#the carpet in my room RUINED my bed frame RUINED she MELTED one of my charging cables she lets her dog PISS in OUR ROOM WHEN WE ARENT HOME

[lovphobic]

like. kim is becoming parasitic at this point. i am PRAYING for december to come i want her GONE

[rowanwhitethornisbae]

Liabilities Ch 3

Rowaelin High School BFFs Modern AU

masterlist

Warnings: Drugs, drinking, swearing

At the sound of his ringing phone he groaned and rolled over in his bed. His eyes were blurry but he could make out Aelin’s name and the time. 6:30. Why the hell was she calling him this early on a Sunday.

“Ace?.” Rowan said, lifting the phone to his ear. His voice was raspy and low with sleep. 

“Hi Rowan.” There was a pause on the other line. “Did I wake you.” Her voice broke on the end of the sentence and he instantly sat up in bed, suddenly very awake. 

“No no, I was, uh, studying.” He stammered for some lie. 

“Can you come pick me up.” She was so quiet he could barely hear her. 

He was already moving, throwing on the first pair of shoes he could find. “Where are you.” 

“Lorcan’s.” He momentarily stopped. A part of him was angry. So very angry that his suspicions about last night had been proven right. The other half of him though, was worried. Aelin sounded genuinely upset. 

“I’m on my way.” He mumbled, and hung up. 

A few minutes later he was on the road, car stopped at a light about five minutes from Lorcan’s. Sighing, he leaned his head against the steering wheel. His heart was racing in his chest, emotions too much of swirling mess to try and decipher. His head hurt. Everything hurt. When had he given Aelin this much control over him? They were best friend, sure, but there had always been a line. They talked about almost everything. Hell, she even went to buy condoms with her for the first time. When had the lines become so blurred that he was now picking her up from one of his best friend’s houses at 6:30 after they slept together?

The light turned green and he pressed down lightly on the gas. The leaves blew outside his window in the early morning fall breeze. A few blocks later and he was rolling to a stop outside Lorcan’s. Aelin was sitting on the front step, her arms wrapped tightly around her shuddering frame. Her dress from last night was hiked up and she looked positively freezing. Her cheeks were red and tear-stained and mascara ran down her face. Her blonde hair was up in loose bun and stands had fallen out and were plastered to the sides of her face. He approached from the car slowly, like he would a wild animal. 

He knelt before her and she looked up at him slowly. “It was my fault.” She said quietly. Something in his chest cracked wide open. 

“What are you -”

“Sam’s death. I should've saved him. I should've jumped infront of the bullet or pulled him out of the way or done anything. Now all I am is a worthless piece of shit. Getting high and wasted and screwing anything in my field of vision. Now I've even ruined my friendship with Lorcan.” 

She broke on the last sentence and her body became wracked with heart-wrenching sobs. Rowan sat down on the step beside her and pulled her into his arms. Aelin buried her head in his chest and cried. 

“Ace.” He whispered, running a hand through her hair. “It’s not your fault.” 

She just cried harder. Her small hands white knuckled from gripping onto his sweater so tightly. Ever so carefully he pried her hands off of him and held onto her wrists. She lifted her eyes to meet his and the pain and suffering written there nearly made him break. 

“I’m a mess Rowan. Why are you even still friends with me?”   

“Because I love you.” Their eye contact didn't break and for a moment Rowan saw something other than pain flash in her eyes. Although the words were true, she’d never know just how much he really meant it. 

“Ace why don't you get in the car.” He looked back at the door. “I’m going to go talk to Lorcan for a moment.” 

She started shaking her head rapidly. “No no no Rowan it wasn't his fault. We were both drunk.” 

“I just want to talk to him.”

She nodded reluctantly and folded in on herself. Her steps were slow and unhurried as she pulled open the unlocked door and slumped into the passenger seat. Aelin rubbed at her temples and reached for the Advil he always kept inside his glove compartment.  

Despite wanting to stare at her forever, he turned away and walked up the last few steps to Lorcan’s. The place was small, but nicely decorated, and Rowan had always liked hanging around here. He pushed open the light red door. The living room was tidy. A small grey couch was positioned a few feet away from a flat screen tv. He remembered how happy Lorcan had been when he’d finally saved up enough money to buy the TV. Rowan and Fenrys had helped him carry it home and they’d played video games on it for hours. Rowan nearly tripped over a blanket as he half stumbled up the carpeted stairs. 

“Lorcan.” He called out. 

A low groan sounded and then a few seconds later Rowan heard blanket’s moving. 

“Rowan?” He yelled back. “What the fuck are you doing here.” 

He rounded the last corner and stood in the entryway to Lorcan’s bedroom. “What was going through your mind last night when you decided to fuck my best friend.” 

Lorcan, who was now sitting up and watching him apprehensively, started. 

“Fucking hell man. You’re one of my best friend. You know I'm madly in love with her. Why the hell would you do this?”

Lorcan rubbed at his temples. His black hair was messy with sleep and had fallen over his onyx eyes. He was shirtless and Rowan desperately didn't want to know whether or not he was wearing pants. 

“I’m sorry man.” His friend said. “I don't even know what I was thinking. Aelin’s my friend too you know.” 

Rowan turned his head slightly and banged it against the doorframe twice. “What am I supposed to do Lor?” He groaned.

Lorcan stood up from the bed, the sheet wrapped around his lower half. He approached Rowan carefully. “Forget about all of this?” He asked tentatively. 

“Talk to Aelin on Monday.” Rowan told him. “Then I'll see if I can voluntarily catch a case of amnesia.” 

Lorcan bit out a small laugh and shifted on the balls of his feet. The tension in the room had lessened slightly, but not enough for Rowan to invite him to breakfast or anything. 

“I’ll just -” Rowan gestured towards the door.

“Okay.” Lorcan said, pursing his lips slightly. 

As soon as Rowan was out of Lorcan’s eye line he practically sprinted to the car. Aelin was waiting, knees pulled up to her chest on the seat. She had turned on the radio and an ABBA song was playing softly in the background. 

“Want to go to Hazel’s?” He asked, referring to their favourite brunch diner. 

Aelin turned to look at him and cracked a small smile. She gave him a small nod and he started the car. She leaned forward slightly and turned up the radio.

“You are the Dancing Queen” She sung softly. Her voice was light and quiet and gave Rowan the distinct impression that he was in heaven. God if he could listen to her sing forever he would. 

“Young and sweet” Her confidence grew with each word and she began to sway slightly. 

“Only Seventeen” She pointed at Rowan as she sang, even going so far as to jostle him with her shoulder. Even the lightest of touches had him tightening his grip on the steering wheel.

“Dancing queen” She was practically yelling now, her voice turning heads from outside his open window. Rowan reached down and turned the radio up even more, his laugh mixing with the music.

“Feel the beat from the tambourine, oh yeah” At the end of this line Rowan finally relented. Her joy and enthusiasm was contagious. He’d follow this woman to whatever end. 

He took in a deep breath and sang. “You can dance” She grinned widely at him. Rowan’s hands drummed subtly on the steering wheel. His voice was deep and raw with a slight accent. They were the perfect contrast and yet somehow melted together heavenly. 

“You can jive” 

“Having the time of your life”

They continued to sing all the way to the diner and as Rowan pulled her out of the car and towards a booth at the back, his heart nearly beat out of his chest. She hadn't stopped smiling since he’d joined her in singing and her tears had dried underneath her eyes. 

“I’m going to go clean myself up a little.” She told him. 

He nodded and watched her form disappear around the corner and into the bathroom. For the first time in a while he felt hope. Maybe senior year would turn out better than he’d thought after all. 

tags:

@bamchickawowow

[drprettyboyspence]

Memory Lane

Dr. Spencer Reid/reader

Summary: Reader just can't seem to get to sleep one night so she decides to walk around the house she shares with her boyfriend, Spencer Reid. As she travels around the house she remembers significant moments in their relationship.

words: 2.9k

warnings: season 12 spoilers, mentioning of mental illness, nothing else to my knowledge! (just a lot of fluff) 

a/n: This is my first Spencer Reid fic and I kinda went off the rails with the word count, let me know if you enjoy it :)

I turn myself over in bed for what feels like the four hundredth time this hour, facing the ceiling now. I can hear the rustling of leaves outside and the distant sirens of the city, remembering how those sounds used to bring me some sort of comfort as a child, now all I can think of is the death and tragedy being an FBI profiler has brought me into contact with, the horrors at the end of the trail of sirens. Mostly noticeably though, I hear the steady breathing of the man lying next to me in the king bed, glancing over at my boyfriend of almost 4 years I smile warmly, his unruly hair draped over the pillow, glad to see him in deep sleep. Recently he hasn’t been sleeping well, suffering from PTSD from his time spent in prison as well as all the trauma the poor man has been through in the last 10 years of his life. I quietly get out of bed, making sure not to bother him, he deserves a good nights sleep and we have to be at the BAU in a depressingly minuscule amount of hours. My feet hit the cold wooden floors and I wonder for the uncountable time “Why did we decide on wooden floors?” A memory of an argument with Spencer answers my question,  

“Because silly, don’t you know that carpets can hold up to 200,000 bacteria per square inch, this room is 100 square feet, 144 square inches per square foot, that is 28,800,000 bacteria in our bedroom alone.” I remember shaking my head at him, he’s always been such a germaphobe. In fact, when we first met, he shook my hand, and later when I confided in JJ and Penelope that I had pretty intense feelings for the resident genius of the BAU, they mentioned that he usually hates shaking hands, is known for refusing to shake the hands of many people the team comes into contact with on cases. He shook my hand right away, it’s one of the things I love about him and we always say we knew right away that we had a special connection. I glance at Spencer’s sleeping frame one more time before leaving the bedroom and making my way down the hallway. There are pictures there, pictures of me and Spence, him and his mom, pictures of the team at work, Spencer won’t admit it often, but he wakes up every morning scared that he won’t remember those he loves, his mother’s dementia and schizophrenia have impacted him greatly. I stop in front of a picture of me and Spence, it’s the first picture we ever took together, Halloween almost 5 years ago now, at the FBI Halloween party.

October 2015

“Come on Y/n! How can you not love Halloween!”

“Spencer, what’s so great about Halloween!” I had asked laughing while filling up a plastic cup with punch. The party is fun, but all this dressing up just seems silly to me sometimes.

“It’s a uniquely American holiday! I mean, despite its obvious origins in the Celtic festival of Samhain and the Christian All Saints’ Day, it really is a melting pot of various immigrants’ traditions and beliefs. It became a little more commercialized in the 1950s with trick-or-treat, and today it rivals only Christmas in terms of popularity!” I catch JJ’s eyes from across the room, she gives me a sympathetic look as I’m stuck in another of Reid’s constant statistics rants. Frankly, I don’t understand how the rest of the team can cut Reid off when he’s like this. He’s so genuinely excited by this holiday it makes my budding feelings for the man standing in front of me even stronger.

“Aw you guys look so cute! Say cheese!” the always-hyper voice of Penelope Garcia shouts from across the bullpen, snapping a quick picture of me and Spence before running after Derek. I glance down at my phone and see a text from Penelope “It doesn’t take a profiler to realize how gone you are for him Y/n” I blush profusely before continuing my conversation with Spencer.

Present day

Tearing my eyes away from that specific picture, I continue walking to the end of the hallway, painfully aware that the floorboards are squeaking with my every step, hoping Spencer’s just-finished-a-case level of exhaustion will prevent him from waking up. I pass the threshold into the kitchen and see the dim light of the clock over the stove, the red 2:15 blinking back at me through my tired eyes, I just can’t seem to get to sleep tonight, I’m sure Spencer would say something like

“Chronic insomnia is usually tied to an underlying mental or physical issue. Anxiety, stress, and depression are some of the most common causes of chronic insomnia but even if you do not suffer from chronic insomnia, 35% of Americans report their sleep quality as poor or only fair.” Dating a living encyclopedia definitely has its perks I suppose. I walk towards the fridge and glance at the refrigerator, my eyes traveling to a postcard held up by a doctor who magnet. Houston, Texas the postcard reads.

February 2017

Me and Spencer had been dating for less than 6 months but as we had known each other for over a year I was falling head over heels in love with him. The last few months hadn’t been easy, Spencer learned that his mother had been diagnosed with dementia and not a day had gone by where he didn’t try and find a cure, he had been traveling to Houston,Texas to talk with his mother’s doctor, he then brought her to live with him in Virginia, it had been difficult to say the least. My fingers traced the edges of the postcard I had received in the mail this morning, then flipped it over and saw Spencer’s familiar scraggly handwriting, it read

Dear Y/n,

I was able to speak with my mother’s doctors today, I feel as though there must be more I can be doing, she seems to be responding to the medicines but I am looking into new methods of treating the disease. I miss you so much Y/n, and I miss the rest of the team as well, tell them I will be back as soon as I can, I hate the thought of you putting yourself in danger on cases without me there, not because I doubt your ability to protect yourself, but because I doubt my ability to handle being 1,402 miles away from you. Please do not worry about me, if you’re anxiously awaiting my return, stop looking at the clock because remember, when looking at a clock our brains anticipate what we’ll see faster than we actually see it, so the clock seems to stop, Ill be back before you know it Y/n.

With all my love, Spencer Reid.

I giggle quietly at the added facts, only Spencer would describe the phenomenon of a clock appearing stopped when glanced out. I’m concerned about Spencer though, I’m not sure what is going on, but there is definitely something not right with him and if I didn’t trust him so much I would consider asking Garcia to do a background check to check the legitimacy of his travels to Houston.

Present Day

This postcard is extremely bittersweet, the next week we were all rushing to Mexico, responding to a call that Spencer was in jail, I was a nervous wreck, we all were, it was an extremely rough 6 months, truly showing me how strong the man I love is. I push some of those harsh memories out of my brain, choosing to focus on the happy memories if I ever want to fall asleep tonight. There’s a coffee machine next to the fridge, if there’s one thing Spencer loves more than me, its coffee, or rather coffee flavored sugar with the amount of sweetener he puts in his cup every day. Spencer smells like coffee, almost always, he struggles to sleep most nights and therefore is always hyped up on caffeine. It's actually played a huge role in our relationship.

August 2016

Dr. Spencer Reid and I are walking to the BAU together as we do every single day, we live close to each other, close enough that he walks about 5 minutes before arriving at my house, we then walk to the coffee shop on the way to the train station. We’re best friends, but I’ve been secretly in love with him for months. Walking into Quantico, we get the daily glances from Penelope, Derek, and JJ who are sitting together looking at pictures of Henry. Penelope always teases me that we’re both so in love with each other that everyone can see it but us, it’s ironic actually. As much as I don’t believe Pen, I have been noticing small changes in Spence’s behavior the last couple months, prompting me to, in the deepest corners of my mind, hope that maybe he feels the same way, our friendship is worth too much to risk him not feeling the same way though, so I’m forever stuck. We aren’t on a case right now, so there’s a lot of paperwork to be done, at one point during the day I get up, asking Spence if he wants another cup of coffee before walking to the break room. I return after a brief 5 minutes and am surprised to see Derek sitting in my seat, arguing with Spencer.

“Come on Pretty boy! We both know you’re in love with her! Just ask her out man, she’ll say yes!”

“Morgan, quiet down, she’ll be back any minute, besides I’m 35 and Y/n is 32, I’m not saying there would even be a chance that we would get married but the marriage success rate in the United States is only 50%, the worst it has ever been, that therefore shows the state of relationships in the country as well, I don’t want to ruin our friendship, I could never lose her. Besides, I’ve never been good with women.”

“But that’s the thing pretty boy, you don’t have to be good with women, you’re already good with Y/n, she’s the one who matters, just ask her out man, you’ll regret it if you don’t.” With that Morgan walks away and I take a deep breath, its now or never, walking over to Spencer and setting down the cup, whispering in his ear,

“You never know how good with women you are until you try, Spence” He looks up at me with wide eyes and licks his tongue across his lips, something he does often.

“Um, Y/n, y-you heard all of that?” I nod and I can see Spence take a deep breath just as I did before walking over, “W-would you like to um- go to dinner with me Y/n?”

“Hmm I don’t know…” Spencer’s face starts to fall as I quickly continue “Of course I would love to go to dinner with you silly, what did you think?” His smile lights up the entire room as he pulls me into a deep hug.

“Well finally you two. You couldn’t have waited just a few more months though, I assumed you lovebirds wouldn’t get it together until after Spencer’s birthday” Rossi says from behind us, passing a pretty hefty stack of bills to Penelope.

That was the day that started the greatest adventure of my life.

Present Day

I leave the kitchen and walk to the living room, a chilly breeze blows my hair slightly askew, its June in Virginia, warm enough that all I’m wearing is one of Spence’s oversized MIT shirts with pajama shorts, but the night air causes slight goosebumps on my skin, sending me into my memories once again.

August 2019

Spencer and I are sitting on the couch, participating in yet another Doctor Who marathon on the tv, it's a rare day off from work and the hot summer air fills our living room even with the fan blowing through the house. I lie my head in Spencer’s lap as we watch the tv and his strong hand strokes the back of my neck, causing goosebumps to pop up all over my arms. I giggle and glance up at him causing him to pointedly look at me asking me with his eyes “What is so funny that you dare distract from Doctor Who?”

“It’s just strange, its 95 degrees outside but your hands on my neck give me goosebumps like its a crisp fall day, isn’t that funny baby?”

“Of course the most common cause of goosebumps is cold weather, but when you’re experiencing extreme emotions, the human body responds in a variety of ways. Two common responses include increased electrical activity in the muscles just under the skin and increased depth or heaviness of breathing, resulting in goosebumps.” I roll my eyes at him and playfully swat his hair out of his eyes.

“Only you, Dr. Spencer Reid, would take a romantic statement and turn it into statistics, and I love you for that” he kisses me and well, the Doctor Who marathon was quickly turned off after that.

Present Day

As I turn the corner into the living room I smile warmly, it’s the room that Spencer and I like the best. There are book cases lining the back wall, Spencer loves books, I’d ask him what made his books so special and he’d tell me stories of his childhood, his mom reading him 15th century literature, I loved when Spence told me stories about his childhood.

December 2017

I knocked on the door of Spencer’s apartment, it wasn’t like him to be late for our daily walk to work especially because he had been on probation after his time in jail. I received no answer, prompting my concern as I unlocked the door with the key he had given me. I walked into his living room and saw him, Spencer was sitting in the middle of the floor surrounded by books, running his fingers up and down the pages as he does when he’s reading at his top speed.

“Spence what on earth are you doing! Where did all these books come from? We aren’t on a case are we?”

“This year in the United States alone there have been 328,259 new books published, I read at 20,000 words per minute but at an average of 100,000 words per book, it would take me 27,377 hours to read all those books!”

“Oh Spencer how I love you, you don’t need to read every book ever published, are you going to start reading romance novels?” I tease while picking up a copy of 50 Shades of Gray from the ground at Spencer’s feet.

“Okay maybe you’re right, I just feel like I missed so much time when I was incarcerated, all that reading I could’ve done when I was trapped in that place, it's time I can never get back.”

“Spencer, I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for you, but this is not going to help that feeling go away, let’s go to work.” Spencer nodded and began to tidy up the floor before following me out the door.

“Wait, Y/n, I have to ask you something that I’ve meant to say since I’ve gotten out of jail, and I might as well say it now, will you move in with me?” He’s chewing on his bottom lip again and I jump into his arms in excitement, kissing his hair as he caresses the back of my head.

“Of course I’ll move in with you! I love you, Dr. Spencer Reid.”

“And I love you Y/n Y/l/n.”

Present Day

I’m coming around to the opposite side of the living room now, sitting down on the couch in front of the fireplace. I love the fireplace in our house and I think secretly Spencer does too. We argued for days over the safety of having a fireplace in our house, Spencer of course supplied with enough knowledge of house fires to last him 5 lifetimes, “But Spencer it’ll be so cozy, doesn’t it sound romantic to cuddle up by the fire?” I had pleaded with him the day we toured the house for the first time.

“Y/n, there were an average of 357,400 residential fires per year in the US between 2012 and 2014, an average of 22,300 of those fires were caused by a fireplace or chimney!”

“But Spenceee, that’s only 6.24% of the residential house fires during that period, 43.9% were from cooking equipment, are you going to forbid us from having a kitchen too?” Hey, don’t underestimate how useful a cellphone calculator and a quick google search can be in winning an argument against your genius boyfriend. Obviously, we had ended up agreeing on the fireplace, but Spencer was still overly cautious whenever it was in use. As I stood in front of the fireplace I became hyper aware of the floorboards creaking in the hallway just as they had done when I left the room earlier, I felt a presence enter the room and the 6’1” frame of my boyfriend wrapped his long arms around me from behind while burying his face in the hollow of my shoulder.

“Hi, baby, what are you doing up so late? Are you feeling okay? Can’t seem to get to sleep?” I nod back at him and recline my head so it rests on his strong chest.

“I was just taking a trip down memory lane I suppose” I say before smiling up at the love of my life.

[softlyjiminie]

sempiternal | k.s.j

⇢ pairing(s): gryffindor!seokjin x hufflepuff!reader  ex-slytherin!yoongi.

⇢ word count: 8.4K

⇢ genre: angst, fluff, hogwarts!au.

⇢ summary: love has many obstacles, more often than not, it is eternal and unchanging; an everlasting love.

⇢ warning(s): please read! swearing, breakups, semi-violence.

⇢ author’s note(s): hey guys! here’s another Harry Potter inspired fic, i worked real hard on this one, it’s been a year in the making so i hope you enjoy! you may read slytherin!yoongi here to understand.

the summer of your fourth year had to be one of the worst summers you’d ever had. your heart broken and torn and ripped and hurt from the year’s endeavours. you had wasted hours with soggy cheeks and a hoarse throat, the other girls in your dorm smoothing down your hair and whispering ‘he didn’t deserve you’’s into your ear as you fell asleep. 

min yoongi. the boy you trusted with all your heart, and gone and ruined it just for a bit of fun. you could still feel the ringing in your ears as the howler spat his venomous words. the ringing didn’t stop after that. 

at least not until seokjin came along.

you were back in the muggle world, with your muggle things and muggle life, trudging through your local corner shop, just looking for something, anything that you could stuff your face with and have no regrets. you wanted to forget. with tired feet, dragging across the store’s floor, you had finally reached the till, plopping the almost melted tub of ben and jerrie’s ice cream onto the counter.

you looked up with a sour face, trying to ignore the fact that the flavour you’d picked had been one of yoongi’s favourites when you introduced him to muggle treats. with a pang in your heart you met a pair of whisky coloured eyes and plump pouty lips that belonged to none other than kim seokjin.

kim seokjin.

fuck, it was kim seokjin.

the gryffindor boy with the soft blonde hair and sweet grin, who was a favourite amongst all of the houses. jin had been popular from his very first year at hogwarts, winning over everyone with his kind heart. he’d soared through the ranks in his house’s quidditch team, now acting as gryffindor’s prized seaker. the girls loved him, and you could see why. gasping, you looked away from the older boy, in his sixth year moving onto his seventh. 

you missed how his lips twitched up into a soft smile as he scanned your tub. you shoved your fingers into the depth of your pocket, ready to pay with a bill or two before seokjins’s soft voice filtered through the air between you. “hey, YN. don’t worry about it, it’s on the house.” 

you felt yourself melting at his soft tone, his honey brown eyes causing warmth to drift over your skin. how did he have that effect on you? You barely knew him. “t-thank you seokjin-“ you blushed, scooping up your bag. the older gryffindor offered you a dreamy smile before shaking his head and running after you once he realised you were leaving.

“you know-“ he hummed, walking you to the sliding doors. “i’ve seen you around, you seem like a nice girl that i’d like to get to know better,” his words sent a pang of warmth to your heart. “if you don’t mind waiting for me, my shift ends in a few minutes and we could hang out for a bit.”

you were hesitant at first, but stayed nonetheless, jaw dropping when seokjin rolled out of the store in a fitted white t-shirt and black skinny jeans (after changing out of his uniform.). he really was effortlessly beautiful. some would have called you foolish for trusting a boy you’d just met, but he was sweet, walking you to the nearest park and devouring your ice cream with you. 

cookies and cream had never tasted so sweet, the memories that go with it becoming much fonder.

“i’m sorry about what happened with yoongi,” the blonde mumbled, as you spooned the last of the frozen desert into your mouth. you flinched, suddenly feeling the ringing from the howler again, and seeing the slytherin’s vacant expression as you ran past him. seokjin knew he had hit a nerve, his hand quickly engulfing yours. “you were really brave for handling it the way you did, i-it gave me the courage to talk to you today,” his thumb smoothed over the back of your hand, and you gulped, losing yourself in the coffee of his eyes. “you deserve better-“

‘i deserve someone like you.’ you had finished off in your head, leaning into him. your vision became clouded just at his touch, his hands coming up to cup your cheeks. the moment was rushed, you’d only just met him, but you’d never been treated with such gentleness, like you were the most expensive thing in the world. seokjin’s eyes flicked down to your lips and then back up to your eyes and you so desperately wanted to meet him in the middle. just a kiss. 

but he was gone as soon as he came. disappointment burying itself in your chest as your eyes fluttered open once again. seokjin was still holding your hands when your vision refocused, his grip on you not loosening. his whisky eyes noted how you posted and looked away from him. “Y-YN... i’m sorry,” he sighed, causing you to gently switch your gaze over to him again. “i know you’re hurting still and trust me, i really do want to kiss you but i don’t want you to feel like i’m taking advantage of you. i’ll wait until you’re ready, if you want me to. ” 

your heart fluttered at the blonde’s words, but you could still feel the disappointment in your veins at the thought of waiting, even if it was best for you. “come on now,” Seokjin grinned, trying to make eye contact with you as you looked away from him to cover your pout. “don’t  be upset YN, won’t you give me a smile?” 

he was crouching in front of you now, palms resting on his knees as he pulled funny faces to make you laugh. you couldn’t help the giggle that bubbled up in your throat when he sent a particularly weird one your way. 

the gryffindor boy beamed adorably, his dark eyes twinkling under the light of the rising moon. “there’s that smile, pretty girl.” 

a romance bloomed for you that summer, with seokjin being a muggle himself it was easier to meet up and organise dates. true to his word, the soon-to-be seventh year refused to kiss you or carry out any public displays of affection with you until you were ready so it took you almost two weeks to convince him to let you hold his hand. 

he treated you like a delicate and wilted flower, watering you with the affection that you craved and might not have gotten with yoongi. he tended to your bruised petals, and lifted them high once again, the colour returning to your life. 

seokjin was what you had needed all along. 

you hadn’t kissed, like he promised until one night where you had invited him to meet your family, they were comforted and surprised at the fact that seokjin was a muggle like yourself. your mother even more so when she pulled you aside to comment ‘that’s not how i expected yoongi to look’ in which you blushed, catching the blonde’s eye from across the room as he wrestled your little brother into the carpet (much to your father’s delight). 

“that’s because he’s not, mum,” you’d said in a hushed whisper, helping her to whip the cream for desert. “that’s seokjin...”

your mother hummed, staring between the two of you before giving you a small nod of approval. “well, i think he’s cute.” 

after a dessert of warm apple pie and cream (or ice cream for your brother.), yourself and seokjin had headed up to your room for some alone time together. You’d shut the door behind you, turning around to find the tall blonde laughing at an old photo of you, which you’d swatted away with a pout.  “your parents are really lovely,” jin whispered when you’d decided to curl up for some cuddles on your single bed, even if it was quite the squeeze. “your brother too.”

you smiled at him, twirling a golden strand of his around your finger, feeling his eyes drifting of your face.  “they really like you seokjin, if you’re not careful, mum might not let you leave, you’ll be on washing up duty for life!” you gasped between small pockets of laughter, causing the boy you’d been dating to laugh loudly.

“so they really like me?”

“Indefinitely.” 

“maybe more than your other boyfriends...?” 

you knew he’d been referencing yoongi, careful not to mention his name. you’d  never had a boyfriend before the slytherin boy anyways. 

“hmm, i’m not sure...” you pretended to tease, almost instantly regretting your decision when Seokjin rolled over your smaller frame, leaving your side. His palms fell flat either side of your head, sinking into the memory foam mattress as he caged you in. suddenly one hand was at your stomach, pinching your side until you were crying from laughter and gasping for air. you had no idea he knew you were ticklish.

your brother must have told him.

“s-seokjin!” you cried, burying your face into his hard chest as he tickled you mercilessly. “i can’t-��� 

he didn’t allow you to finish, tickling you further with a devilish smirk spreading across his lips. “say i’m the best!” 

“y-you’re the best! seokjin-“ 

his fingers paused, palms stretching out by your head again as you tried to regain your breath with a smile. you noticed then, how the pretty his eyes looked when the light hit them properly, how plush his lips were and soft his hair. it seemed as if seokjin was looking down at you with just as much awe, because suddenly he was swooping in, hands finding your cheeks as he sunk lower to brush his lips over yours. “c-can I kiss you?” he mumbled nervously. 

you nodded. “please...” 

his lips touched yours ever so slightly, and it’s only when you parted yours that he begun to kiss you fully. the plush pillows melding with each other perfectly, as your fingers threaded through tufts of his golden locks. jin’s hands slipped down from your cheeks to just under your shirt, soothing your heated skin as you worked your lips against his in a desperate attempt to taste more of him. 

one kiss turned to two, and two to three and soon enough you were full on making out on your silly childhood bedsheets. it was only when you could hear the little thump of your brother’s footsteps against the hard wood of the stairs that you jumped apart, straightening your clothes.

seokjin was the first to stand, knowing it was him that your younger sibling sought. with careful steps, he made his way over to the door, offering you the brightest of smiles before saying. “there’s more where that came from pretty girl.” 

you could have passed out on the spot.

confessions of love came not long after, with your impending return to Hogwarts coming up. seokjin had come to pick you up from your house in his parents’ car at around seven, promising your father you’d be back by eleven-thirty at the latest. he drove you both to the highest point in your home town to watch the sun go down and the city lights switch on, the sight taking your breath away. 

the blonde had treated you to an elaborate picnic of home cooked goodies that he’d made and a tub of your new favourite ice cream of vanilla cheesecake. you’d sat munching the treats on the hood of the car, before laying back and watching the stars, pointing out constellations whilst holding hands.

and whilst star gazing reminded you of yoongi, you couldn’t find it in you to miss him. 

seokjin looked down at you, your head resting on his chest with the stars pairing up in your eyes and he couldn’t help but blush when you met his gaze. “will it be the same?” you mumbled to him, thinking of your return to hogwarts. the older boy was to become a seventh year, and it would be his last year at the legendary school for practicing magic. He would be busy with his N.E.W.T.S and you with your O.W.L.S since you were moving into fifth year. would the feelings that sparked between you both change? for better or for worse? you heart couldn’t decide. 

as if he was reading your thoughts, jin silenced your raging mind with a soft peck to your lips, which deepened when your fingers met his hair, pulling him closer. “i’ll still love you all the same.” he whispered against the seams of your pink lips, not quite wanting to pull away.

“you love me?” you gasped, voice barely above a whisper. all you could see was jin , all you could taste was jin and all you could breathe was jin. all you needed was jin. you heart pounded viciously against your rib cage as he slotted his body against yours, looking down at you with so much love. 

“i do.” 

and then you smiled, with bleary eyes and a raging heartbeat because not once had anyone of romantic interest said those words to you, not even yoongi. so whispering back, you uttered the words. “i love you too,” 

your first few weeks back at hogwarts went smoothly, with you settling into a routine and managing to get top grades in the first-term assignments. your professors had suspected that you’d do exceedingly well in your upcoming O.W.L exams. 

you heard tales of jimin and jungkook’s adventures with taehyung in the muggle world and secretly wished that next time they’d invited you. although you’d run into Yoongi on the first day back, seokjin never complained about you not introducing him as your boyfriend, nor did he push for any explanations when he’d walked in on yoongi trying to make amends, resulting in you becoming a blubbering mess the second you’d left that room.

seokjin was an angel, a sweetheart and you’d never been so happy, memories of your ex becoming faint as you made new ones with the blonde gryffindor . people called it the honeymoon phase and maybe it was, but you wouldn’t let other people’s spite get in the way of you being happy. at least that’s what you hoped for.

a few weeks at hogwarts turned into a month or so, with the winter air fast approaching and first signs of snow fall around the corner. you’d  found yourself scurrying through the halls of the ageing castle, desperate to find your boyfriend; who had promised you an evening of hot chocolate and cuddles to make up for a date night you’d both had to miss. 

seokjin was busy, being the headboy of gryffindor had started to take up a lot of his time that he usually left for you, on those nights where you’d meet outside the kitchens for a quick kiss before bed. quidditch practice had also picked up a tonne, with an important gryffindor vs slytherin match coming up that even jimin was training for. 

it wasn’t just those things, that took up your time with him. the older boy had started hanging out with his teammates more, cutting into scheduled dates and even went on trips to hogsmead without you, only remembering when he found you half asleep outside his common room waiting for him. ‘darling...’ he’d say, lifting you bridle style, and humming in content as you nuzzled into his chest. ‘what’re  doing out out here?�� 

‘waiting for you’ you’d mumble back, still half asleep. ‘we have a date planned don’t we?’

‘maybe another time.’

sometimes it felt like you were giving more than you were getting. you didn’t want to fall into that trap again. 

your winter robes swished at your feet as you trotted down to the gryffindor common room, trying to meet jin before he had the chance to run off with one of his mates. you were walking so quickly, you hadn’t had the time to slow down before you collided with the gryffindor girl jimin had the hots for. “on YN! i didn’t see you there!” she exclaimed, grabbing your shoulders and giving you the once over to see if you were alright. 

you smiled at her softly. “sorry, i wasn’t paying attention to where I was going.”

“ah, it’s alright,” she blinked, looking at you as if there was something more to say. “did you need something? last time I checked you were a hufflepuff, no?” 

the pair of you shared a sweet laugh before you managed to calm down enough to tell her where you were headed. “i-i’m looking for seokjin,” you strung together the words through your final puffs of laughter. “we-we’re meant to be hanging out today...” 

you bite your lip, refraining from mentioning going on a date and watched with a patient stare as the gryffindor girl wracked her brain for memories of her headboy’s location. “he’s  in the library!” she nodded, furrowing her brows as if to confirm her guess. she took note of the way your eyes lit up, sure, the library was an odd place to host a date, but you didn’t mind. “with Namjoon, I think he’s studying.”

you tried to hide the drop of your smile as you thanked the girl, heading towards the library in an even bigger rush than you were in before. you were mad, borderline livid, storming through the rows and rows of books that decked the shelves of the dusty library, your nose twitched at the musty air, but you chose to ignore it, waltzing right over to our target. You couldn’t believe seokjin was willing to miss yet another date.

you found both boys tucked into a corner of the room, books of charms and defence against the dark arts spread across the sleek mahogany table. you allowed yourself a few seconds to calm down, knowing that your face was probably heated high with rage and you didn’t want to embarrass yourself in front of namjoon. 

you didn’t know the purple haired boy all too well, but knew enough to be aware that despite having a quiet and perhaps even shy exterior, he was one of the best and bravest wizards in hogwarts. he was also in the year above you. when you’d finally worked up the courage to approach the table, namjoon was the first to notice you, his quill pausing midair as he glanced between your - still raging - face and his older housemate. “uh- hyung,” he coughed awkwardly as you silently seethed above him. seokjin didn’t budge, too focused on his notes. “hyung-“ 

“what namjoon-ah? i swear to merlin if you’ve spilt your ink again i-“ the blonde looked up, exasperated expression falling away as his quill stopped dead on the page. jin could practically feel your anger, washing over him in boiling waves like heated lava. He was in trouble. “oh.”

Your nose scrunched up. “damn right, oh.” you watched as your boyfriend’s face contorted into a sheepish expression, his gaze flittering down to his stilled hands. 

“i’ve forgotten something haven’t i?” he whispered, the swell of his lips caught between a set of perfectly straight, pearl white teeth. 

“oh of course not, only another date.” 

both males seated at the table flinched at the sarcasm that dripped from your voice. namjoon raised his hand slightly, cowering under your sharp glare when you turned to face him. “t-to be fair, he does have N.E.W.Ts to study for-“ 

“shut up namjoon!” yourself and your boyfriend, very nearly, shouted earning yourself vicious hushes from students that were also in the library. the purple haired boy shrugged, trying to turn back to his work, leaving you and seokjin to deal with each other. 

you felt your heart sink when he looked up at you, this hadn’t been the first time Jin had skipped out on a date, and you doubted it would be the last unless you put a stop to things. you couldn’t help it when a sad pout pushed at your lips, your boyfriend’s large hand coming round to cup your smaller ones. “oh honey. please don’t give me that look,” You turned away, opting to look out of the window instead of into his eyes, you were more likely to give into him then. “YN... i know you’re upset with me, but i promise to get better at this, i hate seeing you sad and the fact that i caused it makes it worse. i’m such an idiot.” He brought your hands to his lips, pressing a kiss atop your knuckles with a downtrodden look.

you blushed, feeling the weight of his stare get under your skin. he was always able to do that, make you smile. 

“won’t you give me a smile pretty girl?” 

And with that you broke out into a large, unstoppable grin. 

the air was cold against your cheeks and nose, the bobble hat and scarf your mother had sent you, doing their best to shield you from the cool, crisp weather. hogsmead was littered with crystal snowflakes, blankets of the thick white layers stretching as far as the eye could see. you rubbed your gloved hands together in order to create some form of warmth, or perhaps it was to do with your nerves.

a few days after your confrontation in the library and some seriously overbearing affection from your boyfriend, he had decided to treat you out on the next trip to hogsmead. you had been bursting with excitement at the thought since then, every date with seokjin was just as nerve wracking as the last. 

from inside the three broomsticks, the boys you had known to become your friends observed you with care and curiosity, the stomachs filled with warm pie and sweet butterbeer. “someone should go and  get her,” jimin mused from over his plate of half eaten pie, he was starting to lose his appetite as he watched you through the window. “she’s bound to catch a cold out there.” 

jeongguk looked up from his plate, crumbs dusting the outer corners of his lips as he munched on his slice of cherry pie. “what’s she waiting for again?” the younger asked, spraying his slytherin and hufflepuff companions with an assortment of pastry crumbs. 

the pair cringed with disgust, wiping away their clothes as taehyung looked up. “she’s waiting for jin, they’re supposed to have a date today...” the Hufflepuff boy was already trailing off when his housemate hoseok let out a deep snore from his seat, slumped over the table. he’d  had a late night sneaking around with his newly found slytherin girlfriend. “i saw him earlier on though, with his quidditch team...” 

the boys fell silent, hoseok’s snores filling the air between them. jimin sighed; pushing his seat back to stand up and meet you outside. with a hat tugged over his luscious silver locks, he left his friends sitting solemnly at the table. the fifth year slytherin resisted the urge to retreat to the warm arms of the establishment once he was outside, his arm sliding around your shoulders for warmth. you jumped when you noticed.

“what’s been keeping you outside, away from the pie, YN?” the boy asked from beside you, you craned your neck to look up at him allowing your breath to catch at the sight of the snowflakes resting on his lips. jimin had always been charming and you would be a fool to say that you didn’t think he was attractive. so it came as no surprise when girls went after him, deeming him the catch of the century. the heartthrob of your year. and still, park jimin had always remained the humble boy you had met during first year, never letting the attention get to his head. park jimin may have seemed like a player, leaving a trail of broken hearts in his wake, but what no one seemed to notice is that girls only wanted him for his pretty face and toned body. you only hoped that certain people saw past that, looking at the sweet boy who looked out for you so much. 

you could see the concern wavering in his dark eyes, so you grinned up at him ignoring the cold dry stretch of your lips. “i’m waiting for seokjin,” you hummed, watching a puff of air fade into the snow scene. jimin flinched from beside you, arm tightening ever so slightly before he relaxed. “we h-have a date...”

jimin would have never missed the little tremble in your voice. part of you already knew that your boyfriend wouldn’t show up, you’d seen him babbling away with his teammates already and yet, you trusted him. trusted him not to break another promise. to not let this be just another honeymoon phase. 

“at least i thought we had one.” 

the silver haired slytherin sighed down at you, squeezing your smaller frame into the warmth of his body. “how about we go get you that pie, yeah?” he offered in a whisper and you nodded, ignoring the swell of heart break in your chest. 

the halls were empty, as they should’ve been that night, with seokjin on hall monitor duty since we he was a prefect. he didn’t mind being up that late, seeing as it was a late start for him the next day. that didn’t stop him from feeling tired though, slips of exhaustion tingling in his brain as he walked mindlessly through empty halls.

the elder boy rounded a corner, only to be met with a shadowy figure at the other end of his path. as they stepped into the candle light, the blonde deemed the figure to be park jimin, his moonish hair was ruffled and a smirk lay delicately on his lips. some people called him a bit of a sleaze but seokjin knew better than to tell you that. 

“jimin!” the gryffindor called out, earning a look of surprise from the younger boy, before a deep scowl. “what are you doing out here all by yourself?” 

the silver haired boy rolled his eyes with a ‘tsk’ storming last jin, who held a look of shock before running to catch up with the slytherin. “it’s none of your business, is it?” 

“i mean it’s awfully late,” seokjin tried to reason, carefully matching his steps with the boy. after all, jimin was yoongi’s cousin and their families had quite the reputation. “i could always deduct house points you know...”

jimin froze, closing his eyes as if to calm himself before turning to face the older boy. “you have a thing for being late or on time don’t you?” he paused, allowing seokjin to think. “you’re  never late to class, to meals and most certainly quidditch practises, but you never seem to be on time for dates with your own girlfriend...or do you even show up at all?”

the gryffindor seventh year froze in his spot as jimin spun on his heel, walking backwards in the direction of his dorms. a cruel smile of a true slytherin crawling onto his lips. “deduct house points for that, why don’t you?” 

whispers trickled through the classroom as a ravenclaw prefect slipped into your class, handing a note to your transfigurations professor. your eyes barely peaked up from your scroll, where you furiously scribbled ahead in your notes, desperate to finish your work ahead of time. your professor had a thing for letting students leave early if they completed their work.

the professor cleared their throat from the head of the classroom, silencing the whispers from your classmates. a mixture of ravenclaw and hufflepuff. your heartbeat soared when you made eye contact with the prefect, gaze skittering to jeongguk who was sitting beside you with lips pursed in curiosity. 

the professor coughed again, causing your line of vision to shoot to them, and he offered you a gentle smile. “YN, you’re needed just outside the classroom.” 

“now?” you stuttered, anxiety sky rocketing. 

he nodded, opening the door for the prefect who was leaving. “now.” 

you swallowed nervously, packing up your belongings as jeongguk gave you a reassuring grin. the class talked in hushed mutters as you passed, your body twitching with anxiety as you left the room. with your eyes trailed on your feet in shame, you lifted your head onto to be met with a familiar stare. “s-seokjin?” you asked in surprise, truth be told, after the incident at hogsmead, you had been hesitant to see him. it turns out he felt the same. “wh-what are you doing here? did you pull me out of class?” 

he nodded, answering the questions swirling in your mind. “i needed to see you, it couldn’t wait,” the blonde paused, as if to seek your permission. he owed you an explanation and you bobbed your head slightly, an indication for him to proceed. “i-i know it looks bad, that i didn’t show up to hogsmead and that i’ve been ignoring you, but trust me YN, when i say that i’m going to make it up to you.” 

you swallowed thickly at his words, folding your arms so that one hand could desperately clutch an elbow as if to soothe your nerves. with a bite of your lower lip, you glanced up at seokjin once more, an earnest and sincere expression painting his heavenly features, an expression you had seen many times before. you could feel yourself melting into the warmth of his gaze, your mind screaming to forgive him just so you could be close to him once more. 

“i’m so sorry, pretty girl,” seokjin added, noting your hesitance to reply. the seventh year took a step forward, closing the distance between you as he reached out to brush a finger down the apples of your cheeks. you could feel yourself keening into his touch, giving into that guilty pleasure. To the risk of heartbreak again. “i promise i won’t miss out on another date again, i’ll treat you to a nice night out and we’ll spend the evening together and-“ you frowned at the familiarity of his words, each syllable recognisable to your ears. seokjin had said it all before, so why did you give in every time?

did he really care about you? were you really just a mindless fifth year, blindly following someone she loved? insecurities  crept up your throat at the thought, choking you from the inside and tearing apart every fibre of your being. it’d only be a matter of time before seokjin left hogwarts and found someone his age. someone he could make it out of the honeymoon stage with. the blonde noticed the frown on your lips and the creases at your forehead. “pretty girl, please give me a smile?”

not this time. 

“seokjin,“ you sliced through his words with a wavering voice, your boyfriend’s hand retreating from your face as he looked at you in shock. “you know i love you, you know i do but i-i think we should take a break. recently it feels like... i’m not getting what i give and i want to say but until you can prove me wrong... i just don’t want to end up like how yoongi and i did before. i don’t want to be your temporary fix.” 

you stood still with a clenched fist until you finished, eyes that were screwed shut opened to find that your boyfriend was completely silent. his eyes told you that he wanted to speak up and you wanted that. you wanted him to say something, something to convince you that you didn’t need space or time apart, and that he wouldn’t let you be just a passing phase. seokjin stood before you, mouth opening and closing as he fought an internal battle. 

with a shake of your head, you stepped away from him, a cloud of disappointment settling between you. his silence was enough. “i’ll see you around then, seokjin .” you breathed, gaze falling to the floor.

“YN..” 

“please don’t pull me out of another class unless you have something important to say,” you cut him off bitterly, turning away with a swish of your golden embossed robes. “my grades are important to me.” 

the halls were once again empty, a sort of coldness settling in them as seokjin patrolled them once more. paintings talked and whispered about his heartbreak, the frown on their golden boy’s face was far too much for them to handle. leaving them to turn away in despair.

he’d fucked up, he really had.

in his mind, seokjin had been doing right by you. he told you loved you, he made you laugh, he made you smile. but telling someone you love them and loving them are two different things. seokjin didn’t know that you felt abandoned, he didn’t take into account that he was creating a repeat of your last relationship. he wanted to do better for you, and he wasn’t. 

so here he was, the gryffindor boy finding comfort on the cobblestone floor of his favourite place away from home. his dark eyes following the magic sprouting from his wand, casting his patronous just to keep his bitter heart company. the scops owl danced around him, wings of blue flapping and shedding its diamond tears. the blonde could only watch with parted lips as his patronous burst into pieces, revealing a munching slytherin before him.

it was common for yoongi and seokjin to cross paths when the elder was on hall duty, more often than not the slytherin boy found himself talking to the house elves who gave him cookies and milk late at night when he couldn’t sleep. the two would bump into each other in the winding halls and magical staircases, share an awkward smile and wave (more like yoongi was grimacing) before heading in opposite directions. tonight was no different, except yoongi noticed something.

seokjin was sad.

the younger boy, with his hair dyed a simple black, knew the familiarity of sadness’ wake. he knew how much it would help someone to offer them a smile or a hand in times like this. yoongi chewed the dry skin at his bottom lip before taking a step towards the elder and holding out half of the cookie he had left. “it looks like you could need it.” the slytherin mumbled gruffly, looking away for a second.

seokjin’s lips parted once more, the words catching on the rim of his mouth as he stared up at the younger boy. not once had they had such a, for a lack of better word -civil- interaction. there had always been the space between them, the elephant between the two. you. but, now it seemed, they shared common ground. you had left both of them. 

“thank you.”

yoongi looked conflicted for a second, debating whether or not he should stay and comfort the elder. his bed seemed much further from his mind than he had hoped for, at this point. “are you...” he started, tongue peeking out to wet his lips. “are you okay, seokjin?”

the question startled the elder, perhaps just a bit, still not used to this level of attention from the boy who’s girlfriend he’s stolen. he couldn’t help when his lips begun to form the words. “no, not really.” 

“wanna talk about it?” 

“y-yeah, sure.” 

at this point the slyhterin had bunched himself up beside seokjin, looking at him with sleep ridden eyes but an expression that said he was ready to listen. and yet, the blonde felt himself hesitating. why did it have to be yoongi? of all people, to find him here in this vulnerable state, it had to be the boy who probably hated him most. 

“YN left me,”He muttered, throat closing in fear of judgement from the very boy who lead him to YN. “we, uh...she broke up with me.” 

a pause. 

yoongi gasped. “Oh wow.” 

seokjin looked up, a fire ready to set ablaze in his eyes as he stared the slytherin down with ease. “what’s that supposed to mean?” 

yoongi shuffled, looking up at the ceiling as his dark hair fell over his eyes, it was almost as if he hadn’t been sure what to say, then again he’d never expected to find himself in kim seokjin’s company. 

“it’s  just that...it’s clear as day to anyone...how much she loves you,i don’t think anyone thought it would end. i never thought it would end. you were her forever it seemed.” yoongi confessed with a slight frown and a crease to his brow, the storm of hurt rumbling behind his black magic eyes. “yoy were her forever and not me,” he turned to seokjin, angry at him, angry for him, angry at himself. “you were supposed to be her forever and not fuck up like me, for merlin’s sake you piece of shit.”  

the gryffindor blinked as he shuffled away from his younger, not quite expecting him to lash out in such a way. “yoongi...” 

“no, shut up!” the latter growled, his voice eerily hushed for the venom laced in his tone. yoongi stood, past emotions rushing through him as he tried his best not to combust. thoughts and feelings of that fateful day blasting a chill through his veins. “I bet you promised not to hurt her, I bet you promised not to be like me.” The words spilled before Yoongi could stop them, white hot anger flashing behind his eyes as his word slurred with fury, Seokjin flinched at every syllable of truth hitting home. “Didn’t you?”

“i did,  I promised…” the elder remembered, frowning at himself as yoongi sat down, the anger having rolled out of him by now. the two sat together in the dark halls, emotions swirling through their minds and hearts as they reflected. 

a moment passed.

“so, how do you intend to keep that promise?”

“wh-what?” the blonde babbled sheepishly, surprised by the slytherin’s sudden change in attitude. Yoongi smiled sadly at his elder, running a hand through his blackened locks, pushing it out of place as he eyed Seokjin. “What do you mean?”

yoongi hummed slightly, kicking his foot on the cobblestone floor as he chewed on his lip. He hadn’t meant to blow up at the gryffindor earlier, too many feelings from the last year still resonating within him at the time. however, now he felt a sense of guilt, wanting to help the poor headboy especially if it meant helping YN, who deserved all the best. “I just mean… you promised her that you’d be better than me, so you have to show her that.  I didn’t mean to blow up at you so bad, but I felt like we both had things to say.” 

“what i’m trying to say, is that if you’re going to make it up to her, you need to show her what she means to you.” the younger noted, distantly. 

seokjin’s brow creased. “how do I do that?” 

yoongi smiled softly this time as he stood, placing his hand on the older’s broad and firm shoulder. “that’s for you to figure out what I couldn’t.” he mumbled softly, bidding the gryffindor a good night as he stepped out into the darkness.

your shoulders sagged as you dumped your bag against the door, shrugging off robes and collapse on your bed. You’re exhausted, the hours of herbology notes you’d written up had finally taken its toll on your cramping hand. 

you desperately want to nap, just a few seconds before the girls get back from their classes and start to squeal over how your infamous best friend kim taehyung snuck his muggle pet into hogwarts. you swear their giggles and claps gave you more migraines than watching jimin endlessly flirt. 

you’re only two steps away from your bed, the smooth honey yellow sheets drawing you in when a warm hand slips over your mouth and another pulls you into a firm chest. 

a horrified scream escapes your lips, was this a prank? were you being attacked? did one of those horrible slytherin boys that picked on everyone sneak into the dorms? a million and one thoughts popped into your mind, and you only wished you still had your wand on you. you’d stupidly left it in your robes.

the stranger whispers short shhs into your ears, but you’re too busy rustling and kicking your legs to care. with heavy breaths you bite on the hand, gagging at its salty taste and jab your elbow into the ribs of your attacker, pulling yourself away from their rather large frame. 

“hey hey! YN, it’s me!” the stranger cries, holding a hand to their ribs as the suck the blood from their wounded hand. he pants, his robes disheveled as you eye him up and down. 

you’re mad, more than so. how dare he come into your private space uninvited, holding you in such a way and giving you such a fright that you screamed louder than the herbs you’d been studying earlier. “by merlin! seokjin what the hell? what do you think you’re doing?” you start, face heating up at all the fury you’ve kept hidden. you try to convince yourself that the anger you feel is because of him sneaking up at you, and not because of the yearn in your heart that comes after seeing him for the first time in a while.

the blonde wipes his hand on his robes, crimson blood blending in with the red of his house. the colour stings your eyes, a reminder of his place in hogwarts. above you. the doubts from times with yoongi creep into your mind, and it takes you a second to remind yourself that you’re better off without him. both of them. 

“i’m sorry, i know i shouldn’t be here, but i had to see you.” 

the words, as sweet as they sound, make you curl into yourself. they would have made you blush before, they would have made you smile. but your heart still hurts from where be betrayed your trust. your eyes meet his, they’re still as warm and as inviting as you remember, and maybe a little more dull. you wonder if he’s taking things well. you know that you aren’t, you miss him.

you want him to stay, but you don’t want to give in.

“you have three minutes to talk, starting with why and how you’re here.” you say pointedly, wrapping your arms around yourself as you cast your gaze aside. your ears detect the small gasp of joy that the gryffindor lets out and your body reacts to the steps, desperately needing his touch after all these weeks.

he blinks as he shuffled towards you, rubbing his thumb over his own knuckles. “i missed you,” seokjin breathes, he knows that he shouldn’t have said it. He can tell by way your face contorts in a slight pain and the way your hand comes to grip your chest from over your shirt. ‘don’t’ he hears you mumble and closes his eyes softly. “i used a disguising spell so i could follow some girls in, and hid behind your door. i’m here because...because i realised how foolish i’ve been, i know that ive hurt you and im here to desperately ask for your forgiveness,”

you blink, frowning at him as he speaks, you’re not used to apologies. but this isn’t yoongi, this is seokjin. “i don’t care how long it takes, i’ll wait for you because i realise how much i need you here.” the blonde finishes, grasping your hand with need. the simple touch sends you into a spiral, your cravings for his closeness raging on as he pulls away. 

“seokjin...” you whisper, so close to him that you can feel the warmth of his breath against your skin. 

“i don’t need an answer from you now, just for you to come to the quidditch match on friday.” the taller asks, his tone pleading slightly. he doesn’t know what he’ll do if you say no, fear wrapping around his heart and squeezing. 

you shook your head, not sure if you were agreeing or disagreeing. you watched with forlorn eyes a the elder wizard moved to kiss your knuckles, standing upright to exit through the door. “i can’t promise you that.” you mumble quietly, letting him walk toward it.

“then just seeing you is enough.” 

the cold air nips at your cheeks as you stand in line with your fellow hufflepuffs. the hands of frost pinch at your skin, and tickle your nose, wrapping their evil arms around your waist as you shiver with annoyance. taehyung looks down at you and smiles, wrapping an arm around your shoulders to pull you into him. his sweater is warm like the honey yellow that drips from its fabric, and you cling to him more in search of it. 

girls squeal around you, they chatter about their favourite quidditch players. jimin is all that they mutter, and while he’s your friend you can’t help but he chanting for someone else in your head. 

“seokjin’s playing today,” a ravenclaw giggles, casting you a side glance as yourself, taehyung, hobi and little jungkook advance in the line. “i wonder who she’ll be cheering for now that she’s had a taste of both houses.” 

the snide remark sets a blaze off in your chest, but you instead, squeeze your housemate’s hand tighter. the boys continue excitedly, going on and on about how jimin trained on end for this. yet your mind lingers on the gryffindor himself. you wonder if he’s thinking of you, of how you would calm him before every match. you feel your heart skip a beat at the thought as you pass through the gates, into the stalls.

students from all years, hufflepuffs from all ages sit with one another and chat excitedly, but you don’t miss the way their loud words become hushed as you and your friends walk by. “don’t worry about them,” jungkook reminds you when you sit down, his bright doe eyes giving you comfort. “they’re just jealous.” 

“of what?” you mumble; there’s nothing that you have. you’re no longer with the golden boy of hogwarts, what else is there to be jealous of? 

hoseok leans over taehyung’s lap to reach for you, his mouth covered in the chocolate frogs that he’d brought from hogsmead. “you’ll see!” 

the boys all share a look and a giggle, you swore they acted like gossiping girls sometimes. you shake your head and roll your eyes, settling into the seat. the hard wood makes your thighs uncomfortable and your teeth still chatter from the cold. a tap on your shoulder makes you turn around. 

“YN LN?” the boy asks, adorning the signature ruby robes. you nod, and he looks relieved, pulling something from his cloak and passing it to you. “this is for you.” 

he speaks, but doesn’t saw where the brown paper package is from. you allow your fingertips to touch at the material as the boys around you stare. you gasp in awe when you tear open the paper, revealing seokjin’s deep red sweater, his name printed on the back. 

‘i love you, please wear this.’ the note reads, and you clutch the clothing to your chest, catching the eye of seokjin as he whizzes out into the pitch.

screams echo in your ears as the final minutes before half time tik closer and closer. you had never understood sports, muggle or wizard like, you had always found them particularly boring. quidditch in a way reminded you of the football your father watched on a sunday down at the pub, either coming back extremely heartbroken or so excited that he’d press sloppy kisses all over your face. 

the students around you jeer at slytherin players as the zip past on their broom, chasing after the infamous golden snitch. you pay little attention, playing with the loose thread of the gryffindor’s sweater, having slipped it on. the fabric smells like him, like comforting nights spent by the fireplace in his common room. you close your eyes and can almost feel his arms wrap around you, and his plush lips press soft kisses to your hair. if you close your eyes you can imagine what it’s like to be with seokjin again. 

the excited chanting suddenly turns into worried gasps, and your eyes shoot open. you seem him, seokjin, spiralling down from the highest point. his broom appears busted and the other players of his team are chasing after him. your heart stops in your chest as you notice jimin heading down after him as well, the mop of silver hair fluttering with the rapid breeze as he zooms after your lover. 

you can feel fearful trembles start to wrack your body, your friends beside you holding you close as you all sit on the edge of our seats. waiting for impact. waiting for the scream of pain.

it doesn’t come.

instead, the blonde stops inches from the ground, his broomstick shooting up into the sky. the wands of his fellow housemates on the ground, follow him and suddenly the sky appears less grey and more...

orange. 

bursts of red and yellow spout from his broom, the petals coating the entire pitch and all the stalls as seokjin circles it, followed by his team mates. the students of hogwarts look up to the skies in awe, giggling and dancing in the petals. you catch two, holding them in your palm as you rub the silken petals. red and yellow, tangle together. 

jungkook shakes your shoulder, pointing up. “what?” you mumble, but replace the tone with a surprised gasp as seokjin comes to a halt on his broom in front of you. he holds out two whole flowers, one a deep rouge and the other a sunset yellow. he looks to you with shy brown eyes and parted pink lips, and you can feel a thousand and one pairs of eyes on the two of you.

“chrysanthemums,” you whisper, taking them lightly and tilting your head to meet his gaze. “they’re my-“ 

“your favourite... i know,” the gryffindor smiles, pointing to the plants in your grip. “yellow is for love and red for loyal love.” he explains, nearing you and you tune out the squeals of girls nearby. “YN i know, that these last few weeks have been hell without you, to which is a fault of my own. i let myself take you for granted, instead of showing you what love should be. you deserve every ounce of love and everything good from then on. i promise from this forward; to love you eternally...that is, if you shall have me?” 

“seokjin...i love you too.” you whisper, rushing forward through the stands to capture his lips in a soft, emotional kiss. you feel the truth in his words and the love that he once gave, relaxing into him as you fight the tears of longing in your eyes.

the klaxon sounds for the end of half time, but you ignore it, kissing him until the moment remains eternal in your mind. 

[moonscarsandstars]

“Can’t believe you agreed-”

“Sirius-”

“-it’s our first night off in the flat, Moons, why one earth would-”

“Because it’s being helpful-”

Suddenly, the door in front of them was opened, revealing a very hassled looking Molly Weasley. Her floral dress stuck tightly to her curves, and her hair was tied up in an orange bun. Her scowl melted into a relieved smile as she spotted the two of them, standing awkwardly at the doorway.

“Come in, dears, come on in,” she said breathlessly, waving her hand.

The two glance at each other, before stepping into the Burrow.

The warmth enveloped them, and the Christmas atmosphere was echoing from the walls, filling the house, though it was still a week away. A large Christmas tree that just scraped the roof was standing towards the corner, decorated with ribbons that had been charmed to light up.

Floating tinsel decorated the walls, except for the one that a small, ginger toddler was hanging off, startling Remus who heard a snort turned into a cough from Sirius.

Mrs Weasley just seemed to notice, as she started shouting in a tired voice.

“Charlie, please get off the tinsel! Bill! Bi-ill! Go play with your brother!” 

Remus and Sirius heard a young voice shout “I’m doing something!” from upstairs, followed by a long sigh from Mrs Weasely.

“Well, now you see what you’re getting into,” said Molly, turning to Remus with an apologetic look on her face.

“Of course not, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“That’s what Arthur and I thought, and look where we got.”

Remus gave a small laugh, discretely elbowing Sirius who let out a fake, cheery chuckle too.

“Well, anyway, not much we can do about that now, is there? Arthur! Come on down, they’re here!”

“Are they now?” A pleasantly curious voice came from down the stairs, where Arthur Weasely was hurrying down in a scruffy but smart, brown suit.

“Ahh, they you are, boys! I was wondering when you were going to come-”

“Arthur!”

“-Joking, joking.”

Remus rubbed sheepishly at his neck, while Sirius stepped forward to give Arthur a small hug.

“Is the- uh,” Sirius lowered his voice, so only Arthur could hear. “Is the Ford Anglia getting on well?”

Unfortunately for both of them, Molly happened to hear, lightly slapping Arthur on the head, before picking up her purse and fixing her hair.

“Well, we ought to be going. Just try to remember that Charlie doesn’t eat soup- and- and Percy can only eat the muggle avocado,” said Molly, her voice getting louder as she walked out. “Not the magical one! Bill- also- he won’t-”

Her words were cut off by the slamming of the door, and a relieved whistle from Sirius.

“Oh c’mon Pads, she’s not that bad.”

“She- hey, Moons, is the kid supposed to be climbing the tinsel?”

Remus’s eyes widened, and he ran towards the tinsel, practically jumping onto the sofa to catch Charlie, who simply laughed in his face. He panted breathlessly, before giving a small smile to the child.

“Okay,” Remus breathed. “We can’t do that now, okay little one?”

“Bet you ten galleons it’ll be ten minutes before he goes at it again” drawled Sirius with a grin. “I like him.”

“Jesus, I thought I was the love of your life, pads,” deadpanned Remus.

“Who even is Jesus?”

“Oh god, forget it.”

Remus let down the fiddling toddler, and allowed him to run off to his older brother for another chance at pestering.

“I guess we’re alone now,” said Sirius, taking a step towards Remus, his fingers travelling over Remus’s torso.

“Pads, I am not going to ruin the innocence of three children by having sex with you in the living room of the Burrow.”

“They’ll be spoilt anyway-”

Remus stepped away, and dragged a hand through his now frizzy hair. Suddenly, a piercing cry rang through the house. 

Both Sirius and Remus ran straight towards the room that the sound came from, only to see a screaming Percy, in a basket filled with blankets. Stuffed toys were being thrown at him by an overly excited Charlie.

“Charlie! No- he’s just a baby,” said Remus urgently, his tone getting softer as he approached Charlie. Remus shot a glare at Sirius, who was doing nothing but grinning.

“C’mon,” said Remus, lifting Charlie up and carrying him. “Let’s get you back to the living room with us.”

“Where’s Bill?”

“Shit- I did not say that.”

“Shit!” Giggled Charlie

“No, Charlie, we don’t say that word.”

“Shit! Shit!”

“Charl- please, no, don’t say that.”

“Why?” Charlie whined.

“Because, um, Sirius help me out here!”

“Because,” Sirius interjected in a silly voice. “It’s an adult word! And you’re still a baby!”

“Brilliant. Molly’ll have my skin.”

“Nonsense,” said Sirius enthusiastically, taking Charlie from Remus’s hands. “You won’t tell your mother, will you? You’ll keep it a secret.”

Sirius put on that award winning smile on, and squeezed the giggling Charlie’s nose with a small “bloop,” and laughed with him.

A hand slid down Remus’s face, and he let out a frustrated groan. He stepped out, looking for Bill, leaving Sirius and the small three year old in Percy’s room.

“Bill?” 

Remus peered around Bill’s bedroom. Sharp memories of the time Sirius couldn’t heal a large laceration filled his mind. Sirius had panicked after the transformation, which had left a large gash on his ribs, and directly apparated to the Burrow. Molly had treated him for a week in this bedroom.

The same one that was now covered with red posters of quidditch teams, and a smaller bed than before, with wooden frames. A small table and a chair lay on one side, occupied by Bill.

“Bill?” 

Remus slowly stepped in, waving his wand to straighten the crinkled carpet.

“Bill? Are you in here?”

Remus heard a confirming hum, and saw Bill sitting, trying to trace out letters onto a piece of parchment, next to a small, colourful book.

His face was screwed up in concentration, and as Remus drew nearer, he could see letters being traced out on the clear parchment, and something warm rose in his stomach.

“Hi Bill, what are you doing?”

“I’m writing. Mum says I’m really good at it. She said I’ll be able to write the entire voc- vocabu- bulary by next year!”

“You reckon?” Remus asked with a grin.

“Yes! I know I will. I’m not like Charlie, I’m big now.”

“Really, are you? You still look a little young to me,” said Remus, lightly touching his cheeks.

“I’m not young! I’m a big child now! Mum said she’d send me to muggle school now!”

“Wow, you really are a big boy, huh? Well let’s see what you’ve done here, shall we?”

Bill excitedly held his parchment, and rolled it out straight, displaying it for Remus to see. And Remus was quite impressed; the child had managed to write small, three letter words by himself. 

“Wow, that’s so amazing! I bet it’s even better than my spelling,” said Remus encouraging, and giving Bill a large, proud smile.  

Somewhere behind the swell of pride, though, a little nostalgia lingered. Something about Bill almost reminded him of himself. Before he was bitten of course.

But all that was waved aside when he saw the innocent grin that Bill had on when he sat on Remus’s lap.

“Tell me a story!”

“Oh, okay. Um, let me see...” trailed off Remus. “What type of story d’you want?”

Bill seemed thoughtful for a second, before shouting excitedly “Hogwarts!”

“Hmm, okay.” He picked up when an idea struck him. “Once upon a time, there were four students who’d just arrived at Hogwarts. Their names were Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs, and they solemnly swore they were up to no good...”

[pookapics]

Sugar, Butter and Flour - A CEO!Steve Rogers x Baker!Reader (Christmas Series) Chapter 5 - Memories As Sweet As Apple Crumble

Warnings - MOSTLY FLUFFY AND SO SWEET IT’LL ROT YOUR TEETH BUT DOES MENTIONS :- Character death (Peggy Carter) and Steve Rogers being sad. 

Word Count -  4552

A/N - This series will be completed by the end of January! Sorry for the delay! December was extremely busy due to university deadlines I had due!

Masterlist - https://protectthelesbians.tumblr.com/post/189337379588/are-you-wanting-a-heart-warming-fan-fiction-just

____________________________________________

The cold, winter breeze pounded against the window-panes, shaking and creaking against the brute force. Slipping off your soaking wet shoes as you turned to Steve “Before I drag you into the kitchen, I’m going to get out of these clothes.” peeling up the edge of your sodden wet sleeve from your arm “I’m completely and utterly soaked.” With a quick glance to Steve again, you spoke up “You’re probably soaked too, I might have some of my dad’s clothes which you can borrow.” You offered which made Steve perk up “You would be a lifesaver because if I keep these clothes on any longer I will become a prune.” his words made you giggle “Well lets fetch you some clothes then.” Leading Steve towards the staircase which connected the bakery to your apartment, the perfect location for you. When reaching the top of the staircase, Steve hunched down as not to bang his head against the low door frame as you unlocked the door to your apartment. The door opened to reveal the small apartment, which made Steve pause. This small space reminded him so much of his childhood home back in Brooklyn.

The walls of the apartment, though small, was littered with hundreds of cracks tracing up to the ceiling, even the wallpaper had become discoloured with age, peeling at the edges and corners. But Steve still felt a sense of home and comfort which exuded from how you worked with what you were given with this space. Photographs covered the larger cracks, the decor upon the walls made the room more spacious than it was. Placing your wet shoes under the radiator, you turned to Steve “Let me put yours under too to dry.” Steve agreed and kicked his shoes off, his once pristine leather shoes now ruined from the snow, socks soaked right through to his skin as well, gently placing the shoes beside one another under the radiator, both pairs of socks lay atop the radiator to dry. 

“I’ll go find those clothes.” you turned on your heel, walking off to what Steve rightly assumed was the bedroom, leaving him standing there in the living-room, his bare feet nestled in the soft carpet. Taking another look at the walls, Steve smiled at the photograph’s which ranged from (YN)’s childhood to more recent times. His eyes locked on a particular photograph, you were standing in the middle of the frame in front of the bakery. The paint on the door and sign looked fresh and crisp, a red shining ribbon covering the front door. Your face was covered with the biggest smile, so bright and full of joy. 

“That was our grand opening, one of the best moments of my life.”

Steve quickly turned to see (YN) standing there, the clothes for him nestled in the crook of her elbow, you too were looking at the photograph which Steve had been gazing at for some time. Steve just listened as you spoke again “Just fresh out of culinary school and my apprenticeship under my mentor just completed, I was so lucky with finding this space and starting my business. I was truly blessed.” reflecting on that happy memory of that day, it felt like only yesterday when you opened the front doors to ‘Fairy-Cakes Bakery’. Breaking from your nostalgic haze and turning back to look at Steve, a smile on your face “Here. found some of my dad’s winter pajamas he left here.” holding the clothes out for him to take. The two sets of fingers brushed gently together as Steve softly took the clothes from her hands, the simple touch felt like a current of energy running up both of your arms and straight to your chest, a warm feeling growing there. Pulling your hands away from him, cheeks a soft pink as you smiled “I’ll leave you to get changed.” walking back to the bedroom to get changed yourself and of course to give Steve some privacy. 

Closing your bedroom door behind you, you immediately began to shake your hands around as to try and get rid of the tingly feeling they had in them, the tingly feeling which had gone straight to your chest after brushing hands with Steve, palms sweaty. After letting the tingly feeling fade, you set out to get changed into your warm pajamas, which so happened to be one of your Christmas onesies. Throwing your wet clothes into the washing basket, they made a thud when hitting the basket, your skin happy to be feeling the warmth which was coming from the radiator in the room. Grabbing the onesie, sliding it up your legs and letting out a squeak as you stumbled putting it on, falling onto your bed.

“You alright in there?” Steve called out from the living-room, you got back up “Y-Yeah!” stumbling with your words as you continued to pull the onesie up your body, getting back up to your feet, zipping up the front of the onesie, the hood of the onesie cradling your neck. With the onesie on and fluffy socks in hand, ready to be slid on, slowly regaining the warmth you lost from being outside. Fluffy socks slid onto your feet with ease, your toes no longer feeling like icicles, it was time to head back to the living-room. Pushing your bedroom door open, your eyes looked around for Steve and you found him, for sure. You definitely could not miss him with what you were seeing.

Steve was in the midst of removing his wet shirt to put the pajama shirt on, his toned chest exposed, he seemed to not have noticed you come in. You tried not to squeak but you couldn’t keep it contained “A-Ah!? Sorry! Didn’t realise you were still getting changed!” Steve looked up as you squeaked, looking like a deer in headlights for a moment. Immediately, you avert your gaze and tried your hardest not to picture his bare chest in your head, cheeks growing as red as strawberry jelly. Steve just stared at you for a moment before letting out a boisterous laugh “Oh my god (YN), its okay! It was just an accident.” he continued to chuckle as he pulled on the red pajama shirt before walking over to you. But you still remained stood by your bedroom door, gaze averted and your hands covering your eyes and your reddened cheeks.

Steve was now stood beside you, his hand on your shoulder as he tried to turn you to face him, your hands still plastered across your face to cover your eyes and cheeks ”Hey. Come on you can look at me now, I’m fully changed.” he teased and tried to pull your hands from your face but you wouldn’t budge, Steve just smiled “Oh Sweetheart come on, look at me please.” his voice like melted butter, which in turn made you melt and pull your hands from your face to peek an eye open. Looking into his serene, ocean blue eyes, your cheeks were still tinted pink out of embarrassment but it began to soften as Steve smiled tenderly and spoke again “There we go, now I get to see your face.” pushing a strand of hair behind your ear softly. A smile broke onto your face, giggling faintly “Still. Sorry for walking in on you.” twiddling your fingers as you spoke, making him chuckle once again “Sweetheart, when you have a kid, you get used to getting interrupted when getting changed.” Having no embarrassment about the situation, which in turn made your own level of embarrassment drop a little, not feeling as much shame as the initial moment did. You took this moment to gently pull up the hood of your onesie, now revealing the theme of the onesie, antlers flopping around as well as a tiny pair of ears, Steve just seemed to look at you in awe for a moment and smiled. The two of you stood in the living-room, both stood wearing fluffy socks, only centimeters apart “Uhm time to head down to the kitchen?” you asked to which Steve nodded “Time for me to show you how much of a failure at baking I am.” he joked which made you smile “Oh come off it! Let's head down.” slapping him on the chest gently as a joke before walking over to the door, the tail on the reindeer onesie wagging side to side as you walked. 

Gently descending down the staircase down to the bakery, Steve walked behind you and entered the bakery once again. The windows covered in snow, which was piling up outside and especially on his car “Thank goodness Sarah’s with Bucky tonight.” thinking of how his daughter was spending the night with Bucky and Sam, the number one babysitters. Nodding, you looked at Steve “She’s probably cuddled up on the couch with Bucky watching a movie.” you noted and smiled, tying your apron as you slid it over your head. Steve smiled “Buck’s probably snoring, after being forced to watch Frozen for the third time that day.” a grin on his face as he thought of his daughter and Bucky’s uncle and niece bond. Smiling to yourself, you picked one of the larger aprons off the peg “Oi mister!, its apron time for you!” waggling it in front of his face for a moment before he took it from you “Alright Alright.” he slid it over his head, the strap pulled across his head of thick, blonde hair and the ‘dad-beard’, his hair now slightly ruffled as he tied the straps at the back “There. Better?” You gave him a thumbs up and pulled your phone out from one of the onesie’s pockets “Now for some music!”

The iconic voice of Bing Crosby began to serenade you and Steve as your phone connected to your speaker, having music on just made everything feel right. The rhythm made you sway side to side gently to the music “Music sorted! Now for the recipe!” You ushered Steve into the kitchen, an area of the bakery he’d never been into, always staying clear of it when here. Cracking your knuckles and pushing up your sleeves to your onesie up your forearms 

“Now. Tonight I’m teaching you how to make a simple apple crumble.” you were determined to teach him this recipe and would not admit failure ever. Steve already looked baffled just at naming the recipe “I promise Steve, this is easy and delicious.” placing a hand on his forearm, reassuring him you’d help him along, not throwing him to the wolves just yet. Taking his hand “Come on, let's go to the storage room and fetch ingredients!” his fingers interlocked with yours as you led him round back to storage where you kept various ingredients, always making sure that on any given day you could make something just by what was in storage.

The two of you walked through storage and picked up 4 granny smith apples from the storage room, using 4 for good measure and as not to be too frugal with the filling. Steve held the apples in his arms, you checked each one for bruising and any imperfections, choosing the best 4 out of the basket. Gathering the rest of ingredients came easy enough, grabbing sugar, butter and flour as you walked back to the kitchen with Steve. Placing the ingredients down on the counter, you turned to wash your hands, guiding Steve to do the same which he did. Stood side by side, washing your hands, preparing to start this recipe together. After drying off your hands, you walked back to the counter “First things first with apple crumble, we need to peel, core and dice them.” starting the first step off with something Steve could definitely do. 

Giving Steve a paring knife, you started on your own apples as you split the work evenly. You immediately began peeling the skin off the apple with ease and coring it out with ease, listening to the sweet voice of Bing Crosby which played through the speakers. Glancing over to Steve, you could tell he was struggling with the paring knife “Here, let me show you.” speaking gently as your hands covered his, showing him the technique slowly so he could pick it up easier “There! You’ve got it now. Keep going!” happy to see him get better at it, returning to your own apples but turning to watch Steve happily, a smile on his face. 

He no longer looked as baffled as he was before.

Chopping up the apples, you perked up when Steve called your name “Are these the right size?” showing you the diced apples “Yep! Perfect size!” You finished chopping up your own and placed them in a pot “Now we need to soften these in sugar on the hob.” The two of you worked in perfect unison, with you guiding him through the steps. He listened intently to each word and watched you as you were in your element. Pouring sugar atop the apples as well as some water, you gently cooked the apples through still they were soft and almost golden from the sugar which melted beautifully before gently spooning the softened apples into a dish, smoothing them out so they lined the whole tray at the bottom. Leaving the tray to sit, the two of you turned your attention to the ‘crumble’ which you needed to sprinkle on top of the sweet apple mixture. Combining sugar, butter and flour together, letting Steve cream the sugar and butter together before adding the flour, it began to form the breadcrumb like texture which was needed for this recipe. 

With Steve sprinkling the crumble on top of the apples, you checked the oven was nicely pre-heated and ready for the apple crumble to go in. Ushering Steve over, he gently placed the apple crumble into the oven and left it to cook. It would take a further half an hour for the crumble to cook, the two of you looked at one another “Clean up time?” Steve asked to which you nodded and began clearing up, Steve working alongside you. Cleaning the counters and putting back the packaged ingredients into storage, the packet of flour still on the counter to be taken back to storage. Things in the kitchen were beginning to look much cleaner, that was until Steve decided to dust off his apron.

“STEVE!” 

Steve looked up and saw that the flour he’d dusted off himself had flown and covered your hair, leaving a white caste, Steve’s facial expressions matched the one you’d given him when you walked in on him. You were unimpressed, you were covered in flour and now had your arms crossed. Steve gave an awkward smile “Whoops. Sorry.” You blinked before giving Steve a mischievous smile “Sorry aint gonna cut it mister.” You reached for the packet of flour on the counter and scooped up a handful, ready to attack. Steve had his hands raised in defence, knowing that with that handful of flour, an full-out war would commence “Woah! Woah! Sweetheart we can solve this in a civil manner!” ready to bolt “Oh don’t sweetheart me Steve, this is revenge!” You rushed at him, he tried to block you but failed miserably, flour covered his hair and beard as well as his shirt. Steve stared down at you in shock, his eyelashes dusted with flour, his hand rose to wipe the flour from his eyes as he went silent before chuckling

 “Oh this is war, Sweetheart…” 

You squeaked and attempted to run away from him, but this time he was quick to snatch a handful of flour from the counter and doused you in it, holding you in place “AH! RUDE!” You laughed and escaped his grip “Excuse me you’re the rude one here!” He was hit with another flour bomb, his shirt covered. 

The battle was glorious, flour flying left right and center around the kitchen, the two of you laughing like children, trying to outwit each other. The flour in the air looked as if it were snowing inside, the Christmas lights which decorated the ceiling dusted with flecks of white. The two of you ran straight into each other with handfuls of flour, trying to attack but ended up running into Steve’s arms. You were both panting from running around the kitchen, your flour-covered hands on Steve’s shoulders, laughing tiredly. Steve’s head was rested atop yours, laughing gently as you were there in his arms.

“I’ll be home for Christmas~”

The speaker began to play Bing Crosby’s rendition of ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’, the soft tune made the two of you look into each other's eyes, as if both sharing the same thought. Steve reached up to take your hand in his, your other hand rested upon his shoulder gently. The music swept the two of you into its spell as you began to softly slow-dance. Steve’s other hand gently rested upon your waist, pulling you closer to him. Relishing in the moment, you rested your head upon his chest, swept up into the dance and closing your eyes, tender smiles on both your faces. Dancing together around the kitchen, moving in unison, just like you had done when baking, elegant but sweet. Steve rested his chin upon yours, swaying and doing gentle turns together, moving as one “I’m sorry if I’m rusty at this, Sweetheart. I haven’t danced in a long-time.” You hummed “No. You’re perfect Steve. Truly.” Steve’s heartbeat quickened, he knew you would feel it with your head rested upon his chest, he just hoped it wasn’t too obvious. With a gentle sigh, you spoke again “When was the last time you danced like this?” Steve froze for a moment. 

“5 years ago. May 6th 2015.” He remembered it off the top of his head “The day Sarah was born.” You were confused, blinking your eyes open and lifting your head to look at Steve as he continued “The day Sarah was born, I was dancing with my wife, Peggy.” Your eyes were locked on him, you listened and didn’t say a word “To help with her contractions, me and Peggy danced in the hospital room to music, that was the last time.” Steve sighed sadly, his eyes glazed over and watery, but you stayed silent. This was his time to tell his story “It was a day like this when I lost her, Sarah was 7 months old. Her first Christmas.” He still slow-danced with you as he retold the story, retold the memory which had been lingering in his heart for so long.

“Peggy, a hard-worker at heart went back to work when Sarah was 5 months and we’d moved her to formula, I was at home with Sarah on paternity.” His hand on your waist tightened as he continued to tell the story, the hand which you had on his shoulder began to rub gentle circles into his shoulder, to comfort him, “She was on the highway, on her way back from a company meeting, the snow was coming down hard…” he began to choke up 

“A driver crashed into her head-on.” He paused before continuing,  “I lost her that day 5 years ago and left to raise Sarah, my little Sarah… Christmas is so hard for me, just reminds me of what I lost. What Sarah lost.” A tear trickled down Steve’s cheek, his tired eyes watery, letting down a big barrier which he’d been holding up for 5 years, putting on the strongest face for Sarah. But here you were, letting him push that wall down and letting him cry and you now understood why he was a “Grinch” at Christmas. 

He was dealing with grief, a grief which stopped him from enjoying the most wonderful time, a constant reminder of what he lost.

 Gently, you wiped the tear from his cheek, raising your hand from his shoulder to brush it away, your hand upon his cheek, he leaned into your touch and closed his eyes, “You are the strongest man I’ve ever met Steve. You’ve raised such a beautiful and wonderful girl, Peggy would be so proud of you.” you had tears in your own eyes, trying to reassure him and console him. Steve nodded and opened his watery eyes to stare down at you in such awe and adoration “Thank you. Thank you for everything.” His forehead pressed against yours ever so gently, noses brushing together softly, the two of you drawn in as you stared into each other’s eyes. His deep, blue eyes filled with such sorrow but also hope. 

Lips were centimeters apart.

 With only a little step, you would be able to brush lips with his, breathing in and out in time with one another. Your eyes began to flutter open and closed, lashes gently fluttering. Your eyes closed shut as Steve prepared to take a step closer, when suddenly...

!*BING*!

The two of you were pulled out of the spell which the music had put you under, the timer for the apple crumble was ringing, your faces were so close but gently you pulled back “I-I’ll go take that out.” your eyes opening once more and looking up to Steve, who nodded and gently removed his hands from you, watching as you walked over to the oven. Turning your back to him, you could feel your heart pounding in your chest, oven mitts covering your hands as your mind reeled. 

You almost kissed Steve. So close.

Trying to slow down you breathing, you took out the crumble, the crumble on top was a beautiful shade of gold, steam coming off it. Turning around to look at Steve, you carried the crumble over to the counter where Steve was stood, his hand gripping the edge of it slightly. Placing it down on the counter and meekly looking up at Steve “Shall we taste our efforts?” Your voice shy and your lips trembling, as if the adrenaline from the flour fight and the dance had all but worn off, Steve nodded and cracked a smile, you smiled back at him “Vanilla ice cream or custard?” you asked to which he quickly responded “Ice cream please.” You scuttled off to the storage room, opening the freezer to take out the ice cream but also to cool yourself down, your body warm especially your nose and cheeks. 

Holding the carton of ice-cream in your arms, you were ready to head back in to see Steve. Carrying it back in with you, you put a smile on your face as you walked into the kitchen “Let's get our portion and we can head upstairs, watch a movie maybe?” You suggested, he grinned and nodded. Grabbing a couple of bowls, you began to ladle out portions of the crumble, breaking the crunchy crumble to reveal the steaming apples which were shining from the sugar coating, it looked divine. Taking two portions, you began to scoop vanilla ice cream into the bowls.

You turned to Steve “Want to taste your creation?” asking him happily, to which he nodded, taking a spoonful. Half of the spoon loaded with the beautiful crumble and the other covered with smooth vanilla ice cream which complimented it perfectly. He finished the spoonful and paused for a moment “That’s amazing!” His eyes lit up again which made your heart soar “And you made it! I told you you could bake!” Steve smiled at your words “I wouldn’t have been able to do it without you though, you’re truly an angel.” The compliment made your heart flutter “How about you take these up and I’ll lock up for the night?” offering and smiling to which he agreed “I’ll see you upstairs then.” He carried the two bowls and headed upstairs.

As soon as he disappeared from sight, you pressed a hand to your heart. This man was killing you, he just knew what to say which could make your heart soar and knees buckle. This man was perfect, sent to you by angels. And that near kiss was lingering in your head. You didn’t want to push Steve, he had lost his wife 5 years ago. Was he ready to move on and would he want to move on with you? That was a question for later. 

Right now, you needed to lock up.

Keys in hand, you locked the windows and the doors and made sure all the fairy lights were switched off. Checking each of the fobs on the oven and appliances, making sure they were all off, taking the time to carefully store the crumble in the fridge. You walked through the kitchen once more and switched off the light as you walked towards the stairs. Step by step, you walked up the stairs and opened the door, Steve was sitting on your couch with the bowls of crumble in hand, smiling. Running a hand through your hair for a moment, you smiled “I’ll grab some blankets.” Opening a cupboard and pulling out an old blanket, big enough for the two of you, once used to cover your double-bed. Draping it across Steve’s lap and across the couch, you got under the blanket and curled your legs underneath you, Steve placing your bowl of crumble in your lap, the ice cream hadn’t fully melted and the crumble still nice and warm. The two of you, sat on the couch together with bowls of crumble in your laps, switching on the TV to find the movie channel. You didn’t really care what was on, since there was a seemingly comfortable silence growing. 

No words needed to be spoken between the two of you as the night went on.

Apple crumble was devoured, the bowls on the coffee-table as ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ played on the tv, snow still falling outside but much softer as the storm subsided. During the 3rd act of the film, your eyes had started to close. You didn’t fight the need to sleep, you gave in easily and gently you rested your head upon Steve’s shoulder as the final moments of the film played out on screen. Steve simply wrapped his arm around your waist, staring down at you in awe and seemingly wonder struck, he moved so you could rest your head on his chest. 

Which you did.

Face nuzzled into his chest, his arm wrapped around your waist. He brushed the hair away from your face and smiled as you nuzzled deeper into his chest, his thumb brushing against your flour-covered cheek. His heart pounding in his chest, he reached down to peck your forehead softly before pulling back.

 The only sounds he could hear being the sound of the tv and of your gentle breathing. Firstly, he switched the TV off and gently held you close to him, letting his eyes close.

As he began to drift off, he muttered something under his breath which was not only a promise to you but a promise to himself that he tiredly hoped he would have the courage to follow through with. His voice soft and comforting, a smile on his face as he fell deep into sleep, your head on his chest. 

“I’ll tell you soon, I promise… Sweet dreams, Sweetheart.”

END OF CHAPTER 5 ---------------------------------------------------------------------

TAGLIST! - @chuckennuggets1213​ @imsonick​ @nervousstrangersandwich​ @justthatfangirloverthere​ @sheadre​ @125bluemachine125​ @giggleberts​ @kind-sober-fullydressed​ @fluffyirwinie​ @kaithezaftig​ @ilovesupersoldiers​ @royale-skeleton-key​ @mcuwillbethedeathofme​ @https://coldmuffinbanditshoe.tumblr.com/ @amberkay284​ @willowtree42095​ @clarinette07​

[harrypupperandhisownerdraco]

💧∗ˈ‧₊°∗ˈ‧₊°∗ˈ‧₊°∗ˈ‧₊°basically i just had a shitty christmas and after that just started screaming n fighting w my mom and i just want to cry so much, this life is shit i just want sum comforting otp, tag urself im draco 

(also this is a muggle!au)

 Story

Silver, blue, on then off… The hanging lights were flickering all over, illuminating the dirty streets with artificial illumination, blinding the moonlight and hibernal constellations. It wasn't snowing anymore, and all of its reminiscent beauty washed away with dirt and stomped away by happy bystander. The air could have been colder, but what made Draco shiver was the contrast between the eerie feeling lingering in the street and the stinging feeling over his cheek. Twisting butterbeer candy in his mouth, its sweet aroma melted along with the bitter taste of blood. It stung a little, but the endearing feeling of alcohol started to take over. Wandering aimlessly, he was focusing his thoughts hard on the christmas song's lyrics resonating all over the town. Otherwise, the dark thoughts he was trying to shut in would start to yell again.

He inhaled -breath shaky- once again, trying to regain consciousness of his surrounding. He couldn't just cry in the street like that, he was pathetic yes but ain't nobody gonna see it. He sighed as a sad grin slightly made its way on his face, finding a place to cry safely was a middle school thing to do but here he was at 20. He let his gaze wander on all the dolled up shop front, displaying all kinds of present ideas. He hadn't even had time to open half of his presents before running away. They might all have been shitty anyway. Except his mother's… Not to be cheesy, but she was the one who really knew him in that big house, no matter how many people inhabited it.

 Since when the family house became so full yet so cold and empty ? Maybe at the blurred line where childhood disappeared …

 Draco rubbed his humid noise, he was definitely not going to cry in public, for god sake. Leaving the nice display for romantic couples, he walked off. There was only one place where a forsaken college kid could cry his pitiful life and that was college itself. And if luck was on his side, he had the shittiest family life and everybody else went back home.

 Luck showed to not be on his side, Draco discovered with bitter annoyance as he was trying to sneak some snacks from the cafeteria. And it seemed Potter (the worst one Draco could fall into) had the same thoughts. His nemesis since middle school, the one person he personally made sure to say « happy christmas loser» before leaving because he knew christmas was Potter’s least favorite holiday.

Homeboy must have had the whole day to make a sweet stock but no, midnight snacking was better, of course. How original Potter.

"Come on Potter, don’t tell me you don’t hide food in that mess of a room you have", Draco put his arms around the amount of baked good and drinks he had stocked. " 'Cause I wont let you have any of these, you had the whole day, too bad."

"What are you doing here ? I thought you went back." Potter raised an eyebrow.

"Well you know, ehe, maybe I'm Santa and haven't given you your gift yet ?", he gave him droopy smile, trying to suppress wiggles alcohol induced. "Maybe, you’re Santa. 

"A- Are you drunk ?"

"That would be insulting my alcohol tolerance considering I only had candy, but I guess a man can get drunk over his spleen. Oh, and like, a few bottle, aha.."

"You're definitely drunk.", Potter sighed. "Get some water and go to sleep Malfoy."

"But I'm hungryy."

"You're only going to regret it afterwards, now come on, give it-" Potter got awfully closer, and Draco felt an itching feeling under his skin.

"Let a man drink and get shitfaced Potter, jeez, I don't remember stopping you having fun at your last scoot boys party." Draco groaned.

"You're not having fun, " Potter sighed and he came so close Draco could feel his breath over.

"Why you caring about that."  Draco tried to defy Potter's deep glare, but booze only confused him into the lulling gaze of green eyes.

As Potter groaned for answer, he grabbed his plate. Draco didn't put up any resistance as he didn't trust his body so close to Potter's. He might accidentally hit his face, and he didn't feel confident over a 1v1 against Potter right now.

"You don't smell like alcohol, you smell… good.", Draco muttered, as his eyes were half shutting over Potter’s collarbones. "What have you been up to Potty, you really don't know how to party, you only grunt and sigh."

 Draco didn't know whether it was willingly or without realizing, but he leaned against Potter's strong frame more than necessary. The sweet feeling of being supported, not having to fight… If only Potter could close his arms around him.

 "Malfoy I swear you should go now.", Potter's arms tried to shift him, but Draco felt his own arms envelope Potter's nice smelling neck on their own accord.

"Oh come on, I had a shitty christmas and a shitty evening, let me have that.", he whined slightly, tugging closer.

He could feel Potter’s breath stopped for an instant, and Draco didn’t know what to make of it. Maybe Potter would kick him for good now, pathetic or no they never indulged in anything soft or warm ; they challenged each other and threw word with deep rooted meaning, but never anything so clear and explicit.

But when Draco went to unlace himself from this awkward situation, he felt Potter’s strong arms not letting him.

"I don’t even know why i’m doing this, you’re heavy. " Potter complained as he was carrying Draco on his back.

"I’m not, not with those fit arms of yours ", Draco rumbled against Potter’s nice smelling jumper.

"... I should record you," Harry muttered, the back of his neck feeling hotter.

" I’d deny everything, the things you can do with technology these day.."

Draco could feel Potter’s muscles moving slightly over a soft chuckle. He pushed his face further into the nice perfume.

"... Hey take me to your room."

"W-what ?!", they nearly fell as Potter lost his balance.

"Calm your tits Potter, jee-"

"Why’d you want to go into my room anyway ??"

Because it might smell as nice as you..., Because it’s your room..., Because, there, it’d just be full of you and nothing would remind me of anything at home..., Because I don’t want to think about home right now...

"Because I know you have a hidden stack of snacks in there..."

"Malfoy."

Draco couldn’t feel Potter’s gaze on him but his tone conveyed enough to make Draco’s throat clench.

"I won’t steal anything, it’s just... there’s nothing that’ll remind me of home there... Just... I... "

Draco never finished his phrase and soft silence fell upon them for the rest of the way. He tried to no think too deep about tonight’s evolution, but even cloudy thoughts weren’t enough.

"We’re here", and as soon as he opened the door, Potter let Draco fall hardly on the floor. Not bothering to listen to his insulting fuss, he went to throw a cushion his way. "There’s a futon over there, the floor is yours."

"You’re the worst host ever, even dogs are treated better." Draco pouted.

"And you’re a handful guest and drunk", Potter said as he let a blanket fall over Draco’s head.

The ground was cold, he could feel it over the futon and the fall had made his heart sad. Draco remembered the comfy over-stuffed bed he left at home and how he should’ve been sleeping there comfily instead of making a fool of himself in front of the only boy that mattered.

"Well if I could have avoided drinking to drown my sorrow trust me i would.", he sniffed, already sobering up. "I’m so going to throw up all over your carpet."

All sound of moving and shifting stopped for a while. Then Potter peeked his face under the blanket, facing Draco’s.

"... Are you crying ?"

"... Next I’m gonna pee and then you’ll have all my body fluids over your carpet." Draco said with a small voice and he wanted to punch himself. Embarrassed him really had the worst retorts.

"You’re disgusting." Potter said, but he brought his nice smelling sleeve over Draco’s nose and whipped the dampness. Draco sniffed again.

"I’m not crying."

"You’ll deny it for the record I know."

For some reason, Potter lingered his touch over Draco’s face, wandering his hands over his cheeks, lightly wiping tears traces. Draco couldn’t see Potter’s face clearly due to the lack of lamps turned on. The room only escaping darkness for dim moonlight and Draco hoped Potter couldn’t see his face clearly either.

"Why did you come back ?"

"Because I’m the family disappointment and I have no weird cousin to dim that off."

Trying to use depreciative humor didn’t seem to get to Potter, maybe because he couldn’t see Draco’s face laughing it off. He had gotten quite good over the years.

"How could you be the family disappointment. You got the best grade and remarks, you’re basically every rich parents dream kid."

"Yeah that’s what I thought too, right ?... I thought that I would go back home and be congratulated or something, I mean I did get some of the best rank right ? But what are best rank when your friends are not ‘good company’ huh ? And when your clothes doesn’t reflect your seriousness enough, I mean who would hire me in these right ? Not like I came home to have dinner not an interview. Oh and sit straight will you, I taught you better, don’t embarrass me. We have guests Draco, is that really how you want to represent the Malfoy name ? And-"

"Breath a bit."

Potter’s voice was calm and strangely soothing. Draco hadn’t felt his blood pumping so hard until Potter made his heart stretch.

"The thing is... I do everything right but it’s never right enough. My father keeps talking about me like I’m just a display for the family name. I cant even think of doing other things that my whole life is already being pushed down my throat ! I don’t even know if I really want to do what I do ? Maybe I just convinced myself that’s what I want to do ? What if I understand I’m ruining my life when they’re already old and senile and I can’t make them pay for it huh ? Is it my fault they only fucked once and now they only have one shot for their brand of whatever ? Is it so hard to let me live as just ... someone ? Am I not enough just being my own ? "

Potter´s hand was still on his cheek and as everything fell into silence again, Draco felt overly conscious of their proximity. Heart clenching, he tried to not dwell on the words he just said, looking for some other depreciative humor ; he hadn’t plan to open to Potter. They never did this.

"Did you tell them that ?"

"I-", Draco let his lips hang open, slightly taken aback by Potter’s empathy and what felt like concern in his tone. "I did but... I feel like they never listen to what I say, I’ve been saying the same things for years. They say they’re scared for my future and just wants what’s best, but the truth is that they just don’t trust me and now I don’t trust myself either when I shouldn’t. " he bit his mouth over the bitter feeling.

"... I think you’re doing good."

"What do you know..." Draco sniffed, he could feel uneasiness coming from Potter and honestly he felt already bad enough from spilling his gut here he didn’t want some colored sappy moral or whatever. "If you’re going to tell me some sappy shit-"

"No I mean," Potter put his hands over Draco’s wrist so that he wouldn’t go away. And even in the darkness, Draco could feel his gaze’s intensity on him. "You look like, you’re... you just seem like you’ve got everything figured it out, like everything’s gonna work out for you in the end and... even if you feel like you want to change when you’re old, you’re the kind of person that’ll find something else and be great at it."

Draco could feel Potter’s pulse stirring over his touch and he didn’t know what to make of it.

"...You suck at sappy-inspirational speech, let me tell you."

"I mean... fuck if your parent don’t see it, you’re always doing your best and trying hard and giving it your all and... Whatever you decide to do with it you’re gonna be great at it... Even if you don’t really know what you want to do now, it’s ok, I mean... nobody does... know what they’re doing really. You don’t really need to know right away, you can... just keep doing for now until you know better..."

Although Potter seemed very thoughtful about what he said, Draco couldn’t help the awkward chuckle that escaped his lips.

"Hey, I’m serious you know !", even over his voice, Draco could hear Potter blush over embarrassment.

"I know this is why it’s weird !" Draco tried to untie his wrist from Potter’s grasp.

"Would you have wanted me to mock you or something !"

"N-no but now I’m confused ! If you’d mocked me I would have punched you and it would have been fine but now I don’t know what to do !"

"Then don’t reject me for once !"

Over their bickering, the blanket felt from over them but Potter didn’t let go of Draco’s wrist.

"You think I’m great ?"

"I’ll deny it for the record." he muttered and Draco could see him averting his beautiful eyes.

"Say it again."

When Potter’s eyes moved on Draco’s again, they held a burning purpose, and he couldn’t avoid his gaze if he wanted to. Potter’s beautiful eyes had him holding his breath but not wavering, even when he felt Potter’s breath over his lips.

He didn’t wonder who got over the last cm as their lips touched each other very softly, barely even, feeling unreal.

"Can I ?" Potter’s murmur ghosted over Draco’s lips.

On impulse, Draco wrapped his arms over Potter and squeezed very tightly. He had been so close all evening and all his life, and he couldn’t contain his feelings any more second. All the places in contact with Potter felt like they were burning the sensation into his skin, so that he would never forget what he’d been longing for so long. And as the kiss deepened, hands caressing softly through hair and clothes, Draco finally finally felt belonging.

As a ray of pale sun made its way on his face, Draco awoke feeling bundled in an infinite source of warmth and safety. He could barely move but he didn’t want to. Ever.

He might have fallen asleep again a few times before he felt some shifting around him.

The moment he turned around, he came nose bopping with Potter’s ; who opened beautiful green eyes and gave soft and embarrassed smile that Draco returned. He felt on cloud nine and the soft embrace he was in, not disappearing as they woke up, was the best part.

"Happy Christmas," Potter whispers against his lips.

“It’s happy now...”, Draco kisses him softly and they might just spend the rest of the day that way.

[nike-shawn]

Cleopatra prt. 2

Continuation of Cleopatra.

You can read the first part, here.

“Damn your wife. I’ll be your mistress, just to have you around…”

You wake up before the sun does.

It’s intentional. In the darkness, it’s difficult to see the state of your apartment. There are books strewn across carpeting that hasn’t been vacuumed since you moved in; the lampshade covering the dead lightbulb in that lamp is haphazardly tilted to the left in a way that tells you it’s not going back to its normal state; there’s cold air seeping into your bedroom from the patio door that is slightly broken off of it’s frame. But once the morning comes, there’s no hiding.

You also can’t hide, of course, the six foot something boy snoring in your twin bed.

His hair is falling in his face and he’s relaxed: these two qualities together make him look much younger. You think that maybe this life has aged him. The cameras have too bright of bulbs, you think, and it’s only a matter of time before he just melts, right before your eyes.

You start to clean. You pin your hair up and begin in the kitchen, where weeks old dishes have festered, and last night’s spaghetti sauce has soaked into those placemats your mom gave you for your birthday. After that’s done, you make your way through the living room and made sure your dining table was tidy before coming to the grand finale, the worst of the worst, your bedroom. You see Shawn still there and he’s sleeping like a rock. You don’t think a tornado could get him up. Yet you’re paranoid at the idea of waking him, so you tiptoe around and tidy up as best you can.

You’re about half-way through when he stirs. He hums in his sleep and turns so his head is facing you now and you notice that his cheeks and nose have grown rosy from the chill in the air. It’s the dead of winter in New York City and the door to your balcony is broken. Whereas you had never cared about the cold and just bundled up twice as much, you found yourself feeling guilty at putting him at risk for a chill.

You’re contemplating these things when his eyes open.

“Why’re you standin’?” he murmurs, face half buried in the pillow. His eyes have already slid closed again, but he musters up the strength to extend an arm towards you in invitation. “C’mere.” You lightly shift your weight between your feet, still holding that textbook from second semester freshman year at NYU that you never opened, not even while taking the class. It’s suddenly extremely heavy in your hand, begging to be put down and neglected in favor of something, someone, else. “What’s taking you so long?” he says jokingly, eyes still blissfully shut.

“I’m…” you say, biding time. “I’m just tidying up.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s… spring cleaning.” You clear your throat to add conviction. “It’s for spring cleaning.”

He opens one eye. You haven’t changed from your (his) t-shirt and pajama pants. Your hair is a mess of tangles and a bobby pin you never took out and maybe a hair tie that you forgot to take out too. You’re embarrassed.

“Just come here.”

You give in. You set down the book on the bedside table and crawl in beside him, allowing the radiating heat off of his body to envelop you in a sort of cocoon. You know that there’s something you guys need to talk about, and the start of the conversation is just waiting there on the tip of your tongue, but the way his arm slides around your waist and his hands melting against your back underneath your (his) t-shirt makes it impossible for those words to leave your mouth.

But they leave his with ease. “Have you thought about it?” he asks. He pulls you closer as if trying to convince you to say yes, of course, I’m yours.

You shake your head. Shawn peeks over at you and leans up slightly so you can see his sleepy, pretty face.

He says, “why not?”

And you say, “because it’s a tough thing to think about.”

Shawn nods, almost dejectedly. “Can you see yourself with me at all?”

You start to pull away, but he quickly pulls you back in. You’re close enough to smell the now-stale cologne on his skin and it humanizes him from the larger-than-life popstar that you thought that you would give the world to, who you hid from your friends and your family, who you compromised every moral standard you were raised on for. But even with this realization, you’re still so in love with him. You’re head over heels.

The words out of your mouth fell out like they had been waiting for an entire lifetime to get out. “I’d be your mistress just to have you around. I am your mistress. I’m… I’m disgusting and a home-wrecker and—”

“Why would you say that?” Shawn interrupts, now much more awake.

“Because it’s true,” you whisper.

“What?”

“It’s true!” you yell. There are tears in your eyes now and you sniff to try and get yourself together. “I’m ruining your relationship.”

Shawn is shaking his head so fast you think he’s going to get whiplash. “It wasn’t going to last anyway. I stopped loving her so long ago, I promise.”

“It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t know that. She thinks you’re in a hotel room, Shawn, thinking about her, when you’re in my bed, in my shitty apartment, proposing to me! Is that not the truth?” you ask. You’re asking, now. You want him to answer you. Tell you that you’re wrong.

He says nothing.

“This is ridiculous,” you choke out, now fully losing it. “I have a degree. I’m smart. I should be with someone who cares enough about me to—”

“What have I done that makes you even remotely think that I don’t care for you?” Shawn asks, his own voice rising you meet your level. He stands and it’s like you suddenly have this statue in your bedroom, this… art form, something that isn’t yours. Something that’s just yours to look at, to be in awe of. Not something to keep. He’s holding back tears, telling you that “you’re delusional. Look at what I’ve put on the line for you!”

“For me?” your voice is back to being deadly quiet. The only lighting illuminating his face is that from the streetlamps and it gives an eerie feeling to the whole thing. You feel like you don’t know who the hell this man is. “You think that you did this for me?”

He knows he’s getting into hot water and he begins to backtrack, stuttering out “no, that’s not—”

“You just wanted to have the girl on the road and the girl at home! You’re the only one who gets all of me, while I’m stuck getting less than half of you, Shawn! She gets to be in public with you, gets to hold your hand, gets to tell her friends about you and gush about you and love you. She gets to love you and I get to… what. Have sex with you at two in the morning when you find yourself in the city? And watch you leave the next morning? What else do I get to do? Call your second fucking phone and get screened until you can find time for me?” You pause. “Lucky me,” you say wetly.

You only give him a minute to reply. When he doesn’t, you swallow back your feelings and let him follow you to the front door. He doesn’t try to propose again. He doesn’t try to make you stay. He gathers his things from the couch. He looks at you briefly, like he’s already trying to forget your face, and he leaves.

He leaves.

[the-quiet-winds]

Shark’s Tooth Lullaby

“So, it was you.”

“And if it was?”

Aragon’s eyes blazed. “You have some nerve.”

“I’m so scared,” Anne snarks, holding her hands up and rolling her eyes to the ceiling.

“You know what that picture meant to me.”

“You can get another one.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” Aragon challenges. “That was the only copy I had. I bought that frame on custom order. It meant something to me.” She scoffs. “Which is something you know nothing about.”

“Don’t you attack me now,” Anne fires back. “I never said that I did anything-”

“You were standing in my room when I came upstairs and found the shattered glass on the carpet, and you expect me to believe you innocent?”

“Whatever you think, it doesn’t give you the right to attack me,” Anne continues, steely and cool.

Aragon huffs, opens her mouth to say more, then, unable to form any more words, turns and leaves Anne standing in the middle of her bedroom, surrounded by broken glass, a frame in three pieces, and a half-ruined picture of herself and Jane.

As soon as she hears the front door close, Anne sighs softly.

“You can come out now, Kitty.”

Out of the closet slips Katherine Howard, tears on her face.

“W-why did you do that?” Katherine whispers. 

Anne steps to her, carefully avoiding the glass littering the carpet, and catches her chin gently between her index and thumb. 

“Because I knew she’d get mad,” Anne says softly, wiping away a stray tear. “And I can handle her getting mad.”

“But it wasn’t your fault-”

“I know. But it wasn’t yours either.”

“But-”

“No more buts,” Anne interjects. She pulls her cousin into a hug. “You just know how important Jane is to Cathy.”

Katherine nods into Anne’s shoulder.

“It’s gonna be alright,” promises Anne. “Just give her a little time to cool down.”

---

Where did you go?

Catherine stares at the text on her phone screen from almost twenty minutes ago. 

Do you want me to come pick you up?

Ten minutes ago.

Anne says she’s sorry for whatever it was.

Four minutes ago.

Please answer.

Jane had been persistent in her messaging, and it’s almost endearing. It comes from care for her best friend. 

But Catherine doesn’t answer.

She needs a moment away.

Instead, she sets her phone down on the bench next to her and folds her hand neatly in her lap, watching as a runner passes by the pathway next to the river.

It’s not cold, per say, but it’s one of those days when you can tell winter is moving towards the door just by the sound of its footsteps.

A breeze crawls across her cheek and she fixes her scarf a little higher across her jawline, and the world is still.

The river is somehow calm and choppy at the same time. The current is smooth, consistent, but the waves hit the bank at a slightly different angle every time.

The odd rhythms it holds begin to soothe Catherine’s mind, as if the gentle laps of the water erodes away the angry limestone formations in the corners of her thoughts.

Well, it’s soothing until her phone buzzes again.

With a barely perceptible groan, she checks the screen.

Another text from Jane.

I’m getting worried.

For a moment, Catherine contemplates not going anywhere. The thought passes her eyes of staying exactly where she is and not moving. Not responding to Jane, not even going to the show tonight. Just sitting on the bench by the river until the night’s frost roots her in place.

That’s not the way to do it.

She gets to her feet and shoves her hands, and phone, in the pockets of her jackets and heads for home.

One step after another, her boots hit the pavement in a clean, easily-followable beat that echoes in the sidewalk and in her head.

Catherine has barely stepped through the front door when Jane is hugging her. 

“I was worried, you never don’t respond,” Jane mumbles into Catherine’s coat. 

Aragon hugs her back. “I just needed to think,” she murmurs. “But I appreciate your concern.”

“Of course!” Jane gasps. “How could I not be concerned?”

Catherine fumbles for words, and Jane shakes her head fondly. “We have to leave for the theater in a few minutes, better get changed.” Just as Jane turns to leave, she turns and presses a soft kiss to Catherine’s cheek. 

Aragon returns the affection automatically, and smiles. “Thank you, Jane,” she says, a little more confident now. 

Jane grins, then turns off in the direction of the stairs.

Catherine follows her a moment later and makes her way to her own room, where a blue-wrapped package was sitting on her bed.

Hesitantly placing her coat next to it, she begins to, against her better judgement, unwrap the unmarked gift.

Tears immediately well in her eyes.

It’s a collage photo frame, with the center piece being Aragon’s favorite photo of herself and Jane. The surrounding four pictures are one each with Boleyn, Cleves, Howard, and Parr.

“I’m sorry about the other one.”

Catherine turns and sees Kat, shifting from foot to foot in the doorway. “I was looking for your rosary… I just wanted to see it, and I knocked over the frame.”

Aragon is breathless, speechless, and unmoving.

Katherine takes it as a bad sign, averting her gaze back to her feet. “I’m really so-”

She’s cut off by arms wrapping tightly around her. She can’t help but to stiffen for a hair of a moment before melting into the embrace, snuggling against Aragon.

“This is so kind of you,” Aragon barely whispers. Katherine leans more heavily into the hold. 

“I wanted to make it up to you.”

“Thank you, Kat.” Catherine turns to press the softest kiss on the girl’s temple. “This means more to me than you could ever know.”

Katherine leans into her affection, hums softly, and closes her eyes.

Are they late to show call because neither of them got ready on time?

Yes.

Do they regret it?

Not in the slightest.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

tag list: @percabeth15 @kats-seymour @qualquercoisa945 @jane-fucking-seymour @a-slightly-cracked-egg @justqueentingz @annabanana2401 @wolfies-chew-toy @broad-way-13 @tvandmusicals @lailaliquorice @aimieallenatkinson @sweet-child-why03 @gaylinda-of-the-upper-uplands @funky-lesbians @thinkaboutitmaybe @hansholbeingoesaroundzeworld @anaamess @beeskneeshuh @prick-up-ur-ears @theartoflazy @justqueentwo @brother-orion @paleshadowofadragon @lafemmestars @beautifulashes17 @jarneiarichardnxel @idkimbadwithusernamesandstuff @ladiez-in-waiting @mixer1323 @boleynssixthfinger @aimieallen @elphiesdance @boleynthebunny @krystalhuntress @lupin-loves-chocolate @bellacardoza16 @bluify @katherines-choker

[poisxnyouth]

neighbors. chapter three. (d.d)

A/N: Okay so hi!!! This is part 3. Not much to say about it except I hope you like it and my inbox is always open for criticism. love u thank u queenies lmk what u think xoxo -hailey (ps thank you to @alrightinbed-betterwithapen for always proofreading my shit I love u bitch)

Warnings: liiiiggghhhtttt smut, cursing, that’s about it?

WC: 3.1k!

Natalie is the one who opens the door, searching you and David’s eyes for any idea of how well the date went. His hand finds the small of your back, gently leading you inside for a quick second before removing it. It was small and quick, but enough to catch Natalie’s eyes and tell her it went better than he had planned it to. He watches as you greet your friends, introducing him to Tessa and Sienna through overwhelming hugs and tear-filled eyes.

  Natalie seizes the opportunity to speak to him as you, Tessa, Francine, and Sienna have a quick catch up.

  “It went well, then?” He nods quickly, trying to brush it off, not really wanting to speak on the topic.

  “What did you guys do?”

  “Dinner, milkshakes, she showed me around, some shopping. You know, the regular.”

  “Did you guys kiss?”

  “Natalie, I don’t want to talk about it. Not right now, anyway.” Natalie knows him well enough to take it as a yes.

  “Why? You just said it went well.”

  “I just – not with them here, I guess. It just feels weird,” he feels like he’s imposing on you and your friends, and it’s obvious. For a moment, he wishes there was another guy around, even with how close he is with Natalie. David keeps fidgeting with his hands, rubbing them together or fiddling with the rings on his fingers, standing awkwardly while whispering to her. He seems misplaced.

  Your friends are tearing into you about him, asking nearly the same questions as Natalie. They’re whispering, all four of you huddled together, ‘Did he pay? Did you kiss? Is that what the thud was? It was so loud! We need details, Y/N!’

  “Yes, he paid. Yes, we kissed. Yes. I’ll tell you later when he leaves,” You hurriedly make an effort to answer them, not wanting to draw attention to the gossiping taking place as you cut your eyes between David and them.

  You attempt to compose yourself, pushing your hair out of your face and turning back to Natalie and David, inviting them to sit down and talk.

  “Actually, I think I’m okay, Y/N. I’m really tired, I haven’t slept in like, two days, I think I might just go to the room,” he replies as you nod.

  “Oh, okay! No worries. You should sleep,” it’s awkward among the 4 other girls witnessing the conversation, their eyes flickering between the faces of the other girls, looking for reactions, and you and David’s eyes.

  “Yeah, um, Natalie, you coming with?” Natalie shakes her head no, promising she’ll most likely be at the room later. He nods.

  “Here, I’ll um, I’ll walk you �� “

  “You really don’t have to, I can find it – “

  “It’s fine, Dave, it’s dark,” you respond, not thinking about the nickname as you pull your coat back on. You’d caught on to the name quickly, hearing Natalie saying it countless times over the past couple days. He doesn’t think twice about it, either.

  “I’ll be back in a little bit,” you insist, David following you through the door and out of the apartment. The door clicks shut and his fingers are immediately finding yours, not tangling them together entirely before he pulls his hand away.

  “Why are you so awkward around them?” you question, trying not to think about the move he just pulled. He just shrugs in response, muttering something about not knowing them so he doesn’t know how to act. You keep casual conversation with him the entire walk out of Francine’s apartment building, down the few blocks to his hotel, and up to his room. He continues to do the same thing the entire walk: intertwining your fingers for a few seconds before pulling away, only to repeat the action in thirty seconds. Their dancing almost makes you anxious.

  “Do you wanna come in?” he questions as you reach his door.

  “I don’t know, David…They’re waiting on me.” You want to, you just wanted to make an excuse.

  “10 minutes?” He’s turned to you now, hands finding his wallet as he searches for the key. You nod, feeling stupid. You’re a grown, educated woman and he’s making you feel like a teenager. Not necessarily in the stupidly in love aspect, more so in the I literally don’t know how to act around him aspect. The feeling is odd to you; your job is to, practically, be able to adequately communicate with an audience, just like his, so for him to make you speechless outside of his hotel room is staggering. You can’t tell what it says about yourself.

 You had thought the mixed signals were on their way out, but he’s began to confuse you again. Between his awkward presence in the middle of Francine’s carefully picked carpet to his unwillingness to fully hold your hand. You feel stupid, again, as you pick up on these clues.

He fumbles with the door lock and key, holding it open for you.

  You wish you were surprised as the door clicks shut and his hands find your waist, lips pressing against yours. You allow it to occur, but you set the mental boundary as your fingers tangle in his hair that this is as far as you’re going to go tonight. He pushes it further, not quite enough to initiate sex, but enough to allow his hands to wander.

  “David,” you say against his lips, “what’s up with you?” He pulls away, hands still on you as he gives you a surprised look.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean – I just – you must love mixed signals,” you watch as his eyebrows continue to scrunch together, head cocking to the side, “You’re like, holding my hand and kissing me one second and unable to keep your hands off of me and the next you’re acting all weird and staying on the opposite side of the room.” He pulls you closer again, eyes flickering between your eyes and lips.

  “Maybe I just want this to be between us,” he continues, voice low as he begins to lean in. You roll your eyes.

  “David, be honest,” you’re pushing your hand against his chest lightly, “Are you just trying to get laid? That’d be fine, just say it.” He fully steps away now, plopping himself on the bed.

  “What?” he scoffs, “No! I mean. I like you, it’s just confusing ‘cause we just met yesterday. I mean, like, if we fucked right now, I wouldn’t be upset or anything, but I’d definitely be bummed out if it ruined any chance of me going on more dates with you.”

  “But?”

  “But…I just got out of a pretty nasty break up. Well, not just, but still. Still hurts, I guess.” You place yourself down next to him.

  “How long ago?”

  “A year.”

  “Jesus. How long were you together?”

  “Two years.” You want to touch him, to hold his hand, but you don’t. It doesn’t seem like your place, especially on the first date. You still barely know the guy.

  “You don’t have to feel guilty about moving on, you know?” you gently remind him, pushing your shoulder against his playfully.

  “I think it’s just cause of how we broke up. Like, we broke up because she says she needed to focus on herself. And I respect that, but that thought is in my head, like, I guess this is selfish, but it wasn’t me that was the issue, you know? Like, if she wants to come back to me, she will.”

  “Okay, Dave,” you stand, not wanting to be a therapist for a heartbroken boy you’re on a date with, “you need to get your shit together. I mean it. I won’t go on another date with you until you do.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Seriously?” you deadpan, “I mean this in the best way possible: I don’t want to continue dating someone who is still not over their ex. I won’t let myself. It’s a disservice to both me and you.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he nods in agreement, hand over his mouth, but it seems as though he’s trying to convince himself that you’re right. David stands now as you head for the door, opening it to let yourself out, getting right outside the door as he grabs your wrist.

  “Hey,” he’s leaning against the door frame, arm above his head as he runs his fingers through his hair, other hand still clasped around your wrist. You wish you could see it forever. “One more kiss? Just for keepsies? And get-my-shit-togethersies?”

  You lean in, giving him a peck before turning to leave once more.

  “That doesn’t count! You know what I mean.” He tugs on your wrist once more. You roll your eyes at his desperation, turning and leaning in again as he moves his palm from your wrist to your face, cold Cartier rings pressing against the side of your neck. He reeks of young money and it makes you melt against him. You wish you knew why, you’d been surrounded by young money your entire life. New York was young money, you were young money, your parents were young money when you had been born. But he wasn’t born into it. He earned every cent he has to his name. The thought of him continuing to spend it on you drives you crazy.

   “Y/N,” he pulls away, saying, almost too loudly, “If I fuck you right now, and then I get my shit together, can we still go on more dates?” David pulls away slightly, eyes following the thumb rubbing against your lips, sliding against your tongue as you look up at him, nodding. You know you should object, you should push him away and tell him, again, to get his shit together but you physically can���t. He looks too nonchalant, too beautiful, to be making out with you in the hallway of his hotel.

  These situations always brought problems into your life. You should be accustomed to them by now.

  “Cool,” he says lamely, pulling you inside the room as he closes the door, pressing you against it.

  “You’re such a fucking pussy,” you’re laughing at him as he starts to leave desperate wet kisses down your throat, decidedly ignoring your comment.

  “Tell me if you don’t want me to-“

  “I got it, David. I know.”

  “I’m just saying…You never know,” He mumbles into your neck before he leans up and kisses you again, chasing the taste of his own lips. He tugs your coat off, mouth still on yours as his fingertips start running over the intricate beading on the waist of your dress. He had bought it for you, giving you and Francine one of his cards before you went your separate ways. You had planned to just switch out his card with your own, but he pulled up to the Saks register just as you did, hovering over you two to ensure you used it. You had felt bad about it at the time, but as you feel his fingers find the zipper and tug down, you never want to feel anything else.

He pulls the shoulders of your dress down, warm hands pushing down the lengths of your arms as he continues kissing you. You hear yourself make a noise from the back of your throat, and he immediately becomes cocky, pulling your hips to his, off the door entirely. You feel a hand leave you, other remaining on your waist. You whine as he pulls away, head leaning over your shoulder as you hear him double lock the door.

“Daviiiiiid,” you hate how desperate you sound, “off, off, off…” you mutter, tugging at his jacket and shirt.

“Slow down,” he says, oddly cool, “Let me get this off first.” He unzips the rest of your dress as you kick your heels off, making you substantially shorter than him.

“What happened to ‘being tired’?” you question, threading your fingers through his hair, tugging slightly as he works on the buttons.

“Stop talking,” he orders, “Why’d you have to get such a hard fucking dress? How long did it take you to get into this damn thing? Zippers and buttons?”

You open your mouth to answer before he cuts you off, “Don’t answer that.” His fingers finally get it, allowing you to step out of the dress as he leads you to the bed.

He takes his jacket off now as you perch yourself on the edge of the bed. He doesn’t seem angry, or even turned on. You feel small, still like a teenager as you wait for him. He’s emptying his pockets on the hotel desk, back turned to you. You hear a small fuck escape his lips as he turns to you.

“I don’t have a condom,” he admits. “It’s fine. I’m not fucking you without one, though.”

“I mean, I’m clean but I don’t want to do that either.” He goes to sit next to you on the bed before you get up to locate your purse, digging through it to maybe find the damned thing that would continue your night with him.

“You really want me to fuck you, huh?” He laughs at your disgruntled ‘shut up’ and your groan of frustration when you have no luck in your search.

“It’s fine,” he promises, “We’ll get some tomorrow. Come here. I’ll eat you out.”

“You don’t have to,” you say, despite it being the very opposite of what you mean. His comment about the next day throws you off; since he couldn’t fuck you now, was he promising he would make sure to before you leave New York? Or maybe after that, in LA? You throw your purse to the floor before making your way to him. He looks too pure as he pulls you onto his lap, attaching your mouths again, allowing his hands to roam. You feel his fingertips graze your spine, and he smiles into your kiss as you shiver. David begins his trek down your neck, fiddling with your bra clasp.

“Fuck, I’m so bad at these.”

“Okay, casanova. Slow down,” you bend your arms to help him, quickly unfastening the hooks and eyes. You manage to throw your bra on the floor as he turns you over, fingers lacing with yours as he makes his way down, eyes looking up at you. He’s going painfully slow, hands slowly leaving yours, taking his time.

He eventually meets your thighs, arms wrapped around your legs with his hands resting on your stomach. David dots kisses up and down the inside of both of your thighs, beginning at the knee.

“David, I swear to God, if you don’t-“

“Slow down, casanova,” he retorts, fingers reaching for the waistband of your underwear.

“I’m buying you new underwear,” he promises.

“Hey!” you swat at his head as he smiles up at you, “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing, I just wanna buy you some,” David pulls it down your legs, allowing them to drop to the floor, “For later.” He pushes your legs further apart, wrapping one arm around your thighs.

“You have to get your shit together first before we-“ He inserts a finger into you without warning, looking up to you for permission, just to be safe. You give him a soft go ahead.

“Fuck, hold on, sorry,” he takes his finger out, and you begin to wonder how often he gets laid if he always stops and starts like this. You then see him forcing his rings off his fingers, taking your hands in his as he slides them on yours instead. They’re too big. You might have to buy yourself some.

“Safe keeping,” he promises, returning to settle between your parted thighs and inserting two fingers inside of you now. You don’t look at him as you feel his tongue push against you, his free hand reaching to grab at your breast. He sucks your clit into his mouth every few moments, fingers leaving you briefly to gather your wetness before returning.

“Hooooly fuck,” he breathes, marveling at how wet you are, your hands now tangled into his hair.

“Daviiiiid, David, fuck.”

He continues his actions until you come, pushing repeatedly against your bundle of nerves as you buck your hips against him. It forces him to push your hips down with his entire forearm, attempting to keep you steady.

  ++

“Are they, like, okay?” Natalie, Francine, Sienna, and Tessa are now pushing the elevator button of Nat and David’s hotel.

“Neither of them are responding to their texts, I’m worried,” Nat says. Most of her believes you’re still together, hanging out in the room, but it’s eating at her. It’d been almost 2 hours since you’d bid your goodbyes.

“They’re not fucking, right? Y/N doesn’t really do that, though,” Tessa asks, looking for confirmation from the other girls.

“Oh, absolutely not. David would never fuck on the first date,” Natalie responds, inspecting her key card to press the elevator button with the corresponding floor. The rest of the girls pile in after her, making small talk.

They reach the floor and pile out once more, reading signs directing them to her room.

The girls round the corner, before shooing each other and peeking their heads around the corner.

You and David are stood in his doorframe, full-fledged making out. They see him pull you closer by your head before he leans out.

“Y/N, if I fuck you right now, and then I get my shit together, can we still go on more dates?” He says it too loudly, the girls are able to hear it from down the hallway as Natalie gasps.

“Oh my fucking God! He’s such a whore!” Natalie whispers exasperatedly, all 4 girls’ eyes on you, waiting for your reaction.

They watch as you nod at him, narrating, “Jesus Christ! SHE’S a whore too?”

“Maybe the date went better than they let on?” Tessa offers.

“You think?” The 3 girls turn to her, looking at her as if she’s stupid. She throws her hands up in response, head still peeking over the corner.

“Cool,” he says, and Natalie scoffs, complaining about how lame he is. The door shuts and they hear a thud on the opposite side of the door.

“I mean, I guess we know where they are now?” Sienna suggests.

“Ugh, there’s one bed in that room! And they’re going to fuck in it! I have to sleep in that later!” Natalie complains, “Should we like, wait and see what happens?”

“That feels creepy, but I kind of want to,” Francine replies, shrugging her shoulders.

“Francine, you’re weird. Let’s just go, she’ll tell us what happened if he won’t,” Sienna responds, fixing the purse thrown over her shoulder.

They leave as they hear him double lock the door.

[singingunderthecurtain]

Tear You Apart (Chanyeol Oneshot Smut)

Picture not mine, found everything on Google

Author: @julietsoddeye  AU: Canon/EXO Universe Genre: Smut | Angst Pairing: Chanyeol x Hyoeun (OC) Trigger Warning: Strong Language, Slapping, Rough Sex, Hair Pulling, Daddy Kink, Choking Word Count: 7,020

Plot: Hyoeun and Chanyeol have known and hated each other for four years. All they ever do is bicker and fight like children and their friends are almost getting tired of it. During EXO's most anticipated Halloween Party, Hyoeun accidentally went into Chanyeol's room as she was looking for a bathroom to use.

A/N:  Hi, hi, hi, hi again lmfao. I am back with another oneshot smut lmfaoooooo. Obviously, this fic is inspired by the song "Tear You Apart" by She Wants Revenge. This has nothing to do with Vampires or American Horror Story, this song is really old and I loved it the first time I heard it years and years ago!!!

He is attractive, I admit that part. But damn that boy is annoying as hell. A grown-ass man who cannot stay put for even just a second, who the fuck does that? I don’t get why people love him so much if only the fans knew how he is in real life.

He’s sleazy, he’s playful and not in a good way. He’s rude and just all around irritating. In short, he is a fuck boy. Wait no, no. He is the fuck boy. I guess he was well trained in acting because all of his fans adored him. He would act cute, innocent and all that shit, but behind all those acts, hides a trashy excuse for a person.

Every time I see him, even just a strand of his hair, ruins my day. I don’t understand why Iseul keeps asking him to hang out, and he keeps coming back to hang out even though all we ever do whenever we see each other is bicker.

Much to Chohee and Jongdae’s annoyance, it’s their call. I told them not to bring Chanyeol to any of our play dates, but Jongdae said Chanyeol and Baekhyun are the only people who are willing to come along. Iseul, on the other hand, enjoys it whenever she sees me and Chanyeol always on our throats about each other.

Jongdae was allowed to date Iseul, but EXO’s manager said that whenever they want to see each other in public, they have to have a company with them so that people wouldn’t suspect. You know so it would look like just a fun hangout time with friends, which to me sounds really ridiculous because their fans are not that stupid, but stupid enough not to know of Chanyeol’s real personality.

“Ugh, why does he have to go too?” I groaned, kicking Iseul’s thighs off my legs as I stood up to go to my room’s bathroom.

“Well… to be honest, Jongdae can go alone. But Baekhyun and Chanyeol wanted to come too.” Iseul explains.

“I’m going out if he’s going here; it’s okay if only Jongdae and Baekhyun show up, not him.” I refuse to say his name. Baekhyun was just as annoying, but since he’s nice to me, I can tolerate him. Chanyeol was never nice to me, not ever. Not even when we first met.

“It's fine Hyoeun, I can’t stop you. But where are you going?” Iseul asks as she spread around my bed. I got out my bathroom when I finished my business and grabbed my purse and stuffed my phone, keys, and wallet in it.

“I’m going to eat dinner alone, drink coffee at Starbucks and maybe do some late night grocery shopping. Do you need me to buy anything for you?” I said in one breath. Iseul stood up and we both exit my room.

“You know what I like, and buy a lot of it!” Iseul said and jumped up to give me a quick kiss on my cheek since I am way taller than her.

“Honey Butter Chips got it!” I clicked my tongue and gave her a quick wink. “I’m going grocery shopping, anything for you Chohee eonni?” I shout out to Chohee who was in the kitchen baking some cookies.

“Honey Butter Chips!!!” She excitedly shouts back! I can tell she’s smiling, by the sound of her voice.

---

Well shit. How convenient, just as I was about to call Chohee to ask if the visitors are still there, my phone suddenly want to act like a bitch and died on me. I swear to God, technology hates me.

“Well, you forgot to charge your phone, duh!” I whisper to myself as I was standing up from my seat.

It’s already 10 PM on a Friday night and Starbucks is closing for the night. I already did my mini grocery shopping a while ago. I have one bag full of honey butter chips and one bag full of random necessities of mine and around the house.

It’s relatively late and the EXO guys are probably on their way home. Thank God I don’t have to see him tonight, it was already an agony to be acquainted with him, and do I really need to suffer more with his presence? I deserve to be happy in life too.

I am aware of his pretty boyish face, his towering height, and his eyes that can melt you with just a stare. Also, his lips that look soft and kissable and his soft-looking hair that screams ‘run your fingers through me!’ whenever I see it…

“Oh God, stop your thoughts.” I cringed as I said those words to myself.

I need to stop thinking about him that way, his attitude is already enough to send me through the roof with hatred. But for some reason, I cannot deny that I am physically attracted to him.

Well, he’ll never know anyway unless I tell him, which I will never do, ever, not even on my deathbed. Not even if it’s the last thing that can save my life. Not even if it will cure me of whatever malady I will chalk up in the future when I get really old.

Never will he get the satisfaction of knowing how I sometimes think about him whenever my ovulation cycle comes around and I feel particularly horny for no reason at all.

Or how he is the main subject and object of every vivid as hell wet dreams I have night after night. He will never be gratified with the knowledge of my little crush and make fun of me with it for the rest of my life.

NEVER!!! EVER!!!

---

“Can you stop right there?” I said to the cab driver while pointing at where my stop is, in front of my apartment complex. He carefully turns the wheel to the right and stopped the vehicle exactly in front of the door of the building.

“Thank you,” I said as the ahjussi hand in my card back along with the receipt from the credit card machine. He gave me a polite smile and a single head bow to acknowledge my thanks.

I got out the car effortlessly, balancing the two eco bags I have on both hands. When I got to the elevator, I pushed level 5 and fished for my keys inside my bag.

I got in front of our door and I can hear the muffled sound of a movie playing inside. Maybe Chohee and Iseul are still up, it’s Friday night after all.

Our door has digital locks, but I still prefer the old-fashioned lock and keys. Also, I don’t want to let them know that I’m home, if I use the digital lock, it will make a loud beeping sound indicating that it was unlocked.

When I successfully unlocked the door with my keys silently, I turned the knob as gently as possible and pushed it open. The surround sound and the horror movie they were watching helped a lot and they didn’t even turn their heads when I got in.

They were all focused on the television while hugging their respective throw pillows in front of them, except for Iseul. Her head was buried in Jongdae’s chest and his arms are snaked protectively around her frame, as she hates horror movies.

Well she doesn’t really hate it, she just doesn’t like the jump scares because she gets startled easily. Convincing her to watch a horror movie tonight is beyond me.

I saw that there are only 4 people watching the movie. And I recognize that Chanyeol wasn’t one of them, maybe he didn’t go after all. I did a tiny celebratory dance and grinned with triumph.

Since the only source of light was the television, I slowly crept my way to my bedroom and I saw that the door was slightly ajar and the light was on. What, did I forget to turn off the lights? I was sure I did and even closed the door.

Maybe Iseul or Chohee went in to get something and forgot to turn it off, they always do that anyway. I pushed the door slightly and I was surprised by what I saw lying on my bed.

“What the fu—“ I whispered to myself but I stopped midway. What the hell is Chanyeol doing on my bed? Who the fuck allowed him to sleep on it?

I closed the door behind me silently and dropped all the things I was carrying on the floor to make a sound. It did make a tiny sound but he was still unmoving. I cleared my throat. Cleared it again two times after a few seconds, three times, four, and then five but nothing happened. He was still motionless and I can hear him snoring slightly.

“Seriously?” I voiced out this time. I’m determined to wake him up without touching him. I mean I would like to touch him but I hate him also, so that is not an option right now.

How dare he even enter my room without my permission? It was the only place that I can be free of his presence and there he is, ruining it again for me. I thought I wouldn’t see him tonight, but I was very wrong.

I walked near the bed where he is, dragging my feet in the process but since the floor was carpeted, it didn’t do much with the sound. I peered silently just to check him out a little bit. A little peep doesn’t hurt, right? Also, I’m thinking of maybe kicking or slapping him awake.

As I stare at him, the hotter my skin felt. It’s in the middle of autumn and it was pretty cold outside. The air condition in the house is room temperature.

But his closed eyes are so pretty with those thick lashes, his makeup-less skin is also pretty; it looks smooth and supple with only a couple imperfections. His nose compliments his face with proportions and his lips… Those plump and pink lips scream ‘Kiss Me!’.  

I think my only problem with him physically was his ears, but damn even those are cute as fuck. He looks like a fucking hobbit. A huge Hobbit at that!!!

God fucking dammit, Park Chanyeol, you are very handsome! Are you even real? Are you even human? Fuck! What I would give just to kiss you right now.

“Why don’t you take a picture, it’ll last longer,” Chanyeol said with a huge taunting grin without opening his eyes.

“Holy shit!” I almost shat my pants with surprise when he suddenly spoke.

Just like those stupid dramas you see on the television, I lost my balance and I dove on top of him on my bed. I closed my eyes, prepared for the clash of our bodies together.

“Woah!” Chanyeol exclaimed as he caught me and he wrapped his arms around my waist for some reason.

I didn’t dare open my eyes, afraid and embarrassed with the current situation. The feel of his touch burned right through my clothes and onto my skin. Holy shit don’t fucking blush, Hyoeun DO. NOT. FUCKING. BLUSH!!!

I felt Chanyeol’s chest vibrate with a silent laughter and the air he let out through his nose envelope my face like a relaxing hot steam. I finally decided to open my eyes and the sight of his smug look made my face turn sour.

“You’re blushing, Hyoeun-ah. Do you like me that much?” Chanyeol said and his smug never left his face. I pushed myself off of him, but his grip on my waist tightened, refusing to let me go.

“Let go of me Chanyeol.” I hiss silently as I keep on trying to push myself off, but wouldn’t let me.

“No. Answer my question first.” He smiled knowingly at me. Both my arms are either side of his face now.

“What question?” I asked with my brows connected with a frown.

“What are you doing?” His lips curled slightly on one side as he asks.

“Shouldn’t I be the one asking you that? What are you doing in my room?” I retaliate.

“I was snooping around; it’s my first time seeing your room. And I guess I fell asleep.” He answered arrogantly as if it’s normal to pry on anyone’s property.

“Who told you to enter my room? Nobody enters here except my roommates!” I ask another question as I try to wiggle myself off his gripe.

“The more you strife, the more I will tighten my grip Hyoeun-ah.” The heat of his breath on my face reminds me of a warm summer breeze and it’s making me want to close my eyes, but I fight it off.

“Let me go Chanyeol!” I protested the more.

“Just answer my question.” He grins up at me.

“I was planning on kicking your face to wake you up.” I sighed my answer to him; feeling exhausted all of a sudden.

The truth is, Chanyeol, I was checking you out. I was looking at your freaking beautiful face with your stupid almost perfect skin and your stupid pretty eyelashes that flutter like butterfly wings whenever you blink. And your perfectly-sized nose that compliments your face very well and, your juicy as fuck lips that I want to ravage so bad.

Of course, I can never voice that out.

“You can get off me now, or do you really want to stay that bad?” He scoffs at me with a tiny chuckle.

I didn’t even realize that his hug on my waist was already gone. I was distracted by my thoughts of him. I hate you Park Chanyeol!!!

“I uh— yeah, no.” I stutter and quickly jump off Chanyeol and brushed my clothes as if I stood up from sand.

I turned my back on him, facing my bathroom door and I swear to God I heard a tiny sigh exit his mouth. Maybe I just imagined it, because Chanyeol is incapable of feelings. For the last four years, I have known him, I’ve witnessed all the girls he has hurt left and right. One of the reasons why I hate Park Chanyeol.

“Please get out. I’m tired and I’m going to sleep.” I crossed my arms in front of my chest, still facing my bathroom door. I heard no movement from him.

“You know you want me to stay.” Chanyeol teased.

“Not tonight Chanyeol, I’m not in the mood.” I sighed in defeat, burying my face in my palms.

“Fine,” Chanyeol said as I heard him shift off the bed and my bedroom door opens. Wow, this is new. Usually, Chanyeol will press his shit on and continue pissing me off, but he also gave up.

“By the way, we have an early Halloween party on the 28th. I’m pretty sure Iseul will bring you along anyway, but you should come. I’m inviting you, thank me later.” Chanyeol added and slam my door shut with a loud bang.

What the fuck was that? Why would he think I will come just because he invited me?

---

I don’t know how Chohee and Iseul convinced me and why I said yes to their convincing, but here we are now on our way to EXO’s dorm for their Halloween party. It was our first time going there and two of EXO’s managers picked us up, blabbering about how we should not spread around where EXO currently lives.

They have moved EXO 2 times this year already because Sasaengs keep finding out their current location. Of course, we already know all the rules, but I get it, he was just being cautious.

“Here we are. You girls go up first; I need to buy more food for the party.” Jongdae’s manager said as the driver, another EXO manager, and pull up the van into a stop in a fancy condominium underground parking lot.

“Do you need help oppa?” Iseul said, genuinely offers help.

“It’s fine, we can do it.” He said and Chohee slid open the door for us to exit.

“Are you sure, we can really help.” Iseul offered again as she smiled at the older man.

“You’re already in your costumes, just go! Their unit is on the eighteenth floor.”

As we stood in front of the elevator door, waiting for the lift to go down from the twenty-fifth, I checked my outfit on the reflective door. Green sleeveless dress with a thick black waistband in the middle, the dress ends just three inches above my knees, white knee-high schoolgirl socks and simple black ballet flats. I’m supposed to look like Buttercup.

I look to my left and Iseul is retouching her lipstick, holding her cushion compact to her face. She is wearing a red-sleeved A-line dress with a similar black waistband like mine. Her dress is shorter compared to mine, it just barely covers her ass. Her socks higher about two inches below the hem of the dress and it hugged her toned legs well. Her three-inch heels made her look almost as tall as me. She’s supposed to be Blossom and the big-ass bow on her head confirms that.

“Do I look okay?” Chohee asks as she smoothes out the back of her dress.

“You look hot!” I confirmed with a wink and tongue click. The bubbles of our group, wearing a loose-fitting blue dress with a black stretchy belt around her waist. She’s also wearing the same knee high socks as mine and her favorite black chucks.

Our costumes scream our personality well. Iseul with her girly, borderline sultry style. Chohee with her cuteness. And me? Well, they tell me I’m a classic beauty, but I think I’m just plain and simple. And I like things like that, clean.

When we got to the eighteenth floor, there were only two doors there 1801 and 1802. The one on the left, 1801 was decorated with a cutout of a Jack-o-lantern with a few bats pasted around it and some cotton styled as cobwebs for effects.

We got in front of door 1801 and it suddenly flies open to reveal Jongdae’s face; he was wearing a Harry Potter costume. A scar on his forehead and circle specs with no lens. The sounds of medium volume music and laughter can be heard from the inside.

“Shit Jongdae, you scared me!” Iseul jumps up and dropped her purse on the floor. Jongdae laughed as he picks up his girlfriend’s bag.

“You look so hot,” Jongdae said and he licked his lips as he eyes Iseul from head to toe.

“I know!” Iseul sarcastically answered, she slightly hit Jongdae’s chest a little bit and giggled like a school girl.

“Wait, who are you guys supposed to be?” Jongdae scratched his head in confusion and touched the big bow on top of his girlfriend’s head.

“Duh, we’re the Powerpuff Girls!” Chohee scoffs with a laugh. The three of us rolled our eyes in unison.

“I’ve never watched that show, how would I know.” Jongdae chuckles guiltily. Iseul’s hands automatically snaked around her boyfriend’s waist and Jongdae’s hand settle on her butt and gave it a slight squeeze out of habit.

“Do you always have to flaunt your relationship to us?” I said under my breath and Chohee’s lips curled in a stifled smile on one side and gave me a tiny nudge to stop me from talking.

“What was that?” Jongdae asks and looks back at me as we walk through the hallway deep into their dorm. I guess he didn’t hear what I said.

“Nothing.” I smiled innocently and Jongdae smiled back.

“Guys they’re here!” Jongdae announced with his borderline annoying voice as we got to the living room.

Everyone looked at us and it suddenly made me feel conscious. I looked up and scan the room to see Chanyeol’s arms wrapped around the shoulders of two girls. He was wearing a Joker costume, his hair green in color, styled messily looking very stiff as wires with white spray on color on a small spot on the right side.

He smirked at me when our eyes met and I gave him a dirty look. His Joker makeup makes him look extra hot for some reason. And I shake my head slightly to stop my brain from side-tracking again.

“My favorite girls are here!!!” Chanyeol exclaimed and left the two girls hanging. He made his way to us and attempted to grab me by my arms, but I swatted him off.

“Don’t touch me, Chanyeol.” I scowl at him and I heard some of the girls in the mini crowd heaves excessive breaths as if I did something illegal.

“You must be Hyoeun?” I heard someone said and I looked up to see who I recognized as Suho walking towards us, he removed the half mask he was wearing as he walked. I guess he must be Erik from The Phantom of the Opera.

Baekhyun, who was wearing Cony-inspired pieces of clothing, was silently laughing in the background when I pushed Chanyeol off. He whispered something to someone who I think was Sehun and they high-fived each other.  What was that about?

“Hi, I’m Suho, EXO’s leader. You can call me by my real name, Junmyeon.” He added and offered his hand to me first.

“Yes, I am Hyoeun. Nice to meet you Junmyeon-ssi.” I answered and gladly took his hand and gave him a genuine smile before I frown again as I look back at Chanyeol when I felt his hand land on my shoulder.

He gave me a knowing smirk on his face that tells me that tonight will be a long night for me. I know that he will do ways to piss me off and not enjoy the party. God, remind me again why I even agreed to go here?

“Hi, I’m Chohee,” Chohee said and shook hands with Junmyeon.

“Junmyeon,” Junmyeon said with a big welcoming grin on his face. He looks like a politician right now.

“Hiiiiii!” Iseul greeted extensively while she’s waving at him. Jongdae’s mouth formed an adoring smile when Iseul acted cutely.

“Hiiii! Nice to see you again, Iseul-ssi.” Junmyeon repeated her tone and giggled.

“So you came. I knew you’d come for me.” Chanyeol inched closer and whispered to me. His sleaziness is making me want to vomit and I haven’t drink any alcohol yet.

“I didn’t come here because of you.” I scoffed at him. Junmyeon, Chohee, Iseul, and Jongdae looked at us. It wasn’t intended to be loud, but I guess some people near us heard it.

“Why don’t you all drop your bags in my room first, girls?” Jongdae cleared his throat and interrupted the already starting razz between me and Chanyeol.

I flick his hand off of my shoulder and walked after Jongdae, Iseul, and Chohee who were already on their way to the stairs. I swing my bag, making sure I hit Chanyeol and I heard a thud. When I looked back, he was stumped on the floor while cradling his stomach. He looked up at me with pure hatred in his eyes.

“Oops.” I put my hands up to my lips, toss my right foot up and proceeded to jog my way up the stairs. I heard Baekhyun making fun of Chanyeol now when I reached the top.

---

Three tequila shots and 4 cups of beer later, I feel like peeing. So I went to the bathroom to relieve myself. When I was near it, Chanyeol suddenly came out of nowhere and beat me to the door. He stopped just outside it and held the door so I can’t come in.

“Chanyeol please let me go first!” I called out over all the different noise. This was our first interaction again after I hit him in the stomach earlier.

“But I got here first.” He taunts and gave me a smug look. He got inside and sticks out his tongue at me before closing the door.

“Park Chanyeol, I swear to God I hate you so much!” I scowl as I keep banging the door and I can hear his laughter from behind the door.

“Hi Hyoeun, right?” I stopped banging the door and look up to see the pretty face of Oh Sehun.

“Y—yeah…” My voice trembled as I concentrate hard not to piss myself right there.

“I get it now…” Sehun’s words trail off as he keeps bobbing his head up and down while looking at me with a sly smile on his lips. “Are you okay?” He suddenly asked when he saw my struggle.

“Do you have another bathroom I can use?” I asked as I sink my nails into my palms.

“Oh, there’s another one upstairs,” Sehun answered with a smile. I quickly bowed to him and brisk walk my way to the stairs, leaving him suddenly with his mouth open in slight shock.

I was already upstairs when I realized I haven’t asked which door was the bathroom. Oh well, I just have to open each door to find out.

I went in front of the first door, grabbed the handle and twist it slowly. I pushed the door to see a man and a woman making out on the bed. They didn’t seem to hear me so I quietly closed the door again. I can feel my heartbeat pulsing in my head now. The urgency of wanting to pee mixed with seeing two people making out is not a good feeling at all.

“What are you doing?” His deep voice suddenly spoke when I successfully opened and almost pushing the door agape. I swear to God I almost peed my pants!

“Don’t fucking startle me Chanyeol, I’m looking for the restroom! I need to pee!” I almost screamed at him.

“That’s my bedroom…”

“Do you have a bathroom in there?” I asked.

“Yeah…”

“Good!”

I proceeded to push his bedroom door wide and flick the lights on, I was met with a relatively clean room. The bed was made and an acoustic guitar is resting on it. The room was full of other instruments and toys, but they were all nicely placed in their respective corners.

I saw another door that was slightly ajar and I can make out the shape of a toilet bowl. I sighed in relief and ran my way to it, not wasting any time. I flick on the light and slam the door shut, locking it in the process. I then started to pull the skirt of my dress up and pushed my underwear down and did my business.

“Hooooly shit!!!” I moaned out as my pee flow voluntarily out of me. The feeling of bliss when I’m finally relieved was making me feel like I’m in heaven.

I think this night is my lucky night because when I grabbed the toilet paper, it was just enough for me to wipe myself. I threw the used toilet paper in the bin and flushed the toilet. When I got out the bathroom after washing my hands, Chanyeol was sitting on his bed waiting for me. His guitar was already placed on a stand next to his digital piano.

“Uh— you’re out of toilet paper.” I awkwardly stated his gaze at me hard and unreadable.

“Hmm…” Was Chanyeol’s only response, it was so silent it’s almost a whisper.

“Yeah, thanks for letting me use your bathroom.” I cleared my throat.

“I didn’t, you just decided on yourself.” He said matter-of-factly.

“Well you went to my bedroom without my permission too, it’s only fair right?” I started walking out of the door, but his hot palm caged my wrist.

With wide eyes, I twist myself dramatically to look at him and he suddenly crashed his lips on me. His other hand cupped the nape of my neck to stop me from pulling away from him. His lips slowly started to move causing mine to dance along. The heat of his palm burned the skin of the back of my neck.

“Tell me you hate this, tell me to stop.” He said with a steady breath when he disconnects our lips, his grip on me still strong. I glance between his eyes that burned with passion and his lips which are slightly moistened by his own saliva. I contemplated for a moment if I should kiss him back.

“I hate you.” I murmur and pull him to me by his necktie, crashing our lips together again.

His grip on my wrist loosened and the hand that left found its way around my waist and Chanyeol pull me towards him. I felt him on my stomach, already hard and needy. He fisted my hair now and tugs it a little bit and a whimper escaped from my mouth.

“You like that, don’t you?” He asks breathlessly. He didn’t even give me time to answer and his mouth already found its way on my neck, tracing kisses, leaving a burning feeling as he goes along.  His grip on my hair grows stronger as he sucks on the sensitive skin of my neck.

“Chanyeol…” I whimper as my hands caress his clothed chest.

“Hmm…” He responded in between kisses.

“Did you lock the door?” I ask as I begin to loosen his necktie. He stopped kissing my neck to look at me, his eyes hooded full of intensity.

“I did.” Chanyeol simply answered. He completely let go of me and back up near his bed.

In one swift move, he removed his jacket off of him and ripped his vest open; some buttons flew all over his room. Leaving him only with an undershirt and a tie that I loosen just a few seconds ago. He sat down on the edge of his bed and motioned for me to come near with his middle and forefinger up.

I did as instructed and walked over where he is slow to tease. I reached my back and fished for the zipper of my dress, letting the garment fall off as I made my way to where he was seated, revealing my matching red underwear.

“Hmm red, you look good in that color.” He compliments as he eyes my body hungrily.

When I reached Chanyeol, I outlined my forefinger from his lips down to his chin, neck, clothed chest, and stomach; I stopped on the waist of his dress pants, kneeling in front of him as I did.

I grabbed his belt and started unbuckling it; he threw his head backward when I began to massage his crotch. The grunt that exits his mouth after sends shiver down my spine and straight to my core. My wetness ever growing.

Chanyeol pushed his pants down along with his boxer briefs and his already really hard dick sprung up. The tip was blushed with arousal and pre-cum slowly trickling down.

Without wasting any more time, I grasp him and started sucking the tip and swirl my tongue all around it, his precum blending with my saliva.

“Hyoeun-ah…” Chanyeol moans breathlessly, both his hands collecting all my hair in one big messy ponytail. Another whine exits his mouth when I suddenly took his entirety inside my mouth. The tip of his cock hits my throat making my eyes water immediately, I started making gagging sounds soon after.

“Your gagging sounds better than the music I make.” The comparison made me giggle with laughter while his whole cock still jammed inside my mouth. I felt the reverberation of my giggle vibrate through his skin, which caused him to gyrate his hips on me.

I relaxed my tongue as I pull away from him. My saliva strung when his cock egressed from inside my mouth. I closed my mouth to swallow and I looked up at him, he was looking down at me with severe need. I gripped his dick again and stroke him gently while I looked him deep in the eyes.

“I’m going to make you cum multiple times tonight.” Chanyeol firmly stated with a husky tone, his lips grinned wide like the Cheshire cat.

“Oh, can you really?” I raised my brows in doubt, challenging him.

“Watch me…” Chanyeol suddenly pulls me up by my hair and we both stood, he wriggled his pants and it pooled around his feet. He steps out of it, I ripped his tie and undershirt open as he twirls me around throwing me on his bed. He removed his tie and shirt in a quick maneuver and jumped up on top of me.

I retreated up to his bed and he crawls right after me, I stopped withdrawing when my back hits the mountain of pillows he has. Chanyeol’s fingers found the garter of my panties and yank it down with force, I swear I heard it rip a little bit. I lift my ass up to help him and he slides it down my legs and feet, completely off.

He lifts the crotch of my underwear up his nose, rolling his eyes back as he whiffs the garment and touched himself. The scene that was happening in front of me is making me wetter and wetter by the second.

“Mmm, lovely.” He growled. “I’m keeping this,” Chanyeol said as he opened the cabinet of his bedside table. He stuffed my red panties in there and closed it again.

“That’s one-half of a pair Chanyeol!” I complained.

“Then I’m gonna have to keep the bra too.” Chanyeol reached for the clasp and he unclutched it in one fluid turn.

His hot mouth immediately latched on my right nipple when he removed my bra and threw it across the room. His big hand grasps the other, kneading it like soft dough. I grabbed his cock, stroking it up and down and he moaned ecstatically when I thumbed the still leaking precum on his tip.

“Lie on your back, for me, baby,” Chanyeol mumbles on my ear, his voice fell an octave down.

I inhaled a heavy breath, my mouth opens with anticipation as I position my head on his pillows. Chanyeol smoothed his hand over my skin, tracing it from the middle of my chest, down to my middle. The sensation he was giving me makes me shiver in the best way possible. Just his touch was enough to make my head whirl.

“I love that you’re wet already,” Chanyeol grumbled when his forefinger found my clit and I let out a whimper from the back of my throat when he rubs circles on it.

Chanyeol’s slick finger effortlessly inserted palm up, pushing in and pulling out before a second finger joins in. He lowers his head on me and his tongue glides up and down, running over my hard nub. His long fingers finally found my g-spot and I cry out when he touched it with the digit of his fingers.

I started thrusting my hips up and down when I felt my climax building up. His other hand playing my nipple in between his fingers.

“Ahh Chanyeol, I’m getting there!” I yelp with irregular breathing. My grip on his hair getting tighter as my peak grows closer.

Chanyeol started to shake his hand while pumping his fingers in and out of me and his head sway violently left and right, using his nose and mouth to graze my clit.

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” I cried out as my walls constrict and my legs shake with my release.

“Mmm so good.” Chanyeol pulls his fingers out of me and inserts it into his mouth, slurping my orgasm clean.

Chanyeol rammed half of his cock inside of me all of a sudden and I gasp in surprise, still very sensitive from my previous peak.

“I wanna fucking tear you apart!” His lips attacked my open mouth and slither his tongue in and around, I felt and tasted my wetness on him when he kissed me.

“Oh… Oh God, you’re so big.” I moaned when he sinks his whole shaft inside of me. He paused for a while to let me adjust to his size.

“Do you still hate me now that I’m inside of you, baby?” Chanyeol teased as we look each other in the eyes with equal fierceness.

“Yes, I hate you Chanyeol. I fucking hate you!” I roared, my hands caressing his stomach, his eyes rolled back when he started bucking his hips. Pushing his cock in and out of me excruciatingly slow.

“I’m gonna hate fuck the shit out of you, you’re gonna keep asking for more,” Chanyeol grumbles with unstable words.

“Ugh shut up, just fuck me already!” I wail and the left side of his lips curl up into a taunting smirk.

“Where are your manners, Hyoeun-ah? You should say please.” He teased some more as he stopped pushing.

“Fuck you Park Chanyeol!” I shrieked and my palm hit his cheek thoughtlessly, even I was surprised.

His eyes widen in shock and the look he gave me after sent a shiver down my spine, his cheek now red from the slap. Chanyeol grabbed my wrists and pin them down on either side of my head and lowers himself down my level and bit the fleshy part of my ear before speaking.

“I love it when you get violent!”

To that, he started thrusting again, with force speed this time. I felt my walls burn with the roughness of our skin rubbing together. Chanyeol lets go of my wrists and his left hand wrapped around my neck and the other pushed my left leg up to give him a better angle.

“Yes… Fuck… Me… Daddy… Faster!” I choke out my words separately with each sharp thrust he shoots me. Chanyeol smirked when he heard me call him Daddy, his thrust not hitching at all.

“Don’t judge me, okay!” I continue to choke out my words, my orgasm growing again as his onslaught continues unchanging and consistent.

“I’m not judging you, I love it!”

“Chanyeol, I’m gonna come, don’t stop…”

“Say my name again Hyoeun-ah, say my name!” Chanyeol’s momentum picked up and his thrusting grew faster, my boobs starting to ache as it bounces with each push and pulls.

“Chanyeol don’t stop!” I howled as my walls tighten around his girth along with his hand around my neck.

“Fuck Hyoeun… Fuck, fuck!” Chanyeol bit his lower lip as he rolled his eyes and threw his head back with the sensation we are giving each other.

I reached my hands up to grab his wrist, my breathing compressed into a pant with his tight hold. With three or more push, I finally reached my limit again for the second time tonight. Chanyeol’s restraint on my neck loosened and continue to fuck me as my orgasm ride out. Soon he also contains his extremity and I felt his hot discharge inside of me.

“Holy shit.” Chanyeol breathed out as he rolled me around and he collapsed on his back while I’m now on top of him, our bond still not disconnecting.

“You know I still hate you, right?” I rested my head on his chest and I listen to his heart beat slowly going back to normal. His chest rises up and down with a single chuckle. I prop myself up a little bit to look at him. He scans my whole face and smiled when his eyes land on my lips.

“We should get back to the party before they suspect anything.” He bit his lower lip, his eyes still glued to my mouth.

I gave him a quick smack on the lips before I stood up, his now soft cock slid out of me, our fused ejaculation trickle down my thighs. Chanyeol grabbed the box of Kleenex on his nightstand, pulled out four to five tissues and hand them to me. I gladly took them and wiped myself clean. I grabbed my bra and dress and started to put them on but Chanyeol stood up and stopped me.

“Let me help you, turn around,” Chanyeol said, twirling me around and grabbed the clasp of my bra that was already hanging onto my shoulder. He took the dress from my hand, got down on one knee and my ass rested on his right shoulder. He slowly pulls my dress to my ass as he trails kisses up my back.

“WHAT THE FUCK?” Chohee shriek at the top of her lungs as Baekhyun kicked the bedroom door open. Iseul squealed like a pig when she saw us there, obviously in a post-coital moment. Chanyeol immediately pulls my dress to cover my chest and stood up straight, covering his nakedness with my body.

“Did… Did— you just…” Jongdae was lost for words, all of them were. Jongdae, Junmyeon and Chohee’s faces were all twisted in disgust, Iseul and Baekhyun, on the other hand, have knowing smirks on theirs.

“I thought you locked the door?!” I whined as I covered my face in shame.

“I DID! GET OUT, GET THE FUCK OUT!!!” Chanyeol screamed at them as he grabbed a pillow with his left hand, the other covering his naked crotch. The intruders started running and retreating away and Baekhyun slam the door shut behind them.

[lmbiggs]

Percival Rex: Prologue

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

The cruelest part of his imprisonment was that he was not restrained.

He could roam his own home freely, Grindelwald didn’t live there, and as such he could destroy it as his temper lashed out, as his desperation grew, and Grindelwald could come in, gleefully surveying the physical evidence of his prisoner’s frustration, the destruction wrought upon Percival Graves’ expensive flat and all the personal items therein.

Now I lay me down to sleep.

When Percival Graves had fought in The Great War he had fought alongside wizards and No-Maj’s alike. He often thought back to the mechanical beasts that the No-Maj men had built, had birthed from fire and iron and steel, and idly wonder what sort of person it made him to only think of objects of destruction when he thought of No-Maj inventions. He had idly heard of a man inventing something called a tell-foney that could be used to speak across great distances, much like Floo but with a series of wires and electricity. The No-Maj record players and gramophones were a hit amongst his peers, but he had only briefly paid the funny little contraptions any mind.

Crammed inside a tank along with two other wizards and four No-Maj men, he had witnessed a man strike a match to light his cigarette, struggling with the flimsy stick, and had reached over to light the end of the cigarette with his own fingers, a brief, telling show of witchcraft that had stunned the young man silent for the rest of the night. A week later Graves had waved his hand and scraped the remains of the young No-Maj soldier’s face out of the inside of the tank.

Credence Barebone was probably one of the few miracles of No-Maj creation that Percival Graves had ever deigned to pay attention to that was not an object meant to wrought destruction.When he dreamed his dreams were filled with No-Maj record players and cigarettes lighting themselves and tell-foney wires tangling, strangling him, lighting lines of pain across his limbs, across an arm that was no longer there, as he danced a morbid waltz that Grindelwald had composed for him.

A waltz he danced with Credence Barebone, instrument of his torment often times.

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

The dreams bled together, all a singular never-ending cycle of pain then relief, some moments more mild than others. Memories (the No-Maj girl who he had quietly given a tin case of eggs to, asking her in clumsy German to cook for him) and fantasies (sweeping Credence up into his arms to dance to the raucous jazz music playing in a sunlit apartment) mingled into one (Percival staring across the table in that ramshackle German apartment, the girl’s face was replaced with Credence as the smell of frying eggs and a few scant strips of bacon filled the air, the bruises on Credence’s arms the same as the ones on the poor German girl’s).

He thought of Franklin Kee, who had handed Percival his dogtags and his wand and stood, walking towards the enemy line, entirely unarmed, sedately strolling forward. He had walked into a fog of mustard gas and proceeded let the deadly cloud of yellow smoke eat away at his flesh, fill his lungs and suffocate him to death. He thought of his own arm, thrown across the room, still clutching his wand, and Grindelwald’s purred out Incendio that had lit the flesh on fire. He thought of the smell of burning, cooking meat, the stomach-churning stench of it seeping into the wallpaper and bed curtains, blood and ash spattering the edge of the bed where the sheets and bedclothes were now slashed open. All of these moments melting together, the drippings of wax Easter candles held during Mass as he stood beside his mother, running scorching and painful over his knuckles, his eyes tracking the mingling lines as they ran and merged in one. Everything was a singular moment, every moment was a patchwork quilt of memories and feelings and experiences, muddled together until he couldn’t tell them apart.

He thought of himself in Franklin Kee’s position, of himself in Credence Barebone’s shoes, staring at the torn and destroyed remains of his apartment and thinking of just... Giving up. Throwing himself into Grindelwald’s line of fire and hoping the man decided to simply put him out of his misery. Thought of continuing the fight despite all odds, despite every ounce of abuse poured into him. He thought of seeing Credence in the streets of New York, handing out flyers in the January cold, his fingers turned blue and the abuse of his mother’s rage evident in long bloody stripes across his palms. He thought of the girl, “Graves’ young schatzi” as the other soldiers had called her, standing in her own apartment, screaming and sobbing as soldiers, No-Maj and Wizard alike, pawed and laughed and grabbed at her until Graves stepped in, barking at them to leave her be and brandishing his wand. He thought of his schatzi, the only name he’d ever know her by, and the bombs carpeting her town, of her corpse lost amidst the rubble, crushed and twisted and still-warm even as he dug her out from the ruins, limbs doll-fragile and broken, sprawled and torn apart, her skull bashed in from a the wall that had crushed her.

And should I die before I wake.

“Mr. Graves.”

Graves looked up from where he was seated amongst the shredded remains of his couch, news clippings and photographs burnt and ripped apart, eyes wide as he stared at the slender figure now standing in his main hall.

“No... No, not you.” His voice cracked as he stared at the boy, begging Grindelwald, or God, whoever could hear him in his own private hell. “Fuck, not you.”

Credence was dressed in nothing but the tattered remains of his one threadbare shirt, his long, coltish legs almost the same shade of white as the shirt. His face was bruised and Graves could see the familiar belt slashes that he had always healed for the boy, cutting in neat, even lines across his back and arms and hands. The boy trembled as he stepped forward and Graves clenched his fist, freezing in an attempt to keep from reaching out for this illusion.

“Mr. Graves, how could you.” The boy sobbed and Graves froze, staring at the face, beautiful and fey and twisted in pain. A wounded angel standing amongst Graves’ savaged apartment. “Y-you let her hurt me.”

“Credence-”

The boy stepped forward, splintered wood and shattered glass tearing open the boy’s feet, leaving slender, crimson footprints on the wood. It was all an illusion. He knew this. A new cruel trick in Grindelwald’s endless ways of entertaining torment.

“You’re not him. You’re not Credence.” Graves quietly whispered, staring at the boy. He stepped forward and a trail of red slithered down his thigh and Graves’ eye couldn’t tear away from the way the blood smeared against the soft, tender flesh.

“Mr. Graves… Mr. Graves, I’m cold.” Credence whispered and it was so hard to remember that this wasn’t real. Not when the illusion spoke with the same soft, nervous, heartbreaking tone that had made Graves cave and break Rappaport’s law in the first place. “Mr. Graves, please.”

When Credence stepped on the remains of a picture frame, a shard of glass tearing into the sole of his foot. A weak knee wobbled and Credence lurched forward dangerously and that was what broke the man across from him.

“Credence, no, you’re hurting yourself.” Graves held out his hand, as if he could will the boy to stop. “Just... stay still.”

Credence didn’t stop, the waif-like limbs trembling, and when the boy’s knees finally gave out Graves stumbled forward, scooping the starved, skinny frame into his arms.

Those glassy eyes looked up at him and Graves stared back, his voice lodged in his throat as the boy spoke again, “Mr. Graves, why didn’t you stop her?”

He let out a wheezing, half-sob, “I’m sorry, Credence, I’m so sorry.”

“Why didn’t you save me? She hurt me so badly. And then Mr. Grindelwald...” Those delicate fingers reached between soft thighs and came back crimson and Graves grabbed them, pressing his lips to the soft, wet smears on delicate fingertips, as if a kiss could make it better.

“Shhh, it’s alright, Credence, it’s going to be alright.” Graves gasped out, voice broken and high with hysteria. “I’m not going to let you go, I’m never going to let you go.”

Those dark, feline eyes stared up at him as if Graves was a guardian angel, a saviour, something Biblical that Graves’ mother would have told him stories about when he was younger. Then they went blank, Credence’s mouth going slack. Laying limp-limbed in his arms, Graves felt the boy’s heart stop as he died.

Graves stared down at the boy, shaking him, clutching the slim frame close, sobbing as he screamed into the air of the room, voice reverberating against the destroyed walls. “You can’t have him! You can’t take him away from me again! You can’t fucking have him!”

The familiar, calloused laughter that filled the room was accompanied by the walls rattling, filling Graves’ lungs like water, drowning him, suffocating him. When he tightened his grip on the corpse in his grip it shattered into a pile of bone and ash, the burnt limbs falling upon the ground. A howl of agony tore from his throat at the sight of those delicate, slender fingers that might have once played the piano blackened and curled and cracked against the floor.

I pray the Lord my Soul to take.

When a deadly black fog rolled into his apartment, filling the entire building, peeling at the wallpaper, making Graves cough with the suffocating fullness of it, he wondered if his fervent, silent prayers to a God he hadn’t prayed to since the war had been answered. Grindelwald had finally tired of him, had decided to kill him, to rid himself of the nuisance of Graves’ continued existence.

He was in his apartment (he was in a small nameless little town in Germany), coughing around the air thick with magic (a shield thrown up at last minute to stop the roiling waves of mustard gas), the bedframe rattling and thrown aside (the dishes rattled in the girl’s grip as she set the table for two), staring up at Credence’s wide, terrified eyes (the boy’s face blended and merged and wavered with that of the girl who had looked at him as if he was a saviour even though he was one of the men pillaging her town, as if he had gifted her with divine intervention rather than foreign invasion).

“Mr. Graves-”

When he woke up it was to light.

Amen.

The sterile, white walls of Saint Jude the Apostle Hospital for Magical Maladies stared back at him and he looked over as the mediwitch entered the room, her brows furrowed as she took his vital signs and sent off a patronus to inform someone of his return to consciousness.

He tried to lift his arm to push her away when she shone a light in his eye from her wand tip, only to freeze when he saw that his left arm was missing, from the middle of his elbow down. A memory of cooking meat filled his lungs and he gagged on the air, retching up nothing as he rolled onto his side, distantly registering the sound of the nurse calling for help.

The second time he woke was to the sound of someone climbing into the bed alongside him. His eyes snapped open and for a moment his reality swam, catching sight of a girl with blonde curls who lived only in his memories, her eyes a sharp bright blue, before the image was brushed aside by a blink of his eyes, revealing Credence’s own inky dark gaze fixed upon Graves’ own face.

“What are you doing up, Credence?” He mumbled, reaching out for Credence with his left hand only to feel the absence of the limb more keenly.

The boy had numerous gashes from curses across his chest, back and arms, and his hands were bandaged up with salve. Grasping Credence’s wrist firmly, Graves pulled the boy closer, making as if he wanted to pull the bandages off.

“Who hurt you?”

Credence shrank before his eyes, the boy bowing his head and whimpering softly. “I’m sorry. He was just... It wasn’t you. It couldn’t have been you. And he - when they took him away you weren’t there and - and....”

Clarity came to him and Graves stared at the boy, “You found me.”

“I found you.” The boy whispered. “I couldn’t live without you.” His eyes were so earnest and dark and wide and brimming with tears, his hands trembling, one resting lightly upon the hand grasping his wrist.

“Oh... Credence...” Percival lifted the boy’s hand to his lips, kissing the heavily bandaged surface, letting the hand cradle his cheek. “You miracle, you wonderful beautiful boy... You saved me.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

[pinkarcadecandy]

TRIAL BY FIRE

Did Texas execute an innocent man?

By David Grann

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009 ISSUE

The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky.

Buffie Barbee, who was eleven years old and lived two houses down, was playing in her back yard when she smelled the smoke. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane, and they hurried up the street; that’s when they saw the smoldering house and Cameron Todd Willingham standing on the front porch, wearing only a pair of jeans, his chest blackened with soot, his hair and eyelids singed. He was screaming, “My babies are burning up!” His children—Karmon and Kameron, who were one-year-old twin girls, and two-year-old Amber—were trapped inside.

Willingham told the Barbees to call the Fire Department, and while Diane raced down the street to get help he found a stick and broke the children’s bedroom window. Fire lashed through the hole. He broke another window; flames burst through it, too, and he retreated into the yard, kneeling in front of the house. A neighbor later told police that Willingham intermittently cried, “My babies!” then fell silent, as if he had “blocked the fire out of his mind.”

Diane Barbee, returning to the scene, could feel intense heat radiating off the house. Moments later, the five windows of the children’s room exploded and flames “blew out,” as Barbee put it. Within minutes, the first firemen had arrived, and Willingham approached them, shouting that his children were in their bedroom, where the flames were thickest. A fireman sent word over his radio for rescue teams to “step on it.”

More men showed up, uncoiling hoses and aiming water at the blaze. One fireman, who had an air tank strapped to his back and a mask covering his face, slipped through a window but was hit by water from a hose and had to retreat. He then charged through the front door, into a swirl of smoke and fire. Heading down the main corridor, he reached the kitchen, where he saw a refrigerator blocking the back door.

Todd Willingham, looking on, appeared to grow more hysterical, and a police chaplain named George Monaghan led him to the back of a fire truck and tried to calm him down. Willingham explained that his wife, Stacy, had gone out earlier that morning, and that he had been jolted from sleep by Amber screaming, “Daddy! Daddy!”

“My little girl was trying to wake me up and tell me about the fire,” he said, adding, “I couldn’t get my babies out.”

While he was talking, a fireman emerged from the house, cradling Amber. As she was given C.P.R., Willingham, who was twenty-three years old and powerfully built, ran to see her, then suddenly headed toward the babies’ room. Monaghan and another man restrained him. “We had to wrestle with him and then handcuff him, for his and our protection,” Monaghan later told police. “I received a black eye.” One of the first firemen at the scene told investigators that, at an earlier point, he had also held Willingham back. “Based on what I saw on how the fire was burning, it would have been crazy for anyone to try and go into the house,” he said.

Willingham was taken to a hospital, where he was told that Amber—who had actually been found in the master bedroom—had died of smoke inhalation. Kameron and Karmon had been lying on the floor of the children’s bedroom, their bodies severely burned. According to the medical examiner, they, too, died from smoke inhalation.

News of the tragedy, which took place on December 23, 1991, spread through Corsicana. A small city fifty-five miles northeast of Waco, it had once been the center of Texas’s first oil boom, but many of the wells had since dried up, and more than a quarter of the city’s twenty thousand inhabitants had fallen into poverty. Several stores along the main street were shuttered, giving the place the feel of an abandoned outpost.

Willingham and his wife, who was twenty-two years old, had virtually no money. Stacy worked in her brother’s bar, called Some Other Place, and Willingham, an unemployed auto mechanic, had been caring for the kids. The community took up a collection to help the Willinghams pay for funeral arrangements.

Fire investigators, meanwhile, tried to determine the cause of the blaze. (Willingham gave authorities permission to search the house: “I know we might not ever know all the answers, but I’d just like to know why my babies were taken from me.”) Douglas Fogg, who was then the assistant fire chief in Corsicana, conducted the initial inspection. He was tall, with a crew cut, and his voice was raspy from years of inhaling smoke from fires and cigarettes. He had grown up in Corsicana and, after graduating from high school, in 1963, he had joined the Navy, serving as a medic in Vietnam, where he was wounded on four occasions. He was awarded a Purple Heart each time. After he returned from Vietnam, he became a firefighter, and by the time of the Willingham blaze he had been battling fire—or what he calls “the beast”—for more than twenty years, and had become a certified arson investigator. “You learn that fire talks to you,” he told me.

He was soon joined on the case by one of the state’s leading arson sleuths, a deputy fire marshal named Manuel Vasquez, who has since died. Short, with a paunch, Vasquez had investigated more than twelve hundred fires. Arson investigators have always been considered a special breed of detective. In the 1991 movie “Backdraft,” a heroic arson investigator says of fire, “It breathes, it eats, and it hates. The only way to beat it is to think like it. To know that this flame will spread this way across the door and up across the ceiling.” Vasquez, who had previously worked in Army intelligence, had several maxims of his own. One was “Fire does not destroy evidence—it creates it.” Another was “The fire tells the story. I am just the interpreter.” He cultivated a Sherlock Holmes-like aura of invincibility. Once, he was asked under oath whether he had ever been mistaken in a case. “If I have, sir, I don’t know,” he responded. “It’s never been pointed out.”

Vasquez and Fogg visited the Willinghams’ house four days after the blaze. Following protocol, they moved from the least burned areas toward the most damaged ones. “It is a systematic method,” Vasquez later testified, adding, “I’m just collecting information. . . . I have not made any determination. I don’t have any preconceived idea.”

The men slowly toured the perimeter of the house, taking notes and photographs, like archeologists mapping out a ruin. Upon opening the back door, Vasquez observed that there was just enough space to squeeze past the refrigerator blocking the exit. The air smelled of burned rubber and melted wires; a damp ash covered the ground, sticking to their boots. In the kitchen, Vasquez and Fogg discerned only smoke and heat damage—a sign that the fire had not originated there—and so they pushed deeper into the nine-hundred-and-seventy-five-square-foot building. A central corridor led past a utility room and the master bedroom, then past a small living room, on the left, and the children’s bedroom, on the right, ending at the front door, which opened onto the porch. Vasquez tried to take in everything, a process that he compared to entering one’s mother-in-law’s house for the first time: “I have the same curiosity.”

In the utility room, he noticed on the wall pictures of skulls and what he later described as an image of “the Grim Reaper.” Then he turned into the master bedroom, where Amber’s body had been found. Most of the damage there was also from smoke and heat, suggesting that the fire had started farther down the hallway, and he headed that way, stepping over debris and ducking under insulation and wiring that hung down from the exposed ceiling.

As he and Fogg removed some of the clutter, they noticed deep charring along the base of the walls. Because gases become buoyant when heated, flames ordinarily burn upward. But Vasquez and Fogg observed that the fire had burned extremely low down, and that there were peculiar char patterns on the floor, shaped like puddles.

Vasquez’s mood darkened. He followed the “burn trailer”—the path etched by the fire—which led from the hallway into the children’s bedroom. Sunlight filtering through the broken windows illuminated more of the irregularly shaped char patterns. A flammable or combustible liquid doused on a floor will cause a fire to concentrate in these kinds of pockets, which is why investigators refer to them as “pour patterns” or “puddle configurations.”

The fire had burned through layers of carpeting and tile and plywood flooring. Moreover, the metal springs under the children’s beds had turned white—a sign that intense heat had radiated beneath them. Seeing that the floor had some of the deepest burns, Vasquez deduced that it had been hotter than the ceiling, which, given that heat rises, was, in his words, “not normal.”

Fogg examined a piece of glass from one of the broken windows. It contained a spiderweb-like pattern—what fire investigators call “crazed glass.” Forensic textbooks had long described the effect as a key indicator that a fire had burned “fast and hot,” meaning that it had been fuelled by a liquid accelerant, causing the glass to fracture.

The men looked again at what appeared to be a distinct burn trailer through the house: it went from the children’s bedroom into the corridor, then turned sharply to the right and proceeded out the front door. To the investigators’ surprise, even the wood under the door’s aluminum threshold was charred. On the concrete floor of the porch, just outside the front door, Vasquez and Fogg noticed another unusual thing: brown stains, which, they reported, were consistent with the presence of an accelerant.

The men scanned the walls for soot marks that resembled a “V.” When an object catches on fire, it creates such a pattern, as heat and smoke radiate outward; the bottom of the “V” can therefore point to where a fire began. In the Willingham house, there was a distinct “V” in the main corridor. Examining it and other burn patterns, Vasquez identified three places where fire had originated: in the hallway, in the children’s bedroom, and at the front door. Vasquez later testified that multiple origins pointed to one conclusion: the fire was “intentionally set by human hands.”

By now, both investigators had a clear vision of what had happened. Someone had poured liquid accelerant throughout the children’s room, even under their beds, then poured some more along the adjoining hallway and out the front door, creating a “fire barrier” that prevented anyone from escaping; similarly, a prosecutor later suggested, the refrigerator in the kitchen had been moved to block the back-door exit. The house, in short, had been deliberately transformed into a death trap.

The investigators collected samples of burned materials from the house and sent them to a laboratory that could detect the presence of a liquid accelerant. The lab’s chemist reported that one of the samples contained evidence of “mineral spirits,” a substance that is often found in charcoal-lighter fluid. The sample had been taken by the threshold of the front door.

The fire was now considered a triple homicide, and Todd Willingham—the only person, besides the victims, known to have been in the house at the time of the blaze—became the prime suspect.

Police and fire investigators canvassed the neighborhood, interviewing witnesses. Several, like Father Monaghan, initially portrayed Willingham as devastated by the fire. Yet, over time, an increasing number of witnesses offered damning statements. Diane Barbee said that she had not seen Willingham try to enter the house until after the authorities arrived, as if he were putting on a show. And when the children’s room exploded with flames, she added, he seemed more preoccupied with his car, which he moved down the driveway. Another neighbor reported that when Willingham cried out for his babies he “did not appear to be excited or concerned.” Even Father Monaghan wrote in a statement that, upon further reflection, “things were not as they seemed. I had the feeling that [Willingham] was in complete control.”

The police began to piece together a disturbing profile of Willingham. Born in Ardmore, Oklahoma, in 1968, he had been abandoned by his mother when he was a baby. His father, Gene, who had divorced his mother, eventually raised him with his stepmother, Eugenia. Gene, a former U.S. marine, worked in a salvage yard, and the family lived in a cramped house; at night, they could hear freight trains rattling past on a nearby track. Willingham, who had what the family called the “classic Willingham look”—a handsome face, thick black hair, and dark eyes—struggled in school, and as a teen-ager began to sniff paint. When he was seventeen, Oklahoma’s Department of Human Services evaluated him, and reported, “He likes ‘girls,’ music, fast cars, sharp trucks, swimming, and hunting, in that order.” Willingham dropped out of high school, and over time was arrested for, among other things, driving under the influence, stealing a bicycle, and shoplifting.

In 1988, he met Stacy, a senior in high school, who also came from a troubled background: when she was four years old, her stepfather had strangled her mother to death during a fight. Stacy and Willingham had a turbulent relationship. Willingham, who was unfaithful, drank too much Jack Daniel’s, and sometimes hit Stacy—even when she was pregnant. A neighbor said that he once heard Willingham yell at her, “Get up, bitch, and I’ll hit you again.”

On December 31st, the authorities brought Willingham in for questioning. Fogg and Vasquez were present for the interrogation, along with Jimmie Hensley, a police officer who was working his first arson case. Willingham said that Stacy had left the house around 9 a.m. to pick up a Christmas present for the kids, at the Salvation Army. “After she got out of the driveway, I heard the twins cry, so I got up and gave them a bottle,” he said. The children’s room had a safety gate across the doorway, which Amber could climb over but not the twins, and he and Stacy often let the twins nap on the floor after they drank their bottles. Amber was still in bed, Willingham said, so he went back into his room to sleep. “The next thing I remember is hearing ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ “ he recalled. “The house was already full of smoke.” He said that he got up, felt around the floor for a pair of pants, and put them on. He could no longer hear his daughter’s voice (“I heard that last ‘Daddy, Daddy’ and never heard her again”), and he hollered, “Oh God— Amber, get out of the house! Get out of the house!’ “

He never sensed that Amber was in his room, he said. Perhaps she had already passed out by the time he stood up, or perhaps she came in after he left, through a second doorway, from the living room. He said that he went down the corridor and tried to reach the children’s bedroom. In the hallway, he said, “you couldn’t see nothing but black.” The air smelled the way it had when their microwave had blown up, three weeks earlier—like “wire and stuff like that.” He could hear sockets and light switches popping, and he crouched down, almost crawling. When he made it to the children’s bedroom, he said, he stood and his hair caught on fire. “Oh God, I never felt anything that hot before,” he said of the heat radiating out of the room.

After he patted out the fire on his hair, he said, he got down on the ground and groped in the dark. “I thought I found one of them once,” he said, “but it was a doll.” He couldn’t bear the heat any longer. “I felt myself passing out,” he said. Finally, he stumbled down the corridor and out the front door, trying to catch his breath. He saw Diane Barbee and yelled for her to call the Fire Department. After she left, he insisted, he tried without success to get back inside.

The investigators asked him if he had any idea how the fire had started. He said that he wasn’t sure, though it must have originated in the children’s room, since that was where he first saw flames; they were glowing like “bright lights.” He and Stacy used three space heaters to keep the house warm, and one of them was in the children’s room. “I taught Amber not to play with it,” he said, adding that she got “whuppings every once in a while for messing with it.” He said that he didn’t know if the heater, which had an internal flame, was turned on. (Vasquez later testified that when he had checked the heater, four days after the fire, it was in the “Off” position.) Willingham speculated that the fire might have been started by something electrical: he had heard all that popping and crackling.

When pressed whether someone might have a motive to hurt his family, he said that he couldn’t think of anyone that “cold-blooded.” He said of his children, “I just don’t understand why anybody would take them, you know? We had three of the most pretty babies anybody could have ever asked for.” He went on, “Me and Stacy’s been together for four years, but off and on we get into a fight and split up for a while and I think those babies is what brought us so close together . . . neither one of us . . . could live without them kids.” Thinking of Amber, he said, “To tell you the honest-to-God’s truth, I wish she hadn’t woke me up.”

During the interrogation, Vasquez let Fogg take the lead. Finally, Vasquez turned to Willingham and asked a seemingly random question: had he put on shoes before he fled the house?

“No, sir,” Willingham replied.

A map of the house was on a table between the men, and Vasquez pointed to it. “You walked out this way?” he said.

Willingham said yes.

Vasquez was now convinced that Willingham had killed his children. If the floor had been soaked with a liquid accelerant and the fire had burned low, as the evidence suggested, Willingham could not have run out of the house the way he had described without badly burning his feet. A medical report indicated that his feet had been unscathed.

Willingham insisted that, when he left the house, the fire was still around the top of the walls and not on the floor. “I didn’t have to jump through any flames,” he said. Vasquez believed that this was impossible, and that Willingham had lit the fire as he was retreating—first, torching the children’s room, then the hallway, and then, from the porch, the front door. Vasquez later said of Willingham, “He told me a story of pure fabrication. . . . He just talked and he talked and all he did was lie.”

Still, there was no clear motive. The children had life-insurance policies, but they amounted to only fifteen thousand dollars, and Stacy’s grandfather, who had paid for them, was listed as the primary beneficiary. Stacy told investigators that even though Willingham hit her he had never abused the children—“Our kids were spoiled rotten,” she said—and she did not believe that Willingham could have killed them.

Ultimately, the authorities concluded that Willingham was a man without a conscience whose serial crimes had climaxed, almost inexorably, in murder. John Jackson, who was then the assistant district attorney in Corsicana, was assigned to prosecute Willingham’s case. He later told the Dallas Morning News that he considered Willingham to be “an utterly sociopathic individual” who deemed his children “an impediment to his lifestyle.” Or, as the local district attorney, Pat Batchelor, put it, “The children were interfering with his beer drinking and dart throwing.”

On the night of January 8, 1992, two weeks after the fire, Willingham was riding in a car with Stacy when swat teams surrounded them, forcing them to the side of the road. “They pulled guns out like we had just robbed ten banks,” Stacy later recalled. “All we heard was ‘click, click.’ . . . Then they arrested him.”

Willingham was charged with murder. Because there were multiple victims, he was eligible for the death penalty, under Texas law. Unlike many other prosecutors in the state, Jackson, who had ambitions of becoming a judge, was personally opposed to capital punishment. “I don’t think it’s effective in deterring criminals,” he told me. “I just don’t think it works.” He also considered it wasteful: because of the expense of litigation and the appeals process, it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas—about three times the cost of incarcerating someone for forty years. Plus, Jackson said, “What’s the recourse if you make a mistake?” Yet his boss, Batchelor, believed that, as he once put it, “certain people who commit bad enough crimes give up the right to live,” and Jackson came to agree that the heinous nature of the crime in the Willingham case—“one of the worst in terms of body count” that he had ever tried—mandated death.

Willingham couldn’t afford to hire lawyers, and was assigned two by the state: David Martin, a former state trooper, and Robert Dunn, a local defense attorney who represented everyone from alleged murderers to spouses in divorce cases—a “Jack-of-all-trades,” as he calls himself. (“In a small town, you can’t say ‘I’m a so-and-so lawyer,’ because you’ll starve to death,” he told me.)

The Willingham family in the days before Christmas, 1991

Not long after Willingham’s arrest, authorities received a message from a prison inmate named Johnny Webb, who was in the same jail as Willingham. Webb alleged that Willingham had confessed to him that he took “some kind of lighter fluid, squirting [it] around the walls and the floor, and set a fire.” The case against Willingham was considered airtight.

Even so, several of Stacy’s relatives—who, unlike her, believed that Willingham was guilty—told Jackson that they preferred to avoid the anguish of a trial. And so, shortly before jury selection, Jackson approached Willingham’s attorneys with an extraordinary offer: if their client pleaded guilty, the state would give him a life sentence. “I was really happy when I thought we might have a deal to avoid the death penalty,” Jackson recalls.

Willingham’s lawyers were equally pleased. They had little doubt that he had committed the murders and that, if the case went before a jury, he would be found guilty, and, subsequently, executed. “Everyone thinks defense lawyers must believe their clients are innocent, but that’s seldom true,” Martin told me. “Most of the time, they’re guilty as sin.” He added of Willingham, “All the evidence showed that he was one hundred per cent guilty. He poured accelerant all over the house and put lighter fluid under the kids’ beds.” It was, he said, “a classic arson case”: there were “puddle patterns all over the place—no disputing those.”

Martin and Dunn advised Willingham that he should accept the offer, but he refused. The lawyers asked his father and stepmother to speak to him. According to Eugenia, Martin showed them photographs of the burned children and said, “Look what your son did. You got to talk him into pleading, or he’s going to be executed.”

His parents went to see their son in jail. Though his father did not believe that he should plead guilty if he were innocent, his stepmother beseeched him to take the deal. “I just wanted to keep my boy alive,” she told me.

Willingham was implacable. “I ain’t gonna plead to something I didn’t do, especially killing my own kids,” he said. It was his final decision. Martin says, “I thought it was nuts at the time—and I think it’s nuts now.”

Willingham’s refusal to accept the deal confirmed the view of the prosecution, and even that of his defense lawyers, that he was an unrepentant killer.

In August, 1992, the trial commenced in the old stone courthouse in downtown Corsicana. Jackson and a team of prosecutors summoned a procession of witnesses, including Johnny Webb and the Barbees. The crux of the state’s case, though, remained the scientific evidence gathered by Vasquez and Fogg. On the stand, Vasquez detailed what he called more than “twenty indicators” of arson.

“Do you have an opinion as to who started the fire?” one of the prosecutors asked.

“Yes, sir,” Vasquez said. “Mr. Willingham.”

The prosecutor asked Vasquez what he thought Willingham’s intent was in lighting the fire. “To kill the little girls,” he said.

The defense had tried to find a fire expert to counter Vasquez and Fogg’s testimony, but the one they contacted concurred with the prosecution. Ultimately, the defense presented only one witness to the jury: the Willinghams’ babysitter, who said she could not believe that Willingham could have killed his children. (Dunn told me that Willingham had wanted to testify, but Martin and Dunn thought that he would make a bad witness.) The trial ended after two days.

During his closing arguments, Jackson said that the puddle configurations and pour patterns were Willingham’s inadvertent “confession,” burned into the floor. Showing a Bible that had been salvaged from the fire, Jackson paraphrased the words of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew: “Whomsoever shall harm one of my children, it’s better for a millstone to be hung around his neck and for him to be cast in the sea.”

The jury was out for barely an hour before returning with a unanimous guilty verdict. As Vasquez put it, “The fire does not lie.”

II

When Elizabeth Gilbert approached the prison guard, on a spring day in 1999, and said Cameron Todd Willingham’s name, she was uncertain about what she was doing. A forty-seven-year-old French teacher and playwright from Houston, Gilbert was divorced with two children. She had never visited a prison before. Several weeks earlier, a friend, who worked at an organization that opposed the death penalty, had encouraged her to volunteer as a pen pal for an inmate on death row, and Gilbert had offered her name and address. Not long after, a short letter, written with unsteady penmanship, arrived from Willingham. “If you wish to write back, I would be honored to correspond with you,” he said. He also asked if she might visit him. Perhaps out of a writer’s curiosity, or perhaps because she didn’t feel quite herself (she had just been upset by news that her ex-husband was dying of cancer), she agreed. Now she was standing in front of the decrepit penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas—a place that inmates referred to as “the death pit.”

She filed past a razor-wire fence, a series of floodlights, and a checkpoint, where she was patted down, until she entered a small chamber. Only a few feet in front of her was a man convicted of multiple infanticide. He was wearing a white jumpsuit with “DR”—for death row—printed on the back, in large black letters. He had a tattoo of a serpent and a skull on his left biceps. He stood nearly six feet tall and was muscular, though his legs had atrophied after years of confinement.

A Plexiglas window separated Willingham from her; still, Gilbert, who had short brown hair and a bookish manner, stared at him uneasily. Willingham had once fought another prisoner who called him a “baby killer,” and since he had been incarcerated, seven years earlier, he had committed a series of disciplinary infractions that had periodically landed him in the segregation unit, which was known as “the dungeon.”

Willingham greeted her politely. He seemed grateful that she had come. After his conviction, Stacy had campaigned for his release. She wrote to Ann Richards, then the governor of Texas, saying, “I know him in ways that no one else does when it comes to our children. Therefore, I believe that there is no way he could have possibly committed this crime.” But within a year Stacy had filed for divorce, and Willingham had few visitors except for his parents, who drove from Oklahoma to see him once a month. “I really have no one outside my parents to remind me that I am a human being, not the animal the state professes I am,” he told Gilbert at one point.

He didn’t want to talk about death row. “Hell, I live here,” he later wrote her. “When I have a visit, I want to escape from here.” He asked her questions about her teaching and art. He expressed fear that, as a playwright, she might find him a “one-dimensional character,” and apologized for lacking social graces; he now had trouble separating the mores in prison from those of the outside world.

The aftermath of the fire on December 23, 1991

Photograph from Texas State Fire Marshal’s Office

When Gilbert asked him if he wanted something to eat or drink from the vending machines, he declined. “I hope I did not offend you by not accepting any snacks,” he later wrote her. “I didn’t want you to feel I was there just for something like that.”

She had been warned that prisoners often tried to con visitors. He appeared to realize this, subsequently telling her, “I am just a simple man. Nothing else. And to most other people a convicted killer looking for someone to manipulate.”

Their visit lasted for two hours, and afterward they continued to correspond. She was struck by his letters, which seemed introspective, and were not at all what she had expected. “I am a very honest person with my feelings,” he wrote her. “I will not bullshit you on how I feel or what I think.” He said that he used to be stoic, like his father. But, he added, “losing my three daughters . . . my home, wife and my life, you tend to wake up a little. I have learned to open myself.”

She agreed to visit him again, and when she returned, several weeks later, he was visibly moved. “Here I am this person who nobody on the outside is ever going to know as a human, who has lost so much, but still trying to hold on,” he wrote her afterward. “But you came back! I don’t think you will ever know of what importance that visit was in my existence.”

They kept exchanging letters, and she began asking him about the fire. He insisted that he was innocent and that, if someone had poured accelerant through the house and lit it, then the killer remained free. Gilbert wasn’t naïve—she assumed that he was guilty. She did not mind giving him solace, but she was not there to absolve him.

Still, she had become curious about the case, and one day that fall she drove down to the courthouse in Corsicana to review the trial records. Many people in the community remembered the tragedy, and a clerk expressed bewilderment that anyone would be interested in a man who had burned his children alive.

Gilbert took the files and sat down at a small table. As she examined the eyewitness accounts, she noticed several contradictions. Diane Barbee had reported that, before the authorities arrived at the fire, Willingham never tried to get back into the house—yet she had been absent for some time while calling the Fire Department. Meanwhile, her daughter Buffie had reported witnessing Willingham on the porch breaking a window, in an apparent effort to reach his children. And the firemen and police on the scene had described Willingham frantically trying to get into the house.

The witnesses’ testimony also grew more damning after authorities had concluded, in the beginning of January, 1992, that Willingham was likely guilty of murder. In Diane Barbee’s initial statement to authorities, she had portrayed Willingham as “hysterical,” and described the front of the house exploding. But on January 4th, after arson investigators began suspecting Willingham of murder, Barbee suggested that he could have gone back inside to rescue his children, for at the outset she had seen only “smoke coming from out of the front of the house”—smoke that was not “real thick.”

An even starker shift occurred with Father Monaghan’s testimony. In his first statement, he had depicted Willingham as a devastated father who had to be repeatedly restrained from risking his life. Yet, as investigators were preparing to arrest Willingham, he concluded that Willingham had been too emotional (“He seemed to have the type of distress that a woman who had given birth would have upon seeing her children die”); and he expressed a “gut feeling” that Willingham had “something to do with the setting of the fire.”

Dozens of studies have shown that witnesses’ memories of events often change when they are supplied with new contextual information. Itiel Dror, a cognitive psychologist who has done extensive research on eyewitness and expert testimony in criminal investigations, told me, “The mind is not a passive machine. Once you believe in something—once you expect something—it changes the way you perceive information and the way your memory recalls it.”

After Gilbert’s visit to the courthouse, she kept wondering about Willingham’s motive, and she pressed him on the matter. In response, he wrote, of the death of his children, “I do not talk about it much anymore and it is still a very powerfully emotional pain inside my being.” He admitted that he had been a “sorry-ass husband” who had hit Stacy—something he deeply regretted. But he said that he had loved his children and would never have hurt them. Fatherhood, he said, had changed him; he stopped being a hoodlum and “settled down” and “became a man.” Nearly three months before the fire, he and Stacy, who had never married, wed at a small ceremony in his home town of Ardmore. He said that the prosecution had seized upon incidents from his past and from the day of the fire to create a portrait of a “demon,” as Jackson, the prosecutor, referred to him. For instance, Willingham said, he had moved the car during the fire simply because he didn’t want it to explode by the house, further threatening the children.

Gilbert was unsure what to make of his story, and she began to approach people who were involved in the case, asking them questions. “My friends thought I was crazy,” Gilbert recalls. “I’d never done anything like this in my life.”

One morning, when Willingham’s parents came to visit him, Gilbert arranged to see them first, at a coffee shop near the prison. Gene, who was in his seventies, had the Willingham look, though his black hair had gray streaks and his dark eyes were magnified by glasses. Eugenia, who was in her fifties, with silvery hair, was as sweet and talkative as her husband was stern and reserved. The drive from Oklahoma to Texas took six hours, and they had woken at three in the morning; because they could not afford a motel, they would have to return home later that day. “I feel like a real burden to them,” Willingham had written Gilbert.

As Gene and Eugenia sipped coffee, they told Gilbert how grateful they were that someone had finally taken an interest in Todd’s case. Gene said that his son, though he had flaws, was no killer.

The evening before the fire, Eugenia said, she had spoken on the phone with Todd. She and Gene were planning on visiting two days later, on Christmas Eve, and Todd told her that he and Stacy and the kids had just picked up family photographs. “He said, ‘We got your pictures for Christmas,’ “ she recalled. “He put Amber on the phone, and she was tattling on one of the twins. Todd didn’t seem upset. If something was bothering him, I would have known.”

The aftermath of the fire on December 23, 1991

Photograph from Texas State Fire Marshal’s Office

Gene and Eugenia got up to go: they didn’t want to miss any of the four hours that were allotted for the visit with their son. Before they left, Gene said, “You’ll let us know if you find anything, won’t you?”

Over the next few weeks, Gilbert continued to track down sources. Many of them, including the Barbees, remained convinced that Willingham was guilty, but several of his friends and relatives had doubts. So did some people in law enforcement. Willingham’s former probation officer in Oklahoma, Polly Goodin, recently told me that Willingham had never demonstrated bizarre or sociopathic behavior. “He was probably one of my favorite kids,” she said. Even a former judge named Bebe Bridges—who had often stood, as she put it, on the “opposite side” of Willingham in the legal system, and who had sent him to jail for stealing—told me that she could not imagine him killing his children. “He was polite, and he seemed to care,” she said. “His convictions had been for dumb-kid stuff. Even the things stolen weren’t significant.” Several months before the fire, Willingham tracked Goodin down at her office, and proudly showed her photographs of Stacy and the kids. “He wanted Bebe and me to know he’d been doing good,” Goodin recalled.

Eventually, Gilbert returned to Corsicana to interview Stacy, who had agreed to meet at the bed-and-breakfast where Gilbert was staying. Stacy was slightly plump, with pale, round cheeks and feathered dark-blond hair; her bangs were held in place by gel, and her face was heavily made up. According to a tape recording of the conversation, Stacy said that nothing unusual had happened in the days before the fire. She and Willingham had not fought, and were preparing for the holiday. Though Vasquez, the arson expert, had recalled finding the space heater off, Stacy was sure that, at least on the day of the incident—a cool winter morning—it had been on. “I remember turning it down,” she recalled. “I always thought, Gosh, could Amber have put something in there?” Stacy added that, more than once, she had caught Amber “putting things too close to it.”

Willingham had often not treated her well, she recalled, and after his incarceration she had left him for a man who did. But she didn’t think that her former husband should be on death row. “I don’t think he did it,” she said, crying.

Though only the babysitter had appeared as a witness for the defense during the main trial, several family members, including Stacy, testified during the penalty phase, asking the jury to spare Willingham’s life. When Stacy was on the stand, Jackson grilled her about the “significance” of Willingham’s “very large tattoo of a skull, encircled by some kind of a serpent.”

“It’s just a tattoo,” Stacy responded.

“He just likes skulls and snakes. Is that what you’re saying?”

“No. He just had—he got a tattoo on him.”

The prosecution cited such evidence in asserting that Willingham fit the profile of a sociopath, and brought forth two medical experts to confirm the theory. Neither had met Willingham. One of them was Tim Gregory, a psychologist with a master’s degree in marriage and family issues, who had previously gone goose hunting with Jackson, and had not published any research in the field of sociopathic behavior. His practice was devoted to family counselling.

At one point, Jackson showed Gregory Exhibit No. 60—a photograph of an Iron Maiden poster that had hung in Willingham’s house—and asked the psychologist to interpret it. “This one is a picture of a skull, with a fist being punched through the skull,” Gregory said; the image displayed “violence” and “death.” Gregory looked at photographs of other music posters owned by Willingham. “There’s a hooded skull, with wings and a hatchet,” Gregory continued. “And all of these are in fire, depicting—it reminds me of something like Hell. And there’s a picture—a Led Zeppelin picture of a falling angel. . . . I see there’s an association many times with cultive-type of activities. A focus on death, dying. Many times individuals that have a lot of this type of art have interest in satanic-type activities.”

The other medical expert was James P. Grigson, a forensic psychiatrist. He testified so often for the prosecution in capital-punishment cases that he had become known as Dr. Death. (A Texas appellate judge once wrote that when Grigson appeared on the stand the defendant might as well “commence writing out his last will and testament.”) Grigson suggested that Willingham was an “extremely severe sociopath,” and that “no pill” or treatment could help him. Grigson had previously used nearly the same words in helping to secure a death sentence against Randall Dale Adams, who had been convicted of murdering a police officer, in 1977. After Adams, who had no prior criminal record, spent a dozen years on death row—and once came within seventy-two hours of being executed—new evidence emerged that absolved him, and he was released. In 1995, three years after Willingham’s trial, Grigson was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association for violating ethics. The association stated that Grigson had repeatedly arrived at a “psychiatric diagnosis without first having examined the individuals in question, and for indicating, while testifying in court as an expert witness, that he could predict with 100-per-cent certainty that the individuals would engage in future violent acts.”

After speaking to Stacy, Gilbert had one more person she wanted to interview: the jailhouse informant Johnny Webb, who was incarcerated in Iowa Park, Texas. She wrote to Webb, who said that she could see him, and they met in the prison visiting room. A man in his late twenties, he had pallid skin and a closely shaved head; his eyes were jumpy, and his entire body seemed to tremble. A reporter who once met him described him to me as “nervous as a cat around rocking chairs.” Webb had begun taking drugs when he was nine years old, and had been convicted of, among other things, car theft, selling marijuana, forgery, and robbery.

As Gilbert chatted with him, she thought that he seemed paranoid. During Willingham’s trial, Webb disclosed that he had been given a diagnosis of “post-traumatic stress disorder” after he was sexually assaulted in prison, in 1988, and that he often suffered from “mental impairment.” Under cross-examination, Webb testified that he had no recollection of a robbery that he had pleaded guilty to only months earlier.

Johnny Webb claimed that Willingham confessed to him in prison.

Photograph by Alex Garcia / Chicago Tribune

Webb repeated for her what he had said in court: he had passed by Willingham’s cell, and as they spoke through a food slot Willingham broke down and told him that he intentionally set the house on fire. Gilbert was dubious. It was hard to believe that Willingham, who had otherwise insisted on his innocence, had suddenly confessed to an inmate he barely knew. The conversation had purportedly taken place by a speaker system that allowed any of the guards to listen—an unlikely spot for an inmate to reveal a secret. What’s more, Webb alleged that Willingham had told him that Stacy had hurt one of the kids, and that the fire was set to cover up the crime. The autopsies, however, had revealed no bruises or signs of trauma on the children’s bodies.

Jailhouse informants, many of whom are seeking reduced time or special privileges, are notoriously unreliable. According to a 2004 study by the Center on Wrongful Convictions, at Northwestern University Law School, lying police and jailhouse informants are the leading cause of wrongful convictions in capital cases in the United States. At the time that Webb came forward against Willingham, he was facing charges of robbery and forgery. During Willingham’s trial, another inmate planned to testify that he had overheard Webb saying to another prisoner that he was hoping to “get time cut,” but the testimony was ruled inadmissible, because it was hearsay. Webb, who pleaded guilty to the robbery and forgery charges, received a sentence of fifteen years. Jackson, the prosecutor, told me that he generally considered Webb “an unreliable kind of guy,” but added, “I saw no real motive for him to make a statement like this if it wasn’t true. We didn’t cut him any slack.” In 1997, five years after Willingham’s trial, Jackson urged the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant Webb parole. “I asked them to cut him loose early,” Jackson told me. The reason, Jackson said, was that Webb had been targeted by the Aryan Brotherhood. The board granted Webb parole, but within months of his release he was caught with cocaine and returned to prison.

In March, 2000, several months after Gilbert’s visit, Webb unexpectedly sent Jackson a Motion to Recant Testimony, declaring, “Mr. Willingham is innocent of all charges.” But Willingham’s lawyer was not informed of this development, and soon afterward Webb, without explanation, recanted his recantation. When I recently asked Webb, who was released from prison two years ago, about the turnabout and why Willingham would have confessed to a virtual stranger, he said that he knew only what “the dude told me.” After I pressed him, he said, “It’s very possible I misunderstood what he said.” Since the trial, Webb has been given an additional diagnosis, bipolar disorder. “Being locked up in that little cell makes you kind of crazy,” he said. “My memory is in bits and pieces. I was on a lot of medication at the time. Everyone knew that.” He paused, then said, “The statute of limitations has run out on perjury, hasn’t it?”

Aside from the scientific evidence of arson, the case against Willingham did not stand up to scrutiny. Jackson, the prosecutor, said of Webb’s testimony, “You can take it or leave it.” Even the refrigerator’s placement by the back door of the house turned out to be innocuous; there were two refrigerators in the cramped kitchen, and one of them was by the back door. Jimmie Hensley, the police detective, and Douglas Fogg, the assistant fire chief, both of whom investigated the fire, told me recently that they had never believed that the fridge was part of the arson plot. “It didn’t have nothing to do with the fire,” Fogg said.

After months of investigating the case, Gilbert found that her faith in the prosecution was shaken. As she told me, “What if Todd really was innocent?”

III

In the summer of 1660, an Englishman named William Harrison vanished on a walk, near the village of Charingworth, in Gloucestershire. His bloodstained hat was soon discovered on the side of a local road. Police interrogated Harrison’s servant, John Perry, and eventually Perry gave a statement that his mother and his brother had killed Harrison for money. Perry, his mother, and his brother were hanged.

Two years later, Harrison reappeared. He insisted, fancifully, that he had been abducted by a band of criminals and sold into slavery. Whatever happened, one thing was indisputable: he had not been murdered by the Perrys.

The fear that an innocent person might be executed has long haunted jurors and lawyers and judges. During America’s Colonial period, dozens of crimes were punishable by death, including horse thievery, blasphemy, “man-stealing,” and highway robbery. After independence, the number of crimes eligible for the death penalty was gradually reduced, but doubts persisted over whether legal procedures were sufficient to prevent an innocent person from being executed. In 1868, John Stuart Mill made one of the most eloquent defenses of capital punishment, arguing that executing a murderer did not display a wanton disregard for life but, rather, proof of its value. “We show, on the contrary, most emphatically our regard for it by the adoption of a rule that he who violates that right in another forfeits it for himself,” he said. For Mill, there was one counterargument that carried weight—“that if by an error of justice an innocent person is put to death, the mistake can never be corrected.”

The modern legal system, with its lengthy appeals process and clemency boards, was widely assumed to protect the kind of “error of justice” that Mill feared. In 2000, while George W. Bush was governor of Texas, he said, “I know there are some in the country who don’t care for the death penalty, but . . . we’ve adequately answered innocence or guilt.” His top policy adviser on issues of criminal justice emphasized that there is “super due process to make sure that no innocent defendants are executed.”

In recent years, though, questions have mounted over whether the system is fail-safe. Since 1976, more than a hundred and thirty people on death row have been exonerated. DNA testing, which was developed in the eighties, saved seventeen of them, but the technique can be used only in rare instances. Barry Scheck, a co-founder of the Innocence Project, which has used DNA testing to exonerate prisoners, estimates that about eighty per cent of felonies do not involve biological evidence.

In 2000, after thirteen people on death row in Illinois were exonerated, George Ryan, who was then governor of the state, suspended the death penalty. Though he had been a longtime advocate of capital punishment, he declared that he could no longer support a system that has “come so close to the ultimate nightmare—the state’s taking of innocent life.” Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has said that the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person would be a constitutionally intolerable event.”

Such a case has become a kind of grisly Holy Grail among opponents of capital punishment. In his 2002 book “The Death Penalty,” Stuart Banner observes, “The prospect of killing an innocent person seemed to be the one thing that could cause people to rethink their support for capital punishment. Some who were not troubled by statistical arguments against the death penalty—claims about deterrence or racial disparities—were deeply troubled that such an extreme injustice might occur in an individual case.” Opponents of the death penalty have pointed to several questionable cases. In 1993, Ruben Cantu was executed in Texas for fatally shooting a man during a robbery. Years later, a second victim, who survived the shooting, told the Houston Chronicle that he had been pressured by police to identify Cantu as the gunman, even though he believed Cantu to be innocent. Sam Millsap, the district attorney in the case, who had once supported capital punishment (“I’m no wild-eyed, pointy-headed liberal”), said that he was disturbed by the thought that he had made a mistake.

In 1995, Larry Griffin was put to death in Missouri, for a drive-by shooting of a drug dealer. The case rested largely on the eyewitness testimony of a career criminal named Robert Fitzgerald, who had been an informant for prosecutors before and was in the witness-protection program. Fitzgerald maintained that he happened to be at the scene because his car had broken down. After Griffin’s execution, a probe sponsored by the N.A.A.C.P.’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund revealed that a man who had been wounded during the incident insisted that Griffin was not the shooter. Moreover, the first police officer at the scene disputed that Fitzgerald had witnessed the crime.

These cases, however, stopped short of offering irrefutable proof that a “legally and factually innocent person” was executed. In 2005, a St. Louis prosecutor, Jennifer Joyce, launched an investigation of the Griffin case, upon being presented with what she called “compelling” evidence of Griffin’s potential innocence. After two years of reviewing the evidence, and interviewing a new eyewitness, Joyce said that she and her team were convinced that the “right person was convicted.”

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in 2006, voted with a majority to uphold the death penalty in a Kansas case. In his opinion, Scalia declared that, in the modern judicial system, there has not been “a single case—not one—in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.”

“My problems are simple,” Willingham wrote Gilbert in September, 1999. “Try to keep them from killing me at all costs. End of story.”

During his first years on death row, Willingham had pleaded with his lawyer, David Martin, to rescue him. “You can’t imagine what it’s like to be here, with people I have no business even being around,” he wrote.

For a while, Willingham shared a cell with Ricky Lee Green, a serial killer, who castrated and fatally stabbed his victims, including a sixteen-year-old boy. (Green was executed in 1997.) Another of Willingham’s cellmates, who had an I.Q. below seventy and the emotional development of an eight-year-old, was raped by an inmate. “You remember me telling you I had a new celly?” Willingham wrote in a letter to his parents. “The little retarded boy. . . . There was this guy here on the wing who is a shit sorry coward (who is the same one I got into it with a little over a month ago). Well, he raped [my cellmate] in the 3 row shower week before last.” Willingham said that he couldn’t believe that someone would “rape a boy who cannot even defend himself. Pretty damn low.”

Because Willingham was known as a “baby killer,” he was a target of attacks. “Prison is a rough place, and with a case like mine they never give you the benefit of a doubt,” he wrote his parents. After he tried to fight one prisoner who threatened him, Willingham told a friend that if he hadn’t stood up for himself several inmates would have “beaten me up or raped or”—his thought trailed off.

Over the years, Willingham’s letters home became increasingly despairing. “This is a hard place, and it makes a person hard inside,” he wrote. “I told myself that was one thing I did not want and that was for this place to make me bitter, but it is hard.” He went on, “They have [executed] at least one person every month I have been here. It is senseless and brutal. . . . You see, we are not living in here, we are only existing.” In 1996, he wrote, “I just been trying to figure out why after having a wife and 3 beautiful children that I loved my life has to end like this. And sometimes it just seems like it is not worth it all. . . . In the 3 1/2 years I been here I have never felt that my life was as worthless and desolate as it is now.” Since the fire, he wrote, he had the sense that his life was slowly being erased. He obsessively looked at photographs of his children and Stacy, which he stored in his cell. “So long ago, so far away,” he wrote in a poem. “Was everything truly there?”

Inmates on death row are housed in a prison within a prison, where there are no attempts at rehabilitation, and no educational or training programs. In 1999, after seven prisoners tried to escape from Huntsville, Willingham and four hundred and fifty-nine other inmates on death row were moved to a more secure facility, in Livingston, Texas. Willingham was held in isolation in a sixty-square-foot cell, twenty-three hours a day. He tried to distract himself by drawing—“amateur stuff,” as he put it—and writing poems. In a poem about his children, he wrote, “There is nothing more beautiful than you on this earth.” When Gilbert once suggested some possible revisions to his poems, he explained that he wrote them simply as expressions, however crude, of his feelings. “So to me to cut them up and try to improve on them just for creative-writing purposes would be to destroy what I was doing to start with,” he said.

Despite his efforts to occupy his thoughts, he wrote in his diary that his mind “deteriorates each passing day.” He stopped working out and gained weight. He questioned his faith: “No God who cared about his creation would abandon the innocent.” He seemed not to care if another inmate attacked him. “A person who is already dead inside does not fear” death, he wrote.

One by one, the people he knew in prison were escorted into the execution chamber. There was Clifton Russell, Jr., who, at the age of eighteen, stabbed and beat a man to death, and who said, in his last statement, “I thank my Father, God in Heaven, for the grace he has granted me—I am ready.” There was Jeffery Dean Motley, who kidnapped and fatally shot a woman, and who declared, in his final words, “I love you, Mom. Goodbye.” And there was John Fearance, who murdered his neighbor, and who turned to God in his last moments and said, “I hope He will forgive me for what I done.”

Willingham had grown close to some of his prison mates, even though he knew that they were guilty of brutal crimes. In March, 2000, Willingham’s friend Ponchai Wilkerson—a twenty-eight-year-old who had shot and killed a clerk during a jewelry heist—was executed. Afterward, Willingham wrote in his diary that he felt “an emptiness that has not been touched since my children were taken from me.” A year later, another friend who was about to be executed—“one of the few real people I have met here not caught up in the bravado of prison”—asked Willingham to make him a final drawing. “Man, I never thought drawing a simple Rose could be so emotionally hard,” Willingham wrote. “The hard part is knowing that this will be the last thing I can do for him.”

Another inmate, Ernest Ray Willis, had a case that was freakishly similar to Willingham’s. In 1987, Willis had been convicted of setting a fire, in West Texas, that killed two women. Willis told investigators that he had been sleeping on a friend’s living-room couch and woke up to a house full of smoke. He said that he tried to rouse one of the women, who was sleeping in another room, but the flames and smoke drove him back, and he ran out the front door before the house exploded with flames. Witnesses maintained that Willis had acted suspiciously; he moved his car out of the yard, and didn’t show “any emotion,” as one volunteer firefighter put it. Authorities also wondered how Willis could have escaped the house without burning his bare feet. Fire investigators found pour patterns, puddle configurations, and other signs of arson. The authorities could discern no motive for the crime, but concluded that Willis, who had no previous record of violence, was a sociopath—a “demon,” as the prosecutor put it. Willis was charged with capital murder and sentenced to death.

Willis had eventually obtained what Willingham called, enviously, a “bad-ass lawyer.” James Blank, a noted patent attorney in New York, was assigned Willis’s case as part of his firm’s pro-bono work. Convinced that Willis was innocent, Blank devoted more than a dozen years to the case, and his firm spent millions, on fire consultants, private investigators, forensic experts, and the like. Willingham, meanwhile, relied on David Martin, his court-appointed lawyer, and one of Martin’s colleagues to handle his appeals. Willingham often told his parents, “You don’t know what it’s like to have lawyers who won’t even believe you’re innocent.” Like many inmates on death row, Willingham eventually filed a claim of inadequate legal representation. (When I recently asked Martin about his representation of Willingham, he said, “There were no grounds for reversal, and the verdict was absolutely the right one.” He said of the case, “Shit, it’s incredible that anyone’s even thinking about it.”)

Willingham tried to study the law himself, reading books such as “Tact in Court, or How Lawyers Win: Containing Sketches of Cases Won by Skill, Wit, Art, Tact, Courage and Eloquence.” Still, he confessed to a friend, “The law is so complicated it is hard for me to understand.” In 1996, he obtained a new court-appointed lawyer, Walter Reaves, who told me that he was appalled by the quality of Willingham’s defense at trial and on appeal. Reaves prepared for him a state writ of habeas corpus, known as a Great Writ. In the byzantine appeals process of death-penalty cases, which frequently takes more than ten years, the writ is the most critical stage: a prisoner can introduce new evidence detailing such things as perjured testimony, unreliable medical experts, and bogus scientific findings. Yet most indigent inmates, like Willingham, who constitute the bulk of those on death row, lack the resources to track down new witnesses or dig up fresh evidence. They must depend on court-appointed lawyers, many of whom are “unqualified, irresponsible, or overburdened,” as a study by the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit organization, put it. In 2000, a Dallas Morning News investigation revealed that roughly a quarter of the inmates condemned to death in Texas were represented by court-appointed attorneys who had, at some point in their careers, been “reprimanded, placed on probation, suspended or banned from practicing law by the State Bar.” Although Reaves was more competent, he had few resources to reinvestigate the case, and his writ introduced no new exculpatory evidence: nothing further about Webb, or the reliability of the eyewitness testimony, or the credibility of the medical experts. It focussed primarily on procedural questions, such as whether the trial court erred in its instructions to the jury.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was known for upholding convictions even when overwhelming exculpatory evidence came to light. In 1997, DNA testing proved that sperm collected from a rape victim did not match Roy Criner, who had been sentenced to ninety-nine years for the crime. Two lower courts recommended that the verdict be overturned, but the Court of Criminal Appeals upheld it, arguing that Criner might have worn a condom or might not have ejaculated. Sharon Keller, who is now the presiding judge on the court, stated in a majority opinion, “The new evidence does not establish innocence.” In 2000, George W. Bush pardoned Criner. (Keller was recently charged with judicial misconduct, for refusing to keep open past five o’clock a clerk’s office in order to allow a last-minute petition from a man who was executed later that night.)

On October 31, 1997, the Court of Criminal Appeals denied Willingham’s writ. After Willingham filed another writ of habeas corpus, this time in federal court, he was granted a temporary stay. In a poem, Willingham wrote, “One more chance, one more strike / Another bullet dodged, another date escaped.”

Willingham was entering his final stage of appeals. As his anxieties mounted, he increasingly relied upon Gilbert to investigate his case and for emotional support. “She may never know what a change she brought into my life,” he wrote in his diary. “For the first time in many years she gave me a purpose, something to look forward to.”

As their friendship deepened, he asked her to promise him that she would never disappear without explanation. “I already have that in my life,” he told her.

Together, they pored over clues and testimony. Gilbert says that she would send Reaves leads to follow up, but although he was sympathetic, nothing seemed to come of them. In 2002, a federal district court of appeals denied Willingham’s writ without even a hearing. “Now I start the last leg of my journey,” Willingham wrote to Gilbert. “Got to get things in order.”

He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in December, 2003, he was notified that it had declined to hear his case. He soon received a court order announcing that “the Director of the Department of Criminal Justice at Huntsville, Texas, acting by and through the executioner designated by said Director . . . is hereby directed and commanded, at some hour after 6:00 p.m. on the 17th day of February, 2004, at the Department of Criminal Justice in Huntsville, Texas, to carry out this sentence of death by intravenous injection of a substance or substances in a lethal quantity sufficient to cause the death of said Cameron Todd Willingham.”

Willingham wrote a letter to his parents. “Are you sitting down?” he asked, before breaking the news. “I love you both so much,” he said.

His only remaining recourse was to appeal to the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, a Republican, for clemency. The process, considered the last gatekeeper to the executioner, has been called by the U.S. Supreme Court “the ‘fail safe’ in our criminal justice system.”

IV

One day in January, 2004, Dr. Gerald Hurst, an acclaimed scientist and fire investigator, received a file describing all the evidence of arson gathered in Willingham’s case. Gilbert had come across Hurst’s name and, along with one of Willingham’s relatives, had contacted him, seeking his help. After their pleas, Hurst had agreed to look at the case pro bono, and Reaves, Willingham’s lawyer, had sent him the relevant documents, in the hope that there were grounds for clemency.

Hurst opened the file in the basement of his house in Austin, which served as a laboratory and an office, and was cluttered with microscopes and diagrams of half-finished experiments. Hurst was nearly six and half feet tall, though his stooped shoulders made him seem considerably shorter, and he had a gaunt face that was partly shrouded by long gray hair. He was wearing his customary outfit: black shoes, black socks, a black T-shirt, and loose-fitting black pants supported by black suspenders. In his mouth was a wad of chewing tobacco.

A child prodigy who was raised by a sharecropper during the Great Depression, Hurst used to prowl junk yards, collecting magnets and copper wires in order to build radios and other contraptions. In the early sixties, he received a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cambridge University, where he started to experiment with fluorine and other explosive chemicals, and once detonated his lab. Later, he worked as the chief scientist on secret weapons programs for several American companies, designing rockets and deadly fire bombs—or what he calls “god-awful things.” He helped patent what has been described, with only slight exaggeration, as “the world’s most powerful nonnuclear explosive”: an Astrolite bomb. He experimented with toxins so lethal that a fraction of a drop would rot human flesh, and in his laboratory he often had to wear a pressurized moon suit; despite such precautions, exposure to chemicals likely caused his liver to fail, and in 1994 he required a transplant. Working on what he calls “the dark side of arson,” he retrofitted napalm bombs with Astrolite, and developed ways for covert operatives in Vietnam to create bombs from local materials, such as chicken manure and sugar. He also perfected a method for making an exploding T-shirt by nitrating its fibres.

His conscience eventually began pricking him. “One day, you wonder, What the hell am I doing?” he recalls. He left the defense industry, and went on to invent the Mylar balloon, an improved version of Liquid Paper, and Kinepak, a kind of explosive that reduces the risk of accidental detonation. Because of his extraordinary knowledge of fire and explosives, companies in civil litigation frequently sought his help in determining the cause of a blaze. By the nineties, Hurst had begun devoting significant time to criminal-arson cases, and, as he was exposed to the methods of local and state fire investigators, he was shocked by what he saw.

Many arson investigators, it turned out, had only a high-school education. In most states, in order to be certified, investigators had to take a forty-hour course on fire investigation, and pass a written exam. Often, the bulk of an investigator’s training came on the job, learning from “old-timers” in the field, who passed down a body of wisdom about the telltale signs of arson, even though a study in 1977 warned that there was nothing in “the scientific literature to substantiate their validity.”

In 1992, the National Fire Protection Association, which promotes fire prevention and safety, published its first scientifically based guidelines to arson investigation. Still, many arson investigators believed that what they did was more an art than a science—a blend of experience and intuition. In 1997, the International Association of Arson Investigators filed a legal brief arguing that arson sleuths should not be bound by a 1993 Supreme Court decision requiring experts who testified at trials to adhere to the scientific method. What arson sleuths did, the brief claimed, was “less scientific.” By 2000, after the courts had rejected such claims, arson investigators increasingly recognized the scientific method, but there remained great variance in the field, with many practitioners still relying on the unverified techniques that had been used for generations. “People investigated fire largely with a flat-earth approach,” Hurst told me. “It looks like arson—therefore, it’s arson.” He went on, “My view is you have to have a scientific basis. Otherwise, it’s no different than witch-hunting.”

In 1998, Hurst investigated the case of a woman from North Carolina named Terri Hinson, who was charged with setting a fire that killed her seventeen-month-old son, and faced the death penalty. Hurst ran a series of experiments re-creating the conditions of the fire, which suggested that it had not been arson, as the investigators had claimed; rather, it had started accidentally, from a faulty electrical wire in the attic. Because of this research, Hinson was freed. John Lentini, a fire expert and the author of a leading scientific textbook on arson, describes Hurst as “brilliant.” A Texas prosecutor once told the Chicago Tribune,of Hurst, “If he says it was an arson fire, then it was. If he says it wasn’t, then it wasn’t.”

Hurst’s patents yielded considerable royalties, and he could afford to work pro bono on an arson case for months, even years. But he received the files on Willingham’s case only a few weeks before Willingham was scheduled to be executed. As Hurst looked through the case records, a statement by Manuel Vasquez, the state deputy fire marshal, jumped out at him. Vasquez had testified that, of the roughly twelve hundred to fifteen hundred fires he had investigated, “most all of them” were arson. This was an oddly high estimate; the Texas State Fire Marshals Office typically found arson in only fifty per cent of its cases.

Hurst was also struck by Vasquez’s claim that the Willingham blaze had “burned fast and hot” because of a liquid accelerant. The notion that a flammable or combustible liquid caused flames to reach higher temperatures had been repeated in court by arson sleuths for decades. Yet the theory was nonsense: experiments have proved that wood and gasoline-fuelled fires burn at essentially the same temperature.

Vasquez and Fogg had cited as proof of arson the fact that the front door’s aluminum threshold had melted. “The only thing that can cause that to react is an accelerant,” Vasquez said. Hurst was incredulous. A natural-wood fire can reach temperatures as high as two thousand degrees Fahrenheit—far hotter than the melting point for aluminum alloys, which ranges from a thousand to twelve hundred degrees. And, like many other investigators, Vasquez and Fogg mistakenly assumed that wood charring beneath the aluminum threshold was evidence that, as Vasquez put it, “a liquid accelerant flowed underneath and burned.” Hurst had conducted myriad experiments showing that such charring was caused simply by the aluminum conducting so much heat. In fact, when liquid accelerant is poured under a threshold a fire will extinguish, because of a lack of oxygen. (Other scientists had reached the same conclusion.) “Liquid accelerants can no more burn under an aluminum threshold than can grease burn in a skillet even with a loose-fitting lid,” Hurst declared in his report on the Willingham case.

Hurst then examined Fogg and Vasquez’s claim that the “brown stains” on Willingham’s front porch were evidence of “liquid accelerant,” which had not had time to soak into the concrete. Hurst had previously performed a test in his garage, in which he poured charcoal-lighter fluid on the concrete floor, and lit it. When the fire went out, there were no brown stains, only smudges of soot. Hurst had run the same experiment many times, with different kinds of liquid accelerants, and the result was always the same. Brown stains were common in fires; they were usually composed of rust or gunk from charred debris that had mixed with water from fire hoses.

Another crucial piece of evidence implicating Willingham was the “crazed glass” that Vasquez had attributed to the rapid heating from a fire fuelled with liquid accelerant. Yet, in November of 1991, a team of fire investigators had inspected fifty houses in the hills of Oakland, California, which had been ravaged by brush fires. In a dozen houses, the investigators discovered crazed glass, even though a liquid accelerant had not been used. Most of these houses were on the outskirts of the blaze, where firefighters had shot streams of water; as the investigators later wrote in a published study, they theorized that the fracturing had been induced by rapid cooling, rather than by sudden heating—thermal shock had caused the glass to contract so quickly that it settled disjointedly. The investigators then tested this hypothesis in a laboratory. When they heated glass, nothing happened. But each time they applied water to the heated glass the intricate patterns appeared. Hurst had seen the same phenomenon when he had blowtorched and cooled glass during his research at Cambridge. In his report, Hurst wrote that Vasquez and Fogg’s notion of crazed glass was no more than an “old wives’ tale.”

Hurst then confronted some of the most devastating arson evidence against Willingham: the burn trailer, the pour patterns and puddle configurations, the V-shape and other burn marks indicating that the fire had multiple points of origin, the burning underneath the children’s beds. There was also the positive test for mineral spirits by the front door, and Willingham’s seemingly implausible story that he had run out of the house without burning his bare feet.

As Hurst read through more of the files, he noticed that Willingham and his neighbors had described the windows in the front of the house suddenly exploding and flames roaring forth. It was then that Hurst thought of the legendary Lime Street Fire, one of the most pivotal in the history of arson investigation.

On the evening of October 15, 1990, a thirty-five-year-old man named Gerald Wayne Lewis was found standing in front of his house on Lime Street, in Jacksonville, Florida, holding his three-year-old son. His two-story wood-frame home was engulfed in flames. By the time the fire had been extinguished, six people were dead, including Lewis’s wife. Lewis said that he had rescued his son but was unable to get to the others, who were upstairs.

When fire investigators examined the scene, they found the classic signs of arson: low burns along the walls and floors, pour patterns and puddle configurations, and a burn trailer running from the living room into the hallway. Lewis claimed that the fire had started accidentally, on a couch in the living room—his son had been playing with matches. But a V-shaped pattern by one of the doors suggested that the fire had originated elsewhere. Some witnesses told authorities that Lewis seemed too calm during the fire and had never tried to get help. According to the Los Angeles Times, Lewis had previously been arrested for abusing his wife, who had taken out a restraining order against him. After a chemist said that he had detected the presence of gasoline on Lewis’s clothing and shoes, a report by the sheriff’s office concluded, “The fire was started as a result of a petroleum product being poured on the front porch, foyer, living room, stairwell and second floor bedroom.” Lewis was arrested and charged with six counts of murder. He faced the death penalty.

Subsequent tests, however, revealed that the laboratory identification of gasoline was wrong. Moreover, a local news television camera had captured Lewis in a clearly agitated state at the scene of the fire, and investigators discovered that at one point he had jumped in front of a moving car, asking the driver to call the Fire Department.

Seeking to bolster their theory of the crime, prosecutors turned to John Lentini, the fire expert, and John DeHaan, another leading investigator and textbook author. Despite some of the weaknesses of the case, Lentini told me that, given the classic burn patterns and puddle configurations in the house, he was sure that Lewis had set the fire: “I was prepared to testify and send this guy to Old Sparky”—the electric chair.

To discover the truth, the investigators, with the backing of the prosecution, decided to conduct an elaborate experiment and re-create the fire scene. Local officials gave the investigators permission to use a condemned house next to Lewis’s home, which was about to be torn down. The two houses were virtually identical, and the investigators refurbished the condemned one with the same kind of carpeting, curtains, and furniture that had been in Lewis’s home. The scientists also wired the building with heat and gas sensors that could withstand fire. The cost of the experiment came to twenty thousand dollars. Without using liquid accelerant, Lentini and DeHaan set the couch in the living room on fire, expecting that the experiment would demonstrate that Lewis’s version of events was implausible.

The investigators watched as the fire quickly consumed the couch, sending upward a plume of smoke that hit the ceiling and spread outward, creating a thick layer of hot gases overhead—an efficient radiator of heat. Within three minutes, this cloud, absorbing more gases from the fire below, was banking down the walls and filling the living room. As the cloud approached the floor, its temperature rose, in some areas, to more than eleven hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Suddenly, the entire room exploded in flames, as the radiant heat ignited every piece of furniture, every curtain, every possible fuel source, even the carpeting. The windows shattered.

The fire had reached what is called “flashover”—the point at which radiant heat causes a fire in a room to become a room on fire. Arson investigators knew about the concept of flashover, but it was widely believed to take much longer to occur, especially without a liquid accelerant. From a single fuel source—a couch—the room had reached flashover in four and a half minutes.

Because all the furniture in the living room had ignited, the blaze went from a fuel-controlled fire to a ventilation-controlled fire—or what scientists call “post-flashover.” During post-flashover, the path of the fire depends on new sources of oxygen, from an open door or window. One of the fire investigators, who had been standing by an open door in the living room, escaped moments before the oxygen-starved fire roared out of the room into the hallway—a fireball that caused the corridor to go quickly into flashover as well, propelling the fire out the front door and onto the porch.

After the fire was extinguished, the investigators inspected the hallway and living room. On the floor were irregularly shaped burn patterns that perfectly resembled pour patterns and puddle configurations. It turned out that these classic signs of arson can also appear on their own, after flashover. With the naked eye, it is impossible to distinguish between the pour patterns and puddle configurations caused by an accelerant and those caused naturally by post-flashover. The only reliable way to tell the difference is to take samples from the burn patterns and test them in a laboratory for the presence of flammable or combustible liquids.

During the Lime Street experiment, other things happened that were supposed to occur only in a fire fuelled by liquid accelerant: charring along the base of the walls and doorways, and burning under furniture. There was also a V-shaped pattern by the living-room doorway, far from where the fire had started on the couch. In a small fire, a V-shaped burn mark may pinpoint where a fire began, but during post-flashover these patterns can occur repeatedly, when various objects ignite.

One of the investigators muttered that they had just helped prove the defense’s case. Given the reasonable doubt raised by the experiment, the charges against Lewis were soon dropped. The Lime Street experiment had demolished prevailing notions about fire behavior. Subsequent tests by scientists showed that, during post-flashover, burning under beds and furniture was common, entire doors were consumed, and aluminum thresholds melted.

John Lentini says of the Lime Street Fire, “This was my epiphany. I almost sent a man to die based on theories that were a load of crap.”

Hurst next examined a floor plan of Willingham’s house that Vasquez had drawn, which delineated all the purported pour patterns and puddle configurations. Because the windows had blown out of the children’s room, Hurst knew that the fire had reached flashover. With his finger, Hurst traced along Vasquez’s diagram the burn trailer that had gone from the children’s room, turned right in the hallway, and headed out the front door. John Jackson, the prosecutor, had told me that the path was so “bizarre” that it had to have been caused by a liquid accelerant. But Hurst concluded that it was a natural product of the dynamics of fire during post-flashover. Willingham had fled out the front door, and the fire simply followed the ventilation path, toward the opening. Similarly, when Willingham had broken the windows in the children’s room, flames had shot outward.

Hurst recalled that Vasquez and Fogg had considered it impossible for Willingham to have run down the burning hallway without scorching his bare feet. But if the pour patterns and puddle configurations were a result of a flashover, Hurst reasoned, then they were consonant with Willingham’s explanation of events. When Willingham exited his bedroom, the hallway was not yet on fire; the flames were contained within the children’s bedroom, where, along the ceiling, he saw the “bright lights.” Just as the investigator safely stood by the door in the Lime Street experiment seconds before flashover, Willingham could have stood close to the children’s room without being harmed. (Prior to the Lime Street case, fire investigators had generally assumed that carbon monoxide diffuses quickly through a house during a fire. In fact, up until flashover, levels of carbon monoxide can be remarkably low beneath and outside the thermal cloud.) By the time the Corsicana fire achieved flashover, Willingham had already fled outside and was in the front yard.

Vasquez had made a videotape of the fire scene, and Hurst looked at the footage of the burn trailer. Even after repeated viewings, he could not detect three points of origin, as Vasquez had. (Fogg recently told me that he also saw a continuous trailer and disagreed with Vasquez, but added that nobody from the prosecution or the defense ever asked him on the stand about his opinion on the subject.)

After Hurst had reviewed Fogg and Vasquez’s list of more than twenty arson indicators, he believed that only one had any potential validity: the positive test for mineral spirits by the threshold of the front door. But why had the fire investigators obtained a positive reading only in that location? According to Fogg and Vasquez’s theory of the crime, Willingham had poured accelerant throughout the children’s bedroom and down the hallway. Officials had tested extensively in these areas—including where all the pour patterns and puddle configurations were—and turned up nothing. Jackson told me that he “never did understand why they weren’t able to recover” positive tests in these parts.

Hurst found it hard to imagine Willingham pouring accelerant on the front porch, where neighbors could have seen him. Scanning the files for clues, Hurst noticed a photograph of the porch taken before the fire, which had been entered into evidence. Sitting on the tiny porch was a charcoal grill. The porch was where the family barbecued. Court testimony from witnesses confirmed that there had been a grill, along with a container of lighter fluid, and that both had burned when the fire roared onto the porch during post-flashover. By the time Vasquez inspected the house, the grill had been removed from the porch, during cleanup. Though he cited the container of lighter fluid in his report, he made no mention of the grill. At the trial, he insisted that he had never been told of the grill’s earlier placement. Other authorities were aware of the grill but did not see its relevance. Hurst, however, was convinced that he had solved the mystery: when firefighters had blasted the porch with water, they had likely spread charcoal-lighter fluid from the melted container.

Without having visited the fire scene, Hurst says, it was impossible to pinpoint the cause of the blaze. But, based on the evidence, he had little doubt that it was an accidental fire—one caused most likely by the space heater or faulty electrical wiring. It explained why there had never been a motive for the crime. Hurst concluded that there was no evidence of arson, and that a man who had already lost his three children and spent twelve years in jail was about to be executed based on “junk science.” Hurst wrote his report in such a rush that he didn’t pause to fix the typos.

V

“I am a realist and I will not live a fantasy,” Willingham once told Gilbert about the prospect of proving his innocence. But in February, 2004, he began to have hope. Hurst’s findings had helped to exonerate more than ten people. Hurst even reviewed the scientific evidence against Willingham’s friend Ernest Willis, who had been on death row for the strikingly similar arson charge. Hurst says, “It was like I was looking at the same case. Just change the names.” In his report on the Willis case, Hurst concluded that not “a single item of physical evidence . . . supports a finding of arson.” A second fire expert hired by Ori White, the new district attorney in Willis’s district, concurred. After seventeen years on death row, Willis was set free. “I don’t turn killers loose,” White said at the time. “If Willis was guilty, I’d be retrying him right now. And I’d use Hurst as my witness. He’s a brilliant scientist.” White noted how close the system had come to murdering an innocent man. “He did not get executed, and I thank God for that,” he said.

On February 13th, four days before Willingham was scheduled to be executed, he got a call from Reaves, his attorney. Reaves told him that the fifteen members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which reviews an application for clemency and had been sent Hurst’s report, had made their decision.

“What is it?” Willingham asked.

“I’m sorry,” Reaves said. “They denied your petition.”

The vote was unanimous. Reaves could not offer an explanation: the board deliberates in secret, and its members are not bound by any specific criteria. The board members did not even have to review Willingham’s materials, and usually don’t debate a case in person; rather, they cast their votes by fax—a process that has become known as “death by fax.” Between 1976 and 2004, when Willingham filed his petition, the State of Texas had approved only one application for clemency from a prisoner on death row. A Texas appellate judge has called the clemency system “a legal fiction.” Reaves said of the board members, “They never asked me to attend a hearing or answer any questions.”

The Innocence Project obtained, through the Freedom of Information Act, all the records from the governor’s office and the board pertaining to Hurst’s report. “The documents show that they received the report, but neither office has any record of anyone acknowledging it, taking note of its significance, responding to it, or calling any attention to it within the government,” Barry Scheck said. “The only reasonable conclusion is that the governor’s office and the Board of Pardons and Paroles ignored scientific evidence.”

LaFayette Collins, who was a member of the board at the time, told me of the process, “You don’t vote guilt or innocence. You don’t retry the trial. You just make sure everything is in order and there are no glaring errors.” He noted that although the rules allowed for a hearing to consider important new evidence, “in my time there had never been one called.” When I asked him why Hurst’s report didn’t constitute evidence of “glaring errors,” he said, “We get all kinds of reports, but we don’t have the mechanisms to vet them.” Alvin Shaw, another board member at the time, said that the case didn’t “ring a bell,” adding, angrily, “Why would I want to talk about it?” Hurst calls the board’s actions “unconscionable.”

Though Reaves told Willingham that there was still a chance that Governor Perry might grant a thirty-day stay, Willingham began to prepare his last will and testament. He had earlier written Stacy a letter apologizing for not being a better husband and thanking her for everything she had given him, especially their three daughters. “I still know Amber’s voice, her smile, her cool Dude saying and how she said: I wanna hold you! Still feel the touch of Karmon and Kameron’s hands on my face.” He said that he hoped that “some day, somehow the truth will be known and my name cleared.”

He asked Stacy if his tombstone could be erected next to their children’s graves. Stacy, who had for so long expressed belief in Willingham’s innocence, had recently taken her first look at the original court records and arson findings. Unaware of Hurst’s report, she had determined that Willingham was guilty. She denied him his wish, later telling a reporter, “He took my kids away from me.”

Gilbert felt as if she had failed Willingham. Even before his pleas for clemency were denied, she told him that all she could give him was her friendship. He told her that it was enough “to be a part of your life in some small way so that in my passing I can know I was at last able to have felt the heart of another who might remember me when I’m gone.” He added, “There is nothing to forgive you for.” He told her that he would need her to be present at his execution, to help him cope with “my fears, thoughts, and feelings.”

On February 17th, the day he was set to die, Willingham’s parents and several relatives gathered in the prison visiting room. Plexiglas still separated Willingham from them. “I wish I could touch and hold both of you,” Willingham had written to them earlier. “I always hugged Mom but I never hugged Pop much.”

As Willingham looked at the group, he kept asking where Gilbert was. Gilbert had recently been driving home from a store when another car ran a red light and smashed into her. Willingham used to tell her to stay in her kitchen for a day, without leaving, to comprehend what it was like to be confined in prison, but she had always found an excuse not to do it. Now she was paralyzed from the neck down.

While she was in an intensive-care unit, she had tried to get a message to Willingham, but apparently failed. Gilbert’s daughter later read her a letter that Willingham had sent her, telling her how much he had grown to love her. He had written a poem: “Do you want to see beauty—like you have never seen? / Then close your eyes, and open your mind, and come along with me.”

Gilbert, who spent years in physical rehabilitation, gradually regaining motion in her arms and upper body, says, “All that time, I thought I was saving Willingham, and I realized then that he was saving me, giving me the strength to get through this. I know I will one day walk again, and I know it is because Willingham showed me the kind of courage it takes to survive.”

Willingham had requested a final meal, and at 4 p.m. on the seventeenth he was served it: three barbecued pork ribs, two orders of onion rings, fried okra, three beef enchiladas with cheese, and two slices of lemon cream pie. He received word that Governor Perry had refused to grant him a stay. (A spokesperson for Perry says, “The Governor made his decision based on the facts of the case.”) Willingham’s mother and father began to cry. “Don’t be sad, Momma,” Willingham said. “In fifty-five minutes, I’m a free man. I’m going home to see my kids.” Earlier, he had confessed to his parents that there was one thing about the day of the fire he had lied about. He said that he had never actually crawled into the children’s room. “I just didn’t want people to think I was a coward,” he said. Hurst told me, “People who have never been in a fire don’t understand why those who survive often can’t rescue the victims. They have no concept of what a fire is like.”

The warden told Willingham that it was time. Willingham, refusing to assist the process, lay down; he was carried into a chamber eight feet wide and ten feet long. The walls were painted green, and in the center of the room, where an electric chair used to be, was a sheeted gurney. Several guards strapped Willingham down with leather belts, snapping buckles across his arms and legs and chest. A medical team then inserted intravenous tubes into his arms. Each official had a separate role in the process, so that no one person felt responsible for taking a life.

Willingham had asked that his parents and family not be present in the gallery during this process, but as he looked out he could see Stacy watching. The warden pushed a remote control, and sodium thiopental, a barbiturate, was pumped into Willingham’s body. Then came a second drug, pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the diaphragm, making it impossible to breathe. Finally, a third drug, potassium chloride, filled his veins, until his heart stopped, at 6:20 p.m. On his death certificate, the cause was listed as “Homicide.”

After his death, his parents were allowed to touch his face for the first time in more than a decade. Later, at Willingham’s request, they cremated his body and secretly spread some of his ashes over his children’s graves. He had told his parents, “Please don’t ever stop fighting to vindicate me.”

In December, 2004, questions about the scientific evidence in the Willingham case began to surface. Maurice Possley and Steve Mills, of the Chicago Tribune, had published an investigative series on flaws in forensic science; upon learning of Hurst’s report, Possley and Mills asked three fire experts, including John Lentini, to examine the original investigation. The experts concurred with Hurst’s report. Nearly two years later, the Innocence Project commissioned Lentini and three other top fire investigators to conduct an independent review of the arson evidence in the Willingham case. The panel concluded that “each and every one” of the indicators of arson had been “scientifically proven to be invalid.”

In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.” What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.” The commission is reviewing his findings, and plans to release its own report next year. Some legal scholars believe that the commission may narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”

Just before Willingham received the lethal injection, he was asked if he had any last words. He said, “The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for twelve years for something I did not do. From God’s dust I came and to dust I will return, so the Earth shall become my throne.” ♦

David Grann has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003.