#I can just SEE him headbanging at the sink
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Dance Party
König x Ghost x Reader
Your boyfriends don't dance, but that won't stop you from trying to convince them anyway :)
Warnings/tags: Drinking, unedited nonsense, but otherwise none really. Simon is forced to have fun because I said so. König tries to get you to headbang while drunk. Good stuff. This is just a fun one I thought of while listening to Rasputin because who wouldn't look hot as hell dancing to that
Words: 1331
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"Woo!" you cheer as Soap spins dramatically, dancing phenomenally badly between you and Gaz while you all laugh, drinks in hand.
The team has the next few days off, so of course you and Soap made a liquor run and Gaz set up his speaker, and the three of you are having a blast in the common room.
Soap cheers, stumbling backwards a bit as he takes another heavy swig of his glass. You catch him with a giggle as you both spin to Gaz.
"Come on, Gaz, I know you can dance, let's go!"
He laughs, placing his drink down. "If you insist."
He bows dramatically before hitting a move perfectly on beat, spinning and tapping his feet in a complicated freestyle that has you and Soap howling his name. "Gaz, Gaz, Gaz, YEAHHH!"
He laughs as the song ends, picking up his drink again, and the three of you turn to the couch shoved up to the wall where a few others sit watching you three.
"Price!" you call, running over as your captain shakes his head emphatically. "Come on, I bet there's a great dancer hiding under there, let's go."
He glares at you, but Soap and Gaz are already on either side of him, pulling him to his feet and to the center of your little dancefloor. "Come on, Captain," Gaz pleads. "Give us a little something."
Price groans, bouncing his shoulders a bit and waving his fists to the beat.
"Fucking beautiful," Soap slurs, swaying into Gaz. You both steady the Sergeant, and Price takes the opportunity to slip from the room. You'll probably get reprimanded tomorrow, but it was worth it.
"Aww," you whine. "No one's dancing."
The only person left on the couch now is König, who has been nursing a bottle and keeping an eye on you the whole night. Simon never comes to these things.
You pout, making your way over to flop on the couch. "Köniiiig. Dance with me."
He shakes his head, one hand catching your drink before you accidentally dump it into his lap.
You hear your name being called and notice the music has been turned off. Soap is gone somewhere, probably to a bathroom, and Gaz has hoisted his speaker up over his shoulder. "I'm turning in for the night." He gives you both a nod, smiling. "See ya tomorrow."
He leaves and you sigh, sinking into the cushions. "I wanted to dance a bit more."
König shrugs, gently pulling your drink out of your hand. "Let's get you back."
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As soon as König places you down in the entryway you giggle, running to the counter to pull your phone out. You look back over your shoulder, grinning at him standing there with his arms crossed.
You press play and spin around fully, clasping your hands behind your back as you saunter over to him. The music bounces off the walls, and you already feel your shoulders and hips swaying as you grab his forearms and pull them down. "Dance with me."
He glances to the side, the muscles in his neck tensing.
"König, there's no one else here. Just for a bit?"
You frown, watching him tilt his head back with a dramatic groan. "Fine. But not to this."
He walks over to turn your phone off, pulling out his own and cranking the volume up with a smile. "This is much better."
He presses play and his phone booms, the sound of his metal playlist thundering around the room.
"König," you laugh, "I am wayyy too drunk to be headbanging right now."
"You wanted me to dance."
"Yes, but," you trail off as he pulls you in by your hips, quirking an eyebrow up at you. "Ok, just a few songs and then we slow down."
He smirks. "Deal."
Before you can react he pulls you in tight, bouncing on his heels with a laugh as he drops his body to the beat, pausing with you just above the floor. You scream, slamming a palm over your mouth as he pulls you up again. "Too much?"
"A little."
He nods. "Sorry. How about this?"
He pulls you up to wrap your legs around his waist, giving him the freedom to bounce and swing his body however he wants, headbanging over your shoulder.
You can't help it, you burst out in a loud guffaw.
He slows a bit, laughing too. "What's so funny?"
"I'm not even dancing," you pant. "I'm just along for the ride."
He swings his head back and forth to a harder riff, hair flying around his face. "Still counts," he yells.
"No it doesnnnnn't!" You screech, clinging to him as he throws his body back and forth again, both of you cackling together as he spins.
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He does stick to his word, though, and puts you down to change it after a few songs. His face is flushed, and his grin splits his face in a way that would be borderline terrifying if you didn't love him so much.
You turn it back to your trashy party tunes, promising him you two can dance to his playlist when you're a bit more sober.
With a flourish, you spin and jump across the kitchen to him, pulling his hands over your hips. "Now we can both dance."
He huffs. "We just were."
You wave your hips back and forth, but he doesn't move, just chewing his lip a bit.
"Come on," you soothe. "It's just like what we were doing before but my feet are on the ground this time. Don't think about it too much."
He makes a nervous little sound in his throat but lets you sway him, lifting his hand to spin under him before pulling him close again. "See? I'm already a shitty dancer, you can't embarrass yourself any more than I can."
"We'll see about that."
"Will we now?"
He smirks, his hands tightening as he starts to really dance with you, bouncing to the beat and spinning with you clamped to his chest. You're too drunk to do anything more complicated than that, but he seems to enjoy himself anyway, laughing as you get more and more excited, practically jumping up and down in front of him.
The gravelly sound of a throat being cleared pulls you both out of it, and you turn to see Simon walk into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes.
Oh no, was he trying to sleep?
You open your mouth to apologize, but König is already grinning above you. "Simon!" he calls, jumping over to the disgruntled Brit. "Come dance with us."
Simon levels him with a signature glare, only to grunt in surprise as König bends over, throwing Simon over his shoulder and careening to the center of the kitchen before putting him down.
You freeze, holding your breath and ready to intervene.
Then Simon Riley laughs.
Not a chuckle. Not a snort.
Simon fucking Riley looks up at König's reddened face and wild hair and laughs, a roughened rush of air you'd never heard his lungs make before, and you hope you hear again.
You breathe a sigh of relief, leaning against the counter to catch your breath as you watch König take charge, spinning the pair around and waving his body, making the other man smile. Simon doesn't sway at all, but he lets König lead him around the room, clasping their hands together in a dramatic march before the Austrian throws their hands up and spins under them.
König giggles, spinning again before stumbling to the side.
Immediately Simon is catching him, hoisting him up against his chest with a shake of his head.
"Alright, time for bed, big guy."
König leans his head back to wink at you upside down. "I knew he was a dancer."
You give him a proud thumbs up, watching him flip back over to give the Brit a loud kiss on his cheek.
It's the first time you've ever seen Simon blush.
#trying to write metal dancing with a partner and no injuries was a trip yall#i just really love them#könig#simon riley#simon ghost riley#könig x reader#simon riley x reader#ghost x reader#ghost fanfiction#könig x ghost x reader#könig x ghost
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24 or 25 for Steddie 😊
Thank you! :D
I went with 25: dancing in the kitchen while cooking dinner. And it came out a bit more silly than romantic because, well, they're dorks. Future-fic AU; established relationship.
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Steve folds his arms, looking amused. “Okay, but I still don’t see how that counts as dancing.”
“Heresy,” Eddie yelps, thrown off his rhythm enough that he probably looks more like a dog shaking off a bath than a self-respecting metalhead. He straightens up, shoves his hair back out of his face to get a good look at Steve, who is wearing a shit-eating grin that could not more clearly proclaim that he’s trying to get a reaction. Eddie stabs a finger at him. “You’re just lucky that I keep you around for your cooking skills—”
“Oh, are those the skills you keep me around for?” Steve asks, faux innocent.
“Well,” Eddie allows graciously, “there are other benefits as well.”
“Right.”
“But that doesn’t mean you can disparage the culture of my people.”
Steve cracks up at that, losing the supercilious veneer all at once. He’s barefoot in sweatpants and one of Eddie’s Iron Maiden concert t-shirts, the bleach-stained one from the Beast on the Road tour that Wayne took him to in Toledo the year he turned sixteen. It’s the first of many t-shirts that Steve has stolen out of Eddie’s wardrobe. He pretty much only wears them around the apartment, and it makes something stupidly warm well up inside of Eddie even when, like this, Steve is giving him shit.
Maybe especially then.
“I mean it, Harrington.” He takes a step closer to poke Steve in the chest. Steve folds his hand around Eddie’s fingers and draws them up to his lips to kiss, still grinning.
“Sure you do,” he says.
“Okay, that’s it,” Eddie says, and leans across him to turn the stove burner off. The water in the pot burbles to a discontented simmer as he tugs Steve back into the slightly less cramped area of their very cramped kitchen, where the blue has almost worn off the linoleum tiles from the foot traffic through here. The place is a shithole, honestly, but it’s their shithole apartment, and that makes it something close to paradise as far as Eddie is concerned.
“Come on, man,” Steve complains, although he’s still smiling. “Let me just…”
“Nope, no, you’ve thrown the gauntlet down—” he breaks off agreeably when Steve pulls him into a laughing kiss, then steps back before Steve can deepen it, grabbing Steve’s hands to settle them on his hips and ignoring his pout. On the boombox wedged above the sink, the tape flips over from Rattlehead to Chosen Ones and Eddie can’t help but headbang a little to the gleefully energetic intro. Steve just watches him, looking both amused and achingly fond.
“I have no idea what the fuck that’s supposed to mean,” he says.
“It means,” Eddie says, with a pointed little shimmy that makes Steve’s grip tighten a little, like it’s instinct. “You issued a challenge, and now you have to pony up. Show me your moves if you’re so slick, hotshot.”
Laughter burbles out of Steve; he leans in for another kiss, which Eddie allows, because of course he does. “This isn’t really the kind of music I usually dance to…”
“Throwing in the towel already? Disappointing.”
“Okay, I didn’t say I wouldn’t,” Steve retorts, pulling Eddie closer. There’s an easy looseness in his hips that Eddie likes; an ease to him just generally these days. They already know how to move together—from fighting monsters, and, later and much more enjoyably, from sex—and it turns out it translates to this as well as anything: the two of them in their kitchen together while Steve tries to adapt his house party dance moves to Megadeth and Eddie clings to him, laughing his ass off, and outside the kitchen window dusk fades gently away into night.
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For Whom the Bell Tolls - Chapter Five - Veteran of the Psychic Wars
Pairing: Eddie Munson x OFC (Kat Ramsay), sequel to Foolin’
Summary: Eddie and Kat have a heart to heart about when she had to deal with these symptoms before. Afterwards, she tries to show Eddie exactly how she feels and what happened. She gives her uncle a call to explain how the severity of the issues in Hawkins has increased.
Warnings: established relationship, unhealthy coping mechanisms, insecurities, hard drug use mentioned, dialogue heavy
Word count: 4.1k
Chapter song: Veteran of the Psychic Wars by Blue Oyster Cult
Tag list: @munchabunch @madaboutmunson2 @michele131 @riffcrusader @prettyboyeddiemunson @idiot-parade
Eddie slammed his van into park, turned it off, and let out a sigh as he sat there for a moment. The deals took longer than expected. That happens sometimes. People from the party clique get chatty with him when they’re high enough. Usually he politely finds a way to excuse himself, but today he found himself dragging his feet to get back home. Case in point, he was still sitting in his van, just staring at his trailer.
He didn’t know what to expect. It’s not that he didn’t trust Kat, it’s that he couldn’t bear to see her go down the road that so many other people in and around his life did. Not only that, he’s heard the stories and rumors of what goes on at Hollywood parties. The unknown of what he would walk into spiked his anxiety.
His grip on the steering wheel tightened as he leaned forward to rest his forehead on it. He started nodding his head while chewing on his bottom lip. Releasing the steering wheel, he hit it once, not out of anger, but as a way to psych himself up. Having gathered enough strength, he exited his vehicle. As he walked up to the front door, he could hear the thumping beat of whatever Kat was jamming out to grow louder.
Kat was somehow doing a mixture of headbanging and dancing as she was vacuuming the living room area when Eddie walked in. Her soundtrack for her cleaning extravaganza was inspired by her flashback of her party days. It wasn’t until she turned around to perform the air guitar to the solo in “Looks that Kill” by Motley Crue that she noticed Eddie. In her state, she had practically forgotten about their fight as her eyes lit up when she saw him.
He looked around, almost in disbelief, at his home. He hadn’t even been gone an hour. Wayne’s mugs had been dusted. The sink was glistening and empty with no dishes in sight. A light lemon scent nestled itself above the smell of stale smoke that stuck to the walls. The floor in the kitchen looked brighter and somehow glistened.
“Eddie!” she exclaimed, throwing her arms up in the air. After shutting off the vacuum, she trotted over to him, wrapping her arms around his neck. “Okay so I promise I didn’t move any piles of anything. Well, I mean, I did, so I guess that’s a lie. But I swear, I put it in the same exact spot it was in after I cleaned. Um, except for the dishes though. Those I put away. I feel like it smells a little better, don’t you? You aren’t mad at me for cleaning, are you? I just, I couldn’t sit still and I just thought it would be nice to, ya know, spruce the place up. Just a little. It smells better in here. Not that it smelled bad before! It didn’t!” She was talking a mile a minute. It took Eddie a couple extra seconds to even process what she was saying. Despite it all, she seemed… happy. Not too happy, just normal albeit hyper.
“Can you, uh, turn that down?” he asked.
“Oh! Yeah, sorry,” she said as she went to turn off the music.
“I… I’m not mad that you cleaned…” he spoke with hesitation in his voice.
“Oh good. I was a little worried, but I couldn’t stop. The bathroom’s clean too,” she nodded. “And,” she pointed at Eddie, “I’ll have you know, I didn’t even have a bump. I’m not gonna need one. This was enough,” she nodded again, this time triumphantly. “Jesus, you have no idea. It’s like there’s this quiet in my mind. Like… like it’s just me in here.” She tapped the side of her temple, before she started singing, “Nobody else can bind me, Take a good look around me, Now I’m breaking the chains!” Emphasizing the last three words, she punched the air with each syllable. “I fucking sound like I should be in Pennhurst. Christ,” she let out a breathy laugh.
When she burst into song, Eddie couldn’t help but shake his head and let out a small chuckle of his own. “I’m, uh, gonna go sort this out, ‘kay?” he said as he held up the black lunchbox. “You just, uh, finish doing your thing…”
“Okay!” she said with such elated enthusiasm. “Mind if I put the music back on?”
“Knock yourself out,” he responded as he shook his head. Before he was in his room, the music was back on and she continued vacuuming. He took his time sorting his money and going through what he had left over from tonight’s party, which was just a couple baggies of special K. He tucked those away in a lockbox in his desk drawer. One of his personal rules was that he never kept the harder drugs he sold in the lunchbox unless there was a planned sale after school or he was dealing at a party like tonight. Usually he hurried through this process, but tonight he really wasn’t in any rush. Kat seemed perfectly content with the cleaning job she bestowed on herself so, really, what was the harm in procrastinating a bit?
She seemed to be doing okay. She was functional and, based on the quick glances he stole at the coffee table when he first got back, she really didn’t take much from the bag. Did he make assumptions about her past and jump to conclusions? Sure he did, but it was because of his own history. Since she had the first nightmare, Kat hadn’t been the same girl he met a little over half a year ago. Her increasing anxiety was palpable and as much as he tried to bury himself in this last campaign, even he was starting to sense that something was afoot in Hawkins.
Over and over and over again the same thoughts kept cycling through Eddie’s mind. Yes, she could handle herself. He was sure she knew her limits. He knew she never fully wanted to lose control. Christ, the girl had superpowers. She didn’t need him; she just wanted him around. He’d never cared about anyone like he cared for her, so just having to sit back and watch from the sidelines… It gnawed at him. The only thing he could do was try to understand. If he couldn’t physically stop her pain and hunt down her demons, at least he could be her rock. The one solid thing in her life that she could always depend on.
He was torn away from his thoughts when Kat poked her head through his doorway. At the pace she was talking, her words all but blended together when she said, “Hey, so, um, I’m kinda done with everything out there. I cleaned the outside of the fridge. I really hope you aren’t insulted, I didn’t–”
“Why would I be insulted?” He cut her off.
“Um, I don’t know? Because you’d think I thought this place was dirty or something. Like in a repulsive way, not in, like, the place just needed a deep cleaning kind of way. You know, spring does start next week. So, it’s like I did your spring cleaning for you already!”
“Sweetheart, it’s fine, really. A little, uh, surprising to come back to that, but I mean, it needed it. Wayne’ll probably be happy about it when he gets home,” he said with a reassuring look in his eyes.
“Okay, good. I don’t like upsetting you. So I wanted to make sure. Can I, uh… Do you mind if I hang out in here? With you?” She mustered her best puppy dog eyes for him.
“I’m done with all this. We can go into the living room, watch a movie or somethin’.” He started to get up and leave his room. Kat broke out into a giant smile and giddily clapped her hands before she went to turn off the stereo and set up shop on the couch. “What was with the music choice? You haven’t listened to that in a while,” Eddie inquired, trying to make conversation to keep her buzzing mind occupied.
“Well, I was thinking about the first time I did that,” she pointed to the bag on the coffee table, “and Nikki showed me. And I missed home. Or maybe not home. Just when I went through this without the nightmares. So I thought I’d listen to that.”
“Nikki? As in…?”
“Nikki Sixx, yep. Like the time after a WASP show, him and Blackie would look out for me like I was the little sister of the group,” she recalled with a fond smile. “I mean, mainly it was Blackie. Nikki would get way too fucked up. When they brought out the heroin, that was my cue to leave. Definitely not touching that shit. Ever.”
A brief lull of silence fell between them. Eddie furrowed his brows at her words. “Kat… you know I just worry about you, right? Earlier I was just–” he started until she cut him off.
“I know. I know it’s serious shit. And I know I didn’t tell you everything. Not because I didn’t want to, just… I just couldn’t. I mean, it’s heavy shit. And I’m not used to having someone to talk about everything with. It’s just way easier to keep it to myself and get through it. Which is totally wrong to do to you. Like, I see that now.” While she didn’t outright say it, her expression was apologetic.
“I’ll be honest, some of the sorceress shit you got going on, I can’t really wrap my head around? But that doesn’t mean I can’t try. Or that I won’t. I’ll listen.” He took her hand in his. “You aren’t alone anymore. You have me. Always.”
She took her hand back only so she could wrap him into a hug. “I love you,” she mumbled into his neck.
“I love you, too. In case that wasn’t apparent,” he lightly chuckled.
Kat swung her legs around, resting them on top of Eddie’s, making herself comfortable as she nestled into his side. “You know how I said I went through this before?” she asked.
“Mhm,” he hummed.
“It… it’s weird. Like… I think this would be the third time something like this happened. I just thought it was something to add to the list of things I thought were wrong with me. But…” She grabbed his hand as she trailed off and started to fidget with his rings. “This time, it feels…serious. Ugh, I don’t know how to describe it.”
“Just start at the beginning. When was the first time it happened?” he encouraged.
“Um… right before I turned sixteen so November of ‘83. When it started it was really bad, but then it kinda tapered off. Just the headaches lingered. You know what’s the weirdest part about it? Music was the only thing that helped. Like, when I would go to shows or work them? I felt fine. That’s how I know it’s gotta be connected to whatever was going on at the lab.”
“Is it reverse brainwashing?”
Kat let out a short laugh. “I don’t think so. It was less brainwashing and more like making us super spies, which I still can’t figure out how it all could even be related.”
Eddie looked around with a pensive expression mirroring how he was trying to connect the dots in his mind. “Were there other times when it was really bad?”
“It was the end of June in ‘84 that I did coke for the first time. It didn’t get really bad until that fall, like around Halloween. Again, weird, because it was pretty much exactly a year from when this all started. And that was my second go of junior year too. I was hanging on by threads. The drugs mellowed me out during class though and then I was always listening to music in between, so somehow I managed to scrape by. It slowed down again, but this summer? It was so bad. Luckily I used Fourth of July parties as an excuse to, uh, cope. Til I fucked that up and my father found out,” she paused to roll her eyes. “Nothing he could really do though, because it was already set that I was coming here. Right before that though, the headaches and stuff were gone. Then when I was here, I actually forgot about them until now. So… I dunno, I just feel that it’s gonna be really, really bad,” Kat sighed as she started chewing on the inner corner of her lip.
“Okay, I think you might be right about the lab connection, I just have no idea how. Hear me out though. You’ve heard how really weird shit happens here, right?” Kat nodded in response, leaving the floor for him to continue. “I wanna say it was like the first week of November in ‘83 when the Byers kid went missing. I can’t remember what I told you about that, but the government literally covered it up. They said he was dead, but he wasn’t, because they found him, like, a week later? Then this girl a grade below me went missing. A year later was when we found out she was actually killed at the fault of the lab. That’s how it got shut down.”
“That’s how it got shut down?” Kat asked, shocked by the news.
“Yep. Some investigative reporter got a confession out of someone from there and the whole place was axed. It’s abandoned now. But it gets weirder. Fourth of July this year there was a fire at this brand new mall that just opened. A lot of people died. The fire was after hours though. And sure the mall is a big place, but the people that died were random. Like one guy from my grade – you know the redhead that lives in the trailer kind of across from me?” Kat nodded again. “It was her brother. He was an absolute prick. Bought a lot off me, but he was a prick. Anyway, there was no way he would have been at the mall at that time. He woulda been at some party getting absolutely fucked up. I don’t know if it’s connected to the lab, but why else would they have to cover up something again?”
“And those were all the times my headaches were the worst… Wait, Eddie, remember what happened at the pumpkin patch?”
“Uh, yeah, you were really freaked out, because…” His face lit up as he realized the connection. “You had a nightmare! You saw that thing you’re seeing now, right?”
“I touched that weird, dead vine. And it brought me into what I remember now is, like, the void. It was reaching out to me then. Only now, it’s talking to me. It was like touching the vine made it realize I was back.” Kat’s stomach dropped like she just started a descent on the world’s tallest roller coaster. She got up and went straight to the stereo. It took a few moments of shuffling through Wayne’s box of tapes, but she eventually found Blue Oyster Cult’s Fire of Unknown Origin to replace the Motley Crue one already in there. She pressed play and returned to sitting in the same way she was before.
“Blue Oyster Cult?”
“Yeah, I didn’t have time to go look through yours for something. Plus I really just love this album.” She gave Eddie a half smile. “You know I don’t only listen to metal. It’s my favorite, but I listen to other stuff too. You should try it sometime,” she laughed as she playfully nudged him in his side.
A light silence fell between the two with just the music in the background, both lost in their own thoughts until Eddie broke it. “Hey what’s the void?” he wondered.
“Oh, um… Well, it’s this place I can go to in my mind and, like, I can see where people are and what they’re doing,” she said sheepishly, almost embarrassed by how it sounded. “It was… It was one of the last things I was working on… when I was at the lab.”
“I don’t really get it. You… mind travel?”
“Like if I’m at home, in my room, I can go into the void and I can see exactly what you’re doing. Like I could hear you practicing for example and freak you out by then calling you and asking why you decided to practice that song. I think, I don’t know, I always had this feeling though if I knew the person they could sense me around. They wouldn’t really know it was me, but they could feel someone watching them sort of thing? Like I said… They wanted us to be super spies.”
“You’re rad as hell, you know that?” he said as he lightly ruffled her hair which made her giggle.
“I can show you, I think. You want me to try?”
“I mean only if you want to, if you’re up for it.”
Kat got up and shut the music off again, only to turn the radio on until all they heard was white noise. “Can I see your bandana?” she asked as she sat cross-legged on the couch. Eddie handed it to her and she tied it over her eyes like a blindfold. She took a deep breath and started to concentrate, falling into the white noise.
“So what happens now? Am I gonna see you floating the cor–”
“Eddie, shut up. I need silence.”
“Oh, right, that makes sense. Sorry.”
She took a deep breath again and let mind quiet as much as it could until she felt herself fall. Her feet landed in a never ending pool of blackness. She was surrounded by darkness. Then she focused on Eddie. Eventually his couch came into view.
She watched him watching her. It was weird to see herself. He was looking at her so intently with so much concern. She walked right in front of him and put her hand on his arm.
“What the… How?” He whispered as he felt some sort of electricity where she was touching his arm.
‘I think I can show you what I’ve been seeing,’ he heard her say in his mind.
“This is fucking wild. Uh, yeah, show me. I wanna know. I wanna understand.” She focused her energy on speaking to him in the void instead of narrating what was happening, so her words appeared in his mind. With his response, she knew it was working and even surprised herself that she could do this.
In the void, she stood in front of him. Eddie heard her deep breath beside him. Gently she placed her hands on his temples. She could see him look her in the eyes. He could feel her essence in front of him even as she was physically beside him. Closing her eyes, she pulled up the images of her nightmares from her mind. She drew on her own emotions that surrounded them. As she applied pressure to his head, she felt the memories course through her and flow into him.
Eddie’s eyes snapped shut as he felt himself free falling backwards into nothing. As much as he wanted to escape the feeling, Kat’s energy kept him in place. Eventually he found himself in places that seemed familiar, but were nothing like they seemed.
First, she took him through her times in LA. He was in her memories. He could feel everything that she felt from the pounding ache in her skull to the relief she felt at shows and at the parties. Then, he saw himself, which was a trippy thing to experience. These weren’t memories though. He was now in her nightmares. Actually seeing how everyone changed from laughing faces to deaden eyes, his stomach dropped. Her most recent one sent chills down his spine.
Kat stepped away from him. Slowly she brought herself back into her own body. She pulled the bandana away from her eyes to meet Eddie’s which were glossy with tears threatening to fall. “Kat…” he whispered as he reached for her. “I had no idea, I had– I’m so sorry,” he muttered, holding her.
“There’s no way you could have known,” she whispered back, wiping the blood from her nose. “But now, now you know.”
“How? How are you… How the hell are you even functioning?” he asked. He couldn't even hide his complete shock and near terror in his voice.
“I barely am. I mean, I wouldn’t really call doing coke again totally functioning. Self-medicating, maybe,” she gently scoffed. His grip around her tightened. “Eddie, I’m gonna be okay. Whatever happens, I’ll be able to handle it…” her voice was slightly unsteady enough so that Eddie caught on. He knew he wasn’t the only one she was trying to convince with that sentiment.
As he sat there trying his best to soothe her, to show her it was safe, he couldn’t ignore the fear that gripped him by the throat. This was far, far bigger than anything he could have even imagined she was going through. It was one thing when he was playing D&D. There, he was unstoppable. But this? This was real. That figure, he could feel it from her nightmares. Somehow, somewhere it was waiting. He wasn’t sure if it was just waiting for Kat or to strike its wrath on the whole world. He felt inadequate. He felt defenseless. He felt utterly powerless.
Every alarm in his body was going off and telling him to run. As he looked down at her as she pressed herself against him, he vowed to stay by her side. He would stay and fight and he would fight only for her.
– – – – – – – – – –
Kat sat at the kitchen counter, wringing her hands, waiting for her aunt to get home. The constant feeling of dread was consuming her. She couldn’t stand idly around, waiting for this… this thing to make the first move. There had to be something she could do.
Eventually she heard her aunt enter. She greeted her niece happily, but when she saw Kat’s serious demeanor, her face fell. “Honey, what’s wrong?” she asked with such concern.
“I need to talk to Hank. I– I’m having nightmares again. And they’re… they’re getting more and more intense. I just– We need to find 011. It’s just… Things are going to get bad. Like, end of the world bad.”
Linda didn’t press Kat for more information or ask any questions. She went straight to the phone to get Hank on the line. The look of concern never left her face. Soon enough, she handed the phone to Kat.
“What’s going on, Kiddo?” he asked.
“The nightmares are getting worse. That thing is getting more… confident. Look, I know weird shit has been happening here. I know the lab was active until two years ago. My headaches are back.”
“I know, I know. I’ve been trying to get your Uncle Sam to tell us where he sent 011.”
“You know Sam is too soft! We need 011. I can find her, you know. This shit is only going to get worse.”
“Kat, I know. I keep trying to tell him, but he says we need to wait. It’s not time yet. 011 still needs time before she gets her powers back.”
“What? She doesn’t even have her powers?! Who is he to decide if we wait or not?! I am telling you, this is going to be horrific. People are going to die. I just… I don’t know what it’s planning, but I know it can’t do whatever it’s doing and spare people’s lives.”
“Look, I’ll try to talk to him again. I’ll tell him 001 is trying to get to you through the nightmares.”
“Wait, 001? That’s who… oh my god…” Kat was left speechless as she pieced everything together. The man from the first nightmare she had at the beginning of the month. The power that she had felt. The evil she picked up on from the vines at the pumpkin patch.
“Yes, 001. That’s why I tried to go slow bringing your memories back. There’s a lot to all of this.”
“I don’t care how you do it, just… Get 011 back in the game. I can’t do this alone.” Without waiting for his response, she hung up the phone. She had thought talking to him would have put her at ease, even if it was just slightly. Her feelings of dread and apprehension weren’t solely in the back of her mind anymore. They were consuming her.
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#eddie munson#eddie munson x ofc#eddie munson x original character#eddie munson fanfic#stranger things fanfic#stranger things 4#joe quinn#joseph quinn#eddie munson angst
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Subhuman - Dante's battle theme from Devil May Cry 5 OST (HD)
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Tbh, this song is not only a certified headbanger and just makes me want to break everything in my room, it also has something of a narrative going on in the lyrics, that of Dante's internal relationship. It basically comes down to this: Dante, being a hybrid, is half-human, half-demon; his two sides compel him to act in opposite ways. The human-side is lawful and benevolent, wanting him to act with control and reason, for a good cause ("I cannot erupt", "I must control"); meanwhile, his demon-side keeps contained within him, begging to be let out to take over and cause mayhem, act on impulse and with sheer violence ("Let me out", "I must explode"). Both sides despise each other, the human-half hating and wishing to restrain and completely subdue the other ("I will not falter, shout at the devil", "Got no respect for the demons in my head"), while the demon-half wishes to come loose and fully take over, uproot the more rational half which it itself thinks very little of ("Hellbound", "I am subhuman", the latter meaning less than human, an imperfect human, not truly human). You could see a few possible outcomes to the conflict: 1) Demon-Dante takes over. The chorus always ends with "I must explode" after the human-half utters "I cannot erupt", "I must control"; this could be seen as Dante giving up the fight and allowing his impulses to control him; 2) Human-Dante aligns with Demon-Dante. One thing to notice about the lines in the chorus and the lyrics after the chorus is that they overlap with each other, as if both were fighting for dominance; in the end of the lyrics, however, there are multiple voices saying "I must explode", which could mean Human-Dante gives up on the fight and aligns with its counterpart. 3) ... there is not really a fight here. This one is interesting: both sides are struggling for dominance, but not really battling at all times. The human-side seems to have more dominance overall, which is why it is the voice that speaks outside the chorus ("Funny how the mind tries to sink me deeper", "Got no respect for the demons in my head", "I will not falter, shout at the devil", "Something saved me, put me out of my destiny"), while the demon-half is relegated to echoes in the chorus. Also, here comes the catch: when it comes to external battle, both sides are working together, which is why, in some other lines of the chorus, there are multiple voices (especifically, "You cannot kill me", "I am Omega", "I am subhuman", "I must explode"). Even more interesting is this line, out of the chorus, the human-half saying ".. as I call upon the dark gift to erupt". IT IS ALLOWING ITSELF TO ERUPT. Not out of impulse, but WILLINGLY. Dante is mostly using his human side, but he also uses his devil side. He's found out the way to control himself: not by repressing the explosions, but timing them. Using even his outbursts for a good cause. Little thing to notice is that it is something all of us must learn. We all have peace and turmoil within us, sympathy and aggression. We can't simply say that one will reign and the other disappear, it doesn't work like that: we can't neuter our aggressions, nor can we be impulsive for long. Too much fuel means an explosion, but a lack of fuel means no explosion. The trick is to time the burts. To control the explosions; the when and the how. To redirect our impulses toward a goal is the best outcome: not only is a great fuel for action not wasted, but it is not used wrongly. It is what Dante is doing. Gotta remember, this is the peak of his character arc, until now. The utters of the human-half are not for dominance, but for simple control: a countdown of sorts. "I cannot erupt". Not now. "I must control". Not yet. "I cannot erupt". Still not yet. Now. Now is the time to call upon the dark gift. Now, "I MUST explode."Show less
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Show Me A Good Time
Pairing: Hyunjin x Female Reader (ft. voyeur Minho)
Genre: Smut, Light humor
Rating: Explicit
WC: 2.2k+
Tags: Smut, accidental voyeurism turned voyeurism, light humor
Summary: Seeing you make his best friend so happy never ceases to make him happy and vice versa. He loves seeing love in all forms; though this may be seeing you and Hyunjin’s love just a bit too much to be appropriate. Maybe Minho will remember to close his doors fully next time.
"Hyu-- Honey.." your soft voice filtered up into the air along with an airy moan, echoing.
"Yeah? Is it good?" Hyunjin's voice answered yours in a low tone. “That good? Baby my sheets are getting so dirty because of you~”
Minho was confused, groggy from sleep. The clock glared an obnoxious light of numbers, changing to 3:01 am. Was he dreaming? Maybe he's in a weird alternative middle ground again or something… It wasn't often he would have suggestive dreams regarding his roommate and his roommate's girlfriend. But it can happen; seeing them be so cute and happy together with the silly banter, inappropriate comments do happen also. The soft, slick sounds of kissing and slurping on the other hand were too high and sharp to be his dream-lagged mind. (Possibly… He does have a habit of daydreaming) He rubbed at his eyes as he was going to get up but a sharp moan stopped him in his tracks.
His eyesight came into a sharp focus towards the bathroom since it was between the rooms connecting them both in a roommate suite. His door was slightly ajar as Hyunjin's was open. Completely open with a reflection of the bedside lamp, Hyunjin’s room was … Giving Minho a full view of the activity going on with you and Hyunjin.
Of you two in bed preparing to fuck. Heavens why did you two have to go at it at this hour? Do you two not know how to sleep?
You were breathless against the gray cotton sheets, body shiny with a thin layer of sweat in a sweet arch that he didn’t think was comfortable but you could care less about. Another moan rippling from your lips as your legs slid further down on the bed. Hyunjin himself just seemed to be in his boxers for the time being but his body also had a layer of sweat to match, hair wet, and sorta curled up at the ends. A shift and you moaned hard for him.
Fading pink and mostly blonde hair shifted as the male lifted his head to tilt it innocently. “You have to be quiet sweetheart. Do I need to keep your mouth occupied?”
A view of your head thrown back from the pleasure Hyunjin was giving between your legs, his grip tight enough on the inner part of your thighs. The way your hips tried to roll against the male’s face or fingers but was stopped when his grip adjusted to press your hips against the bed more. Minho could tell Hyunjin was looking up at your face with that grin he loved to use when he was particularly enjoying the torture. The blonde didn’t have his mouth on you right now in combination, for the fingers quickly going in and out of your wet core were doing wonders he was guessing. He mentally thought how long Hyunjin was down there lapping at the juices coating his hand. Or if Hyunjin has already made you cum once or twice.
“Maybe if you would just… Fuckin’ gimme..” Your voice waivers from another plunge of Hyunjin’s fingers into you, gripping his free hand to immediately shove a couple of fingers into your mouth.
The male’s mouth dropped open at the same time Hyunjin spluttered your name in a whimper. You flicked your tongue around three of his fingers sloppily, slurping and making Hyunjin stop to focus on punishing your mouth. You took it in stride as more spittle fell onto your chest with a muffled groan. He pressed down harshly to make you open your mouth wide, even rubbing the pad of his fingers onto your tongue.
“Mm ready Hyunnie. M’ready now.'' He watched you plead, in that whiny voice you reserve to try and get what you want once your mouth was free.
The male mimicked you as he sat up to look down at you. He demanded you to say it again. With lips shiny from spit your mouth opened again to repeat yourself. And again. And again, the tone turned just that tad more demanding that Minho’s own body heated up in response.
Minho always caved under it no matter what you asked for when you got petulant. (He was weak for you and he believed his best friend knew it too.) This was going in his spank bank, he’ll feel guilty about it later. He slid his hand into his boxers and gripped himself, biting his lip hard to keep his noise of satisfaction at bay, realizing he was already leaking enough pre-cum to make the slide against his dick easier. He should feel guilty but right now he was too hard, his mind on wanting to watch you two until the end.
“Are you darling? Think you’re soaked enough?” a hummed out question, probably rhetorical. Hyunjin didn’t even let you answer before he continued, “Maybe you can have it now if you ride me pretty. Can you do that?”
Minho gyrated his hips into his hand lightly, eyes taking in everything as you pulled your boyfriend in for a deep kiss. Groans and whimpers being swallowed by each other. Fuck… What he wouldn't give to see you on top of his cock, letting him sink deep into the most intimate parts of your beautiful body and carve his shape in. Kiss and mark your skin besides Hyunjin’s finger bruises.
Hyunjin pulled back with a satisfied sigh at your drenched core and brought his hand down to his aching dick to ready himself. Wrapping his fingers to coat around the dripping head, down the slight curve to the base for a quick squeeze with a harsh moan of your name. Both you and Minho watched; you more so turned on and ready but he did more to assess it.
Not to say his best friend has a pretty dick… But Minho thinks it’s a pretty dick to match his pretty best friend indeed. So pretty he wondered if you were going to stretch your lips around it.
Do you deep throat? Do you tease with kisses and avoid his arousal completely? Would you let Hyunjin fuck your mouth as you gag with spittle and cum sliding down your face? Or maybe you two kiss after you take his load?
He was glad his free hand was in front of his face due to holding back a whimper. His hips kicking into the tight fist of his hand, his eyes were drinking in your frame as you sink slowly onto Hyunjin’s lap, thighs drenched in your juices that the squelching sound echoed loudly.
“Nngh-- Finally I’ve been waiting for this all day. It’s so good.”
Your hands glide up your body with the first roll of your hips onto Hyunjin’s with a pace that screams payback. The slow and dirty kind, the grind so hard that you had Hyunjin bruising up your thighs and hips with the tight hold on your body.
He looked up your frame with love and teasing, voice coming out in a broken husk “Come on baby you said you waited for this--”
Minho slowed the movement of his hand over his cock, following along with what seemed to be a hell of a ride. He snuck some extra lube into his hand for the easier glide and to not cum so early.
"I did say that didn't I?", a hiccuping giggle left your throat as your loving boyfriend kicked his hips up. "It's my turn to have a l-little fun too." Your lips left little blooming marks upon the slate of salty skin and lean muscle as you rode him slowly. Sometimes your hips would leave Hyunjin’s so you could look at him twitch, shiver from the cooler air on his heated skin then drop down hard onto his cock yet again.
You alternated this for a while and caressed your body, sighing from a particular roll or whimpering when the blonde sped up the pace for a bit. Minho was drooling onto his pillow and his own skin was hot and sweaty in its rising temperature. His best friend caresses and gropes where he can reach as he praises you.
“Feeling good?”
“Mmm yea, roll your hips just.. just like that.”
“Squeezing me like you don’t want me to leave you, that’s fucking hot--”
You squeezed around him when you raised up before dropping down so hard that you watched blonde hair fly back in undeniable pleasure-- what you didn't expect was the loud ass THWACK to resonate in the room. Hyunjin groans (in a non-sexy way, that’s gonna leave a bump--) while holding the back of his head and wiggling underneath you. Curses flew from both of you as it made you laugh loudly.
"Honey! Aaaha--" a wheeze "Honey are you ok--" another wheeze "Okay? Fuck that sounded like it hurt.."
"Pussy so good I lost my head for a second there--" he hissed out. His eyes were closed tightly, grin goofy despite the obvious pain with him slapping at the air in your direction, "You're loud! Don't wake up Minho!" But your cackling echoed into Minho’s room too.
Said male was stifling his laughter into his pillow, heart full watching you two take care of the situation while laughing. Knowing that you'd stop everything to check on your boyfriends’ well being made a little envy burn in his chest, but he pushed that away when his dick throbbed from you guys laughing again.
Really dick? At a time like this? Laughing shouldn’t be sexy you know--
"If your damn headbang didn't wake him up before my laughter then I dunno what to tell you."
A gentle ass smack here, "Cheeky brat!"
"Who's being loud now~? You want Minho to hear you?" You questioned the blonde, not missing the way his cock jerked against your walls.
"Oh?" The may you said that to Hyunjin had Minho’s hand grabbing his dick tight yet again, playing at the base near his sack.
Now he sees that you guys changed positions so Hyunjin's head was at the bottom of the bed, feet touching the headboard. His best friend looked sheepish when you placed a pillow underneath his head. You still cooing at him and massaging his scalp while talking to him; agreeing that it would be a slow sex night after all. Exchanging a few deep kisses, Minho's rapidly paying attention again when Hyunjin goes to lay back down. Your hips sinking down onto Hyunjin’s cock (which was still hard... Minho wonders yet again if his friend likes pain--) moving back to its up and down motion. Occasionally he'd play with his tip and sigh, eyes starting to slip closed…
"Don't think I missed that little tidbit, Hyunjin.."
Hyunjin moaned your name high from his throat when you scratched down his chest, "Miss wh--"
A slow corner smirk appeared, nonchalance lacing every word. "The fact that your dick twitched when I said Minho's name."
Hyunjin's face was red with a wide-eyed stare towards you, not knowing how to proceed with that. Minho in his bed was wide-eyed to match, ears heated in surprise and cock weeping just a bit more at that thought. Fuck did Hyunjin find him attractive sexually too?
"We'll be able to talk about that later. Hm?" You pant and grind harder, "Wanna be loud next time for your best friend then too. Maybe he can join--"
Hyunjin's moan was even higher this time, gripping your waist hard with a blown outlook as you leaned back to ride. Legs spread farther so his cock could reach even deeper into your body. When his hips began to meet yours you felt euphoric, his tip kissing your g-spot with ease now. It was deeper but still a leisurely pace.
Minho forwent that pace and was trying his best to stay quiet as he fucked his fist again, his other hand sliding under his shirt to tug his hard nipples. His mind produced so many scenarios of how he'd have you bent over, folded, split on his cock while he kissed you over and over again.
A tremble skittered up into your chest, mouth running off now. "O-Oh? You'd like that babe? Would you watch him fuck me?"
"Shhhiiit yes…" he groaned deep, his face still sporting that strawberry hue on his sweaty skin. "Wanna see your lips around his cock--"
"I wanna see yours around his cock too, Jinnie. Minnie wouldn't know what to do--"
Both of you were whimpering and moaning loudly, uncaring of the noise level now that you two were so deep into the pleasure that clouded minds. Minho listened, his own soft whines joining into the fray of noise. How you two talked about the positions, the possibility of whose mouth did what to his body, or what fingers went where. Even how every surface of the house would be a new surface to fuck on if he did accept the proposal.
Yes yes, I would accept. He thought, hand blurring over his cock as his orgasm began to coil. Tugging his puffy nipples, a look of bliss casts over his face at the mere thought of the chance. He imagined him getting his cock rode by Hyunjin, you by their side as you marked his neck or kissed him filthy. As the two of you played with him, making his voice reach pitches he never thought of. Hyunjin's shout of your name as he came, made Minho crash through his orgasm with a low and long whine; a combination of both your names like a prayer. He was still riding out his high when you came a bit after with Hyunjin’s name on your lips.
All three of you were spent, Minho staying still and suddenly sleepy again. You slumped over Hyunjin’s side and shared tired kisses while wiping each other down with baby wipes. He should clean up before he had a bigger mess in the morning but he was drifting off to your voice murmuring jokes and Hyunjin’s squeaky laugh.
With his mind fizzed out he succumbed to sleep, he dreamed of hand holding and chaste kisses this time. Shy smiles and embarrasing laughter on outings with his favorite two people in the world.
The clean up is for future Minho anyways, he’s gonna enjoy his nutting experience to the fullest.
Future Minho would like to beat up Past Minho’s ass. Since Future Minho was stuck with the embarrassment of being woken up by you giggling over the mess in his bed; making some excuse of a pretty good ass dream. Curse you Past Minho! Curse you!
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Unsainted
Pairing: Ben Miller x Bestfriend!Reader
Summary: You and your best friend Ben were waiting for this concert for so long.
Warnings: fluff, kissing
Word Count: 1,200
Note: I had this idea when I was listening Unsainted by Slipknot. It’s not a romantic song but I can’t stop thinking that Ben and his best friend were singing this song while looking at each other and shouting. I hope you'll like it. '^^ AO3 Link
There was more time for the concert but you could not stand still because of the excitement. It was your first concert after a long time so your excitement was understandable and of course there is Ben. You were going to the Slipknot concert with Ben. Therefore, half of your excitement was about it.
He was eager to go with you any event you talked about. He would always accompany you and excited as much as you which was very important to you. You wanted him to have fun like you and this concert was another event you will have fun together.
You offered to meet at the place where the concert is but he said he will take you from home so before the concert, you two can listen to a couple of songs by Slipknot to hype yourselves and you were okay with it instantly because there is nothing you love more than to listen to music in the car out loud and sing it all road.
*
You gave him your spare keys in case something happens so Ben was already in the house while you exit the bathroom. When you saw him sitting on the couch you couldn’t help but jump with scare. You grab the cushion and threw it at him “I told you to let me know before you come in.”
He caught the cushion in the air “I send you a message.” you check your pockets but couldn’t find your phone “where is my phone” you started to looking around “why is your hair in a ponytail?” You found your phone just when he said. “Why?” you asked looking at your phone to check notifications.
“Aren't you going to headbang?” He stand up walk over to you “Yes?” you said looking questioning. He loosened your hair “that’s better” slipped the barrette around his wrist. “Then…” you took of his hat “don’t wear it either.” You ran your fingers through his hair and smoothed it out. “That’s better.” you smiled “Let’s go!”
✶⊶⊷⊶⊷⊷⊷❍⊶⊷⊶⊷⊷⊶⊷✶⊶⊷⊶⊷⊶⊷⊷❍⊶⊷⊶⊷⊷⊶✶
After the fun car ride you were finally at the area. It was crowded as you expected. You never wanted to be in the front, it was more sense to you to have fun in the back rows instead of being crushed among people in the front. You stood on tiptoe trying to look around, Ben looked at you chuckled “Do you want me to take you on my shoulder?”
“What?” you asked looking at him with your beautiful eyes. When he approached you felt so small beside him and you liked this feeling so much. Every time you hugged him, every time he wraps his arms around you, you were sure as hell nothing or no one can hurt you. He leaned to your ear “Do you want me to take you on my shoulder?”
“No! I’m heavy.” he looked at you, raising an eyebrow asking like “Really?” you sighed “Not heavy enough for you I know but I don’t feel comfortable.”
“Just a suggestion darling” you kissed his cheek “thank you” you hold his arms as he hugged you behind your back. You two talked until the concert started. Slipknot finally made its way onto the stage. You jumped like a little girl. How much you miss this feeling. There was no other place where you felt so free. "Uh, I love them! They look hot."
Ben looks at you confused "You can't see their face?" you turn your head and looking at him wide eyes and a big smile on your face while your fingers interlocked and holding them to your chest. "Yeah. I know. With the masks they look so hot don't they?"
"Is this a mask kink?" he put his hands in his pockets, lifting his eyebrow. "Is there such a thing?", "I don't know silly, I'm asking you" you laughed "I don't know either, I just like it." You pointed your index finger at him "Don't judge me"
He took his one of his hand out of his pockets and put it on his heart. "Wow. Now you broke my heart. You know I would never do that." You smiled and hugged him tightly "Yeah I know" giving another kiss to his cheek.
As you two were talking, Unsainted intro starts playing, you grabbed Ben’s wrist tightly with excitement. You watched the Unsainted music video maybe thousands of times and now you were listening to the song live.
Oh, I'll never kill myself to save my soul. I was gone, but how was I to know? I didn't come this far to sink so low. I'm finally holding on to letting go.
You started to sing along as soon as they started to sing. Turning your attention to Ben, singing the song looking into his blue eyes, which were shining with the lights on the stage. He smiled and sang along with you.
I'm just weathering a rough patch. Another villain with an itch to scratch. Denial is the darkest when you live in a hole. Why does the hell make you feel so cold? Make a move and you pay for it. Pick a lord and you pray to it. You're so demanding when you want the truth but your stories don't read for me.
You looked at each others eyes and sang louder and louder, and getting closer and closer. Under the stage lights, your face was so close to each other's. You can easily smell his perfume. God, how much you love this scent. You throwed your arms around his neck stood on your tiptoe, still singing the lyrics loudly and looking at each others lips.
He grabbed your waist and pulled you to himself now your chests were touching. Your heart was beating on your throat.
Oh, I'll never kill myself to save my soul. I was gone, but how was I to know? I didn't come this far to sink so low. I'm finally holding on to letting... go.
As your bodies pressed together, you could feel his warm breath on your lips. You couldn't take it anymore and pressed your lips to his. Were running your fingers through his hair, you can taste the beer on his lips he had drank a few songs ago. When your regret is about to take over your body, thinking it was a big mistake to kiss him but then his tongue was in your mouth. Pulling you as close as he could.
Did you think you could win? And fill me in? Did you think you could do it again? I'm not your sin. I was all that you wanted and more, but you didn't want me. I was more than you thought I could be, so I'm setting you free. I'm setting you free.
After the passionate kiss, you two slowly break up and pressed your foreheads together. "So..." he gulped down and wet his lips with his tongue. "Do you want me to wear a mask?" you bowed your head laughing "No. I want to see pretty face of yours all day and night long." you said looking directly at his eyes, he smirked and gave you another kiss.
*
#Ben Miller#Benny Miller#Ben Miller x Reader#Ben Miller Imagine#benny miller x reader#triple frontier#benny miller imagine
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Use All Of Me (P.3)
Title: Use All Of Me (Part Three)
Summary: Fem!Reader x Dark Mob!Steve Rogers. The Avengers are heroes saving the world but in this AU, they are also permitted by the powers in charge to have less than favorable business underneath their guise of mere superheroes. Steve and Tony are at the helm, keeping their empire’s wealth in check, both devious and perilous if crossed. Steve takes a liking to the reader at a party and it may be her undoing to her autonomy choosing to go home with him.
Words: 2,382
Warnings: Dark AF, angst, emotional/mental abuse, smut, breeding, death
Author’s Notes: This relationship is going to go ~downhill~ from healthy really quick. Please do not read if that is going to offend you.
If anyone is interested in a playlist I am using for this while I write...
Part Two || Part Four || Masterpost (mobile) || Fanfic masterpost
Sweating, you brushed the sweat from your brow. Even though you had changed out of your original dress and swapped it for shorts and a tank, you were still hot. The club was packed considering it was a live music night, with Every Time I Die headlining in their home state. Thankfully the show had not been sold out entirely when you had shown up. You doubted it had stayed that way since the main set had started and it was after 10pm.
Keith yelled into the mic, encouraging people to come up on stage with them for the next song.
The shape of your data got me astral projecting
But I think you and I, we need to talk
The room was alive, people crowding the stage as people began to find their way up there, headbanging around the artists before diving off the stage to welcome arms.
“I wanna do that!” you yelled over the music to Yua. The pair of you were further into the crowd than Natalie and your other couple friends. You were sure they were still standing by one of the tables up the stairs.
“Are you serious, Y/N?” she laughed, looking jubilant.
“You should!” the guy, Joseph, that had attached himself to yours and Yua’s side during the show encouraged you. He was cute enough, was not handsy – a huge plus especially in a huge crowd where people had been drinking or doing drugs.
You teased, “You just want to be one of the people holding us.”
He let out a laugh and said over the music, “If you think so lowly of me, maybe I need to prove myself a little harder!”
Yes, he certainly was cute. You beamed at him. Maybe you would not end up alone tonight.
“Here! Let’s go up!” Yua said, tugging on your arm. “Just make sure you don’t get punched in the face if you get too close to the mosh pit.”
The two of you shoved your way through the crowd towards the stage.
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Natalie craned her neck to look over the crowd to where Yua and Y/N had been. They were no longer there and she sighed. She hoped they were not getting themselves into trouble, mainly the mosh pit. Yua and Y/N both had suffered bruises before and still went back. They insisted it was fun; she saw nothing fun about it, she rather enjoyed watching the show from afar where she could enjoy it in more relative peace.
“What’s wrong?” Ada asked her over the music.
“I can’t find Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb.”
Miriam asked what she said from across the table and Natalie repeated herself.
“They’re fine. They can handle themselves,” Miriam reassured her. “We’ve been in worse places with a far rougher crowd and they’ve managed.”
“Too true,” Natalie agreed.
Over the heads of the crowd, Natalie’s eyes came to rest on a familiar face. Her stomach dropped seeing Steve, who looked entirely displeased. He was searching the crowd and she had a great idea of who he was looking for.
“Shit,” she said out loud. She looked back over the crowd desperately. It was not going to look good if Y/N was still flirting with that other random guy. She was worried for that potential mess with someone like Steve.
“What?” Ada asked confused, following her line of sight. She of course did not recognize what Natalie did because she did not know who Steve was yet.
Leaning in closer to the pair, she explained, “Y/N’s date from tonight, yeah? The one that stood her up? He’s here.”
“What?” Miriam gasped, standing up trying to figure out who it was in the general direction Natalie had been looking.
“Found ‘em,” Ada feebly said, pointing out across the crowd towards the stage.
Natalie and Miriam looked to the stage and Natalie wanted to scream in frustration. Both Yua and Y/N were on the stage, dancing close to the edge of the stage. Y/N dove off the stage into the crowd, Natalie tracking the spot where she had fallen onto. Her stomach flipped seeing Steve was already on his way, the crowd easily parting for someone his size. She would not make it to Y/N before he did.
She just had to let that unfold, feeling a rock sinking in her stomach.
<> <> <>
A group of people helped you slide to the ground so you could land on your feet, even if you were a little unsteady.
Joseph was there. He held up his hands and said, “No touchy. I was just here to make sure you got down okay.”
“How gentlemen like of you!” you smiled at him, tapping him on the nose.
You let out a laugh and turned back towards the stage. You could not spot Yua, you thought she would jump in the same direction as you. You stood on your tiptoes still to no avail.
Suddenly you saw her and you moved to where she was, greeting her as she came down.
“See, I told you it would be fun!” you yelled to her and she nodded in agreement. She had a wide smile planted on her face as she tried to fix her hair. You slid off an extra hair tie and handed it to her as the song ended. “Let’s go back to the table! I want another drink!”
Turning to Joseph, you grabbed his arm. “You can come with us! It’s on me!”
He looked pleased, nodding. “Alright, cool.”
His arm intertwined with yours in turn to your grasp and the two of you turned. But just like that, your smile melted away.
Steve was there blocking your way, a vexed look painted on his face. His gaze dropped down to where you and Joseph’s arms were interlinked; you could see his jaw clench at the sight.
“Steve,” you said breathlessly. “What… what are you doing here?”
Joseph seemed to catch the situation and dropped your arm, uncomfortably taking a step back. Yua came to his side instead of you. He was staring at Steve in awe, no doubt recognizing him.
“Come on,” Steve ordered you sternly, grabbing your hand and beginning to lead you through the crowd away from the stage without waiting for you to respond. You shot a look over your shoulder at Yua, seeing the worried expression on her face. Joseph leaned in to speak to her and you were sure he was asking what was going on.
He did not stop until the two of you were outside, you struggling to keep up with his stride, even with people around. They seemed to move out of his way, which did not help slow down his pace.
“Steve?” you tried as the two of you began walking down the sidewalk past the crowd outside.
He ignored you.
Away from the line, halfway down the block, he came to a sudden stop and let go of your hand roughly.
“That was foolish, Y/N.”
He was scolding you? He was the one that had stood you up.
Defensively, you told him, “It was just a bit of fun. I’m not hurt.”
“You could have been. And who was the kid?”
Kid? Joseph was most certainly in his late twenties, early thirties. Although, you were sure with how old Steve was, anyone could seem like a kid.
“Just some guy that was in the crowd,” you shrugged, trying to play it off. “He made friends with us. We were about to go have some more drinks with him. He’s cool.”
“’Cool’,” Steve drawled. You nodded, not knowing what he wanted you to say. “Looked like you were getting quite close. Like it might lead to going home.”
Cocking your head, you challenged, “You don’t get to scold me because I was hanging out with him. You’re the one who ditched me.”
Steve’s tone was laced with annoyance, “I tried to call you. Multiple times. And you didn’t answer me.”
“My phone is in my purse.”
“Well, if you would have had it on you, you would have seen that.”
Frustrated, you exasperated, “You didn’t show up!”
“I know! And I’m sorry about that. I got caught up in work.”
“And you couldn’t even send me a text?”
“There was no service.”
You scoffed and Steve’s jaw tightened. “What? That’s such a bullshit excuse. Where is there not service in NYC?”
“Underground,” Steve told you as a matter of fact.
Oh.
You opened your mouth to ask what he was doing underground but he anticipated it, “I can’t talk to you about that. You know that or you should.” You closed your mouth. He took a step closer, peering down his nose at you, a dangerous glint in his eye. “So, let me ask you again… were you planning on going home with him? If it came to that?”
There were a few moments of uncomfortable silence, you knowing he knew the answer already, but he wanted you to say it out loud.
Shrugging, you said, “Yeah, sure.” Steve gave a dry laugh and you told him firmly, “I thought you were done with me. So, excuse me.”
“Yes, excuse you. What the hell were you thinking? It was the same damn night you had a date with me, Y/N!” Steve snapped.
You recoiled a bit and he sighed loudly, putting his hands on his hips. He closed his eyes, swallowing sharply, taking a few moments. “Look, I’m sorry. I was just worried about you and I’m a little high strung.”
“Worried about me?” you asked disbelieving.
“Yeah, I drove by your place and it was dark. Seemed a little odd it being so early. And with you not answering your phone… So, I checked your location to see where you were. I did not know what this place was, so I came down here to check it out. To make sure nothing had happened to you. And if you were alright, I just wanted to tell you face to face that I was sorry for not being able to get a hold of you to let you know I was going to be late. I owe you that much for missing our date. I was looking forward to it.”
He sounded sincere and the anger melted a bit at his words. He was waiting for you to say something.
“So,” you started, licking your lip. The tension was waning on you and you wanted to move on from it, salvage what you could. A smirk tugged at the corner of your mouth. “Can I call you my boyfriend now? Since you’re so worried about me and all?”
Steve visibly relaxed, the tension leaving his jaw.
“Look, I’ll keep it in mind in the future you might be on some secret mission,” you told him, closing the space between the two of you, Your hand rested on his chest, playing with the edge of his leather jacket. “And I’ll keep my legs closed until I know for sure otherwise.”
“That’s a crude way to put it,” Steve responded.
“Fine. I’ll stay at home, waiting by the window, pining for you to return. Is that better?”
This drew a small smile out of him at least. He reached up to hold the side of your face, his thumb caressing your cheek. “I quite like the idea of you pining. It paints such a pretty picture.”
“Of course you do. It’s an ego booster.” You tossed a look over your shoulder and if you were not mistaken, Steve’s grip on your neck tightened ever so slightly. “The bouncer should let us back in.”
Steve forced you to look back at him. “Not my scene.”
“Is it classical then?”
“I do enjoy that, but it’s not just that.”
Suddenly curious, you asked, “How did you get in anyway? I thought it would have been sold out.”
“It was. I spoke to the bouncer.”
“So, he’s a Captain America fan, then?”
“Something like that.”
There was something hanging in the air with that statement, but something deep down told you to leave it alone.
“Regardless, I do need to get my purse…”
“Right,” Steve said, his hand dropping to come to hold you around your waist, turning you around to walk back down the sidewalk to the door. When you got there, the bouncer saw it was Steve and nodded him through.
Instead of letting you go in alone, Steve went with you. He stood a few paces away as you grabbed your purse, assuring your friends that you were alright. You let them know you were going home with Steve and to not wait up for you. When you got back to his side, he leaned down, giving you a kiss on your forehead. His hand gripped your wrist, leading you back outside, leaving your friends behind.
<> <> <>
Steve’s house was enormous compared to your apartment. He had insisted you go home with him, promising you breakfast in bed. How could you say no to that?
You had been enthralled with the pool room – after you insisted he show you around the place. Steve had not been deterred when you suggested skinny dipping, ushering you along out of the room to continue the tour. When he brushed behind you in the process of doing this, you already could feel him through his slacks. No wonder he had been in such a hurry.
Steve moaned beneath you, his eyes hooded with lust as he watched you towering over him as you rode him. His hands gripped your ass, helping to guide you with more force. Panting loudly, your fingers dug into his chest. Steve lifted his head up to suck and bite at your breasts, adding to your sensation. Your lips crashed into his desperately as you felt the peak quickly incoming.
You cried out against his lips, convulsing around him.
“That’s it,” Steve rasped out in praise.
He increased his speed, pushing himself over the edge. You felt him empty himself as he gasped out broken praises for you and you alone.
Tucked into his embrace, your back to him, you relaxed.
As you slipped off to sleep, you felt Steve’s arm wrap around you, his hand caressing your abdomen.
~~~
Tags: @imsonick, @alexakeyloveloki, @kvzctam, @ironlady1993, @taintedgenre
#steve rogers x reader#dark!steve rogers#dark steve rogers fic#marvel fic#dark marvel#steve rogers fic#my shit
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picking favorites (a @tsbandau drabble)
if y’all aren’t emotionally invested in @underdog-arts ‘s band au, idk what y’all are even doing /j
anyway, here’s a wholesome family drabble insp. by the band au and my (not-so) subtle obsession with remus and janus. also subbing to their patreon is the best $5 i’ve probably ever spent, no joke
“Honey, you can still pick up Ry, right?” Janus called down the hallway, carrying a basket of laundry on each hip before depositing them in the hallway to put away later. Remus was seated in their shared office catching up on emails as Janus began packing up leftover pasta into containers to take to their show scheduled that night.
“I told you I got ‘em,” he agreed, banging the last clumps of his protein shake into his mouth with the heel of his hand. “I’m gonna’ jog to V’s and grab the van.”
Janus nodded to themself out of instinct before faltering, their brow furrowing.
“Wait—Re, that’s like three miles,” they challenged, dumping the dirtied dishes into the sink. “Just take the fucking car.”
Remus’ snort laugh was audible from down the hallway.
“They asked for the van!” Remus cackled. “And I, for one, do not disappoint. Apparently making my kid’s friends think they’re cool is worth a three-mile jog.”
Janus rolled their eyes, albeit fondly. This was, unfortunately, not news.
Riley was having an…interesting phase. It wouldn’t be abnormal for kids their age if it weren’t for the fact that their parents were ridiculously competitive, and all of their parents’ friends were eager to get in on it.
As soon as Remus attended career day in Riley’s first grade classroom, resulting in the entire class of six-year-olds marveling at the fact that their friend’s dad was a “rock star.”
Janus loved that conversation over dinner that night.
They weren’t jealous. No, in fact, it was probably overdue for Riley to have a bit of a “Daddy’s kid” phase, considering how joined at the hip they were with Janus for multiple years now. But they wanted to win.
Riley could make their own decisions about picking a favorite parent. As long as that decision was Janus.
“You’ve gone so-oft,” they sing-songed, smirking as Remus appeared in the kitchen behind them, wrapping one hand around their hip and pressing a kiss to their temple. “Ry’s got you wrapped around their finger.”
Remus have a flash of his crooked grin.
“Yeah, well…at least I know where they get that from.”
Janus rolled their eyes, trying to hide their reddening face.
“Sap,” they grumbled fondly. “Hurry up and get on with your run before you’re late to pickup. And tell V I said hey.”
Remus gave an exasperated chuckle and affirmation, but pocketed his keys and wallet nonetheless.
The jog to Virgil’s apartment wasn’t a particularly strenuous three miles, being downtown and all, and Remus was far from out of shape. Still, three miles was three miles—especially in the late afternoon sun. Needless to say, Virgil wasn’t thrilled to have a giant sweaty man on his doorstep, but he handed over the keys nonetheless.
The van was old, still clinging to its axels from when Remus himself purchased it from an old neighbor and declared it the band’s “tour bus.” It was nice enough at the time, especially for the price he paid, but it certainly wasn’t still around for anything more than sentimental value.
Mainly just Remus refusing to get rid of it.
That, and the fact that, for whatever reason, Riley thought it was the coolest thing ever.
The drive wasn’t long, only the sitting in traffic of other parents in minivans trying to get into the school parking lot. He…wasn’t a fan of that part of being a parent, that’s for sure. He could do without any other parents, thank you very much, but at least it was fun to see how obvious all of them were in their distaste of both him and Janus, compared to how much their kid absolutely adored them.
A fact that was only proven when Remus eventually made it to the parking lot and exited his van, only to be met with ear-splitting squeal of “daddy!” and an armful of six-year-old.
He can’t deny how, even after all these years, the title still makes him feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Like…he is a dad. That’s his kid! How fucking rad is that!
He happens to spot a few other parents, along with some of Riley’s friends that he recognizes, and he offers a quick wave with the hand that isn’t mussing up his kid’s hair.
“You brought the van,” Riley points out with a toothy grin that Remus can’t help mirroring. He can’t help the knot in his throat when he spots the gap in their teeth from their first ever lost tooth—which only meant they were getting much too old and Remus would really appreciate it if they would slow the fuck down.
“I told you I would, didn’t I?” Riley nods, bouncing on Remus’ hip just a bit out of excitement. “I gotta’ warn you though, JJ’s getting pretty jealous.”
Riley laughs before sticking out their tongue and making a fart noise in Remus’s face.
Remus is, for the thousandth time, bewildered at how Riley couldn’t possibly be more like Janus if they tried. And mostly smitten. He has the coolest kid on Earth, after all.
“They can suck my butt!” Riley squeals and Jesus Christ, Remus is going to have a heart attack right there in the parking lot. He’s gonna’ have to grill Jan again to make sure those two aren’t secretly biologically related.
“Hey, your words not mine, squirt,” he smirks, opening the van door and strapping them into the car seat. “And your early bedtime if you let JJ hear any of that.”
He finishes with a pinch on their nose before closing the van door and getting back in the driver’s seat.
Riley, as soon as the radio turn on, starts protesting very aggressively to listen to “your songs, daddy! Play your songs!”
Thankfully, he has a CD burned with some of their…cleaner songs for that exact purpose.
Riley, for lack of a better word, was ‘singing’ along at a volume that Remus would’ve otherwise found hilarious and impressive if it wasn’t right in his ear. Still, there was a certain fondness that came with watching his kid’s excitement over his work—something that, as usual, was paired with thrashing within the confines of a car seat and headbanging their little heart out.
Along the drive Remus made every attempt to stop the barrage of the screamo singer in the making, but all were ultimately unsuccessful. At least…until he pointed out one particular building out of a strip mall assortment.
“Hey, you see that store right there? The one with the red sign?” He spoke up, catching Riley’s eager attention in an instant. They placed both hands on the van window to look out.
“What is it?” They asked, squinting to try and read what was on the sign.
“You know the snake on my leg?” Riley nodded, quieting down. “That’s where JJ took me to get it.”
They paused, seemingly putting some pieces together in their head.
“How come you only have one?” They asked, still kicking their legs against their seat. “JJ has lots, how come you don’t have lots too?”
Remus chuckled, continuing along the road as the light turned green.
“‘Cause I don’t need another one. They’re very expensive, you know.”
“Is it ‘cause you’re a wimp?”
Remus choked on his own spit.
“N-no,” he choked out, laughing. “No I’m not, I just think it looks better this way.”
He didn’t bother looking into the backseat to see what Riley thought of that answer, but if the return to karaoke that followed was any indication, they were not impressed. Still, he’d probably take the teasing over the screaming, but kids are kids.
Even as they pulled into their driveway, Remus had to strategically dodge Riley’s flailing limbs in order to un-fasten the seatbelts on their car seat and actually get them in the house. Apparently the music was not as vital to the ‘sing-along’ as he’d hoped it was when he turned the car off.
“Alright, alright, calm those legs down before you knock my teeth out, will ya’?” Remus teased, placing Riley on his shoulders where they instantly took fistfuls of his hair to hold on. Riley toned down the velocity, but otherwise did not stop. “Careful, squirt, if you wanna’ kick so bad, I’m signing you up to play soccer.”
Riley stopped almost instantaneously, gripping Remus’ hair even tighter as they headed back inside the house, Riley’s tiny backpack slung around Remus’ forearm.
“Nooo,” they wailed, half punctuated by laughter that echoed through the house.
“What are we complaining about?” Janus spoke, leaning against the doorway across the room with a fond smile.
“He said if I kick him in the teeth I have to play soccer,” Riley whined, attempting to climb down from Remus’ shoulders on their own. Janus snorted a laugh before swiftly crossing the room to collect their child and place them on their hip.
“Wow, your daddy’s so mean,” Janus agreed, raising a challenging eyebrow as they stood in front of their husband. Remus pouted before bending down to steal a kiss.
“Gross,” Riley giggled, pressing a hand on each of their parents’ faces to separate them.
“Gross?” Janus smirked. “Well in that case, maybe your dad was being a bit unfair.”
Riley turned to Remus to stick out their tongue at him.
“I mean, soccer? That’s just ridiculous,” Janus continued, a mischievous glint in their eyes. “We’ll obviously have to sign you up for football instead. A punt like that has got to be put to good use.”
Riley immediately went back to their dramatized complaining, this time reaching desperately for Remus to get him to take them back from Janus—to which Remus just held up his hands in mock innocence.
“No can do, kid,” he smirked. “The punishment has to fit the crime, after all.”
Riley continued their attempts to wiggle out of Janus’ unyielding grip.
“Never!” They declared, trying a different approach of reaching over Janus’ shoulder to escape from behind. “I won’t! I won’t do it, I promise!”
Remus and Janus both knew they wouldn’t actively try to hurt either of them, but sometimes it was just more fun to assert rules when it came with shrieking laughter and climbing their parents like a jungle gym.
“Well, now you know where we stand,” Remus spoke in false authority, reaching for one of Riley’s tiny shoes and holding it up to address it as if it were in control of their legs. “I better not see you around these parts again, ya’ hear?” He added in an over-the-top western accent, gesturing to his face.
Riley squealed with laughter as he held out his hand for a handshake and they shook it with their accused foot.
“Alright, alright, you two,” Janus intervened with fond exasperation. “Snacks are on the counter, take it or leave it.”
Riley whipped their head around to peer into the kitchen, cheering when they spotted two plates on the kitchen counter, each with a toaster waffle piled high with blueberries.
“Second…breakfast!” They cheered, drumroll-ing on their leg before whooping and slinking out of Janus’ grip and climbing up onto the kitchen barstools. Remus, giving a fond eye-roll at the enthusiasm, turned to drape his arms over Janus’ shoulders from behind, perching his chin on top of their head.
“They get it from you, you know,” he mumbled, smirking at the scoff it earned him.
“Shut up,” Janus grumbled, the smile evident in their voice. “That is all you.”
“Babe, sports are a threat in this house,” he teased. “You’re telling me that came from me?”
“Yeah, I’ll take that one,” they chided, turning around to face their husband. “As long as you’re aware that the energy, the volume—honey, that’s all you.”
Remus quirked his brow with a proud smirk.
“Or maybe it’s the fact that they sleep for fourteen hours and we haven’t even had eight in the last six years,” he challenged knowingly. “You know, I happen to remember that back in the day…that bed was hardly even for sleeping.”
Janus snorted, their face reddening slightly.
“Is it bad to think of those as the ‘good old days’ already?”
Remus swept a piece of their hair out of their face.
“Hell no, dude. We lived like kings back then,” he chuckled. “How ‘bout this—I’ll get Ro to take ‘em to the park or something this weekend and I’ll dick you down just like old times, ‘kay?”
Janus sputtered out a cackle, smacking Remus on the chest before covering his mouth with their hand.
“Fucking christ, they’re like two yards away,” they hissed, still laughing. “I am not going to be the one fielding questions about what getting dicked down means, oh my god.”
“You say that like they listen to anything when there’s food in front of them,” Remus countered, nodding in the direction of their kid as Janus rolled their eyes with a chuckle.
“Now that, is from you,” they grinned, jabbing him in the side with their elbow.
“Hey, it’s not my fault you’re serving up delicacies like toaster waffles,” Remus said, raising his hands in mock defense.
Janus gave him a look before crossing their arms.
“Yeah, well, you’re lucky I know you can’t go two hours without food. Go on, there’s one for you, even if it’s probably cold by now,” they teased as Remus excitedly kissed their forehead before practically running to the kitchen. He hopped up to sit on the counter, folding each toaster waffle like a blueberry-filled taco before funneling them into his mouth.
Janus followed close behind—at a normal pace, thank you very much—and took the actual seat next to their kid, sipping at the cup of tea they had left on the counter before the two had returned home as they listened to Riley regaling their day at school.
———
Realistically, Remus probably should’ve seen it coming. He was a couple days past his previous record of days as Riley’s “favorite” and he knew he likely didn’t have much longer before Janus dethroned him again, but he certainly hadn’t expected the scene he walked in on that night.
He had heard hushed laughter coming from one of their house’s bathrooms that evening, assuming at first that Janus was just handling Riley’s bath or something like that, but as he cleaned up the mess from their dinner and finished washing the rest of their dishes, he was surprised to find they were still in there. So obviously he had to investigate.
He knocked on the door, rolling his eyes fondly as shushing and giggles came from within.
“Everything good in there?” He teased, leaning against the door. “I gotta’ say, I’m a little hurt I didn’t get invited to whatever club this is that hangs out in the bathroom.”
More giggles followed by the oh-so familiar sound of Janus’ shushing.
“I guess I’ll just have to find out for myself what all the fuss is about,” he sing-songed, slowly creaking open the door before letting out a snort laugh at the scene before him.
Janus was seated on the edge of the bathtub, wash cloth in hand, as Riley sat on the sink counter, covered on all limbs with temporary tattoos. At least the pieces of tape that Janus had cut into circles and colored black to look like ear gauges were admittedly cute.
“Oh, I see how it is,” he smirked from against the doorframe.
“JJ said you’re a wimp,” Riley proudly announced. “I was right.”
Janus stuck their tongue out and made a spitting noise and…yeah, that was their kid alright. Not that Remus would have it any other way.
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A bathroom figures significantly in the origin stories of at least two classic One Direction songs. The first will be familiar to any fan: Songwriter and producer Savan Kotecha was sitting on the toilet in a London hotel room, when he heard his wife say, “I feel so ugly today.” The words that popped into his head would shape the chorus of One Direction’s unforgettable 2011 debut, “What Makes You Beautiful.”
The second takes place a few years later. Another hotel room in England — this one in Manchester — where songwriters and producers Julian Bunetta and John Ryan were throwing back Cucumber Collins cocktails and tinkering with a beat. Liam Payne was there, too. At one point, Liam got up to use the bathroom and when he re-emerged, he was singing a melody. They taped it immediately. Most of it was mumbled — a temporary placeholder — but there was one phrase: “Better than words…” A few hours later, on the bus to another city, another show — Bunetta and Ryan can’t remember where — Payne asked, maybe having a laugh, what if the rest of the song was just lyrics from other songs?
“Songs in general, you’re just sort of waiting for an idea to bonk you on the head,” Ryan says from a Los Angeles studio with Bunetta. “And if you’re sort of winking at it, laughing at it — we were probably joking, what if [the next line was] ‘More than a feeling’? Well, that would actually be tight!”
“Better Than Words,” closed One Direction’s third album, Midnight Memories. It was never a single, but became a fan-favorite live show staple. It’s a mid-tempo headbanger that captures the essence of what One Direction is, and always was: One of the great rock and roll bands of the 21st century.
July 23rd marks One Direction’s 10th anniversary, the day Simon Cowell told Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson that they would progress on The X Factor as a group. Between that date and their last live performance (so far, one can hope) on December 31st, 2015, they released five albums, toured the world four times — twice playing stadiums — and left a trove of Top 10 hits for a devoted global fan base that came to life at the moment social media was re-defining the contours of fandom.
It’d been a decade since the heyday of ‘N Sync and Backstreet Boys, and the churn of generations demanded a new boy band. One Direction’s songs were great and their charisma and chemistry undeniable, but what made them stick was a sound unlike anything else in pop — rooted in guitar rock at a time when that couldn’t have been more passé.
Kotecha, who met 1D on The X Factor and shepherded them through their first few years, is a devoted student of boy band history. He first witnessed their power back in the Eighties when New Kids on the Block helped his older sister through her teens. The common thread linking all great boy bands, from New Kids to BSB, he says, is, “When they’d break, they’d come out of nowhere, sounding like nothing that’s on the radio.”
In 2010, Kotecha remembers, “everybody was doing this sort of Rihanna dance pop.” But that just wasn’t a sound One Direction could pull off (the Wanted only did it once); and famously, they didn’t even dance. Instead, the reference points for 1D went all the way back to the source of contemporary boy bands.
“Me and Simon would talk about how [One Direction] was Beatles-esque, Monkees-esque,” Kotecha continues. “They had such big personalities. I felt like a kid again when I was around them. And I felt like the only music you could really do that with is fun, pop-y guitar songs. It would come out of left field and become something owned by the fans.”
“The guitar riff had to be so simple that my friend’s 15-year-old daughter could play it and put a cover to YouTube,” says Carl Falk
To craft that sound on 1D’s first two albums, Up All Night and Take Me Home, Kotecha worked mostly with Swedish songwriters-producers Carl Falk and Rami Yacoub. They’d all studied at the Max Martin/Cheiron Studios school of pop craftsmanship, and Falk says they were confident they could crack the boy band code once more with songs that recalled BSB and ‘N Sync, but replaced the dated synths and pianos with guitars.
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The greatest thing popular music can do is make someone else think, “I can do that,” and One Direction’s music was designed with that intent. “The guitar riff had to be so simple that my friend’s 15-year-old daughter could play it and put a cover to YouTube,” Falk says. “If you listen to ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ or ‘One Thing,’ they have two-finger guitar riffs that everyone who can play a bit of guitar can learn. That was all on purpose.”
One Direction famously finished third on The X Factor, but Cowell immediately signed them to his label, Syco Music. They’d gone through one round of artist development boot camp on the show, and another followed on an X Factor live tour in spring 2011. They’d developed an onstage confidence, but the studio presented a new challenge. “We had to create who should do what in One Direction,” Falk says. To solve the puzzle the band’s five voices presented, they chose the kitchen sink method and everyone tried everything.
“They were searching for themselves,” Falk adds. “It was like, Harry, let’s just record him; he’s not afraid of anything. Liam’s the perfect song starter, and then you put Zayn on top with this high falsetto. Louis found his voice when we did ‘Change Your Mind.’ It was a long trial for everyone to find their strengths and weaknesses, but that was also the fun part.” Falk also gave Niall some of his first real guitar lessons; there’s video of them performing “One Thing” together, still blessedly up on YouTube.
“What Makes You Beautiful” was released September 11th, 2011 in the U.K. and debuted at Number One on the singles chart there — though the video had dropped a month prior. While One Direction’s immediate success in the U.K. and other parts of Europe wasn’t guaranteed, the home field odds were favorable. European markets have historically been kinder to boy bands than the U.S.; ‘N Sync and Backstreet Boys found huge success abroad before they conquered home. To that end, neither Kotecha nor Falk were sure 1D would break in the U.S. Falk even says of conceiving the band’s sound, “We didn’t want it to sound too American, because this was not meant — for us, at least — to work in America. This was gonna work in the U.K. and maybe outside the U.K.”
Stoking anticipation for “What Makes You Beautiful” by releasing the video on YouTube before the single dropped, preceded the strategy Columbia Records (the band’s U.S. label) adopted for Up All Night. Between its November 2011 arrival in the U.K. and its U.S. release in March 2012, Columbia eschewed traditional radio strategies and built hype on social media. One Direction had been extremely online since their X Factor days, engaging with fans and spending their downtime making silly videos to share. One goofy tune, made with Kotecha, called “Vas Happenin’ Boys?” was an early viral hit.
“They instinctively had this — and it might just be a generational thing — they just knew how to speak to their fans,” Kotecha says. “And they did that by being themselves. That was a unique thing about these boys: When the cameras turned on, they didn’t change who they were.”
Social media was flooded with One Direction contests and petitions to bring the band to fans’ towns. Radio stations were inundated with calls to play “What Makes You Beautiful” long before it was even available. When it did finally arrive, Kotecha (who was in Sweden at the time) remembers staying up all night to watch it climb the iTunes chart with each refresh.
Take Me Home, was recorded primarily in Stockholm and London during and after their first world tour. The success of Up All Night had attracted an array of top songwriting talent — Ed Sheeran even penned two hopeless romantic sad lad tunes, “Little Things” and “Over Again” — but Kotecha, Falk and Yacoub grabbed the reins, collaborating on six of the album’s 13 tracks. In charting their course, Kotecha returned to his boy band history: “My theory was, you give them a similar sound on album two, and album three is when you start moving on.”
Still, there was the inherent pressure of the second album to contend with. The label wanted a “What Makes You Beautiful, Part 2,” and evidence that the 1D phenomenon wasn’t slowing down appeared outside the window of the Stockholm studio: so many fans, the street had to be shut down. Kotecha even remembers seeing police officers with missing person photos, combing through the girls camped outside, looking for teens to return to their parents.
At this pivotal moment, One Direction made it clear that they wanted a greater say in their artistic future. Kotecha admits he was wary at first, but the band was determined. To help manage the workload, Kotecha had brought in two young songwriters, Kristoffer Fogelmark and Albin Nedler, who’d arrived with a handful of ideas, including a chorus for a booming power ballad called “Last First Kiss.”
“We thought, while we’re busy recording vocals, whoever’s not busy can go write songs with these two guys, and then we’ll help shape them as much as we can,” Kotecha says. “And to our pleasant surprise, the songs were pretty damn good.”
At this pivotal moment, too, songwriters Julian Bunetta and John Ryan also met the band. Friends from the Berklee College of Music, Bunetta and Ryan had moved out to L.A. and cut a few tracks, but still had no hits to their name. They entered the Syco orbit after scoring work on the U.S. version of The X Factor, and were asked if they wanted to try writing a song for Take Me Home. “I was like, yeah definitely,” Bunetta says. “They sold five million albums? Hell yeah, I want to make some money.”
Working with Jamie Scott, who’d written two songs on Up All Night (“More Than This” and “Stole My Heart”), Bunetta and Ryan wrote “C’mon, C’mon” — a blinding hit of young love that rips down a dance pop speedway through a comically oversized wall of Marshall stacks. It earned them a trip to London. Bunetta admits to thinking the whole 1D thing was “a quick little fad” ahead of their first meeting with the band, but their charms were overwhelming. Everyone hit it off immediately.
“Niall showed me his ass,” Bunetta remembers of the day they recorded, “They Don’t Know About Us,” one of five songs they produced for Take Me Home (two are on the deluxe edition). “The first vocal take, he went in to sing, did a take, I was looking down at the computer screen and was like, ‘On this line, can you sing it this way?’ And I looked over and he was mooning me. I was like, ‘I love this guy!’”
Take Me Home dropped November 9th, just nine days short of Up All Night’s first anniversary. With only seven weeks left in 2012, it became the fourth best-selling album of the year globally, moving 4.4 million copies, per the IFPI; it fell short of Adele’s 21, Taylor Swift’s Red and 1D’s own Up All Night, which had several extra months to sell 4.5 million copies.
Kotecha, Falk and Yacoub’s tracks anchored the album. Songs like “Kiss You,” “Heart Attack” and “Live While We’re Young” were pristine pop rock that One Direction delivered with full delirium, vulnerability and possibility — the essence of the teen — in voices increasingly capable of navigating all the little nuances of that spectrum. And the songs 1D helped write (“Last First Kiss,” “Back for You” and “Summer Love”) remain among the LP’s best.
“You saw that they caught the bug and were really good at it,” Kotecha says of their songwriting. “And moving forward, you got the impression that that was the way for them.”
Like clockwork, the wheels began to churn for album three right after Take Me Home dropped. But unlike those first two records, carving out dedicated studio time for LP3 was going to be difficult — on February 23rd, 2013, One Direction would launch a world tour in London, the first of 123 concerts they’d play that year. They’d have to write and record on the road, and for Kotecha and Falk — both of whom had just had kids — that just wasn’t possible.
But it was also time for a creative shift. Even Kotecha knew that from his boy band history: album three is, after all, when you start moving on. One Direction was ready, too. Kotecha credits Louis, the oldest member of the group, for “shepherding them into adulthood, away from the very pop-y stuff of the first two albums. He was leading the charge to make sure that they had a more mature sound. And at the time, being in it, it was a little difficult for me, Rami and Carl to grasp — but hindsight, that was the right thing to do.”
“For three years, this was our schedule,” Bunetta says. “We did X Factor October, November, December. Took off January. February, flew to London. We’d gather ideas with the band, come up with sounds, hang out. Then back to L.A. for March, produce some stuff, then go out on the road with them in April. Get vocals, write a song or two, come back for May, work on the vocals, and produce the songs we wrote on the road. Back to London in June-ish. Back here for July, produce it up. Go back on tour in August, get last bits of vocals, mix in September, back to X Factor in October, album out in November, January off, start it all over again.”
That cycle began in early 2013 when Bunetta and Ryan flew to London for a session that lasted just over a week, but yielded the bulk of Midnight Memories. With songwriters Jamie Scott, Wayne Hector and Ed Drewett they wrote “Best Song Ever” and “You and I,” and, with One Direction, “Diana” and “Midnight Memories.” Bunetta and Ryan’s initial rapport with the band strengthened — they were a few years older, but as Bunetta jokes, “We act like we’re 19 all the time anyway.” Years ago, Bunetta posted an audio clip documenting the creation of “Midnight Memories” — the place-holder chorus was a full-throated, perfectly harmonized, “I love KFC!”
For the most part, Bunetta, Ryan and 1D doubled down on the rock sound their predecessors had forged, but there was one outlier from that week. A stunning bit of post-Mumford festival folk buoyed by a new kind of lyrical and vocal maturity called “Story of My Life.”
“This was a make or break moment for them,” Bunetta says. “They needed to grow up, or they were gonna go away — and they wanted to grow up. To get to the level they got to, you need more than just your fan base. That song extended far beyond their fan base and made people really pay attention.”
Production on Midnight Memories continued on the road, where, like so many bands before them, One Direction unlocked a new dimension to their music. Tour engineer Alex Oriet made it possible, Ryan says, building makeshift vocal booths in hotel rooms by flipping beds up against the walls. Writing and recording was crammed in whenever — 20 minutes before a show, or right after another two-hour performance.
“It preserved the excitement of the moment,” Bunetta says. “We were just there, doing it, marinating in it at all times. You’re capturing moments instead of trying to recreate them. A lot of times we’d write a song, sing it in the hotel, produce it, then fly back out to have them re-sing it — and so many times the demo vocals were better. They hadn’t memorized it yet. They were still in the mood. There was a performance there that you couldn’t recreate.”
Midnight Memories arrived, per usual, in November 2013. And, per usual, it was a smash. The following year, 1D brought their songs to the environment they always deserved — stadiums around the world — and amid the biggest shows of their career, they worked on their aptly-titled fourth album Four. The 123 concerts 1D had played the year before had strengthened their combined vocal prowess in a way that opened up an array of new possibilities.
“We could use their voices on Four to make something sound more exciting and bigger, rather than having to add too many guitars, synths or drums,” Ryan says.
“They were so much more dynamic and subtle, too,” Bunetta adds. “I don’t think they could’ve pulled off a song like ‘Night Changes’ two albums prior; or the nuance to sing soft and emotionally on ‘Fireproof.’ It takes a lot of experience to deliver a restrained vocal that way.”
“A lot of the songs were double,” Bunetta says, “like somebody might be singing about their girlfriend, but there was another meaning that applied to the group as well.”
Musically, Four was 1D’s most expansive album yet — from the sky-high piano rock of “Steal My Girl” to the tender, tasteful groove of “Fireproof” — and it had the emotional range to match. Now in their early twenties, songs like “Where Do Broken Hearts Go,” “No Control,” “Fool’s Gold” and “Clouds” redrew the dramas and euphorias of adolescence with the new weight, wit and wanton winks of impending adulthood. One Direction wasn’t growing up normally in any sense of the word, but they were becoming songwriters capable of drawing out the most relatable elements from their extraordinary circumstances — like on “Change Your Ticket,” where the turbulent love affairs of young jet-setters are distilled to the universal pang of a long goodbye. There were real relationships inspiring these stories, but now that One Direction was four years into being the biggest band on the planet, it was natural that the relationships within the band would make it into the music as well.
“I think that on Four,” Bunetta says with a slight pause, “there were some tensions going on. A lot of the songs were double — like somebody might be singing about their girlfriend, but there was another meaning that applied to the group as well.”
He continues: “It’s tough going through that age, having to spread your wings with so many eyeballs on you, so much money and no break. It was tough for them to carve out their individual manhood, space and point of view, while learning how to communicate with each other. Even more than relationship things that were going on, that was the bigger blanket that was in there every day, seeping into the songs.”
Bunetta remembers Zayn playing him “Pillowtalk” and a few other songs for the first time through a three a.m. fog of cigarette smoke in a hotel room in Japan.
“Fucking amazing,” he says. “They were fucking awesome. I know creatively he wasn’t getting what he needed from the way that the albums were being made on the road. He wanted to lock himself in the studio and take his time, be methodical. And that just wasn’t possible.”
A month or so later, and 16 shows into One Direction’s “On the Road Again” tour, Zayn left the band. Bunetta and Ryan agree it wasn’t out of the blue: “He was frustrated and wanted to do things outside of the band,” Bunetta says. “It’s a lot for a young kid, all those shows. We’d been with them for a bunch of years at this point — it was a matter of when. You just hoped that it would wait until the last album.”
Still, Bunetta compares the loss to having a finger lopped off, and he acknowledges that Harry, Niall, Liam and Louis struggled to find their bearings as One Direction continued with their stadium tour and next album, Made in the A.M. Just as band tensions bubbled beneath the songs on Four, Zayn’s departure left an imprint on Made in the A.M. Not with any overt malice, but a song like “Drag Me Down,” Bunetta says, reflects the effort to bounce back. Even Niall pushing his voice to the limits of his range on that song wouldn’t have been necessary if Zayn and his trusty falsetto were available.
But Made in the A.M. wasn’t beholden to this shake-up. Bunetta and Ryan cite “Olivia” as a defining track, one that captures just how far One Direction had come as songwriters: They’d written it in 45 minutes, after wasting a whole day trying to write something far worse.
“When you start as a songwriter, you write a bunch of shitty songs, you get better and you keep getting better,” Ryan says. “But then you can get finicky and you’re like, ‘Maybe I have to get smart with this lyric.’ By Made in the A.M. … they were coming into their own in the sense of picking up a guitar, messing around and feeling something, rather than being like, ‘How do I put this puzzle together?’”
After Zayn’s departure, Bunetta and Ryan said it became clear that Made in the A.M. would be One Direction’s last album before some break of indeterminate length. The album boasts the palpable tug of the end, but to One Direction’s credit, that finality is balanced by a strong sense of forever. It’s literally the last sentiment they leave their fans on album-closer “History,” singing, “Baby don’t you know, baby don’t you know/We can live forever.”
In a way, Made in the A.M. is about One Direction as an entity. Not one that belonged to the group, but to everyone they spent five years making music for. Four years since their hiatus and 10 years since their formation, the fans remain One Direction’s defining legacy. Even as all five members have settled into solo careers, Ryan notes that baseless rumors of any kind of reunion — even a meager Zoom call — can still set the internet on fire. The old songs remain potent, too: Carl Falk says his nine-year-old son has taken to making TikToks to 1D tracks.
“Most of them weren’t necessarily musicians before this happened, but they loved music, and they found a love of creating, writing and playing,” Kotecha says
There are plenty of metrics to quantify One Direction’s reach, success and influence. The hard numbers — album sales and concert stubs — are staggering on their own, but the ineffable is always more fun. One Direction was such a good band that a fan, half-jokingly, but then kinda seriously, started a GoFundMe to buy out their contract and grant them full artistic freedom. One Direction was such a good band that songwriters like Kotecha and Falk — who would go on to make hits with Ariana Grande, the Weeknd and Nicki Minaj — still think about the songs they could’ve made with them. One Direction was such a good band that Mitski covered “Fireproof.”
But maybe it all comes down to the most ineffable thing of all: Chance. Kotecha compares success on talent shows like The X Factor to waking up one morning and being super cut — but now, to keep that figure, you have to work out at a 10, without having done the gradual work to reach that level. That’s the downfall for so many acts, but One Direction was not only able, but willing, to put in the work.
“They’re one of the only acts from those types of shows that managed to do it for such a long time,” Kotecha says. “Five years is a long time for a massive pop star to go nonstop. I know it was tiring, but they were fantastic sports about it. They appreciated and understood the opportunity they had — and, as you can see, they haven’t really stopped since. Most of them weren’t necessarily musicians before this happened, but they loved music, and they found a love of creating, writing and playing. To have these boys — that had been sort of randomly picked — to also have that? It will never be repeated.”
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A bathroom figures significantly in the origin stories of at least two classic One Direction songs. The first will be familiar to any fan: Songwriter and producer Savan Kotecha was sitting on the toilet in a London hotel room, when he heard his wife say, “I feel so ugly today.” The words that popped into his head would shape the chorus of One Direction’s unforgettable 2011 debut, “What Makes You Beautiful.”
The second takes place a few years later. Another hotel room in England — this one in Manchester — where songwriters and producers Julian Bunetta and John Ryan were throwing back Cucumber Collins cocktails and tinkering with a beat. Liam Payne was there, too. At one point, Liam got up to use the bathroom and when he re-emerged, he was singing a melody. They taped it immediately. Most of it was mumbled — a temporary placeholder — but there was one phrase: “Better than words…” A few hours later, on the bus to another city, another show — Bunetta and Ryan can’t remember where — Payne asked, maybe having a laugh, what if the rest of the song was just lyrics from other songs?
“Songs in general, you’re just sort of waiting for an idea to bonk you on the head,” Ryan says from a Los Angeles studio with Bunetta. “And if you’re sort of winking at it, laughing at it — we were probably joking, what if [the next line was] ‘More than a feeling’? Well, that would actually be tight!”
“Better Than Words,” closed One Direction’s third album, Midnight Memories. It was never a single, but became a fan-favorite live show staple. It’s a mid-tempo headbanger that captures the essence of what One Direction is, and always was: One of the great rock and roll bands of the 21st century.
July 23rd marks One Direction’s 10th anniversary, the day Simon Cowell told Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson that they would progress on The X Factor as a group. Between that date and their last live performance (so far, one can hope) on December 31st, 2015, they released five albums, toured the world four times — twice playing stadiums — and left a trove of Top 10 hits for a devoted global fan base that came to life at the moment social media was re-defining the contours of fandom.
It’d been a decade since the heyday of ‘N Sync and Backstreet Boys, and the churn of generations demanded a new boy band. One Direction’s songs were great and their charisma and chemistry undeniable, but what made them stick was a sound unlike anything else in pop — rooted in guitar rock at a time when that couldn’t have been more passé.
Kotecha, who met 1D on The X Factor and shepherded them through their first few years, is a devoted student of boy band history. He first witnessed their power back in the Eighties when New Kids on the Block helped his older sister through her teens. The common thread linking all great boy bands, from New Kids to BSB, he says, is, “When they’d break, they’d come out of nowhere, sounding like nothing that’s on the radio.”
In 2010, Kotecha remembers, “everybody was doing this sort of Rihanna dance pop.” But that just wasn’t a sound One Direction could pull off (the Wanted only did it once); and famously, they didn’t even dance. Instead, the reference points for 1D went all the way back to the source of contemporary boy bands.
“Me and Simon would talk about how [One Direction] was Beatles-esque, Monkees-esque,” Kotecha continues. “They had such big personalities. I felt like a kid again when I was around them. And I felt like the only music you could really do that with is fun, pop-y guitar songs. It would come out of left field and become something owned by the fans.”
“The guitar riff had to be so simple that my friend’s 15-year-old daughter could play it and put a cover to YouTube,” says Carl Falk
To craft that sound on 1D’s first two albums, Up All Night and Take Me Home, Kotecha worked mostly with Swedish songwriters-producers Carl Falk and Rami Yacoub. They’d all studied at the Max Martin/Cheiron Studios school of pop craftsmanship, and Falk says they were confident they could crack the boy band code once more with songs that recalled BSB and ‘N Sync, but replaced the dated synths and pianos with guitars.
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The greatest thing popular music can do is make someone else think, “I can do that,” and One Direction’s music was designed with that intent. “The guitar riff had to be so simple that my friend’s 15-year-old daughter could play it and put a cover to YouTube,” Falk says. “If you listen to ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ or ‘One Thing,’ they have two-finger guitar riffs that everyone who can play a bit of guitar can learn. That was all on purpose.”
One Direction famously finished third on The X Factor, but Cowell immediately signed them to his label, Syco Music. They’d gone through one round of artist development boot camp on the show, and another followed on an X Factor live tour in spring 2011. They’d developed an onstage confidence, but the studio presented a new challenge. “We had to create who should do what in One Direction,” Falk says. To solve the puzzle the band’s five voices presented, they chose the kitchen sink method and everyone tried everything.
“They were searching for themselves,” Falk adds. “It was like, Harry, let’s just record him; he’s not afraid of anything. Liam’s the perfect song starter, and then you put Zayn on top with this high falsetto. Louis found his voice when we did ‘Change Your Mind.’ It was a long trial for everyone to find their strengths and weaknesses, but that was also the fun part.” Falk also gave Niall some of his first real guitar lessons; there’s video of them performing “One Thing” together, still blessedly up on YouTube.
“What Makes You Beautiful” was released September 11th, 2011 in the U.K. and debuted at Number One on the singles chart there — though the video had dropped a month prior. While One Direction’s immediate success in the U.K. and other parts of Europe wasn’t guaranteed, the home field odds were favorable. European markets have historically been kinder to boy bands than the U.S.; ‘N Sync and Backstreet Boys found huge success abroad before they conquered home. To that end, neither Kotecha nor Falk were sure 1D would break in the U.S. Falk even says of conceiving the band’s sound, “We didn’t want it to sound too American, because this was not meant — for us, at least — to work in America. This was gonna work in the U.K. and maybe outside the U.K.”
Stoking anticipation for “What Makes You Beautiful” by releasing the video on YouTube before the single dropped, preceded the strategy Columbia Records (the band’s U.S. label) adopted for Up All Night. Between its November 2011 arrival in the U.K. and its U.S. release in March 2012, Columbia eschewed traditional radio strategies and built hype on social media. One Direction had been extremely online since their X Factor days, engaging with fans and spending their downtime making silly videos to share. One goofy tune, made with Kotecha, called “Vas Happenin’ Boys?” was an early viral hit.
“They instinctively had this — and it might just be a generational thing — they just knew how to speak to their fans,” Kotecha says. “And they did that by being themselves. That was a unique thing about these boys: When the cameras turned on, they didn’t change who they were.”
Social media was flooded with One Direction contests and petitions to bring the band to fans’ towns. Radio stations were inundated with calls to play “What Makes You Beautiful” long before it was even available. When it did finally arrive, Kotecha (who was in Sweden at the time) remembers staying up all night to watch it climb the iTunes chart with each refresh.
Take Me Home, was recorded primarily in Stockholm and London during and after their first world tour. The success of Up All Night had attracted an array of top songwriting talent — Ed Sheeran even penned two hopeless romantic sad lad tunes, “Little Things” and “Over Again” — but Kotecha, Falk and Yacoub grabbed the reins, collaborating on six of the album’s 13 tracks. In charting their course, Kotecha returned to his boy band history: “My theory was, you give them a similar sound on album two, and album three is when you start moving on.”
Still, there was the inherent pressure of the second album to contend with. The label wanted a “What Makes You Beautiful, Part 2,” and evidence that the 1D phenomenon wasn’t slowing down appeared outside the window of the Stockholm studio: so many fans, the street had to be shut down. Kotecha even remembers seeing police officers with missing person photos, combing through the girls camped outside, looking for teens to return to their parents.
At this pivotal moment, One Direction made it clear that they wanted a greater say in their artistic future. Kotecha admits he was wary at first, but the band was determined. To help manage the workload, Kotecha had brought in two young songwriters, Kristoffer Fogelmark and Albin Nedler, who’d arrived with a handful of ideas, including a chorus for a booming power ballad called “Last First Kiss.”
“We thought, while we’re busy recording vocals, whoever’s not busy can go write songs with these two guys, and then we’ll help shape them as much as we can,” Kotecha says. “And to our pleasant surprise, the songs were pretty damn good.”
At this pivotal moment, too, songwriters Julian Bunetta and John Ryan also met the band. Friends from the Berklee College of Music, Bunetta and Ryan had moved out to L.A. and cut a few tracks, but still had no hits to their name. They entered the Syco orbit after scoring work on the U.S. version of The X Factor, and were asked if they wanted to try writing a song for Take Me Home. “I was like, yeah definitely,” Bunetta says. “They sold five million albums? Hell yeah, I want to make some money.”
Working with Jamie Scott, who’d written two songs on Up All Night (“More Than This” and “Stole My Heart”), Bunetta and Ryan wrote “C’mon, C’mon” — a blinding hit of young love that rips down a dance pop speedway through a comically oversized wall of Marshall stacks. It earned them a trip to London. Bunetta admits to thinking the whole 1D thing was “a quick little fad” ahead of their first meeting with the band, but their charms were overwhelming. Everyone hit it off immediately.
“Niall showed me his ass,” Bunetta remembers of the day they recorded, “They Don’t Know About Us,” one of five songs they produced for Take Me Home (two are on the deluxe edition). “The first vocal take, he went in to sing, did a take, I was looking down at the computer screen and was like, ‘On this line, can you sing it this way?’ And I looked over and he was mooning me. I was like, ‘I love this guy!’”
Take Me Home dropped November 9th, just nine days short of Up All Night’s first anniversary. With only seven weeks left in 2012, it became the fourth best-selling album of the year globally, moving 4.4 million copies, per the IFPI; it fell short of Adele’s 21, Taylor Swift’s Red and 1D’s own Up All Night, which had several extra months to sell 4.5 million copies.
Kotecha, Falk and Yacoub’s tracks anchored the album. Songs like “Kiss You,” “Heart Attack” and “Live While We’re Young” were pristine pop rock that One Direction delivered with full delirium, vulnerability and possibility — the essence of the teen — in voices increasingly capable of navigating all the little nuances of that spectrum. And the songs 1D helped write (“Last First Kiss,” “Back for You” and “Summer Love”) remain among the LP’s best.
“You saw that they caught the bug and were really good at it,” Kotecha says of their songwriting. “And moving forward, you got the impression that that was the way for them.”
Like clockwork, the wheels began to churn for album three right after Take Me Home dropped. But unlike those first two records, carving out dedicated studio time for LP3 was going to be difficult — on February 23rd, 2013, One Direction would launch a world tour in London, the first of 123 concerts they’d play that year. They’d have to write and record on the road, and for Kotecha and Falk — both of whom had just had kids — that just wasn’t possible.
But it was also time for a creative shift. Even Kotecha knew that from his boy band history: album three is, after all, when you start moving on. One Direction was ready, too. Kotecha credits Louis, the oldest member of the group, for “shepherding them into adulthood, away from the very pop-y stuff of the first two albums. He was leading the charge to make sure that they had a more mature sound. And at the time, being in it, it was a little difficult for me, Rami and Carl to grasp — but hindsight, that was the right thing to do.”
“For three years, this was our schedule,” Bunetta says. “We did X Factor October, November, December. Took off January. February, flew to London. We’d gather ideas with the band, come up with sounds, hang out. Then back to L.A. for March, produce some stuff, then go out on the road with them in April. Get vocals, write a song or two, come back for May, work on the vocals, and produce the songs we wrote on the road. Back to London in June-ish. Back here for July, produce it up. Go back on tour in August, get last bits of vocals, mix in September, back to X Factor in October, album out in November, January off, start it all over again.”
That cycle began in early 2013 when Bunetta and Ryan flew to London for a session that lasted just over a week, but yielded the bulk of Midnight Memories. With songwriters Jamie Scott, Wayne Hector and Ed Drewett they wrote “Best Song Ever” and “You and I,” and, with One Direction, “Diana” and “Midnight Memories.” Bunetta and Ryan’s initial rapport with the band strengthened — they were a few years older, but as Bunetta jokes, “We act like we’re 19 all the time anyway.” Years ago, Bunetta posted an audio clip documenting the creation of “Midnight Memories” — the place-holder chorus was a full-throated, perfectly harmonized, “I love KFC!”
For the most part, Bunetta, Ryan and 1D doubled down on the rock sound their predecessors had forged, but there was one outlier from that week. A stunning bit of post-Mumford festival folk buoyed by a new kind of lyrical and vocal maturity called “Story of My Life.”
“This was a make or break moment for them,” Bunetta says. “They needed to grow up, or they were gonna go away — and they wanted to grow up. To get to the level they got to, you need more than just your fan base. That song extended far beyond their fan base and made people really pay attention.”
Production on Midnight Memories continued on the road, where, like so many bands before them, One Direction unlocked a new dimension to their music. Tour engineer Alex Oriet made it possible, Ryan says, building makeshift vocal booths in hotel rooms by flipping beds up against the walls. Writing and recording was crammed in whenever — 20 minutes before a show, or right after another two-hour performance.
“It preserved the excitement of the moment,” Bunetta says. “We were just there, doing it, marinating in it at all times. You’re capturing moments instead of trying to recreate them. A lot of times we’d write a song, sing it in the hotel, produce it, then fly back out to have them re-sing it — and so many times the demo vocals were better. They hadn’t memorized it yet. They were still in the mood. There was a performance there that you couldn’t recreate.”
Midnight Memories arrived, per usual, in November 2013. And, per usual, it was a smash. The following year, 1D brought their songs to the environment they always deserved — stadiums around the world — and amid the biggest shows of their career, they worked on their aptly-titled fourth album Four. The 123 concerts 1D had played the year before had strengthened their combined vocal prowess in a way that opened up an array of new possibilities.
“We could use their voices on Four to make something sound more exciting and bigger, rather than having to add too many guitars, synths or drums,” Ryan says.
“They were so much more dynamic and subtle, too,” Bunetta adds. “I don’t think they could’ve pulled off a song like ‘Night Changes’ two albums prior; or the nuance to sing soft and emotionally on ‘Fireproof.’ It takes a lot of experience to deliver a restrained vocal that way.”
“A lot of the songs were double,” Bunetta says, “like somebody might be singing about their girlfriend, but there was another meaning that applied to the group as well.”
Musically, Four was 1D’s most expansive album yet — from the sky-high piano rock of “Steal My Girl” to the tender, tasteful groove of “Fireproof” — and it had the emotional range to match. Now in their early twenties, songs like “Where Do Broken Hearts Go,” “No Control,” “Fool’s Gold” and “Clouds” redrew the dramas and euphorias of adolescence with the new weight, wit and wanton winks of impending adulthood. One Direction wasn’t growing up normally in any sense of the word, but they were becoming songwriters capable of drawing out the most relatable elements from their extraordinary circumstances — like on “Change Your Ticket,” where the turbulent love affairs of young jet-setters are distilled to the universal pang of a long goodbye. There were real relationships inspiring these stories, but now that One Direction was four years into being the biggest band on the planet, it was natural that the relationships within the band would make it into the music as well.
“I think that on Four,” Bunetta says with a slight pause, “there were some tensions going on. A lot of the songs were double — like somebody might be singing about their girlfriend, but there was another meaning that applied to the group as well.”
He continues: “It’s tough going through that age, having to spread your wings with so many eyeballs on you, so much money and no break. It was tough for them to carve out their individual manhood, space and point of view, while learning how to communicate with each other. Even more than relationship things that were going on, that was the bigger blanket that was in there every day, seeping into the songs.”
Bunetta remembers Zayn playing him “Pillowtalk” and a few other songs for the first time through a three a.m. fog of cigarette smoke in a hotel room in Japan.
“Fucking amazing,” he says. “They were fucking awesome. I know creatively he wasn’t getting what he needed from the way that the albums were being made on the road. He wanted to lock himself in the studio and take his time, be methodical. And that just wasn’t possible.”
A month or so later, and 16 shows into One Direction’s “On the Road Again” tour, Zayn left the band. Bunetta and Ryan agree it wasn’t out of the blue: “He was frustrated and wanted to do things outside of the band,” Bunetta says. “It’s a lot for a young kid, all those shows. We’d been with them for a bunch of years at this point — it was a matter of when. You just hoped that it would wait until the last album.”
Still, Bunetta compares the loss to having a finger lopped off, and he acknowledges that Harry, Niall, Liam and Louis struggled to find their bearings as One Direction continued with their stadium tour and next album, Made in the A.M. Just as band tensions bubbled beneath the songs on Four, Zayn’s departure left an imprint on Made in the A.M. Not with any overt malice, but a song like “Drag Me Down,” Bunetta says, reflects the effort to bounce back. Even Niall pushing his voice to the limits of his range on that song wouldn’t have been necessary if Zayn and his trusty falsetto were available.
But Made in the A.M. wasn’t beholden to this shake-up. Bunetta and Ryan cite “Olivia” as a defining track, one that captures just how far One Direction had come as songwriters: They’d written it in 45 minutes, after wasting a whole day trying to write something far worse.
“When you start as a songwriter, you write a bunch of shitty songs, you get better and you keep getting better,” Ryan says. “But then you can get finicky and you’re like, ‘Maybe I have to get smart with this lyric.’ By Made in the A.M. … they were coming into their own in the sense of picking up a guitar, messing around and feeling something, rather than being like, ‘How do I put this puzzle together?’”
After Zayn’s departure, Bunetta and Ryan said it became clear that Made in the A.M. would be One Direction’s last album before some break of indeterminate length. The album boasts the palpable tug of the end, but to One Direction’s credit, that finality is balanced by a strong sense of forever. It’s literally the last sentiment they leave their fans on album-closer “History,” singing, “Baby don’t you know, baby don’t you know/We can live forever.”
In a way, Made in the A.M. is about One Direction as an entity. Not one that belonged to the group, but to everyone they spent five years making music for. Four years since their hiatus and 10 years since their formation, the fans remain One Direction’s defining legacy. Even as all five members have settled into solo careers, Ryan notes that baseless rumors of any kind of reunion — even a meager Zoom call — can still set the internet on fire. The old songs remain potent, too: Carl Falk says his nine-year-old son has taken to making TikToks to 1D tracks.
“Most of them weren’t necessarily musicians before this happened, but they loved music, and they found a love of creating, writing and playing,” Kotecha says
There are plenty of metrics to quantify One Direction’s reach, success and influence. The hard numbers — album sales and concert stubs — are staggering on their own, but the ineffable is always more fun. One Direction was such a good band that a fan, half-jokingly, but then kinda seriously, started a GoFundMe to buy out their contract and grant them full artistic freedom. One Direction was such a good band that songwriters like Kotecha and Falk — who would go on to make hits with Ariana Grande, the Weeknd and Nicki Minaj — still think about the songs they could’ve made with them. One Direction was such a good band that Mitski covered “Fireproof.”
But maybe it all comes down to the most ineffable thing of all: Chance. Kotecha compares success on talent shows like The X Factor to waking up one morning and being super cut — but now, to keep that figure, you have to work out at a 10, without having done the gradual work to reach that level. That’s the downfall for so many acts, but One Direction was not only able, but willing, to put in the work.
“They’re one of the only acts from those types of shows that managed to do it for such a long time,” Kotecha says. “Five years is a long time for a massive pop star to go nonstop. I know it was tiring, but they were fantastic sports about it. They appreciated and understood the opportunity they had — and, as you can see, they haven’t really stopped since. Most of them weren’t necessarily musicians before this happened, but they loved music, and they found a love of creating, writing and playing. To have these boys — that had been sort of randomly picked — to also have that? It will never be repeated.”
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Kiss me you animal
Sum: dance like no one is watching
Pair: Virgil/Remus, Dukexiety
Written for @dukexietyweek Day 5: Music
Warnings: song!fic, probably swearing, mild anxious feelings, MCR.
--
Remus is bored. Which is never a good thing on it’s own. But he’s also bored and lonely. He wants to do something with someone but he isn’t sure what he wants to do either which make him more frustrated with being bored and lonely. He groans to himself and the walls around him shudder with the force. He’s so bored he actually walks down stairs to the common area instead of just sinking through the ceiling and landing with a crash like he usually does.
The common room is dark, and dingy, and a little messy, but most certainly lived in and loved by its occupants. Remus kind of likes it that way, make it easier to hide stuff in the cushions to be found later for a well awaited prank.
This time the room is not empty. For once in a blue moon Virgil is on the couch, curled up in a tight ball of a blanket with his headphones on. Remus twists his nose up at him in greeting and Virgil flips him off in return. As he passes by he catches the sound of music coming from the headphones and an idea strikes him.
With an easy snap of his fingers, the music stops in the headphones and plays from loudspeakers now lining the top of the room. Some bright colored lights flood the floor and Virgil jumps out of his skin at the sudden new loudness.
“Remus what the fuck dude!” Virgil cries out but it’s too late, Remus is already headbanging wildly to the song playing and not caring for anything else, screaming the lyrics loudly.
“Drugs, gimme drugs, gimme drugs, I don't need it, but I'll sell what you got, take the cash and I'll keep it!”
He gesutres wildly to Virgil who is still looking at him like he’s crazy which to be fair Virgil does a lot but this seems more directed this time. Remus hops over the couch towards him and Virgil jumps back and hits the wall, skittering up like a spider.
“Eight legs to the wall, hit the gas, kill them all, and we crawl, and we crawl, and we crawl! You be my detonator!” Virgil lets out a snort but stays safe on the wall for while longer as Remus belts out the lyrics and shakes the entire common space with the force of his passion. He thrashes about, not ruining anything but certinaly causing a disruption. He spies Virgil whispering along to the lyrics as well and decides that just won't do. He slides to stop in front of Virgil with his hands out and an inviting smile.
“Gimme more, gimme more, gimme more, shut up and sing it with me!” He yanks Virgil down and pulls him into a weird spinning jumping sort of dance, no ryhme or reason, just pure movement. He’s screaming along to one part of the song while Virgil does the chorus slowly getting louder and louder. The general air of tension Virgil keeps close around him is slowly dissolving. He's laughing as he sings and the smile he wears is one Remus does not see often.
It’s a hidden sort of thing, because Virgil is all of the fears and worries, and one is that his smile looks weird or bad. But it’s here now that smile, and Virgil looks so unashamed to show it that it makes Remus even more crazy.
“More, gimme more, gimme more!” Remus spins Virgil away from him and hops up on the table.
“Oh, let me tell you about the sad man!” He makes a crying motion with his hands, his outfit shifting to pastel blue and grey, a mockery of Patton. Virgil snorts and turns away from him but Remus is faster he slides in front of Virgil and now dorns yellow and black.
“ Shut up and let me see your jazz hands,” He echos and Virgil does the jazz hands with him with no shame.
“Remember when you were a madman," Blue and black and glasses, and a crazed expression has Virgil busting out laughing.
“Thought you was Batman!” Something blindingly red and Virgil is pushing him away only to rock his head back and forth to the music.
“Hit the party with a gas can! Kiss me, you animal!” Virgil shouts the lyrics and Remus feels like ice water was dumped down his spine as Virgil keeps recklessly singing the lyrics. A sudden part of him wants to. Wants to kiss this wild Virgil who looks carefree and happy and for once not worrying what someone else thinks about him. Remus wants so badly.
So he gets closer as the song reaches a lull and back to back they rasie their hands, palms up with their fingers pointed to the sky, pressing into each other for support and energy, feeling the buzz between each other as the song begins to pick up again.
They turn and face each other screaming out the lyrics. Smiles on both their faces.
"Everybody wants to change the world, but no one, no one, wants to die, wanna try, wanna try, wanna try, wanna try, wanna try, now-!"
They head bang in time to the music, a miracle they don't bang into each other with the building force of their movements. Remus can see multitudes in Virgil’s eyes as he screams.
"I'll be your detonator!” And the music gets louder by Remus’s doing. It pounds in his ear drums as they both dance haphazardly to the music, jumping on the couch and table, kicking over a chair or two just because they can.
Remus sees Virgil laughing and looking so free of worries for the first time in a long time and he can’t stand to be away from him any longer. He dahes forward and right as the lyrics pick back up he hoists Virgil up in his arms and spins him about
“Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na!” They shout to the ceiling and Remus drops Virgil back to his feet, making sure to keep one hand on him as much as possible, gripping his fingers, hand on his shoulder, pressed up against his side or back. Remus needs to be closer to him, to somehow let Virgil know this wild side of him is welcome, wanted, beautiful.
They end face to face, hair in their eyes and cheeks red with the force of their yelling. The two of them barely breathing enough to continue but they do if nothing else than out of pure spite.
“I'd rather go to hell! Than be in a purgatory!” Remus screams.
“Cut my hair, gag and bore me!” Virgil shouts back at him.
“Pull this pin!” Remus grabs Virgil by the waist and spins him, dropping him into a dip.
“Let this world explode!” Virgil breathes out the last lyric, letting his hand fall down to the ground with his head back, Remus being the only thing keeping him from falling to the ground.
The sound of their panting fills the room as the speakers Remus put up melt into puddles and disappear. Silence surrounds them and with a small squeaking cackle, Remus hoists Virgil back to a proper standing postion but doesn't remove his hands from Virgil's waist. Virgil is still smiling and laughing, shaking his head at his own enjoyment and Remus doesn't want to let him go for a second.
But then Virgil looks at him, the smile on his face slowly falling away as he realizes the position they’re in and what he jsut did.
“Uh-” Virgil says eloquently and weasels his way out of Remus’s hands. He rubs his arms and shrinks, and just like that, the sudden explosion of who he was is gone leaving Remus whiplashed. Virgil moves to walk away.
“Where you going?” Remus asks him, trailing like a lost dog. Virgil gives him a grimace.
“Away form here,” Virgil says and before Remus can do anything else Virgil sinks out leaving him hollow and definitely missing something. Remus spins in a circle looking at the upturned room from their dancing.
They were having fun. Laughing, getting along, and Remus didn't bring out any kind of intestines or bugs or anything. It was fun and Virgil was smiling and looking so alive and now it's gone and Remus doesn’t know why.
Now he's, bored, certainly lonely, and confused.
With a twist in his mouth he sinks out to Virgil's room, except he pops up in front of Virgil's purple door and not inside like he intended meaning Virgil has locked it.
“Oh Virgey! Let me in!” Remus coos and knocks on the door quickly. There’s a muffled 'no' from the other side that makes Remus pout.
“Little pig little pig let me in!” He tries again. This time no answer at all. Remus tilts his head to the side with a crack and waves his hand at the door, willing it to open for him. It does and he steps inside.
“Seriously dude?” Virgil snaps at him because they both know that Remus knows that Virgil doesn't like when he breaks into his room. He sits up on his bed and Remus closes the door behind him with a kick.
“What just happned.” He demands. Virgil glares at him.
“What are you talk-”
“We were having fun, and dancing and singing and having fun and you just left.” Remus accuses of him angrily. Virgil slinks down at his words, not looking at Remus as he does.
“It's nothing dude just forget about it.” Virgil turns away from him and flops to his bed, putting his back towards Remus. Remus’s blood boils and he can feel the steam coming out of his nose when he exhales.
“No.” He says decidedly and stalks forward. Virgil twists just enough to see him coming but Remus is faster, landing on Virgil's bed with both his hands smacking down on either side of Virgil's head to trap him down.
“We were having fun, what happened.” He asks again. Virgil shifts uncomfortably under him, the feeling of being trapped starting to edge on his anxiety. The shadows of the room twist and creep closer but Remus glares them back with a look.
“It’s just- I don't know! We were so exposed out there and- it probably looked super fucking dumb I don't know!” Virgil scrambles for words and Remus lets out another smokey exhale.
“You know I don't give a shit what you do or what you look like right?” He deadpans. Virgil freezes and stares at him. Remus arcs an eyebrow at the confused expression.
“Out of all the people to not give a fuck how you look, I am probably the best bet,” Remus says a little softer this time, gently easing back so Virgil is less trapped but still beneath him. Virgil relaxes a little and covers his mouth with his hand.
“I know that, I do , it's just.. hard to remember sometimes. Because of, the whole-” Virgil gestures to himself as a whole and Remus rolls his eyes so hard they fall out of his head and across the floor. He shakes his head and new eyes appear in the sockets, an electric purple just for Virgil.
“Listen raggedy anx, I don't give a flying fuck,” He says and grabs Virgil's hand from across his mouth. He knows how embarrassed Virgil is by his smile, a common fear for many, but not for Remus.
“-About any of that shit.” Carefully he brings Virgil's hand to his face and kisses his palm. He feels Virgil still below him but he doesn't stop. He feels a burning inside him and he's never really learned how to call it quits before.
“I liked seeing you act all crazy and wild. I liked seeing you smile and having fun. I liked that you were having fun with me. How many more times do I need to say it?” Remus asks him then, glaring from over Virgil's hand still pressed to his face. He’d say it seven million more times if needed. Virgil swallows hard and Remus zeros in on the action hungrily.
“Maybe.. maybe a few more times wouldn't hurt?” Virgil chokes out, embarrassed about wanting the attention but Remus isn’t. He smirks wildly.
“I liked hearing you sing, i liked hearing you scream, i liked seeing you kick over a chair” HE says and Virigl snorts and attemps cover his mouth with his hand but Remus is still holding it and ends up squeezing their hands together.
“I like seeing you smile I like seeing you be happy, I like seeing you having fun,” Remus goes on and Virgil is giggling hysterically now unsure of how to respond to the affection.
“I like hearing you laugh.. I like seeing you beanth me," Here Remus wiggles his eyebrows and Virgil takes the nearest pillow to shove in his face in a peel of laughter. Remus shoves it out of the way and dives forward, scooping Virgil in his arms and shaking his head into Virgil's chest. He can hear Virgil's heart beating and the shakiness of his breathing but he's alive in his hands and it sends him reeling.
“I like you,” He pops up to look at Virgil. Virgil's smile slips off to a bewildered expression. Remus stares back at him. And since he’s never thought anything through in his life, Remus shifts a hand out from under Virgil to place on his cheek to hold him steady and kiss him.
Virgil lets out a shaky exhale of a noise through his nose that Remus can feel on his cheek but it doesn't stop him, especially not when Virgil’s tension of existing seems to melt away. So he kisses a little longer until Virgil gently places a hand on his chest and pushes him back. He stares down as Virgil catches his breath.
“I liked that,” Remus says then. Virgil looks up at him, a lopsided smile crosses his face.
“It was. It was alright,” Virgil tells him but there’s a hint of smirk there that has Remus buzzing.
“Can I do it again?” Remus asks and shimmies a little in excitment. Virgil snorts and almost, almost covers his mouth with his hand, but thinks twice and moves it to the back of Remus’s head to scratch at the base of his neck. Remus lets out a grumbling purr at the action.
“I guess you can, if you want.” Virgil tells him.
“Do you want?” Remus asks. Virgil bites his lip and Remus decides he too, would like to bite Virgil's lip.
“Yeah, I.. yeah I would like that.” Remus scrunches his nose.
“Are you sure?” He doesn't want Virgil to tighten up or fall back into his shell now. Virgil huffs at him and tugs him down just a little.
“Kiss me you animal.” And no sooner do the words leave his mouth is Remus dropping down again to kiss him, getting Virgil's lower lip between his teeth and nipping at it playfully.
They spend the rest of the day curled up around each other in Virgil's bed, kissing and teasing each other over stupid things and Remus is wiggling happily. He’s no longer bored, or confused, and certainly not lonely.
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THWACK - A Negan One Shot
Summary: a load of words slung haphazardly together to create a modern masterpiece. Written for @negans-lucille-tblr 6K Roll The Dice Challenge using the prompt “ I'm a slave to your games. I'm just a sucker for pain “.
Characters: Negan x Reader (ft. Floral Wallpaper)
Rating: 18+ but maybe less than 98
Warnings: All the warnings. Don’t read this if you get offended by anything typically Negan. Floral Wallpaper.
Word Count: 1,963
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
The sound of the clock echos through your mind. It suffocates your thoughts as it reminds you of the monotonous grind of time. Every "tick" amplified through the dark. The space between each one extending for eternity as the silence between them crashes through you like unrelenting waves on a crumbling cliff face, slowly beating away at your resilience. The rest of the community sleeps blissfully as you lay there, your consciousness unwavering.
Tick.
You roll on to your side and open your eyes, staring blankly at the wall. The floral wallpaper, once pristine, now peels away slightly at the seems, unveiling the illusion of perfection, breaking the once perfect pattern.
The luxuries of the past have long been abandoned. What's the point in keeping the inside looking nice any more? Compared to the horror that lies in the world beyond the mildew covered window of The Sanctuary, the room you're in, even in this state, IS luxury these days. You only need to see a couple of Walkers have their heads smashed in to be cleansed of material desires and become satisfied with basic needs being met.
Another tick of the clock calls an end to the time you're willing to designate to falling asleep. You sit up and swing your legs over the side of the bed, exposing them to the chill of the air that your bed sheets were protecting you from.
You feel the layer of dust and dirt on the soles of your feet as they connect with the cold floor. You reach to grab your clothes from the chair next to the bed and pull them on, taking the time to dust the debris from your feet before donning your boots.
You open the door, trying to muffle it's creak by pulling it softly and slowly away from the latch before stepping out into the hallway. You would rather not wake anyone. People would get suspicious if they saw someone walking The Sanctuary grounds in the early hours of the morning.
You make your way along the corridor to the door that leads outside and gently push it open. The cool breeze from outside washes over you, almost through you, as it breaks into the corridor. You take a deep breath, feeling the air fill your lungs, calming you, if just for a moment.
The door comes to a stop with a soft thud, fully revealing the early morning landscape. The trees and buildings in the distance consumed by a mist that spills onto the roads towards you.
As you step out, gravel crunching underfoot, a glint catches your eye. You follow it to its origin, finally laying your eyes on the steel barb wire coiled tightly around a baseball bat, like a snake wrapped tightly around a branch. It's doing no harm where it is but anger it and it will bite! Lucille, resting by the man himself, Negan.
You wonder if you can back away, sink back into the darkness of the doorway but it's too late, even though he isn't facing you, you know he knows you're there.
He stands, leaning on a barrier, his folded arms resting along it supporting the weight of his upper body, leather jacket taught across is broad back. Lucille stands propped against the barrier beside him, perfectly inanimate yet still so menacing. It's like the bat had a presence all of it's own, bringing fear to many while being nothing more than a prop to the horrors of it's master.
You have wanted to be this close to Negan for such a long time but now, in his presence, you freeze. Just standing there taking him in, feeling your heart thump harder in your chest, adrenaline surging through you.
"You just gonna stand there pissin' your pants or are you gonna join me?" His deep voice startles you for a moment, you weren't expecting him to speak. You walk over and lean on the barrier next to him, staring out into the mist.
You sense him turn to look at you but you don't dare look back. Not yet.
"So... who are you?" He says in a gentle deep drawl.
"I am Negan", you respond, now turning your head to look him, traces of a smirk lining your lips.
He chuckles and looks back to the landscape. "Holy shit balls, we got ourselves a joker!"
You don't take your eyes from him, taking in his profile. It's not until you're up-close like this that you can see his imperfections, the lines starting to creep across his skin, breaking the perfect appearance, reminding you of that floral wallpaper.
"What the fuck are you doing awake at this time, Comedian?"
"Can't sleep", you respond.
"Huh. No fuckin' shit!" He pauses for a beat and you say nothing. "Me either."
"Why?" You pry and he lets out a sigh.
"Could you fuckin' sleep if you had to do the shit that I do? Smashin' dead fuckers' heads don't make my prick hard, Joker! Smashin' livin' fuckers', even less so but some fuck's got to protect and lead this community. They haunt me. Every one of the cunts marchin', around my fuckin' thoughts like they're on parade. That's why."
It's an honesty you weren't expecting from him. You had always been sold this fearless, unfazed persona yet here before you stood a man troubled by the actions of his past. Almost broken. For a moment you let yourself pity him.
"Does nothing ever help distract your mind? Help you sleep?" You ask.
"Fuckin' my wives! At least, it used to. But knowing their just fuckin' me out of fear has started to take the shine off the pussy, if you know what I mean? Shit! I wanna slip my cock down the throat of a fucker who wants it, not just because they feel obliged. Then I might have the release I need". His hand slips down and gently caresses the handle of Lucille as if unconsciously.
You're so close to getting what you have wanted for a long time and you know you can get it if you play your cards right.
"WANT ME TO GIVE THE OLD CODGER A DAVID BLOWIE?", you exclaim.
"Oooh err, yes please, if that's okay with you, like? If you like don't mind and stuff and that?" He says back in a melancholy tone not far from how a school boy might ask for his ball back when he kicked it into his neighbours garden.
"You want to?"
"WANT TO? I'D FUCKING LOVE TO!" you whisper. "GIMME THAT WONDER WURST!"
You drop to your knees. Ouch! You think. You should have gotten down gently. Why the fuck you decided to drop so hard no one fucking knows.
You undo his pants revealing his big, flaccid whopper. "It's flaccid." You say. "Yes" he replies.
You stick out your tongue and touch the head of his penis with it as though your testing an ice lolly to see how cold it is. THWACK! His instant erection ploughs into your chin, essentially upper cutting you, and knocks you over. His meat looks like a big fat sausage that's about to explode. You get back to your knees and take his shaft in your hand. "Hey ho, here we go, yo!", you sing into his flesh stick like it's a microphone, before... boom! You slam that happy package right on down your gob hole! Your head smacking back and forth like your headbanging to a heavy metal track. Your throat is making noises like a fucking plunger making hard work out of a toilet or some shit. Like gluh, ung, gug, guh, glug, guh, guh, guh, gug, gluh, ug, ugh, glug... ... guh, gluh, uh, ugh. You had to stop in the middle there to take a little breath. You are human after all.
Anyway your smashing his trouser snake and shit and he fucking loves it and all that and he is like "yeah, yeah, ooh, fuckin' yeah" and shit. Drool is all puddling on the floor beneath you and all that and like splashing all over the place, you know. Like, step off Shamoo, people need to be careful of MY splash zone! And you like grab the shaft in one hand and the balls in the other and stuff and your like working it like that. Your tongue giving it the biggun on his nut balls. Like slip, slop, lollipop mother fucker. Better tongue action than a fucking ant eater. You pushing your tongue down his urethra and give a good old lick all up in there. Then you start slurping on that junk like a fucking kid trying to get the last of their slushy. And his eyes are popping out his head and shit and he's like "Holy shit balls, joker this is a damn acceptable level blow jay." And you like slap it on your forehead and shit and like maybe prod yourself in the eye with it a bit, I dunno. And you like slap it and he looks at you like "uh okay, I s’pose" and then you slap it again because fuck it. And back in the face opening it goes. Plunger noise returns. And he maybe grabs your hair or maybe not, maybe if you're into that and you're not but maybe you are. And he is all like, "I'm going to do a cum" and you're like "pardon?" And he's like "I'm going to do a cum" and you're like, "sorry what?" And he's like "I'm going to..." and you stop sucking and are like, "I'm so sorry, I can't hear you over the racket". He's like, "ever so sorry, I was just letting you know, I was going to do a bit of a cum" and you're like, "Right you are, Sonny Jim" and stick his whoopsie back in your cock pocket of a mouth. Then all of a sudden, without any warning whatsoever, *pew, pew* he does a bit of a cum in your throat making you gag. Then like a fucking fireman's house, white spaff juice sprays out of the end sending you flying backwards as he drenches you with his load. Like DRENCHES you. When he is done, you pull a hanky from your pocket and wipe the corners of your mouth. You have some class after all.
You get to your feet and walk back over to him, a twinkle in your pink eye.
"Thanks Joker, that was okay, I really fuckin' needed that".
You blush slightly and lean in for a kiss. As your faces connect you take his lip in between your teeth and hold it there. You hold it there until you feel it go slack in your grasp, until his eye's glaze over and then you pull out the knife you had plunged into his throat, his blood starting to gush over you. His body goes limp and falls to the floor with a thud. The vibration knocks Lucille from her perch and she falls across his slumped body. You wipe the blood from the knife on your shirt and place it back through your belt, behind your back. You had finally got what you had come for and you didn't care what it took to get it. You didn't fear the walking dead but you did fear what someone might do to you if they found you like this so you decide it best to head off. You step over Negan's lifeless body and start your walk home. After all, people will be waking up soon and it's a long walk back to Alexandria.
... oh yeah! You sing "I'm a slave to your games. I'm just a sucker for pain" as you walk off or something.
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its gonna be an oolong night
A/N: Yes, I’m still alive. This is for a character that literally nobody is familiar with, and I honestly don’t care at this point. He’s wonderful, attractive, and my god great character yes yes yes. Mat x reader.
Warnings: smut, oral sex (fem! receiving), major teasing, like more than usual for me, but somehow still soft like what the fuck
I also know that a lot is going on right now, fandom-wise, and here in the US.(i swear to god one of these days im just gonna start throwing hands at the police) (or just the world in general.) But here’s some smut to take your mind off that, at least for a few thousand words.
Tag List: @super-unpredictable98, @seanfalco, @seancekitsch, @bisexualnathanyoung, @neuroticpuppy, @misskittysmagicportal, @ghoulsbuddy, @magic-multicolored-miracle, @the-freckled-luba, @maerenee930
“Come on, it’s not that bad. It’s literally just a dosage cup full.” he said, leaning the small cup towards you. Mat was testing a new brew of coffee, one he made this time. Although you loved and trusted him, sometimes he didn’t have the best execution.
“Sir, you have no idea how much anxiety I’m gonna be having if I have like any of that.” you reply, slowly backing into the corner. You look around for any type of escape, and it seems as if the side door in the kitchen was the only option. As Mat dove forward, you spun to face the door, and placed a finger on the handle.
“One move and I’m gone sir. Not permanently of course, the dick’s too good, but you know I have places to be. Food to eat. Arson to commit.” you say, half-stern, foot inching towards the door.
“Ugh fine. At least I know that I’ve been fucking you right this entire time.” he replies, downing the coffee before throwing the small cup in the sink, walking towards you. The sun was out, and he was simply glowing in it. Especially after that work out with Craig, dear lord, that man was looking scrumdiddlyumptious.
“You always listen. I have no idea if it’s because of your anxiety, or that you drink your respect women juice every morning. But what can I say, you know your way around.” you mutter, letting him come from behind you in order to hug you.
“I don’t think I’d want it any other way. Finding the body’s secrets and enjoying them together. Are you purposely trying to get me to fuck you on the couch, because I will.” Mat whispered into your form. You could feel him press his hardness into you, and a few thoughts passed through your head.
Do I want this man to fuck my brains out? Yes/No
Am I going to have to clean the couch, bed, counter, and or kitchen table afterwards? Yes/No
Will he make/give me brownies afterwards? Yes/No
But I have work to do??? Do That First, And Let Him Tease You Through It/Ignore
“Okay, fine, I’ll let you fuck me afterwards. But you can tease me throughout, it’s always an option.” you mutter, turning around to see the half-smirk on his face.
“Oh, you’re going to struggle, mama.” he said, putting a record on, Keys of Life, as expected.
“We’ll see.”
And fucking see you did. You couldn’t get a fucking break from this man’s fucking hands. He was observing you while you folded laundry, and would purposely brush his hands with yours when you handed a new article of clothing to him. You were washing dishes practically attached at the hip. It took you a good hour to get all of the housework done. Of course, it would’ve gone much smoother if Mat wasn’t sitting on counters like a cat, mind, counters that you were trying to clean.
“Yay, you’re finally done!” Mat cheered, climbing towards you from the end of the bed, gently tugging your pants off. He kissed up your calves, and breathed in deeply once he got to your hips. He let the sigh out, and got to work on treasuring your legs and thighs.
You took a deep breath, and got distracted in thought for a moment. Mat always treated you like, well a queen. Waking up in the morning to cook before he goes down to the shop, and letting you try new recipes. He even let you go back into the kitchen to tour it once. Although, Pablo headbanging wasn’t what you intended on seeing. Nevertheless, you wouldn’t take it back for anything. Mat’s wonderful, and he made sure everything was as it should be. Well, most times at least. It gave you a warm, fuzzy feeling, and you came back to the realm of reality where Mat was finishing his rounds, fingers threading a trail to your underwear.
He also tugged those off, and without a second thought, your legs spread further, and Mat gently kissed along your slit, then using his fingers to separating your labia. Your head sat back on the pillow as his tongue made itself familiar with you once more. His hands came up to hold your hips to his face, and you had half a mind to squeeze his head with your thighs. Tiny, lewd noises filled the once-quiet space as Mat went to town on your pussy, like he hadn’t eaten in days (thats a lie, he ate you out during a work call the night before). His nose gently nudged your clit, and you gasped. He smiled against you as one of his fingers came to toy with it, rubbing gentle circles. You sighed at his touch, but then the fucker began teasing.
His tongue would get within centimeters of your clit before retreating back down. You were very tempted to reach down to hold his head where you wanted. You thought it out for 0.5 seconds before reaching down and gently pressing his head into your sex, adjusting your hips as to where they’re slightly off the bed. He looked up at you, glaring, as he let you have your way with his head...for the time being at least.
He lapped at your excretions, almost disgustingly so, but every noise that come from below further fueled the fire. The burning, aching fire in the pit of your gut that wanted nothing more than to absolutely be ruined by (or to ruin) your lover, as well as the bedsheets that you’d been occupying. For short moments of time, you focused on the feeling of his dreads on your thighs before another intrusion made you gasp out loud, making your hips stutter against Mat’s face, losing their up and down motion. Mat’s fingers were more than skilled at getting where they needed to be, and as you felt them (yes, them, he works quick) scissor into you. Your walls contracted when he moved his mouth over your clit, sucking roughly. Those fucking sounds drove you over multiple waves, but the big one was yet to arrive. You were getting extraordinarily close, and on extremely short notice. You couldn’t make head nor tail of Mat’s fingers or his tongue. All you knew was more and more pressure right where you wanted. The flat of his tongue just needed to move like an inch to the left-
oh jesus fucking christ~
Your legs squeezed around Mat’s face as you came, and you screamed to the heavens, head thrown back. Angelic, almost, except maybe God won’t let you in for this moment, right here in particular. Mat came back up with the bottom half of his face covered in slick, eyes blown with lust.
“Every time you properly give me an orgasm, I swear 5 extra years get added to my life.” you mumble, catching your breath.
“Mm, and well deserved. You taste so fucking good, I need even more time to cherish you.” he replied, shedding his shirt.
You admired him from your spot on the bed for a short moment before the sex gremlin in your brain leaned forward, urging you to kiss your partner. He reciprocated, and his arm found its way back around your body as the two of you made out. Mat’s hard-on pulsed against your thigh, even through those fucking boxers, you thought, as Mat detached from the kiss, moving his way to your neck. He nipped at a few spots, and kissed over your clavicle before finally taking off his last article of clothing, and you contracted once more upon realizing that this man, truly was yours. He wouldn’t be this tender and caring with anyone he found (on second thought, mans does have horrible anxiety, so-). But no, he usually wouldn’t eat out some stranger, then ask them what their favorite surprise flavors in cupcakes are. He wouldn’t carry them to bed after their day was too exhausting to even want to life another finger. He wouldn’t come over and smoke, and talk over records with just anyone.
“I know you’re thinking about something. Come on, my penis is a simple being, it’s not a deity.” Mat says, chuckling afterwards.
“Right... let me just call the pp doctor real quick. In reality, I was thinking about how good you are to me. But please, do feel free to stick it in, I’m waiting sir.” you reply, letting Mat line himself up before he gently sheathed himself in you, causing your head to tip back once more. Mat also let out a beautiful, guttural noise of his own, furthering your own want for him to fuck your brains out.
Mat gently pulled back before starting a decent pace, making sure to let you adjust where needed, and tucking his head into your neck. You looked over to his back, and stare at his ass before deciding to actually focus on the pleasure you were experiencing in that moment. Your hands rested on his back as you gently clenched and unclenched, thinking of nothing more than being absolutely wrecked and fucked out by Mat, letting your thoughts wander to the dirtiest, most filthy parts of your brain. Once you were done practically creaming at the thought of being ruined, Mat groaned against your neck. He was almost whimpering, and beads of sweat formed on his forehead, and his muscles gleamed in the sunlight, which peeked through the blinds.
��You just so happened to look down at where Mat was slamming into you, and it was such a wonderful thing to see. There was cream practically streaming out of you, and the spot underneath you was soaked, a good sized puddle of release surrounding your bottom. Mat wasn’t even fully pulling out anymore. That didn’t even matter though, he just felt so good. Too fucking good. The sound of him fucking you into the mattress was so good. So much better than the toy in the bedside drawer. It worked wonders, true, but my god, Mat did you so well. Could never hold candle to him. Mat was getting louder, and the almost full-bladder feeling built inside of you, but that was for another time. Although, the sheets can’t possibly be ruined any further. Anyway, Mat was about to fucking mating press you into the goddamn mattress.
You clenched, and gasped loudly as Mat hit that one spot. The definite, all-in spot that made you see stars when tapped correctly. Your nails dug into Mat’s back, much to his liking, and he drilled you into the mattress, legs held by his hands, and all thoughts thrown out of the window. He was openly praising you, how good and tight you felt, and how he wanted to *shudders* fill you up while he gently, but somehow so roughly made love to you. A few more loud moments passed, and you ground your hips upwards, making sure that somehow, you remained dominant in your own sense. Mat sped up impossibly, hips moving like a blur into you. He reached his end, and cried out, hips pressed directly into yours as he came. His eyes were closed, but he looked so fucking good, head thrown back, chest glistening with sweat. He collapsed next to you, breathing heavily. You contemplated getting up, but Mat always got a smidge clingy after his orgasms, so you were you wrapped your arms around him, in an odd sideways hug. Minutes passed, and you were fighting sleep, and resisting the urge.
Once you were almost out, you heard a muffled noise from besides you.
“Sorry, didn’t catch that.” you muttered. Mat moved his head from the pillow and said something very honest.
“I want you to sit on my face. You didn’t get a chance to orgasm again, and I want you to have as lovely of a experience as I did.” he replied, and you were a deer in headlights for a moment. A very aware deer, but like sir, I need some reference. Don’t tell me to pop, lock, and drop it on your face right after I just held my legs in one spot for like 30 minutes.
“Fucking get to it then.” you purred, hips hovering above his face
He waited only seconds to begin absolutely devouring you, nose buried in your pussy. You barely even had to move your hips, as was getting into every spot you needed him to perfectly. His tongue seemed to move a mile a minute, getting all of the best places it could find. You were afraid of what was to happen if he was too quick. Poor thing would need a good five minutes of warning. You fully let go of the tension in your body, and let Mat work his magic, hands holding onto your ass extremely tight, sure to leave bruises.
You screamed when he landed a slap to your ass, harder than usual, and you were just moments away from another wonderful climax. At this moment in time, you wished that you had a mirror on the top of your bed, so that way, you could see everything. It would be so perfect for so many tender moments in time. Or less tender, more rough and “chile, we shoulda got the roast out at 4:45, but it’s 5:25 moments”
Your brain just go happened to think about looking down, and Mat’s blissed out face, mildly flushed in comparison to other moments. You moved your hips just one touch to the right, and it caused you to orgasm on his face. Quite messily for an observer’s eye. Yeahhh, you should’ve warned him about that. Mat wiped his face off, and smiled, kissing your thigh as you fell to the opposite side of the bed. You laughed it off, and almost immediately knocked out.
“You could’ve told me about that, y’know.” Mat said, the next morning. He was brushing his teeth, and preparing to open The Coffee Spoon up for the morning.
“It would’ve ruined the fun. Who doesn’t like a bit of spice added to their coffee, hmm?” you retorted, watching as his eyes drifted over to yours in a somewhat happy, somewhat “oh my god, the fucking nerves of that pun” way.
No matter, because there would be a lot more surprises where that came from.
Mat, for reference:
Masterlist
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The One Where Jill Shows Up
(steve and jill series)
(jill is like 5 years older than steve)
oh ok so steve seems to put himself down very often and his parents are very dismissive of him, which could be a result of an older sibling and steve being… unplanned.
i feel like her name would be jill. both her and steve would have insanely long names because they’ve got posh parents.
so steve is like steven michael robert harrington or some shit. then jill’s name is jillian rebecca christine harrington
she’s like their perfect little girl, straight a’s, does community service, is cheer captain in high school, and she’s going to yale to become a defense lawyer. she’s their pride and joy.
but like 5-ish years after she was born, they thought they weren’t going to have more kids, because they weren’t really parent material. enter Steve.
jill became like a mother to steve as they grew up. she was there for him as often as she could be. when she got her driver’s license, her parents began leaving on longer and longer business trips and vacations, eventually just sending checks in the mail for food and stuff and coming home for christmas and jill’s birthday, steve’s if they had time.
it wasn’t like they didn’t love steve, he was their son, they loved him, but they didn’t plan on having him.
plus, jill turned out so well, steve will probably just follow in her footsteps.
except they failed to realize that they had completely contradicting personalities and steve just wasn’t an academic person.
even when jill went off to college, she tried to visit at least once a month, but eventually that turned into once every three months, then twice a year, then maybe she’d visit at christmas.
and all steve ever heard from adults is how much they admired jill. how cool it was that she was following his father’s footsteps and going into law. they asked if steve was planning to follow her and go to yale. maybe harvard?
steve couldn’t even get into community college.
jill showed up one grey, stormy day at the end of august.
steve and billy, who’d just recently been released from the hospital, were out running errands. groceries, picking up billy’s meds from the pharmacy, going to the little bakery on the end of the plaza to get bear claws and coffee.
as they reached the end of the long driveway that led to the harrington house and parked the car, billy asked the obvious.
“whose car is that?”
steve had never seen that car before. it was expensive, that much was obvious, but he wasn’t sure if it was his parents or not. his dad always bought red cars, and this car was a shiny silver camaro that looked almost just like billy’s did (before steve slammed into it on july 4th)
they grabbed the groceries and started walking to the front door, steve testing the handle before realizing it was unlocked.
there was music coming from the house, loud, obnoxious music.
“hey i love this song,” billy chirped up from behind steve.
as he said before, loud, obnoxious music.
they walked further into the house and steve took note of how everything looked the same as he’d left it, until he saw the only clue he needed:
the grey hoodie on the armchair that read ‘yale’ across it in navy blue block letters.
there was movement in the kitchen, along with the music, which steve guessed was probably metallica (he thinks that he’s heard this song in billys car a time or two).
as steve set the large bags down on the island and billy put the gallon of milk next to them (steve wouldn’t let him carry anything heavier), jill turned from the pot she was stirring on the stove and noticed the two boys staring at her headbanging.
she jumped back and accidentally slammed her hand onto the hot burner, yelping in pain as she shot to the sink, running it under cold water.
“stevie, turn the radio down, please,” she yelled over the noise.
steve did as told and then came to sit on one of the barstools around the island.
“why are you here?”
billy slapped steve’s shoulder lightly in reprimand for his rude comment.
“well, i’m not sure if you know this, but i used to live here,”
billy noticed that her and steve both had the same smirk and glimmer of chaos in their eyes when they made a snarky comment.
they also had the same dark brown hair and full cheeks, but sharp nose and jaw. jill was almost as tall, if not as tall as steve, had no moles or freckles that he could see and had green-ish/hazel eyes as opposed to steve’s brown ones. they were both relatively thin and long-legged, too.
“oh, wow, you’re so damn funny, jill,” steve snarked back.
jill was still running cold water over her burnt hand. so they were both clumsy as hell, too.
“can you get the hot chocolate off the stove, i don’t want it to boil,” she asked, more like directed, steve to do. he got up and pulled the pot off the burner, turning the burner off. “thanks,”
there was a few more beats of awkward silence that followed.
“so who’s your friend?”
billy sat up and smiled charmingly, “billy hargrove,”
“well, i’m jill,” she turned the water off and grabbed a bag of mildly cool peas from their grocery bags, holding it on her palm. “i’m sure steve talks about me all the time,”
“yeah, i have nothing to talk about but you and your loud ass mouth,” steve grumbled, getting another soft slap from billy.
“so, billy, are you sleeping with steve?”
both boys choked a bit at the comment, trying to not make their bulging eyes too obvious.
“why would you ask that?” steve questioned quietly, almost scared of the answer.
“well, you went grocery shopping together, so you’re living together. or billy stays over often.” jill shrugged as she leaned on the counter, “when i was putting my stuff in my room, there wasn’t anything in the other rooms that insinuated someone else was living here, then i peaked in your room because i was seeing if you were home or not, and there were leather pants, oversized jean jackets, and there was some hairspray brand that i know you refuse to use.”
billy and steve were caught red handed. they knew it. jill knew it.
“please don’t tell dad,” steve begged as sternly and un-childishly as he could manage.
“dude, i don’t care,” jill scoffed, turning to grab three mugs from the cabinet and pour hot chocolate in each one.
billy and steve were sharing a look that screamed “what the fuck are we supposed to be doing in this situation?”
“you’re… ok with this?”
“i go to new york city every other weekend when i’m in connecticut, what do you think i do there? study group?”
“but you’re not mad?” steve still didn’t believe her. he wasn’t sure why but this just seemed too easy. billy was stiff as a board next to him, too.
“that would make me kinda hypocritical, steve,”
billy’s head shot up at her comment and the clinking of mugs being placed in front of them. “you’re…”
“bisexual,”
another thing her and steve had in common, billy thought.
steve and jill were still at odds with each other, but, as steve took a sip of his hot cocoa, he figured they may get used to being siblings again. like they were before she ever left.
#harringrove#Steve and Jill#Steve's a bratty little brother#as he should be#billy x steve#Steve x billy#stranger things#mediocre—writing#mw harringrove
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hype man
Request: 21 and 34 with Steve?
Word Count: 1.1k
Warnings: a few curse words
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21. “I’m (First Name) Fucking (Last name)!”
34. “Now I know where half my wardrobe went.”
from this prompt list
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When Steve asked you to come over to help him get ready for a first date, you didn’t hesitate to say yes. You weren’t sure which part of you answered, your heart or your head, because both were conflicted. They both knew you were head over heels in love with him, despite how much you mind pushed the idea into the corner, and how watching him practically skip around the room at the idea of taking someone who wasn’t you on a date was gonna hurt like hell. Despite all the cons, spending time with him outweighed them all, and you could never say no to Steve.
So here you are, sitting in his room waiting for him to come back and gush about how amazing his night was. Your homework was a nice distraction, but on that didn’t last long enough. You finished what feels like hours ago, and everything is tucked neatly back into your backpack, leaving you to wander his room.
You’ve been here countless times, but it’s never been this quiet. Visions dance around the room.
You rushing in to wake Steve up when he’s overslept, his drowsy groans melting into warm laughter as you whack him with pillows.
How everything seemed to shake when he turned his radio up full blast the day Queen had released their new album. He dragged you along before sunrise to get it as soon as the store opened, and rewarded you with over an hour of air guitar. You both headbanged so hard you had run to the pharmacy for Advil to relieve your pounding headaches.
His room isn’t the roaring fire it is when Steve’s here, but the knick-knacks and photos are embers sitting patiently awaiting his return. The absence of the usual warmness sends a shiver down your spine and sends you into his closet for a sweatshirt.
After tugging the biggest one you could find over your head, you’re faced with the mirror on the inside of the door. Wedged in the corner is the photo booth strip from homecoming.
You were able to pull him away for a moment and into the booth. The four moments captured are all beaming with joy. The last one, where you’re cheek to cheek with grins so big your eyes scrunch shut stands out, warming your heart at the happy memory.
Hearing the bedroom door softly click shut, you close the closet and see Steve, whose current state is a stark contrast from the pictures you were lost in.
His hair is disheveled as if he ran his hands through it a million and one times. His nose and eyes are bright red, tears threatening to fall. Your heart dives into your stomach.
“Oh my god, Steve. Are you okay?” You rush to him and wrap him in your arms as if they can shield him from whatever hurt he’s feeling.
“I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that.” His voice creaks like an old floorboard, the honey usually present in his tone nowhere to be found.
“She said she had a crush on me in high school, but I never gave her the time of day. I picked her up, and took her to a nice restaurant. I haven’t been on a date in a while and I wanted to make it special. She was quiet the whole dinner and waited until I paid the bill to tell me off about being a douche in high school. She wanted revenge or something, get me excited for a date, buy her a meal, let me think I had a chance with her just to turn around and call me an asshole.”
His speech is interrupted with sniffles and hiccups. As you rub his back and listen, anger boils the bile in your stomach. Before your mind can catch up with your mouth, you spit out.
“What an idiot” Despite Steve's face being buried in your neck, you can feel his eyebrows scrunch together in a quizzical look.
“She didn’t even give you a chance! You’re not who you were back then, and if she listened to you, saw how you treated her, she might have had a change of heart and realized how amazing you really are. But she had tunnel vision on a stupid revenge plot that just wasted everyone’s time. Her loss.”
Steve sniffles again, pulled back into the throws of sorrow, and you bring a hand to the back of his head, tangling your fingers in his wild locks. You whisper reassurances that are reinforced by your continued physical closeness, which you’ve learned Steve needs in times like these.
Distance only comes when Steve pulls away a bit, really looking at you for the first time since his return from the awful date. When he sees you’re wearing one of his sweatshirts, he laughs, a bit muffled by his runny nose.
“Now I know where half my wardrobe went.” You look down at the tear-soaked cotton and blush.
“Hey, I got cold.”, you pout, quickly thinking of how to avoid the conversation and bring it back to how to make up for his shitty night out.
“I meant what I said earlier, you didn’t deserve to be treated like that”
“Well, I’ve treated people a lot worse than what I got tonight. I guess it’s karma coming to kick me in the ass. My name’s basically interchangeable with douchebag.”
“Okay, what we’re not gonna do is shame spiral. Here-” you stand on his bed, motioning for him to follow, which he does after grumbling and taking off his shoes. Once you’re both on the sinking mattress, you continue,
“Okay, we’re taking your name back. You’re not ‘King Steve’ or ‘douche’ or ‘Harrington’ or anything like that. You’re Steve Harrington. Now you say it.”
Steve shakes his head and licks his lips. “Come on, this is stupid.”
“No, it’s not! Now say it!”
“I’m Steve Harrington.” He shrugs at the weak words, attempting to get down. You pull him back up by his bicep.
“Uh uh uh! You’re not done with this! We are reclaiming your name! Shouting it from the hilltops, er-” you motion grandly around the room, “bed top! Reclaim it! I need some conviction!”
“I’m Steve Harrington.” His voice, though monotone, is better.
You gesture again, and he repeats with a bit more effort. After a few times and some pushing from you, he’s practically beaming
“I’m Steve fucking Harrington!”
“Yes! You are! And that's amazing!!” All you’ve wanted was to see his smile again, and now it’s the brightest thing in the room. The fire is back.
Steve wraps you in his arms and plants a quick kiss to the top of your head, the only way he knows how to show his emotions at the moment.
“Thank you” he whispers in your hair. Neither of you can see the other’s blushing, but you can see how much you mean to one another. And that was all you needed.
#steve harrington#steve harrington x you#steve harrington x reader#steve harrington fluff#steve harrington angst
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A bathroom figures significantly in the origin stories of at least two classic One Direction songs. The first will be familiar to any fan: Songwriter and producer Savan Kotecha was sitting on the toilet in a London hotel room, when he heard his wife say, “I feel so ugly today.” The words that popped into his head would shape the chorus of One Direction’s unforgettable 2011 debut, “What Makes You Beautiful.”
The second takes place a few years later: Another hotel room in England — this one in Manchester — where songwriters and producers Julian Bunetta and John Ryan were throwing back Cucumber Collins cocktails and tinkering with a beat. Liam Payne was there, too. At one point, Payne got up to use the bathroom, and when he re-emerged, he was singing a melody. They taped it immediately. Most of it was mumbled — a temporary placeholder — but there was one phrase: “Better than words …” A few hours later, on the bus to another city, another show — Bunetta and Ryan can’t remember where — Payne asked, maybe having a laugh, “What if the rest of the song was just lyrics from other songs?”
“Songs in general, you’re just sort of waiting for an idea to bonk you on the head,” Ryan says from a Los Angeles studio, with Bunetta. “And if you’re sort of winking at it, laughing at it — we were probably joking, ‘What if [the next line was] “More than a feeling”? Well, that would actually be tight!’”
“Better Than Words,” closed One Direction’s third album, Midnight Memories. It was never a single, but became a fan-favorite live-show staple. It’s a midtempo headbanger that captures the essence of what One Direction is, and always was: One of the great rock & roll bands of the 21st century.
July 23rd marks One Direction’s 10th anniversary, the day Simon Cowell told Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, and Louis Tomlinson that they would progress on The X Factor as a group. Between that date and their last live performance (so far, one can hope) on December 31st, 2015, they released five albums, toured the world four times — twice playing stadiums — and left a trove of Top 10 hits for a devoted global fan base that came to life at the moment social media was redefining the contours of fandom.
It’d been a decade since the heyday of ‘NSync and Backstreet Boys, and the churn of generations demanded a new boy band. One Direction’s songs were great and their charisma and chemistry undeniable, but what made them stick was a sound unlike anything else in pop — rooted in guitar rock at a time when that couldn’t have been more passé.
Kotecha, who met 1D on The X Factor and shepherded them through their first few years, is a devoted student of the history of boy bands. He first witnessed their power back in the Eighties, when New Kids on the Block helped his older sister through her teens. The common thread linking all great boy bands, from New Kids to BSB, he says, is, “When they’d break, they’d come out of nowhere, sounding like nothing that’s on the radio.”
In 2010, Kotecha remembers, “everybody was doing this sort of Rihanna dance pop.” But that just wasn’t a sound One Direction could pull off (the Wanted did it only once); and famously, they didn’t even dance. Instead, the reference points for 1D went all the way back to the source of contemporary boy bands.
“Me and Simon would talk about how [One Direction] was Beatlesque, Monkees-esque,” Kotecha continues. “They had such big personalities. I felt like a kid again when I was around them. And I felt like the only music you could really do that with is fun, poppy guitar songs. It would come out of left field and become something owned by the fans.”
To craft that sound on 1D’s first two albums, Up All Night and Take Me Home, Kotecha worked mostly with Swedish songwriters-producers Carl Falk and Rami Yacoub. They’d all studied at the Max Martin/Cheiron Studios school of pop craftsmanship, and Falk says they were confident they could crack the boy-band code once more with songs that recalled BSB and ‘NSync, but replaced the dated synths and pianos with guitars.
The greatest thing popular music can do is make someone else think, “I can do that,” and One Direction’s music was designed with that intent. “The guitar riff had to be so simple that my friend’s 15-year-old daughter could play it and put a cover to YouTube,” Falk says. “If you listen to ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ or ‘One Thing,’ they have two-finger guitar riffs that everyone who can play a bit of guitar can learn. That was all on purpose.”
One Direction famously finished third on The X Factor, but Cowell immediately signed them to his label, Syco Music. They’d gone through one round of artist development boot camp on the show, and another followed on an X Factor live tour in spring 2011. They’d developed an onstage confidence, but the studio presented a new challenge. “We had to create who should do what in One Direction,” Falk says. To solve the puzzle the band’s five voices presented, they chose the kitchen sink method and everyone tried everything.
“They were searching for themselves,” Falk adds. “It was like, Harry, let’s just record him; he’s not afraid of anything. Liam’s the perfect song starter, and then you put Zayn on top with this high falsetto. Louis found his voice when we did ‘Change Your Mind.’ It was a long trial for everyone to find their strengths and weaknesses, but that was also the fun part.” Falk also gave Niall some of his first real guitar lessons; there’s video of them performing “One Thing” together, still blessedly up on YouTube.
“What Makes You Beautiful” was released September 11th, 2011 in the U.K. and debuted at Number One on the singles chart there — though the video had dropped a month prior. While One Direction’s immediate success in the U.K. and other parts of Europe wasn’t guaranteed, the home field odds were favorable. European markets have historically been kinder to boy bands than the U.S.; ‘N Sync and Backstreet Boys found huge success abroad before they conquered home. To that end, neither Kotecha nor Falk were sure 1D would break in the U.S. Falk even says of conceiving the band’s sound, “We didn’t want it to sound too American, because this was not meant — for us, at least — to work in America. This was gonna work in the U.K. and maybe outside the U.K.”
Stoking anticipation for “What Makes You Beautiful” by releasing the video on YouTube before the single dropped, preceded the strategy Columbia Records (the band’s U.S. label) adopted for Up All Night. Between its November 2011 arrival in the U.K. and its U.S. release in March 2012, Columbia eschewed traditional radio strategies and built hype on social media. One Direction had been extremely online since their X Factor days, engaging with fans and spending their downtime making silly videos to share. One goofy tune, made with Kotecha, called “Vas Happenin’ Boys?” was an early viral hit.
“They instinctively had this — and it might just be a generational thing — they just knew how to speak to their fans,” Kotecha says. “And they did that by being themselves. That was a unique thing about these boys: When the cameras turned on, they didn’t change who they were.”
Social media was flooded with One Direction contests and petitions to bring the band to fans’ towns. Radio stations were inundated with calls to play “What Makes You Beautiful” long before it was even available. When it did finally arrive, Kotecha (who was in Sweden at the time) remembers staying up all night to watch it climb the iTunes chart with each refresh.
Take Me Home, was recorded primarily in Stockholm and London during and after their first world tour. The success of Up All Night had attracted an array of top songwriting talent — Ed Sheeran even penned two hopeless romantic sad lad tunes, “Little Things” and “Over Again” — but Kotecha, Falk and Yacoub grabbed the reins, collaborating on six of the album’s 13 tracks. In charting their course, Kotecha returned to his boy band history: “My theory was, you give them a similar sound on album two, and album three is when you start moving on.”
Still, there was the inherent pressure of the second album to contend with. The label wanted a “What Makes You Beautiful, Part 2,” and evidence that the 1D phenomenon wasn’t slowing down appeared outside the window of the Stockholm studio: so many fans, the street had to be shut down. Kotecha even remembers seeing police officers with missing person photos, combing through the girls camped outside, looking for teens to return to their parents.
At this pivotal moment, One Direction made it clear that they wanted a greater say in their artistic future. Kotecha admits he was wary at first, but the band was determined. To help manage the workload, Kotecha had brought in two young songwriters, Kristoffer Fogelmark and Albin Nedler, who’d arrived with a handful of ideas, including a chorus for a booming power ballad called “Last First Kiss.”
“We thought, while we’re busy recording vocals, whoever’s not busy can go write songs with these two guys, and then we’ll help shape them as much as we can,” Kotecha says. “And to our pleasant surprise, the songs were pretty damn good.”
At this pivotal moment, too, songwriters Julian Bunetta and John Ryan also met the band. Friends from the Berklee College of Music, Bunetta and Ryan had moved out to L.A. and cut a few tracks, but still had no hits to their name. They entered the Syco orbit after scoring work on the U.S. version of The X Factor, and were asked if they wanted to try writing a song for Take Me Home. “I was like, yeah definitely,” Bunetta says. “They sold five million albums? Hell yeah, I want to make some money.”
Working with Jamie Scott, who’d written two songs on Up All Night (“More Than This” and “Stole My Heart”), Bunetta and Ryan wrote “C’mon, C’mon” — a blinding hit of young love that rips down a dance pop speedway through a comically oversized wall of Marshall stacks. It earned them a trip to London. Bunetta admits to thinking the whole 1D thing was “a quick little fad” ahead of their first meeting with the band, but their charms were overwhelming. Everyone hit it off immediately.
“Niall showed me his ass,” Bunetta remembers of the day they recorded, “They Don’t Know About Us,” one of five songs they produced for Take Me Home (two are on the deluxe edition). “The first vocal take, he went in to sing, did a take, I was looking down at the computer screen and was like, ‘On this line, can you sing it this way?’ And I looked over and he was mooning me. I was like, ‘I love this guy!’”
Take Me Home dropped November 9th, just nine days short of Up All Night’s first anniversary. With only seven weeks left in 2012, it became the fourth best-selling album of the year globally, moving 4.4 million copies, per the IFPI; it fell short of Adele’s 21, Taylor Swift’s Red and 1D’s own Up All Night, which had several extra months to sell 4.5 million copies.
Kotecha, Falk and Yacoub’s tracks anchored the album. Songs like “Kiss You,” “Heart Attack” and “Live While We’re Young” were pristine pop rock that One Direction delivered with full delirium, vulnerability and possibility — the essence of the teen — in voices increasingly capable of navigating all the little nuances of that spectrum. And the songs 1D helped write (“Last First Kiss,” “Back for You” and “Summer Love”) remain among the LP’s best.
“You saw that they caught the bug and were really good at it,” Kotecha says of their songwriting. “And moving forward, you got the impression that that was the way for them.”
Like clockwork, the wheels began to churn for album three right after Take Me Home dropped. But unlike those first two records, carving out dedicated studio time for LP3 was going to be difficult — on February 23rd, 2013, One Direction would launch a world tour in London, the first of 123 concerts they’d play that year. They’d have to write and record on the road, and for Kotecha and Falk — both of whom had just had kids — that just wasn’t possible.
But it was also time for a creative shift. Even Kotecha knew that from his boy band history: album three is, after all, when you start moving on. One Direction was ready, too. Kotecha credits Louis, the oldest member of the group, for “shepherding them into adulthood, away from the very pop-y stuff of the first two albums. He was leading the charge to make sure that they had a more mature sound. And at the time, being in it, it was a little difficult for me, Rami and Carl to grasp — but hindsight, that was the right thing to do.”
“For three years, this was our schedule,” Bunetta says. “We did X Factor October, November, December. Took off January. February, flew to London. We’d gather ideas with the band, come up with sounds, hang out. Then back to L.A. for March, produce some stuff, then go out on the road with them in April. Get vocals, write a song or two, come back for May, work on the vocals, and produce the songs we wrote on the road. Back to London in June-ish. Back here for July, produce it up. Go back on tour in August, get last bits of vocals, mix in September, back to X Factor in October, album out in November, January off, start it all over again.”
That cycle began in early 2013 when Bunetta and Ryan flew to London for a session that lasted just over a week, but yielded the bulk of Midnight Memories. With songwriters Jamie Scott, Wayne Hector and Ed Drewett they wrote “Best Song Ever” and “You and I,” and, with One Direction, “Diana” and “Midnight Memories.” Bunetta and Ryan’s initial rapport with the band strengthened — they were a few years older, but as Bunetta jokes, “We act like we’re 19 all the time anyway.” Years ago, Bunetta posted an audio clip documenting the creation of “Midnight Memories” — the place-holder chorus was a full-throated, perfectly harmonized, “I love KFC!”
For the most part, Bunetta, Ryan and 1D doubled down on the rock sound their predecessors had forged, but there was one outlier from that week. A stunning bit of post-Mumford festival folk buoyed by a new kind of lyrical and vocal maturity called “Story of My Life.”
“This was a make or break moment for them,” Bunetta says. “They needed to grow up, or they were gonna go away — and they wanted to grow up. To get to the level they got to, you need more than just your fan base. That song extended far beyond their fan base and made people really pay attention.”
Production on Midnight Memories continued on the road, where, like so many bands before them, One Direction unlocked a new dimension to their music. Tour engineer Alex Oriet made it possible, Ryan says, building makeshift vocal booths in hotel rooms by flipping beds up against the walls. Writing and recording was crammed in whenever — 20 minutes before a show, or right after another two-hour performance.
“It preserved the excitement of the moment,” Bunetta says. “We were just there, doing it, marinating in it at all times. You’re capturing moments instead of trying to recreate them. A lot of times we’d write a song, sing it in the hotel, produce it, then fly back out to have them re-sing it — and so many times the demo vocals were better. They hadn’t memorized it yet. They were still in the mood. There was a performance there that you couldn’t recreate.”
Midnight Memories arrived, per usual, in November 2013. And, per usual, it was a smash. The following year, 1D brought their songs to the environment they always deserved — stadiums around the world — and amid the biggest shows of their career, they worked on their aptly-titled fourth album Four. The 123 concerts 1D had played the year before had strengthened their combined vocal prowess in a way that opened up an array of new possibilities.
“We could use their voices on Four to make something sound more exciting and bigger, rather than having to add too many guitars, synths or drums,” Ryan says.
“They were so much more dynamic and subtle, too,” Bunetta adds. “I don’t think they could’ve pulled off a song like ‘Night Changes’ two albums prior; or the nuance to sing soft and emotionally on ‘Fireproof.’ It takes a lot of experience to deliver a restrained vocal that way.”
Musically, Four was 1D’s most expansive album yet — from the sky-high piano rock of “Steal My Girl” to the tender, tasteful groove of “Fireproof” — and it had the emotional range to match. Now in their early twenties, songs like “Where Do Broken Hearts Go,” “No Control,” “Fool’s Gold” and “Clouds” redrew the dramas and euphorias of adolescence with the new weight, wit and wanton winks of impending adulthood. One Direction wasn’t growing up normally in any sense of the word, but they were becoming songwriters capable of drawing out the most relatable elements from their extraordinary circumstances — like on “Change Your Ticket,” where the turbulent love affairs of young jet-setters are distilled to the universal pang of a long goodbye. There were real relationships inspiring these stories, but now that One Direction was four years into being the biggest band on the planet, it was natural that the relationships within the band would make it into the music as well.
“I think that on Four,” Bunetta says with a slight pause, “there were some tensions going on. A lot of the songs were double — like somebody might be singing about their girlfriend, but there was another meaning that applied to the group as well.”
He continues: “It’s tough going through that age, having to spread your wings with so many eyeballs on you, so much money and no break. It was tough for them to carve out their individual manhood, space and point of view, while learning how to communicate with each other. Even more than relationship things that were going on, that was the bigger blanket that was in there every day, seeping into the songs.”
Bunetta remembers Zayn playing him “Pillowtalk” and a few other songs for the first time through a three a.m. fog of cigarette smoke in a hotel room in Japan.
“Fucking amazing,” he says. “They were fucking awesome. I know creatively he wasn’t getting what he needed from the way that the albums were being made on the road. He wanted to lock himself in the studio and take his time, be methodical. And that just wasn’t possible.”
A month or so later, and 16 shows into One Direction’s “On the Road Again” tour, Zayn left the band. Bunetta and Ryan agree it wasn’t out of the blue: “He was frustrated and wanted to do things outside of the band,” Bunetta says. “It’s a lot for a young kid, all those shows. We’d been with them for a bunch of years at this point — it was a matter of when. You just hoped that it would wait until the last album.”
Still, Bunetta compares the loss to having a finger lopped off, and he acknowledges that Harry, Niall, Liam and Louis struggled to find their bearings as One Direction continued with their stadium tour and next album, Made in the A.M. Just as band tensions bubbled beneath the songs on Four, Zayn’s departure left an imprint on Made in the A.M. Not with any overt malice, but a song like “Drag Me Down,” Bunetta says, reflects the effort to bounce back. Even Niall pushing his voice to the limits of his range on that song wouldn’t have been necessary if Zayn and his trusty falsetto were available.
But Made in the A.M. wasn’t beholden to this shake-up. Bunetta and Ryan cite “Olivia” as a defining track, one that captures just how far One Direction had come as songwriters: They’d written it in 45 minutes, after wasting a whole day trying to write something far worse.
“When you start as a songwriter, you write a bunch of shitty songs, you get better and you keep getting better,” Ryan says. “But then you can get finicky and you’re like, ‘Maybe I have to get smart with this lyric.’ By Made in the A.M. … they were coming into their own in the sense of picking up a guitar, messing around and feeling something, rather than being like, ‘How do I put this puzzle together?’”
After Zayn’s departure, Bunetta and Ryan said it became clear that Made in the A.M. would be One Direction’s last album before some break of indeterminate length. The album boasts the palpable tug of the end, but to One Direction’s credit, that finality is balanced by a strong sense of forever. It’s literally the last sentiment they leave their fans on album-closer “History,” singing, “Baby don’t you know, baby don’t you know/We can live forever.”
In a way, Made in the A.M. is about One Direction as an entity. Not one that belonged to the group, but to everyone they spent five years making music for. Four years since their hiatus and 10 years since their formation, the fans remain One Direction’s defining legacy. Even as all five members have settled into solo careers, Ryan notes that baseless rumors of any kind of reunion — even a meager Zoom call — can still set the internet on fire. The old songs remain potent, too: Carl Falk says his nine-year-old son has taken to making TikToks to 1D tracks.
There are plenty of metrics to quantify One Direction’s reach, success and influence. The hard numbers — album sales and concert stubs — are staggering on their own, but the ineffable is always more fun. One Direction was such a good band that a fan, half-jokingly, but then kinda seriously, started a GoFundMe to buy out their contract and grant them full artistic freedom. One Direction was such a good band that songwriters like Kotecha and Falk — who would go on to make hits with Ariana Grande, the Weeknd and Nicki Minaj — still think about the songs they could’ve made with them. One Direction was such a good band that Mitski covered “Fireproof.”
But maybe it all comes down to the most ineffable thing of all: Chance. Kotecha compares success on talent shows like The X Factor to waking up one morning and being super cut — but now, to keep that figure, you have to work out at a 10, without having done the gradual work to reach that level. That’s the downfall for so many acts, but One Direction was not only able, but willing, to put in the work.
“They’re one of the only acts from those types of shows that managed to do it for such a long time,” Kotecha says. “Five years is a long time for a massive pop star to go nonstop. I know it was tiring, but they were fantastic sports about it. They appreciated and understood the opportunity they had — and, as you can see, they haven’t really stopped since. Most of them weren’t necessarily musicians before this happened, but they loved music, and they found a love of creating, writing and playing. To have these boys — that had been sort of randomly picked — to also have that? It will never be repeated.”
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