#which means i Have to say something on here or ill die about it

[treatbuckywkisses]

aww ur favorite so far im even more excited to dive in now😭

BUCKYS POV MY BABY OMG 

The opening scene as a fucking fight I'm ill:(

Omg?????? The opening of the loop?????? Stop by now I'm just imagining like him hearing her cinematic scream when he fades out IM GONNA BE SICK.

Bucky grits his teeth and tries blocking the whole thing from his mind. His thoughts keep returning to your scream, instead, which might be worse. FUCK I DIDN'T WANT TO BE RIGHT IM SO SAD NOW SHUTUP 

Today, his run takes Bucky eight minutes longer than average, but he can wholeheartedly blame that on his almost-incident with the car. His thoughts are still stuck on what he remembers from the dream, spinning around and around in a loop until the elevator dings and he has to shake himself because he’s already here. Hehehe in a loop 

Bucky can’t help but smile a little at the smugness in your voice. No matter what that terrible voice at the back of his mind is still whispering, you’re fine. It was all a strange, bad dream; end of story. OH HE WAS WORRIED ABOUT HER IM SO VIOLENTLY UNWELL

It’s the one thing he gets. oh baby:( 

It’s then that he realizes the odd thing about you was that it almost, unexplicably, looked like relief. Full body chill my nipples are hard you're insane 

All of his thoughts and he's thinking something must be wrong with HIM for this I need to hold him so badly :(

You’re so pretty. It’s not making the confusion boiling inside of him any easier to deal with. I'm just gonna go cry now 😭 

I thought you’d be there, he texts the number that never responds. He waits for a minute, two minutes, but of course there’s no answer. Whooooo is he texting ✋🏻

But when Sam calls, "We need to get moving," Bucky already knows, deep down, how this is going to end. His heart is beating frantically as the situation stays out of control, even though this should be easy. He’s seen this before. What is he missing? STOP IT NIKA I CAJT HANDLE THIS ANYMORE WHY ARE YOU PUTTING MY BABY THROUGH THIS

It’s a small, coal black ring that he’s seen many times before, and his stomach churns again as his hand closes around it so tightly it must leave an imprint. Of course, there are no coincidences in his life. I'm speechless 😶 in shambles rn you have no mercy 

Despite it all, his heart cracks a little more. "What?"OHMYFUCKUNGGOD YOURE JOKING IM SO UNWELL YOU ARE OSNSGAHBSLSNSHHA IMAGINE ME RIPPING OUT ALL MY HAIR AND SCREECHING SO INSANELY 

I'm scared, I feel so alone, I don't want to die ........what a punch in my heart 

He’s already half-turning when you say it, already pulling the trigger as the words leave your mouth, moving on muscle memory alone at this point. And you still don’t notice. GOD THEY ARE MADE FOR EACH OTHER I AM DOWN IM INJURED GET A MEDIC I CAN'T TAKE IT 

It takes all of his might not to lose himself completely in the fight to come, not to unleash his full serum-powered strength on a couple of faceless fanatics who would be fine again in a couple of minutes, anyway, depending on how long he’ll make it today. Still, there’s a certain mindlessness to it as he repeats his own steps, ribs cracking and wrists twisting as he strikes again and again and again. this is absolutely freaking criminal actually how dare you.

He presses both of his hands to his heart to feel it beat against his palm, more steady than his thoughts and still there. He’s still there. GIVE HIM A BREAK DAMMIT MY POOR BABY JUST NEEDS TO BE HELD AND IT NEEDS TO BE SATURDAY FOR FUCKS SAKE

He knows that voice. He knows it just as well as his own, just as well as the one hiding inside some dark corner of his mind, and it shouldn’t sound like that anymore. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN NIKA.

Bucky huffs. "I heal fast, I’m not invincible." WITTY BABY HES STILL IN THERE THATS MY BABY !!!!!!!!!!! LET HIM OUT

You look at him, almost reaching out but never quite touching, your eyes gleaming green. All I can think about is when they held hands and I'm sick to y stomach🥺🥲

Them talking to each other through the house im so emotional 😭 

So this was INSANE??????????????? I feel like I got inside knowledge but I know NOTHING at the same time😭 so extremely thankful for Bucky's pov but feeling sooo terrible for my baby😭😭😭 the pain he's feeling and the confusion he's going through this is so cinematic and theatrical I'm so obsessed with this and you I love you I'm begging for something good to happen 😔

time after time [7]

series summary: After what starts out as a fairly normal mission, you find yourself stuck in a time loop. Which would already be bad enough in itself if it didn’t also mean having to watch Bucky die over and over again.

pairing: bucky barnes x f!reader

word count: 11.1k

chapter warnings: self-deprecation, negative self-talk and canon-typical violence. this one's heavy on the angst. it's also my favourite so far. please note that my blog is rated 18+. minors dni. ageless/empty blogs will be blocked without warning.

a/n: i return with a semblance of a posting schedule and a chapter that i'm well aware is absolutely insane. but that was always gonna be the case. enjoy my loves 💚

series masterlist | main masterlist | read on ao3

seven: spellbound

The slamming door made you flinch awake from where you’d fallen asleep on the couch, still wearing your extravagant jumpsuit. Bucky’s hands were clenched into fists, the frown on his face familiar and deep. He’d lost his tie somewhere on the way back.

"You alright?" you mumbled, getting up on one elbow.

He ignored you, facing Sam, who had his hands folded in his lap, back still hunched forward in thought or worry.

"You alright?" Sam repeated.

Bucky gave a short nod. "Can I talk to you?"

"Talk."

He did look at you, then, his gaze slowly and irritably dripping down your body. "I meant alone," he said pointedly.

"This is my home," you protested, sitting up properly.

"You’re a squatter."

"What do you want to talk about?" Sam interjected before you could snap back.

Bucky crossed his arms in front of his chest. "I want her out."

Your mouth dropped open. "What the fuck?"

"Tonight wasn’t ideal, I’ll give you that," Sam said tiredly. "But we got what we went in for and we didn’t cast any unwanted suspicion."

"Didn’t we?" Bucky said. "Because I feel like some of us remember tonight differently."

People murmuring in confusion as you blinked in and out of existence, knowing that something was off, even though they couldn’t put a finger on it. Agitated comm chatter throughout the corridors.

"Excuse me for saving your ass," you said hotly. Maybe it would have had the intended effect if you’d properly wiped the dried blood from your face.

"I didn’t ask you to do that," he pressed out.

"If it pissed you off so much, I’ll just let you get shot next time, then, see how that feels."

"Okay, I think we can all just calm down and continue this conversation tomorrow," Sam boomed.

Bucky gritted his teeth and turned his back on you, but you jumped up from the couch, your anger giving you enough energy to follow him to the stairs.

"No! He’s having a go at me for no reason at all and I would like to hear the rest of it. Tell me where I made a single fucking mistake. Because I can tell you when you did."

"I am sick of you pretending to fix stuff—"

"Pretending?!"

"Guys—" Sam called from the living room.

"—when we don’t even know what it is you’re changing!"

"How about you actually just trust me for once, like you said you would?"

"I said I trust Sam’s decision to take you on, and that I trusted Steve’s judgment. There’s a difference."

You threw up your hands. "You wanna know what I changed? Your fucking arm almost got both of us caught, tin man, that’s what I changed."

"Do you know what it feels like," Bucky said, voice shaking with barely restrained rage, "when people tell you things about yourself that you don’t remember choosing to do?"

"Must be nice to get to forget things."

Your fingers twitched at the same time as his, metal and flesh curling like you both wanted to clutch at something you couldn’t reach. In another universe, he might have turned on you, slammed you into the wall with his hand around your neck.

Do it, then.

But no. In this one, he just went very, very still. Like he’d simply turned to stone under your gaze.

"Stay out of my fucking head," he pressed out under his breath, so low you barely caught it at all.

"I have no interest in your fucking head," you said, rage and frustration blazing in your eyes. "You want me to be honest with you? Fine. I’m sorry about what happened to you and I get why my powers are touchy for you because of it, but you gotta stop telling yourself that I’m holding out on purpose or that I have any control over anyone but myself when I go back. I didn’t ask for this shit, so get off my damn back."

"Who did, then?"

You stumbled a half-step backwards involuntarily. "What?"

Bucky’s jaw was set so tight his teeth audibly ground. "How did you get your powers?"

You blinked several times, your nails digging into your palms again. "I don’t know."

He huffed, turning away with a shake of his head. "You gotta be shitting me."

"I don’t know, okay? I don’t remember. I have to remember every single reset I’ve ever made, but I don’t know when it started, or how, or why. It’s just always been a part of me."

"Then why don’t you try to find out?"

"Oh, because you’ve got me all figured out, haven’t you? Clearly, I have no interest in understanding the thing that’s ruined my fucking life. I’ve tried. I’ve tried everything I could think of, and none of it’s done me any good."

"And you’re just fine with that, and so we’re supposed to be fine with it as well. Not knowing what the extent of your powers is, or why you got them in the first place. Sounds like a great idea."

"It was enough for Steve." You laughed mirthlessly. "He told me once that we would’ve gotten along, can you imagine that?"

"Well, maybe he was wrong about both of us, then, but why don’t you do your thing and we can ask him ourselves."

"Because for the millionth time, it doesn’t work like that! Don’t you think I’d like that, too? To go back and undo all of this damage that happened over the past couple of years? But I can’t, I can’t do it, I can’t change anything that’s farther back than eleven fucking minutes, and that was when I still had a family."

The word fell apart on the way out of your mouth, breaking into pieces just like the actual thing. You pressed your shaking palms against your eyes.

"So. I’m sorry, Barnes, that I’m not good enough for anything like that. I know that. I know that my powers are essentially useless, and I don’t need you to remind me all the time, okay. I’m already very aware."

* * * * *

.

.

.

.

.

.

Darkness.

.

Darkness and pain.

.

.

The sound of dripping, ticking, tilting.

.

Something like a bright light.

.

.

And then—

* * *

Bucky comes to in the middle of the crossing between Lexington and East 55th, right as he’s about to turn his back on the brownstone front of the Central Synagogue. There is a strange itch on his left arm that almost feels human.

He blinks, disoriented, unsure how he got here. The last thing he remembers is—

A car honks and he staggers to the sidewalk, head still pounding, and his good hand flies to the side of it, as if checking for blood.

He doesn’t find any.

Another nightmare, then. Disturbingly vivid, though. He’s concerned that his only memory of getting up and going on his usual run has the tinge of the dream to it, like he hasn’t actually woken up yet.

And neither the memory nor the nightmare carries the usual haze.

Bucky grits his teeth and tries blocking the whole thing from his mind. His thoughts keep returning to your scream, instead, which might be worse.

He notices he keeps rereading the sign in the window in front of him, and when he realizes that it’s yet another fucking Starbucks, he’s about to cut his route short and just go home, like there’s something there that could fix this bad feeling curdling in his stomach.

Instead, he takes a few shallow breaths, pulls his cap more deeply into his face, and then he continues.

When he was younger, he took up running to keep him quick on his feet during a fight. These days, he probably doesn’t have to keep on it quite so regularly, but there’s something about the rhythmic, constant movement that usually does help clear his mind.

Damn, he hates when his shrink is right.

Today, his run takes Bucky eight minutes longer than average, but he can wholeheartedly blame that on his almost-incident with the car. His thoughts are still stuck on what he remembers from the dream, spinning around and around in a loop until the elevator dings and he has to shake himself because he’s already here.

Maybe a shower will help.

It does, a little, because he turns the hot water to cold several times until he thinks, of course he’s awake. It seems so obvious now.

This is real.

The water turns off with that little squeaking sound that he keeps forgetting to fix. He doubts that anyone but him can even hear it; one of the uncountable inconveniences of enhanced senses is the ability to find some of the tiniest noises insufferable.

He shrugs a new shirt on and hangs his towel up on the only free hook, grabbing a fresh cloth from the closet. There’s not many left; neither of you has gotten around to doing laundry post-mission yet.

His heart is still beating a little harder than usual when he cracks open the door to the gym, peering inside right when Sam hits the mat.

"Geez, what’s gotten into you?"

You shrug and roll your shoulders, pulling him back to his feet. "I’ll dignify that with an answer when I see you kick above your waistline, Sammy."

Bucky can’t help but smile a little at the smugness in your voice. No matter what that terrible voice at the back of his mind is still whispering, you’re fine. It was all a strange, bad dream; end of story.

He watches the two of you circle around each other for a moment longer. There’s a grace to your movements as your eyes stay focused on Sam, calm and unwavering, like you’re anticipating the right moment to pounce on him. It’s mesmerizing.

Then again, you usually have that effect on him.

Bucky quietly slips away when you’re about to call it a day. Normally, he’d probably sit in your company to dry off his prosthetic, listening to your heartbeat return to normal levels and then watch you trot off to the showers with that little indignant shake of your head. In fact, there’s a significant part of him that wants to do just that; maybe he’ll catch a glance of that annoyed glimmer in your eyes that seems to be reserved solely for him.

It’s the one thing he gets.

He tries not to read too much into the fact that Sam gets things like an affectionate little suffix to his name when you tease him, even though that fact haunts him more than he’d care to admit. You probably don’t even notice you’re doing it, but it’s because you actually like Sam. Have learned to care about him over the past few months. And why wouldn’t you?

Bucky, on the other hand, is just Barnes more often than not. Which is fine; he’s used to it by now.

He opens the door to his room and a waft of stiff air hits him, familiar and suffocating all at once. For the first couple of months, he hesitated to even call it his room, even though he always picked the same one when it was easier than traveling all the way back to Brooklyn; the one upstairs with the large corner windows facing east and south.

It still doesn’t feel much like his out of anything other than habit. Blank, off-white walls, a half empty dresser, bed always made, the only source of disorder a couple of cat toys cluttered in the far corner. The only thing that reminds him of home is stowed in the drawer next to his bed.

He doesn’t open it now, instead reaching for the journal on the bedside table, flicking through until he reaches the latest entry.

But it’s strange.

Not the content itself, but the fact that Bucky could’ve sworn that he’d written it yesterday. He stares at it for a moment, flips the page over and back again, frowns slightly.

This nightmare is truly fucking with his head if he wasn’t even in a clear enough space of mind to jot down a couple of notes before his run.

He does it now, in as few words as he’s comfortable with, because something about all of this still doesn’t sit right with him but he can’t quite put his finger on it yet.

Out of some deep, dark instinct, his hand slips underneath his pillow, and he hates that his heart beats a little more calmly when he feels the cool metal of his gun right where he left it, where he always leaves it.

This is real.

Something nudges his side softly and when he turns, Alpine is nuzzling her head into the crook of his arm, mewling discontentedly. The sound melts a little more of his trepidation away.

"What’s wrong, sweetie?" he says with a quiet smile.

The cat observes him unblinkingly as he puts his journal down again and reaches out to pet her head, but she jumps off the bed before he can make contact, looking back at him in anticipation and, he’s pretty sure, annoyance.

She’s hungry, then.

Bucky sighs and follows her out of the room only for you to almost barrel into him. You’re sweaty and breathless, and he refuses to notice the way your training gear sticks to your body. In fact, he refuses to look anywhere but your face.

There’s an odd look on it, just as odd as the tone of your voice when you gasp, "Bucky!"

"Y/N!" he says, mimicking it. Adrenaline is still coursing through you, your heart beating so erratically he can almost feel it pulsating in his own skin. "What’s wrong with you?"

"Nothing," you answer quickly enough for him to know something is definitely wrong. "You look … normal."

"Thanks," he says dryly. "You don’t."

The nervous twitch of your ear is back, the soft tapping of your fingers against your thigh. At least he’s seen you like this enough times to know how to deal with it.

"You remember what showering is, right?" A tilt of the head, a hint of a scoff in his tone; you respond best to him pretending not to give a damn, and so he’s gotten quite good at it.

Predictably, your shoulders lose a little of their tension, even though your eyes don’t. "Fuck you, Barnes."

Really; he’s used to it by now.

Alpine meows again, like a reminder not to get hung up on things he has no control over, and it finally lets him look away from you. That’s always the hardest part, somehow, even though that makes him feel ridiculous.

Downstairs, he can’t keep his mind from wandering as he scrapes the contents of a tin can into Alpine’s bowl only for her to fall asleep in a spot of sunlight on the kitchen floor.

It’s then that he realizes the odd thing about you was that it almost, unexplicably, looked like relief.

* * *

Bucky’s been on enough missions with you and Sam by now to know you both use mindless chatter to calm yourselves in tense situations, and so he doesn’t mind forming the rear. Even if he doesn’t listen in on every word, he can easily tell if something about your situation changes while he’s covering your six.

There’s at least two guards patroling the grounds, according to Sam’s funny little computer bracelet, and so it’s no surprise that he asks Bucky to keep an eye on them while the two of you head up to find the entrance to the lab. You keep your hands raised halfway up, but Bucky can tell by your empty gaze that you’re tired. His grip on his gun tightens.

He nods to Sam once he’s in position, perched up on the roof just out of sight from any unsuspecting anarchists. Then, he watches you slip through the entrance of the barn-like building and lets out a deep, slow breath.

It’s been a weird day.

That gnawing feeling of déjà-vu has settled deep into his bones, like a pesky thought he can’t quite let go of. This, though? He can manage this.

The strange truth is—and frankly, this is something he’s looking forward to never disclosing to his therapist—that being on a mission like this one, having a specific set of tasks he can concentrate on, being keenly aware of all his surroundings … it has a calming effect on his brain. He’s not sure what to make of that fact, but it’s true.

He’s sick of the fighting, but he can’t let go of it, either.

Instead, he squints at the two white dots in the distance meeting on the other side of the block, gesturing for a while, and then slowly creeping closer.

Without taking his eyes off his targets, he tunes into your conversation again.

"—only scream when there’s good reason."

"I don’t wanna interrupt," Bucky murmurs, fiercely ignoring the untimely lurch his heart makes, "but they’re heading your way now, so get a move on."

"You’re no fun, Bucky."

He would love to roll his eyes, but he’s a professional. That’s also why he swallows his remark when you make a comment about your resets; it not like it’s surprising, anyway. You haven’t been sleeping well these past couple of weeks. Breakfasts have been particularly grumpy affairs since Marylebone.

The guards creep closer, and even though their faces are covered by the white masks, Bucky can tell they’re bored. Shoulders slumping, grip on their weapons loose, boots shuffling on the gravel. One of them has a pack of cards in her breast pocket.

If either of them were smart enough to look up, they’d spot him within a second. But since nothing unusual has ever happened during their shifts, it doesn’t even occur to them to do so.

Look at them, a voice inside him says. They don’t notice anything, do they?

Bucky’s jaw clenches, his finger tightening on the trigger. Breathe in. Breathe out.

"Reminds me of old times," Sam says.

"Can’t say that, bud," Bucky murmurs. The guards are only a couple of yards away now. "Twenty seconds."

Take them out now.

"—makes Barnes cranky."

"You forget he’s always cranky."

This is what he’s good at, what he’s always been good at. Being the lookout. The Howlies’ best sharpshooter. His aim is perfect. His mind is clear.

They might be dangerous.

He swallows.

One of the guards trips over his own feet, almost losing the rifle he’s holding. They’re both amateurs; it’s clear from their posture, the way their jackets aren’t quite crisply ironed, even the way they walk. Neither of them pose any real threat.

Still, the voice says. Why not make sure?

It’s easy, so easy, to aim at the center of their white jackets. To imagine them soaking red on the ground while he barely moves more than a single finger. Just a flash of a second.

So easy.

"Any time, Buck."

Breathe out.

The taller one gets a bullet in her right shoulder, just underneath the joint, missing her subclavian artery; the shorter one gets hit in the kneepit as he turns, his rifle skittering away as he falls, safety still engaged. Clean and quick.

With one last glance around, Bucky jumps to the ground right as the explosion sounds inside. No one is coming. Yet.

He knocks the guards out with two quick blows to their temples. Their wounds aren’t bad, of course; just enough to keep them out of the way and hurt a bunch later.

Сбой.

No, but it’s all too simple. Too obvious. This, he remembers from his nightmare as well; the lab with the hidden staircase, the metallic stench coming from the leaking containers, the data stick and then …

Another fight.

The voice leaves him alone when there’s no time to think, and so Bucky trusts his instincts for this one. It’s despicable, really, how much the rush of adrenaline makes his blood boil in the best possible way, blocking out all other thought, leaving nothing but the cacophony of noises and the flurry of movement surrounding him.

This is what he was made for.

His breath hitches when a memory catches him, and he steps out of the way of a shot aimed for his head like it was in the dream, just in case.

It fires into thin air, instead.

The fact that it does fire, exactly like he remembers, takes him a fraction of a second to process.

Talk of a lucky coincidence, he thinks, knocking another agent out cold. Breathe in. Breathe out.

"We better get moving," Sam shouts, and Bucky nods.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see you throwing another punch; you barely seem to have broken a sweat.

There’s something off about the way you move. It seems controlled, almost rehearsed in a way; as if your body knows exactly where to land your next attack without even thinking about it.

A little too perfect.

There’s a beat before you turn around to face him, and your eyes widen at the same time as Sam’s voice explodes in his ear, "Bucky!"

There’s a flash of pain and a burst of green light, and then he comes to in the middle of the crossing between Lexington and East 55th, and it’s like you’re still shouting his name, the sound echoing through his mind so clear and sharp it’s like you’re standing right behind him.

There’s something wrong with him.

Something wrong with his brain, something terribly wrong, because this—

He stumbles to the sidewalk when the same car as yesterday honks at him, comes to a halt next to the same street lamp, sweat beading on his temples in the exact same way while his bad arm itches and his head aches.

Bucky’s hand flies to his chest, pressing, feeling his heart beat erratically. There aren’t any holes. No broken ribs, no scars he doesn’t already know, every new trace of violence vanished like it had never brushed his skin.

Even though he just got shot.

Again.

He’s drawing attention now; he can feel the stares in his neck. It’s not going to take long for someone to recognize his face as well.

So he forces his breaths to slow, straightening his shoulders and tilting his head in the most unassuming way he’s taught himself. After a while, his thoughts start to clear.

There’s something wrong with his timeline. You told him once that going back felt a little like the moment before freefalling, and the bile in his mouth might just be proof for that hypothesis.

But how on earth would he have gone back, and why?

Maybe it’s his perception of time that’s warped.

He remembers the stories about people seeing their whole lives flash before their eyes before they die; and he remembers almost dying.

This feels like much more than a flash, though, and he’s not quite dead yet. This is real.

Right?

"This is impossible," he whispers.

His reflection in the Starbucks window does the same.

* * *

One more, he thinks as the shower washes away the cold sweat sticking to his skin. He’ll give this one more try before accepting that he’s either finally losing his marbles or that there’s something else going on.

His life’s been an assembly of unexplainable things. Twice might still be a coincidence.

Third time’s a pattern.

The shower squeaks off and he steps out in a cloud of steam, the cold tiles underneath his feet grounding, in a way. He wipes a streak of condensation off the mirror, staring at his own face for a moment, trying to find any signs of his mind starting to crack. His hair is long enough to stick to his forehead again, eyes tired as always.

Everything feels the same.

No one’s done laundry.

It’s like his feet automatically follow the same path they’d gone yesterday, turning left, waiting for him to push the door open, hesitating.

"What’s gotten into you?" Sam asks you again, and you shrug, again, neither of you noticing that you’re all retracing steps you’ve taken before.

Bucky thinks about the journal on his bedside table, and his fingers curl more tightly around the rag in his hand because he already knows, he knows it’s going to be incomplete again. The heavy feeling in his stomach settles as he sits down on the wooden bench, the sun hitting his arm at the exact same angle again. For a moment, golden spots dance around the room before he twists his torso just enough to make them disappear again.

He thinks about the journal, and he doesn’t want to have to look at it quite yet.

You flop down on the mat when Sam calls it a day, and Bucky nods back at him as he heads outside, rubbing a spot between his shoulderblades. Your face is still tense, even with your eyes closed, your heartbeat fast enough to make him tilt his head.

You’re so pretty. It’s not making the confusion boiling inside of him any easier to deal with.

The words are at the tip of his tongue without him having to think about them.

"You look like shit."

You blink at him in a peculiar way, like you’re just waking up from a dream yourself, and you let out a long, shaking breath.

"Oh, fuck you, Barnes."

It’s so normal for you to say it like that it almost puts him at ease. Almost.

"I think you nearly broke his nose, there." He presses the rag into another one of the crevices in his arm.

You hum noncommitantly. "Didn’t, though."

You haven’t put your rings back on, but your knuckles look fine, so you’ve probably managed to not do it in one try as well. Bucky’s gaze wanders up your arms again, slowly; your heart hasn’t calmed yet, and you continue to stare at the ceiling like you’re waiting for something.

Probably his leave, he realizes, standing up. He’s had his indulgence. "Take the towel on the right," he tells you again. "I already used the other one."

He doesn’t miss the shaky little exhale you let out as he turns his back on you, and his left fist clenches involuntarily.

One more.

He’s probably just going to have to take his mind off it all.

The air outside is sticky with heat; like the skies are supposed to break open but refuse to. Even when he squints, he can’t make out a single cloud in all that endless blue.

He keeps his head down even as his eyes scan his surroundings. It’s a little like being part of a movie he’s seen before.

There’s the woman with the two dogs, one of them barking at a garbage truck across the street. The banker on a phone call with his pregnant fiancée. The tired violin player busking near the subway station, playing the same song he did yesterday, something Bucky recognizes but still can’t name.

Everything is exactly the same.

He shoves his hands deeper into his pockets to fish for his ticket, joining the other people lining up to board the subway, their faces too familiar to distract him. He keeps expecting one of them to break, to call him out on doubling back every day, but none of them do. They don’t seem to notice.

He almost hesitates before he knocks on Sam’s door that afternoon, but the knot in his stomach hasn’t loosened. If anything, it’s gotten worse.

I thought you’d be there, he texts the number that never responds. He waits for a minute, two minutes, but of course there’s no answer.

There never is.

Just another thing to take his mind off of. Let his mind settle on something concrete that’s right in front of him. That he has complete control over.

Besides, maybe there’s something he’s supposed to get right here.

But when Sam calls, "We need to get moving," Bucky already knows, deep down, how this is going to end. His heart is beating frantically as the situation stays out of control, even though this should be easy. He’s seen this before. What is he missing?

The voice at the back of his mind hums dangerously, and he ignores it, punching out the agent in front of him and then whipping his head around to find you already staring at him with your eyes wide and for a moment, the world freezes because you look at him like … well, fuck.

Like he’s usually looking at you.

Desperate.

It’s his last thought before something right next to him explodes and there is nothing but pain.

And then he comes to in the middle of the crossing between Lexington and East 55th, and this time, this third time, he feels like he’s earned the right to be considerably less calm about the whole thing.

The car honks and the people stare and Bucky throws up on the sidewalk next to Starbucks because the world is still hung up on Friday and he’s died three days in a row. When he rummages through the pockets of his slacks for a tissue, his hand grazes something cool.

It’s a small, coal black ring that he’s seen many times before, and his stomach churns again as his hand closes around it so tightly it must leave an imprint. Of course, there are no coincidences in his life.

He really should’ve known better from the start.

* * *

He needs to talk to you.

He thinks it when he puts the ring back into his pocket and he’s still thinking it when he bursts into the Tower, doors slamming loud enough to startle Alpine awake from her spot on the couch. He needs to talk to you, and you’re going to figure this out together, because that’s what you do. It’s what you always do.

But she’s got time powers.

He presses his lips together tightly as he jogs up the stairs two at a time, ignoring the thought. Then again, there’s the piece of soap on the tiles next to the sink that he’s picked up three days in a row now, and his hand reaches for the same towel automatically, and how the hell does one get stuck in a time loop in the first place?

Месть.

Bucky turns the shower off so resolutely part of it dents. No, he thinks. If you knew, you’d get him out of this. He knows that you wouldn’t wish him harm.

Then how?

"You’re dead," he says out loud, staring at his own steamed up reflection. "You’re not real."

Neither of us is.

His heart beating out of his chest would disagree.

When he sits down next to you today, he watches you apprehensively. You still ignore him, but it seems to come so natural to you. As if all of this is normal, as if you don’t even notice something is wrong, even though you have to, right, you have to.

"You look like shit," he says out loud, but he feels like he’s still talking to himself.

Fuck you, Barnes.

And then it happens again.

Clearly, he’s losing his mind.

It’s the only explanation that’s left. He’s already been to hell and back and now he’s going mad, he’s finally going mad, he’s going insane—

No, you’re not.

His own heartbeat sounds so loud in his ears as the shower screeches off and something settles in his stomach like a stone, something as sure and familiar and uncomfortable as that voice that’s been getting louder each day.

You’re as clear-headed as you’ve ever been.

Which means that once again, someone or something else is trying to mess with his head, only this time, it’s already been screwed with enough for him to tell.

Here’s the thing about all this that keeps rubbing him the wrong way, keeps scratching at the very back of his mind just like the parts of him he’d rather keep buried for the rest of his days: If you truly don’t know this is happening, then why are you the only one doing something different every time?

Bucky’s spent the better part of his life honing in his perception skills, and he’s seen everyone else behave in the precise same manner four, five, six days in a row, but you … you’ll leave a room a few minutes earlier than the day before, or order a different lunch, or wear a different shirt.

It’s not easy to miss in the slightest and it makes him doubt you’re as clueless to this as you pretend to be.

Which leaves him with the version of events he hates the most, and which is therefore the most likely: If you do know this is happening, then why do you keep up this charade? Is it because you’re responsible for all this somehow? And if you are, is it on purpose?

That’s too many ifs for his liking. It all makes him think back to the Westview Anomaly, so he reads up on it.

And then he decides that he’d rather know whether the sinking feeling in his gut is right.

You’re staring up at the ceiling like you want to pretend he’s not even there, and his good hand is shaking too much to be of much use in drying the arm.

"Take the towel on the left," he makes himself say. "I already used the other one."

There’s a shuffling as you sit up, but he can’t bear to turn around. "Sorry, what did you say?"

"I said use the one on the left, because I took the other towel," he repeats.

"Right," you say, and then he can hear your rings clink against each other as you collect them from their dish.

Maybe he should return the one he found in his pocket. Maybe you just haven’t realized it’s missing yet, because this is your first time living through this day and you don’t know to ask for inconsistencies yet.

You shuffle towards the showers, and he’s startled to realize how relieved he feels. Strange, really, to put that much weight on a towel; but at least it means you don’t—

"Hey, Bucky," you say, hesitating at the door, and his stomach drops a little. "What day’s today?"

"Friday," he answers, his voice surprisingly level. "Why." It’s not really a question.

"No reason," you say, and the door clicks shut behind you. The sound seems to echo in the empty gym.

"Something weird is happening," he tells Sam as soon as he can hear him approach the kitchen.

He hates that he’s doing this, but it’s not like there’s a roster of people he could talk to. His shrink would probably just prescribe him some pills that won’t work again—that is, if Bucky could get a hold of him on a national holiday in the first place—, and even though Sam is going to laugh in his face about this whole thing, he at least has to try. Right?

"You sound like Y/N," Sam says, pouring himself a bowl of cornflakes.

Bucky grimaces, which earns him a concerned head tilt. Sometimes, Sam reminds him of all the best parts of Steve, and he doesn’t know whether that makes him calmer or furious.

"Talk to me, Buck."

He stares at the milk carton like it’s holding the solution to his problem. "I think she’s doing something to me."

Sam snorts. "Thank you, Captain Obvious."

He says it so lightly, almost jovially, and Bucky’s nails dig so hard into his palms one hand draws blood. "You know?" he says tonelessly.

"Are you kidding me?" Like he’s tickled. Like he’s been in on the joke for a while. "You two have been doing this dance for months."

Despite it all, his heart cracks a little more. "What?"

Sam hesitates for a moment before squinting at him. "We’re not talking about the same thing, are we?"

And Bucky supposes they’re not, they’re really not, so he says, "Today should be Tuesday."

A frown. "What do you mean?"

"What day is it?"

"Friday," Sam says.

"Wrong," Bucky tells him. "Yesterday was Friday. And so was the day before, and the one before."

He finally puts his bowl down on the counter. "Are you having a stroke?"

"Sam, listen to me. Today keeps repeating."

He frowns. "You mean like a time loop? Like you’re in Groundhog Day?"

"I don’t know what that is." A fun little name for his personal Gehinnom.

Just deserts, don’t you think?

"Have you talked to Y/N about this?" Sam asks. "I mean, that’s kind of her thing. I’m sure whatever this is, she can help you out." He still sounds a little incredulous, but he knows Bucky well enough to recognize when he’s not joking.

He’s never felt less like joking.

"There’s also this." He pulls out the ring. "I found this in my pocket. Why would it be in my pocket?"

Sam leans against the counter. "You tell me, man."

"I think she knows something."

"But that’s a good thing, right?"

Theoretically. Not when he’s died for a week straight, though.

"Then why didn’t she tell us?" He hates the despair in his words, the paranoia seeping through. He hates that Sam catches it, and that his features morph into something that’s supposed to look understanding, even though he doesn’t get what this is about.

"Maybe you’re wrong," Sam says gently. "Are you sure she’s not just as oblivious to this as everyone else?"

Bucky drags a hand through his hair. His left shoulder aches. "I don’t know."

Yes. You do.

"I’m telling you, there’s something going on."

Sam stares at him for a long, hard moment, and then he nods. "Okay. What do you want to do?"

He wants to sleep in on Saturday. He wants to stop feeling so confused. He wants the words in his throat to stop choking him.

But what he wants hasn’t mattered in eighty years.

And so he doesn’t say, I’m scared.

He doesn’t say, I feel so alone.

He doesn’t say, I don’t want to die.

And the only one who hears those things swallows them up whole until there’s nothing left.

"I’ll tell you when I find out," he says, because that’s the only thing that will leave his mouth. And if Sam looks at him doubtfully, well, maybe he knows him a little too well.

* * *

"I’m gonna go get some coffee. Do you want something?"

Bucky can hear your keys clattering as you pull on your shoes in the hallway, but he doesn’t move from his spot on the couch. He has to think.

"I’m good," he says blankly.

Are you?

Even Alpine looks at him doubtfully. He leans back a little until a spot of sunlight reflects from his watch, making her pounce at it playfully. Normally, it’d make him smile.

She jumps up on the coffee table and sniffs at the shreds of cardboard someone’s left behind. They weren’t there yesterday.

On the muted television, Sam enters the stage with his signature cap grin. Presumably, there’s thunderous applause, because it takes him a while to actually step up to the podium and begin his speech.

In the background, dozens of important-looking people gaze at him expectantly, with the exception of a woman with short blonde hair who’s turned away from the stage, holding both hands to her ears like she’s trying to understand a person on the phone. Bucky squints.

"You sure?"

Reflexively, he looks up at the sound of your voice, only to see you leaning in the doorway with a cautious expression that doesn’t help his muddled thoughts in the slightest.

Talk to me.

"Why are you wearing a jacket?" he asks.

You tug at the sleeves, not meeting his eye. It’s become a habit he doesn’t care for. "To be more like you," you deadpan.

It would feel so normal if only he could shake the feeling that something is wrong. Something is off.

He catches a glimpse of your hands just before they vanish into the pockets of your jacket. Not long enough to clearly see what color your rings are, but enough to notice one’s missing.

It’s flitting through his own fingers instead, and you would notice, too, if you would just look at him.

"You sure you alright?" he asks, and for a split second there’s something like a flicker on your face, but it washes away immediately, replaced by the usual unbothered exterior you’ve been wearing.

"Just fine," you say, voice even, face neutral.

And the problem is that he’s not sure if you’re lying. Normally, it’s so easy to tell, but right now …

Alpine rubs her head against his palm, your ring pressing into it like a reminder, and it sends a chill down his spine.

Bucky waits for the door to click shut behind you before slipping into his shoes and quietly following after you. He takes three steps at a time to keep up with the elevator, and in his rush he ends up having to wait for it to arrive in the lobby, glancing surreptitiously through the small window in the fire door.

A change has gone through you while you were out of his sight. The mask you’ve been wearing whenever you know he’s around has vanished, dropped like your shoulders. When you cross the entrace hall, the usual bounce in your step is gone and you just look tired.

The frown on his face deepens. He makes himself count to ten before following you.

Stepping outside at this time of the day always feels like getting slapped across the face by the noise and the heat. The sun is relentless today, and he can feel sweat beading on his neck, but you don’t so much as readjust your jacket as you make your way across the street, slowly, like you’re letting yourself be carried by the crowds.

Bucky keeps enough of a distance so even you won’t get a second chance to become aware of him. Just before you enter the Starbucks, your chin raises up again, your spine straightening.

It’s uncanny to witness your defenses going up as clearly as this, and it makes him stop in his tracks so abruptly someone almost bumps into him.

"Hey, I was just—oh, sorry, Sergeant Barnes."

"It was my fault," he mutters. The guy strolls towards a delivery bike, stealing a cautious look over his shoulder. Something about the way he moves feels oddly familiar.

There’s no time for Bucky to entertain the thought much longer, because a couple of minutes later you step out onto the sidewalk again, drink in hand, and he retreats a bit further into the alley, expecting you to pass him on your way back. You don’t, though. Instead, you look up at the sky and let out a sigh before turning and strolling down Lex.

You didn’t do that yesterday, either.

Bucky hesitates for a moment. He doesn’t want to outright follow you around for the rest of the day; he only wanted to see … what, exactly?

He groans quietly and then walks into the Starbucks himself. Maybe coffee isn’t such a bad idea after all.

Besides … it’s not like she’s that fast.

How strange to know that if he really wanted to, he could probably track your steps without much of a problem, even on a day as busy as today. It unsettles him more than he would like to admit.

The AC blasts a little bit of common sense back into him, even though the volume inside the store immediately makes him want to tear his ears out. It’s not that busy at the moment, but the amount of noise of the chattering people and the coffee grinders and the milk steamers is close to unbearable as usual.

The barista who has a crush on Sam is working the register again, fanning herself with a playbill. There are red, white and blue stripes running down her forehead, and Bucky briefly wonders how she keeps it from getting into her eyes.

"Hi there," she says with a knowing grin as soon as she recognizes him. "You just missed Y/N."

"I saw." Bucky shifts his weight. "Did she seem weird to you?"

She chuckles. "Apart from the fact that she ordered decaf?"

He frowns. "Something like that."

She shrugs and redjusts her cap. "Just the usual amount," she says in a way that would make him smile on any other day. The tag on her apron has the name Nora on it, but he feels like that’s not right. "Do you want to order something? I can put it on her card."

Normally, he’d refuse out of principle, but it’s not like anything he does today matters.

"Thanks," he says. "I’ll have a coffee, then."

He doesn’t even particularly like coffee, but it does help when he hasn’t slept a lot. And, truth be told, he’s not sure when the last time he slept was. He’s been awake for a week, but without feeling any of the usual side effects of insomnia.

Or the numerous head wounds.

"Mhm," Not-Nora says. "Little more specific?"

Well, shit. "Not decaf?" he tries.

"You’re useless," she smiles and then taps her screen a bunch of times. "Alright, move along. Tell cap good luck from me."

He almost smirks. "Why not tell him yourself?"

She huffs, blushing ever so slightly. "I’m not getting out of here ’til one and I’m already a sweaty mess."

And maybe it’s because his day has been nothing but a shitshow over the past week. Maybe it’s because Sam hasn’t talked about Leila in over three weeks even before Friday started, and Bucky doesn’t like his friends being quietly miserable. Maybe he just wants to see something work out for a change.

It’s been a while since he’s played matchmaker. His sisters would’ve laughed about this for weeks; maybe he does it for that thought.

"How about you put down your number and I’ll pass it on?"

Not-Nora perks up even as her flush deepens. "Are you serious?"

"Deadly."

When he leaves five minutes later, her phone number is scrawled along one side of his paper cup, and even though the coffee tastes just as disgusting as usual, he can’t help but feel like maybe he can do one tiny thing right. At least for a moment.

His feet carry him down Lexington Avenue without him even consciously thinking about it, and he gets as far as three blocks before he remembers that Sam’s speech started at 14:00. He jerks up his watch so quickly the coffee spills on his shirt, but he barely hisses at the burn.

14:47.

What’s the point? he thinks as he throws the empty cup into the closest trash. Or maybe he does.

* * *

He throws his punches a little harder each day.

It takes all of his might not to lose himself completely in the fight to come, not to unleash his full serum-powered strength on a couple of faceless fanatics who would be fine again in a couple of minutes, anyway, depending on how long he’ll make it today. Still, there’s a certain mindlessness to it as he repeats his own steps, ribs cracking and wrists twisting as he strikes again and again and again.

"I think I’m losing it," he tells Sam about a week in.

"Like a bad day or you’re about to go Shining on me?"

So far, there hasn’t been any shining, but it wouldn’t make a difference.

"Two o’clock."

He’s already half-turning when you say it, already pulling the trigger as the words leave your mouth, moving on muscle memory alone at this point. And you still don’t notice.

A single bead of sweat runs down the side of your neck as you kick another one of your assailants in the groin, and even though your eyes are focused, you’re not in it.

If he didn’t know any better, he’d say you were just concentrating; but he knows you can be in the moment and quip freely at the same time. He’s seen you do it countless times before today.

But it’s Friday, endless, sweltering, blood-stained Friday, and it’s like you’ve turned into a robot version of yourself, every move premeditated and precise, every look and word and nod planned and practiced just enough not to arouse suspicion in anyone who doesn’t look as closely as he’s had time to. It’s a game of pretend, and you’re almost winning. You’re almost perfect.

No. You’re too perfect.

Perfect in your display of almost-shock, of almost-pain as the knife cuts through Bucky’s kevlar vest like butter and lodges right above his heart. At first, he barely feels it; he only tastes the blood bubbling up his throat when his mouth drops open.

His eyes stay on you as he thuds to his knees, bones crunching, eyes watering. You catch him, barely, supporting his shoulders to keep him steady.

Your silence is deafening.

"What’s wrong with you?" he murmurs as the ringing in his ears gets louder, barely audible enough for you to hear, but clearly you do, because something shifts in your eyes, and oh.

There’s that glimmer in your eye he loves looking at so much, the one he only gets to see when he teases it out of you. That spark of mischief he’s missed during all this, like your fire has burned out.

He’s never hated it more.

And then he comes to in the middle of the crossing between Lexington and East 55th, and once again, he feels like a decision’s been made for him already.

He makes it to the side of the road and sits down on the boardwalk, ignoring the bustle of curious people around him. Instead, he stares directly at the synagogue on the other side of the street, and he doesn’t ask why.

He asks, Like this?

And just like he expected, there’s no answer. Not even from within.

He presses both of his hands to his heart to feel it beat against his palm, more steady than his thoughts and still there. He’s still there.

It’s Friday again.

Bucky thought, not too long ago, that with everything he’s come to know and … like about you, you were someone he could let in. That someday, he could let you see him, with everything he’s used to hiding away underneath all of the protective layers he’s built around his heart.

Maybe he was wrong.

He should confront you. No, he should just ask. Why can’t he bring himself to ask?

Сбой, the voice in his head reminds him again and he presses it down, down between his torn open ribs, shoves it underneath the wounds that keep reopening anyway because he’s sick of having to listen to it all the time, sick of never being alone in his own damn head anymore, of not being able to leave a single day behind, let alone anything else.

Something tugs at him from deep within, and it’s enough to make him get up, rub his palms against his pants, and then take out his phone as he starts walking again. He knows the number by heart, but he’s never been able to actually hit the call button before, even though he’s tried. He’s tried countless times.

His speed picks up with every ring of the phone because something about this makes him feel like running away. Like maybe he gets it now. Like—

There’s a click, and then the sound of the voicemail recording. Of course.

Bucky groans. "Damnit, I know you’re never gonna listen to this, but there’s something really fucked up going on and I don’t—I don’t know what to do, man."

He keeps walking, keeps his head up even when he bumps into people, because what does it matter, right now? He ignores the red light at the next crossing, mostly because he needs to move.

"It’d be real fuckin’ decent of you to just pick up the goddamn phone every once in a while, you know, because that’s what—"

"Buck?"

For a second, everything screeches to a halt.

He’s not sure what comes first, him dropping his phone or the car hitting him from out of nowhere, but the next thing he knows is he comes to in the middle of the crossing between Lexington and East 55th, right as he’s about to turn his back on the brownstone front of the Central Synagogue, and it feels like someone just ripped his heart open all over again.

He flips the car off when it honks, not even caring about the ache in his limbs. His phone is safely tucked away in his pocket, and when he pulls it out again, there’s not so much as a scratch on the screen, but right now, it’s not like he would have cared.

The next five times he tries, the call doesn’t even go through.

He knows that voice. He knows it just as well as his own, just as well as the one hiding inside some dark corner of his mind, and it shouldn’t sound like that anymore.

The thing inside stirs again, that other, softer voice, that part of him he hates just as much.

Keep trying, it says.

It’s the part of him that told him to jump from the helicarrier. The part of him that still refuses to believe he was past redemption despite all the evidence pointing to the contrary; the part of him that’s too damn hopeful for its own good, and somehow still persists.

Talk to her, it says.

He can’t go on listening to ghosts for the rest of his days.

Or day, rather.

His thumb hovers over the call button one last time, and then he shuts his phone off.

* * *

"You look like shit."

"Oh, fuck you, Barnes."

He scoffs, but his mind is still hurling with anger and pain and confusion, and it comes out like a growl. He’s vigorously scrubbing at the crevices in his arm. Maybe the inside is still stained with his blood; maybe that’s why it feels so heavy.

"Are you alright?" you ask and his head snaps up.

You look so innocent, almost concerned. Normally, he would enjoy it for the second it would last, but today, it sticks. Everything sticks today.

"What do you think?"

Your eyes widen just a little bit, but you don’t say anything. You still don’t fucking say anything, and that’s more telling than anything else in this endless nightmare so far.

You’re not asking what’s wrong with him, because you know. You know.

"How many times are we gonna go through this before we’re done?"

You bite your cheek, your fingers twitch. "I don’t know," you say, and your voice sounds so far removed it barely sounds like yours anymore.

Fine, he thinks. If you’re not telling him, then it really is some elaborate scheme to punish him. To make him think he’s lost his mind again, make him see that free will is nothing but an illusion, that things will always, always stay the same no matter what he does. He gets the point.

Then why does it hurt so much to know? Why does it hurt to know you?

Maybe because none of this, as terribly, horribly real as it’s been, has felt like it was true at all. He’s still missing a piece of the puzzle, and you’re refusing to give it to him. If he only knew what went wrong between the two of you—no.

You’re clearly done with him, and he’s not going to beg for answers he’s not going to get. People he cares for usually made a point of leaving him; why should it have been any different with you?

By the time Sam enters the kitchen, Bucky’s been glaring at the fridge for a while already. There’s a magnet in the shape of a blue alien with six arms holding up your shopping list; a couple of sticky notes with passive-agressive messages on them, most of them about the cat litter; a postcard from the exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum. Trivial bits and pieces.

He wants to set all of it on fire, starting with the postcard.

"She knows," he says without turning when he hears Sam’s steps behind him. They halt on the other side of the kitchen island.

"Knows what?" He doesn’t even ask who, and it fuels the anger.

"That I’m stuck in a time loop."

A choking sound, too short to be worrisome. "Come again?"

Bucky glowers at him over his shoulder, even though none of this is Sam’s fault. He gets a concerned stare in return, which cools his temper somewhat; he lets out a sigh. "What day do you think it is?"

"Are you feeling alright?"

No. "Humor me."

He grabs a mug from the drying rack, just to have something to do with his hands. It’s the one with cat ears that showed up outside his room on his birthday, wrapped in cheap brown packing paper.

How long ago was March?

"Friday," Sam says, and he sounds so sure about it. Bucky desperately wants to believe it’s that easy.

"It’s been Friday for a while," he says instead, his voice cracking.

To go through everything like this is both easier and worse than he expected.

"I don’t get it." Sam pinches the bridge of his nose. "I’ve seen you fight before. Hell, I’ve fought you before. You’re near impossible to hurt, let alone kill."

Bucky huffs. "I heal fast, I’m not invincible."

"Then how does it keep happening when you know it’s coming?"

Unbidden, the glimmer in your eye comes to mind again. The line of your back turned towards him, the complete abandon of self-preservation in your fighting style, however streamlined it may be. Even through all this, you expect him to watch your six.

And why wouldn’t you? His eyes are continually drawn to you, anyway.

He knows that just as well as you do, and there’s nothing he can do about it. He can just go and be slaughtered instead.

Bucky swallows. His throat feels very dry.

"I told you we shouldn’t have brought her on," he finally says, even though it’s not really an answer. Or maybe it is. You were always going to be the knife that cut the deepest, and maybe he’s known from the start. "Reckless idiot."

"Yeah, you said that. Almost a year ago. Hasn’t that changed?"

"Everything’s changed," he snaps, and the mug slips from his fingers. It shatters on the tiles, small shards flying off in all directions, and it hurts.

It’s just a mug. It shouldn’t twist his stomach, not like this. He keeps staring at the pieces.

"And why do you think that is?" Such a soft question.

Bucky’s hands clench into fists.

That other voice inside knows the answer, is desperate to scream it out, to share the burden and the weightlessness of it, but he can’t let it. He squashes it down, forces it back into its dark, hopeless corner. It has no place here. It can’t.

Somehow, Sam seems to hear it anyway.

"Have you talked to her?" He chooses his words carefully.

Bucky’s heart is racing like he’s dying, but he knows what that feels like now and it’s not this. This is worse.

Сбой, he thinks again, and this time, it echoes in his mind loud enough to drown out anything else. The shards on the floor are blurring. He has a sudden urge to spit or vomit, but he half-expects words to come out if he should. Of all things.

Can we leave before I do something he’ll regret?

His left hand makes a grating sound as his right palm opens underneath his fingernails, blood slowly dripping from one wrist. It brings him back into the kitchen, Sam’s gaze still heavy on him. He doesn’t want to meet his eyes.

"She’s not coming."

There’s something cold in Bucky’s voice he’s too fed up to care he recognizes.

It’s his own fault. He’s let his guard down around you, let you in, and it’s been a mistake. Of course it was. You’re the one who led him here, and he doesn’t want to follow your orders any longer.

"Let’s go on the mission without her. If she isn’t there, maybe I won’t …" He doesn’t have to say it out loud. He’s still bleeding, after all.

"Are you sure?" Sam says.

No. "I’m asking as a friend."

As expected, that’s enough.

He doesn’t feel bad leaving you behind without a single word, without looking back over his shoulder as he quietly drags the door shut behind him. He doesn’t feel bad sitting on the quinjet in silence, staring daggers at the wall. He doesn’t feel bad as he climbs out and soaks up the last few rays of sunshine, his focus unbroken for once.

He’s not haunted by you here; only by his own ghost.

Bucky’s been through this enough times to recall more than the broad strokes of it; he slips this mission on like a second skin, breathing through the absence of you with more calm than he’s thought possible. Then again: this is what he’s good at.

There’s a goal, and there’s a catch; but no more distractions. This will be a breeze.

.

…

That night, he dreams of you. If you could call it a dream, the few strange, hazy moments after he dies and before he gets put together again.

You look at him, almost reaching out but never quite touching, your eyes gleaming green.

His name still echoes in your voice when he comes to.

* * * * *

From his perspective, it made sense, of course, so really there was no point in going over it again.

And yet you did. Over and over.

I want her out.

It was quite simple, really. Bucky hated your guts because of something you couldn’t control, you were still seething because of it, and you were both perfectly fine with avoiding each other for the rest of your days.

You took an extra shift at the store the next day, just so you wouldn’t have to run into the two of them any more than necessary. You couldn’t wait until Sam jumped back on his flight to D.C. and Bucky fucked off to do whatever he did all day; the most important part was that they’d both be far, far away from you.

"Fucking Steve," you mumbled as you violently scrubbed the counters. Come to think of it, all of this was entirely his fault. No one would even know you existed without him blabbering on about you. And what you wouldn’t give to live in a world without being judged for your very existence by a bionic ex-assassin.

On top of everything else, some moron decided to steal the tip jar while you were distracted getting some ice, and by the time you made it home, it was nearing midnight, you’d had way too many espresso shots for a single human being, and you just wanted to cry in the silence of your own four walls. It was probably the single most terrible day you’d had since the first couple of weeks in the Tower.

Unfortunately, when you unlocked the front door, you immediately realized that your terrible day wasn’t over yet. There were too many pairs of shoes sitting in the hallway, and voices coming from the kitchen area.

You quietly pulled off your sneakers in the semi-darkness of the hallway. You were way too exhausted to attempt to use your powers, but maybe you could tiptoe past them to take a quick shower and then fall into bed without having to talk to anyone.

Slowly, you crept closer to the stairwell, keeping one eye on the shadows dancing across the wall to your left. Snippets of conversation got clearer.

"—not saying that, but whether you want to admit it or not, she’s good." Sam sounded annoyed.

"It’s not about that and you know it."

"Yeah, I do. You know what else I know? You need to go back to therapy."

You froze, shrinking back into the darkness of the hallway. You could hear Bucky huff an incredulous laugh.

"I made—"

"Amends, I’m aware. And was that your idea, or was that the assigned homework from your court mandated army doctor?" Silence. "You can’t just work through a list and at the end of it decide you’re done and everything’s magically alright again."

"'Course not. I don’t get to do that."

There was something about his tone that made your anger sink down slowly, heavily, until you swallowed it down entirely and you just felt wretched.

You weren’t supposed to listen to any of this. This was way out of your depth, and you had no idea how to get out of it. Their voices blurred into each other as your pulse was rushing through your head loud enough to make you dizzy, and you reached for your necklace in an attempt to ground yourself, to calm your breaths and reach out to something that could get you away from this moment in time.

It was useless.

"Like I said," Sam continued calmly. "You don’t have to work together ever again. But the two of you should talk it out first."

"Or how about this," you whispered, not loud enough for any but superhuman ears to pick up on, "should we ever get to the point again where I reset something around you and it’s important, I will let you know."

You barely knew why you offered, with your back pressed against the wall, not even standing in the same room as Bucky. But you didn’t want to fight.

There was a beat of hesitation, and then he said, "Promise?"

"Sure," Sam said.

You held up your pinkie finger in front of your heart, even though no one could see. "On the nine lives of the cat I will own one day."

You counted your breaths up to twenty before you heard one of them shift their weight, bare feet shuffling over your tiles.

"Fine," Bucky said finally. "She can stay for now. But I’m keeping an eye on her."

A familiar hitch went through you all on its own and you opened your eyes to find the world standing still. You took a couple of hesitant steps towards the stairs again, your head turning when you passed the kitchen area.

Sam had his back turned to you, stretching to reach something on the shelf next to the fridge, but Bucky’s frozen gaze was fixed on the wall you’d been leaning against, his arms crossed in front of his chest. Determination was a good look on him, you decided. It left a certain shine in his eyes that was hard to look away from.

That night, you dreamt of drowning at sea, and somehow you didn’t want to call it a nightmare.

chapter eight

thank you for reading!! you can follow my library blog @intrepidacious-fics for update notifications 💚

this chapter was my best kept secret and i'm forever grateful to @marvelettesassemblenow for reading ages ago 🫶🏼 also no one talk to me about thunderbolts bc i still haven't watched it but it seemed like a good time for a comeback

[dykekarkat]

arcane s2 spoilers i guess but my favorite caitlyn moment in this season by far is her conversation with vi when she's trying to convince her to be an enforcer. like immediately vi rejects that and says something like "u want me to be an enforcer? after what they did to my parents? do you understand how that feels?" and CAITLYN'S response is just a perfect showcasing of her misunderstanding of the system. like this is right after she lost her mother to jinx so her response is something like "yes i do". like caitlyn believing that she has been personally victimized by the system through jinx's act of rebellion the same way vi has by losing her parents to enforcers. which is just objectively not true because the violence of jinx and silco and zaun in general will never be state sanctioned. like an enforcers job is to weild violence FOR the state to enforce the status quo and oppress those at the bottom. which is why vi's parents died while they were Rebelling against the state. And we literally see this state sanctioned violence in action when we See caitlyn and vi decide to literally poison the underground. like fundamentally jinx's rebellion is so so different to that but caitlyn is unable to see it because she thinks that all of the violence being enacted is equal in its power, which it isnt. and i think its just such a good moment to show that not even rlly slow slide into fascism by her

[david-watts]

now that I am on a computer with a keyboard and not trying to use my blunt malformed arthritic-swollen fingers which I'm certain have some form of nerve damage after consistent frostnip for literal years. I had a very strange dream last night and I think it may be one of those dreams. the ones I remember for years. the ones where... I don't think I can explain that in public without a lot of people suddenly having another reason to hate me and want me committed

[leashybebes]

Hi!! Can i please request the prompt "caring for each other while ill" for bucktommy? ✨💖 It can be post 8x15 or not, i'm not picky, write however the muse hits! (Although i do agree that many of these prompts give post 8x15 vibes! Like what do you mean "reacting to seeing the other one cry" we literally just saw that happen in canon😭😭)

Anyways no pressure of course and also i love your writing! Have a nice day! 🤗

also for @devirnis 💖 went with some nebulous point after they get back together so let's say this features schroedinger's father figure lol

Buck's learned a lot of new things about Tommy, this time around. What he likes, what he hates, what he's scared of. It's been like watching a flower unfurl. It's beautiful to begin with, sure, but you give it some light and you make the soil right, and it becomes something you'd never have been able to predict, with colours and textures and shapes that take you by surprise.

It's wonderful. It's a privilege. 

It's a nightmare and Buck is going to murder him.

Because the latest thing that he's learned about Tommy is that when he's sick, Tommy is apparently an absolute asshole. 

He doesn't really get sick, is the thing. He has allergies in the summer for which he pops antihistamines and merrily carries on. He has a bum knee that he cheerfully RICEs when the air pressure goes too high. Buck has seen him bruised up from Muay Thai, concussed from a rope rescue that went bad, on oxygen for smoke inhalation, and now…now he has a cold.

The first two days, he'd miserably denied he was getting sick (I feel fine, Evan), refused to take any medication (because I don't need to be drowsy, Evan), went to work (I can't believe they grounded me, Evan), and spent the evening sulking on the couch (I'm not in a mood, Evan). 

The third day, he found Tommy at the kitchen table at 5am wearing Buck's favorite blue hoodie with the hood pulled up and the drawstrings pulled tight, a pile of used tissues at his elbow, the tip of his nose bright red, and his eyes teary.

"I woke you up," he says, except it comes out I woag you ub, and the tears spill.

"Uh," Buck says. "Hey there."

"Hi," Tommy says, and scrubs at his eyes with the cuff of Buck's hoodie which…rude. "I think I'm sick." I thig I'b sig.

"You think?"

Buck loosens the drawstrings on the hoodie, pushes the hood down, scratches his fingertips through Tommy's sweaty hair. Tommy nods pitifully against the touch, like he'd managed to completely miss the sarcasm.

"I'm sorry I was mean," Tommy says. I'b sore-y I was bead. "But I think I'm dying." Bud I thig I'b dyig.

Buck bites his lip so he doesn't laugh.

"Okay," he says. "Well, would you rather die in bed?"

"Yes please." Yed bleadth.

Buck does a mental inventory of the medication in the house, the ingredients for a spicy chicken noodle soup while he helps Tommy back into the bedroom, peels him out of his stolen clothes, presses a kiss to his clammy forehead.

"You're a big baby," he says gently, and Tommy gives another one of those miserable little nods, letting his forehead drop onto Buck's shoulder.

"I'b sore-y."

"I'll forgive you if you lay down and take some pills."

"You still lub me?"

"Yes, I still lub - love you, dummy."

Tommy's eyes well up with tears again and Buck tries to remind himself what people say about colds - two days coming, two days here, two days going, right? They've survived worse.

Probably.

[lame-cameoliob]

Kallus' motivations are so interesting

I just need to get these thoughts out so I’m throwing this ramble here:

Now, this may totally just be me thinking too much (fork found in kitchen) but I feel like when it comes to how we tend to think about Kallus’ characterization, the implications of Kallus’ experience on Onderon are very overlooked. 

So he goes to Onderon with “the boys”-- which, the term “the boys” has its own set of implications about how Kallus must have really cared for those troopers under his command but I digress– and on a patrol they’re attacked, yada yada, we all know the story. 

But Kallus becomes fully paralyzed. He doesn’t describe the extent of his paralyzation but given that he had to watch as his squad was “finished off one by one” it’s pretty fair to assume that he could not move whatsoever. The fear that any person would experience in that situation is completely indescribable, that is genuinely some shit straight out of a night terror. 

He is– as we know– spared (albeit we don’t get exact details (did the merc try to kill him but reinforcements arrived before he could? Did the merc think that Kallus was already dead? Secret 3rd option?)) and he makes a full physical recovery, but there is no way in hell that he is not coming out of that encounter with some crazy PTSD. 

There’s not a whole lot of info on Imperial mental health services but I don’t think it’s a longshot to assume that they are probably close to nonexistent.

So the empire now has… an ISB agent with field experience… with untreated PTSD… where said PTSDs inciting incident pertained to a Lasat… and they’re looking to make an example out of Lasan……….. Are you picking up what I'm putting down here…...?

If you aren’t; it is BY NO MEANS a wild assumption to say that the Empire– essentially– weaponized Kallus’ PTSD, given that he would be less likely to question the moral atrocities happening on Lasan since he was already biased against Lasat as a whole. 

Now, we don’t really have a solid grasp on what Kallus’ exact role in Lasan was since he’s  kiiiiinnnd of an unreliable narrator– I mean we’re given the line in Droids in Distress where he takes credit for giving orders during the siege, but Kallus routinely just runs his mf mouth whenever he’s throwing hands so it’s like…  that could either be the truth or a crazy exaggeration, we as viewers have literally no idea what’s going on there– but it goes without saying that Kallus is obviously not excused from his participation just because of (likely) untreated mental illness, but that is literally like the whole point of his character so like we all knew that

Now, after Lasan, Kallus does something really bizarre for an imperial to do; he accepts the borifle given to him through the Boosan Keerah, and even though he doesn’t know about the cultural significance of that, he still takes it upon himself to learn how to use this weapon. I think that literally any other imperial would have tossed that shit out on sight, so I think it does kind of imply that Kallus did have a good deal of respect for Lasat culture.

Now we can all recall how Kallus is so annoying and also batshit insane whenever he fights Zeb for the first season and a half of rebels, and ME THINKS that this is because he wants to prove to himself that if he were not paralyzed on Onderon, he could have saved the members of his squad. He had to sit by and watch them die, and I think that he just wants the vindication; now you may be thinking, But Emma, he beat the Lasat who gave him his borifle, why would he still be obsessing over this– say it with me now– he is mentally ill. No victory will ever be enough to prove this to himself. Point blank period. 

(edit:) He is for sure operating from a place of extreme predjudice and bias but I think it's worth noting that he’s not operating under the usual xenophobic imperial mindset that other species are automaticaly lesser than. (end edit) This weird obsession that he has in seasons 1 and 2 deels like it's mostly there because he wants to outwit and outfight Zeb (and the rest of the Ghost crew… but especially Zeb) (edit: Though it is 100% influenced by Xenophobia-- his mental illness and xenopobia DO coexist!!)

And after the Honorable Ones???? It’s literally never brought up again. He chills tf out so hard after that it is high key uncanny. And like, yes duh that is because– for writing purposes– that’s the beginning of his redemption and they want viewers to root for him as fulcrum, but it also implies that after finding common ground with Zeb, and understanding where he’s coming from and who Zeb is as a person, he realizes that he’s been CRASHING TF OUT for basically no reason. 

And he is SO QUICK to switch sides?? Like, he is fulcrum at least a decent time before the beginning of season three. The whole point is that the second he asks questions and delves deeper into what the Empires motivations are he is disgusted enough that he doesn’t just drop everything and disappear, no, he became a spy for the rebels because he wants to help. I feel like that just goes to show that, at his core, Kallus is a good person. A deeply confused, and hurt, and misguided person, but a good one. 

I dunno, this is just a really long winded way of saying that Kallus is the perfect example of an imperial pawn. Like the Empire is an incredibly effecient indoctrination machine that exploits people at every turn, especially their own soldiers, and I think that Kallus’ relationship with that indoctrination along with his own motivations is just super super interesting and I think about it literally all the time

[bliss-in-the-void]

No bc Satoru has this whole hallucination-dream-limbo sequence where he’s talking to Suguru about how he wanted to give Sukuna his all to get through to him and show him how he understood his loneliness only to have Suguru go “…you’re making me jealous.”

As an author, what Gege did here is genius because that is such a loaded statement to make in response to Satoru processing his fight with Sukuna. It can mean so many different things and we, the audience, are free to interpret exactly how Suguru meant it.

On one hand, you can say he said he was jealous because he wanted to be the one Satoru fought with all his might. He wanted to be as strong as Satoru, to match him in prowess, and hearing that Sukuna was the one to do it instead made him jealous.

On the other hand, you can say that he said he was jealous because Satoru recognized that Sukuna was lonely and wanted to get through to him, something that he was too late to recognize in Suguru when he was descending into madness, and that in turn made Suguru jealous because it was as if Satoru was saying “I recognized the loneliness in him and wanted to do something about it” when he failed to do that same thing with Suguru.

I personally interpret it the second way more (the first one is very valid, but I just see things the second way), because of the next lines.

He made Suguru cry. While laughing. Once again, holy shit is that such a loaded scene. What did Suguru’s tears mean? We have never seen him cry before. Not when Riko died, not at any point when he was losing his mind, not even when he died by Satoru’s hand. So why, when Satoru said he wished Suguru was there to wish him luck before he fought, did he finally get brought to such strong emotion that he cried?

Was it because he was happy to hear that Satoru still thought of him, even in his final moments?

Was it because after all these years, Satoru never thought ill of him and pictured him there beside him, and he was relieved?

Was it because he regretted making the choices he did that led to him not being there by Satoru’s side?

Or, in a very indirect way, was it an admission of love from Satoru that made Suguru happy?

I wonder that, because of these panels from Chapter 238:

Kashimo asked Sukuna, “if you’re so satisfied being alone, why did you refuse to die and turn yourself into cursed fingers?”

Sukuna’s response is, “Love is worthless. I’ve never needed anyone to satisfy me.”

Which is a directly opposing statement to the one that Satoru had just made to Suguru.

Sukuna: I only have to worry about myself and I get to do as I please. I am satisfied by myself. I don’t need love.

Satoru: I worried about everyone else my entire life and I was controlled by the society. I was not satisfied, but I would have been if you had been there with me, Suguru.

That. Is. Powerful. Those panels imply that love is what made Satoru weak. He did not feel complete because he didn’t have Suguru. He had all of the power in the world, he had status, he had students that depended on him, other friends even, and he still was not satisfied because Suguru wasn’t there.

Sukuna on the other hand recognized how detrimental love was because of what it did to people, how it made them weak, and he decided he didn’t need it.

Those panels were such an indirect-direct conversation between Satoru and Suguru.

Essentially, they were saying:

Suguru: You fought with all of your might and I wish that you recognized my loneliness so that I could have been there with you

Satoru: I was at the peak of my power and I had the weight of the world on my shoulders, and I was allowed to go all-out to fight yet I just wanted you to be there with me

It’s just. Ugh. They’re saying they want each other in the most infuriatingly roundabout way.

[yrrtyrrtwhenihrrthrrt]

Top Six Arcane Characters ranked in reverse-order of how much silly fucking nonsense they have to put up with throughout the runtime of the show

6. Cassandra Kiramman (daughter became a cop [I'm so sorry girl], daughter randomly goes missing for several days and breaks into her own house shot in the leg with a fucking homeless lesbian, gets killed by Zaun literally four seconds after being convinced to grant them sovereignty, and if there is an afterlife she had to watch her daughter crash out spectacularly using her very own initiative to gas the poor. Embarrassing.)

5. Ekko (every single Topsider he meets is next-level stupid and he has to hold their hand like a baby even when they are a literal genius. Had to watch Cait say "The enforcers aren't oppressing you guys that's not true :( !!" with a straight face, had to watch Jayce say "Oh yeah we put the hexgate here so that if it blew up it would only release dangerous arcane-gamma rays upon YOUR people so nobody who actually matters would die" with a straight face, had to find out the founder of the city that oppressed him his entire life was literally just a stupid old man with a banjo, Jesus fucking Christ. He is low on this list because of the amount of silly nonsense he subjected other people to, especially in the AU. Also he threw a time-machine bomb at God which wasn't so much something that happened to him but felt worth mentioning)

4. Jayce Talis (literally on a constant mission to keep his very fragile partner from killing himself through sheer scientific negligence and is consistently thwarted by either Viktor's impulsivity, the narrative, or him-fucking-self. Had to go to the shadow realm while Heimer and Ekko partied in Utopia playing the banjo and dancing to silly little songs and the first person he has the absolute misfortune to see when he gets back is fucking Salo I would kill myself)

3. Mel Medarda (practically runs a counsel full of idiots twice her age at like 25, himbo situationship's twink almost dies every time they try to fuck, has to deal with her mother ravaging twinks with her eyes right in front of Mel's salad, got kidnapped by witches for literally no reason)

2. Silco (Girldad who somehow, despite being one of the least mentally hinged people in the undercity, has an even less hinged daughter who so regularly blows things up and kills people that he scolds her about it as though she'd just snuck out past curfew. Has to work with a gaggle of dumbasses to produce and distribute his sterocainoin I mean Shimmer who regularly plot to kill him but are legitimately too stupid and useless to pull it off, his factory got randomly busted up and a bunch of his employees killed by an angry twenty-something with pink hair and also The Guy From The Fucking Posters [imagine Niel DeGrasse Tyson and a twenty-two year old homeless lesbian blow up your job like tell me you wouldn't have a stroke] and had to deal with a TREMENDOUS amount of nonsense in the AU where Ekko out of nowhere reminds him of his Most Traumatic Memory Ever and also the founder of Piltover blows up and his teenage stepkid is the only one who saw it happen.)

1. Sevika (Literally cannot ever catch a break for one second. Just wanted to help Zaun be free from Piltover and gets absolutely bodied by one or the other of Felicia and Connol's cursed fucking daughters every other episode in season 1, loses a combined total of like four??? arms, is forced to clean up the typically VERY bloody messes of her boss's unhinged daughter because he's such a pookie-wookie that he refuses to discipline her in any way, becomes the unwilling parent of two (2) mentally ill orphans, is subjected to Jinx's constant jokes at the expense of her missing arm (which Jinx is responsible for, by the way) gets given a political position as some form of shitty reparation when she is NOT a politician she is the guy who backs up the revolutionaries like miss girl just wanted to gamble punch people and fuck whores can you let her live her life??? Is one of the few people to survive and probably hates every minute of it)

[niningtori]

violets are blue: a hanahaki au | oneshot

pairing(s): choi beomgyu x you, choi yeonjun x you

summary: you love beomgyu, your best friend, so much it makes you sick. literally. like, sick in the sense that your days are numbered as you try to fight off the hanahaki threatening to kill you every time he breaks your heart with his loving girlfriend, so you decide you'll try getting over him with the help of his girlfriend's friend, yeonjun.

genre: ANGST, melodrama, romance, hanahaki

warnings: lots of clichés, serious illnesses, and mentions of death

word count: 5.2k

notes: surprise! i didn't think i'd get this out just yet but here it is <3 please don't be mean (i'm fragile) and feedback is always appreciated!

it’s a bearable sort of pain, but it’s still painful, nonetheless. bearable is a very loose term, too, because you know if and when things continue as they are, you will no longer be able to write your symptoms off so casually. and as you lean over beomgyu’s toilet and watch purple petals stained with crimson red blood swirling down the drain, you know it won’t be long before your pain crosses from “bearable” to “hellish”. 

still, you manage to flush the evidence of your dying heart and take a good look at yourself in the mirror. your lips are nice and bloody, your makeup nice and smudged. you calmly take out the emergency mouthwash and makeup from your bag and get to work. after you’re finished tidying up, it’s almost like nothing ever happened. with a shaky smile and slightly reddened eyes, you leave his bathroom and prepare for the worst.

and the worst, it is. you just so happen to walk in to beomgyu’s living room while he plants a kiss on his girlfriend’s cheek as she giggles like mad. suddenly, your chest hurts even more than it already did and you find it hard to breathe. well, back to the bathroom you go.

-

you wish it were like the stories. you wish you could get some magical surgery to remove the flowers from your lungs — yes, even if it meant forgetting beomgyu. if you were a better person, you would say you’d rather die with your love than forget him; but as you’ve come to find out, you guess you’re not that selfless. actually, with the way things are now, you think it’d be better to forget. but unfortunately for you, there is no such solution in this world. 

as it stands, the only way for you to cure your illness is by finding another love, which you have been too stubborn to try, but as you die a little more and more every day, you realize you have to do something. beomgyu is getting more serious with his girlfriend with every passing day, and even before that, he never once looked at you like anything other than a best friend — which you thought was killing you at the time, in a figurative sense, but now it’s killing you in the most literal of ways and you’re desperate. 

you want to tell yourself that beomgyu needs you, and maybe he does, but he does not need your love the way you need his. the proof of this sentiment being that one of you is, at present, dying for the love of the other, and it’s not him. 

-

it’s hard to hate beomgyu’s girlfriend when she’s so fucking nice, so you stopped trying to hate her long, long ago. in another life, you might even call each other friends. in this one, though, it’s a quiet sort of dance where you neither push nor pull her too hard. if she’s there, you greet her with a smile on your face. if she’s not, you don’t ask about her. it’s a delicate little charade, but one you play the part in flawlessly. beomgyu commends you for being “so cool” with her, but you have no other choice. if you veer too much in one direction or the other, you run the risk of losing him for good. 

so she is, understandably, very surprised when you wait for beomgyu to go to the bathroom before asking her if she has any single friends.

“oh my god, really? i thought you'd never ask!” she exclaims, and you paste on a smile so sweet it’s sickening.

turns out, she has a lot of friends, unlike you, and many of them are, in her words, handsome. she pulls up a picture of a few of them and your eye is caught by one in particular. 

“who’s that one?” you ask, pointing to a black-haired boy with an undercut. 

“that’s yeonjun,” she grins. “oh, i just knew you’d like him. you’re totally his type, too. he’s gonna freak when i set you two up.” 

“what’s going on?” beomgyu cuts, and your short-lived giddiness is shot in the head almost instantly.

“baby, you’ll never believe it. she’s interested in yeonjun,” she declares, still as excited as ever.

beomgyu turns to you with a look you can only describe as odd. you never talk about dating with him. like, ever. you don’t even seem interested in the idea to the point where he very earnestly sat you down one day and asked you if you were asexual, to which you spent a very arduous few hours awkwardly explaining that you are not. honestly? he didn’t really believe it at the time, but he’s beginning to now, if only because you seem so incredibly flustered at the moment. 

“really? that’s great,” he says after a slightly off-putting pause, but thankfully, nobody catches it. “you know, for a second there, i thought you were gonna be our future kids’ single wine aunt forever. i’m glad you’re finally putting yourself out there.” god, he doesn't even know how much he hurts you, but he hurts you all the same. he’s spoken about marrying and having children with her, but to think that you fall into the “fun aunt” role in his future with her just makes you feel sick. you’d better pray that this shit with yeonjun goes well, because your lungs are starting to ache just as the thought.

“this is great,” she says, breaking you out of your trance. “how about this: we’ll go on a double date. that sounds fun, right?” 

“actually, i think i’d like to meet him on my own first, if that’s cool with you,” you say. the last thing you need is for the love of your life to be there on your first date with another man. what if things go wrong? or worse, what if things go right? beomgyu can’t be there for that. you can’t do that to poor yeonjun.

she looks disappointed at your words, but beomgyu cheers her up by pinching her cheeks and promising that you’ll all have plenty of chances to go out together if things go well. you try to smile, you really do, but you’re not sure if what comes out looks anything even remotely close to one. luckily, it seems like they’re too absorbed in each other to notice.

-

you haven’t talked much with yeonjun before tonight, opting to meet him in person to see if the chemistry is there before wasting any time with just “talking”. you simply don’t have the time to spare, and yeonjun seems equally as eager to meet you for reasons unknown. so now you sit all dolled up and glammed out at the back of a dimly lit restaurant as you wait to meet the boy you can only pray will save you. he must have no idea how much you need this. 

when you first see him, you’re taken aback by how handsome he is. you see beomgyu every day, and he’s the handsomest man in the world to you, but something about yeonjun is different. when he introduces himself and you get to know each other, his charisma charms you in a way you sincerely did not anticipate. he’s funny and goofy, which is just how you like them. you haven’t been on a date in god knows how long, but you’re starting to think that maybe this previously incomprehensibly doomed situation may not be so inescapable after all. that is, until he’s taking you home.

it’s dark outside and he graciously gives you his jacket like the gentleman he is, and you’re walking notably close together on the sidewalk, bodies brushing each other every few steps when he tells you something that just might change your life.

“listen, i really had fun tonight,” he says nervously, and it’s like you can feel the rejection before he even says anything more.

“but to be honest with you, my intentions aren’t exactly pure.” your heart drops. does he just want to sleep with you or something? that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but it’s not what you need. you need to love someone and for that someone to love you back so you don’t get sick beyond salvation. the only way to get over beomgyu is by getting serious with someone else.

“then what do you want?” you question feebly. he stops walking and turns to look at you, placing his hands on your shoulders.

“i want to fall in love with you, and i want you to fall in love with me. i want us to be together forever. i need it, actually.” he says eerily seriously, and you’re confused for a few moments before it dawns on you. 

“you’re sick, aren’t you?” you ask, and his face hardens for a second before he nods.

“y-yeah, i'm sick. if you don't wanna see me again after this, i understand. i just —”

“it's okay. i am, too,” you say with a small, reassuring smile.

“you too?” he asks, eyes comically wide and pouty lips agape in an “o”. 

“yeah,” you tell him, and he’s quiet for a few moments before he laughs. it’s a cute, pretty little thing, and it makes you join him, too. 

“wow, maybe meeting each other was fate,” he says between giggles.

“maybe,” you reply. and for the first time in a long time, you think you might really make it out of this alive.

-

“and you won’t believe it, but he told me he spent the whole night with her!” beomgyu’s girlfriend says proudly. 

“... what?” he mumbles dazedly. 

“he said he went over to her place and stayed there all night, and on the first date, too!” she babbles. “now, he didn’t tell me what they did, but if i know yeonjun, i bet they —” 

“stop,” he cuts in. he doesn’t know why, but he feels that if he hears one more word about it, something will feel horribly wrong. it already does feel wrong, in a way, but he can’t quite put his finger on why. 

“why? aren’t you happy for them?” she asks confusedly. 

“i… i am. it’s just weird, y’know? she’s like… like a sister to me. nobody wants to hear about their sister’s private life,” he reasons, and she nods in response.

“i guess that makes sense,” she says. “but still, i’m so happy for them. especially him. he’s actually had a rough time, lately. i don’t know why, but he’s been acting kinda weird with me, so i —” 

“you’re here!” beomgyu says as you walk through his front door. he’s been expecting you. since your first date with yeonjun, he’s been eagerly texting you about it. you haven’t responded much, but he’s been chalking it up to how busy you must be with your new, well, whatever yeonjun is to you. he’s excited when he thinks about how he’ll get to see how you two interact with each other tonight since his girlfriend suggested you all hang out together, but part of him feels off about this entire situation. what he told her was the truth: it is weird to see you with someone, but maybe he’s just not used to it. you’ve never been openly attracted to anyone before, so it’s brand new territory to navigate. 

you greet him with a soft smile and not much else, which strikes him as odd, but yeonjun trails in after you, and all other thoughts go out of the window. 

“hey, man! nice to see you. it’s been a while,” he says, and yeonjun reciprocates the same excitement, going in for a side hug. 

beomgyu’s girlfriend goes in for a hug, too, and yeonjun freezes for a bit, but it goes unnoticed by everyone besides you. you look at him with as much reassurance and understanding as you can muster, and he replies with a grateful, shaky smile.

honestly, you weren’t terribly surprised when he told you that the object of his affections was the very person who holds the heart of the object of yours. she’s a bubbly, lively kind of girl, and it’s easy to fall in love with someone like that. if anything, it just makes you think that maybe yeonjun was right when he said meeting each other was fate.

the night is pretty fun, all things considered, and you find yourself not wanting to die while spending time with the loving couple, but that’s only because yeonjun is sitting next to you. when something particularly devastating happens, you grab each other’s hands and squeeze like you’re the other’s only lifeline. in a way, you kind of are. without him, you’d be on a one-way train to certain death, and without you, he’d be the same. 

things are pretty light, though, until beomgyu says he has an announcement to make.

“we’re moving in together!” his girlfriend cheerily cuts in before he can do the honors, and that’s enough to make any hard-earned progress go out the window. you feel your stomach churn and you’re finding it hard to breathe. you look very visibly ill, and while yeonjun is not doing much better, you definitely take it a lot harder.

“that’s amazing! i’m happy for you guys!” yeonjun chirps. 

“yeah. sorry, i think i need to go to the bathroom,” you mumble, and yeonjun concernedly looks at you before you subtly shake your head. in that brief look, you have an entire conversation. he asks if you’re alright and if you need him to come with you to spill your guts out, and you tell him you’re not, but you’d rather go alone.

while his girlfriend may not catch it, beomgyu certainly does. that odd, silent conversation that only yeonjun and you seem privy to. the fact that you two seem to have a level of understanding with words unspoken makes him feel suffocated, and there’s an unknown sharpness in his chest. 

he tries to join back in on the banter, but he can’t shake the uncanny feeling he has, so he excuses himself and follows you to the bathroom. 

now, he knows this is really fucking weird to do, so he almost doesn’t do it, but the sound of you retching makes him abandon all consideration of right and wrong. he presses his ear to the door and hears hushed sobs in between hacks, and it makes his eyes widen in horror and concern. 

he’s not sure how much time passes, but he hears the heartbreaking sounds die out, and then he hears the water run and you clearing your throat. he takes the cue to stop pressing against the door, and before long, you step out of the bathroom while looking perfectly put together. you flinch almost imperceptibly when you catch him right outside the door. 

“are you alright?!” he exclaims, but you just nod and begin to push past him, murmuring something about being fine, but that you and yeonjun need to leave because something came up. he didn’t even know you could move so fast, and he finds that he’s borderline chasing you to the living room where his girlfriend and yeonjun look up in surprise at the scene before them.

“do we need to leave?” yeonjun asks carefully.

“yeah,” you say shortly, and you’re booking it out of the door and onto the porch before beomgyu grabs your arm and spins you around to face him. his girlfriend hesitantly follows yeonjun outside and watches the entire ordeal as puzzle pieces begin to fit together in her mind.

“are you alright?!” he repeats, and you just face him with a withering, humbling look.

“i’m okay. i just don’t feel good tonight, but i’ll be alright. congratulations on everything, i’m sorry i can’t stay to celebrate.” and normally that would be enough to throw him off of your scent, but beomgyu remembers your muffled cries, and he won’t be swayed so easily. 

“what’s wrong? no bullshit. just tell me,” he demands in a way that is uncharacteristically solemn, but you can’t answer that. the only way to get him to forget about you is for you to distract him with the person he loves most.

“but your girlfriend —” 

“don't even start. what’s wrong?” he, well, asks isn’t even really the world, is it? there’s no room for negotiation in his tone. 

“i… i’m sick,” is all you can really say. 

“sick how? sick like you need me to take you home?” and he doesn’t really believe his own implication that it’s something so easily fixable, but he has to try. 

“i’m… i’m really sick. sick like i’m dying, sick,” you manage to croak out, and it’s everything he feared and more.

“what’s wrong?! do you need to go to the hospital?!” he panics, and you feel an overwhelming sense of dread. this is what you wanted to avoid because he can’t help you. nobody can. 

“baby?” the soft voice of his girlfriend pipes up from behind you. his gaze is torn away from you for just a moment, but that’s enough to make you ache.

“not now!” he snaps before turning his attention back to you, but it’s too late. you feel the sharp stems scratching at your lungs, causing a scorching sort of pain you can’t even put into words. slowly, you begin to cough — choke, really — and beomgyu is helpless to watch as you clutch your chest and hack up a mess of bloodied, tangled flowers. his eyes widen as he takes in the blood seeping from the corners of your mouth. 

“who?” he asks shakily as you finish coughing up the last of the petals, and you know he’s asking who your unrequited love is, but you don’t reply. you can’t reply. 

“who is it?” he asks again with more edge to his voice, but you still can’t muster up the courage to answer him. you could lie like you usually do, but you’re so tired, you just can’t anymore.

“baby?” his girlfriend repeats.

“what?!” he snaps, unable to help himself from losing his temper as he turns to look at her.

“it’s… it’s you,” is all she says, and his scowl drops and morphs into incredulity and dread.

“that's impossible,” he whispers, but one look at you and your twisted expression is enough to erase all doubt. “m-me? listen, you know i love you, but i —” 

“it's alright,” you coax, trying to placate him. even in your darkest moments, you're still putting his feelings first, and the thought alone is suffocating him. “i know. i really, really do. you don’t have to explain it to me.” and your “comforting” smile would be more convincing if it weren't stained red. 

“but you’re sick! you —” 

“i’ll be alright,” you whisper, and he’s at a loss for words at how calm you seem to be. how can you be so resigned? he looks at you — really, truly looks at you — for the first time in god knows how long, and he finally notices how different you are. your frame is lighter, your cheeks are more pronounced, and there are violet bags underneath your bloodshot eyes. how could he have missed so many signs? you’re dying, no way around it, and he was so busy playing house with his girlfriend, he had no idea just how much you were — are — suffering. it’s unforgivable, but he can tell you’ve forgiven him, anyway. how long have you been forgiving him? since the start of his current relationship? or even before that? 

“we should go,” yeonjun cuts in tentatively. you just tearily nod, and before beomgyu can say anything more, you’re in yeonjun’s car and driving away.

-

he calls and texts for days on end, but you don’t respond. at some point, he resolves to come see you in person. the way you looked the last time he saw you haunts him viciously. he just has to see you. he just has to be sure.

but when he shows up at your doorstep, you just look exhausted and even worse for wear. you don’t greet him, even, you just sigh and walk back to your bedroom before plopping down into the bed and looking at him with a look he can only describe as unreadable. 

“i just h-had to make sure you’re okay,” he stammers.

“i’m okay,” you reply gently. “i just need some time.” 

“b-but maybe if i —” 

“it won’t work. the only way out of this is for you to love me back, or for me to get over you. yeonjun is helping me, so it’s going to be alright, i think.”

“what if i —” 

“you can’t make yourself love me, beomgyu,” you say softly, the slightest tinge of a reprimand in your voice. 

“i… i can try,” he whimpers.

“yes, but i don't want you to. you have a girlfriend,” you patiently reply, but your seemingly unshakable patience just makes him more desperate.

“then what do you want me to do? i’m killing you!” he exclaims, and you wince as a sharp pain strikes your temples at the noise. he notices your response, and he just wants to die from the guilt.

“i don’t want you to do anything. that’s why i didn’t tell you.” how could you not want him to do anything? how could you possibly ask that of him? 

“h-how can you say that? how can you just expect me to watch you die?” he whines, tears spilling down his cheeks as he looks to you for a perfect solution that will never come.

“i’m alright,” you tell him again, but the way you wheeze afterwards suggests otherwise.

he goes to grab you, maybe to pat your back or maybe to hold you, he’s not really sure, but you feebly put your hand up to stop him before he gets too close. it’s an innocent gesture in and of itself, yet it somehow feels like you just smacked him across the face. 

“don’t touch me,” you say, but it’s more like a plea than anything else. “it’ll just hurt me more.” with that, your words devolve into a coughing fit and all he can do is watch as splatters of blood and stems stain the tissue you cough into. he never, not in a million years, thought that his touch would hurt you. it’s supposed to soothe you like nothing else. you know, the way your touch soothes him.

“i think you should go,” you suggest after your coughing has died down. he can see the aftermath of his mere presence etched into the tired lines on your face, and he feels less like a person and more like the scum of the earth. 

-

“what are you thinking about?” a sweet voice says, effectively pulling him out of his reverie. beomgyu is currently supposed to be cooking dinner with his girlfriend, but he’s spending more time spacing out than actually cooking the noodles he’s meant to be stirring.

“n-nothing,” he sputters, but her knit eyebrows and frown let him know he has to elaborate. still, he pretends he doesn’t notice her silent urging and returns to his task. 

he can feel her stare on him as he watches the pot, and it’s not very long before she sighs and says her next words.

“you’re thinking about her, aren’t you?” 

“what? n-no! i just —” 

“yes, you are.” and her tone isn’t accusatory, but it’s filled with a sense of knowing. “it’s normal to think about her, you know? she’s dying and —” 

“don’t say that! why would you say that?! she’s not going to die!” he yells, slamming down the fork he was using to stir and turning to face her. he’s visibly shaking with rage — which makes no sense given that he knows, she knows, and even you know that her words are true. 

“she’s going to die,” she repeats. “you need to accept that.”

“how can you expect me to accept that?! you two just expect me to be okay with her fucking dying! well, i’m not!” he cries, tears streaming down his face as his words get louder and louder. 

“... i think you need to take some time to cool down. i’ll stay with my parents, so do what you need to do. when you’re ready, just call me, okay?” she says, and he only sobers up after he hears the front door slam shut.

-

beomgyu stays in an odd sort of purgatory. he’s constantly torn between contacting you and leaving you alone like you so obviously want. he tells himself that you’re his best friend, so of course he wants to see you and comfort you, but it feels much deeper than that. like there’s something unsolved and untouched that he just needs to dig a little deeper to figure out, but as for what that something is, he can’t seem to quite grasp. 

with this in mind, he never, not in a million years, anticipated that you’d be here on his doorstep. but here you are. you look even worse than before, somehow, which he is surprised by seeing as how things with yeonjun seem to be going well if yeonjun’s instagram updates of the both of you mean anything at all. he invites you in and offers you a seat, but you refuse. 

“come on, sit down. you must be tired,” he urges, but you wave your hand. 

“i don’t need to stay here long,” you dismiss, and it hurts his heart. “i just need one thing from you, and i’ll be out of here.”

“you need something from me? sure, anything! w-what is it?” and he sounds so hopeful, so earnest. maybe there’s a way to undo what he’s done. maybe he can help you after all. no matter what it is, he knows he can do it.

“... i need you to reject me,” is all you say, but the words ring in his ears. reject you? how can he reject you when it looks like a breeze could knock you over?

“b-but why?” he stammers, and you sigh.

“i finally figured it out. i just need to hear you tell me that you don’t love me, then i think i’ll be able to fully let you go for good.” usually, you’d have a soft smile on your face in order to comfort him, but your face is blank except for your eyes, which seem more desperate than anything he’s ever seen. but your words confuse him.

“let me go for good?” 

“yeah. i think if i can just hear you say it, i won’t need to see you anymore. i won’t ask for anything else, i just need to hear it from you,” you say determinedly. but he’s stuck on “i won’t need to see you anymore”. what could you possibly mean by that? 

“what do you mean you won't need to see me anymore?” he asks, voice devoid of any ill intent, but filled with genuine confusion.

“i mean, yeonjun doesn’t like me seeing you for obvious reasons, but i told him that i think i’ll be okay after this.” his confusion turns into dread. things that were a mystery to him suddenly make perfect sense.

“i can’t,” he chokes out, and you’re visibly stunned before anger explodes inside of you. 

“you can’t? what the fuck do you mean you can’t? why can’t you?!” you seethe. you’ve done everything for beomgyu, you even almost paid the ultimate price for him just so you wouldn’t have to make him uncomfortable with your feelings. you’re quite literally dying because of him, and he can’t offer up a meager sentence for you?

“i… i can’t say it. please don’t make me say it,” he pleads. “i’ll do anything else — anything, i swear to god!”

“beomgyu, there is nothing else. this is the only way. i’m not asking you for much, just say it, then i’ll be okay.” but he can’t do what you ask of him. not when he’s realized what he just realized. 

“b-but i… i do love you. i’m sorry, i just didn’t realize it until just now, but i do. a-and if you’ll have me, i —” smack! and his pathetic speech is stopped by your hand meeting his cheek. 

“you are so fucking selfish,” you spit, voice low, but vibrating with rage. “more selfish than i will ever be able to understand.” 

“w-what do you —” 

“beomgyu, you have a girlfriend. a girlfriend who loves you. what about her? huh?” you ask, and his previous momentum falters, but you’re not even finished yet. 

“and if she gets sick, are you gonna leave me and tell her you want her instead? you can’t do that, beomgyu. i won’t accept that. i won’t accept your love just because you feel sorry for me,” you declare, voice cracking as thick, hot tears roll down your cheeks. he’s still speechless, so you somehow find it in yourself to continue.

“i’m not doing this with you right now. call your girlfriend, tell her you’re sorry, and tell her she doesn’t have to worry about me anymore. and even if i’m gone, don’t you dare tell her what you told me today, okay?” and it’s not really an ask as much as a demand. 

“i can’t do that,” he whispers, and you’re not sure if the ache in your heart comes from the briars encircling it or from how pained he looks.

“i know i’m selfish. i know i’m a bastard. but seeing you with yeonjun, or worse, not seeing you at all? that’ll fucking kill me. i just can’t do it. i don’t want to hurt her, but i don’t want to lie to her. or you. or myself,” he says shakily.

“what are you saying?” you ask. this is not how you anticipated things would go. 

“i’m saying that if you leave me, i’ll be sick,” he says shakily. “j-just the thought of that makes me…” and it’s a surprise to the both of you when he coughs like crazy, and it’s to the horror to the both of you when a pretty, blood-stained violet petal escapes his mouth.

“oh god,” you whisper. “you can’t do this.”

“i can’t help it!” he exclaims. “i didn’t know before, but it’s true. i just didn’t realize it. i’m just — i’m just sorry i didn’t realize it.” 

“beomgyu, it’s going to kill her,” you say, dread evident in your tone.

“i know,” he says tearily. “but it’s you. it’s always been you. we can’t change it.” 

“i can’t do this to her. it’s wrong,” is all you can say. 

“i can’t live without you, and you can’t live without me,” he replies. “w-whatever happens, can we please just figure it out together? i don’t think i can handle another day without you. i think it might really kill me.” he pushes your hair off of your sweaty forehead, and you know as you feel your heart lighten that you have no choice. if not for you, then for him. whatever happens with his girlfriend, you will try your damndest to make sure she doesn't have the same fate as the two of you. 

“okay?” he asks. 

“o-okay,” you tell him, because what else is there to say? 

notes pt. 2: lorddd i know this ending will be polarizing but what can we do... it is what it is :(

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[mulletmitsuya]

Tokyo Revengers Groupchat (Final Timeline)

Warnings: suggestive (i might have to change this warning to "mentions of sexual content" bcs it's too tame of a warning for the stuff that's actually in here), swearing, the word "pedophile" is mentioned, mentions of substance abuse

Desc: Everyone finds out Takemitchy and Mikey are time leapers, which leads to some...interesting questions

Mitsuya: so let me get this straight

Mitsuya: you're a time traveler, and you've lived dozens of timelines to prevent Hina from dying but she kept dying anyway but then when you got to one where she didn't die, Mikey was some deranged criminal lord and was miserable and depressed and tried to kill himself so you had to go back in time again to make sure everything was fixed but ended up dying while fighting Mikey but then somehow you both went back in time and rewrote all of our entire lives??

Takemitchy: yeah...

Baji: cap

Mikey: it's not

Mitsuya: so Mikey's a time traveler too?

Mikey: yeah it's crazy i know

Draken: do you guys have any way to prove this?

Chifuyu: this explains why i keep getting random visions of me in alternate universes. holy shit

Haruchiyo: weird ass prank

Takemitchy: i think it happened since you're close to me and we basically did everything together. i'm not sure

Inupi: we're just gonna believe this?

Koko: wait, i kind of do

Kisaki: this...defies all logic of anything ever.

Mikey: shut up Kisaki

Mikey: i'm sorry it's just that in ever other timeline you've ruined my life so it's difficult to be nice to you sometimes

Kisaki: so you don't like me because of something i did in another universe?

Takemitchy: *timeline

Mikey: yeah. my bad

Baji: i'm gonna entertain this cause i'm bored but what was i like in other timelines

Mikey: dead

Baji: ...all of em?

Mikey: yeah, it kinda drove me to insanity

Baji: damn

Baji: why?

Mikey: you killed yourself to save Kazutora

Baji: what was the context

Mikey: long story

Baji: there wasn't any other way?

Mikey: you're kinda pissing me off cause that's what i was wondering, actually

Baji: damn

Kazutora: thanks man. appreciate it🙏

Kazutora: i'll slobber on your meat later, as a proper thank you

Baji: i'd appreciate that. thanks homie🙌

Koko: what about me?

Baji: you wanna slobber on my meat? i mean i won't stop you. as long as i can call you kitten.

Koko: ...i was talking about me in alternate universe's😐

Takemitchy: i don't think we should go there guys. there's too many timelines, and not everything was exactly the same. and also in general it was a really traumatizing experience for me and i kind of want to end my life every time i think about it

Hanma: womp womp. what about me???

Mikey: murderer

Hanma: YESSSSS 😭😭😭😭😭

Hanma: THANK GOD, I KNEW IF I COULDN'T DO IT HERE, MULTIVERSE ME WOULD HAVE LIVED THE DREAM

Hanma: are me and Tetta-san together in every universe

Mikey: surprisingly, yes

Hanma: and he denies we're soulmates😔

Kisaki: i will not hesitate to get another restraining order

Hanma: a piece of paper won't stand in my way. let's get married

Kisaki: i will call the police

Draken: guys are we really entertaining this?

Mikey: you went to jail in one of the timelines and you were bald LMAO

Draken: sure

Baji: why'd he go to jail?

Mikey: these guys killed Emma and Ken-chin took revenge

Baji: respectable

Mikey: he was given a death sentence

Baji: that's tough fr

Ran: i'm kinda curious

Ran: humour me, what was i like?? was i famous?

Mikey: you were a criminal. killed people

Ran: sounds about right if i'm being honest

Ran: and Haruchiyo and Rindou?

Haruchiyo: leave me out of Takemitchy's psychotic episodes

Haruchiyo: i think you have a hallucination/delusion disorder or something

Mikey: but don't you believe me?

Haruchiyo: ...

Haruchiyo: Mikey, you're also pretty mentally ill

Mikey: says you???

Haruchiyo: i just have substance abuse problems and i'm getting clean so...

Mikey: GUYS I'M TELLING THE TRUTH I SWEAR

Mikey: I'VE BEEN GOING CRAZY KEEPING THIS A SECRET

Draken: when was the last time you slept?

Mikey: ☹️

Baji: guys just play pretend.

Rindou: what about me?

Mikey: same as your brother just uh, less gay and slutty?

Rindou: story of my life

Inupi: you didn't do Koko

Mikey: criminal

Koko: the whole time?

Mikey: yeah

Mikey: Inupi got normal at some point because he and Ken-chin got close and they fixed bikes together and had sex

Inupi: Draken????

Draken: you're really starting to piss me off.

Mikey: Akane died in the fire though like she was BURNT

Takemitchy: uh Mikey-kun...

Mikey: she was a crisp i'm telling you

Mikey: Inupi you had an ugly red scar on your face and no one wanted you

Mikey: Izana i know you're reading this, you were fucking insane dude like you killed Emma for some fucking reason then Kisaki shot you 3 times in the chest and you died while having a really bad mental breakdown. it was a major L on your part

Chifuyu: Mikey why are you leaving out the fact that the common denominator in every single timeline was that you killed every single one of your friends in the most brutal ways possible🤨?

Mikey: no comment

Smiley: how'd he kill me?

Chifuyu: uhhh

Chifuyu: Takemitchy help me out here

Takemitchy: i don't want to talk about it😐

Chifuyu: I REMEMBER

Chifuyu: backshot

Smiley: ...

Smiley: he killed me by giving me backshots..?

Smiley: i would NEVER take it from behind

Smiley: especially from MIKEY

Smiley: small dick having ass

Smiley: my bootyhole is not to be messed with

Smiley: i'm so pissed off right now holy shit

Smiley: how did i even die???? dick so good it killed me?

Smiley: i'm so angry

Angry: and i'm Smiley😂

Baji: 3/10 joke 👎, poor delivery, fell flat

Smiley: i hope you kill yourself, Mikey

Mikey: trust me, i've tried

Chifuyu: ???

Chifuyu: he shot you in the back with a gun?

Chifuyu: what's wrong with you

Smiley: oh my bad i though you meant like, he was taking me doggy style

Smiley: i'm no bottom

Ran: what is happening

Chifuyu: i'm moving on😐

Chifuyu: Hakkai was tied to a chair and burnt to death

Hakkai: wha-

Hakkai: WHAT DID I DO??

Hakkai: jesus 😟

Chifuyu: why am i getting all these memories, i'm freaking out

Hakkai: Mikey please tell me what i did to deserve that ☹️

Mikey: idk Hakkai i was going through a lot

Draken: have you been diagnosed with anything?

Mikey: i don't need a diagnosis bcs i'm fine now, you're all alive and i don't have any murderous intent!!! yippee🤗

Mikey: isn't this great Takemitchy??

Takemitchy: well, yeah no ones dead so that's great

Izana: this is obviously completely fabricated

Izana: are you guys that bored?

Senju: man for all that time traveling you sure are a shit boyfriend😭

Takemitchy: how????

Takemitchy: did Hina say that☹️??

Senju: it's an observation

Senju: you've had way too many coincidental close calls with other woman💀

Draken: yeah you pissed me off when you thought i was gifting you a prostitute. you had a whole ass girlfriend. shame on you

Senju: and you also almost slept with Emma and you "don't remember"

Smiley: Mitchy's low-key funny as hell because what do you mean you stripped yourself and another girl down to your underwear by accident

Baji: wouldn't Takemitchy be a pedophile then?? Emma was 13 dawg🤨

Mikey: he was 14 though😭

Baji: you're gonna ride Takemitchy's dick to defend him from trying to sleep with your 13 year old sister??? crazy

Baji: wasn't be mentally 26🤨?

Baji: bro i'm gonna beat your ass actually

Mikey: hmm

Mikey: you know what Mitchy, why did you do that 🤨?

Smiley: LMFAOO

Mitsuya: why did i come back to Takemitchy facing pedophile allegations, like what's going on right now

Kazutora: is it not enough that he changed the space and time continuum just to be with his girl?

Kazutora: cheating this cheating that, my boy deserves all the pussy he wants

Kazutora: he's been beaten, shot, stabbed AND killed

Kazutora: i personally believe he's the goat

Baji: ?

Chifuyu: goat is an acronym for "greatest of all time", Baji-san

Baji: what's an acronym

Chifuyu: i'll dm

Kazutora: bro you're so fucking stupid😭

Draken: i don't care if he was skinned alive by an orangutan, there's no excuse to cheat on someone

Rindou: i think being skinned alive by an orangutang warrants having more than one girl. idk that's just me tho

Ran: not the point that's being made rn

Rindou: what exactly is the point that's being made

Rindou: is this real. are we being serious.

Rindou: i don't think i get the joke

Haruchiyo: i think we should all stop talking now

Mikey: Mitchy we need to talk a bit

Takemitchy: i told you this was a bad idea

[len-yx]

Mydei’s glaring queer coding (fixed)

(By the same person who did the twitter thread :))

First things first. Please be normal if I get something wrong. I have put so much effort into research (I am so dedicated to doing that stupid thread justice) and would like to be spoken too as if I’m an actual person who got something wrong and not like some evil being sent to intentionally spreading misinformation. I know people are much more forgiving on here than they are on twitter but my anxiety was fuck all after that original thread and I’m pretty nervous putting myself in that same situation but am desperate to not have that thread be “The Mydei queer-coding thread” that people use as reference when talking about Mydei’s queer coding. That’s all. Apologies for rambling. Onwards we go!

Amphoreus draws heavily from Ancient Greek (and Roman) influences. Greek (and Roman) armies were known for the fact same-sex relationships were viewed pretty uniquely. It was common and even encouraged for soldiers to form intimate relationships. I do want to mention (though not very relevant to Mydei’s queer coding) that despite this, Greece was not that queer normative (mostly). Yes, gay sex was typical, but it was still considered shameful to be penetrated and the most accepted form of two men in a relationship was pederasty. Which was a relationship between an adult male (usually of higher class), and a young boy in his teens. Really the higher class were the only ones that didn’t have to be concerned about judgment and their specific role in a relationship. I suppose Mydei is upper class anyway. So. This was all just something I thought was worth mentioning.

All of Mydei’s Kremnoan companions had references to Greek history tied to Alexander the Great (it’s actually very interesting I advise seeking out the meanings of their names yourself (and it’s further evidence that Mydei’s ties to Alexander the Great is far from coincidences and unreasonable stretches)). Hephaestion specifically is a reference to Alexander the Great’s closest friend and potential lover of the same name. Both the real Hephaestion and the one from HSR die of illness rather than in battle, how both were expected to die, leaving Alexander/Mydei to mourn alone. Hephaestion’s (HSR) death has extra attention drawn to it by not only being the last to die of the companions but also both Mydei and Hephaestion emphasising their close friendship. Calling one another things such as “dear friend”, “most trusted companion” etc. And with a real life comparison for this death it only emphasises how big of a deal Hephaestion’s death is meant to be for Mydei.

Funnily enough Alexander the Great’s mother, Olympias, actually claimed to be a descendant of Achilles who Mydei also has multiple references to.

There are many versions of how Achilles gained his immortal body, one being that as a baby his mother dipped him in the river Styx, holding onto him by his ankle. Similarly, Mydei’s immortal body was made known/gained (I don’t believe it’s clear?) after being thrown into the sea of souls also as a baby with a matching ”Achilles heel” in the form of his tenth thoracic vertebra.

The exact intent of Achille’s and Patroclus' relationship is very very debated. And Homer isn’t responding to my emails for an interview. But I do want to remind everyone that this isn’t about “was Achilles and Alexander in relationships with their best friends” (though neither of the two’s queerness is actually up for debate, they both had multiple romantic endeavours with men) but about how some of the reasons historians believe why the two were queer are used in Mydei’s character and why I believe this was intentionally done by hoyoverse. Achilles and Patroclus have been a symbol of close male relationships since the myth was realised, Alexander the Great even comparing his relationship with Hephaestion to the two. I’ve seen a few people saying that Phainon has some looser similarities to Patroclus however I have not yet read The Iliad (I just don’t have the time I’m very sorry) so I can’t speak on how intentional these similarities seem.

However, Mydei and Phainon do parallel another duo very deeply, Mydei’s own parents, Queen Gorgo and King Eurypon. Mydei and Phainon’s first meeting was a duel lasting ten days and nights that ended in a draw, the same as with Eurypon and Gorgo’s infamous first meeting at the Kremnos festival. Except instead of a close companionship forming after their draw, Eurypon promptly proposed to Gorgo. During 3.0 when Phainon challenges Mydei to a competition to see who can kill more titankin, he uses the phrasing “Just you and me. Let’s recreate the original Kremnos Festival.” On top of that, in 3.1 while retrieving Phainon from the trial we run into ”Chartonus” (quotations because it’s within the trial) Mydei tries to ask “Chartonus” where Phainon is and “Chartonus” has an angry rant before throwing Queen Gorgo’s signet ring at him. The ring isn’t brought up again until Mydei and Phainon’s goodbye. Mydei waits until the last moment to question if Phainon was the one who told Chartonus about his mother’s ring. Phainon’s response is just “who knows” but it’s pretty clear that the audience is at least meant to believe Phainon was the one who told Chartonus about it. There is one other thing that may tie Phainon and Mydei’s relationship to Eurypon and Gorgo. However it’s pretty much theory crafting and even leaks so I’ll just leave it at that.

It’s become almost a pattern in HSR to have deeply queer coded duo’s be compared to animals, specifically a predator animal and a prey animal (e.g. Acheron and Blackswan.) During the scene in the baths the bath sprite compares Mydei to a lion and Phainon to an oryx before describing the dynamic between the animals. Cut to a black screen with the two moaning due to the hot steam and the bath sprite continues describing the lion hunting the oryx in detail reminiscent of the “Rondo Across Countless Kalpas” animated short of Acheron (a variant of a lesbian character) and Blackswan (a woman who’s relationship with other female characters are placed on a higher pedestal) doing the tango. The bath scene is very much a mix of a joke and fanservice but in the context of a rather genuinely queer coded relationship I am treating it as a more genuine innuendo. Just before deciding on the bath competition we get to see Mydei’s internal dialogue and him struggling to figure out how to comfort Phainon after failing the demigod trial, intentionally creating a more intimate atmosphere. Phainon uses rather suggestive language when proposing the competition such as “Maybe we both need to relieve some stress” deliberately creating a charged atmosphere.

In the end Mydei’s character is deeply intertwined with historical narratives of male bonds, grief, and devotion that have been read through a queer lens for centruies. Whether through his parallels to Achilles and Alexander the Great, his profound connection with Phainon or Hoyoverse’s own storytelling patterns, the intent behind his characterization feels undeniably deliberate.

[mariusrenathyrs-crashout]

Thinking about this post talking Sparrow verus Lark and the care and attention differences they both receive based off of how well or poorly they both are able to cope with their respective traumas and mental illnesses. Not to say it is Henry or Mercedes faults since I can't even imagine the situation the two were put in, especially with how viscerally and full heartedly Lark came to resent Henry due to the Rogue's Curse; but it meant that Sparrow in a way turned into somewhat of a Glass Child (idk if this term is still commonly used so forgive me if it's out dated).

I think this is something very sad about Sparrow when it's placed into the context of his actions and life. As a child he and Lark were pretty 50/50 when it came to feelings and experiences: they both experienced the kidnapping, Lark's homunculi body died which he experienced but Sparrow experienced watching his twin die and attempting to kill their grandfather for it, they both experienced the attack that happened to Walter resulting in his legs being cut off, and both experienced the last big battle. But Lark got cursed by that goddamn Rogue's Curse and Sparrow didn't, and because he did and because of Willy, he is the one that shed the blood of Henry releasing the end times.

Of course he had a lot to deal with with the guilt and self hatred and resentment he can to feel because of it, not only towards his father but himself and others. It just makes sense that Lark's change in behavior and his literal intentional reckless endangerment warrants Henry and Mercedes to shift focus to Lark; but I think this also leads to the neglect of Sparrow. Sparrow who originally was the one who saw this Eldritch deity in his dreams as a child and drew it, who saw his brother be "killed", was kidnapped and beaten to a literal bloody mess, who experienced much of the same things Lark did.

But Sparrow experienced uniquely to Lark was being tasked with watching over Lark by Henry, "watch out for your brother, okay?". In that moment Sparrow became parentified, he put his issues on the back burner all for the sake of normalcy and so his parents didn't have to worry about 2 children rather than the 1. He did so much to take care of Lark to the point that this continued to adulthood. Where Sparrow let Lark live in his house with him and his wife, his wife who Lark slept with and never told Sparrow, Sparrow who knew but never said anything to disturb the peace and didn't want his brother feel more guilty so he played ignorant. Who helped Lark try and sit upon the throne by taking on his visage and through Lark's mouth pleaded how it was both of their faults, that it was the twins responsibility to fix this not just Lark, not only so Henry could hear it but so Lark could as well. Who wanted normalcy so badly he named his son Normal and named his daughter Hero for what he couldn't be. Who loves Normal but is so afraid that Normal will grow up to be like him and tells his son it scares him so bad that Normal doesn't have a mean bone in his body and is willing to get hurt for others happiness. Sparrow who did egregious things to preserve his family, only to be told by his parents that his brother was forgiven because his actions weren't his own but Sparrow in all his sacrifices and willing to be the bad guy or neglected child was at fault and they couldn't forgive him. Henry hated how he got treated by his father, yet here he is, having put those same standards on Sparrow. He loves Sparrow, but doesn't like Sparrow.

Rip baby girl. I'm sorry everything sucked so bad and then your wife got shot and your house was burned down. You really never stood a chance, huh.

[mourningsbane]

Okay this blog and the story has been circulating slowly in my head for days now and I feel like tossing out a theory because I never theorize but here I am

So. Tanglefern’s greatest mistake. I believe that he may have poisoned Honeyspring in some way. If not a direct poisoning, he was at the very least aware of and partially involved in Honeyspring’s rapid death. But I also think he was not aware she was pregnant. I do not know if the kits were not quite right because they were too early in development, some kind of curse stuff, or because of the poison/illness. Either way, it seems Tanglefern wished them no ill will due to the intense despair he felt when the crude surgery (is it surgery if on a corpse?) failed. Another note; I’m not fully sure Tanglefern meant for/wanted them to die. ‘There’s nothing more I can do for you’. And it seems very heavily implied that Rootstar ordered the c-section, which is where the ‘no respect for the dead!’ Line comes in from Bearface. Along with this, I’m like 99% sure Honeyspring and Flaildrizzle were in a romantic relationship and were planning to raise those kits together. Honeyspring looked so soft in her dream, maybe they were trying to look less spooky as to not scare Flaildrizzle?

I do not believe Honeyspring is ‘evil’. She is scared and oh so alone, and is lashing out because of it. She just wants help, as I believe that is what the messed up mouse is huffing at Tanglefern, and potentially Sweetkit too. Tanglefern even wonders why StarClan won’t take them, implying that in life she never did anything evil enough to warrant going to kitty cat hell. At least, not that Tanglefern would know. And, seeing how their mere presence is warping the prey, I think she could have killed Sweetkit if she wanted, but they didn’t.

A very out-there theory is that Honeyspring may have been kept from StarClan because of the rage fuelling the end of her life (towards Tanglefern?). In my opinion, she seems aware that her death wasn’t natural. Their first headshot reference says ‘I will never forgive you’ which I believe is specifically aimed at whoever orchestrated or at least played a part in her death. Her second reference says kind with a question mark in brackets, which means they were at the very least kind in life. Not being able to communicate with anyone, those who see her being terrified, not being allowed into StarClan, they must all tear at their mind and likely their overall stability. I honestly don’t think she’s as malicious as we seem to be getting led to believe.

This may also be me grasping at straws but with the ‘there’s something underneath the ground’ and the description of her disease-reeking blood seeping into the dirt floor I wonder if that’s something. Definitely not I’m reaching but meh it’s fun.

Finally, I’m not fully sure that, whatever Tanglefern’s involvement was, he intended for them to die. ‘Distantly, some raw part of him, carbed open like the body before him, realized it was all for nothing’ now while it’s likely this is just in reference to the c-section, I feel this could also be the fact Honeyspring died and may not have been meant to. There was some kind of plan, I’m just not sure what it was’

Basically a summary I believe Tanglefern had an influence in Honeyspring’s sudden demise but was not aware of the kits, Bearface was NOT happy about the c-section, Flaildrizzle and Honeyspring were a couple and going to raise those kits, Honeyspring wasn’t evil in life but is now losing stability due to being so isolated, and Tanglefern may not have intended Honeyspring to die. I may be super off I am not good at theories and it is very late. But hey. All in good fun.

Anyways giving Honeyspring a big hug I love them and she is spinning around in my brain like a rotisserie chicken 24/7

also omg sorry this got so long i got lowkey rambly here but my brain is going whir because oh my god this is so cool-

Worry not, I do not mind receiving long post! I, too, tend to get rambly when talking about things, so I certainly don't blame you. Plus, I love reading theories! It gives me insight into what people think, and I don't want any lore elements to feel like they came out of nowhere! <3

As for your theories, you are very close! Tanglefern gave Honeyspring Mourningsbane instead of Clottingroot when treating the injury on her hind leg.

Honeyspring and Flaildrizzle were mates, and you're right that Honeyspring tried to look "softer". The time is soon, and Honeyspring didn't want to startle her. Honeyspring is weak and intangible at the moment, but not for long. And you're on the right track with her "disease-reeking blood seeping into the dirt floor"; her rotting body taints the very soil.

I agree that Honeyspring is not a villain in the stereotypical sense! She was very well-liked in life, and had a lot going for her! I would say that she's both a victim and a perpetrator.

[ayeshascorner]

Some of my controversial opinions, scroll and fuck off if your sensitive idc

-Daddy kinks aren't weird, if you find them weird then get off of Tumblr cuz ur ass is gonna have a hard life, or ur just young.

-The teacher/student concept with Tom is hot, the age gaps are too although there's a limit, but overall it shouldn't matter as long as the reader is at least at the adult age, idk I really don't care as long as the fic is good

-The usage of "y/n" makes my face contort nd makes me wanna actually fucking die sometimes (MY OPINION, it reminds me of those tiktok POVs 💀)

-Sw in fanfic is okay, I genuinely dont see a problem with it, supporting it is okay unless its romancing SA or r-word and promoting it in any way (Which it isn't so idk who's ass ppl pulled that out of, u gotta make bank some way) <3

-Rough sex in fanfics doesnt= non con (I think everyone knew this already just making sure cuz some bitches r dumb) (another edit: y’all this doesn’t mean that you can write straight up 🍇 or mentions of 🍇 in your fanfic cuz that just isn’t sane, there’s a damn limit)

-If yall want these toll bitches to go away PLEASE I fucking BEG PLEASE stop mentioning them cuz that motivates them, they are petty as fuck. (ion support toll y'all so dont start- cuz I WILL drag your ass if a get accusations 😻😻 I'm not a weird bitch!)

-When someone posts something u dont like, just scroll, no one actually cares about your comments unless its support, like genuinely shut the fuck up, ESPECIALLY if its at the fic writers, they are giving it to YOU not themselves.

-I feel like some of the ppl complaining about the kid problem on here are kids themselves, I mean.. I can tell some of y'all aren't 17+ nd thats fine unless yk what ur getting urself into..

-If your a little sensitive ass snowflake then Tumblr genuinely isn't the place for you (I've said this multiple times nd ill repeat myself even more)

-"He's a full-grown man with a wife!" Shut ur dumbass up, stupidass hoes mad asf over small shit, like okay and? Ya' think were actually gonna fuck him?💀💀

-"🍇 isn't 🍇 if you like it" Your sick, shut the fuck up.

-"G-Guys I dont like the smut😖" Stfu and get off Tumblr.. Its obviously not the place for you 💋

-Last but not least...💀

Lets not do this, its genuinely stupid...Like why are we comparing races over a man who doesn't even know who we r? Be so fr.. Gtfo my asks if ur gonna say this 💋

[deathbxnny]

Have I watched/read JJBA kinda. Is it my new hyper fixation yes. Anyways Giorno Giovanna, Jotaro Kujo, & Jolyne Cujoh with a reader (platonic or romantic idc) that’s like Firefly and her stance is just Sam but it’s called Iron Maiden!

(＃＞＜)

JJBA characters with a Firefly-like! Fem! Reader | Jolyne Cujoh, Jotaro Kujo, Giorno Giovanna

As someone who can easily say that JJBA is their favorite anime, I absolutely love this idea, Anon!! I made this a romantic hc, so I hope you'll like it!<33

Content: Vague mentions of chronical illness, mentions of potential future death by illness, angst, hurt/comfort, sfw

Reader is fem/afab in this, but no pronouns are mentioned!

((Not proofread))

》JOLYNE CUJOH

Jolyne met you in jail as a cell mate, one she quickly found a lot in common with, especially regarding your rather special stand abilities. But your illness is what really drew her to you and made her determined to keep you safe after you became a couple. Her heart ached knowing you were stuck in a prison, when you should be out there experiencing life as much as you still could, but alas, you were here with her, and she tried to make things easier for you with her presence.

She was left stunned however, when you were attacked by some stand users and quickly found out that you perhaps didn't need the extensive help and care she had given you after all. Sam, your stand, was more than enough to destroy any enemy in sight, something she found absolutely awesome. Jolyne would absolutely cheer you on from the sidelines, completely forgetting that she had to fight too.

It makes her proud to see how strong you are despite your potential deadly fate and hopes to stay at your side until the end.

》JOTARO KUJO

You both were childhood friends turned lovers, and so he was very much aware of your condition from day one. He watched as your illness progressed to become worse and worse until you were left unable to walk properly anywhere. But what hurt the most deep down was that you always remind me so gentle and calm with him anyway, despite his rather aloof and indifferent personality. His mother often teased him playfully for being so soft with you and only you, but he'd just stubbornly deny it every time.

With that said, anyone that hurts you is practically dead before they know it. He doesn't play around when it comes to your health or well-being, and so it does come to some sort of relief that your stand is extremely powerful. It made protecting and keeping you safe a lot easier when you could just do it yourself, too. This doesn't mean he won't keep his eyes on you at all times anyway.

Jotaro is somewhat in denial about what's most likely going to be your early passing due to your sickness, despite his rational mind. He doesn't want to think or hear about it, as it hurts too much to lose you as well.

》GIORNO GIOVANNA

Giorno met you through Bucciarati, and whilst you weren't directly a part of the gang, you were still an important person in it due to your stands immense strength. You immideatly introduced him to it through a battle against an enemy stand user, which made him take interest in you initially. You were gentle and soft-spoken, so it was definitely a contrast he quickly became infatuated with over time. But what really got him about you was that you were able to do all these great things despite being gravely ill.

It served as a reminder that life was cruel, and yet Giorno wasn't phased by it. In fact, he hoped that once he was successful with the mission of overtaking the boss, he'd eventually be able to get you the medical care you needed. He was determined to find a way to stop the illness or at least make life better for you, so you became another goal for him to fight for.

You can always count on him for anything and everything, that's for sure. He loves you greatly and wants to show you that by staying by you even when things get worse. So if you inevitably die, then he'll be there until your last breath.

[vemuabhi]

What Sanji is like when Falling in Love

- Ft. Chubby Reader

Hey People! After a long time, I'm here with a Sanji Fic. Please show me your love and support by reblogs.

The part-2 is here people. Please check it out!

What Sanji is like when falling in love

Pairing : Sanji X Fem! Chubby! Reader

Prompts taken from : Bas-writes (4 ; 6 ; 21 ; 30)

Warnings : A bit suggestive but non really. Mostly Fluffy ; Thick Thighs Save lives ; Stretch marks ; Making food for Reader ; Loving Touches

Word count : 1.7K

copyright © vemuabhi

Though Likes are cute and all, Please Reblog me if you like my writings.

Lazy afternoons

The travelling on the sea has been fun because of the crew and their liveliness but there are some days when everything is very quiet like, sometimes Luffy and co. are so serious and trying to fish, sometimes they are all playing some random game which is just not at all understandable. Only Luffy, Ussop and Chopper could understand and play it. No one else can even understand it. Except for Robin who denies she understood to avoid playing. Nami doesn’t care and doesn’t wish to know what they are doing. Now today, the trio fell asleep post lunch leaving the crew to calm down and rest for the time.

Leaving you and Sanji near the Tangerine trees on the back of sunny. Both of you were tired after cleaning up the plates and kitchen. The empty glasses of orange juice were on the table. It was too hot and luckily Sanji got you the juice to cool you down. You both sat on the bench which had the umbrella to protect you from the sun. Sanji had dark circles under his eyes and his eyes kept drooping.

“Do you wanna sleep”, your question made him to turn towards you and smile. He glanced towards his shoes and nodded.

“Yesterday’s night watch is making me like this Y/N”, he said as his tired blue orbs met yours.

“You are tired. Lay down. Ill make sure no one disturbs you for a while”, you said as you took the book which was on your lap and placed it beside you. Sanji’s cheeks reddened as he noticed your action.

“Am I… Supposed to-”

“Yeah, you can. I mean no force ofco-”

“I’ll. I’ll take up the offer”, he said while you took your kerchief and wiped the blood from his nose making the latter gulp.

Sanji slowly placed his legs on the bench and leaned down on your lap. The moment he felt your soft thighs on his cheek, he almost got a nosebleed again but he tried his best to not die. Noticing his nervousness, you ran your fingers in his hair making him flinch at the touch but he soon accepted your touch. Your soothing touch and the soft thighs made him to calm down. The sound of the waves relaxed him to the core. A yawn escaped his mouth. He closed his eyes and within seconds he fell asleep. His soft snores indicated how tired he was after making so much food for the rowdy crew.

After sleeping peacefully for a while, he woke up to the sky turning orange and the soft cushion wasn’t a cushion. Upon careful inspection he noticed that it was your thighs and his eyes widened at how long he had slept on your divine lap till now. He got up and apologised at his behaviour which you chuckled.

“Don’t have to be sorry Sanji. I’m happy that you to sleep till now”, you smiled at him making his heart skip a beat. As he was about to say something, the captain yelled for Sanji asking for food as he noticed the blond was awake now. That made you to giggle.

“They cant live without you”, you said suggesting him to go to feed them which he obliged. Sanji’s new fetish unlocked. Your thighs. Your soft plump thighs.

Needless to say, after that day you found Sanji come to you whenever he was tired and sleepy. He wanted to feel your touch in his golden locks. He wanted his cheeks to be met with the best pillow in the world, your thighs. Of course, he wasn’t vocal about all that but anyone could understand his actions at that point. You certainly allowed the cook to rest on your lap whenever he approached you. Sanji, was not the guy who would show his vulnerable side to women. But he started to slowly show that to you.

Sometimes he would just lay down on your lap and face you while you both talked about nothings. He would talk about the general topics which ranged from the news he had read that day to talking about the songs which he heard recently. Sometimes he made jokes which weren’t that funny but that’s what made them funny. You never not laughed at his jokes. Never knew Sanji was so talkative, usually he would always listen but when someone is listening to him, he opened up more and more. The heart eyes of Sanji never appeared during these times and he stayed calm. His eyes showed… adoration.

Little treats for the little deeds

After you had let him sleep on your lap, he never once missed to give you a special dessert or a special dish in gratitude. His way of showing you thankyou was it. While you guys were at the dinner table, he always… always made sure to slip a little treat near your plate making you smile at him while you nibbled on it.

“Ah! Not fair! Even I want that whatever Y/N is having”, Luffy cooed being yelled by the cook to shut up and eat his share of meat. His blue eyes looked into your direction while you still continued to smile at him. He had to avert his gaze from yours to stop his spreading blush more obvious to the rest of the members.

Sanji, being so precise while he selected ingredients for cooking, he made sure to especially be careful while he worked on yours. Some times when he would just be engrossed in his cooking book to a point where he wouldn’t even notice you coming into the kitchen. You would just sit across from him and continued to read your book. The silence with Sanji was also what you fancied soon enough. His presence was just… that calming.

When he finally had noticed you, he would gasp making your gaze turn towards him. His porcelain skin turned red as he smiled and walked towards you. He sat on the table and talk about the recipe that he was going to prepare.

“Everyone would be so amazed by this, I’m telling you”, he said as he gently took your hand in his and rubbed his thumb gently. “So, I feel like, I’ll be needing… somebodies help to make it”, he then looked at you with a slight pout.

“Haha, so tell me mister cook, what should be done?”, his smile grew, he pulled your hand and lead you to the counter to prepare the food. Sanji could easily make it on his own. He didn’t require anyone’s help. He could just have you sitting there being pretty while he cooked, but he didn’t want you to leave. And what way to keep you around than to ask your “help” because he “can’t” do it on his own.

Lets just say that cooking never felt this fun before. It felt refreshing to be cooking along side Sanji. He just knew… just knew how to make it right. The little intimacy moments you had shared were what made it so important to you both.

Tender Touches

Sanji had never been in a relationship. Not once his fate aligned with his pursue of love. Now that the stars had listened, he had a chance with you. But he didn’t want to get too cocky.

Then you could expect how thrilled he was when you asked him if he wanted to help you apply sunscreen. He almost crashed while approaching you. You laid down on the lawn chair with your back facing the sun. Sanji almost had a nosebleed when he touched your back. Just as he thought, you were so soft. He thought of your thighs as a reference when he imagined how soft you would be over all.

He applied the sunscreen on your back, while he lingered a bit too long holding the softness of your love handles. He gulped after the task was completed. You held his tie and pulled him closer to you and placed a kiss on his cheek making him to fall to his knees while he still gazed at you. That resulted you to again wipe the blood from his nose.

“You’ll have to get used to that, Sanji kun”, you ruffled his silky hair while he just chuckled. He blinked slowly as his gaze fixed on you. The crew could literally feel butterflies in their stomach when they watched you two. Like how Sanji’s wishes came true. That made him to lean into you to place a kiss on your soft plump cheek. His sudden action made you to chuckle, while he raised on eyebrow, “You sure you can handle it Y/N”. Maybe he could get cocky after all.

Silver marks

Night watch was especially given to one member and Luffy, chopper were exception from it. Sometimes when he was on night watch, there were you, leaning your back on the ship rail while his arms were on wither sides of you. He smelled really good. As if he took a shower just then. There were little to no space between you two. He used to get flustered and shy in the beginning but, as time went on, he was getting more and more confident on initiating kisses.

Tilting your head to right by placing his fingers under your chin, and closing the gap between you two. Your arms wrapped around his neck and pulled him even closer while deepening the kiss. Your fingers gently laced in his golden locks. His hands travelled to your thighs and pulled them up, aligning them on his waist while his slender, but damn strong arms carried you to place you on the bench.

Sanji pulled away from the kiss to look at your body beneath him. His gaze shifted towards your top, which was ridden almost past your stomach. Now for the first time, he almost had a full view of your torso. His fingertips traced along the silver lines on your body. You could see the love and lust glimmer in his blue eyes because of the moon. His white cheeks were turning pink, and his breathing was getting heavy because of the stretch marks on you. New kink unlocked. Stretch marks. Your Silver marks.

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Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: 琅琊榜/Nirvana in Fire.

Nirvana in Fire is a 2015 historical series best described as either a complicated succession drama set in the premodern Chinese imperial palace, or the story of a man who didn't die a decade ago and has decided to make it everyone else's problem.

And really, I almost feel silly giving my glib little summary, because Nirvana in Fire is so well-known of a property. It's a classic for a reason, and that reason is that it's legitimately very good. This show is what happens when you adapt a solid story, get a bunch of very talented actors, and throw a huge amount of money at it. It's incredibly popular and highly acclaimed, and it earned all of the hype.

Still, while I bet there are few people adjacent to c-drama stuff who've never heard of Nirvana in Fire, I'm sure there are plenty who haven't watched it. After all, it looks like one of those slow, serious shows with a lot of ponderous talking and no joy. If that's the impression you've been given, I could imagine looking at the 54-episode commitment and saying, I don't need that in my life.

I am here to tell you you're wrong. It is a banger of a show. It's tense. It's funny. It's heartbreaking. It’s exceptionally clever. It’s jaw-droppingly stupid. It’s romantic. It’s tragic. It has smart plots and bizarre subplots. And that's not even touching the thing with the yeti.

So in case you're one of those people who's heard of Nirvana in Fire, but has put off watching it for one reason or another, I'm here with five reasons I think you should try it.

1. Epic Shit

Did you like the Lord of the Rings? More specifically, did you really like the second Peter Jackson film? Great, then you're all set for this.

I guess I could have called this Game of Thrones without the dragons, but that's not actually the vibe at all. Game of Thrones is much more sensational and salacious, with all the blood and butts and what-not. The Tolkien comparison is more apt, I think, because Nirvana in Fire is equally about as wholesome as you can get in a property where dudes are still getting stabbed all the time.

This is a show about vengeance. And yeah, justice for the fallen, sure, that's fine too. But mostly it's about a bunch of good people joining forces to make sure the bastards who did wrong pay, with their lives as necesary.

The problem, though, is that these bastards are incredibly powerful, which means that a pure brute-force approach isn't going to work. Accordingly, this quickly becomes a story about the power of smart teamwork to exact retribution on some people who can (and did!) legally get away with murder -- and our heroes are some of the people with their necks most on the line if anything goes wrong.

Don't let the Middle Earth comparison fool you into thinking this is all epic swordfights. It's not. (I mean, for one thing, as well-funded as this project is, it doesn't have Peter Jackson Money.) The vast majority of the tension in the show comes from dialogue and slow, terrible realizations. The fight scenes are almost a relief from the nail-biting intensity of intimate conversations about getting a letter from somebody's ex-wife or returning a book.

All told, the show has that incredible almost-RPG vibe of going through all the little subquests and cutscenes you find along the way to defeat the final boss. The plot carefully unravels a multi-tendriled mystery told to you by people in incredible costumes. It doesn't get much more epic than that.

(Nirvana in Fire is also a cautionary tale about how you should be very careful with who gets invited to your birthday party.)

2. A chronically ill protagonist

Okay, right in the first episode, it is established that the main character has three whole completely different names and an old nickname. I'm going to call him Mei Changsu for the duration of this rec post, but let the record show that I could just have easily gone with one of the other three.

What you learn in that same first episode is that Mei Changsu used to be a palace insider, the cocky son of a noble family, only now nearly everyone he used to know thinks he's dead. Also, he's not far off from being actually dead -- he has an unspecified terminal condition that's mostly managed, provided he stays in his little mountain hideaway with his handsome doctor bestie and doesn't return to his old stomping ground and start kicking over hornets' nests.

So guess what he's about to do.

I have to make a note of how brilliant the casting is here: Hu Ge is an action actor! He is a kickpuncher of a man! And I think it's great that you can sort of see his frustration, as well as Mei Changsu's, at having to spend the whole series wrapped in countless layers of fabric and/or lying in bed while everyone around him gets to be the badass action heroes.

Mei Changsu's not faking it, either -- he's actually dying. He expends his energy where he thinks it's necessary, and sometimes that means he has to spend the following week in bed. He's constantly frustrated with himself for what he can't do anymore. He's racing a clock, and that clock is his own failing body. If he dies, the only hope anyone here has for justice dies with him.

He gets two love interests that the show treats pretty much equally. One's a lady general who wasn't even a love interest in the book. The other's the handsome prince who was initially going to be his textual romantic partner in same book, until the author hopped genres from danmei to general historical drama. I can't even call this a love triangle, because there's no competition. He just gets a wife and a husband -- in that he gets neither, because circumstances and his own illness keep him distant from them. He lies to both of then about his condition (among other things). He wants to be with them both and knows he can't be with either. And they in turn have to learn to accept what of him they can and can't have.

(Also, Nihuang (her) and Jingyan (him) are both incredibly gorgeous, which is exactly what bisexual genius Mei Changsu deserves.)

Obviously this isn't a perfect representation of life with chronic illness, largely because Mei Changsu is an incredily wealthy man who lives in a universe with what's basically magic medicine. However, I've seen the story's treatment of him and his condition resonate with a lot of chronically ill viewers, so even with the fantasy layer on it, there's definitely something there.

3. Dave

I have already told the story of how Meng Zhi became "Dave," but long story short, he's such a Dave that I legitimately forget his character's real name. He embodies Daveness. He's The Ultimate Dave.

Dave is an excellent fighter, a loyal friend -- and a terrible liar. He's possbly the only straightforward character in the entire show. When he's asked to be duplicitous, he's comically bad at it. Dave will never do a heel turn. I was misled at first by his semi-evil facial hair, but I have seen the error of my ways. Dave is pure lawful good.

And the reason I list Dave as such a selling point is that having a Dave means you always know what's going on. This is because Dave never knows what's going on, and he has no ego about that, so he asks questions, and other characters have to explain to him what just happened, and that is how you figure out what's going on.

It's an incredibly smart move on the drama's part, because some of the (very fun) schemes are so complicated that there's no way for you, the viewer, to understand them just by watching. Without the internal monologues and omniscent narration of a book, the machinations are opaque. You need things explained -- but why would the schemers explain their schemes? Well, Dave needs some exposition, so here you go.

So if you're worried that you might be left feeling stupid by a show where so many sneaky people are hatching so many complex plans, worry not! Like the good man he is, Dave has your back.

4. A Million Amazing Antagonists

If you like bad guys, this is a show for you. This show has brilliant bad guys all the way down. It has bad guys at every turn. It has bad guys for every taste. Welcome to Big Liang's Big Bad Guy Emporium, where we guarantee you'll walk out of here with a bad guy you like, or your money back!

(And yes, this set of pictures is also to say that their costume budget was entirely well-spent.)

Without getting too far into spoilers, I will say that the basic situation underlying the whole series is this: The emperor has done a lot of bad things, and he has enlisted a bunch of people's help in hiding those bad things, so much so that many of those other people have done even more bad things the emperor didn't even know about -- and then everyone has gone to great lengths to cover those up as well. Our protagonists spend the whole series unraveling this colossal shitshow and bringing people to task for their crimes.

So really, if you're going to spend 54 episodes taking down the baddies, they've got to be baddies you love to see taken down. And these are -- in part because all of them have crystal-clear, rock-solid motivations for their actions. Nobody here is a moustache-twirling comic-book-villain baddie. They're all bad for reasons that are very understandable in their individual contexts. And not a single one of them is going to go down without a fight.

5. World's Best Mom

(Sidebar: The fact that four out of five of my reasons to watch the show are individual or groups of characters should be your strongest indicator that this is an intensely character-driven story.)

This is not a Dead Mom Show. Okay, some moms are dead, but mostly this is a Moms Are Alive And Often Cause Problems Show, which is a lot of what makes the palace drama so delicious. But there is one Good Mom who stands out above all the rest: Consort Jing.

Played with perfect grace and devastating politeness by the stunning Liu Mintao, Consort Jing is a skilled doctor and excellent baker who starts the show with a low-level status among the women of the palace. She swallows down all kinds of mistreatment because she's not in a place to oppose it -- and when she can retaliate, it must only be through soft power. She loves her jock son with all her heart, but because of both their relatively poor positions in the hierarchy, she doesn't get to see him all that much. She wants to be an asset to him, while all the time she has to fear becoming a liability.

She is also the smartest person in any room that she's in, unless she's in a room with Mei Changsu, and even then it may be a tie.

There are lots of great characters in the show that I could have highlighted here, and plenty of them are women, but Consort Jing in particular never ceases to impress me. She is trapped in a gilded cage, married to a man who [lengthy list of spoilers that are traumatic to her in particular], and held hostage by how every time she even looks like she's out of line, it puts both her and her boy in danger. She's the most vulnerable of any of our good guys. Kind of like Wang Zhi, she's got to be clever or she's dead.

Consort Jing is not part of Mei Changsu's original plan. She figures out his plan and makes herself part of it -- and entirely remotely, as she and he aren't even in the same room until episode 40 or so. She puts herself in great danger to make sure he succeeds, not because it will necessarily do her any good, but because Jingyan needs him. This woman has been captain of the Mei Changsu/Jingyan ship for like twenty years already.

Oh, and did I mention her outfits?

I love you, Consort Mom.

Are you ready to watch it yet?

Get it on Viki! Get it on YouTube! Get it on YouTube but in a different playlist! (And also maybe get it on Amazon? Not in my region, but maybe in yours.)

I will warn you that it does take off running -- I think I saw someone say it introduces nineteen characters in the first episode? I was worried that I'd be too innundated by situations and flashbacks and names to be able to follow. By the second or third episode, though, I was rolling with it. So if you feel like you're struggling at the beginning, stick with it a bit. See if you don't feel it start to click.

...Man, reading over this post has left me going, oh, but I missed that! and that! and that guy! And yeah, the truth is that there are just so many great things about the show that limiting myself to only five (and being limited to only thirty images) was tough. I'm sure that people reblogging will add their own must-see elements.

Truly, this is a show that deserves its reputation. It may not be for everyone, but if this is the kind of thing that you like, it is a shining example of that thing.

Besides, you have to love a production where everyone was clearly having just a whole lot of fun being big ol' costumed dorks.