#though I haven't been reading much lately

[pinkberrytea]

midnight blue 🌙

Round, radiant and casting a creamy white halo, the moon stands before them proudly, imposingly, a celestial pearl in a sea of stars.

Diana may be too perceptive for her own good, but Astarion is no less insightful; he has a suprise for her, one she will not soon forget.

Spawn Astarion x Named F!Tav (Diana)

w/c: 1.5k words . spotify playlist . dividers

a/n: happy new year! this fic is a gift for @amoremagnificentbastard as part of our server's secret santa exchange. i was so excited that i got to write for diana, but also pretty intimidated since i feel like that's a huge responsibility! i hope i was able to do her justice. if you haven't read amy's distarion fics, please do yourself a favor and go read them already, i promise you won't be disappointed! i'd like to again thank @xxnashiraxx for her invaluable support; she was there holding my hand ever since the drafting stages, and i couldn't have done this without her. i love you friendo!

tags: hurt & comfort; fluff & angst

“How much farther, Astarion? I’m freezing,” the young priestess says, arms wrapped around herself in an unsuccessful effort to shield her shivering body from the harsh winter cold. Her coppery curls bounce with each step, the late night silence broken only by the howling wind and the crunch of snow underfoot. What was she thinking, indulging him when he insisted that they go on a “light hike”? Although in truth, denying him never came to her naturally, and it only seemed to become harder with every passing day; not that he made things any easier, but the amount of incentive required for Diana to submit to her lover’s whims had dropped to dangerously low levels in the past few months, much to her dismay.

“We’re almost there, darling.” Astarion’s face creases into a smuggish simper, and he stops, holding out a hand while waiting for her to catch up to him. “I thought you had snowfall in Amn?” he asks, voice laced with a playful lilt and eyebrows quirked upwards in feigned surprise. Diana pouts, forehead wrinkling with annoyance, acquiescing though begrudgingly and intertwining her fingers with his outstretched ones; as soon as she does, he pulls her to him and sneaks an arm around her shoulders, which doesn’t really help with the cold considering his own lack of natural heat, and yet the familiarity of his embrace brings her comfort anyway.

“We do. Just not like this,” she mutters, her softening frown betraying the disgruntled tone with which the words leave her lips. He plants a loving kiss on her temple before picking up the pace, and it doesn’t take long for the indigo sky to start peeking out through the dense foliage of the towering trees surrounding them, adorned with a glimmering blanket of twinkling stars.

“There. Just behind that rock,” Astarion says, pointing to the rocky outcrop at the end of the path they’d been following. Diana scrunches up her nose, disdain crafting her cerulean irises into a frustrated stare, but before she can protest, he squeezes her arm reassuringly and meets her gaze with rounded, almost pleading eyes. “You trust me, don’t you?”

The priestess is briefly taken aback, blinking slowly as if thinking of what to say; once enough time has passed, she lets out an exasperated sigh, hunching in defeat. “I do. You know I do. But gods, Astarion, climbing a rock? In the middle of the night? In this weather? That’s a big ask even for me,” she retorts, brushing her hair to one side, though the warmth radiating from her voice and the subtle smile tugging at the corners of her mouth tell a different story—one where he emerges victorious.

“I know, sweet girl. Thank the gods I have such a patient, understanding lover, hm?” he purrs, clearly pleased with himself. Diana sighs again, and without first shooting him a disapproving glance, she lets him guide her to the base of the rugged boulder. The night is bright enough that even her human eyes are able to make out all the ridges and crevices she’s supposed to use as leverage to reach the top, but still, Astarion steps forward and takes the lead, pulling her up as he slowly claws his way to the summit.

“Careful, darling.” Taking her hand in his, he watches her feet to make sure she’s keeping herself steady. The phantoms of days past rush through her mind as they inch closer to their intended destination, and in the minutes that follow, it’s as if they’re still lost in the wilderness with a mind flayer tadpole lodged within the recesses of their brains, a promise of ceremorphosis that would never come to be. They had climbed many a rock back then, though never during the night���their life together in the sun now feels like a distant dream, a wistful memory.��

“Do you ever regret it?” Diana asks, her voice small, hushed, no louder than a whisper; they both lie naked in their shared bed, Astarion with his pectorals pressed flat against her back, one arm folded possessively around her hip. The sunlight casts dancing shadows from behind the tightly drawn curtains, almost teasingly, caressing the pure white sheets with ghostly brushes of its long, splaying fingers. His closed eyes twitch in acknowledgement of her question, but he remains quiet for a while; when she is finally convinced he has fallen back into a trance, he then suddenly breaks the silence, cold lips vibrating against the warm skin of her shoulder as he speaks.

“Regret what, darling?” The tone with which he articulates each word is remarkably gentle, tentative, even. She doesn’t reply immediately, trying to first contend with the inevitable pang in her chest, searching for the source of it, much as it eludes her. This happiness, this halcyon bliss, why does she think herself not entitled to it? Why does it cause such guilt to bloom in the depths of her heart? No matter how many times he reassures her, it seems her soul can’t be so easily swayed—they did the right thing, of that there is no doubt, but none of it holds any weight when she isn’t the one struggling with the consequences; when he’s the one sentenced to spend the rest of his days in darkness, never again to feel the sun on his face, never again to feels its soothing heat. 

“Nothing. Forget it.” And just like that, Diana once more closes that door before it’s even opened. Truth be told, she’s terrified she won’t be able to seal it back shut; she’s terrified that whatever is hiding behind it will cause her fragile reverie to shatter into a thousand pieces, crumble into dust and dissolve in the ground beneath her feet. She’s afraid, so afraid—of losing him, of losing them, of losing everything.

Everything.

“My love?”

The silky sound of Astarion’s voice brings Diana back to the present, and she jerks her head up to look at him, eyes large and mouth slightly agape. With an eyebrow raised quizzically, he chooses to shrug her reaction off rather than dwell on it, propping himself with both arms to finally leap over the edge of the boulder; he then helps her do the same, and before long the two are standing on the highest point of the hill, hands still locked together.

“So? What do you think?” Astarion asks, staring at her expectantly, appearing almost boyish for a few fleeting moments. She returns his gaze with confusion coloring her expression, but shortly afterwards, his meaning at last becomes clear—a quick turn of her face reveals the reason why they have hiked all the way up to this place, and no sooner than such revelation is brought to light, Diana feels the threat of tears prickle her long lashes.

The full moon.

“By the Moonmaiden’s grace, Astarion… it’s beautiful,” she whispers, bringing a hand to her own quivering lips. Round, radiant and casting a creamy white halo, the moon stands before them proudly, imposingly, a celestial pearl in a sea of stars. It shines so intensely that the landscape splaying below them is fully visible to the naked eye, every tree, every stream, every stone and every flower laid completely bare, stripped from their shadowy secrets. It’s the wee hours, and yet it might as well be noon.

“You know, darling, when you made no mention of the usual request for a pint of milk with the full moon quickly approaching, I really began to worry.” Though his mouth curls up into a smirk, Astarion speaks with apologetic softness, his crimson irises gleaming affectionately. Using his free hand, he tucks an unruly lock of auburn hair behind Diana’s ear; softly brushing the pads of his elegant fingers against her cheek, he then cups it gently, gazing upon her with dreamy tenderness. “Whatever is afflicting you, my dear, we can work through it together. You need not keep it to yourself.”

The tears welling up in the priestess’ eyes finally roll down her now flushed face, leaving a glistening wet trail in their wake. Of course, how could she have been so foolish? Words are not required—she understands it now. One has no need for the sun when they are loved by the moon; one has no need for sunshine when they have the pale, forgiving glow of the Lady of Silver’s moonbeams illuminating the path forward. Astarion is not sentenced to live in darkness—not while Diana remains by his side, not while she is there to bathe him in light, warmth, and life.

Life. With everything it has to offer. 

“I love you.”

Their lips touch before their eyelids close, and for a split second they’re each able to see the tiny flecks floating around the others’ pupils, swimming in pools of blood and moonlight. Diana wraps her arms around Astarion’s neck, and he wraps his around her waist; her tears taste salty on his tongue, his breath feels cool against her skin. The winter moon watches them warmly from its place amid the stars, cradling them in its soft embrace; it’s going to be okay. They’re going to be okay. Maybe not forever—maybe not even for long, but right now, all is well, and so it shall remain, until dawn breaks, painting the sky midnight blue.

[stuckinmymind22]

playlists | velvet connection

pair: portgas d. ace x afab reader (she/her)

modern au | multimedia | musician ace | more info on story

tags: drinking (reader participates), smoking, unhealthy amounts of alcohol consumption (drink responsibly)

mdni: please - look i can't tell you how to live your life but this isn't for you pls avoid thx

wc: 7.7k

excerpt:

"On stage he exudes charisma, it seems like he is in his element. Like much of the crowd, you are not immune to his charms, he’s almost entrancing up there. You’ve always found it attractive to see people so passionate about what they are doing, and it is clear that he is loving this. He is beaming. A smile like no other graces his face. He has the crowd wrapped around his finger and he knows it. ... You eventually allow your eyes to drift back to Ace, who catches them and sends you a wink. The simple action makes your heart flutter in a way that you know is problematic. Instead of showing the way he’s impacting you, you give him a short laugh in response. Even at a distance you can tell that his eyes light up as he smiles into the mic."

a/n: v excited to start this story, rn i'm not planning on it being much longer than 15 chapters but we will see how that goes when i wrote this i had just finished sabaody (had a breakdown) and idrfk who sabo is so idk why i included him but i did, if he's ooc pls ignore, thx

wc: 7.7k

important: reader works in live music there's a couple of technical terms that aren't crucial to know, like you can understand the story without knowing them but i wanted to include them

Tech rider = document saying what the artist is bringing and what equipment they need from the venue

In ear monitors/in ears = how a musician hears themselves while playing on stage, has noise cancellation (tbh i take some creative liberty with how they work)

just so you know half of this is how live music works (well more than half tbh) and the other half i made up source: i work in live events not in production though

song(s): they haven't really started playlists so no official song but this one kinda sets the vibe of what we got going

"I know you felt it that velvet connection" - Velvet Connection by Moody Joody

You walk into the old venue that you call work where you are a live sound engineer. The small place is barely staying open, relying on subsidies from being a historic site and sales of alcohol, but you love it anyways. You’ve been working here for the past two years and really enjoy both the job and your coworkers.

You were running a little late but you came bearing gifts, you stopped at a nearby coffee shop and grabbed some drinks. Ussop, the other live sound engineer, happily grabs his as he reads through the tech rider to see what you will need for the night’s show. You really should have looked it over before you got here. It is the first time in a while that you were going into a show blind, all you know is that it is a local act, beyond that you’re clueless. As soon as Usopp leaves the booth you spot a familiar head of red running your way.

“Why’re you here so early,” you question Nami, one of the venue’s bartenders, amused with how fast she dashed over to you. She pulls her drink out of the cup holder and thanks you.

“I had to come in for a delivery,” she answers dismissively before her entire demeanor shifts to excitement, “Anyways, are you excited for tonight?”

“...why would I be?” you ask with confusion.

“Don’t you know who’s playing tonight?” she looks disappointed and sighs when you shake your head no, “I can’t believe you don’t know. Tonight Luffy’s brother is playing.”

“That’s cool,” you say, unsure what to make of her enthusiasm.

“No, you don’t understand, Luffy is playing with him,” Nami says, brimming with joy. Luffy is an energetic coworker of yours who normally controls the lights, he’s also Usopp’s roommate. You love him but he isn’t exactly known for his musical talent, in fact it was quite the opposite, he quite literally cannot hold a note.

“Oh…wow,” you say, not sure how to feel about this information, “Let’s just hope he plays the drums, he can keep a beat but anything else… I’ll make sure it’s tuned really well. But maybe he’ll surprise us?”

“I mean I hope so, but Luffy?” she gets called back to the bar before she can finish her thought.

Suddenly interested in the act, you check the show’s schedule and see that their name is Ace and The Spades. You think that you’ve heard the name before but you aren’t entirely sure what their sound is. You’ll find out soon enough.

Looking through the tech rider for the night you see that they are bringing a lot of their own equipment, which shows that they’ve probably been performing for a while and also means that there isn’t too much for you to do until they get here. They should be arriving any moment, so there’s not much more you can do but wait to help them unload.

To your annoyance, the time that they were supposed to unload comes and goes, setting back your schedule. It’s nice to have that extra time padded in in case something goes wrong, but running late is also something going wrong you suppose. Before you can get truly irritated, Luffy comes bounding through the artist door carrying nearly an entire drum kit by himself, making him look like a pack mule. Honestly, it was so impressive you nearly missed the two other guys who came in with him.

“Sorry that we’re running late Y/N,” Luffy says when he sees you. You quickly move to help Luffy with the drums. “This one fell asleep,” he says, using his newly freed hand to point at the man in an orange cowboy hat, who promptly sets down a guitar case to hit Luffy on the head. 

“Ow, Ace, that was mean,” Luffy says, rubbing his skull. So this is his brother you think. There's no doubting that he’s attractive, with dark raven hair and freckles that dot his face. He is quite a bit taller than Luffy, but around the same height as the other guy, who you forgot about until now. 

“Well you’re here now,” you say with a smile, quickly helping Luffy with the kit. “I had no idea you were playing tonight, that’s so cool,” you say to your coworker who laughs happily in response.

“Isn’t it?” Luffy says cheerfully, putting the drums down on the stage, “Oh, before I forget this is Ace and Sabo,” he says pointing to the dark haired one and the blond respectively, “Ace, Sabo, this is Y/N, she’s on production.

 “I need to go make sure that the lights are programmed right and show Usopp how to use them.” Luffy calls the man in question over and they both disappear to the tech booth.

You start unpacking the drum set and when Ace approaches you, “You don’t have to do that, I can do it.”

“It is quite literally my job,” you say to him, trying to hide your annoyance, “it’ll take me twenty minutes max.”

“I know, I just feel bad for being late,” he says, scratching the back of his neck.

 “If you really want something to do, you bring those five mics over here,” you say pointing to the ones for the drums just off stage. He successfully brings four of them to you while you work on assembling the kit. 

“Fuck,” you hear in Ace’s direction following a crash. The mic stand is in two parts, the stand is knocked over on the floor and its arm Ace holds in his hand. You sigh and stand up, ready to fix it.

“That happens it's okay” you say walking to him. When you get there you take the arm from his hand and pick up the stand and attempt to reassemble it, but it isn’t working. You examine the parts only to realize that the stand is broken broken. “Well, shit” you mumble.

“I am so sorry, I just picked it up and it fell apart,” Ace says guilt laces his voice.

“From the looks of it this was probably bound to happen, I’ll go find another one,” you say before you disappear into the depths of backstage looking for another overhead mic stand. You search everywhere you can think of but cannot find a replacement.

“Hey Usopp,” you call for his attention running towards him, “Do we have another overhead somewhere special that I forgot about?”

“No, that was our backup, remember when that one artist broke ours and dipped a few months ago before getting us a new one,” he says, “What happened?”

“One broke,” you sigh in defeat.

“Well, shit,” he responds.

“That’s what I said.”

“I can probably rig something up for the night,” Usopp offers, always ready to jerry rig something.

“I’ve tried that before and broke multiple drumheads”

“How did you break multiple, it just goes above one,” Luffy butts in.

“Because I’m stubborn,” you say to him and turn back to Usopp, “I can just go to Larson’s real quick.” You offer to go to the local music store a few blocks down. Usopp agrees, telling you he’ll hold down the fort but to be quick. 

On your way out the door, Ace stops you, “What’s the verdict?”

“Gotta go get a new one,” you admit.

“Let me come with you.”

“I can do it by myself,” you push back.

“I don’t doubt it,” he says with a charming grin, “But I broke the other one, so I should help fix it.”

“I told you, you didn’t break it, but if you insist, let’s go,” not willing to waste time arguing.

The two of you make your way out the building and he follows you down the city sidewalk. In this light you can really see the freckles that adorn his face, they give him an almost boyish charm. Realizing that you’ve been staring, you clear your throat and turn your eyes to the path in front of you.

“So Luffy’s your brother, huh,” you say awkwardly trying to start a conversation as you walk.

“Yeah, he’s my little brother,” Ace says, putting his hands in his pockets.

“It’s cool that he’s in your band, what does he play?” you ask.

“He plays the drums,” Ace responds. Called it you think. He continues, “When I first started playing live he got really excited and kept asking me to be the drummer. It didn't take much for me to fold. He’s my brother and I love him. If it makes him happy, I’ll let him play for me anytime.”

“That's actually very nice of you,” you say nodding.

“What? Were you expecting me to be mean, Doll?” Ace asks you with a playful grin.

“Doll?” you say, raising your eyebrow.

“I thought it seemed fitting,” he shrugs.

“What about Sabo? What does he play,” you question.

“Sabo does a little bit of everything, mainly bass and keys though.”

“Ah so a multi-talented king I see,” you joke, causing Ace to laugh. He has a nice laugh, you think to yourself, the kind that makes you want to laugh too.

“How’d you get into music in the first place?” you question. 

“There’s not really one specific answer to that,” he starts, “I guess I’ve always enjoyed music. Around middle school I started playing guitar and by the time I got to high school, I was writing song after song - granted most of them were absolute garbage,” he chuckles, joy sparking in his eyes, it’s clear he loves talking about music.

“Eventually, I got better at writing and I knew it was all I wanted to do. I had to stop for a few years when my grandpa forced me to join the navy,” the bitterness in his voice is evident.

“But I’m back,” he says cheerfully as looks at you and his smile grows.

Before he can ask you the same question you arrive at Larson’s and your conversation is put on hold. You know exactly what you need and where it is so you head over to the mic stand section picking out a cheap replacement that’s decent enough quality. You bring it to the register and by the time you’re ready to pay Ace already has his card on the reader.

“What are you doing?” you question him.

“Paying,” he responds.

“I can see that, I’m asking why.”

“Because I broke it and I feel bad.”

“I already told you you didn’t break it,” you say with a sigh, “from the looks of it it was on borrowed time, the threading was basically non existent.”

He offers you a smile and takes the stand from the counter turning on his heel to the door. You have no choice but to follow him.

“You know I would’ve been reimbursed for that, right,” you say as you step into stride with him.

“You can reimburse me by taking me to dinner sometime,” he flirts. You can’t help the butterflies that form in your stomach. First it was calling you “Doll” now he’s asking you to dinner? Is this just how he is?  You think to yourself.

“I suppose that’s a fair trade,” you say. His smirk is triumphant.

~~~~~~

The two of you arrive back at the venue laughing as you walk in the door. You know you need to get back to work, but you also don’t want to stop being with him, you’ve really enjoyed being around him so far.

“Have you thought about where you’re taking me to dinner,” he jokes, hoping to talk to you more.

“Where would you want to go?” you try turning the choice on him.

“You’re taking me so you decide. While you’re thinking about it, how about you give me your number,” he says with a charming smile, pulling out his phone. You give him your phone and he hands you his to put your contact information in, you keep it simple, just your name and number, and give it back to him. 

He looks at his phone and shakes his head, changing something about the information you put in, but you don't have time to question because Usopp runs up to the both of you and takes the mic stand from you – well from Ace – before he runs back to stage to set it up.

“Back to work” you say with a hint of regret.

“Aye aye captain,” Ace says with a goofy smile and salute. You turn on your heel, concealing your grin and go get to work.

A switch is flipped inside of Ace during soundcheck, as soon as you start he becomes surprisingly professional. Despite being late earlier, it seems like he doesn’t like to waste people’s time. He’s articulating exactly what he needs, something that you really only see in seasoned artists. He even helps translate for his brothers, namely Luffy. (“the clicky thing is too quiet,” he complains. “the metronome,” Ace clarifies).

For someone who literally works in the industry, you would think that he would know some of the technical terms, but it seems not. When working on the mix for his in ears.

“Why does it sound fuzzy,” Luffy asks. You hear it too and your eyes scan the stage looking for the cause

“Luffy, how are you getting feedback?”Ace snickers, instantly understanding what his sibling is saying. All eyes go to the culprit who for some reason had taken out one of his in ears and had it dangerously close to the mic.

“Luffy, you gotta keep those in,” Ace laughs even harder.

“But I hate them, they’re uncomfy” Luffy pouts and you struggle to hide your smile.

“How? They were literally made for you,” Ace says tired as you stifle a giggle, “You gotta keep them in.” Luffy grumbles but does as he is told.

You don’t get a full picture of their sound, which is common with sound check, because they only play bits and pieces of their songs but as they cycle between them you can tell that Ace has a nice voice.

After soundcheck is over you manage to catch up to Ace. “You're an excellent translator for Luffy, maybe we should keep you around,” you joke.

“It’s years of practice,” he responds.

~~~~~~

The pull that Ace surprises you, people seem to be flooding into the venue as soon as the doors open. You already knew that it was going to be a busier night, but you weren’t expecting this much. You don’t actually remember the last time you saw this place this packed full of bodies. There’s not even an opener so all of these people are here for him. It was so uncharacteristic of this place that the cynic in you can’t help but wonder if Robin had a bunch of tickets comped, giving out free tickets for the bodies, and that’s why it was so full. Something is telling you that this crowd is genuine.

As showtime draws nearer, anticipation bubbles in your stomach, it’s possible that you’re in for an even bigger treat than you thought. When it is finally time for the show to start and they come out on stage you notice that somewhere between now and soundcheck Ace lost his shirt. Goddamn, you think. You knew he was hot before but wow. 

On stage he exudes charisma, it seems like he is in his element. Like much of the crowd, you are not immune to his charms, he’s almost entrancing up there. You’ve always found it attractive to see people so passionate about what they are doing, and it is clear that he is loving this. He is beaming. A smile like no other graces his face. He has the crowd wrapped around his finger and he knows it. 

You’re staring more than you would like to admit, the ways that the muscles in his arms move as he plays the guitar has you in a chokehold. His fingers moving across the fretboard with such ease is placing thoughts that are not safe for work in your head, and it’s that realization that snaps you out of it. 

What the hell are you thinking, you internally scold yourself, first of all he’s Luffy’s brother and that would be weird. Secondly, You. Are. At. Work. 

You forcefully rip your eyes away from him, worried that they’ll remain glued to the man for the rest of the show if you don't. You switch your focus to the monitor and when that gets boring eyes wander the stage and crowd. You’re looking everywhere but him in fear that you won’t be able to pull yourself away if you lay eyes on him again.

Your eyes find Luffy and you remember that you should be supporting your coworker. He actually is pretty decent at drums, he misses a beat every now and then but that’s likely due to how much fun he is having. He wears his trademark boyish grin as he thrashes his head as he plays, causing his hat to fall off, repeatedly. Between songs and during little breaks he is constantly reaching towards his back to put it back on. At least he’s wearing the head strap you snort, thinking of all the times his hat has fallen from the beams as he worked on the lights.

You eventually allow your eyes to drift back to Ace, who catches them and sends you a wink. The simple action makes your heart flutter in a way that you know is problematic. Instead of showing the way he’s impacting you, you give him a short laugh in response. Even at a distance you can tell that his eyes light up as he smiles into the mic.

You can’t deny that he puts on a great show, it seemed to come naturally for him. You’ve seen a lot of performances, but this was something special. It was clear that Robin thought so too. Near the end of the show Robin, who is one of the managers and also the one who books acts, joins you sidestage - you’re pretty sure you know what that means.

“Y/N, how was working with Ace?” Robin asks in a calm voice.

“Great, he’s really professional, I was surprised,” you tell her, intentionally putting a good word for him - not that it isn’t the truth. You can’t lie to yourself, you are hoping that he becomes a regular, you like his company and would want him to be around more. She nods in response, she stays by your side for the rest of the show, which is a good sign.

Right before it ends, Robin asks again, “Do you think that they should come back?” You answer positively a bit too fast, she turns and raises an eyebrow with a small grin. “Okay then, I’ll see what I can do,” she says.

“Great job, Dollface,” Ace says to you, walking off stage, grabbing a towel he left there to wipe off the sweat.

“You were incredible too,” you tell him.

“Really?” he cocks his head, “I felt rusty.”

“If that’s rusty then I can only imagine what you could do at full power,” you tease. He laughs lightly. Robin, who you forgot was still there, has an amused look on her face looking between the two of you, before she whisks Ace off to talk.

You and Usopp start taking down the equipment as the crowd filters out of the venue, you’ve done this so many times together that you don’t even need to communicate. You bring something back to the booth and are surprised to find Luffy there.

“What are you doing here, mister,” you say in a deep authoritative voice, causing the both of you to chuckle.

“Don’t wanna forget the program,” he says holding up a USB stick.

“You can probably just leave it too, I got a feeling we’ll need it again,” you say, unable to keep it in even though it’s not a done deal.

He scratches his neck looking confused, “What do you mean?” he asks. You give him a look, knowing he can figure it out and his eyes widen. “Did Robin-” he stops when you nod with a big smile. He practically vibrates from excitement.

“I knew it would happen!” Luffy says feeling vindicated, “Ace didn’t believe me.” 

You frown, “Why didn’t he believe you?” 

“I don’t know,” he says unsure, “I think he said something about being out of practice?”

You hum in response before switching the subject “I didn’t know you played drums.”

“Thanks, I’m bad at them,” he says with his signature laugh.

“I thought you were really good actually,” you say, giving a heartfelt compliment.

“That was lots of practice,” he says seriously. 

“That’s what it takes to be good at something, you goofball,” you giggle, “How long have you been playing?”

“I think I started when I was like 13? I’m not sure,” Luffy says after thinking hard. “I wanted to spend time with my brothers and this let me do that, plus hitting things is fun” He laughs again, “Anyways, I gotta get going see you later.”

You watch Luffy walk away with a smile, you can see that he’s halfway to the green room when he turns around. “Oh, Y/N,” he nearly shouts as he runs back to you, “I don’t know if Usopp told you but we’re having some people over Saturday cause we don’t have a show. You should come.” He ends up in front of you.

He must be able to tell that you’re a bit hesitant, “Pleeeeeaassee,” he drags out his plea, “Zoro’s on keg and you don’t smoke so you don't need to worry about bringing anything,” he tries to convince you.

“I’ll be there,” you say with a smile

“Yay!” he exclaims, before walking away “see you Saturday Y/N!”

You return the sentiment, but you can’t help but wonder if Ace will be there too. 

Packing up the rest of the equipment goes smoothly and soon enough you’re in the comfort of your own bed when your phone buzzes.

just a quick psa: do not fucking drink like this, binge drinking can and will kill you, you are not invincible please be safe. Have to dial back what they are capable of drinking in universe bc alcohol poisoning exists but this is still you’re in the hospital level binge drinking, like you’re dead drinking please do not do this. <3

Ace feels a little bit out of place in the small apartment, surrounded by his little brother’s friends on a Saturday night. Luffy asked Ace to come over at least a dozen times and he would do anything for the kid, so he plans on sticking around for a little while despite the awkwardness.

He got roped into party prep earlier in the day, which was moving the furniture to the walls and sweeping (“We have to make a good impression,” Usopp, Luffy’s roommate said, “it is very important to any social gathering, and we have the best ones” Luffy reminded him that they had never hosted before with a laugh and Usopp launched himself at the guy, shushing him, claiming that Ace didn’t need to know that). 

When the first person knocks on the door, Luffy flies over to open it. On the other side is a green haired guy holding a quarter keg (this is like 80 bottles/cans of beer and weighs like 90lbs/40kg) with one hand and a bucket of ice in the other like it is nothing. 

“Zoro!” Luffy shouts with glee.

“This should last us most of the night,” the man grunts as he the keg down in the kitchen before tapping the keg and pouring himself a sizable cup. Luffy is right behind him and Ace follows. Soon enough more people trickle into the space, Luffy making sure to introduce Ace to each and every one.

Ace is excited when he sees you enter, he didn’t want to admit it but he was hoping you were going to be there. You came with a redhead that’s introduced to him as Nami, someone who also works with you, Luffy, and Usopp, just at the bar. He tries not to stare as the two of you go and grab drinks while chatting, but he’s having a hard time keeping his eyes off of you. When Nami leaves you to go talk to other people Ace moves quickly to take the chance to swoop in and talk to you.

“Hey, Doll,” he says as he approaches, you turn to meet him and a smile blossoms on your face, “I was wondering if I’d see you here.” He likes the way your cheeks heat up from the nickname and he really likes the smile you give him when you see him.

“Hi Ace,” you say, almost sounding nervous - is he imagining that or does he have that effect on you?

“Know where you’re taking me to eat yet?” Ace asks playfully, bumping your shoulder with his own.

“Not yet, I think I gotta get to know you more first so I can pick a good place after you saved my ass,” you say, “I still can’t believe you did that by the way.”

“Get to know me, huh,” Ace responds mischievously with a wiggle of his brows, “If you were that eager to go out with me you could’ve just asked.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” you question, playful glint in your eyes.

You grill him on his favorite foods, an undeniable undercurrent of flirting continuing to permeate your conversation. People maneuver around you two in the kitchen, several stopping by to greet you as you and Ace talk, but nobody has been able to pull you away yet. That is, until Nami comes back declaring it was time to smoke. You send Ace an apologetic look as she drags you off to the couch by your arm.

A knock reverberates through the front door snapping Ace out of his momentary trance. He quickly pays the delivery guy with the cash left by the door, exchanging it for the multiple boxes of pizza. He places them down and grabs a slice of whatever box was on top, mindlessly looking around the room. His gaze but his gaze lands on you as if you were magnetic. He watches you laugh with your friends when Usopp takes too big a hit and devolves into a coughing fit.

Usopp passes the bong your way and to Ace’s surprise you don’t take a hit, instead you pass it on to Nami before downing the rest of your drink. Now he wonders why Nami pulled you away in the first place if you weren’t going to smoke.

You stand up and walk Ace’s way, patting Usopp – who is still coughing – on the back as you pass. You make a direct beeline for the keg. He watches you as you refill your glass only to down that cup in one gulp, refilling it again. He raises an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything.

“Fancy seeing you here again,” Ace says, drawing your attention.

“How’re you doing, hottie,” you tease - the words are playful but they ignite something inside of him. He smiles cheekily at the reference to the contact name he put in your phone.

“What brings you over to my side of town,” he jokes.

“Weed doesn’t really agree with me,” you say simply leaving it at that, leaning against the counter. A silence envelopes the kitchen, one that Ace is desperate to break but can’t figure out how to. All hope is lost when you bring your glass up to meet your lips. His eyes follow your every move, completely transfixed by the simple action.

He forgets how to behave casually, his elbow missing the counter top entirely when he tries to lean against it next to you. He really hopes that you didn’t notice that but the silent giggle tumbling out of your mouth is telling him that you did.

Ace clears his throat, trying to dispel the thoughts in his mind, “So how ya know Luffy?” As soon as the words leave his mouth he knows that it was a stupid question. What the hell is wrong with him? He can’t believe that he is acting like he’s never done this before, it’s embarrassing.

“We work together,” you laugh.

“I meant what got you into music? I didn’t get the chance to ask earlier” he says, trying to recover, hoping desperately that you can’t see the heat in his cheeks. He grabs another slice of pizza hoping that eating will prevent him from being awkward. 

“Ace you didn’t tell me the pizza was here,” Luffy says from across the apartment with a frown. 

“Luffy, the pizza’s here,” Ace grins, mouth full. You try hard to stifle a laugh as the energetic boy comes running into the kitchen grabbing the boxes of pizza. Just as quickly as he came, Luffy runs back to the living room, setting them on the table before taking one for himself.

Ace notices how Nami catches your eye and gives you a questioning look. He watches your silent interaction, which ends with you waving off Nami - he isn’t sure if that is a good thing or not. Before he can dwell on what that meant you turn back to him.

“We were talking about music, yeah,” you question. Ace nods in response, his mouth full from another bite. “I’m not entirely sure exactly what got me into music, I think it was a cumulation of a bunch of things. Music has always been a big part of my life, even when I was growing up. Honestly I can’t really picture myself doing anything else.”

The conversation moves to music in general, a topic he is more than happy to talk about. Ace finds himself getting more and more excited as you talk, nobody has really been able to match his freak when it comes to music and it was refreshing to talk to someone just as passionate about the topic. He knew already he enjoys your company but this is solidifying the fact.

You mention your love for making playlists and you see how he lights up. Ace quickly (and excitedly) suggests that you make playlists for each other, immediately pulling out his phone to craft one right then and there. You laugh at his enthusiasm but are fast to do the same. After you finish making him a short on-the-spot playlist, Ace watches you go for what he is pretty sure is your fourth drink of the night. 

“You should probably slow down,” he cautions, gesturing to the keg, trying to save you from the pain of a hangover. 

To his surprise however, you scoff before looking at him with a smile, “Relax, I can outdrink you.”

Now it’s Ace’s turn to scoff. “I highly doubt that darling,” he says full of confidence.

“I outdrank Zoro once,” you proudly proclaim. Ace didn’t know the man in question super well but he’s been witness to the number of times the green haired man came to refill his cup and how he seems to be able to handle his alcohol well.

Zoro, as if knowing you were talking about him, snaps his head in your direction and shouts, “Oi, that’s not fair, I was sick.”

“You threw up, so it counts,” you shout back sticking out your tongue, delight written all over your face. Zoro mumbles something in disagreement but doesn’t push any further. Ace finds your antics amusing and a bit charming.

“Wanna put money on it, Doll?” Ace asks with a mischievous grin.

“How about you buy me dinner,” you playfully respond. 

“And if I win?” he wiggles his eyebrows.

“It won’t happen,” you state firmly.

“If it does?” He pushes, not sure what answer he is hoping for, probably any that involves spending more time with you

“Then I’ll take you out to dinner twice,” you say.

“Deal” he says and the pair of you shake on it, “let me catch up to you then.” He chugs two more cups of beer so you start at the same baseline.

“Did I hear something about a drinking contest?” Nami shouts and you laugh at her. If Ace knew her better he would probably be able to tell that the tone of voice she is using is reserved explicitly for when there is money on the line.

“Are you sure, Y/N, Ace is really able to drink,” Luffy warns you from across the room. Ace’s confidence grows at his little brother’s praises. 

That is until Nami hits Luffy on the head, “What are you talking about? You’ve seen her drink.”

It is starting to become clear to Ace that this is going to become an event and that your group takes drinking contests seriously. While he isn’t worried, being confident in his abilities, he just hopes you’re going to be okay losing infront of all your friends.

The group that was smoking and a few stragglers move into the kitchen to watch. Usopp is quick to declare himself the referee. Nami and Sanji – Ace is pretty sure that is his name – both bartenders, come over and start filling cups.

You and Ace sit down at the small bartop and shake hands. Out of the corner of his eye, Ace can see Luffy clapping his feet in excitement. When he reverts his attention back to the game, it surprises Ace to see how many cups the bartenders filled. There are at least ten for each of you. He is sure that your friends would know your limits but Ace starts to worry about you getting alcohol poisoning or something.

“I already know where you’re gonna take me to dinner,” you tease him.

“We’ll see about that,” Ace says grinning ear to ear, “You ready, doll?”

“I am so going to kick your ass,” you say, and he is loving your confidence. With that Usopp declares it’s time to start.

Ace downs the first glass of beer only to see that you’re already on your second. He takes that as a sign to lock the fuck in and he keeps going. The two of you remain neck and neck, and he is surprised you’re even able to drink this fast. He would be lying if he said that he didn’t find it kinda hot, but he is too focused on winning to dwell on that. He starts to feel the alcohol enter his bloodstream but he doesn’t stop.

“Damn, Doll, I did not expect you to make it past ten,” Ace slurs as you both catch your breath between drinks. Still tied, you had made it nearly the entire way through the cups and were now in the home stretch.

“What are you at now?” Nami asks, concern in her voice she looks over at Sanji and they share a look of unease.

“Not sure but I think we’re at eleven - maybe twelve or thirteen,” Ace answers, doing his best to count. Sanji’s eyes grow wide, both of you are well past double the amount of drinks he would serve a customer and both bartenders know it is time to cut you off.

“Alright, you’re done, no more,” Sanji says, pulling away the glasses. Nami is already getting the two of you water.

You pout a little at the cut off but neither you nor Ace are going to argue with a bartender who cuts you off, they may not be on the clock but they understand how alcohol impacts people. You whisper to Ace (loudly) that this is why all of your good drinking contests happen when they’re not around. Sanji scoffs at that, mumbling something about the damn moss head? Ace isn’t sure.

After you're cut off, the crowd disperses with some chatter. Zoro grabs as many of the glasses as he could carry, which is five of the six left, and goes back to the living room. Sanji rolls his eyes, clearly annoyed at the guy, but doesn’t make a move to stop it. Ace can’t help but wonder what Zoro’s tolerance is, How fucked is his liver?

Nami then pulls you away and practically forces water down your throat, nearly choking you in the process. But Ace can hear her faint praise to you, commenting how she just made money, which causes you to laugh and spit out some of the water. Sanji slides a glass of water to Ace as well, instructing him to drink it. 

Hands appear on Ace’s shoulders causing him to jump a little. “It seems that you’ve met your match, huh,” Ace hears Sabo’s voice. He’s not wrong, Ace thinks, reaching for a slice of pizza.

“I really gotta go,” Sabo says with a sense of urgency, “I bet the redhead like 50 bucks on you and she looks like the type to collect if there’s a draw.” Ace laughs, from what he overheard, Sabo is probably right. 

“Good luck getting home,” Sabo says jokingly, patting Ace’s back before sneaking out the door.

Off in the distance he can hear Luffy trying to put on some music and multiple people jump trying to stop him. Ace chuckles, he can’t really blame them, Luffy’s taste in music is… unique. He can hear bickering about who is going to control the music, but he tunes it out, his mind elsewhere. 

Ace is still thinking about what Sabo said earlier. He can’t pretend like he doesn’t really like you, or at least enjoys your company. He watches you over with Nami, who he can hear making you promise to keep drinking water and eating food - with threats attached of course. Once she seems content, she leaves you to your own devices, returning back to her earlier spot on the couch. And just like that the two of you are alone in the kitchen again.

You turn to him and let out a joyous laugh making his heart constrict a little bit. “You just had to tell them what we were at, didn’t you,” you say in a jokingly accusatory tone, walking over to him again.

“Hey, I didn’t know they would cut us off like that,” Ace defends.

“I know, they’re such buzzkills sometimes,” you sigh overdramatically, he lets out a little laugh. You sit down next to him, swiveling the stool to look at him. He’s not quite sure why he is so happy you came and sat next to him but it’s making his heart palpitate.

“I’m impressed that you could keep up with me, Dollface, not many people can say the same,” he pokes fun. If he could read minds he would know that you were thinking how it is possible for someone to have such a charming smile.

“You shouldn’t underestimate me, I have powers beyond your comprehension,” you lean in close with a goofy grin. Ace can’t help but find drunk you adorable – not that you weren’t already. You sit back up and continue, “But you were good.”

“I put my money where my mouth is babydoll,” he says. Ace doesn’t register the new name until a spark of something flashes through them and you lick your lips. He is enchanted by the action, eyes lingering on your lips longer than they should be.

“JENGA TIME,” Luffy shouts, pulling Ace out of his thoughts. Why the hell are you playing Jenga, he thinks. When you look at Ace you can see the confusion on his face and answer the question before he can even ask, “It’s jenga but the blocks have things written on them and you have to do what it says or drink.”

“Come on let's go play,” you say giddy, pulling him out of the chair.

The alcohol is clearly starting to course its way through the both of you as you walk. You drag him across the apartment stopping short to scout out a spot for the two of you to sit. You point to the empty cushion on the couch and drag him over. The two of you squeeze into the last seat, Nami, on your otherside refusing to give the two of you space. For some reason Ace doesn’t really mind having you pressed up against him. 

He’s so focused on how your bodies connect he doesn’t notice the game starts until Luffy is screaming out from drinking a shot of hot sauce. The room erupts in laughter at his brother’s misery and Ace can’t help but join in. Luffy leaves the circle and sticks his head under the kitchen faucet drinking water straight from the tap.

“How does he always get that one,” you giggle.

“He probably likes it,” Zoro grunts, “Ever notice how the hot sauce gets hotter every time?”

When Luffy returns, the game continues around the circle with some getting dares others having to tell embarrassing stories. Eventually it comes around to Ace and he has to answer what happened the last time he got blackout drunk. It’s been a while but it’s a story that Marco never lets him live down, not that he remembers doing it. 

“I’m pretty sure that Luffy knows this one,” Ace starts with the slightest hint of embarrassment.

“Is this the stop sign one?” Luffy asks, getting excited when Ace nods, “This is a good one.” Luffy laughs, knowing what’s to come.

“Gonna share with the class, Portgas?” you tease. He flashes you a smile that leaves you full of anticipation. You lean into him even more, not noticing how his breath hitches. He takes a beat, preparing himself before he tells the tale.

“For the record, I don’t remember any of this, this is just what I’ve been told,” Ace starts, struggling to keep his words coherent, “It was Halloween a couple of years ago, I was walking back to my apartment with a couple of friends and on the way there was this stop sign that had clearly been hit by a car, it was messed up and bent out of shape. For whatever reason, I really wanted that stop sign, probably to liven up the apartment.

“I ripped it out of the ground and right after I did that an officer stopped us, which makes sense, a group of drunk guys holding a stop sign that was clearly just pulled out of the sidewalk is sketchy. The officer asked what I was doing with the sign and I wanted to keep it so I played dumb and hid it behind my back. But I didn’t do a good job because the sign was sticking out above my head.

“Luckily, my friend Marco managed to convince the officer that it was already out and I just picked it up to try and put it back and he believed him and let us go, but I had to leave the sign behind and I was so upset about losing it that I was sad the rest of the night. Marco likes to say I was crying about it while over the toilet but I think he’s full of it.”

The story seems to be popular with the crowd because it has them cracking up for a while (Luffy being the loudest, despite having heard this story several times), throwing out questions that he couldn’t answer. The room eventually calms and then it is your turn. 

Nami instructs you which block to pull when your turn comes around and you happily follow her suggestion, not seeing the mischievous smirk on her face that she directs at Ace, confusing him.

“Sit in the person on your right’s lap for the next round,” you say, slurring your words together. …He’s the person to your right. Nami’s look is making sense now.

“You good with that?” you ask him with big doe eyes that make him feel weak. 

“Shit,” Ace whispers, grateful that the heat of alcohol can be blamed for his blush. You cock your head, waiting for his response. He scoops you up onto his lap, wrapping his arms around your waist, “If that’s what it says.” You show him the block as proof and to be honest he doesn’t care if you made that up or not. Once you’re comfortable on his lap and distracted, Nami mouths ‘you're welcome’ to him. Ace isn’t sure if he should thank her or be embarrassed that she read him so clearly.

The round comes and goes and you’re still perched on his lap. The two of you are sharing laughs at jokes only you understand. He already likes making people laugh but Ace is finding just how much he enjoys getting you to throw your head back in laughter.

The game fizzles out naturally as people start to leave for the night, but Ace and you are so lost in your own world you don’t really notice. At some point you shifted positions. Now sitting across his lap and he is glad to be able to see your face, happy to get lost in your features. You reach up and pluck the hat from his head, placing it on your own. 

The simple sight of you in his hat has Ace feeling a hunger that he hasn’t felt in awhile. He’s at a loss for words, seeing you in something he owns is releasing primal urges in him that he’s been trying desperately to beat back with a stick all night. You’re his little brother’s friend for fucks sake, no need to make it awkward if it doesn’t work out.

“Hey Y/N, is that Ace’s hat you’re wearing,” Nami says poking fun at you. In either embarrassment for being caught or realization of what you did you remove the orange hat, placing it back onto Ace’s head.

The sight of you in his hat feels like a guilty pleasure, one that he is not willing to give up so quickly. He catches your hand and guides it back your head and a surprised look overtakes your face. “It looks good on you,” Ace explains in what he hopes is a casual tone.

Much sooner than he’d like, Nami is pulling you away from him to bring you home. You give his hat back and leave his lap with an apologetic glance. He can't help but be excited to see you again.

a/n since they kinda drink like a frat in universe i figured they probably buy kegs like one too, they likely rotate who buys though i am an absolute lightweight but grew up around heavy drinkers, this is only slightly exaggerated (bc that fits the characters better) but i have seen people drink a LOT like your liver cannot be fine a lot also i LOVE drunk jenga. They drank enough to get FUCKED UP fr so ofc they drunk idiots at the end, love that for them, it’s cute

pls don't expect chapters to be this long i can't do it regularly 😭

pls like & comment! let me know your thoughts | © stuckinmymind22 | dividers by @enchanthings

[hopetorun]

it's always harder to start a personal post than it feels like it'll be when i'm drafting it in my head while i wash the dishes. pushing through to ramble and navel-gaze anyway, though—

i've been thinking as the new year gets its legs under it about the effort i put in last year toward the goal of not being single. i didn't call it that, obviously. the actual spelled out goal was to do one singles or speed dating event per month and one volunteering event per month, which to be clear i came nowhere close to (i went to three speed dating events and three volunteering events and did one month of weekly swing dance classes). but i did do more than last year. and out of those three speed dating events i ended up going on two dates (with the same person). overall it was, diplomatically, pretty disheartening.

i'm going to keep trying, though i haven't decided exactly what that's going to look like in 2025. going out and doing things is expensive, and putting yourself out there without much to show for it is draining. even trying to buy cute clothes as a fat person is draining. i like the idea of trying to cultivate a larger social circles of weak ties, but in practice i'm pretty reserved when i'm alone in a crowd of new people. i'm starting to get the sense that it's easier to meet someone when you're already dating someone, like getting a job is easier when you already have a job. is it worth trying the horrid apps again, because at least they're less expensive, even if they're more draining? is this just what it's like trying to not be single when you're fat? am i just emanating lack of confidence in my dating prospects from every pore?

i'm giving myself january off, to fortify myself emotionally and think about how i'm going to take aim at this this year and because i want to have a low spend month and this shit adds up quick. unfortunately, thinking about it means thinking about it. and thinking about it kind of sucks!

there's this big part of myself that i've never had the opportunity to know, and i've really felt it lately. i can only take a guess at what i'm like in a relationship, what i'm like when i share my life with someone to that degree. the older i get, the more keenly i feel having never known that, and the more i doubt that i can even find room in my life for it. where do i fall on the i don't want somebody in my house to there's someone in my house and they love me spectrum?

when i was home over christmas, mom said something about me having kids (not in a pushy way, it was fine) and i said that i don't want to undertake single parenting. she, not unfairly, pointed out that that's always a risk of it. and she's right, of course, there is always a risk of a partner dying or leaving or needing to be left. she didn't change my mind, or even particularly open the door to me changing my mind, but it did make me additionally sad for another part of myself i might never get to know.

i don't really know where i'm going with this. thinking about my gratitude to all the writers i've read over the years who've been so clear that there really are no guarantees. thinking that many people look for love for years and years and never find it. that others find it later in life. too late for some things, perhaps, but not never. that it's this huge, important thing that i can't really control much at all. i can make an effort (even though making an effort often feels worse than not) and ... that's basically it. i can work on my tendency to be reserved in a crowd and take myself out to places where people meet people and beyond that ... hope for the best? kinda sucks.

a dear friend texted me the other day asking for me to be there for some of her wedding day activities. she's older than me, and met her wife (who's my age) in fandom. it's both heartening and not, you know? most of my friends met their spouses in college (that ship has sailed) or in fandom (i'm open to it but it's probably a long shot). some fell for a friend. a lot of my friends are just as single as me (though many of them are more content to stay that way).

i want to wrap this around to some kind of conclusion, and i don't think there is one. i haven't even really learned anything from a year of this. feeling unwanted sucks (i knew that), meeting someone to fall in love with is a crapshoot (i knew that), going out and doing things is expensive (i knew that). i hope i can come back to this post someday and have a way to tie it all back together and mean something. it doesn't feel likely right now.

[sams-butt-dem0n]

love the gang breaking up with reader hcs!! could we get hcs of them getting back together though😔

A/N: Hey guyssss! So sorry that i haven't posted in a while, I was enjoying some time off before the dreaded work ethic takes over haha. I have had SO MANY people ask this (by that I mean like 5) but that's a LOT fort me. I love this idea so i hope you like my writing of it :)

---

DARRY would take such a long time to realise that he regrets breaking up with you purely because he is such a busy man that he barely has any time to think about something other than work work work. He wouldn't know where to begin, what to say, when he was gonna have the time to even speak to you properly.

Luckily for him, you just so happened to be passing by the store he works in on weekends and he caught a glance of your figure walking past.

"Y/n!" He shouts, catching your attention. You roll your eyes as soon as you see him.

"What, Darry?" You say, standing still in the middle of the sidewalk. "I thought you wanted nothing to do with me, huh?"

"Look, y/n, please can I just talk to you," he says. "Give me five minutes."

"Five minutes. Max."

He takes a deep breath, looks down at his feet, and begins. "Look, y/n, I've been a real dickhead."

You nod. "Good start."

"I just want you to know that I never meant anything that I said to you. I was going through a lot of stress, you know how I get. I'm so beyond sorry. What is it gonna take for you to have me back?"

You chuckle and look up into his eyes, those eyes you had missed so much. "Oh, Darry," you say. "You don't need to beg for me back. I'll always be yours."

You pull him into a kiss, your arms around his neck and his around your waist.

"I love you."

SODAPOP would be running back to you the literal next day. He would sleep on what he had said and accused you of and immediately regret it in the morning. He would race out of bed, throw a comb through his hair and put whatever shoes he could pick up first on his feet before sprinting to your place.

He would bang at your window, most probably waking you up as it was about 8am on a Sunday and there was no way in hell you'd be up before 10.

"Soda? What the hell are you doing here?" You ask, anger layered in your voice.

"Y/n, I'm so sorry," he says, tears rolling down his face. It killed you to see him like this. "Please forgive me. I know what I did was wrong and I'm so sorry that i fucked things up but please baby I need you to realise that I was just beating myself up for no reason. I would never think of you as a cheater I just-"

You needed to cut off his rambling. Soda, stop. Just get in here before you freeze to death."

PONYBOY doesn't even feel any form of regret until a good couple of moths later, the pressure of school had worn off and he was exposed to the harsh reality of what he had done. Of course, it's typical of a man to only realise what they have lost months too late but it was worth a shot. Within an hour, Ponyboy was stood at your door with a bunch of flowers, a personalised poem he had written just for you, and all of your favourite chocolates.

"Ponyboy, what are you-"

He cuts you off. "Y/n please don't say anything until I'm done. If you're gonna kick me off your porch, please just wait until I'm finished."

You nod and he begins to read out his poem, causing tears to gather in your eyes and roll down your cheeks. Just like they had been doing for the past 73 days. He hands you a bunch of your favourite flowers halfway through his speech and continues, capturing your heart in a moment you shall never forget. How could you not forgive him after this?

DALLAS would take forever to even think of apologising to you and that's purely because of his bad boy ego he has going on. Like, what do you mean apologise? Do you know who he is? However, after about four months, Dallas finds a picture of the two of you from when you were together. You were sat beside him at the drive in, your legs laid over his and you had the largest beaming smile he had ever seen. God, he missed your smile. It was that moment where he realised he had thrown everything away.

And that's how you ended up in this moment, a beaten up and bloody Dallas Winston stood at your doorstep, begging for you to forgive him.

"please, y/n, I need you back," he says, spitting blood from between his lips. "I need you to say that everything is okay."

You weren't going to give in. Not until he said it.

"Please," he says, looking at you with such desperation in his eyes. Those eyes you had come to love endlessly.

He needed to say it. He still hadn't said it. Please, say it, Dallas, you thought.

"I'm sorry."

Without hesitation, you grabbed his face and pressed your lips against his; his arms finding their way around your waist, pulling you close. He had finally got you back.

JOHNNY would be exactly like Sodapop, realising he made a huge mistake immediately after he made it. However, due to his home life and lack of confidence in any scenario, Johnny would have no clue how to apologise or even approach you. Because of this, he asks Dallas, his best buddy, for help. Why on Earth you would ask Dallas Winston for relationship advice is anyone's guess, but he did it either way.

Surprisingly enough, Johnny's effort was very much appreciated by Dallas and he genuinely helped him develop a plan that wasn't completely offensive. Johnny obviously recognised and cut out the parts that were. And so, he knocked at your bedroom window after climbing up the gutter, and you welcomed him in, your eyes still sore from all of the crying you had done.

"Johnny? Why are you here?" You ask, sitting him down on your bed and pacing around your room, not knowing how to feel about the situation. Relieved? Happy? Angry?

"I missed you," he says. "and I'm sorry."

STEVE would spend weeks upon weeks mulling over the fact that he had not only ended things with you, but ended them over the phone. He didn't get to hug you one last time. He didn't get to kiss you goodbye. He didn't even see your face when he had told you that it was over. He didn't have to see the hurt - he heard it. He could hear your heart sink to your stomach; he could hear the tears spill down your cheeks, your sweet rosy cheeks; he could feel the anger running through your blood. He hated himself for it. So much so that he was pushing everyone away as punishment to himself, even Soda.

Fortunately, Soda had had enough of Steve being so depressed about what he had done that he went to fetch you himself. You were minding your own business in your bedroom when your mother came to tell you that someone was at the door for you. Expecting it to be one of your girlfriends, you ran to the door to greet her but when you were faced with Sodapop Curtis, your smile dropped.

"Oh, hey Soda," you say, coldly.

"Y/n, I know you want nothing to do with Steve anymore but-"

"No." You say. "I don't care what you have to say. That asshole deserves whatever is coming to him."

"Pleaser, y/n." Soda begs. "Just talk to him for five minutes."

And that's how you ended up sat on the Curtis's couch, alone in the living room with none other than Steve Randle. Obviously, all of the boys were listening at the door.

"Y/n, I've been such a fool," Steve begins, making you chuckle.

"You can say that again."

"I've missed you so much," he admits. "And I am so sorry for what I did to you. I know you can't possibly forgive me straight away but I'm begging you - give me one month to prove myself to you. Just one month, that's all I ask."

You sigh, look down at your hands and then back up at him. "Fine. One month."

You knew whatever he had planned was going to bring you right back. And that is why you said yes.

TWOBIT would win you back almost instantly. He was just the kind of person that you couldn't stay mad at. No matter how badly he had hurt you, the second he knocked on your car window at the drive-in, you knew you were screwed.

"I've noticed you avoiding me, you know?" He says, cocking his head to the side, looking around your car to see you're alone.

"Well done, Columbo," you say. "Do you want a gold star?"

He nods. "Yeah, that would actually be pretty beneficial."

You hated him. (You really didn't).

"Are you gonna let me in or what?" He asks. "I hope you know I'm not gonna leave until you let me in."

You looked at him in disbelief. "Are you crazy?"

He gives you a look as if to say 'Did you really just ask me that?'. He sighs. "Please just let me in."

You unlock the door and allow him to sit in the passenger seat beside you. You had never heard a silence so deafening.

"I'm sorry," he says. "You that I'm sorry."

It's true, you did know, because every time you saw him on the streets he would look at you with his pleading, begging eyes that you love so much.

"I know," you reply. "But how do I know you won't hurt me again."

I promise you with every inch of my being that I will never fuck you over," he says, grabbing your hand and looking into your eyes. "Please."

[mondscheinprinzessin]

@arsonist-chicken (tumblr isn't letting me answer this)

What was your first fandom? Are you still in that fandom now?

I’m unsure what really counts as ‘being in a fandom’. But it could be german Youtubers that collabed a lot back in the days: Gronkh/Sarazar/Sgt.Rumpel. I’ve read fanfics about them, had a friend to talk to about it all, watched their videos, left comments, even send them fanart once. I didn’t even know what shipping was back then but I enjoyed interacting with it. I’m not in that fandom anymore, I haven’t read fanfics for that long for them, and the guys aren’t doing anything together anymore and haven’t for a long time.

2. Who is your current favourite author? What is their best story?

There isn’t the one for me, but I’m going with curious_crocodile for this one because they always manage to hit me in the feels and they tend to write what I enjoy reading about. And So far behind is definitely my favourite to read and re-read.

3. Which story have you read more than any other? How many times?

I think it’s actually a One Direction fic which I’ve come back to a lot because, well, hurt/comfort. Exposing myself on here, it’s A Love Like War. And how often? I don't know actually, but's a few times.

4. What is the best plot twist you’ve ever seen?

Can’t remember any right now but then again my memory is non-existent. Could have been in a Spiderman fic though.

5. Is there anything that makes you nope out of a story? What is it?

God awful grammar, no paragraphs, writing in all lower letters, almost exclusively dialogue with no scene setting at all, when I realize the characters are written like a 12 year old on wattpad has written them. There’s probably more.

6. Why did you leave your most recent comment? Will you share it with us?

My most recent comment is on xnowimnothing’s fic masterpiece made of mistakes, and I just had to let her know what I’ve been feeling. Like, you’re most likely to get a comment from me when you’ve hurt me😄 (Not sharing, but you can click on the fic and see for yourself and along the way read the fic.

7. What is one story idea you really want to read but no one has written yet?

Uhhh everything I have planned to write but would rather have written by someone else so I can read it instead? There’s nothing too specific, but if we limit it to the BC fandom then give me something with addiction recovery maybe. Because it’s not something I’m too confident I could write myself perfectly.

[journey-to-the-attic]

uh oh

[sangrenfreude]

i love cj!evelin they're so gender

[arklay]

WIP DAY.

tagged by @girlbosselrond @morvaris @aartyom @risingsh0t @phillipsgraves @leviiackrman @indorilnerevarine & @denerims over the past month! sorry it's taken me so long to get to anything at all, i'm sure you guys have heard me address it enough, but thank you all so much for continuing to tag me in things while i've been inactive ♡

tagging @aelyosos @brujah @calenhads @florbelles @jendoe @lightwardens @liurnia @nokstella @nuclearstorms @shadowsofrose @shellibisshe @steelport @swordcoasts @wrymbloods @voerman & all of those who tagged me again cause i'm so behind + anyone else who'd like to share anything they're working on, not just writing! ♡

i haven't written anything since the last wip game i did, but i started trying to put diana's timeline together at the start of january, so i mean... i'll show that instead. as you can see, fatigue hasn't let me do much with it even though i've got all of her timeline already done and strewn about all over the place.

started with 1995 onwards cause it was originally going to be an ewskers timeline situation, but then wanted to include all of her backstory so i went back to the start and still have the late 80s and early 90s to get through before then, but yeah :]

it's going to include like all little moments i've thought of between the ewskers just for me and placing them on the timeline, so you can imagine how long this is going to get if i have to go to 2021 for village... like just 1996-1998 is going to be so much... she's very special to me if you couldn't tell already lmaoo

never sharing this though, it's just for me, and like will help for when i do her timeline page (more in-depth version of what's on her oc page) to just run through canon events and brief descriptions and whatnot. you understand.

everything is blurred out besides 1995 ewskers momence and the years, just cause like idk her i feel weird sharing her in-depth backstory unless it's in dms or something, just cause there's lots going on there and yeah. things. idk

i also made a carrd for twt if you wanna have a look at that :] there's some cheeky subtle things with the two resi items i used as pics hehe

actually, you know what, i'll give a lil bit from where i left of with that rewrite anyways, even though it's been months since i wrote it. but why not

Wesker left a fleeting kiss behind her ear then reached around her and hooked his fingers beneath her coat, prompting Diana to glance back at him. But all he did was gently pull it from her shoulders. She watched him from out of the corner of her eye as he hung it up on the rack by the door, his movements careful and almost calculated, until he turned back towards her, and the warmth of his body returned once more. He pressed up against her side this time, as opposed to her back, and one of his hands found a home on her waist. The way the arm it belonged to was resting firmly against her as he began leading her towards the kitchen was comforting, secure, yet unmistakably possessive. And she revelled in it. He had quite the knack for handling her just the way she wanted.

[vergina-spva]

🖋️🕊️ (if you get what i mean)

Here's your Pen-wing WIP (because, yes, this is said to Penguin):

Killer leaned back a little and smirked. “I think it’d look good on you.”

[knifefightandchill]

i finished the ballad of songbirds and snakes and holy shiiit that book.

[artemismatchalatte]

I didn't go online at all yesterday. I self-designated a reading day and finished a book for class (The Good Solider) and one book on my owned TBR (Convenience Store Woman). It bothered me that I didn't have any books done yet for this year. I'm in the middle of three others, with a mind to start maybe one or two more, but still, it feels like very slow going.

[nereidprinc3ss]

hourglass

in which spencer disappears from fem!reader's life entirely for three months, right as it seems they were finally about to make things official. when he comes back they reunite, all the while knowing things can't be the same as they were.

18+ (smut, angst) warnings/tags: oh god so many. NOT canon compliant in the slightest, i make shit up, softdom!spence, nipple stuff prob, fingering, oral f receiving, piv sex, unprotected sex, pet names, tara mentioned, depression, mentions of trauma cause its the prison arc duh, passing mentions of alcohol, mentions of spencer losing weight, reader mistakenly thinks spencer tried to kill himself BUT ONLY FOR A SECOND, where is diana reid, nobody knows or cares, probably filming glee, optimistic ending a/n: haven't posted smut in forever but this wip required it and the angst was so angsty i just had to finish it. it was started in jan or feb and subsequently added to and changed months apart and then edited so the writing quality varies from section to section which i apologize for. originally based on good guy by julia jacklin... also the odyssey by homer? can't really explain that one you'll just have to see for yourself anyway byeeee ilysm!!! PLS tell me if you liked it! or if you hated it! but preferably if you liked it! MWAH! wc <12k

It’s been about three months since you last saw Spencer Reid.

About three months since you had an early Valentine’s Day celebration (even though you weren’t a couple) complete with champagne (even though he doesn’t usually drink) and slow dancing (even though you swore you’d be terrible and he spent the first ten minutes laughing at you as you stepped on his toes.)

About three months since you finally settled your head on his shoulder and let the warbling vinyl carry you somewhere distant as the two of you danced slow circles on the parquet floor for what felt like hours.

You’d have liked him to stay later that night. You’d have liked him to stay all night if you were being honest with yourself, but at 11:45 he gently pulled away and told you he had to go.

“Curfew?” you joked, the corner of your mouth lifting a little and you hoped you were hiding your disappointment well.

“Actually, I’m going down to Texas for a few days to speak with one of the leading doctors in experimental Alzheimer's and dementia treatment. I’m going to see if he can get my mom into a clinical trial. I leave early tomorrow morning.”

“Oh my god, that’s amazing, Spencer! What are you doing still here? You should be at home getting ready to go!”

A rosy blush stains his cheeks and he looks down at the ground, laughing that little self-deprecating laugh of his. It makes your heart dance to see him so happy, makes you want to wrap your arms around him and never let him go so that he knows how much you absolutely adore him—but you settle for an affectionate squeeze where your hands have come to rest on his biceps.

“I wanted to see you tonight because I won’t be here for Valentine’s Day... but I still really wanted to spend it with you,” he admits meekly.

If before your heart was dancing, it is now melting.

The dreaded ‘what are we’ talk has been lurking in the dark corners of every conversation you have with each other lately—at least, in your mind it has. What you have with Spencer is not easily defined, and near impossible to explain to your friends—you act like a couple, you go out on dates, he introduces you to his team like you’re his girlfriend without ever putting it into so many words—but this validation that your pseudo-relationship might be evolving is better than any flowers he could have gotten you (although the peonies he brought will look very nice on your bedside table.)

“Four whole days... what will I do without you?” you whisper, brushing a hand along his face, and your chest aches with the heavy truth of it—despite the fact that he often is gone for stretches about that length. They don’t ever start to feel shorter.

“Well, you can start by reading that copy of The Odyssey I annotated for you.”

“Depressing,” you admit. “And a little ominous, considering you’re about to embark on a hero’s journey.”

“I think you’ll like this one,” he smiles.

You chew on your bottom lip, looking up at him as you think.

“Give me something to look forward to,” you say, earnestly.

“I—well, honestly, I just really want to kiss you and I’ve wanted to for a long time now and, you know, if that’s something you’re maybe also interested in then we could, uh, figure out a time to—”

“You want to kiss me?”

“Wh—you couldn’t tell?” Spencer says, like he can’t believe it.

As if on reflex, you lunge up and capture his lips with your own. It obviously catches him by surprise, but when you lower from your tiptoes he follows you, pulling you in closer and holding your face in his hands.

It’s too natural, too right, to be exhilarating. There’s no rush of adrenaline—it's more like stepping into a hot bath or warming your freezing hands at a fire. Like pieces clicking into place. It’s a relief.

You breathe into it, letting more and more of yourself melt against him. He keeps coming back to you deeper and deeper like a rising tide, and you want more than anything to keep getting closer to him—but then he stops. He stays close enough for you to breathe his air, but dodges your kiss gently before supplanting it with a gentle one to the corner of your mouth.

“I really have to go,” he breathes, before moving away from your mouth to kiss your forehead and speak softly against your skin. “If I don’t leave now I’ll be here all night.”

Which is exactly what you want, and the implication does little to make you want him less. But you care about him too much to be so selfish.

At some point, his hands found their way into your hair, and you gently grab his wrists.

“Incentive for you to come home.”

Nearly three months since that night.

At first when he stopped answering texts, you’d assumed he just had too much going on down in Texas. Which you could understand—you knew how stressful this situation with his mother was.

Even when four days came and went without even an alert from him that he was back in town, you thought, okay, maybe he’s been called away on a case. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s disappeared because of his work. But even then, he’d at least text you enough information so that you would know he was alive. Now, radio silence.

So you tried not to be clingy. You tried to act like an adult, to focus on school and your life outside of Spencer, but when Tara Lewis cancelled your weekly meeting due to an “unforeseen work-related emergency”you called her immediately. Tara was something of a mentor, and it was she who had connected you and Spencer to begin with. You had met the other members of his team by that point, yes, but none who you knew as well as Tara.

When she had informed you that Spencer had been arrested in Mexico and was now facing prison time for murder, you laughed.

Laughed until you realized her end of the line was silent.

Realized it was not at all a joke.

In a catatonic state of tranquility, you asked her for more details. Beyond assuring you of his innocence, she couldn’t (or more likely, wouldn’t) provide them. Asked where he was now. Asked all the right things that made sense to ask.

Then you hung up and had a panic attack because Tara said something about 25 years and you saw Spencer evaporate from your future like an apparition.

Slowly, you felt him evaporating from your past, too. Those memories from the night he left, became visions of you swaying with a ghost. Holding nothing but light between your hands as you kissed the peony air of your apartment.

He doesn’t want to see you, she had said into the phone one night, her tinny voice cutting in and out. You’re not on his list of approved visitors.

“You asked him about me?” you had whispered, curled up on top of your made bed in the dark.

I tried. I’m sorry. I’ll call you when I know more.

All your days melded together like a muddied smear of paint. Suddenly you felt you had nothing to look forward to. No anchor, no goal. Yes, a PhD... and then what?

The only thing that punctuated one 24 hour period from the next was the time you spent crying because Spencer was in prison and he didn’t want to see you and by the looks of things you may never see him again. When you weren’t crying, you were thinking about how your life was a big cosmic joke. An unfortunate statistical anomaly that didn’t mean anything to anyone else, and that you couldn’t do anything about.

That copy of The Odyssey, which wasn’t even bound and instead was a thick stack of printer paper organized by a single black clip, became something of a manifesto for you—a tome that your poured over, reading and re-reading each note in the margins, each word beautiful and imbued with meaning because you knew Spencer had selected every single one specifically for you. You traced the letters reverently, because in a way this was the last thing he had said to you—about Lattimore’s faith to the original text, Merrill’s strict use of dactylic hexameter, the stylings of Wilson and Lombardo, and how he thought you would enjoy Hammond’s prose just as much as he did.

Day by day it was becoming more prophetic than fictional, and you allowed yourself to sink into madness. You would rather be a deluded zealot than be nothing at all.

He didn’t want to see you.

He might as well have been dead, for all that you were grieving him. And you started to hate him, because he wasn’t dead, but wouldn’t do you the kindness of proving it. Like a festering wound, scratched open day after day so as not to ever heal, you had to live knowing he was less than an hour away. So no, you weren’t exactly over it. You lived day by day, waiting for the occasional call from Tara to keep you updated on Spencer, but either she didn’t want to share much about how he was doing, or he had specifically barred her from doing so, because she was always sparse on the personal side of things. That thought actually lifted your spirits, because it meant he was at least acknowledging your existence in some tiny way.

But your routine was becoming more regular, and so you staid on top of your classes and your non-Reid related meetings with Tara once a week, and you learned to dip your toes into existential dread and the oily black pool of depression every night without ever fully submerging yourself. You learned hope, because it was pretty much all you had, and the BAU had confidence that they would get Spencer out one way or another so you did too.

So you didn’t really think about it when you missed a couple of calls from Tara some evening in May. You were preparing for finals and had way too much on your plate academically to think about anything else which was a welcome relief so you fully embraced it. I’ll call her back tomorrow, you think, as you clean up from dinner before going back to the living room where your textbooks and papers are completely covering every available surface. Maybe I have no idea what I’m going to do with my life after school, but I’ll be damned if I don’t even make it that far.

Hours later, well into the night, you’d all but forgotten about the calls. A knock at the door takes you a bit by surprise, and you frown as you stand again, tugging your Georgetown sweatshirt down over your shorts as you shuffle to the entrance of your apartment. You’re not expecting anyone, so you crack the door, peering around the edge of it.

And you couldn’t even consider trying to hide that shaky inhalation of dead air when you see Spencer standing on the other side.

Surely you’re hallucinating.

Surely this man in front of you who looks like he just got back from a day of work didn’t spend three months in prison pretending you didn’t exist.

He looks the same. Hair a bit longer, maybe—and gaunter even more than is normal for him. 

But it's him.

You can’t think about the apprehensive look on his face—you can’t think about the impossibility of him being here. You can’t think at all. Without your explicit permission, your body surges forward into his, and he’s real, and alive, and warm, and he is an anachronism in the hallway as he accepts everything you pour into the embrace, doesn’t flinch when you move your arms from around his waist to loop around his neck and back to his waist again with crushing force because you just can’t get him close enough.

“I’m sorry,” Spencer mutters into your hair, I’msorryI’msorryI’msorryI’msorry, he keeps saying, rubbing your back as you try to find a solid grip on the sleek material of his suit—try to gather all the pieces of him, already afraid he might fall apart and float away again.

“You—dis—disappeared,” you hiccup after an eternity, pulling away enough to look up at his pretty face. Tears blur your vision and darken the front of his jacket, bending the florescent lights so they form a kind of halo above his head.

Through the surreal haze you can see his throat bob.

“I know.”

He knows?

He knows?

You scoff.

“You have no fucking idea, Spencer. What the fuck is wrong with you? I—I'm—”

The hot anger is such a relief for a second, boiling the oceans of your despair into a wrathful, scorching fog, but as soon as you try to tell him how you feel, the barbed wire cuts into your throat again. You shove him away, skin burning where his hands had been.

“I’m sorry,” he croaks, hands hanging uselessly at his side. There’s that kicked puppy look about him—and it’s familiar, but now there’s more damage. You don’t know anything about his time in prison, you haven’t heard a damn thing, but beneath the glassy desperation in his eyes there is an unfathomable void that seems to be preventing him from being fully present—and you realize for the first time that he is different.

It chills you.

Before, you and Spencer shared everything. There wasn’t one part of his internal machinations that you didn’t understand, nothing you kept from each other. But as you study him now from a few feet away, you realize there might as well be a yawning chasm between the two of you.

He is so different.

Those eyes look deeper. No gears turning just behind the slashes of gold and brown anymore—only an endless dark corridor that goes places you will never go.

Gone is the perpetual boyish up-turn at the corner of his lips that always made him look slightly vacant in a way that you found incredibly amusing. Something you had been so fond of, even if you teased him.

He seems to have aged ten years—if not physically, then in demeanor. And now you feel like a little kid throwing a tantrum.

You cross your arms, suddenly unable to meet his eyes.

You’re embarrassed. And pissed. And relieved. Everything is worse and better. You want to fall back into his arms, but you have been jarred by the revelation that this might not be the same Spencer. It might not be the same relationship. You have no idea where you stand.

He says your name gently, with so much familiarity you’re briefly jerked into the past. It makes you wish you could look up to find him as he was three months ago. Wish this was just a bad dream. But that’s not fair to him.

“Sorry,” you mutter, studying the grey carpet fibers instead of looking at him.

“Don’t apologize,” Spencer says immediately, “you’re right. I don’t—” he clears his throat— “I’m being incredibly selfish. I shouldn’t have just shown up, I’ll just—I'll leave. I’m sorry.”

A silent moment passes.

You don’t look up as he turns and swiftly begins to move down the hall toward the stairway, leaving as quickly and silently as he had come, like a few bars of a song sighed in and away on a fleeting breeze.

Your bare feet are concretely planted, imagining him jogging down the steps and speed-walking away from your building—

And suddenly you’re sprinting after him, feeling like you might puke because Spencer was just here and you let him go again—and even though you’re still so mad and confused and hurt, the realization that he is leaving again makes the entire building spin and lurch.

“Wait!” You yell, almost wiping out as you run down the stairs and whip around corners in your slippery fucking socks. “Please, wait!”

The lobby is already empty as you spill out into it, and cold dread tightens around your neck like a fist as you shoulder your way through the double doors and right into Spencer.

“Please don’t leave again, you just—I'm sorry, I really need you to not go—” you blabber, lachrymose once more, gripping onto his forearms for dear life.

“I’m not going,” he breathes shakily. “I tried to leave because I think you were right and maybe I should and maybe it would be better for you but I can’t.”

“You can’t,” you agree, more sob than spoken word. He cups your jaw, then your cheeks, wiping tears and brushing away hair like he can’t figure out how to hold enough of you between his hands. The wild kaleidoscope of his eyes, bright and alive and real as he scans you desperately captures your attention enough to slow the tears to a trickle. He notices this and stares back, entranced.

A silent agreement is made, or maybe an inevitable fate is accepted—either way, something was set in motion three months ago and it matters to see it through. Spencer kisses you and you’re ready for it. You don’t need slow or tender. You need to feel how he feels. You need to know what he knows.

You sling your arms around his neck and he pulls you closer until you almost tip backward, chasing the bruising kiss even as you regain your footing. You want to drink him in and you do your best, breathing deeply as he kisses you deeper, backing you inside and toward the elevator.

“Is this okay?” he manages, only after blindly reaching for and mashing the up button on the wall panel.

Ideally it wouldn’t happen like this, but the world you live in obviously isn’t ideal and your personal situations as they coincide are far from ideal, so this is how it has to happen. But it’s hard to explain, and you’d rather not admit that this is so far from what you wanted for both of you and follow up with the fact that despite that you need him like you need water. So you don’t say a word as the metal doors slide open promptly. Instead you pull him in and let him press you to the chrome wall as he hits your floor button, and that very hand comes back to grab your ass like you didn’t think Spencer Reid capable of. It almost aches as his fingers dig into the flesh, but it’s a good ache because it means he’s real and he’s there.

You gasp as he hitches your leg up, arching into him. The shorts that you’re wearing leave very little to the imagination to begin with, but they become downright indecent like this.

Quickly the elevator stops and the doors hiss open. You don’t hesitate to pull Spencer by the hand down the hall. When you notice you left your door wide open, you don’t even care. Neither does he, apparently—once you’re inside he slams it shut, flipping the deadbolt while his eyes are glued to you like you’re already naked. Now Spencer is shameless in the way he drags his eyes over every curve, every place your clothes and hair are disheveled from his touch and eye-fucks you so obviously it makes your face warm. Three months ago Spencer would have at least been bashful about it when he met your eyes again, but this Spencer is far from apologetic as he pins you with his burning gaze once more. His hand stays stuck to the door like he’s holding himself back.

“Is this what you want?”

There’s an undercurrent of sorrow below the gravely arousal, like this isn’t what he wanted for the two of you either. But you’re both at the mercy of fate. This is all you have, and it might be all you can do for each other anymore. So you don’t need to say that, because he understands.

“Yeah. Yes, this is what I want.”

For just a second more he watches you from his place by the door, and there’s an unexpected softness to it. He looks at you the way he would have looked at you before. Like as long as he stays there he can entertain the idea of being that person again.

Need wins out quickly, though, and he surges forward. Immediately you’re caught in the riptide of him, helpless as he kisses you all the way to your bedroom.

He’s never been in here before. You find yourself glad it’s relatively clean—one of the pastimes you’d picked up in his absence was keeping everything tidy. It was something you could control.

A lamp glows at your bedside. You lean against the footboard of your bed, hands timidly behind your back and suddenly shy to have in him in your intimate space. Both of you set aside the heaving desperation long enough to catch your breaths, and for him to scan the room like he too is being forced to reconcile with the innate and unexpected intimacy of the moment. He cuts a harsh, dark gash in your sweetly decorated bedroom, radiating something wild and powerful and unsure of himself like a chained bull as he takes in the soft, pale bedding, the paintings and photos taped to the walls, the woven rug and the sheer drapery. His breathing slows as he studies it all—eyes eventually catching on something behind you. Looking is unnecessary. You’re sure he’s spotted the dried peonies in their ceramic vase. Or maybe the now worn stack of papers that is his Odyssey, marked up and soft around the edges from constant flipping-through.

Then Spencer looks at you, and that softness seeps in again. Along with something like... fear? Grief?

In some other universe your first time with Spencer is sweet and giggly and kind and he smiles at the decor in your room and looks around with wonder because it’s another way he gets to know you. It’s a different way to learn you from the inside.

You sense that he’s caught in between universes right now as well, painfully aware of what he would have given you that he can’t anymore.

He breathes your name like an apology, and foolishly you let a second go by in which you think he might offer you one. But he doesn’t. Not with his words, anyway. His eyes tell a different story.

“It’s fine,” you say unprompted on a whispered exhale, then a little louder as you push off the footboard, crossing the space until your hands are on his chest. You focus on his tie, not making eye contact as you rush to undo it. “It’s fine.”

He lets you do this for a few seconds before finally covering your trembling hands with his own. You still can’t meet his eyes.

“We don’t have to do—”

“No! No, please. I want to. I need—I need us to be okay.”

“Hey,” he murmurs, catching your chin and forcing you to look at him. “We are okay. Me and you are fine.”

It’s a pretty thought, but it’s not true. In fact, it’s a hideous and abject affront to the truth. Sure, maybe you’re fine in comparison to last week. Maybe anything feels fine compared to an eight by six cell. But it would be impossible for you and Spencer, for your relationship, whatever that relationship may be, to be fine. It’s especially impossible for him to make that claim, after all he did or rather didn’t do while he was gone. What you need is for him to stay anyway. What you need is to find a way to be with him, to exist with him, even when you are so clearly not fine.

“I just need you to stay,” you whisper, and he’s already nodding, wide-eyed like he’d do anything for you. You ignore all the bitter venom rising in your throat. You pretend this isn’t all happening after he cut you out of his life with a dirty switchblade. Instead you focus on his hands on yours, the familiar smell of him, which invites you to let go of each and every thought and worry. He must’ve showered before coming here, you realize. How long has he been out? What happened? 

“Okay. Okay, I can stay. What else can I do? How do I make it better?”

You sniffle and look back down.

“You can untie that for me.”

He hesitates, then nods some more, fingers working under yours to undo the tie around his neck.

“Okay.”

A moment goes by and after that final whispered word, the tension begins to build again. Spencer senses it in the way your fingertips linger on his chest and you step even closer, dragging them down to his belt. The metallic sound of it unbuckling, despite being your own doing, still manages to flip your stomach. How many times have you pictured this? When was the first time you realized you wanted it? You’re sure you haven’t stopped wanting it even once since then.

Spencer tosses the tie away and is shrugging off his jacket now, then before you see it coming he’s kissing you again, ducking down to do it. He feels taller this close up, and especially in your bedroom, where he just seems rather out of place. But you want him here. God, you want him here.

You break the kiss, forced to look down as you fumble with his belt.

“Sorry,” you gasp, embarrassed by your lack of dexterity. The light is barely sufficient to see what you’re doing, especially when he’s wearing black on black and your eyes are still bleary.

“You’re okay,” he assures you, and it’s so Spencer a fresh round of nerves electrifies the tips of your fingers. That thing is happening—the thing you’d hoped to avoid if you hadn’t lost momentum partway through, where you’re allowing your actual feelings for him to get in the way rather than getting swept up in the pathos of the moment and letting everything be easy and mindless. “Here, can I help you?”

But he doesn’t actually wait for an answer before he’s finishing off the belt for you, tugging it loose from his hips till it’s a leather coil in his hands. Your fingers brush the material and he lets you take it as if it were your prize. It’s heavier than you thought it’d be, and you just feel the weight of it in your hands for a moment, your dropped head brushing his chest.

You have a terrible feeling that if you do this now, it doesn’t mean everything will be alright. Because it can’t just go back to normal. Spencer has told you nothing of what must be an enormous trauma, and you haven’t spoken about it at all, but you sincerely doubt that after this he’s going to be ready to just jump into that committed relationship the two of you had been toying with for months before his absence. You’re almost... scared of him, now. Scared of where he’s been and what he’s endured—things you’re sure you couldn’t have taken. What that does to a person, you can’t imagine. He seems so solid and real in front of you now—but you know that’s not always enough. Maybe you’re just scared that somehow whatever he’s been through will have made him care for you less. That you were too far removed from the whole ordeal, and now you’ll never understand. If you could understand, maybe you could fix it for him. Maybe he’d stick around.

Still—even if you do end up pushing him further away in the long run—won't it have been worth it to have had him so completely, even just once?

You toss the belt to the ground, compressing all of these very complicated thoughts and feelings into a few seconds so short he can’t ask you any questions about them. Instead you find his top button, and just as you manage to undo it with relative ease he’s gently grabbing your wrists. You look up at him, immediately surrendering.

“If we’re going to do this I need you to relax a little bit.”

Gears grind in your chest. You feel need and anxiety comingling in every square inch of your body. It’s a sick buzz—a high on an empty stomach.

“I can’t,” you admit.

“Yeah, you can,” Spencer gently disagrees, slowly lowering your hands. When he’s sure you’re not going to try ripping his clothes off again, he releases, and his eyes lower to the zipper of your hoodie. His fingers follow, warm against the soft triangle of revealed skin at your chest as he grips the small piece of metal between barely shaking fingers. “You can.”

You match his eyeline, breathing shallowly and watching as he slowly drags the zipper down. You wonder if that sound has haunted his fantasies the way the sound of his belt has haunted yours. If he’s seen this hoodie on you and wondered what’s underneath, staring at you and daydreaming during movie night with you none the wiser.

Both of you have your eyes glued to the span of skin as the zipper parts. Spencer stalls with the zipper at your sternum, just below the band of your bra.

Right. No shirt.

You look up and find his eyes already on you, tinged with a curious kind of humor.

“I wasn’t expecting guests.”

The words come out shy. Spencer’s chuckle has its own nervous airy quality as he resumes tugging on your zipper, leaning down until your noses bump.

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

Then he kisses you again, a little sweeter now. Sweet enough to give you butterflies and for them to flutter right out of your stomach and spill from your lips in a little whimper against his.

It comes as a surprise when he pushes the fabric from your shoulders without looking or asking. Not that you’d have said no—you're just underprepared for how assertive he is in this foreign context.

Left just in your flimsy shorts and your thin bra, you feel quite exposed—but Spencer’s hands are as demanding and hungry as his mouth. They skim up your sensitive sides and sweep lower, suggesting less proper placement over your ass and pulling at your bottoms until you gently put a stop to their wandering.

“Wait. We’re... we’re uneven.”

It’s a struggle to get any words out at all when he keeps chasing your lips, nipping at you like he physically can’t stand not kissing you, but they catch his attention and he laughs airily, pulling back to let his gaze pour over your less clothed form. It lingers and catches and lights you up everywhere it touches, drops of heat soaking into your skin and making you feel all fuzzy and needy.

“We are,” he acknowledges, tone low and colored with the faintest smile. “You’re a lot prettier without your clothes on than I am.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The challenge comes immediately and thoughtlessly. Spencer’s golden eyes flash up to yours. He’s breathing a little harder than usual.

“You want me to show you what I mean?”

If that means getting him naked, then yes, absolutely.

You nod, but rather than immediately stripping, he takes your hand and holds his own open next to it. A thick pink scar bisects some pretty significant palmistry lines, but you don’t mention that. Instead you swallow—your thoughts, your words, your nausea.

“That’s new.”

You wonder how you hadn’t noticed it earlier.

He nods.

“A lot is new.”

It sounds almost like he’s challenging you—there's a kind of tremulous force in his voice, despite the perpetual softness there, like he’s inviting you to say it’s ugly. And you realize he’s referring to more than just the glowing scar cutting an asteroid trail against the flesh of him palm. The scars he obtained in prison must form a constellation over his body.

“I don’t care. I wanna see you.”

Spencer swallows, cupping your face with the scarred hand once more. You can’t feel it against your cheek but you know it hasn’t gone away.

“I’m sure you think you do,” he permits, and that’s where the conversation ends for the moment—with his hand on your face and his lips back on yours. “For now why don’t you let me worry about you?”

Obediently, you breathe, “okay.”

This is, for whatever reason, amusing to him. The brief levity dies as quick as it comes like a snuffed-out brush fire as soon as he lets his hands fall back down to your hips.

“I want... I want to give you slow. But...”

But slow is for people who didn’t lose three months of their life. Slow is for people who don’t know what it’s like to be starving. Slow is not for the desperate.

You understand the feeling.

“I don’t need slow.”

You’ll let him use you up like quick-burning fuel if that’s what he needs. You’ll go as fast and as bright and as hot as he tells you.

“But you want slow,” he murmurs, a secret acknowledged into your own waiting mouth. You’d keep it there forever. You could be the object he hides his soul in. “I know you do. You deserve to get what you want.”

“I can go fast. I want whatever you can give me.”

Spencer’s shuddering exhale is like a drug, dizzying as you inhale it and your eyes flutter at the high, pressed head-to-head with him. For so long you’ve needed him so badly. It’s overwhelming to have him now, all over you. If only your walls could breathe him in the way you are, if this room could remember what it feels like to hold him the way you will, if any inanimate object could bear witness to how you’ll give yourself, any part of yourself, over to him, so willingly.

“I’m going to try.” Spencer’s voice is hoarse as he walks backward to the bed, taking you by the hips as he goes. “I want to do it right. I want to do this the way I... the way I imagined it, before...”

Now he’s sitting, and you’re standing between his legs as he finds the clasp of your bra and undoes it, his fingers a comforting pressure where they ghost down the slope of your back. Your heart is pounding at the confession, at the way his tongue darts over his bottom lip and his fingertips journey back up to your straps, looking up at you with haloed irises as if he’d find anything other than the most dangerous kind of smoldering devotion in your eyes—the kind cult-leaders seek and spend years nurturing, and he’d earned with a mere brush over your bare skin.

The fabric slides down your arms, and as it falls to the floor, you watch something like despair flash-flood his eyes. It is a deep, distinctly human grief. The ineffable kind where something is almost too beautiful; so perfect it offends the mortal senses because it should be permanent, but nothing is, and the clash of divine beauty with unstoppable time which oxidizes copper and covers marble with vine is almost as grotesque as metal rending delicate flesh. It is the grief that drove the first poet to write and the first parents to press their baby’s painted hands to the walls of a cave. It is the desire to do the impossible—to capture ephemeral perfection and make it eternal, and the knowledge that it is hopeless. You recognize it because you’ve felt it for him.

“I thought about you all the time,” he whispers, doesn’t bother calling you beautiful but you don’t mind because he’s telling you with his hands and his eyes and the waver of his voice. “When I was gone, I thought about you—”

You’re just as quiet, just as soft.

“Don’t, Spencer.”

He doesn’t get to tell you about when he was gone. Not now. Not after he acted like you didn’t exist.

“Okay.” He swallows the things he’d wanted to tell you like you choked on the things you needed to tell him for three months. “I’m sorry.”

But his hands—his hands are perfect over your waist and his lips are perfect where they kiss your ribs like they’re his homeland. You could forgive a thousand wrongs for each kiss he puts to your skin. Light from the full moon stretches over the room like a blessing from the cosmos, and you have every intention of making the most of that gift, how the silver gilds the planes of his face and highlights curls like they were carved, and invites you to search for something in each shadow.

Some of his kisses land over the sensitive skin of your breasts though you doubt he has much intention or that there is any sort of end-goal with the trail he blazes—in fact, you have to root your hand in his hair and pull gently back when he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s making you wait again. His eyes are glassy and cheeks slightly pinkened—you weren’t expecting this wave of fondness to knock you on your ass but here you are, falling all over again.

“You don’t have to go that slow.”

A slow smile splits the heart of his mouth at your bashful tone and he’s emboldened to bring his hands higher for a moment, thumbs brushing particularly delicate though not downright indecent spots. Nonetheless, your breath catches.

“Impatient girl,” he scolds, and though it’s lighthearted it still inspires heat to dance across your face. Oh, I think I’ve been plenty patient, you itch to say, but you bite it back because it’s only sad and true and unkind.

Still, he gives you the beginning of what you want, really only the tip of the enormous iceberg that is your desire for him, by slipping his thumbs into the waistband of your shorts and tugging them down. His hands slide up the fronts of your thighs, tracing the trim of your underwear, and you’d swear he’s not even breathing. The moment one of his hand loops behind your knee and pulls forward until it’s pressed to the mattress and you’re half-kneeling, half standing, desire begins to truly cloud your mind. Manhandling never seemed like Spencer’s style, but when paired with how softly he reveals your hip, pulling gently down on the fabric of your underwear just to admire you up close, you don’t mind it.

More kisses are littered over your stomach, and he takes you by surprise a second time with a quick maneuver landing you on your back and him on top of you.

“I wasn’t doing you justice with my imagination,” he murmurs against your mouth. “I couldn’t have known.”

“Couldn’t have known what?” you pant as he shamelessly digs his fingers into the plush of your ass. You almost hope it bruises.

“How pretty you would be,” he coos like he means it, and you dissolve, slipping through his fingers like sand in an hourglass. “You were holding out on me.”

It’s a tease, not at all serious, but you manage to hit him with a, “Was not, asshole,” and he chuckles, placating your little hurt with another sticky kiss, and you get another disorienting glimpse of some other timeline where you’re both a little less damaged. Where it’s a little easier.

But in this timeline, his touch becomes starving and ragged and urgent, and you accept the drag of his thumb up your thigh and between your legs, gasping when he runs his knuckles up the center of you. This touch is metal on screeching metal. It does not pretend to be anything more than what it is—brute, powerful, executed to elicit sensation. You get the sense that Spencer’s never touched anyone this honestly, and while you do envy the girls who got to have him gentler, you’ll take this as the compliment that it is. A kind of vulnerability that is nearing primal.

His lips, though—always his lips—are kind when they brush and land on your skin guided by some invisible map. A dip down your neck and chest and then a plunge, his tongue dragging over your hips, chasing the fabric of your underwear as he almost pulls it off and then reroutes, making room for himself between your legs and pushing lace aside to mark the hinge of your inner and upper-most thigh. Your chest heaves and you don’t dare move for fear he’ll stop leaving signs of himself on your body and you won’t be able to reassure yourself that it was real and he was here and it was not another dream.

Because something in you knows, if only consciously recognizing it for the first time now, that he will disappear again. That this may be your only chance.

The desire to make the ephemeral eternal. An impossibility.

He’s clearly losing himself to something, eyes shutting blissfully. You wonder when the last time he let his guard down even a  little was. You’re okay with being the thing he gets lost in, even if you’re not exactly okay with him—something you are becoming more acutely aware of as each touch makes a part of you want to cry. Maybe you still have some things in common. A strange pain that doesn’t quite feel like it belongs to you, for one thing.

You slam back into your body as his nose nudges against you through fabric, and his lips catch on cotton as he drags himself up, eventually settling a kiss against the little bow at the waist of your underwear. There he stays, eyes closed, mouth pressed to you.

“Is this okay?”

You swallow, buzzing. Is this really what he wants? After everything?

“You don’t have to...”

“But is it okay with you?”

Nothing more than an airy whisper, you reply, “Yes, if that’s what you want.”

Being emotional at this point seems wrong, but it’s difficult to ignore the fact that you have thought about this before and it’s finally happening but it’s not exactly as you’d imagined it. There is an indelible sadness to it, to the way he’s so hungry for you because he’s been deprived, to the desperation with which he touches you because he’s had everything taken from him.

For a moment, before he tugs your underwear down, he pauses, and you wonder if he’s freezing one moment in time, this moment, and grieving all the other ways it could’ve been, and accepting that this is the way it is going to be. You are.

These higher realms of thought abandon you as he finally pulls the last barrier down your legs and encourages you to spread them further. You don’t have time or energy to be embarrassed, not even by his staring, or the way his eyes dart up to yours and back down again, wide and shining, as if to say, have you seen yourself? Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?

All you feel is the lack of him on you, the pull to have him closer so strong it’s almost sickening because he could be gone at any second. Maybe he understands that because he doesn’t waste anymore time before he’s kissing the most sensitive part of you. The drag of his tongue has you loosing a shuddering cry.

His mouth wanders, making connections you wouldn’t have realized the value of until you feel them on your skin. Your hips buck as he traces you and you’re unable to stop yourself from tangling your hands in his hair. Speech fails you—hell, you can hardly breathe as you watch his with a furrowed brow and parted lips, only expelling air from your lungs in the form of little cries and gasps and failing to hold your hips down to the bed.

The tip of his tongue teases around your entrance and he catches your leg as your foot rises off the bed, slinging it over his shoulder and consuming you more fervently until you have no choice but to moan though you’ve never been one for theatrics. Nobody has done this for you like he’s doing it for you. Locks of hair fall in front of his face and you hold them back for him, shuddering as he shifts his weight and presses the tip of his finger to your cunt.

“Ah—please,” you manage, your first words since he started. Spencer groans against you and the sound is so wonderfully unexpected, so much better than in your dreams. You cant your hips up in further invitation, chirping as he takes it, pushing two fingers into you at once. Your eyes screw shut and you bite back a whine at the slight stretch, unconsciously writhing your hips either to get further away or take him deeper, you’re not sure.

Spencer pulls back, kissing your hips and thighs and pumping his fingers very slowly as you adjust.

“’M sorry,” you pant, “it’s been awhile, I...”

“Don’t apologize,” Spencer says like it’s simple, his own breath coming quicker. “How’re you feeling? Need me to stop?”

“No! No, it feels really good, I feel good.”

He holds your burning gaze, matching it with his own, and his hair is tousled and his cheeks are flushed as he continues to move his hand.

“Yeah?”

“...Yeah.”

This little show of obedience, of call and response, has him smiling before he occupies his mouth with something else once more. It’s a different smile than you’re used to from him, but you decide you don’t at all mind it.

Like that, with his tongue and fingers working tirelessly, your orgasm comes on quickly. The feeling is rare but not entirely foreign, and in that brief moment of utter disconnect between your brain and reality, of sheer white-hot pleasure, you don’t feel you’re missing out on anything at all. How could you be, when you are here and Spencer is here and for a moment all your neurons are lighting up and flashing neon? How could there be anything more to life than the searing feeling of him slowly withdrawing his fingers from you, than your hips between his hands like he’s cradling the world, and his lips, indiscriminate with where they kiss because every part of you is worthy of attention?

You’re reeling, and your legs are gelatinous as he so affectionately sucks the darkest mark yet onto your inner thigh like a parting gift, like he’s signing his trembling work. If you could clamp your legs shut around the almost painful aftershocks you would, but he’s climbing back up your body, so all you can do is wriggle against him and release delayed, stunted little moans. He stops to kiss your neck before he makes it to your mouth and drinks down all your sounds until you’re gentle and pliant for him like you haven’t been yet.

His voice is soft and sympathetic when he speaks. “Better?”

Wordlessly you nod, both comforted and unsettled by how well he knows you. What, exactly, has been made better, you’re not sure. Not trust. You don’t trust him anymore. Something cheaper, but temporarily effective. A sense of permanence, maybe, however fleeting it may be. You’ve completed something with him now, and he’s still here, still sweet.

He looks into your eyes, then, for a moment—and there is just enough light in the room for you to tell yourself that the shadows dancing there as he looks at you are love.

They morph as you watch into haunting, wild hunger. Pained even now.

He sits up abruptly and so do you, scooting back against your headboard and pulling your knees to your chest to protect your pounding heart as Spencer takes you in with darting eyes and quick breaths. His fingers find the collar of his shirt and he begins to unbutton.

“I need you to remember it’s all going to heal.”

He swallows, and you hardly have the wherewithal to study the way he unbuttons his shirt, a way he exists in the world that you had previously not been privy to. The words are too distracting.

“What?”

Sometimes he reminds you of a deer, with those big brown eyes that can’t help betraying anxiety. Moreso in those old pictures he’d shown you from his early days at the BAU—but it shines through occasionally even now. It’s reassuring to know that something inside of his has remained soft.

“Just...” his fingers don’t stop at their task, and you come to the disturbing realization that his knuckles are bruised. “Please don’t freak out, alright?”

Your mouth goes dry, eyes glued to the lengthening span of revealed skin.

And before he even has his shirt fully undone, something isn’t right.

He’s like a Pollack of bruises—starbursts and watercolor blots of discoloration blooming over his side and stomach.

You’re glad the light is off for two reasons: one, being that you don’t think you could handle the bruising in all its glory, and two, you hope the look of horror painted on your face is at least partially obscured from Spencer.

But you can’t. You simply don’t have the gas in the tank to freak out, as he’d said—at least not externally. Those bruises shouldn’t be there, but 96 days is a long time to be gone.

You drag your eyes back to his—nervous, deeply insecure and mistrustful. A deer. Just like those pictures of a 24 year old Spencer in an FBI jacket that was too big for him.

It’s enough to have you scooting on your knees across the mattress to him. Those big eyes stay glued to you as you draw near, falling as you carefully push open his shirt, cautious not to bump any tender spots as it falls to the bed. A flash of white gauze wrapped around his forearm that makes your stomach flip. How? You want to ask. Why?

He doesn’t seem to know what you’re going to do, and neither do you, until you’re grabbing his hands, bruised knuckles and all, and just... holding them for a minute.

“I lost weight,” he says quietly, as if that’s the most shocking thing about his current appearance, though it is noticeable.

“You’re still pretty.”

He smiles at this—a true Spencer Reid smile. Flattened lips, eyes tinged silver with sadness, voice quiet and anxious and wavering.

“I didn’t have a lot to spare.”

A moment goes by.

“I’m not going to ask you about them,” you promise, though you care so much and you want to know but you already understand that he won’t want to tell you.

Another moment. It doesn't surprise you to watch the shiny vulnerability in his eyes to freeze over completely. But he squeezes your hands once in thanks, and you know it’s still the same Spencer.

“Lie down.”

Oh. Right.

This.

You do as he says, taking a deep breath to try and exhale the concern twisting your stomach like a poison. Somehow your room feels so unfamiliar, so new with him in it. Even the whorls on your ceiling look different as you study them, trying to time the pattern of your breathing with the pattern of the paint and plaster and not let the sound of Spencer further undressing quicken your heartrate too much.

Soon he’s coaxing your legs apart again, reverently, and kneeling between them, studying every part of you—lingering not on the parts you’d expect. He traces the scar on your knee with his thumb, follows a line down your thigh to the freckle on your hip. The scrutiny is unnerving and warms you everywhere. Perhaps he senses the microscopic clench of your thighs as you imagine pushing them together, if he weren’t in the way.

“You alright?” He asks, still stroking your hip. Tender again. It’s so hard to keep up.

“I...”

Suddenly your heart beat is a deafening echo in your own ears. The tide of your breathing is too powerful, too in and out and whooshing, leaving you always too empty or too full but never comfortable.

Maybe he’s changed, and he’s harder to know now, but he is the same Spencer. He is the Spencer you’d fallen in love with. The hard part is knowing that now you may never get a chance to tell him that. You don’t know if he’d be able to hear it.

There are things you can’t have with him anymore. Not now, at least. Maybe not ever. But you can have this. It will be different, but you’d rather him be different and here than the same and only in your memory.

You swallow.

“I’m good.”

Tangling your hand in his hair once more, you pull him down into a kiss. It’s hesitant, at first—maybe he can taste your thoughts, where they’d been balancing just on the tip of your tongue. But the uncertainty fades and he kisses you deeper, harder, in a way that is hard to keep up with. You like the messy overwhelm of his lips, teeth, tongue. That’s the only way he knows how to want you.

When you go to wrap your leg around his waist he catches it, running his hands over the soft plush of your thigh. The hard line of him presses against you like memory foam and you gasp and he breathes it in deeply as your brain short-circuits, as you realize this is really going to happen, that you’re going to have him like you’ve never had him before and in ways you’ve only imagined and immediately felt ashamed for.

“Spencer,” you whisper. He ducks to leave open-mouthed kisses along your neck and your eyes flutter shut, craning your neck but not losing sight of your objective as you reach down blindly. When you find what you’re looking for he freezes, groans against your neck at the same time as you breathe the tiniest whimper. Just in your hand he feels impossible, hot and imposing and hard. Your heart palpitates.

Without thinking, you angle your hips up and encourage him closer, until the tip of him is smearing through your folds, and you both go utterly silent like the breath had been stolen right from your lungs. The moment crystallizes, time around you hardening like preserved amber to keep you frozen there forever.

And then he rolls his hips, catching the underside of his cock on the crux of you, and then he does it again, and you choke out a moan and so does he, and it’s beyond perfect—it's nirvana, more than you could ever have conceived of, with his weight pressing you into the mattress, arms caging you in, his heavy breaths hot against your neck and vice versa as you twine together like serpents on a rod, your foot floating in the air as you widen your legs to make more room for him.

And you’re not even fucking yet.

“Oh my god,” you whine, just for him, barely audible under the heavy cloak of night, the thickened air in your bedroom and the sound of panting and fabric shifting. It’s like your heart is trying to reach through your chest to his own where they’re pressed together—that is how hard it’s beating.

Spencer only breathes a long, low curse and shifts so he can grasp himself. Your fingers drift down the shaft of him as he slots himself at your entrance, notching half an inch in and you hold your breath, and you brace yourself—and then he’s kissing you again, but gentler this time. Reassuring. You soften, you can’t not, releasing all your air in a soft gust through your nose, and then he’s pushing in.

Your lips part at the stretch as it fuzzes your mind, but he stays right there, nose pressed to your nose, lips ghosting over your own. He’s not going anywhere, you think, and you’re glad for it, when it burns ever so slightly, and the tiniest whine escapes your open mouth.

“Shh,” he soothes immediately, low and soft, only fractionally louder than you had been. “You’re okay.”

Spencer. Your Spencer.

For a moment, you’re living in that alternate universe. The kinder one. The flash of pain you feel then has nothing to do with the way he’s opening you up.

This is the closest you have ever been, and in some strange way, the furthest apart.

Together, fingers brushing, you guide him until he settles at not quite your deepest point. You can feel that he’s not giving you everything yet, but you’re okay with that, as you adjust to the full feeling. Spencer again senses your desire to close your legs against the deep intrusion, and gives you the best he can by encouraging you to wrap your legs around him.

“Good girl,” he whispers tenderly, nudging at your jaw with his nose and dragging kisses along the ridge of it. Your stomach flips at the moniker and your brain turns to warm sludge as your eyes flutter shut. It makes you feel all light-headed and you flutter around him. Spencer chuckles into the junction of your neck and shoulder and the vibrations send a chill down your arching spine. “I thought you might like that one.”

“Mhm.”

“Mhm. How are you? You okay?”

“’M ready.”

“You’re ready?” His tone is dripping sarcasm and faux-disbelief as he pulls back the slightest bit only to push right back in deeper, this time. Your toes curl, one thigh sliding higher up his waist as you cling to him.

“Fuck,” you manage, a pitiful, high pitched curse tossed to the wind. He echoes the sentiment.

“Oh, my god,” he groans, continuing with that slow pace, “you feel so good, angel.”

You grapple at his back, searching for purchase as your brow knits. “Faster.”

This inspires another breathy chuckle, but he obliges, and you cry out softly. It’s almost unreal, your head buried against his neck, drunk on his scent and the drag of him like a shock felt in the far reaches of your body, again and again.

There’s nothing you can say that will accurately demonstrate what you’re feeling, so you elect not to speak, to remain silent and try to get a grip on this cacophony of sensation and emotion. But it’s too much to be alone with. You feel you have to get it out, to seek understanding. You can’t do it alone.

“Spencer.”

“Hm?”

“I don’t know...” the sentence trails off into a gentle keen. He moves to kiss you, speaking against your lips.

“You don’t know?”

Shyly you shake your head. Spencer sighs wistfully.

“Do you know how much I missed you?”

It’s like he can sense your need for comfort. For something grounding.

And while this topic was off-limits earlier—you're softer now. The stone walls that form your boundaries have been chipped away and lowered.

Spencer continues unprompted.

“I thought about you every day. Every night while I was falling asleep. You were always on my mind, angel girl.”

You whine. Whether it’s pleasure or distress is anyone’s guess—including your own.

“You were gone so long,” you whisper, eyes shut.

At this, Spencer slows again, and the tension that was building settles back to a simmer.

“I know. I wish I could—I wish I could change that. But I’m here, okay? I’m right here with you.”

Then he makes sure you feel every last inch, and it takes your breath away. If your thoughts were any more coherent, they’d be something along the lines of: but for how long? How long until you leave again?

“You’re here.”

You say it like a mantra, once out loud, and then again and again in your head, timed with every clash of your hips. With each repetition he becomes more real. Every little ache, every tingling, head-emptying brush against that most sensitive spot inside proves to you that he could not be any closer. This can’t be faked. It can’t be another dream to wake up in tears from.

“You’re here,” you gasp as it hits you, as it truly sinks in.

“I’m here,” he breathes.

There’s so much you want to say—three months of words you need him to hear, of things you need to talk to him about, things you need to yell at him for and things you can only say crying in his arms and things you can only say laughing or whispering or drunk or half-asleep—and in this moment you can’t manage any of it. Every word condenses into one drop of salt water, drifting away from your eye and down your cheek. Spencer doesn’t tell you to stop crying. He only kisses the tear away, and murmurs I’m here I’m here I’m here over and over again against your skin until he’s not even speaking it out loud anymore. But you feel it. With every brush of his lips, every breath, every movement, you feel it.

Soon he’s adjusting his angle, gradually picking up the pace but retaining that unforgiving depth, and your nails bite into the skin of his back as your jaw drops. Spencer hisses, pressing impossibly closer.

“I’m sorry!” you squeak.

“Do it again.”

“Wh—what?”

“Please,” he begs, low and hot against your jaw, just beneath your ear. “Do it again, honey.”

Honey.

You’d do anything for him if it meant he calls you that again.

When he shifts his weight to one arm and reaches down between your bodies to play with your aching clit in exactly the right way, you don’t really have a choice. You arch and moan wantonly enough to feel embarrassed as your nails scratch down his back. At the same time he’s making noises of his own, and you almost feel guilty for marking him up like this only you think he likes it. The most perfect and troubling tension is building in your core, so taut you almost fear the inevitable rebound when it snaps. But you’re driven to be exactly what Spencer needs right now, and to let him try and be what you need. Even if it scares you. Even if you’re not sure how.

Spencer groans, head tucked to the bend of your shoulder. “I’m not gonna last.”

Any response you might’ve been about to muster is annihilated by a sudden, deep bolt of pleasure.

“’M gonna cum,” you mewl like it’s a secret.

“Are you?” he asks, coming up breathless. If your eyes were open, you’re sure you’d see him above you.

“Mhm.”

“Look at me. Look at me.”

It is unmistakably a command—one you fight to follow.

You cry out as you meet the intensity of his gaze, those shadowy corridors suddenly ablaze and alive. They are not unending, like you’d thought. They are a door thrown open to let the light in, or maybe to let the fire out. They’re open in this moment for you.

No more words are spoken after that—you cum hard, gasping as you fall and spin. Spencer follows very shortly after, like he was holding it together just for you, and your eyes are still locked though everything is a bit bleary.

“Fuck,” you whine as he continues to fuck you for as long as he can, despite your writhing hips, but you’re entranced by him, unable to look away now that you’re hooked. Until he slows to a halt, glances down at your mouth, and you just have time to pray that he’ll kiss you before he does. You whimper against his lips—a plea for understanding. A plea for him to stay, even though this is over. He kisses back so soft and sweet it’s like he can read your mind. Echoes of I’m here I’m here I’m here still buzz across your skin. His eyelashes tickle your cheek. Your heart stops beating quite so quickly, melting and warm like the rest of your body.

Soon the kissing ceases and you’re just breathing together, trapped and faced with the knowledge that it must end just the same as you had waited for it to start.

Eventually the air between you becomes mostly carbon dioxide and you let your head fall to the side, dizzy and giggling breathlessly as you nearly avoid asphyxiation. Spencer laughs too, letting his head fall to your shoulder once more, and you finally let your eyes flutter closed. To do something as simple as laugh with him again is its own small euphoria. It’s unexpected, and a soft landing once all that tension breaks underneath your combined weight.

It can’t last forever, you know that well. But the slow fade of it makes the next parts a little easier.

Spencer presses a kiss to your neck. “Is your bathroom through that door?”

You hum a confirmation and are only slightly disheartened when he pulls out and rolls off of you. You’re further disturbed when you see there’s gauze around his thigh, matching what’s around his arm, and you wonder how you missed that. Spencer scoops up his clothing and disappears into the adjoining restroom, assuring you he’ll be right back and leaving you alone with your thoughts and the whorls on the ceiling which have seemingly shifted into entirely new constellations.

He leaves the door cracked which is oddly reassuring—the sliver of warm light and the sound of the sink running. Only a few moments pass before he’s returning clad in boxers once more to sit on the edge of the bed, pushing away the sheet you’d just pulled over your chest and pulling one of your legs over his lap. Your face warms as he brings a washcloth between your thighs. As soon as he glances up at you and catches your eye you’re looking back to the ceiling.

“I should’ve asked first,” he says quietly as he cleans up the mess he’d made of you.

You speak just as softly, like you’re both afraid of disturbing some peace, of waking some sleeping giant. “It’s okay. I would’ve told you if I didn’t want it.”

His reticence, his unreadable face, make you nervous.

When he’s done, he rises to toss the dirtied cloth in the laundry bin, and with his back to you (as scratched up as it might be) you feel braver.

“Are you gonna, like... hate me now?”

It was a mistake. That’s clear by the way he turns around, brow knit deeply and grimacing slightly like even the suggestion offends him.

“Am I going to hate you?”

Again you pull the sheet up, and again you look away, studying the pattern of moonlight stretching out over the floor and scooting to make room for him when he steps in it.

“Not hate, I just...” the bed dips beside you and you are indescribably glad he’s not immediately running out the door. “I’m not dumb. I know what this was.”

He pulls you into him and you settle against his chest. It feels good. “I never thought you were dumb.”

This is your first real conversation since he’s gotten back, you realize. And how quickly you’re falling into familiar patterns, familiar syntactical beats. You know when to speak. You know when to bite your tongue and keep him talking.

The silence goes on longer than you’re used to. Maybe he got good at not speaking while he was away.

Eventually your eyes wander, falling to the white strip over his thigh where it is parallel to yours on the bed, only over the sheets.

“What happened?”

You said you wouldn’t ask, but that was then, and you’re upset again. You almost want to hurt him. To piss him off. You don’t know.

But it doesn’t work.

“Do you really want to know?” There’s a note of something heavy in his voice, and you look up at him. It’s a privilege to have him this close—his beauty is a constant surprise that you’d become unaccustomed to over the months. You say nothing, and he takes that as the yes that it is. “I... I did it to myself.”

He may as well have reached down your throat and grabbed for fucking heart for all its clenching. Tears well almost immediately, though they’ve been waiting in the wings all night.

“What? Did you—were you trying to—”

His eyes widen.

“No! No, honey, no.” You wilt as he gathers you closer, a deeply confused frown still contorting your features, too heartbroken even to cling to him, or to appreciate the ease with which honey slips past his lips again. “No. I was—it's complicated. I didn’t—I wasn’t trying to hurt myself, but I had to—I had to do it before someone else did something worse.”

The bruises covering his abdomen.

You sniffle and pull back enough to look up at him tearfully. “Why would they want to hurt you?”

Mist fills his eyes even as he’s looking down at you, a layer of separation, as if he’s two places at once. Even as he goes to brush your hair behind your ear, to stroke your cheek.

“I’m... not... the same, as I was.” It’s not an answer to your question—but it’s the beginning of the answer to a question you’d been too afraid to put into words.

“Don’t say that,” you beg, because you know where this is going. He keeps smoothing your hair like it’ll make this easier.

“But it’s true,” Spencer says gently, the slightest waver betraying his own emotion.

“You’re just going to leave again.”

And you’re losing to the tears.

“I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

“But you will,” you insist, like a child crying to a parent come to comfort them after a bad dream.

“Not right now. Right now I’m here.”

I’ll stay until you fall asleep again.

For now, maybe that has to be enough. 

You cry on his shoulder. He kisses your head and doesn’t tell you to stop. 

Eventually, you sniff and wipe your eyes. 

“We were so close. Before you… we were almost there.”

You’re sure of it. You’re sure that if he hadn’t gone when he did you would’ve been a real couple. You would’ve told him you loved him. 

“We’ll get there again,” he promises, rubbing your arm. “I just… I need a little bit of time. I think you do too. But we’re going to get there again.”

Maybe it will never be like it was. 

But as so often is the case—Spencer is right. Difference doesn’t mean it won’t ever be good again. 

You have to believe that, just as you had to believe you’d see him again. 

You look to The Odyssey on your bedside table. 

The sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world. 

But the sun has a habit of rising, time and time again, after the longest nights, after the darkest storms. 

You feel the beginnings of its rise, see the golden tips of it lighting the room as he holds you. Even now. 

[grimesapologist]

hey! i'm val, i'm a trans woman, DJ, and a writer living in the UK and im reaching out bc i need to raise money to stock up on hormones!

i've been out of hormones for a few weeks now and i'm trying to raise £200 to buy 2 vials of estrogen and a blocker for emergencies

I currently can't afford to pay for it myself as i'm currently on benefits and haven't been getting much DJing work lately (though it should be picking up soon i hope!) anyways, if you could help out and/or share this i'd really really appreciate it, thank you for reading! ☣️ payp*l: paypal.me/vmclaren368 ☣️

[assignedmale]

I'm on the verge of quitting everything. I've been crying all day. I'm tired of putting up a candid face when social media is scr*wing over trans creators or only showing my art to anti-trans suicide-baiters. Even though this has been my most productive year ever, in terms of online content, I get comments practically every day about how rarely people get to see my posts in their feed.

Since last winter's natural disaster, we haven't been able to afford groceries. We haven't had hot water since March. I've been late on student loans and car payments for months. Orders are late and I feel like I'm failing everyone.

On top of that, I'm still regularizing my situation in this country, and in that context, I just received a letter telling me that as a self-employed artist, I'm obligated to put a monthly $700 in a private retirement fund (and pay the 21 months backlog since I officially started paying taxes here). The only other options are to quit art or go back to Canada.

I've talked in the past few months about the necessity for the survival of this project to double the amount of subscribers on patreon. Each time, social media killed the reach of these posts. I'm not expecting this one to do better. However, it has never been more urgent. There needs to be about 200 new subs or I might be forced to shut it all down. I'm really scared and I wish this wasn't the only way.

You got some choices, although they are being updated more or less regularly - keeping Assigned Male Comics free and easily available on social media remains my priority : Assigned Male Comics patreon A Frog in the Bog (foraging and DIY) patreon Pastel Sexy Times (nsfw) patreon Candycore Comics patreon

Paypal : @assignedmale

I'm sure you all got so much on your plate, and you could do without the series of woes that have afflicted our family this year. Thank you for reading through this and for your constant support, even if it's just through leaving comments - it does help. It's my privilege to create these comics, and I hope to do it as long as you will allow me.

xx Sophie

[thinkinonsense]

I KNEW YOU IN ANOTHER LIFEᰔ

dp&w!logan howlett x past wife!reader

cw: mostly angst, some fluff, sorta mean logan, cussing.

wc: 800+

a/n: this is inspired by a one-shot I read a while back but I cannot remember who wrote it. If anyone knows, please please please let me know in the comments so I can give them credit <3 update!!! this is it!!

｡ ₊°༺❤︎༻°₊ ｡

The last person you thought you would find here in the void is Logan. There has never been a Wolverine in here. You almost didn't believe it when you found out; needing to see him for yourself. And here he was. Right in front of you, the Logan you grieved all those years ago. The one who stole your heart.

Your Logan.

"And who the fuck are you?" He barked, pushing you away from him.

Those words broke your heart the second they left his lips.

Wade smacks Logan, informing him of your past together. Logan looked like he didn't believe Wade at first. You were way too beautiful for any version of him, Logan thought. What would someone like you want with a man like him?

Tears well up in your eyes as you leave, not wanting it to sting anymore. Laura follows you, glaring at the man who looked like her father. Logan didn't seem to care about the new information, instead reaching for another one of Gambit's bottles.

"I'm sorry, mom," Laura whispers, wrapping her arms around you.

"It's okay, sweetie. I'm not sure what I expected to happen." You sniffle. "He just looks so much like him."

"I know."

Suddenly, Laura stood up and stomped out the door to confront the man who upset her mother. She found Logan sitting outside alone by the fire.

"Look kid, I'm not the man you and your mother think I am." Logan sighs, not even bothering to turn around to check if it's Laura.

"You made her cry," Laura hissed, ignoring his previous comment. Logan looked up at the young girl almost apologetically before shaking his head. "Her Logan would have never made her cry."

Logan felt a sharpness in his stomach at the news. Deep down, he wondered if you two were together at some point. He doubted it though because you looked out of his league. If a past version of him managed to marry you then maybe he did some good during his time.

"If you two haven't noticed, I'm the worst Logan apparently."

"You don't have to be."

ᰔ

It's late when you finally stumble out of bed, not able to sleep. Hours of tossing and turning, trying to get Logan out of your mind. This felt like a cruel joke on your poor heart. You know it's unfair to have him pretend to be your Logan but you desperately wanted it to be him.

All of your memories together haunt your mind like a graveyard. Sweet Sundays spent wrapped in sheets. How he kissed your face every morning, had you wear his dog tags, and ride on the back of his motorcycle. You would give anything to get just one of those moments back.

"What are you doin' awake?"

The voice behind you caused you to jump slightly. A hand coming to rest on your back. You turn around, face-to-face with Logan.

"Can't sleep." You shrugged, opening the freezer to pull out a container of strawberry ice cream.

"That shit won't help you sleep." He grunts, sitting at the table. You ignore his grumpiness and continue scooping the ice cream into a bowl.

"Can we talk?" Logan didn't look you in the eyes as he spoke. Too ashamed of his actions earlier.

"I suppose so." You shrugged, pulling the spoon from between your lips.

"Were we really married?"

You answer by pulling the chain around your neck for him to see. A small diamond ring dangled next to the dog tags he gave you. The moment he saw it, he felt like the biggest asshole who ever lived.

"How many years?" The words stung in his throat.

"Five."

"What was our life like?"

"Perfect." You smile softly down at your bowl. "At least it was to me."

"You did a good job with raising her." He muttered, referring to Laura.

"You would have to."

He's silent for a second, trying to wrap his mind around the idea of being a husband and a father. He wished he knew what it was like to be cared for as much as you cared for your Logan.

"You know, you have the same look in your eyes," Your voice was so quiet, stepping closer to him until you were in front of him.

Logan could see the desperation on your face as you stared at his lips. It would be wrong for him to toy with your widowed heart, but he wanted to be the man you needed. The man you deserved.

"I'm not him, sweetheart," He said, attempting to stop you before you hurt yourself. "And I don't want you to get hurt-"

"Please," You beg, eyes filling up with tears. "I don't care who you are. I just don't want it to hurt anymore."

You were slowly killing him. How could he say no to you? Even if he was the worst Logan, he has a heart. Which is why he lets you close the gap between the two of you. His hands are tangled in your hair while one of yours rests on his jaw before climbing into his lap.

For the first time in years, your heart began beating again. You and Logan could play pretend for now. Neither of you cared what would happen tomorrow, right now was all that mattered.

[prettycottagequeer]

ok maybe I'm a little late to this BUT I'm gonna do a to-do list motivation thingy because I've had the worst two weeks since I started college :)

SO these I should start on asap:

50 I make the snack I really want but I haven't had the motivation to make

100 I clean my dorm. another thing I've been meaning to do for a week

150 I do the presentation about mid-victorian fashion I've been putting off (due Monday)

200 I start memorizing the monologue that was due a week ago (now due Tuesday)

these can wait longer:

300 I spend time outside. It's so nice but I'm getting stuck scrolling because I feel like shit. vicious cycle ect

500 I start setting a better weekend routine (aka getting up before noon)

1k I start working out again. I was doing a routine to get more masc and build muscle and I liked it but life hit me like Crowley driving the Bentley and I've missed like 3 weeks

2k I buy my first binder. I've been coping with sports bras for almost a year now and I haven't been able to justify spending $50+ on a binder even though I know I'd love it and use it everyday.

Do I tag people? I don't know but I'm going to. @the-globe-theatre-maggot @weirdly-specific-but-ok @howmanyholesinswisscheese

here's just some context if you want to read, feel free to skip. some of this I've talked about in the maggot server, some I haven't, but I really just need a place for this to go that's out of my head. tw homophobia, transphobia, car crash(??)

How I Have Been Run Over By The Bentley Going 90 In Central London What Feels Like 50 Times In The Last Two Weeks

I'm going to college about 4 hours away from my parents, and it's been really nice. They.. suck, to say the least. transphobic/homophobic ect, super traditional conservative catholic, racist, all of it. so i tried to move somewhere where I wouldn't have to think about them and I could be myself and do what I can to be happy. March 1st was the start of my spring break, which meant going home because the dorms close. I was already not excited, but I was prepared. the problem with being away from home is I forget just how bad they are. My optimism gets the better of me and I think maybe this time they'll be better. so I decided to not hide my septum piercing.

that was a mistake. it starts a whole fight where they say we know you're trans, you're actually a girl and you always will be, we have the bones argument, they think I'm being influenced by demons or something (if only they knew about crowley) because I want to change my name, and they tell me that going on t will completely ruin my body and give me cancer and other things. They're also mad about my dyed hair, septum, and general style, and say I'm setting a terrible example for my (5) younger siblings and make it a point to tell me just how much of a disappointment I am. I think I'm pretty cute and fun but y'know, whatever. very fun time. I lie so much, don't give them any more details about my identity, and say I'm not planning to go on t to save my ass. which is all on instinct which makes me feel worse because if I'm really trans I should be able to stand up for that, right? maybe I'm faking the dysphoria.

the next morning I wake up really sick, and spend the rest of the week sick and feeling like shit because I'm home and back in the same place and situation I was a year ago that I thought I escaped. at one point I pretty much lose my voice but also kind of get gender euphoria from it. it's weird.

On Friday it's time for me to drive back 4 hours to school, and I make it about 3/4 of the way when google maps takes me on a random gravel road and I crash my car, really crash my car, like sideways-in-a-ditch-windows-broken-crawling-up-out-the-door crash it in the middle of nowhere. (I was fully paying attention to the road, it was raining and super slick) I call my parents because I have no one else to call and I sit in a Subway for 3 hours while they drive to get my car. when they get there they're (understandably) really mad, and they tell me that I'm not mature enough to be going to school so far away and I need to get my shit together and stop depending on them. which. is probably true. but made me feel even more stupid about the fact that I crashed my car. I get back to school and I'm still Very Sick with no energy or motivation to do anything. So I've spent the last week trying to get better and honestly to do anything. it hasn't really worked. I'm a lot better health-wise (Not emotionally), still sick but I have a lot of work due, so I really need a push to get started