#to not feel respected or like you’re able to have the voice to ask for what you need

[sorinethemastermind]

Sorvus Week 2024 | Prompt: Hearts of Cinder (No Warnings Apply)

 Corvus knew that something was wrong the moment Soren wasn’t there to greet him and Ezran. And it wasn’t just that, nobody seemed to have seen him. Not since the attack, which at least Opeli was able to confirm that he’d made it out of. Corvus had been over the camp twice, even ducking into a few tents to check if he was there. He wasn’t. But several frustrated civilians were. 

 It wasn’t until his nerves calmed that he was able to think about it logically. He was a tracker, after all. If anyone could find Soren, it would be him. So he did.

 He went through the entire camp searching for the familiar tread of Soren’s boots, finally spotting them by the clearing’s edge. Corvus followed them into the woods, wondering why his friend would have gone there. It wasn't like him. Soren rarely liked to be alone, and more than that, with everything that had happened, it only made sense for him to be at the center of what was going on back at the camp. Soren never turned his back on someone in need. It was one of the things Corvus respected about him most.

 And yet here his tracks were, leading off into the woods. Corvus walked for a while, picking his way through the steadily thickening foliage until he began to hear the burbling of a nearby stream. And that was where he found Soren.

 At first he didn’t understand why his friend would be sitting like that, hunched over and staring into the water. His first instinct was fear, that somehow he’d gotten hurt. But that didn’t make any more sense than him wandering off into the woods. And then he spotted the little things, the small details that he had missed at first glance.

 The scorched marks on the fallen log Soren was sitting on. 

 The steam rising from the water before him.

 The faint glow emanating from his hands where they rested in his lap.

 “Soren?” Corvus asked tentatively, making sure to let his footfalls be audible as he approached so as not to startle his friend. “What are you doing out here?”

 Soren, back already to Corvus, turned away further. “You made it back quick.”

 He didn’t sound especially happy about it, and that… hurt in a way Corvus hadn’t been expecting. 

 “We got your message. Are you-”

 “I’m fine.” Soren interjected, turning away again as Corvus neared. “You should get back to camp. They probably need your help.”

 “They need your help too.” Corvus waited for him to turn and look at him, stopping a few steps away. “Soren, what’s going on?”

 He heard the other man take a deep breath, then he turned to face Corvus all in one quick motion, like he had to do it that way or he wouldn’t be able to make himself go through with it. Corvus’ eyes widened. Glowing lines crisscrossed Soren’s face, disappearing into his collar and reemerging across the backs of his hands. They shimmered in sunset tones, shifting and changing. The same color had swallowed the blue of his eyes, the whites of his eyes turning black. This close to him, Corvus could feel the heat radiating off Soren, see that the puffs of steam he’d seen earlier were from the proximity of his shoes to the stream.

 “I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to see me like this.” Soren said, voice wobbling. He glanced down at his hands, clenched tightly in his lap. “I know I look like some sort of… some sort of monster and I-”

 “Soren.” Corvus sat beside him, ignoring the radiating heat. “You’re not a monster.”

 “But I-”

 “Soren.” Corvus said again, reaching out and gently untangling his friend's hands. He winced as their skin touched, thin threads of smoke rising from the places where his clothes made contact with Soren. But he ignored it. “You don’t look like one either.”

 “I’m hurting you.” Soren gasped, pulling his hands back with a look of horror.

 Corvus snatched them back, not caring. “Soren, look at me. Whatever this is, it will pass. Magic isn’t forever-”

 “But what if it is?” Soren got up, trying to take a step back, but Corvus rose with him. “I… I already have Dark Magic in my system. And that’s forever. So what if this is too? What if this is me now? What if-”

 “Then we figure it out.” Corvus told him, taking another step towards him. “I’m not going to let you banish yourself to the woods.”

 “I’m hurting you.” Soren said again, his eyes drifting down to their clasped hands.

 “I don’t care.”

 “But-”

 Corvus took another step closer, and taking a deep breath, let Soren’s hands go just long enough to wrap his arms around him, pulling him into a tight hug.

 “I thought I lost you, Soren.” he said, giving voice to the fear that had plagued him the entire flight back. “That hurt more than this ever could.”

 Slowly, tentatively, Soren lifted his arms and hugged Corvus back.

 “Just, let me know if I should-”

 “Don’t stop.”

 “Okay.” 

 Slowly Corvus felt Soren begin to relax. “I’m glad you’re okay.” he told him.

 “Would you really call this okay?” Soren tried to laugh, but it died in his throat. 

 Corvus pulled back, stared into his eyes. They seemed a little… cooler. More purpley, less orange.

 He opened his mouth to tell him, but had a realization. Maybe it wasn’t the Dark Magic in his system keeping the spell active. Maybe it was Soren.

 He guided him back over to the fallen tree he’d been sitting on, and only a little smoke rose as they returned to their previous seats. Corvus didn’t let go of Soren’s hand. 

 “Maybe okay was the wrong word.” he admitted. “Because you don’t have to be okay. You know that, don’t you? That we’ll all still be there for you, even when you’re not okay?”

 “Of course I know that.” Soren stared at the ground, at his shoes, at the smoldering grass under his boots. As he watched, the fire grew, a small flower shriveling and blackening. And the more Corvus watched, the more Soren watched, the more the flames climbed until he was forced to drop Soren’s hand and collect water from the stream to splash on it. Steam mingled with the smoke as the pair of them watched. Corvus took his friend’s hand again.

 No, not friend. Soren was more than a friend.

 “You know, you’re the reason I stayed in Katolis.” he told him. “Not King Ezran.”

 Soren glanced up at him, eyes flickering for a moment. Corvus swallowed nervously, but forced himself to continue.

 “I could tell that you weren’t okay, but that you weren’t going to ask for help. Sometimes I wondered if you didn’t know how. If it was never an option before.” Corvus took a deep breath. “But it is now. We’re here to help. I’m here to help. Because-”

 He reached out, brushing the hair back from Soren’s face. His eyes were wide and purple. Corvus let his hand linger on the other man’s cheek. 

 “Because I love you, Soren.”

 And then before he could think any better of it, or wonder if this would actually work, he leaned forward and he kissed him. And the kiss burned. But Corvus didn’t care, because Soren didn’t pull away, and he didn’t flinch back and ask ‘what do you think you’re doing’ like Corvus had pictured him doing a thousand times.

 Instead he reached out and pulled Corvus closer, one hand resting on the small of his waist as the other traveled up to cup his chin and pull them together. And slowly the burning faded, and only the sweetness of finally doing this of finally admitting to himself that he wanted to remained.

 When Corvus opened his eyes, it was to find Soren’s blue ones shining back at him.

 “I’ve wanted to do that for a while.” he admitted. “Not exactly how I pictured it.”

 Corvus laughed, an oddly free and joyous sound even to his own ears. And he kissed him again, because he could. 

[nose-nippin-fun]

Whoopsy doodle, I realized why Angel is a comfort character.

[paarksunghoon]

FIXED COMFORT | SUNGHOON

SUMMARY: typically, sunghoon’s the one who takes care of you when you’ve had one too many. but once in a blue moon, he lets his guard down and allows you to care for him the way he does for you.

or, the one where sunghoon’s drunk at a bar and misses his girlfriend a little too much.

NOTES: idk I just feel like someone should let him sleep for six months straight!!!

PAIRING: sunghoon x fem!reader

WORD COUNT: 4.4K (4444 exactly—she’s a shortie).

WARNINGS: fluff on fluff on fluff.

***

“Hey, do you think you could come get Sunghoon from the bar? He’s been asking for you for the past hour.”  

Jay’s phone call pulls you out from a deep slumber on a Saturday night that falls on a day with no plans other than pure relaxation. Sunghoon had been preoccupied with work and classes this past week and wanted to unwind by drinking at his favorite bar with his closest friends and all you wanted to do was sleep the weekend away. 

Since the two of you started dating six months ago after being friends for a little over two years, you both agree on the notion that you’ve found a good balance between time spent together and apart respectively. Nothing fundamentally changed with the exception of kissing and touching one another in the way a couple would. He still respects your independence and you respect his time away from you as well. 

Sunghoon learned quickly that you’re the type of person who values your alone time more than anything else. When he first started developing feelings for you, grappling with your absence wasn’t easy. He initially thought you weren’t interested in getting to know him the way he was with you because you weren’t afraid to decline invitations and telling people ‘no.’ Slowly, over the course of many months of pining and late night conversations, did Sunghoon learn that you’re typically your best self after a moment of isolation. 

Your boyfriend is somewhere in between an introvert and extrovert. He tends to be shy when he meets people he isn’t familiar with while his loud, rambunctious attitude is typically reserved for those who know him best. He likes to keep to himself for the most part, giving some of his personality away when he feels his walls start to crumble naturally. You love that he has a good head on his shoulders and that he’s able to tell you about his feelings while maintaining an air of confidence. He doesn’t inherently need anybody; he likes your company and will do anything to keep it.

Moments like this are when your heart feels softer for Sunghoon than when the two of you were just friends.

“I know you wanted to spend the weekend alone but Hoon’s been saying your name all night,” Jay says. “I’m sorry for waking you up.”

“No, it’s fine.” You’re sure Jay can hear your brittle voice. “Are you guys at the bar near your place?”

“That’s the one. Thanks again and I’m really sorry for waking you up.”

“Don’t sweat it. Cook me something next week if you still feel bad.” 

“I can do that. Chili oil noodles with shrimp sound good?”

“It’s almost like you know me.” He laughs at your sarcasm. 

“Drive safe.” 

When Jay hangs up, you allow yourself a few minutes to adjust and wake up, stretching your body from the warm comfort of your blankets. You change out of Sunghoon’s shirt to put on pajama pants and another one of his stolen shirts, opting not to take a jacket since you figure you won’t be out for very long. 

You thank your past self for filling up your gas tank before tonight after having put it off for a few days. Knowing Sunghoon, he would still scold you for allowing yourself to run nearly empty before filling it up even if he was inebriated. Somehow, knowing this about him brings a smile to your face.

Sunghoon’s the kind of guy who likes to have some control over certain things. He likes order and structure, often waking up at the same hour every weekday to build a routine his body can remember. He’s been like that since you first met him but you think it’s part of his charm. Even from two years ago, when you met him through Jake Sim, Sunghoon has maintained a level of confidence and control that he does now. On the heels of an impressive skating career before pivoting to focus on higher education, Sunghoon had his preferences and will stick by them. 

His discipline is the first thing you noticed when you met him for the first time. Jay, someone you were already familiar with, agreed to cook dinner with your friend group under the condition that everyone helped him shop and chip in for the meal. Sunghoon held Jake back from buying unnecessary things like boxed chocolate milk and candy because Jay had desserts back at his place. He held a checklist of items whereas the rest of your friends ran up and down the aisles without thinking much about what needed to be purchased.

Sunghoon’s near-meticulous behavior is juxtaposed to your chaotic and rambunctious nature. You often follow your gut instead of setting a solid plan because you’re not concerned with meeting deadlines, sans education. Whereas you tend to lean towards a go-with-the-flow attitude, Sunghoon is the opposite. But that’s something he loves about you.  

At a surface level distinction, it didn’t seem like the two of you would get along as well as you did. It surprised Jake when Sunghoon asked for your number so he could text you about seeing a comedy film with him as no one else in the group wanted to see it. Including you at an impromptu study session with him (Sunghoon was organized and neat while your pens were spread all over and your study methods, haphazard) felt like watching two people clash. 

Rather, you and Sunghoon complement one another. 

The idea of letting himself go with someone who wasn’t part of his friend collective was unheard of. Getting to know a girl who didn’t share similar lifestyles didn’t appeal to him before meeting you, and you’re inarguably the most chaotic person Sunghoon knows. But he finds that there’s order within your chaos—you know who you are and what you want, and you will not compromise yourself just to please other people. 

It’s what Sunghoon loves the most about you. There’s a boundary you never let anyone cross under the assumption that your own safety net feels compromised. He’s watched you lose friends for this same reason and has always admired the way you carry yourself like you know you deserve better than people who disrespect you. He’s witnessed the grace you maintain when people who call you a friend voice words of kindness but speak ill about you behind your back. If anything, Sunghoon feels pity for anyone who crosses you to the point of anger. To be envious of another’s confidence is one thing. To make that known is another. 

Sunghoon learns that you let your inhibitions go because holding control over yourself feels like a burden. It feels like setting a standard you will never be able to meet. He never thought of order in that way before getting to know you. Your approach to life sparked a new wave of emotions within him to the point where he was open and willing to let you farther into his life. 

His days were ruled by guidelines he had to maintain and proper etiquette that followed him even off the rink. The poise he carried from his career on the ice bled into his personal life too. Although, he doesn’t mind that it does. Sunghoon values any form of structure because it makes him feel like he has a purpose and that there’s something to be accomplished at the end of the day. 

Most times, Sunghoon’s feels like people judge him for his regimen and can’t fathom why he appreciates control so much. They tell him to let loose and enjoy his time away from his career. People always think he simply doesn’t know how to have fun because he’s set in his ways and won’t let other people coax him into doing something he’s not comfortable with. But not you. Sunghoon has never felt like you‘ve judged how he chooses to live his life. 

Before he knew it, a year had passed and he started to call you one of his best friends. The friendship was gradual. Sunghoon didn’t have many close female friends in the way he does with Heeseung, Jay, and Jake. You’re the first person since ending his career who hasn’t tried to pry into the why. In fact, Sunghoon enjoys that you didn’t bring it up. 

(You did, in the form of cooing over his younger self skating in competitions for the first time or roasting all of the outfits he had to wear. But somehow, all of your jabs made him feel happier than when people complimented his performance.)

Eventually, being around you felt too right. He loved it when you took naps on his bed and felt comfortable raiding your kitchen pantry without permission. Sunghoon could leave you in his apartment without him being in it and feel at ease. In fact, he started to look forward to coming home to you. All it took was seeing you wear his hoodie because you got too cold and forgot your jacket, to make him drop his bag by the front door and ask you to be his girlfriend. He hasn’t regretted anything with you since. 

The weather is cold outside since it’s approaching the middle of autumn. You let your car warm up and blast the heat all the way up while adjusting your defrosting settings before heading to the bar to pick up Sunghoon. You sift through your playlists and settle on soft indie melodies before you drive away from the curb. 

You’ve never seen Sunghoon get drunk to the point of needing extra help. Usually, you’re the one who goes a little too hard whenever Heeseung brings out the alcohol or if Jake offers an edible or two. Sunghoon likes to sit back and stay sober (or sober up by the end of the night) when he notices you having too much fun. He doesn’t mind, though. Sunghoon likes taking care of you because sometimes it gives him purpose. You’ve never understood that sentiment but to each their own. 

The only times you’ve seen him completely wasted are usually when you’re equally as gone, like on your first road trip as a couple. The five of you rented a lakehouse a few hours from Seoul and spent an entire weekend basking under the hot sun and chose to forget about university stress before finals would inevitably kick everyone’s ass. All five of you were cross-faded (but not without Jay and Sunghoon both prepping water bottles and snacks for when the munchies would hit prior to taking anything). You watched Sunghoon relax to the point where he was much quieter than he normally was and when you asked if he was doing alright, he looked you in the eye and told you he loved you for the first time. 

I always have, I think, he said as he brought your hand to his chest. You might not believe me because neither of us are sober but I swear I’ll tell you in the morning. 

Sunghoon gets affectionate when he’s drunk or high, often to the point of asking for reassurance. The rational side of his brain is temporarily disfigured. You don’t mind being there to tell him that he’s the love of your life and you’d never go anywhere when he gets like this. Although, you’re usually just as gone and gush all of your hidden emotionally-charged feelings, which pair well with Sunghoon’s need for validation sometimes. 

Your friends love your relationship. They don’t think it’s too much or too little, going so far as to take photos of the two of you when you aren’t looking. Some are funny like the pictures of you sleeping on his chest with drool pooling out of your mouth. Others are romantic and whimsical, like the pictures of Sunghoon looking at you like you’re the sunshine to his moonlight. They can’t get enough of you two. Your friends love knowing people they care about are deeply in love with one another and your relationship is somewhat of a reminder that true romance does exist. 

Thinking about this makes your heart swell as you park your car and tuck your keys inside your purse. The bouncer checks your ID and lets you inside the bar, and you already spot Jay off to the side. 

“Thanks for coming,” he says as he gives you a loose hug. “And sorry for waking you up.” 

You wave him off. “It’s fine. I’ve probably woken you up for worse.” 

“Yeah, like the time you and Jake wanted ramen at 3am and wouldn’t stop calling me because both of you got a little too high.” 

“Can you blame us?! You were like, two blocks away.” 

“Yeah, but did you need to eat with me?” 

“Duh. You’re like, the best person to eat a late night dinner with.” 

The two of you laugh as he leads you to the group. You see Sunghoon slumped over the table with his head in his arms and the rest of your friend group tries really hard not to seem too excited when they see you standing next to Jay. 

“Fucking finally.” Heeseung stands and gives you a quick side hug before Jake does the same. “Love you guys and all but he started to become unbearable when he kept showing us photos of you.”

Jake snorts. “Poor guy was almost about to cry.” That makes your heart soft. 

“He looks so cute,” you coo, tilting your head to savor this moment. It’s abnormal for you to be the sober one but you’re starting to understand why Sunghoon doesn’t mind taking care of you when you’re like this. 

Jay comes to stand next to you. “He’s not cute when he drank half his weight in alcohol and wouldn’t shut up about how pretty your hair is.” 

“What, do you don’t think my hair’s pretty?” The messy, unbrushed hair is enough to make the guys laugh. 

“Nah seriously, thanks for coming,” says Jake. “We felt bad calling you but he refuses to get out of his seat.” 

“It’s fine.” You wave him off and step closer to your boyfriend, who still hasn’t moved from his position. 

“Do your thing and we’ll be here if you need help bringing him to the car.” Heeseung smiles gratefully at you. 

Even the back of Sunghoon’s head is unfairly gorgeous. His hair always looks nice, although you credit that to his younger sister introducing him to a world of hair care products during his skating years. It feels soft to the touch as you stroke the back of his head until Sunghoon slowly comes to. You feel his body start to stir.

“Baby,” you say quietly, bending down until you’re next to him. “Wake up for me.” 

“Hm?” Sunghoon mumbles from his arms. He feels the sensation of your fingers carding through his hair and pulls himself from the table, wiping the spit from the corner of his mouth before realizing you’re standing next to him. “Y/N?”

“I’m right here.” 

He pulls his head up until he’s sitting upright in the booth, squinting up at you to adjust to the bar lights that disappeared when he closed his eyes. Your boyfriend looks so innocent like this. He looks at you with a wide, round gaze as if you’d appeared out of thin air and he’s trying his hardest to figure out how you’re standing in front of him. 

“Is it really you?” Sunghoon asks in a quiet voice. His tone makes your heart flutter and you reach your arms out until you’re cupping his jaw and rubbing the pads of your thumbs over his cheeks. Sunghoon melts into your touch and you feel his body start to relax. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too, bug. Did you have fun tonight?”

He nods in your hands, “Mhm. Just tired now.”

“Jay said you were asking for me.” 

“I always ask for you.” Your cheeks heat up and you try to ignore the snickers from behind you. 

“Why don’t we go back to my place, yeah? You can sleep in my bed instead of this bar.” 

“Can we? I love the guys but I just missed you.”

“Simp,” Heeseung whispers before coughing into his fist. 

Sunghoon stands from the booth once you’ve taken a step back to give him the space to move. He’s surprisingly able to stand on his own and clutches onto his jacket as he makes his way to the door. 

“Sorry guys,” he mutters to the guys. 

“Yah, it’s fine,” Jay says as he waves Sunghoon off. 

“Get home safe,” Heeseung says as he opens the door for the two of you. Sunghoon waves behind him until you guide him to the car. 

“Can you put your jacket on for me?” You catch it in your hands after he nearly let them fall from his grasp. 

“Shit, sorry.” You watch Sunghoon put on one arm and then the other. He looks so childlike in this moment as he concentrates his hardest to put the jacket on without stumbling. 

It reminds you that he doesn’t show you this side of him often. Sunghoon, ever the poised individual who likes to know what’s ahead of him, has let his inhibitions down. Seeing his figure slowly push his body through the warm fabric has you biting back a smile. 

“Need help?”

Sunghoon looks down at his hands that are trying to zip his jacket up to no avail. He feels like his hands are too big and the zipper is too small. “Please.”

Your steady fingers cover Sunghoon’s and take over the tedious task. The metal is warm from his fingertips. You can feel him looking down at you and you temporarily fumble with the zipper, which makes him laugh.

“Silly,” he mutters. “Ah, fuck. I don’t know if I can open the door.”

You roll your eyes and open it for him. “You’re funny.” 

He slides into the seat as gracefully as he can without hitting his head on the roof. Sunghoon struggles, but manages to buckle himself in and grins up at you when he hears the click of the buckle. When you look down on him, the lamp post from above casts a soft glow on his face. He looks so youthful at this moment. Sunghoon has let go of his thoughts and couldn’t think about anything but the present moment even if he tried. 

He waits for you and mumbles about how cold it is when you turn the engine on. The warm air starts to uplift his spirits and he looks at you with us head pressed to the headrest.

“I’m sorry you have to see me like this.”

“What?” you ask. “Why?”

He shrugs. “Dunno. Usually I’m the one taking care of you.”

“You don’t always have to be brave, you know.” 

Sunghoon doesn’t say anything. He reaches out to envelope your hand in his and squeezes it until he’s holding it loosely in the quiet of the evening.

“I love you.” 

Your heart blooms. “I love you right back.” He seems satisfied with your response and lets go of your hand so that you can drive back to your apartment. 

When you park on the curb, Sunghoon’s sober enough to unbuckle his seatbelt and wait for you to turn the engine off before opening his door carefully. He steps outside and leans back on the car door until you walk around the hood of the vehicle and grabs your hands to pull you into him. 

You feel his lips on your before you register what’s happening. He tastes faintly of pineapple soju and beer, and his mouth is warm. Despite his inebriated state, Sunghoon’s able to hold you between his hands as he moves to place them on your hips to balance your body after you’ve stumbled into him. 

The kiss itself is slow. In fact, it feels as though Sunghoon has slowed time around so that the two of you could enjoy the late night kiss uninterrupted. You can barely hear anything besides the ringing in your ears after being caught by surprise due to your boyfriend’s abrupt movements. Your mouths move in slow tandem and Sunghoon nearly pushes his tongue inside your mouth before pulling away to rest his forehead against your own.

“My baby,” he whispers against your lips before giving you another quick peck. 

“You are so cute.” You blurt out this confession like you’re still pining after him. “Let’s go inside, yeah?” 

The apartment is warm compared to the environment outside and Sunghoon slips off his shoes in favor of wearing his designated slippers. He doesn’t let go of your hand the entire time he does so, letting you pull him into the hallway until the two of you reach your bedroom. The hardwood floors feel better than the uneven pavement from outside.

He loves it here. It’s a sanctuary away from his apartment with the friends he will probably invite to his wedding. But something about your green comforter and hand-painted artwork adorning your walls makes Sunghoon feel like he would live by your side for the rest of his life. The scent of your room–warm peaches and vanilla–tugs at his heart strings. This is where he belongs. 

Likewise, you love seeing Sunghoon behave like this. It’s not commonplace for him to let people take care of him in the way you are now. He’s used to people looking out for his career and best interest but he struggles with allowing others to handle him with such care. After a decade of enduring harsh criticism and physical endurance, Sunghoon struggles to relax and allow others to take the reins. It’s partially why he loves taking care of you. Being able to provide that kind of love and support makes him feel wanted and needed, even if you tell him he’s more than enough a thousand times over. 

You leave him in your room to change his clothes taken from his designated drawer while you prepare skincare and the works. You hear him shuffle outside and fall onto the bed once, prompting you to hold your laughter in as you wash your hands and pull out hair clips for him to use. 

“I can’t lie,” Sunghoon says as you emerge from the bathroom to see him in a big t-shirt and pajama bottoms, “I’m really looking forward to you doing my skincare.” 

You snicker and pull your desk chair into the bathroom. “Now you know exactly how I feel every time I beg you to do mine when I’m drunk. Sit and close your eyes, please.” 

He follows your instructions and leans his back against the furniture. Sunghoon doesn’t fuss when you pin his hair back until it’s secure and allows you to make him feel pampered in a way he typically wouldn’t. 

“Did you have fun tonight?” 

Sunghoon hums. “Yeah, I did. The guys picked me up from my place and we had lunch at that seafood spot we’ve been meaning to try.” 

“Was it any good?”

“So good.” He licks his lips. “God, I’m still thinking about that shellfish soup. We ordered enough food to feed a village but it was so worth it. I wanna go with you.” 

“We can go wherever you want.” He smiles at your soft tone. 

“We also went to the beach and met some guys at the skate park by the highway. They were pretty nice and let us use their boards for a little. Heeseung got along with them the best, I think.”

“Heeseung makes friends with everybody.”

“He says he’s not social but that’s a lie.” Sunghoon twitches his nose when he feels a damp washcloth on his face. “We went to the bar afterwards and split it by round. I got the first and honestly, I don’t remember much after that.” 

“How are you feeling now, though?” you ask as you finish patting his skin dry. “Do you still feel dizzy?” Sunghoon opens his eyes and watches you apply a serum before dabbing it all over his face. 

“Not as much as before. I think I’m just tired.”

“And clingy, apparently.” 

Sunghoon smacks the back of your thighs. “Shut up. You love it.” You silence him by kissing his nose. 

While he brushes his teeth, you situate yourself underneath your plush covers and allow the weight of the blanket to fall on top of you. The sweet promise of a good night’s rest feels imminent, especially when you see your boyfriend emerge from the bathroom. He turns off the light and walks towards the empty side of the bed before he’s slipping himself beside you. 

Sunghoon’s an equal opportunist when it comes to sleeping positions. He loves it the most when your head is on his chest and when your arms are tangled in one another because he likes knowing that the two of you yearn for each other equally. But when he gets like this, Sunghoon takes initiative to maneuver himself until half of his chest and head are on top of you. He situates his arm around your waist and pulls himself closer to your body until a deep, satisfied sigh comes from the back of his throat. 

He hums in appreciation when your fingers begin to massage his scalp. Sunghoon’s hair is soft and silky and on most days, you’re the only person who gets to touch it. The slowness of your movements paired with the soft kiss you place on his temple makes his eyelids feel heavy. 

“Sorry you had to come pick me up,” Sunghoon mumbles against you. “I know we agreed to give each other some space this weekend.” 

“You should know by now that I’d do anything for you.” He feels you kiss the crown of his head. “Plus, we both know you’d do the same for me.” 

Sunghoon nods. “I would. You’re my girlfriend. Duh.” His sleepy nonsense makes you laugh. 

“You can go back to hanging out with the guys tomorrow if you want.” He shakes his head. 

“I want to get breakfast with you.” Sunghoon finds your free hand and presses a sleepy kiss to the back of it. 

“Whatever you want. We can get breakfast.” 

“If we wake up early enough.” 

You laugh again. “Yes, if we wake up early enough.” 

Sunghoon mumbles a few incoherent words that you can’t quite make out because of your own tiredness. When your own eyes start to droop, Sunghoon feels your fingers start to falter and looks up at you to see you’ve fallen fast asleep. 

He kisses the underside of your chin and falls asleep too.

***

comments and reblogs are appreciated! x

[danveration]

Sleep well, amour.

Parings: Alastor x reader

Summary: You’ve been very intrested in Alastor ever since you met him. He invites you to see his recording studio, which you accept. Then you ask if you can stay and listen to him host! While listening, you fall asleep. How does he react?

Word count: 2844

Warnings: Ummm not really much? Alastor being Alastor! One mention of not being able to sleep sometimes, mention of seeing people in hell doing dr*gs, k*lling eachother, and fighting, mention of reader having bad social skills (?)

part two

A/N: UM!! this is my first time writing for alastor, so apologies if it isn’t the best. Please give me any feedback you want, I’d love to hear it! Also sorry for any spelling mistakes. I hope you enjoy :’)

Alastor the radio demon. You know of the things he’s done, you know that people are quite literally terrified of him. But for some reason... you feel a certain way towards him that you can’t describe, but it’s surely not fear.

You’ve had a some-what odd admiration of him since you landed in hell, only a few months ago. You got spotted by Charlie when you first got to hell. She noticed you looking around nervously and lost, and put two and two together that you must be new. She very kindly introduced herself which was refreshing because.. well.. it’s hell. Everywhere you looked people were fighting, doing drugs, and even killing each other. You were glad there were kind people even down here.

“Hi, you! Uh, you lost?” Charlie smiled you and waved.

“Um yeah! I’m guessing this is hell, huh?” You awkwardly chuckle. Social skills weren’t ever your thing, it seems they haven’t got better after you died, either.

“Yep! This is hell! You must be new? I’m Charlie! Charlie Morningstar. It’s so nice to meet you.” She smiled and stuck out her hand for you to shake.

“Nice to meet you, Charlie! My names Y/n.” You politely smiled back and shook her hand.

After that meeting, Charlie showed you to the hotel in which you eagerly accepted to stay at, her being the only sane thing you’ve seen down here. It was a pretty nice place, no 5 star hotel like back on earth, but it was something you’re very grateful for. Who knows what would’ve happened to you if you haven’t met her.

While she was showing you around, someone caught your eye. He was a tall man, very polite and respectful looking. He was dressed head to toe in old fashioned attire, with a cane to suit his charming look. He was smiling in a way that made you look at him like he was something you wanted to inspect under a magnifying glass.

He glanced at you and smiled larger, stepping over to you and Charlie.

“My, my! What do we have here? Charlie! You didn’t tell me that we’ve got more guests? It’s a pleasure to meet you, my dear! The names Alastor!” He spoke politely.

His voice was sort of.. Radio-like? You found it soothing.

“Haha yeah! I found them wandering around on the street this morning! They’re a newcomer, their name is Y/n.” She spoke back, excited to introduce you.

“Y/n! Well, my, my. That’s quite a lovely name!” He said. “Say.. do you listen to radio? I host a brilliant radio broadcast that’ll give you some real insight on this place!” He said enthusiastically.

“Oh.. haha thank you” You smile. “I do actually! I love radio shows.” You immediately feel drawn towads him. You cant tell if it’s just the new scenery or what.. but you want to just sit and chat with him for hours.

Alastor perks up at that. “Oh you do, do you?” He smiled more.

“Yeah! Back when I was.. uhm.. alive, I actually had a whole playlist of them! What do you do your show about?” You ask.

Alastor is delighted to have you take interest in his show. “Well, dear, I do all sorts of things on there! Yes, yes, you think of it and I’ve most probably done it! Most commonly known is the souls I entrap and prison, as I broadcast their screams of horror all over this horrible place and people get to hear the noises of their never-ending torture and demise. But! I also just made a wonderful segment on my mother’s Jambalaya recipe!” He stated.

While part of those sentences gave you chills, you still seemed to take interest in him.

“Well,” you chuckle. “I will certainly check it out!” You smile.

“Ah! Wonderful news, my dear.” He said while he twirled his cane.

Charlie was watching you interact with him and noticed how you looked at him, as if admiring. She smile and said, “well! We better finish the tour.”

She motions for you to follow her and you do, waving Alastor goodbye.

He waves back and yells, “goodbye, sweetheart! Lovely to have met you.”

After that, you wanted absolutely everything to do with him. You’ve also got to know the other people staying at the hotel. Angel, Vaggie, Husk, Niffty, and Sir Pentious. They were overall kind people. Husk found your interest in Alastor to be no good.

“Yeah, no. That, whatever thing you have created in your mind about him, isn’t true. He’s vile, Y/n. Trust me on that.” He grunts.

Angel thought you had some kind of kink towards “scary, creepy men.” Which wasn’t true because you didn’t even find him scary. You found him charming.

“Ah.. Alastor? Fucking sexy weirdo if I do say so myself. He’s got some reaaal problems but hey, if you’re into that-“ You cut him off by saying it wasn’t like that & that you don’t think anything sexual towards him.

One day, you were talking to Sir Pentious about his “crush” on Cherry Bomb. He completely denied it but you could tell from his blush and his nervous demeanour that he was very interested in her.

You were caught off guard when you heard that radio voice coming up from behind you.

“Y/n, my dear! I have a question for you.” Alastor came and stood beside you, looking down from where you’re sitting.

“Al! Hey, what’s up?” You ask, containing your excitement.

Sir Pentious excused himself quickly, seeing one of his “egg boys” were being played with by Niffty. She isn’t one to be gentle.

“So, I know how you’ve been listening to my radio show as of late, and I was wondering if you’d like to see where the magic happens!” He states.

“R-really? I’d be honoured!” You say, smiling.

“Ah! Lovely. Come now, this way.”

You get up and he locks arms with you and chats about his new microphone that he got.

Once you guys arrive, you’re shocked. It looks very professional and comfortable. It suits him heavily. There’s a big open window, a desk, some chairs and sofas, a bunch of technical stuff on the desk along with his new mic that you recognize from his descriptions, and a deer coat hanger?

“Wow, Alastor. This place is so actually so sick. I love it. And the new microphone suits you!” You say. “Thank you for showing me, really.”

Typically, Alastor would never show someone something personal of his, including his studio, but you are an exception. He isn’t sure what it is about you but he doesn’t seem to hate you as much as he does with anyone else. At first he was weirded out, but now he just embraces it. He also feels protective of you. He doesn’t know exactly why you’re even down here. For as far is he can tell, you’re an angel. Always being kind even to those who aren’t kind to you, always saying “please” and “thank you,” all that jazz. Jazz! You even like jazz music, his favourite. He told you that he lived on earth the time jazz music was popular. The 20’s and 30’s. That explains his vocabulary and how he dresses. You just find it more interesting and take time to ask questions about what it was like in that time.

“Why of course, my dear! If I’d want to show anyone here, it would be you.” He says, giving you his iconic smile.

You have a thought. “Hey, Al? Would it be alright if the next time you do a show, I could stay and listen?”

You hope he doesn’t think this is odd.

Alastor raises a brow. “Why would you want to do that?” He asks.

You panic, thinking you went too far by asking and now he’s going to cut you off or something.

“Ha! Kidding, sweetheart! Of course you can. I love when my broadcast is wanted to be listened to. Though I love it as well when they don’t want to.” He says.

You’re relieved, a bit scared, but still relieved.

“Say!” He says. “I was going to make one tonight talking about this silly technology box that thinks he is better than me! You know, expose all his lies and secrets to my listeners, and unwilling listeners. Maybe broadcast it all throughout hell!” He starts laughing manically. Then calms down and stares at you.

“Would you want to stay and listen, hm? I can do it now! I didn’t have any plans today going forward and well, getting it out sooner is better than later, I always say.” He asks.

You know he’s talking about Vox when he mentioned the technology box. Him and Vox have a sort of rivalry going on. Though Alastor seems to not care much about him, Vox is sure obsessed. He’s even gone so far as to making posters about him. Which areee.. not much of a resemblance.

This offer strikes you and you immediately perk up. “Yes! I’d love to.” You say.

You don’t think Alastor knows this but whenever you’re struggling to sleep, you put on his radio show and his voice comforts you to sleep. You’re sure if you told him, he would find it weird.

Little did you know, Alastor already knew. He walked past your room one night and heard static sounds coming from your quarters. He immediately was intrigued and put his ear close to your door to hear his voice. He was surprised, but not weirded out. He found it delightful that you found comfort in his voice. It’s not everyday someone does. Usually it invokes terror and anxiety on anyone who hears. This was new, and he didn’t hate it.

“Lovely! Let me get all set up. You can sit wherever you feel the most comfortable!” He says, adjusting his mic and pressing a buttons on his table.

You find a spot and sit down. Feeling honored to even be in the same room as him, let alone HIS room.

“Ahem! Welcome ladies and gentlemen-“ He goes off into his introduction, before winking at you and starting.

After about 20 minutes, you begin to feel tired and put your head on the side of the wall, still listening but with your eyes closed.

Alastor immediately notices and smirks, knowing how his voice effects you. He continues on and after about another 20 minutes, he finishes up. You’re asleep, slightly smiling.

He walks over to you and looks down.

“My, my. You really are an interesting one, aren’t you?” He whispers. He smiles more softly than he usually does and looks around to find a purple blanket hanging on his deer coat hanger, and gently places it on you.

He feels his heart fluttering while looking down at you and he immediately shrugs it off.

“Mm well, my dear.. I guess you can stay here. I’ll just be over there, transferring my broadcast to the other radios around town.” He says and points to his table.

“Sleep well, amour.” He speaks softly.

[taeyongdoyoung]

wolf and bunny

summary: you ask your best friend to fuck you in your sleep but your bottled up feelings come out to the surface... pairing: chan x reader genre: smut, best friends to lovers warnings: cnc/somnophilia, discussion of boundaries, eating out, touching, groping, unprotected sex, spanking, stranger+wolf/bunny roleplay, little red riding hood references, face-slapping (once), size kink, cockwarming, multiple rounds, feelings (ew), pet names, discussion of future scenario 👀 (i know i said this is the end but...we'll see) author's note: hii everyone, this is the third and final part of my wolf and bunny series, thank you so much for going on this nasty journey with me 🤍 part one & part two word count: 2k

You and Chan are having a bit of a disagreement in connection with the circumstances surrounding your next game.

“But I want to know exactly which night you’ll do it.”

“If you know, you won’t be able to fall asleep,” Chan reasons with you. “Kinda like Santa Claus. Kids stay up all night waiting for him and then he never comes.”

“Please, even if the kids were asleep, he’d still never come ‘cause the parents are putting the presents under the tree!”

“It was just a metaphor.”

“A bad one. You’re gonna have to work harder to convince me.”

“Hey, wasn’t this your idea in the first place?” Chan reminds you teasingly. “You’re the one who wants me to fuck her in her sleep.”

“Ey, don’t pretend you won’t be into it,” you shake your head.

You are both so stubborn you don’t see this ending unless one of you retreats. Then, after a brief consideration, you speak again.

“Fine. You can keep the secret of the exact night you’ll do this. On one condition.”

“Sure, bunny, let’s hear it,” Chan listens eagerly.

“If I wake up, you won’t stop. I’ll just pretend I’m still sleepy and we keep going.”

“Is that even possible? I mean, for you to not wake up?”

“It is if you drug me or something,” you shrug.

“Ugh, don’t give me such evil ideas. You never know when I might take advantage of you.”

“Oh, I’m counting on it, wolfie.”

“But are you sure the sleep thing is a great idea? I mean, you wouldn't be able to say a safeword...” Chan can't help but worry, always putting your needs first and planning every scenario in great detail to make sure you're alright. Damnit, could he get any more perfect? He's so sweet and considerate you wish you could just tell him how you feel. But what if that scares him away? What if you lose not only your wicked game buddy but your best friend in the entire world? You wouldn't be able to live with yourself.

“Yes, I'm positive, Chris,” you place your hand on top of his. “I trust you 100% and know that you'll look after me. The question is, do you trust my judgement?”

“I mean, I do trust you. It's just that last time you didn't communicate your discomfort clearly and I wouldn't want to risk messing up to the point of accidentally hurting you,” Chan verbalizes his anxieties.

“I get what you're saying but it's not like I'm open to doing this with a stranger. It's you we're talking about. You've always been great at taking care of people so I know you wouldn't go too far. But at the same time, I wouldn't mind if you went loose. If anyone can take it and accept you fully, it would be me.”

“Yeah, I know. You're right. But just in case, I want you to know beforehand that I care about you and respect you like a lot. So, even if I get carried away, I still want you to feel safe.”

“Aww, Chris, ya old softie! I always feel safe with you, it goes without saying!” you insist.

“Well, I like hearing you say it.”

You gulp nervously. His voice is so commanding and yet so reassuring that your words have never rung truer. He's more to you than a safety net and you hope he knows it. He's incredibly thoughtful and infinitely kinder than the first impression. He's a riddle in the way he keeps surprising you and yet you wanna keep learning more about him. He's hundreds of the loveliest words in the dictionary multiplied. He's more comforting than your favourite blanket. He's warmth personified and you would be an idiot to let him go.

“I'll try to say it more often, then,” you promise. “When I'm with you, I know no harm will come my way. But here's the thing...you're the only one I'd willingly let hurt me.”

“I don't want to hurt you, though.”

“You don't?” you pout, suddenly feeling guilty. Then, what have you been doing? Was he forcing himself to act out these fantasies for your sake alone? You genuinely thought he was enjoying them as much as you were.

“Sorry, that came out wrong,” Chan is quick to explain. “I like our games. I meant that I don't want to hurt you emotionally. Ever.”

“Ah, yeah, that makes sense,” you chuckle, feeling a little stupid. “Well, you don't need to worry about that. Glad we had this talk.”

“Me too,” Chan gazes at you fondly.

“So, which night are you fucking me while I'm asleep?” you attempt to find out while he has this dazed look in his eye.

“Next- Hey, nice try! I'm not telling you, you impatient devil.”

“Aw, man, I was so close,” you bemoan the uncertainty of your future.

“You wish.”

The long-awaited night finally arrives. Chan has a key to your place so entering it is too easy. He makes sure he picks a night when you’ve complained about being exhausted and sleepy all day long. And he is certain that you’re passed out in your room, not suspecting a thing. Well, a part of you is always anticipating what could happen, but still.

He’s beyond glad to find you sound asleep. You’re wearing nothing but a t-shirt and some flimsy panties. Chan admires your sleeping form for a couple of brief moments before he gets down to business.

He wonders where to start. Should he tear them up? Or maybe push them to the side? Should he grope your boobs through your shirt? Or perhaps slide his hands beneath it, stroking your nipples directly? So many opportunities. He wants to do everything, he decides.

Chan starts by moving your panties to the side and licking your tiny pussy. He touches you with his fingers, gently prodding your entrance but not exactly sticking them inside yet. Then, he sneaks his hand underneath your shirt, teasing your nipples. Fuck, you’re so soft.

He marvels at the knowledge that you’d trust him with something like that. Though the previous scenarios were hot and intense as fuck, this one hits different for him. Maybe because last time you were awake, you were still in control because you could say the safeword whenever. Maybe because you want him at your most vulnerable even in your sleep. Or maybe because he’s slowly falling for you, but he doesn’t know how to say it.

It’s okay. Chan’ll show you, instead. He pinches your nipples lightly and continues to make out with your pussy. You are so wet already it’s adorable. He wonders if you’re dreaming of him, as you shift slightly in your sleep. He wants to drag this out. But how?

He uses his nails to trace circles on your skin, which causes goosebumps to appear. Are you cold? He wants to keep you warm and full at all times. Chan can’t take it any longer and takes his cock out, sliding in so perfectly. As if you were made for him. Made to take his cock and let him do crazy things to you. His sweet little bunny…

You moan desperately and the spell is broken. You’re awake. He wanders if you’ll speak or he’ll have to make you. Both options sound quite appealing. But he wants to hear your voice more than anything.

“Shhh, go back to sleep, sweetheart,” Chan whispers gently.

“W-who are you?” you cry out.

Aw, you’re gonna pretend not to know him? That hurts. But it can be fun, he thinks.

“Just the big bad wolf,” he chuckles at the irony of it.

“Please, don't do this,” you fake not wanting it, even though you've never wanted anything so badly in your life.

“Oh, bunny, but I already am,” Chan replies, spanking your ass a couple of times in the meantime.

“G-gonna split me in h-half,” you mumble, voice muffled against your pillow.

“Yeah? G'na ruin my sweet girl?” he speaks to you so softly you want to melt right there and then.

“Feel so full 'n so s'eepy,” you slur helplessly.

“Aw, tiny, go back to sleep, then,” Chan pats your head soothingly.

“Can't. What a deep voice you have!” you play along too well.

“All the better to degrade you with, my slutty bun,” Chan laughs, while still continuing to fuck you.

“What big hands you have!” you keep saying.

“All the better to grab your tits with,” Chan chuckles and makes good on his promise by playing with your boobs.

“And slap me with!” you remind him playfully.

“As you wish, princess,” Chan growls and slaps you across the face harshly but not harsh enough to actually leave a mark.

“What big eyes you have,” you sigh wistfully.

“All the better to stare at you fall apart,” Chan responds cleverly.

“And what big cock you have!” you scream, barely resisting the urge to laugh. Are you a silly little bunny or Little Red Riding Hood? At this point, you don't care, but it feels too good regardless.

“All the better to fuck you with,” he grunts loudly, spilling inside of you.

You follow rightaway and urge him to stay like this for a while. Maybe round two is in order?

“You know what else is big?” Chan teases you.

“Oh, shut up, Bigfoot!” you reply and are no longer able to hold it in, breaking into laughter. Chan also finds the interaction hilarious and buries his head in the nook of your shoulder. You stroke his hair without realizing. Shit, he's so adorable you almost say the three words. Is it too risky? Too soon? You need a distraction. You need... “Fuck me again.”

“Already? Aren't you tired?” Chan wants to make sure.

“Fuck me till I fall asleep again,” you ask him.

“Um, okay, sure,” Chan looks a bit confused but does as you ask.

This time there is less talking and more fucking but no matter how many rounds you go, sleep doesn't come again. You both orgasm more times than you could count, but somehow, it isn't nearly enough to distract you from the inevitable. You love him. Your heart knows it, your pussy knows it, even your brain knows it but is stubborny telling you not to confess for fear of somehow ruining things.

Once Chan decides he's completely spent for the night, he pulls out of you and rips off the bandaid.

“Are you alright? Something suddenly shifted but I can't quite place it,” he tucks a piece of hair behind your ear and nudges you softly with his shoulder.

“Do you want the truth that might mess up everything or do you want me to lie to you and say I'm fine?” you ask, even though you're already on the verge to tell the truth.

“With you? Always the truth, please,” Chan clearly states his preference.

You sigh deeply and tilt to the side so you're facing him properly.

“I think...no, I know I love you.”

“I love you, too, babybun,” Chan responds fondly and kisses you on the nose.

“In a non-friendly way. And I don't mean just sexually, either. I mean, the friendly way and the sexual way haven't diminished, of course. But I also love you in a...I want to be yours, your girlfriend, your lover, your romantic partner, your everything.”

Chan is taken aback by your words. You...feel the same?

“You already are,” he confesses genuinely.

“Huh?” you blink in shock.

“I mean...you are already my everything. But, if you'd like me to officially ask you, then...will you be my girlfriend, angel?”

“You...you'll have me?” you are still in disbelief.

“I thought I already had ya,” Chan pinches your cheeks lightly.

“Damn right you do, Mr. Wolf,” you giggle and pull him into a kiss.

He smells like autumn, his embrace exudes warmth and his lips taste like home.

“You have no idea how badly I've wanted to tell you about my feelings,” Chan confesses. “When I found that story of yours in your drafts, I just couldn't resist the opportunity. I hoped that if I turned your fantasies into reality that you'd eventually fall for me.”

“Oh, Channie...I've been falling for you for longer than you realize,” you admit shyly. “How could I not? You're everything I've ever wanted.”

So, this is what it feels like to have the world in your hands. Huh. You could get used to it.

Bonus:

“No, I'm not kidnapping you!” Chan is adamant as you two sit in a nice restaurant.

“But Chriiiis,” you whine. “You said you'd do anything for my birthday.”

“Anything but that!” Chan shakes his head in amusement.

“Why not? It can be fun!”

“Fun? What if something goes wrong, what if someone sees us and thinks I'm actually kidnapping you, what if...hear me out, here, I go to prison for it?”

“Well, duh, then I'd bail you out!”

“As if you could afford it,” Chan rolls his eyes.

“Hey! But seriously, I'll just tell the cops that I asked you to kidnap me.”

“What if they don't believe you and think you have a Stockholm syndrome?”

“I'll...think of something. Come on, we're going too far with the what-ifs.”

“You gotta be prepared for any situation. You'd know that if you carried the heavy burden of being a dom,” Chan tsks at you.

“I'd know that if you let me,” you give him a wink.

“That will only happen the day I agree to fake-kidnap you.”

“So, tomorrow? It's a date!” you grin excitedly.

“Keep dreaming, darling.”

“Oh, I will.”

The End

[prettyg1irlstears]

i js saw ur pillow princess reader x rafe blurb n its amazing !!

but how would rafe x gf!reader be when rafes friends have been bringing up about how it feels good when ‘the girl takes charge’ but she gets upset n self conscious cs she literally cant, shes js a pillow princess at heart !! she wld constantly ask rafe if shes good enough in bed, if its fine she cant ride him like his friends have been showing off :(((

first of all thank you!!<33 second of all i’m so sorry if i’m answering late, but i hope you’ll like it<3

softbf!rafe x sub!reader

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

you’re in the large living room of tannyhill, a pretty sundress on while sitting of your boyfriend’s lap, listening to the conversation between him and his mates.

you were telling rafe that you’ll come tomorrow, that it’s fine if he wants to have a ‘all bro evening’, but rafe insisted on you staying, so you did, because you’re his good girl.

so here you are, playing with rafe’s fingers as the boys don’t bother to acknowledge or respect your presence and talk about their girls.

“bro, my girl’s wildin’ when she takes charge,” kelce boasted, smirking as he took a swing of his beer. “doin’ all the work, feels so good.”

your chest tugs anxiously, slightly squeezing rafe’s fingers as you listen.

“yea i feel ya, man,” topper adds, grinning as he high-fives kelce. “wish you could see the way sarah moves on me ‘cause like goddamn..”

you feel yourself getting uncomfortable, partly because they’re talking about their girlfriends like they were a piece of meat, but mostly because you know you’ll forever be a pillow princess.

“yo, top,” rafe feels jow uncomfortable you are, stroking your silky hair lovingly, thinking it’s just because the conversation’s too much for you. “it’s my sister, man, don’t be gross,”

“sorry bro, not my fault she’s freaky,” topper sneers, kelce chuckling along with him.

you withdrawn a little bit, nuzzling into rafe’s chest as your mind runs a marathon. you were never able to take charge, especially in bed. you and rafe tried it a few times, but you always get all shy and embarrassed, just simply not finding it in yourself to be dominant. but now, after you heard the boys’ conversation, you feel even worse than ever.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

“you okay, baby?” rafe asks you softly. the boys have already left, you’re now helping rafe clean the beer cans and pizza boxes. he has noticed something’s off — he always does.

“mm good ray, just tired.” you fake a yawn and give him a small smile.

that seems to make rafe calmer, maybe he just doesn’t want to press you. he comes over to you, placing his hands on your waist. “can we still do sum’ or are you like really tired?”

you chuckle and look up at him. “no we can still do something.” because even though you still feel bad, you can still feel a little wet spot making itself in your panties just from that one simple sentence.

rafe smiles and kisses you, his hands moving from your waist to squeeze your butt. “alright let’s get to bed, hm?”

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

you thought it would make your mind go elsewhere, like always, but even when you’re a moaning mess under the muscular body of your boyfriend, you’re still thinking about it.

“what’s the matter, bunny?” rafe grunts into your neck as he kisses it, giving you long and deep thrusts.

“n-no, no!” you let out in a whimper, squeezing his shoulders. “please don’t stop.”

rafe smirks, slowing his pace even more as he bites on a soft spot of your neck. “then what is it?”

you whimper at that, but you can’t keep your worries inside anymore. “am i good enough for you?” as soon as these words leave your mouth, rafe stops, stilling inside of you, making you let out a small whimper of disapproval.

“baby.. baby look at me, will ya?” he gently takes your chin in his hand, making you look up into his eyes.

you look, his hand caressing your cheek as you look up at him with those puppy eyes of yours.

“why would you ask that?” he asks, his voice soft as he has no idea where this is coming from. “of course you are, you always were and always will, baby.”

“because i can’t ride you.. can’t make you feel good..” you say quietly, tears welling up in your eyes. “mm sorry rafe, i just can’t..”

“hey, hey, look at me, baby..” he makes you look at him again, his hands running through your hair and caressing your cheek. “that’s perfectly fine, bunny. you’re perfect, i swear to god,”

you’re looking into his eyes, nervously playing with his curtain bangs. “are you sure? ‘cause i felt really bad earlier..”

rafe chuckles a little, kissing your forehead. “baby, don’t listen to those two pricks. can’t appreciate their girls like i can apprexiate mine.”

he kisses your lips softly, slowly starting to move inside you again. “i love you being my little pillow princess.” he grunts at the movements, earning a tiny moan from you. “wouldn’t change for anything, baby.”

“you mean it..?” you ask, leaving out tiny whimpers as he moves slowly yet deeply, wrapping your legs around his waist.

“absolutely,” he whispers, kissing your lips while leaving out small moans. “don’t have any idea what you do to me like this.”

“alright..” you feel a shy smile growing on your lips, tugging on his hair as his tip hits that one spot inside you. “r-rafe.. please.. faster..”

“faster, yeah?” rafe smirks, increasing his pace, holding the side of your neck, earning sweet little moans from you that make his cock twitch inside of you.

“don’t need ya to take charge, baby..” he lets out a pretty moan into your ear. “js’ fucking you like this is enough for me to go absolutely crazy.”

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

[daechwitatamic]

cherrybomb || csc

(banner by @sailorrhansol)

cherrybomb seungcheol x afab reader || angst smut fluff || exes2lovers, pacific rim universe NSFW - minors DNI

Summary: Piloting a jaeger requires a rare ability called drifting - a neural connection with your co-pilot. You and Seungcheol are masters of the drift... until you have something in your head that you don't want him to see.

wc: 19.5k

warnings: language, heavy angst with happy ending, fight scenes, fight scenes written by an author with zero fighting or martial arts knowledge lmfao thus they are vague as possible, feelings heavy plot light and smut light, kissing and pretty generic (and brief) p in v smut

Author's note: thank you for @sailorrhansol for 1) accidentally sparking this idea, 2) agreeing to collab with me, 3) reading this along the way and hyping me up, and 4) beta-ing my mistakes, a million smooches for you ily

This fic takes place in the Pacific Rim universe but I honestly don't think you need to know the lore, everything you need to know should be explained. If you think something is unclear without prior pacific rim knowledge, shoot me a message privately and I'll make some edits and credit you for the insight!

Also in this universe: storm breaker by @/sailorhansol

Teaser:

“Marshall, with all due respect, I don’t know why you’re calling me,” you admit. “You were there. You saw what happened. Seungcheol and I can’t drift anymore.”

“You couldn’t then,” he points out. “That was three years ago. Things that were once too painful to carry into the drift… they’ve had time to mellow.”

He’s wrong, and you want to tell him so. Nothing has mellowed. You love Seungcheol just as much today as you did then.

“Have you talked to him about this?” You’re afraid of the answer. 

The Marshall’s voice hardens, and you can just picture his eyes narrowing. “Mr. Choi will follow orders,” he says evenly, “and so will you. Asking is really just a courtesy.”

“You can’t order us into being able to drift again,” you snap, pulse suddenly pounding in your arms, your hands, your face, your chest. 

“No,” the Marshall says, and any previous friendliness is gone from his voice now, “but I can - and will - order you to try.”

Playlist: you're the smoke in my gun, blowin' like cherry bombs...

The first time you ever saw Choi Seungcheol, he was flipping a man four years his senior over his shoulder and slamming him into the ground. Satisfied, he staggered backwards, chest heaving from exertion, eyes narrowed in preparation for the next move.

That’s what Seungcheol did - he leveled whatever was in front of him, and he started watching for what was coming next before the body could even hit the ground.

That’s what made him a great jaeger pilot. Not the brute strength - strong men are dime a dozen, always have been - but the watching.

You’d marked him as your first choice.

You were both nineteen. You’d grown up in the Shatterdome, the only child to a couple who piloted a neon green jaeger named Charron’s Revenge. You knew everything about how jaegers and their teams worked by the time you were nine. You started training to fight years before that. There was never a question that you would follow in your parents’ giant, mechanical footsteps one day. You just needed the right partner.

You needed Seungcheol.

The jaeger program didn’t turn away recruits - everyone could do something - but there was an organized process to match up compatible pilots. Applying recruits would fight before an audience of previously-accepted but currently-unmatched potential pilots. The pilots would rank the fighters, choosing their top five based on perceived potential for compatibility.

Then, the roles would switch. The applicants became the audience. The audience became the show.

When it was your turn to fight, you silently pleaded with the universe that Seungcheol would mark you high as well. This was the only guarantee that you’d get a chance to spar with him, to test it out before the Marshall, who would make the final call.

Let him see, you begged. Let him see how perfectly we’d work together.

And, by some miracle, he did. In fact, he rated you first, as well.

Your sparring match went exactly how you expected - he barreled at you, and you dodged every move. He could easily take you out with a single blow, but he couldn’t get his hands on you, not when you used his own inertia against him at every turn. What you didn’t expect was your own inability to land a shot. For the whole fight, you were unable to move out of the defensive - keeping out of his reach took all of your effort.

It was a draw - the first sign of strong compatibility.

You didn’t talk after the match - your father whisked you away to recover before your second-rated match, and you didn’t see Seungcheol for the rest of the day.

The second-rated match was a dud. But you already knew, even then, that it didn’t matter.

You’d met your co-pilot. You’d found your partner.

—

He found you in the mess hall that night, dropping into an empty spot on the other side of the table, his tray in his hands. His black hair was loose and wavy, and his right arm sported a sizeable bruise that he definitely didn’t get from you.

“I know who you are,” he said by way of greeting. You raised a brow at him, waiting. “Your parents piloted Charron’s Revenge.”

You narrowed your eyes at him. “That better not be why you picked me.”

He gave his head an annoyed little flick. “Of course not. I picked you because you’re fluid - and I’m not.”

Appeased, you felt your hackles settle back down. “That’s true,” you allowed. “You’re not fluid. But you’re purposeful, and-”

You were interrupted when Yoon Jeonghan dropped into the seat to your left, chuckling under his breath as he fixed his long, dark hair into a spiky ponytail at the back of his head.

“Cherry, did you hear?” he asked you, ignoring the new-comer. “The crew for Fatal Rapids got called back in for misconduct.”

“Choi Seungcheol, Yoon Jeonghan,” you said, introducing the two young men. “Hannie does more than gossip, I promise. He’s one of the pilots for Devil’s Advocates. Their drop stats are insane.”

“In practice only,” Jeonghan demurred. “For now.”

“Cherry?” Seungcheol parroted, raising a dark brow. “That’s not what I wrote on my paper earlier.”

“Just a nickname,” you explained. When you were very small, you’d struggled with the name of your parents’ jaeger, calling it Cherry’s Revenge instead of Charron’s, and the crew - who doted on you like their own - started the habit of calling you Cherry. Somehow, it had spread, and stuck. “Only my parents use my real name. But you can call me whatever you’re comfortable with.”

“No,” he said, frowning as if deeply considering his options. “I like it.”

You folded your arms on the table, leaning in to peer at Seungcheol. “So, what’s your story? You’ve heard of me. I haven’t heard of you.”

He shrugged, glanced around, then decided he could talk freely. There’s something about being in a room that’s positively teeming with people and conversation - it gives you privacy without feeling too intimate. You’re not alone.

“Not much of a story, not like you,” he admitted. “I grew up thinking I’d take over my dad’s business. We lost my dad… then, we lost the business. I have no marketable skillset, and university was out of the question. But…” He trailed off, then met your gaze firmly. Something in his look demanded you forgo any pity or sympathy, demanded you take him seriously. “I’m strong. So I came here. I came to fight.”

You sidestepped the bruises he’d bared. “Not like me,” you repeated with a bit of a scoff. “I hate to disappoint you, but my parents are the pilots - the story is theirs. I don’t have one, not yet.”

Something playful glinted in his eyes, the first true sign of personality you’d seen. “So all the rumors about the Princess of the Shatterdome aren’t true?”

Your jaw dropped. You’d heard the nickname before - it was never meant nicely. You tried to ignore it as best you could - people could think what they wanted. When you had a crew, when you had a jaeger, you’d be able to prove them wrong. “What rumors?”

“You’re spoiled,” Jeonghan supplied, having decided he was part of the conversation after all. “Entitled.”

You spluttered as Jeonghan stood, giving you a cheerful pat on the shoulder. “And bitchy! That’s just what I’ve heard. Of course I know better. Anyway, I’ve got to go. Love ya!”

You stared incredulously after him as he disappeared, your face burning with embarrassment and your heart hammering with adrenaline. Fight, your systems told you.

If only you could.

Seungcheol bit back a smile, reaching out to pat your arm placatingly.

“I don’t…” you started to say, but your voice caught in your throat. You cleared it, tried again. “I don’t think I really deserve all that.”

He nodded, lips pushed into a semblance of a thoughtful pout. “What I’d heard,” he said calmly, “is that you’re a hell of a fighter, scary smart, and that you take no shit. Unless it’s from your friends, apparently.”

This made a bitter little laugh bubble from you. You still simmered with humiliation, feared that maybe he’d decide he didn’t want to co-pilot with you after all.

“I think it’s up to you which story gets told,” he said finally.

“Yeah,” you said, nodding. “That’s what I always said. So… let’s get started.”

—

You and Seungcheol lucked out - the team that had been recalled for misconduct were terminated from their posts in the weeks following the sparring trials, and their jaeger Fatal Rapids had been disassembled, the parts up for grabs.

You and Seungcheol repurposed Rapids’s main frame, your crew working to individualize the bot to your needs as best they could. You splurged on quad-processors for her legs to allow your jaeger to keep up with how you move - quick and lithe. Seungcheol lobbied for (and won) some extra power in the top half, and you compromised and chose a mix of red and blue sections for her paintjob.

Duellona Fury, you named her. Duellona for you, the destroyer. Fury for Seungcheol, because that was where his fight came from.

You got to know Seungcheol’s fury very well. Especially when you started trying to drift.

None of it happened fast - not the building of your machine, nor your neural handshake. In fact, you didn’t pilot Duellona Fury together for a whole calendar year.

You started with physical compatibility - you sparred almost all day, every day. You fought - with each other and against each other - until all you could do was lay on the ground and pant, blinking to make the ceiling stay in focus.

Seungcheol may not have grown up training in the Shatterdome the way you did, but he kept up without complaint. You learned his way - force and strength - and he learned the way you favored - to weave and dodge.

The fighting was the easy part.

You had never drifted with someone you had true drift compatibility with. Seungcheol had never drifted at all. The Marshall wouldn’t even consider hooking the two of you up to the machine until you went through the proper training.

On the day you and Seungcheol were officially declared as co-pilots-in-training, you both stood below the half-built shell of your towering jaeger, sparks flying and drills screaming as the crew worked on her.

Your Marshall looked seriously at his new team-in-training. “Starting tomorrow, you’ll meditate together. Talk to each other. Get deep about it. If you’ve talked about it out here-” he swept an arm across the deck, “-it won’t take hold so strongly in there.” He’d jabbed a finger in the upward direction of Duellona Fury.

Seungcheol didn’t look at you, nor the Marshall. Instead, he kept his eyes on Duellona's unfinished frame, stories above you. “Yes, Sir,” he said steadily.

Your parents weren’t technically retired yet, the year you and Seungcheol started training together. Charron’s Revenge still sat in the well below the Shatterdome. They still lived on the base, still took part in daily training. They hadn’t been called into a fight in years, though; the assignments went to the younger crews.

You took dinner in their quarters instead of the mess hall, that night.

“Congratulations,” your father said warmly from across the table. “You worked hard to get here.”

“Thank you,” you said, feeling shy beneath the praise. “I hope the drift will work for me and Choi Seungcheol.”

“What do you think of him?” your mother had asked, her sharp eyes honing in on you, watching your reactions.

“I think he’s a great fighter,” you said. “The rest… I guess I’ll have to learn.”

“Do you trust him? Can you trust him out there, when the sea and the wind are trying to knock you down, and hell itself rises up from the depths?”

You swallowed. She’s right for her intensity - they will be putting their daughter’s life in her co-pilot’s hands, every time there’s a fight. You knew firsthand how terrifying it was to stand in the tech bay and wait, not knowing if your loved ones will make it back.

You thought about how you and Seungcheol fight together in the sparring rooms. You thought about how you weaved and your opponent followed your movement, only to be knocked sideways. You thought of how Seungcheol followed your motion backwards, ducked in tandem with you to avoid a hit, and how you followed his momentum forward and up to attack. Your bodies followed each other like they were magnetized. And Seungcheol was always watching for the next hit.

“Yes,” you said, so quietly that you cleared your throat and said it again. “Yes, I trust him.”

“Then we wish you luck,” your father said, and raised his glass. “To Duellona Fury.”

“To Duellona Fury,” you echoed.

On your way out of the quarters, later, you slowed as you passed the wall where they hung their accolades and awards, the newspaper clippings, photos, and medals. Before your eyes they aged - the photographs changing through the years, no longer showing a bright, fiery couple, instead displaying proof of passing time: a baby bump, then a toddler, then a child beaming alongside them as if she’d done what they had done; greying hairs, softening bodies, deepening of wrinkles. Then the pictures stopped.

You never asked them if they missed it.

—

You and Seungcheol started meditating together the next morning; it seemed logical to begin at the easiest step. In an empty sparring room, you sat facing each other, knees touching.

“Have you done this before?” you asked, as you both settled in, shifting weight and adjusting ankles.

“Not with someone else,” he admitted, lips protruding in a bit of a pout. “Only alone.”

You nodded. You’d grown up learning all of this - the right way to fight as a team member, how to be in tune for a neural connection. It led to you teaching Seungcheol often - yet when you fought together, any leadership fell away.

“Normally,” you explained, “you focus on your breath, keeping your mind clear. But for our practice, you want to focus on our breath. We breathe together. And when your mind wanders, your awareness should be coming to peace with my presence there. Like, making a path for the neural connection - for later. So there’s no resistance.”

“Have you done this before?” Seungcheol asked.

You wobbled your head around - not yes, but not no. “I’ve practiced it - I’ve done the meditation with partners. But I’ve never moved forward to an actual drift with anyone.”

This seemed to appease him, and he settled his weight backwards, letting his hands rest near his knees.

You let your eyes float closed and inhaled, listening and feeling for Seungcheol’s inhale to end, letting your breath out when he did. It took no time to match your breaths, to let your mind go blissfully quiet. You focused on feeling open, readable - any thought that floated through your mind, you pretended he could hear, too. You tried to feel and release any defensiveness, any urge to close off.

When the timer went off, it surprised you. You opened your eyes, and the feeling that struck you was this -

It was surprising to see Seungcheol before you. It hadn’t felt like he was beside you. It had felt like he was you.

You meditated, you fought, and finally, you talked.

Laying on the sparring room floor, your head somewhere near Seungcheol’s shins, he asked you, “Where do you wish you were right now? If you weren’t here.”

You laughed at yourself before answering, knowing how silly you would sound. “In a tree.”

A disbelieving smile played on his lips, almost as if he wasn’t sure you weren’t making fun of him somehow. “A tree?”

“No, really,” you insisted, still smiling a little. “There’s not a lot of nature here, in case you didn’t notice. I grew up in the Dome - never got to leave, much.”

Seungcheol didn’t respond to this, just nodded like he understood, his small smile going a bit tight around the edges.

You frowned, reading him exactly. “You think I’m sheltered,” you observed. It wasn’t a question. He couldn’t say no.

He looked at you, then. “You were sheltered,” he said, voice low. “But when I say it, I don’t mean naive. I just think… there’s a lot of world out there. A lot of things to see. You won’t see any of it if you spend your entire life under the Dome.”

You nod, accepting this. “I won’t see any of it if it gets destroyed, either. There’s a lot of world out there - that we’re trying to keep safe.”

Seungcheol watched you intently for a moment, lips downturned and gaze heavy. Then, he asked, “Have you ever seen a kaiju? I mean - in person?”

“Sort of,” you mumbled.

He’d rolled from his back to his front, closer to you, putting you shoulder to shoulder. “Kind of seems like a yes-or-no question.”

Your lips twisted. “Then, no. But I’ve stood in the bay and listened to Mission Control talk my mom and dad through a fight dozens of times, watched Charron’s Revenge on the screens and prayed I wouldn’t see her get sawed in half.”

You stopped, trailed a finger through the thin layer of dirt on the floor. “I know it’s not the same as looking one in the face myself,” you whispered. “But the fear… shouldn’t that fear count, shouldn’t it feel the same?”

Seungcheol swallowed, trailed his own finger through the dirt until his fingertip just barely touched yours. It felt like energy sizzled in the centimeter between your pointer and his.

“When Menaceclaw attacked,” he said, “he missed my home by one block. We watched him go by from the sidewalk. I wasn’t even as tall as his foot. But even with him towering over the buildings, taking them down without even trying, I don’t think what I felt was afraid. I think I just felt resigned. Like I knew, at seven, that even though we survived this one… nothing was going to be… the same, or okay. I don’t know.”

“You knew what you lost,” you said quietly. “Part of you did.”

He looked up at you, nudged his finger into yours. “You never knew anything different. It wasn’t a loss. The fear was just always part of the deal.”

You rolled sideways, laying your head on your bicep for a pillow, regarding the dark-eyed, dark-haired young man across from you. His face scrunched in a laugh, brows furrowing and lips pouting.

“What?” he asked through the quiet laugh. “Why are you looking at me?”

“What else?” you mused. “What else am I going to find when we go tiptoeing through your memories?”

He smiled faintly and then mirrored you, laying his head on his arm, his eyes swimming as he thought.

“A lot of my family, probably,” he said. “A lot of fighting. Menaceclaw. Probably some very mid sex.”

You laughed without meaning to. “My condolences?”

He grinned at you, pleased. “Eh, what can you do? I try to treat everything like a learning experience.”

You laughed again, and his smile grew, gums showing. “What about you?” he asked off-handedly.

“Mid sex?” you asked, eyebrows raising. “I hate to inform you, Choi Seungcheol, but I don’t do anything mid.”

“No,” he protested, laughing, reaching out to gently shake your shoulder. “I meant - what will we see when it’s your turn?”

“The Dome,” you said, half-joking - but it was true. “Training. My parents. Their fights, their accomplishments.”

And, as a true drift partner should, he understood what you weren’t saying.

“We’ll have our turn,” he promised, pushing himself to sit up, then stand, reaching down to help you up. “We’re gonna be fucking unstoppable. Let’s go again.”

Fire sparking behind your ribs, you nodded seriously, then reached up to take his hand.

—

Weeks of sparring melded into months of meditation and talking. The next phase of training co-pilots was learning to drift in one of the simulators - but not in a jaeger. Not yet.

You and Seungcheol finished training in one of the sparring rooms shortly before dinner would be served in the mess hall.

“Meet you there?” you asked, still half-breathless, your body starting to ache as the adrenaline from a fight melted away.

“Sure,” he agreed, and you disappeared into the changing rooms, scrubbing the sweat and dirt away as quickly as you could. You changed into something clean and made your way to the mess hall.

You scanned for familiar faces, frowning when your normal table seemed to be occupied by a team of new recruits that you didn’t know.

Seungcheol appeared at your elbow, frowning dramatically. “Our table,” he whined.

“There’s Chan and Wylie,” you said, nodding to another corner where your friends sat practically on top of each other. Chan and Wylie had never understood personal space, not when it came to one another. They barely noticed when you and Seungcheol plopped onto the benches next to them, but Seungkwan did.

“You’re bleeding, Cherry,” he said, before inhaling an entire mouthful of rice.

You started to scan your arms - you didn’t feel pain anywhere - but Seungcheol found it first, gingerly swiping his thumb along your cheekbone.

“Sorry, Cherry,” he murmured. “I should’ve pulled that punch.”

“No you shouldn’t have,” you grumbled, swatting at his hand and wiping roughly at the spot, your hand coming away with a small smear of red - nothing to be alarmed about. It would stop on its own. “You pull shots in practice, you’ll hesitate in the field.”

“She’s right,” Chan said from his physical tangle with Wylie. “What you practice will show up in your muscle memory. You’ve got to mean it, every time.”

Wylie reached across his arms and took a bite from his plate, then asked, “Did you guys see the new jaeger?”

“I did,” Seungkwan said eagerly. “Chaser Supernova, or something like that? She’s smaller, but she’s supposed to be fast.”

“Is that her team at our normal table?” you asked dryly, shooting the rookies a dark look over your shoulder. Seungcheol jostled you playfully, sending you a smile that brought you back.

The bench dipped to your left, and you turned to see Soonyoung - one of Seungkwan’s two co-pilots - settle in.

“Talking about Supernova?” he asked, hands busy opening his drink. “They seem okay - they’re a trio, like us.”

“Where is Seokmin?” Seungkwan asked, scanning the room. “I haven’t seen him in like two hours.”

“Talking to Jihoon, I think,” Soonyoung answered absently, focused on his meal. “He lost another co-pilot today.”

“Not again,” you and Seungcheol both blurted, matching levels of exasperation.

“That was freaky,” Wylie said, just as Chan told you, “You two are acting like us, now.”

“We do not need another Chan-and-Wylie,” Seungkwan said seriously, shaking his head.

Seungcheol sent you a sideways, sheepish grin.

“We won’t be,” he promised the group, but his eyes were still on you.

—

The simulators were built to be exact replicas of the conn-pod, so that trainees could get used to the feeling of being strapped in, of moving with the gear. But the real purpose was to practice the neural handshake without risking damage - to the jaeger, to the tech bay, to each other.

“Don’t be nervous,” you told Seungcheol as the tech team worked around you both like a choreographed dance.

“I’m never nervous,” he said, suddenly cocky.

If you could reach his hand from where you were strapped in, you would have. If you understood anything about Seungcheol - if any part of him mirrored you - it was the way he showcased bravado, the way he used it as his most-familiar mask.

“It’s only practice,” you reminded him. “And it’s only me.”

He licked his lips quickly, eyes darting to the side and then back to you. Then, he gave you a small nod.

“Normally,” your chief tech - a beautiful woman with jet-black hair named Nainsi - told you, “right now, you would be ready for the drop. In the simulator, we skip that step because we aren’t dropping onto a jaeger. Instead, we’ll engage the pilot to pilot connection protocol sequence.”

You and Seungcheol nod in tandem.

“You’re all good?” Nainsi checks. “Then I’m going back into the tech bay - you’ll hear me through the intercom.”

Alone in the simulator, you met Seungcheol’s gaze and couldn’t help the excited grin that spread across your face. Finally, finally you were here. Once you could do this successfully, the next step was to fight in your own jaeger - to drop into Duellona Fury and walk into the sea.

He didn’t return your smile, instead giving you a tight nod, expression serious.

Over the intercom, you said clearly, “Ready and aligned.”

Nainsi answered, “Prepare for neural handshake.”

You took a deep breath and steeled yourself as the artificial voice of the simulator’s tech system spoke around you, 3… 2… 1… neural handshake initiating…

At first, you thought something went wrong. Everything went red behind your eyelids, and you blinked, instinctively trying to clear it away.

The red faded, and you found yourself in Seungcheol’s childhood home. You didn’t know how you knew that - you just knew. It was as familiar to you, inside the drift, as your own. You knew that to your left was a small kitchen with two broken floor tiles; you knew - without having ever seen it - that to your right was a narrow hallway that led to a bathroom and two small bedrooms.

Two small boys played on the carpet; rather, the smaller one played with some toy cars while the other watched the television with rapture. Behind them, at the kitchen table, a woman typed busily on an outdated laptop, bags heavy under her eyes.

Somewhere around you, a voice floated by, telling you, neural handshake strong and holding.

You could see Seungcheol in your periphery - the adult Seungcheol, the Seungcheol of now - as he looked at his mother, his brother, himself.

“It’s not real,” you reminded him gently. “It’s just a memory.”

“I know,” he said back, voice hushed, as if he might scare them away. “It’s just… good to see them.”

The house evaporated as gently as morning dew under a mid-morning sun; you stood in a schoolyard. Seungcheol, the small one, had a bloody lip and a mean swing.

You felt a rush of affection for him - him, the child, face contorting with misplaced anger, using strength as a bandage. You wanted to stand in front of him, between him and the anger, him and the other kids, and let him take a breath. You wanted to tell him to step with his punch to get more power. You wanted to put a hand on his shoulder and tell him, you’re going to be fine.

And he knew all of it, because he was in your mind.

Seungcheol - your Seungcheol - walked away from the swarm of children egging on the fight and opened a door. You followed.

Inside was not the school, but a hospital room. Your body jolted forward, distracting and alarming. You heard, faintly, a series of beeps, that robotic voice needling in your ears, saying, calibration failure… recalibrating in 3… 2… 1…

“It’s only a memory,” you said again, but the warning beeps were coming stronger, louder, more clearly. The hospital room looked opaque, and Seungcheol walked backwards towards you, away from it, herding you both out of the room. The room - a bed, a pulled curtain, a lot of white - flickered, like a glitch, and then vanished, leaving you standing in the simulator.

Neural handshake disengaged…

“Seungcheol!” you yelled, pulling your helmet off and wheeling on him as best you could with most of your body still strapped in. “What the hell was that? You pushed me out!”

He was breathing hard, eyes a little wild. “Not that,” he said, a little ragged. “I’ll let you in but - not that.”

“You don’t get to choose!” you snapped. Part of you knew this was just growing pains, he’d never drifted before, he was learning. But the rest of you smarted and stung - both from his rejection and from your failure to train, to succeed, to check off this final step before you could get inside your jaeger. “It’s kind of an all-or-nothing thing!”

He let out a billow of air, reaching a hand up to rub at his face. “Sorry. I’ll… let’s try again.”

You didn’t answer, fuming silently instead.

“I’m sorry, Cherry,” he said. “The stuff with my dad…”

“You can’t cherry-pick what we see and what we don’t,” you fired back. His eyes shot to yours and his mouth quirked and you read the joke all over his face. “Don’t you laugh, Seungcheol, it’s not funny!”

But you were laughing through the scolding.

“Stop,” you whined.

Your anger defused, he looked at you again, taking a bracing breath. “It’s not about you,” he tried to explain. “I’m not keeping you out. I’m keeping me out.”

“Don’t chase the rabbit,” you told him, shaking your head. “See what it wants you to see and move on. Find the next door. If you stand there and let your hurt - or your, I don’t know… grief - rise up… that’s when we’re going to have trouble.”

“Find the next door,” he repeated, eyes on the floor. “Got it.”

“You can’t push it away,” you reminded him, “but you don’t have to stay in it, either.”

He nodded, eyes already lighting up, ready to go again.

The second time, you saw him steel himself before opening that same door, watching carefully as he shuffled inside, only looking sideways at the hospital room that materialized around you.

“Seungcheol.”

He turned to look at you, wide-eyed, but you hadn’t called him. The voice, weak and hoarse, had come from the other side of the fluttering curtain.

The glitching started almost immediately - the image around you flickering like a bad wall projection. Something rocked beneath your feet, an earthquake only inside your minds.

You opened your mouth, started to tell him, you don’t have to stay, to remind him that he could move forward. Instead, you heard yourself say, “I’m here.”

The tremors under your feet quivered to a stop. You watched with trepidation and Seungcheol closed his eyes and took a deep breath, releasing it slowly. Then, he held his hand out, waiting.

You slipped your hand into his, and then he turned and continued walking, ignoring his father’s memory calling out to him. The flickering stopped, the picture you were part of brightening again as you found the next door, stepped through, left his pain behind.

—

It got easier quickly. Seungcheol’s ability to press on, to maintain focus, strengthened.

The strolls through your mind went easier - you’d had years to practice maintaining focus, waiting until after to let the emotions hit you.

Seungcheol learned to be ready for you, after. He’d sit with you, silent, and breathe in tandem as you worked to let go, to release the images of Charron’s Revenge on the tech bay screen, the sounds of your parents’ frantic communication as they fought together, the fear crawling its way up your legs every time until someone in the bay said, “Charron’s Revenge, cleared to return.” The loneliness of being the only kid in the Dome, having no outlet except fighting. Everything that threatened your mind while you piloted, everything that you had to save for later - save for him.

You were both freshly turned twenty when you got green-lit to drive.

“Seungcheol!” you called across the mess hall, practically racing to your table. He turned, eyebrows raised, as you crossed the large room.

“We’re approved to drop!” you told him excitedly. It churned in you - finally, finally you could fight, you could prove what you could do, you could help. “We’re on the drop schedule for tomorrow!”

His grin was unfettered, unfiltered, just for you. He reached up a fist and you bumped it enthusiastically. You were too excited to eat, too excited to sleep. You tossed and turned, imagining experiencing a drop for the first time, imagining striding through the mighty sea like it was nothing, imagining staring down hell itself and bringing it to its knees.

You were still awake when you heard the alarms down the hall. Yours didn’t go off, because you weren’t on duty, weren’t approved to fight.

Down the hall, there was a flurry of commotion - shouting, rushing, people pushing past you as they pulled on boots and jackets.

“Cat-3 in the west bay,” someone shouted.

“Deploying Devil’s Advocate!”

You reached the tech bay, trying to stay out of the way but not unseen. When the Marshall strode by, you stepped sideways.

“Let us drop,” you said quickly, knowing time was precious. “It’ll be like practice. We can be back-up. We’ll hang back.”

“Absolutely not,” the Marshall said, already moving to work past you. “You’re not approved yet. We don’t need a liability right now.”

“We’re scheduled for tomorrow!” you protested, and then you felt a hand on your shoulder.

“We’ll get our turn,” Seungcheol told you quietly. Of course he’d come out, of course he found you.

You deflated. “It could have been us. We are hours from approval.”

He gave your shoulder a tiny shake. “We’ll get our turn,” he repeated. “Don’t make trouble.”

You glowered, but you knew he was right. “Fine,” you grumbled as Joshua and Jeonghan slinked past you in matching jackets and matching shit-eating grins. You stayed out of the way as they prepared to drop.

You stayed through the fight, listened to the control room buzz and chatter, until you heard, “Devil’s Advocate, cleared to return.”

Only then did you try to go back to sleep. Seungcheol gave your shoulder one more squeeze.

“Tomorrow,” he promised.

“Tomorrow,” you repeated.

—

Some people feel God at church. The history of tradition and the sanctity of ritual speak to them, help them feel part of something, help them feel that unnameable swell of something spiritual.

Some people feel God in nature. The patterns of the universe, the way math exists without human touch, the harmonies and patterns that seem too intricate for coincidence help them believe in a planner’s touch. The beauty of the outdoors allows them to wonder, to feel like they belong as a piece of this clockwork.

But you - you felt God when you stood before your jaeger, marveling at the power, the beauty, how it feels like yours, how it feels like Seungcheol before you’re even inside it. Duellona Fury promises you power, promises you purpose.

That hand was on your shoulder again, and it slid down to the center of your back before removing itself.

Beside you, Seungcheol stared up at your glorious machine.

“She looks sick,” he said, the grin taking over his face.

“I can’t wait to fuck shit up,” you murmured, your reverent tone at odds with the flippancy of your words.

“Ready?” the Marshall asked you, coming up to your left. “We’ll get you calibrated and dropped, and then you’ll do a lap of the bay. We’re sending out Pretty Savage just in case you run into trouble.”

The defensiveness rose in you quick, like a snakebite.

“We don’t need a babysitter,” Seungcheol said, voice hard. You reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze - a reminder to watch it, just as his hand on your shoulder frequently did for you.

“It’s just safety protocol.” The Marshall was unphased by the outburst. “Have fun, you two. Enjoy your first joy-ride.”

You screamed when you dropped, the exhilaration rushing out of you as Duellona Fury fell story after story before slowing and attaching to your jaeger’s mainframe.

Goosebumps raised along your arms when the Shatterdome’s sea-doors slid open, shudders traveling your body as you and Seungcheol stepped together, Duellona Fury stepping with you, her gigantic, metal form following every movement.

For the first time in your whole, careful life, you felt powerful. Your jaeger cut through the ocean waves like they were nothing, making an easy perimeter of the bay. In your head, you could somehow both hear and feel Seungcheol’s delight, his low-simmering desire to fight, to do something a perfect mirror of your own.

“How is it?” Soonyoung’s voice crackled in your ears, reminding you that Pretty Savage wasn’t far behind you.

“Incredible,” Seungcheol answered him, at the same time that you said, “It’s everything.”

It didn’t matter that you came from a family of pilots. It didn’t matter that you were raised in the Dome, training since you were young. None of that mattered. You were born for this - born to fight for your planet, born for Duellona Fury, born for Choi Seungcheol.

—

The west bay became Duellona’s playground; you and Seungcheol were often assigned to patrol there.

It was only a few months in that you faced a kaiju for the first time.

“Come in, Duellona Fury,” Nainsi’s voice came through. “We have a reading just a few miles north of you. Cat-2. Approaching at -”

Duellona Fury was turning due north before the command was even given.

“Are you ready for this?” you shouted to Seungcheol as Duellona slid through the water, the adrenaline singing in your system already.

“You know I am,” he answered, something hard in it, and the thrill in your stomach sparked.

When the sea split in half, the kaiju rising from the depths with an unearthly roar, you sank into a defensive stance, feeling Seungcheol move beside you, doing the same.

“Let’s fucking go,” Seungcheol said darkly, and launched forward, your arms rearing back for momentum before the first swing. The punch landed solidly, your whole body shaking once as the kaiju faltered backwards a few steps.

It opened its mouth and you glimpsed three rows of teeth bigger than a cow before it was lunging at you; Duellona Fury lurched. You tried to duck sideways as Seungcheol tried to move towards your opponent.

The moment of indecision cost you - the kaiju got its teeth on Duellona’s shoulder, knocking you back several steps. Beside you, Seungcheol roared as sparks flew near the bite.

“Are we breached?” you yelled, trying to steady your balance again.

“Not yet!” he yelled back, and you swung again, a hit landing hard enough to knock the kaiju loose, spitting it back into the sea.

You tried to move into a defensive crouch again; again, the jaeger faltered.

“Cherry!” Seungcheol yelled, desperation laced in his voice. “Cherry, don’t fight me!”

“Move with me!” you answered, and he did, miraculously, Duellona dodging left before an incoming attack.

Don’t fight me.

You rocked forward with Seungcheol as soon as you were clear of the kaiju’s trajectory, just as you’d done in practice thousands of times. Back in sync, Duellona Fury landed a kick to the kaiju’s middle that sent it stumbling.

“We’ve got him,” you said, feeling a win.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Seungcheol warned you. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the kaiju exploded from the dark ocean, limbs flailing as it flew towards you.

Duellona’s arms came up and locked it in battle, the impact shaking you so hard that your teeth chattered against each other. You groaned with exertion as you tried to match its strength.

“I don’t think we can hold it,” you managed through grit teeth.

“We’ve got this,” your partner promised, and with a mighty shove, you managed to flip the beast over your shoulder and beneath the waves.

“Drop the bombs and head for the east side,” you said quickly, already moving. Duellona Fury followed your command, turning and starting an easy run through the bay’s churning waters, away from where the kaiju was struggling to its feet, furious and vengeful. As she ran, she dropped three small explosives, about sixty feet apart. The explosives slipped into the ocean depths.

“Ready?” Seungcheol asked, a little breathless. “Are we far enough away?”

“Light him up,” you replied. Seungcheol reached up and tapped the button; somewhere behind you, the ocean exploded.

—

“How’s your shoulder?” you asked, later, in the med bay.

“Not that bad,” Seungcheol said, but you could see the blood-stains on the bandaging.

“It won’t happen again,” you promised. “I think I just… practiced alone for so long. I forgot to listen. I’m sorry.”

Seungcheol shook his hand, eyes finding yours. “There’s nothing to forgive, Cherry. Forget about it.” Then, he brightened. “You know what I want to do?”

“What?” you asked, not entirely past feeling guilty.

His smile was devilish. “I want to go celebrate our first fucking kill.”

– 

You marked the passing of two years in statistics.

Three hundred and forty-six explosives detonated.

Two hundred and eighty-three drops. Two hundred and eight-three kills. 

Seventy-two mainframe repairs.

Twenty-eight achievement awards.

Nine television interviews.

Six upgrades.

One ill-informed “vacation” during which you both itched with anxiety, spending the whole time messaging your friends back in the Shatterdome desperately, praying you wouldn’t miss a fight in which you were needed.

Seven hundred and thirty days of living in and around Seungcheol’s mind and heart. But that stat should’ve gone first.

It was a good high. Your team had a good run.

It wasn’t a kaiju that reduced it to ash, not an attack that took your team out of the rotation of main fighters and sent your jaeger to gather rust and dust below the Dome. It was your own stupid heart.

There were a lot of moments that could have been it. Each time you walked into a fight knowing the danger, each time he ended up in the med bay reeking of antibacterial ointment and resentment. Each time you slid into your place beside him - space he saved only for you. Each time his voice bidding you goodnight from the bottom bunk was the last thing you heard at the end of the day. Any of these moments might have been the one to make you stop, gasp, suddenly slammed with understanding. That you loved him, that he was everything you couldn’t bear to be without, that he was part of you. But they weren’t.

There was no moment of realization at all.

Instead, it slowly seeped into your consciousness, as gently and naturally as morning dew collecting on pre-dawn petals. The knowledge clung to you, as impossible to ignore as damp feet after running barefoot through the yard just after sunrise.

If you knew something, that meant your co-pilot would know it, too.

Unless you tucked it away, pushed it down deep and cast his attention elsewhere, a mental sleight-of-hand. Look here instead. 

You were twenty-three, on a routine patrol, when Mission Control radioed Duellona that there was a reading in the bay.

“Looks like it’s only a Cat-1,” Mission Control told you.

“On it,” you told them, feeling your body already mirroring Seungcheol’s as Duellona picked up her pace, striding through the waves. 

You glanced sideways at him, and immediately wished you hadn’t. He was already zoned in, eyes focused and jaw sharp as he concentrated. 

He caught your gaze for only a second. “Focus, Cherry,” he cautioned. “Don’t get cocky.”

“I would never,” you retorted, and he laughed. You were both cocky; you both knew it.

For a second, things felt better. 

The fight was almost easy, when the ocean seemed to split in two and the waves fell away like wrapping paper to reveal the kaiju you’d been sent for. 

You swung and ducked, dropping explosives strategically, Seungcheol moving in unison with you. There was something graceful about it - something beautiful in the sync, something holy in the way your muscles mimicked each other’s. 

This is what happens when sunlight hits morning dew: it warms, lifts, makes the air humid and sticky until it burns away. 

It rose up in you, your love for him, infusing the air around you, infusing the neural handshake that he was deeply imbedded in.

No. 

You panicked, tried to do several things at once - tried to shove the feeling down, tried to think of something else, tried to push Seungcheol’s consciousness out of yours.

Duellona Fury lurched around you, shuddering. 

“Cherry!” Seungcheol screamed to your left, and then the kaiju hit, its full weight slamming into Duellona’s mainframe.

You both staggered, trying to right yourselves, as the machines around you blinked and beeped and rebooted. 

Seungcheol grunted under the neural weight of driving alone as you gasped and closed your eyes, trying desperately to fix it. Around you, you heard the floating words - recalibrating.

“Recalibrate faster!” you shouted, glancing sideways to see your co-pilot struggling to hold the monster in place, his face contorting with effort, arms straining against the machinery. He bared his gritted teeth, exhaling in a hiss between them. 

You gave yourself a shake, bouncing on the balls of your feet, desperate for the connection to take again so you could pick up your half, take the literal weight from him. As soon as you felt the neural handshake, you gave a mighty shove and Duellona flipped the monster backwards, the ocean receding and then coming back to slam her shins, swallowing the monster whole.

You both sank into a defensive stance, ready for the beast to rise again.

“What was that?” Seungcheol demanded, later, as he sat in the med bay, waiting for his nosebleed to stop. The nosebleed you’d caused by letting him carry a neural load meant for two.

“I don’t know,” you lied, still panicked and desperate. 

“Bullshit,” Seungcheol countered, eyes narrowed. He reached up and pulled the cotton away from his face, examining it. “I’m fine now,” he announced, and tossed the wad into a nearby trash bin, standing.

You fought the urge to cower, knowing he’d never let it go if you did. You followed him silently out of the med bay and back towards your dormitories. Halfway there, he slowed, then stopped.

Then, more calmly this time, he asked, “What happened, Cherry? You pushed me out.”

There was a slight pout to it, a sliver of hurt, and it sliced through you like something tangible, like you were actually wounded from it, like it might actually bleed.

“I don’t know,” you repeated. Guilt poked at you until you relented, gave him something that was at least partly true.  “I got scared.” 

“That can’t happen, and you know it,” he said seriously, his large frame casting a long shadow to your left as he leaned into your space. “You can’t keep secrets - that’s piloting 101. We’ve got to handle it. You know what’s at stake here.”

You did; you did, and that was entirely the problem. It wasn’t just feelings, it wasn’t just your relationship with Seungcheol at stake. It was your relationship with your co-pilot - your ability to fight was at stake, your ability to keep others safe. Your legacy.

Your parents’ wall of pictures flashed in your mind.

“I’m going to my mom and dad’s for a while,” you said quietly. 

He nodded, let you run away - trusted you to come back to him when you were ready, trusted you to let him in.

You weren’t sure if he was right or wrong, as you walked away and left him behind.

You didn’t go to your parents’, though. Instead, you went to the tech bay and sat, watching Duellona undergo simple repairs from her fight. You stayed there, the metal cold beneath your thighs, watching the tech team buff over a scratch on your jaeger’s torso, until someone dropped into the spot next to you, bumping their shoulder roughly into yours.

“Where’s Seungcheol?” Wylie, who co-piloted Fury Striker with Chan, was your closest friend in the Dome besides Seungcheol. 

“He’s pissed at me,” you answered, looking sideways, because the question had really meant, why isn’t Seungcheol with you? 

You weren’t sure she’d understand what you were going through - she and Chan had been obsessed with each other since they were kids. Neither of them had ever had to fear that their love for each other would mess anything up. It had been part of their deal from the start.

“What’d you do?” Wylie demanded, turning her full, unfettered attention on you. You wanted to shrink from the intensity of it - but that was always how Wylie worked: full wattage, all the time.

“Almost got us killed by a fucking Cat-1 tonight,” you muttered, angry at yourself, angry at your heart.

Wylie smacked your arm hard enough to send you sideways. “Cherry!” she scolded. 

“There was something I didn’t want him to see.” You said it in your head first, weighed the words, then forced them through your teeth. You hoped she’d just know what it was, hoped you wouldn’t have to force those words past muscle and bone, too.

Wylie’s face dropped into irritation. “Cherry,” she repeated, disappointment dripping from the two syllables.

You looked up at Duellona Fury again. 

“You can’t do that,” she told you, giving your ankle a little kick for emphasis. “You know you can’t do that.”

You can’t love him? Or, you can’t keep secrets from him?

You didn’t ask. You didn’t want to know the answer.

Seungcheol was waiting up for you when you finally returned to the dorm. You opened the door to find the first room - an entryway and kitchen, both - dimly lit. Beyond it, in the small sitting space, Seungcheol sat facing the door, his chin in his hand.

You knew the look on his face. You knew it so well that you almost ran from it, almost turned right around and went back out to the hallway.

Brows slightly furrowed, mouth a straight line, jaw tight. Eyes focused, locked in. It was the face he made in training before he bodied someone. It was the face he made in the field before an offensive strike. It meant he had his sights on a target, a problem, and he was about to throw everything he had at it.

And right now, you were the problem.

“Hey?” you tried meekly.

He nodded. Licked his lips. Stood. 

He’s pissed at me, you’d told Wylie. The energy radiating from your co-pilot was much more complex than that, the air around you palpably tense and teetering.

“How was it at your parents’?” he asked, voice low. 

You took one tentative step closer. “I didn’t go,” you admitted. One lie between you was already more than you wanted. “I watched them patch up Duellona instead. Talked to Wylie a little.”

He nodded, eyes still on you. Nervousness coursed through you, but it would be a lie - another one - to say it wasn’t laced with a little excitement. He was stunning, always, but like this - it almost took your breath away.

If he was in your mind right now, there’d be no question. He’d know all of it. The attraction, the desire, the fear, the affection, the love, the need. All of it. 

His eyes caught on a bruise peeking out from the short sleeve of your top. “You should’ve had them look at that,” he said, reaching out like he wanted to run his fingers over the dark splotch, but he was just too far away, fingertips closing around the air just an inch or two away. 

You shook your head. “You needed attention first. You carried the neural load alone.” Because of me.

“Only for a minute.”

“A minute too long. I’m… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

It hung between you. You don’t know if you’d inched forward or he had, or both, but you were close enough to touch now when you hadn’t been just seconds ago.

He lifted his eyes, his gaze locking on yours. In the dim room, his eyes shone black. “You pushed me out.”

It was an accusation, but it was also a question.

“I’m sorry,” you repeated, barely able to say it, your voice coming out in a hoarse whisper. “Seungcheol, I was scared.”

Maybe he was in your head. Maybe he did know all of it.

“Don’t be,” he told you. “Don’t be scared.”

His arms were around you though you didn’t see him move. It wasn’t the first time you’d let him embrace you - after a fight, in relief, or in victorious delight, or sometimes just in sleepy affection at the end of a long day. It was far from the first time that you’d found comfort in the space between his arms, strong and capable around your frame, your forehead pressed against his sternum as his heart beat directly into your bones. 

But it was the first time that his fingers, confident and sure, tipped under your chin, guiding you to look up at him, guiding your mouth to meet his.

You don’t know if you melted or exploded - it was somehow both at once. You gripped his back, feeling the muscles move beneath his t-shirt, relaxing into his hold and focusing on the feel of his full lips firm and hungry against your own. This was everything - everything you’d wanted, everything you were afraid of, everything you needed, everything that could rip your life apart.

You didn’t mean to whine, but it slipped up your throat and into the gasped space between your lips and his as you tried to pull in a desperate breath. He responded with a grunt, walking you backwards until the edge of the kitchen counter jutted into your lower back. His hands traveled, up to the back of your neck, back down to the slight curve of your waist, around to the back of your ass. He tugged your hips against his roughly, and you let your head fall back, panting, head spinning.

“Cherry,” he breathed against the newly bared stretch of your neck, his lips close enough to drag against your skin as he spoke.

Your hands found the back of his neck, gave the slightest tug upwards, and he followed, bringing his mouth back to yours. His tongue pressed yours briefly, your moan muffled entirely by his mouth as you tried to press him closer, closer, as if you wanted your rib-cages to meld, to slip together like fitting puzzle pieces. 

His hand slipped lower from your ass and wrapped around your thighs, taking only a second to lift you onto the counter behind you. You wrapped yourself around him immediately, pulling him into the space between your legs, arms around his neck, pulling him in, wanting to feel every bit of him against you. 

His hands found the hem of your shirt and lifted; you raised your arms in compliance and felt the cotton slip over your head and your hands.

“Yours,” you murmured, but he had already reached back between his shoulder blades, his own top joining yours on the floor.

Your hands found him on their own, sliding over his skin, fingers dipping between muscles, thumbs sweeping over shadows.

You kissed until you turned liquid, molten, your fingers wrapped in his hair. His fingers mapped every inch of your skin, as if his job was to report back on every previously unknown dip, every rough circle, every beauty mark or blemish. His fingers traced them all, his hands passing over you reverently.

The brush of his bare chest against your own was torturous; delicious until you were full, until you couldn’t take it anymore, until the electric-sharp thrill became uncomfortable. You tilted backwards, creating more space between your torsos but pushing your hips firmly into his.

You both groaned at the contact. You could feel the heat and weight of him now, and everything instinctual within you urged you to shift further, to bring that heat and heaviness closer to the part of you that ached for it. 

He pressed his hips into you without reservation, your core clenching in response to the movement and the friction. 

Then he leaned back, his hands gripping the edge of the counter, his arms bracketing you on either side, his chest heaving as he struggled to control his breathing. He drank you in, his eyes as molten as you felt. You leaned back on your elbows and met his gaze.

The moment expanded; nothing existed but his eyes and the pant of his breath and the way he smelled like he’d just finished a fight and the way he felt between your thighs, unmovable and steady.

Neither of you was connected to jaeger machinery, but you may as well have been, because you knew without a shadow of a doubt that your minds were connected, the drift be damned. Your eyes locked, you knew he felt everything you felt - the gravity of what you were doing, the love that drove you, the fire coursing through you. If there was going to be hesitation or questioning, this was the moment, this was the pause. But you were one, your minds were one, and there was none of that. 

His unvoiced question definitively answered by the certainty that flowed between you, Seungcheol moved to lift you again, taking you easily from the countertop into the dark of the room you share, settling you on your back on his bottom bunk.

Above you, mostly shadowed, was your other half, the only person who knew and understood every cobwebbed corner of your consciousness, the only person who had walked through your mind and found himself mirrored in every way that mattered. He was beautiful in the fractured light, his expression serious and gaze intense. 

You reached up to slide your thumb along his jaw and his eyes fluttered closed, his breath leaving him as in relief, as if you’d made some kind of admission. 

Making love to Seungcheol felt like drifting. His eyes on you as his fingers pulled you apart felt the same as the careful way he’d watch you when your memories got emotional, like he was watching for any sign that you weren’t okay, that you needed more or less or him. 

The way his breath and shoulders shuddered when he pressed into you for the first time felt the same as when he faltered in face of his father’s memory; both times, his fingers laced through yours and held tight until you could both breathe again.

He felt how you’d always known he would. Perfect - a perfect fit for you, a physical compatibility you had never tested but had always trusted would be there. He took you apart without even trying, and all you could do was hold onto him, feel all of him, feel all of it, and try to remember to breathe.

You didn’t speak as you moved together in the dark; the only sounds in the tight room were muted gasps, tiny moans muffled against necks, skin on skin, the obscene squelching sounds that accompanied each snap of his hips. You didn’t say the words that your lips tried to form - it’s so much, go slow for a little, Seungcheol, I love you, more - please, don’t stop. Maybe he heard them. Maybe this was a different way to drift, one that didn’t need wires.

You did your best to hold his gaze, losing sight of him only when you strained up to kiss him, when you nuzzled your face into the warmth between his neck and shoulder and gasped against a wave of sensation, when you couldn’t help but close them as they rolled back, your toes curling. 

He pressed his forehead to yours when he finished, your name slipping out of him, as if it had been literally squeezed from his lungs. “Cherry… Cherry…”

You lay together in silence for a long time, feeling your hearts slow, your skin cool. Your thumb traced his jaw again and again, slow, worshipful. “Cheol,” you whispered. My Cheol. My everything. You didn’t say the rest as you lay together in the quiet, in the dark, your heartbeats competing. 

You didn’t know that you’d drifted together for the last time. You didn’t know that your ability to neural connect could be broken.

–

The wind whips around you, stinging your face. You barely flinch. When you’d first relocated here, three years ago, the cold had made you literally cry during your first month. Just from having to walk from the door of the dormitory across the yard to the mess hall dorm, the intensity of it had sent you spiraling into misery - damning the circumstances that had sent you here, away from everyone and everything you knew and loved, to a place where the air hurt. 

You were sure it would hurt, this intensely, forever.

But time eased the sting, and despite your doubts you did adjust. Now the early morning wind feels bracing and refreshing rather than painful. You’ve adjusted to a lot of things since relocating to a small training center in Alakanuk, Alaska: the climate, the food, the no-frills campus you lived and worked on. Being away from your parents, from Wylie and Chan and Seungkwan and Jeonghan and all the other pilots you were friends with at the Shatterdome.

Being away from Seungcheol. Being partnerless, a half instead of a whole. 

Being unable to pilot, unable to fight. 

Being brokenhearted.

Just like the cold, the pain of your losses was the same - the sting of heartbreak and loneliness and homesickness faded to something ignorable, something you could keep tucked tight in the back of your mind. 

You can hear the noise from inside the mess hall before you even cross the courtyard. There are short of fifty girls ranging from ages seven to eighteen being housed here, but from the noise you’d swear it was at least a hundred. 

The buildings are single-storied, painted with a heavily-chipping grey-blue that sometimes seems to belong to the mist you often get rolling in from the ocean. When you’d first come, you’d legitimately thought they were painted that way as camouflage, meant to blend in with the sea. The other trainers had a good laugh about that. 

As you cross the courtyard between the trainers’ dorms and the mess hall, you breathe deeply, eyes on the birds alight above you. After a lifetime in the Shatterdome, you don’t take for granted the fresh air you’re afforded as you pass between buildings, outside, the sky open and changing above. You don’t take for granted the rhythm of the ocean, the cries of the gulls, nor the distant treeline.

It was Seungcheol who had noted that you were sheltered, having never lived outside of the Dome. 

It was Seungcheol you could blame - at least halfway - for your relocation here, where there wasn’t a jaeger or even a city for hundreds of miles. 

When you pull open the flimsy door to the mess hall, the noise triples. Several of the girls call out to greet you, and you give them a quick wave as you head to the table where the staff eats.

“You’re later than normal,” one of the other instructors notes as you reach for a piece of bread.

You shrug lightly, unbothered. “Still have plenty of time before the first class. What day is today, Thursday? I’ve got the little ones first, right?”

The all-girls training center is meant to teach fighting and the groundworks for drifting, but no jaegers are housed here, no teams launch into the icy bay. The girls here will grow up to pilot - if they get selected, if they get paired with a partner. 

You’re mostly here to teach them to fight, the way you trained in the Dome, but you do plenty more. Help brush hair in the mornings, console tearful faces, teach games and sports, mediate arguments. You also got sucked into running one literacy class a week, though you still haven’t figured out how that happened. 

It would be a lie to say this wasn’t fulfilling, that you didn’t love the girls you cared for, that you weren’t happy here with the ocean and birds and trees and laughter. In many ways, the seclusion of this training center is exactly what you needed to get back on your feet, to find strength in yourself, to heal with distance and time.

But, god, what you would give for a real fight. What you would give to feel both loved and threatened by Wylie, to rib at the guys, to hug your mom. What you would give to hear Seungcheol’s teasing pout, to catch his gaze across the span of your jaeger and know what his body and yours will do, to feel his fingers just barely graze your back when he knows you need to be reminded to focus.

The final time you’d tried, the neural connection never took. It was like trying to connect with a stranger. It had simply been still, a thing that was never alive.

“Don’t do this,” Seungcheol had begged, and that had been the nail in the coffin.

Don’t do this, he’d said. It had landed like blame. Like everything was your fault, and only yours. Like you had broken the connection on purpose, were keeping him out, barricading your mind from his when you desperately wanted everything to go right back to normal.

After that failure, you didn’t tell him you were asking to be reassigned. You didn’t want to give him the chance to say don’t do this a second time.

You’ve just ended a class, the girls starting to filter out through the training room’s side door towards the mess hall for lunch, when the center’s Administrator calls your name from the door.

“There’s a call for you on my line. I have them holding.”

A call? 

Adrenaline races through you; it has to be an emergency. Your parents and friends can reach you on your own device, which is tucked into your back pocket. To call the mainline here at the center means this is a base-to-base call, not a personal one.

You’ve only been in this office a handful of times in your few years here, and you shuffle awkwardly around the desk and pick up the receiver that sits abandoned on the chipped, wooden desktop. 

You greet the person on the line with your real name. 

“Cherry?”

Your Marshall - your old Marshall, from the Dome - sounds unsure if he has the right person on the line. No one has called you Cherry in three years. Even your parents have used your given name the few times they’ve said it on your weekly calls home.

“It’s me,” you affirm. “Is everything okay? My parents?”

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says, and you heave a relieved breath. “Everyone is fine. This is official business. I want to call you in.”

You shake your head, frowning, well aware that he can’t see your reaction. Your body has said no, but you force yourself to ask, “Me? Why?”

“We’re down a few teams,” the Marshall says. “And -”

“You’ve got more recruits than places to put them,” you counter before he can finish. “Call one of the new teams up. Call three new teams up. You don’t need me.”

“We do - we need teams with experience, teams that are ready. Not rookies bumbling around looking for mistakes. We need precision. We need Duellona Fury.”

Your Marshall lays out the situation: the teams that are out, the problems they’re having at the breach - less time between attacks, more monsters at once. You’ve seen this before, you all have, and there’s protocol in place - protocol that starts with all hands on deck. 

You shake your head again. From the door, the Administrator of the center watches you seriously, like she knows you’re being taken away. 

“Marshall, with all due respect, I don’t know why you’re calling me,” you admit. “What can I give you? I can’t pilot Duellona.”

Not anymore. 

The Marshall sighs, like he knew this argument was coming and didn’t have a good response. 

“I think you can,” he says finally. “I’m not saying it will be easy, and I’m not saying it will happen quickly or without effort. But I think you can.”

“No,” you say, the first time you’ve voiced it. “You were there. You saw what happened. We can’t drift anymore.”

“You couldn’t then,” he points out. “That was three years ago. You’ve both had a lot of time to…. You’ve both had a lot of time since then. Things that were once too painful to carry into the drift… they’ve had time to mellow.”

This blow knocks you into silence. You sink your teeth into your bottom lip, eyes steadfastly on the warped wood of the desk, fingers toying absently with the Administrator’s pen. 

He’s wrong, and you want to tell him so. Nothing had mellowed. You love Seungcheol just as much today as you did three years ago. The splitting ache in your chest that you’ve felt every day since you became aware of loving him has only worked its way deeper with time. 

And Seungcheol’s anger? The anger and betrayal he’d leveled at you, when he was sure you were keeping him out of your head on purpose? You couldn’t speak for him, but if you had to guess, there weren’t enough years in a human life to let that hurt mellow into something safe enough to drift with.

“Have you talked to him about this?” You’re afraid of the answer. 

The Marshall hesitates. “Not yet.”

“You might want to do that first,” you point out. “Before flying me back only to have him refuse.” 

The Marshall’s voice hardens, and you can just picture his eyes narrowing. “Mr. Choi will follow orders,” he says evenly, “and so will you. Asking is really just a courtesy.”

“You can’t order us into being able to drift again,” you snap, pulse suddenly pounding in your arms, your hands, your face, your chest. 

“No,” the Marshall says, and any previous friendliness is gone from his voice now, “but I can - and will - order you to try.”

The girls cry when you tell them you’re leaving, and it makes you want to cry, too. You hold it together as you give them hugs, hold it together as you pack your single bag of belongings. You hold it together in the passenger seat of the center’s only beat-up van, waving out the back window as the training center fades away.

It’s standing on the deck of the ferry, the coast receding and the sea wind clawing at your face, that you let it go. You bury your face behind your hands and feel it release behind your ribs. You cry for all of it - for leaving the girls behind, for leaving a place that had sheltered you like a sanctuary. For the time you’d lost at the Dome, for the fights you’d sat out, for the years with your parents and friends that had slipped away like sand between your fingers. For your fear that Seungcheol will turn you away, just as hurt and angry as he was one thousand and ninety-five days ago. 

You’d been so determined to keep him from walking through the depths of your love for him, in the drift. You were so scared it would be too much, too intense, too much emotion for the drift. You’d been scared it would be too much for him - that the weight of it would inherently ask for more than he could give you in return. You’d been scared it would ruin your partnership, your compatibility, your capability to co-pilot.

But that had happened anyway. You almost have to laugh. 

As furiously as your tears begin, they peter out quickly. You take a few deep gulps of salty air, use the backs of your hands to wipe at your cheeks and beneath your nose. As you calm down, you keep your eyes on the horizon, your hands tight on the ship’s railing, and you let your mind wander back to Seungcheol. Here, thousands of miles away, you let yourself think back to those last weeks before you left the Shatterdome. You let yourself wonder, for the first time, what exactly caused everything to crumble.

You’d been so afraid to let Seungcheol into your head once the loving him had taken over. Why had it scared you so badly? As you keep your eyes on the grey of the horizon, you puzzle it out in your mind.

Had it been the uncertainty? That had certainly played a part. Did Seungcheol love you, back then? If he didn’t, everything between you could have changed - your friendship, your partnership, your ability to drift. It hadn’t seemed worth the risk to lose it all - his presence in your life, your ability to fight together. 

But maybe he had. If he did love you, back then… that would have changed things, too. What if starting something romantic affected your drift? There were too many maybes, too many variables. It had seemed safe to push it all down, to try and keep him away from it. To try and keep things the same.

Of course, you’d lost it all anyway.

Even if he did love you three years ago, you think as the sea air whips around you, did he love you the way you loved him? What if it had been too much - the way you could breathe once he was with you, the way you kept each other in check - what if he had loved you, but not that much?

Had it been a mistake to keep him out? Maybe. But it could have been just as catastrophic to let him in. There was no way to know, now.

You turn away from the ship’s railing, away from the horizon and the sea, away from your mistakes. There’s no use looking back like this. You can’t change it. You aren’t even sure you can fix it.

You were hoping to sleep on the plane, but you’re woefully awake well after take-off. Determined not to keep ruminating on what had happened before you left, instead you wonder what awaits you now.

The most-likely scenario, you think, professional and polite - but cold. Like you, he takes duty and responsibility seriously. The airplane bumps, a pocket of air jostling the small craft, and your hands find the armrests and cling tight until it stops.

The best case scenario, of course, would be that enough time has passed that Seungcheol’s hurt has faded. Maybe, you think, maybe he’s moved on from harboring that anger. Maybe he’ll greet you warmly, maybe you’ll pick up right where you left off.

This hope, this day-dream, aches, so much that you blink it away and turn to watch the clouds through the window, a desperate distraction. You crave Seungcheol - you crave feeling safe with his arms around you, you crave the elation you’d feel when he entered the room you were in, you crave the peace that comes with two minds engaged in neural handshake - the peace of someone’s mind interlaced with your own, understanding you, operating with you, picking up half of your mental lift.

You crave his giggle when you say something stupid in the dark of the dorm before bed, his pout when he feels like he isn’t getting enough attention, you crave his voice echoing in your head long after he’s gone asleep because you heard him talk to you all day long. 

You crave his lips on yours, his teeth on your neck, his hands on your body, even if you only had it once. You’ve craved it ever since.

You crave closing your eyes and pressing your forehead to his sternum, feeling safe and quiet and like you belong. You miss the sanctuary of that space, chest to chest with him, something sacred in the way it exists only for you.

You know you can’t have it - any of it. The daydream isn’t real. Your curse will be to crave it forever, alone.

When you arrive at the Shatterdome, it’s your parents who greet you just inside. For a moment, you’re happy to be back, overcome with emotion as you hug them tight. They’ve aged in these three years. You’ve missed them awfully. You only tell them the latter. 

They walk with you to the Marshall’s office, where you’re meant to report upon arrival. 

You hesitate, covering the moment by tugging your duffle’s strap higher on your shoulder. Your mother reads you anyway, reaching out and giving your shoulder a squeeze. 

“It will be okay,” she whispers. 

Your father catches on. “You’ve faced down worse,” he reasons. 

You disagree. There’s no monster in the sea bigger than your love for Seungcheol, no wounding possible that could hurt more than losing him has. But you appreciate the sentiment, so you give them each a grateful nod, tell them you’ll visit after dinner, and turn to knock on the door.

“Come in,” the Marshall’s voice carries through the door, and you turn the knob and step inside. 

All you see is Seungcheol; the Marshall, the office furniture, the flickering screens on the walls all snap into nonexistence in the presence of your former lover. He’s the only thing in the room that comes into focus. Everything else is just fuzzy noise.

His face wavers for a moment when your eyes meet his, the muscles rippling as he fights to get them under control. 

You don’t know what reaction he’s fighting. You don’t know if he’s feeling happiness or hatred. You don’t know if he’s fighting a smile or a scowl.

You give him a quick bow in greeting, and he returns it. His face is stone, now, his mouth tight and eyes flat. 

He turns to face the Marshall, to receive orders, so you do the same.

“I trust your travel went well?” the Marshall begins.

You nod, not trusting yourself to speak. Even the single syllable of yes will come out of your mouth like gravel and dirt and sand, getting everywhere, leaving a trail.

“Your orders,” he says then, a bit of a sigh on his tone - as if he knows the uphill battle this will be, “are to reconnect as best you can. You’ll follow your old schedule. You’ll spar, you’ll meditate, and you’ll talk. After some time, we’ll try the drift again, see if the connection has recovered any.”

Seungcheol’s voice startles you when he speaks. “How long do you imagine it will be before we try?” he asks, just cold enough to have a sliver of sarcasm in it. 

The Marshall’s eyes narrow, just slightly, as if he’d caught it. “That’s entirely up to you two,” he says evenly. “When you were young and hungry to fight, you trained yourselves into exhaustion. You spent every waking second trying to cultivate the bond that would carry you into your jaeger. With the same intention and drive, I imagine you could be piloting Duellona within the week.”

You fight to keep your chin up, your eyes on the Marshall, instead of ducking your head and watching the floor. The Marshall lifts his arm and glances at his watch. 

“Your allotted time in Sparring Room 7 begins on the hour,” he says. This is his way of dismissing you.

In the hallway, you pause. “I’m just going to drop my bag in the dorm,” you say quietly, not looking at Seungcheol. 

He gives a tight nod. “Fine,” he says, and turns to go the other way, towards the sparring and training rooms. Clearly he intends to meet you there. You heave a deep breath, and turn back towards the wing with the dorms.

Stepping into the dorm you used to share with Seungcheol hits you harder than you thought it would. You’re not sure what you expected - to feel like coming home, maybe, or perhaps to be slapped with the memories of you and Seungcheol together, dancing around each other as you hurried to get dressed for a drop, lazing around in the sitting area after a full day of training. And, of course, the single night you’d spent together.

Neither thing happens. You aren’t overcome by a feeling of nostalgia and love, nor are you inundated by memories of what you’ve lost. Instead, the room feels exactly as it is: empty and still.

Your footsteps’ echoes taunt you as you walk through the kitchen, the sitting area, and into the bedroom. It’s pristine to the point of detriment; it feels like no one lives there. You set your bag on the floor near the foot of the bed - you can unpack later, after training - and turn to go.

Strangely, it’s stepping into the training room that slams you with memory and nostalgia. The wood cool beneath your feet, the vague smell of sweat and citrus-y cleaner, the sounds of punches landing and grunts of effort from the training rooms on either side - they all cocoon you in history, making goosebumps rise on your arms as the emotions surround you.

It makes sense, you think, as Seungcheol glances over his shoulder at the sound of your arrival. He doesn’t speak to you, just swaggers to the center of the room and takes a stance you recognize from Form One. Your body leads you opposite him, muscle memory guiding you into the first form you ever learned with him. It makes sense that this would be what felt like home - your minds going empty together, your bodies following the steps in unison. The sparring forms are the closest you can get to drifting without an actual neural connection.

Well, that and sleeping together, but you don’t see that on your agenda.

You stare at him across the invisible circle between you and try to read him. His face is cold and empty, but that already tells you so much about what he’s feeling. Seungcheol was never cold with you. When you fought together he slipped into that mode you loved so much - ready to level anything, chin lifted, eyes narrowed, confident and so very strong. But it was when you were together outside the fights that you had loved him best - often pouting, lips protruding, voice lifting into a whine. And the best of all - that smile, dimples creating shadows that beg for your thumb to press them, eyes squeezing shut with happiness or laughter.

Something must show on your face, because you watch the muscles in Seungcheol’s upper body untense, as if he’d been ready to fight and recognized that you weren’t.

“I’m good,” you mutter quickly, before he can ask. It feels better to lie to him before he actually asks you, like that’s somehow less dishonest. “Let’s go.”

Form One is basic - no hits, no fancy moves. At the training center, you’d teach it to the littlest ones until they had it memorized. It was really about control and communication - precision and alignment with your partner. You had to breathe together as your feet traced opposite circles across the knots in the wooden floor. You had to rise and bend in unison. It was about watching and listening.

You and Seungcheol could - literally, you’d tried more than once - do it blindfolded in perfect step with one another. Before. You don’t know if you still can. But, now, unblindfolded, it’s too easy.

You move through forms one through six without incident - both of you flowing as easily as water.

Form Seven is the first form that incorporates actual hits and blocks. You’ll have to touch for the first time, even if it’s forearm to forearm or ankle to shoulder. You move right as he moves left, crouch and circle as his right foot flies over your head, stand and punch where you know his open hand will be waiting to stop you.

It is, and you press your fist against it for just a second before spinning away to continue the form. You ache, even as your body continues following the steps, to have him entirely again - to meet his eyes and smile the way you both used to, because you were pleased with what your bodies could do. Because you had each other, completely.

After the tenth form, you bow, turn, and walk out of the ring. You drink some water, your back to him. Years ago you’d have used this break to chat, but you don’t know what to say to him. You’re scared that he’ll shut down anything you say, whether you choose small talk or go straight for the heart of the problem, and you honestly don’t think you can shoulder his rejection right now. So you stay quiet.

After a few short minutes of rest, you return to the center of the room. This is when you’ll spar for real.

You and Seungcheol had done this for years before things went wrong. You’d long ago adjusted to how hard you should hit, how to dodge his moves, how to make this a dance as much as a fight. Now, you feel like it’s your first time again.

Seungcheol attacks as you’d expect - all offensive, pushy, succeeding in herding you backwards even as you dodge each blow. You know his goal is to flip you, and normally you can avoid that by forcing him to go on the defensive as he avoids your own hits. Simply dodging won’t be enough - eventually he’ll cage you in unless you distract him.

You throw yourself into a summersault and manage to get behind him - an opportune moment to strike. You shift your weight to follow the blow as you twist your hips to send a kick towards his unprotected head. He turns just too late - the blow will land.

You can’t do it. You freeze, your core working to keep you upright as you fight your own momentum, halting the kick inches from his temple.

You know immediately that pulling the hit was a mistake. His eyes narrow, and he sweeps his foot at the ankle you’re balancing on. You crash to the ground, heaving a breath and taking quick inventory.

You aren’t hurt. Not this time.

“Get up, Cherry,” he says darkly, moving back to the center to start again. “And don’t do that shit again.”

He comes at you full force in the next match, too. You dodge and weave, but you don’t try to strike. You know he knows it; this isn’t how it used to work. You can almost feel him get angrier as you fight, but you can’t make yourself hit back. You want him to knock you down, you deserve to take some shots.

You take two blows to the back and one to a shoulder; you fall back unsteadily but manage to find your footing and roll away from his next kick.

The match continues - you taking a handful of blows, though none with the force to level you, and Seungcheol with his lip curled in fury.

“If you’re not going to fight, then leave,” he spits.

“Would if I could,” you retort without thinking. You mean that you don’t want to be here like this - not talking, cold, at odds. But you know it reads as not wanting to be here at all.

It seems like everything you say and do only hurts him more.

“I didn’t mean -” you start, and Seungcheol takes your arms and flips you over his shoulders.

“Don’t waste my fucking time,” he says, brushing his hands together and stepping back to give you room to pick yourself up.

“Don’t curse at me,” you answer, pushing yourself to your hands and knees, pausing to catch your breath before rising fully again.

He shakes his head, rolls his eyes a little.

You hate this side of him.

You know you deserve it. For pushing him out. For leaving him here. For loving him, messing everything up, when he never asked for that.

“Seungcheol,” you say, but he ignores you, pacing a few steps and then turning to face you, lowering himself into a defensive stance, ready to spar again.

“Cheol,” you try again. “Listen to me.”

“Marshall scheduled us time to talk later,” he says flatly. “Right now we’re scheduled to fight. So fight me, Cherry. Let’s go.”

The rest of the hour continues the same. By the time it’s over, Seungcheol storms out without speaking to you, furious over every single pulled punch.

You don’t know what to do to make it all better.

You shower quickly, dressing in dry linens, and then re-emerge for the hours you’re scheduled to meditate together. You hope that maybe this will help the situation - maybe not talking will be good for you, give you a chance to feel your connection without the chance to fuck it up with words.

You’re wrong; trying to meditate together is just as desperately fruitless as sparring had been.

You can’t focus at all - can’t shift your attention to your breath, to your body, to the earth beneath you, to the energy of your partner.

Your partner is the distraction, though he sits perfectly still, eyes closed. He might as well be yelling. His shoulders are tight, his jaw still clenched. Anger radiates off him so strongly that it makes your stomach hurt, makes you want to cower from it. You can’t stop watching him, hoping you’ll see him relax, hoping you’ll see the moment that he lets go.

He doesn’t.

“Your eyes are supposed to be closed,” he murmurs, and you feel your face heat, embarrassed that he knew you were watching him.

“I can’t,” you admit. Maybe, you think, you should just be brutally honest, starting now. It’s not like you could make this worse. “I can’t stop noticing how angry -”

“Then stop pissing me off,” he snaps, eyes opening. “Just a suggestion.”

“Don’t talk to me like that!” you cry, and push yourself to stand. You’re not sure why - maybe just to pace. “You never used to talk to me like this. Who are you?”

He looks at the floor, the first sign of guilt you’ve seen since you came home.

“Fine,” he finally bites back, and you know it’s as close to sorry as you’ll get. “I’ll reign it in. Sit back down.”

You shift your weight, arms crossed defensively across your chest, and close your eyes, deciding.

“Sit down, Cherry,” he repeats, and it’s gentler now. That’s what makes you cave, and you settle back across from him.

He’s less tense this time, so you eventually manage to close your eyes and count your breaths. But you’re still feeling for him, reaching for him in your mind, and coming up with nothing between you fingers. Touching him is as possible as touching the fog that used to blanket the training center, thick enough to blind you but impossible to grasp.

The pain feels like a cramp, except it’s behind your ribs instead of in your muscles. The pain grips and tightens, takes over. You want him, you want to be his again, you want to be inside these walls - where you used to fit comfortably. The fact that you’re out here, without him, aches so badly it makes you nauseated.

You want to beg him - let me in again, let me back in, let me be close to you again.

It won’t do any good, and you know it.

He was yours - you had him, you knew him, you could reach out to him and he’d pick you up. You’d taken it for granted, and you’d run away from it. You’d chosen to let it go, and now all you get is this: Seungcheol, cold and closed. Seungcheol, hating you for everything that happened.

—

Dinner is just as bad.

You go to the mess hall eager to see Wylie and Jeonghan and Seungkwan and all the other friends you haven’t seen in years. Wylie screeches like a banshee when she spots you, crossing the mess hall in a blur and hugging you so tightly that you both stagger, off balance, until Seungkwan joins the hug and rights you again.

“I missed you both so much,” you whisper, the only vulnerability anyone’s going to get out of you today.

“Then don’t leave again!” Wylie snaps, but you know the admonishment is full of love.

“I can’t promise,” you admit. Honestly, you’ve already made up your mind - you want to go back to Alaska. You’re not wanted here, not by the person who matters. What good are you, taking up a bed, if you can’t drift?

You’ve already given up hope that he’ll come around.

Seated at the table, you listen while your friends fill you in on what you’ve missed in three years - the fights in the bay, the new teams of pilots, the illnesses and injuries. You almost don’t notice Seungcheol silently takes a seat on Jeonghan’s other side, but something in you prickles, like you’ve sensed him.

The tension around the table heightens; the conversation goes a little stilted. When it’s apparent that he’s going to ignore you two seats down from him, Wylie slaps her hand flat on the tabletop.

“Come on, Seungcheol,” she scolds, and you’re sure no one wonders what she means.

His face goes dark so quickly it’s alarming. “Don’t,” he tells her darkly, one finger coming up to point at her in warning.

Her own eyes narrow and dart to her fork. Beside her, Chan’s eyes pingpong between them. He’s probably wondering if he should hold her back or join her.

“It’s fine,” you mutter, grabbing your tray and making to rise. “I’ll go.”

“Cherry, no,” Wylie protests, and then turns a glower onto your ex-co-pilot as if to say see what you did?

“It’s fine,” you repeat, standing. “I told my mom and dad I’d come by.”

You slink out before anyone else can argue.

You can’t even be mad at him - you did this by pushing him away. You hammered every last nail in the coffin by requesting to transfer. You pushed him out and you left him behind and now you have to face the reality that you can’t have him anymore. He isn’t yours, not anymore.

When you return to your dorm, he’s already in bed, the lights out. He’s facing the wall so you can only see his back, can only see the angry, tight shoulder poking out the top of the sheets. It tells you everything you need to know.

You don’t try to talk to him. You just go to bed.

—

You spend four days identically - fighting while sparring, not meditating, and avoiding Seungcheol’s ice-out. On the fifth day, your Marshall loses patience and changes your schedule. Your entire day is blocked to working on Duellona’s mainframe - buffing, repainting, greasing, and anything else you’re able to handle on your own.

“Since you can’t do anything else useful,” he adds, and you avoid Seungcheol’s eyes, ashamed.

Standing under Duellona’s unlit frame fills you with guilt. It feels like you’re letting her down, disappointing her by letting her rust here, failing your half of the bargain. You run your hands gently over the metal, finding the rough spots that need attention. Somewhere to your left, you can hear the telltale sounds of Seungcheol tightening bolts.

You work in silence for hours.

Eventually, you crack. You’re not sure if it’s the monotony of the task, the tension woven into the silence between you too, or being so close to your jaeger but unable to fight in it - maybe a combination. Something pushes at you from the inside, like a balloon trying to inflate under your skin and running out of room.

You flop backwards on the metal walkway, the grooves digging into your back. “What are we doing?” you ask, and you hear the tool Seungcheol had been using cling loudly as he sets it down.

“Following orders?” he says, stepping around Duellona’s side to look at you. “Fixing up the jaeger?”

“Fixing up the jaeger we don’t get to pilot?” you ask, sitting back up to look at him better.

“Is that what you’re here for?” he asks, the sudden ferocity of it surprising you. “To fight? Is that why you came back?”

You reach up to the walkway’s railing and pull yourself up. You feel yourself frowning at his question, at the heat behind it. 

“I’m back because the Marshall gave me an order,” you say slowly. 

“And that’s it?” he demands. 

You stare at him. You feel sure there’s more to the question, more that he’s asking. You feel sure, after knowing Choi Seungcheol down to the last molecule, that he’s really asking, you didn’t come back for me?

And it confuses you. You try to think about your split from his perspective: you’d shut him out, then slept with him, and then vanished. You’d made a lot of assumptions about his anger since then. You assumed he was angry at you for pushing him out of your head. You assumed he was angry at you for sleeping with him and then leaving. You assumed he was angry with you for ruining your drift, for ripping him away from the ability to fight. You assumed he was angry because he never knew why - never knew what it was that you were so desperate to hide, never knew why sleeping together had made things so much worse that the neural connection had fizzled into nothing altogether.

Is there more to it, his anger?

Should you call him on it, should you ask?

You take too long deciding. Seungcheol scoffs, like he’s disgusted with you. “I should have known,” he says coldly. “Princess of the Shatterdome, I should have known you only cared about piloting - about your legacy.”

This is something you’ve never said to him - that your desire to shine as brightly as your parents has weighed on you. This is something he’d pulled from the drift, something he only knew from tiptoeing around your mind before a fight. 

“That isn’t fair,” you say, your voice hard. “Is there another reason I should have come back? I’d love to hear it.”

He hears the challenge as it is - you didn’t ask me to come back, the Marshall did. You let me go.

He has nothing to say for himself, just stares back at you, eyes narrowed in anger, chest moving too quickly as he battles with his temper.

“Exactly,” you say curtly. The victory stings. It doesn’t feel like a win at all. “The bottom line is I’m here now, and we can pilot again if we can get our shit together.”

He shakes his head. “You left,” he says finally. “That’s the bottom line. You decided you were out, you decided you didn’t want me in your head, and then you left.”

He watches you, waits for you to say something. When you don’t, he lets out a derisive little laugh. “We’re both wasting our time here. The drift won’t work. We aren’t going to fix it.”

For the first time, fear slices through you like steel. “You can’t know that,” you say. You hear the fear in the way your voice comes out low and rounded, barely sounding like you at all.

“I can,” he retorts. “You know how I know? Because I don’t want to. You wanted me out of your head so badly? You got it. Can’t turn back now.”

He heads for the ladder, swings around and finds the third rung down with ease.

“So that’s it?” you ask his retreating form. Your heart is hammering and you’re starting to get tunnel vision. 

The only answer he gives you are his feet hitting each new rung with a clunk and a vibration that rattles up your legs.

—

You go to the training rooms alone and run through the forms just to do something; your mind turns the problem over and over as your body goes through the motions. After, you take a longer shower than normal, letting the water run hotter than you normally would.

After, you go to the Marshall’s office, determined. Or maybe resigned.

When he opens the door, he already looks irritated, like he knew exactly who would be on the other side.

“Requesting an audience,” you say flatly, fighting the instinct to cross your arms defensively.

He glances at his watch. “Five minutes.”

You step inside but leave the door open.

“I’m requesting transfer back to Alakanuk,” you tell him as evenly as you can manage. You’re sure he’s not surprised. “Seungcheol has made it very clear that we won’t be fighting together again. If that’s the case, then I can’t do anything useful here. But in Alakanuk I can.”

You pause, looking to see if you can read anything on the Marshall’s face - any hint that he’s considering what you’re saying, or that it’s a lost cause. He gives you nothing.

“Please,” you say. “Those girls need me. If I can’t help here, I can help them.”

The Marshall tilts his head just slightly. “Surely anyone can teach little girls the forms.”

You shake your head. “It’s more than that, and you know it. It’s not about the forms. I love those girls. I came back here to follow orders, and I tried. But if it isn’t going to happen… Please, don’t make me waste time here if I can be with them instead.”

The silence when you stop speaking seems to last for hours. Your heart pounds, and you work on keeping your breathing even. If he tells you no, you might just lose it, just give up entirely.

Finally, he takes a breath and seems to consider you. “If,” he says, and your eyes widen with hope, “your co-pilot agrees, then I will reassign you back to Alaska. But only if he will agree.”

“No problem,” you say quickly. Seungcheol was the one who said it was over. He should have no problem letting you leave.

When you step out of the Marshall’s office, Seungcheol steps out of the shadows. You should be surprised to see him, but in the Shatterdome it feels right that he just is wherever you are. That’s always how it was, before.

You look at him disdainfully. “I assume you heard that conversation?”

He nods, once.

“So?” you ask. “Will you tell him you approve, so I can go?”

For the first time since you returned, Seungcheol smiles, tight and sarcastic.

“No,” he says easily, like it’s kind of funny.

Fury erupts inside you; you can’t even pinpoint where in your body it stems from. “Why?” you demand. “Because you feel like I took something from you, so you want to take something from me?”

He doesn’t respond to this. You know you’re right. You know him. You know his mind.

“I hate to fuck up your narrative,” you spit at him, “but I’ve lost out here just as much as you have. You’re not the only one who lost the ability to fight. You’re not the only one who lost their partner.”

You wish you could tell him the rest - you’re not the one who spent three years with a broken heart on top of it. He had lost you as a partner and a friend - you had lost him in the same ways, and you’d had to harbor your broken heart.

He shakes his head. “Poor baby,” he bites sarcastically, and then takes off down the hallway, into the dark.

—

You stop sleeping at the dorm. Sometimes you sleep at your parents’, sometimes on Wylie and Chan’s tiny couch, sometimes in bed with Seungkwan, who kicks at you and whines that you take up too much space. Sometimes you sleep inside Duellona Fury, sitting up, your back against her metal frame.

The Marshall seems to have taken some pity on you. He schedules your mornings training the Dome’s recruits, and lets Seungcheol get back to what he was doing in your absence - which seems to be on track to move up in rank, to maybe become a Marshall himself, someday. It isn’t quite the same as being back with your girls, but training recruits feels at least somewhat fulfilling. And it keeps you and Seungcheol busy - separately - until afternoon.

Then, he schedules you to spar.

In your first week, you’d been unwilling to hit Seungcheol. You’d been feeling guilty for hurting him, sad for your time apart, hopeful that if you were soft to him, then he’d be soft back to you.

Now, you’re fucking furious.

For the first time, when the match begins, you hit him first. He’s surprised for only a second, eyebrows shooting up as he stumbles for balance, and then you watch something delighted and devilish fall over his face. Like he knows exactly what dance this is, and he’s been learning the steps in secret.

The match is brutal, reminiscent of your very first one, when you were both nineteen. You throw hit after hit his way; he blocks or dodges all of them. But he can’t get a hit on you either - you’re too quick, spurred on by fury. You’ve been angry in a fight before. But you’ve never been angry at him.

You spin and throw up a kick, expecting his forearm to rise and block it. Instead, you knock him in the jaw.

He grunts, hand flying up to cover his mouth, and you drop your stance with a gasp.

“Shit!” you cry, hurrying closer. “I’m so sorry! Are you bleeding? Let me look.”

“‘M fine,” he mutters thickly from behind his hand, but you ignore him. For a second, things are how they used to be between you. He lets you peel his hand away, lets you gingerly turn his head this way and that, even opens up so you can check his teeth.

“You’re gonna have a fat lip,” you tell him regretfully. “But nothing’s bleeding. Teeth look okay. Anything loose in there?”

He pokes around his teeth with his pinky. “Nope.”

You take a step back, cowed. “I’m really sorry.”

He laughs a little, wryly. “I bet you feel better, though.”

You bite back a smile. “Actually…” you say, and he laughs again. You both do.

Somehow, this seems to be the thing that cracks the anger you’ve both been encased in, unable to move forward or backward. You feel melted, and you wonder if he feels freer now, too.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” you say. You mean the kick, but the words land heavy.

He avoids your gaze. “I need some water,” he says, turning and heading to the side of the room.

You do the same, sitting heavily on the bench where your water waits for you.

“Hey,” he says, and you look over, brows raised in anticipation. “Tell me about Alaska.”

You can’t help but smile.

“It’s so beautiful,” you tell him. “God, Cheol, the ocean there. And the birds, and the snow…”

He’s watching you, listening, but while he listens he stands and heads to the center of the ring, settling into a starting form. With a small smile, you follow, standing opposite him. He starts an easy match that’s mostly just following the eighth form. It includes some hits and blocks, but you both do them gently, easily, circling each other slowly.

“So you liked it?” he asks. You can hear how hard he’s working to make it sound casual.

“It was so beautiful,” you admit before ducking below a kick. “But it was also… really hard.”

“What was the best part?” he asks.

You smile, block a hit. He almost gets his hands on you for a flip, but you dodge around behind him. He turns to follow you. “Weirdly, it was taking care of them outside of class. We - the instructors - we kind of their moms, away from home, you know? I’m the one who knew Yejin won’t sleep unless someone sits by her bed for a while. I’m the one that knew that Farrah and Salome only argue because they’re competitive. I’m the one that knew that Maria and Anjali don’t know their times-tables, that Ximena can’t brush her own hair, or that Iseul is allergic to fish. I loved them. I loved knowing them.”

He looks at you for a long time. “Maybe you should go back,” he says finally.

It feels like a trap. 

You look at the floor, at the wall, then finally back at him. “If you’ll do this for real,” you say carefully, “then I’d rather be here. If we’re actually trying, then I don’t want to go.”

He’s quiet for a long time. Finally, he swallows hard, not looking at you.

“What was the worst part?”

There’s only one answer.

“Missing you,” you say. “Losing you.”

He manages to get both of your arms and hauls you over his shoulders. You land on your back so hard that the air is knocked out of your lungs and your eyes close protectively. For a second, you lay there panting, waiting for the pain in your back to settle down, waiting for the stars behind your eyelids to calm.

When you open them again, the ceiling coming into focus above you, the room is empty.

–

You have a hunch on where you can find him, and you head to the jaeger bay. Sure enough, he’s sitting below Duellona, knees to his chest, staring up at her.

You sit next to him and he doesn’t get up and leave, which you take as a good sign.

“I can’t do this if you’re not all in,” he tells you without looking at you. “You walked away from me once. I can’t let you back in my head if there’s any possibility you’ll walk away again. If you’re with me, I need you to be with me.”

Something prickles in the back of your head. You feel like you’re starting to realize something - the seed of an understanding is pushing delicately through the dirt, but hasn’t yet spread out its leaves under the warmth of the sun yet.

Something about his hurt. Something about why.

“I think we should try to drift,” you tell him.

This seems to startle him - he forgets to be cold, turns to look at you, eyebrows raised in surprise.

“I can tell you how much I missed you,” you reason, “and tell you about how I spent every minute just… steeped in regret. Or we can walk through it - you can see for yourself.”

You know what you’re risking. If he gets into your head now, he’ll see it all - he’ll know everything, he’ll be able to feel for himself the depth of your loss, the height of your love. 

But what’s the harm, now? You can’t lose him twice. Maybe it’ll be enough for him to realize you hadn’t left him because you didn’t care about him. Maybe it’ll be enough for his forgiveness. 

Maybe then, he’ll tell the Marshall to let you go back to Alakanuk. 

It’s Seungkwan you bother, since he’d been in mission control before finding his team of co-pilots. The sideways look he gives you as he walks to your conn pod is withering, but you know better than to take it personally.

You buzz with nerves. The last time you’d tried this, the neural handshake hadn’t even connected. There had just been nothing.

The second you hear neural handshake initiating, you almost sob with relief. You can’t even pay attention to the memories - Seungcheol’s memories - floating around you; you want to collapse, to press your palms to the ground and thank the universe for letting you back in.

His first memories are a breeze - the ones you’ve jogged through together hundreds of times: his first home, his school, his father’s hospital room, the Dome. Then you slow your pace, because this is new.

You’re facing the landing dock on the Shatterdome’s roof. Seungcheol stands with his back to you, watching through the glass walls as a helicopter waits, the pilot talking into his headset.

You watch yourself walk towards the chopper’s open door. You watch yourself leave, remember how hard it was to not look back.

You hadn’t known that Seungcheol had been there, that he had seen you go.

The pain that accompanies the memory hits you like you’re drowning, like it’s too deep and you can’t feel the bottom, and you feel the machinery falter around you.

“Hey,” you say quietly. “I’m with you.”

He nods, still doesn’t look at you. But the beeping stops, the connection holding. 

There’s knowledge in this memory, knowledge in this pain. Seungcheol’s thoughts in this moment read in your head as clearly as if he said them aloud - I did this. I pushed her too far; I made her run.

You can’t stay here, can’t let him wallow in the memory of pain. You had to move forward - that’s how the drift works. Reluctantly you step towards the door, glancing over your shoulder to see if he’s following. 

He is. His jaw is tight and fists are clenched, but he is.

When the next memory - not in order of chronology, clearly - appears before you, you want to vanish into the floor. You’re watching yourselves in Seungcheol’s bed. Thankfully, you’re sleeping - this was after. But in the memory, Seungcheol is awake, laying on his side, his eyes drinking in your sleeping form.

The emotions and the knowledge come with it in an instant. The tenderness and the love he felt in that moment surround you now in the memory, unignorable, impossible to mistake. 

He had loved you. He had known you loved him, and he was showing you how he felt. The understanding slams you so hard that you think you stop breathing.

“Seungcheol,” you whisper. Around you, the scene begins to flicker, the connection starting to react to the oversaturation of emotion.

“We can talk about it after,” he says, voice hard. “Don’t stay in it. Find the next door.”

Your eyes find the door, but you feel frozen. You want the connection to drop, you want to unlock yourself from the stupid drive-suit and throw yourself into his arms, you want to apologize for leaving him thinking he’d pushed you away, thinking that he scared you into running.

“Cherry,” he warns. “The drift can’t -”

You know. 

And you owe him your side of the story.

You take a steeling breath and head for the door. You don’t take his hand. You don’t know if you deserve to, if he’d want you to.

When you step through the doors, you’re confused - you’re still in your dorm. Your bodies are both in the bed.

Now, though, Seungcheol sleeps, and you - the memory of you - sits on the edge of the bed, your head in your hands. 

You feel the emotion the memory holds, which means Seungcheol does, too.

Fear. It’s still fear - fear that he’ll know, fear that what you just did together will make it worse, make it harder to hide. 

Beside you, Seungcheol’s eyes go wide. 

“We have to move on,” you tell him. He looks at you, then back at the memory. 

“You -?” he starts to ask.

“After,” you tell him firmly. “We’ll talk after.”

You open the door, and you’re suddenly outside, surrounded by white.

Alaska.

The emotion knocks you over with the fury of an ocean wave - even though you know you’re not supposed to let it. This was how you had felt every day that you were gone, and it screams at you now, determined to be heart, determined to be felt. The loneliness, the regret, the despair and heartbreak all rise up in you, overtaking you, as snow falls gently and silently around you.

And the love. That never went away. That never mellowed, as the Marshall had put it.

If he didn’t know before, he has to know now. There’s no way he couldn’t.

Seungcheol squeezes your hand, and you almost jump. You look down at your linked fingers in shock, then up at him, eyes wide.

“We should go back and talk about this,” he tells you, but his grip on you is firm, assuring.

“Okay. It’s this way,” you tell him, trying to breathe, and you lead him by the hand through the snow. The fog strengthens as you walk, until you can’t see anything but grey, can’t see anything but Seungcheol’s hand in yours.

You continue on. You know where to go. When you step through, the fog vanishes as if it was never there, nothing gradual about it. With the fog gone, you can see clearly where you are - inside Duellona Fury’s conn-pod.

As you begin to work on the straps, you call through the intercom, “Kwan? We… need some privacy. We’ve got to talk - alone.”

His voice crackles back at you. “Yes, I’m leaving, I’m already gone. If you hear popcorn crunching, no you don’t.”

Seungcheol gives you a flat look. “Let’s go home and talk,” he suggests.

Home.

You are so afraid and so hopeful. You don’t know how to juggle both.

Back in your small living space, you sit like you’re meditating.

“Let’s figure this out,” he says. “No lies.”

“No lies,” you agree. Your knees touch, and you reach to take his hands. He lets you, giving your fingers a squeeze.

“You knew,” you say first, bordering on accusation. “I was trying so hard to hide how I felt about you… but you knew.”

He nods, his eyes on you. “And you,” he says slowly, “didn’t… know? That I knew?”

You shake your head, confirming. “I didn’t know. I thought I hid it.”

He smiles at you, a little placating. “Not as well as you would have liked.”

“And you…” You chicken out, swallow, force yourself to be brave. “You… loved me, too?”

He nods. “I did.” 

The air leaves your lungs so forcefully that you bend over, pressing your forehead to the tops of your hands. He pulls his hands from yours and you feel his touch, firm and reassuring, cupping your shoulders and rubbing his thumbs along them.

“We felt the same,” you echo into your shins. “You loved me.”

“Cherry,” he says above you, his voice like a plea. “I don’t understand why - when we… when I… I felt like once I forced you to look at it, it was too much. You ran.”

You sit with this for a minute, stunned and processing. His hands are back in yours, which you take as a good sign. 

“You thought… wait. You thought, after that night, that I knew how you felt, too?”

He nods. “I thought you knew,” he says, confusion still present in his tone. “I thought we both knew. I thought if it was out in the open, the glitch in the drift would be fixed.”

You wipe at your face, trying to breathe. “And instead,” you realize, “we couldn’t even connect, because I was still trying to hide it from you, and then you were hurt. I thought it was broken. I thought we really broke it forever.”

He looks at you in wonder. “That’s why you left,” he breathes, and you know he’s understanding this for the first time. “You thought we made the problem worse.”

It’s your turn to nod. “After we…I mean, I knew if I couldn’t hide it from you before that night, there was no chance I’d be able to hide it after. I kept you out in the first place because I… was afraid. I was afraid for you to see how much I loved you. It seemed… hopeless to keep trying.”

The words lay bloody between you, but his grip on your hands is strong, and you take another breath.

You push on, adding, “I was afraid it would be too much. I was afraid everything would change.”

Which it did, you think. He nods, like he hears this, like he agrees.

He releases you and leans back, blowing out a loud breath. “We’re so fucking stupid,” he says, and you splutter out a laugh.

“We really are.”

“I can’t believe we lost three years over that,” he says.

“I can’t believe you thought it was your fault that I left.”

“I can’t believe you left in the first place.”

This makes you smile, guilty. “That’s fair.”

You push yourself to stand; Seungcheol mirrors you, as if you’re already in the neural handshake, bodies working in tandem. 

“Cherry,” he says quietly, stepping closer. “It could never be too much. I love you. I’m crazy about you. I’m only me when I’m with you.”

You remember him, the night you’d slept together, telling you, don’t be afraid. He’d told you, after all, and you’d missed it entirely.

You close the distance between your bodies and kiss him hard. His arms circle your waist immediately, like they were waiting for you. He kisses you back hungrily. His mouth meets yours eagerly, his tongue stroking yours confidently before he shifts his attention to your jaw, your neck, then your mouth again. His hands don’t wander this time - instead he holds you so firmly it almost hurts, like he won’t let you move an inch, won’t let you out of his grasp ever again.

You cradle his face between your hands, let your teeth gently scrape along his bottom lip. “Cheol,” you whisper, then kiss him again. “You’re everything.” It’s what you should have said aloud the night you’d slept with him.

When the kiss breaks, he presses his lips to the top of your head and holds them there, melting around you a little. You give his middle a squeeze, revel in his heartbeat surrounding you like music.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m sorry I didn’t just say it.”

“Me too,” you tell him, holding him just a little tighter. “I should never have tried to hide it from you in the first place.”

He kisses your temple, and you hold each other, silently, each grappling with the time you’d wasted apart. 

You’re interrupted by a knock. You break apart, puzzled. You’re even more puzzled to see your Marshall at the door, and Seungkwan literally bouncing on the balls of his feet in excitement.

“I’ve heard your drift is working again,” the Marshall says dryly. 

You look over your shoulder at Seungcheol, grinning. “Seems like it.”

“There’s a Cat-1 reading in the bay. I was about to alarm for Pretty Savage to drop, but Savage’s team insisted I give you the opportunity first. They can follow as backup. How do you feel?”

Seungcheol is at your side. He looks at you, his face open and raw. “Well?” he asks you. “Are you in, or are you out?”

“I’m in,” you tell him seriously. “I’m with you.”

You thrum with excitement as a tech team helps strap you into the drive-suits, and you can’t help but shoot Seungcheol a wild grin, your happiness alive and unbounded. 

You tell mission control - Nainsi, probably, just like the old days - “Ready and aligned.”

Mission Control - definitely Nainsi - responds, “Prepare for neural handshake.”

The artificial voice bounces around you - 3… 2… 1… neural handshake initiating…

Around you, the machines flicker busily. Neural handshake strong and holding. Now calibrating…

You’re crying, but you ignore it. You beam through tears, looking sideways at your co-pilot. His eyes dance as he smiles back at you. You want to unstrap yourself to the drivesuit and go kiss his dimples, the dimples you hadn’t seen in years. You resist the urge.

“Ready to drop?”  He looks sideways at you, sly. 

You scoff at him, your own grin cocky and sure, like you’re twenty again, like nothing had ever been broken between you. “Been ready. Let’s light ‘em up.”

– end

thank you so much for reading!!!!

stay tuned for more fics in this universe! Wylie and Chan will get their own fic written by @sailorrhansol, as will Woozi! I'm also planning a Vernon x Reader in this universe, too! Should be a fun time!!

[a-b-riddle]

Not me imagining medic reader who acts weird around Ghost.

At first everyone thinks that you’re just weirded out. 6’4 wall of a man in a skull mask. His eyes covered in black makeup and eyes such a deep brown they’re almost black. Anyone in their right mind would be on edge.

But then as time progresses it doesn’t stop. You don’t ease up no matter how many times you’ve been around Ghost. Eventually the 141 begins to suspect something much more sinister.

Theories of knowing something about Ghost you shouldn’t. Are you working for Makarov and worried? Your eyes never leave him anytime he enters a room. Your voice wavering anytime he asks you a question. You’re not like that with the others. You’re hiding something. And they know it.

Johnny is the one you’ve gotten closest to in the 141. The one who wants to believe you’re not a traitor. You’re Birdie for Christ’s sake. Their bird, as they call you. You couldn’t be betraying them. He’s able to convince the guys to let him get you drunk. See if you slip up.

It’s a quiet night on base. Johnny had manage to get flavored vodka imported. Enticing you to come have a drink in his barracks.

And boy, do you.

You get too tipsy to notice how off Johnny seems. How his voice is softer, more alluring. You also down notice the phone face down on the table, serving as a live walkie-talkie between him and the others listening in Price’s office.

Johnny and you bullshit around. Talking about F1 racing, the need for more help in the medbay and even what your plans are when you get back home.

Eventually, he can’t take it anymore. He needs to know.

“What’s your deal with the Simon?” He finally asks. His question grants you pause, almost instantly sobering you up. Johnny sees it in your eyes. His heart breaking because he begins to believe he was wrong.

“Hen,” his hand grabs yours, when you don’t say anything. “I know something is going on.” You try and pull away but he doesn’t let go.

“Have-” you begin, trying to figure out how to tell him. Johnny is your friend. He wouldn’t care. But you fail to come up with the words. “Fuck.”

“Please.” He begs. “You know you can tell me.” You wait. Contemplating if you should tell him. But then it could mean losing any respect you had earned with them.

“You can’t judge me.” You made him promise, tears beginning to well in your eyes.

“I won’t.” He promises, offering a squeeze of reassurance. He knew that the moment you confessed to whatever it was you were hiding, the team would be in there. He knew what would happen to you. And although there were no romantic feelings he held toward you, he still cared.

You took a deep breath.

“It’s the mask.” You confessed. “It’s hot.” Now it was Johnny’s turn to pause.

The mask?

“What?” He asked in disbelief, pulling his hand off of yours. “What do you mean it’s hot?” “You’re worried that he’s sweating underneath it.”

“I want to fuck him.” It felt like a weight lifted the moment your confession of lust escaped your lips.

Johnny sat there, knowing his Captain, fellow Sergeant and, most importantly, his Lieutenant were listening on the other end of the phone.

“Simon.” he clarified. “Ye want to fuck Simon.”

“I mean if he keeps the mask on.” You shrug, looking at his bewildered expression. “It’s a kink, Johnny. Some people like feet or being led around on a dog leash.” You down the rest of the sweetened liquor, cringing as the last sip makes your stomach flip. “Men in masks do it for me. It’s a thing now. Lots of women like it.”

He doesn’t say anything. The room filled with uncomfortable silence until he breaks out in laughter.

“If you say anything, I will murder you and we both know I can make it look like an accident.” You threaten.

“Feckin’ hell.” He sighs, wiping tears from his eyes. “This isn’t how I expected the conversation to go.”

“Well,” you say standing, needing a moment to get your bearings. “It’s also over. I’m calling it a night.”

“I’ll walk ye back to yer room.” He says standing.

“No need.” You wave off. “I’m good.”

He knows you’re right. But now guilt eats away at him for even thinking you were a traitor. So he lets you go, listening to the sound of your footsteps fading as you walk down the empty corridor.

Several minutes later the others join him in his barracks. None of them saying something until, Johnny looks at Simon.

“Looks like the little Bird has a thing for you, Lt.”

Simon rolls his eyes.

Thankful that his mask is hiding his shit eating grin.

[ponderingmoonlight]

hi lovely ! you asked for kny requests and i've just finished my kny volume 22 re-read, so thats perfect timing 💙

I was wondering if you could write something with Yoriichi — (tw for potential child loss)

Maybe a hurt/comfort fic where his pregnant wife actually survives the demon attack while he's away (but maybe she gets quite badly injured and their unborn child doesn't make it, if you want to add a little extra angst to it. If not then that's totally fine, this man deserves a happy ending after all 🥺)

Of course, you're the writer — feel free to take any creative direction you'd like or ignore this request if you're not comfortable with it. Have a lovely day/night! <3

Again, I'm beyond sorry you were forced to wait for this so long! But here you go honey, let me know what you think <3

Yoriichi saving his pregnant wife and unborn child just in time

Pairing: Yoriichi x pregnant!wife!reader

Word Count: 4,2k

Synopsis: You never expected to face a demon ever again, especially not when you are about to deliver your child while your beloved husband Yoriichi is in search for a midwife. Will you and your child be alright? Will your husband make it back on time?

Warnings: injury, horror, child birth, tortue, description of death, extreme angst to fluff, last part is not proofread

Notes: Since the first Yoriichi fic I wrote, I'm so deeply in love with his character that I adore writing him so much! Since this fic took a while, I would totally appreciate your support through liking, commenting and reblogging this fic - thank's a lot babes <3

He can’t get enough from simply looking at you. You with your head in the clouds, you with your hand mindlessly roaming around the soft grass underneath, the other one caressing your heavy pregnant belly, you when you give him those surprised eyes as soon as you notice his presence.

“Oh, I wasn’t aware that you’re already here”, you say in a small panicky voice.

You didn’t expect your beloved husband back this soon. If you would have known that he’ll be here by know you would have cleaned the whole house, made him something to eat and-

“I can only imagine what is going on inside your head again.”

His soft but at the same time rough hand touches your cheek gently, the loving gleam in his fuchsia eyes making you blush in an instant. All the voices in your head stop right in their track when he’s around.

Yoriichi Tsugikuni. Your savior, your best friend. And most importantly, your husband and father of your future child.

“How are you feeling, love? Did you enjoy your afternoon?”, he questions, eyes wandering down your body to your swollen belly.

It was hard leaving you alone in a state like this, but he wasn’t able to resist the urgent call from last night. He might be nothing but another simple man holding a sword, but it is his responsibility to save those who are in need. What else is he able to give to this world?

His hand lands on your belly, feels the tiniest kick of his unborn child against the palm of his hand. At least he was able to create a smaller version of you. Is it a boy, a girl maybe?

“I hope our child is a reflection of you”, he finally mutters into the silence, a small but somehow sad smile forming itself on his lips.

You suddenly forget how to breathe, glossy eyes fixated on his captivating sight. Oh, oh much you hate the stinging fact that your husband thinks so negatively about himself. Why can’t he see all the heroic things he has done so far, how respected he is in the demon slayer corps? Why can’t he see that every inch of his body is flawless? Out of instinct, you let your head rest against his broad chest, breathe in his strong scent. If you could only stay like this here forever, his hand resting against your body while the sun tickles your skin-

A violent moan escapes your lips when a sharp pain runs through your stomach. A kick. A really rough kick, to be exact.

“Are you alright, love? Did something hurt you? Is it the baby?”, your husband asks feverishly, his usual neutral face garbled by worry lines on his forehead.

“Just a kick”, you press out, still fighting to regain your composure.

“I will search for a mid-wife, (y/n).”

His words make your eyes widen in an instant, a wave of fear crushing down on you. Is it really time already? You look down at your swollen belly, so big that you aren’t even able to sit down properly anymore. This has to be the ninth month of your pregnancy.

Your heart sinks. The ninth month. If the books you’ve read are accurate, it really is time.

“I can’t do this, Yoriichi.”

Thick panic runs through your veins, forces your heart almost out of your chest. You aren’t ready to deliver a child, let alone to be a mother. All the things you haven’t read yet, the things you’ve probably never heard of…What if you mess it up? Until you met Yoriichi, all you were able to do was trying to survive. Your mother never had the chance to tell you about those things, isn’t here anymore to stay by your side.

You are…on your own.

“Look at me, (y/n). I will go out and search for a mid-wife and I’ll be back at sunset, you hear me? Just stay inside the house and nothing will happen. I promise to return as early as possible.”

Fuchsia eyes that radiate through your soul immediately. An angelic voice that calms down your tingling nerves with only four sentences. Strong arms that lift you off the ground and lead you back into the warmth of your home.

But know, it’s not the wooden cabin that feels like home. Your eyes wander to the neutral expression he wears on his face, only betrayed by a worried glow in his orbs. It’s him, your beloved husband.

“Are you feeling alright, love?”

You take a deep breath in, a deep breath out. Eyes focused exclusively on him until your mind finally silences. It’s just you and him. You and your beloved husband, the man you would trust with your life without battling an eyelid, the man who made you the person you are today.

“I do”, you breathe out.

Your heartbeat tames down as well as the kicks of your unborn baby, Yoriichi’s hands keeping you from falling over.

“Promise me to lock the doors and wait in bed until I return, (y/n).”

A seriousness you only know from him when he is forced to leave at night veils his calm eyes.

“But…you will be back before the sun sinks, right?”

He gifts you a small smile, hand caressing your cheek so gently that you almost forget about the worry lines decorating his face. The truth is that the next midwife lives miles away. Even if he gets to the village as soon as possible, the sun will be about to set when he returns. Yoriichi can’t help but clench his other hand into a fist next to your stomach. The sheer thought of not making it in time, that you’ll be defenceless.

“Don’t worry, love. Rest your eyes and be assured that I’ll return as soon as possible.”

But he cannot allow himself to fail you, to leave you alone in those oh so merciless nights. He will return, no matter what it costs.

He presses a soft kiss against your forehead before grabbing his sword tightly.

This. This is his fate, his family. You are his whole life.

And he’ll do everything to protect you.

-later that evening-

You are exhausted. Over the last few hours, your body was haunted by waves of pain coming and going like the seasons. Again, you dig your nail into the wooden floor, your heavy breaths hanging in the thick air. You definitely don’t need a midwife to tell you it’s time. Yes, your baby is on its way.

And your husband didn’t return yet.

Your glossy eyes dart towards the window, witness how the sky outside turns bright red in the down-going sun. Is Yoriichi alright? You know how cruel life can be. Maybe he met a person who needed to be saved on his way, maybe the midwife is too old to rush to your side in time.

“Rest your eyes and be assured that I’ll return as soon as possible.”

Those words. Even though he’s not yet by your side, you are able to feel his powerful presence around you, how he calms down your aching heart.

“Everything will turn out alright”, you mutter to yourself while caressing your tummy.

“Everything will be alight…”

You allow your lids to rest, body relaxing for the first time since your husband left. You will get through this, you will deliver your wonderful child tonight. A tiny bundle of joy, an image of its father. Is it a boy, a girl? As long as your child is healthy, you couldn’t care less.

Carefully, you curl up on your futon, snuggle yourself into the blanket that still holds his scent. Maybe you’ll be able to catch a few hours of sleep until he finally comes back. Sleep sure does sound very appealing at the moment.

But just when your breath begins to steady, a violent scratch forces you to sit straight up. It came from outside, without a doubt. Is it an animal, is it…

Your throat gets tight immediately, glossy eyes staring at the closed window in sheer horror. The trees bend back and forth peacefully in what looks like a tender night. But that scratch, it sounded exactly like claws digging into hard wood, sent shivers down your spine immediately. You know that sound all too well, experienced what it means to get slaughtered by a demon before. Just before your whole family died violently, this was exactly what you’ve heard.

Out of instinct, you bury yourself into the corner of the room, the blanket that holds Yoriichi’s scent still pressed against your now shivering body tightly. Please, let it be nothing but a wild animal, let your husband come back home soon. Maybe this is nothing but a nightmare and you’ll wake up any given minute-

A violent pain runs through your body so suddenly that a shriek escapes your lips. Suddenly all air escapes your lungs, the way your belly cramps making you see start. No, you know exactly what this means, that this is not the right time to deliver a baby. Isn’t there anything you can do to stop this? You still need to wait for your husband, the midwife, for this gut-turning feeling to vanish. Your breath gets stuck in your throat, sharp and fast breaths hanging in the thick atmosphere.

But it doesn’t stop there. As if this wasn’t enough already, you can only stare at the door that gets opened painfully slow, claws digging into the wooden frame.

Without any doubt, this is a demon.

You press your sweaty palm against your mouth, force yourself to stop screaming, to stop breathing.

“I know you’re here, human. You smell like a…woman.”

It’s like all life is drained from the dead shell of your body, widened orbs staring at the frightful creature that makes its way into your home. Get up, fight, defend yourself like you saw Yoriichi do countless times, use the knowledge you gained from him.

But you don’t move an inch, don’t dare to look away. For a brief moment, time seems to stand still. Out of all the nights you’ve spent together with your husband, this is the first away from him, the first without his protection. Is all of this a dream, a hallucination to test your nerves?

The second the monster’s deadly red orbs meet yours, you get hit by reality. No, this isn’t a dream.

This will be your death.

“I knew you were here, lady. Let me help you up, okay?”

“N-no. Please d-don’t”, you whimper under your breath.

Your coward of a body doesn’t even fight back when he lifts you off the ground with ease, his nails digging into your soft flesh.

“Oh, you’re expecting a baby, don’t you? Well, does this count as a double kill, then?”

Your baby getting killed? If that thing ends your life, it means your unborn child will never experience dawn, will never get to see the face of its father, will never take in his scent. Your glossy eyes widen in sheer horror, tears now streaming down your face like waterfalls when a single frown form on your forehead.

You couldn’t care less about your own life. After all, you were lucky that Yoriichi saved you back then, didn’t even deserve to survive when your whole family had to die before you. But that oh so innocent child that might have the eyes of its father, the blessing of your life right after your husband. That innocent life cannot be taken.  

There is no way you will let this creature lay hands on it.

Your body reacts faster than your mind. With a surprisingly well-placed kick, you free yourself out of the monster’s casual grip. You need to get out of the house, out where you are able to find shelter, to run away. Your lungs feel like bursting any given minute, legs trembling underneath the weight of yourself and the unborn baby you still carry right under your heart. Even if it means you’ll die in vain, even if you won’t be able to see Yoriichi’s tender eyes ever again, you have to make sure your child is safe.

“I underestimated you, stupid woman. As it seems you didn’t give up on life yet”, the creature purrs what feels like right next to you.

A new nauseous wave of panic rises up your veins, makes you sprint even faster through the thick woods that surround your house. This has always been your favorite place to be. The calm trees waving back and forth in a soft breeze, your husband right by your side-

Your husband. Just the thought of never getting to see him again makes your heart ache. You didn’t even get the chance to thank him one last time, to let him know how much he truly means to you, that he’s way more than the man who saved your life back then.

He’s everything you ever wanted, everything you ever needed.

A sharp pain that radiates through your lower body sends you straight onto the ground immediately, figure cramping so violently that you can’t catch your breath. No, this is not the time labor, not when a demon is this close.

“Oh, there you are. Did you really think you can run away like that? You, a little human? You made me so man that I will kill you as painfully slow as possible.”

You try to lift your trembling figure off the ground, try to get back onto your feet, to sprint down the forest you know so well. But just when you’re about to get back onto your knees, a stinging pain in your right thigh paired with a contraction sends you straight back.

A violent scream escapes your lips.

Red. Everything around you is discoloured red. Is this your blood? Did this thing kill you already, are you going to die? Despite the way your guts start to turn when you follow the trail of blood, you can’t look away. And there it is indeed, a gaping hole in your leg, throbbing and bleeding.

All color that is left now drains from your face. With an injured leg, your chance to escape this demon’s claws is non-existent. Which means…

Your heart skips a beat, threatens to fail you any given second. What about your unborn child? A violent storm of anger and determination clouds your mind, makes all logical thoughts vanish into thin air.

“You can’t kill me”, you press out.

Since the day you first laid eyes on a demon, you accepted your own death. Your life is worthless anyway, compared to great warriors like your husband himself. But that oh so innocent child, that tiny life you were given to. You ball your hands into fists so tight your knuckles stand out white and lift your throbbing self off the ground. You cannot allow a demon to take the life of that unborn baby.

“I won’t allow you to touch me.”

You realize the stupidity of your words after they spill out of your mouth in rage. You, not allowing a demon to touch your puny figure? Another contraction makes your guts turn and vision almost go black.

As expected the frightful creature draws closer, its unpromising pair of razor-sharp teeth glittering in the dim moonlight. You never expected to see a demon this close again. Oh, how much you hoped you’d never find yourself in that situation again. But you have to get through this, have to make sure you will survive long enough for the mid wife to deliver your child to this world.

His child.

“I’m sorry Yoriichi. I never planned on leaving you alone like this”, you mumble to yourself, shaky lips tinted in salty tears.

“But this all I’m able to do.”

-Yoriichi’s POV-

Something seems off. Is it the way the trees bent back and forth in the soft breeze of the already set sun? Is it that distant smell that hangs in the air, the one that reminds him of fresh blood and lavender?

“We must make haste. I can sense that danger is ahead of us”, he speaks out with firm voice.

He promised you that he’ll be back before the sun goes down, that he will make it on time before demon are able to roam around freely. Are you feeling alright? Is the pain unbearable at this point? Do you still hold trust for him in your heart? His footsteps pick up instinctively, eyes set on the visibly stressed man behind him. In contrary to most people, Yoriichi doesn’t fear the night or the demons it brings. The only thing he fears at the moment is what you have to endure without your husband by your side.

With every he takes forward, the stinging smell of blood mixed with lavender becomes more urgent in his nose.

Lavender.

He always wondered how you did it. Even after washing, all your clothes kept that calming scent that surrounded you as if you were standing in a lavender bush. A smell so sweet that it caught his interest back then before he caught a glimpse of your fascinating orbs, a smell that always reminds him of home. Yoriichi’s home will always be where you are, where the sensation of lavender is the strongest.

Lavender, the stinging smell of blood that hangs in the air. His eyes widen when his mind starts to race. The smell, it radiates from the direction of your shared home, from the direction that usually fills him with excitement. Can it be…?

His heart starts racing uncontrollably while he dashes forward and draws his sword. Let it be nothing but coincidence, a cruel joke his thoughts play on him. But the stinging fragrance of lavender mixed with iron fills his heart with dread, makes his mind go numb. What if you got attacked by a demon, what if you are in great danger? All because he didn’t live up to his promise, because he didn’t make it on time. His eyes roam around the dark area, desperately searching for a sign.

And then his eyes find you.

Yoriichi’s heart stops.

There you lay, leaning against a nearby tree with a puddle of blood surrounding you, widened eyes starring straight into the face of a demon who hollers above you.

“No one is coming to save you, stupid girl.”

He doesn’t waste another second. With a swift motion of his sharp blade, Yoriichi beheads the demon on top of you while a toe-curling scream escapes your lips. Just one look at your sliced-up kimono reveals countless injuries, especially a gaping hole in your thigh. You hold onto your swollen belly for what looks like dear life, eyes still widened in nothing but shock.

“(y/n)”, he gently speaks out while letting himself fall down next to you.

You have to blink a few times. The demon, it was just about to dig its sharp teeth into your sensitive skin, to take the life of your unborn child in front of your eyes.

Maroon.

But those aren’t the deadly red orbs. No, those oh so gorgeous eyes look so familiar that your heart tames down in an instant. Could it really be, is it possible that it’s…him?

“Yoriichi.”

You breathe his name into the night like a prayer.

Maybe this is nothing but an illusion, a cruel trick your own brain plays on you.

“Words can’t express how sorry I am for arriving too late. I will never forgive myself for leaving you alone this long, for causing this to happen”, his oh so familiar voice blurts out.

Yoriichi’s usual so composed face twists in sheer agony, eyes filling with salty tears. All of this is his fault. He should have arrived sooner, he should have made hurry, he-

“We didn’t come this far to worry now. Please, help be delivering this child, let it all make sense”, you press out while grabbing his hand tightly.

It doesn’t matter that you’re severely injured, it doesn’t matter that your beloved husband took longer than expected to come back to you. All that matters now are you, him and your unborn child that waits to be delivered.

“Allow me to assist you.”

A foreign man suddenly speaks out with sweat dripping from his forehead in waterfalls. Just when another wave of nauseous pain hits you with full force, as if you got kicked into your stomach by a horse. You fail to breathe for a second, hands holding onto your husband for dear life.

“You are already close, it won’t be long now”, the man reassures you while gently opening your legs.

“You can do it, (y/n). After all the things you had to endure today, you will be able to get through this. With me by your side. I love you more than any words could ever say, darling.”

One more push.

One more wave of pain before your body goes numb, before you lose the ability to feel anything except for sweet nothingness.

Until a loud shriek finds its way to your ear.

A violent scream, almost frustrating. When you open your eyes again, you are greeted by a crying but alive bundle of joy, carefully wrapped into a white cloth and placed onto the arm of its father.

Those eyes.

“I prayed every night that he would have your eyes”, you whimper with tears running down your cheek uncontrollably.

You did it. You saved your beloved child who looks just like its father, you managed to somehow stay alive.

“She”, the midwife corrects you gently.

“She…”, you mumble with a small smile.

The last thing you see are the troubled maroon eyes of your husband before your world goes dark.

-the next day-

A foreign but still so familiar laughter fills the atmosphere around you with joy while you see nothing but black. When your stubborn lids finally open, you are greeted by the wooden ceiling you know so well. This is your home, without any doubt.

The home a demon invaded.

The home where you feared for your life while your husband rushed to the midwife in order to deliver your child.

Your child.

You get up way too quickly, glossy eyes darting around the room without a real aim. Is your baby okay? What happened after the delivery? All you can remember are those familiar maroon eyes that looked so much like the orbs of your beloved husband. Your husband…Where is Yoriichi?

“Don’t move too quickly, love. The doctor strictly forbids you to be in a haste”, his gentle voice speaks out next to you.

Just a few moments later, you get invited by the warmth of his arms swallowing you whole. Out of instinct, you let yourself fall against him, press your very own body into his despite the scorching pain that immediately takes over your whole self.

Right, you were attacked by a demon the night you gave birth. How did you manage to escape? Are your injuries critical.

But most important: How is your baby?

“Look what you have accomplished. A little wonder. Just like you, my love”, your husband murmurs, carefully lifting a little bundle off a blanket nearby.

Your heart nearly stops when you catch a glimpse of her. Those maroon eyes are the last thing you remember before everything goes black. With shaky hands, you start caressing her puffy cheek. This. This is what you fought for, what makes it all worth it in the end.

“She has your eyes”, you hush, tears now streaming down your face in waterfalls.

“And your hair”, Yoriichi replies with a soft smile towards you.

“(y/n), I promise I’ll do anything in my power to protect you and her from something like this. I promise I will stand by your side no matter what. And I hope that someday, you will be able to forgive me for not being there for you when you needed me the most.”

The second your husband’s voice cracks, you can’t hold onto yourself any longer. You wrap your arms around him and your daughter longingly, take in the scent who gave you strength that night.

“There is nothing to forgive and nothing to feel sorry about. You did your very best and that is all that matters. I love you, Yoriichi. And I have to thank you for saving both of us just in time.”

“You are my greatest treasure on earth”, he mumbles against your lips while giving you a passionate kiss.

What a plot twist, what a happy end after all. Yesterday you were sure your life is over, that you won’t live onto the next day. And now you’re lying in your house, holding your giggling daughter while pressing your heavy head against your husband’s broad chest.

“Well, I fear I will have to share this special place by now”, you comment while gazing at your perfect little daughter.

“This might be true, love.”

Tags: @chilichopsticks @hellkaiserinphoenix  @ynackerman9499 @keepghostly @beatrexworld

@froufrousnowman @hidazinie @tomiokathedepresso  @poketrainer2270 @chaoticwinnercupcake

@lees-chaotic-brain @wordskeeper @polarbvnny @kayleegomez @ryva @baku2345

@komelrebi-san

[sarahisslytherin]

•❣•୨୧ 𝙬𝙞𝙡𝙙𝙚𝙨𝙩 𝙙𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢𝙨 ୨୧•❣•

benedict bridgerton x princess!reader

summary: benedict has always been against marriage, but when he meets the princess one fateful night he can't help but fall in love.

contains: fluff and a lot of flirty banter.

a/n: another series cos it was just too much for a oneshot! this was so fun to write i just adore him. to the anon who requested this, i hope you love it and all its upcoming parts!

word count: 1.2k

You feel a heavy gaze on you as you glide across the ballroom. The chandelier above you twinkles with a warm glow, the light catching in your hair as you’re spun around by this suitor and that. The king has tired of begging you to select one for yourself and has threatened on more than one occasion to marry you off to the next prince to set foot in the palace. You know he doesn’t mean it, but you also know it is your duty to carry on the royal bloodline. Your father is right. You must choose. But certainly not this young man dancing with you. No, he’s far too boring. Not unsightly by any means, but he doesn’t make your stomach flip, doesn’t make you giggle as if possessed by an unearthly amount of joy. Still, you feel the eyes of another on you.

Benedict Bridgerton has long been a firm believer of marrying only when absolutely, undeniably in mad love. He hasn’t found that, not yet. That is why when his sisters begged him to accompany them to the royal ball he only agreed under the condition that they leave him free to speak to all the lovely women attending. Perhaps he might be able to take one home tonight and part ways come morning. That had been his original plan, anyway, which lay discarded from this very moment on; the moment he laid eyes on you.

Your current dance partner bows before you as the song comes to a close. He gives you a playful smirk before leaving you, and you resist the urge to laugh. You sigh, exhausted. You’ve got half a mind to find your father, tell him you’re not feeling well and retire to your bedroom for the remainder of the night. You’re grasping at the ruffles of your gown to turn and leave when he appears before you. He has a boyish grin fit to make the most reserved of women melt, and his ocean eyes glimmer like moonlight on waves. “May I have this dance, Your Highness?” You couldn’t say no if you tried.

It’s a different ballroom tonight, but you feel yourself searching faces in the crowd, hoping you might catch a glimpse of that handsome stranger you danced with only a fortnight ago. It was no simple feat escaping the palace. You struggled to squeeze into your gown on your own, but couldn’t risk any of your ladies in waiting knowing about your little disappearing act. You slipped on a cloak and placed a mask over your face. You followed an emergency tunnel beneath the palace grounds until you finally found yourself beneath the pale glow of moonlight. You knew it was mad, but you simply had to see him. He consumed your dreams, and when you were awake, your daydreams. He had been whisked away too soon by his family. You couldn’t even get his name, only his surname: Bridgerton. They have always been a respected household, and at tonight’s masquerade ball you can only hope to encounter them.

Music fills the halls of the Featheringtons’ estate, but the plucking of strings and sweet melody of the violins does little to soothe your nerves. You resolve to distract yourself from your anxious mind and seek out a dance partner. They’re playing a lively song, one that makes you laugh giddily as you hop to the rhythm. You’re so overjoyed, you almost forget all about that Bridgerton lad and his blasted piercing blue eyes. That is, of course, until you step aside to catch your breath and are met with them for the very first time since the night of the royal ball. 

“So we meet again, Princess.” he teases, and your eyes go wide. 

“How did you recognize me?” you ask, your voice barely a whisper.

“The same way you recognized me, of course.” he smirks, almost as if he weren’t speaking with royalty. “I would know those sweet eyes anywhere.”

“You’ve got quite the silver tongue, haven’t you, sir?” you smile, your cheeks taking on a faint blush as you fan yourself coyly.

“So I’ve been told.” he replies cockily. He gets closer to you; simultaneously too close for comfort yet not close enough. You’re not sure what to make of this man who makes your heart pound in your chest like no other has ever done before. This man whose name you do not even know.

“Tell me,” you demand in the tone you have grown accustomed to using to get what you want, “what is your name?”

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.” he giggles like a mischievous schoolboy, and you’d be lying if you said you don’t find it endearing. 

“You know mine.” you retort. “The entire kingdom knows it.”

He feigns shock, clutching his heart and letting his jaw drop. “Why, aren’t we full of ourselves?” You laugh, your eyes crinkling behind your lace mask. 

“I know one of us certainly is.” you tease him back, and he loves every second of it.

“Princess?” he asks, but is quickly hushed by you.

“Lower your voice, do you wish for the entire ballroom to know of my presence here?” you urge him.

“Forgive me, Pri-” he begins once again, but you give him a playful shove your father would have undoubtedly reprimanded you for, seeing as it isn’t very ladylike. “Forgive me, my lady.”

“Much better.” you smirk, satisfied with yourself. “You are forgiven, my lord.”

“Now you tell me.” he says. “What is a lady like yourself doing at a ball like this? Surely you’ve been to better ones.”

You’re suddenly thankful for the white mask hiding your bashful expression from him. “You’re right, I have. But, you see, I was hoping to run into someone.”

He replies with a playful, “Oh?”. You can tell he is clearly intrigued by the information you’ve provided him. “What a coincidence. I was hoping for the same, though I must admit, never in my wildest dreams did I think my hopes would come true.”

“Well”, you go on, “I dare say they have.”

Suddenly, his eyes change and all playfulness is replaced with earnestness and solemnity. He lowers his voice down to a baritone only you can hear. “Princess, you truly must know you have haunted the chambers of my mind since the moment I laid eyes upon you. I may not be royalty, but I have other virtues you will discover if you only allow me. I can love you like no suitor or prince has done so before. Say the word, my lady, and I am yours.”

You’re a bit taken aback by his sudden outburst, but you can tell by his eyes, those gentle eyes, that he means every word he utters. And his words couldn’t have described your own feelings any better. “You’re quite the poet.” you grin. “But how can you be mine if I don’t even know your name?”

He laughs once again, and the tension is lifted. “Benedict Bridgerton, my lady.”

You extend your hand to him and his lips ghost your knuckles. “A pleasure to meet you, Mister Bridgerton.” 

“The pleasure is all mine.” Benedict beams, rising once again. “and I’m hoping the next dance will be, as well?”

“Of course.” you nod, a glint in your eye only Benedict can catch. “I’m all yours.”

tagging: @velvetcloxds @oweninadaydream @holdthegirrrl @enchantedbytomandhenry @sublimepenguinpeach-blog @dd122004dd @marvelspogue

[catsoupki]

花的名字 / flower territory (bakugou x reader)

Summary: a flower has its cycles, it buds, it flourishes, blooms, and it dies, yet you’re still a constant in his life, he’s a sunflower that doesn’t look away

Warnings: improper capitalisation i’m afraid :( very very fluffy ! inspired by this wonderful post and this AMAZING one, both written by @cashmoneyyysstuff lmk if u want this taken down! (editing rn and i feel like flower territory is not the best title but im just so EMOTIONAL over it …. attachment issues fr)

wc: 700

the way katsuki crushes on you has stayed the same, since he was four he has made sure that everyone, including you, always knew that you were his.

he offers you roughed up flowers from the sandbox, covered in dust and dirt, shoved into your hands are the bundle of wild chrysanthemums and crumbled weeds, and in exchange are the paper rings you made before going to the park, because even when you were four, you already knew bakugou in the way you knew the names of the stuffed animals in your room; a sense of pride nestles inside, somewhere between your little childishly innocent heart and your soft fluttering stomach when you see your katsuki declare proudly with a smug smirk to all his groupies that he's now a married man, and that doesn't change.

in middle school, aged 12 bakugou isn't afraid to lean over your desk and stare you down and demand your time during recess, even though his cheeks used to redden when his female classmates would tease him for being such a romantic for you, he's learnt that it's either he toughens up and take this, or he has to deal with the other boys from his class chatting you up, and seeing their little cheeks tint with pink when they're spared even an ounce of (undeserved) attention from you is much more painful than having his own apples go fuzzy from your gaze.

katsuki changes a lot in U.A. but not in this. maybe the other class 1A kids don't have enough reference to notice, but izuku sure as hell can tell that the slight glisten and shine in his childhood best friend's eyes when he looks at you have only ever grown in brightness as you mature and age. as your body takes shape and your voice deepens, his affection for you simply gets magnified from a sheer adoration for your ability to keep up with him on the monkey bars and to withstand his loudness, either that be from the epicentres of his palms or the ever growing intensity of his voice when deku gets in his way, his respect for you grows and grows and festers and festers the more you win in the sports festival, the more you train, the more muscular you get, and the more internships you are offered.

as his own brashness gets dimmed down while the months go on, deku is no longer the only one who is able to notice the soft spot he has for you. jirou and shoji can only ignore the way bakugou whispers 'that's my girl' to you during class drills so many times, ochako and mina can only turn a blind eye to the way bakugou always cooks for you during the late nights where you collapse from exhaustion before eating so many times, by the end of the second year, even shouto knew to always find bakugou when you got hurt during missions and to just leave you two to your own devices for the rest of the evening.

the smirks might have grown less and less smug throughout the years and maybe more genuine, but the childlike wonder when katsuki looks at you stays always the same, it stays constant from when you were four all the way to when you're walking down the altar, it stays the same, from stepped-on flowers to bouquets of roses, from 'that's my girl' to 'that's my wife', you've always been his, the switch from craft paper to the 24 carat diamond ring on both your fingers never changed that; his face, to deku, looks identical; whenever dynamight is on a talk show and is asked to watch a clip of you fighting, the soft creases next to his eyes have always been there, bakugou's lips just twitch upwards when it's you;

what can he say? your katsuki has always been a prodigy, he knew since he was a kid, since the second his grabby little hands and tiny rolling eyes were laid on you, he has since decided that you were the only one worthy of his greatness, no matter how shitty his temper was at age 15, he looks at you like how sunflowers look at the sun, and that will never change.

[luveline]

hey!! I'd love to see one where maybe jack and hotch try speaking to the baby in pregnant!reader's tummy :))

thank you for requesting! fem, 1k

You sniff Aaron’s hair. It’s your right as his wife to enjoy his smells. You’re too tired for subtlety. “You know how many weeks I am today?” you ask. 

You’re in a bubble together. Aaron answers with his usual calm tenor. “You are twenty seven weeks today, honey.” 

It’s endearing that he knows. It’s nice to have found a good one. To never have to worry about compassion or care. Which isn’t to say he’s perfect, he makes wrong decisions, and he disappoints you sometimes, but still, he’s a good one. You aren’t perfect either and you don’t have to be, all you need to do is love and respect one another as much as is physically possible, and you do.  

“Mm,” you hum, drawing a heart into his arm, “and you know what they say around this time?” 

“I’m not sure.” 

“She can hear you, if you want to talk to her.” 

“Really?” 

“That’s what I read earlier on. That if you talk to her through my stomach, she can probably hear your voice. By full term she’ll have hearing like me and you.” 

“Is that true?” he asks, resting his hand on your bump. Sometimes when the baby is in a bad mood and her foot feels like it’s making a bruise through your skin, all Aaron has to do is touch you, and she stops. 

“Well, according to the baby book. They say by twenty nine weeks it’s a sure thing.” 

“Can I speak to her?” 

You brush through his hair with your pinky nail. “Sure, sweetheart. You can talk to her all night long, I’m sure she’d love to hear your voice.” You push the hair from his forehead. “I like hearing you talk.” 

“Lay back,” he says. 

Aaron sits up and you lay down, your head in the pillows, your pregnancy cushion a support on your left side. He slides your t-shirt up slowly as though giving you time to say no. He begins to rub slow circles around the bump, before laying his head flat to he bed, his lip less than two inches from your distended tummy. 

“Hi, baby,” he says, unabashed. “How are you feeling?” 

You laugh. He peeks up at you. 

“Sorry, it’s just funny.” 

“It’s okay. I’d laugh if you started asking my stomach questions too…” He smiles. “But my baby’s in there, so you’ll have to forgive me.” 

“I won’t laugh again, promise.” 

“It’s fine if you do. I’m finding it hard to take myself seriously.” He slows his rubbing. “Baby, if you can hear me, please say hi… I love you. I’m so happy you’re getting bigger.” 

The longer he talks, the less funny it becomes. His melodic murmuring turns praising, he talks of you and Jack and every amazing thing waiting for the baby in the world when she’s done cooking. He tells her he loves her, loves you, that she’s beautiful even though she’s shaped like a GMO kidney bean. He’s totally relaxed. You fall in love with him all over again. 

“And it looks like your big brother wants to say hi too,” he says. 

You perk up. Footsteps rush down the hall to the master bedroom, and a knock echoes fast. Jack doesn’t wait for an answer, bursting in with a happy gasp. “I knew you were still awake,” he says. “Please can I come watch TV with you?” 

“Sure, buddy, but we aren’t watching anything right now,” Aaron says. 

“What are you doing?” 

“I’m talking to your sister.” 

Jack leans against the bed, fingers screwing in Aaron’s shirt unthinkingly. “You are?” 

“I read in my book today that she can maybe hear you when you talk to her,” you tell him. “Would you want to talk to her, bud?” 

“Can I?” 

“Sure. I don’t mind. I’d love for you to say hello, ‘cos how special is that? For the last few weeks, all she’s been able to hear is me. She doesn’t know she has a whole family waiting for her.” 

Aaron straightens and helps Jack climb onto the bed. He settles at the pillows with you, leaning down briefly to kiss you, lips misaligned but no less gentle. 

“What do I say?” Jack whispers, putting his hand carefully on your bump. 

“You can say anything you want,” you whisper back. “You can say hi, or you can tell her something. The best thing about babies is that we get to teach them about everything.” 

“Okay, um… well,” —he braces himself with two hands on your tummy and leans in— “you can’t see, but we have a dad with brown hair and brown eyes, and we have a super pretty mommy who smiles all the time at me…” Jack’s cheek tips toward his shoulder. “On Sunday they take me to the library and we stay there all morning. And for dinner we always have, um, one hand of vegetables and one hand of chicken, or pork, or pasta. But it’s okay if you can’t finish everything.” 

He looks at his father. “Is that okay?” he asks. 

Aaron offers his hand. “Buddy, that’s perfect. You can tell her anything that you want. She just wants to hear your voice.” 

“Can I tell her about teenage mutant ninja turtles?” 

You laugh. “Sure,” Aaron says. 

Jack starts to talk about Donatello. You try not to laugh as his little hands tickle you, turning your face into Aaron’s side. 

“I have so many things to say to you right now, but I’m worried it’s too saccharine,” he says. 

“Save them for later,” you say, hugging his waist. “Can I nap here? Would you rub my arm?” 

Aaron rubs your arm as you’ve asked. You fall asleep to the sound of your stepsons mumbled rambling and Aaron’s occasional breathy laugh. 

[madame-fear]

Hi i was wondering if you could write an nsfw head cannon of jacaerys and his wife reader and what their intimate life is like, and like talk about stuff they do.

𝐍𝐒𝐅𝐖 𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐂𝐀𝐍𝐎𝐍𝐒 | 𝐉𝐀𝐂𝐀𝐄𝐑𝐘𝐒 𝐗 𝐖𝐈𝐅𝐄!𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐄𝐑

˗ˏˋ ꒰ summary : request.

˗ˏˋ ꒰ genre : headcanons, smut + slight fluff. ˗ˏˋ ꒰ pairing : : jacaerys velaryon x wife!reader

WARNING.ᐟ THIS FIC CONTAINS ; p in v, unprotected sex, sex from behind, bootfucking, breast play, creampie, slight mentions of mirror sex, oral sex (both receiving), mentions of you riding him, praising, slight mentions of spanking.

: ̗̀➛ Okay, so, for starters. Your intimate life naturally came after you were both officially married, and the bedding ceremony came. To respect your privacy, the two of you already had a chamber of your own to share, and you would be able to be as intimate as you wished.

: ̗̀➛ Initially, Jace would’ve been very soft and delicate with you. It’s in his gentleman nature to be careful, especially with the woman who was now his wife, and he so adored. Things would’ve gone slowly, but surely. And perhaps, there would’ve been a bit of foreplay and kisses before starting anything.

: ̗̀➛ Jace would press sweet, teasing pecks all across your cheek, going down to your jawline, focusing on giving your neck attention with his kisses — especially in a particular spot of your neck where Jace notices it makes you squirm and gasp —, and goes to your collarbone, savouring your skin with each peck.

: ̗̀➛ All the while, of course, Jace’s hands softly move behind your back, playing with the laces of your nightgown as he leisurely unties them, letting your gown become loose from your body, and fall from your shoulders. Being the gentleman he is, of course, Jacaerys would constantly ask you if you’re feeling comfortable with what he’s doing, if you want him to stop, or keep going; all with the most sweetest voice you’ve ever heard.

: ̗̀➛ His coffee eyes would look up at you admiringly, just like a fascinated puppy. You don’t want him to stop any sooner — if anything, the way he teased your skin by pressing soft kisses and caressing it leisurely with the tip of your fingers, merely got you all wet and needy for him. To which, you gave him the green light to keep going.

: ̗̀➛ And my god, you didn’t regret it. The second you approved for him to keep pleasing you, his hands rather desperately pulled down your gown, low enough to just expose your breasts. His mouth immediately took your hardened nipple in a delicate manner, using his tongue to tease it very lightly, and his teeth nibbled on your sensitive skin to leave some lovemarks, using his hands to pinch, twist, and rub your nipples.

: ̗̀➛ Pretty little hushed whimpers & moans would continuously escape from your lips as your eyes flutter shut, and you throw your head back; feeling your cunt grow wet and needy. Each sound that spurred from that beautiful mouth of yours, simply made Jace grow harder for you, with an overwhelming need to fuck you right there, and make you shout loudly his name for everyone to hear who you belong to.

: ̗̀➛ And so he did. By the time Jacaerys had already feasted a bit too much on your delicate skin and sweet breasts, his mouth abruptly pulled away from your tits after some minutes, making you gasp, and his firm yet gentle hand pushed you onto your back against the mattress, getting on tip of you, and fucking you fervently throughout the entire night, cumming in and out of your body several times.

: ̗̀➛ After such lovely bedding night, getting lovingly yet roughly fucked by the eldest son of Rhaenyra Targaryen, you would’ve gotten more and more used to explore your intimacy together - whether it’s privately, or... Even publicly, being a bit more bold.

: ̗̀➛ Jacaerys absolutely adores having you all submissive & needy, as much as it pains him to hold himself back from taking you right there all for him. So, whenever he’s either studying, reading in High Valyrian, or simply reading a book - he will absolutely have you sitting on the floor, whining and begging for him to take you.

: ̗̀➛ You look beautifully endearing just like that, and Jace will tease you by making you sit on top of his boot, and rubbing your needy moist cunt, bootfucking you. Continous desperate whines would escape from you, begging for him to fully take you - but not just yet. Jace prefers having you clinging to his leg, and seeing how you rub yourself with the tip of his boot.

: ̗̀➛ Jace always knows exactly what you like, and what you need. And he keeps the perfect balance between roughness, and gentleness at the same time. Part of him loves treating you as if you were the petal of a rose, or made of glass - delicately and lovingly. And another part of him simply wants to fuck you like a whore, like you need and want to get fucked, rough and disgusting. This, however, doesn’t mean he will not respect the boundaries you’ve set for each other, and afterwards, he will always ask you if you’re okay, and feeling comfortable.

: ̗̀➛ Sex from behind happens often, and I dare to say it’s one of his favourite positions, after having you riding him. The feeling of you becoming weaker with every pound of cock buried deep inside your pussy, continously hitting your soft spot. Expect his hands to always firmly grip your waist violently in a possesively controlling manner... Or, perhaps, one of his hands gropping your breast while he plays with your stimulated nipples. That feels pretty good for both of you.

: ̗̀➛ And speaking about sex from behind! During this position, I can imagine he would like fucking you right in front of a mirror, making sure to change the speed in which he penetrates you just to see the different expressions in your beauteous features. His hand would hold your chin occasionally, forcing you to stare at yourself through the mirror being fucked by him, as he whispers just how much of a good girl you are, taking his cock so well and obediently.

: ̗̀➛ One of his many favourite things to do in bed, is having you go down on him, and him going down on you. The way your hand forms a fist around his throbbing cock, gently masturbating him as your lips press delicate smooches on his leaking tip, moving your mouth all the way down to his cock with small kisses until you decide to finally take him in your mouth makes him go absolutely feral for you.

: ̗̀➛ It would take Jacaerys all the efforts that he has to not grip harshly from your hair, pulling it back, and violently face fuck you until you’re deepthroating his shaft and maybe even gagging a bit. It hurts not doing so, but he prefers to treat you like the true future Queen you are. The way in which your tongue strokes his cock leisurely while you’re going down on him with your mouth provokes him to loudly groan, and chant your name under his breath. As expected, his semen spurs all over the inside of your mouth, your tongue, and the roof of your mouth.

: ̗̀➛ Or, if he’s feeling a bit too aroused, he will quickly pull out from your mouth at the feeling of his seed being released, and come all over your precious lips, chin, neck, and chest. The sight of his own cum dripping from your chin and neck, some sticky drops falling to your tits, is enough to make him feel proud of himself. You’re all his.

: ̗̀➛ And when Jace has to go down on you? Man, he for sure knows how to take your aching pussy. His hands would be harshly gripping your hips, as his plump lips press playful kisses all over your inner thighs, moving upwards until he meets with your wet core.

: ̗̀➛ There, he would sweetly place kisses all over your moist folds, working up until he meets your glistening clit. He would then carefully rub the rim of it, and slowly work his way in to meet your throbbing core. His tongue would flick against that sensitive spot, and then he would move his mouth back towards your entrance, where he would suckle at your slit, selfishly drinking from your dripping slick while he eagerly fingerfucks you.

: ̗̀➛ It’s just as if Jace knew exactly how you like to be treated; pampering each bit of your sensible core with such fervent adoration. Jace does it like nobody else does, and you can go down on him like nobody else as well. You’re the perfect match.

: ̗̀➛ The eldest Velaryon Prince would also absolutely adore having you riding him. Especially because you tease him by telling him that you’re finally learning on how to properly ride a true dragon... And because he likes the way your tits bounce when you’re on top of him. And, of course, the sight of the bruises Jace leaves on your hips after firmly holding you down on him is also a very pleasant one.

: ̗̀➛ Jace knows how to treat you when you’re such a good girl for him, so obedient — and he will be so gentle, loving, and adoring. But when you’re a bit feisty with him, thinking that you can misbehave around him, Jace will never doubt on having you laid all across his lap, harshly spanking your ass until your flesh is red and swollen, occasionally rubbing his palm across your aching cunt teasingly.

: ̗̀➛ And when you accept your punishment, his pulsating cock would fill you up so delightfully. Pounding violently in and out of you continously, making sure his cock hits deeply against your G spot just to have you shaking, whining, and whimpering under him. Seven Hells, the way you moan his name in that ruined state is so, so pretty. And Jacaerys would cum several times inside of you, to the point you would feel comfortingly and overwhelmingly warm, until his hot semen is oozing out of your abused pussy, dripping down your inner thighs.

: ̗̀➛ I think Jace would pretty much be up to anything. Want to be tied to the bed while he fucks you and you can’t do anything about it? Sure, he will do as you please. Want to be choked? Okay! Jace will be happy to oblige. Want to be tendered softly, and fucked with love and adoration as he praises you in between kisses? Say no more. Jacaerys absolutely adores you, and that’s an understatement.

: ̗̀➛ Your sex life will be pretty much open to anything, and of course, his only focus will be in making you feel satisfied, comfortable, and loved. Jace would never do anything to get hurt you or make you uncomfy. 💗

♡ taglist : ♡

@damatheirin @jacesvelaryons @jjamieberry @anemicroyalcore @countsmoon @capellaadara @kyuupidwrites @tchatso @tasty-nutella @mstxdes @valeriecash @cookielovesbook-akie @zzz000eee @bellarkeselection @visenya-reigned @maria699669 @hopelesswritergall @mariaelizabeth21-blog1 @sweethoneyblossom1 @jamiemydeer @snowprincesa1

[latenightreadingpdf]

Knock on the Door - Spencer Reid

₊‧⁺˖⋆ Masterlist ⋆˖⁺‧₊

Summary: In the midst of an intense investigation, Spencer and Derek bring you into protective custody after a disturbing discovery links you to their case. As you navigate the unexpected situation, Spencer’s calm presence offers reassurance, sparking an unexpected connection amid the chaos.

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆

The quiet street was a far cry from the usual high-stakes BAU scene, but the tension in the air made Spencer’s skin prickle with unease. He glanced at Derek, who was already preparing to knock on another door, exuding his usual calm confidence.

"This one could be a lead," Derek muttered, showing a slight glint of hope in his eyes as he raised his hand to knock. The case had been dragging on, and frustration was growing with each unanswered question.

When the door opened, Spencer noted the faint hint of confusion in your expression. Derek immediately flashed his badge, his tone respectful but firm. "Ma’am, I'm Agent Derek Morgan. This is my colleague, Dr. Spencer Reid. We’re with the FBI."

Your eyes darted between the two of them, registering the serious expressions they wore. "The FBI? What's going on?"

"Have you had any strangers come to your door recently trying to sell you something?"

A flicker of recognition passed over your face, and Spencer leaned in, catching the shift. "Actually, yes,” you said, brows furrowing. “A guy came by yesterday… He gave me his card.”

Spencer and Derek shared a look. "Do you still have that card?" Spencer asked, trying to keep the urgency out of his voice.

"Yeah, I think so. Let me grab it." You turned back into the house, leaving the door partially open, and returned a moment later with a card in hand. As Derek took it from you, he confirmed with a nod that it matched the cards left at the other crime scenes.

You looked between them, anxiety creeping into your voice. "What is going on? Who is this guy?"

Spencer’s voice softened, his gaze meeting yours directly. "We believe he's a dangerous criminal who may be responsible for several recent homicides. His method involves gaining entry to homes under false pretenses."

Your face paled as the weight of his words sank in. Derek placed a reassuring hand on your shoulder. "We need to take you back to the station to make sure you’re safe. There are some steps we’d like to take to ensure you’re protected while we gather more information."

"Safe? Is he going to try and kill me?"

Derek’s expression turned serious. "We have reason to believe he might try to come back, and it’s important we get ahead of him."

A sense of dread settled over you as you let their words sink in. You followed them to the car, feeling your stomach twist with a mix of fear and disbelief. As you settled into the backseat, Spencer turned to give you a reassuring nod.

“Just so you know,” he began, his tone gentle, “we’ll have officers posted near your home to ensure he doesn’t have the chance to get in. We’re taking every precaution.”

“Thanks,” you murmured, your voice barely above a whisper. “It’s just… a lot.”

“Understandable,” Spencer said, glancing at you with a sympathetic look. “We’ll also have you meet with a sketch artist and undergo a cognitive interview. It’s standard procedure, and it might help us learn more about him.”

You looked out the window, processing the reality of the situation. The quiet chatter between Derek and Spencer drifted over you as they discussed possible motives, patterns, and theories. But for now, you were too lost in your own thoughts to make out their words.

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆

When you arrived at the station, Spencer took a moment to walk you through the cognitive interview process. "It’s designed to help you remember specific details," he explained, his voice calm and assuring. "It might feel intense, but I’ll be with you the whole time."

You nodded, glancing around the bustling police station, feeling a strange mix of curiosity and adrenaline. "Okay, so… I just answer questions, and you’ll be able to get a clearer picture of this guy?"

Spencer gave you a small smile. "Pretty much. Think of it as helping us paint a portrait. Every detail, no matter how small, could be useful."

The interview went smoothly; Spencer’s presence was patient and encouraging, never making you feel pressured to remember something you couldn’t. Afterward, he led you to a small break room, offering you a seat at a worn table with a coffee machine humming nearby.

A few minutes later, Spencer returned with two steaming cups, handing one to you. "Here," he said, "it's not gourmet, but it’ll keep us awake."

You took it gratefully, feeling a sense of normalcy settle in. "Thanks, Spencer." You sipped the coffee, savoring the warmth. "I didn’t expect to spend my afternoon in an FBI station, but… it’s definitely more interesting than my usual routine."

Spencer chuckled, seeming surprised by your laid-back attitude. "Most people aren’t as calm in situations like this."

You shrugged, feeling the weight of the situation but refusing to let it get the best of you. "I don’t know. I figure, if I’m in good hands, there’s no point in freaking out."

As you chatted, Spencer filled you in on some of the behavioral profiling techniques they used, giving you a peek into the mind of the BAU. His eyes lit up as he explained the ways they’d been analyzing the unsub’s behavior to find any possible patterns, and you found yourself genuinely interested, asking questions and absorbing his answers.

"Do you ever wonder why people do these things?" you asked thoughtfully, watching him as he considered your question.

"All the time," Spencer replied, his voice softening as he looked down at his coffee. "But there’s rarely a straightforward answer. The best we can do is study the behaviors and try to make sense of them. Hopefully, it helps us stop them."

A sense of respect grew in you as he spoke, and you found yourself admiring the dedication he had for his work. "That sounds exhausting. Important, but exhausting."

"It can be," he admitted, his gaze meeting yours. "But it’s worth it, especially when it means keeping someone safe. Like now."

You smiled, feeling a warmth spread through you at his sincerity. "Well, I guess I’m lucky you guys were around."

The door to the break room opened, and Derek poked his head in, giving Spencer a grin. "You two doing all right in here?"

Spencer nodded, standing up to update Derek on the details you’d given during the interview. As they talked, you finished your coffee, feeling a strange sense of calm despite the unusual circumstances.

When Derek turned his attention to you, his gaze softened. "We’re going to have a team set up around your house tonight, keeping a close eye on things. We’ll catch this guy if he shows up."

You nodded, feeling reassured. "Thanks, Agent Morgan. I know you guys are handling it, so I’ll let you do your thing."

Spencer glanced back at you with a small smile. "If you need anything, or have more questions, just let me know."

As they walked you to the main desk, Spencer looked back, his gaze soft. "We'll keep you safe," he assured you once more, his sincerity unmistakable. "Until then, try not to worry. We’re on it."

A small smile tugged at your lips as you nodded. "I trust you," you replied, giving them one last grateful look before they escorted you to a waiting area. And as you waited, you felt a sense of calm, knowing you weren’t facing this alone.

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆

[mcrdvcks]

Call It What You Want

Summary: A single sneeze turns into something more, at least to your husband Logan.

Word Count: 1.9k+

Pairing: Logan Howlett x fem!reader

Notes: i'm feeling a bit sick and i remember i had written this a while ago so here it is :)

i actually have a few other ideas and short oneshots written in this universe so i might upload some more sporadically

(also thank you for 500 followers! really means a lot to me <3)

Warnings/tags: sickness (sneezing, stuffy nose), reader has powers (sonic screams), pet names (darlin', baby, sweetheart)

A simple sneeze. That’s how it started.

You and Logan were in your shared bedroom, both at your respective desks, grading papers in silence. The quiet was only interrupted by the occasional sound of paper rustling or the scratch of a pen. It was peaceful, really. Until you sneezed into your elbow, trying not to make a big deal of it.

Logan glanced over, raising an eyebrow but not saying anything at first. You grabbed a tissue and blew your nose, tossing it into the wastebasket nearby.

"That time of year again?" Logan asked, his deep voice cutting through the quiet.

"Maybe," you replied, rubbing your nose. "’m fine."

He let out a low chuckle, standing up and stretching his arms over his head. “Yeah, ‘cause you always say you’re fine, then next thing I know you’re curled up under six blankets, complainin’ about not bein’ able to breathe.” He walked over, placing a hand on your shoulder.

"I’m not always like that," you protested, looking up at him with a small smile.

"Sure, princess." Logan smirked, brushing a few strands of hair from your face. “But if you’re gettin’ sick, you should rest. You work too hard.”

"I don’t have time to be sick." You glanced at the pile of essays that still needed grading. “Besides, these students aren’t going to grade themselves.”

"Bet you I could convince Chuck to get a telepath to grade these for ya," Logan teased, leaning down to press a kiss to the top of your head. “Now, go lay down.”

You rolled your eyes but couldn’t help the warmth spreading through your chest at his concern. "Logan, I’m fine. It’s just a sneeze."

"Uh-huh," he grumbled. “Just a sneeze, until it ain’t.”

"I’ll be fine," you insisted. "Besides, you're not the boss of me."

Logan smirked again, his voice dropping to that low, gruff tone that always made your stomach flip. "Ain’t I though?"

You shot him a playful glare, knowing exactly where this was going. "No, you’re not."

He tilted his head, eyes twinkling with amusement. "Alright, darlin’… but if you start feelin’ worse, you better let me take care of ya. You hear?"

You smiled, unable to help it. "Yeah, yeah. I’ll be fine, tough guy."

He leaned down, capturing your lips in a soft kiss before pulling back. "You better be. Ain’t in the mood to deal with a cranky version of you.”

You laughed, nudging him playfully. “Like you’re never cranky.”

“I’m lovable,” he grunted, moving back to his desk. "You, on the other hand…”

“I’m adorable,” you finished for him, a smirk tugging at your lips.

Logan chuckled, shaking his head. “Whatever helps you sleep at night, sweetheart.”

You turned back to your papers, feeling the slightest tickle in your nose again. "Uh-oh."

"Uh-oh?" Logan repeated, eyeing you cautiously.

And then, you sneezed again—this time louder. The vibration from your powers caused a low hum in the room, the soundwaves vibrating through the air, making the picture frames on the wall tremble slightly.

Logan raised an eyebrow, crossing his arms. "That didn’t sound like just a sneeze, baby."

You winced, looking around at the small vibrations that still lingered in the room. "Oops."

He sighed, walking back over to you. "Come on, Y/N, that’s your body tellin’ you to take a break." He bent down to your level, his face now inches from yours. "Or do I need to carry ya to bed?"

You bit your lip, trying to keep the smirk from your face. "You wouldn’t."

"Wanna test me?" Logan’s voice was low, full of challenge.

You tilted your head, pretending to think about it. "Well, when you put it that way…”

Without another word, Logan scooped you up from your chair, making you let out a surprised laugh. “Logan! Put me down!”

“Nope,” he said, carrying you toward the bed with ease. “You had your chance, sweetheart.”

You kicked your feet lightly in protest but didn’t really try to escape. Being wrapped up in his arms was hardly a punishment. “You’re impossible, you know that?”

“Yup,” he agreed, laying you down gently on the bed and pulling the covers up over you. “Now, you’re gonna stay right here, and I’m gonna make sure you’re comfortable.”

You crossed your arms, but a smile was already spreading across your face. “You’re overreacting.”

“Am I?” Logan raised an eyebrow, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “Remember the last time you got sick? You nearly took out half the mansion with your soundwaves ‘cause you were sneezin’ so much.”

You sighed, relenting. “Okay, maybe a little rest won’t hurt.”

Logan grinned, leaning down to kiss your forehead. “Atta girl.”

You settled back into the pillows, the warmth of the blankets and Logan’s presence making you feel more relaxed. “Thanks, Logan,” you said softly.

He gave you a soft smile, brushing his thumb over your cheek. “Anytime, darlin’. Now get some rest before you blow up the whole room.”

---

After days of trying to convince Logan, and the others, that it was just allergies, Logan had enough. He had dragged you to Jean after you finished teaching your first class of the day, and after accidentally shattering your computer screen with your sneeze.

Jean was already prepared, a bottle of cough syrup on a nearby medical table. “See? Told you it was a cold,” she said, holding up the bottle like it was proof.

You groaned, slumping in the chair next to her. “It’s just a little cold, Jean. You all act like I’m on my deathbed.”

Logan crossed his arms, standing behind you. “That little cold shattered a computer screen, Y/N. If it wasn’t for your powers, maybe we’d take your word for it, but—” He gestured vaguely with his hand. “We’ve seen what happens.”

Jean smirked at Logan’s comment but quickly turned her attention back to you. “He’s right, you know. We’ve got to be careful with your powers. Your body’s trying to rest, and that includes your control.”

You shot Logan a half-hearted glare. “You dragged me here for this?”

“Yup,” he replied, entirely unbothered. “And now that you’re here, Jean’s gonna make sure you actually take care of yourself.”

Jean held out the bottle of syrup. “Bottoms up.”

You stared at it like it was some sort of punishment. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Logan let out a chuckle, moving to stand beside you, his hand resting on your shoulder. “Come on, princess, just take the damn syrup. The faster you do, the faster we get back to our room.”

With an exaggerated sigh, you took the bottle from Jean’s hand and downed the syrup. The taste made you wince, and you immediately regretted it. “Ugh, that’s awful.”

Jean patted you on the back, her smile widening. “It’ll help, though. Now, you’ll need rest, fluids, and minimal stress. I don’t want to see you teaching for a couple of days, at least.”

You opened your mouth to protest, but Logan cut you off before you could say anything. “You heard the doc, darlin’. No teaching, no grading. Just rest.”

You turned in your seat to look up at him, narrowing your eyes. “It’s just a cold. I’m not dyin’ or anything.”

Logan raised an eyebrow, the corners of his mouth tugging into a smirk. "Not dyin’, huh? Try tellin’ that to your computer screen."

You rolled your eyes, leaning back in the chair with a groan. "That was an accident, and you know it."

"Doesn’t matter," he shot back, folding his arms across his chest. “Still proves my point.”

Jean chuckled from where she stood, clearly enjoying the back-and-forth. “Logan’s right, Y/N. Your body’s using up energy to fight this cold, and with your powers, that means less control. It’s not just about you—it's about keeping everyone around you safe.”

You narrowed your eyes at Logan. “You’re really milking this, aren’t you?”

Logan didn’t even try to hide the grin on his face. “Oh yeah. And I’ll keep doin’ it ‘til you get your stubborn ass to bed.”

You huffed, crossing your arms. “I hate when you’re right.”

He chuckled, leaning down to press a quick kiss to your forehead. “Get used to it, sweetheart. Happens more often than you’d like.”

Jean smiled warmly at the two of you, shaking her head. “Okay, lovebirds. I’ll give you some privacy while Y/N gets some rest. Logan, make sure she takes it easy.”

Logan nodded as Jean left the room, then turned back to you with a smug look. “So, no more arguments, right?”

You glared at him, but it lacked any real heat. “Fine. But just so you know, when I’m better, I’m gonna remind you of this moment. Payback’s a bitch, Logan.”

He chuckled again, unphased. “I’ll take my chances, darlin’.” Then, without warning, he bent down and scooped you up in his arms again.

"Logan!" You yelped, your arms instinctively wrapping around his neck. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Making sure you actually rest," he replied, his voice casual as if carrying you around was the most normal thing in the world. “Figured this way, there’s no chance of you sneakin’ back to your desk.”

You tried to fight back a smile, though it was nearly impossible when you were cradled against him like this. “I wasn’t gonna sneak back.”

“Sure, princess,” he said, clearly not believing you for a second. “But just in case.”

He carried you back to your shared bedroom, gently setting you down on the bed and pulling the covers over you. He gave you a stern look, but there was warmth behind his eyes. "Stay."

You rolled your eyes but couldn’t help the small smile tugging at your lips. “You act like I’m a dog.”

"Not a dog,” Logan corrected, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Just a stubborn wife who doesn’t know when to quit."

You reached up to swat at his arm playfully. “I’m not that bad.”

He caught your hand in his, bringing it to his lips and pressing a kiss to your knuckles. “You’re worse, but I still love ya.”

Your heart swelled at the soft look in his eyes, and for a moment, you forgot all about your cold. “I love you too,” you murmured.

Logan’s expression softened even further, his thumb brushing over the back of your hand. “Now rest, sweetheart. You need it.”

You sighed, snuggling deeper into the blankets. “Only because you asked so nicely.”

Logan chuckled, leaning down to kiss your forehead once more. “I’ll take it.”

He stood up, moving toward the door, but you called after him. “You’re not leaving, are you?”

He stopped, glancing over his shoulder with a smirk. “What, miss me already?”

You rolled your eyes, but your tone softened. “Maybe. Just a little.”

Logan’s smirk turned into a genuine smile as he made his way back to the bed. “Alright, darlin’. I’ll stay.”

He kicked off his boots and slid into bed next to you, pulling you into his arms. You rested your head on his chest, listening to the steady rhythm of his heartbeat. For a moment, the cold, the shattered computer, and everything else melted away. All that mattered was the warmth of his embrace.

"You’re lucky I love you," you mumbled, already feeling yourself start to drift off.

Logan chuckled softly, his hand running through your hair. “Damn right, I am."

As sleep began to claim you, Logan’s steady presence beside you was the last thing you felt, a reminder that no matter how tough things got—or how stubborn you were—he’d always be there, ready to hold you close and make sure you were safe.

[faebaex]

TWST Characters - Big Spoon or Little Spoon?

author note: don't ask me what provoked this, i'm writing these silly little headcanons so that i can get it out of my head so i can write the things i'm supposed to be writing! forgive me for my slowness (｡T ω T｡)

characters: Heartslabyul, Savanaclaw & Octavinelle

Heartslabyul

Riddle Rosehearts

Little spoon who thinks he is a big spoon

He will try being both the big spoon and the little spoon respectively

But in his ACADEMIC opinion, he will declare that he is the big spoon

But despite how he insists that he is the big spoon, most nights he ends up falling asleep in your arms

If he wakes up in the middle of the night he’ll groggily try to rearrange but it doesn’t always work

Don’t tease him about it, sometimes he just needs the comfort of being held

Little spoon in denial basically

Ace Trappola

Silly straw who thinks he is a big spoon

No fr this guy will posture and insist that he is 100% big spoon material

But then as SOON as he falls asleep, he’s snoring and throwing his arms around and wiggling around, tossing and turning

Man will NOT keep still

The amount of times you’ve kicked him out of bed bc he keeps waking you up with his flailing

Rarely you’ll get a night where you comfortably sleep with him as the big spoon but don’t get used to it

Deuce Spade

Respectable big spoon

Probably one of the most comfortable people to sleep with

Will cuddle you well enough that you feel soothed but not tight enough that you can’t slip out if you want/need to

Always makes sure you’re comfortable, probably to the extent that you have to tell him to stop fretting

Good boy, 10/10

Cater Diamond

Undeniable little spoon

There is no doubt, just hold him pls

His favourite position is with his back to you bc he prefers it if you can’t see his face

Can’t have you seeing him vulnerable instead of his usual silly, goofy persona

Sometimes tho he’ll lay his head against your chest and you’ll have a little moment together

But don’t mention it otherwise he won’t do it again

Trey Clover

Big spoon

As if there was ever any doubt

He actually really likes spooning, he likes the intimacy

He likes the feel of your heartbeat and being able to stroke a hand through your hair or watch you as you sleep

Plus it is easy for him to slip into bed next to you if he’s stayed up late to finish baking

Savanaclaw

Leona Kingscholar

Big spoon but only because he treats you like a living pillow

I mean let’s be real all this man does is sleep

So there is no way that you will be anything but the little spoon here

He’ll think its funny if you try to be the big spoon and then just push you underneath him and resume business as usual

Spooning with Leona is either incredibly comfortable or the most uncomfortable sleep you’ve ever had – there is no in-between

He pretends not to care if you voice any discomfort but genuinely will try to be more attentive in future

Jack Howl

Big spoon

But he goes to bed sooo early so you don’t always get to cuddle

Sometimes when you sneak into bed he’ll roll over and engulf you in his arms

As if he sensed you in his sleep

But other times Jack sleeps like a rock

So its kind of hit and miss

But when you do get to spoon, it feels like you are encompassed in a huge, never-ending hug

It may even be tempting enough for you to become a morning person, if you’re not already

Ruggie Bucchi

Little spoon 100%

My man just likes to cuddle up after a long day of making thaumarks and running around taking care of Leona

So there is nothing he loves more than snuggling into your chest or side and passing out

Plus being the little spoon makes it a tiny bit easier to slip out in the morning when he has to do one of his early morning jobs or get Leona's breakfast ready

Plus plus having you there makes his bed feel just that little bit more comforting :)

Octavinelle

Azul Ashengrotto

Little spoon who thinks he is a big spoon #2

You’ll fall asleep with him being the big spoon but you always ALWAYS wake up with him somehow in the little spoon position with his arms and legs wrapped around you

Will insist this is a misunderstanding and that he slipped bc he’s still not used to beds yet

He actually loves nothing more than burying his face into your chest and feeling nice and safe

Nevertheless he will go to the grave insisting that he is the big spoon

The biggest little spoon in denial, no one compares

Jade Leech

Big spoon

The only time he is a little spoon is when he gets too excited about mushrooms or something and needs to calm down while you stroke his hair

Otherwise he is a big spoon through and through

Thing is though, his grip is TOO strong

Once you make the decision to spoon with him, there is no escape

His arms will be wrapped so tightly around your waist that you can’t even more an inch away from him

He has absolutely no remorse about it either the next morning, he’ll just give you his little closed eye smile and be all ‘whoops’ but hold you just as tight the next time

Floyd Leech

Hear me out, hear me out

100% a little spoon

He gives off big spoon energy but actually prefers to wrap himself around you and have you hold him and play with his hair and give him back scratches

Be careful if he’s in a silly goofy mood though because he’ll start nipping at you

Thinks its hilarious when you’re relaxing and you suddenly yelp bc he’s nipped at your side

But usually he behaves himself bc sometimes he’s a little touch starved so he really likes it when you hold him