#the plot floats vaguely in my head

[yusuke-of-valla]

In Berry Blast Brigade Yusuke is way more chill about the "Chidori kidnapping him that one time" thing than most people would be but Hamuko does not forgive or forget when it comes to her baby siblings so whenever Yusuke wants to visit Chidori in the hospital Hamuko is in the hallway glaring menacingly.

[darksouls2yuri]

literally wishing wishing i could muster up the courage and inspiration to write anything outside of assignments

[duck-a-doodle]

The Rumoured Casper’s Honeybee (1/2) [EDITED]

A/N: Hello there! This is a little unedited drabble that has been stuck in my head, so I hope you enjoy it!

P.S.: I have edited and changed some grammar and the plot point to fit the second half better.

WARNING: Potentially OOC Simon 'Ghost' Riley. The reader is 'married to work' and is slower on tphe uptake. Let there be ANGST then fluff.

SUMMARY: Simon "Ghost" Riley, who has shockingly grown accustomed to you, seeks your medical attention. Masterlist

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The role of a medical professional under military services is nothing to choke at. Sounds of barked orders and the bright glint of hospital lights have become a familiar environment, and your eyes have grown accustomed to the olive drab greens and the standard heavy gears that came and went in a clinical setting, and that scene held true, even after your transfer to the 141.

Of the men in this base, the most outstanding ones you knew were Captain John Price, Sergeant Garrick, Sergeant McTavish and — Ghost. Tales of their stunts would float down the hallways thus naturally, you knew of them before you were properly acquainted. Loosely acquainted. Before you found your place in the 141, you were reserved, fastidious and competent, earning yourself the call sign 'Honeybee'. That had been your impression to many others of your field before you joined, and that was not to change now at your newly designated location.

It would not be uncommon for the clients to remember their practitioners and vice versa, but your case just seemed a little more special than the rest.

Ghost, who you prefered to refer to as ‘lieutenant’, seemed to have made himself familiar in your routine for the last two months. Prior to your arrival as the new medic of this organisation, you were told that he avoided the clinic like it was the plague, only showing up for the bare minimum of checkups. The turning point, some of your colleagues pointed out, appeared to be around the time you showed up, right as the team had returned from the Las Almas fiasco. No one person dared to deal with the lieutenant after witnessing his demeanour, and where he stepped, a repelling effect took place; anyone and everyone who had ever vaguely heard of him parted around him like the red sea, all except for you who refused to waver at any of the ‘Ghost rumours’.

The commanding officer was yours to manage ever since. For any wounds, illnesses, obligatory checkups or medical documents that he bore, it would be you who handled them. Not that you had any choice in that regard, given that whenever he set foot into the office, a clear path that led to you would reveal itself before him.

Never did you consider it a hassle when you understood it as part of your duty during government time, and soon a routine was formed after every operation he takes on.

He would come back more battered than a steak, and you would be at the ready with your gear, aid kit and all. On the rare, exacting moments of your career, you were even assigned to go out in the field where he had to be, for in the words of Captain Price, “our lieutenant recommended you for the role.”

Even with that, you thought nothing of it. Until you slipped.

The medical room was empty save for yourself and the medical equipment that needed sorting after an intensive few hours of patients filing in and out for appointments and health check-ups. After the last of the bunch left you wired and riddled with a terrible tension headache, you turned around to retrieve some aspirin, only to stop short at the sight of a tall, mass of black standing by the examination stable, waiting.

“Oh for god’s- hello, lieutenant,” You let out a breath after closing your eyes to gain your ground.

“Doc.”

“One moment, lieutenant.” Striding towards the cabinet which held your relief, you quickly popped yourself a pill before returning to address your surprise patient of the day.

Ghost simply lifted his mask slightly, to your surprise, and you looked away instinctively. Moments pass before you realised that the problem laid under the mask; a lip lasceration, there on the corner of his mouth. Wordlessly, you sprung into action despite your exhaustion and the throbbing sensation that weighed on the back of your mind. Carefully, you applied the L.E.T. Gel before going in with absorbable sutures, making sure to puncture the skin surfaces appropriately. Your eyes trained on the gash on his lips, away from the faint scars that litter his lower face, away from the details of his sharp nose and light five o’clock shadow that formed around his jaw.

Through, over, then through again went the needle, pulling the thread together in a quiet, steady rhythm. He never moved an inch; the only signs of life you felt from his were the warmth of his skin and the slow deep breaths that flowed through his chest. And when you were done, you cannot help but find that he is, of all the patients you have had, one of the most disciplined.

Perhaps it was the headache, perhaps it was your sleep-addled mind at play, or perhaps it was your lack of water that made you do it — but in a brief motion, you behaved contrary to your character. Before Ghost could fix his mask properly, you hand reached up to pull it down, lining it smoothly to his jaw before giving his head a soft, gentle pat.

A fleeting eye contact was all it took for your actions to dawn upon you. His eyes froze your hand in place and rendered you near speechless.

“I- My apologies, Capta- I mean, lieutenant. I forgot myself,” embarrassed, you removed your hand from his head immediately. He did not move. He did not blink. You watch cautiously, waiting with bated breath for him to reveal his displeasure. Instead, he chose to drop his head ever so slightly, closing his eyes.

Unsure of what to make of the situation, you followed his implications. Slowly, you rest your full palm against his skull, feeling the top of his head through the coarse fabric of his mask. You move your fingers lightly over his balaclava and feel something soft underneath — it was a bouncy, curling texture under the cloth. He has hair. A huff left your nose before you could stop it and his eyes snapped open to look at you.

Awkwardly, you offered him a small, tight-lipped smile, patting his head twice more before letting your hand drop to your side.

“For being a good patient,” you jested in an attempt to compose yourself.

Not long after he left, you shut your eyes and berated yourself for behaving like an utter fool, for losing your own decorum like a green-faced soldier despite your years of experience. You could not stop thinking about the glint in his eyes before he left that day. It felt almost playful, akin to that of a mischief about to stir awake, and by the devil did that memory return far too often for your liking.

*

Something certainly has shifted.

Soon, he began to visit you more often. You had suspicions that he may have memorised your timetable, and you had even deeper suspicions that it was one of your colleagues who has let him privy to said information. During unforseeable times of the week, a certain lieutenant of the 141 would show up to the clinic, requiring salves for a bruise, requesting ibuprofen for pain relief or even seeking combat gauze for his raw knuckles, of which you were certain that he must already have a few, considering his occupation. Once, he stood waiting behind you silently as you worked on your computer, waiting to ask for a bandaid. Needless to say, you were beyond startled to find that a skull face was poised quietly behind you for goodness knows how long.

You fail to remember exactly when he began to refer to you by your call sign ‘Honeybee’ instead of just ‘Doc’, and all you could think of was the way it rolled off his tongue. Funny, you thought, that the very name should sound just like honey coming from his own scarred lips.

A most prominent change, however, came not in the form of his unprompted visits, but in how they would end. Upon attending to his laughably miniscule thumb injury and amusedly pressing the medical ointment to his palm, he sat stock still on that same medical bed when you thought he would up and go. Mild bewilderment rested upon your knit brows, and you decided to voice your bemusment.

“Is there anything else, lieutenant?”

“Was I not a good patient?” He asked with a solemn expression.

Clearly, he has you dumbfounded. “Well — you are quite well-behaved during treatments, if that’s what you’re asking. So, yes, you are a good patient.”

Watching him closely, your eyes followed his line of sight and it lands, unexpectedly, on your hand. You looked between your raised hand and his unwavering, sharp pupils.

Oh.

Oh.

Once again, you dared to cross the boundary of his space, (or was it a boundary anymore?) and rest your hand on the side of his head this time, rubbing delicately, hesitantly. Fondness flutters warmly in your heart when his eyes shut serenely, enjoying your caring ministrations.

“Did it not bother you, lieutenant?” You whisper through the quietude.

“No,” came his gravelly reply.

He would clarify a little later, another detail that would occupy you for days on end.

“It’s comfortable. Like medicine to the head.”

All the air had tightened in your lungs at his admittance. There was something picturesque about a towering, muscle-bound killing-machine, bending to chase the sympathy of another’s warm fingers. It was almost endearing, the way this light gesture soothed him.

He had felt so — human.

*

Each time he came and went, it seemed to go further, like wading into the deep end of the pool in search of something, with only the vague impression of what you were about to find. Ghost would lean further in with every visit, and with every visit you would hold his head softer still, basking in the warmth of his face in one palm, then in two. He would breathe slower, as if savouring the air, the space, and eventually, his head would come to lean on your shoulder without any questions asked, and you would give him the medical attention he needed.

Cute.

It was, as he said, medicine to the head.

The method was unorthodox, yes, but if it can ease his temperament, then no doubt that a working solution should keep on. Through the two months which this had ensued, he was noticably less irritable and his team, who figured you were the source of his better nature, made sure you knew of the change whenever they came by the clinic. Only a few visits in, and sergeant McTavish, (who insisted that you call him ‘Soap’,) already has the nickname ‘Ghostbuster’ made for you, all in your honour. Even the staff now looked forward to Ghost’s visits too, despite still keeping a clear distance from him. They would observe the man covered in black from head to toe make a beeline for your office like clockwork, and the chatter between colleagues would be unending.

The amount of time with you spent treating on his physical wounds have been abbreviated as much as your call sign whenever he uses it, and it always warmed your ears considerably.

“G’d evenin’, Honey.” His guttural voice would greet.

“Lieutenant Riley,” you replied good-naturedly.

In exchange for shortening your name to something more familiar, he offered you his.

Simon Riley.

Something too intimate lay behind the use of his name, and so you both of you had come to a compromise; the lieutenant may go by Ghost to many, LT to some and Simon to rare few, but to you, he was lieutenant Riley.

He must be.

You were his doctor, and he was your patient, receiving an unusual prescription of several pats on the head every other day. It was a routine, just like any other meeting or appointment.

Speculations of a medic by the callsign ‘Honeybee’ began to spread around base alongside Ghost’s exaggerated talk, and when it reached your own ears through a closer colleague, you all but responded with a cocked brow, and went on with your day. People do little else, you had always known so. With the rising frequency of contact between the both of you, you felt that such hearsay was natural. And as long as nothing brewed inbetween, it was of non-consequence. On the occassion that you do hear the whispers firsthand down the hall, an amusing saying stuck with you; "the Honeybee’s caught a ‘emselves Ghost". Nicknames have been floating about, calling you a "Ghostbuster" or a "Ghost Hunter", and the most ridiculous one being "Lazarus", which was based on an old movie you have heard of but have never seen in your life.

You then caught wind of the lieutenant’s new nickname.

Casper. Such a silly name.

And then yet another nickname, "Kat" has surfaced for you, only this one had made zero sense to you at all.

Regardless of the silly teasings and harmless jibes from your colleagues about Ghost’s very frequent doctor appointments, you went on, working around the clock and going by the books.

Nothing has to change, especially if it meant nothing.

And yet, that silly little "nothing" began to occupy you through the quiet hours, and through the night.

An odd weight began to settle in your throat and chest whenever you saw your special patient, and the nicknames had begun to bother you more and more. You were too busy to think, too overwhelmed by people for an appetite, and too tired to make head nor tail of the week.

"... Doc?"

Your spine snaps straight at the sound of your name. How long have you been floating down your reverie?

"Ah, I'm sorry — yes?"

You colleague, who stood poised in blue scrubs whilst holding a clipboard, grins at you. "Casper was just looking for you. He left though, think his captain called for him or something."

"Ah, I see."

He shook his head lightly and turns to leave, but you stopped him with a question that you could not bear to have unanswered any longer.

"Why do you call him Casper?"

The man hummed, leaving you to sit with a disconcerting moment of silence as the answer sat on the precipice of his tongue.

"You know the plot of Casper, don't you?"

*

You swiveled on your office chair across the tables to your computer, a new task set to mind. Frantic fingers tapped away to solve that nagging mystery, and you felt the fine ends of a thread beginning to pull at the seams of your logic.

From the 1995 movie, he said.

The tab screen loaded your search, and your eyes scan the brief descriptions under each link. A small drop-down bar caught your attention, and in your gut you felt a twist of discomfort at the words that displayed before you.

Casper (1995) Plot What is the relationship between Kat and Casper?

Your breathing stopped at the insinuation, and a weight pulls on your lips as you read on.

… Casper, the ghost protagonist of the movie, falls madly in love with James' loner teenage daughter, Kathleen “Kat” Harvey, who is also looking for a friend. 

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FOOTNOTES:

"Lazarus" is the machine that was meant to bring Casper back to life, so the rumours are suggesting that the reader gives Ghost life.

[nomazee]

silly silly

sebastian (sdv) x gn reader

word count: 2.1k

content: pining (mutual...), AGGRESSIVE pining, reader is smitten and in love, stream of conciousness/ramble type of writing, romantic tension (unresolved), cute and will maybe make ur stomach hurt from anxiety (i have my ways) (i’m lying)

notes: omg hey guys so i wasn’t lying about the stardew valley delusion and now i’m so deep in that i wrote this in a haze last night and posted it to my ao3 and now im posting it here. please enjoy. my heart and soul (my rotted brain) went into this it’s the beginning of my magnum opus 

part 1 (you are here) part 2 part 3

<><><><><>

You’re gonna kiss him silly. By the end of the night, you totally are.

It’s something you decided since before you showed up at this jellyfish-festival thing. You barely even know what it’s all about, really—the note from Demetrius didn't say much other than the fact that it was happening tonight, and you should come, and it’s beautiful and all the jellyfish are going south for the winter (like they’re a flock of birds, you think absurdly), and it’s down at the beach at 10pm. You weren’t exactly up to asking him more about it, seeing as it would be awkward to do that and then kiss his step-son on the mouth right in front of him that same night.

That was the plan. Kiss Sebastian on the mouth. It was going to happen and there was kind of nothing anyone could do to stop it (except Sebastian himself, reasonably). You’d like to think you’d gotten close enough to him to let this sort of thing happen. But then again, Sebastian is a special enigma, like a specter floating around on his own path, invisible to the things around him (or at least, trying to be invisible. He’s not invisible to you, never ever ever. You’re too painfully aware of him to let go of that).

Your mind is running with too many thoughts. It’s dark on the beach, and the wood of the dock creaks faintly beneath your feet as you approach where he stands with Sam and Abigail. Vaguely, you wonder how much they’d mind if you yanked Sebastian away from them to give him a kiss. A big fat whopping breath-stealing mind-turning stomach-aching kiss.

You’re going crazy. This whole thing is crazy. You say hi to the three of them and pretend like you’re not plotting this whole thing in your head. They seem none the wiser to your conflicts, and give you amicable greetings as you shift closer to where Sebastian is standing.

He almost blends in with the rest of the night, all black hair and black clothes, but the torches on the dock light him up just enough for you to see his skin and eyes and smile as he glances at you. You greet him, no smile on your part, but a sweet sort of look in your eyes that you hope he’ll catch onto soon. (You don’t think he does.)

He makes space for you to stand next to him, between some empty box and the odd warmth of his body. You take the offer. You’re standing, next to him, so close that you can almost smell the tea tree oil of his shampoo wafting off of him. You think you’re going crazy. You’re going crazy. You look at him, and he looks at you.

Sebastian has a serious look in his eyes, eyebrows furrowed and lips downturned. “I thought I saw something moving in there… something big. Something dark.” You nearly nod along to whatever he’s saying from habit. There’s a second or two where you realize how absurd his words are, and he sees it in your face because he goes, “Just trying to scare you.”

Now he’s teasing you, a smile and a fun kind of glint in the way he does it. The thought crosses your mind to warn him, tell him that he shouldn’t play jokes with you like that because it might make you kiss him silly on this beach before the stupid jellyfish even get here. Then you wave the thought away, because really—that wouldn’t be the final straw. The final straw has been broken for days now. Even weeks. Maybe since the first day you spoke to him and he talked so incredulously about how you could’ve picked Pelican Town as a place to live, but you’d like to think you have more self control than to let a love-at-first-sight kind of deal happen like that.

“You’re funny,” you say back, and you hope it doesn’t sound too strangled. “I think I almost believed you.”

“Really? I didn't expect that. I thought you would’ve called my bluff.”

You could tell me anything and I would believe you, you want to tell him. You could tell me there’s a monster in the sea. You could tell me you made the sun and the stars and the moon and the clouds. You could tell me you’re a jellyfish. I would totally believe you.

You don't say any of that. Because that would be embarrassing. Sam says something, and then Abigail says something, and then Sebastian is turning himself around to talk to them now. Sam and Abigail are nice, and you’re close enough to them where if you joined into their conversation it wouldn’t be awkward or unwelcome.

But there’s something telling you to stay quiet. Anxiety, maybe, fear of saying something stupid and ruining every friendship you’ve made in this town. It’s a crazy hyperbolic thought but it’s enough to make you keep your mouth clamped shut. It’s fine. You listen and turn your head to them and nod along with whatever they say, something about the jellyfish being poisonous and how bad would it be if you reached your hand in and grabbed one, and—?

“It’s starting!” Someone says distantly, and your head snaps back to face the ocean just as lights glow from underneath and the forms of sea creatures illuminate themselves. It’s beautiful. It really, really is beautiful, and you think that you should’ve taken everyone’s word that this was a wonderful event, something you really shouldn’t miss out on, something gorgeous and unimaginable and isn’t it crazy we get to see this every year?

The glow pulses bright enough for you to see more of Sebastian’s face from beneath the darkness of the night. You glance to the side, slowly and subtly (or at least, you hope so). His eyes are bright, and just a little bit wider, and there’s a twitch of his mouth as if he’s holding back a smile. As if he would be embarrassed to let it show how much he likes seeing this.

He smiles, big this time, and it’s one of those downward smiles where the corners of his mouth are tucked in and his cheeks are flushed and you are going to kiss him. You are totally going to kiss him, right now, because now he’s looking at you and the smile still hasn’t left his face and you hope you’re not unsettling him by how you’re ignoring the jellyfish at this point just to stare at him.

Sebastian is not unsettled. At least, not outwardly. He’s staring back and it’s soft now. And his stupid smile is still there. It hasn’t moved, hasn’t changed the way that his gaze had, and you hope it’s not because he has the same affinity for you that he has for the jellyfish. You’d like to be more than the jellyfish, maybe.

You’d like to be more. A little more. And you think, just a little bit more time, and you could kiss him. You could kiss him tonight. You could.

You don’t. Your head turns back to the ocean and you’re shocked at the level of self control you just displayed. It’s almost unbelievable. This whole plan, this whole dream had been built up over weeks now and here you were, being patient. It’s uncharacteristic. You wonder. Wonder wonder wonder.

From beside you, Sebastian doesn't deflate, but there’s a moment of hesitation before he turns to face the same direction as you. Maybe he understands. Maybe he knows. You hope he doesn’t know. You hope this is your own secret to keep.

Minutes pass, and the ceremony ends. The rest of it is nothing short of incredible and wonderful and spectacular and every word you could possibly use to describe it. Your legs buzz from disuse as you push yourself to stand up. (You don’t notice Sebastian hesitating to stick a hand out for support before pulling it back to his side.)

“I like this place,” you say absentmindedly, and suddenly everyone is turned to you—not just Sebastian, but Abigail and Sam and maybe even Vincent from further up the dock. “This was really nice. Thank you all for letting me stay here.”

There’s a pause, and you can’t believe any of that just came out of your mouth. It was cheesy and sappy and insane. This night has rotted your mind so much it’s starting to ooze out of your mouth. You hate this town. You love it. You let them know.

“Of course, man!” Sam is exuberant, and he smiles at you. “I guess at first it was weird having someone new here, because no one new ever comes here. But you’re great. And you’ve done so much for all of us. Really.”

Abigail nods along, a firm gesture paired with this triumphant sort of smile that makes your chest warm. “Really. Like, yeah, maybe it sucked having my old hang-out place taken over by a stranger.” (Sam elbows her. She yelps indignantly.) “But you’ve kind of made it worth it. Thanks for everything, too.”

It’s sweet. It’s all so sweet it makes your teeth ache and your head ache and your stomach ache. You’re hit with a sudden need to go home, and it’s the first time you’ve really felt like you knew where home was. It’s weird. Your legs ache, now.

Your head is muffled. You think you nod to all of them and you hope the appreciation and care in your eyes is enough to make up for your stunted responses. People are packing up and going home. Sam and Abigail give some sort of look in your direction, not unkind, but unusual, and suddenly Sebastian is thanking you for the night and asking to walk you home. You want to kiss him. Kiss him. Hold his hand and kiss him and trace his palm and maybe throw him into the ocean with the possibly-poisonous jellyfish remnants.

It’s quiet as he walks you home. Faintly, you realize how out of character this is for him. But this whole night has been full of out-of-character things for you and him and everybody. This is so weird. You’re going crazy. You’re going to kiss him.

Or, you think, for sure, that you’ll kiss him even if it wasn’t in front of the docks or the jellyfish or his friends—you think, for sure, the rest of this night is going to be made up of you kissing him silly on your doorstep and then collapsing in your bed and moving back to the city in shame.

But. But but but. But. There is something. And you don’t know what it is. And you don’t know if he’d kiss you too, but maybe. But. But but but. You don’t.

You’re at your doorstep. You thank him. And now, you are both waiting expectantly at your door for something to happen. You need to make it happen. Now. You need to kiss him and you won’t move and your stomach is aching and you think maybe you have a shellfish allergy.

“I feel sick.” It’s not a lie, and you really are two steps away from throwing up on his shoes and you really, really don't want that to happen—if you throw up on his shoes, then you’ll never be able to kiss him, because every time you reach for him he’ll be struck by the memory of you splattering vomit all over his sneakers and then he’ll ask you politely to move back to Zuzu City and never look back. (You think this is accurate.)

“Get to bed,” he tells you, and you’re shocked to hear him speak after so long. “It’s been a long night.” He’s polite, he’s kind, he’s so so kind that it’s stabbing you in the chest and twisting around your insides and why couldn't you just kiss him like a normal person?!

Okay, you think you say. Okay okay okay. His brow is furrowed and his lips are downturned but not in that odd smiley way of his. He’s just worried, now, and you think you’re going to be sick, for real this time.

You don’t tell him goodnight, but the slam of the door in his face is probably enough of a signal. You’re embarrassed. You didn't even kiss him. You can’t even tell if this night is a success or not. Kitty walks across your feet and looks up at you as if she knows what kind of clusterfuck of a night you just had. What a little shit. You let her follow you to bed and sit on your chest while her deep breaths lull you to sleep.

You didn't kiss him. What a wreck. What a joke. You’ll kiss him tomorrow for sure. Kiss him silly.

[fadingplaidlibrary]

use your words. 💋

pairing: sdv!harvey x gn!reader. SMUT, 18+, minors dni

word count: 643

notes: subby harvey x gentle dom reader. no plot, just horny. reader described as topless, no gender/sex/genitalia specified. harvey uses he/him pronouns, no genitalia specified. no beta or edits, all typos and mistakes are my own etc. i do not consent for my work to be uploaded elsewhere. enjoyyyy <3

harvey wasn't sure which one of you had started it. he remembers the two of you lounging on the couch together, then sliding to the floor with you in a pile of blankets and limbs. he vaguely remembers you teasing him, smiling at him like you were hungry for something... it started with a kiss, didn't it? -- or maybe it started when he slid his fingers under your shirt? -- or when you tugged on his hair, threw the pillows down, maybe then... but here he was now, sitting shirtless on a cushion on the floor between your thighs, his back pressed against your bare chest. he felt like he was floating, or perhaps falling. where were his glasses? and could he be any more sensitive? your hands were just so warm against his still-clothed thighs. you kept kissing and kissing and kissing his neck. how did he get here? how did he get this lucky? how did his hands land on top of yours to guide them - "right there?" just so close, and then- "not yet, baby, shhh..." you murmured the words into his shoulder, and a desperate, whiny kind of noise shuddered through his chest and out of his open mouth. was he panting? "please, i- fuck - more, ple-" your hands massaged at the apex of his thighs, so close to where he needed you, and he gasped. you leaned forward slowly, pressing him upright, and whispered, "stay." he did, of course he did, his eyes soft and unfocused and his lower lip now caught between his teeth. you slowly pressed one gentle kiss after another across his broad shoulders, warm and easy, while your hands wandered across his torso. harvey tried to focus, tried to breathe while the fire under his skin followed your touch, your lips, your blunted nails now ghosting over his chest, lightly combing through the hair there. he was shaking, he was sure his skin was blushed all over, but he stayed put. and when you finally leaned him back against your warm chest again, he turned his head and helped himself to a kiss. "p-please..." he begged oh-so-sweetly. his eyes were closed tight, his whole body trembling in your arms, and you knew what he needed. "please what, my love?" you teased him, kissing the tip of his nose. you didn't plan on teasing him for much longer, but you you couldn't help savoring him. "touch me, please," he whispered, barely audible over the rustle of blankets, the pounding of two heartbeats. you let your thumbs glide across his nipples slowly, agonizingly slowly. his eyes rolled back, his mouth fell open, he looked just... so far gone. "poor thing," you crooned, pressing a kiss to his forehead, all hot to the touch and sheened with sweat, "i am touching you." harvey groaned and pressed his face into the crook of your neck. his own hands grabbed at your bare thighs on either side of his, desperate for more warmth, more touch, more of you. in between rough, shaky breaths, he pressed his lips to your skin, leaving sloppy marks behind with his teeth. harvey knew he'd have to use his words eventually -- and he felt himself throbbing at the thought -- but just for now, he was lost for words, lost in the mess you were making of him. your hands drifted down, just low enough to hook your thumbs in the waistband of his sweatpants, tug them lightly, and let the elastic snap back against his skin. his hips bucked up instinctively, chasing the feeling, as he let out a choked groan. he looked, sounded, smelled desperate, and you were basking in it. you knew what he needed, knew how close he was to falling apart in your arms. but if the good doctor didn't use his words... it was going to be a long night.

[imaginespazzi]

Part 2: If Only You'd Been Here

Masterlist - Part 1 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7

Ain't nobody hurt you like I hurt you (but ain't nobody love you like I do)

(In which a sadistic writer tortures her beloved ship a fair amount and maybe her readers too)

Pairing: Paige Bueckers X Azzi Fudd

Themes: Angst, Pining, Hurt/Comfort and maybe Fluff if you squint

Words: 6.5K (someone please be proud that it is in fact shorter 🙈)

TW: Swearing, Alcohol, Injuries, Alludes to Sexual Content

A/N: Good morning my lovelies <3 Just a couple of things I changed that you should know before you read. If you follow WCBB, you know UCLA didn't win the Pac-12 tournament in 2023 but in this universe they did. You also probably know they lost in the NCAA tournament last year to SC in the Greenville region but in this universe, for plot purposes, they're gonna be in the Seattle region. I kept their seeding and who they were playing vague because it was gonna get too complicated to figure out. Also if you saw my list of part titles a while ago, no you didn't lol. As always, feel free to know what you liked, what you didn't, and anything you'd like to see in future parts. And as you're reading, let's just remember y'all love me and everything I do is for the plot. Happy reading and have a wonderful week lovelies!

December 2022

The distinctly “car” smell of her car is starting to make Paige more than a little nauseous. Going by the way Drew is pouting in the passenger seat, he’s also clearly over it. They’ve been driving in circles for what feels like hours. At first, still enamoured with being allowed to sit in the front, her little brother had gone along with her ridiculousness. Now, as they approach maybe the 12th or so lap around the neighbourhood, he seems less than thrilled. 

“Alright let me out and you keep driving,” Drew says, fiddling agitatedly with his seatbelt, “I think I’m gonna puke.”

“Well hold it in,” Paige retorts unhelpfully as they re-round the block. She keeps her eyes focused on the road, ignoring the glare her brother sends her away. He takes in a dramatic breath and leans back onto his seat. She grips the steering wheel tighter as they pass the house again, still not brave enough to pull into the driveaway of a place she’d once considered just as much a home as her own. 

Drew lets out another groan, “I shoulda just stayed home.”

“Well you didn’t-” Paige’s reply is cut off by the sound of a phone call reverberating around the car. The CallerID reads “Azzi (DON’T YOU DARE IGNORE)”, a name the younger girl had plugged in herself with a warning look the day Paige had left LA. Chewing whatever dry skin is still left on her bitten-to-death lips, Paige clicks accept on the call. 

“What number lap is this?” comes Azzi’s exasperated voice and Paige can’t help the smile that creeps onto her face. 

“Oh you know my car’s feeling the need to exercise today,” Paige hums back, suddenly feeling a lot lighter than she had just a couple of seconds ago. Sometimes, she’s not sure how she managed to go a year with this constant heavy weight pressing down on her ribs, and no Azzi to slowly ease her out from under it. 

“Azziiiiii,” Drew whines dramatically, “please come save me. I’m gonna die in this car.”

Affronted, Paige splutters, “nobody forced you to come.”

“You begged me to come,” her young brother quips back and it elicits a laugh from the girl on the other end of the line. 

“I did-”

“Paige,” Azzi cuts her off, “just come inside okay? You’re wasting gas for nothing.”

“I- it’s just-,” Paige’s hands tighten even more around the wheel, as she stops on the sidewalk, switching on her turn signal, but still not entering the driveway. She leans her head against the wheel, overwhelmed by emotions she can’t quite name. Drew places a comforting hand on her back and she sends him a reassuring smile, trying to shield her younger brother from the havoc in her brain. 

“Hey,” Azzi’s voice floats through the fog, “it’s just me okay? Me and you and us. It’ll be okay. I promise.”

It’s like a child being soothed with their favourite binkie, that’s what Azzi’s promise feels like to Paige. She finally turns into the driveaway, and both Drew and Azzi cheer in tandem. The knot in her chest loosens just a little bit at that because the large crowds that scream for her make her feel adored, but this, her own personal cheer squad for her littlest of achievements, well it makes her feel loved. 

“Freedom,” Drew yells as he practically flings himself out of Paige’s barely parked car. She rolls her eyes fondly at her mini me as he dramatically pretends to kiss the ground. It’s a small distraction from the memories that are swirling like a tornado in her mind. Minnesota is home, it’ll always be home but this place, this had been her safe haven, something she could hold onto at a time where everything else was slipping out of her hands. And then, like a fool, she’d let go of it. 

The door opens even before they’ve made it halfway to the door and Azzi’s brothers run out into the front yard. Jon pretends to take pictures and José practically falls to his knees as they swarm around the blonde. 

“Paige, Paige, can we get a picture or an autograph please,” they yell teasingly, “please Miss Bueckers we’re your biggest fans.”

“Move over boys,” Tim Fudd’s booming voice hollers, as he swats his children away, “her biggest fan is actually me eh Paige?”

The girl in question nods solemnly, her smile stretching the full length of her face, and both Jon and José let out a groan as their father beams at Paige. And then Katie’s there, not a hint of anything but pure happiness on her face as she wraps the younger girl into a hug. Paige melts into the embrace, trying her hardest not to burst into tears. Because all she can think about is the hundreds of calls and texts from Azzi that she’d left unanswered, all she can think of is Azzi's devastated face as she’d told Paige about just how hard she’d tried and that wretched ache of i don’t deserve this i broke your daughters heart wraps itself around Paige’s  heart. 

Over Katie’s shoulder, Paige watches as Azzi finally walks out into the law, her cheeks immediately turning red from the cold. The younger girl winks at Paige with a radiant smile, before giving all her attention to Drew who almost trips as he excitedly launches himself into Azzi, tiny hands wrapping around her waist. Paige watches, still buried in the warmth of Katie’s arms, as Drew animatedly tells Azzi all the stories he possibly can and Azzi nods along emphatically as if she’s being told the most important facts of her life. And Paige takes a snapshot of it to add to her ever growing collection of moments i just knew. 

***

January 2023

“Call her.”

Paige doesn’t bother replying, burying her face further into her tear-soaked pillow. Maybe if she ignores her teammate, Caroline will get the message and go away. The earth-shattering pain that she’d subdued for the last couple of months had finally reared its ugly head. And that too at the worst time possible, when her team needed to be a source of strength and with cameras catching the teardrops falling as she mourned the loss of not being able to play in the epic UConn-Tennessee rivalry. She’d done so well at holding it in, breaking apart only a couple of times, sometimes alone and sometimes with Azzi on the other end of the line. Until tonight, when the bright lights and roaring crowd had reignited the itch to just fucking play ball. 

“Paige,” Caroline says again, “stop being stubborn and call her.”

“She has a game tomorrow, she doesn’t need my dramatic ass worrying her right now,” Paige replies, getting into a sitting position when she realises the other girl isn’t about to just let this go. 

“You’re eventually going to call her. The two of you haven’t gone one day without talking to each other since this summer,” Caroline gives her a look, a hint of a smirk play on her face when it tints Paige’s cheeks pink, “seriously, just call her.”

It’s not that Paige doesn’t want to. She’d scrolled through her contacts and stopped at Azzi’s one too many time’s tonight. And each time, just as her fingers had hovered over the green call button, she’d felt guilt claw at her neck. Since she’d shown up in LA, Azzi had shown up for Paige every step of the way, checking in regularly, listening to Paige vent her anger at the world and whispering words of comfort that only sounded true when they came from Azzi’s mouth. Sometimes, if she tries really hard, Paige can feel the ghost of Azzi’s arms wrapping themselves around her shoulders, just as they had that one night in LA when Azzi had held her, so delicately as if she was made of porcelain, through the worst of her breakdowns. 

“She needs to focus on her game,” Paige says after a moment. 

Caroline sighs, mind wandering to the countless texts on her phone from Azzi begging her to take care of Paige and to let her know when the blonde wasn’t doing okay, “I know but she’d want you to call her if she knew. You need her.”

“And where was I when she needed me?” it’s the word need that triggers it, the quick snap because it’s all Paige has been able to think about lately. 

Without basketball, she’d had far too much time on her hands and she’d ended up going down a spiral of watching Azzi’s games from her freshman year, something she’d religiously avoided doing when they had happened live. At first, it had just been this immense feeling of pride, seeing her best friend be the college basketball phenomenon Paige had always known she would be. She’d shoved away the envy of it was supposed to be us that immersed her seeing the way the Bruins celebrated their new star player, and just let herself be happy in her best friend’s happiness. 

And then something changed around at the beginning of January 2022. It had only lasted a couple of games, but Azzi had hit a wall. Threes were short, cuts were made at the wrong time and she kept on getting lost on defence in a way that was very unlike her. And all Paige could focus on, eyes glued to the screen, was how completely and utterly exhausted Azzi looked during that stretch, despite the fact that she’d just come back from winter break. The smile had vanished off her face, replaced by stress lines Paige wished she could go back in time and erase. 

It wasn’t until she’d binged through all the games, cheering silently as Azzi slowly returned to form, that the realisation had hit Paige. She’d been slapped with the memory of a store decorated brightly for Christmas and a familiar voice calling her name, as she’d purposely walked the other way, pretending she hadn’t heard and the more than deserved i’m done trying text that had followed right after. For a year, perhaps longer, Paige had convinced herself that she was the only one who had lost something, she was the only one who had a right to hurt, to break. And still, she thinks she’d take all of that pain again a thousand times, if it means she could erase the fact that in all of her self-pity, she’d broken Azzi too.

“Where was I when she needed me?” she repeats again to Caroline, as the brunette stares at her in confusion, “the answer to that Carol, is that I was anywhere but with her.”

Caroline’s eyes soften in realisation as she takes a cautious step towards Paige, “oh P don’t do this to yourself.”

“I want to call her,” Paige confesses in a whisper, tears brimming in her eyes, “it’s the only thing I’ve wanted to do all day and maybe- maybe I should have but I’m just- I’ve been so unfair to her.”

“You were hurt Paige.”

“I know- I know that. But so was she. You don’t- god Carol- you don’t even know the things I said to her before she left for LA. And she’s still here,” the first tears fall from her blue eyes, and then the next and the next until there’s a steady waterfall streaming down her face, “you know I almost didn’t let her in when she first came over this summer?”

Caroline doesn’t say anything, choosing instead to come sit next to Paige and wrap her arms around the point guard. 

“I didn’t answer her calls or her texts for a year and still, still she’s picked up every call, replied to every text I’ve sent her since summer. I know- I know I need her and she’s going to be there of course she is. But when she needed me, where was I?” Paige drops her face into her hands, “I just- I don’t deserve her.”

There’s a moment of silence as Caroline rubs Paige’s back and lets the older girl wallow in her guilt. And then she reaches for Paige’s phone on the nightstand, ignoring the little grunt of protest. When the screen lights up, there’s already a notification of new messages from Azzi and Caroline can’t help but smile. 

“I think,” she begins softly, “Azzi’s a smart girl so maybe give that tiny little brain of yours a little bit of rest and let her decide who deserves her,” she hands Paige her phone “let her be there for you. I think maybe she needs that too.”

Caroline gives Paige’s shoulders a little squeeze before heading out the doors, giving the older girl a moment of privacy. Paige sighs, getting herself comfortable against her pillows, and rubbing away her tears, before finally giving in and pressing the facetime call button. 

“Do you want a distraction or do you want to talk about it?” Azzi says as soon as she picks up and Paige can see the concern etched all over her face.

“Or maybe I’m perfectly fine?”

“Ah we’re playing the pretend game tonight. Should have cleared your throat for a second longer maybe Miss Perfectly Fine, your eyes are red as fuck and you sound like a dying cat.” 

“Wow, that was rude. Maybe I’m sick?” 

“With what? The “lies to her best friend” flu?”

“That UCLA education has you making up illnesses now? Damn Az, you’re supposed to get smarter in college.”

“You’re so funny, like so funny,” Azzi huffs sarcastically before they both dissolve into giggles. It’s always just been so easy with them. And Paige’s isn’t a poet, but if she was, she’d write sonnets about the sound of Azzi’s laughter, and the way it makes the corner of her eyes crinkle. 

“I watched the game,” Azzi says after a second, “and I saw you.”

Paige smirks, “so you didn’t actually watch the game, just stared at my gorgeous face the whole time?”

“There’s that comedian streak of yours again.”

“Hey you’re the one who said you were watching me instead of the game. But who could blame you really?”

“I didn’t-” Azzi rolls her eyes, as Paige’s cocky smirk deepens, “stop it.”

“You can admit I’m a pretty girl Az,” she teases, delighted when it makes the younger girl blush. 

“Fuck off, you have enough people telling you you’re a pretty girl.”

“Yeah but it means more coming from you,” she says quietly, biting her lip. It’s not the kind of thing you’re supposed to say to your best friend, at least not in the soft, wanting way that Paige says it. Except they both know that the lines in their friendship are far more blurred than they should be, even if they've both done a pretty fantastic job at ignoring that kiss. Paige had learned over Christmas that Azzi was exceptionally good at the pretending part, moving away the moment Paige’s hands lingered a little longer than they should, changing topics if they even got anywhere near addressing the something between them. It shouldn’t have hurt but it did and Paige doesn’t understand how she can so desperately miss something that she never even had in the first place. 

“So distraction then?” Azzi says after a second, changing the subject back to her initial question. 

Paige closes her eyes, taking in a deep breath, “it was just- it was a lot tonight. I didn’t realise I was being that obvious.”

“You weren’t. I just know you a little too well.”

“These are my favourite types of games, you know. The rivalry, the crowd booing my name and getting the chance to quiet them, that’s- that’s the type of game players live for and I just- I miss it Azzi. I miss shooting, I miss defending, I miss just standing on the fucking court sometimes. I miss playing basketball. So. Fucking. Much,” a fresh set of tears leak out of Paige's eyes, as her free hand fists at her bedsheets. 

There’s silence as Paige’s words linger in the air. In a way it’s freeing to be able to say it out loud, to just let herself feel how she feels instead of fighting them. 

“You’re gonna miss it every day until you play again,” Azzi says quietly, her own voice thick with emotions, “and it’s not really gonna get easier until you get it back. But when you finally do, just- just imagine it okay, your first game back. The feeling of the crowd. Dribbling up the court. Making that first shot as everybody loses their minds. Finally just playing the game you love. That’s when that feeling of loss will finally go away.”

Using Azzi’s steady breathing as an anchor to still her erratic heartbeat, Paige lets herself get lost in the picture the younger girl has just painted for her. She lets her mind run to the future that lies ahead of her and if she focuses hard enough she can almost hear the Gampel crowds roaring as she finally returns to the court. 

“It’s kinda really fucking annoying how you always know what to say,” no it isn’t, it’s the only thing that’s keeping Paige going these days. 

“Surviving an ACL injury will do that to a girl,” Azzi says with a pained smile. 

That’s not it Paige thinks, it’s not experience, it’s you and I really wish you were here. But she can’t say that, so she changes the subject instead. 

“Tell me about your game tomorrow.”

They both settle back into their pillows, getting into more comfortable positions. Azzi tells Paige all about her upcoming game and then moves onto another topic, then another and another and another. They’ll wake up tomorrow morning to phones that died and no memory of when they’d fallen asleep. And then they’ll remember who was on the other end of the line, and if that makes them smile a little too hard, well that’s just another thing they’ll pretend didn’t happen. 

***

March 2023

It’s only natural that when Paige finally feels like she can learn to live with just having a little bit of Azzi, that the world would show her just how wrong she could be. She’s been in a much better headspace these days, her knee finally starting to feel like itself again, bit by bit. The guilt of not being able to help her team is still settled into the pits of her stomach but even with that, she’s reached a sort of acceptance. And while she’s still struggling to fight the part of her heart that wants so much more, she’s learning to be content with just having her best friend back.

It’s that little bit of time in between conference tournaments and the NCAA tournament when it feels like the calm before the storm and it’s the first weekend since before the season that the UConn team finally gets to go out and let loose for a bit. They’re riding the height of winning another Big East title and even if it’s a little bittersweet that they did it without her, Paige is beyond the moon happy for her team. 

She turns up the music in her room and changes the lights for the sake of a little ambience, before sitting down at her desk, to call Azzi and do what little of her makeup she knows how to do. Normally she’d get one of the other girls or Kayla to do it, but she’d rather sacrifice a flawless makeup look then miss out on having Azzi tease her about how she still didn’t quite know how to do her eyeliner properly yet. 

The fact that it takes Azzi longer than the third ring to pick up should be Paige’s first warning sign but instead she’s sucking in a deep breath at the sight of her best friend who looks breathtakingly beautiful tonight. Paige’s heart stutters as she takes in Azzi’s face, the light layer of red lipstick (that Paige wants to kiss off), the blush-tinged cheeks (that Paige wants to caress delicately) and the perfectly done mascara on her eyelashes (that Paige wants to feel flutter against her own skin). 

She lets out a low appreciative whistle, “celebrating that Pac-12 championship in style huh?”

“Something like that,” Azzi bites her lip and really that should have been warning sign number two, “was there- was there something you needed?’

“I can’t just call you?” Paige asks, noticing the tension on Azzi’s face, “are you busy?”

“No it’s not-”

“She is actually,” a different voice cuts in aggressively and Azzi immediately gives whoever it is an exasperated look. Paige doesn’t know who it is, but she guesses it’s one of the UCLA players. It’s no secret they aren’t huge fans of her. They’d made that much clear the few times they’d met Paige during September, always regarding her with a wary eyes. It wasn’t their fault really, Paige understood their protectiveness, in fact she appreciated it more than they would ever understand. 

“Chill Angela.” 

“Are you not busy then?” the other voice who Paige assumes is Angela Dugalic says, clearly a little annoyed. And then Azzi’s phone is being shifted away from her and instead it’s Angela’s face that covers Paige’s screen. 

“Oh,” the blonde manages to get out, taken aback by the sudden change, “hi Angela.”

“Hi Paige,” the other girl says, her voice dripping with saccharine sweetness. 

“Angela,” there’s a clear warning in Azzi’s voice and Paige already knows, even before the words are let out into the open, that whatever Dugalic is about to say is going to tear her apart. 

“Azzi has a date tonight,” Angela pronounces the last words with a gleeful lilt. 

The world spins and Paige’s head spins with it, as she grips onto her desk for some semblance of stability. She can hear Azzi spluttering in the background as she tries to get her phone back but it’s of no use as the UCLA forward powers on. 

“With a really pretty girl,” Angela smirks at the camera, clearly trying to prove something, “Zoe’s really wonderful. You’d like her, Paige.”

Zoe. Recognition registers in Paige’s brain. She remembers seeing the name flashing on Azzi’s phone a couple of times, accompanied by a photo she never quite caught a glimpse of. But as she tended to do with most phone calls that came during her time with Paige, Azzi had simply just declined the call and texted whoever that she’d call her back later. And so Paige hadn’t really bothered caring about Zoe, chalking her up to being some random friend Azzi had made. But fuck, maybe she should have cared. 

“And Azzi really likes her I think. They’ve been tiptoeing around it for ages you know? But we all knew it was only a matter of time.”

A strangled noise escapes Paige’s throat and she tries her best to disguise it as anything but the cry of despair it is. It feels like there’s a thousand knives digging into her skin, pressing harder and harder until she has no blood left to bleed. 

“They’re gonna make the cu-”

“Give me my phone back Angela,” Azzi’s voice cuts in harshly and Paige hurriedly rushes to contort her features into a smile right before the camera’s back to facing her best friend. 

“So you’re all dressed up for a date then?” Paige manages to get out and the word date sounds like bile on her tongue. 

“Doesn’t she look lovely?” comes Angela’s voice again; the girl seemingly on a mission to break Paige as much as possible, “give her a proper look Az.”

“Angela,” Azzi hisses through gritted teeth. 

“N-no show me the fit,” Paige counters, because that’s what a best friend’s supposed to say right? Show me how fucking perfect you look for a girl that’s not me

Azzi hesitates, swallowing nervously, before she takes a couple of steps back so the camera captures all of her. And Paige wishes she’d never asked to be shown in the first place, hell she wishes she’d never bothered to call tonight. Because she thinks the image of Azzi’s casual light blue jeans and simple green off-the shoulder top will be etched in her mind forever, captioned with the words not for you. 

“You look lovely Azzi,” she whispers quietly, trying to keep her voice steady.

“Zoe won’t be able to keep her fucking hands off of you,” Angela supplies and this time the glare Azzi shoots her is murderous. 

“I think I hear Emily calling your name Angela.”

“I don’t-”

“Yes,” Azzi says pointedly, “yes you do.”

Angela rolls her eyes but doesn’t protest this time. She turns to the phone with a devilish grin, clearly feeling accomplished in being a menace, “nice talking to you Paige.”

She waltzes out, leaving Paige, Azzi and a silence that feels like it could drown them. 

“You could have told me,” the blond says after a second, averting her eyes from the screen, “aren’t dates the kind of thing best friends are supposed to tell each other?”

“Paige-”

“It’s good though- you-uh- you deserve a night out.”

“P-”

“Listen, I uh- I’m going out too so- I- umm- I better get going but-,” Paige takes in a deep breath, “have a- have wonderful time on your date Az.”

She hangs up before Azzi can reply, the concern in the younger girl's eyes becoming too much to bear. For a moment, she stares straight ahead at the wall, just processing. And then she lets herself fall apart. 

***

It’s 1 a.m., Paige is drunk and miserable and so fucking tired; it’s an extremely dangerous combination. Aaliyah and Amari had practically had to carry her to her dorm because she’d been stumbling far too much and everyone was worried she’d eventually fall flat on her face. Personally, Paige thought they just didn’t have enough faith in her. She wasn’t even that drunk, she couldn’t be. After all she could still feel that stupid Azzi-sized scar on heart and wasn’t the whole point of being drunk supposed to be not being able to feel? But she has to be drunk because sober her would know better than to do what she does next, would know better than to call Azzi when she has no control over herself. 

“Paige? Is everything okay? Are you okay,” Azzi’s voice is filled with concern when she answers.

“Azziiiii,” Paige slurs, “areyoustillwithyourdate?”

“What?”

“Are. you. still. with. your. date?” Paige pronounces each word slowly. 

“I- yeah. She’s in a different room. Paige, are you okay?” 

“Interesting,” the blonde remarks quietly, “you never picked up her calls when you were with me. And we weren’t even dating.”

She hears Azzi’s breath hitch on the other end, can almost picture her doing that nervous swallow of hers, “ I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

“You didn’t care if she was okay then? Those times she called you?”

“That’s not- she didn’t call me at 1 a.m.” the younger girl justifies hollowly. 

“Bullshit,” Paige scoffs, “1 a.m. isn’t even that fucking late. Why is it so hard for you to admit you care about me waaaayyyyy more than you care about Zara or whatever?”

“Zoe. You’re drunk Paige, go to bed,” and Paige really should listen to the edge in Azzi’s voice.

“Where did y’all go?” she asks lightly, changing the subject, “c’mon Az, best friends share their date stories right?”

“Baltaire,” Azzi relents, choosing to let this battle go. 

“Oooh that restaurant we passed that one time wow,” Paige coos, “too fucking bad you hate fine dining huh? But she wouldn’t know that now would she? Because she doesn’t fucking know you.”

“Paige please,” Azzi breathes out quietly in a pained voice.

“But you know who does know you? Me. And I would have never taken you to some boring old fancy ass piece of shit restaurant like that.”

“Don’t-”

“I would have taken you on a picnic. Do you remember that park you loved, the one by my air bnb? There, that’s where I would have taken you. And I’d have gotten you supermarket sushi even though I fucking hate that shit but I know, I know, you like it. And flowers. Did she get you flowers? Because I- I would have. Roses and peonies and lilies, a whole fucking bouquet.”

And Paige is crying again, for the second time tonight, one hand gripping at her phone as the other one tries to wipe away the frantically falling teardrops. 

“And we’d stay at that park til the sun goes out and I’d take a polaroid of you in the sunset and I’d keep it forever. I swear Azzi, I’d keep it forever and I’d put it on my wall.”

“Paige,” Azzi whispers, as if it’s the only word she knows, as if it’s the only word that matters. 

“I’d bring my laptop so that when it finally gets dark, we can watch a movie. You choose Az, whatever you want. And I’d get distracted and start playing with your hair or something and you’ll pretend it’s annoying you but you’d be smiling. Fuck I love your smile.”

“You can’t- you can’t just say these things Paige.”

“Why not? It’s the truth right- why can’t I say the truth?,” Paige says petulantly, “but hush okay I’m not- I’m not finished yet. And then, then we’d just lie under the stars and it'd just be you, me and the sky. Perfect.” 

Azzi lets out a broken sob and Paige hates it, she hates it but she keeps on talking. 

“And then I’d take you home and I’d kiss you,” she whispers the last bit like a confession, “everywhere. Fuck, I’d make it so good for you Az. So good. Everything you wanted, everything you needed, I’d give you all of it. I’d make you come apart on my fingers and then my tongue-”

“Shut up,” Azzi’s voice is suddenly cold and frosty and it feels like all the heat has been sucked out of Paige’s room as well, “shut up, shut up, shut up.”

“Azzi-”

“No,” Azzi all but yells, “you don’t get to say all of that to me.”

“Then who does? Her? Zia or whatever? Who the fuck even is she?” Paige spits out venomously.

“Zoe. Her name is Zoe and you wanna know she is Paige?” 

She should say no. She should apologise for interrupting Azzi’s date and hang up the phone, but no, Paige doesn’t do any of that, “enlighten me why don’t you.”

“She’s the girl who was there,” Azzi says, her voice cracking, “she’s the girl who held me last year when I was going through the worst time of my life. She was there when I couldn’t make a fucking shot and I thought maybe I’d never be good enough. She was there when I let the pressure and the media and all of it get to my head. She was there when I was crying my eyes out over losing the one person I was sure would always stay. She- she’s who you were supposed to be because she was there, and you weren’t.”

Paige isn’t sure if it’s the bitterness behind Azzi’s words or the brokenness of her sobs that is the reason for the ache in her own chest. All she knows is that she still remembers tearing her ACL, and she doesn’t think it hurt as much as this. 

“It was supposed to be you,” Azzi sniffles, “I wanted it to be you. Because I’d have let you- fuck- Paige- I’d have let you take me on a picninc and if you brought me sushi I’d have brought you your favorite mac and cheese. I- I know you don’t really care about flowers so I’d get you chocolate, the rum-filled ones that you love. And that sunset polaroid would have been a selfie of us, where you’re kissing my cheek and I’d have it framed. I’d pick out a movie but first- first you could watch whatever basketball game was on and you’d get exasperated when I don’t know the team because I’m literally a basketball player,” she lets out a wet laugh, “but I know you secretly like explaining the NBA to me. And then- then I’d have let you take me home and I’d let you take everything. Whatever you wanted, it’d be yours.”

The vivid image of a date that never happened fills every inch of Paige’s brain. She feels like she’s in a bad dream, trying so hard to reach for a happiness that keeps on evading her grasp. 

“But you weren’t there then Paige, and you aren’t here now.” 

“Azzi-” Paige chokes out. 

“Go to bed Paige,” the younger girl says, her voice shaky but adamant, ‘Get some sleep. Maybe you’re drunk enough that you won’t remember this when I call you tomorrow.”

“Right. So we’re gonna pretend this never happened. Again. We’ll just keep on pretending forever I guess,” Paige retorts bitterly. 

“Yes, we will. Because if I stop pretending, I don’t think I’ll be able to survive.”

***

The buzzer rings around Climate Pledge Arena as the UCLA women’s basketball team loses in the Elite 8 on a last second buzzer beater. Azzi’s face contorts into one of sheer disappointment, and in the stands, Paige feels her own heart drop. She’s not one to root for a team outside of her own and god knows what would happen if Nika found out that she’d been screaming her head off each time the Bruins, or at least one specific Bruin, scored, but for Azzi, well, there’s not many of her own rules that Paige follows when it comes to her best friend. 

It had taken a fair amount of convincing on Paige’s part to even be able to come to this game. Everyone had wanted to leave immediately after the Sweet 16 loss but Paige had insisted they needed to stay in Seattle, do something to get the team’s mind off of the terrible end to their season. And that wasn’t a complete lie because even if she hadn’t been able to help when they needed it on the court, she could try and help boost morale. But she knew her teammates weren’t fooled. They knew the schedule just as well as she did and they knew exactly what or better yet, who she wanted to stay for. 

On the court, Paige can tell Azzi’s fighting back tears. The brunette had given it her all, scoring an efficient 34 points and really the game could have gone any way. That last minute heave from the opposing team really probably shouldn’t have gone in, but at the end of the day the NCAA tournament was a lot about skill but also a little about luck. But Paige knows, Azzi isn’t thinking about any of that, too busy finding a way to blame herself even though she’d had a near perfect night. They were just too similar sometimes. 

Azzi’s eyes flicker through the stands, clearly looking for a familiar face. Paige resists the urge to run on to the court and pull the younger girl into her arms and soothe away the defeated look in her eyes, if only for the fact that Azzi doesn’t actually even know she’d figured out a way to stay back for this game. Despite being in the same city, they hadn’t been able to spend nearly as much time together and while Paige’s teammates had tried to be of some help, Azzi’s teammates had seemed determined to pull her away as much as possible. All of that on top of the fact that they’re still playing that stupid game of pretend had left Paige wanting for just one moment alone for the two of them. 

As soon as the UCLA team starts heading back to their locker room, and the crowd starts leaving, Paige scurries towards where she knows Azzi will be. Their assigned locker room isn’t that far from where UConn’s had been and Paige gets there in almost record time, her mind firmly planted on being there for Azzi. She’d missed so many opportunities, but this time, this time she’d be there. 

Azzi’s leaning against the wall, her eyes closed and Paige has to take in a breath at the sight of her. Sweat sheens against her tan skin and her gameday braids are falling apart just a little but still, she’s perfect. Before Paige can take a step towards her, there’s another girl, all dark hair and long legs, brushing past her, rushing to get to Azzi’s side. It’s like the world has stopped and yet is spinning too fast all at the same time, as Paige watches this girl, Zoe, pull Azzi, Paige’s Azzi, into her arms. 

After the night of the date (and everything else they’re ignoring), Paige hadn’t bothered to bring it up and Azzi had never said anything about it again. Naively, the blonde had thought that maybe that meant nothing much had transpired after the date, silently patting herself on the back for possibly even having had a hand in that. Except, the way Zoe holds Azzi isn’t fucking platonic and the way Azzi relaxes in Zoe’s arms, isn’t fucking friendly. 

“I”ve got you Az,” Zoe whispers into Azzi’s hair and Paige wants to die. She should look away, she should walk away but her feet seem to be glued to the ground. And she remembers the way Azzi’s eyes were searching the crowd and oh- she’d been looking for- Paige can’t even let herself complete the thought because she’s sure she’ll burst into flames the second she does. 

“I’m really glad you’re here,” Azzi says quietly to Zoe. To Zoe, and not Paige. If she could feel anything beyond the dagger twisting in her heart, maybe Paige would hear the way there’s still a tinge of disappointment in Azzi’s voice, as if she’s wishing it was someone else. 

It takes Zoe pressing a kiss into Azzi’s forehead, eliciting a sigh from the brunette for Paige to finally tear her eyes away. Her feet finally move and then she’s running faster than she has in a long time, ignoring the way it causes her muscle to ache. She can’t tell if her rapid blinking is to usher away the tears or to try and prevent the memory of Azzi with some other girl from welding itself into her eyelids. It blurs her vision and in the speed of things, she can barely tell where she’s going. Paige runs chest-first into a wall, bruising her elbow. Her phone slips out of her hands, falling to the ground with a loud thud, the screen protector cracking into pieces. 

And when Paige looks at the mess of her phone on the floor, she thinks it couldn’t possibly have cracked harder than this silly little stupid heart of hers.

[irisintheafterglow]

love me from your point of view

↻ ◁ II ▷ ↺ now playing: ariana grande - "pov"

summary: you teach sakusa kiyoomi how to love, in spite of the cameras and the gossip.

wc: 8.45k

cw/tags: pro!sakusa x rockstar!reader, fem!reader in mind but no specific pronouns used, strangers to lovers, character study, explicit language, minor injury (blood/glass tw), mentions of drinking and alcohol, angst with happy ending <3

note: this is my contribution for the lovely sel's "and there's something, this feeling" collab to celebrate one year of @seiwas ! this is the longest fic i've written to date because i tried my best to go a character-driven route that i've always admired sel for rather than my usual plot-driven route. i hope you like this and happiest of anniversaries my wonderful sel :))))

likes, reblogs, and replies are appreciated :) check out the rest of sel's event here!

Sakusa Kiyoomi hated cameras. Unfortunately, in his line of work, they were essentially gnats buzzing constantly around his head. They were always trying to make him do something, look here or there, pose with his shoulders angling this way or that. After the commands came the interrogations, nosy reporters sniffing around his private life for something sellable. Then there were the phone cameras and the fans behind them, and they could be a hit or miss depending on if they respected his boundaries. When he was in highschool, he could get away with avoiding socialization; but now, as a striker for one of the most famous teams in the country, socialization was a required skill. 

“I’m happy you agreed to go with us, Sakusa,” Bokuto says for the fifth time since they parked at the venue in the heart of Tokyo. It was a little irritating, the way they kept thanking him for his presence like he’d back out if they didn’t continue expressing their gratitude. He couldn’t leave, even if he wanted to; Atsumu insisted on being the one behind the wheel and the car narrowly avoided a collision after Hinata said he’d missed the exit. “We know you’re still a little grumpy because of the drive, so don’t feel the need to talk to us right now.” 

“Hey, if you wanted to leave so badly, you could just call a car,” Atsumu points out, “but I know you secretly like spending time with us.” Sakusa fixes his teammate with a stare that could be perceived as a grimace, but his friends know him better than that. Sakusa wasn’t angry, he was bored. It was originally Bokuto and Hinata’s idea to see some artist he didn’t listen to in concert, saying that it was ‘a once in a lifetime experience’ and that the artist hadn’t played in the country in over a decade. He was vaguely aware of some songs, mostly because his teammates cranked the speaker volume during conditioning. Still, it wasn’t his ideal Saturday night, especially before a big game. “And, guess what?”

“Holy shit, box seats!” 

“We have our own bathroom!” Bokuto and Hinata’s shouts of excitement drown out the rest of Atsumu’s sentence and the security guards are barely able to open the doors as they tumble into the private section. 

“Yo, Shoyo. Be careful of that railing or you’ll fall into the general audience,” Atsumu warns while Hinata willfully ignores him, staring out over the crowds slowly filing into their seats. “Pretty cool, ain’t it?” Sakusa nods once, approaching the balcony and then deciding against it when he catches the telltale flash of a phone camera. Like clockwork, he and the other Jackals would be on every update page within ten minutes. A small object appears from behind the balcony wall, floating upwards in a thin arc before falling back to the seats below.

“The hell are they doing?”

“Sakusa, fans are trying to give us bracelets,” Bokuto beams, holding up his forearm halfway-covered in colorful beads. “Apparently it’s a tradition with this artist.”

“I don’t like gifts,” Sakusa deadpans, his mouth taut in a frown. “Tell them I can’t take it.”

“Too late,” Atsumu says, snagging a vibrant purple bracelet as it’s tossed upwards. He looks down at the eager fans below and claps, gesturing for them to throw more. “We’re already taking ‘em, so they’re gonna wonder why you’re not taking them too.”

“If they’re real fans, they’ll know I don’t like gifts,” he counters with narrowed eyes. 

“C’mon, Sakusa. Take one, at least,” Hinata says. His shorter teammate carefully pulls one off and slides it onto his wrist. The pattern alternates between yellow and lime green beads, with letter beads in the center spelling ‘NOKMLYDANOEW.’ It looked like Bokuto and Akaashi’s cat stepped on their computer keyboard. “The letters are an acronym for a song, I think. It’s an inside thing with the artist,” Hinata explains, leaning his bracelet-covered arms against the railing and waving to excited fans. 

“I’m gonna see if they have time to meet us backstage. The fans’ll go berserk.” Bokuto’s words make Sakusa’s eye twitch involuntarily. Staying longer than expected of him was a surefire way to make him irritated and they knew that. 

“Yeah, they’re not the only ones who will benefit from a little meet and greet,” Atsumu whispers cryptically and it’s impossible not to see the way he looks Sakusa up and down. 

“The hell is that supposed to mean?” 

“It’s nothing, really. Don’t worry about it, man,” Bokuto reassures him with a pat on the back, but he doesn’t budge. 

“No, I’m interested. What’re you on about, Miya?” 

“Trust us, it’s nothing!”

“Just grab a soju and relax, Sakusa–”

“They’re trying to set you up with the artist!” Sakusa flinches, turning slowly to his teammates that shrink away like vampires in direct sunlight. Hinata looks mortified, his hands slapped over his mouth as if to seal off what was already revealed. Atsumu and Bokuto shrug, giving him guilty smiles and showing their palms to convey their surrender. “That’s…that’s what they were talking about before we picked you up,” Hinata continues sheepishly. 

“This whole thing is a blind date?” He seethes through gritted teeth, the lights of the stadium starting to give him a migraine. “You guys brought me here to set me up?” 

“All we’re trying to do is have you meet someone new,” Atsumu says gently, stepping forward and then abruptly backward when Sakusa looks like he’s about to commit a homicide. “We think it’ll be good for you.” 

“I don’t care about new people. I have work and you idiots to keep me busy,” Sakusa argues, crossing his arms over his chest. The beads on his arm press into his skin and he fights the urge to rip the entire thing off. “Why would I wanna meet some musician I don’t listen to?” 

“Even if you don’t listen to their music,” Bokuto replies without hesitation, “You should read through their lyrics sometime; I think you’ll find a lot of stuff you can relate to. I bet they get just as much bad publicity as we do.” 

“As if,” he scoffs. “I don’t need someone with a purple guitar telling me what I think.” 

—

“You said there were volleyball guys in attendance, right? If they’re still here, I should probably meet them,” you say to your publicist as you step out from the automatic riser that brought you below the stage following the last song of the show. The sound of your platform boots echo on the linoleum in the back halls of the stadium, your exit music faintly audible from above. “Who are they?” 

“There’s four in total, along with some managers and press. They’re on a team called the MSBY Jackals, with an outstanding record in the sport. From what I’ve seen, three of them are pretty nice.” The two of you, along with a handful of security guards, climb into a waiting golf cart. 

“And the other one?” 

“Toss-up. He might not even talk to you.” You take a sip from your water bottle and briefly glance at the photo your publicist has pulled up on her phone. You can guess which one is the quiet one from his face in the photo alone, staring blankly at the camera while his other teammates smile brightly. 

“He looks like he’d kill me in my sleep,” you observe bluntly. “The type of serial killer people make fan accounts about.” 

“In his defense, I don’t think this is his type of crowd,” she shrugs, her attention flicking to the way you stretch your legs in the seat of the small vehicle. “Sore?”

“Beyond belief,” you chuckle, wincing as a small stab of pain shoots through your calf. “I think I might need a little more padding on the soles, if possible. Chunky heels, in all their wonder, were not made for three hour shows.”

“I’ll see what I can do. You focus on turning back on for the players.” 

After a few more minutes of sipping water and stretching out your legs in the backseat of the golf cart, you pull up to the loading dock where the four athletes are waiting. Two of them, one with iced tips and the other with vibrantly orange hair, practically jump in place when you arrive. The grumpy one lingers at the back of the group; the blonde player extends his hand to you as you step out. 

“Thank you so much.” You greet them with a practiced smile and hope your exhaustion isn’t too visible. “Did you enjoy the show?”

“I couldn’t stop screaming the entire time and I think my voice is shot.” 

“You are incredibly talented.” 

“It was wonderful!” 

“Oh, I’m so glad. It’s such a pleasure to meet you all,” you say warmly, truly wanting nothing more than to curl up in bed and sleep for 24 hours straight. Even when his friends chatter your ear off, the curly-haired one at the back doesn’t say anything. The short one with orange hair and the widest smile introduces himself as Hinata Shoyo, excitedly leading you to each of his teammates: loud Bokuto, flirty Atsumu, and reclusive Sakusa. You’re left alone with Sakusa when the other three rush off to find a bathroom, having been too excited to use one during your show. 

“I didn’t take you for the bracelet type, Sakusa,” you comment, clocking the single bracelet on his wrist. “The colors are nice, though. They go with your eyes.” You let some of your facade come down, mostly because you figured you didn’t need to be as energetic around this one compared to the others. 

“Yeah, Shoyo let me have one of his. Didn’t realize you had such a passionate fanbase,” he states and you fight the urge to laugh. “Or such a large one.”

“You didn’t think I had fans, Sakusa?” His eyes widen ever so slightly and the chuckle slips out before you can stop it, his ears turning a shade pinker. 

“Not what I said,” he backtracks, avoiding eye contact. “The show was good,” he continues unexpectedly, and you find yourself appreciating his praise more than you should. It was a triumph, in your mind, every time you won over a new listener, and he was no different. At least he wasn’t one of the guys harassing you in your Instagram messages. 

“I appreciate the compliment,” you say and catch his ears turning even redder. As much as he was trying to seem offputting, you could read him like a book. “You guys are in town for a game?”

“We’re playing not tomorrow night, but the night after. Coach would kill us if he knew we were going out before a big game,” he answers and you nod, gears starting to turn in your brain. It would be a headline tomorrow that the four players came to your show, but it would break the Internet entirely if you attended their game, especially in the middle of a sold-out tour. It was the kind of publicity you needed to drown out the tabloids. 

“My last show of this city is tomorrow night, but I can get away with skipping a rest day. Would it be weird if I came to watch you play?”

“You want to watch me play?” Sakusa echoes. The tiniest little smirk plays on the corner of his lips. Ugh. For all his introvertedness, he still had the ego of a pro athlete. “That’s what you’re saying?”

“I meant you guys. Don’t think I forgot about the players that actually came to talk to me,” you correct quickly. You exhale through your nose and shake your head with a small smile. The enthusiastic conversation behind you tells you that the rest of the team is returning. “Fine. Maybe I do wanna see who you are under all that antisocial attitude.” 

“Have fun with that. I don’t like new people,” he says, testing you. Too bad you were used to men that probably weren’t healthy for you. “There’s no changing that.” Your forehead throbs at his pure audacity, but you manage to keep an unbothered expression. 

“Good thing I love a challenge.” 

—

“I didn’t think they’d actually show up,” he mutters, taking another look at the large screens projecting the image of you in a VIP box. Sakusa didn’t recognize you without your concert makeup and stage outfit until Shoyo practically knocked him over in excitement. Seeing you smiling and catching your eye, even from at the bottom of the court, made his stomach turn in a way he wasn’t used to. 

“I can’t believe we didn’t think of that first,” Bokuto beams, sending a powerful serve that barely cilps the top of the net. Sakusa finds his eyes drifting to your box, his scowl deepening when you blow an exaggerated kiss to his teammate. His next serve he puts more effort into, but when he looks up, you’re not even watching. Not only were you crashing his game, you were distracting his team. “Nice plan, Sakusa! Maybe we can become friends with them and go to each others’ events.” 

“That wasn’t my intention,” he cringes, the idea of spending more time with you making him nauseous. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but the fact that you were making an effort to engage with him and his friends was outlandish. And all because he invited you to a game? Didn’t you have anything better to do?

“You thought inviting them to the game would scare them away, huh?” Atsumu’s watching Sakusa carefully, inspecting his disgruntled expression under a microscope. “Believe it or not, Omi, some people actually want to be around you…despite how difficult you make it sometimes.” 

“I don’t remember asking for your input,” he threatens, but the blonde Miya merely shrugs, impervious to Sakusa’s warnings. “Can we agree to ignore their presence? Focus on the game. It’s your job.” Atsumu and Bokuto share a look, with typical Hinata none the wiser. Whether they knew it or not, your attendance was throwing off Sakusa’s entire concentration. The average spectator wouldn’t notice the change in Sakusa’s behavior; if anything, they would think he was functioning at a higher level than he usually plays. His serves are stronger, his spikes are sharper, and his steps are quicker than any other player on the court. Fans rave on social media about how focused he is in the game, and the reporters scribble in their notebooks the pressing question for the post-game press conference: Why are you playing so well today? 

“I always play that well,” he mutters, his lie drowned out by the lively conversation around the booth in the corner of the restaurant. The Jackals had cinched an easy victory and Bokuto and Hinata dragged you from your box to get dinner with them. Sakusa sits at the edge of the booth, flanked by Atsumu, followed by Bokuto and Hinata. You sit at the other end, laughing at some dumb story being recounted. It made his forehead pound. “You just don’t notice.” 

“Yeah, right,” Atsumu snickers with another sip of beer. “Admit it, something’s pissing you off.” Maybe I do wanna see who you are under all that anti-social attitude. Your words linger in the back of his mind and fire him up again, unknowingly furrowing his eyebrows and incriminating him. “Yep. Knew it.” 

“Shut the hell up, Atsumu.” He hated that his normally-idiotic teammate was on the cusp of exposing the truth, not to mention the fact that he’d downed one too many soju bombs and was feeling pushier than usual. 

“Is it ‘cause they actually listened to you and showed up?”

“I told you to shut up,” he hisses through gritted teeth. You’re laughing so hard that tears are starting to prickle at the corner of your eyes. It’s the kind of laugh where no noise is actually leaving you and you’re fanning yourself with your hand. Gross. 

“Aww, look at little baby Omi-Omi, finally having a feeling over someone wanting to get to know him,” Atsumu gushes and Sakusa’s ears burn. He threatens his friend with an indescribable death to no avail. “I knew you had a heart under all that coldness!” 

Sakusa’s fist clenches around his glass and he realizes his mistake a split second before there’s a sharp crack! and sudden pain prickles in his palm. “Oh shit, man. I–” His teammate swears under his breath when drops of dark red and amber starts to trickle down Sakusa’s arm, staining the white napkin on his lap. He grinds his teeth down to keep from crying out, the whiskey in his shattered cup burning his raw skin. 

“What happened?” You’re by his side in an instant, your perfume flooding his senses in a way that makes him dizzy. “Jeez, Atsumu. What’d you do?” 

“Why are you blaming me? He’s the one who was holding the cup,” Atsumu says defensively and you shoot him a look. “Fine. I got him riled up and he did,” he gestures to the mess on the table, “that.” 

“Could one of you call your driver please? I think it’s time you three head back to your hotel,” you recommend calmly. 

“What about Sakusa?” Hinata asks as he climbs out from the booth, dragging an apologetic Atsumu and a very buzzed Bokuto toward the door. “He should probably get that checked out.”

“I know. I’ll stay with him,” you reassure him and, after a brief pause of thinking, the short spiker nods and heads for the exit. Sakusa is rigidly still, save for the involuntarily twitching of his injured fingers. “C’mon, let’s go,” you say, gently guiding him out of the booth and grabbing some unused napkins to catch the bleeding. He follows you wordlessly, a million thoughts stewing in his eyes that he refuses to verbalize. He knew he didn’t like you when you tried to read him after your show, but the alcohol in his system was making him despise you. 

You, sitting with him on the way to the nearest hospital. You, carefully looping the elastic bands of his mask over his face before leaving the car. You, politely declining a fan’s attempt to introduce themselves while you’re checking him in at the reception desk. You, listening intently to the doctor as she says that he’ll need stitches in his right hand and that they’ll need to pick every last particle of glass from his palm so that it doesn’t become infected. You, ignoring your vocal coach’s orders for a rest day and staying by his side from 11:00pm to 3:00am when the doctors finally finish his hand. 

He despises you and his pride becomes a gag in his mouth once you drop him off at the Jackals’ hotel, rendering him unable to choke out a simple ‘thank you’ as you continue to treat him with unending kindness. You’ll get hurt if you keep being nice, he thinks to himself, and the way you flinch like you’d been shot tells him he’d spoken his thoughts aloud. He hears you murmur Sleep well, Sakusa, as he shuts the door with his left hand and stalks away, lost in the trenches of his mind. 

—

“But, I’m not sure if it should be the A minor to keep with the chord progression or go to E to create some tension.” Your producer nods at you, his chin resting on his knuckles as you strum your latest song idea on your purple acoustic. It’d been a few days since your late-night trip to the emergency room with Sakusa, and you decided to spend a few hours in the studio before catching your flight to your next tour city. “And when I tried to do it on piano, I just wanted to change the key entirely.” He opens his mouth to speak but is abruptly cut off by three insistent raps on the doorframe of the control room.  

“You have a visitor,” your publicist informs you, peeking her head into the room with a slightly bewildered look in her eyes. “He says it’s urgent.” Your eyebrows dip but you stand anyways, walking through the halls of the recording space until you reach the lobby of the building and stop in your tracks. 

What the hell was he doing here?

“Hey,” Sakusa greets and you blink at him, like he was a figment of your imagination that would disappear if you ignored him. It’s impossible to ignore him, though, considering the outrageously large bundle of flowers cradled in his arm. He follows your eyeline, muttering, “I didn’t know which ones you liked, so I just…bought all of them.”

“I’ll, uh,” your publicist glances at you for a brief moment, giving you an unreadable look before gingerly taking the bouquet from the Olympian in the lobby. “I’ll take these and have them brought to your next hotel, okay?” She dismisses herself, leaving you alone with him. 

“Why are you here?”

“Are you busy right now?” You cross your arms over your chest, annoyed that he replied to your question with a question of his own. Since dropping him off at the team’s hotel, you’d come to peace with his hatred for you even though you’d tried to be nothing but cordial; maybe he could tell that you wanted to be friends for the publicity, you theorized. 

“I’m in a recording studio doing my job, so yeah,” you reply and allow all your suppressed attitude to rear its head. To your surprise, he doesn’t immediately fire back at you. If anything, Sakusa looked uneasy, nothing like the cold confidence you previously saw. “What do you want?”

“Do you have time for lunch?” 

“Oh, now you’re interested in my company,” you scoff, rolling your eyes. In the time following that night at the hospital, you hadn’t received any updates other than an unprompted photo of hungover Atsumu. “Unless you’re ready to apologize for how much of an asshole you’ve been, I don’t wanna hear it.”

“I wanna start over,” he says as you turn your back on him to return to the studio. “One meal,” he proposes, “and if you want nothing to do with me after that, I’ll leave you alone.” You check the wall-mounted clock and make your decision. 

“You get two hours.” 

By the time you sneak through the back of a restaurant and sit down to eat, your stomach is turning itself inside out. You thumb through the menu eagerly, ignoring your present company until water glasses are set out and orders are taken. 

“Look,” you begin, peering at him in the dim light, “I haven’t been completely honest with you.”

“That makes two of us,” he agrees. “You go first.”

“Truth is, I didn’t go to the game to see you, or any of the Jackals, for that matter,” you admit. “I went to get the tabloids off my back and give them a different reason to talk. I didn’t mean to mess up whatever dynamic you guys had going, so for that I am sorry.” You can’t see much of Sakusa’s expression, but you can tell his eyes are on you by the way they shine like a cat’s. It was off-putting, but also drew you in like a black hole. “Is your hand doing okay?”

“It’s better now,” he replies. “Doc’ told me that if we’d left that glass in for longer, it would’ve been more serious.” You nod and take a drink from your water as an excuse not to respond, to see if he would go further. “I, uh,” he swallows thickly, steadying his nerves. “I’m sorry for being avoidant and just being a general asshole. You didn’t deserve that, and I’m…incredibly remorseful.” A puff of air leaves your nostrils in amusement and he can hear you smirk from across the small table. 

“I appreciate the apology, and the apology lunch. Wanna start over without our respective teams breathing down our necks? Friends?” You stick your open hand toward him and he shakes it without hesitation, sealing your deal. “Awesome.” 

“You said ‘tabloids.’ What do they say about you?” Your smile fades and for a moment, he thinks he’s pushed too far too soon. He’s on the brink of apologizing again when you exhale an unsteady breath. 

“The tame ones call me an industry plant,” you explain awkwardly. “The–uh–bolder ones call me a slut.” His nostrils flare and he’s glad there’s no glass in his hand again, otherwise he couldn’t promise it wouldn’t be shattered. “The big drama came from me leaving the producer who’d helped me start my career. The media got the wrong idea, said I’d slept my way into working with him, and left when I’d had my fill.” Sakusa slowly stretches his neck from side to side, willing the sudden tension in his body to relax as he starts to see red. “I hope you can see why I wanted to give them a different reason to talk.” It’s more of a struggle than he expected to keep his voice steady. 

“What actually happened? With the original producer?” You hum in lieu of answering, grateful to catch the approaching servers out of the corner of your eye. 

“I’ll tell you another time,” you dodge, giving him a smile that he can tell is off. “For now, can we eat? I’m so hungry I’m about to eat these silly little herbs in the centerpiece.” 

—

Sakusa stays in Tokyo longer than the rest of his teammates, who depart on the team jet for the next game. He says he wants to do a little more sightseeing, despite having an apartment in the most expensive highrise in the city and knowing the streets like the back of his hand. The truth was, he wasn’t ready to give up the…thing…he’d established with you. He fell into an odd sort of routine: saying goodnight over text, calling you in the morning and telling you what time he’s picking you up, choosing the best places that can shut down for the world’s biggest rockstar on a day’s notice. You were in town for three more days and ended up spending every waking moment of them with Sakusa. 

“You’re really good at dodging the cameras,” you remark over a shared cup of ice cream on your last day, digging your spoon past the numerous toppings you’d insisted on adding. “How do you do it?”

“It helps when I’m not surrounded by the three biggest noisemakers on the planet,” he deadpans and you giggle, a sound he was increasingly becoming fond of the more time he spent with you. “I’m pretty good at laying low. People don’t know where I am unless I want them to know.” 

“Everyone seems to know where I am before even I know,” you frown. “I envy you; I really do.”

“I don’t,” he shrugs.

“Why not?” 

“When you’re trying so hard to avoid people, they tend to stop looking for you. Makes my job easier.” Your lips part in an oh of understanding. “But, I guess you’re here, so either you truly care about my wellbeing or you’re clinically insane.” You burst out laughing, so much so that you snort and have to cover your mouth with a napkin. “My running theory is that it’s a mix of both,” he declares with a rare upturn at the corner of his mouth. 

“Oh, shit,” you mutter once you’ve caught your breath and checked the time on your phone. “I should go. My plane leaves soon and my manager’ll kill me if I’m late. She’s already iffy about me staying in Tokyo this long.”

“What’s your next city?” 

“Madrid. I’m starting the European leg,” you reply while you pack up your things. He stands, walking you to the door of your waiting car. His eyes instinctively scan the surroundings street for cameras, and he subtly positions his body to block you from any passing eyes as you climb into the car. The window makes a humming noise as you roll it down. 

“Have a safe flight.” 

“Don’t be a stranger, yeah? I’ll miss you, even if you don’t want me to.” He memorizes the way the afternoon sunlight catches in your eyes, how each thump of his heartbeat seems louder when you’re near. Something is wrong in my brain, he thinks to himself. Once he’s completely sure your car isn’t being tailed, he dials Atsumu on the drive to the hotel to collect the rest of his things.

“You land already, Miya?” His car purrs beneath his fingertips as he speeds through the busy streets. 

“Safe and sound,” his teammate confirms. “Though jet lag is starting to hit Shoyo and Bo. How were the rest of your dates?” 

“They weren’t dates,” he argues, his hands unconsciously gripping the wheel tighter in indignance. “I was just thanking them for that night.” 

“Yeah, and a bit more than that, I figure.” 

“I don’t even know why I bothered calling you,” he groans.

“Because you want me to say ‘I told you so,’ right? That it was a good idea for me to bring you to that show. You know, a trip to that conveyor belt sushi place will suffice as repayment.”

“In your dreams, Atsumu,” Sakusa deadpans. 

“C’mon, Omi. I know you wouldn’t keep spending time with them if you didn’t feel some kind of tug.” 

“Tug?”

“Like you’re drawn to them,” Atsumu gushes and Sakusa feels like gagging. “Intimately.” Sakusa definitely didn’t think of you that way…right?

“You’re such a pervert.” His disgust is clear, and his speakers blow out with Atsumu’s screams of Not like that! and You don’t even pull enough for me to make fun of! “I’m at the hotel now so I’m gonna hang up. Not sure again why I even bother talking to you.”

“Because I’m your best friend,” Atsumu answers. “See you soon, my sweet Omi~” 

“Remind me to punch you when I touch down.”

—

“How was the show a few nights ago?” 

“Amazing, as always. Almost fell on my ass running around to meet people at the barricade, but thankfully kept my balance,” you chuckle, running the pad of your thumb over the petal of a purple gladiolus. “You can probably see a clip of it on all the fan pages.”

“You think I follow fan pages about you?” 

“What? I follow fan pages about you,” you insist. “User ‘omi-omisbigtits’ has some pretty funny posts of you.” Sakusa groans from the other end of the line.

“That’s the one fan account I have blocked because they post such heinous things,” he recalls. “Did you scroll far enough to see the one where I’m at the zoo and–”

“You’re running away from the peacock, yep,” you finish. Out of the various presents and letters your fans gifted you, you find yourself drawn again and again to the pot of sword lilies. “I screenshotted it and made it your contact photo.”

“I’m never sending you flowers again,” he mutters, but you hear it, snapping your head upwards. 

“These were you?” Your jaw drops so forcefully that it aches. “You’re the mystery flower sender? No one would tell me who sent these!” 

“Because I told them I’d sue if you found out it was me,” he shrugs and you roll your eyes, a grin creeping onto your face. 

“Why’d you want to send them anonymously?” Upon inspecting the color further, you realize where you’ve seen the shade before. 

He’d sent you flowers that matched your favorite guitar. 

“I didn’t wanna distract you before your shows. I was aiming for subtlety.” You blink in disbelief. Sakusa had sent you flowers the night before you started your show run in Paris, knowing you would be at the venue for soundcheck. Maybe he did care about you and your career.

“Well, you failed,” you state, staring at the large bundle of purple taking up half the space on your dressing room’s side table. “This bouquet is the opposite of subtle.”

“Bouquet? I ordered you one stem.”

“No,” you restated. Even though you’d never video called Sakusa before, you switch on your phone’s camera anyway to show him the absolutely gargantuan amount of flowers he mistakenly sent you. “You ordered this.” To your surprise, he turns on his camera as well. His face contorts into such a shocked and puzzled expression that you snort out the water you were sipping, burning your nostrils as tears prickle your eyes. “Stop looking like that, I can’t breathe!”

“What do you mean, ‘stop looking like that?’ I didn’t mean to send you the whole rainforest!” You choke out another uncontrollable laugh, turning the camera to face yourself and setting it in front of your vanity mirror. “Alright, at least you got them.” 

“Yes, and I really appreciate you sending them.” You can tell he’s not used to having his camera on, as he keeps tilting the phone at odd angles and barely showing his face half the time. “What’re you doing right now?”

“Just in bed.” Or a snowstorm, from the looks of it. 

“Why does it look like your poor phone is in a typhoon?” 

“You’re literally so annoying,” he grumbles, reluctantly positioning himself so that he’s sitting against the headboard. With the new point of view, you also notice very quickly that he…is completely shirtless. “Better?”

“Yep, yeah. That’s fine,” you force out, clearing your throat aggressively while the image of his very broad shoulders assault your brain. “Sorry that I didn’t send you flowers for your game.” 

“The guys would give me shit about it if you do, so I’m glad you did not,” he replies. “Though, it does suck not having you around.” 

“This is the closest I’m ever getting to you saying you miss me. I should commemorate it with a plaque.” Sakusa clicks his tongue and rolls his eyes, but you can tell he’s trying not to smile. He must’ve taken a shower recently; his curls look slightly wet and dangle haphazardly across his eyes. You have the sudden urge to run your fingers through it, and then the even more sudden urge to slap yourself for thinking in such a way. 

“What city are you in now? I know you just finished up Dublin.” His voice snaps you out of your daydreaming. 

“Paris,” you manage to reply without too awkward of a pause. “You?”

“Paris.” 

“Huh? I thought your next game was in Brazil,” you ask. His face goes still for a moment and you figure it’s probably frozen from bad service, wherever he is. “Hello?”

“Sorry, you broke up for a second. What were you saying?”

“I was asking why you were in Paris.”

“I’m not in Paris,” he states. “I’m in Seoul.” 

“Isn’t your next game in Brazil?” He pauses for an almost imperceptible amount of time.

“Game schedule got rearranged. We’re in Seoul, then the States, then Brazil.” 

“Oh. I see.” A loud series of knocking on your dressing room door makes you jump. “Ah, I’m sorry. I need to go.” 

“Rockstar duties?”

“You know it,” you yawn, taking one last indulgent look at the exposed muscle on his shoulders. “Hopefully we both get some rest for the coming days.”

“Yep. G’night.” 

—

There was a little bit of lingering guilt on his end after you hang up; the fact that he’d lied to you about his whereabouts didn’t escape him. 

He wasn’t sure what came over him, what sentimental demon temporarily possessed him to take a plane to wherever you were (Paris, not the lie that he gaslit you into believing) and buy a last minute ticket to your show. His emotions and desires were thrown completely off balance; he truly didn’t care if he was up in the nosebleeds if it meant he got to see you. Thankfully, a wealthy couple had bought out an entire area of club seats for their granddaughter’s birthday, but decided last minute that they wanted to fly to Cancun. It made him a little anxious, having all that space to himself, but he figured he could have his guards and team invite family to make it a little less lonely. It didn’t matter how many strangers he needed to meet or how much he had to spend. 

He just wanted to see you. 

He finds himself in a familiar position from the first time he went to one of your shows, rooted under the awning of the expansive lounge area and just out of sight from fans. His arms unconsciously cross over his chest and the beads of the bracelet he’d dug through his luggage to find presses against his skin. But, this time, he isn’t annoyed by the pain; if anything, it reminds him that he’s actually here with you, even if you don’t know it yet. 

I’m pretty good at laying low. People don’t know where I am unless I want them to know. His words echo back to him and he makes his decision, stepping out into the stadium lights and resting his forearms on the railing. 

He wants you to know he’s there. 

The first fan to notice is a girl in purple, slapping her friend furiously until they both are gawking at him. One pair of eyes becomes two, which becomes five, which becomes twenty, until hundreds of phone cameras are pointed at him and snapping photos. The sentimental demon possesses him again and he sticks up an involuntary peace sign, even going so far as to smile to look less bored. They scream for him and he thinks the sentimental demon is Atsumu, because he finds himself imitating his teammate’s movements. His hands clap together and he gestures for fans to toss him bracelets, which become an impossible shower as dozens are thrown at once. By the time the lights dim and news of his presence is trending across the continent, his arms are covered in sleeves of rainbow beads. 

— 

The ache in your feet is immediately replaced by adrenaline when your head of security informs you who came to the show. You don’t bother waiting for the golf cart to bring you to the back of the stadium and take off sprinting, chunky heels and all. They’re calling after you to hold on to let the rest of your team catch up, but you don’t listen. The stadium staff look at you fondly but also have a reasonably startled reaction to you running like you’d escaped from an asylum. 

You round the corner absolutely heaving and his face breaks into a wide smile. You’d never seen him look like that before, never at his games or during any of the time you’d spent together. It was an expression reserved for only you in this moment. You don’t remember if he catches you or if you embrace him first, but soon enough your face is tucked into the crook of his neck, eyes squeezed shut and grinning like a lunatic. His arms are rock solid around your waist, pulling you impossibly closer until you can hear his heartbeat slamming against his ribcage. Neither of you speak for a few minutes because you don’t feel the need to; only when you pull away to hold his face with your hands do you manage to articulate words. 

“You’re here,” you breathe. “You’re actually here.” Recognition blinks onto your face and you suddenly frown, lightheartedly slapping his shoulder, saying, “You lied! Your dumb ass said you were in Seoul!” 

“I wanted it to be a surprise,” he concludes unapologetically. “I did slip up with my story a few times, though.”

“Yeah, you got your own game schedule wrong.” 

“To be fair, some games did get rescheduled, which is why I’m able to be here. Our next game’s in Seoul, which is why I blanked and said that instead,” he explains and you respond with an exasperated eyeroll. “Find it in your heart to forgive me?” 

“I see right through you, Sakusa Kiyoomi. You don’t…uhm…” He comes close enough that you can count his eyelashes and it takes you a few seconds to recompose yourself. “Mmm, you wanna kiss me so bad, it makes you look stupid,” you challenge and hope he doesn’t hear the butterflies going wild in your stomach. 

“Maybe I do,” he smirks and it only makes the situation more sweat-inducing. “I missed you, after all.” Your eyes flutter closed as he leans in but instantly shoot back open, gently pushing him away as he pouts. “What is it?”

“Take me out to dinner, first. If you apologize sufficiently for being a terrible liar, maybe you’ll get a kiss,” you propose and he’s already lacing his fingers in yours. 

“Good thing I love a challenge.” 

— 

In spite of his attempts to ignore the cameras and the footsteps that were always a few feet behind him, there was a pit in his stomach every time Sakusa was in public with you. He couldn’t figure out why he was so irked, but the feeling made it difficult to enjoy how you smiled at him in quiet moments and pointed out things he’d never think to notice before. Most perplexingly, you didn’t seem bothered at all by the cameras. It was like they disappeared as soon as he came into your proximity; you barely spared them a glance in favor of beaming up at him. 

Even though you agreed that there was a feeling more than platonic between you two, he hadn’t mustered up the urge to kiss you properly, opting for your forehead or your hands instead. It didn’t seem to bother you, the way he only reserved showing his affection when you were out of view. But, he slips up the night before you have to part ways, him for his next game and you for your final European date. The dread he’d experienced for days felt like intuition telling him something was inherently wrong, like he was teetering on the edge of a cliff he didn’t know the height of. 

It comes crashing down when the tabloids catch him holding your hand.

“Can you believe this?” You snort, showing Sakusa the headline as he forces down the bile in his throat. “They think you’re my next ‘big catch,’ like you’re a fish or something,” you chuckle obliviously, leaning into him on the living room couch of his hotel suite. He manages a pained mhmm and watches as you continue to scroll through the news site, the photos of him holding your hand and grabbing your waist flying by like a nightmarish film reel. He rubs his palms back and forth over the fabric of his sweats, feeling suddenly feverish from every single point where your body was touching his. Clearing his throat, he swallows thickly and you finally look at him, concern pinching in your eyebrows. Your voice is gentle and you reach up to feel his forehead; he dodges your hand and you carefully hide your disappointment. “Hey, are you feeling okay?”

“We can’t do this.” His heart sinks as you sit up and blink at him, his words registering slowly in your mind. “I can’t…I can’t do this with you,” he sputters out. You exhale a single time and he watches your eyes flick from side to side, your brain running a thousand miles a minute.

“I don’t understand.”

“We need to stop.” You laugh forcefully, like you were commanding your body to feel lighter. 

“If this is a joke, Kiyoomi, it isn’t funny–”

“It’s not a fucking joke; you need to stop being with me,” he snaps and the room falls silent. The only thing he can hear is his heartbeat rushing through his ears, his face hotter than the sun. 

“Why?” Your voice breaks and so does something in him, his jaw clenching unconsciously. 

“You need to stop being nice to me,” he says through gritted teeth, “because I can’t guarantee I’ll be nice back.” This is how it always ends. Push them away before things get messy. This is how it works for Sakusa Kiyoomi. 

“But you have been nice,” you fight back, your grief morphing into unfiltered rage as you stand and scream at him. “You sent me flowers. You bought me dinner. You flew across the world to see my fucking show!” 

“That doesn’t matter. None of it mattered.” His composure wavers momentarily, unreadable emotions flashing across his face. “You can’t be close to me without getting hurt.” He gestures to your phone, the paparazzi image of you two together brighter than a Times Square billboard. 

“Who said it needed to be that way?” 

“Everyone did!” He stands without warning and you flinch backward, stumbling against the coffee table. “People think I’m an asshole, so that’s how I choose to stay. At the very least, I can predict things and prevent people from getting too close. You’re too close.”

“But you’re not an asshole. You’ve shown me that much,” you insist, arguing with his back as he starts to retreat into the master suite. What you say next makes him freeze, trapped in an endless time loop with you. 

Tell me you care for your friends. 

“What?” He’s seething as he turns, meeting your eyes. “What the fuck do you mean, do I–”

“Do you care about your friends?” You repeat, stepping closer to him. His eyes are burning, molten to the core even when you refuse to shrink away. “If Bo, Shoyo, and Atsumu were dying in a fucking fire, would you save them?”

“Of course I would,” he spits indignantly. “What kind of–”

“Then you have the capacity to love, Kiyoomi, as much as you don’t want to admit it.” You’re crying, tears streaming uncontrollably down your cheeks. Why are you crying? He never wanted to make you cry. What did he do to make you cry? 

“Because the last time you loved something, people scorned you.” They told him his passion was suffocating. They told him he was walking a path that one could only walk alone. He’s frozen, his feet left immobile on the hotel carpet. He makes no sound beside shaking exhales and can sense nothing but your voice coming closer.  

“You made it your career to prove that it’s worthy of your love…but you forgot how to love anything else.” Time slows. He doesn’t remember when your face appeared so close to his. He can see a universe behind your eyes and he wants nothing more than to hold you and call you his. His passion was suffocating. It would hurt you. It would burn you. It would–

“I wish you could love yourself as much as I love you.” 

One breath, and then another. 

A crack in an eggshell. A hole in a fortress. 

You are an asteroid completely obliterating the planet he considered himself. 

And when he finally kisses you properly, he understands just how freeing being destroyed could be. 

—

Sakusa Kiyoomi did not like cameras. They were gnats buzzing around his head, calling for him to look this way and that, catching his every reaction to whatever crossed his path. They were broken whispers that floated to his ears, unintelligible conversations that stayed as voices in his head. He did not like cameras, but he found that looking at you was infinitely better than looking at anything else. 

“You doing okay?” Your murmur is the only thing he hears, quieting the rest of the chatter around him. Swaths of dresses and suits brush against his arms and he fights the instinct to shield you from view, despite being sat in the very center of the huge theater. It was the biggest award show of the season, and he’d made a vow with himself that he wouldn’t ruin tonight for you. With your hand in his, as long as he had physical contact with you, it was easier to keep the doubts in his mind at bay. “I’m feeling fine, if that’s what you need to know.” 

“I’m doing okay as long as you’re okay,” he confirms softly, barely sparing a glance at the giant lens a few feet from his face. “I’m here to celebrate you. I won’t let them bother me tonight.” You beam at him, opening your mouth to say something when a commotion comes tumbling down the aisle. “Actually,” he mutters as his three teammates trip over themselves to find their seats in the rest of the row, “Do you think I can have one nasty scowl? I promise I’ll behave otherwise.” 

“Having a rockstar best friend is like, the best thing ever,” Bokuto declares before you can respond to Kiyoomi. 

“I’m so glad Omi finally got his head out of his ass, too,” Atsumu drawls with an unbothered yawn that makes Sakusa’s blood boil. The blonde Miya sibling had been very vocal with the press about playing as the matchmaker, pointedly dodging questions about his own romantic status. “I think I’ll secretly have ‘I told you so’ engraved on the inside of your wedding rings.”

“Over my dead body,” Kiyoomi grumbles and you smile, squeezing his hand once. He squeezes back, pressing a rare public kiss to the side of your head. You shift your body to lean more closely to his and your wrist presses down on something wrapped around his wrist. 

“What’s under your sleeve?”

“Hmm? Oh, this?” He pulls back the freshly ironed fabric to reveal a familiar pattern of green and yellow beads, out of place compared to the rest of his formal attire. “Got it from a concert,” he smirks knowingly. “The show was cool, but I think I’m in love with the artist.”

“Yeah? You never figured out what that acronym stands for, did you?” He shakes his head and you point at each letter bead, explaining, “No one knows me like you do, and no one ever will.” 

“Well, isn’t that fitting?” The lights dim and the orchestra starts to play its signature fanfare, spotlights gliding in aimless directions across the audience. “Thank you for helping me understand.”

“The meaning of the lyric? Of course, I think of you every time I sing it, now,” you smile. 

“No, about what you said that night when we argued.” He feels a familiar blush creeping up his cheeks. “About loving me how you love me.”

“And do you get it now?”

“I do,” he nods, glancing at the colorful bracelet on his wrist and your fingers intertwined with his. “I just needed a little bit of convincing.” Your head settles on his shoulder and he lets you, allowing himself to relax in spite of the sea of cameras surrounding him. 

“Good thing I love a challenge.”

if you enjoy my writing and would like to support me, you can buy me a coffee on my ko-fi! commissions and nsfw requests can be sent through my fiverr! you can also check out my full masterlist here :)

[lilacmingi]

SNOWMAN

My works are 14+ ONLY. If you’re under 14 DO NOT interact with me or any of my works

Pairing: Yunho x fem reader

Word count: 3,640

Note: Bringing you another imagine from Wattpad! I’m gonna be honest, this one is probably my most favorite Christmas imagine T^T I adore the plot and I had so much fun seeing everyone’s reactions when it first came out. For those who haven’t read it, buckle up! You’re in in for a ride!Reminder: This imagine is from Wattpad so there will be no continuations or extra parts

A long, drawn-out sigh left your lips as you stared out the window watching the snow fall to the ground below. You would train your eyes on one snowflake, watching the way it floated downwards, joining the rest of the crystals on the solid, white blanket coating your yard.

Unlike other Christmases, your heart felt very empty this year. You felt something was missing—more like someone.

You work in an art museum and you've always been very involved in your job. You've never been one to worry or stress about settling down or finding someone, as your job keeps you happy. Sure, you've had moments where you feel a little lonely and maybe wish you had someone to spend time with, but you've always been able to brush it off. However, now something is different.

You tried to make plans with some of your coworkers, but they were all busy with their significant others. Your parents had taken a trip, so seeing them was out of the question, and your friends were busy as well with their boyfriends and girlfriends. Again, you've never been one to concern yourself with relationships, but it seems that everywhere you look there are couples. It's almost like the universe is rubbing it in your face.

In an attempt to try and brighten your Christmas, you decided to go outside and indulge in the snowy weather, perhaps even make a snowman. You bundled up tightly in your warmest clothes and stepped outside into the frigid air which immediately began to nip at your nose.

Tugging your scarf up a bit closer to your face, you stepped off your porch and into the thick, white powder coating the ground. Your feet sunk into the snow as you trudged out into the yard, trying to find a place to start building your snowman. Your gaze came to halt just underneath a tree. It was dead, but some of the branches would provide at least a little shade for your snowman.

You began shoveling up snow, pushing it into a round sphere before shaping it and smoothing out the rough and lumpy edges. Once you got a good base going, you began scooping up snow with your hands, adding to that base, building it up higher and higher.

You continued to work on your snowman for an unspecified amount of time. You were so focused on perfecting the snowman, you didn't even keep track of how long you were outside. At some point, you took a moment to step back and see what you had created.

Your brows pulled together as you glanced at the snowman you had sculpted, chuckling bitterly as you realized you had unintentionally made a literal snow man. The icy white snow had been shaped into the silhouette of a man. You had even given him facial features like a nose and the vague shape of lips.

"Wow. I must be really lonely." You remarked.

As if things couldn't get any more miserable, you realized you built your snowman underneath a mistletoe tree. Though, you could've sworn it was just a regular, dead tree, especially since you don't have any mistletoe trees in your yard.

"The universe is just mocking me at this point." You muttered, glancing up at the cluster of mistletoe in the branches above.

Fixing your gaze on the literal snow man in front of you, you let out a scoff.

"'Tis the season." You muttered before leaning in, pressing your lips against the ice cold snow.

When you pulled away, you couldn't help but chuckle dryly, shaking your head at how pitiful you were.

"I really am lonely."

You stepped away from your creation and headed inside to warm your numb hands and feet. You cozied up by the fireplace with a blanket and a cup of hot cocoa. You had even turned on some holiday music to try and get into the Christmas spirit. The tingling in your fingertips subsided as your hands warmed up and you regained feeling in them.

Being near the toasty fire had made you a little drowsy, so you migrated to the couch where you curled up and unknowingly dozed off.

It was early in the morning, your snowman sat in its spot under the tree which previously had clusters of mistletoe on it. Now, those clusters of festive greenery were nowhere to be seen.

Suddenly, a quiet, icy crackling sound could be heard as your snowman began to move. Of course, you were inside snoozing away, so you had no idea.

The once stiff, snowy limbs of the snowman began to move as it unstuck its feet from the white blanket beneath. It stretched its back just slightly before shaking its body, the snow falling off and dropping into a pile on the ground.

You rolled over, letting out a small groan as you came to. You found that you were still on the couch, nearly forgetting that you fell asleep there the previous day.

You pushed yourself into a sitting position, your muscles aching slightly from sleeping on the couch. After allowing yourself to wake up a little, you stood up and shuffled to the kitchen to make yourself a coffee. You blinked lazy as you hovered your finger over the broad selection of Keurig K-cups, deciding which flavor you were in the mood for. After making your selection, you put the little pod into your coffee maker and waited for it to brew.

The delicious smell of coffee quickly filled your kitchen, waking you up a bit. Once your hot beverage was finished, you took your mug full of caffeine and walked to your living room window.

You admired the view of the snowbank outside, watching as a flurry of snow came down, accumulating on the ground. Your eyes drifted over to the tree that sat in your yard, your whole body freezing when you noticed that your snowman was gone. All that was left was a small pile of snow.

Abandoning your coffee, you slipped on some shoes and hurried outside to inspect. In the middle of the shallow pile of snow was what appeared to be footprints, as if someone had been standing in the same spot as your snowman. You then noticed shoe prints in the snow leading away from the spot where your snowman previously stood. They looked fairly fresh so you hoped the culprit was nearby.

As soon as you turned around, you spotted someone standing a few feet away. He was tall with boyish features and stared at you with wide, innocent eyes. He wore a large white sweater, a red scarf, and had small chunks of snow sitting on his shoulders and his head.

"Hi!" He beamed brightly, waving at you.

"You! Did you destroy my snowman?" You asked, pointing to the man.

"No." He shook his head, vigorously. "Don't you recognize me?"

"No."

"You don't know who I am?" He asked, seeming hurt.

You shook your head. "I've never met you in my life."

"I'm Yunho, your snowman."

"My—my what?" You questioned.

"Your snowman. You built me right over there." He pointed.

"Ah. I see what's going on here. You were spying on me. You saw everything that was going on and then you decided to come over and destroy my snowman."

"No, that's not it at all." He shook his head. "I just woke up and the snow was so cold so I shook it off and started walking around looking for you."

Your brows furrowed in bewilderment. His story was so bizarre and nonsensical, and because of it, you were unable to comprehend anything that was happening. You looked over at "Yunho" giving him a once-over. He did kind of favor the snowman you made. The nose and hair was almost a perfect match, and if he really did wake up covered in snow, then that would explain why it's on top of his head and on his shoulders, but there's no way he came to life. Snowmen don't come to life. This isn't some Christmas special, this is real life.

"You put your mouth on me. Right here!" He pointed to his lips. "It felt funny."

Your eyes widened as your cheeks were set aflame.

"I—" You started.

"You're lonely. You said so yourself."

You knew right then that he was telling the truth. You had said that so quietly, there's no way someone spying on you would have heard it.

"You—you're really..." You trailed off. "You're my snowman?"

He nodded with an excited grin.

"I don't understand." You murmured in shock and disbelief.

"It's Christmas magic!" He smiled, throwing his arms up, the snow on his shoulders falling to the ground.

You stared off in the distance trying to grasp the fact that the impossible just happened.

"Can we go inside? It's cold out here." Yunho shivered.

"Yeah." You answered, walking blindly to your house.

"What's your name?" Yunho asked as the two of you went inside.

"Y/n."

"That's a wonderful name." He smiled.

Still in a daze, you grabbed Yunho's face, squishing and pulling on his cheeks to make sure he was real.

"That feels funny." He giggled, his words being distorted as you continued to poke around at his face.

"You're real." You murmured, staring off at nothing in particular.

"Yes, I'm real." Yunho told you. "Can you not see me and hear me?"

You didn't answer.

"Are you alright? You seem to be acting a little weird."

"I just can't believe this is real. I don't—I don't understand."

"I already told you, it's Christmas magic."

"Christmas magic." You scoffed. "Christmas magic."

You paused suddenly, a strange occurrence popping into your mind. Hurrying to the window, you looked outside where the tree you built your snowman under stood. The limbs were barren, bearing no clusters of mistletoe at all. You knew you had no mistletoe trees in your yard and the fact that you clearly saw a bundle of the plant appear on the tree the day before was incomprehensible. You blinked to make sure you were seeing the bare limbs correctly, making sure you weren't delirious.

The only explanation was just as Yunho said—Christmas magic. You had trouble believing it yourself, but it made sense. Come to think of it, you had been feeling lonely and wanted someone to spend the holidays with, and that's exactly what you got.

"What's this?" Yunho's voice broke through your messy thoughts.

You turned to see him looming over your cup of coffee.

"It smells really good." He commented.

"It's coffee." You said, walking over to him.

"Oh. Can I try some?"

"Sure. I'll make another one."

Yunho followed you into the kitchen, trailing behind you like a puppy. He watched your every move as you made coffee, fascinated by the process. The hot beverage was finished in no time, which Yunho was excited about. You handed the mug to him, watching cautiously as he took a sip.

His face twisted in distaste, then switched to an expression of surprise.

"I like that." He grinned. "I wasn't sure at first because it was sweet and a little bitter, but it's really good."

"I'm glad you like it." You told him, taking a sip of your own coffee, which was just barely warm.

You weren't sure what to do with your new houseguest. He had just come to life less than half an hour ago and didn't seem to know too much. I mean, he is... was a snowman, after all, so you didn't expect him to know everything.

"Y/n?" Yunho spoke up.

"Yes?"

"Why are you lonely? Don't you have friends to spend Christmas with?"

"They're all busy with their boyfriends and girlfriends." You answered.

"Oh. I bet you don't have one of those. That's why you're lonely."

"How'd you guess?" You asked sarcastically, your tone emotionless.

"It was easy." He smiled. "But there's no need to feel lonely anymore, though. I can be your boyfriend."

"Boyfriend?" You parroted. "That's not necessary. Plus, we don't really know each other that well."

"I'm a boy and I'm your friend. That should be enough, right?"

"Not exactly. You see, boy friend is a boy who's your friend, exactly as you said. Boyfriend is when you're dating someone. You hold hands, cuddle, kiss, and go on dates." You attempted to explain.

"You kissed me. So that means I'm your boyfriend." He smiled.

"You were just made of snow, I didn't think anything of it."

"But I'm not now." He grinned, cutely.

"Let's just take it one step at a time, okay? Friends first."

"Ah. Okay. Friends first." He nodded.

By some miracle, the universe had sent you someone to keep you company. The circumstances, albeit odd, seemed to produce a great result, one that you would surely take advantage of. So, for now, you decided to teach Yunho about different things and let him have some fun and some new experiences.

A few weeks passed and you found that Yunho enjoyed learning about new things and was eager to try out new stuff. He was very excitable about nearly everything and you found it absolutely endearing. It was strange, and you might sound crazy, but you were actually falling for Yunho. You tried not to think about it too much, or else you'd convince yourself you were crazy.

The two of you were currently sitting on the couch, bundled in a blanket, watching a Christmas movie, per Yunho's request. You made hot cocoa for you both to sip on while you watched the film, along with a bowl of popcorn which was slowly emptying.

Yunho's eyes stayed glued to the screen as the two main characters stood in front of each other. The girl had just realized her feelings for the guy, unbeknownst to her, he was about to confess first.

You watched the scene unfold. The man confessed, the woman accepted his feelings, and, like all romance movies with a happy ending, they kissed. You could see the ending from a mile away, so you weren't too shocked.

Yunho's mouth dropped open when he saw the way the characters kissed.

"Is that how you kiss?" He asked.

"Sometimes." You answered.

"I wanna try that."

Your eyes widened. "What?"

"I wanna try kissing like that."

Your cheeks were set aflame by his request. They became even hotter when he turned towards you, his large puppy-like eyes glimmering with anticipation.

"Can we try it?" He inquired.

"I suppose we can." You answered, hesitantly.

You weren't sure why you were so tentative, it was a win-win situation; Yunho got to experience a real kiss and you got to kiss Yunho, so why did it feel inappropriate?

The dark-haired male leaned forward, his innocent eyes staring straight into yours.

"You have to close you eyes when our lips touch, okay?"

He nodded, hanging on every word.

He then eagerly closed the space between your mouths, his lips crashing onto yours. Your eyelids fluttered shut as you unconsciously leaned into him, the kiss warming you from the inside out.

Yunho was pleasantly surprised by the kiss. It felt a lot different than when you had first kissed him. That first one was strange, and a little tingly. He also couldn't really feel it. This kiss, however, was completely different. He could feel everything. Your lips on his, your hands resting on his shoulders. It was warm and made his stomach do flips. Yunho decided right there that he loved kissing.

When the two of you parted ways you were quiet, feeling a little bit sheepish. Yunho, on the other hand, was smiling like a child on Christmas morning. His face was practically glowing with joy and his already shimmery eyes were brighter than ever.

"Alright. Well, that's that." You murmured.

"I liked that." He grinned.

You weren't sure what to say to that. The situation was awkward—for you anyway.

"Can we do it again?" Yunho asked.

"Maybe some other time." You answered, quietly, not being able to tell him no.

The days until Christmas dwindled down to single digits. Yunho could feel it. He didn't know how, but he knew his time with you was coming to an end. He knew from the day he met you that he would only be able to stay with you until Christmas. At first, he was happy. He thought he would keep you company and help you enjoy the holidays, then disappear. He was okay with that, until recently. He never expected to fall in love with you.

Christmas approached rapidly, sneaking up on you, much like your feelings for Yunho. Every day he seemed to do something that had you absolutely head over heels for him.

You had been debating it for a few days now, and you'd finally come to decision... you were going to tell him how you felt. No backing down, no chickening out. You were going to go through with it.

You had put it off all day. You were going to confess after breakfast, then Yunho wanted to watch a Christmas special on tv. You were going to do it after the movie ended, but Yunho wanted to bake cookies, so you did.

It was now nearing midnight. You stood in your bedroom, taking in a deep breath. Your heart was pounding so fast and so hard that you felt like it was about to burst out of your chest.

"Okay, Y/n. No chickening out."

You stepped into the living room, spotting Yunho standing by the tree. His fingers ghosted over the needles on the artificial evergreen and traced over the glittery ornaments hanging from the branches. He seemed to be distracted by something, but there was no time to worry about that.

"Yunho." You spoke up.

He turned towards you, his face lacking it's usual brilliance.

"I have to tell you something." You approached him in a hurried manner, grasping both his hands.

Yunho locked eyes with yours, waiting to listen to anything you had to say. You opened your mouth to speak, but a slight chilly breeze brushing past your ankles catches your attention, causing you to clamp your mouth shut. You glanced down, a gasp leaving your mouth at the unusual and alarming sight. Yunho's feet were disappearing, turning into little snow flurries that flew around him in a cyclone-like manner.

"What's happening?" You asked, panic rising in your voice.

He gave you a somber smile. "I have to go."

"What do you mean you have to go?"

"You wanted someone to spend the holidays with. You got what you wanted. Now it's time for me to leave."

"But I don't want you to go." You whimpered, tears pricking your eyes.

"I don't want to go either." He spoke shakily, icy crystals falling down his cheeks.

"Yunho, no." You shook your head.

Your brain was a jumbled mess. You had this whole confession thing planned. You knew what you wanted to say, but you couldn't even say it because of how panicked you were. The only thing you could manage was:

"I love you."

Yunho swallowed, more tears welling up in his eyes. The flurries were swirling around his abdomen which was slowly disappearing and turning into snowflakes. As if things couldn't get worse, you no longer felt his hands in yours. When you looked down, his fingers were beginning to vanish in a flurry of white along with his hands. He would be gone soon.

Without thinking, you grabbed his face, pulling him down to your lips.

If Yunho was going to disappear, you wanted to give him one, last kiss—a real kiss that meant something and had true emotions behind it. You clutched the sides of Yunho's face, afraid that if you let go he would disappear. You kept your lips pressed firmly against his in a long, passionate kiss.

You pulled away, your vision blurred by the tears that welled in your eyes. You waited for what seemed like forever for Yunho to turn to snow flurries and disappear forever—but he didn't.

Yunho looked down at his hands and feet which were now back to normal. He held his palms out in front of him, flipping his hands over and clenching them into fists to make sure he was real. A joyous smile broke out onto his features and bubbly giggles escaped him.

"I get to stay."

"You—you get to stay?" You sniffled, quietly.

"Yes!" He nodded.

"How do you know?"

"It must have been the kiss. You confessed and then you kissed me. It was like a seal."

"Sealed with a kiss." You murmured.

"Yes! Exactly."

You collapsed into Yunho's arms, sobbing hysterically, clutching onto him like your life depended on it.

"Hey. It's okay." He cooed, wrapping his arms around you. "Everything is okay."

You lifted your face to look up at him.

"I almost lost you. You're the best thing that's ever happened to me and I nearly lost you."

"But you didn't. You saved me and now I'm here to stay."

You nodded, attempting to pull yourself together. Yunho carefully wiped away your tears, cupping your cheeks in his large hands.

"Now that all that's over, I believe you said you loved me." He grinned cheekily.

"I do."

"I love you too." He smiled softly.

You had to stop yourself from crying again. You were so happy, words couldn't even describe it. Never in a million years would you have thought that the events leading up to right then would have ever occurred, as you always thought it was impossible. But if there's one thing that you've learned, it's that no matter how nonsensical or utterly impossible it may sound, Christmas magic is indeed real.

Hongjoong ❄︎ Seonghwa ❄︎ Yeosang ❄︎ San ❄︎ Mingi ❄︎ Wooyoung ❄︎ Jongho

Masterlist ᝰ — enjoyed this imagine? reblogs & comments are very much appreciated!

DO NOT steal, plagiarize, copy, repost, alter, or translate my works in any way

[ckret2]

Chapter 22 of human Bill's still putting up with being the Mystery Shack's prisoner (title tbd), featuring: Dipper's having nightmares about his spirit floating out of his body, just like the Bipper incident. (He's very sure they're only nightmares.) And Bill, kind and generous muse that he is, would love to help, and definitely isn't offering for secret evil reasons. After all, how could a dream demon benefit from telling his enemies how to control their dreams?

Even though Dipper already knew, intellectually, that dreaming about Bill didn't mean Bill was in his dreams, getting immediate physical proof was a relief. Any time he had another nightmare, all he had to do was get out of bed, go find Bill—sleeping, drinking, reading, meditating, watching TV, staring out a window—and see for himself that there was no way Bill could have been in his head.

So tonight, when he "woke" into another Bipper nightmare, his first instinct was to go gripe at Bill about it.

He'd floated through the bedroom door and hovered halfway down the stairs before he remembered that since he was currently having the Bipper Nightmare, dreaming that he was floating ghostlike outside his body, it meant he wasn't actually awake and he couldn't gripe at the real Bill; but then he decided maybe he'd feel better if he ranted at dream Bill anyway.

The TV glowed from the living room. At this time of night, it could be Abuelita or Bill. Dipper's spectral socked feet settled on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, he turned toward the sofa—and froze.

Sitting on the sofa, legs curled feet-on-thighs in lotus position, was Bill—and he was surrounded by a brilliant light, yellow-golden against the dream fog gray. Like the halo of sunlight around an eclipse, or like a radioactive mass close enough to melt your eyes, or like an explosion rushing closer. The light danced around Bill like solar flares. Dipper had to squint his eyes against the light.

"Whoa," Dipper said.

The light dimmed to a faint yellow aura as Bill turned toward him. Dipper nearly jumped out of his skin, except that he was already out of his skin. Bill said, "'Whoa' what?"

No one ever saw Dipper during his Bipper nightmares. (But then, he supposed, it made sense if he dreamed that Bill could see him, didn't it? Since he'd been the only one able to see Dipper after he stole his body.) Dipper gestured vaguely at Bill. "You're, uh. Glowing."

"Aw, flattering." Bill laughed. "You look like a zombie trying to figure out if he wants to return to the land of the living. Shouldn't you be asleep?"

"Ha ha," Dipper said flatly.

"What, another nightmare? Are you here to tell me how your subconscious is my responsibility again?"

"Shut up." Imaginary dream Bill was just as annoying as the real one; but Dipper decided he'd feel pretty dumb for yelling at "Bill" for invading Dipper's dream while Dipper was still dreaming. (Maybe Dipper's subconscious mind was using the form of a snarky Bill to tell Dipper that he needed to seize control of his dreams rather than blame somebody else for them? That Bill might have caused Dipper's recurring nightmares, but only Dipper could do the work to end them? Huh. He'd look into that when he woke up.)

His gaze drifted to the television, which was displaying a man hunched over a bizarrely-angled desk in a black-and-white movie. (He could somehow tell it was black and white, even though colors were already muted and grayish during his Bipper nightmares.) It was like seeing a dream within a dream. "What are you watching?"

"The Counterfeit of Dr. Calligraphy," Bill said. "A hypnotist sends letters to a sleepwalker that have subliminal messages concealed in the handwriting. He brainwashes the sleepwalker into making fake money in his sleep. It's a comedy."

It didn't look very comedic. Dipper wondered how he'd dreamed this plot up. Anxiety about waking up from one dream into another dream, combined with memories of counterfeiting money last summer?

He leaned against the doorframe and watched the movie long enough to confirm it was not, in fact, a comedy, but rather some kind of gloomy noir-ish silent film; then sighed in boredom. His subconscious couldn't even imagine up a fun movie. "I'm going back to my body," he muttered, pushing off the ground and hovering back up the stairs.

Bill, eyes half-lidded, didn't look up from the screen as he sleepily muttered, "Mmkay."

It took a long moment before he said, "You're going to your what?" He leaned out of the living room and looked up the stairs; but Dipper was long gone.

Maybe he'd misheard "bed." He settled back in front of the TV; but he wasn't paying attention to the movie now.

####

"You look exhausted," Mabel said, ruffling Dipper's messy hair with both hands. "Did you stay up late reading again?"

"No," Dipper groaned. "I just slept badly. I had another Bipper nightmare. I dreamed about Bill making fun of me and watching a boring movie."

"Aw, Dipper. I'm sorry," Mabel said sympathetically. She fixed her headband for the day in the bedroom mirror and pulled on her shoes. "I dreamed about a car race where all the drivers are kittens!"

"Oh yeah?"

"It was really intense! Two of the cars crashed," Mabel said. "Everyone was okay though. The drivers were saved by a firetruck with Dalmatian puppy firefighters!"

When they made it down to the kitchen, Bill was already there, sipping burned coffee with his eyes closed. "Hey, twerps." He peeled one eye open a slit just long enough to figure out which set of twerp footsteps belonged to Mabel, and held his coffee mug in her direction. "Top me off?"

"You got it!" Mabel retrieved her pitcher of Mabel Juice from the fridge, refilled Bill's coffee with it, and poured herself a cup.

"What's today's flavor?"

"Blue!"

"That's exactly what I need." Bill took a deep drink, spat a small plastic horse on the table, and sipped more carefully.

"You look exhausted, too." Mabel poured herself a bowl of cereal and milk. "Did you have a nightmare?"

"I don't have nightmares; nightmares have me," Bill said.

Dipper, the person whose nightmares had Bill, scowled and leaned against the stove to wait for Bill to leave so he could get breakfast.

"But no—I was up late watching a German expressionist cinema marathon," Bill went on. "They don't make 'em like that anymore. Which is good, because I prefer my movies with colors and music; but there's nothing quite like watching five movies in a row about going insane in the middle of the night on twenty-four hours without sleep. Second most likely experience to make you see phantom spiders crawl across you skin." He cracked open an eye again and tried to steal Mabel's cereal. She smacked his hand with her spoon and stole it back.

He dragged himself out of his chair to get some proper food. "Get the fridge?" Mabel opened the door for him. As he rummaged around for something appealing, he glanced back over his shoulder at Dipper. "You missed the punchline, by the way."

Dipper started. "The what?"

"On Dr. Calligraphy," Bill said. "You went back to bed before the ending. The sleepwalker's counterfeits are so good that nobody believes the investigator from the treasury when he says they're fakes. He gets hauled to the looney bin—and then realizes the handwriting in all the letters from his boss is the same as the hypnotist's." Bill laughed. "I told you it was a comedy, didn't I?" He dumped some bagels, squirt cheese, and pickled jalapeños on the kitchen counter, then glanced at Dipper again. "What's with that look? Don't you get it?" He sighed and rolled his open eye. "Okay, so the joke is that both the main character and the audience will never know if he was set up, driven insane, or always insane—"

"I didn't go 'back to bed'," Dipper said, stomach twisting. "I—never got out of bed. I didn't watch a movie last night."

"You didn't," Bill said skeptically. And then, studying Dipper's face, repeated, "You didn't?"

Mabel was staring between Dipper and Bill. To Dipper, she said, "Was... that the boring movie in your dream?"

Dipper didn't reply. He didn't want to say anything with Bill listening—not when he didn't know what Bill knew. Or what Bill might have done. Maybe I just heard the movie from upstairs, Dipper thought—and might have believed, if not for the fact that it was a silent film.

Bill was silent for a long moment—longer than Dipper felt safe with. Like a cat sizing up its prey. "Well, how about that," Bill said. His smile was not reassuring. "Looks like Dr. Calligraphy isn't the only one with a sleepwalker on his hands."

####

"Do I sleepwalk?" Dipper demanded.

Bartholomew stared at him in perfect silence. "You can't tell," he said, "on account of the fact that I can't move; but I just did a confused double-take in my head."

"Do I sleepwalk!" Dipper repeated. "I was—I think I was sleepwalking last night—? If I wasn't sleepwalking, then that means Bill was—was in my head somehow, and I don't know how or what he was doing in there—so either he was in my head or I was somehow downstairs, or—I don't know, maybe I was out of my head—but I really need to know which it was, and Mabel was asleep last night so you're the only one who would know—"

"Dipper," Mabel said, shutting the door behind them. "Hold on. If Bill was doing something in your head, why would he just tell you about it at breakfast by spoiling the end of the movie?"

"I don't know!" Dipper said. "To terrify me? To let me know what he can do?"

"But if we know he can do it, that means we can stop him from doing it," Mabel said. "It doesn't make sense—"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Bartholomew said. "I wasn't up here last night. I was watching a picture show marathon through the living room vent."

Mabel laughed. "You call them picture shows. You're so old."

"'Move-y' sounds stupid and I'm willing to die on this hill."

"Was I there?" Dipper asked. "Did I come downstairs last night?"

"Yeah, during Dr. Calligraphy," Bartholomew said. "I could hear you talking to Bill. You said he was glowing. Which stood out to me as kind of weird, since he's always glowing." 

Dipper heaved a sigh of relief. "Okay. Great. So I was sleepwalking. That's..." He paused, gave Bartholomew a funny look, and said, "Let's... let's unpack the thing about Bill glowing later."

"Suit yourself."

He looked at Mabel. "I was having a Bipper dream. Do you think I always sleepwalk during those dreams? Maybe that's why they're always about me wandering around at night?"

"Maybe?" Mabel shivered. "Augh, does that mean whenever you dreamed about trying to come to me for help, you were actually just standing over my bed watching me sleep?"

Dipper dragged his hands down his face. "Mabel. Sometimes I visited the neighbors' houses."

"Dipper!" Mabel laughed, but there was a nervous edge to it. "Have you been walking around in the street in your pajamas?"

"Maybe it's not that bad. Maybe sometimes I'm sleepwalking but sometimes I stay in bed. Last night I really wanted to go yell at Bill, maybe that... got me on my feet?" He dropped onto his bed, chin in his hands.

Mabel sat on her bed with her cereal, and handed over a banana she'd grabbed for Dipper. "We can start locking the bedroom door," she said. "So if you do start sleepwalking, at least you can't get out."

"What if I unlock it in my sleep?"

"Maybe Grunkle Ford could teach me the anti-door curse he put on Bill! And I could cast it on you at night so you can't get out of the room?"

Dipper shook his head. "That's not a long-term solution. What about when we go home? Or what if I need to go to the bathroom?" He gestured emphatically with his banana as he spoke. "I realized something last night, Mabel: I'm sick of these nightmares and I'm sick of just putting up with them. They were bad enough when they were just in my head, but now they have to affect me in real life, too? No! I'm just—not gonna have them anymore."

"Yeah!" Mabel cheered. "I like that attitude! I'm with you. I'm sick of being freaked out by my dreams, too. Do you know how hard it is to rescue kittens from a car crash when you've got to stop and ask yourself if this is a Mabeland thing?"

Dipper hesitated. "Um... probably pretty hard?"

"We'll do it together. We'll both stop having nightmares." She paused. "How?"

"I... don't know yet." Dipper sighed. "Our therapist's given me a few tools to cope with nightmares, but they haven't stopped them. I'm thinking our best bet is magic."

They looked at Bartholomew.

"Sorry," he said. "Outside my wheelhouse. I specialize in creepy dolls and necromancy."

"There's gotta be something in this town," Dipper said. "Maybe dream catchers? Do dream catchers actually work?"

"What about that spell to enter other people's dreams?" Mabel asked. "We could take turns entering each other's dreams to help fight each other's nightmares! That would totally work, right?"

"Except then we'd have to take turns not getting any sleep."

There was a knock on the attic door. Mabel called "Yeah?" and hopped to her feet to open it.

Bill was leaning with his elbow against the doorframe, cheek in his hand, one ankle hooked over the other, grinning broadly. "Couldn't help but overhear that you're having some dream troubles! Here, my card!" He handed Mabel a paper towel on which he'd poorly painted his triangle self with coffee grounds and signed his name in an alien language. "Bill Cipher, professional dream demon—at your service."

Dipper said, "We hung up a 'no solicitors' sign."

"I saw it and I ignored it."

"Bill," Mabel groaned. "Get out of here!" She tried to block him with her arms. 

He dodged around her to enter the room with a laugh like this was some playground game, and then immediately tripped over a cardboard box. He recovered his balance by grappling with Mabel's bag of mini golf clubs and drew one out to use as a cane so smoothly it almost looked like he'd planned it that way. "Hey, hold on—I'm here to help!"

"Right," Dipper scoffed. "Like when you wanted to help me unlock that laptop."

"Or when you offered to help me extend summer."

"Or when you were going to 'help' our dimension 'party'?"

Bill said, "I did extend your summer and I did throw a party."

Dipper asked, "And the laptop?"

"No excuse for that! I was just lying to you, kid." Bill laughed.

"Yeah, no," Mabel said, "we don't want your help. No offense, but your help is super evil. Get out of our room."

"No." Bill plopped down in the middle of the floor, arms and legs crossed, mini golf club lain across his knees, smirking defiantly up at Mabel. "Not until you hear me out."

"No! Go. Scoot. Get out." Mabel attempted to shove him toward the door.

"Try it! I weigh more than both of you combined! Physics is on my side! I'm master of this room."

Mabel only succeeded in knocking him onto his side. Bill prodded her back with the handle of the club and said, "Seriously, just listen to me and then I'll go. I'm more or less the reason you're having nightmares in the first place, aren't I? C'mon! How can I make it up to you if you won't even hear me out?"

Mabel paused in her onslaught. "You wanna make it up to us?" Dipper rolled his eyes.

"Sure, why not? Do you think I wanted to traumatize a couple of kids? You just happened to stumble in the way of a force beyond human comprehension! Hey, I stuck you in a paradise bubble, does that scream 'deliberate attempt at psychological torture' to you?"

"You were going to kill me," Dipper said.

"You even left his suicide letter," Mabel said.

"Which was wrong of me," Bill said patiently, with an air that made it sound like he was the one who had to explain this to them, "but I can't undo that unless you want to give me that time tape you're hoarding. On the other hand, I can do something about the nightmares. Just hear me out."

Dipper had been climbing to the end of his bed to try to get past Bill and escape for adult reinforcements, but stopped to stand on the mattress and glare down at Bill. "And then once we've heard you out, you won't leave until we've accepted your offer—"

"There is no offer," Bill said. "I'm giving you information. No 'deals,' no favors, no magic, nothing. Just information. It's your business what you do with it. If you want to throw it away, I've already done my part!"

Dipper hesitated. "I don't trust you."

"You don't have to trust me. Go verify everything I tell you with someone else. Heck, you can even go ask Stanford about it, he'll back up everything I'm about to say."

The fact that Bill was suggesting he talk to Ford threw Dipper off. He glanced at Mabel to see what she thought.

Bill took the momentary silence as a victory. Smugly, he said, "Lucid dreaming."

Dipper blinked in surprise. "Hey, I know what that is. It's when you're dreaming and know you're dreaming, right?"

"You obviously don't know any more about it than that, or else you wouldn't be having nightmares." Now that Mabel wasn't attacking him and Dipper was actually listening, Bill perched on a crate and crossed an ankle over the other knee, getting comfortable. "Knowing you're asleep is step one of lucid dreaming. The next step is controlling your dreams. If you've fully mastered the techniques of lucid dreaming, you'll essentially be a god inside your own sleeping mind."

"Like we did in Grunkle Stan's head!" Mabel said. "When we beat you with kittens."

"And eye lasers," Dipper added.

"And stomach lasers!"

"And 80s music."

"And hamster balls—"

The corners of Bill's mouth twitched a little further down with each sentence. He forced a smile back on. "Right! Haha! You kids." There was friendly good cheer in his voice and wrath in his eyes. "Exactly like that. Except you weren't asleep at the time. That wasn't lucid dreaming, that was imagining. It's a lot easier to do inside of someone else's dreams. You've got to learn an entirely new set of techniques if you want to do it in your own."

Dipper dropped down to sit on his bed again. "Like what kind of techniques? Does it involve meditating, or...?"

Bill laughed. "And here I thought you didn't trust anything I had to say! What, do you want me to teach you how to do it now?"

"No."

"Didn't think so!" Bill grabbed a sparkly pen off Mabel's bedside stand and a scrap of notepaper off their table. "I'll give you some names of authors. Human authors. Experts on the psychology and spirituality of dreams. And if you don't want to trust these authors because I recommended them, fine, just find their books in the library and anything sorted on the same shelves will teach you the same techniques. But master lucid dreaming, and your dreams will be your playground. No more nightmares."

Bill offered the paper to Mabel, but his smirk was aimed at Dipper. "Just like I promised: no magic. Nothing that could invite the big scary dream demon into your precious little heads. All I'm telling you is where to learn your own species's skills. If you don't believe me, go ask for yourself."

####

Sitting back in the guest room's desk chair, Ford frowned at the list of authors Mabel had handed him and stroked his chin thoughtfully. The kids sat on Ford's bed and waited for him to render judgment on the Latest Bill Nonsense.

"That look doesn't look like a good look," Mabel said. "Is Bill up to something bad?"

"On the contrary, I can't think of any way that your learning how to lucid dream could benefit Bill," Ford said. "In fact, if anything, it would be actively detrimental to him. That's what has me so puzzled."

Dipper asked, "What do you mean, actively detrimental?"

"Lucid dreaming is the first line of defense against Bill's mental tricks," Ford said. "By itself, it isn't enough to drive Bill from a dreamer's head; but instantly telling the difference between dreams and reality takes the power out of most of his simplest psychic illusions." He nodded toward Dipper. "For instance, knowing you were dreaming might have saved you entirely from Bill taking over your body."

Dipper blinked. "Wait. What do you mean?"

Ford stared at him. "The computer," he said. "When Bill waited for you to nod off and used a dream to make you think the computer was going to self-destruct."

"He did what?"

"Dipper, Fiddleford never installed a self-destruct sequence on that computer," Ford said. "I... thought you figured that out?"

Dipper stared at Ford. He slid to the floor, lay down, and stared at the ceiling. Mabel leaned forward to pat his head.

Ford did not let himself grin at Dipper's reaction. Dipper had been through a traumatic experience, and finding out there was something else he personally could have done to avoid it all had to be devastating, and therefore—therefore—his dramatic reaction was not funny.

Ford cleared his throat and politely avoided calling attention to Dipper. "And—actively controlling your own dreams won't prevent Bill from controlling them as well; but it arms you with the same weapons he has—just like when you drove him out of Stanley's head. Plus, if there's anything in your dream you can't control, you can be surer that it's Bill's influence rather than a product of your own subconscious. Which... is what makes it so strange that Bill would suggest you look into lucid dreaming. I'm not sure what to make of that."

"Maybe he just told us to be nice?" Mabel asked. "Maybe he really is trying to fix some of his mistakes."

Dipper raised a brow. "Do you really believe that?"

Mabel briefly looked thoughtful; then cracked up laughing. "Okay, I tried! But nope, not for one second!"

Ford chuckled. "Attagirl." He propped his chin in his hand as he thought. "There's a chance that Bill might not be up to anything actively nefarious. I strongly suspect he can't invade others' dreams in his current form—and if that's true, it might not make any difference to him if you know how to defend yourself against attacks he can't even use. And the only thing he's told you is to go look up lucid dreaming—a technique invented by humans, for humans. He might be trying to ingratiate himself with us by offering up cheap information he suspects you could have found on your own."

Mabel said, "So he told us to be nice, for selfish reasons."

"I think that's the most likely explanation. He likes to offer little scraps of wisdom to his 'students'—and then hold them over your head later." Ford hated the possibility that Bill was trying to adopt his niece and nephew as his newest "students"—Mabel especially—but dancing around the uncomfortable possibility rather than pointing it out would just leave them more vulnerable to his tricks.

"That sounds like him," Mabel sighed. "Like the free birthday cake thing."

Ford tried to remember whether he'd mentioned how he'd gotten his cake when they'd been in Portland. "He told you about that, did he?"

"Yeah. While feeling bad for himself about not getting to go to your birthday party."

"Ha."

Dipper said, "So... you don't think there's any risk in learning how to lucid dream? Except that Bill might start bragging about how good he was to suggest it?"

Ford glanced again over the list of authors Bill had given Mabel. "Well... I don't immediately recognize any of these names; but I can double-check to make sure none of them are affiliated with Bill's known protégés or worshipers. But with that risk aside, I'm sure learning about lucid dreaming would be good for you."

"Yes!" Mabel pumped a fist in the air, startling Ford and Dipper. "Time for Mabeland Two, Electric Boogaloo: Democracy Edition! Founded by the people, for the people, with one hundred percent less psychic police states and zero triangle dictators! All the disco coconuts and yarn castles you already know and love, but this time with open borders and free speech!" She ran from the guest room, opened a door, slammed a door; opened the door again, and yelled, "Grunkle Fooord, can you give us a ride to the library!"

Dipper grimaced and looked at Ford. "Uh... Should we be worried about that?"

Ford considered that with pursed lips, then stood and grabbed his keys. "If she starts napping excessively, let me know so we can stage an intervention."

####

Mabel trudged into the living room, lay face down on the carpet between Bill and the TV, and said, "I hate you."

"Sure," Bill said agreeably.

"I mean it. I really hate you." And she said it with such vitriol, such vehemence, that Bill was absolutely positive she didn't hate him at all and would probably never be able to hate him again.

"All right, I'll play," Bill said. "What did I do this time?"

Mabel held a thick, dusty book over her head. It was titled Sleeping Awake: A Meditation and Study Guide for the Initiate Oneironaut. "You gave me homework over the summer."

"Oh, is that it? That's the limit, is it? That's the worst thing I could possibly do to you."

"Yes," Mabel said to the carpet. "It's completely unforgivable." She paused. She lifted her head. "Um. You... do know we're joking, right? The joke is that we're pretending homework is worse than all the other stuff you did, when it definitely isn't? I'm stiiill not exactly sure what your moral compass looks like."

Bill said, "Relax, kid." Bill did not say that he understood that they were joking. "Here, lemme see how painful this is." He plucked the book from Mabel's hand, flipped through a few pages, and grimaced. "Oh wow. Oh, wow, this is drier than the Atacama. This isn't a 'meditation,' it's a textbook. Do they really spend a whole chapter talking about Frederik van Eeden? Gag me with a spoon." He flipped to the index, muttering, "Does this thing even go into milam, or are they completely reinventing the wheel?"

Mabel propped her chin in her hands. "Is it that bad?"

"Well, at first glance, it's not promising." He flipped toward the middle to skim some of the recommended exercises. "Pfff. I think the closest it'll get you to lucid dreaming is boring you to sleep."

Mabel groaned. "Dipper and I checked out like a dozen books on dreams and that was the least boring-looking one."

Bill shut the book and studied the cover. It showed a lush fantasy world with rainbows and colorful planets in the sky. "You know what they say about judging a book by its cover?"

"I know, I know." Mabel rolled over and flopped onto her back, staring at the ceiling. "I guess I'll try reading one of the other books." She let out a sigh. And then, deciding she hadn't expressed herself properly, she let out an even louder, deeper sigh.

Bill laughed, then considered the cover of Sleeping Awake again. "Ahh, what the heck," he muttered, "what else am I gonna do with myself today?" He waved the book at Mabel. "Hey. What if I read through some of them for you? Let you know which ones are a waste of time and which ones might be helpful?"

Mabel considered that. "Seriously? It's a lot of books and they all look boring."

"Sure, why not? If it's too boring to stand, I'll quit. But oneironautics is one of my specialities, I'll probably find the contents more interesting than you would. And, anyway—" Bill glanced away from Mabel self-consciously, voice dropping a tad, "anyway, I recommended lucid dreaming to fix a problem I caused, didn't I? I get why you kids won't let me teach you how to lucid dream—but it's not fair if I throw a couple names at you, make you do all the hard work, and pat myself on the back for helping out. The least I can do is endure a little boredom."

"Aw, Bill..." Mabel offered him a warm smile.

Bill looked at the ceiling. "Don't look at me like that, jeez. You're a sap, you know that?"

"You're the sap! You're like a tree: all bark on the outside and sap on the inside."

"I'll kill you if you ever say that again."

"I'll be right back!" Mabel sprinted upstairs; and a minute later, trudged back down, carrying a double armload of books. "Here." She dumped them in Bill's lap. A couple spilled on the floor.

"Whoa!" Bill scrambled to catch the escapees, and dropped another one. "Is this all of them?"

"All except the one Dipper's reading. The Encyclopedia of Dreams or something."

"That sounds like a waste of time. There's about as much overlap between dream interpretation and lucid dreaming as there is between astrology and astronomy. But hey, toss it my way when he's done with it. I wanna see what it says about dreams with pyramids and all-seeing eyes."

"Your ego's so big."

"Big as a universe, kid!" He started stacking the books beside him on the sofa, setting aside a promising-looking one that mentioned "Tibetan Dream Yoga" in the subtitle.

"I'll let him know. Thanks for the help, Bill!"��Her afternoon now freed up, Mabel went upstairs to call Candy and Grenda and see what they were up to.

Bill listened as her footsteps ascended. He waited to hear the attic bedroom door shut.

And only then did he allow himself a small triumphant giggle.

He adored that girl. She was so trusting. He'd never have gotten his hands on this kind of educational material without her help. Finding her the most short-attention-span-friendly book was the least he could do as thanks; maybe he'd go the extra mile, leave bookmarks on the most useful chapters. Let her know just how good he could be to the people who did what he told them to.

He turned off the TV, cracked open the first book, and settled in to re-teach himself how to control dreams with a human mind.

####

(Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed, I'd really appreciate a comment!)

[devondespresso]

Wiggly Worm Wednesday!! 🧠🪱

tagged by @little-annie this Wednesday, @pearynice and @hotluncheddie last time, @queenie-ofthe-void (and hotluncheddie again💕) the time before, and @carolperkinsexgirlfriend the time before that. Thank you guys so much for tagging me even when i can't get to it right away 💖💗💝

Lately I've been kinda swamped with fic commitments and rushing stuff last-minute (my own fault ofc 😅) writing mostly romance, so now im just itching to go back to my platonic stuff! nothing against romance, im enjoying writing it for sure, but god i can't wait to work on my Steve Henderson au again

for now tho the probably-never-to-be-written worms are about Steve bunking with the Buckleys post s4. maybe his parents just never came home, maybe they were there and had a big blowup argument with Steve about leaving, but they're not around now and Robins not about to let Mr Walking-Sepsis-Risk live alone for the apocalypse

in my head i imagine the buckleys house is kinda like max's before s4, a smaller 1-story but cozy, and no guest room so Steve stays in Robin's room.

her parents let them but they're definitely a little wary and a little lost but at least a little used to it, both thanking whatever power they believe in that no matter how freakishly clingy they are now, its still world's better than the violently freakishly clingy stobin was right after starcourt, when both of them looked to be hanging on by a thread and that thread was each other.

so they're like. chill. they plow through an awkward conversation about how bad an idea it would be to be up to something right now with steves injuries and robin sees herself out like halfway through, piling all the old stuffed animal onto her bed and keeping them there for the next week to avoid thinking about it. And Steve, abandoned by his partner in crime, stumbles through his own awkward explanation along the lines of 'you don't have to worry about that, i promise' before joining Robin in her embarrassed cringing-party, featuring notable guests such as Mr. Cat, Doodles, and Floppsy Bunny.

Not much of a plot in my head really, I'm just enjoying all the vague ideas floating around this premise. theres lots of details about Steve and his wounds, like wearing button downs that are easier to put on than pull-overs, Mr. Buckley letting him borrow some when Steve only finds a couple (or when he packs his normal clothes not realizing how miserable itd be to take them on and off constantly to check how things are healing).

Also Steve helping around the house and the Buckley's getting to know him better and not just the Polite Steve that they usually see because Steve couldn't risk his best friends parents not liking him (and because usually robin would go to his house, its a lot easier to sneak out than it is to smuggle someone in, especially with freaky upside down nightmares). Maybe Steve gets to actually joke around with Robin's dad, talk real shit with her mom (maybe about the future, hippie mom offering a different perspective on what life can be, how you can figure things out, just try things even if you don't have a perfect plan)

Steve finding safety not just with Robin, but with Robins family. the four of them growing this sweet relationship, not like a second child for the buckleys but more like a second home for Steve. stobin are firmly strange best friends to me (as opposed to siblings), and i like the dynamic of steve and robin's parents as 'my kids best friend' type stuff, not cause there's any less love but more like they're not trying to replace Steve's parents, they just end up filling in the gaps.

oki tagging presumably for next time (tho if you guys wanna do it late anyway you go for it, time isn't real wahoo): @marvel-ous-m @momotonescreaming @puppy-steve @lightoftheseraph @lingeringmirth

@writing-kiki @eriquin @scriptorbemi @sourw0lfs @soaringornithopter

@solarmorrigan @eddiethebrave @steddiecameraroll @imfinereallyy @yabakuboi

@kikidoesfanfic @tinytalkingtina @hairstevington @stellarspecter @sunflowerharrington

[cakerybakery]

Creative part of my brain: hey remember that idea from a few weeks ago?

Me: going to have to narrow it down and not just give me a vague feeling

Creative part of my brain: that thing about Adam and the exterminators

Me: … where he’s their bio dad he’s had with a bunch of angel in heaven?

Creative part of my brain: we should do something with that.

Me: no. We have nearly ten half projects, several prompts for ideas with plots and a bunch of just free floating lines. I don’t have time. I can list like five stories off the top of my head I want to complete before we think about starting a new project. And we know I started a few of them with people in mind.

Creative part of my brain: … so Adam-

Me:

I fucking said no.

[hazbeans-for-thee]

Radioapple Week Day 2 - Enemies/Pining

Characters: Alastor, Lucifer Morningstar

Warnings: None

Word count: 689

Summary: A quiet day at the hotel causes Alastor to get curious at Lucifer’s current activities.

[A/N: See if you can spot the vague plot point that connects each of these stories!]

Alastor was wandering the corridors of the hotel a little while after lunchtime, something he found himself doing when he had little else to do. He had started near his own room, and has crossed the length of the hall to the king’s side of the floor.

Alastor curled his lip for a moment with disdain as his eyes fell on the elaborately decorated doors that provided entrance to Lucifer’s room. Why had he insisted on interrupting the flow of aligned doors just to stick comically large doors in their place? It made little sense to the demon, so he pressed his lips together into a tight smile as he walked by. However, he came to a stop after a moment, his attention now turned toward the doors. His ears turned forward, trying to identify the nature of the sound. With a chuckle, he sunk into the shadows of the floor and crossed the threshold of the king’s room to find out what he was doing.

Lucifer was currently bent over a large work table that was pushed against the far wall. His coat and hat had been discarded, with the coat on the floor and the hat sitting on the edge of his bed. Alastor grimaced and waved his hand, causing the discarded clothes to be enveloped in a green glow and float above the floor. The coat was folded and placed on the dresser, with the hat sitting on top. Honestly, he must have to do everything around here.

It seemed that Lucifer had been the source of the noise. As he tinkered away at his newest creation, he hummed a familiar tune under his breath. “Hey, hobo man, hey dapper Dan, you’ve both got your style… but brother you’re never truly dressed without a smile…~”

Without a sound, Alastor stepped closer to Lucifer. He had to admit, even if the man had his faults, he had a nice singing voice. He wondered as well how long it would take for him to be noticed. He got his answer a moment later, when Lucifer turned around and nearly fell over with how fast he stumbled backward. “What-! What in the unholy hell are you doing in here!?”

“Why, I simply came to check on our most esteemed guest at hour humble establishment,” Alastor answered. “Is it not my job as the hotelier to ensure the satisfaction of all current residents?”

“You could’ve at least knocked,” Lucifer grumbled as he straightened his posture.

Alastor chuckled as he tapped his nails against his microphone. “But would you have answered if I had?”

Lucifer opened his mouth to answer, then closed it again. Alastor smiled in a smug manner at the reaction. “May I inquire as to what you’re working on, your majesty?”

Lucifer quickly stepped back, his back against the side of the desk. “Oh, you know, nothing important,” he said simply.

Alastor tilted his head to the side. “Surely if it’s taking up this much of your time, it can’t be nothing at all.”

“Well, it’s none of your business,” Lucifer snapped back as his hands fell to his hips. “So there.”

“It’s going on within the walls of the hotel, and it is my job as the hotelier to ensure the comfort and safety of our guests,” Alastor said as he straightened his posture a little.

“Does it look like anything particularly interesting or dangerous is happening?” Lucifer asked. “No, clearly not,” he then answered with an irritated tone with a slightly dismissive wave of his hand. “If there’s nothing else you wish to discuss, please leave.”

Alastor thought for a moment before nodding in agreement. “Of course, your majesty.” With that, Alastor waved with his fingers as he sunk back down into his shadow and slid under the door.

Lucifer let out a nervous breath as he turned back to the table. A small duck sat in the middle, with half its body now covered in red paint. “That was a close one… now, to return to my magnum opus,” he said as he picked up the paintbrush. “I can hardly wait to show you off!”

[nadianova]

How much time do you spend planning some of your visual novels? At least going by some of them being jam submissions, it feels like you go from pre-production to a finished build very quickly, and it's amazing how you can manage that while still having an awesome story and so many assets.

Also, what is like, the process of planning a story out for you, if there's any vague or concrete similarities that you've noticed?

i think the important context here is that if i get bored/have nothing to do i jhust immediately get really suicidal its like ridiculous how bad it gets(ITS FINE DONT WORRY ABOUT IT IVE HAD 5 YEARS OF THERAPY). so i hate being bored and want to occupy my time wit something fun whatever that is. if i have a project to focus on but especially if I'm working for a game jam i have a deadline and i just decide to myself okay i will release a game now.

because ive made a decent amount of games i roughly have an idea on my capabilities, i can estimate how long it takes for me to write a story so and so long and how long it takes for me to draw stuff i need and how long it takes for me to throw stuff in renpy. these are estimates like as in I'm not accurate with it but still enough that i generally know where to start cutting ideas since the most important part is just having something to submit. i also know to plan around my brain wanting to slam my head into a wall an my hands suddenly giving up on being able to draw.

i think thats the beauty of game jams it forces you to just go for it and release something. releasing a 'bad' game is better than no game at all. experience only comes over time and i think just going for it is the best approach there is. like its literally 2 weeks 1 month whatever of your life. if you have the time and motivation go for it. make it work or fuck it up it wont matter in the grand scheme of things

im not sure what is the motivation behind the question but i do want to point out that this is just my method (if you can even call it a method) and the only way to figure out what works for you is to just try until you find something that actually works for you

idk not everyone will find it doable/fun to plan around spending two weeks gamedev 10 hours a day just cause i wanted to fit in 100 cgs for a jam game but apparently i can do that when i cheat my stupid adhd brain into hyperfocus with adhd meds

READMORE BECAUSE I CANT STOP RAMBLING

as for planning tho i think ideas on their own are worthless and its always about execution in the end. a great idea or a meh idea are the same for me but i do still enjoy the planning process so i keep notes

like i see a great tumblr post or i see some art or visual novel has some scene that inspires me: i save that shit for myself

having a big collection of random floating ideas like that helps me easily pick from especially during a jam type duration. right now i have like 4-5 half-baked project skeletons, some are literally like 3 pictures and some like naomida are a hundred hours worth of me writing world building about how the toilets work in a city with no plumbing cause its -30celcius(i love bringing this up)=

i dont normally plan that much, i tend to just wing it. like for malmaid i seriously just had some rough ideas and just went along as i wrote

same thing for dddeviance i had a handful of scenes that i really wanted to make and knew what kind of start and end it was meant to have and just figured out how to fill the in between. a lot of plot points changed vastly like halfway through i realised my devil + angel combination was stupid and i should just go for fallen angel + angel.

i think there really is no simple answer tho (as evident from the long as hell post) i don't really have a 'process' because every single game has been worked on has come with different type of planning since I'm always trying new stuff to try and distract me from boredom. like I've been using obsidian for naomida while previously I've just used a empty discord serve as my notes app for malmaid and dddeviance

and tbh with naomida I'm running to a new problem where I'm definitely planning too much. like I'm spending too much time fidgeting with details in chapter 4 even when i haven't finished writing chapter 1 just cause its so easy to get in the loop of "oh ill just change this one line" and boom 20 mins spent playing with my notes that didn't really progress my game since by the time i reach this point the whole scene might have shifted to something else

.

but if i had to squeeze an answer itd be something like everything related to my art or writing or games is just like "oooooo that seems fun i should remember this for later" and then i just string 10-100 of those into a story

i tend to write my stories in a format of

character A does this and that

this happens here

puppy play ryona piss orgasm

new day and then this happens here

sad thing happens

more piss orgasm

the end

and just like start filling in more details and working on my story in a nonlinear fashion until i feel like i have a strong enough skeleton that i can start writing my scenes. i hop around a lot, often preferring to write the fun scenes first like ero stuff or the ones I'm the most interested in and then the rest is just filling the blanks and stringing the cool scenes together

[shiyorin]

#A story about Fulgrim and his dear agent

#Reader is Imperial Agent

#Maybe cheesy, I don't know

Celebration raged within the Pride of the Emperor, lauding some recent victory you cared little for. But revelry meant relaxed protocols, a rare chance for reprieve from duty's rigors. And you partook freely, allowing carefree pleasures seldom indulged. Wine flowed rich and heady, loosening inhibitions with each quaff. Laughter came easier as night deepened, lashing you lighter and looser till worries dissolved on fermented tides.

A passing servant refilled your goblet unbidden, bearing a flagon of rare vintages from a paradise world. You sipped appreciatively, tension seeping from tightly-wound muscles under alcohol's warm caress. Drink flowed freely and you eagerly partook, letting wine-soaked revelry carry worries downstream. Hours passed in a haze, surroundings blurring yet warmth spreading through weary limbs. All too soon had bottles emptied, head spinning pleasantly as body sighed surrender.

Rising unsteady, you wandered in search of new diversion. Gaze drifted haphazard across boisterous crowds, latching upon lush plumage amid a flock of preening nobles. Your primarch, lord Perfect stood resplendent, holding court through honeyed words and flashing smiles that once stirred heartstrings.

"Bah, empty flatterers a lot." you grumbled, eyeing Fulgrim's patience enviously.

Memory floated vaguely, had you always found him so striking? Of course. He is lord primarch of III legion. Fulgrim the Perfect. Mind drifted as legs carried you ambling path ever closer, drawn as moth to glorious flame. Fulgrim noticed the approach, bidding flock disperse with practiced grace to spare privacy for he and you.

Fulgrim wrapping you in a steadying arm, concern lit amethyst eyes scanning for injury.

"My agent, have you been drinking again?" he sighed, exasperation battling amusement seeing you wobbling grin.

"My lord, you looked like you needed rescuing," you whispered. "From these swollen head simpletons with their incessant bleating!"

A flash of mischief lit Fulgrim's eyes, eagerly joining any plot to unsettle pomposity. "Indeed, though it seems I must rescue you now!"

Sweeping you up unceremoniously, he deposited you upon his massive arm, smirking at your unnoble like sprawl. You sagged against him, awash in heady scents of exotic perfumes. But then you began wriggling restlessly, limbs flailing with drunken kittenish abandon.

Fulgrim grunted, fighting to maintain balance beneath your inebriated writhing. "My dearest, do cease your fussing or I'll drop you amongst these peacocks!"

You merely giggled uncontrollably, squirming ceaselessly in his chest, nuzzling into it as warmth spread through chilled form. An itch arose beneath the skin, demanding satisfaction. You writhed against him, kneading clawed grip along sculpted arm. A purr rose in your chest, desire demanding release something.

Fulgrim sighed, resigning himself to an undignified struggle until balance prevailed once more.

At last you stilled, slumping bonelessly against Fulgrim's chest. He peered down into your flushed. His fingers stroking your spine in a manner at once soothing yet stirring ominous lusts within.

"Never a dull moment with you, my dearest. Come, let us away before you cause more trouble."

Scooping you close once more, Fulgrim departed. Your laughter is fading into the distance still.

Fulgrim sighed as you squirmed restlessly against his chest, shredding silk robes in an unconscious frenzy before gradually subsiding into exhausted slumber. He gently brushed tangled locks across silk folds now rumpled. Strange to find such unbridled potency contained within frail mortal flesh.

One delicate finger traced your lips, split and swollen from conflict yet no less exquisite. A token caress, but you stirred against him with low purr, seeking warmth instinctively. Fulgrim smiled softly. His touch trailed lower, tracing delicate collarbones bared by rumpled silk, feeling heartbeat quicken.

You sighed drowsily but not stirred from a reluctant nest. Fulgrim paused, gently easing free from rumpled silks cocooning your form, Fulgrim lifted you into strong arms. Your head lolled bonelessly onto silk-clad shoulder. His steps carried both through winding halls to lavish chambers sealed from curious eyes.

Soft silks and plush furs welcomed weary forms, Fulgrim settling you lightly upon awaiting down. You stirred briefly but exhaustion held fast, sighing content as Fulgrim joined you casually amidst luxuries gleaming in lamplight’s golden glow.

One arm curled about your slight waist proprietarily, fingers tracing subtle contours while imagination spun fantasies still. Fulgrim smiled faintly. Your skin bared awaiting revelation by caring touch. He closed eyes languidly.

[kn-1013]

Exploratory Surgery #1

Sal notices that Travis is a bit space-y like he is, but it's a bit different.

Rating: E Word count: A thousand and something Pairing: None/Gen Warnings: Use of homophobic slurs

A/N: welcome to my new series called exploratory surgery. idk how many more of these i'll post but the general concept of this series will be me posting plot bunnies, darlings or drabbles that i can't/won't/shouldn't otherwise put into full fics, or they just haven't become full fics yet. you can think of them like 'sketches' in the same way that someone posts art sketches or whatever. idk i haven't slept, this one's vaguely about a niche headcannon i have for travis being able to see ghosts. please enjoy, or don't

========

It wasn’t unusual for Sal to be found staring off into the distance about something, what with the ADD diagnosis, chronic dissociation, and now these new episodes, where he’s getting fucking visions from god or something. His friends had started calling him Space-y Face because of how often they had to wave a hand in front of him to get his attention. ‘Hey, Earth to Sally!’ It was a whole thing.

That’s why he noticed that Travis seemed to have the same problem.

Some teachers seemed like they didn’t want to call out Sal for spacing out, they seemed reluctant to want to put too much attention on him, which was kind of annoying when he actually wanted to pay attention in class, because then he had to get his notes from other people or ask questions after. At least he could kind of appreciate the thought.

But they weren’t afraid to call out Travis when he was staring out the window, and make him answer questions in front of the whole class when he wasn’t paying attention. Considering he was a known problem child, it seemed like some kind of sadistic humiliation tactic to try and push him back in line or to punish him for being such an asshole, or maybe even because they simply didn’t like him, and they used him as some kind of scapegoat. Some teachers certainly hated their lives enough to do that.

Though, there was one thing that kept bugging Sal.

When Sal zoned out, he could sometimes be like a mola-mola fish, floating through the ocean, going wherever the current takes him without a second thought, or even a first one. Eyes visibly unfocused, blinking slowly, speaking slowly, mouth sometimes left agape if he wasn’t talking, (which made him glad he wore a mask, because he sure looked stupid like that). The entire time, it would kind of feel like he was moving backwards through a brick wall; it was hard to think or move, and everything felt so distant. On really bad days, it honestly felt like he took something, his head was so fuzzy.

Other times, he could be like a possum playing dead: completely frozen. Hours could pass that left his body sore and aching, where he hadn’t moved a muscle or thunk a single thought. That happened a lot around August 16th.

Either way, the big thing about Sal’s zoning out, according to how Todd’s described it, is that he seems incredibly distant and unfocused. It looks like he’s ‘inside’, as he described it—inside his own head.

Travis wasn’t like that at all, in Sal’s observations. When he stared off in the distance, it was like he was looking at something far away, even when he was staring at an empty corner. When the teachers called him out, he sometimes did some kind of double take, or his eyes kept drifting back into the spot he was staring at. He didn’t seem like he was inside his head, he seemed like he was looking at something that was right there, but Sal couldn’t really be sure what.

It reminded him a lot of whenever Gizmo started staring randomly into the distance, like he was seeing something nobody else could. He always wondered if animals could see ghosts.

Now he was wondering if Travis could, especially with the way he was currently staring at that roadkill.

Sal had been going for a walk around town on a Saturday afternoon and had ended up in a nicer part of town, the part that Ashley lived in. He was thinking about stopping by to hang out with her, when he spotted Travis, who also lived in this area.

Travis was across the street from him, on the other sidewalk. He was completely frozen, staring straight down at a dead cat near the curb.

Sal decided he felt like being a pest that day, so he walked across the street nonchalantly to over just behind Travis, who continued staring at the ground.

His gaze, shifted near his feet as Sal began approaching, but Sal’s mouth moved before he could process it, and his subsequent greeting startled Travis out of whatever daydream he was having about that dead cat.

“Hey, Travis, what’cha lookin’ at?” Sal said, almost instantly regretting it. He should’ve waited a bit longer to see what was going to happen next.

Travis jumped hard enough that his hair seemed to stand on end for a second, before he realized it was just Sal. Then he slumped his shoulders and rolled his eyes.

“What do you want?” He spat.

“Saw you blankly staring at a dead cat for no reason, thought I’d see what the fuss was about.” Sal tilted his head to the side curiously. “You know that cat or something?”

“No, never seen it before.” Travis’s voice was cold and bland.

There was a beat of silence, where Sal was staring directly at Travis. Silences like this tend to make people uncomfortable, and often makes them volunteer information they wouldn’t have normally simply by being asked. It was one of Sal’s special tactics for extracting information from other people, and it typically worked especially well, because most people already found Sal’s presence discomforting.

“Anyways, bye.” Travis began walking away.

Travis was weird though, it didn’t always work on him.

Sal caught up behind him, patting him on the back of the shoulder to get his attention again.

“You stare at stuff a lot, you know that?” Sal said, walking beside him.

Travis walked faster. “What, are you stalking me? Freak?”

“Is that a question?” Sal cocked his head to the side, appearing nonchalant as his legs struggled to keep up with Travis’s long strides.

“You’re a freak, no question about it.” Travis huffed, adjusting his book bag irritatedly and turning his head.

“It’s not hard to notice things about other people if you just pay attention. You can learn a lot about people by just watching them.” Sal’s voice was calm, factual, as if it were normal to just watch people all the time.

Travis had felt dread before, but not quite like when Sal had finished letting that sentence out of his mouth. Sal was about to describe some of his unconscious behaviors, and it was going to make him deeply uncomfortable, and there was nothing he could do about it, because Sal seemed to just love making him as uncomfortable as possible in every imaginable situation. That blue haired faggot just had to stick his plastic nose in everything.

“Like, you read a lot—like a lot, a lot. You’re ambidextrous, but I’ll bet you’re naturally right-handed because that’s the hand you punch with. You’re not very familiar with computers, and you like to be outside, but you’re not really jock levels of athletic, so I think you kind of just hang out there, usually in trees, 'cuz of the callouses on your hands. You ever been hiking? You might like it.” Sal’s voice was way too cheery and overall normal to be saying these things. Nobody knew these things about Travis, because nobody paid attention to him. They all hated him, because he was an asshole, and that was kind of the point.

The fact that Sal could just swoop in and watch him like a hawk when he wasn’t paying attention and learn all these things about him without even talking to him was terrifying in the same way he was terrified of God.

Travis recoiled harshly. “Ugh! You’re such a creep! Don’t watch me like that, what’s wrong with you?”

“What, it’s a bad thing to pay attention to your friends?” Sal sounded a bit disappointed. After that, he was disappointed? Over what? That Travis didn’t like being watched? He sure hoped this was just God working in mysterious ways somehow, because he hated this.

“I’m not your friend, you fucking stalker. Leave me alone.” He began to walk faster, and Sal started to trail behind. “To be fair, I’ve kind of just been seeing you around for a couple of years, now. I’m not even paying that much attention to you.” Sal shrugged, shortly before tripping on something on the pavement.

“That doesn’t make it much better, you fucking weirdo. Stop watching me!” Travis began racing back to his house, his face burning red at how much Sal had seemed to learn from him when he wasn’t even trying that hard. What would happen if he tried much harder? He really needed to stay away from this guy.

Sal gracefully recovered from his trip and stared off at Travis’s disappearing form, head cocked to the side. He just didn’t quite get that guy.

But boy, did he want to.

[crossdressingdeath]

A thing has been living in my head since I listened to the first episode of Vows and Vengeance (uh, potential spoilers for that by the way), so have some vague thoughts as I try to make sense of it.

It's like... okay, we've all been enjoying the jokes about Solas's ritual-based woes (because they are very funny, to be clear), but the fact that he keeps doing rituals even though they never end well and he never likes the result is fascinating to me, both in terms of his character and in terms of potential DAV plot hooks. I mean, he knows he's fucked up every time! He's never happy about it! But he never stops either, even though he never gets what he wants. That refusal to accept that he needs to step back, listen to others and look at other possibilities instead of steamrolling his way towards the conclusion he's decided is an unfortunate necessity is such a fascinating part of his character. Also yes, I know that Solas has that thing where if Quiz says they want to change his mind he seems to want them to but the issue with that is that he's still refusing to stop for five fucking seconds and actually let them try before he goes about his merry world-ending way. Solas has this thing where even when he knows he's fucked up his response seems to be trying to undo the one specific thing he knows he fucked up rather than... learning from the mistakes he made and trying to move forward with that knowledge instead of constantly trying to go back. This is most noticeable with his main plan ("fucking with the line between the waking world and the Fade destroyed my people and brought me nothing but misery so clearly the solution is to fuck with that line again, in the opposite way this time, with the knowledge/assumption that doing so will once again kill a shitload of people and make me miserable and guilty" sure is... a plan) but honestly just in general the fact that he keeps doing rituals that never work out for him is like. my guy at some point you have to realize that this isn't going to do what you want, please try a tactic that is not a magic ritual.

But that leads me into how this could lead to some interesting plot possibilities, because Rook has also royally fucked up after the first part of DAV. Their attempt to intercede in a ritual has fucked up the world and based on what we've heard seems to have changed them permanently. It'd be very fun if one factor in their relationship with Solas involved the question of whether they do what Solas does and just try to undo what they did, or accept what happened as a now-unchangeable fact and make the best of it they can. Especially if you agree with the theory I've seen floated that the Veilguard are going to on some level correspond to the Evanuris with Rook themself corresponding to Solas; the concept of them being in a similar position to him (having fucked up their world by accident during a ritual gone wrong, although in this case the ritual itself wasn't their doing and the fuckup wasn't nearly as fatal) and having the choice of either following in his footsteps and just trying to undo it somehow or learning from his mistakes and accepting that there's no real way back and they have to go forward. Now I don't know how exactly that would work, it's not like Rook has access to time travel or anything like that, but it could be something like... rather than trying to somehow magically undo the Evanuris getting out (since they're going to have to do that the old-fashioned way) maybe they could try to fix (or "fix", since we don't actually know if them being bound to the Fade is harmful at this stage) what happened to them personally? Again these are just vague thoughts that I'm having, I have no idea how viable this would be, but it could be interesting if Rook was given the same choice of either moving forward with the knowledge that their actions did likely irreparable damage (to themself if not the world) or trying to undo it and could either follow in Solas's footsteps or say "No, I've seen where people trying to undo their mistakes leads, I will do everything in my power to mitigate the damage but I will accept that it's done and can't be fixed just like that".