looking for a place to eat. What a coincidence, huh? Hey, where's Scarlet?"
"Perfect," I muttered sarcastically, leaning back against the seat and looking out the window, trying to ignore her.
The ride was silent—on my part, at least. She seemed quite pleased to tease me with remarks about the city, the driver, and even how I always seemed grumpy.
When we finally arrived at the address, I got out quickly, eager to rid myself of her. But, unsurprisingly, she followed right behind me, the sound of her boots echoing on the sidewalk.
"Why are you getting out?" I asked, turning to face her.
"Because I decided to eat at the same place as you," she replied with a challenging smile.
I rolled my eyes and started walking, but soon noticed something strange. The address I had chosen… didn't seem right. There was no restaurant in sight, just old buildings and poorly lit streets.
"Are you sure this is the place?" she asked, glancing around with raised eyebrows.
"Of course I am," I lied, though the discomfort was evident in my voice.
"Oh, then where's the restaurant, genius?" She crossed her arms, tilting her head at me with a look of fake patience.
"Maybe it's around the corner," I replied, pointing randomly and starting to walk, even though I wasn’t certain.
"Or maybe you just have no idea what you're doing," she quipped, following me.
"You didn’t have to come," I shot back, spinning on my heel to face her.
"And you didn’t have to get us lost," she countered with a shrug.
The argument escalated quickly. Our voices echoed through the deserted streets as we argued about whose fault it was—mine, for choosing an address without checking, or hers, for insisting on tagging along.
"You think you know everything, don't you?" she exclaimed, shaking her head.
"And you think you have the right to meddle in everything," I retorted, pointing at her.
She opened her mouth to reply but was interrupted by a distant sound—something metallic, like a gate slamming shut. We both fell silent immediately, the atmosphere now much quieter and stranger than before.
"Great," she muttered, glancing around again. "Now we're lost on an empty street and probably about to get mugged."
"If you’d stop complaining for a second, maybe we could find the place," I replied, trying to ignore the growing unease inside me.
But deep down, I knew she was right. The night was only getting worse.
The sky began to shift slowly, the bluish tones giving way to a deep orange that soon turned into an oppressive darkness. What once looked like deserted streets now carried an unsettling aura. The buildings and sidewalks disappeared, replaced by empty lots and sparse trees. The silence was broken only by the sound of our footsteps, which seemed louder with every second.
"What’s the matter, Noah? Afraid of the dark?" she teased, wiggling her fingers, though her voice trembled slightly, betraying her growing discomfort.
"Stop being pathetic!" I snapped, forcing sarcasm to mask the anxiety creeping over me.
The real trouble came when my phone vibrated one last time before dying completely.
"Perfect," I muttered, holding the lifeless device in my hand.
She glanced at her own phone and made a face, letting out a dry laugh. "Mine’s almost dead too. We’re out of GPS, no taxi, and no idea where we are."
"Oh, so you’re just now realizing this was a terrible idea?"
"You brought me here!" she shot back, arms crossed like she owned the moral high ground.
The argument continued as we walked, but the energy was draining along with the daylight. The jokes and taunts gave way to irritated grumbles and, eventually, to an uncomfortable silence. The cold began to set in, making her rub her arms and mutter something about how much of a waste of time this all was.
That was when we spotted a structure in the distance, partially hidden by the trees.
“Is that a house?” she asked, her voice tinged with doubt.
“Sort of,” I replied, eyeing the weathered, timeworn structure. It was small, with cracked walls and windows boarded up with planks.
It looked like it had been abandoned for years, but at least it offered shelter.
“I can’t believe I’m going in there,” I said, taking a step back.
“Great. Stay out here and see how much you like the freezing wind,” she shot back before pushing open the slightly ajar door.
The inside was no more inviting than the outside. The wooden floor creaked with every step, and the smell of mildew and dust filled my lungs. There were only two rooms: one that seemed to be the main living area and another that might have been a bedroom. Unlike me, she was enthralled, poking around at everything from the walls to the furniture and even amusing herself by sniffing the abandoned food in the fridge.
I hated how she could turn any situation into a joke.
“Do you think it’s safe?” I asked, following her hesitantly.
“No idea. But it’s better than staying outside.”
I scoffed, glancing around with disdain.
“So, what now? Are we setting up camp here and waiting for sunrise?”
“Maybe. Did you bring a tent? Because there’s only one bed, and I’m not sleeping with you, Mr. I-Snore-All-Night.”
“Funny,” I said mockingly, throwing a dusty pillow at her. “I don’t snore anymore.”
The tension between us kept building, every word dripping with irritation and exhaustion. My heart was pounding harder—not just because of the situation, but because of her presence, so close yet so infuriating.
“I feel like you planned this just to get some alone time with me!” she accused, her eyes gleaming with anger. “At the very least, I expected a less exotic location.”
“Disappearing your body behind this house at sunrise is still an option.”
“I definitely deserve more than being dumped in the middle of nowhere!” she declared haughtily.
“I can’t believe I have to spend the night under the same roof as you! I’d have preferred being mugged outside.”
“Then go back out there, Superman!”
Our bickering echoed off the empty walls, the anger making the discomfort almost palpable. Yet, in the midst of our insults, a sound from outside cut through the tension.
A low rustling, like leaves being stepped on.
We both fell silent immediately, our eyes darting toward the open door. The air grew heavier, and for the first time since we left the hotel, I felt something close to genuine fear.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered, her voice finally stripped of sarcasm.
“Yes,” I replied, my gaze fixed on the darkness outside.
Something was out there.
And, for the first time that night, our argument ceased to matter.
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