#too exhausted from loneliness to go to an event to try to change the loneliness

[rubenesque-as-fuck]

There's a meet and greet at a local kink club tonight and I really want to go. But also I'm very tired and anxious and bleh

[temis-de-leon]

He has a nightmare where he rejected you

Characters: Asmodeus, Beelzebub and Belphegor (x reader, separately)

Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 4

Main Masterlist

CW: Asmo's having a bit of a mental breakdown, Beel literally has a fever dream and there's a brief description of lesson 16 in Belphie's part

.

Asmodeus – He didn’t want to play favourites

There’s an endless line of demons and witches alike willing to kill and die for him.

He can’t live without their adoration, their desire and their support.

While he knows you are not like everybody else, he can’t help but compare you to the rest of his fans.

Where’s the difference between your love and theirs? Can you give more than what they’ve already given him?

He can’t help but feel honoured by your confession, being chosen by their beloved human, but the idea of accepting your advances makes him feel ungrateful to his loyal fans.

The rejection comes out easily, just like many times before, and your reaction makes him sigh and almost offer his shoulder to cry on.

That would’ve been too cruel, wouldn’t it?

The uniqueness of your feelings doesn’t stand out until time passes.

It’s not just your attention that he misses, but also the tenderness in your eyes and the shy hint of your smile whenever he looks at you.

It became apparent that you cared not only for what he showed but also for what he hid about himself.

He tried searching for that same shade of love in your expression, but it faded quickly as weeks passed.

It all reached an end where, in a turn of events that made him sweat in fear and disgust, you started to look instead for his eldest brother.

He starts to work, desperately thinking that, maybe, if he made himself more beautiful or popular, you would change your mind and return to trying to be with him.

However, judging by the way you looked at Lucifer, he knew his reciprocation came a little bit too late.

You woke up to the sounds of sobbing, an animalistic yearning for comfort that pulled you out of your slumber. Hands grabbed the blankets covering you and a voice kept bubbling nonsense, an entire monologue full of sorrow that you couldn’t understand. In the end, it was the familiarity of the demon in front of you what fully brought you to the living world.

Asmo, kneeling beside your bed, cried even louder when he saw you opening your eyes. By the desperate moves of his hands you knew he wanted to hug you and that, mixed with the despair in his expression, tugged your heartstrings with painful force and made you open your arms.

He threw himself at you, burying you both in the cocoon of bedsheets and blankets and wept as you smoothed his hair and murmured words of consolation in his ear.

Almost half an hour passed until he could breathe with ease, but he wouldn’t look at you. Not like you were counting on it.

“You love me, don’t you? Do you still love me? Please, tell me you do. I love you, I truly do. I’d never reject you…”

“Reject me…?”

“I love you, I love you…”

Asmo hid his face in the crook of your neck, rocking the both of you back and forth in search of calmness. He ignored your questions and shaking hands, although you quickly realised he wasn’t entirely conscious about it. He seemed completely lost, repeating the confessions of his affections for you until he finally fell asleep from exhaustion.

You laid under him for the remainder of the night, too scared and shaken to rest again and hoping with all your strength that whatever put him in this state would disappear forever.

Beelzebub – He didn’t feel the same

It is indifference. From the moment you stepped into the house, what he felt for you was nothing more than indifference.

His room is empty and his twin’s absence occupies his mind more than it should, but he can’t do anything about it besides dealing with the loneliness.

Living with his older brothers simply isn’t enough anymore.

His family isn’t complete and the presence of a human in their home isn’t going to change that.

The first time he truly interacts with you is in the kitchen, in the middle of the night, willing to murder you over custard. The only reason you aren’t harmed is his brother’s fondness for you.

As a consequence, his room is no longer empty and he finds that quite enjoyable. Without any reason to be rude or mean to you, your short time spent together passes too quickly for his liking and, afterwards, he finds himself visiting you whenever he has the chance.

Beel values your friendship and he believes the feeling is mutual, even when you blush, smile with excitement and stare with bright eyes whenever he enters the room.

He is incapable of seeing how unbalanced your affections compared to his are.

His heart doesn’t stutter at your existence and neither do his words. You are his friend, a dear one, but nothing more; that’s what he tells you in response to your confession.

He pities your heartbreak and assures you your platonic relationship will remain the same, but his promises fall on deaf ears. The friendship is left hollow and unnatural and he briefly wonders if accepting your pouring heart would’ve been the better option.

Would have he fallen for you over time? If that were the case, although initially forced, would the love blossom into something strong and worth fighting for?

He hopes he will, too, go back to normal as weeks pass and you painfully overcome your crush, but when you’re finally able to look at him with non-romantic warmth, half of his face is red, his eyes twitch in adoration at each one of your smiles and his throat hurts from self-caused frustration.

Now it’s his turn to suffer the heartbreak.

There was a deep pressure on his chest when he woke up and as bad as Beel wanted it to be the comforting weight of your body, he knew that couldn’t be true. He didn’t feel the top of your head under his chin or your quiet breath against his skin. Had you actually been there, he would’ve never let you go.

His eyes were tired, itchy under heavy eyelids, and a pounding headache begged him not to move an inch, although he wasn’t sure he would be able to anyway; his muscles were glued to the bedsheets with sweat.

Groaning in exhaustion, he slowly turned his head sideways, staring at his twin’s sleeping form with deep-rooted fondness. Belphie was frowning, probably feeling part of Beel’s discomfort, and was twitching in his sleep, murmuring words he couldn’t decipher and lashing the tuft of his tail with weak movements.

An empty chair was also there, slightly facing his direction.

Quietly, the door opened and the dim glow of the hallway’s candles briefly lighted the entry, distracting him from the ache. A figure stepped in, tip-toeing while closing the door again and making its way to his bed.

MC…?

Was he hallucinating?

“Did I wake you up?” you asked in worry, unfazed by his silence.

He watched as you ignored the chair and sat beside him at the edge of the mattress, unsure of what to say or do. He wanted to touch you, take your face in his hand and make sure you weren’t a manifestation of his desires, but he wasn’t sure he was allowed to. In addition to that, his head felt full of cotton and completely detached from the rest of his body; he didn’t want to strike you by accident.

“My DDD ran out of battery, but I didn’t know where your charger was and I didn’t want to make noise. I just came back from my room”

You lifted your hand and he gasped in expectation, sighing with relief when you pushed away his wet hair and placed a kiss on his forehead. If he could return the gesture, he would, but he was barely able to keep his eyes focused on you, let alone talk or move.

“You’re still too warm” you informed with a frown, preparing yourself to leave his side. “I’m going to get a wet tow-… Honey?”

Beel sighed again, this time shuddering, exhausted at the effort of grabbing your arm and pulling you back to him.

Honey.

Your lips turned down in a sad smile, still coming down to kiss him again for a little longer.

“You’ll feel better tomorrow, I promise”

Honey.

“…ve you…”

You hummed a question against his skin, unsure of what he’d said, but he suddenly felt too weak to repeat himself.

“Go to sleep, okay? I’ll be here, Beel”

Honey.

Belphegor – He hated you

Your free will and your refusal to give up, going up the stairs despite Lucifer’s threats and helping the mysterious man imprisoned in the attic; stupidity and no sense of self-preservation trapped behind a weak shield of kindness and compassion.

Seeing you strive to help him is amusing; like a candle hoping to light the vastness of the night.

That you think he is a human is just an advantage to his plan, but how can you, such an insignificant creature, aid in his escape?

The mere sight of you sends bile to his mouth, but he can’t do anything besides entertain you whenever your human need of connection forces you to search for him.

You talk incessantly and he listens, albeit with no interest and borderline rude behaviour. He scoffs, shoots sarcastic remarks and brings you down whenever he has the chance, calling you stupid and naïve.

That’s why your feelings for him are so surprising.

You… like him? Do you like being lied to and degraded?

Okay.

He’s not going to complain.

It’s just another reason for you to help him without thinking twice.

And that you do.

A laugh blurts out of his throat when he finally closes his arms around your excited figure. You’re blushing and smiling like a fool and when you try to step away to ask if he’s okay, there’s nothing in your existence but pain.

Your desperate scratches are nothing for him and neither is the heartbreak of betrayal in your eyes. If anything, they make him want to hurt you even further, pushing your neck against the floor with inhumane strength and letting your body fall down the stairs like a child dropping a ragdoll would.

He comes to his senses no long after that; less than an hour. Your heritage is explained and his prejudices are proven to be incorrect, vanishing like dust at the prospect of sharing a friendship with you like his brothers do.

You were nice to him then, back when you didn’t know who he was, so why wouldn’t you be nice to him again now that there are no secrets between you? His actions were wrong, yes, but also justified.

Wouldn’t you agree, MC? He deserves the benefit of the doubt.

But why aren’t you looking at him anymore? Why do you hide? Don’t you trust him?

He said he was sorry! Isn’t that enough?

The door opened with a loud noise, then closed almost without notice. Something dragged across the floor until reaching your bed, a blanket, and if the soft hint of lavender didn’t let you know who just disturbed your sleep, then his words would make it obvious.

“You’re not in my bed” Belphie stated. You turned, confused at the abrupt interruption and the tone of his voice, which made it clear he was trying to hide something. His figure was indistinguishable amidst the dark, but his purple eyes stood out like stars. Before you could say anything, he talked again. “Why?”

He watched in silence as you looked around, trying to find a clue to understand what was happening. Still waiting for a response, he huffed as he climbed over you and settled on the other side of the bed.

“Like a cryptid, Belphie” you mustered in annoyance while letting him cling to your side. “You’re just like a cryptid”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’re testing my patience”

“Why aren’t you in my bed?”

“I swear to God…”

You stared at him in disbelief, but something in his expression subdued your irritation. Now that he was closer you could see his glossy eyes, a frown twisting his whole face as his hands held on to you with more force than necessary. Although you had suspicions about what he wanted to hear, a sincere I love you, you still took the longer route and calmly answered his question.

“You kicked me out…”

“I never would” he quickly retaliated, sitting straight like a spring and hovering over you with determined and unblinking eyes.

“…because I had an accident in Solomon’s laboratory and my skin and clothes smelt like chemicals”

There was silence in the room for a few seconds and, after pushing him softly, Belphie finally laid down again, his features slowly relaxing until only a bitter expression remained. Your fingers carefully detangled his hair, but not even that seemed enough to fully calm him down.

“I’m sorry”, he said against your shoulder, delicately hugging your waist like you were made of porcelain.

“It’s okay, we can just go back to sleep…”

“I’m sorry, MC”

Your confusion was obvious, but he didn’t say anything and, by the time you gathered enough courage to ask, he was already deeply unconscious.

.

.

Taglist: @ilovecandys2010  @ollieoven @kingofspadesdelusion @whimsybloom

[dreamboundedstar]

Linda: But trying to make people think you're cool is exhausting. And when you stop trying, suddenly the next person you talk to thinks you're the best person ever.

Cue the time-passing montage of Tina learning to let go of that embarrassing moment and stop trying to be cool. Most of the time it's with her family, at the restaurant, or by herself just investing herself in her favorite music again. However, there's this one frame I'm convinced has subtle symbolism!

The only time Zeke appears in the episode and it's to be in front of Tina while she looks out the window still sad from the event. Due to how this scene was set up it really looks like it's implying that Zeke is one of those that would think Tina is "the best person ever". However, Tina is too busy being sad to notice what's already in front of her. I mean, the window perfectly frames Zeke in (and sweet Susmita gets her moment too, even if it's just her hair and some of her skin) when they literally could have done whatever they wanted and changed the character in the seat in front of Tina. Heck, Tina could have been in the last seat and further symbolize the loneliness/self-pity Tina is feeling. It's possible they just wanted to stick with accurate continuity and have Tina, Zeke, Susmita, and the rest be in the same seating arrangements as they were in "Cheaty Cheaty Bang Bang". For continuity reasons or not, I still take it as symbolism that Zeke already thinks Tina is the coolest person ever and Tina just needs to really look around her to realize it. The subtext I tell ya!

[mt07131]

for ocs youre DYING to talk about: alone, hate, monster, midnight, torture. for as little or as many as you like.

Y'know I can always rely on you to send asks for ask games and let me yap about my girlies. We're gonna go hmmm let's go Kalliope, Katarina, Maeve Trevelyan and Xuna

Not-so-nice OC ask game

Alone: How does your OC deal with loneliness? Have they ever been completely alone before? How do they act when there's no one around to see them?

Kalliope: She doesn’t deal with loneliness well AT ALL. Everything in her life revolves around the public’s perception of her and she is all too happy to oblige that. Being alone does not line up with that kind of life, which leads to the fact that she has never been completely alone pretty much ever In her life. Whether it was her family, staff, sycophants, and late Naomi, she pretty much always has someone around her. Because this public persona has pretty much become her, she doesn’t really change when she’s alone. Even when there isn’t anyone around, there’s always an audience.

Katarina: She is okay with loneliness, at times she prefers it. When she was younger, this was a little different, but after Certain Events she prefers it. She finds it hard to trust people nowadays and being around them gives them more chances to poke holes in her, which she hates. She has been completely alone before, frequently in recent days. She is still adjusting to this complete loneliness, but keeping people at arm’s length helps with that, or so she thinks. Once she’s alone, she definitely has a little less bite to her but overall is generally the same

Maeve Trevelyan: If we’re talking pre-inquisition, she’s pretty good with loneliness. She doesn’t necessarily prefer it, but sometimes it is a welcome reprieve. This carries on through inquisition, because being such a public facing figure is exhausting in more ways than one. Completely alone, she has been probably by her own hand. Depending on what’s happened recently, sometimes she seeks that loneliness. Mid-inquisition, this is less frequent as she turns to her companions and friends for reprieves from being the inquisitor. When she’s alone, she is way more casual than people expect. There are no expectations of manners so that all goes out the window.

Xuna: She is very familiar with loneliness, from being an outcast in her own home to being a literal outcast once she’s exiled, she knows how to deal with it. Pre-BG3 she was completely alone more often than not, with her exile, but that obviously changes with the start of the game. She’s honestly not that much different when she’s alone, she doesn’t have any sort of expectations to adhere to so there’s no crazy shifts in personality.

Hate: What does your OC hate? Why? How do they act towards the object of their hatred?

Kalliope: Any paparazzi, most of her family (save for her youngest brother, Theseus), most of her sycophants. They all expect something out of her that she doesn’t want to give up so easily. They all get the same treatment and that is her blunt, biting, poisonous wit. She is pretty much every classic mean girl trope made flesh.

Katarina: Her parents and the cult are her main sources of hatred, obviously because both are the reason she’s even in this mess in the first place (being born simply to be a sacrifice without knowing it will do that to you). When she is faced with them, it’s one of the few moments you see genuine anger from Katarina, as opposed to a dry annoyance, because they ruined her life.

Maeve Trevelyan: Her family, her mother especially. It’s all about expectations, the fact that she’s had so many shoved on her that she didn’t want in the first place, doubly so when they try to keep controlling her life. Faced with them, it’s mostly sarcasm as a response, unless they get her really irritated, to which that will turn into an outburst.

Xuna: Also most of her family (save for Myri), ESPECIALLY her mother (Maeve make an oc without family troubles challenge FAILED), also people who think drow are evil because they’re drow but that’s lower on the list. Her mother has despised her from birth over something she couldn’t control, and her being the matriarch, that obviously trickled down to the rest of the family. In a similar vein, she most sticks with sarcasm as a response (do you notice a theme about my ocs???) but is more inclined to walk away if they’re really irritating her.

Monster: Is your OC monstrous in any way? Is there something that makes them monstrous? Are they aware of their own monstrosity? Do they accept it or reject it? Kalliope: Less monstrous and more of just a bitch, and she is well aware that she is a bitch and plays into it.

Katarina: Absolutely, she doesn’t necessarily look the part but her whole deal as a warlock makes her monstrous. She is definitely aware of it, and she definitely accepts it. To her, it’s power, which she believes she deserves after being powerless for so long.

Maeve Trevelyan: She’s not really monstrous at all, she’s just trying to live her life.

Xuna: If we’re talking in-game, I’d definitely count the illithid powers as her being monstrous as she does tap into them (to an extent, using the astral tadpole and becoming half-illithid is a step too far for her). She is very aware of it, being that it’s the whole plot of the game, and again she mostly accepts it to a certain extent.

Midnight: What keeps your OC up at night? Do they have nightmares? Fears? Anxieties? What do they do in the small hours of the morning when they should be sleeping? Kalliope: This woman sleeps like a goddamn baby she doesn’t worry about SHIT (money can solve a lot of problems). The only reason she would be up at night is if she’s partying into the wee hours of the morning.

Katarina: Mostly what keeps her up is her ruminating on her own revenge. She does have nightmares, it’s definitely not uncommon for them to be of the day she became a warlock considering it was the worst day of her life so far. If she isn’t sleeping, she is probably talking to herself (and by extension, her patron).

Maeve Trevelyan: Mostly what’s keeping her up at night is anxiety. Whether she’s doing the right thing, leading the inquisition in the correct way where things will work out. If she can’t or isn’t sleeping, she’s a wanderer. Pre-inquisition, she usually ended up in her family’s library, but during the game she’s commonly seen wandering the battlements of Skyhold.

Xuna: She’s got a lot of things keeping her up at night, many of which have to do with the uninvited visitor in her head. I would say a lot of her current fear stems from that, but having nightmares of her past home life is common for her too. When she should be sleeping, she’s more often than not going through her gear, sharpening her blades and making sure everything is set should she need to move quickly.

Torture: Has your OC ever been tortured? Would your OC ever torture someone else? Kalliope: Not tortured no, unless you count her yearly family dinners as torture (she would). I don’t think she would torture anyone else but she has been known to ruin a reputation or two (or more) with a well-placed word.

Katarina: Yeah I would consider being basically kidnapped and thrown in the ocean as a sacrifice to be torture. She would torture someone else, I think, if she found it justified. Justified in her case means they’re a member of the cult. They tortured her so in her mind she’s right to torture them back.

Maeve Trevelyan: She hasn’t been tortured, just neglected. She wouldn’t torture someone else, she has too much of a soft heart for that.

Xuna: Physically? Not really. Mentally and emotionally? ABSOLUTELY thank you Zelnirra Mizzrune for that one. Being told you’re a blight on your family for your entire life sticks with you. She wouldn’t torture someone else, she doesn’t find any sort of purpose to it when there’s other ways to get what she wants.

[crisps-craft]

Hello, I saw your post about being open for readings and thought I would try at asking a question if that's alright. Lately I have been contemplating the concept of a curse, I have been a witch for 5 years and understand the concept within its typical context and discourse, but I find that often times we tend to view ourselves as being 'cursed' when we see the repetition of an event or fault within ourselves; this can be something we see suddenly begin at some point in our lives (clear or vague) or believe to come from birth (maybe a past life). In some ways, rationally I know I'm not cursed and that it has more to do with my self perception, but looking back at my life I see a history in which I'm alone, incapable of making friends or successfully socialising with others except for a few online friends and shallow irl friendships who aren't part of my daily life (unlike other forced/awkward interactions). I would like to know if, when, and how this will change? Is it really a curse that I've placed on myself or was born with?

I hope you have a wonderful day and Thank You,

-L.C.F 🌙

Capricorn Rising, Sagittarius Sun

hello :) reading this ask, i just wanted to take a second to appreciate your occult philosophy because mine is very similar and its fascinating talking with other practitioners and witches! & while reading your question, i got a very cerebral and intellectual vibe from you. you spend so much time refining your perspectives and personal beliefs- its like a mental tinker toy that you always add, remove, transmute, and transform with. you are always learning and try to add / question it and its cool. scientist philosopher vibe and it makes sense with the cap ris and sag sun!

a quick astrological note i have about sagittarius is that a lot of them that ive been friends with (i have a lot of sag friends - im a gemini so sister signs hehe) never feel at place anywhere. not only physically, but even with friends too? even the extroverted ones who have the skill and charisma of socializing never feel at place or 'real' with anyone - jupiter (ruling planet) is an outer planet and they are more focused on large-scale collective issues / philosophy, etc. and their energies tend to be heavier / more intense with outer planets imo. esp with saturn as your ruler (im going to guess your sun in sag is in the 12th house if your rising is in cap! i have a 12th house too and 12th house planets are veryyyy important to your soul's path and how it experiences existence) a 12th house sun indicates someone more withdrawn who only feels comfortable being who they are alone - however, often enough, they find themselves emotionally in conflicts with this. 12th housers are notably known for experiencing loneliness, however, not only can this change (the 12th house has highhh spiritual energy within it that can manifest sooooo much holy shit) 12th housers are natural psychics, channelers, and magicians. its part of their soul path. when they learn to channel more from a place of pure self acceptance, self-love, etc. - existence will be so much easier for them.

i have a couple 12th house placements and when i was younger i couldnt click with anyone either - for example, i hate television and mass media. i use tumblr as a spiritual space which is nice but thats about it. i have others but all of it exhausts me tbh. i read a lot of philosophy and psych (im a phi and psych major) and its made me see the world differently. i took for more sensitive intelligent yet fun types! those people can be hard to find and when i was younger and not in control of my 12th house energies (aka always having self guilt, intense self hatred, intense ego inflation / wanting to achieve worldly goals) i couldnt manifest or meet any of them. i spend a lot of time alone (but honestly my psychic abilities thriveee when im alone so realize that the 12th house has hidden gifts and they r so fun hehe) and through self-healing, when i noticed myself shedding those parts of myself that were channeling dark energy, my life manifested better in all areas. when you shed the ego, oddly enough spirit comes through and blesses your life and im so serious with this one. my relationship to the world changed radically, same with my family, friends, i came into alignment with my soulmates. the 12th house is all about learning self-forgiveness and changing negative mental patterns- like i think, from reading your question, you are blaming yourself a lot like "whats wrong with me?" or "what am i doing to 'dispel' people?" i dont think this is the case. its wild because other people find you really cool and intelligent but in a detached way while you see yourself so much lesser than. but ur cool asf so remember that haha. i think that recognizing what qualities you like in people instead of what you lack in yourself might help - there is a good manifestation tool where you write spells/ affirmations and put it on the windowsill and forget about it. when you write what you want, you have to be specific (to make sure the spell doesnt work wrong), use positive energy, and use the present tense as if it has already happened. this might help you redirect and refocus a bit?

i also want to say that witches and mystics can often feel lonely- i notice this a lot with my intuitive friends where they either need a lot of alone time or cant find those introspective, deep, solacing, and safe connections that they crave. they exist out there, and i think alignment will help. trust in yourself. i keep getting the whole self-love message here - your guides are stressing this a lot - also i would recommend looking into 12th house placements because (i cant exaggerate it enough) that's the fix- the only way out is from within.

though im not too familiar with the specifics of curses (i practice light magick) i see curses as reversible forces and i truly believe in the unconditional love of the Absolute (the universe) and its extensions of Being (the soul in the immaterial realms, and the ego in the material realms). the lessons that our souls are learning on earth are stepping stones to our revolution. opening up the heart to the unconditional patience and forgiveness to yourself is so essential - don't rest in shame or feel like 'something is wrong with you'. fear feeds on fear, and love breeds on love. Sometimes 12th house placements can feel like a curse but it’s moreso what state of mind you have. If anything, the 12th house is karma to resolve. Just make sure you aren’t blaming yourself and that it can be so difficult to connect with people and it’s not your fault at all - imo from a philosophical standpoint, we have capitalism to blame. Marx’s theory of alienation is interesting.

I hope that this could help and that it resonates! energy is such a malleable and manipulative source so you can use this for good causes such as energy transmutation and rebirth. i think that expanding out into your interests and trying to find people similar to you might help? like i think you seek mental stimulation and you should look for those types? like most people seem kind of unconnectable or maybe even childish to you and i don't blame you at all for that

[scoundrels-in-love]

Alright, gimme the full DVD commentary about this passage from "I will drown for you...":

"It's not easy to forget, Vash doesn't know how to do it at all actually, but he knows how to put so many things away in boxes with loose lids, stacked in a pyramid that has long since outgrown him. He laughs and smiles and kind-of and almost feels it (and doubts his grief is real, since he can), at least while they're mostly closed.

But there are times when some of the lids open and in a chain reaction, spring many others open, too. Memories and pain and ghosts of what ifs and almosts, and a vacuum of isolation and loneliness that consumes all the air in his lungs, pour out, become all he can sense, all he is.

Unless Vash manages to fix the opening lids quickly, trying to close them can become like a game called guacamole or something of the sort that Rem had told him and Nai about - trying to hit a little pest as it pops out of holes rapidly all over the game field. There is no winning, only endless chase until the time runs out and he collapses from exhaustion, from being hollowed out by all he has held onto. The recovery can be hours or days, he never knows." I wasn't even looking for it, but when I saw it I knew it was the one. I just love it.

Hi hello my dear beloved sibling.

I now realize I have no idea how the DVD commentaries go so I am just going to babble how I know to.

First of all, I am amazed and touched that this is section you still remember *checks* 5 months, oh wow.

In all honesty, it's part that I wrote and then almost deleted. I wasn't sure if this sort of disassociation and compertmentalizing your grief and trauma was something that felt Vash like. At least in these words, in this metaphor.

But I kept it. Stayed honest to my want to write it the way it is and, in some way, I experience and struggle with grief and going through the day. Some of the most stinging, forever sticking with me throwaway comment on my grief in my life has been how 'I am clearly handling my loss quite well' because I could give a sort-of laugh a couple months after my loss. The way the pits of despair would change into numb neutrality through which I would mask and go on and how it always makes me doubt that I am sincerely grieving, that my pain is genuine and true to the bone and not just another reason for me to throw pity parties when I feel like.

In same way, my worst spirals are often gradual, at least at the start - started by some random thought or event that I have to then work on suppressing, putting away, lest it springs forward more and more thoughts and pains until I collapse. And sometimes the attempt to wrangle it all, no - usually, even -, is just as exhausting.

I took those feelings and experiences and gave them to Vash, who seems to compartmentalize a lot, who puts up a mask of cheer, but his eyes aren't into it. Who finds ways to blame himself for everything, even the way he feels things. I think the complexity and layers of guilt and pain and the way he's had to keep going make for very potent, very complex cocktail that he very much can't really deal with other than like this.

In this case, he's been teetering on edge of Feeling Bad and Too Much for a while, the injury and upsetting Meryl (and others) heightens it and the thought of Rollo & Livio resurfaces, as echo of his guilt for having anything nice, for having people who care when he's failed so many, just to push him closer to edge of not being able to tuck it all away neatly.

As for the guacamole, I thought it'd be funny if Vash for all his great memory couldn't quite remember something he heard as baby 150+ years ago and it became slightly twisted into a different word. A sort of little inside joke between me and readers who Know the words. I think a lot about words and things Vash knows that no one else does anymore, in general.

Send me excerpt from my fic and I will give you the DVD commentary on it?<3

[kammartinez]

By Katy Waldman

n the 2022 song “Anything but Me,” MUNA, a pop group known for sweet, close harmonies and an aesthetic of “queer joy,” sings, “You’re gonna say that I’m on a high horse / I think that my horse is regular-sized / Did you ever think maybe / You’re on a pony / Going in circles on a carousel ride?” Beware the woman on her high horse: like the animal she steers, she is extravagant, willful, disobedient. She takes her grandiosity seriously, even if “high” is a subjective word, even if any horse might appear too high with a woman on its back. Ask the British author Deborah Levy, who considers the idiom in “Real Estate” (2021), her third “living autobiography.” The book, which Levy wrote after getting divorced in her fifties, chronicles her attempts to unlearn the lessons she absorbed during her marriage—namely, that she should subordinate her life to caregiving and housework. In an anthemic passage, she envisions the kind of woman into whom she is trying to transform herself:

If I could not find her in real life, why not invent her on the page? There she is, steering her high horse with flair, making sure she does not run over girls and women struggling to find a horse of their own. Does she scoop them up and ride the high horse with them? Do they scoop her up and take over the reins? Did that feel true? I hoped so. My fifties had been a time of change and turbulence, energetic and exciting. A time of self-respect and perhaps a sort of homecoming. So there you are! Where have you been all these years?

“Real Estate” and Levy’s two earlier living autobiographies, “Things I Don’t Want to Know” (2014) and “The Cost of Living” (2018), are bound together by her search for this figure, the elusive “major female character” or “missing female character”—a woman who would be the hero of her own life. (In “Real Estate,” Levy further complicates this quest by looking for the older female protagonist.) Levy has been writing fiction, plays, poetry, and essays since the early eighties, and has twice been short-listed for the Booker Prize, for the novels “Swimming Home” and “Hot Milk.” But the three living autobiographies, named for their elliptical quality, the way they drift backward and forward in time, may be her best-loved works. A pleasing paradox of Levy’s career is that new generations have received her rejection of maternal martyrdom as a gesture of care. The books have connected her to an audience of women grateful for the mentorship and encouragement in their pages; a recent Guardian profile describes readers coming to Levy’s events for life advice, as if travelling to Canterbury.

In “Things I Don’t Want to Know,” which Levy wrote in her late forties and early fifties, she excavates her childhood in apartheid South Africa, her early years as a playwright, and the beginnings of her marriage. “The Cost of Living” and “Real Estate” cover her divorce and subsequent self-reinvention. Levy travels across Europe; she covets imaginary mansions with fountains and pomegranate trees; she throws elaborate dinner parties with her daughters.

The books have their manifesto-like moments. “To strip the wallpaper off the fairy tale of the Family House in which the comfort and happiness of men and children have been the priority is to find behind it an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman,” Levy writes in “The Cost of Living.” But much of their appeal flows from Levy’s honesty about her own ambivalence and uncertainty. Her account of becoming free—filling her days with art and work, thinking through solitude, battling loneliness—refuses triumphalism. “I was unmaking the home that I’d spent much of my life’s energy creating,” she writes. “My new life was all about fumbling for keys in the dark.”

In her fiction, too, Levy evokes characters who are unrealized or in transition. “Swimming Home” features a Polish émigré turned cosmopolitan poet. The historian in “The Man Who Saw Everything” can’t put the events of his life in the right order. “August Blue,” Levy’s eighth and newest novel, extends this project. When the book opens, the main character, Elsa, a concert pianist, is in crisis. She keeps catching glimpses of a woman whom she believes in some enigmatic way to be her double. She has just sabotaged a performance at a concert in Vienna: instead of Rachmaninoff’s second concerto, her fingers, as if possessed, began to tap out an alien composition. Elsa’s own origins are equally mysterious to her. Her birth parents gave her up when she was very young to a neighboring family. Later, she was adopted by the renowned maestro Arthur Goldstein. The novel is shaped by Elsa’s longing for her birth mother and her struggle to make peace with women who turn away from their children, as Elsa’s mom did, and toward themselves, as Elsa herself must. The book unspools, in spare, charged vignettes, as a kind of pilgrim’s progress, with Elsa moving closer to her doppelgänger, the buried truth of her parentage, and her own artistic voice.

The novel, like much of Levy’s fiction, takes place in a world that feels at once familiar and permeated with tones and shapes from its protagonist’s unconscious. Obscurely symbolic horses dance and stamp; the double seems somehow to have accessed Elsa’s earliest memories. Elsa is searching for what the typical Levy heroine seeks—a blueprint for becoming the major female character—and her desire pushes her to strange and poetic acts of self-repossession. She uses her hands, insured for millions of dollars, to pull sea urchins from the ocean. Declaring independence from nature itself, she dyes her hair blue.

When I spoke to Levy, who is sixty-three, over Zoom, she had recently concluded her U.K. book tour. She appeared at her desk, in front of a wide-open window, clad in a wavy blouse that matched her plummy lip gloss. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How are you doing?

It’s a sunny day in Paris. It’s been raining endlessly, as if there were no other weather here. But now it’s warm and the sky is blue. And I have the window open and that feels good.

I’m in Paris because my French publishers keep me busy, and they have just brought out a book of my unpublished collected writing—essays, stories, letters, and so on—called “The Position of Spoons.”

Why “The Position of Spoons”?

It’s the title of a story in the anthology, and there’s something about putting a collection of writing together. You’re positioning, you’re deciding what’s going to be against what.

Was there something in particular that drew you to spoons?

The French title is “La Position de la Cuillère,” which means “the spoon position.” And when the book is published in the U.K. next year, it will also be “Spoon Position”—a title with a different meaning, I think. Just slightly sexualized. The story is about a man who always wants his spoon, when he eats his boiled egg, to face the egg. It’s a little obsessional. He feels faint and disoriented if the spoon changes position.

Your work feels very French to me, even though you’re not from France. It’s maybe to do with sensuality and the absence of puritanical shame. Pleasure is healthy but not fetishized; you pay attention to the idea of living well. Does that seem fair?

There is certainly a lack of shame in the living autobiographies. They’re not written with the shame of a shipwrecked marriage; they try to write themselves out of societal shame. And my characters take pleasure in small things. It’s a suffering world and a nourishing one; it contains many things that are of sustenance.

I grew up on French literature, by mistake, at my school in London. We had an Irish librarian and translated literature was very hard to find, especially for my generation. My mother had introduced me to Colette—I’d never been to France and was thirteen, fourteen—and it was as if a wind had blown in from Burgundy and from Paris. When I read about Colette’s mother, in her book “Sido,” I wanted my mother to be just like Sido, to make me hot chocolate and to point out spiders, the silk of their webs, and to show me the dew on a rose in the morning. But my mother was scared of spiders.

Your writing has a very dreamlike, inward quality. There are the doubles in “August Blue.” Even the autobiographies have an associative logic that makes them feel as though they’re transpiring half within the narrator’s head. But that self-involvement, for lack of a better word, doesn’t collapse into self-loathing. Characters aren’t ashamed to live in their thoughts or to put their artistic practice first. So much recent American literature seems mired in self-awareness and shame. Your work feels different.

A friend, a radio producer, was telling me about making a program about music teachers. A student was playing Chopin, and the teacher said, “Stop! Don’t you realize all of life and all of death is in this chord?” [Laughs.] Now that’s not how I would speak about writing. But, in a way, it’s how I think about writing. Elsa, the protagonist of “August Blue,” is a concert pianist, and the mercilessness of her training really interested me. I’ve always wanted to write about merciless training, which I have a great deal of respect for. I was slowly building up to Elsa because I wanted [the training] to come apart—just to see what would happen. If there’s something locked inside you and you are fearful, as she is fearful, of unlocking it and playing it . . . perhaps there is shame in that, in showing the composition to others—as well as, I suppose, in keeping it locked up. But one hopes that the shame isn’t the sum of the story.

In some ways, “August Blue” reminds me of your other work, especially the autobiographies. A woman’s way of life comes to an end, partly because she chooses to end it, and she has to find something new. What drew you to this configuration of the problem, these details?

I was writing the book during and after the lockdowns of the pandemic. I became very addicted to my news feeds, which I read every day. What was I looking for? It was as if I were looking for a narrative for the end of the world. I had to read everything. I realized that the anxiety was pervasive: my friends and family felt it, too. I wanted to scoop up that mood, all the low-level anxiety, and put it in the body of my protagonist. And I was listening to a lot of classical piano. I wanted no words at that time. The feeling of wordlessness—I think it amplified my sense that the world needs a new composition.

I know we don’t want pandemic novels—my heart sinks if someone tells me to read one—but I have to own that I wrote one. I had to decide: What do I do with it? What do you do with a momentous historical moment that you lived through? Do you just pretend it didn’t happen? I decided that I wanted to mark it in some way because it marked me. I was thinking of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” which was set in 1923, soon after the First World War and the Spanish Flu. Of course Woolf had Mrs. Dalloway buy flowers! Because of the grim time that Woolf lived through, she would need to begin with the character doing something totally frivolous. That’s why I had Elsa buy a pair of mechanical dancing horses. In “Mrs. Dalloway,” Woolf and Clarissa Dalloway merge, and their double, as it were, is Septimus Smith, the shell-shocked soldier. I could hear the echo, the haunting, of Woolf’s book in my mind all through the writing of “August Blue.”

You often return to the figure of the horse, especially in connection with women. Who is the woman on the high horse?

There aren’t many female doppelgängers in literature. I was thinking of Jean Genet, who was an orphan. I remember reading, in Edmund White’s brilliant biography, that Genet used to write under the light of a lamp at night. He would look up at every woman passing just in case it was his mother. That’s not rational: how would he know? But he was in that interesting place that Elsa is in, looking for her mother in the double. When Elsa is just a baby, her birth mother gives her up. And Elsa, on a very subliminal level, when she’s playing the piano, aged five and six, experiences a feeling that she’s playing to someone. I reckon that would be her unknown mother. When she talks about her double as someone who’s listening to her very attentively, I wanted, without underlining it in any way, to mirror the mother. The double is the split self; usually, there’s a good and a bad self, and they’re hellbent on destroying each other.

The double struck me as an example of the “missing female character” or “unwritten female character” that you’ve said you’re looking for. In a way, she’s Elsa, and she’s Elsa’s birth mother, and she’s possibly her lover, too. What made you want to blur those relationships?

I don’t feel that mothers are lovers. But maybe you’re talking about affection, attachment, or detachment—all wonderful subjects. All my subjects, I think. It’s not clear in the book whether this woman who bought the mechanical dancing horses actually is identical to Elsa. I leave some space there. A little later we hear that Elsa has green eyes and her double has brown eyes. She must represent Elsa, and yet I wanted her to be embodied, with needs of her own.

You said that Elsa, when she plays piano, is always playing to her mother. Who were you writing to when you wrote the novel?

Maybe I’m writing to my father. Elsa and Arthur have a confusing relationship—one that I didn’t have with my own father, by the way. He wasn’t my teacher. But Elsa’s been gifted to Arthur, who is her father-teacher. I was interested in the relationships that we have with a mentor. I can see that, writing Arthur’s death, I had my father’s recent death in mind. We all sat on his deathbed and fed him ice cream. I was so struck by how much he was enjoying the ice cream. That’s what it comes down to in the end: a little bit of ice cream on a teaspoon.

Who else am I writing to? I’m in conversation, I think, with a generalized contemporary anxiety. “August Blue” is not really about finding an identity; it’s about losing one. It contains my rage about the old composition of the suffering world. It’s about how badly we need a new language, and how hard it is to make it. I don’t just mean a literary language or musical language. [While writing the book,] I was watching films of the third generation of dancers who followed Isadora Duncan. Duncan was the mother of modern dance and broke through all the ballet conventions. Hers is a very easy language to mock: I would find myself doing the mocking and the admiring in equal measure. But then I decided it was much more interesting to respect it. To respect it would be to move, as Duncan often does, upward and outward, instead of only inward and downward. And so, having come from those pandemic years of inward and downward, I thought, Yes, what we have to do is move upward and outward. I repeat that in the novel, because it’s somewhere for Elsa to get to as well. Upward and outward. With the help of a possible double.

Tell me about your ongoing search for the “missing female character.”

You’re talking about the living autobiographies, where I riff on major characters and minor characters. In “The Cost of Living,” a young Englishwoman is invited to the table of an older man, and she is brave—she decides to take him up on it—and she begins to speak about herself. He says, “You talk a lot, don’t you?” It’s as if she doesn’t understand that he’s the major character and she’s the minor character. The talking, which she’s doing too much of, isn’t required; she’s not required to come with a whole life and libido of her own.

What kind of female character is Elsa? How does she fit into your search?

Do I think Elsa is my “major unwritten female character”? No, I don’t. The major female character is more of an ideal than a person. Elsa is both immensely powerful and immensely fragile. I like the back-and-forth of the two together; for some reason, it still feels subversive. I’ve never believed in binaries. So to mess with them in fiction interests me.

How do you decide, when you have an idea that might be part memory and part theory of human nature, whether to flesh it out as fiction or as autobiography?

In “August Blue,” I wanted avatars; I wanted them to go and do all the work for me. I asked myself, “What did I want to read?” I regard the novel as an intellectual entertainment, which is why I loved reading Colette when I was young. The world is so vivid in her work. It’s not otherworldly. I think too much otherworldliness is a mistake. We might not understand our motivations, we might not understand our desires—why we’re sad or angry—but the pleasure of writing in any form is when something totally incoherent to oneself becomes more coherent. You smell the smoke, the blast of something that seems so impossible getting closer. But it works the other way, too. What was once coherent and understandable suddenly becomes much less so. That to-and-fro, in my work, of coherence and incoherence interests me a lot. I don’t know anyone who’s entirely clever or anyone who’s entirely stupid.

Many of your characters are mysteries to themselves, or at least find parts of their own psychologies obscure.

It’s not exactly that the characters are “mysteries to themselves.” The truth is that it’s extremely hard, extremely painful, to feel things, and so the failure to access feelings, to actually get somewhere near them, is one of my subjects. Some people don’t want to go there. Fair enough; I have a lot of respect for that position. This idea that we all have to go there is rather punitive.

Are there particular feelings that you’re interested in unearthing, or I guess not unearthing?

I was trying something, in “August Blue,” with the reveal and the conceal. I became aware that I didn’t want the reveals—and there are few of them—to be “Ta-da!” moments. I wanted them to be in the middle of lots of other things, like the noise of a restaurant, the sound of a road being drilled up outside, the distraction of a conversation about something else altogether. You know, you’re crossing the road and you see a truck go by and it’s raining and water splashes on your favorite pair of shoes and you’re thinking about your shopping list. But then what you’re really thinking about suddenly comes closer to you. I had to give up quite a lot of writing ego to do it like that. I wrestled with it for some time; I wrote up a storm. I wrote two glorious reveals, and then I got rid of them.

Yet you did include a spectacular moment when Elsa dyes her hair, and both she and Arthur declare that she’s a “natural blue.” I love that phrase; it’s a place in the book where the themes of heredity, art, and identity seem to intersect.

When Elsa dyes her hair, when the foils are off and her blue hair ripples down, she says, “I could hear my birth mother gasp.” It’s like a separation from her DNA. She no longer asks all those questions about her birth parents: Do I look like them? Who do I look like, my mother or my father? Where do I get my height from? Where do I get the shape of my nose from? She’s solved that.

Did you study music as a child?

Regretfully, no. I just loved to play the piano as a kid. I think I understood that you could speak through the keys and that it was a kind of musical diary. But I had to dare myself to make her a concert pianist. Elsa never speaks viscerally about the sensation of playing the piano. I didn’t dare go there. If I listen to cello, for example—such a warming feeling, cello—I can feel it vibrating through my body. But Elsa doesn’t use that sort of language, about what it feels like to play the piano, in “August Blue.”

Toward the end of the novel, there’s an image of Elsa’s birth mother sunbathing against the wall, closing her eyes in the sunlight. That seems right to me. Maybe it feels like that.

The scene in which her mother is taking in the sun was one of my favorites to write. Usually the mother who has given up her child is supposed to suffer. That’s the script written for her. So I wanted a moment that she’s taking for herself, where she is sunbathing, topless, with her scarf wrapped around her waist, her back pressed against the warm stones of a wall in a field. Why not? Give her some pleasure.

[kamreadsandrecs]

By Katy Waldman

In the 2022 song “Anything but Me,” MUNA, a pop group known for sweet, close harmonies and an aesthetic of “queer joy,” sings, “You’re gonna say that I’m on a high horse / I think that my horse is regular-sized / Did you ever think maybe / You’re on a pony / Going in circles on a carousel ride?” Beware the woman on her high horse: like the animal she steers, she is extravagant, willful, disobedient. She takes her grandiosity seriously, even if “high” is a subjective word, even if any horse might appear too high with a woman on its back. Ask the British author Deborah Levy, who considers the idiom in “Real Estate” (2021), her third “living autobiography.” The book, which Levy wrote after getting divorced in her fifties, chronicles her attempts to unlearn the lessons she absorbed during her marriage—namely, that she should subordinate her life to caregiving and housework. In an anthemic passage, she envisions the kind of woman into whom she is trying to transform herself:

If I could not find her in real life, why not invent her on the page? There she is, steering her high horse with flair, making sure she does not run over girls and women struggling to find a horse of their own. Does she scoop them up and ride the high horse with them? Do they scoop her up and take over the reins? Did that feel true? I hoped so. My fifties had been a time of change and turbulence, energetic and exciting. A time of self-respect and perhaps a sort of homecoming. So there you are! Where have you been all these years?

“Real Estate” and Levy’s two earlier living autobiographies, “Things I Don’t Want to Know” (2014) and “The Cost of Living” (2018), are bound together by her search for this figure, the elusive “major female character” or “missing female character”—a woman who would be the hero of her own life. (In “Real Estate,” Levy further complicates this quest by looking for the older female protagonist.) Levy has been writing fiction, plays, poetry, and essays since the early eighties, and has twice been short-listed for the Booker Prize, for the novels “Swimming Home” and “Hot Milk.” But the three living autobiographies, named for their elliptical quality, the way they drift backward and forward in time, may be her best-loved works. A pleasing paradox of Levy’s career is that new generations have received her rejection of maternal martyrdom as a gesture of care. The books have connected her to an audience of women grateful for the mentorship and encouragement in their pages; a recent Guardian profile describes readers coming to Levy’s events for life advice, as if travelling to Canterbury.

In “Things I Don’t Want to Know,” which Levy wrote in her late forties and early fifties, she excavates her childhood in apartheid South Africa, her early years as a playwright, and the beginnings of her marriage. “The Cost of Living” and “Real Estate” cover her divorce and subsequent self-reinvention. Levy travels across Europe; she covets imaginary mansions with fountains and pomegranate trees; she throws elaborate dinner parties with her daughters.

The books have their manifesto-like moments. “To strip the wallpaper off the fairy tale of the Family House in which the comfort and happiness of men and children have been the priority is to find behind it an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman,” Levy writes in “The Cost of Living.” But much of their appeal flows from Levy’s honesty about her own ambivalence and uncertainty. Her account of becoming free—filling her days with art and work, thinking through solitude, battling loneliness—refuses triumphalism. “I was unmaking the home that I’d spent much of my life’s energy creating,” she writes. “My new life was all about fumbling for keys in the dark.”

In her fiction, too, Levy evokes characters who are unrealized or in transition. “Swimming Home” features a Polish émigré turned cosmopolitan poet. The historian in “The Man Who Saw Everything” can’t put the events of his life in the right order. “August Blue,” Levy’s eighth and newest novel, extends this project. When the book opens, the main character, Elsa, a concert pianist, is in crisis. She keeps catching glimpses of a woman whom she believes in some enigmatic way to be her double. She has just sabotaged a performance at a concert in Vienna: instead of Rachmaninoff’s second concerto, her fingers, as if possessed, began to tap out an alien composition. Elsa’s own origins are equally mysterious to her. Her birth parents gave her up when she was very young to a neighboring family. Later, she was adopted by the renowned maestro Arthur Goldstein. The novel is shaped by Elsa’s longing for her birth mother and her struggle to make peace with women who turn away from their children, as Elsa’s mom did, and toward themselves, as Elsa herself must. The book unspools, in spare, charged vignettes, as a kind of pilgrim’s progress, with Elsa moving closer to her doppelgänger, the buried truth of her parentage, and her own artistic voice.

The novel, like much of Levy’s fiction, takes place in a world that feels at once familiar and permeated with tones and shapes from its protagonist’s unconscious. Obscurely symbolic horses dance and stamp; the double seems somehow to have accessed Elsa’s earliest memories. Elsa is searching for what the typical Levy heroine seeks—a blueprint for becoming the major female character—and her desire pushes her to strange and poetic acts of self-repossession. She uses her hands, insured for millions of dollars, to pull sea urchins from the ocean. Declaring independence from nature itself, she dyes her hair blue.

When I spoke to Levy, who is sixty-three, over Zoom, she had recently concluded her U.K. book tour. She appeared at her desk, in front of a wide-open window, clad in a wavy blouse that matched her plummy lip gloss. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How are you doing?

It’s a sunny day in Paris. It’s been raining endlessly, as if there were no other weather here. But now it’s warm and the sky is blue. And I have the window open and that feels good.

I’m in Paris because my French publishers keep me busy, and they have just brought out a book of my unpublished collected writing—essays, stories, letters, and so on—called “The Position of Spoons.”

Why “The Position of Spoons”?

It’s the title of a story in the anthology, and there’s something about putting a collection of writing together. You’re positioning, you’re deciding what’s going to be against what.

Was there something in particular that drew you to spoons?

The French title is “La Position de la Cuillère,” which means “the spoon position.” And when the book is published in the U.K. next year, it will also be “Spoon Position”—a title with a different meaning, I think. Just slightly sexualized. The story is about a man who always wants his spoon, when he eats his boiled egg, to face the egg. It’s a little obsessional. He feels faint and disoriented if the spoon changes position.

Your work feels very French to me, even though you’re not from France. It’s maybe to do with sensuality and the absence of puritanical shame. Pleasure is healthy but not fetishized; you pay attention to the idea of living well. Does that seem fair?

There is certainly a lack of shame in the living autobiographies. They’re not written with the shame of a shipwrecked marriage; they try to write themselves out of societal shame. And my characters take pleasure in small things. It’s a suffering world and a nourishing one; it contains many things that are of sustenance.

I grew up on French literature, by mistake, at my school in London. We had an Irish librarian and translated literature was very hard to find, especially for my generation. My mother had introduced me to Colette—I’d never been to France and was thirteen, fourteen—and it was as if a wind had blown in from Burgundy and from Paris. When I read about Colette’s mother, in her book “Sido,” I wanted my mother to be just like Sido, to make me hot chocolate and to point out spiders, the silk of their webs, and to show me the dew on a rose in the morning. But my mother was scared of spiders.

Your writing has a very dreamlike, inward quality. There are the doubles in “August Blue.” Even the autobiographies have an associative logic that makes them feel as though they’re transpiring half within the narrator’s head. But that self-involvement, for lack of a better word, doesn’t collapse into self-loathing. Characters aren’t ashamed to live in their thoughts or to put their artistic practice first. So much recent American literature seems mired in self-awareness and shame. Your work feels different.

A friend, a radio producer, was telling me about making a program about music teachers. A student was playing Chopin, and the teacher said, “Stop! Don’t you realize all of life and all of death is in this chord?” [Laughs.] Now that’s not how I would speak about writing. But, in a way, it’s how I think about writing. Elsa, the protagonist of “August Blue,” is a concert pianist, and the mercilessness of her training really interested me. I’ve always wanted to write about merciless training, which I have a great deal of respect for. I was slowly building up to Elsa because I wanted [the training] to come apart—just to see what would happen. If there’s something locked inside you and you are fearful, as she is fearful, of unlocking it and playing it . . . perhaps there is shame in that, in showing the composition to others—as well as, I suppose, in keeping it locked up. But one hopes that the shame isn’t the sum of the story.

In some ways, “August Blue” reminds me of your other work, especially the autobiographies. A woman’s way of life comes to an end, partly because she chooses to end it, and she has to find something new. What drew you to this configuration of the problem, these details?

I was writing the book during and after the lockdowns of the pandemic. I became very addicted to my news feeds, which I read every day. What was I looking for? It was as if I were looking for a narrative for the end of the world. I had to read everything. I realized that the anxiety was pervasive: my friends and family felt it, too. I wanted to scoop up that mood, all the low-level anxiety, and put it in the body of my protagonist. And I was listening to a lot of classical piano. I wanted no words at that time. The feeling of wordlessness—I think it amplified my sense that the world needs a new composition.

I know we don’t want pandemic novels—my heart sinks if someone tells me to read one—but I have to own that I wrote one. I had to decide: What do I do with it? What do you do with a momentous historical moment that you lived through? Do you just pretend it didn’t happen? I decided that I wanted to mark it in some way because it marked me. I was thinking of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” which was set in 1923, soon after the First World War and the Spanish Flu. Of course Woolf had Mrs. Dalloway buy flowers! Because of the grim time that Woolf lived through, she would need to begin with the character doing something totally frivolous. That’s why I had Elsa buy a pair of mechanical dancing horses. In “Mrs. Dalloway,” Woolf and Clarissa Dalloway merge, and their double, as it were, is Septimus Smith, the shell-shocked soldier. I could hear the echo, the haunting, of Woolf’s book in my mind all through the writing of “August Blue.”

You often return to the figure of the horse, especially in connection with women. Who is the woman on the high horse?

There aren’t many female doppelgängers in literature. I was thinking of Jean Genet, who was an orphan. I remember reading, in Edmund White’s brilliant biography, that Genet used to write under the light of a lamp at night. He would look up at every woman passing just in case it was his mother. That’s not rational: how would he know? But he was in that interesting place that Elsa is in, looking for her mother in the double. When Elsa is just a baby, her birth mother gives her up. And Elsa, on a very subliminal level, when she’s playing the piano, aged five and six, experiences a feeling that she’s playing to someone. I reckon that would be her unknown mother. When she talks about her double as someone who’s listening to her very attentively, I wanted, without underlining it in any way, to mirror the mother. The double is the split self; usually, there’s a good and a bad self, and they’re hellbent on destroying each other.

The double struck me as an example of the “missing female character” or “unwritten female character” that you’ve said you’re looking for. In a way, she’s Elsa, and she’s Elsa’s birth mother, and she’s possibly her lover, too. What made you want to blur those relationships?

I don’t feel that mothers are lovers. But maybe you’re talking about affection, attachment, or detachment—all wonderful subjects. All my subjects, I think. It’s not clear in the book whether this woman who bought the mechanical dancing horses actually is identical to Elsa. I leave some space there. A little later we hear that Elsa has green eyes and her double has brown eyes. She must represent Elsa, and yet I wanted her to be embodied, with needs of her own.

You said that Elsa, when she plays piano, is always playing to her mother. Who were you writing to when you wrote the novel?

Maybe I’m writing to my father. Elsa and Arthur have a confusing relationship—one that I didn’t have with my own father, by the way. He wasn’t my teacher. But Elsa’s been gifted to Arthur, who is her father-teacher. I was interested in the relationships that we have with a mentor. I can see that, writing Arthur’s death, I had my father’s recent death in mind. We all sat on his deathbed and fed him ice cream. I was so struck by how much he was enjoying the ice cream. That’s what it comes down to in the end: a little bit of ice cream on a teaspoon.

Who else am I writing to? I’m in conversation, I think, with a generalized contemporary anxiety. “August Blue” is not really about finding an identity; it’s about losing one. It contains my rage about the old composition of the suffering world. It’s about how badly we need a new language, and how hard it is to make it. I don’t just mean a literary language or musical language. [While writing the book,] I was watching films of the third generation of dancers who followed Isadora Duncan. Duncan was the mother of modern dance and broke through all the ballet conventions. Hers is a very easy language to mock: I would find myself doing the mocking and the admiring in equal measure. But then I decided it was much more interesting to respect it. To respect it would be to move, as Duncan often does, upward and outward, instead of only inward and downward. And so, having come from those pandemic years of inward and downward, I thought, Yes, what we have to do is move upward and outward. I repeat that in the novel, because it’s somewhere for Elsa to get to as well. Upward and outward. With the help of a possible double.

Tell me about your ongoing search for the “missing female character.”

You’re talking about the living autobiographies, where I riff on major characters and minor characters. In “The Cost of Living,” a young Englishwoman is invited to the table of an older man, and she is brave—she decides to take him up on it—and she begins to speak about herself. He says, “You talk a lot, don’t you?” It’s as if she doesn’t understand that he’s the major character and she’s the minor character. The talking, which she’s doing too much of, isn’t required; she’s not required to come with a whole life and libido of her own.

What kind of female character is Elsa? How does she fit into your search?

Do I think Elsa is my “major unwritten female character”? No, I don’t. The major female character is more of an ideal than a person. Elsa is both immensely powerful and immensely fragile. I like the back-and-forth of the two together; for some reason, it still feels subversive. I’ve never believed in binaries. So to mess with them in fiction interests me.

How do you decide, when you have an idea that might be part memory and part theory of human nature, whether to flesh it out as fiction or as autobiography?

In “August Blue,” I wanted avatars; I wanted them to go and do all the work for me. I asked myself, “What did I want to read?” I regard the novel as an intellectual entertainment, which is why I loved reading Colette when I was young. The world is so vivid in her work. It’s not otherworldly. I think too much otherworldliness is a mistake. We might not understand our motivations, we might not understand our desires—why we’re sad or angry—but the pleasure of writing in any form is when something totally incoherent to oneself becomes more coherent. You smell the smoke, the blast of something that seems so impossible getting closer. But it works the other way, too. What was once coherent and understandable suddenly becomes much less so. That to-and-fro, in my work, of coherence and incoherence interests me a lot. I don’t know anyone who’s entirely clever or anyone who’s entirely stupid.

Many of your characters are mysteries to themselves, or at least find parts of their own psychologies obscure.

It’s not exactly that the characters are “mysteries to themselves.” The truth is that it’s extremely hard, extremely painful, to feel things, and so the failure to access feelings, to actually get somewhere near them, is one of my subjects. Some people don’t want to go there. Fair enough; I have a lot of respect for that position. This idea that we all have to go there is rather punitive.

Are there particular feelings that you’re interested in unearthing, or I guess not unearthing?

I was trying something, in “August Blue,” with the reveal and the conceal. I became aware that I didn’t want the reveals—and there are few of them—to be “Ta-da!” moments. I wanted them to be in the middle of lots of other things, like the noise of a restaurant, the sound of a road being drilled up outside, the distraction of a conversation about something else altogether. You know, you’re crossing the road and you see a truck go by and it’s raining and water splashes on your favorite pair of shoes and you’re thinking about your shopping list. But then what you’re really thinking about suddenly comes closer to you. I had to give up quite a lot of writing ego to do it like that. I wrestled with it for some time; I wrote up a storm. I wrote two glorious reveals, and then I got rid of them.

Yet you did include a spectacular moment when Elsa dyes her hair, and both she and Arthur declare that she’s a “natural blue.” I love that phrase; it’s a place in the book where the themes of heredity, art, and identity seem to intersect.

When Elsa dyes her hair, when the foils are off and her blue hair ripples down, she says, “I could hear my birth mother gasp.” It’s like a separation from her DNA. She no longer asks all those questions about her birth parents: Do I look like them? Who do I look like, my mother or my father? Where do I get my height from? Where do I get the shape of my nose from? She’s solved that.

Did you study music as a child?

Regretfully, no. I just loved to play the piano as a kid. I think I understood that you could speak through the keys and that it was a kind of musical diary. But I had to dare myself to make her a concert pianist. Elsa never speaks viscerally about the sensation of playing the piano. I didn’t dare go there. If I listen to cello, for example—such a warming feeling, cello—I can feel it vibrating through my body. But Elsa doesn’t use that sort of language, about what it feels like to play the piano, in “August Blue.”

Toward the end of the novel, there’s an image of Elsa’s birth mother sunbathing against the wall, closing her eyes in the sunlight. That seems right to me. Maybe it feels like that.

The scene in which her mother is taking in the sun was one of my favorites to write. Usually the mother who has given up her child is supposed to suffer. That’s the script written for her. So I wanted a moment that she’s taking for herself, where she is sunbathing, topless, with her scarf wrapped around her waist, her back pressed against the warm stones of a wall in a field. Why not? Give her some pleasure.

[s-brant]

Angels Roll Their Eyes (2/2)

(gif: @toesure) (PART ONE)

Summary: Hurricane Agatha approaches Kildare Island during the aftermath of the eventful Fourth of July party. JJ and Y/N are determined to continue avoiding each other after what happened at the party, but John B has other plans for them.

Warnings: Smut, strong language, angst, implied physical abuse, depictions of anxiety/panic attacks, and sickeningly sweet fluff.

Word Count: 24k

A/N: Here we goooo! To celebrate the trailer dropping today, here’s part two to Devils Roll The Dice. If you haven’t read the first part, I suggest you read it and come back so this makes sense. This one has all the drama and spice, so buckle up! Thank you for the love and support on the first part. Let me know if you enjoyed this and have fun, cause I had a blast writing it.

Hurricane Agatha.

It was the first thing she heard about as soon as she woke up yesterday to the sound of her phone blaring with an obnoxious tone that reminds her of waking up too early in the morning for work or school.

Her sleepy eyes couldn't make out who was calling, so she pressed the button to answer and lifted the phone to hear her mom's voice squawking through the speaker at her about the hurricane projected to hit the island in the middle of the night tonight.

The problem is, her parents are out of town this week, leaving her all alone to prep the house and endure the storm alone. And for someone who flinches whenever she thinks she hears the sound of thunder in the sky, that is the worst it can get.

It's a fear her friends are conscious of. One time when they were out on the HMS Pogue, a quick summer storm started to drift overhead and it took all of her self control to not fall into a blind panic when thunder began to rumble above. John B was already steering them back in the direction of the Chateau but she knew it would do nothing to calm her nerves until she was back inside of the house.

The anxiety was starting to become too overwhelming when JJ sat down beside her and threw his arm over her shoulder. It was their first month of knowing one another, so the casual friendly gesture made her jump at first and turn her head to look at him, but he acted like everything was normal.

The next person to notice was John B. With JJ currently out of commission, the only person she thought to call to help her prep the house for the incoming storm was him. Since they never got hurricanes up where she used to live her whole life, she needed someone who's been through a couple to help her while her parents weren't home.

That's how she ended up here. Sweating bullets in the front yard of her house as she unloads the contents of the van with John B was not how she envisioned her Saturday night to go, but she's glad she has someone who's willing to help.

In the past five months of being with the Pogues, she's learned that it's lovely to have friends. She never used to have any before she moved, so in situations like this or when she got so drunk at the party, she never would've had anyone to be there for her. It's quiet moments of kindness and companionship like this that make her realize how much better life has been on the other side of uprooting everything to move here—self-inflicted boy drama and all.

The sandbag on her shoulder sends a growing ache through her back muscles with every step she takes to follow him up the length of unpaved dirt path up to her front door. As usual, he makes it look way easier than it is, and it almost makes her want to laugh at how different they are.

Most of her new friends are effortless, naturally picking up anything they decide to try at while she is inept by comparison. It's part of what attracted her to JJ in the first place. He may have his insecurities the same way every other individual does, but in her eyes, he has nothing to be insecure of. Even when he wipes out on a wave and appears out of the water with sand clumped in his salt-kissed strands of blonde hair, he manages to make it look cool.

"What are you smiling about?"

John B's laughter makes her look up from where she concentrated on the dirt path to see him looking back at her. He stands at the entrance to her house with the rest of the sandbags they carried up placed meticulously in front of the door to prevent water from entering the house. They did the same thing with the back door an hour ago.

Is she smiling? She hadn't even realized her expression changed from one of exhaustion and fear at the dark clouds closing in above to a grin, so her face instantly drops in guilt. After running out on JJ for the second time two days ago to go to work, any mention of him from their friends has left her drowning in shame.

She can't recall the bulk of her memories from the night of the Fourth of July party, but she fills in the gaps between those flashes of memory with what their friends told her about it.

Thanks to her overindulgence, there are holes poked in the fabric of her memory.

It jumps from her last fully sober moment of seeing JJ across the room with the kook girl to dancing clumsily with Kie to the floral scent of her makeup wipes that she can't attach a specific visual image to.

Then, she can remember waking up with a start in the middle of the night to throw up in a pot beside the bed while he held back her hair. Before John B explained it, she was quite confused after waking up about how she somehow got from being jealous over JJ flirting with another girl to waking up in the same bed as him.

She grunts as she plops the last sandbag down into place and decides to take a seat on the steps leading up to the door.

"It wasn't anything special," Y/N says and watches him come down to sit next to her, "I was just thinking about taking something so I can pass out and avoid having a panic attack over this stupid storm."

Unlike JJ, she isn't that skilled of a liar. It's obvious to anyone who knows her well when she does it based on the way her eye contact begins to drift away and her voice raises in pitch when she speaks. She's too honest with her friends to handle keeping secrets from them, which is why it's been so difficult for her with everything that has happened recently. Not only does she lie to the Pogues, she also avoids them by association in the process of trying to avoid JJ.

Regardless of how obvious her bluffing is, John B doesn't call her out on it. Instead, he focuses on a different part of what she said.

"Are you sure you're gonna be okay alone? I know your parents are out of town till next week..." he trails off into concerned silence.

The tip of her sneaker hangs off of the edge of the bottom step and absentmindedly digs a line into the dirt as she takes in his question.

Being alone when she's prone to panicking is a recipe for disaster. Anxiety and loneliness have a relationship similar to that of a weapon and ammunition. It takes very little for her to fall down the rabbit hole of obsessive thinking and break down into a hyperventilating, fearful mess, especially when no one else is there to tug her out of those dark thoughts.

Most of the time, the people who help her with that are her parents. If they're home during one of these episodes, she'll come stumbling downstairs to them from her room for help, and they'll do everything they can to bring her down from hysterics. Her friends, on the other hand, have yet to witness her have one of those moments.

"Having people with me helps, you know? But it is what it is, I'll just try to cope the best I can and hope for the best."

He nods, and though he's a portrait of understanding, she wonders if he finds it as juvenile and stupid as she does.

Logically, she knows that this anxiety is something many people experience. She understands that it's something that is mostly out of her control but can't help but tear herself apart over it.

She thinks to herself, What kind of weirdo can't sit inside during a thunderstorm or hurricane without losing their shit? Why am I not the one in control of my own mind when this happens?

Do her friends think similar things? Do they think it's as pathetic as she does, or is she just paranoid that they pick her flaws apart as much as she does? And, of course, she wonders what JJ would think if he saw her panic like that. He may have seen her start to become anxious on the HMS Pogue, but he hasn't seen her panic panic before, not in the way that her parents have, and she wonders if he'd think less of her for it.

Right when she's about to change the topic and steer him away from a chance to think of how ridiculous she's being about the approaching hurricane, he says something that makes her look back over at him.

"Then come spend the night at the Chateau. I can distract you. We can play board games and shit."

"Really?" she asks.

The idea of anyone wanting to waste an entire night playing board games and possibly signing themselves up for having to talk her down from a panic attack makes her heart melt.

"Yeah, why not? You need a friend tonight. You know any of us would do anything for you. You're like my little sister, dude, we'd all probably hack off a limb if we thought it'd help you. Especially JJ."

John B's last second name-drop is designed specifically for where he wants this conversation to go. Underneath the need to get his friends back to normal, he does feel a little guilty for having to do this. She thinks he's only offering to let her stay with him to help her—and he is, even if there weren't a rift between her and JJ, he'd still offer—but he has a different reason.

"Right," she says softly. "Speaking of which...is he gonna be there tonight?"

With how often he escapes his house to spend a night or two in temporary safety at the Chateau, it's not an unfounded assumption. He and John B spend more time together than any of them because of this, and when she goes over to hang out, she knows that he and JJ often come as a package deal.

He tries to play it cool and not give up anything that could make her suspicious of him, looking off at the van parked in the driveway as he takes a second to collect his thoughts. It's never easy for him to deceive people he cares about, even if it's for their own good. It wasn't easy when he invited JJ to spend the night a few hours ago with the knowledge that he'd soon invite Y/N too either, but he managed.

As always, Pope is the brains behind this operation. He was the one to suggest inviting them both over to wait out Agatha together when the three of them put their heads together to come up with a solution to their oblivious friends' drama. After JJ stormed out of the house the morning after the party, they knew they had to do something about it. This was what it came to.

"Nah. I offered but he said he's staying at home until this whole thing blows over."

He isn't sure why she buys into it.

She knows JJ well enough to know that he would literally rather eat glass than be trapped in a confined space with his dad for an entire day. Perhaps it's only because it's what she wants to believe. She wants to believe that she won't have to see him again tonight after everything that happened. How can she handle having to tell him why got so drunk that night and made an ass of herself? She can't bear to tell him all of that unnecessary drama started because she was jealous.

What right does she have to feel that way? He isn't hers. They aren't together, and she thinks it's quite obvious that he doesn't want a relationship out of whatever it is they have together. It was one night. She has no right to be mad at him for flirting with other girls because of it.

"Then I'll definitely be taking you up on that offer. Thank you," she says.

The old wooden stairs make a squealing sound when she stands to make her way inside to gather her things for the night, but the feeling of a warm hand gripping her forearm stops her mid-step. Her eyes follow down the length of her arm back to where he sits, glancing at her with this knowing look in his eyes that makes her want to turn and hide.

"When are you gonna talk things out with him, Y/N?" he asks. "He misses you."

Since the party, no one has had the courage to burst her bubble of pretending not to care until now, but now that someone has, all of her bottled up emotions stir inside of her at a simple concept she hadn't considered yet.

JJ misses her.

For the first time since they began this stupid game of cat and mouse, she is confronted with how desperately she misses him back. So consumed with the task of concealing everything that happened and trying to avoid him, she hadn't acknowledged that all she ever really wants is to be with him lately.

She misses his jokes and the way he looks at her when she giggles at them. She misses his smile when they play fight on the HMS Pogue. She even misses when he dangles her over the edge of the boat as a means to end the wrestling match, making her squirm in his strong hold as he threatens to toss her overboard.

But what she misses most of all is how he never lets her fall in. It's something about the way he looks at her as he pulls her back onboard, how time itself seems to stop in the moment between when he's still holding her and when she feels her feet touch the deck again.

Then, they'll suddenly want nothing to do with each other for the next half hour.

JJ will make himself busy forgetting the way her hands felt holding onto his shoulders for dear life, burning the memory of her palm prints into his skin for the next few hours. And she'll try her hardest to forget that charming smile and the feeling of his arms around her. But it won't work, not really, and when they're both laying down to sleep at night, they'll have one thing keeping them awake.

She takes a second to internalize what he said and avoid exposing the effect it has on her to hear it before asking, "Did he tell you that?"

The sky overhead grows darker and darker by the second, but she has yet to notice it due to the topic of their conversation. With JJ involved, her attention shrinks to a tunnel leading only to him. There's no room for anything else but the audacious idea planted in the back of her mind that he might miss her as much as she misses him.

"No, he didn't," John B admits, and right when she's about to say more in response, he cuts her off, "but hear me out. I've known him since we were kids, so I can tell when things aren't right with him, and ever since your relationship with him got complicated, I picked up on some weird vibes."

Y/N doesn't give anything away with how she reacts. He can't tell if she's about to bolt like JJ did or stay to talk and open up to him. All she does is cross her arms over her chest and lean back against the railing.

"Weird in what way?"

"Weird in a way that makes me think you two have to talk it out before you ruin your friendship. I've never seen him act this way over a girl."

That doesn't surprise her. He has a reputation for chasing after any girl available to him, something the Pogues have gently teased him about, and it factors into why she doesn't want to have this dreaded conversation with him. She doesn't want to sit there and listen to him tell her that she was just another one of those girls to him.

Going for broke and being honest about what he thinks of their situation is a better strategy for trying to get her to talk to JJ than the other way around. John B can look back on what happened the morning after the party and see where they went wrong in their approach of trying to get him to talk, but she's less unpredictable and turbulent than he is. The fact that she's hearing him out is enough proof of their differences.

She sighs.

"I know we need to talk sooner or later, but it's hard, you know? I'm so embarrassed of how everything went down at the party, even though I was too fucked up to remember most of it, and I just—" There's a brief second that lapses between when she stops and when she starts again where he can almost see her working through it in her head. "I don't wanna get hurt."

John B's face falls at the mention of the party and her feelings surrounding it.

"You have nothing to be embarrassed of. You drank too much but who cares? The only person who should be embarrassed about that night is the guy that tried to take advantage of you."

That part is the most fuzzy in her mind.

She can remember what led up to it and the moment she saw JJ pull him away from her, but she can't remember anything about the interaction itself. It wasn't as if he did anything to her—not yet—but the thought of it alone makes her skin crawl because she's seen that before. She's been the JJ in that situation, pulling a wasted Touron away from someone who thought nobody would be looking out for other people at the party, and she knows how quickly those situations can escalate past "harmless" flirting.

The sound of JJ shouting at Tyler echoes in her mind as she reaches for any remaining memories left from the party. He said it right after he punched him, when he was starting to rush forward to follow him onto the ground and pin him there.

"If I see you near my girl again, you're fucking dead! You got that?"

She doesn't remember realizing that he called her that at the moment. She was confused and upset and all she wanted to do was stop him from getting himself in trouble, so she pulled him away from hitting Tyler again without realizing what he said. And even now, she tries to avoid acknowledging it. She reasons with herself, telling herself that he was pissed off and didn't mean it, because if he did, why hasn't he told her how he feels yet?

Y/N looks up and sees how dark the converging clouds have gotten in the time since they began working on prepping the house for the hurricane, so her next words are shakier than usual.

"I guess you're right." She pushes off of her spot against the railing. "But can we not talk about JJ tonight? I kind of wanna hang out and forget about the rest of the stuff I've got going on right now."

This makes him feel a pang of guilt inside of him for the ulterior motive he's kept hidden from her for the duration of the conversation, but he knows it's for the best. Even if her and JJ's inevitable conversation goes in the wrong direction and they don't end up mending fences, it's better that they let it out sooner than later. If they wait any longer, it'll make it worse, and he knows that they're stubborn enough to keep this childish game going for another week or so.

So, he keeps her in the dark for now and offers a kind, "Sure, that's cool with me," despite knowing how messy the night will soon become.

A smile pokes at the edges of her mouth, making the sides of her eyes crinkle, and she extends a hand to help him up from where he sits.

"Now," she says as they make their way inside the house for her to pack a bag, "are you ready to get absolutely crushed in Monopoly?"

It started to rain before they left her house, and by the time they pull into the driveway of the Chateau, it's pouring down on them with violent winds whipping droplets at their faces hard enough to hurt.

The rapid pace of her pulse beats with such an intensity, she can feel it in her head. They shouldn't have taken so much time at her place before heading over here. While she was packing, they talked and dilly-dallied the whole time, and now they pay the price for it.

If she knew that it would start this soon into the night, she probably would've hurried things along sooner, but it's too late. She's already starting to feel that tightness in her chest and each breath of air feels less satisfying with every inhale. It's not so bad that she loses complete control of herself, but it's getting there, and she can't express how badly she doesn't want to lose her shit in front of John B.

The passenger side door is slammed shut by the force of the wind behind her, the noise becoming swallowed up in the rest of the budding storm, and she stifles a sound of surprise that escapes her in reaction to it. They're lucky they made it here in the first place. Any later in the night and they probably would've had to take refuge at her place until it blew over.

She decides to focus on how the edges of her white sneakers are swallowed up by the muddy earth on her way through the front yard to distract herself. It stains them a deep brown color and simultaneously washes them clean from the rain coming down from above, which she'd probably be annoyed about if she weren't such a nervous wreck. But, because she's too busy keeping her backpack raised over her head to shield herself from the rain on her way up to the front door, it's not high up on her list of priorities.

Since both the screen door and the door behind it are unlocked, she doesn't hesitate to come bursting into the house as she usually does.

Y/N lets out a deep breath, feeling that telltale tension in her chest and shoulders, and laughs at the sight of John B running in as she kicks off her shoes. His t-shirt is speckled with rainwater, and his hair is saturated enough with it to stick to the sides of his face after he crosses the threshold into the Chateau.

The sound of her laughter makes JJ's heart stop from where he stands in the kitchen.

"There was an umbrella right on the dashboard, why didn't you take—"

Her heart might as well have stopped just as abruptly as the sentence she was in the middle of saying when she turned and saw him standing there.

Maybe they're both a tad too dramatic, but it takes a full few seconds for them to stop staring at each other in surprise. He looks like a deer in the headlights, eyes wide with surprise like he was caught doing something he shouldn't even though all he was doing was grabbing a beer from the fridge.

It's been two days since they last saw each other. For him, the last glimpse he got of her was when he peeked through the blinds to see her pedaling away on her bike to go to work, but hers was somewhat different.

The last time she saw him, he was asleep. Their legs were tangled together underneath the sheets and his face was smushed against her chest, allowing her to feel the soft puffs of his exhales on her skin every few seconds. It's a wonder that she managed to slip away unnoticed once she remembered she had work that morning. He was holding her closely, so closely that she found it hard to discern where she ended and he began in the dazed, hungover headspace she woke up in.

It's when the conversation she had with John B on the front steps of her house comes back to the forefront of her mind that she puts together what's happening right now. Now that they're here, it's far too late to leave. With how aggressively the wind and rain batter the area surrounding the house, it's obvious that they're not going anywhere.

It seems to click with them at the same time, because JJ turns to look at him only a half second after she does.

Y/N says, completely serious, "If you did what I think you did, I'm gonna kill you."

Before either of them can think of doing anything, John B shoots out from the doorway and runs past her in the direction of the hallway where his bedroom is.

"Gotta catch me first!"

They both chase him, JJ hopping over the back of the couch to run after him, but they end up coming to a screeching halt at the shut door right when they hear the lock turn and click.

Neither of them knows what they were planning to do when they caught him, cause it isn't like they'd hurt him, but they bang on the door nonetheless. The sound is drowned out by the sound of the wind and rain pounding the outside walls of the house, picking up speed, and for a second she wants to kick the door open.

She shouts, "John B! Open this door!"

The last thing she wanted tonight was to be trapped in a house with the one person she didn't want to see. Doesn't John B realize how embarrassing it is for her to be around him when she knows that he's gonna reject her? He may have said something about JJ never acting so weird over a girl before, but he's wrong. There's no way JJ actually wants her...right?

"I can't hear you, this storm's kinda loud!" he yells back at them through the locked door. "Maybe try again later!"

Neither of them wants to acknowledge the other. In fact, they don't even want to look at each other right now, so all they can do to stop themselves from acknowledging the elephant in the room is continue trying to get answers out of John B. What does he think that locking them together in the Chateau for the night will accomplish other than make them ignore their own drama and team up to plot their revenge on him?

Though he's significantly less angry than she is, JJ pulls the doorknob enough to make the door whine on its hinges and pleads with their friend, "This isn't funny, John B. Open the door."

"Not until you guys stop being immature and talk to each other."

She furrows her brows at him even though he can't see her, saying, "It's none of your business. You can't just trap us here cause you think you know what's best for us."

The sound of thunder rumbling above the house makes her flinch, hand shooting out to latch onto JJ's arm on an instinct she couldn't consciously resist. Feeling the warmth of his skin beneath her palm and the fingers clutched around his wrist sends shocks of familiar electricity up her body. Touching him always makes her feel hyperaware of herself, leaving her to wonder if he can sense her pulse picking up or notice how her breathing pattern turns uneven.

With that being said, it's safe to say that the night they spent together took that sensation of electricity and hyperawareness to a height it hadn't reached before.

That time, it wasn't a brush of their hands or an arm over her shoulder, it was the epitome of physical closeness. She couldn't handle it. He was so sickeningly sweet with her, yet, at the same time, he knew all of the right times to be commanding and in control too. There were awkward moments at first, sure, but once they became comfortable with each other, it was game over.

And whenever they've touched since, she hasn't been able to get those memories off of her mind. It's less prevalent now, since she's only holding onto him out of fear, but it's still there underneath it all—the unfiltered desperation of the lust in his eyes, the low noises that escaped his parted lips, and the strong pair of hands that pinned her hips down on the mattress to give him the leverage to really give it to her at the intensity she begged for.

It's pathetically easy for her to be sucked right back into the vortex of emotions, memories, and fears that haunt her whenever they touch, but he brings her back out of it just as easily when he speaks.

"You okay?"

John B was as good as forgotten by him as soon as he felt her jolt next to him and grab onto his wrist like she was hanging from a ravine and he was the only thing preventing her from falling. It makes him feel like a fool, but even when they're ignoring each other, the urge to comfort and protect her from anything that displeases her never disappears. He'd literally fistfight Zeus if it meant there'd be less thunder to scare her.

If he weren't hiding behind a locked door to avoid their wrath, JB would probably be calling him a simp right about now.

The concern on his face is so pure and unaffected by any of the chaos that surrounds them, both physical and emotional, that it makes her stomach turn with a sick feeling. God, he really does care about her. Why does that scare her? Why doesn't she want to believe that he cares? Why is she so set on believing that he wanted nothing more than a quick fuck from her?

Her eyes turn down to see their connected hands, realizing all in one moment what she did and pulling her hand away as if she were burned.

"I—Yeah," she stops, looking up at him, then back to the closed bedroom door, "I'm fine. You know how it is, it's just the storm."

They're both left with no choice but to face the music after days of avoidance that had no good reason behind it other than the respective doubts and fears they have. Yet even now that they're standing here, unsure of what comes next, they're hesitant to say or do anything that might disrupt the illusion they've created in the week and a half since they first ruined their friendship for good.

It feels as though the tension that has been boiling between them is coming close to turning explosive and all it will take is one tremor of their self-control for it to spill over.

Every feeling they have feels so contradictory. They want to but they also don't. They almost do it, then hesitate and decide to ignore each other for days. At the party, this tug of war game was at its peak for JJ when she was telling him about her jealousy and cuddling up to him, but he couldn't do it then, not when she was drunk. And by the time he had a whole night to think it over and see her biking away, he didn't want to risk it.

She looks away from him, hoping that "out of sight, out of mind" may ring true for once, and says to John B through the door, "Whatever, have fun. I won't hold JJ back when you finally come out of there though."

He won't actually do anything to him, maybe just a non-serious fight that'll end with her walking in on them rolling around on the floor trying to wrestle each other, but she likes to fuck with him anyway. For the dick move he just pulled, she thinks he can withstand a little teasing.

Without anything else to say, Y/N turns and walks off to make herself useful elsewhere—anything to distract from the buzzing, anxious energy that surrounds her from both the hurricane and being forced to confront JJ. She tries to play it cool though she is anything but at the moment, allowing herself to grimace once her back is turned to the blonde boy still standing against the wall in the hallway.

Maybe if she keeps pushing this false sense of normalcy, it'll work. It worked when they both started pretending things never happened between them initially after they had sex, so who's to say it can't work now?

All they have to do is get through the next 12-24 hours without talking and all will be well. Right?

They tried.

They truly tried to get through the night without inciting chaos within the Chateau, but, for these two idiots, not inciting chaos is a task easier said than done. Not only was John B much more stubborn with staying in his room than either of them bargained for, he didn't even attempt to speak to them for the first five hours and they were left with nothing to do but find new ways to avoid talking to each other.

It was simple in the beginning.

She went off on her own and sat with her headphones in to drown out the sounds of the storm.

With her eyes fluttered shut to block out anything but the sound of The Cure blasting into her ears, there was no reason for her to have to worry about anything once her nerves began to settle. Since the songs drowned out any sound and all she could see was darkness behind her closed eyelids, she was able to drift away with the distraction of the music.

The thing is, after a while, she started to see pieces of him in every song she skipped to. She made it a full minute into Just Like Heaven before a supercut of her most treasured memories of him began appearing in her head. Fade Into You? Skipped as soon as the first dreamy lyric flooded in through the tangled cords of the headphones. Cloud 9? Forty seconds in. By the time Dirty Little Secret came on, she decided that her playlist was mocking her.

The headphones were out of her ears, hastily wrapped up, and stowed away in the small pocket of her overnight bag before the chorus of the song could hit. Thankfully for her, JJ wasn't looking when she ripped the headphones out and put them away in a huff, so by the time he turned to see her again, she was laying down on the couch to "nap"—meaning she laid awake for another hour and cursed John B for making her endure this.

While she was daydreaming of a John B voodoo doll, JJ was worried about her.

Yes, the topic of their relationship/friendship/situationship/whatever-the-fuck-it-is was bombarding him against his will every five seconds, but not without him coming back to his concern for her. A small sound of thunder on an otherwise perfect day was enough to make her zone out and start getting antsy that day on the boat, so he didn't want to know how bad it could get during a time like this.

He tried to play it cool, and, in all honesty, his remaining scraps of sanity lasted a lot longer than hers. Four and a half hours passed, then, as the storm began to do its worst on their town, the power flickered out and left them in complete darkness. At that point, John B was passed out in his bedroom, so he didn't care nor notice when they had to find a few candles and stumble through the dark.

Somewhere along the way, having to search through the dark house for candles to light and place around the living room led them here...he isn't quite sure how.

JJ can hardly open his eyes enough to see through the rain that pounds against him the second he runs after her through the back door. The wind is so aggressive and unrelenting, it almost sends him stumbling a few steps when he follows her blurry figure a few paces behind where she tries to flee the house in a panic.

"Get back inside!" he shouts as he picks up his speed to catch up, "Y/N!"

The part of him that isn't focused on the pure physicality of trying to see and move through the stormy weather is utterly overwhelmed with fear. Not for himself but for her. She's deathly afraid of mild storms, let alone hurricanes, and yet she ran through the back door when he tried comforting her through an anxiety attack. One would think that she wouldn't want to go directly into the thing she fears the most, but what sent her running for the hills wasn't the panic itself, it was him.

It's hard for her to think rationally in this state, but all she knows is that he was there, he was saying all the right things and holding her, and she couldn't do it. The fear began to blend to one centered around both him and the storm. The hours of useless distractions and ruminating in her thoughts built up to this point of contention, then it snapped.

Between the thunder, his voice, and the voice in the back of her head that was urging her to confess her feelings and do as John B advised them to, it became too much. Maybe it was the most idiotic split-second decision she made without any regard for logic or reason or her safety, but she bailed. For the third time, she couldn't handle the pressure and ran from him.

The only difference is that he couldn't let her leave this time.

He gasps for air against the streams of water flowing down his face, soaking his hair and making it hang in his eyes to obstruct his view more than the weather already has. It happened so fast, neither of them are wearing shoes. His feet sink into the muddy yard with every stride he takes in his frantic pursuit of her and it frustrates him no end because of how it slows him down.

There's endless dangerous possibilities with her being out here. She could be knocked over into the marsh by the wind, or stuck and hurt by a piece of debris—merely thinking about it makes him call out her name louder in the hopes that it'll wake her from her panicked trance.

After trudging through the mud all the way to the edge of the yard, he finally manages to get to her.

"What are you doing?" JJ shouts, turning her around and grabbing onto both of her arms as if one gust of wind would sweep her away if he didn't, "You're gonna get hurt!"

Stumbling backwards in the direction of the screened-in porch that surrounds the back door, he uses their difference in strength to tug her away in the direction she came out in. The rain makes it difficult to keep a firm grasp on her, and she almost slips away a couple of times when the wind picks up enough to make him too unsteady to hold on.

His arms slip around her waist for a better grasp on her the closer they come to reaching the house. The last thing he wants is to almost get her back inside and lose her at the last second. She isn't thinking rationally right now with the panic she feels taking full control of her responses. He knows firsthand how it feels to be thrown headfirst into a panic attack, he's been in her shoes before and knows better than anyone the lengths your irrational mind will go to if it means survival. And for whatever reason, her response is flight, not fight.

The door to the screen porch takes all of his effort to open against the power of the wind blowing it back against the house.

He grits his teeth as he forces it open, one arm secured around her midsection, and helps her in before he slips inside too. The second he lets go of the door, it's sent slamming back into place and rattling in the frame behind them, but he doesn't spend anymore time on it other than the few seconds it takes to lock it. As soon as it clicks with him that they're safe—most importantly, that she's safe—he whips around to face her with a cold rage flowing through his veins.

"What the fuck?"

She stands in front of him with water pouring off of her in rapid drops onto the rug, and there are no thoughts in her head outside of the ones telling her to leave. Her tears blend in with the droplets of rain so seamlessly that he wouldn't know she's crying if not for the sound of it.

In between her rapid breaths and sobs, she yells back at him, "I was scared, okay?"

"Why'd you run out into the storm if you—"

"I wasn't afraid of the storm, I was afraid of you!"

The silence that follows is louder than anything they've experienced. Nothing can rival it, not the thunder, the rain, or anything can drown it out while he stares at her in shock. His eyes are wide, lips slightly parted as he reaches for something, anything, he can say in response to that, but there's nothing. For once, he is absolutely speechless.

Things got awkward between them in the initial aftermath of last week, but not like this. There was never an instance where he felt like there was nothing left for him to say to her to fill the uncomfortable silence that always brought forth memories of them together until now. Until she said the last thing he wanted or expected to hear.

His anger subsides as he picks over what he did in his head for anything that could've made her feel unsafe.

Before it evolved into him chasing after her through the hurricane, he noticed how terrible it had gotten for her when he lit the first candle. Her cheeks were streaked with tears and her chest began to rise and fall faster with each second that passed. He could see it on her face that things were getting worse, but, now that he thinks of it, it got worse once he reached out to put his hand on her shoulder.

It felt like a dream sequence in his head, so hazy and faraway now that it's over, and he was so stunned by what she was doing, he didn't run after her until a few seconds later. There was a delay in which he stood there in surprise and tried to process what the hell just happened to no avail. Though it wasn't very long, he remembers it feeling like eternity tucked into the cramped space of four seconds.

JJ's voice is softer than she's ever heard it, asking into the void of the near-darkness that encloses them, "What'd I do?" And it breaks her heart in half to hear him sound so concerned, so terrified of the idea that he did something to hurt her when all he did was try to help. "I never meant to scare you, I swear. I know how bad it can get sometimes, and I know we haven't been talking but I'd never try to hurt you if that's what you thought..."

His thoughts run rampant with the possibilities of what she was thinking at the time, and he realizes that he can't stand the idea of her thinking anything badly of him. He never cares about what people think, but, fuck, he loathes the idea of her having any ill feelings toward him.

Y/N immediately starts shaking her head, her face scrunching with the emotion and incessant tears.

"I know you'd never hurt me. I was scared because..." she stops herself mid sentence, catching it right when she was about to admit the one thing she promised herself she wouldn't.

But the need to say it doesn't go away this time. Usually, once she catches herself she comes to her senses and realizes how foolish it would've been to confess, but this time is different. This time, the urge to speak her mind and tell him everything sticks around. The words left unsaid creep up her throat, thrashing and begging to let out after months of being pushed aside.

The look in her eyes is strangely reminiscent of the way she looked at him the night they hooked up, almost yearning in its nature, and he couldn't be more confused. She's scared of him, but she's looking at him like she did when she was two seconds away from jumping his bones. And if he didn't do anything wrong, why was she afraid enough to face her worst fear in order to avoid him?

"Because what?" he asks.

That frustration from when they first stepped into the porch hasn't vanished, it only took a backseat once she said she was afraid of him, not the storm, and he can feel it stirring up again. He's tired of not having answers. He's tired of mixed signals and loneliness and unrequited love. Most of all, he's tired of her running away all the time. At this point, he questions whether or not it's worth it to expose his feelings to her and suffer the consequences.

John B was right. This isn't healthy for them, nor is it healthy for them to put their friends through this along with them, and it might be better to not be friends than to stay this way forever. At least that way they wouldn't be wishing for answers that would never come for the rest of their time together.

She decides at this moment that this has to be said before it gets worse, before she runs away again like a scared, immature child and ruins everything.

"Because," she has to shout over the lightning that cracks down on the earth down the street, something she would be trembling in fear over if she weren't so focused on him, "I've been in love with you for a couple months and it scares me more than anything, even this stupid fucking storm! And I've tried so hard to ignore it because I know you don't feel the same way, but you touched me and I just"—a soft cry escapes her—"I couldn't do it anymore."

There it is.

After months of ruminating over it and hiding everything, he knows, and her immediate feeling after she says it isn't what she thought it would be. She expected trepidation and regret, but what she finds on the other side isn't either of those, it's relief. Her dad often tells her when she's nervous about something that the anticipation is worse than the thing itself, and that has never been as true her as it is now.

However, some of the nerves return with the time that passes after she spoke in complete silence. Much like the delayed reaction he had to her running out of the house, it isn't as long as it feels to her. It's a short span of time that it takes for her words to process with him, but it feels like an eternity that he stands there with his head facing the floor in quiet contemplation.

Her heart sinks.

This means he doesn't feel the same way, doesn't it? If he were the one telling her he loved her, she likely would've leaped into his arms and said it back, but he stays where he is.

Then, after what feels like forever, she thinks she sees him start to smile and feels like she's losing her mind. It's quite dark out here, so there's only a limited amount of light to allow her to see his features, but there's no doubting it when a flash of lightning floods the porch with a split-second of harsh light.

Oh God, why is he smiling? What does it mean?

Much to her frustration, the first thing he says after her confession isn't much help in making her understand his feelings either.

"Why didn't you just talk to me?"

Why? The voice in the back of her mind asks incredulously. Is he seriously asking why? He ignored me too. He didn't want to talk about it either, so what else was I supposed to do?

Maybe she was undeniably worse when it came to the avoidance and lack of communication, but he could've reached out to her too. They both could've. Instead, they spent day after day waiting for the other to make the move and pushed the tension further and further until it finally broke. Now she's waiting for him to hurry up and reject her so she can move on with her life.

She shivers from the wind blowing at her wet skin through the screens separating them from the outside world, crossing her arms over her body to hug herself. His eyes follow her movements down to the breaths that are slowly evening out without her realizing it. It turns out that confessing your love for the guy you've been crushing on since the day you met him is a hell of a distraction.

"I thought you wouldn't wanna hear me being all emotional and shit over a one time thing. You've literally never had an actual relationship before. And that's fine," she rambles, "I'll be okay eventually, but that's not who you are and there isn't a problem with that. I just caught feelings when I shouldn't have."

In her defense, she isn't making baseless assumptions about him, he hasn't had a relationship before. His love life hasn't ever really revolved around love itself, it was mostly comprised of random chicks he'd meet at parties or at the beach during the summertime when tourists come to visit the island. Out of all of them, he's the last one the Pogues would expect to fall in love with someone and commit to a relationship, but then...

He looks over at her with a swell of emotion within him that he's never felt before. It wasn't like he hadn't known before now. He did. He even said it out loud to himself that morning after the party, but this is when it feels the most real. Now that she's said it to him, he doesn't feel so stupid for toying with the four letter word in the back of his mind for the entirety of the past week.

In all honesty, he was the last person he would've expected to fall in love with someone this quickly too. He thought he knew himself better than this. He thought he could keep himself hidden away and not let anyone close enough to see him—the real him, faults and feelings and vulnerability included—but she proved him wrong. In walked Y/N with her pretty smile, teeny bikini bottoms, and oddly strong opinions on Ratatouille, and he stood no chance.

This sudden crescendo of emotion only continues to grow when he watches her shiver, soaked to the skin, across from him and decides that he never wants to deny himself of her again. Those feelings of inadequacy that forced him to question his relationship with her may not have gone away, not by a long shot, but they can't stop him anymore. Nothing can.

Like a light flickering to life in this swirling, stormy darkness, she hears JJ's voice asking her, "What if it is who I am?"

It was said so softly, she nearly lost it beneath the rain and wind. But it was not said with a lack of certainty, which is why she questions if she heard him correctly. He sounded so sure of himself that it feels too good to be true. After his reaction, or lack thereof, to her telling him she loved him, she accepted what was coming and this was not it.

"What?"

He doesn't miss a beat.

"You heard me." There's a pause. "Maybe I needed to meet the right girl."

There is no way he's saying what she thinks he's saying because if he is...if he is then that means the tears and frustration have all been for nothing because he loves her back. But if he loves her, then what was with the kook girl? Was it to make her jealous, or is she misinterpreting him right now and he was flirting with that girl because he doesn't have real feelings for her?

"JJ..." she trails off, looking down and thinking to herself how thankful she is that it's too dark for him to fully see how nervous he made her, "don't do that."

Partly, he should feel offended that she'd think he'd toy with her feelings like that, but he isn't. He's too busy wondering what on earth made this poor girl so insecure to think that someone has to be joking to confess their love to her. It makes him wonder if anyone wronged her before she moved here, and he feels that switch of impulsive anger inside of him flip at the thought.

But that anger has nowhere to go, so it shifts into something different—a need to spend every waking moment of the rest of their time together proving to her that she doesn't have to be so afraid. Does it make him a hypocrite? Probably. It wasn't too long ago that he was telling the Pogues how much he didn't deserve to be with her, but he doesn't see himself the same way he sees her. In his head, he has reasons to believe he doesn't deserve her love, but how could she ever think that herself?

He steps closer to her, the movement something so natural and unconscious to him that he doesn't recognize he does it until he hears her breath hitch in the back of her throat. They were already close enough to reach out and touch each other if they wanted to, yet now it's the kind of closeness that wipes the slate of her mind clean with nothing else but the thought of him there to stay.

He starts to say, "I'm not fucking with you, dude, I'm being serious—"

"Then prove it."

Oh.

The sound of his unfinished sentence lingers on the tip of his tongue as he blinks away his surprise at what she said, though it was less of a statement and more of a challenge. What the challenge is, he isn't too sure, but he thinks there could be a couple of meanings there.

The fire in her eyes when she looked up at him is one he recognizes very well, it stars in one too many of his daydreams that center around their secret night together. She rose to the occasion without fail and matched his chaos every time, and that steely-eyed stare is reminiscent of it.

Yet, the sexual undertone isn't the only part of it to be discovered. There's a clear meaning there for him to actually prove it, to put his money where his mouth is, grow a pair, and tell her how he feels with no room for confusion. No more miscommunication, running away, or insecurity getting between them, just a clear cut confession like hers.

His hand runs through his hair to sweep it out of his eyes and keep the wet strands from dripping down his face. It helps him see her a little better too, grounding him to the moment and calming him at the dimmed sight of her expectant, wide eyed gaze.

There were a million versions of this whenever he let himself imagine admitting it. He only let himself picture it on the worst days, days like the one two days ago when he went home to his dad, ending the night by cleaning his own cuts and inspecting his own bruises in his locked bedroom. He did it to distract himself from wanting to storm out of the room and finally kill the son of a bitch after years of suffering in silence.

JJ closed his eyes, shaking with anger, and dreamed of how he'd tell her. There were versions with long speeches that were far too sappy to exist outside of the realm of his imagination. There were versions with him burying the words between friendly jokes to play down the extent of his feelings too, but he thought it worked best in its simplest form.

So he puts it as simply as it gets, lips fighting a soft smile as he crosses the space between them and rushes in to kiss her. It's charged with an accumulation of the pent up love, anger, and sexual desire that has been repressed until now, resulting in something utterly explosive.

He stops for a second to whisper, "I love you too," into her parted lips, and she finally lets herself go at the sound of those words.

Forget that they've only known each other for five months, when you know you know. This is the real deal. This is the kind of feeling that possesses every accessible inch of her heart and she'd never be open enough to admit that to anyone but him at the moment, but neither of them minds that. It's such a new, rapidly developing feeling that they want to protect it and keep it close to them for the time being.

His arms twine around her waist, tugging her the last bit forward and leaving no space between their bodies this time. The sudden movement draws a sharp gasp from the back of her throat and sends her hands out to brace themselves on his shoulders. The sound of the gasp that disappears into their connected mouths only fuels him on more. It makes him more eager with how he touches her with his hands drifting down the plane of her back, one of which playfully slipping beneath the hem of her soaked shirt in a way that makes her smile into the kiss.

He knows exactly what he does to her. He can sense it in the small reactions that would often go overlooked if it were someone less familiar with her.

It's easy to tell by the way she completely surrenders herself to him, letting out these soft little noises she doesn't even realize she's making when he takes control of the interaction and kisses her like he's starved for it. In a way, he is starving for affection and attention from her. He never knew it was something he needed so badly until he got it, and now he never wants to go without having her again.

That's why it doesn't surprise him when she starts getting antsy after a moment or two, especially after keeping away from him for days.

Her hands run down the length of his chest over the soaked t-shirt, taking a quiet victory in how his stomach flinches inward in response to her exploring touch, and she could swear his next exhale trembles as she continues lower. Never once does she break the kiss, which, by the way, has gone past the point of being passionate and straight to downright needy, but her concentration does falter. The perfectly paced rhythm of her mouth moving with his is interrupted when she touches him over the fabric of his shorts.

Those plushy soft lips go on an exploration of their own too. Leaving him with the first opportunity to catch his breath in minutes, she dips her head beneath the sharp edge of jaw in pursuit of the sweet spot she remembers reducing him to a grabby, moaning mess the last time they did this. It doesn't take her long, not if the tightening of his arms around her and the satisfied hum of a moan she feels vibrate beneath her mouth has anything to say for it.

He loses himself in it for a second or two...okay, fine, maybe ten.

The separate sensations combined spark a flame inside of him that burns so hopelessly for whatever she'll give him. His mind sends him images of them together, both real memories from their first time together and imagined fantasies he only let himself visit in his dreams, and he realizes how thinly spread his self control has become lately.

First, it's the thought of her from last week, thoughts of her gasping, writhing, and begging beneath him that makes his cock throb under the teasing contact of her hand through his shorts. But then he's brought elsewhere. Then, though he hasn't thought of it since the day after the party, he thinks of the mix of jealousy and anger he felt when he saw Tyler with her.

He remembers being sane one moment and charging across the room like a madman the next. He remembers how it felt to watch another person's hands slip under her dress, how it felt to see someone else try to kiss her the way he had, and this raw wound of a memory is all it takes to spur him into action.

It happens so quickly, she doesn't even notice what's happening until he has her scooped up in his arms with her legs around his waist. She doesn't even have the chance to voice her surprise or crack a joke at the expense of his neediness before he reconnects their paused kiss with enough force to make her teeth ache in the collision.

JJ's rings are colder than ice, digging into the flesh of her thighs as he holds them with a tight grip and blindly takes the few steps necessary to reach the back entrance of the house. His wet handprint smudges on one of the cracked-open glass doors and sends droplets of water dribbling down the surface. The teardrop of rain zig-zags at the swinging motion of the door on their way in, only changing course again when he nudges it shut behind him a little too loudly.

"Wh"—her question is cut off by him laying her down on the rug-covered floor in between the couch and coffee table—"What if John B wakes up?"

His first thought was to bring her into the spare bedroom, but then he realized that it shares a wall with John B. Then, he considered the pull out couch but realized that would be louder than the room adjacent to their friend's. His only conclusion was this.

It isn't nearly as romantic as either of them would've pictured, but they're not exactly picky either. They're so desperate for it, they'd likely do it on the porch in the middle of a hurricane if there weren't another option. And in their own weird way, they make it romantic.

There's no one else she'd rather risk rug burn for, and that is the peak of romance.

"John B sleeps like a fuckin' rock," JJ says, "and it's own his fault for trapping us here anyway."

He follows her down onto the floor without a second thought, not even looking up to see if they woke their friend with the sound of the door shutting behind them.

Hovered above her, he looks particularly captivating in the flickering candlelight. The fire burning in one of the three-wick candles they scoured the bathroom cabinets for brings out the warm hues in his blonde hair and highlights every edge of the angular face that looks down at her. The porch was far too dark for her to see him in all of his near-perfection, but this is enough for her to notice a multitude of things.

His slicked back, wet hair allows her to see his features better and the way he looks at her...it's enough to make anyone feel red in the face. How hadn't she see it before? She knows it was denial, but, somehow, she used to overlook the small hints along the way like how he looks at her like she's the only thing that makes sense to him. For the first time in a while, she allows herself to embrace the idea of being loved without looking for something to justify her fears surrounding it.

The sound of her voice brings him out of the mesmerized trance he fell under at the sight of her.

"I've missed you," she says softly, "like a lot."

The sweet admission slows him down for a second, making him stop to ignore the distracting desire that she sparked to life a moment ago and take the time to cherish this moment of rare serenity with her.

It's a wonder that she hasn't even acknowledged the storm raging on outside since they've come back in. It's all thanks to him, of course, since she's been too focused on everything happening between them, but it surprises him. It makes a sense of pride flare up in him on her behalf for being capable of forgetting something she fears so much.

But, on the other hand, it reminds him of how distraught she was right before their conversation/argument on the porch shifted from her panic to the topic of their relationship, and he can't help but hesitate a little.

"I missed you too." The hand he isn't using to support himself above her cups her face, his thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone. "Are you okay though? You were just crying and I don't wanna make you—"

"Yes."

It was so said so quickly, there was zero hesitation. It's not that it doesn't surprise him that she's as eager as he is after what started to happen out on the porch, but it does make his eyes widen a little. His mouth curls with a slight grin. It's the kind that never fails to make her stomach fluttering and light with butterflies.

"You don't have to worry about me. I'm okay, and I promise I'll let you know if I'm not," Y/N clarifies.

"Okay."

There's a short moment where all they do is look at each other with a complete loss for words to convey what they feel right now. It isn't as awkward as it would've been prior to tonight. Before they confessed their feelings, they wouldn't have been able to look at one another for any longer than a few seconds without needing to walk away to break the tension. Now, things have changed. They don't feel the need to conceal how much they care anymore.

They're still the same bickering duo they've always been with the added fun of being head over heels. She never used to understand how some people could let their feelings for another person drive them crazy, but it's done more than make her crazy this past week. It made her jealous, obsessive, and somehow happy too, and no one has ever made her feel so many varying emotions in her life.

Her fingertips graze the stretch of skin between where his cargo shorts sit on his hips and his shirt rides up the side of his torso, and he swallows thickly at the feeling.

"Do I make you nervous?" she asks.

Her lilting, smooth voice is enough to soothe any nerves he could possibly have. It's as if hearing her ask that paired with the hand teasing the waistband of his shorts pulled him back to the place he'd been before when she was teasing him over his clothes.

He answers honestly, his head going fuzzy with the crushing desire that courses through him, "Not as nervous as I make you," and closes the space between them again.

The cheeky comment doesn't go unnoticed by her, not one bit. It makes her face heat up in embarrassment that is purely instinct after having to hide her feelings from her for so long. Maybe after they've been together for longer, it won't make her blush every time he acknowledges the effect he has on her out loud, but that day isn't today. Today, she goes hot in the face from a sole second of his attention, let alone this.

JJ lets his hand climb up the length of her torso as they kiss as if they have all the time in the world, as if their best friend isn't sleeping less than twenty feet away from them, until it flattens at the base of her neck. It doesn't curl around her neck and squeeze, nor does it do anything but remind her how much she loves the feeling of him touching her, the large palm of his hand simply stays draped over her throat to flaunt his ability to sway her nerves.

She's pretty sure if it were anyone else, it wouldn't work, but he's JJ for fuck's sake, and the quiet display of dominance sends an exhilarating little thrill rumbling through her. It isn't anything over the top or exaggerated like some people would do in an attempt to stake a claim over the person they love, just a simple gesture that they both know the meaning of.

She's his. After five months of friendship, two months of silent pining, and a week of sexually confused hell, she's his, and he'll never let her forget it.

The wind rattles the windows over the couch with its force and she notices that his hips grind into hers at the sudden sound. Even in the midst of such a heated moment, it's downright cute how he still makes an effort to distract her from what she fears. And, boy, does it work.

Their panting breaths in the brief seconds they allow themselves to break away from each other are the only sounds audible in the small living room. The storm drowns it all out for now, including the noises that start to leave them from the steadily building pleasure of their bodies moving together.

She can feel how hard he is through the layers that separate them with every absentminded thrust that brushes the fabric of her panties up against her clit each time. It leaves her breathless and wondering, despite already knowing, what it'll feel like when he finally slips inside of her again.

They both fantasized about it in the time they spent apart. Neither of them would dare deny it, least of all JJ. It actually became frustrating after a while because she started to become the only scenario he could conjure to get himself off when he had a rare moment of privacy. His fantasies, all stemming from the night that was so perfect, he began to question the reality of it, linger in his head.

The best part of his fantasies were the parts of them based in truth, and if he knows anything about her when she's in this state, it's that she's needy. Her tongue swipes along his bottom lip in a silent urging to let her deepen the kiss, and he complies without a second to spare, willing to entertain her every whim so long as she keeps being so good for him.

He revels in her muffled squeak of a moan when he presses down on the sides of her throat at the precise moment his hips grind down to meet hers. She can't keep herself still for any longer than a half-second, always meeting his movements halfway and unknowingly doing another thing that will be the death of him.

She leads his shirt up his body without having to second guess herself, knowing that he's always on the same wavelength as her no matter what. This was how it was the last time too. Anything she did, he was already one step ahead, and tonight isn't much different. By the time her hands ball up the dripping cotton fabric, JJ is lifting the hand off of her neck to reach for the neckline of the shirt and help tug it off.

There's a sense of urgency in everything they do. Charged up with frustration and jealousy that brewed within the days they spent apart, there's nothing to stop them from reducing themselves to a pair of panting, impatient lovers too consumed in each other to care about the outside world.

The sopping wet fabric is thrown beyond her line of sight and lands on the hardwood floor with a 'thwack' that accompanies their cacophony of moans and gasps, and she whimpers at the sight of him. It may have to do with the fact that he's guiding their bodies together at a cadence and pressure perfect enough to make her legs tremble, but seeing him like this does nothing but aid the sensation.

Golden skin glistening under the candlelight, tendrils of half-dry blonde hair falling into his face with the lazy effort of his movements, and a stray raindrop that squeezed from the wet shirt dripping down his chest...she's not gonna make it out of tonight alive, is she? In her memory, she knew he was a sight to see in the midst of a heated moment, but, fuck, memories do not hold up beside the real experience of it.

Y/N is so caught up in his seemingly endless beauty, she doesn't notice him peeling her damp denim shorts off of her hips until they're halfway down her legs, and the only reason she does notice is because he must shift his position to do it. Suddenly, the budding feeling that stirred from their needy antics is plucked away and left to ache for more in the absence of him between her thighs.

Her middle and index fingers hook around the front of his necklace to pull him back down to her, but he doesn't budge at first. He's too busy trying to rid her of her shirt to care.

It was too much of a distraction while they kissed for him to resist slipping it off of her when he got the chance to. Much to his frustration when he first realized they were trapped with each other, she's braless underneath, and it's only worse now that the t-shirt is soaked to her skin and clinging to every delicate curve.

Once the clothing gives way to the canvas of her bare skin, he submits to her urgency and follows her down by the fingers hooked around his necklace without any qualms.

As soon as they resume, it's as if they never stopped to begin with, and they start to realize how seamlessly they fit together as the seconds elapse. Neither of them are actively thinking about it while he dips his hand into the front of her panties, but it is in their subconscious.

It's a revelation of sorts, an ah-ha moment where it hits them both in a sweeping realization that it was obvious from the day they met. They should've known sooner, they should've dropped their pride and admitted it as soon as the first inklings of desire began to pop up, but they didn't. Instead, it washes over them now and they let the current take them away together.

Her mouth falls open against his cheek at the feeling of his fingers swiping through the arousal that pools in her underwear for him, dragging the wetness over his fingertips and spreading it up to brush fleetingly against her clit. It's a split-second of a touch that it makes her hips lift up off the floor on their own accord to seek out more. It makes her dig her nails into the skin stretching over his taut shoulder muscles in a wordless plea for more that he doesn't indulge her in at first.

He makes her earn it from him without having to say a single word. He touches her, but he doesn't touch where she wants or ease his fingers into her to satisfy the need she feels yet. It's a blessing and a curse that he manages to turn her on to such an extent. He does it for her like nothing else can, so much so that she's noticed a distinct difference in how it feels when she's alone versus when they're together. When she's alone, it can tend to feel like active effort, but when she's with him, it's as natural as the urge to breathe.

His smirk is felt against her skin the entire time she begs for it through the revealing actions of her body—her hips jerking up toward him, her chest pressing tightly to his, and the sound of her murmuring, "Please," in a breathy tone that could stop his heart.

"Tell me what you want," JJ says, every word constrained and tight in a way that tells her he's a lot less composed than he lets on, and "accidentally" swipes his thumb over her clit again. "Talk to me, baby."

She almost forgot in their time apart how much of an effect he has on her, but this is the best reminder of that she could possibly imagine. If she could, she would find a way to bottle the feeling he gives her and keep it with her forever so that, no matter what happens between them, she'll never have the misfortune of forgetting him.

What he said simultaneously melts her heart and frustrates her to no end because he knows! He knows damn well what she wants from him and won't give it to her unless she asks for it, and she hates herself for loving it. She hates herself for enjoying the flushed-face embarrassment it brings to her cheeks to be so open with him about what she needs.

She swallows the lump in her throat and tries to focus through the clouded landscape of her head to speak to him. It's hard to concentrate when he's above her like this, touching her, calling her pet names, and looking at her like that.

With his lips worshiping the sensitive skin along her neck, she finds it hard to choke out the words, "I want you," into the humid air that has infiltrated the house.

It's not a lie. Anything regarding her wanting him or any related feeling is no longer something she can hide anymore, but they both know it isn't exactly what he wanted. No matter how it took his breath away to hear her say it, he was seeking something more specific. He was aiming to make her ask, maybe even beg, for it. They're both too impatient to wait and based on how wet his fingertips are from barely dipping into her, he can tell she's as eager as he is.

It's been thirteen days too long since the last time they allowed themselves to meet this way, and neither of them wants to let it happen again.

She was nearly trembling with the urge to go to him whenever they were together in the company of their friends, unable to think about anything except for how badly she wanted him. All the while, he appeared so unbothered, especially on the night of the party when he flirted with someone else, that she didn't even believe he felt the same way back. Thankfully for her, she couldn't have been more wrong.

He clicks his tongue and says, still teasing her with light touches that never linger in one place for too long, "That wasn't very specific."

Part of her should know that he's about to do something based on how he withdraws his head from its cherished place in the crook of her neck, but she's too caught up in the anticipation and seeing his face for the first time in a minute to think about it. How dare he look so good? She could cry in frustration, although she might actually already be tearing up a little with the rush of neediness hitting her in its full force.

Never has she felt so turned on by so little physical contact before. It usually takes longer for her to get to this point, whether it be alone or in the past with previous partners, yet all it took was being kissed, touched, and being given his undivided attention and now...She realizes she's in trouble. He has her in an emotional and sexual chokehold at this point, and she fears that no one can compare.

"I want—" her voice is snuffed out in an instant when he eases two fingers into her, "Oh!"

So that's why he pulled away from her neck to look at her.

It was worth abandoning the mark forming on her neck just to see the expression on her face shift. She gets this cute look when anything overwhelming starts to happen where her brows scrunch a little to create a soft wrinkle between them as her mouth drops open in a moan. And after ten steady minutes of doing nothing but some over the clothes action and painstaking teasing, this is as overwhelming as it gets without it crossing the line to being too much.

It never occurred to her how much larger his fingers are compared to hers until now. This type of pleasure is like an itch only someone else can scratch to her, she feels virtually nothing when she does it to herself, but when he does it, it's like an explosive being set off inside of her. Especially with the thumb that sneaks up to circle her clit without stopping to tease her again, she is putty in his hands at this point.

Every smooth stroke of his fingers into her reaches a spot she can never quite find on her own, and she can feel the cold bite of rings when they're buried into her to the knuckle.

It's a surprise every time, even when she knows to expect it. Like a delightful chill running up through her body and down her spine exactly how it's intended to. It strikes an idea in her head for when he eventually pulls them out of her, conjuring the image of her sucking them clean for him just for the sake of imagining what it'll do to him.

With that idea tucked away in the back of her mind, he's the center of her world right now. All she breathes, thinks, and feels is him. Whether it be the sight of him, or the feelings he's giving her, or even the taste of his kiss that still lingers on her tongue, it connects to one common thread.

"What were you saying?" JJ asks, and she wants to wipe that smirk right off his face.

It's virtually impossible for her to piece together a coherent thought, let alone a sentence detailing every filthy idea she has for him, but she tries. It takes another moment or two of her succumbing to the rapid incline of pleasure that he gives her, watching her in wonder through any greedy buck of her hips or gasping inhale that makes her head loll back onto the floor.

At first, what she wanted to say was that she wanted him to touch her, to do anything more than the fleeting touches he gave before. Now, she wants more than that. Now that she's drawn in closer to the eventual high that's to come, she doesn't want it to happen like this. She wants to feel closer to him than this, wants to feel him throb inside of her and fuck her with all of the urgency and desperation that has accumulated in their time apart.

That's why her hands start to grab at the belt loops of his shorts to tug him closer by them, meeting his gaze through the hazy bliss of his fingers pumping into her. It's not enough.

"Please"—she keeps pulling him closer to her, so close that there's hardly any space left to cross, and he revels in her desperation—"just fuck me already..."

Internally, JJ is losing his shit.

Though this was what he wanted, what he coaxed out of her with the teasing and the pretend sense of a nonchalant attitude on his part, it hits him harder than he expected it to to hear her say it. It's not necessarily the act of begging itself either, it's the fact that she's the one doing it. She may have been jealous of the girl at the party, but she had nothing to worry about. Not in the slightest.

Before her, he never thought he'd fall for someone this way. It's not like he had a hatred for love or anything, he understood the appeal, it simply wasn't his thing.

He was perfectly content with his only form of companionship being his friends. Then, she came along and changed it. So to hear her say something like that isn't just breathtaking, it's the kind of thing that makes his heart ache for her. It hits him precisely where she wanted it to, and he has never felt as consumed with love the way he does now.

JJ can do nothing to stop himself from pouncing on her at this point, like some animalistic form of himself has worn down the restraint he used to keep himself at bay.

The loss she feels when his fingers slip away from her is an emptiness she mourns at first before she realizes what's happening. He pulls away slightly to reach down between them for the front of his shorts, and their hands clash as they both frantically try to undo them together. The rings adorning his fingers glisten when they catch the light and remind her of the thought that popped into her head when she first felt their coldness against her skin.

That idea paired with the promise of what they're trying to accomplish in their uncoordinated attempt to get the rest of their clothes off makes her want to press her thighs together. Her hands abandon the task of undoing his shorts for the sake of ridding herself of the last layer that separates her from him.

Her most embarrassing old pair of brightly colored panties, courtesy of past Y/N's questionable decision to trust her mom to buy some on her behalf, are hardly a sight to behold. They're the kind that come in a value pack from Walmart, vibrant blue with the word, "Tuesday," printed on the front of them, and she could hide her face into the rug in shame if she weren't so determined to get them off. Of all the days to wear the day of the week undies her mom accidentally got her, of course she chose today.

By the time she reaches for the waistband, he has pushed his shorts and underwear down his thighs and comes back to her with just as much excitement as he left with, but when he helps her tug her panties down her legs, he laughs. Apparently, he had also been too eager to touch her to notice what was written on them before.

"Cute," he breathes out through a laugh, then adds as the cotton fabric slips over her knees, "Pretty sure it's not Tuesday though."

"If you tell anyone, I swear I'll—"

He cuts her off, "Whatever you wanna threaten me with won't work, chances are I'm gonna be into it."

Her eyes are alight with a certain fire he's had yet to fully lure out of her. Even her voice is slightly more airy and seductive as a result of it.

"Promise?"

JJ grins down at her as he finally tosses her panties aside with the rest of their clothes, "Cross my heart, pretty girl."

His hands grip her thighs and tug her down the  rug to him with a quick jolt that snaps them out of the playful nature of their back and forth teasing. No matter how lighthearted of an interruption it was, the mini-conversation might as well have never existed for how easily they fall back into it again.

She watches with her forehead pressed against his as he strokes himself a few times, then drags his tip, messy with precome, through her wet heat. And though she watches it happen, her body still arches into his when he lines up with her and sinks his hips forward.

She anticipated it, but she still gasps and digs her nails into his biceps at the sensation of him pushing into her. Neither of them bothers to worry about the obvious lack of a condom—it was discussed the first time around when he offered and she told him it was okay. He's often the one to silence the alarm on her phone warning her in its title to, "Take your birth control or else, bitch," while she searches her bag for it anyway, so he trusts her.

Both of them prefer it this way enough to risk the  minuscule failure rate of the pill anyway. It's more intimate, closer, and they can both feel the warmth of each other in a way that would've been somewhat muted with an added layer between them. It makes the feeling of him entering her all the more gratifying as she tenses up around him in reaction, drawing a groan from where his parted lips brush against hers.

She lifts her head off of the floor as much as she can to capture his mouth with her own and stifle the sonorous sound despite the storm doing a better job of it.

It seems that every blast of wind and roll of thunder is in their favor tonight, so much so that he isn't even worried about getting walked in on. It's not a thought in his head at this point, the only thought he's capable of having is this. Forgive him for being shortsighted, but he doesn't give a shit if John B notices or hears what's happening when he's buried inside of her so deeply.

His hips are flush with the backs of her thighs in a matter of seconds, and right when he pauses to give her a breather, he feels her shake her head ever so slightly against where their faces are pressed together.

The touch of her hands on his hips is not timid by any means, it's commanding. Her palm prints singe an indelible claim into the surface of his skin as she guides him to start moving without a second spared to dwindle the discomfort of him filling her up. It's less like a pain and more of a pressure blooming from the insistent presence of him, not so overwhelming that it's painful, but it's an effort to breathe evenly and the only thing that'll ease this transitional moment is to continue.

At first, their bodies start to rock together lazily as though on autopilot. They'd hardly be conscious of the fact that they're doing anything if not for the initial sensations of heady ecstasy that flash like the sparks of a lighter in response to their movements. As soon as he felt her hands coax him into action, he sighed happily and surrendered himself to the instinct of wanting to move.

The merging of their bodies is less of the aggressive rutting motions they'll surely succumb to once their current pace is no longer satisfying, but that doesn't make it any less intense. She's partly sure that this is one of the most vulnerable moments either of them has ever had when it comes to sex, and it wouldn't work if it weren't them together. No other person could consume her the way he does, taking up every unoccupied space of her soul until there's nothing left but the silent begging of her heart for him.

Their kiss is messy when it breaks to allow them the chance to suck down a couple breaths of air, saliva shining on his lips in between the seconds it takes them to come crashing back together.

It's loving enough to rot her teeth with its sweetness, a slow but impossibly deep grinding of their hips together that continually presses the tip of him into that sweet spot inside of her, but it takes a turn.

Not only do her hands shift from his hips up to the sides of his waist to get a firmer hold on him, the kiss starts to become vigorous, almost hungry, in search of something more. The dreamlike sequence of the first moment or so they spent slowly fucking under the warm hues of candlelight starts to unravel to reveal the baser instincts that guide them forward.

"Fuck, you feel so good," he whispers the praise into her mouth.

As soon as the words are said, he can feel the effect it has on her. The hands braced on his waist pull his body closer to her at the same moment that she involuntarily squeezes down around him, making the smooth drag of his cock against the velvet-soft heat of her walls even tighter than he thought possible.

The sudden feeling of it makes his first returning thrust much harder than the last. He jerks forward into her with none of the restraint he's retained for the past few moments, and her reaction is nothing short of perfection, at least from his perspective. He watches her throw her head back in a moan, hips bucking to him in pursuit of more, and feels the tips of her fingernails digging crescent-shaped marks into the unmarred skin along his waist.

"JJ!" she gasps in surprise, and if her initial reaction weren't enough to spur him on in a frenzied state of desire, this is.

He almost forgot how intense it had been the first time. Their confessions of love preceding this made them both somewhat softer and sweeter in their approach when they started, but he knows how she likes it.

Nobody would expect it from her. He's another story entirely, especially considering how much John B and Pope know about him, but her? He didn't have any in depth conversations about it with either of them, so none of their friends know how dirty she is.

But when you start to tease it out of her, she's got a side to her that makes his blood run hot. Considering how polite she is, he sure as hell didn't see it coming. For fuck's sake, she's the kind of person who'll apologize to a chair if she bumps into it. With that in mind he never thought she'd be the type to demand such things of him.

Just like that, with one moan of his name, it's like she flipped a switch in him that they forgot was there in the first place. It'll never stop surprising him how little it takes to get him going when he's with her, and he doesn't see that changing no matter how long they spend together in the future. Just a touch from her is all it takes, so it's needless to say that the sound of her calling out his name was more than enough.

Those slow, deep movements he made to sink into her again and again have turned rapid and rough, but still controlled enough to have a semblance of precision to them, hitting in all the right places.

"I bet," JJ speaks lowly, "that you want John B to walk out and see us right now."

She doesn't want to admit how much of an instantaneous effect those words have on her, but the feeling of her clenching around him as she bites back a moan completely betrays her. Partly, she worries that he'll take that the wrong way and think it has something to do with John B when it has nothing to do with him at all, but he doesn't. For the spare second of thought she's allowed to have before her mind goes hazy again, she notes how much more eager he is on the upstroke of the next thrust.

Noticing how right he was in his assumption about her liking the risk of getting caught jumpstarts his heart and makes everything he does rougher. She can sense that he's starting to lose control over himself and is acting on instinct alone.

It makes her much more sensitive to everything he does, and all she can do is cling to him and enjoy it as she takes in everything he says and does. It's hard to pick one thing to focus on between the switch up in pace and what he said.

"You want John B to know you like getting fucked like a slut, don't you?"

She could get off on the sound of his voice alone. Hearing him say stuff like that kills her, it makes the swirling bliss that builds in the pit of her abdomen with every thrust he gives her triple in its extremity.

Her legs are tightly wound around his hips to keep him as near to her as possible, her hands sliding up around his waist to keep a steady grasp on him while he pounds into her. The rug scratches at her back enough to make it sting alongside the immense pleasure building in her, but she doesn't care. When blended with the good sensations, the pain underscores the addictive feeling of him inside of her, fucking her exactly how she asked him too.

Looking up at him when he's like this is simply unreal. There's no other way of describing it in her eyes except for that. He's so stunning, she's inclined to believe that he isn't even real as a means of explaining it. This shouldn't be real. It should be one of her daydreams while she steals covert stares at him as they hang out with the Pogues, but it isn't. She can't wrap her head around it.

Those strands of hair that were damp from the rain are mostly dry as they fall into his eyes with the force of his movements. The sight of him alone, set aside from the rest of it, is enough to make her writhe beneath him and claw at his back in tandem with another thrust that sends her jolting against the rug.

He takes one of his hands up from where they both held her hips for leverage to weave his fingers into the roots of her hair.

He demands between the panting breaths and moans that flood the limited space between them, tugging on her hair, "Answer me."

She instantly blurts out the words, "I want him to see us." The feeling of him tilting her head back by the fistful of hair he has wrapped up in his hand is her persistent reminder to concentrate enough to continue, and she bites down on her lip to contain a moan before speaking again, "I want him to know..."

Her cheeks burn with the mere thought of it, let alone saying it out loud. He's the only person she'd ever let in on this intimate side of her, the side that makes her crazy when she hears him say stuff like this. The reason she feels so comfortable doing this with him is that she knows he understands her. It's as if he can read her mind without even having to try, knowing exactly what to say and when to say it.

It wouldn't matter if the topic of their exhibitionism were any other Pogue or a stranger, it isn't about who it is, it's about the thrill attached to the concept of almost getting seen during such a heated moment. In all actuality, John B is probably snoring face down into his pillow right now with no care for what's happening out here, but he knows what it does to her when they push the boundaries of decency this way. It's the same rush he gets from stealing random, useless things every so often, it's the thrill of getting away with something.

The hand tangled up in the roots of her hair sneaks down between their colliding bodies to rub her clit, and her mouth drops open to take in a shaky breath.

The sight of her beneath him is undoing in and of itself. Head tilted enough to expose her neck to him, chest rising and falling rapidly with her breaths, and breasts bouncing gently with the momentum of their actions—seeing her this way makes his thrusts ramp up into more of a frenzied, uncontainable pace rather than one with the same control and cadence as before. But it's mostly the eye contact that kills him. She doesn't dare to shut her eyes the entire time, as if she can sense that he'll tell her to look at him again the second she does.

"You want him to know what?" he asks, and she knows he won't let her get away with not saying it.

She whines, utterly helpless to the climax starting to build inside of her, "Please."

What she's pleading for, she isn't quite sure, but he can tell by how she's acting that she's starting to get closer, and he wants nothing more than to tease her with the impending chance of her orgasm.

"If you wanna come, you're gonna have to do a lot better than that."

Just like that, he withdraws his hand from between them and leaves her desperate, blindly grasping for the peak she was so close to reaching, she could almost feel it already.

With JJ rocking into her at a relaxed, slower rhythm, the pleasure hasn't disappeared completely. It's there, but she can sense the feeling of her orgasm receding as quickly as it had creeped up on her as soon as he slips his hand out from between them.

It's instantly clear to him how desperate she is as all of her previous shyness surrounding having to admit this to him out loud withers away in seconds. She isn't beneath begging again at this point. He could tell her to crawl across the floor to him and she'd happily do it for the chance of touching him. It's pathetic but true. As much as she has him wrapped around her finger, he has done the same to her and she isn't afraid to admit it anymore.

Her hips jerk toward him in search of the familiar frenzy they were in before that sent her to the brink of climax, but he is impressively stubborn. Despite the fact that it physically pains him to dial it back again, he tries to keep the signs of his own frustration at bay. She knew what she had to say to get what she wants, so he'll only cave when she does.

This time around, she doesn't give a fuck about how badly she blushes or the voice in the back of her mind telling her she should keep this side of her to herself. This time, the one thing she needs to do to prompt her to open her mouth and speak the dirty words he asked her less than a moment ago is look at him. One second of staring up at him and here she is, driven mad enough to say or do anything to get him to pick up where they left off.

She says between the soft noises and breaths coming from them both, clinging to him through every slow but deep thrust that sends sparks ricocheting through her body, "I want John B to know I like getting fucked like slut." Her voice is breathless, and he hangs off of each word as she pauses, looking up at him with a challenging attitude swirling in those pretty eyes. "So stop being a tease and fuck me like one."

His jaw clenches at the bratty statement, one he's too far gone to resist at this point, and right when he's about to respond to her, she speaks again.

"Either that," she says, and a deceptively sweet smile crosses her kiss-swollen lips, "or I can go ask him to—"

She doesn't even get the chance to voice the rest of that thought before he's set into motion.

The hands on her hips flip her over with such casual strength, all she can do is yelp in surprise at the sudden movement that blurs the living room in her peripheral version until she lands with her hands and knees pressing into the rug. He was so swift in pulling out of her and tossing her onto her front like she was nothing more than a rag doll, she hardly had the time to take a breath before she ended up here.

There's hardly any time between when he pulled out to flip her over and when he returns to her again, but it feels like an eternity for them. The few second transition might as well be a few years as she feels his hands guiding her body where he wants it, pushing down on her back until it arches just so, and falls down onto her arms. But as soon as she gets situated, she feels a pair of hands yanking her arms away from where they were braced against the floor and put them behind her back.

It's only then, when he has an unflinching grasp on where he keeps her wrists behind her back with one of his hands, that she is met with the relief of him sinking into her again.

Y/N's jaw goes slack, and she cries out into the rug that her cheek is pressed into as he gives her no chance to adjust or catch her breath before resuming the brutal pace they kept a moment ago. Mentioning anyone else but him doing this to her was the quickest way to get him to snap, so it's safe to say that she's getting what she wanted. After all, she did what he asked, it's fair that she gets rewarded for it.

Amidst the sounds of the storm waging war on the landscape outside of the house, the one thing she can hear over the buzzing pleasure that drowns out her senses is the sinful blend of sounds they create together. It's the sound of their bodies merging, his name falling from her lips, and the curses he makes under his breath that never fail to drive her a little wild.

The hand that isn't holding her arms behind her slides down the length of her curved back until it wraps around her throat to pin her down, and her reaction is everything he could ask for. Seeing her rock back against him to meet him halfway makes his grip on her wrists tighten enough to turn his knuckles white.

Her hair is spread in endless directions in a fan around her head, and he can only see one side of her face from where he kneels behind her, but that glimpse is more than enough. Brows scrunched in pleasure, mouth dropped open in a gape as soft 'uh's and 'ah's escape her on the upstroke of each thrust—she's a mess right now. A beautiful, perfect mess.

"Oh God, JJ," she moans between her rapid breaths and the strong hand constricting her neck, "I'm so close. Please, just let me come."

It took virtually nothing for her to be pushed right back to the edge of the peak she was at less than a minute ago. It took a mere half-minute of this and she's once again reduced to incoherent pleas for more and shaking with no control over herself. Her legs tremble with the effort to keep herself up in this position, and she isn't even the one doing most of the work. In all fairness, this change in position has made the intensity triple. It's deeper this way, and with how harshly he slams into her, it's as though she can feel it in the base of her abdomen.

It's the enjoyable type of pain, however, not the bad type. It'll surely end up with her being sore tomorrow, but she can't hide how much she loves the painful pleasure of how rough it's getting. Being denied an orgasm when she was so, so close to it was initially disappointing too, but it was worth it. If the build up to what would've been her climax before was a spark, this is a flourishing fire spreading through her with no chance of smothering the flames.

He lets go of her throat and taps the side of her jaw in a silent request that she picks up immediately, letting her lips fall open to suck his fingers into her mouth without a second of hesitation.

The taste of her arousal on them is faint, but still there, and it occurs to her that she thought about this earlier before things evolved into chaos. Her tongue swirls around the tips of his fingers as he starts to pull them away in what feels like the blink of an eye to her, leaving him to remember what it felt like when her lips were once wrapped around a more sensitive part of him a week and a half ago.

The one other time he let himself remember it was when they were on the boat with the Pogues, yet that wasn't really of his own volition. It was hot out, so Kiara bought ice pops for them and his mind wandered far from where it should've stayed.

Shining with her saliva, his fingers are pulled from her lips with a soft 'pop' in pursuit of that sensitive collection of nerves at the apex of her thighs. She just needs is a little push to go over the edge, and when he slips his hand down her body to rub tight circles onto her clit, she loses whatever remnants of control over herself she had left.

The steady rhythm of her hips moving back against him falters as she is overwhelmed with the separate sensations culminating into one and giving her the push she needs to come. Her entire body tenses up in anticipation, and since she's pinned to the floor with her hands behind her back, she can only lay there and savor the feeling as it hits her.

After what felt like ages of having it build and build within her, then having it taken away to start the process over again, finally being given a release is a relief beyond any she's felt before.

It's so consuming, it takes away her ability to think of anything outside of how it feels to dissolve into the shockwaves of euphoria rushing through her. Every pulsing wave is prolonged by him, not even through the peak of it does he let up on his precise touches and unforgiving thrusts into her that turn a typical orgasm into the most intense thing she's ever felt.

She's melting in his arms through it all, and as if the change in position didn't make it worse, her involuntary spasms leave him hanging on by a thread.

JJ collapses onto her, barely having the chance to keep himself propped up on his arms as he lets go of her wrists and falls forward onto her sweat-slick back.

The heat of his panting exhales raises goosebumps in its wake where his face is buried into the curve of her neck, and he whines at the impossibly tight feeling of her squeezing around his cock through the end of her climax. Those sounds he doesn't realize he's making have her writhing through the aftershocks, answering with a sound of her own that almost makes him come instantly.

For that reason, he makes the decision to pull out and flip her onto her back.

At this point, she's so dazed and fucked out that she doesn't register any of it until she notices the hollow absence of him inside of her, but it doesn't matter when his face appears through the partial darkness above her.

Despite how sensitive she is right now, the sight of him makes her hands reach out blindly to pull him closer again. They're frantic in their need to get back to one another, grasping and clawing until he finds his way back to her in less than a second, hiking her legs up around his waist with a touch that is somehow demanding and tender at the same time.

It's only when he's inside of her again that it occurs to her why he rolled her onto her back again, and it makes her want to kiss him until her lips turn numb. It may be undeniably hotter to pin someone down and fuck them hoarse, but, no, that wasn't what he wanted. He wanted to be able to look at her, to see her face, and the thought of that has her biting back a sudden confession of love. She isn't sure why she doesn't say it right away, since it isn't like they haven't already done it, but she keeps it to herself for a second first.

It's different now. It's not less passionate or frenetic. It isn't as if he isn't being as rough with her as he was before, but they can both sense a shift in the energy between them as soon as he reenters her. It's less about the pursuit of pleasure and more about the feelings they've kept hidden away for so long. It's a simultaneous realization that hits them a little late after they initially confessed their feelings for each other: this is reality. It's real, and when she touches him this time, he isn't going to disappear if she opens her eyes.

The realization of what happened tonight had yet to hit them until right this second, but now that it has, they move forward with a sense of sentimentality that remained partly dormant before.

If there's anything JJ dislikes, it's being vulnerable. The idea of letting someone in to see every part of him, including the parts he doesn't want to see of himself, has always terrified him after years of being made to believe he's undeserving, yet he isn't uncomfortable right now. Somehow, he feels safe with her. Sex has never been something so emotional for him until now, until her, and he doesn't want it differently.

Their bodies are drawn in close, her arms thrown around his neck, and he's so close, he can feel the muscles leading down past his lower abdomen contract with the inevitable approach of his orgasm. She can sense it too in how he acts.

When he gets close, he becomes clingier and lets his feelings get the better of him. His hands squeeze at her hips, sliding up her sides and back down to hike one of her legs up high around his waist to press deeper into her. He can't bear to allow his touch to stay in one place for too long before exploring another part of her, wanting to memorize the delicate intricacies of her body in its entirety.

It's as if she can read his mind too, cause even when she's sensitive enough to gasp when he pushes her thigh to her chest and throws his remaining energy into fucking her at a satisfying pace, she understands what he needs. She knows to reach up and run her fingers through his hair, to tug on it gently until the light strands are taut from his scalp. She knows to lift her head off of the floor enough to trail tender kisses along his face, his jaw, his neck—anywhere she can access.

"Come for me," she says into a kiss placed on the edge of his cheekbone, reeling in overstimulation as she jolts with his quickening thrusts, "I want to watch you..."

Hearing those words, paired with the kisses and fingers pulling on his hair, does it for him. It doesn't take more for his hips to falter and jerk forward into her a final few times before he comes.

Their foreheads press together as they cling to one another for stability, though it's mostly JJ clinging to her while she watches in adoration, and she has to bite her lip to contain a moan at how it feels. The aftershocks of her orgasm have yet to fade as the feeling of pulsing warmth inside of her makes them stronger, reigniting the fire she felt a moment ago if only for a second.

There's a closeness to this situation that they hadn't felt the last time, and they know it has everything to do with what was said before this happened. The sex itself feels like a dream sequence in her mind now that she's coming down from it with him, moving together slowly and gently beneath the candlelight until they ride out the ends of their highs. It was like they were put under a trance by each other, and now that it's over, the first thoughts that come to mind are of what comes next.

It's not the sole topic on their minds though. They're more focused on catching their breath from where they lay, tangled up together, on the living room floor. As soon as the very last of his orgasm faded from him, he fell onto her without a single ounce of energy left to spare. He's careful not to crush her, but, for the most part, he relaxes on top of her and lets his head rest on her heaving chest.

Strong arms slip down to loop around her waist, and she sure that she couldn't get him to release her if she wanted to, which she doesn't.

But they can't stay like this, not for any longer than a few moments anyway, since they don't know how if John B might wake up and come out of the safety of his bedroom after hours of leaving them to their own devices. JJ was right. He's out cold, but for as much as it turned them on in the heat of the moment, neither of them finds getting caught by him as hot with the clarity of their rational minds coming back to them.

He's the one to break the silence.

"As much as I wanna stay like this, we should probably move in case John B wakes up."

The sound of his voice settles in her with the effects of a sedative. It calms her more than anything else could, especially with the added comfort of him cuddling her so closely. One of her hands strokes through his hair and pushes the damp tendrils of sunshine away from his face as he cranes his neck to look up at her. And, for fuck's sake, what else is she to do except admire him?

His cheeks are dusted pink in a way they often are when he spends too much time outside without one of his hats shielding his face, and she thinks he's never looked better.

Ever since they became friends, she's had this theory about him. In the unrealistic landscape of her overactive imagination, JJ didn't come to this world the way the rest of them did. To her, it seems impossible that someone so good, even in his worst moments, could've come from someone like his dad.

So, in idle moments where she would watch him on a day out with the Pogues or daydream about him, she decided that he's the sun.

She imagines he was created in those breathtaking but brief moments where the sun meets the horizon atop the ocean and washes the sky with a vast array of colors. She likes to think he's the incarnation of it. Golden, warm, and bright for everyone but himself, he keeps the world light for her and their friends without intending to.

Some days are warmer than others too. Some days, the light is dimmed by another bruise beneath his clothes or a bad run-in with some kooks, but today is not like that. This moment is eighty-five and sunny with a balmy breeze. Looking at him right now feels like basking in the sun, and she'd burn here forever if he let her.

Without realizing she zoned out, she jolts when he pinches her arm to rouse her from her ridiculous thoughts. He has this dopey half-smile on his face that nearly draws her back into them again.

"You know what they say," he says, "if you take a picture..."

Her soft laughter invades the room, filling his heart with this light, fluttery feeling that always finds him when she's near. His smile grows as she playfully shoves him and reaches above their heads for her wet shirt to cover up with just in case. Odds are, their friend isn't waking up at the exact moment before they seclude themselves to the spare room and get dressed, but she doesn't wanna take that chance.

"I wasn't staring."

She was totally staring. But who could blame her? When someone looks at a person the way he looks at her, how could they ever stay away?

"Whatever you say."

JJ keeps smiling to himself while he pulls his underwear and shorts up his legs and waits for her to be decent enough to sneak past John B's bedroom to the bathroom at the end of the hallway.

The clothes are soaked through with rainwater, so they feel quite uncomfortable to slip back on, but they merely redress enough to be covered. She stole his shirt to avoid putting her shorts back on, the hem of the grey tee hanging right at the tops of her thighs when she walks. As soon as she slips her panties back on and picks up the rest of their cold, wet clothes, that's the cue he needs to scoop her up and take her away.

Y/N curses under her breath in surprise at feeling her feet being plucked off the ground, but she relaxes again once she's settled in his arms, realizing that it was just him who snuck up behind her and lifted her into his arms.

She doesn't say anything on the way to the bathroom. Instead, she lays her head on his shoulder in exhaustion and finds herself staring at the mark she left behind on his neck.

It's a deep, purplish red against the backdrop of his tan skin...the Pogues will surely notice the next time they see him. And while it will make her blush, it won't make her scared as it once would've. There may be a lingering sense of doubt and insecurity within her, but she wants this with him. Even if it means being teased by their friends or dealing with the jealousy of watching kook girls and tourons at parties hit on him, she wants this.

By the time the shower is spraying the rainwater from her hair and washing her clean of sweat sticking to her skin, she realizes that he isn't saying anything either, but she doesn't think it's out of any awkwardness or miscommunication. There's truly nothing to say, at least for now.

Though they didn't have the chance to talk in depth about everything yet, neither of them thinks of that right now. All they know is that they're together, whether it be officially or not, and it feels good. For once, something in his life feels right, and he lets himself enjoy it in silence.

The shower is a cramped space when shared between them and the wet clothes they have draped over the back edge of the tub, but they make it work. It's not like they mind anyway.

They bump into one another whenever they do so much as breathe, and the white walls echo the sounds of her giggling when he tries to tickle her. She leans her head back against his chest and lets out a laugh with shampoo dripping down the front of her face, and he'll be damned if he ever heard a sound as intoxicating as that.

It's a little weird. He's never been as soft and loving with a person before, and he has already felt overwhelmed in the lulls of quiet between them when he's given the chance to think about it.

When she washes his hair for him, insisting that she must return the favor after he so kindly washed hers, he was struck with the same mixture of wanting to simultaneously lean into and pull away from her that he felt the night of the party.

The warmth of the water loosens his sore muscles, washing suds of the green apple scented shampoo over his shoulders and down, down, down until it circles the drain beside his feet. All the while, her fingertips are delicately tracing over a healing bruise on his torso. Those pretty lips of hers are painted in a suppressed frown that she can't hide from him.

"Are you okay?" Y/N asks.

His instant reaction is to fake a smile, to brush it off and distract her as he usually does, yet he doesn't. He forces himself to remain neutral and not push her away.

"Happens all the time," he murmurs, shrugging and averting his eyes to reach for the soap off on the ledge.

The hands holding either side of his waist tighten as he tries to turn, pulling him back to her with more strength than he knew to anticipate from her. Their chests gently collide back together beneath the stream of water, and she can feel his breathing catch for a second or so in response.

The fact that their relationship has changed doesn't change how she handles this aspect of his life. Their new confessions don't have an impact on the part of his life he never wants to let anyone see, so she isn't going to force him to talk about it because they're trying out this whole relationship thing now. He has hard boundaries that she knows not to push sometimes. That's the way it is, and it might change as they grow closer but she knows to accept it for the moment.

As soon as he hears what she has to say next, he could crumble in relief at the realization that their new dynamic doesn't change anything.

"I didn't necessarily mean...that...I meant generally, you know? It's just that—" she sighs, "you shrink away a little when I hold you, and I wondered if I was making you uncomfortable."

Before she could finish the sentence, JJ was already thinking of what to say to prove her wrong, because that's not it. That's not what it is, and if she thinks she's done anything wrong, he'll do anything to convince her otherwise because it isn't her. It's him.

It's his dad lingering in the darker trenches of his mind, commanding his fear and attention so that even when he isn't physically present, he's still here. Part of why he denied wanting her was because he knew these types of things would arise in the beginning, that there would be difficult adjustments to make and conversations to be had, and he didn't want her to leave him as soon as she was faced with one of these things.

He shakes his head.

"You didn't do anything."

The feeing of her chest rising and falling with his begins to steady him after a moment of allowing the initial hesitation to dissolve. His internal reaction to her touch is the mental incarnation of a flinch. It's him waiting for the other shoe to drop and expecting her to do something, to hurt him, before his mind catches up with his heart. But once he realizes everything's okay, he loves it.

"It's kinda embarrassing, but I guess when you touch me, I'm expecting something else," he says softly, scared that if he speaks too loudly, everyone in the world will know how weak he feels.

She should've figured, but hearing him say it is different than wondering what the reasoning behind it is. Hearing him admit it after months of strict avoidance on the topic is a sucker punch to the gut.

Both times they had sex, he was too distracted and thoughtless to get caught up in that part of himself, but it's when the bliss of the afterglow disappears that it creeps back in. That's why he could always handle touch when it came in that context. It was his way of obtaining what he wanted without having to face this side of it—a temporary fix to a greater web of issues.

But there's nothing temporary about her. He doesn't want her to leave him, not without him resisting the urge to beg her on his knees to stay and at least remain his friend, so there's no choice but to face these momentary challenges head on.

She pauses for a second, thinking, then says, "You don't have to be embarrassed about it, I get it. We'll just have to take it day by day then. We can take it slow, and you'll let me know if it gets to be too much, okay?"

It's hard not to be shocked by how well she's taking it. A lot of people probably wouldn't feel too great after someone they love tells them they expect to be hit whenever they touch them, yet she's taking it in stride.

Things are back to normal as soon as she sees the grin on his face.

"So, you're saying you're gonna be trying not to throw yourself at me all the time?" JJ asks, then clicks his tongue as though in thought. "I give you a week. Tops."

Her eyes go wide as she looks at him. She holds her hand over her heart as she pretends to be scandalized by such an accusation, but they know it's true. They both can't keep their hands off of one another, which is why it confuses him. How can he want to reject and enjoy her touch at the same time? Sure, the discomfort disappears after the first split-second, but the fact that it happens in the first place annoys him to no end.

She rolls her eyes and tries to hide the fact that she's giggling as she reaches for the soap.

"You're a little shit, you know that?"

He doesn't miss a beat, saying back, "Yeah but I'm your little shit, so I feel like that says more about you than it does me."

While he's too busy rinsing the rest of the shampoo out of his hair, she smiles to herself at what he said.

Hers.

Nobody has ever been hers before, or proclaimed themselves as belonging to her as proudly and casually as he just did, and her heart melts over the sweet sentiment he didn't think twice about.

Less than a day ago, she was agonizing over her relationship with him and trying to ignore how powerful those feelings for him were, and now they're here. She no longer has to steal glances when he looks away or hide how jealous she feels when other girls flirt with him. To finally let the tension disappear is an immense weight off of her shoulders.

The rest of the shower is as quiet as the start of it was, and that comfortable silence continues through from when they're drying off and redressing to when they hit the mattress in the spare bedroom with tired sighs.

After the day they had, the mere suggestion of sleep is enough to make them start yawning, so being able to slip beneath the sheets and rest their heads almost sings her to sleep instantly.

Their bodies are laying in the exact outlines of where they laid the night of the party, the only difference this time being their mindsets. This time around, they aren't holding themselves back from anything, and it's most evident in the little things. Like how she doesn't turn around to shield her face from him, instead laying with her head propped on the other end of his favorite pillow.

They're so close, their noses brush if they make any slight movements, and this would be enough for him to submit to the urge to drift into sleep if not for the fact that he feels her jolt when thunder rumbles loudly outside of the window.

Much like his own fears being pushed to the side amidst their desire for each other, her anxiety about the storm wasn't on her mind until they laid down to sleep.

She was so wrapped up in him and everything that happened between them that she didn't have the time to think again until now, until she hears the violent patter of rain against the roof and feels her stomach drop at the sound of the thunder. Suddenly, she's not the one reassuring him about his fearful reactions, it's the other way around.

His warm hand takes hers, snatching it up as though he's worried it'll disappear if he doesn't take it quickly enough, and she lets him. Her eyes flutter shut with the release of a slow, deep breath, and she lets the presence of his hand in hers bring her back to earth.

JJ asks into the darkness, "Can I take you out on a real date?" After a beat of silence, the comforting sound of his voice returns to her. "Not that this isn't fun, but I think you deserve a little more effort than John B's living room floor."

A short-lived chuckle escapes her—a win as far as he's concerned. It's difficult to lure her head from the clouds when she gets this way, and it isn't like he has much experience with calming her during these moments either, but that sounded good to him. It sounded like she wasn't thinking about the increased pace of her heart or the howling wind outside.

He was planning on asking anyway. However fitting of a first night together this was, he wants to take her out for real sometime soon. He doesn't have much money for it, like at all, but they can come up with something special together, even if it's similar to the same shit they usually do together. As long as it's time alone together, they don't necessarily care if it's a perfectly traditional first date.

The tip of his thumb rubs comforting circles onto the back of her hand in the brief time it takes her to respond, stroking the soft skin as if to tell her that everything's okay. It seems to say, I'm right here. Nothing can hurt you. And it might make her crazy, but she believes him. JJ could take her back out into the eye of the hurricane at this very moment and she'd still believe his unspoken promise of not letting her into harm's way.

"Of course," she says, then pauses, and the sound of her sleepy voice hardly reaches his ears when she speaks again, "...I'm sorry I avoided you for the past few days. I was scared to tell you how I felt but I shouldn't have left that morning."

The memory of waking up in his arms is fresh in the forefront of her mind, so much so that she can remember the way his breath felt where it exhaled in warm puffs onto her skin.

In the first few moments of consciousness, it was peaceful.

She laid awake for a minute or two to count his breaths and soak in the comfort of being cuddled up next to him, wishing she could stay there for hours. It wasn't until another moment passed that it clicked with her where she was and what was going on between them recently, and that was what prompted her to slip away from the bed to get ready for her day at work.

It was the second time in a row that she left him in that bed with nothing to wake up to but the cold absence of her body between the sheets he slept under, and he can't deny that it's part of why he holds onto her hand so tightly tonight. Even though she's promised him otherwise, he can't help but think she'll be gone by the time he wakes up. At this point, he's struggling to stay conscious. She can see those pretty eyes drooping more and more by the second, yet the hand holding hers doesn't loosen its grip.

He takes a deep breath and scoots closer to her, keeping his one hand in hers while the other arm drapes itself over her waist, and he can feel her relax into the touch.

"It's okay," he says.

It's easier for him to adjust to so much physical contact when he's the one initiating. He knows that's why she only reached out to hold his hand. If she had it her way, she would've already been cuddling with him as soon as they laid down, but he likes that she gives him the space to initiate it. In the ways it counts the most, she cares about him more than anyone else has.

The touch in itself is his way of accepting her apology. However, truth be told, he already forgave her for it before knowing his love was reciprocated could be a possibility.

Right when she's about to fall asleep, the screen door slamming open and shut with the wind on the back porch makes her whip her head around to look over her shoulder in the direction of the sound. It seems like every time he successfully distracts her from it, the storm finds new ways of reminding her of what's happening outside of the safety of the Chateau.

There's the sound of a barely audible, sharp inhale, then her whispering into the dark room as she looks at the closed door, "I can't believe I went out into that. What the fuck was I thinking?"

It's beginning to close in on her again; the sounds of the storm, the sense of being trapped no matter how safe they truly are, and the rising tidal wave of anxiety that picks up speed the more she tries to will it to stop. This is the part where she tries to relieve it in some way, usually by smoking weed to sleep or going to one of her parents so they can help her through it, but she can't help herself right now.

Debris was being picked and tossed around in the wind like it weighed nothing when she was out there, she could've been knocked into the marsh or struck by a piece of debris.

How could she be so stupid?

Not only could she have hurt herself, she could've hurt JJ knowing that he'd likely follow her out into the storm to bring her back inside, and the thought of him being hurt makes the tension in her chest heavier. Her breathing picks up speed, the anxiety starting to snowball out of control when—

"Hey, look at me," JJ says, reaching up to turn her head to face him, and she damn near crumbles in relief at feeling his hand cup her cheek. It doesn't make it all disappear, but it provides a momentary comfort that she doesn't take for granted. "You're safe here. You know damn well I'll do anything to protect you. I mean, shit, dude, if I have to go out there and tell that rain to fuck off, I will."

This draws out a laugh from her, chest stuttering with the happy sound through the tears glistening in her eyes, and he never wants to stop hearing it. His thumb swipes away the first teardrop that falls before it can slip over the apples of her cheeks. I'm Her quiet cries and shaky breaths continue for a while after the laughter disappears. For a second or two, he watches with his thumb still wiping her tears away and hopes that it'll be enough to comfort her, but it can't do it completely.

He pulls away from her to get up from the bed with an idea popping into his mind, but upon hearing her whine at the loss of contact with him, he pauses to say, "I'll be back quick, don't worry."

The remaining humorous side of her left wonders if he's actually gonna go tell the rain to fuck off, but he's just opening the bedroom door to trot out into the living room.

A candle burning on the coffee table illuminates the space for him, guiding him straight to the forgotten backpack she left slumped against the arm of the couch hours before their relationship was changed for the better. It takes him an instant to get there and back with the bag in hand, and he's digging through it for a second before climbing back into bed with her.

If anyone else rifled through her bag, sifted through her personal belongings, and dug her phone out of it, she'd probably be annoyed, but she never is with him. She's inherently protective of her things, but JJ can do whatever he wants and it has always been that way. It should've been the first warning of what was to come.

He pulls the sheet back over his body and scoots up close to her, trying to resist the urge to retreat at first when he maneuvers her to lay with her head on his shoulder. It should trigger the flight or fight response that often alarms in his head, but he's able to push it away.

She's so vulnerable right now, so gentle and in need of the warmth of another person that he isn't as intimidated. It's not that she couldn't hurt him if she wanted to right now, she could, but he knows her. He knows that the last thing she'd ever want to do is hurt him, so he has to remind himself of that and give himself the permission to enjoy the physical intimacy of her touch. The part of him that questions if he even deserves it can't reach him now, not when he's so focused on her.

"Thumb?" he asks with the phone held out expectantly.

The screen is less than two inches from her face, so she has to push it back slightly, but she flattens her thumb to the button without further hesitation.

When he unwraps the pair of headphones from around the palm of his hand and plugs them into the charging port, she realizes why he left in the first place.

When she was facing away from him, eyes shut and headphones in to distract herself with music earlier, he was stealing glances at her every so often. He tried to keep away from her for the most part. It was difficult though, especially knowing what she said about being jealous the night of the party and knowing how scared she was of the hurricane. He couldn't help but keep an eye on her, for both his own selfish needs and his worry for her.

He keeps an arm tucked around her, pressing her body into his while he pops one of the headphones into her ear and the other into his. The thing is, her eyes aren't trained on the screen like his are once he starts looking through her vast collection of not-so-legally acquired music for a song that suits both of their tastes, they're trained on him.

Their taste in music tends to diverge in certain ways and overlap in others, so there's always a fifty/fifty shot of him liking what she plays when she's the one picking the music. That is why he smiles to himself and halts the endless scrolling in its tracks to hover his thumb over one song.

He obviously heard it before she played it that one time, but it's different for him now. They were riding together in the backseat of the Twinkie on the way to the beach with John B, Kie, and Pope when they let her take her turn to play a song.

That's how it is with them, the driver goes first, then it goes to the front seat passenger, and so on and so on until they make their way back to the beginning of the rotation. It was her turn when she picked this song, and it could've been the song, or the sunset shining through the window, but he felt as though his heart exploded when he looked at her in the middle of it.

He remembers feeling confused, confused as to why he couldn't catch his breath and why he suddenly adored the song he only heard casually a couple of times.

It was her. It was everything about her. The soft hum of her voice murmuring the lyrics, too shy to actually sing them in the presence of anyone else, was too delicate for the others to appreciate over the sounds of the van. He heard it though. He clung to it and admired her, so unashamed in his staring that he didn't realize he was doing it. It wasn't until she noticed that he stopped.

"Do I still have ice cream on my face or something?"

Her fingers came up to wipe at the corner over her mouth, and the action sent him turning his attention away quicker than he knew he could move, pulling the lighter out of his pocket to fiddle with as he mumbled, "Yeah, but you got it off now."

The cheery melody of Just Like Heaven bursts out of each headphone into their ears.

How did he know? How is he constantly reading her mind without realizing it?

This was her first song on the couch that she couldn't stand to sit through without thinking, naturally, of him when confronted with the topic of love. Somehow, it's like he knew that, and instead of feeling exposed and scared he'll know her feelings like before, she feels loved.

She is never skipping this song again.

"Go to sleep," he murmurs, clicking the screen off and resting it on his stomach.

It takes him a short thirty seconds to fall into an easy, calm pattern of breathing that tells her he isn't asleep, but soon will be. But she's fighting her sleepiness to continue looking at him. His eyes are fluttered shut, hair messy on the pillow, and she'd want to reach up to kiss him if he weren't trying to fall asleep.

Instead, she settles for matching her quickened breaths to the slow rise and fall of his chest beneath her hand and shuts her eyes along with him.

By the time the song reaches its end, she thinks he's asleep, but she still whispers, "Thank you," and feels his arm squeeze around her body in response.

The next songs fade into white noise at this point for her, drowning out the storm to the point where she begins to forget it's happening out there.

Maybe they can be each other's safe place when things get rough. After all, he handled this wonderfully considering his lack of experience with her anxiety and she never pushes him on his plethora of unsorted issues, even when she wants so badly to be the one to initiate the touch.

She never makes him think she pities him, or wants to "fix" him like so many partners with savior complexes who will never try to understand how it feels often do in these situations. With each other, maybe it doesn't have to be so complicated anymore, even when they have those inevitable arguments here or there.

The last thing he does before allowing himself to be dragged under is brush his lips on her forehead in a tender kiss. And when he eventually wakes to the rising sun shining through the windows in the aftermath of the violent hurricane, she's still there.

Tag List: @jjjmaybank, @its-simply-fanfiction, @naughtydild0swaggins.

[shihalyfie]

The meaning of the Beast Spirits in Frontier, and what it means to control it

(On request by @digitalgate02​.)

When you think about it, Frontier can be framed as a story of outcasts or misfits having to accept the idea of “changing themselves” in order to become better people, both literally in the sense of embracing physical transformation, and metaphorically in the sense of making attempts to do better. Implicitly, it speaks a lot as to how quickly these kids accept the idea of turning into something else -- perhaps implying as to how ostracized they’ve felt that such a thing instantly sounds appealing -- but it also adds some interesting layers to the concept of the Beast Spirit and how the difficulty of “controlling it” ties into each character’s personal story.

I think a lot of it has to do with the idea that these kids did have inclinations of being selfish or shallow at the beginning -- while they were full of potential to become heroes, they definitely started off as unlikely misfits at the beginning. In that respect, you can see the Beast Spirits arc as a sort of lesson that great power must be used wisely and responsibility...

Believe it or not, our biggest clue to all of this comes from episode 16, Izumi’s episode. It’s not directly stated in words, and the abstract summary of “determination” is passed off as a joke, but looking at the context clues around the episode indicates that’s actually not far off.

The thing is that Calmaramon is depicted as having the hardest time with her Beast Spirit compared to practically about anyone else in the group, and one of the recurring themes about it is that it’s partially because her personality is downright terrible. If you look at the context clues behind the prior episode (15), you’ll notice that while her looks are briefly brought up as an issue there and in this episode, the part that’s really freaking everyone out (and is making everyone worried Izumi will turn out to be the same) is that they actually saw it have an impact on her personality, where she was clearly conscious and able to talk but also indiscriminately destroying everything and enjoying it. At least in the case of Kouji, Takuya, and Junpei, they can be forgiven because they all did their best to keep it under control after the initial fallout, but Ranamon changing into Calmaramon had also involved her becoming someone actively reveling in senseless destruction. When everyone worries that Izumi might turn out like that, they don’t even bring up looks at all, and they all recoil when she does start showing signs of being destructive anyway.

The thing is, the entire rest of the episode puts a massive spotlight on Izumi’s actions of standing up for the Gomamon and empathizing with their loneliness (which, given the contexts added about Izumi’s background and backstory in episodes 8 and 26, are most likely her feeling that the concept of “being isolated from others no matter how much you want to reach them” hit way too hard for her) to the point she puts her foot down to override the boys’ prior plan of chasing the Toucanmon and their Digivices. She actually faces quite a bit of protest from the boys on this issue, and even admits she’s not sure if her own plan will work, but focuses on the idea of doing her best to undo the whirlpool with her abilities -- that is to say, using her power to protect and help others.

This sentiment of “I have to protect everyone” drives Izumi’s actions for the rest of the episode, to the point it’s the only thought consuming her head right before she finds and claims her Beast Spirit. So to make it clear, at the time she claimed it, the thought of “protecting others” was desperately, single-mindedly consuming her head...

...and the contrast is immediately apparent when Shutumon emerges, and the only thing Ranamon cares about is looks.

In other words, the reason the Beast Spirit wasn’t working out for Ranamon/Calmaramon is that she only wanted the Beast Spirit’s power for the sake of pride, vanity, and dominating others, and because of that, she had difficulty controlling it because it resonated with those feelings -- after all, although she wanted to “control” it to the extent of not carrying her all over the place, she was perfectly fine with the part about causing wanton destruction. Izumi, on the other hand, is clearly holding herself back even after her first evolution to Shutumon -- trying to keep a calm head -- and, after all, her entire motivation had been driven by “helping and protecting others” for the whole episode, so she doesn’t want to let this fail on her now, and she keeps that calm head all the way throughout the rest of it.

When we get to the next episode (17), you’ll also notice that one of the first things Blizzarmon (Tomoki) does is actively attempt to restrain himself. If you look back at what Tomoki’s character arc is about, he’d spent the better part of his past being bullied by others and tossed around, so “overpowering the weak” is the last thing Tomoki ever wants to do (especially given the events of this episode, as well). So, having witnessed the potential consequences of the Beast Spirit with the other boys, it stands to reason that Tomoki would want to avoid “hurting others” so much that restraining this would be a strong priority for him. While it’s commented that it does take his personality out of control a bit, the worst it ever gets is that he seems to be overly elated and cheerful about his defeats, but that’s also in line with Tomoki constantly having been pushed down so much during his life that you can imagine he’s enjoying the opportunity to finally be strong and have the spotlight.

But because he hates the concept of bullying and pushing others down so much, it stands to reason that he wouldn’t really have as much of a problem with that.

So when you look back at the prior episodes with the Beast Spirits with this context, you can see it applying there as well. In episode 14, Junpei was spending the better part of the first half of the episode livid at what was happening to his friends -- absolutely pissed at Grottomon for taking Izumi's spirit (and, despite Izumi's doubts, it's pretty apparent he actually does care about it beyond just having a crush on her), and then upset at the idea of being a sitting duck while Agnimon and Wolfmon are getting tossed around. While Junpei initially has trouble keeping the Spirit under control, the exact moment he gets a grip on himself is the moment he reaffirms his determination to fight for the sake of his friends.

Looking back at the other two episodes about rampaging Beast Spirits in episodes 10 and 12, you can also see why the concept applies there as well. It’s interesting how the “worst” rampage shown among the main protagonist Beast Spirits was not the first one obtained (Garmmon) but the second one (Vritramon), and if you look at the circumstances surrounding them, it doesn’t seem to mean as much about Takuya having any particular stronger tendency towards condescending violence as much as the sheer circumstances that went on behind them:

Kouji obtained his Beast Spirit under the circumstances of already knowing that he needed to protect Gotsumon with that power (and, moreover, having spent the end of the prior episode and the duration of the beginning of this one mulling on Ophanimon’s warning that he’d need to “grow” before he could obtain it). Therefore, “using this power for the desire to protect others” was a huge thought in his head from the very beginning, even though -- presumably partially because this was a first time for everyone -- it threw him off just enough for him to end up exhausting himself.

Takuya obtained his without warning and without proper understanding of what he was dealing with, having had it practically forced on him after Shamamon-as-Vritramon’s defeat, and so, with no context of purpose and no real depth of what he was about to get into, he ended up on a complete destructive rampage. He was snapped out successfully by the need to not hurt someone (Tomoki), and spent the rest of the episode agonizing and mulling over the risks and meaning of having such power before he eventually evolved into Vritramon without too much issue the second time.

So the point is made clear: the “destructive” and “uncontrollable” impulses associated with the Beast Spirits will be sent out of control if the user doesn’t have a strong desire to use it with proper purpose. For Ranamon/Calmaramon, she had the worst time with it because she was the single most obsessed out of the Legendary Warriors to use it to stroke her own ego and vanity, whereas at least the other three Cherubimon-allied ones (besides Duskmon -- see below) were at least capable of using it towards a greater goal, and the remaining five went through the proper outlets of thinking about how this power should be used and how it shouldn’t be used lightly.

While the issue of the Beast Spirits being inherently difficult to control isn’t as prominent as we go later into the series, we do actually see shades of it when we get to the tale of Kouichi/Duskmon/Velgrmon, because while part of it can be chalked up to the power of darkness being consuming, Kouichi, during his first transformation to Velgrmon in episode 30, is only able to talk barely coherently and is really just venting his rage and anger out, presumably because his entire state of mind is locked into all of that, making the rampage even worse. (Also keeping in mind the theme of embracing the idea of changing yourself, you can also think of this in terms of how Kouichi is getting so consumed by his own emotions of anger that he’s become almost completely unrecognizable from his original self.)

Once we get his first “proper” evolution in episode 33, however, Kouichi is abundantly aware of what he’s done and has all of the proper determination to never let such a thing happen again -- so it’s not surprising that his evolution to KaiserLeomon happens with relatively little incident.

[raineydays411]

Trauma does really bond

Umbrella academy x teen!reader

Summary: You were number eight, The Healer. With the power to heal anything you touch. Or at least you would be, if the world knew about you.

A/n: I know I said new fics on Friday but I couldn’t wait lol

Everybody knows the story of the Umbrella Academy. Seven children, adopted by an eccentric billionaire, forced to become superheros and eventually fizzled out of the limelight.  

But know one knows about you. 

You were the eighth child Reginald Hargreeves adopted. You were Y/n Hargreeves, age 17. Everyone knows that the seven siblings were all born at the same time, and day. So how are you 17?

Well basically the same thing, but when your mother spontaneously gave birth to you, she handed you over to Reginald within a heartbeat and as far as he knows, you were the only spontaneous birth on y/bd. So he took you in. Now he wasn’t completely sire that you would get powers. For all he knew, your mother just didn’t want you. But all that changed when you were just 6 years old. 

You had stumbled upon a mouse that was squirming in a mouse trap while exploring the attic. You felt so bad for the poor thing that you had set it free. You cradled it in your hands, as you teared up at the sight of it twitching when suddenly you felt it. It was like magic, you felt each bone and nerve that was broken heal until the mouse was once again moving, full of life. You ran out the attic, mouse in hand. Running all the way to your fathers office, barging in despite his protests.

“Y/n Hargreeves, how many times must I tell you--” “ I’m sorry father, but look!” you cut him off, thrusting the healed mouse towards him.

“Number eight. You interrupted my studies to show me vermin?” 

“No father! I healed him! He was in the mouse trap and I healed him!” You exclaim. That caught Reginalds attention. 

“You healed it?” He asks eyeing the mouse, “ How?”

“I dunno” you shrug, “ I just felt bad and touched him”

Reginald hums, standing from his desk and walks over to you. 

“Come with me.” He says, leading you out the study with a hand on your back. 

From then on he put you through brutal training. Nicking you with knives I see if you could heal yourself, bringing you hurt animals to heal, injured people. Then it escalated. He brought in people who were on the brink of death, comatose. He forced you to heal them, despite it taking all your energy. There were multiple times where you ended up collapsing, sobbing and exhausted from healing too many people in one day. He forced you to get up, and heal some more claiming,

“You have been given a gift. It would be selfish of you to hoard it just because you get a little tired”

Not to mention the brutal physical training. Because you had no siblings, he made training robots. They, unlike humans, did not hold back. Forcing you to fight as if you were actually trying to survive. And if you lost, you weren’t able to heal yourself.

Now all this training would have made some sense if you were going out into the world and saving lives. You weren’t. Reginald didn’t allow it. You were to stay on the premises, 24/7, 365 days a year. He claimed

“The world is cruel Number Eight. You are not yet ready to face the harshness that is reality. It is best to keep you here until you are.”

So alone you were. Well not totally alone, you did have Grace an Pogo. And you had Luther but all he did was missions and avoid you so he didn’t really count. But Grace and Pogo? They were your best friends. Grace was practically your mother. She sang to you, brushed your hair, tucked you in, told you about your “siblings”, and taught you how to bake and cook as well as other things. She like you, wasn’t allowed to leave, so you felt like she understood you. Pogo, taught you everything you know. He helped you learn seven languages, he sat and was forced to listen to you learn the piano, violin, and guitar, he was the one who snuck you Vanyas book and answered any questions that Grace couldn’t. And he was the one who sat with you in the attic as you both looked out at a city that didn’t know you existed.

You secretly longed for the day you were able to leave. If not training or doing school work, you could be found gazing out the attic window, or outside in the courtyard staring up at the sky. Despite being in a huge mansion, you felt trapped. You have read almost every book in the house, including Luthers research that he sent from the moon, Fives old theories, and Allison’s diary. You started meditating, yoga, and even picking up little hobbies like scrapbooking or candles making. You learned different ways to play chess, ballroom dancing ( your father insisted), how to read music, and so many other things. You were so smart and yet so naive. You, theoretically knew the cruel realities of the world, having read them in books and such. But you never experienced them. You had no human contact other than your father (and Luther till he was sent to the moon). You knew battlefield medic techniques but not simple everyday things. Hell, not even your so called siblings knew that you existed except Luther and he was sworn to secrecy. Not like he payed attention to you anyway. You weren’t even allowed to watch movies or listen to modern music. Just whatever records Luther had, and the Walkman you found up in the attic. But secretly, at night when you crept into the attic, you can see into the apartment across from you. Their large tv playing movies and you were able to watch. Playing classics like Dirty Dancing and Grease, action, and scary movies that scarred you for life. But it was your escape. You couldn’t hear the words but you made them up. A little world all to yourself, your little secret. You yearned for that moment when you could leave. Leave behind strict schedules and brutal training. Leave behind empty halls and loneliness. But you knew it wasn’t coming soon.

Not over your fathers dead body.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Your father is dead.

You didn’t realize it at first, having been extremely exhausted for some reason. You went to bed early saying good night to everyone and promptly passing out. But you know that your father was fine. Healthy even, as you could sense it with your powers. So when you woke up and reached out, sensing your family as you always did, you knew something was wrong. You couldn’t feel your father. Not how you used to. It felt like...like the dead bodies he used to force you to heal.

You leapt out of bed and dashed to his room, heart racing as you passed a humming Grace. You burst into the room, seeing him collapsed against the bed, limp and eyes closed.

“Nononono father?! Father can you hear me?!” You say rushing to his side. You feel for a pulse but find nothing, noticing his cold skin. You start CPR, like he trained you to do.

“ Father?! Father please!” You start to cry, tears running down your face as you race to save him. But deep down you knew...you couldn’t heal a dead body.

“ MOM” you scream desperately, starting to use your powers, “ POGO”

You start to get light head, your basically pouring your energy into this dead body. Your powers kickstart the healing process, accelerating it 10 times it’s usual rate allowing for quick healing. But if the bodies dead...it can’t heal itself and you basically just heal superficial wounds but not bring them back. 

“Father...” you start to slur, you’re running out of energy and he still hasn’t woken up. “Father you have to wake up...don’t leave me...”

Your world starts spinning as you fight to stay awake. Desperate to save the man you consider as your father. But you collapse. The world fading in and out as you see two silhouettes hover over you.

“ oh y/n...” a voice softly says. You feel someone touch your head and you succumb to the darkness. Feeling helpless as you realize one thing.

Reginald Hargreeves is dead.

That night, around the country seven siblings find out that their father has died. And make plans to come home.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You were unconscious for the whole day.

You woke up letting yesterday’s events wash over you. You cry. Not for the man, cause let’s face it he’s an asshole, but because of what he represented. He was part of your family. Your world that only consisted of three.

And you couldn’t save him.

And let’s face it, he was your father. He kind of raised you for seventeen years. You had to care about him.

After calming down, you reach out. You try to feel for Pogo or Grace, but you can sense the presence of two people you’ve never met. So you force yourself out of bed, and creep down the hallway. Your room right closer to Reginalds as it was the only room left. So you snuck into the main room, seeing your mother staring into space.

“Momma?” You whisper, catching Graces attention.

“ Oh Y/n dear, you woke up.” Grace says with a smile standing and stroking your face, “ Darling, your in your night clothes, you know the rules.”

Your eyes water as you throw yourself in her arms. Feeling like a child.

“ I..I tried momma..I really did”

You feel her arms wrap around you, “ Do you want breakfast, you haven’t eaten in 12 hours and 15 minutes.”

You were confused. Why was she acting like nothing has happened?

“Momma I-“ “Mom?”

A male voice cuts you off. You freeze, not knowing who the voice belongs to. His presence unfamiliar.

“Diego, welcome home are you hungry?” Grace says, “I was just going to make breakfast for Y/n” she squeezed you gently before letting you go to turn to Diego.

You hide behind her, like a child. Peaking over her shoulder to get a glimpse at the man. He was average height, Hispanic most likely, wearing all black with a harness and some knives. He had short hair and a scar on the side of his face. He looked at you then Grace in disbelief or shock. You can feel that he was healthy, just a bit sore.

“Um mom who’s that?” He asks gesturing to you.

“Oh I suppose you haven’t met yet. Diego, this is..well why don’t you introduce yourself.” She says to you. Your eyes widen and shake your head.

“Come on dear, just like we practiced. Go on.” Grace nudges you in front of her. Setting a comforting hand on your back.

“ hello...my names y/n Hargreeves. It’s lovely to meet you.” You say softly, and then you give a shy smile.

“Hargreeves?” Diego asks, shocked, “ I don’t understand...how?”

“ Y/n is just like you and your siblings.” Pogo chimes in, startling the three of you.

“ She came to us 17 years ago, just as the six of you left. Your father kept her secret as he did many things.  She has remarkable abilities just as you and your siblings. ”

Diego looks at you, sizing you up and taking you in. “Why didn’t we know about this?” He asks Pogo.

“ Your father had his reasons. He believed she wasn’t ready to see the outside world. She has been here her whole life.”

Diego scoffs, “ What? It wasn’t enough that he ruin our lives, he had to start again?”

He looks at you, “ Welcome to the family, kid.”

Then he walks off. You look at Grace and Pogo

“ Did..did I do something wrong?” You ask.

“ Oh no, Diego is just...on edge. You did great.” Grace says cupping your cheek.

“ I am glad that you are alright Y/n. It’s good to see you up and about.” Pogo says with a comforting smile.

“ thank you..” you say, “ there’s another person here..a woman.”

“Yes, well I think it is time you meet your sister. Come along.” Pogo says, leading you to the kitchen.

Oh boy...

[stayevildarling]

Wilhemina Venable x Reader- When the time is right - Pt 3

Part 1, Part 2

word count: 5.3k

warnings: mention of scoliosis, feeling sick, dizziness, angst + fluff at the end

A/N: Part 3, Reader and Venable finally having the conversation that needs to take place and understanding and learning the truth about what happened.

Taglist:

@lunaticwhittaker, @billiebeanhoward, @mrsdeanhoward, @okpaulson, @in-cordelias-coven, @kenzbro, @twistedpoeticjustice, @minaslittleone, @vintagepaulson, @ninaahs, @whitelotus00, @httpfiftyshadesofgay, @talulahmae, @cordeliass

Tossing and turning in bed, you try and ignore the massive headache, responsible for your slightly blurred vision and the ringing in your ears. The last few days had been spent in bed, feeling awful as if some kind of force had rippled its way through your body, causing this exhaustion within you.

Maybe it was the flu or some similar infection your body was fighting at the moment or maybe it was caused by something entirely different. Maybe it had been the events of this past week, reuniting with Wilhemina randomly as if it was fate or the encounter with her just a day after. It had been a week since now, a week of fighting your way out of bed every morning, fighting your way to the office every day, pretending it didn't take its toll on you, pretending she wasn't still present in every single thought or dream. Your body gave up eventually, not managing to go in yesterday as it felt like you might pass out if you had to leave your bed. As a result, you called into work sick, feeling guilty as you usually would, always caring more about not letting others down and performing well.

Feeling the urge to use the bathroom, you slowly get out of bed, ignoring the blurry vision and sick feeling in your stomach. As you walk past the kitchen, you realize the feeling is probably due to the fact you had abandoned any thought of food or staying hydrated in the last few days, not feeling like it and at the same time not having enough energy to either. It feels like there is this source of pain in your body somewhere, near your chest area, causing this deep sadness within you. In the past, there had often been days like these, days you felt physically sick from the aching in your heart, the busy thoughts in your head causing throbbing pain that would keep you from performing well and giving it your best every single day.

As you stand by the sink, the cold water coming into contact with your shaky hands, you look up and your breath hitches a little at the reflection in the mirror. It's not the paleness of your skin, lacking any kind of light or color, or the bags under your eyes, a sign of the lack of sleep. It's the image of a broken girl, once a smile so bright it could fill the whole world and rid it of its ugly sides. All that vanished, pain taking over and grief, grief for a love you once felt and the feeling it gave you, sadness and loneliness and longing at the same time. Shaking the thoughts away, you slowly make your way back towards the bedroom, not planning to leave it for the rest of the day either, as you feel drained and tired. With shaky hands you reach for the bottle of water on your nightstand, letting the cool liquid run down your throat and at least soothe the dryness and hydrate your body a little.

Just as you are about to lie down, falling back into the same habit, curling up in bed, pulling the blanket over your head as if it could shield you from the outside world and harsh reality, you hear something. A quiet knock. For a second you debate whether you heard it wrong, after all, it must be late in the evening now, considering it was dark as you passed the window, the moonlight shining brightly and igniting the dark apartment. In your slightly dizzy and confused state, you slowly make your way out of bed again, thinking maybe it isn't actually evening and maybe early morning and it being the mail or your landlord. As you take slow and steady steps, ignoring the pain, you failed to acknowledge the indication who is waiting by your door. The tapping of a cane and a second impatient knock as you missed the first one, after being in the bathroom moments ago.

Opening the door, your eyes instantly close as the bright ceiling lights of the hallway blind you momentarily, still keeping you in the dark about who is standing in front of you. In fact, standing in front of you is the same woman that has been on your mind for the past two years, including the past week after reuniting with her and just moments ago, as you washed your hands. The redhead never quite left your mind in the first place, however, you never expected to see her again after your last interaction, let alone her standing by your apartment in the middle of the night.

''Y/N'' her voice startles you, causing your eyes to abruptly open, ignoring the pain the light causes and for your heart's beat to instantly pick up the pace, matching the woman standing in front of you, her own anxiety high, even though you could never tell as she wouldn't let anyone notice or in.

You scan her features, two hands balancing and at the same time gripping around her cane, her facial features stern and cold, matching her demeanor. She is wearing an alike outfit to the one you met her in last, although you can't fail to acknowledge the light purple tie. Your mind instantly wanders to many flashbacks, many mornings spent helping your ex-girlfriend getting ready for work and helping her with her tie as she used to look like a dork when doing it herself and you doing it for her in the end. Even though she learned it eventually, watching you do it every morning, it became your little habit, Wilhemina lovingly watching you as you helped her adjust the tie, the same little loving smile on her face and her brown eyes looking into your soul. You felt nervous every single time, averting her gaze as it caused your heart to beat uncontrollably and the butterflies in your stomach to show every single morning.

''Aren't you going to invite me in?'' her voice rips you out of your thoughts yet again, unable to react at first, as her presence and the fact she is standing right outside your door, comes as a shock, like a slap from reality.

Your throat goes dry, breath hitching slightly but you try and focus regardless. ''Of - of course'' you say, trying hard to get the words out, before opening the door a little further and letting her walk inside. Taking a step towards you, you take a step back, allowing her to enter your home.

The redhead scans your apartment for a moment, never having been here before and until about a week ago, having no idea you actually live in the same city. Internally scolding yourself, for not keeping the place tidy over the last few days, you lead the way into the living room and towards the sofa, knowing it's clean in there.

Wilhemina follows you, scanning every aspect of your home carefully, not allowing herself to smile at all the little details she had missed in her life for the time you had been separated. For instance, the little accessories and details, colors perfectly matching, furniture carefully picked, making the apartment cozy and comfortable. Wilhemina's thoughts wander to her own home these days, that same lightness and feeling of comfort lacking as it is entirely decorated in dark shades and hardly any personal details or additions, matching the feelings hidden deep beneath the woman's walls.

Suddenly, Wilhemina halts in the middle of the hallway, her eyes noticing the photo in the frame instantly. It's a portray of your side profile, laughing and smiling, overlooking a hill and suddenly the redhead gets hit by her own memories and emotions as she remembers that day so clearly, before everything had changed. She took you on a picnic to the park, as a surprise after getting promoted in the department you both worked in. She was so proud of you, insisting on taking you there and after seeing how you kept admiring the hill and talking about what a beautiful view it must be from up there, she ignored her back pain and walked up there with you. And it was worth it in the end, the view making up for the aching in her spine, you overlooking the city, the many buildings, and skylines as well as the river. However, no view could ever be better than the one right in front of her, you, her little sunshine at the time smiling brightly and causing for the redhead to feel the same familiar tingles in her heart, whenever she used to be near you.

''Wilhemina?'' this time you are the one startling her, pulling her out of her own thoughts as she snaps out of it, focussing her attention back onto you. For a second you thought you saw her eyes watering as if she was trying to fight tears but that couldn't be true. You point towards the sofa and explain ''Please sit, would you like some water?''. The redhead meets your gaze, nodding and you walk past her, making your way into the kitchen.

While the redhead sits down, inspecting your apartment a little further, you walk into the kitchen, still unsure whether this is a dream after all. Grabbing a tray, two glasses, and a bottle of water, you make your way back into the living room and for a moment you find yourself halting too. Looking at the redhead, sitting on your sofa, the moonlight shining through your apartment, the only light source other than the lamp in the corner. The white light ignites her features perfectly, her side profile looking perfect as ever, the darker hair and clothes long forgotten as her cheekbones, eyes, and mouth are so familiar. She seems familiar, yet at the same time so far away.

Snapping out of it, you walk over to her, not realizing that her presence is indeed causing your own anxiety to reach its peak point and only adding to the way you felt before she arrived. You set the tray down and pour two glasses, handing her one, trying to stop your hands from shaking. However, the redhead instantly notices, her eyes wandering from your hand holding the glass, to your face, only for the first time tonight noticing how pale you are.

''Y/N are you feeling quite alright?'' she asks, before retrieving the glass and setting it back down on the table. ''I heard you called in sick at work'' she explains, her voice now showing clear signs of concern.

At this moment it hits you, the question that never occurred to you when finding her in front of your own front door ''How does she know your address?''. Her statement only adds to your confusion, had she been at your work? did she call in to check on you? why is she here in the first place?. All these questions only add to your state, the pain in your head becoming more excruciating by the minute and black spots now clouding your vision.

''Sit down'' Wilhemina demands, being able to tell how unwell you are, after all, she had been the person caring and loving you for an entire year, not to mention knowing you before then. She quickly stands up, ignoring her back as she realizes your body just barely holding itself in place. Your fragile body gently collapses forward, your forehead hitting Wilhemina's shoulders, her hands instantly reaching for your arms, holding you in place. ''Y/N'' she repeats, the concern visible in her voice.

All you remember, before everything goes dark, is two hands steadily, grip around your arms, and helping you onto the sofa. Two hands, reaching for your legs and a soft fabric covering your body, before your head was met with a soft surface. As sleep finally consumes you, the exhaustion from the last few days finally coming to an ease as you sleep off the events, the redhead woman in your apartment is still there, not thinking of leaving you like this for a second. Wilhemina sits on the other end of the sofa, carefully watching over your fragile state and her heart breaking at seeing you in such distress.

As soon as she noticed, your breathing evening out and sleep consuming you, she breathes out, a breath she had been holding in for way too long as your distressed state caused concern in the usual stern and strong woman. Within the last week, Wilhemina had tried to forget about you, tried to ignore the fact you live and work in the same city, tried to forget about the memories you had brought back after being in her office twice and she tried to ignore the feelings seeing you again caused. However, she couldn't get you out of her mind, not when you first walked into Kineros Robotics with your boss, or the second time retrieving some files. That night she couldn't sleep one bit, your laughter still so present in her memory as well as the carefree times you two had experienced together.

At first, Wilhemina tried to remain strong, ignore the uncomfortable feeling in her chest and the scars that seemed to have opened when you waltzed right back into her life, the wounds that she caused herself when walking out of your life together, and the years of coldness patched together. However, after four days she couldn't stand the silence, hoping to see you at another meeting with Mr. Odell, only to be disappointed when his assistant showed up with him. She questioned it, trying to make it not obvious what her true reasoning for the question is and Mr. Odell didn't notice it either, simply explaining you only helped out on the case. After that encounter, Wilhemina fought a battle, the soft Mina begging her to just reach out, try and figure out your number or a way of contacting you, while the cold Wilhemina tried to stay harsh, pushing all the feelings back, ignoring the sleepless nights and the toll the situation had on her own body, specifically her back.

Ultimately, the soft Mina won, finally after many battles in the past, she returned, quite literally forcing herself to make the phone call to your workplace and ask for some information on you, whether it being your number or address. In the end, she spoke to your co-worker, and even though she was skeptical at first, she was also concerned about you not coming in, so she told Wilhemina the address, desperately hoping she didn't just give some stranger that piece of information. Wilhemina waited until today, not having the courage to show up, scared of her own emotions and walls she build up high, ever since the day she had walked out of your life. Your cries and begs have never left the redhead's memory, the pain in your voice and written across your entire face, you collapsing onto the floor, while she simply walked out, still causing this pain and mostly regret in the woman, currently sitting on your sofa.

You feel your eyes opening, a few hours later, your neck feeling a little stiff but a much more calmer feeling settling in your chest and stomach. The sun is slowly rising, causing your apartment to fill with both light and warmth. As you sit up a little, you realize that you haven't slept this peacefully and calmly in a long time, no nightmares coming to haunt you or the usual insomnia. Only realizing the reason for this as you see Wilhemina on the other end of the sofa, gently leaning against it, her eyes closed and chest rising and falling slowly. For a moment you melt, unable to believe she actually stayed all these hours with you, slowly the memories from last night coming back and you instantly worrying about her back, knowing this uncomfortable position must have hurt and cause her pain now. Despite everything that happened, you can't stand knowing Wilhemina would be in any kind of pain or discomfort because of you.

Feeling a little stronger, legs less weak and hands less shaky, you make your way into the kitchen to make some coffee. While the coffee machine is preparing the warm beverage for you and Wilhemina, you walk into the bathroom, quickly freshening up a little. As you walk back into the living room, two cups of coffee in your hand, Wilhemina is already awake, woken up by the sound of the coffee machine and at the same time the concern of you not being on the sofa anymore.

''Good morning'' you mumble, before handing her a cup of coffee and also some painkillers, knowing her pain must be bad and at the same time remembering she used to always take those ones in the morning. Her gaze meets yours, taking the coffee and looking at the two painkillers in your palms. ''Here go on, I um- know you might need these now'' you explain and walk over to the other side of the sofa again, two hands cupping around the coffee cup.

Wilhemina's eyes close for a second, taking a deep breath, unable to believe even after all of this time you would still remember her routines and caring enough to give her a painkiller or make her a coffee. You watch her closely, as you take a few sips from your own drink, as she swallows the pills and sets the coffee cup down afterward. There is silence for a moment, the painful kind, both of you wanting to say so many things but holding back at the same time. Taking all your courage, feeling a little barrier and wall broken after her staying with you last night, you try and touch the subject, knowing it won't be easy.

''I'm sorry for this'' you mumble, meeting her eyes and her brown orbs instantly lock with yours. ''Don't be ridiculous Y/N, you weren't feeling well, no need to apologize'' she replies. For a second you feel intimidated by her presence again, her voice sounding just a little harsher than you remembered it last night.

''Are you feeling better now?'' she asks, her eyes full of concern and hope and you find yourself melting yet again, witnessing these small moments with her, reminding you so much of your old Mina. ''Yes, much better, thank you'' you reply with a small smile that she almost returns before replying ''No need to thank me''.

You realize this version of the redhead is much like Wilhemina at the beginning, when you had met her at the office, insecure, not being able to take a compliment or anything nice being said to her and you still wonder what had happened, the reason for her leaving and also what made her change into this different person.

After some silence, you feel the urge to just ask and find out the reason, why she is currently sitting in your apartment, after thinking you might never see her again after the last interaction you had with her. ''M- Wilhemina? why did you come here last night?'' you blurt the question out, not being able to beat around the bush for much longer and just needing answers. Answers for questions that have been burnt into your mind for years, many months filled with laying awake at night, or randomly zoning out throughout the day, breaks in the park, sitting at your desk, wondering what went wrong and what you had possibly done to drive her away.

''I-'' she starts, her lips parting but no more words leaving her mouth for now. Silence fills your apartment yet again and this time you know it's not her not having anything to say or being too cold to find the right words, you practically watch the woman you had fallen in love with fighting this version build to protect herself and you know she won't open up without your help.

''Did my workplace give you my address? or have your stalker skills improved a little over the years?'' you joke, hoping the little reference might help to get her to open up a little, as you remember her often admiring how easily you could find out information about someone back then, simply by looking up their name on social media. Mina often had you do that with clients she was wary of or someone she wasn't particularly fond of to make fun of them.

''Your co-worker gave it to me'' she states but you do notice a little smile tucked on the corner of her mouth. ''Thought so'' you add, before Wilhemina's eyebrows furrow, confused how you aren't mad at her or terrified that she would go through such lengths just to see you.

''It's okay, I'm not mad or anything but Wilhemina why are you here?'' you ask, her insecurities visible in this moment. Her eyes lock with your own again, before she finally speaks up.

''I had to see you Y/N'' she explains, her voice filled with pain and for the first time since meeting her in this city again, she allows herself to be vulnerable around you.

You watch as she takes a deep breath, averting her gaze to look anywhere but your eyes as her whole face scrunches up, feeling guilty for the way things had ended and never having the intention to leave you in the first place. What you didn't know is that the reason for Wilhemina leaving you in the first place, walking out of the shared apartment on that dark day, was never you or anything you had said or done. She loved you so much, she allowed herself to feel love for the first time, never thinking one day anyone would walk into her life that would be able to make the redhead feel the emotions she felt when she met you. Wilhemina had never known about love, the love she felt for her parents and what they gave her in return, a very different kind of love, lacking empathy, kindness, and gentleness.

Her childhood was rough, often being told that what she was feeling wasn't valid, she wasn't allowed to feel pain, she wasn't allowed those doctor's appointments or medication for her back as she was only making it all up. Only after she ended up in the hospital one night after her parents ignored her cries and pleas for too long, they changed their mindset a little but the scars on Wilhemina's soul had never really left or healed. However, when you walked into her life, you showed her the things she had always missed, empathy always checking in on her, despite only being co-workers at the time, always kind and gentle with her, and appreciating every single part about her. You taught Wilhemina it's possible to be loved, you made her feel valid, like all of those confusing feelings and the pain was valid and okay to be voiced by her. You made her believe she could never be a burden or anything those voices and insecurities made her believe. However, there were still those days after she started dating you, the days where she tried to stay funny, kind with everyone, and loving with you even though the darkness inside her was killing her. She tried for so long and hard and she managed to fight it until there was one day, one day that changed everything and ended up resulting in her leaving just weeks after.

It was the day after an office party, you and Wilhemina attending together and after dating for a year at that point, not really caring about occasionally holding hands that night or being a bit more open, considering most people in the office knew regardless. However, one of the male co-workers just had to point it out on Wilhemina's way out, managing to catch her both off guard and on a vulnerable day, as both her back pain and her insecurities were very strong that day.

''Isn't she a bit young for you, after all, you could be her mother'' was all the words it needed. Hitting Wilhemina right in the feels and insecurities. After all, she had always been a bit skeptical of the age gap between you two but you often reassured her it's not a problem and age is only a number. She felt awful that day, not being able to dance with you at the office party properly, and even though you reassured her it was okay, she didn't believe it. The voices making her believe she could never be good enough for you, her scoliosis always being the problem in your relationship, and that you deserved someone better. She took about a week to make her mind up, knowing her leaving would break you as you had not only grown so fond of her but also knowing you needed her. However, Wilhemina came to realize the pain is worth it if it means setting you free and someone better coming along eventually.

''Why did you wanna see me Mina?'' you ask, freeing Wilhemina from her thoughts and sending her right back into reality, the reality of sitting in your living room. Her face is still guilty, not able to look at your face.

''I came to say that I'm sorry for how our last conversation ended'' she explains and this takes you by surprise. Your mind wanders to the last conversation at Kineros Robotics when you had to pick up some files and you remember leaving after it seemed like she had nothing left to say to you.

''It's okay, I had to get into work it's-'' you try and explain but the redhead meets your gaze and cuts you off. ''No Y/N.. I mean the last conversation a year back'' she clarifies, talking about the time she walked out and left without saying a single word other than her leaving you.

Tears instantly build-up, the emotions of that day present again as if it just happened yesterday. Wilhemina notices your smile fading and the pain in your eyes. The old Wilhemina feels the urge to walk over to you, hold you in her arms, and wipe those tears just like she would have done but at the same time not ready to fully lose her cover and facade just yet.

''Why did you leave me?'' you question, not able to hold back your own emotions, as tears run freely down your cheeks.

''I never meant to hurt you'' the redhead whispers, a genuine confession leaving her lips.

''Please answer my question Mina'' you beg, needing answers after all this time.

''What happened to you, you changed, you aren't you anymore'' the words leave your mind before you can even think about it.

At this moment Wilhemina fights the biggest battle with herself, the newer darker side, wishing to simply build her walls right back up and walk out of this situation and out of your life, letting you find someone else just like she always had intended but her coming here in the first place was an indication that the soft woman you had fallen in love with, is still in there and currently back, finally winning her inner battle after such a long time.

She retrieves her cane, standing up and for a moment you fear she will walk out, having offended her but instead she takes you by surprise yet again, walking closer to you and sitting on the same end of the sofa you are sitting in. Her hand wanders to your leg in a comforting manner, wanting nothing more than to dry your own tears as she hates seeing you in pain.

''You need to believe me, sweet girl, I never meant to cause you pain and walk out the way I did, there hasn't been a day where I didn't miss you'' she explains, opening up and not holding back on how she really feels anymore.

''But then why did you?'' you question, not able to believe it truly didn't have anything to do with you.

''Someone said something to me that got under my skin, I should have never let it affect me this much, affect us this much'' she adds and you lock eyes when hearing her last sentence.

''Us?'' you whisper, barely audible. Despite hoping and often thinking whether there was ever a right time again for you and Wilhemina to be together again, you never thought it could be true.

''My darling, I know things have changed, I have changed but I don't want to lose you again, now I want to take this slow, respect you and your feelings but please don't let me walk out again'' Wilhemina begs, taking you by surprise as now her own emotions are on this display, a tear running down her cheek.

You sit up a little more, moving closer to the woman in front of you, your hand moving to cup her cheek and wipe the tears, before halting for a moment as it feels so unnatural after all this time. Wilhemina closes her eyes ready to lean into your touch and that's when you ignore the voices and simply wipe her tears. She leans into your cheek, enjoying the warmth you radiate and internally grateful to still be able to feel around you.

The two of you spend moments, sitting there and comforting each other, wiping each other's tears and just looking at each other, so many things to say, not just things that had happened in each other's lives since being apart but also still so many feelings and thoughts needing to be exchanged. However, for now, you feel grateful, grateful to have some part of your Mina back, and even though things are uncertain for now, you know there is now a different ground and knowing maybe now the time is right after all.

''I would like that, taking it slow and figuring this out, figuring us out'' you explain after some comfortable silence and you find Wilhemina smiling, breathing out in relief and all the anxiety and nervous feelings about this conversation leaving the redhead.

A little smirk makes its way onto your features, feeling a little like teasing Wilhemina ''By the way, how did you know I wasn't already taken or married or something at this point?'' you joke, with a little smirk, hoping she won't take it the wrong way but knowing your Mina would appreciate and understand this sense of humor as you always communicated like that before.

Wilhemina smiles, no sign of insecurities or doubts in her features before replying ''Well maybe after all this time my stalker skills did improve and I may or may not have found that piece of information out'' she explains.

''Besides there is no ring on your finger'' she adds, making you smile yet again and things feeling so natural as if nothing ever changed in the first place.

The two of you chuckle, your eyes locking with hers as she looks at you with so much love and gratitude, just the way she would usually look at you, so grateful to be in your embrace, to be in the same room and alive at the same time as you.

For the first time in a long time, you feel complete and warm, no doubts, no questions about Wilhemina lingering on your mind as now finally you have some answers on what happened. Even though there are still things to be figured out, questions to be answered, conversations to be held, you two working on each other, at least you now know that you won't have to do it without the redhead anymore, and this time she didn't just walk out, this time she wouldn't as this time- the time is right.

[sweeethinny]

Come and sit a while with me

It's been a year since I started all of this, that I wrote a fanfic to celebrate Ginny's birthday, and here I am, posting once again, keeping the tradition <3

This story will deal with grief, suicidal thoughts, but it has a happy ending, I swear

Happy birthday, Ginny.

AO3 | FF. NET | SIYE

----------

It was a normal afternoon at the Potters' house, Ginny wasn't working today and the kids were on vacation, James had gone out with friends, Lily was at the pool with her friends, and she and Albus were enjoying their free time before they had to get ready to go out to dinner and celebrate Ginny's birthday, so they lay on the sofa in the living room, both of them with moisturizing masks on their faces and hair, and the TV on.

The perfect day for her, if she was sincere.

"Mom," Albus muttered, looking at her curiously. "When did you know you loved dad?"

''I always loved your dad.''

''No… when did you know you really love him?'' Albus looked at her, his hair in a bun and his green eyes staring at her in the same way he had since he was born, as if he wanted to know the whole truth, and not half lies. "I mean, when did you look at him and realize he wasn't just another one?"

''Let me see…'' Ginny changed the channel when the movie ended, trying not to smile at the memory. ''I guess I never thought he was just another one, but there was a specific day when I was sure he was the one I wanted to marry…''

August 11, 1998

Ginny loved birthdays, it was simply her favorite date, along with Christmas.

How could anyone not be happy on the day that was entirely and unique to them? Everything revolved around her: the cake, the celebration, the attention, everything. It was her day, the day that Ginny didn't share with anyone, and even though she sometimes felt a bit of a bitch about it, she was glad none of her brothers were born on the same day as her..

She didn't want to have to share this too.

But today wasn't that happy day. Today wasn't sunny and as much as Molly had become more involved in her garden, Ginny's favorite flowers hadn't bloomed in time, as if they knew she was in mourning.

It was the first time that someone would be missing at the party.

Even Charlie called her over the Floo so everyone could sing together and celebrate, but today, it would be eight Weasleys for the first time, not nine. And Ginny didn't know how to deal with that, with that pain that seemed to consume her in every way, and that made her close the bedroom curtains and hide under the covers because she was exhausted.

Exhausted from fighting. Of having to be strong. Not being able to afford the privilege of just crying and admitting it hurt. It hurt a lot. At times it seemed almost impossible to bear. Ginny wanted for the first time in a long while, someone to take over things for her, letting her sleep and cry freely, without judgment, without trying to fix what was broken.

She didn't want a solution.

But she couldn't do that, Molly was doing her best to make this date happy, so that Ginny would realize that there was reason to celebrate, that Fred wouldn't want her to spend all day in her room. She also thought this was unfair, because Fred didn't have to bury one of them, Fred didn't have to go through grief, he never faced that pain, so what would he know?

Ginny knew. She knew what it was like to want to die every day since he died, she was the one who felt this agonizing loneliness that seemed to get bigger every day, she was the one who lay in bed at night and thought she could go crazy at any time because it hurt so much and it was so exhausting.

"May I come in?" A knock on her door made her jump as she tried to hide her dark circles with some of the makeup she had on, and his voice made her curse herself for still being in her pajamas.

''Yes.'' She tried to hide her nervousness because things were still a little awkward between her and Harry, even though she had kissed him a few days after the war ended, on the sofa in the living room in the middle of the night, when her room looked very cold and lonely, and Harry looked so cute wearing plaid pajamas and with his hair cut.

He clearly blamed himself for Fred's death, and Ginny still hadn't gotten over all the latest events: the Carrows' tortures, the war, the deaths, Fred…

Ginny had certain doubts, even though she didn't like to think about it, that they would last.

Maybe they were that couple that everyone looks at and says 'what if life had been different with these two?', figuring they could be something more if there hadn't been so much destruction in their midst.

"Happy birthday." Harry still looked tired, he hadn't regained his weight, but he was already showing signs of improvement, which was good. Ginny was happy to see him look good.

He was wearing the outfit she helped him buy for his birthday when they, Ron and Mione went for a walk in Muggle London. A light blue T-shirt, dark jeans, and black sneakers. A simple outfit, no big deal, but one that seemed to make him look even more handsome, if that was even possible.

The woman who would marry him would be very lucky, Ginny thought.

''Brought it for you.'' She hadn't even noticed that he had his hands behind his back, looking nervous as he showed her a bouquet of honeysuckle, tied with a red satin bow, and a cream-colored card pinned there with his name signed. "I know they're your favorites, and I thought you'd like it." He smiled awkwardly. "I noticed yours didn't bloom this year, and I thought you might want to continue the tradition."

"You didn't have to worry about that." Ginny had to swallow hard to keep from crying in front of him, even though there wasn't a reason to.

"Of course I did, it's your birthday, I want to see you happy." Harry shrugged, his cheeks flushing as if he'd been out in the sun for hours on end. He was so cute, Ginny wished she didn't like him so much, because that way, when their imminent separation came, it wouldn't hurt so much. ''How is your day? I don't want to spoil the surprise, but I think your mom made your favorite cake.''

"It's okay, as far as possible," she shrugged. "Mom is trying to keep me away from the kitchen and all the preparation, so I decided to stay in the bedroom."

''Are you going to be here until party time?'' She thought Harry would start the same speech Hermione gave her when she said she was going to do it, which was the same as Bill and his father: Fred wouldn't like it. Besides, you need to celebrate that you're alive, enjoy life…

Ginny was ready to fight with him, just as she had with the three of them.

"Is there a problem?" Ginny crossed her arms, careful not to crush the flowers.

Harry was bigger than her, but that wouldn't stop her from kicking him out if necessary.

''No. Want company?" Harry looked sincere though. "We can assemble that puzzle you bought, remember?"

''Do you want to stay here? Assembling a puzzle?' Ginny followed Harry as he walked around her room as if the surroundings had been familiar to him for years already, looking for the box on her shelves, which was a total mess of old books, photos and other stuff.

"Of course, it's your day, we'll do whatever you want, ma'am."

August 11, 2021

''How did you know you loved him? Because he wants to assemble a puzzle with you?" Albus asked, no longer paying attention to the TV.

''No and yes. See, unlike everyone else that day, your dad respected my grief. He didn't try to make me go outside, see the bright side of things, nothing. He just stayed there with me, accepting that on that day, I wanted to stay inside my room, putting together a puzzle… He paid attention to the flowers I liked, in the cake." Ginny smiled. "That dawn, after everyone else went to sleep, I finally managed to cry, and son, it's a pain I can't put into words." She swallowed, not wanting to get emotional. ''Over time it gets a little easier, but that year, it was a pain that seemed to tear my chest apart. And do you know what your dad did? He sat with me, hugged me, and listened to me cry for an hour, not saying anything, just standing there by my side.''

The memory was no longer as painful as it had been, and Ginny allowed herself to smile as the image of Harry lying beside her on the bed, his arms around her waist, came back to her mind.

"He never tried to save me, he just stayed there with me, helping me when I needed it, and that was the most important thing."

"He saved you in the chamber," Albus remembered, a mischievous smile on his lips that reminded her of Fred when he was younger. Ginny didn't even know it was possible, but it was always the image that came to her mind when she saw Albus smile like that.

"It was a different situation." She shrugged.

"Did you doubt you would marry him after that day?"

"Never again." And it was true. ''Since that morning, when I woke up and he was still sleeping with me after I cried and sobbed things I don't even remember anymore, I knew he was the one I would marry.'' Ginny touched the ring that was already on her finger for over twenty years now, still smiling like a fool as she remembers the marriage proposal and the marriage itself.

"And why weren't you sure you'd be with him before that?"

''It's not that I wasn't sure, it's just that when you go through something really bad, everything around you seems to fall apart together, it's like nothing else has a solution and you are bound to fail whatever you try. It's a horrible feeling, I hope you never feel that.'' Ginny shifted on the couch to give him a closer look. ''Why this now?''

"Just curiosity." Albus smiled, his cheeks a little flushed. "Happy birthday again, Mom, I love you so much." He kissed her forehead, as she usually did.

''I love you too, my love.''

[escapewithbts]

Secrets in a Foreign Language (Part Seven) - Jungkook

sorry it took so long for an update!

<<previous_next>>

—————————————

You were heartbroken. How someone you hadn’t known very long could make it hurt so badly you weren’t sure. But man, did it hurt.

So many times over the next week you debated just showing up at his place, hearing his side, figuring out a next step together. You missed him.

But then you would recall him telling you to get in the closet, acting like a coward, like you were his meaningless dirty little secret. Reminding yourself of these things kept you from going over there.

In fact, you barely left your apartment at all. The same loneliness of when you first moved to Seoul becoming ever so prevalent again. You vowed to try and go out and make friends when all this Jungkook stuff was just a distant memory.

However, it proved difficult to make it all fade away in your mind since you were still scheduled to clean his apartment. To go back to the place where it all came to a beginning. And an abrupt end.

With hesitation, you slipped the key into the lock of the front door the following Tuesday. You insisted he not be there that last time you saw him, but what if he wanted to reconcile? You gulped and opened the black wooden door.

Silence.

He wasn’t on the couch in front of the tv waiting for you. He wasn’t in the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal. He wasn’t in the master bathroom taking a quick shower. Jungkook wasn’t here. You didn’t know if you felt relieved or disappointed, but you didn’t give yourself time to think about it as you immediately noticed the state of the home. It wasn’t cleaned like all the weeks prior. It was lived in, messy even.

So that was it. Back to square one. You alone in the apartment of a famous and wealthy Korean celebrity with a job to do.

-

 A few days later you were laying on the couch in your studio loft apartment. It was dark outside since it was 12:47am, the only light was coming from the iridescent blue glow of the television. This had become a routine now, you turning on the tv but not watching anything in particular, just so there was noise and something to get your mind off everything. Some nights you never even made it upstairs to your bed.

And tonight your eyes began to slowly drift shut, your thoughts traveling elsewhere, the beginning of sleep taking over.

All of the sudden, you heard Jungkook’s name from the television. Or had you dreamt it? However, when your eyes opened in shock and confusion, his ever familiar face appeared on the screen. It was the same show you had seen while scrolling channels at Jungkook’s a couple months ago you realized, the trashy one where random people discuss the lives of famous actors and musicians. You sat up and tried to focus on the delayed English subtitles coming up at the bottom of the screen.

 “… an official statement from both their companies was released.”

“So, it is true?”

“I would say that solidifies it.”

Cho-hee’s picture popped up. Followed by one taken outside at night of her and Jungkook walking and laughing. Then a graphic of a zig-zag shaped rip formed between their bodies, and the picture ripped in half, a broken heart and crying face appearing between them.

 “Wow. They seemed so happy. I really thought this would last.”

“They’re so young and busy, no need to settle down yet.”

“But still, this begs the question… is love even real?”

 *laughter*

 Then they moved on to talking about another kpop idol.

Your felt your heart pound inside your chest. Jungkook and Cho-hee had “broken up”? Their companies had let them? They were no longer in a secret fake relationship? You couldn’t help but wonder what happened.

With shaky hands, you picked up your phone from the coffee table and opened the internet. Curiosity was getting the better of you, your desire to read those statements greater than your will to stop yourself from trying to remove all evidence of Jeon Jungkook from your brain.

 ‘Hello,

This is a representative from HYBE Corporation commenting in regard to the relationship between our artist Jeon Jungkook and fellow artist Kim Cho-hee. At this time, Ms. Kim and Mr. Jeon have mutually decided to part ways due to their careers and lack of schedule alignment. Going forward, there will no longer be any updates on the matter, and any information regarding their relationship from outside sources is invalid. Please respect the artists’ decision and privacy during this time.

Thank you.

HYBE Corp.: PR Department’

 You stared at your phone in shock, rereading it a couple times to make sure it was real.

So, they really ended their fake relationship? Was because of Jungkook or Cho-hee? Or their companies? What was the real reason? Who was the perpetrator?

So many theories and questions ran through your head, furthering your exhaustion, and soon enough you drifted off to sleep, head full of images and thoughts of Jeon Jungkook.

 -

The following Tuesday started off like any other. The sound of your alarm blaring woke you up out of a deep sleep at 4:00 in the morning. You groaned and hit the snooze button, questioning why you chose a job where you had to work so early… and basically all your other life decisions. (You were, in fact, not a morning person).

Eventually you sat up and rubbed your puffy eyes, removing the sleep from their corners. You yawned and stretched your arms up high before reaching for your phone on your nightstand. You checked Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, of course, then like every morning, you opened your work schedule, just to see if there had been any changes to the course of the day ahead.

 And boy, was there.

 For under the 2pm slot was the same unit number that had been there for weeks, however this time one word next to it caught your immediate attention.

 Vacancy.

You stopped dead in your tracks.

Wait, what?

Clearly this was wrong. This was Jungkook’s apartment! There was no way it was now empty. He had never mentioned the fact that he wanted to move, that he was going to move. This would have come up in a conversation with him at least once if it was this sudden.

Yes, his stuff would still be there when you arrived to clean this afternoon. He still owned it, still lived there. He wasn’t gone. Right?

Wrong.

To your surprise, when you opened the door, the entire apartment was empty. Everything was gone. It was cold and echo-y and barren. Dust covered the hardwood floors of the living room where the rug had laid. Harsh sunlight poured in through the large windows, no longer shielded by the curtains that had previously been hanging there. The walls were now bare, small holes left from the various works of art that were once on display.

The memories of the times being with Jungkook flooded your brain almost instantly. Playing games and watching shows and movies on his large sofa. The time he admitted he was cleaning just so he could hang out with you. When you would two would sit at the kitchen island and eat delicious food, talking and laughing about anything and everything. When he told you he had feelings for you. The first of many times you made love.

Overcome by those thoughts, you finally allowed yourself to break down.

The sound of your sobs and unsteady breathes bounced off the walls and echoed throughout the room, tears cascading down your hot cheeks.

Maybe you were being dramatic. Maybe Jungkook had turned out to be a coward. Maybe he had been using you for sex and company. Maybe he had lied about having feelings for you. Who knows?

But even if had been all pretend for him, you had still fallen in love with him.

You could finally admit that the past two weeks since you saw him last you may have been holding on to some kind of hope. Hope that he wasn’t a coward, hadn’t been using you, did have feelings for you; and all that would become evident if you ever saw each other again, if he was ever at his apartment when you came to clean like he had been so many other times.      

But now it was as if the universe was laughing at you for falling for someone so unattainable and complicated.

He was gone, and you had no way of contacting him.

Eventually you pulled yourself together enough to start the long cleaning process for a vacant unit. Every surface, cupboard, drawer, nook and cranny had to be spotless so new potential buyers could tour the home.

You started in the living room: vacuuming, mopping and dusting, making sure the floor, walls, and windows were shining.

Then you moved into the adjoining kitchen, spraying and wiping every countertop, the refrigerator, the island. You even had to open each drawer and cabinet to wipe those down, too.

But as you opened the last upper cabinet to clean its inside as well, you suddenly caught your breath in your throat.

For there inside the cupboard was a box of cereal. Your favorite cereal. The same kind of cereal you had eaten with Jungkook in this very kitchen the first day you met.

He must have just left it on accident.

With a shaky hand, you grabbed it and brought it down to eye level. That’s when you noticed the envelope taped to the front of the box.

Your heart pounding, you ripped it off and tore it open.

Inside was a letter, and as you unfolded it something fell out and into your hand.

It was a ticket.

To a BTS fanmeeting event.

What?

Your eyes moved to the handwritten letter.

 ‘There are so many things I wish I had done differently. You didn’t deserve what I asked of you that day. I’m so sorry I handled everything so poorly. I don’t blame you for questioning everything and leaving. I was a coward. I know this now.

Please, please come see me. Please come to this event. I understand if you don’t. I just want nothing more than to see you and talk to you again.’

 And then, at the very bottom,

 ‘보고 싶어요

사랑해요

JK’.

 *

Masterlist

Author’s note: The two phrases in Korean at the end mean “I miss you” and “I love you”(!!!!).

:)

[ally22042000]

BTS Reaction: Them forgetting / not coming to an important event - Aftermath

Commenting and rebloging is appreciated.

BTS x Reader

Fluff, Angst

Wordcount: 2K

Previous Part

Special Thanks: to the individuals who commented one the previous part. I hadn’t even considered writing a second part. Thank you for giving me inspiration.

A/N: I think I was a bit dramatic at certain part, but oh well. Here your go, I hope you’ll like it.

Kim Seokjin

“I’m sorry, honey. I promise to make a greater effort for this to work.”

And he did. It took you some days to forgive him, but you had noticed the change immediately. In the beginning you didn’t let yourself dream, thought it was only a temporary change because he felt guilty. But when he prioritises you even months later, telling the company no, when they wanted to plan a “Run BTS” shoot on your birthday, you realised that he truly chose to change his behaviour – for you and your future.

And now, as he was driving the packed car, you in the passenger seat, sleeping heavily, he couldn’t be happier to have made the right decision.

Your wedding ring reflecting the afternoon sun. He stopped at a red light and turn to take you in fully. Hand slowly lifting to land on your pregnant belly. Another four month and the both of you would be proud parents.

“The both of you are worth every effort a man could make. I’ll make sure my girls will never forget that.”

Min Yoongi

6 pm on the dot he stood in front of your booth, flowers in one hand, a beautifully wrapped gift in the other.

“Hey”, he awkwardly said.

You stopped your tiping to turn your chair in his direction, not bothering to stand up or replay to the greeting. A heavy sigh left his lips as he realised you hadn’t forgiven him yet.

“I- ahm, I brought you flowers and this” he held the present in your direction “this is the gift for our anniversary, I brought it month ago.” Slowly you turned back to your screen while announcing that you still had work to do.

“Oh, okay, that’s no problem. I’ll just wait right here until you’re done and then we can go for dinner.” You didn’t give any sign of acknowledgement and just started tipping. After a few minutes he rolled over a chair from one of your co-workers who had already left and soon after he pulled out his phone.

You wanted him to wait, to suffer, he knew that. Just like you had waited after preparing dinner for the both of you. But he would brave the silence and wait until you were ready to start the process of healing what he broke. Because if Min Yoongi was one thing, then it was patient. You were both aware that he would not leave until it was with you.

That’s why you were surprise when he got up suddenly and called for the elevator. It was just past 7 pm, no way would he give up that fast.

You decided not to go investigate and return to your document which could easily have waited until the following morning.

You didn’t look up when the doors opened a new, and you heard him walk back to your booth. What made you lift your head though, was the delicious smell, that suddenly floated in the air.

Two white bags were placed on your desk, on the side the name of your favourite Take Away.

“If you won’t let me take you to dinner then I’ll bring dinner to you.” He grumbled, while emptying the bags.

Not being done with that little dance of yours, your resume your typing, waiting until he would go off. You didn’t have to wait long though.

His hand grabbed the arms of your chair and spun you in his direction, caging you in your seat.

“Eat Y/N. You don’t have to talk to me, forgive me, hell even look at me. But you will eat.”

His eyes held a fire that you hadn’t seen in a while. Slowly you reached for the first dish and started eating. Meanwhile Yoongi had fallen back into his with a satisfied not.

You continue to ignore him for the rest of the evening. This dispute wasn’t over, and you were still hurt, you were both aware of that. But when you finally slipped into bed with him you made sure to pull him close, a heavy sigh slipping past both of you lips.

You fought and pickeered, but you would never give up on him. Never give up on your love.

Jung Hoseok

You heard him mount the steps before you saw the letter enter through the opening in your front door.

Two months, that’s how long you hadn’t spoken to him. Using the time and distance to find yourself again and reorganise your thoughts and feelings. Analyse the situation and trying to find the solution that fit you best.

And each week he dropped of one letter. He never ringed, respecting your boundaries.

The content was random thoughts he had had throughout the week about you - your smell that had left his bed sheets – your song that had play while he was on his way to work and made him stop in a parking lot to cry his heart out – the way he missed holding you – kissing you – making love to you – hearing you laugh.

In the two-month gone you were able to fix yourself again, gluing the pieces back together that you needed to protect yourself and to make the tough decision that was best for you.

And while you were able to do all of that, the loneliness never left. The loneliness only he could cure.

You had a lot of things you would need to work on, and he had to prove himself a lot before you would trust him with your love again, but your heart never left his clutches. Jung Hoseok was your man, your soulmate, your future.

And so, for the first time in two month you opened the door. He was in the middle of turning back around when he heard the movement. Your eyes connected. Shock written all over his face.

“Do you want to come inside for a cup of peppermint tea?” On simple question and the sun came out. His entire face was lit up with happiness. He nodded eagerly not able to form any words.

And with the closing of the door, a new chapter in your story begun. Let’s hope this time it would have a happy ending.

Kim Namjoon

Namjoon’s entire body felt like it was made out of stones when he entered his bedroom. He was beyond tired and everything hurt. He flipped on the light and almost let out a scream when he saw you sitting on the edge of the bed, exactly where he had left you.

“Y/N?” his voice nothing but a whisper.

Slowly you lifted your head to look at him. Your eyes red from crying. A white stick between your fingers.

“What is that?”, what a question? Of course, he knew what that was. Was he ready to hear it, though?

“I’m pregnant.” Your voice sounded horse and tired. Your entire posture screamed exhausted. No at all how he imagines he would ever hear those news, but well it was kind of his own fault.

“Okay.” Was all Namjoon said, knowing both of you weren’t in the right state of mind to have the required conversation right now. He helped you clean up and tucked you in. Quickly jumping into the shower, himself before he crawled beneath the sheets next to you, one arm thrown over your middle.

Sleep came fast for the both of you, your bodies allowing you the rest. Tomorrow you could deal with all of this. With the emotions. With the questions: does this change anything? Will this be enough for him to change his priorities? Or will the same factors win again as they always did.

Park Jimin

It was shortly past four in the morning when you returned. Silently you walked through your apartment and slid though your bedroom door. After cleaning up and changing you slid beneath the sheet ready for sleep. That is when you realised that the man next to you was awake. Eyes trained on your celling, not moving a single muscle.

“Jimin?” his name was nothing but a mere whisper as it glid past your lips. You thought he would be deep asleep by now.

“Do you still love me?” You barely heard the question, not sure if you were supposed to.

“What?” An incredulous look took residence on your face, confused about the sentence.

His head turned in your direction, eyes filled with tears, pain written all over his face.

“I am so sorry, Y/N. I swear I didn’t mean to forget. I am so stupid. Please forgive me, please. Please.“ The silent tear turned into pained sobbed as he buried his face in the pillow.

Stunned into silence you watched as the man you love fell apart in front of you. Slowly you scooted toward him, fingers gliding into his hair as you buried your face in his shoulder. Softly massaging his scalp, you tried to calm him down.

“Jimin, of course I still love you. Nothing could ever change that. You are my Jiminie, okay? Please stop crying.” He didn’t, for a long time, but he reached out and held your hand through it.

And while you were laying there, comforting him, and waiting for him to calm down, your realised that this was not something you could do with Jimin. His love was too passionate and his insecurities too big for him to take this kind of behaviour. He needed words of affirmation during though times, not abandonment.

You would be sure to remember that because you never wanted to see him in this kind of pain again.

Kim Taehyung

This time he was prepared. He had the gift, invited your friend and family, planed the entire day weeks ahead and made sure everything was perfect.

This was going to be your day. You were going to feel like the queen you are, and he would read every wish form your eyes. Royalty would be jealous for the way you would be treated, and everybody would long to be in your shoes. That was what he had planned.

What he didn’t plan for was the black attire and the crying. What he didn’t plan for was the preaching and the current venue. What he didn’t plan for was the car crash you had a week ago. What he didn’t plan for was for you to be found dead on impact.

So here he was, watching as your cascade was lowered into the ground. On your birthday. It sounded like a sick joke.

Life gave Taehyung so many chances, but sadly he couldn’t redeem himself to the person that is most important to him – was most important to him.

Jeon Jungkook

Your heard him as he walked through the door. The blanket above you felt heavy just like the silence that filled your little apartment.

The screeching of your bedroom door notified you of his entrance. The rustling of clothes as he disrobed, and his soft breathing was the only thing that you could catch.

Your body stiffened when you felt him slip under the covers behind you. His naked chest pressed into your back as he slung his arm around your middle. A faint kiss was left behind your ear as he mumbled the words, he declared every night: I’m home.

Two years later but nothing had changed. At the same time so much had. Tonight you didn’t sit, waiting in a restaurant by yourself for hours, praying he would show up. You didn’t endanger your life on the way home or cry yourself to sleep.

No, tonight you laid in the arms of your boyfriend while your mind was with your lover who had entertained your loneliness for the past three months.

You had been correct in your assumption that nothing would change and after a lot of fights and tears but without the strength to actually leave Jungkook, you had fallen in love with another man. Obtaining through him the love and touch you missed from your absent boyfriend.

Namjoon and you weren’t proud of what you were doing, far from it. But you kept gravitating towards each other.

One who seeks love, one who gives it and one who is blinded by misplaced priorities: a recipe for disasters and broken hearts.

[peterprkrsbtch]

sapphire - part 1

Peter Parker x reader

A/N: This is some type of wish fulfillment writing for me because I like to imagine becoming a hot and badass superhero when I fall asleep and I thought other people may be entertained as well :) If you enjoy it, like or reblog to share!

REMINDER: in this story, the reader gains superpowers and I do describe the appearance of her body. i hope you know every body is a superhero body and weight does not impact your beauty at all-i just needed to show how drastic the changes were!

Warnings: Swearing, fighting, attempted kidnapping, guns/violence

The sun that came beaming through your window brightly as you opened the blinds in your room immediately brought a small smile to your face. Summer had always been your favorite season. As smart as you were, a three month break from Midtown has never sounded better. Junior year had not been easy for you.

Small goosebumps appear on your arms as you shiver when the memory of that night crosses your mind.

***

You’d been walking home after your first day of school, distracted as images of the day flicker through your mind. The first day was always exciting, new classes and people. Probably why you were too distracted to notice the man creeping up behind you until he wrapped his hands around your backpack and yanked it off of your back, making you let out a yelp of surprise.

Or, he’d tried to. Unfortunately, this dumb ass criminal didn’t know how backpack straps work and when he tugged, the straps caught around your arms and yanked you off your feet, slamming your body into your attacker with a groan.

Panic immediately clouded your mind. You’d never been mugged before. You try desperately to remember anything from the self defense class you’d taken in seventh grade. The attacker seemed surprised that your bag hadn’t slid off your body and this gave you the opportunity to scream. “Help!” You shrieked. “Somebody!” It was the middle of the day in New York and yet, the street you were walking was dead empty.

“Shut the fuck up.” The man growled in your ear and you suddenly became aware of his death grip on your arm. Before you could contemplate punching him in the face or kneeing his dick, a sharp poke on your arm made you whip your head, just in time to see a needle full of glowing blue liquid being injected into your arm by the man. He hadn’t wanted your backpack at all.

The shock you felt as you watched the unfamiliar substance enter your body was amplified at the burning sensation quickly spreading from the injection site to your whole upper arm. The man lets out a harsh laugh, and you finally turn to see his face. He did not look like a homeless man. Or a thief. The sight of his groomed beard and expensive jacket made you feel like you’d been plunged in ice. What the hell was happening?

“What did you do to me?” The sound of your voice is much stronger than you expect it to be, and it helps to ease a couple of the butterflies going mental inside your stomach. At least you didn’t sound terrified. He just lets out a low laugh and begins to drag you by your backpack towards a car parked on the opposite side of the road you hadn’t noticed until now.

“You’re coming with me.”

The burning had spread to your entire left arm and was now taking over your left shoulder. If you didn’t have adrenaline coursing through your veins due to your current situation, you would’ve been doubled over with pain. You struggle against the man’s hold on your backpack as he drags you closer to the large black SUV.

Hell no. I am not getting kidnapped today. You force yourself to calm enough to quickly think of a plan. Any plan. When the man reaches the car despite your struggling, a disgusting sneer on his face, he lets go of his grip on your arm to reach for the handle, and you take your chance to head-butt him as hard as you possibly can-letting your arms slide out of the backpack as you do.

“Ow! Get back here you little bitch!” But it’s too late. In the two seconds when the man doubles over to clutch at his head, you’d snatched your backpack from the ground where he’d let it fall and sprinted down the street. You try to tell yourself that the unbearable burning sensation now settling into your chest is from running, not from whatever the fuck he’d injected you with.

***

A loud beep, beep from the clock on your bedside table snaps you out of reminiscing on your near death experience and a large smile grows on your face. Finally it was 5 p.m, the time when your mom usually went over to her boyfriend’s apartment across town. Every night, like clockwork, since you were 13.

It used to bother you, but now the silence gives you the opportunity to do what you needed to do alone. You get up and move towards your closet as you let your mind slip into your memories again as you reminisce on the events after the attack.

***

You’d run home like hell and had never been so grateful to find that your mom had left early. Within ten minutes, the burning had spread and you were left to writhe around in pain on your bed for hours. There was no let up, no break. You knew you were going to die.

Whatever the man had injected in you was breaking apart every muscle, every atom in your body so slowly that you could feel it. Eventually, your pained screams became quieter as exhaustion began to take over. This is it. I’m really going to die. My mom is going to come home and find me like this-

Before you could finish your thought, a harsh gasp involuntarily left your mouth and you launch forward to sit up. Okay, maybe I’m not going to die. You thought as the pain suddenly ceases. You slowly bring your hands up to stare at them, scared that the pain will return. Just as you’re about to let out a breath of relief, it hits you again.

And it’s so much worse. The burning sensation shoots through your body, and every broken muscle and molecule felt as though it was being bound together again. The minutes bleed together as exhaustion and pain take over your body.

***

Looking back, you still have no idea what was in the injection. All you know is what happened because of it.

***

Beep, beep.

Beep, beep.

BEEP, BEEP.

The incessant beeping of your stupid alarm wakes you from quite possibly the weirdest dream you’ve ever had. You’ve never had pain in a dream feel so vivid before, and the memory alone draws your body inwards, hugging your arms in for comfort.

Your arms. Hold on.

They didn’t feel like this last night. You glance down at your skin, the shadow of your blanket making it hard to see. You rip the covers off and storm over to your full length mirror-and all you can do is let out a gasp. I’m going crazy.

With shaking hands, you grab your phone and unlock it, scrolling until you find a mirror selfie you had taken at the pool over summer, just two weeks ago. You glance at the photo, then back up at the mirror. Then at the photo, then the mirror. Photo, mirror, photo.

A shocked laugh rips through your lips as you stare at the photo of yourself. Smooth skin and curves. A couple extra pounds of baby fat you had yet to lose, a spot or three of acne on your forehead. You weren’t an extraordinarily insecure person, but you were a teenage girl and a couple of those things had bugged you but-

Your eyes flicker up to the mirror. You run your hands along your arms. You used to describe them as flabby, but you can feel and see the toned, tight skin. You move your eyes to your boobs. Were they bigger? They definitely looked bigger.

Any “baby fat” you carried had seemingly disappeared overnight. You slowly lift your shirt and let your jaw drop, running your hands over your small waist, not missing the muscle you can feel under your skin. Your skin was perfectly clear and your hair and lashes both seemed longer and healthier.

When you were younger and more naive, you’d hoped puberty would involve waking up one morning looking like a Victoria’s Secret model. But that was stupid. Things like that don’t happen, right?

Slowly, the events of yesterday began to register in your mind. The attack, the injection, the pain. A million questions flooded your mind. The most prominent being what the actual fuck??

“Y/n? You almost ready to leave for school?” Your mom’s voice rings out into your silent room as she knocks on your bedroom door.

“Yeah, Mom! Just a couple minutes.” You call out nervously, waiting until you hear her footsteps walk away from your door. You let out a curse as you race into the bathroom, the harsh lighting illuminating even more changes to your face.

Your lips were bigger, your eyes more open, and your cheekbones and jaw more defined. Fuck. If you weren’t so worried about anyone noticing your overnight transformation, you would’ve taken more time to think about the positives of this situation.

You were always shy and quiet at school, choosing a small group of people to hang around and mostly focusing on your classes. But every teenage girl dreams of being beautiful, and now you finally were. You pull your hair up to brush your teeth and wash your face faster than you ever have before, electing to ignore the fact that you should have a nasty bruise from your head-butt yesterday.

You choose to skip makeup completely, knowing it would draw more attention to your new face. You took one last look at your body in the mirror before pulling on the baggiest sweats you owned and a loose hoodie, hoping they would mask your new curves.

You had no idea how you were supposed to hide this all year.

***

You smiled as you remember how silly you’d acted the next day. You were overly paranoid, covering your face with your hoodie as much as you could and choosing to sit alone in the library rather than at your usual table. No one questioned you, not once.

You had felt a pang of loneliness at first, knowing that no one at your school even cared enough to notice the obvious change had hurt just a bit, but it made dealing with the powers easier.

***

You’d first noticed it on the walk to school. It was barely September and the summer sun was still coming down on the city. This paired with your heavy layers of clothing and the long walk to school would normally leave you slightly breathless. As you arrived at the school feeling more energized and alive than ever, you noticed you’d gotten there in a fourth of your normal time without even trying.

You next noticed it in gym, when the daily pushups the teachers forced you all to do every year were suddenly easy. Effortless. As soon as the final bell rang, you ran home within minutes without feeling winded at all and winced as you threw your door open, nearly ripping it off it’s hinges.

Something else was definitely going on. Your appearance was not the only thing that seemed to go through an upgrade. You said a quick hello to your mom before running up to your room.

For the first time since you woke up that morning, you relaxed once your door was closed and locked. Your shoulders release as you sink to your bed, dropping your head into your hands. You try to recall anything you’ve read about people being totally changed after some sort of injection.

Your heart sinks. Captain America jumps to mind. The Winter Soldier, Wanda Maximoff and her dead brother. They’d all been injected.

You bite your lip and glance at a book sitting on your bedside table. You straighten up and thrust your hands towards the book, trying to make it move. Unsurprisingly, nothing happens. You close your eyes and breath out a small breath of relief. Ok so I’m beautiful now and have great endurance, at least I’m not a superhero. You let yourself relax slightly, your eyes still closed. Now you feel dumb for throwing your hands around like some kind of knock off Scarlet Witch.

When you open your eyes, your blood runs cold. The book is floating in front of you, a blue glow surrounding it. Slowly, you raise your, now shaking, hands again towards the book until they flash with the same blue and it launches towards you, the force of it making you rock back as you catch it in your hands.

Well. Fuck.

***

After that, you were thankful that no one had noticed anything out of the ordinary. You bite down a smile as you remember the first few months after, thinking about how much you’d changed since then.

***

You spent nearly every night for weeks studying every superhero fight video you could find on youtube and practicing the moves alone in your empty house, over and over.

It didn’t take much for you to perfect them as your new body seemed to be built for this kind of shit. Black Widow was your favorite to watch, and you made sure to spend extra time working through her signature moves, letting the flips, kicks, and punches become muscle memory.

You spent time practicing your real powers as well, though those seemed to come to you naturally. After that first delay with the book, it had almost felt like second nature to lift up the heaviest objects in your house with just a wave of the hand, but still, you practiced. Over and over and over. You quickly learned you could move people as well, namely yourself. Flying over New York in the middle of the night was something that would always leave you breathless.

Once winter settled over New York, you decided you were finally ready to try and use your abilities for good. You had near perfect control over your “magic” and you were pretty sure you’d spent more hours in the past month punching the air than sleeping.

You spent all day Sunday bent over the dusty sewing machine you dug out of a shelf in your kitchen closet. The trip to Joann’s reminded you of your mother teaching a younger you how to sew, though you two never bought yards of spandex to make a skin tight suit.

It had taken a couple minutes for you to remember how to use the machine, but you were extremely proud of the final product. You’d made a simple skin tight black suit with a zipper up the front and a mask to cover most of your face, but you figured no one could recognize you by just your mouth.

Once you finished the last hem on your face mask, you took the suit and the mask and hid them in your closet next to a pair of black combat boots. You put the dusty machine away and finally made your way into your bathroom, glancing nervously at the box on the counter.

Although you had exactly zero friends at Midtown, you had grown up with some of these kids and you couldn’t risk one of them recognizing your hair color if they saw you in your superhero suit and the box advertising temporary spray on hair color seemed to be the perfect solution.

You take the small can out of the box and spray blonde-ish highlights into your hair and brush it through until your long hair is shades lighter than your natural color and you’re happy with the results.

Your hands shook as you pulled on your suit, then your mask, and finally, the black boots. You move to your mirror and nervously give yourself a glance, only to be pleasantly surprised. You really do look like a superhero, even more so when you will your hands to glow blue with your powers.

***

That night, you learned that you had severely underestimated yourself. You thought memories of your own attack would flash before your eyes every time you knocked down a criminal, but it didn’t.

Every time you would wrap your thighs around someone’s neck to drag them to the ground you felt strong and every time the person you just saved would begin to thank you aggressively, you knew you made the right decision to help people.

You kept your guard, and your hood, up during the school days but your months of training and now your late night rescues, had caused a spike in your confidence. After a particularly hard 18 vs. 1 fight in which your zipper had gotten yanked down a bit, you just left it. It looked better like that anyway.

You wished you had someone to show the new you. You used to be so unsure of yourself, and now because of a seemingly random attack, you had the ability to help people. It definitely felt good to be doing something good.

Unfortunately, your endeavors started to become sensationalized. New York was obsessed with superheroes, you knew this. But you never thought people would start paying attention to you.

You should’ve known better. A girl with enhanced curves in a skin tight suit, flying around the city with glowing blue hands and fighting crime with her front zipper pulled down, and you thought you could remain invisible in the media too?

Luckily for you, the spotlight was cast upon another new superhero around the same time-a Spiderman. Once he entered the superhero scene just weeks after yourself, you noticed the articles you’d previously seen sexualizing you and your costume turned into articles about the two of you instead. If only those reporters knew you were 17.

You were thankful for him even though you’d never met him, and your two names “Spiderman and Sapphire” were often used in the same headlines to discuss you two newcomers.

At first you hated the nickname the media gave you simply because of the increased attention, but you learned to love it. It was nice to see people appreciating what you were doing, even though every camera that was ever pointed your way made you anxious to protect your identity.

Ever since your first winter night spent fighting crime, you’d quickly fallen into a pattern. School with your eyes glued to your desk the whole time, sweats and hoodies concealing your body, then homework until your mom leaves, then go out and help your city.

Your fighting has improved to the point that you almost prefer hand to hand combat rather than using your powers. On especially slow nights, you’ve let yourself drag out a fight with some bank robbers or kidnappers just to entertain yourself.

It was your escape. In your suit, with your face covered and your hair thick with the lightening spray, was the only time you felt like yourself. Really yourself.

But you had a plan to change that. As easy as it had been to lay low throughout the last year at school, you’d had enough. You wanted more. So you had a plan. A new body and face overnight is impossible, but over three months? Totally plausible.

You were excited for three months with nothing to do but go out as Sapphire, and you knew these few months were going to be the calm before the storm if you really decided to go back to Midtown as the new you.

God, enough with the reminiscing. You told yourself, but you do allow yourself to feel pride at how much you’d matured from your first day of school this year to your last as you tug on your familiar suit and mask.

***

You glance down at the buildings beneath you, eyes silently scanning every dark alley and corner for trouble. Your hands glow blue as you fly yourself gracefully through the sky. Suddenly, loud sirens and screams sound from beneath you and you look down to see 8 large men climbing into a bank as they smashed the windows.

You quickly fly yourself down and through the hole behind the men as they point guns towards the only two people in the bank, a janitor and a man you assume is the manager. “Give us the fucking money.” One of the men growls and the others laugh menacingly at their friend’s threat.

The manager notices you standing behind the men and his eyes widen, causing the men to start to turn towards you. You grab the gun out of one of their hands using your powers and smirk at the oh, shit look on their faces. Before you can make a move to knock the man nearest you off his feet, a web snaps through the broken window and snatches the gun from his hands before you can blink.

Spiderman comes swinging through the opening, landing gracefully. “What’s going on here, fellas?” He asks, and you can’t help but smirk at the sound of his voice. The two of you seemed to live similar lives, and yet this was your first time meeting him.

The white eyes of his mask flicker from the men, frozen with fear, towards you, and his eyes grow with recognition and maybe shock? Hard to tell with the mask. He opens his mouth to say something else, but one of the men still holding guns raises it and fires towards Spiderman without a second of hesitation.

You raise your hand quickly, stopping the bullet in mid-air and everyone around you stares at the bullet suspended in mid-air, your glowing blue hand outstretched, almost as if you were catching it. Spiderman’s eyes widen even more. “Holy shit.”

You smile to yourself and clench your hand into a fist, letting the bullet crumble to the ground in dust. “Nice try.” You say to the man. “But you’re getting on my nerves.” You turn towards the 8 men in front of you, 5 still holding guns. You move your hand to face the men, and with a sweeping motion, the 5 guns are yanked from their hands to suspend far above their heads, where they couldn’t reach.

You can’t help a small laugh as one of the men tries to jump up and grab it. You turn towards Spiderman who’s standing there with his mouth wide open. “Sorry if I stole your moment.” You say genuinely. You had no doubt that he could’ve taken care of this himself, but you had gotten here first.

“Are you kidding?” He nearly squeaked. “That was amazing, oh my god! I can’t believe we haven’t met until now.” Your cheeks blaze slightly under your mask from his praise, you’ve never had a superhero compliment you before. You adjust your focus back to the men quickly, who seem to be thinking of a way to run.

Your eyes meet Spidey’s again. “You wanna web ‘em up?” He nods excitedly, his eyes finally breaking from yours as he jumps into action. As impressed as he was by you, you couldn’t help but watch in awe as he swings around the room and with a thwick, he webs all of the men together in a cocoon, hanging upside down from the chandelier of the bank ceiling.

He swings himself one last time to land next to you again. “Cool.” You say before you can even realize your mouth is open. “I mean, you’re not too bad yourself.” He bows his head a bit, seeming shy even though it was a half-compliment to cover up your embarrassment.

“Sorry to bust in on your fight,” He says, glancing around the room towards the two terrified employees staring at the two of you in shock. “Not a lot happening tonight, and I didn’t know you were here.”

“Ugh, I know.” You agree. “Not to complain about less crime, but our jobs have been a little bit too easy this past week.” His mask crinkles as he smiles.

“We could...work together sometime if you wanted too, of course.” He says nervously, nearly stuttering on his words. “It’s just, you’re really good and you seem really cool and I-”

You interrupt his word vomit. “Of course I want to! I’ve been wondering when we would meet.” His eyes move from staring at the eye holes in your mask down to your lips when you smile. “How’s tomorrow?”

“How’s right now?” You don’t think your smile can get wider. “One sec.” He holds up a finger before quickly running over to the two bank workers, who thank you both over and over and then they both hugged him. You were wrong, your smile grows and remains goofy and big as he runs back over to you. “Let’s go.”

That night you found out that your view of the city is 100 times better when you can also see a red and blue suit swinging from building to building out of the corner of your eye.