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baby-yongbok · 12 days

Text

𝘗𝘪𝘯𝘬 + 𝘞𝘩𝘪𝘵𝘦

Hwang Hyunjin 𝗑 Afab!Reader

♡ Genre - Friends to Lovers

♡ CW - Explicit Sexual Content, Unprotected Sex, Nightmares, Alcohol usage by reader, Hyunjin calls reader rose as a nickname, One use of 'y/n'.

♡ Summary - Your avoidant tendencies have allowed the burn of pink and white to keep you Hyunjin at a safe distance until it all comes crashing down. Can the fire that kept you apart also be what brings you together?

♡ Word Count - 9.2k

♡ A/N - I went from not being sure if I liked this fic to being in love with it. I think that it's a very sweet fic and I loved writing it. I worked so hard on it and I'm so proud of it. The goal was for it to be 4k words.. then I almost posted it at 8k but now... yeah. I hope that you love this as much as I do!

♡ Playlist - Pink + White - Frank Ocean, Rainy Days - V, For Us - V, Beautiful Things - Benson Boone, Trajectories - Bruno Major

✧ Masterlist ✧

When you were six years old you punched a boy in the face on the playground. That was the first time that you ever felt the burn of genuine fear.

Your mom along with the many others came swirling around them. When your mother asked you what happened you cried. You clung to her running over to you and the crying brunette boy on the playground with a mix of emotions and explained the best you could through your tears that you didn’t like that he was chasing you, when you agreed to play tag you thought that you’d be the chaser not the one being chased.

That was the day that you learned two things about yourself, you have a habit of acting impulsively when you’re scared and you don’t like being chased. It's suffocating.

As you got older your friends described you as the avoidant type, especially in relationships. You developed a reputation for being an ice queen in your Sophomore year of university which led to you being one of the most sought after girls on campus.

You’ve lost friends because of this. Their boyfriends saw getting close to them as a gateway to meeting you. Many guys took dating you as a challenge with an end prize of overnight popularity. Unfortunately, some of your closest relationships have been destroyed because of it. You learned not to be sad about it, you’ve come to terms with it, this is just the way that it goes. Of course your other friends were all important to you but you always told yourself that you’re alright with losing them as long as you have your best friend by your side.

“More roses? Are you in love or something?” You weaved through the cluttered art studio that Hyunjin has claimed as his own. It’s on the dead side of campus on the second floor of a building that was abandoned last year. Your best friend refused to let the studio go when it was shut down, he says that it houses some of his fondest memories.

“Always in love, never loved back.” He quips, eyes still trained on the canvas. “You’re early.”

You jump up onto one of the few clear desks in the room, right behind his easel. “Chemistry ended early.” Hyunjin stands straight, eyeing his canvas for a second before looking over at you. He knows that you’re skipping class. Your last hook-up is in that class and you're trying to avoid his attempt at getting you in his bed again. If you’re being honest, the decision to sleep with him was impulsive. You blame the beer, all eight of them.

“I thought that we could go to the exhibition early.” He starts another brush stroke and silence swallows you both. “I’m excited about it and if I’m being honest I just wanna spend time with you. I’ve barely seen you for the past three days.”

Hyunjin’s steady hand wavers and he thanks his lucky stars that you didn’t see it. “Aw she misses me. She loves me so much.” The sound of your feet hitting the ground as you jump off of the desk echoes through the dusty room of stacked chairs and forgotten storage items.

Hyunjin stands and dips the paint brush covered in bright pink in the cup of water next to him. “You could’ve come to my place ya know.” You grab your stuff, swinging your bag onto your shoulder.

“Your brother is there, you know how he gets.” You scrunch your face at the thought of Hyunjin’s step brother, Jeongin. The two of you get along perfectly, almost as well as you and Hyunjin until Jeongin starts flirting. He confessed to you on New Years and you’ve been avoiding him ever since. He’s too sweet for you, you’d hate to hurt him. “I’m gonna go change, I’ll meet you by your car.”

“You brought a costume change for an art exhibit?” He asks as he starts cleaning his space.

“Of course, I need to look like art too.” You smile at him but he doesn’t smile back, he rolls his eyes and turns his attention back to the mess of paints and rags on the desk in front of him. He waits until he hears the door open and close behind you to finally let the corners of his mouth turn up. He chuckles to himself quietly while his mind comes up with responses that he’d never dare to utter out loud.

“This one looks like you, rose.” The year old nickname slips off of Hyunjin’s tongue like silk. You’ve never fully understood how the name stuck. You figured that it’s because roses are his favorite flower and he thought it was cute. You’ve never asked for its origin but you don’t mind the name. It’s sweet.

You turn to view the series of pink, white and green dots making up a bouquet of roses on the framed canvas in front of Hyunjin. He studies it with smiling eyes though the neutral look on his face could fool those who haven’t experienced him like you have.

“It’s pretty.” You mumble as you lean your head on his shoulder. You wrap your arm around his and the sleeve of the brown oversized flannel shirt that you picked out a year ago rides up his forearm a bit, he blames the chills running up his spine on the breeze against the newly exposed skin.

“I knew I’d see you here.” The voice of a woman next to Hyunjin startles you a bit. You stand straight and watch as Hyunjin smiles towards her. He’s cursing her in his head for interrupting the moment between the two of you but he learned a long time ago to just live in the moment when it comes to you.

“Of course, I had to see this exhibition.” He shakes her hand and you chalk it up to her being someone important though she doesn’t look much older than either of you. “You put it together beautifully.”

Ah, she owns the gallery. “Oh, please, it’s nothing. I just hope that you’re enjoying it. I actually thought about you when I put this piece up.” She motions towards the art in front of the two of you. The piece that Hyunjin says resembles you. “It looks like something you’d design. I’m still desperate to organize a local exhibition for you, ya know.”

Hyunjin laughs but it's stiff and polite. He’s being shy. He’s a very cautious person but he reaches a whole new level when it comes to his art. “I’m not quite on that level yet.”

“I disagree but I won’t bother you about it until you graduate. This is your final semester, right?” You can see her eyes smiling just like Hyunjin’s were a second ago as she checks him out. She’s shameless in her actions, the glint in her eyes is far from professional.

“Yes, just three months to go.” She nods, dragging her gaze up from his lips with a smile.

“Call me when you graduate, I’d love to have you working with us.” She pulls a business card out of her pocket and flashes one last smile before waving a reluctant goodbye towards your best friend.

Silence settles between the two of you for just a couple of seconds before you break it. “She wants to fuck you so badly that she didn’t even look at me.” Hyunjin scoffs at your whispered words as he slips the card into his pocket. “Don’t tell me that you didn’t notice. How old is she anyway? She looks a bit young to be in charge of this place.”

“Her father owns it.” He mumbles as he grabs your wrist and leads you over to the next piece of art.

“Oh, of course. She probably thought I was your girlfriend, ya know. She’s rude as hell for not even asking or looking at me. I know she saw me here, she’s clearly -” You’re pulled into Hyunjin’s side before you can finish your sentence. The sudden action cuts you off with a heavy thump of your heart and that painfully familiar burn rising in your chest.

“Look at this one.” Your eyes are on him but his are on the art. “This one looks like you too.” You pull your gaze away from him to view the piece. The thumping in your chest doubles once your gaze meets your own. It’s a mirror with pink and white abstract designs floating around and over the glass. The paint is so messy yet strategic. It leaves just enough room for your reflection.

“It’s messy yet elegant, don’t you think? You can’t help but to stare..” He’s visibly smiling now. The corners of his mouth turn up as he studies the art in front of him. As he studies you. “This one might be my favorite. It’ll be hard to beat it.”

“I don’t like it.” You mutter quickly, pulling away from Hyunjin and turning towards the next piece. You try your best to steady your breathing. You will your heart to calm down so that you can take a complete breath but it’s betraying you. “I’m gonna use the bathroom.”

You’re walking away before Hyunjin can reply. He watches you with that smile in his eyes as you disappear around the corner. He knew that what he pulled would be a risk but it was one that he was willing to take. He doesn’t call you beautiful nearly as much as he should or as much as he really wants to.

In the bathroom you’re slumped against the door of a stall while you try to catch your breath. You don’t like how Hyunjin’s words made that white hot burn in your chest kick up. You don’t like the way that his eyes being on you made you feel like you were the only two in the entire gallery. It’s suffocating.

When you step out of the stall your fingers are busy on your phone screen. You find your friend Isa’s number quickly and take a sigh of relief when she answers on the third ring. You bypass reciprocating her kind greeting and get right to the point.

“Get-together at yours tomorrow?”

You’re standing in the middle of the Pink and White art exhibition. Other viewers jumble together along the walls of the gallery and crowd the pieces. You can’t see anything but their blurred faces decorating the white walls. There’s a slow yet heavy beating in your ears but you’re comfortable. You’re alone in the middle of it all, watching everyone from a pleasant distance as you turn to study them all as if they’re the art on the walls.

The beating in your ears skips as you turn and come face to face with Hyunjin. He’s standing in front of you wearing that brown hat that you love and the oversized flannel that he bought just to share with you.

Suddenly the others in the room are quiet. All eyes are on you but Hyunjin’s gaze is the most piercing. His brown eyes are smiling at you with a softness that makes the flame in your chest burn brighter.

“Why are you staring at me like that?” You look around at everyone else but they’ve vanished along with the art on the walls. The beating in your ears picks up, it’s deafening but Hyunjin’s voice can be heard loud and clear over the noise.

“I like staring at you.” He takes a step towards you but you take two back. He frowns and steps forward again. You repeat the process until your back is against the wall. “Why do you do that?”

“I’m not doing anything.” You swallow hard as you try to push him away but he’s stronger than you. As strong as stone caging you against the stark white wall. “I can’t breathe.” You’re pushing as hard as you can but it’s no use. You’re stuck under him.

“Why do you do this?” He’s still staring down at you, a burning gaze setting your skin ablaze. “Why do you keep running?” The beating in your ears drowns out all sensible thoughts. You can feel your veins swelling with fear and the blinding white burning in your chest puffs up with the crushing pressure of having him so close. Too close.

“Back up.” You inhale the thick air, feeling dizzy. “Move.”

“Stop running.” You try to inhale but it gets stuck in your throat. You want to scream. You need to escape. You need to get out of here.

You lift your heavy arm the best you can and pull back enough to punch Hyunjin. You aim for his face but your fist goes through him just as your lungs start to burn, you take one last look at him before the wall behind you gives out and you’re falling backwards. Hyunjin watches you, his eyes are void of that sparkling smile and guilt consumes you right before you hit the ground.

You jump up with a gasp as your eyes frantically search the room around you. Your chest rises and falls heavily and sweat beads at your hairline.

It was a dream.

Friday is a late day for you with your last class ending at nine in the evening. Hyunjin always waits for you in the abandoned art studio, he waits for two hours just to walk you to your dorm across campus. It’s become a routine for the two of you but you told him not to wait up tonight. He was reluctant at first, he insisted on waiting for you but you were adamant about breaking your routine.

He agreed eventually but you could see the dejection in his eyes as he hugged you goodbye before your last class. He watched you walk away just like he always did but this time his heart was heavy in his chest. Did he do something wrong?

That question haunted him throughout the day. It was loud in his head as he collected his stuff and made his way to the abandoned studio. It echoed in his ears as he tried to finish the painting of his vibrant rose that he’s added notes of dusty pale pink to. But it was the loudest when Jeongin called him to ask if he was going to the get-together at Minho’s place tonight.

He knows that you and Minho’s girlfriend Isa are close so you have to know about this, hell, you might’ve even helped plan it and you kept it from him. You’re avoiding him.

You skipped your class to head to Minho and Isa’s place. They share a small apartment right off of campus that you often use as an escape. Isa is one of the few friends that you still have from sophomore year since her boyfriend has never once tried to get in your pants.

You sat on Isa’s bed clutching a bottle of soju that is not at all meant for one person while you laid your head in her lap. You loved being with her because there was never any pressure to fill the silence. She understands you in a way that other people just don’t. Not even Hyunjin.

“So, he called you pretty?” You’ve been telling her everything from what happened at the art gallery to the nightmare you had last night. “And now you’re avoiding him?”

“I’m not avoiding him.” You take a swig from the glass bottle and gulp hard to rush the alcohol into your system. “I’m just being careful.”

“You’re being careful by avoiding your best friend… because he called you pretty and you had a nightmare about it?” You sit up with a groan, lifting the bottle to your mouth again with a sigh. She’s not getting it.

“You didn’t see the way he looked at me. You didn’t feel the way he pulled me into him, his arm wrapped around my waist and he just stared at me with that smile in his eyes. You know the one that makes his eyes shine when he sees something pretty? He was looking at me like that and he told me that I looked elegant. Messy but elegant and that he couldn’t help but to stare. There was a softness in his voice, I swear, and he just wouldn’t take his eyes off of me. It’s like he was looking into me instead of at me it was… it was..”

“Sweet?” You tap the bottle in your hands with your nails.

“Suffocating. It was too much. It made my heart skip and it made me feel hot.”

“That usually means that you like him, ya know.” She takes the bottle from you, drinking from it a bit herself. “ You know that he’s a romantic and this isn’t the first time you’ve felt like this with him.” She hands the cold glass back to you while you think back to the other times that you’ve felt this. The latest being your birthday three months ago when Hyunjin whisked you away to the next city for a mini getaway.

You stayed in the same hotel room and on the night of your birthday you had a bit too much to drink. He carried you up to your room since you were too out of it to walk but you weren’t too far gone to forget the way that he handled you with such gentle care.

He brushed your hair out of your face when he laid you on your bed and took your make-up off with such a tender touch that it made you want to kiss him. You almost kissed him.

“I don’t like him like that.” You shrug and she sighs.

“Whatever you say, ice queen.” That damned nickname makes you cringe but Minho is bursting through the door before you can rebuttal.

“Jisung and Bin just got here, come on.” You stare at him with confused eyes and he crosses his arms as he stares back at you. “Well? Get up, you wanted to do this.”

“Do what?” You look over at Isa who’s already getting up from the bed.

“Did you not call her asking for a get-together? People are getting here so come on. I’m not hosting this by myself.” Your heart drops and you stare over at Isa who looks back at you with her own look of confusion until it all sinks in.

“You meant for it to be just us, didn’t you?”

Hyunjin is a cautious person, anyone who knows him knows that about him. He doesn’t like when things go wrong because of him. It eats him alive until he can fix it and if he can’t he lets the anxiety consume him until a part of him dies with the memory of it all.

His cautious nature is what prompted him to drive home after he got that call from Jeongin. It brought him right to his bedroom where he dropped his bag by the foot of his bed and laid back against the mattress with a death stare set on the dull ceiling. It stared back at him, reflecting his thoughts back to him for him to analyze.

His brother left for the get-together as soon as he walked through the door and Hyunjin was tempted to follow him down to Seungmin’s car.

He was tempted to drop his bag and turn on his heels and come straight to you but he knew better. He knew you better than you knew yourself. If he shows up at that get-together you’ll avoid him like the plague. You’ll feel trapped by his presence and any hope that he has of fixing this situation will die right in front of his eyes.

His cautious nature is what’s keeping him on his bed. It’s what’s grounding him to this spot and sating the burning desire to chase you. The problem is that the fire in his chest is bigger than he can handle. He’s seen how you treat the men you want to avoid on campus, he’s seen you take the long way home just to avoid a conversation and the thought of you doing that to him makes him wilt. He can’t let that happen.

His feet are carrying him across his room before he can even fully process it. He opens his closet and pulls out the brown flannel along with his brown beanie. They’ve become comfort items for the both of you at this point, especially the flannel. It feels like a thread connecting you to him and him to you. He needs to save that connection.

He sloppily throws on the items while he checks the clock. He’s nearly two hours late but there’s still time.

Hyunjin has never gotten a speeding ticket but he was nearly positive that he’d get one tonight. He made it to Minho’s place in record time but he’s panting when he knocks on the door like he’s ran there. His heart is hammering when Isa answers the door and the look on her face when she takes him in only makes his heart beat faster.

She forces a smile, inviting him in and telling him where everything is but he already knows all of that and she knows that he does. “She doesn’t want to see me does she?” Isa sighs, giving him a look that answers each and every one of his questions all at once.

“Thanks for letting me in.” He walks past her with a nervous huff, making his way into the small party and searching for you immediately. He finds Changbin and Chan before he can find you and the two quickly drag him into a conversation about gods know what while wedging a glass bottle of mystery liquid into his fist.

Hyunjin’s eyes wander in an attempt to find you as he ignores his friends' conversation. Luckily it didn’t take long for the sound of your loud laughter to echo through the room. His eyes were on you in an instant once he heard it. You’re right in front of him sitting in the truth or dare circle with a can of something strong in your hand. You’re always the loudest in the room but right now you seem to be the drunkest too, you shouldn’t be playing that game you’ll do something reckless.

He wants to go over and pull you up, he wants to tell you that you’re going home and that you need to sober up. He wants to get you to talk to him but he ignores everything he wants and watches you instead. He stays cautious and keeps his distance.

“Y/n, truth or dare.” One of your few girl friends, Harvey asks from across the circle. You answer ‘dare’ with a wide smile, it’s no surprise, you always pick that. The raven haired girl looks over to Mingi for assistance since she’s known for picking terrible dares. After a couple seconds of deliberation the blonde perks up with an idea.

“I dare you to kiss whoever this bottle lands on.” Mingi dares with a nonchalant smile and you shrug, the alcohol in your system is surely boosting your confidence but it’s not like you’ll remember any of this tomorrow so who cares, right?

He spins the bottle in the middle of the circle and everyone watches with quiet anticipation as it lands on the copper haired boy sitting three people away from you. It’s Jeongin.

He stops in the middle of sipping from his cup and flashes you a small innocent smile but what you return to him is nothing less than a look of raw seduction. You’re on your feet in an instant, making your way over to him with low and hazy eyes. You straddle him swiftly, getting comfortable in his lap like you’ve done this a hundred times.

“You sure about this, noona?” His hands rest on your thighs, he brushes his thumbs over the bareskin and you can feel a shiver down your spine. It almost reminds you of how Hyunjin touched you on your birthday.

“Do you not wanna kiss me?” You tease him with a slight slur to your voice. You know he wants to kiss you, everyone does except for Hyunjin, right?

Just as that thought passes your eyes flicker up and meet those of the very man on your mind. He’s watching you with an angry gaze as he fists the neck of the glass bottle in his hand. Your mouth goes dry as you take him in, when did he get here? You feel stuck staring at him, everything around you is suddenly muted and the people around you disappear. It’s only you and Hyunjin.

Both of your hearts are pounding in your chest.

Both of you feel like you can’t breathe.

Both of you are about to do something that you shouldn’t.

“Kiss her already!” Ryujin instigates from across the circle and you snap out of your haze and blink down at Jeongin. You both share a smile, one more genuine than the other, before he’s leaning into you. His lips just barely brush against yours before you’re interrupted.

A firm grip on your shoulder startles you and the man under you. You both look up to meet the eyes of the angry Hyunjin above you.“Get up.” He practically growls with a slight tug on your arm. You stare up at him with glassy eyes though you are feeling a bit more sober now. “Get. Up.”

You’re being pulled up before you can process it. Your feet fight to keep up with him as you stumble towards the bedroom he’s leading you to. You can feel all eyes on you, you can feel the room getting smaller once he locks the bedroom door behind the two of you and pulls his flannel off to drape over your shoulders, something that he does to comfort you.

“What the fuck?” That’s all you can manage to get out of your mouth as you stare over at him. He stares back with his arms crossed and his chest rising and falling with what you perceive as anger but he would describe as anxiety. Pure fear.

“Do you understand what you were about to do?” Hyunjin tries to be mindful of his tone. He tries to limit the waver of his words and calm the frantic thoughts in his head. He’s trying. “Why would you kiss him?”

“I didn’t.” The alcohol in your system takes over again and you thank the ridiculous amount of soju you’ve consumed for coming to the rescue. You tug on the flannel resting over your shoulders, pretending that its warmth would protect you from the buzzing in your head and inevitable burning in your chest.

“You would’ve if I didn’t stop you. What happened to you not being into Jeongin? What happened to you not wanting to hurt him?”

You groan, stomping your foot like a child being scolded by their guardian. Like the little girl who punched the brunette boy in the face for chasing her. “Why don’t you mind your business?”

Hyunjin scoffs, his anxiety grows in his chest and he takes a step back. “You are my business.”

It’s silent for one, two, three heartbeats before the dizzying emotions burning in your chest fill in the silence for you. “Well maybe I shouldn’t be. You’re way too attached to me.”

Hyunjin feels frozen even though he’s stepping back from you. He’s creating more space between the two of you just like you seem to be doing. What do you mean by that? You’re rambling on before he can ask. “You do all of these things that make me feel like I can’t breathe. You call me pretty and you touch me softly and you hold me close and… and you just make me feel hot. You suffocate me.”

Hyunjin whispers through the bubbles forming in his throat. He’s gentle with the way he speaks, he is a cautious person after all, especially when it comes to his art. “Is this about what I said at the gallery?”

His question goes in one ear and right out the other. Your brain formulates words quicker than you can process them, creating a violent episode of word vomit that threatens to spill over your lips and onto the carpet but you swallow hard and condense it all into one simple yet seering sentence. “You keep making my heart race, it’s not fair. You need to go, just go.”

Hyunjin’s blood runs cold and his temples throb like you’ve hit him. Like you’ve punched him in the face. Anxiety bubbles in his veins and swells behind his eyes. It’s his turn to ramble, the word vomit seems to be contagious.

“I’m not leaving.” His gaze is frantic, cautious, scared. “I am too attached, you’re right. I have been for a while. I’ve loved you for a while and I tried to hide it but I shouldn’t have to. I shouldn’t be scared that I’ll lose my best friend if I tell her that she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

“No, you are not confessing to me right now. Don’t you dare do that.” You pace to the left then the right in a hurried attempt to escape his words before they could reach you. He can’t be doing this right now. You needed to get out of here.

“I am. I am confessing to you. I need you to hear me say that I love you because I do and it scares me just as much as it scares you but you are the reason that it’s scaring me. Losing you is the reason that I’m afraid and I need you to tell me that that isn’t going to happen.” His voice is shaky just like your hands. He watches you like a dog being dropped off at the pound as you physically try to escape him. He knew this would happen, this is what he was afraid of.

“Stop. Just stop it, Hyunjin. You’re doing it again, I can’t breathe when you’re this close to me.” He stares over at you from the other side of the room and you stare back at him. This doesn’t make any sense. He isn’t next to you but you still can’t breathe. It doesn’t make any sense. “I have to go - I have - just… just leave me alone.” You turn towards the bedroom door but he speaks up before you can make your escape.

“I’m not going to chase you.” Hyunjin is unmoving. His feet are still planted to the floor like a statue as he slips his fists into his pocket. “I don’t want to push you further away but don’t you dare go home and convince yourself that I don’t care just because I let you go.”

You listen to him over your hammering heart with your back turned to him and your unsteady gaze trained on the worn door knob. “I’m letting you go with the hope that you’ll come back. You know where to find me.”

Your feet threaten to betray you, they try to turn you around and drive you over to him but your heart is screaming. That white flame is burning in your chest and begging you to run. Run as fast as you can and find safety, but your safety is standing behind you. It’s watching you with teary eyes that are desperate to meet yours.

A tear slips down your cheek as you grab the doorknob and pull it with a quick twist. You follow your heart and rush out of the room with tears decorating your face and your hand over your mouth. You let the burning win again.

You rush past everyone, Isa tries to stop you and Minho even catches you for a minute but you fight him off of you and make your way to the front door. You don’t get too far before the last layer of your resolve snaps, You turn onto the next dark block and sink to the ground. Sobs rip through you as Hyunjin’s words hang in your head. He loves you. He wants you but you left him. You left everything you’ve ever wanted behind you.

A heavier sob escapes you as the truth of it all comes crashing down. You love him too, don’t you? You’ve loved him for so long. Since your birthday and beyond that but you’ve been avoiding it. You’ve avoided your feelings just like you have everything else. You’ve punched yourself in the face, you’ve chased yourself into a corner and now you might just lose everything you have left. You might lose your best friend.

The storms over the next two days swirl the skies into mysterious clouds of pink and white as rain soaks the grass the same way that you’ve soaked your pillow for hours. You’ve opted to stay in, avoiding anything or anyone that could remind you of Friday’s catastrophe.

You’ve debated texting Jeongin and apologizing for what you remember of the situation. You almost called Isa to spill the fears bubbling in your lungs to her so that she could help you sort through them but she can’t. This is up to you. You need to make a choice. Will you run away from the fire or towards it?

On the other side of campus Hyunjin sits in the abandoned studio with paint stained hands and dried tears on his cheeks. He’s left his previous painting incomplete. The bright blushing rose sits across the room with the others just like it while he touches his brush to the canvas and smears a smoky mauve to the pristine white flesh. His lines are messy and uncalculated. Far from cautious.

For a moment he considers that he was only ever careful because of you. Your lack of control over your emotions inspired him to fill in the blanks for you. Now there’s no need for caution without you.

The rain carried into Monday along with the emptiness in your chest. You’ve typed and deleted paragraphs to Hyunjin who has done the same as he sat on the studio floor.

He stayed in the dusty room until midnight each day that he was without you and you stayed up well past then. He poured himself into painting and you poured yourself onto the carpet of your dorm room. You made lists and mapped your emotions until it all started to make a bit more sense. Until the love that burned alongside your hot white fear was glowing pink in the mirror.

You skipped your classes on Monday, your feet drove you over to the dead side of campus through the violent rain. You stood in the hallway outside of Hyunjin’s studio. The worn copper doorknob stared back at you like it knew what you were here to do. Like it was daring you to go inside. You suck in a breath as you grab the metal, you’ve never been one to back down from a dare.

The studio is empty when you walk inside. The fading warm light of the lamps that you and Hyunjin bought and snuck in illuminate the space the best that they can given the dull pink skies. Your eyes catch on the new piece sitting up on his easel. It’s dark and runny, it’s raw and it feels like it’s calling your name.

“Hi.” Hyunjin’s voice snaps you out of your thoughts. His voice is small and surprised as he stares over at your frame clad in that famous brown flannel and sweatpants.

“Hi.” You whisper back. He looks like a mess. Brown hat, pulled too far over his head and his hair spilling from every exit it can find. “More roses?”

He stares passed you and over at the wilting petals on the canvas with a sad smile. “It’s like I’m in love or something.”

Your guilt tinged heart beats a bit faster when he steps further into the room and closes the door behind him. He drops his bag next to the door and stares at the dinghy tile with his hands in his pockets. “I’m sorry. For everything, for the party and everything with your brother and for everything that I said.”

The word vomit is back. It spilled over your lips before you could attempt to swallow it back but you’re almost thankful for it. You have no clue how you’d get your words out otherwise. “You just made me feel… I just felt..” You kick at the cracked tile as if it holds the answers you’re looking for but Hyunjin beats you to it.

“Suffocated.” His eyes are on you now, they’re low and shadowed in a longing sadness. “I’ve seen this happen a million times to other guys and I thought that I was being careful enough to avoid it.”

“This is nothing like the other guys.” Your bag slumps off of your shoulder and you carelessly allow it to hit the floor. “Your confession just -” He cuts you off with a tight smile.

“I know. It ruined everything.” He sighs, sad eyes examining the space between the two of you. “I ruined everything and I’m sorry for that, rose. I really am.”

“It didn't. It didn’t ruin anything, it just scared me. I felt suffocated, yes, but not by you. It was by what I felt for you. That’s why this isn’t like what happened with any of the other guys. I never wanted them. Avoiding them was easy but you… avoiding you..” Hyunjin watches your heaving chest with the caution that he thought had abandoned him. He’s quiet, allowing you time to gather your thoughts. He doesn’t want to corner you, he just wants to hear you.

“Why do you call me that?” You whisper once your breathing has steadied. “Why did you start calling me rose?”

Suddenly he’s looking past you then down at the tile under his feet. He leans against the door behind him, a faint smile decorating his sad face. “You were wearing one in your hair on the day that I realized I love you.” He looks over to where his easel is set up. “We were sitting right there and you had a pale pink rose behind your left ear. You picked me one to match and I told you that it was my favorite flower because in that moment it was. It was beautiful but you…your beauty is hard to beat.”

Your heart is thumping in your ears, it’s a sound that you’ve grown comfortable with over the past few days. The clutter of the abandoned room almost seems to disappear as you process his words. The burning in your chest makes itself known along with the newly identified pink flame. The white walls of the studio almost seem brighter as you receive Hyunjin’s confession. You let it sink in and drown out the tension little by little. “So when you paint them…”

“I’m painting you. I’m always painting you.” The thumping is deafening but Hyunjin is clear over the noise. He has always been the only one who can cut through it all, even in your dreams.

You can feel yourself falling just like in your nightmare only it’s forwards. You’re falling forwards as your feet carry you to him. You run. You run to him and you fall into his arms that have been desperate to catch you for months. The burn in your chest is paralyzing, it’s seering and fighting the pink flame for dominance.

You cry into his chest, you sob as the pain of running into the fire engulfs you. It swallows you whole and you stand in it with him, you cling to him before you burn to ash and he holds you like he knows it all. He cradles the back of your head like he can feel the fire ripping your flesh apart.

You’re flush against him, tears soaking his shoulder and burning all over until he does what no one has done before. He puts it all out. A simple kiss to the top of your head dowses the flame and reduces it to a measly spark of fear overshadowed by an uncontainable pink and white glow of love in your chest.

You gasp at the cooling effect. Air rushes into your lungs and you can finally breathe, he’s the oxygen you needed. He’s everything you’ve needed but now you want to give your air away again. You want to give it all to him.

You pull away from his shoulder in one swift motion, your eyes are shut tight as your lips find his and you pull him into a hard and messy kiss. The sound that escapes you both is desperate and beautiful. His lips move with yours in an uncoordinated rhythm that makes your lungs burn comfortably. They burn the way that they’re supposed to.

Hyunjin cries into the kiss. Tears stream down his cheeks as he cradles you against him like you’d vanish if he didn’t. He drinks it all in, he allows himself to live in this moment that he’s been dying to have with you for what feels like an eternity before he reluctantly breaks the kiss.

His eyes are still closed when he pulls away. He whispers to you, careful not to crack the shell of this delicate moment. “I thought you -”

“I don’t want to keep running. I can’t, I need you. I can’t lose you.” Your eyes flutter open at the same time as his. He stares down at you with that smile in his eyes. That smile he has when he sees something beautiful, when he’s utterly enamored by the sight before him. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to do any of this, I only know that I want to do it with you.”

He’s quiet for a couple of seconds before a smile sneaks up on him. It fades just as quickly as it came and his eyebrows pinch together. “You want me?” You nod and the smile shows itself again.

“I want you.” He leans back in, cupping your cheek as he kisses you hard. His body pushes against yours and you move with him as he walks backwards towards one of the few empty desks and lifts you onto it.

His hands explore every inch of you that he can reach. He balls his fist over the baggy flannel hiding your body from him while your fingers tangle in his hair and scratch over his shoulders and up his arms.

He breaks the kiss to run his lips over the flushed flesh of your neck, he whispers into your skin between each kiss “Tell me to stop.” He pulls at the collar of the flannel to kiss the curve of your neck. “I’ve waited so long for this, please tell me to stop. Tell me to wait.”

You push his head further into the crook of your neck as you tilt your head further to give him better access. “I don’t want you to.” He sucks a mark into the skin right below your ear and you pull his tucked in shirt from his pants with an elated moan.

His clumsy fingers fight to unbutton the oversized flannel as yours attempt to unbutton his jeans. You reach your goal before he does and waste no time capitalizing on your victory. You dip your hand in just enough to fish his growing erection from his briefs and wrap your hand around it.

Hyunjin moans at the stimulation, leaning his forehead against yours and squeezing his eyes shut as you stroke him slowly. “Fuck, please don’t, I wont - I can’t last.”

You kiss his temple softly, whispering reassurance that you don’t care to have him last, you just want to have him. Once he’s centered himself again he continues his struggle to expose your body to him. The final button falls open like the curtain to a play and he stares down your scantily clad torso like an audience in awe.

His hand moves on its own as he admires you. It dips into the waistband of your sweatpants and swipes over your clothed clit.

Your head falls forward to rest on his shoulder with a quiet moan as he groans into the air. Your grip on his cock tightens a bit in response to the sensation and he hisses. “Please tell me I can feel you. Is it okay? Can I?”

He doesn't want your first time to be here but he wants you. He needs you.

Hyunjin hooks a finger into the damp gusset of your panties and pulls it to the side just enough to slip a finger into your waiting cunt. You pant in his ear, wanton moans bubble over the brim of your lips as his free hand cradles the side of your neck. “Look at me, please look at me, baby.”

He runs his thumb over your cheek, brushing over the path of your dried tears. “So pretty, this must be a dream.” You shake your head. Speaking between moans. “Not a dream, baby.”

He slips in another finger as you circle your palm over the head of his cock and you both moan. “Please tell me I can.” He leans his forehead against yours, his desperate eyes reflect the look in your own.

“You can. Please, I want you to.”

“Have you ever thought about it?” He’s asking before he can process it and you’re shaking your head before he can even finish his sentence. A shy glaze washes over your desperate gaze as you watch him undress you.

“You’re all I ever think about.” He whispers as he hooks his thumbs into the band of your pants. “You’re all I’ve wanted for the past year.”

“I’ve loved you since my birthday.” You blurt out, vulnerable eyes peering into his. “Maybe even before that.” He runs a finger over your clothed cunt and you shudder under the touch.

“I wanted to kiss you the night of your birthday. You looked so beautiful but you were wasted. You wouldn’t have remembered. I just stared at you, I took your make-up off and I brushed the hair from your face and you stared back at me. I was just dying to kiss you. I was dying to confess.” Your hand runs slowly up his shaft and he swears that he feels electric.

“I wanted to kiss you too.” He’s quiet, staring back at you with a smile. “That’s why I was staring”

“I kissed your forehead when you fell asleep.” He pulls your panties down your legs, allowing them to pool at his feet with your sweatpants. “I knelt by your bed and whispered my confession to you.”

His fingers are filling you again and you gasp while staring into his eyes. “I wanna hear it.” You whisper through a moan.

“You want to hear my confession?” You nod, your gently fucked out gaze stares into his like your hypnotized by the moment. He scissors his finger into you, stretching you out just a bit before you’re gasping from the stretch of him replacing his fingers with his length.

“Fuck, you’re inside of me.” Hyunjin stills with a groan. His forehead rests on your shoulder while he silently begs himself not to come undone just yet. He sucks in a breath before he recites all that he can remember.

“You’re everything that I thought it would be to fall in love.” He whispers as he pulls back, thrusting into you slowly. “You really snuck up on me, I don’t know what I expected though.” He lifts his head to look at you as he sinks back into you. “You became my world so quickly. So effortlessly.”

You cup his face with both of your hands as you bite back your moans. You want to hear him loud and clear. You want to remember every word. “I should’ve known that I’d fall in love when I first met you.” He picks up the pace, falling into a messy rhythm that’s accompanied by a fit of moans and grunts.

He struggles to keep his eyes on you. They flutter shut with each thrust as he feels himself float closer and closer to his climax. “Baby, I won’t last.” You wrap your arms around his neck and one of his wraps around your waist while the other rests on your thigh before creeping over to softly pinch and rub your clit.

“Hyune, you’re gonna make me - gonna -” He cuts you off with a sloppy kiss, his tongue brushes over your parted lips to request access before making room for itself against yours.

“If you tell me that you’re gonna cum I won’t last another second.” He whispers against your lips and you moan against his.

“What if I tell you that I love you.” Hyunjin’s eyebrows pinch at the confession. That’s way worse than telling him that you’re close. “I’ve loved you back for as long as - as long as you’ve loved me.”

“Rose, baby, you’re gonna -” It’s your turn to kiss him now, it’s a mess of teeth and tongue but you love it. You love him and him you.

You both pull away in tandem, twin moans ripping through your chests as you both announce yourself to the other.

“I’m cumming, I’m cumming.” Hyunjin pulls out of you, painting your thighs in his sticky white release while his fingers toy with your clit to ride you through your orgasm. It’s loud and messy and beautiful. A romantic elegance that you want to live in for as long as it’s available.

Once you’ve both come down from your high Hyunjin kisses your sweaty forehead and you kiss his. He pulls his bottoms up before grabbing the cleanest paint rag he has to clean you up. A comfortable silence settles around you as you ground yourself and take in the space.

“You didn’t finish that one.”

He follows your gaze over to the painting of the pale pink rose. The middle of the canvas contrasts the rest with nothing but dull line art to show the completed picture. It looks like a work in progress. “I know, but I think I like it like that.” He looks back over at you and you at him.

“It looks like you."

It’s been seven months. Graduation has come and gone in the middle of your blooming relationship with Hyunjin and you’ve dedicated each and every second of your budding love to taming the flame.

Each kiss from him has kept the spark of fear at bay and each touch has taught you how to stop running. It’s been a slow and cautious process that he is more than proud to be a part of. He takes pride in it. He takes pride in being with you.

The smooth breeze of late summer brushes against your skin as you step out of your car. The white dress that Hyunjin picked out for you sticks to you like paint on a canvas as you make your way up to the art gallery.

It’s buzzing inside, people stand and stare in awe at each piece while whispering and pointing to their favorite details. You stop and stand in the middle of it all, taking it all in with a slow spin on the balls of your feet. You take in every corner until you turn around completely and you’re met with the face of the artist himself.

“Hi.” Hyunjin smiles down at you, brown baggy flannel hanging from his shoulders.

“Hi.” You stare back at him with a gleaming smile in your eyes. You take in every inch of him, scanning him like he should be framed and hanging on the walls around you.

“Why are you staring at me like that?” Hyunjin wraps his arms around your waist, pulling you closer to him. “I like staring at you.” Your response makes him beam a shy smile.

“You should be staring at the art. The artist might get sad if you don’t.” He kisses your forehead before letting you go. Some people around you stare over at the two of you with curious eyes. They’re eager to put a face to the muse of the showing artist.

You take his hand and lead him over to the piece that a couple is walking away from. You stand in front of it hand in hand as you study it for what feels like the millionth time. “This one is my favorite.” The incomplete pale pink rose stares back at you.

“And why is that?” Hyunjin has that smile in his eyes as he stares up with you. The memory of this piece's origin plays behind his eyes like a memorized movie.

“I’ve been told that it looks like me.” You lay your head on his shoulder and wrap your arm around his. A chill runs up his spine and he blames it on you. You and the love he feels glowing pink and white around you.

“There you are.” History repeats itself as the lady that you’ve come to know as Dalia interrupts the two of you. “I wanted to check in with you, how does it feel to finally have your own exhibition?”

Hyunjin smiles at her politely, turning towards her a bit with his fingers still threaded through yours. “It’s amazing. Thank you, you’ve done a wonderful job putting this together.”

“Oh, please, it’s nothing. This is all you.” You watch her as her eyes smile just as they always have. Her hand brushes over his arm in a carefully calculated move. She’s still shameless and unprofessional. “This piece is my favorite. The unfinished look is unique and raw. What inspired this one?”

You grin to yourself as you listen to her. She’s trying so hard that it’s difficult not to laugh.

“Actually.” Hyunjin pulls your hand a bit, leading you forward so that you’re right next to him. It’s impossible for Dalia to ignore you now. Her eyes scan you reluctantly and the smile on her face falters for a second before she pulls it together. Gosh, that's gratifying.

“My lovely rose here is the inspiration for it all.” Hyunjin looks over at you with a glow that is unmatched even by the largest of flames. “None of this would be possible without her.”

It’s like Dalia disappears once Hyunjin looks over at you. You’re the only two in the room as far as you’re concerned. “Oh, well that’s just - that’s wonderful.” Her staggered speech pulls you both out of your loving haze.

“Such a … sweet profession of love.” She glares over at you though you’re sure that in her head she’s doing a wonderful job at hiding her contempt. “I should make sure that everything is running smoothly. Please excuse me.”

She clears her throat awkwardly before she departs, you and Hyunjin both bid her smiling farewells before turning to each other with wide smiles. “Show off.” You push his shoulder playfully and he laughs.

“I didn’t do anything.” You roll your eyes as you both wander over to the next piece on the wall. You stare up at the two pink roses in a lone vase, a shadow of sunlight casts down on them both as they rise towards its shining glow.

A comfortable silence blankets the two of you while you listen to the soft buzz of the people around you. You squeeze his hand softly and he squeezes back just as you open your mouth to speak.

“She still wants to fuck you.” He smiles

“Shut up.”

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lucysarah-c · 3 months

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Fifteen, what an age to be alive. Dad!Levi

Summary: Steal your father's car! What could go wrong? Author note: Since the Marley world seemed to be around the 30s-40s, I’ll set this idea in a world that looks like the mid-50s. This is POST WAR. Warnings: Cursing 'cause Levi, obv. And slightly mention of a group taking advantage of a girl, nothing really happens and there's no graphic description at all. Word count: 3.9k Pairing: Dad! Levi x Mom! Reader

His hands gripped the big round wheel of the car as his eyes scanned the dark night with a nervous smile, quickly turning into clenched teeth. His attention shifted to the passenger seat, soft as if it was a scene from one of the horror pictures he saw at the drive-in.

A light blond girl lay unconscious, her head resting against the door, appearing lifeless. She wore a typical sleeveless red button-up shirt and very short white shorts, with white socks crumpled down to double-coloured loafers. Her hair was still in a ponytail, exposing her face completely. It was August, plain summer break, and he knew that most of his classmates wore shorts or even swimsuits at the pool or beach. But somehow, her exposure made him blush and feel ashamed, as if even staring felt wrong.

Turning to the back seat of the car, he picked up his letterman jacket and placed it on top of her, covering her as much as possible. It looked big on her, and somehow, Adrien blessed every deity mentioned; he probably was inheriting his father’s uncle’s height and not his father's, a fact becoming rather obvious every day, as he was only 15 and already almost 1.80m.

“Calm down, Adie… you got this,” he whispered to himself, “I’ve no idea what I'm going to do but I got it.”

How did he get into this situation? It was supposed to be a silly night out; one of his friends invited him to a party of the seniors who were graduating from high school that year. What was the issue if he was just a freshman? Fifteen, eighteen, it’s the same! Plus, it was some party at some old forgotten building, half destroyed during the rumbling around ten years ago, in the middle of nowhere. Nothing wrong with that.

Yes, perhaps he stole his father’s keys and car. Yes, perhaps he lied about sleeping in his room. Yes, maybe he stole a bit (a lot) of money from his parents. “I mean… deep down, it’s my father’s fault for not allowing me to come legally,” Adrien argued with his own reflection in the car's mirror.

But everything went downhill when he saw a group of guys dragging a girl who was clearly not feeling well and decided to step in. Now, here he was, the party had turned into a mess as the fight happened, he got kicked out with an unconscious girl, and who knew what they had given her. He hit his forehead against the wheel as time slipped through his fingers; he was supposed to be back home already.

“Fucking shit! Who told me to step in!” he cursed under his breath. Deep down, he knew stepping up for what he had been told was horrendously wrong, knowing he had the strength to fight those assholes back. ‘The curse of being a fucking Ackerman, man,’ he thought.

He had done the right thing, at least one right thing during the entire night, but now he had to face the consequences. Muffled cries mixed with distressed groans filled the car, “My father is going to kill me!”

His forehead kept hitting the wheel repeatedly as if that would knock some common sense into him or perhaps give him a concussion and fake that he had been kidnapped or something. Surrounded by trees in a dead-end road, it wasn’t even paved. Only the footprints of multiple cars to follow back to civilization. The distressed teen didn’t even know where he was; his older friend had guided him there and left with his girlfriend at some point of the party.

Slowly raising his head up again to admire the endless kilometres of dim nothing, contemplating his options, seizing his courage. “Come on, Adie. Be a man, be a man!”

The trees’ branches creaked in the middle of the night, the car slightly swayed under the strong summer wind. “I want my mommy,” he muttered.

Hand on the wheel and turning on the car, one step at a time, he took a deep breath and then decided to go out on the road again. Forgotten somewhere, his father’s car’s papers and driver's license. In them it read “Levi Ackerman.”

Each branch from the forest that scraped the car was a personal pain, praying to any god's existence that it didn’t scratch it. Of course, his father had filled up the tank, obviously he had. Levi was like that, always cautious. Adrien did a personal wish his father had a map stored in the glove compartment, but obviously, he didn’t. After all, Levi knew the streets of the city like the back of his hand. He drove a lot, especially since his legs weren’t what they used to be anymore. Perhaps he didn’t need any support for walking any longer, but walking long distances wasn’t in Levi’s plans anymore.

“Perhaps I can… drive to the hospital, leave her, and like run away,” he contemplated, before groaning loudly, “No, I can’t do that. God, I’m dead.”

‘I could have walked away, but no, Mr. Adrien Ackerman has to be a hero. Mr. Ackerman has to do the right thing.’

Adrien had driven twice in his life; this one was the second. The first was a few years ago when his father sat him down on his lap and let him do it for a little bit. He was happy he hadn’t encountered much traffic and only had to drive ahead because he wasn’t completely sure yet what the third pedal was for.

“I got it, do not worry,” he said, trying to sound reassuring to the unmoving girl on his right. Adrien’s grey eyes checked on her from time to time, but she seemed deeply asleep, or so he hoped. “I’ll get to the hospital in no time, and you’ll be alright,” he promised.

His smile created a couple of dimples on each side of his face, but it quickly faded as fear kicked in. “And if you’re not alright, do not worry. I’ll throw myself off a bridge, and we can be not alright together,” he kept joking as if, by some miracle, the girl would reply.

He didn’t even know her name, and somehow, that made him feel even guiltier. As civilization began to appear and the sky began to lighten up, he lost hope of not dying at the hands of his own progenitor, but he was also hopeful that at least he was getting somewhere without crashing. The sun hadn’t shown up yet, but the deep blue of the sky had a particular glow to it that made it imminent.

The streets were deserted, and rightfully so; it was the middle of the night on a Monday. Adrien tried to park the car as best as he could, finally reaching the only hospital he somehow remembered the route to. Rushing to the other door, he carefully picked her up.

When he crossed the doors of the main hospital, which was almost empty at those hours, the doctors on duty quickly took her in, some searching for identifications inside her clothes. The police officer at the front gates forbade him from leaving the place.

“Alright, please hand me your ID,” the front gate secretary asked after informing him that the girl was out of danger, but she would have to stay for monitoring. Adrien’s suspicious silence made the woman raise her eyes from the form she was filling out to look at him. “You know that carrying IDs is obligatory, right?”

“Yes, madam…” He felt his palm sweating as he feared being taken to the police station.

“How old are you?”

Her voice sounded calm but tired as she quickly understood the issue, “… eighteen.”

With a loud sigh, she took off her cat-eye red glasses and then slowly blinked back at him. “Look kid, I’ve been on night watch for three days straight. I’ve no energy to deal with this.”

Adrien’s eyes remained glued to the floor, feeling small despite his stature. “… fifteen,” he admitted reluctantly.

Her unpleasant groans echoed in the empty walls that reeked of disinfectant. He slowly turned to the gates, and the security guys began to chuckle as they drank coffee. Feeling the need to clarify, he said, “I swear it wasn’t me who hurt her.”

“Kid, people who drug girls don’t carry them to hospitals,” she replied disinterestedly, pouring the information into the typewriter, the typing echoing in the place. Finally, she picked up a post-it with a pencil and raised it to the top of the reception table. “Your parents' contact number, please.”

Her eyes quickly moved to him and then back to her writing as he hesitated to fill out the paper. “You know I’ve done nothing; can’t I just go?” Adrien insisted, trying to escape the situation.

“Kid, you’re breaking national curfew and walking around without identification. A responsible adult must come and sign for you to leave; otherwise, you’ll live here until you turn 18.”

“Could you at least wait until 9 am to call my mother’s work number?” He smiled awkwardly, trying to find a way to avoid his father’s rage. The secretary looked up at the clock; it wasn’t even 5 am and then back to him, deadly. Unpleasant complaining groans echoed as he reluctantly wrote his house’s telephone number. “Sorry.”

Sat down at one of those uncomfortable waiting room’s seats with a latte and chocolate donut he brought at the cafeteria, he waited as someone waits to be hanged. The doctors and nurses moved here and there attending to the few people that came in with emergencies. Until the secretary walked by and said, “Your father picked up the phone; he said that getting the car and coming this way.”

Adrien’s grey eyes quickly turned in fear to check out of the window, grimacing uneasily as he admired the family's car parked outside. “Great…”

The longer it took, the more Adrien knew he was in trouble. Pressing his eyes closed and clenching his jaw, as if he could already feel the kick in his ass. Despite the nerves, his head bobbed forward as he fell asleep, and the tug of falling forward snapped him back awake. At some point, he rested his head on the joined seat and fell asleep, mouth open.

The front gates snapping open woke him up, and he wished to make himself smaller so he could hide behind the back of the seats. But as he turned backwards, Levi was at the front desk talking to the secretary and security guards. His dark hair was a mess, and it seemed like he had just put on some shoes and a shirt because he still had the pyjama pants on. Outside, the cap that his father had probably been forced to take there.

As the secretary picked up the forms for him to fill, his father quickly raised his grey eyes to shoot him across the room the deadliest glance he had yet to witness. ‘Goodbye everybody, it was nice knowing you.’

Avoiding facing death, Adrien remained seated, giving his back, but he quickly heard the footsteps of his father, characterized by the slight hobble he had after the war. With his presence looming, he looked down at Adrien, who slowly raised his attention up.

Smiling innocently, “Hi, dad.”

Levi didn’t smile back; quite the opposite, he frowned even more and extended his right hand that was missing two fingers. “My fucking keys.”

The teen searched for them inside his jeans and quietly handed them over with puppy eyes. Levi snapped them, but his hand didn’t withdraw. “And my damn money.” Repeating the same action but with the bills, Levi grabbed them and began to count. “And the rest?”

Adrien mumbled some incoherent groans as he refused to make eye contact. “Tch,” Levi clicked his tongue and gripped his shirt neck, raising him from his seat, pushing him to the exit. “Get in the fucking car.”

The walk of shame only accentuated as his father's angry tone didn’t match the polite one he used to greet the secretary and guards on his way out. He cowered in the passenger seat, trying to make himself a tiny ball as Levi slammed the door shut. Loud sighs that didn’t withdraw the deep frown before he turned on the car again.

“You’re so fucking wrong if you think I’ll stand this type of behaviour; I'm telling you,” Levi spat the words as he drove back home. “What the hell were you thinking?!”

“Adrien!” Levi insisted as the kid didn’t even reply, looking to his right as he waited at a red light. “You don’t want to talk? Fine, fucking ungrateful brat. You know how fucking worried your mother was when we received a call from the shitty hospital? Eh?”

“The drive-in the other day, the supposed hang out at your friend’s house that you were never fucking there, and now this. Are you fucking proud?” the ex-captain of the scouts kept going as his eyes were glued to the road despite only one of them working anymore. “You’re grounded, you’re so fucking grounded that I’ll fucking die, and you’ll have to get a damn Ouija board to contact me to see if you can go out to buy groceries.”

The teen just silently rolled his eyes as the long list of unhappiness of his father about his behaviour couldn’t care less. “Don’t you dare to roll your eyes on me, brat. You heard me? Drop that fucking attitude.” Somehow his father always seemed to have eyes everywhere. “Happy now? You ruined your entire summer break; beg all you want later on. You’re not leaving the house.”

“As if you’d let me go out anyway,” Adrien murmured mockingly under his breath.

“What?” Levi demanded. “If you’re going to have the guts to steal MY car, MY money, and break MY orders, then grow the guts to speak the fuck up.”

“That you never let me go anywhere!” Adrien shouted back angrily.

“For what? To go to this damn party in the middle of nowhere to hang out with fucking rapists and get

shit-faced?” Levi argued back. “You think I was born yesterday? I know exactly which places I don’t want you to get involved with. You think you’ve everything figured out, but that’s not it, Adrien! You’re 14! Fourteen!”

“I’m fifteen!”

“You turned fifteen two weeks ago, for fuck’s sake!” Levi shouted, slightly turning to his right before focusing back on the road. “I’m telling you, better fix your attitude or this is not going to end well. You may be getting big and feel cocky, but you won’t play smart-ass with me. You can grow up to be as tall as the fucking Colossal Titan, and yet you would do whatever the fuck I tell you!”

“I did the right thing! I stood up for her; I’m not stupid enough to do whatever my classmates do. Why can’t you see that?!” Adrien complained as they reached the front of the house, and Levi stopped the car.

“’Cause you were stupid enough to steal my car even when you don’t know how to fucking drive!” Levi complained as he got out of the car, walking to the front door. He kept going with the lecture but lower as he didn’t want to wake up the neighbours. “You don’t like it? Choose another father in your next life; in this one, it’s me, and I’m not going to let my teenage kid not give a fuck about the decisions I take. I’ve gone through too much shit for a fucking brat to tell me what I believe is the best for them.”

They both walked in, and Levi locked the door behind them. The room was still dim for the early hours, and their dog greeted them enthusiastically. The keys dropping at the front plate echoed loudly, and the tuxedo cat of the family finally appeared to rub himself against the legs of the teen, who quietly picked him up. Y/N quickly rushed to check on her kid.

“Are you okay? Are you hurt? Did they hurt you somewhere?” She seemed clearly agitated, and Adrien remained with his eyes glued to the floor.

“No, mom,” he murmured, downcast. “I’m fine.”

“Oi, to your damn room,” Levi quickly ordered. “and clean it up; I won’t say it again.”

The kid left, cursing under his breath as he went upstairs and slammed the front door shut.

“What happened?” she asked Levi, who was preparing himself a tea to calm down, enveloping herself in a negligee.

“What happened? That kid is driving me nuts, that’s what's happening,”

Y/N sighed loudly, positioning herself behind her husband and running her hands through his arms, seeking to provide some comfort. She then switched to hugging him from behind. “He’s going through a phase… his new classmates are mostly kids who survived the rumbling, and some of them aren’t the best influence. He just wants to fit in, you know how important that is at his age.”

“Tch,” Levi kept facing the countertop, murmuring as the anger didn’t quickly wash away. But eventually, he closed his eyes and sighed loudly as the adrenaline slowed down. “The audacity of that kid, where the hell does he get it?”

Y/N couldn't help but chuckle against his back, “MH, I wonder,” she said sarcastically. “If they were still around, perhaps we could have asked some senior MPs… perhaps they could enlighten us on how you were as a teen,”

“I wasn’t like that,” Levi softly replied, almost ashamed of the point out.

“No haha you were worse,” Y/N was entertained as she kissed his shoulder blades tenderly. “Or do I have to remind you how you made me sneak out to meet you after curfew?”

“That’s different…”

Forcing him to turn around to place a kiss on his scar as she caressed his face softly, “He’s your kid,” she murmured against his lips. “He hates to be told what to do and has the strength to know he can get out of almost any situation. Asking him to be submissive is like asking him not to be an Ackerman; he got it in his genes,”

Levi just groaned, accepting the caress, her loving his face as if he was brand new and the residues of the war had never happened.

Days passed by, and while the mood in the house was slowly returning to calmness, the punishment still stood, and Adrien was reading in his bedroom, suffering the heat of summer without being able to go out with his friends. He couldn’t even play his record player because if in normal cases his father tolerated him to play his favourite bands loudly, now he was almost cursed to quietness. Levi didn’t seem to be very fond of Rock; perhaps Paradise music was too behind, and the period of adaptation was lacking. It sounded like loud noise to him.

A quiet knock at the front door was heard, mostly because the dog that was resting beside him in his bed raised hastily and rushed downstairs. The noise was almost imperceptible as his father was vacuuming the living room’s carpet while his mother prepared dinner. Adrien was about to raise himself from his bed and open the door himself, but the overwhelmingly loud noise of the vacuum stopped, so he guessed his father was on it.

Levi opened the front door without checking; he had faced so many adversities in life that he hardly doubted that anyone who rang his bell at 6 pm on a Thursday in their quiet family neighbourhood was a threat. “Yes?” he crossed his arms as he admired the young girl at the front gates. She was wearing the usual outfit of the time, white and brown loafers, crumpled low white socks, an inflated pastel yellow skirt that was tightly around her waist with a white blouse. The matching light cardigan was hanging from her shoulders, but she didn’t seem to put it on, another thing that Levi thought was some stupid new fashion trend from teens. That and his son’s imperious necessity to fold the sleeves of his t-shirts. High ponytail and blushed cheeks.

“Good evening, Mr. Ackerman,” The girl greeted him with kindness and politeness.

“Hello,” Levi replied, almost uninterested, his usual unfriendly nature not withdrawn even after years of not being on service.

“I was wondering if Adrien is at home,” she asked, and Levi wished he could roll his eyes at how almost immediately the girl blushed at the mention of his son’s name. “I’m the girl from the other night; I wanted to thank him…” seeing Levi’s slight frown at the memory of that early morning, she nervously added, “And you, of course, for what he did for me,” The young girl handed a package that was easily deduced to be a cake.

“He’s grounded,” Levi quickly replied. “And you don’t need to thank him; he did the only right thing to do. I don’t raise abusers,”

“Oh…” the disappointment in her voice was palpable, “Well, but please at least take the cake? For all the inconvenience,”

“No, kid, it’s alright-”

“Hi, sweetie! Adrien will be down in a minute!” Y/N popped behind Levi, slightly pushing him to the side and smiling softly at the girl. “Do you want to wait inside?”

Levi looked at his wife, confused and slightly offended by how quickly she overstepped him in the conversation.

“Ah, no, it’s alright; I don’t want to be a bother-”

Adrien appeared behind his parents, wondering what the whole issue was, and his mother quickly pushed him forward. “There he is!” She added while tugging Levi back inside. “Let’s give him some space,” she whispered to her husband, who was refusing to move.

“Oi,” Levi complained as he was forced back inside.

Both parents faking to be doing something in the living room to not be seen; Levi wasn’t spying, but his wife was. “She’s so cute,” she whispered, “and she’s crushing so much on him.”

Levi clicked his tongue, “He’s tall. All girls of that age crush on tall boys,” he argued back.

Y/N chuckled and turned to look at him, “talking from experience?”

“Ha ha,” Levi faked a sarcastic laugh. “He’s supposed to be grounded,”

“Shh, I can’t hear!” She hushed him back and then moved slightly as Levi joined her next to the window.

“Great,” Levi said annoyed, “she’s fucking bonnie,”

Confusion was written all over his wife's face as she grimaced dazed and raised an eyebrow, silently asking how those words could be said with such disappointment.

“Now I won’t only have to buy him all those stupid vinyl records, textbooks, and uniforms for the school team, but I’ll also have to start buying condoms; there goes my fucking salary,”

Tags!: @nube55 @justkon @notgoodforlife @nmlkys @humanitys-strongest-bamf @quillinhand @thoreeo @darkstarlight82 @i-literally-cant-with-this @angelofthorr @aomi04 @levisbrat25 @fxnnyackerman @secretmoneybearvoid @s0meb0dy-0nce-t0ld-me @trashblackrainbow @l3visthighs @hum4n-wr3ckag3 @hannieslovebot @feelingsandemotionsnotexplored @flxrartsstuff @starrylevi @rithty @mariaace @ackrmntea @emilyyyy-08 Wanna join my tag list? Here!

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bingwriterxo · 10 months

Text

the chase

pairing: vada cavell x reader

summary: in which you and vada play a game of cat and mouse

warnings: none

word count: 4100+

author's note: does this make any sense? great question!

The moment Vada slipped into the passenger’s seat of Nick’s car, words were flying out of his mouth faster than she could comprehend, which was saying a lot considering how often she’d find herself rambling about the most random of things.

“Where were you yesterday?” he started as he shifted the car into drive, beginning their short ride to school. “I called you seven times, and you didn’t answer once. It was Sunday, and you do nothing on Sundays! I was beginning to think you were dead until I texted your mom and--”

Vada shook her head. “Wait, slow down. Back up. You text my mom? When did you get her number?”

He waved her off. “Not important. What is important is you telling me what you were doing yesterday.” He rolled past a stop sign, barely even glancing in its direction as he drove past. “I mean, seven calls, V, and you answered not a single one! So, what were you doing?”

She grinned, giggling in her seat at what she was about to reveal. “I had a date!”

Almost immediately, Nick whipped his head to look at her, his eyes wide and his mouth agape. “With who?!” he practically shouted.

Vada reached out, took his chin between her forefinger and thumb, and turned his head back in the direction of the windshield. “Eyes on the road, stupid. I’m not trying to die today.”

His grip on the steering wheel tightened. “Vada, if you don’t tell me who you went on a date with in the next five seconds, I’ll purposely drive us into oncoming traffic.”

“You’re so dramatic,” she teased with a roll of her eyes. He glared at her quickly before focusing on the road again. She bit her lip, trying to quell the excitement raging in her stomach as she said, “It was with Y/N.”

The car skidded to a stop and Vada was jolted forward, her seatbelt pressing tight against her body.

“Dude, what the fuck--” she began, but she was silenced as Nick twisted in his seat, his eyes hard as they set on her and his frown so defined that it made her uncomfortable.

“What,” he deadpanned.

She rubbed at her chest, right where the seat belt had dug into her. “What?” she asked, confused.

“You went on a date with…Y/N? Popular Y/N? Like, most-popular-girl-in-school Y/N?”

Vada tilted her head. “Uh, yeah?”

“Why the fu--” Nick was interrupted by a car honking at him. He threw his arm up in annoyance before starting to drive again, and Vada gulped as he stewed in his seat. “I can’t believe you went on a date with Y/N!”

“Why are you saying it like that?” Vada asked. She shifted, disliking the tension that was starting to fill the air. “You make it sound like a bad thing. I thought you’d be excited! I finally went on my first date with a girl! You’ve been waiting for this moment since the second I came out to you.”

“First of all, I’ve been waiting for this moment since the second I met you, because, baby, the closet is glass.” He took a hard right. The school loomed up ahead. “Secondly, I wanted you to go on a date with basically anyone other than Y/N.”

Vada furrowed her eyebrows. “I’m not that obviously bisexual.” Silence filled the car and she huffed, crossing her arms. “Fine, maybe I am. But why is going out with Y/N such a bad thing? She’s funny and cute and really smart. Basically, she’s perfect.”

“She’s not perfect, V,” Nick said, sitting up a little straighter as he pulled into the parking lot. “Haven’t you ever noticed that she’s got a new girl hanging off of her every month?” Vada’s stomach dropped, a sudden sense of anxiety flooding through her veins. “I mean, she goes through girls like you go through sugar.”

“No she doesn’t,” Vada tried, but her denial fell on deaf ears.

“She’s the biggest player this school has,” Nick said, leaning forward as he tried to pull into his designated parking spot. “She’s probably the biggest player in the damn county. She chases after a girl, stays with her for a few weeks, gets bored, and then does it all over again.” He turned to her as he shifted the gear into park. “Vada, she’s worse than John Tucker.”

“Are you seriously referencing a movie right now?” She scoffed and unbuckled her seatbelt. “She’s not like that.”

“Fine,” Nick conceded. “But when you get hurt, don’t say I didn’t warn you. She’s just in it for the chase.”

Vada clambered out of the car and pulled her backpack onto her shoulder. “And when we live happily ever after,” she started as she and Nick started to walk into the school, “I’ll say ‘I told you so’.”

He glanced at her before looking forward, his eyes widening. “...I’m not so sure about that one, V.”

She frowned and followed Nick’s line of sight, a sharp pain shooting through her at what she saw. You had your back pressed against your locker, trapped there by Stacey from Vada’s history class, who had her hand flat against the metal and was leaning close to you. Stacey was batting her eyelashes and giggling, and you were smiling along.

“Oh,” Vada said, voice quiet and small. She tore her eyes away and blinked hard, looking back up at Nick. “Well, I guess you were right.”

He offered her a pitiful smile. “I’m sorry, V. But, you should be glad you won’t be another girl stuck in her revolving door of girls.”

“Yeah,” she said, voice low and filled with sorrow. “So happy.”

Nick wrapped his arm around her shoulder, leading her toward his own locker. “Don’t be so sad. It’s for the best.”

Vada glanced away. “I just don’t get it. I mean, if she’s in it for the chase, then why is she flirting with another girl? Was I not good enough to chase?” She frowned. “Am I just too boring? Or do I talk too much?” She looked up at Nick. “Nick, be honest with me, do I talk too much? Could that turn someone off?”

“Yes,” he said simply, nodding his head. Vada huffed. He pulled away as the two reached his locker and focused on putting his combination into the lock. “Don’t think too far into it, though. I don’t think you wanna go through the pain of it anyway.” He shrugged and then hit the metal door when it wouldn’t open. “Stupid, old locker.” He glanced at her. “You’d just end up getting your heart broken.”

Vada sighed and leaned against the locker beside Nick’s, her shoulder pressing against the cool metal. “That’s dumb. And unfair. And not very nice.”

Nick’s locker door finally popped open. “Just ignore her from now on, okay?” He glanced at her and started to put his books into his locker. “Don’t talk to her, don’t text her, don’t even think about her. ‘Y/N Y/L/N who?’ That’s how you should be acting.”

She nodded hesitantly. “Okay. I guess I can do that.”

“Good.” He slammed the door shut. “Now let’s go to class.”

* * *

The first few periods rolled by smoothly. Vada had no classes with you until after lunch, and she didn’t even get a glimpse of you in the hallways. While part of her was still disheartened by your act, she also agreed with Nick’s words: it was probably for the best that she didn’t get tangled up with you.

That is, until she asked to use the bathroom during her science class, and upon walking inside, found you standing by the sinks, fixing your hair in the mirror. Almost immediately, your eyes landed on her figure through the reflection and you grinned, showing all your pearly-white teeth, before turning around to face her. Vada’s breath was practically sucked from her lungs as she stared at you.

“Vada! Hey!” you greeted, voice happy and excited.

It made Vada uncomfortable, how easily you were able to put on that mask. Nick’s voice rang in her head: Don’t talk to her. She bounced on the balls of her feet before promptly making the decision to hide in one of the stalls, slipping away from your field of vision without a word.

“Oh…kay…” she heard you say. There was the shuffling of your feet before she could see your shoes beneath the stall door. “Text me, okay? I had fun yesterday.” You turned and Vada listened as your footsteps receded.

When she knew she was finally alone, she let out the breath she had been holding and leaned forward, her forehead bumping against the metal of the stall.

“C’mon, Vada, get it together,” she mumbled. “She’s a player. She doesn’t want anything from you.” She clamped her eyes shut and shook her head. “She doesn’t want you.”

That was the mantra that repeated in her head for the entire day. It was what she heard when she saw you during lunch, waving at her from across the cafeteria. She reminded herself of it when you sat down beside her during English class and tried to make conversation, to which she entirely ignored you--it did hurt her heart a little when she saw your wide eyes and jutted out bottom lip when you realized she wouldn’t talk to you, but she tried to ignore that, too.

It all came to a head at the end of the day, when Vada was trying to pile as many of her books as she possibly could into her backpack. She was almost done when you sidled up beside her, a gleaming smile on your face and your hands tucked sheepishly in the back pockets of your jeans.

“Hey,” you said softly, like Vada was a scared animal that would run away.

She swallowed, half of her so desperately wanting to talk to you and ask why you would ask her out just to play with her, while the other half of her was set in her stubborn way of not speaking a word to you. The latter half won as she shut her locker door and walked away, but she couldn’t shake you.

You followed beside her, looking down at her as you walked. “I don’t know what happened between yesterday and today, or if you’re just having an off day or something, but I really did have fun on our date, and I’d like to take you on another one.”

She glanced up at you, unable to stop the quickening of her pulse. What if you were telling the truth? She shook her head, Nick’s words in her ear: Don’t even think about her.

Vada managed to lose you in the crowd of students all trying to exit the school at once, but she still heard your voice call over the sound of everyone else.

“I’ll text you then!”

Something about your determination made her want to melt right into your arms, but she stood up a little straighter and continued walking. You didn’t actually want her, she reminded herself. You just liked the chase.

* * *

After a night full of text messages from you that Vada never answered, she sauntered into school the next day with Nick by her side, completely set on avoiding you as much as she could. Unfortunately for both her and Nick, it seemed like you wanted to make that impossible.

The minute she passed through the front doors, you were walking beside her, a bouquet of flowers in hand. Vada glanced at them quickly, feeling butterflies stir in her stomach at the sight, but Nick slapped her on the hand, forcing her to keep her stoic face as she picked up the pace and tried to walk away.

“What, do you not like roses?” you asked, just a step behind the pair. You sounded dejected, defeated--some part of Vada felt bad; the other part thought ‘good. she should feel bad’. After a moment of silence from you, she heard the smallest, “Well, okay,” and when she looked over her shoulder, you were gone, the roses sticking out of the top of the nearest trash can. It was a depressing sight to see.

She sighed. “I feel kind of bad, Nick,” she admitted, and the boy shook his head.

“Don’t,” he said firmly. “She deserves to be humbled for once.” He scoffed. “She can’t just have anyone she wants and then throw them away when she gets bored because she’s pretty and popular. And she most certainly can’t do that to you.”

“But, yesterday she said that she had fun on our date and wants to go on another one. What if she was telling the truth? What if she actually likes me?”

Nick shook his head again. “It’s all part of her sick game. She wants you to fall for her, and then she’ll pull the rug right out from under you.” He patted Vada on the shoulder. “Trust me; she’s bad news.”

Vada glanced back over her shoulder again, and this time she found you in the same position as the day before--leaning back against your locker with Stacey standing in front of you, twirling a strand of her hair around her finger.

Your eyes flitted toward her for a split second, wide and forlorn, before they were focusing on Stacey again. You broke out into a grin, throwing your head back as you laughed.

“Right,” Vada grumbled, an ache forming in her chest and radiating throughout the rest of her body. “Bad news.”

* * *

The ‘bad news’ didn’t seem so bad anymore when, in the middle of English class, Vada was tapped on the shoulder by the boy behind her. When she twisted around to see what he wanted, he unceremoniously shoved a folded piece of paper in her direction, a scowl on his face as he waited for her to take it.

With furrowed eyebrows and a frown, Vada grabbed the paper and turned back in her seat, glancing up at her teacher to make sure he wasn’t watching as she unfolded the sheet.

Vada,

Thought I might try the old-fashioned way. Are you free on Friday night? The drive-in is showing The Princess Diaries, and I remember you saying you had a crush on Anne Hathaway. Wanna go together?

Y/N :)

Vada glanced toward the back of the room, where you had found yourself sitting that day, and saw you already looking at her, hope painting your face prettily. She cursed herself internally at the butterflies in her stomach as she looked back at the note you had sent forward. It was cute--she’d give you that--and she was tempted to say yes, but the image of Stacey flirting with you flitted through her mind, and that was enough for her to crumple the paper in her hand.

She didn’t look back at you.

* * *

The rest of the day passed without incident: you didn’t try to speak to her in the halls, and by the time she went to sleep, Vada hadn’t received a single text from you. Just before she drifted off for the night, she briefly thought that you had given up--perhaps you had grown so used to girls falling into your lap that chasing Vada was just too much energy that you didn’t want to use.

She was proven wrong when she woke up to a voicemail from you in the morning. You had called her late at night--the timestamp reading nearly three o’clock--and when Vada played the message aloud, your voice filling her room, shame bloomed in her stomach.

“Hey,” you started, your voice quiet and scratchy. “It’s me. Or, it’s Y/N. I--I don’t know if you’ve deleted my number or something. I just…Look, I know it hasn’t been long since our date, but…” You sighed, and Vada could hear the faintest sound of a sniffle. “The cold shoulder from you doesn’t feel great. I just wanna know where we stand. I had fun on Sunday. Uh, it’s okay if you didn’t. I just wish you would tell me.” You sniffled again. “I guess if you don’t answer this, that’s my answer. Yeah, okay. I’ll see you in school.”

Vada threw herself back into her pillows with a sigh. She ran a hand down her face, groaning. “Fuck,” she mumbled. “Fuck.” You sounded so sincere in the voicemail, but what if that were just another one of your ploys? What if you did this with every girl? What if—

“Bitch, why the fuck are you still in bed?” Nick asked as he burst into Vada’s bedroom.

She groaned again, throwing her legs up and down like a small toddler not getting their way. Her heart was pulling toward you, but her brain was trying to run away from you as fast as possible. She was torn, and she had no idea what to do.

Luckily for her, she was given more time to think than she had expected. You were absent that day, your missing presence a large hole in her day. There was no one to offer her flowers, or to try to pass her notes during class, or to wave at her in the cafeteria. As much as she hated admitting it to herself, she still liked you, and the lack of you carved a deep pit into her stomach.

That night, when there was still no sign of you--no texts or calls or even posts on any social media--she fell asleep with worry itching beneath her veins and guilt pricking at her chest.

The next morning wasn’t any better. Anxiety sat heavy like a rock in Vada’s stomach as she got ready, while Nick sang some random song in the car, when she walked through the parking lot and into school.

Her eyes immediately flitted toward your locker, a mixture of relief and sorrow surging through her at the sight of you standing there, alone, but with your head hung and your eyes trained on your feet. You were in sweatpants and a baggy hoodie. It was all completely unlike you.

“Nick,” she called, getting the boy’s attention. She subtly pointed at you. “Do you think she’s okay?”

He scoffed. “I’m sure her outfit just didn’t look as good in real life as it did in her head. What else does she have to worry about?”

Vada shrugged, her eyes still locked on you. You didn’t look up once.

* * *

It was at night that Vada’s worry had turned into all-out panic. Throughout the school day, you had avoided her like the plague, making sure to never interact with her. At one point, you had locked eyes with her down the hall and then swiftly spun on your heel and walked back in the direction you came from.

That, combined with getting absolutely no notifications from you, led her to a terribly easy decision as she stood from her bed, grabbed a hoodie, and lied to her mom that she was going to Nick’s house. She slipped out the front door, her pace quick as she rushed the few blocks to your house.

When she arrived, it was almost completely dark, save for the fluorescent light coming from your living room, where Vada had found herself just days before after you had taken her out to dinner.

With a hesitant hand, she knocked on your front door. It took only a few seconds before you appeared, looking completely unsurprised to see her.

“Vada,” you said softly, and she was immediately surrounded by the scent of alcohol on your breath. “What’re you doing here?”

Her eyebrows furrowed. “Are you…drunk? On a Thursday night?”

You shrugged. “So what if I am? What’re you doing here?” you repeated.

Pushing aside her concerns about your drinking habits, she asked, “Why did you stop?”

“Stop what?”

“Chasing me,” she said, like you should’ve known.

You forced out a dry laugh, tilting your head to the side. “You know, you’re a confusing girl.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that you completely ignored all of my attempts to talk to you, and now you’re upset that I’ve stopped, even though it seemed like that’s what you wanted.” You narrowed your eyes. “Sounds kind of confusing, don’t you think?”

Vada swallowed, crossing her arms and shaking her head. “That’s not fair.”

“Not fair,” you muttered beneath your breath. “Okay. Sure. I was unfair to you.” You leaned back on your heels, your hand gripping the doorknob. “Now, if that’s all, then I’ll see you at school.”

You started to close the door, but something about your indifference made anger rise in Vada. “I just didn’t want to become a girl in your revolving door of girls!” she shouted.

You stilled, your eyes widening before glazing over. “Right. My revolving door of girls. That’s what everyone says, right?” Your voice was hollow, sad. Vada didn’t understand why.

“They say it because it’s true,” she huffed. Your posture fell and you glanced away, clenching your jaw. “You chase, you get, you grow bored.”

“That’s not true.” You looked at her, and faintly, she could see tears glossing your eyes. “That’s not…true. Those girls chase me; they use me; they leave me.” Your volume grew steadily, a sort of rage backing your words. “But since I’m the one factor that stays the same, everyone blames me. And it’s not--” You sighed. “It’s not true.”

You scoffed. “And you know what, I thought you might be the one person that didn’t believe what everyone else said. You seemed real, authentic, like you didn’t really give a shit about the crowd, Vada. That’s why I liked you, why I was trying. I thought you were your own person. But I was wrong. You’re just like the rest of the school.”

With all of the new information thrown at her, confusion and guilt and shame and hurt burning her, the only thing Vada managed to say was, “Oh.”

You nodded, glancing away. “Yeah. ‘Oh’. So, I’ll see you at school.”

When you shut the door, leaving Vada standing alone on your front porch, realization struck her like a tidal wave, and everything from the past few days came crashing down on her.

You didn’t chase. Or, at least, not until her.

“Shit.”

* * *

Vada (11:42pm): need ur help

Vada (11:42pm): 911

Mia (11:43pm): ???

Vada (11:43pm): help me ask Y/N out

Vada (11:43pm): ur her best friend. pls.

Mia (11:45pm): bro u fucked up big time

Mia (11:45pm): shes forgiving and all but…

Vada (11:45pm): mia pls

Mia (11:49pm): fine.

Mia (11:49pm): only b/c i know how much she likes u

Mia (11:49pm): dont fuck up again

Mia (11:50pm): heres what u should do

* * *

You didn’t show up to school again the next day, but it barely registered in Vada’s mind. She had already known beforehand that you wouldn’t be going--Mia had slipped her some ‘secret intel’ that your hangover had you sleeping the day away. Instead, she spent the hours mentally preparing herself, and as soon as the bell rang to signal the end of the day, she set her plan into motion.

At exactly six o’clock at night, Vada was standing at your front door again, a bouquet of flowers in one hand and her (Mia’s) car keys in the other. She knocked on the wood, waited, and when you pulled the door open, her words immediately pushed themselves out of her mouth.

“The drive-in is showing The Princess Diaries tonight, and I know you don’t like Anne Hathaway as much as I do, but I’d like to take you to see it.” She inhaled deeply and continued. “And I’d also like to apologize because I’ve been shitty to you these past few days, and I shouldn’t have listened to the rumors, and I should’ve just talked to you about it all, and I’m really sorry about everything that happened, and I just”--she gasped, her lungs stinging with lack of air, and kept going--“I really do like you, and I did have fun on our initial date, and I’m sorry. Can I take you to the drive-in?”

You blinked once, twice, before you raised a single brow. “What?”

Vada sighed. “The most important thing from all of that is that I’m sorry. I know I hurt you, and I know that can’t just go away, but I’d like the chance to make it up to you, if you’d let me.” She shoved the flowers in your direction. “Want to go see The Princess Diaries?”

You glanced down at the flowers, your bottom lip pulled between your teeth, and then took them from her. With the smallest and softest smile that made Vada’s knees buckles, you nodded.

“Okay.” Your face fell. “But on one condition.”

She nodded fervently. “Anything.”

You grinned. “Let’s get milkshakes after and talk.”

bonus: “like, how could you not have a huge crush on anne hathaway?” vada asked, her eyes glued to the big screen.

you hummed. “i’ve got my eye on someone else.”

when she looked at you, ready to argue about anne hathaway’s attractiveness, you were already staring at her, smiling.

#vada cavell x reader #vada cavell #vada x reader #jenna ortega x reader #jenna ortega #jenna x reader #the fallout

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pumpkinbxtch · 5 days

Text

ᬊ Serenade ᬊ

— LEO VALDEZ X FEM!READER

─────────────•~❉᯽❉~•────────────

☆ radiostar is playing... paloma querida by josé alfredo jiménez!

warnings; language, a pinch of angst with comfort at the end. a/n; I wanted to do this one so much, I finally got to finish it, I hope you like it. The translation of the song is below each verse, as well as the vocabulary at the end.

— You know what? Go to hell!

You slammed the bedroom's door behind you, trying to shut it with a bang, but Leo managed to catch it with his hand to follow you. Although in fact, it wasn't to try to solve the things.

He let out a loud huff when he saw you grabbing your keys and your things.

— Well, actually you’re the one leaving so, why don’t you just go there and give me the address later?

The regret was immediate, but he was just as angry and ignored it. For a second, he feared for everything as you turned back to him with flared nostrils and a frown, your eyes starting to tear up.

— If that's how things are. Good, then I won’t have to come back to this dump. — You threw the keys at his face and left with a door slam that echoed in the apartment.

Within two seconds, Leo was already running down the stairs, shouting your name, but it was too late when he saw your car turning the corner, almost leaving a trail of fire on the pavement. Feeling down, he ran his hands through his curly hair and sighed.

Who started the fight? It was hard to tell, but maybe Leo's response wasn’t the best. Actually, it had been the worst of all their fights, and he saw that reflected in the way you left. You two weren’t the type of couple to fight with sharp words, so this was almost like saying he’d rather see you dead.

— I’m- uh que pendejo¹ ! —he exclaimed, throwing himself onto the couch and complaining while rolling around. How would he apologize now? This time, flowers or a card saying "Sorry for being an idiot" wouldn’t cut it, and even if it did, he knew you deserved more.

Then he had an idea, triggered by a memory from his days in that old neighborhood when his mom was still alive. He could remember that place was lively, colorful, and sometimes noisy because people like his mom and him lived there, never letting a place so far from home feel as cold and foreign as it actually was. And there was something moms and grandmas children would do for on their birthdays, big block parties, or even when there were small couple fights: a serenade seemed like the ace up the sleeve to ease the pain and give a heartfelt apology. For Leo, that was fair.

Where would he get mariachis? But that was the least of his worries. He’d done more impossible things than finding a mexican musical group in the middle of the night.

— Hephaestus, help me — he muttered -almost like a prayer- as he put on his green military jacket and grabbed the keys you had thrown at him earlier. The raccoon keychain wearing a Camp Half-Blood shirt left a bitter taste in his mouth.

Before leaving, the candle illuminating the picture of his mom on the shelf next to the TV flickered intensely, catching his attention, and he took that as a response from his dad that was something like: " I Pass, I’ve had enough with my wife," and he honestly understood what he meant. One thing was a fight, another was being cheat repeatedly.

He turned off the lights and fearlessly wandered around to find his grand musical apology.

You were curled up in your bed with a frown and some tears in your eyes. You never thought any of your fights would reach this point, even if Leo's response had been in a joking manner, fighting with him was already too much for your heart. You wondered if this was the beginning of the end, if he was really angry, or if his response was an expression of how tired he was of you.

Were you done? 'cause you had thrown the keys at his face and had no way of getting back into that place.

Your anxiety flooded your body, and a slight tremor in your lip kept asking you to finally release the tears you had held back. Would you go to bed this sad and empty? Even the mattress seemed too big without him by your side.

You turned to switch off your bedside lamp when you heard a small object bounce against your window. You turned around and nervously played with the laces of your hoodie. Was it him? You looked at the clock and could see through your blurry eyes that it was around 2 AM. No way Leo could be here at this hour, maybe it had just been the wind

You turned to reach the switch when the sound repeated, and before you could get up, two more pebbles hit the glass. At the foot of your window, before opening the curtain, you heard a whistle and some trumpets starting to play.

— Amor!

You opened your eyes wide and clumsily pulled out the curtain. What you saw through the glass left you speechless. There were mariachis, about seven of them, and Leo was there with a bouquet of roses, waving his hand at you. When you opened the window, he smiled broadly, though there was a noticeable hint of shame.

— FORGIVE ME, MI AMOR — he shouted, cupping his hand to his mouth to amplify his voice, and you, speechless, kept watching the scene. Your boyfriend turned around and gave some instructions to one of the mariachis, who nodded and started a count of three. The music began, and not only did the singer's voice echo in the street, but so did Leo's.

— Yo no sé lo que valga mi vida. Pero yo, te la vengo a entregar.

( I don’t know what my life is worth, but I’m here to give it to you!)

You smiled. You couldn’t understand much from the distance, but the way he clutched his chest with each word made you tear up.

— yo siento quererte... con todas las fuerzas que el alma me da.

(I feel I love you with all the strength my soul can give...)

Leo impatiently gestured for them to continue while he looked for a way to climb up to your window. Though the vines weren’t entirely safe, he decided to risk it.

— Paloma querida! — he shouted off-key as he walked on the roof, short of breath, and beneath your window, he stood on tiptoe to hand you the roses. You leaned on your stomach to grab the flowers wrapped in red cellophane, and without taking your eyes off him, you smelled them.

He stepped back enough for you to see each other clearly. Again, he placed his hand over his heart and with a sincere smile mouthed, "I’m sorry."

What felt like seconds were actually minutes until the song change brought both of you back to reality. You leaned out to be a bit closer to him, and he jumped up to barely kiss your lips.

— No that, dummy! — you said giggling, nodding towards the group who continued playing with smiles, seeing that the serenade had achieved its goal. — The neighbors, Leo.

Leo raised his eyebrows and pointed to the front of your house, where people in nightgowns peeked from their windows, and some kids were dancing. An elderly couple watched the scene with tender eyes. Apparently, there were no complaints, so everything seemed cool.

He bowed without taking his eyes off you, and opening his hand in the air, let the keys jingle sweetly. You smiled, and he mimicked you.

— I love you.

— Te amo más.³

❉᯽❉

¹ que pendejo: I'm an asshole!

² paloma querida: dear dove; It's the name of the song translated to eng, an expression too or a kind of petname

³ te amo más: I love you more

⁴ amor, amor mio, mi amor: love, love of mine, my love.

#heroes of olympus #pjo hoo toa #pjo #percy jackson #leo valdez #leo valdez x reader #leo valdez x you #leo valdez x y/n #leo valdez hoo #heroes of olympus x reader #hoo x reader #leo valdez fic #leo valdez one shot #leo valdez imagines #leo valdez fanfic #leo valdez blurb #pjo x reader #percy jackon and the olympians

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carolperkinsexgirlfriend · 4 months

Text

Steddie Upside-Down AU Part 94

Part 1 Part 93

Will can’t tear his gaze away from Steve. Even as Carol flutters around him, frantic and worried, and Eddie just cries.

Will’s shivering. Mom’s rubbing her hands up and down his arms in quick movements, like she can warm him up. But he is warm. The Harrington’s water heater’s working as good as advertised; the bathroom’s downright sweltering.

He’s just shaking.

“We should get him to the hospital,” Barbara says, crouching down beside Steve and settling her fingers against his pulse. She looks over at Eddie, grimacing, “Probably get all of us looked at.”

Eddie’s sopping wet and bloody, cheekbone swelling, and he’s sitting hunched strangely like something inside him aches. Perkins is similarly scuffed up and bruised, if less bloody. Collectively, they look like a group of disaster victims that barely managed to crawl their way out of the rubble.

Eddie pulls Steve further into himself, hauling himself up with a painful-sounding grunt, Steve cradled in his arms.

Mom lets go of Will, rushing forward to flutter her hands around him. “You shouldn’t be holding him, sweetie,” she cries. “You’re hurt.”

Eddie’s already listing to the side, nearly falling back into the tub until Barbara curls her own arms around Steve, hefting him up.

“I’ve got him,” Eddie says, but he doesn’t pull away.

“You’re three seconds away from keeling over dead,” Carols scoffs, leading the way out of the bathroom with sloshing footsteps.

Eddie and Barbara shuffle after her, awkward like they’re hauling an old couch out to make room for a new one. They luckily fit side by side on the stairs, but Carol still walks in front of them, hands raised to catch anyone who tumbles, somehow maneuvering each backward step with ease.

Mom and Will hold up the rear, taking awkward stilted steps to try to stay out of anyone’s way at the slow pace.

The house is lit, fluorescent and quiet, and warm against his cooling skin from the heat Carol had clicked on when they’d arrived. He feels like an ant walking through its opulent, barren rooms, leaving wet, muddy tracks into its pristine carpet.

The gulf between him and Steve seems like a trench. It’s hard to imagine Steve here, small and alone in his nice clean sneakers and his clean, fresh clothes. Everything’s so white, any careless movement could leave a smudge. Will’s house is a second-hand storage bin.

But then again, Steve had left this house hadn’t he? He’d made himself as at home in the Munson’s trailer as Uncle Wayne’s recliner or Eddie’s guitar.

Will’s throat hurts when he swallows, like that time he’d gotten strep and hadn’t been able to go to school for a whole week. He raises his fingers to the tender flesh, feels them like Steve’s hand around his throat.

He wants his Mom, even with her standing right there. He wants Steve even though he’s passed out in front of him and it was his hands–

No. He can’t think like that. He can’t.

The house is the graveyard of Steve’s life. Had he toddled down these stairs as a teenager? Settled onto that couch as a teenager? Hosted parties in that kitchen? It’s hard to picture the rooms full of people, even when he knows it's true.

The rumors of his parties had trickled down even to the middle school.

But it’s so quiet now. Too quiet.

“Mike?” Will calls as they stagger their way into the living room.

No one answers.

“Kids?” Mom calls, rushing around where Barbara and Eddie are clogging up the living room. “Where are you?”

She frantically searches the living room, then kitchen, then opens doors at random, calling through the house for no one who can hear her. Will can almost hear his own disappearance echoing through her desperate words. “Where did they go?” she cries as she dashes back into the living room, eyes frantic and wide.

Barbara snorts. “Doing something stupid would be my guess.” She adjusts her hold on Steve, doing a little jump to shimmy him back up into her arms from where he’d been slipping.

Will bolts out of the house, ignoring everyone’s calls in his mad dash to the van. Harrington's security light turns on, blanketing him in sharp light, briefly blinding him before his eyes adjust.

Max’s step-brother’s car is gone, the only proof that he was ever there a splash of blood on concrete.

The van’s gone too.

Will fishes his walkie talkie out of his pocket, hands fumbling with wet jeans. It’s damp when he pries it free. He wipes it off on his partially dry shirt and compresses the button with baited breath, sighing in relief when the tell-tale crackle of an open line filters through.

His voice is breathless and croaking as he asks, “where are you, are you okay?” all in one breath, finishing with a quick, “over.”

It’s Lucas who replies. “Did it work?”

“He’s back,” Will replies, choking on tears he didn’t realize were flowing.

It’s silent for a moment before Mike’s voice comes through. “What about El?”

Will’s gut churns, throat clicking as he says, “We don’t know yet,” he turns back toward the house, noticing for the first time that the garage door is open, shelves ransacked, odds and ends tossed haphazardly all over the floor. “We have to get Steve to the hospital; did you take the van?”

Everyone else is shuffling out of the house, cries of dismay and alarm coming from them all as they take in the lack of transportation. Barbara asks, “should we call an ambulance?” as she stares dubiously at all of them, frowning at their bedraggled states.

Before anyone can reply, there’s the murmur of too-many voices for the walkie to pick up before Dustin’s voice cuts through it with a vehement “shit,” Max’s own shouted “we’re almost back!” barely intelligible, like she was speaking from too-far away.

“Who’s driving?” Mom cries, running up to Will and looking down at the walkie clutched in his hand like it’ll open its mouth and answer her questions despite the button not even being compressed.

It doesn’t matter – the van comes careening around the corner, and onto the street too fast. It takes the turn into the driveway too wide, running over the Harrington’s perfectly cultivated rose bushes before it screeches to a stop alarmingly close to their fleshy bodies.

Carol laughs when she catches sight of Max sitting in the driver’s seat, looking out at all of them like she belongs there. “I like you, red,” she calls, even as she opens the driver’s side door and shoves her out of the way despite her protests. “You’ve got guts.”

Dustin wrenches the door open, eyes widening as he catches sight of Steve. “What the hell happened to you guys?”

Barbara bullies her way past him, losing her footing and her grip on Steve enough that his head thuds alarmingly into the hard floor of the van despite Eddie’s fumbling to help. They all end up sprawling, Eddie on the van’s ground, Barbara only partially in, feet dangling awkwardly out the open door.

“Be careful,” Eddie snarls, glaring up at where she stands. She doesn’t spare him a glance as she helps get Steve fully into the van. Eddie pulls Steve away from her, almost growling. It’s incongruent with the picture he paints as places Steve’s head gently in his own lap, smoothing his wet hair back from his face.

Barbara ignores the whole thing, moving past them all to claim the passenger seat, brushing past where Max is still crouched by the driver’s seat. Barbara settles into the seat like she owns it, foot up on the dash, knee bent as she turns to lock gazes with Carol.

Dustin’s hovering by Steve and Eddie, hands flitting around like he wants to touch but can’t figure out where it won't hurt anyone further.

Mike and Lucas both stay seated, looking down at Steve with furrowed brows. “Is he going to be okay?” Lucas asks. No one answers because no one knows.

“How’d you even start it?” Carol asks Max, fiddling with the trailing wires Eddie’d used to spark the thing to life.

Max snorts derisively and crosses her arms, dropping to sit criss cross on her butt. “You morons never cut the engine.”

“Enough!” Mom yells, brushing Will’s shoulders gently and easing him forward until he has no choice but to crawl into the van himself. She climbs in beside him, shutting the door with a slam that makes everyone jump. “Carol, dear? Drive.”

She does, pulling out of the driveway with only slightly less reckless abandon than Max used to enter it.

It’s quiet as the van trundles down the road, save for Eddie’s quiet, unintelligible murmuring in Steve’s ears. His ribs must hurt with the way he’s hunched over Steve, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Will stays where he is, sitting on his hands even as he feels Eddie’s gentle pulling, like he needs to know that Will’s still there.

“Did we turn off the water?” Carol asks, cutting through the tension with relaxed ease.

Barbara snorts, “Did we close the front door?”

Will pictures that empty dollhouse with its absent family. He pictures it filling with water, like a fishbowl, like the Titanic. A shrine to all the cruelties that happened there.

“Do we care?” Will asks. Steve’s face looks peaceful in sleep. Almost serene the way it never is when he’s awake.

Carol laughs, manic as she speeds up, van bumping along the road at reckless speeds. “We do not,” she calls vindictively before laughing again.

Will doesn’t take his eyes off Steve.

Taglist: @deany-baby @estrellami-1 @altocumulustranslucidus @evillittleguy @carlprocastinator1000 @hallucinatedjosten @goodolefashionedloverboi @newtstabber @lunabyrd @cinnamon-mushroomabomination @manda-panda-monium @disrespectedgoatman @finntheehumaneater @ive-been-bamboozled @harringrieve @grimmfitzz @is-emily-real @dontstealmycake @angeldreamsoffanfic @a-couchpotato @5ammi90 @mac-attack19 @genderless-spoon @kas-eddie-munson @louismeds @imhereforthelolzdontyellatme @pansexuality-activated @ellietheasexylibrarian @nebulainajar @mightbeasleep @neonfruitbowl @beth--b @silenzioperso @best-selling-show @v3lv3tf0x @bookworm0690 @paintsplatteredandimperfect @wonderland-girl143-blog @nerdsconquerall @sharingisntkaren @canmargesimpson @bananahoneycomb @rainwaterapothecary

Part 95

#steddie #steve harrington #eddie munson #steddie upsidedown au #my fic #will byers

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dellalyra · 11 months

Text

𝙔𝙫𝙚𝙨 𝙎𝙖𝙞𝙣𝙩 𝙇𝙖𝙪𝙧𝙚𝙣𝙩 - 𝘍𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘭𝘺 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴

ɢᴏᴊᴏ ꜱᴀᴛᴏʀᴜ x ʀᴇᴀᴅᴇʀ

A/N: submission request from my dearest darling @soraya-daydreams, coming in clutch with the cute ideas.

CW: like one suggestive sentence, almost crack, hints that pixie loves her fashion

“Y/N!” A scream (clearly Nobara) echoed down the corridor of the school as you organised some books in the Jujutsu High library.

“Y/N!” Yuuji, this time.

“Mom!” Unless Akio had miraculously learned how to speak at 6 months old then that was Megumi.

Three figures skidded around the corner, through the library door and landed in a heap of limbs and black, brown and pink hair. You just raised your eyebrows.

“I’ve heard walking slowly causes less injuries, but hey, what do I know?” You smirk, as the kids untangle themselves.

Nobara is clutching a bundle of fabric in her hands, creamy white and brown - clearly something stained.

“Y/N, this is a DEFCON level one emergency - we screwed up like, majorly.” Nobara uttered, hand on her hip.

“You screwed up majorly, Itadori and I were just sitting there.” Megumi pointed out.

“But ‘Gumi! We were witnesses, that makes us like - accessories to murder!” Yuuji scrambles.

Your heart skipped hearing Yuuji call your son ‘Gumi’, something he only let you and Satoru and Tsumiki call him beforehand, you also don’t miss the blush on his pale cheeks - reinforcing your idea that the feelings these two had for each other were not simply platonic.

Wait -

Did Yuuji say murder?!

“Okay, who’s dead? Where’s the body? Have any of you touched anything at the scene? Megumi I need you to -” you immediately went into practical mode and all of those true crime documentaries and podcasts come flooding back.

“Jesus, mom, no - not actual murder. Yuuji is just exaggerating.” Megumi says, eyes rolling.

“I really fuck with the ‘act now, questions later’ vibe though, Y/N. Queen behaviour.” Nobara says, throwing a peace sign with the unoccupied hand.

“We were just having coffee! Well, Megumi and Nobara were having coffee - I was having orange juice.” Yuuji adds.

“Guys. What’s broken or who’s injured?” You say, mom voice appearing.

“Um… so! I was drinking my coffee, and Ijichi left something on the table, because he’s dumb!” Nobara starts frantically explaining.

“No - ah ah, we love Ijichi, this school wouldn’t function without Ijichi. Don’t listen to your Sensei.” You butt in because there will be no Ijichi slander in your presence.

“Sorry, Y/N. Anyway! I was drinking my coffee! The coffee got knocked over and spilled! It spilled onto this!” She says, holding up the ruined white fabric in her arms, as both boys grimaced.

You gasp.

“Oh, fuck.” You whisper.

“That’s what I said!” Yuuji interjects.

“Shit.” You say again, examining the fabric in your hands

“That’s what I said.” Megumi groans.

“Motherfucker.” You toss your head back.

“That’s what I said!” Nobara nods.

“Okay. Let’s fix this. Eh… Megumi! Go to see Ijichi - ask him for washing detergent - he lives in the staff accommodation, so he can get us some. Nobara, I need you to boil the kettle and get some boiling water and cloths, okay? Yuuji, do you have vinegar in the kitchen? Because we need that.” You list off, desperately trying to remember what gets rid of coffee stains.

Megumi nods and leaves, Nobara rushes from the room and Yuuji salutes and darts to the kitchen.

This has to work.

Because the coffee flavoured thing in your hands is your husbands tailored white silk Yves Saint Laurent dress shirt, which he adores.

Which he also bought for ¥250,000.

After a moment the three kids come back with the required equipment and you combine all three and dunk the shirt into the mixture to soak for 15 minutes.

As the timer beeped on your phone, you took out the shirt and quickly realised it was absolutely no better.

You looked at the kids.

Then it all went to shit.

“Princess! Are you being a dork and organising books for fun again? Yaknow if you’re bored you can always come into my office and get on your kn-” The boisterous voice of your love echoes as the man himself rounds the corner and finds the kids and you tussling by the table. In a flash, you all turn to him - wide smiles.

He quirks his eyebrows.

“Princess, I saw you an hour ago and I’m pretty sure that a baby bump doesn’t grow that fast in an hour, and thanks to modern contraception and a 6 month old son I’m guessing you’re not pregnant.” He smirks, knowing you’re hiding something, probably covering for the kids.

Before you can react he’s swooped you over his shoulder as the kids all grab your ankles and you become a tug of war between two warring factions.

Satoru eventually wins by teleporting you both to the other side of the desk and sticking his tongue out at the teenagers and shoving his hands under your sweater and taking out the offending lump.

He studies the fabric for a minute, as four people hold their breath.

That’s when he burst out in hysterical laughter.

“Baby, were you covering for these delinquents?” He asks, hand on your cheek.

“Covering?! No! They were helping me! I spilled the coffee!” You say, stuttering.

“No you didn’t princess, you drink mochas, and this is just coffee.” He says, still laughing and you curse how well he knows you.

“I don’t drink coffee!” Itadori adds.

“You don’t need the fucking caffeine.” Megumi nods.

“Well don’t leave your silk designer shirts on the table -” Nobara starts and they’re all speaking at once.

Satoru just smiles and opens his phone, tapping it a few times and then he spins the phone around, showing it to the kids.

“I just bought 5 more of the same shirt. I don’t give a damn about the shirt, seeing you three running around trying to fix it was a years worth of entertainment for me. Truly - high quality comedy.” He laughs, tossing the shirt into the trash near him.

It’s moments like these the ‘Gojo heir’ in him shines through.

“Say sorry to your mom for worrying her.” He says, winking at them all.

“Sorry, mom.” Megumi shrugs.

“I’m sorry, mom!” Yuuji adds.

“Yeah, sorry mom.” Nobara sulks.

“I DON’T REMEMBER GIVING BIRTH TO ANY OF YOU!”

#submission #jjk #jjk x reader #gojo satoru #gojo satoru x reader #gojo x reader #gojo fluff #anime #family formations extras #dad!gojo

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pinksugarscrub · 3 months

Text

Starstruck

Hobie Brown x fem! reader (high school au)

@rexlroze, @the-kr8tor What better place to stir up drama than high school? ✨️Enemies to lovers✨️

Part(s): Prologue, ???

Visions Academy. Elitist? Yes, but the school of your dreams. An hour trip from Harlem on the subway. But if your mom’s dingy blue bug held up for another year you wouldn’t have to worry about paying for a Metrocard.

It was incredible when you visited on a campus tour. The music program was world renowned. You plan to take every course available but you need to be in that music room. Smell the polish from the guitars and touch the marble of the grand piano. You shiver just thinking about standing in the auditorium. It’s everything you’ve ever wanted. Everything your family could ever have dreamed of for their daughter.

So it doesn’t bother you to work until the dead of night with customers that make you want to tear your hair out. Visions makes it all worth it and well, being able to pay for your own gas is nice too.

It’s Friday, the parlor is loud and bustling with families, high schoolers, and disgruntled adults who just want to pay. Life couldn’t be any better than this.

“Manolo where are my damn pizzas?” Yuri screams over the bar separating the kitchen and the cashiers. Stacking empty boxes into her hands before shoving them under the counter.

“What do you expect me to do!?” He yells back. Antonio, his younger brother slipping on what you assume is the ghost pepper Manolo never picked up. “I’ve got six other orders before damn what’s his name. Tell him to wait his fu-”

You tune them out as you smile politely to the little girl in front of you who’s asked for a to-go cup.

“Thank you!”

“You’re welcome,” you chuckle. Watching her run back to her parents. It was sweet, reminding you of your own dad and mom back home.

“(y/n)!’

You don’t react as Yuri spins you around, pushing you towards the kitchen where boxes and boxes of pizza are stacked up. “Go, I expect you back within two hours eh?”

You also don’t react when she glares down at Antonio. Who is usually your delivery boy but is currently nursing a burn on his hand. The poor guy really was as clumsy as a deer.

“Two hours (y/n)!” She repeats.

Then the door slams shut behind you. Your car keys in hand and a bag draped over your shoulder that burns into your side with how many pizzas are stuffed inside. Don’t even ask how that worked, Yuri has her ways.

You sigh as you hop down the steps. Gently setting the bag in the passenger's seat once you reach your car. It takes you a second to set up your phone with directions along with music. The speakers are surprisingly clear as you turn the volume up and drive off. The city becomes a blur and the clock ticks back at you with each and every stop.

The last apartment. A pink building that’s chipping and full of overgrown vines that reminds you of a photo you saw at a pop up show once. You walk up the steps, the last two boxes in your hand.

“O’hara…”You mumble, “O’hara, O’hara- ah ha, there.” The loud buzz of the intercom makes you recoil as it echoes across the street. A minute later a voice rang through, words muffled and unintelligible

You shift nervously on the balls of your feet. Leaning close to the speaker against your better judgment.

“Hi! For Mr. O’hara?”

More words? You’re sweating at this point. You’re almost hitting your two hour mark. A second later another buzz rings through and the door unlocks.

You sigh, muttering under your breath. “Oh thank god.”

You quickly swing the door open. Scaling the steps once you see yellow caution tape and a note stuck to the elevator.

By the time you reach the fourth floor you’re huffing. Holding onto the railing you catch your breath.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,”You huff in exasperation. Eyes wide as you see every door number is faded or falling apart. “These people need a better landlord.”

You almost shriek as you see what time it is when you look down. You have less than fifteen minutes.

Running through the numbers as best you could. You settle on a door with punk themed stickers. You hope this is the apartment or the tenants will at least be nice enough to point you in the right direction.

Before you can even knock the door swings up.

“What do you mean-”

You stand there visibly in awe as you stare into the most beautiful set of eyes you’ve ever seen. Silver piercings and earrings decorating his face. Wicks pulled back into a ponytail.

“Oh hey! Can we help you?” A second face pops out from the side of the door. A kind smile on his face.

You clear your throat as you avert your gaze. “Yes, uhm, I’m looking for 4D?”

“O’hara?”

You melt inside as you hear his accent. British? But not exactly?

“O’hara,”you confirmed. Smile wobbly as you force your butterflies down. You really need to get out of here.

You don’t notice the two exchange a look.

“Oh, that’s us love.” He grins as he stares down at you.

“Great!” You beam. Mentally storing the name in the back of your mind. For what? You don’t know. It’s not like you had the courage to ask for his number.

It takes you less than a minute to hand the boxes over.

“How much do we owe you?”

This confuses you but your smile never wavers. “I’m sorry, I’m pretty sure you prepaid online.”

“Right right!” The second boy nods. Dragging his friend inside by the arm and snatching up the pizza with his free hand. “Thanks!”

The boy with wicks sends you a wink before closing the door behind them.

You wait until you’re out of sight to swoon. It lasts for about five seconds when you realize it’s been exactly two hours.

Yuri’s too busy when you come back to scold you. So the rest of your shift goes smoothly. Your mind drifting to the boy every once in a while. A small smile on your lips.

The phone rings and your bliss is broken. You hold your breath as insult after insult hits your ear through the receiver.

You feel like an idiot. The boy’s pretty face fading into obscurity. You blink back tears as you talk with the real Miguel O’hara.

What a shitty night.

#atsv #across the spiderverse #hobie brown #hobie brown x reader #hobie brown x you #spiderman atsv #atsv hobie #spiderpunk #hobie x reader #spider punk x reader

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holylulusworld · 9 months

Text

Big girls don't cry (2)

Summary: You are no stranger to heartbreak.

Pairing: CEO!Steve Rogers x Plussized!Reader

Warnings: angst, strong reader, mentions of former heartbreak, arguments, heartbreak, almost violence

Big girls don’t cry masterlist

<< Part 1

Steve’s whole world just exploded. His life lies in shambles because of one stupid mistake.

After he lied to his friends to make them shut up, he lost you. And now, the chairman of his company is yelling at him. But Steve doesn’t care.

He can only think of you, the only woman he ever truly loved. You didn’t answer his calls and sent the roses he ordered for you right back.

“I told you that I don’t want to use my girlfriend to get closer to Harlan Thrombey,” Steve yells back. “You pressured me into meeting her grandmother to charm her. Now my girlfriend hates me, and Harlan Thrombey will never agree to sell his company to you.”

“Mr. Rogers, must I remind you that your position and fate are in my hands?” Alexander Pierce sneers at Steve. He cannot employ someone weak who puts feelings first. “Do still want your job, or is some pussy more important to you? Did that chubby bitch cloud your mind—”

Alexander Pierce doesn’t know what hit him when he ends up on the ground. His nose was broken, and more so his pride.

“Fuck this job,” Steve looks down at Alexander, the man he used to admire. “I can’t do this job anymore. And I won’t. I hate my job, and I hate what you made me do. So many jobs…no not only jobs but lives ruined because of your greed. I’m out of this!”

Steve storms out of the office, cursing himself for ever wanting to follow in Pierce’s footsteps. He’s not the same man he was six months ago. No. You’ve changed his whole life for the better.

“I need to get her back,” he decides there and then to not give up until you are back in his arms.

“Babydoll, I know you are in there!” Steve rams his fist into your door. “Please, I fucked up big time. But I love you, Y/N. Please…I need you.”

“Eat shit,” you yell from inside your penthouse. He can rot in hell for what he did to you. “Get away from my door or I swear you will taste my baseball bat today.”

“I won’t go. If I must, I’ll camp outside your home. It’s cozy out here,” Steve tries to sound confident. “I got food, and sweets, and a soft blanket.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” you open the door size Steve up. He looks like he hasn’t slept for days. His hair is a mess, and the suit he’s wearing has seen better days. “Get away from me and my home. There is nothing left to say.”

“I didn’t go out with you to get in your grandma’s good graces. I swear, until my boss brought it up, I didn’t know she was friends with Harlan Thrombey. I refused to use my relationship to get the deal.”

“You know, out of all the shitty guys I met in my life, you are the worst. At least the others had the guts to tell me that they only used me. They never spoke about love,” you huff when Steve dares to take one step toward you.

“I love you, please,” he tries but you shove him away. “Y/N, it was stupid of me to say those things to get Bucky to leave. I swear on my mom’s grave, it’s not true. You mean the world to me.”

“If you don’t want me to break your dick with my baseball bat, you get out of my sight Rogers,” you point at his crotch. “It’s a nice dick, and it’d be a shame if he gets damaged because of the asshole carrying him between his legs.”

Steve would laugh about the way you talk about his cock. Sadly, you are dead serious about hurting him. “Please give me five minutes, baby doll.”

“The fuck no,” you shake your head. “I’ve got no time to waste on a man using me to make even more money. Where everyone has a heart, you’ve got a cold and rotten lump in your chest.”

“I quit my job.” Steve reaches out for you. “I never wanted to hurt you or use you. I swear this is all a misunderstanding. Bucky was nagging, and I wanted him to stop making fun of me for being in love.”

“You mean for being in love with the fat girl,” you snap at Steve. “I heard all of this before. You’re nice, and your face is pretty for a fat girl. If only you’d lose some weight we could be more than friends.”

“Whoa, baby! Where is this coming from?” Steve raises his hands in surrender. “Bucky is not that kind of guy, neither am I. I love you for yourself. Your size never mattered to me…or it does because damn, do you know how I love burying my face between your tits? You are perfect the way you are.”

How you wish Steve’s words were true. You know better than trusting a man with your heart. “No, I’m not. Not to you and the likes of you.” You shrug. “It’s fine. Not everyone can handle a woman like me. The difference is, you pretend to like, no love me, for a deal.”

“No-“ he sniffs. “Can we not talk, doll? Did you even listen? I quit my job and hit my boss for you.”

“Sure,” you sneer. “I want you to leave and never come back. If I see your face around here ever again, you will regret your birth.”

You slam the door in his face, locking it. No man breaks your heart and gets away with it. If he won’t leave you alone, you’ll make sure that he regrets messing with you…

>> Part 3

Tags in reblog.

#Big girls don't cry (2)#steve rogers #steve rogers x reader #steve rogers x you #ceo!steve rogers x reader #steve rogers x y/n #angst

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cutedice · 1 year

Note

i could have a headcannon on the monster + ace trio with a s/o who died in the battle and when they come back in boat their kid comes up and says "where's mommy?? she said we'll be playing dolls when she comes back !!☹️"

((ooooh this one hurt. Thanks for requestin!!))

Telling Your Kid You're Gone

Characters: Warnings: Death (reader dies), angst, mentions of violence

Fem!Reader, Feminine Titles used "mama, mom, etc..."

LUFFY

- He watched it happen.

- He watched the bastard that killed you commit the crime.

- And he couldn’t do anything to stop it.

- It was devastating. Flashes of other people he loved vanishing just out of reach filled his head. Sudden grief filled his heart, and he couldn’t hold back the brutal beating the guy had coming.

- He held your dead body for a while and made sure you had a burial. He wasn’t going just to leave you. He wanted to give you a proper one at sea, something beautiful.

- He brought you back with him and Franky was quick to start setting something up while Chopper and Robin prepped you.

- He went off to do his own important task. He finds your daughter in the kitchen doodling at the table and singing.

- She does look a lot like you when he looks at her.

- She looks over, excited for a moment before she pouts. “Aw it’s just daddy,” she stuck her tongue out. “I want mommy! Where’s she?”

- Luffy chuckled, walking over and pinching her cheeks. “Am I not good enough?” he asked her, pulling as she whine in annoyance. He stopped shortly after though and crouched down. Tears were already building in his eyes. And, he’s never been subtle, but he almost wants to try for her.

- Still, he tries to speak. Once, then twice, and finally he pulls her into his arms. “I’m sorry,” he says, still smiling just a bit, “(Y/N)’s gone away. She won’t be back.”

- The girl doesn’t mind the hug, but she leans back to take Luffy’s face into her tiny hands. “Quit crying! I don’t like crying!” she exclaimed.

- “It’s okay to cry,” Luffy argued as she stretched his face in revenge for the earlier treatment. “I just miss her a lot!”

- Your daughter nods and huffs. “I miss mommy too!” she decided with another nod before she squeezed Luffy tight. “Is she really nod gonna come back? Not even to visit?”

- It broke his heart to tell her no.

ZORO

- Damn.

- He sat on the ground, covered in blood, next to your motionless body.

- You looked so peaceful and content.

- He was all for going out in battle, so the fact you died fighting until the end made him unbelievably happy in one way.

- It also left him feeling empty and lost.

- ‘More than usual?’

- He could imagine you saying something like that, and it almost made him laugh.

- He cried a handful of times in his life, and he swore he wouldn’t ever again after the fight with Mihawk. But tears just kept falling against his will.

- So, he sat. Silently crying and deeply wounded.

- He eventually called the others with him over once the tears had finished and his aching heart settled for the time. They helped him give you a proper burial, something quick, but it meant a lot to him.

- Once he returned to the ship, he headed for the library in search of his daughter. Robin was left in charge, and he figured that’d be his best bet in locating her.

- He asked Robin to leave, which she did after a moment, patting Zoro on the shoulder before she gave them privacy.

- “Dad?” your daughter asked, looking at him curiously.

- “Hey,” he greeted, walking over and patting her head before he sat down with a small sigh. “I’ve got some news.”

- He told her honestly what happened, sugarcoating a few things, but he let her know about you and your brave sacrifice. And he was there for her as she cried into him.

- If anything, he was happy she was still alive. He would give anything to keep her from experiencing that loss again, as she became his world as they lost you.

SANJI

- “(Y/N)!”

- He screamed your name. He watched the sword go through you in complete terror.

- It all happened so fast, yet so slowly. The battlefield felt frozen at the moment.

- He moved fast, kicking the man away that dared to hurt you. No one even saw where he went. For all they knew, Sanji kicked him hard enough to make him disappear.

- That didn’t matter to the cook, though, not when he cradled your face in his hands and tried to get Chopper or anyone to help.

- But it was ultimately too late. You passed in moments, whispering your last words before going limp.

- He was so full of grief immediately. The battle continued behind him while he mourned before he got up to help finish. And, when it was all done, the strawhats around helped put you to rest before they escorted Sanji back to the ship.

- He didn’t blame you or anyone on board, though he wanted to push it somewhere. He blamed himself in that steed, for being too slow, for not being strong enough. He blamed the stupid murderer as well and the gull of him harming you.

- He dismissed himself from the group once they returned to the Sunny, and he quickly ran off to locate his daughter.

- He found her in the men’s cabin with Brook, the two playing dolls together. Brook could recognize the aura surrounding the chef, so he left the two alone.

- “Papa! Are you and Mama gonna play with me now?” she asked, holding up a doll towards him.

- Sanji had to fight back tears, leaning down to brush her hair out of her face before cradling it much as he did yours. “No bugs. Mama won’t be able to play.”

- He carefully broke the news to her, holding her tightly as she cried into him. He cried with her, soothing her to the best of his abilities as well.

- “It’ll be okay. I’m here, I’m here…”

ACE

- Needless to say, he was not okay when it happened. Not in the least.

- He already struggled daily with his own worth, but losing one of the only people who made him feel worth loving hit him hard.

- The whitebeards were big on getting back at those who hurt their family, and given the fact you were not only his partner but the mother of his child, he was going to murder whoever dared hurt you personally.

- His flames were hotter than ever, and the battle was over in minutes. He was left for a minute, cold despite the heat and afraid of heading back to the ship without you. But he did. He forced himself to walk to the ship and board.

- He felt like time was slow, and his reactions were late. He also felt suddenly as though he were a burden, like a curse that wasn’t worth living.

- That was until he felt a hand tug on his. He looked down, and for a moment, he saw you. But then he noticed freckles and curious eyes, and he smiled tiredly. “Hey, Sweety.”

- “Pops said you were sad!” she declared, and she had this determined tone in her voice that ace would typically adore, but now he was just too beat to acknowledge it with anything but a sad hum. Which ultimately confirmed her suspicion.

- She reached up, and Ace lifted her without complaint. She leaned in to wrap her arms around his neck, hugging him. “They said Mama’s gone,” she mumbled. “Is she really?”

- Ace’s breath hitched. She was clever, and he knew she could handle the truth, but that fact also hurt him in a way. He put a hand on the back of her head, gently patting her. “Yes… Yeah, it’s true,” he admitted quietly. “I’m sorry,” he choked out, trying to hold back a sob.

- But, to his surprise, she pulled back. And, with the strength of a child raised by pirates, she squeezed his face and looked at him sternly through her own tears. “Mama was strong! We gotta be strong for Mama,” she nodded and patted his cheeks. “Okay? Strong for Mama!”

- Ace stared at her, his tears falling, and he smiled a bit. “Right. We’ve gotta be strong for her.”

- It wasn’t much, but at that moment, he decided he’d live for her. He was sure that you’d want that for him, and he grieved hard, and sometimes it was… terrible. But, he kept going for her.

#tw death #cw death #monkey d. luffy #luffy x reader #roronoa zoro #zoro x reader #black leg sanji #sanji x reader #portgas d ace #ace x reader #op x reader #one piece x reader #one piece #x reader headcanons

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morganbritton132 · 1 year

Note

The juicy drama of Steve still inviting his mother to things, though?

I know you said in the tags she has never come but I am living for a very petty Eddie seeing Steve’s mom after all these years and going “you look great, Helen. Haven’t aged a day since you begged me not to marry Steve.” (Not sure if you’ve named Steve’s mom yet. Helen is just my head canon name for her.)

I’m not sure if I’ve named Steve’s mom in this AU yet or not, but she is universally known as Angela in all my work thus far so I’m going to keep it the same here.

Steve might have had virtually no contact with his mother over the years despite numerous attempts to reach out to her, but Eddie has.

Eddie has a tour bus and final say over their touring schedule, and Angela Harrington still lives in Hawkins. Eddie is a petty bitch when he wants to be, and trust him. He wants to be.

He always ensures that Corroded Coffin plays at least one gig that’s close enough to their hometown that they can make a day trip. Some might say that he’s keeping close to his roots and others may say that he’s giving the band a chance to visit with family, but Gareth knows Eddie too well.

Wayne doesn’t live in Hawkins anymore and Eddie would only ever step foot in that town to cause a problem, so he tells him. He says, “Don’t get arrested” and then he goes to see his parents.

Eddie paints pentagrams on his fingernails and lines his eyes with the darkest liner he has, and then he makes his way up Loch Nora with the windows down and the music loud. He parks in front of the Harrington residence and he pounds on the door until someone answers it.

Angela never looks older than she does when she’s glaring at Eddie and it makes him smile, “Hiya, Mom.”

She never slams the door in his face despite how much she looks like she wants to. It would cause too much of a scene and Eddie has caught her in the middle of her book club – a bit of good timing on his part (and a lot of listening to Steve Facebook stalk everybody that has ever lived in Hawkins). She looks him up in down like she’s already annoyed, puts her hands on her hips and says, “Absolutely not.”

Eddie’s already slipping passed her by then and into the house. He looks around like he’s never fucked her son there before and says, “Wow, Ang, it almost looks like a human being with a functioning heart lives here.”

She hisses at him to get out of her house or she’ll call the police, but Eddie just got here. And anyways, he’s too busy introducing himself to her friends, “Hi. Hi. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about me from Angie. I’m her son-in-law.”

Gosh, some of these girls are young enough to not know that Angela abandoned her son because one of the girls says, “Oh, I didn’t know she had a daughter.”

“Yeah, no,” Eddie says, pouring himself a glass of their champagne. “She doesn’t. A son. Hot as hell, great ass, wonderful person – he’s fantastic. That’s actually why I’m here, you see.”

“My girl, Angie, here married a violently homophobic man and when he kicked her son out, she didn’t do jackshit about it. Still hasn’t,” He continued, despite her actually picking up the phone to call the police. His smile dropped a bit when he made eye contact with her, “But Richard is dead now and there’s nothing stopping her from reconnecting with her kid, right?”

Eddie’s smile picks up again when he addresses the rest of the book club, “You see, a couple years ago, Stevie went back to school to get his masters. He’s has a few sets back - ‘cause he’s still got that head injury, Ang. The one you never ask about – but he’s set to graduate end of the semester. I just happened to be in town and though, you know what?”

“Wouldn’t it just mean the world if his mom came to his graduation?” Eddie continued. “You know, since you missed the high school one.”

“I think you’d do very well to leave now, Mr. Munson,” She tells him, and Eddie makes a big show of listening to her. He leaves behind an invitation to the party that Joyce is throwing for Steve and the info of when graduation actually is.

Eddie doesn’t see her if she’s there, but he doesn’t spend a lot of time looking for her. He’s there to see Steve walk across the stage and to cheer him on with his real family.

#Eddie gives her two months after Richard’s funeral to reconnect with her son before he decides to make himself her problem #eddie munson tiktok saga #steve harrington #eddie munson

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hiddenwritingsintheworld · 10 months

Text

Cruel Summer Chapter 1 (Chris Evans x Actress/Singer!Reader)

(Okay, So Ive been away for a hot minute. And I've been through quite a bit. But I got inspired to write this and I hope yall love it!! Couple of things. 1.) Taylor Swift doesnt exist in this series, the reader is like taylor swift! 2) dont come for me, I've been chewing on this idea for a few months now lol. 3.) Im almost done with chapter 1 of My Alpha, I know I've gotten some messages about that!! Also, half way through chapter 2 of Midnight rain ;) Enjoy! Let me know your thoughts on this!! love you guys!!!)

Thoughts? Suggestions? General opinion wanted here!!!!!

You’d be delusional to think that he wanted anything more than hookups with you. Being a movie star was hard enough to make a “normal” life ...falling in love with your co-star though...that made everything even worse. That’s what led you to becoming a world famous pop star, releasing smash hit after smash hit. Your smile; when up on that stage, tens of thousands of fans screaming your songs as you sang them, standing ovations, tears of happiness, excitement, thrill, it all made that heartache ease just a little bit. But not all the way.

“Tonight is a HUGE night, I can’t believe you’re going to announce another album. I’m in awe, really I am.” Your mom said, grabbing your shoulders and looking at you in the mirror of the room you were currently using backstage. “Mom, thanks so much for traveling with me during this tour. It means so much to me.” you smiled softly at her, “especially after everything I’ve been through recently. Wanna know the surprise songs tonight? Or just be surprised like everyone else?” you asked with a soft laugh.

Your mom and dad were your biggest and best fans you could have ever asked for. Even during the worst time of your life, you’d had your parents support when changing careers. “Awe, let me be surprised like everyone else dear. Your cue is up….come on,” she gave you a big hug and kissed your cheek. “You’re going to be amazing, just like every other night” she beamed before walking out of your dressing room.

You stared in the mirror, touching up your red lipstick before turning around and walking out. Your bejeweled bodysuit in the colors of your most favorite album you’d put out, pinks and blues. You smiled at the stage crew and everyone working behind the scenes as you walked with your assistant. “Another great sold out crowd out there, the VIP tent is dead center, lots of celebrities are here tonight too.” She smiled before you walked away standing on your mark.

Listening to the entrance music you’d had custom made, caused the memories to flood your mind.

You looked over at him grinning as you both reached for a piece of popcorn. “Soooo I thought you wanted to do something else when you asked me to come to your hotel room 10:30 at night.” you smirked as he laughed, throwing his head back. “While yes, I’d love to do that too….I figured it would be nice to watch a movie or two, enjoy a snack and relax together too. I ordered some wine and chocolate covered strawberries too.” he said leaning closer to you, as you bit your lip leaning into him, letting his lips brush yours. The next thing you knew, he had you pinned to the bed, popcorn littering the floor as he kissed down your neck, slowly pushing your shirt off and attacking your chest.

“Ready? Have fun!!” Your assistant shouted over the music and screaming fans as the platform started to bring you up from under the stage. You plastered a grin on your lips and got in your stance with your mic.

The moment your back up dancers pulled back the large fabric fans to reveal you, you began to sing one of your songs. The roar of screams, cheers and cries erupted throughout the entire stadium as you came into sight for everyone. The platform continued to rise as you sang, smiling at everyone.

“It's you and me, that's my whole world

They whisper in the hallway, "She's a bad, bad girl"

Oh, I just thought you should know (you should know)

It's you and me, there's nothing like this (like this)

Miss Americana and The Heartbreak Prince (okay)

We're so sad, we paint the town blue (paint it blue)

Voted most likely to run away with you.”

The music ended as everyone cheered even louder and you laughed softly, the platform lowering back to the mainstage level; you grinned as the next song began instantly. You loved performing for a crowd, they never made you feel like you weren’t worth the love and attention. You strut toward the front of the stage, beginning to sing the bridge, along with the crowd, when a sight almost threw you off your performance. He stood there in the VIP tent with a cold beer in one hand, his other arm around the shoulders of a petite brunette.

“I'm drunk in the back of the car

And I cried like a baby coming home from the bar (oh)

Said, "I'm fine, " but it wasn't true

I don't wanna keep secrets just to keep you

And I snuck in through the garden gate

Every night that summer just to seal my fate (oh)

And I screamed for whatever it's worth

"I love you, " ain't that the worst thing you ever heard?

He looks up grinning like a devil”

You belt out the bridge, the crowd screaming louder toward the end. You tried to not to look at the VIP tent, the urge to see him again, standing there happy with some other girl, you danced around, happily grinning at the crowd, encouraging them to sing along. You finally took a break, smiling wide as everyone clapped and cheered. “Hi!” you said cheerfully. “My name is Y/N and welcome to The Eras Tour,” you grinned as the stadium erupted again.

“I just want to say thank you to everyone who is here tonight and I hope that I don’t disappoint. I usually perform only two surprise songs a night, however, I’m feeling…fun tonight, so I want to add another song to the list for you all. It’s one that I don't usually perform live. But, I hope you enjoy it.” you smiled as the platform rose and you looked around, the soft jazz music starting as loud cheers erupted. You couldn't stop the smile that landed on your face as you began to sing.

“We were crazy to think

Crazy to think that this could work

Remember how I said I'd die for you?

We were stupid to jump

In the ocean separating us

Remember how I'd fly to you?

And I can't talk to you when you're like this

Staring out the window like I'm not your favorite town

I'm New York City

I still do it for you, babe

They all warned us about times like this

They say the road gets hard and you get lost when you're led by blind faith

Blind faith”

You smiled looking around, your eyes landed on him again, he had a look in his eyes, just like how he used to look at you, hunger and desperation for your touch. You put your lips back up to the microphone and made eye contact with him again.

“But we might just get away with it

Religion's in your lips

Even if it's a false god

We'd still worship

We might just get away with it

The altar is my hips

Even if it's a false god

We'd still worship this love

I know heaven's a thing

I go there when you touch me

Honey hell is when I fight with you”

You didn’t mean to stare for so long, but the way he looked at you, watching your body move. You wanted to jump off stage and run into his arms again, kissing him, telling him how in love with him you still were, even after the three years that had passed. You felt a tightness in your chest when the girl turned and kissed his neck, and began to dance with him.

You finished the song not soon after and took a small bow as everyone screamed out. You stood still smiling as the platform began to lower, before diving off to get changed. “I need a minute,” you said as your assistant came up to you. She looked slightly confused as they began to help you into your next outfit. How were you going to continue this concert with him staring at you? You didn’t think you could do it honestly.

“I can’t believe you changed the set list, We’re going to have to cut one of the surprise songs.” You looked at her. “No we can’t but we are changing them tonight.” you said as they did up the back of your dress. “What?! Why!” she gasped. “Chris is here,” you said looking at her as her face fell. “With some girl.” she sighed putting a hand on her head “Jesus fucking Christ……okay. Tell me what you need.” you looked at her again as tears filled your eyes. “I need a fucking minute.” you grabbed the new mic rushing off.

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untitlednerd · 1 year

Text

"I've got you, and you've got me."

Neteyam x twin!reader

Summary: You and your brother were never apart, but one moment - amidst all of the chaos - would change that forever.

Warnings: Sadness, no spelling or grammar checks.

A/N - I'm not going to lie, I almost cried multiple times while writing this. I just finally watched the new Avatar movie yesterday, and this was just sitting in my thoughts.

“I’m shot, I’m shot! You got me.” You laughed as you ran over to your brother, who was laying on the ground dramatically, playing dead.

“I finally got you!” You said as you grabbed his hand, squeezing it gently and pulling him so he was sitting up. He squeezed your hand back.

“Yes, you did. Good job, little sister.” He smiled back at you, patting you on the head. You rolled your eyes, swatting his hand away.

“You’re only older than me by two minutes, Neteyam. Besides, isn’t it like a twin rule that you can’t argue about being older than the other?”

“I believe it’s the other way around, but since when did we care about rules like that anyway?” He answered as he stood up, pulling you into a hug.

“Promise me that you won’t die, or leave. That we will always stick together.” You said, looking up at your brother who was slightly taller than you.

“I mean – I’ve got you, and you’ve got me. Right?” He asked, looking down at you. You gave him a look, causing him to sigh in amusement.

“I promise, I promise. But only if you promise the same thing. I don’t want to hear that you slipped and fell, or died because of a tiny cut or something.”

“I promise. Besides, I’m not that clumsy-”

“Are too.”

“Am not!”

“Are too!”

“Neteyam!” You yelled as you chased your brother, who only laughed as he ran away from you. Eventually, you joined in on the laughing.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“You skxawng. I’m shot.” Is all you hear as your heart drops to your stomach. It took you what felt like hours, but was really only seconds, to register the words that Neteyam spoke – then, in almost a flash, you were swimming to his side, helping him to Tsireya’s Ilu, while Lo’ak and Spider held on.

As Tsireya instructed the Illu to head swim, you kept your attention on Neteyam. Knowing what your father had told you about wounds like that, you already ripped off a piece of cloth, and shoved it onto his wound, keeping as much pressure on it as you could. He whined in pain because of it.

“I know, I know. I’m sorry – I have to try to stop the bleeding.” Your voice broke when you heard his whines, but you kept the cloth where it was, even as it got drenched in blood. You were the only thing keeping some of the blood from leaving your brother. And you knew that if he died because you did something wrong, then you would never forgive yourself. “Hold my hand, brother. Stay with me. I’ve got you, and you’ve got me.” Neteyam smiled softly through his pain when you said those words. Though you knew you couldn’t technically claim words, the two of you said them to each other for as long as you could remember. As far as you both knew, those words belonged to you. To your bond.

“It hurts, sister.” As much as you wanted to cry at his words and his whines, you knew you had to be there for him, so you forced the tears away, putting more pressure on his wound.

“I know it does, but you’re going to be okay. We’re going to find mom and dad, and they’re going to help you. You’ll be okay. I promise.” You smiled as much as you could down at him as you held his hand, gently squeezing it once and awhile, to which he would squeeze back each time. A way to show each other that you were both still there.

Your concentration on Neteyam’s wound was broken when you heard Lo’ak yell for your father.

“Dad! Here, take him.” Lo’ak said as you all helped your father pull Neteyam onto the rocks. In a split second, you were by his side again, sitting next to him as you continued to put pressure on the wound, only stopping when your dad gave you a new piece of cloth that wasn’t soaked in blood to put on the wound.

“Good job, you’re doing great. Keep putting pressure like you have been.” Your dad said, kissing you on the head softly as he looked at you, and then at Neteyam.

The two of you were twins. Bonded since birth. As close as you were with the rest of your siblings, it would never be the same as it was with him. He was part of you, and you were part of him. You both needed each other. You were rarely apart, because being apart killed you both inside. And right now, you were in pain because you saw him in pain. It wasn’t as if you could feel the pain of the wound, but you could feel the pain he was in just fighting to stay alive. Fighting to stay awake. Fighting to look at you. His other half.

Your mother ran over when she saw Neteyam, and fell to his side.

“I want to go home.” He said in the midst of his erratic breathing, looking back and forth between you and your parents.

“I know, I know. We’re going.” Your dad said, looking down at him, his hand on Neteyam’s cheek as he tried to keep him looking at one of you. His breathing became more erratic as he started to cry, but you knew it wasn’t from just the pain of the wound. He was scared. Scared of dying. Scared of leaving you and the rest of his family. Scared of not being there to protect any of you anymore.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. I’ve got you, and you’ve got me, remember? Just focus on me. Stay awake, and keep looking at me, brother.” You said, not being able to hold back your tears as you held your hand on the cloth on his wound with one hand, and his hand with the other.

Soon after you spoke, Neteyam stopped breathing. But he did what you asked. His eyes were open, looking at you. They were lifeless, but they were still looking at you. You squeezed his hand, but he didn’t squeeze back.

“Neteyam? Neteyam! Squeeze my hand back, you skxawng!” You yelled, still keeping pressure on the wound even as your dad tried to pull you away from him, to which you shoved him back with your hand, holding Neteyam’s hand again right after. Even as your mom closed your brother’s eyes, and even as she was screaming and sobbing in the background, you kept pressure on the wound. “You open your eyes, and you come back to me. You promised! You told me that you wouldn’t die! You told me that I had you and you had me, you liar!” You screamed, not able to hold any emotions back. Through all of the chaos and emotions, you didn’t even realize that Lo’ak, your dad, your mom, and Spider went to find your sisters.

Tsireya put a hand on your shoulder, saying your name softly.

“He’s gone..” She said, trying to get you to let go of him.

“No, he isn’t. Okay? He told me he wouldn’t die on me, so he isn’t going to die. Neteyam has never broken a promise.” You said, your breathing erratic as your thoughts were clashing in your mind. The rational side was telling you to quit trying to stop the bleeding because he was gone. But the side of shock, the side that loved your brother – that was telling you to keep going. To keep trying to stop the bleeding. To keep trying to keep him alive.

Only when your dad returned with the rest of your family did he finally pull you off of him. You fought him, screaming and crying. But he was picking you up, his arms wrapped around you as your mom cried next to Neteyam. “I know, it’s okay. Everything is going to be okay.” He whispered to you, trying to calm you down.

“No, it isn’t okay! He wants to go home. We have to take him home! He will be okay then!” You yelled through your sobs, still kicking your dad.

“No, sweetheart, he won’t..” Your dad held you until you were too tired to fight him, hugging you and sitting with you as you fell to your knees, just now seeing the blood all over your hands. Your twin’s blood. You were too tired to move, but you weren’t tired enough to not scream one last time. This one was full of pain, anguish, and loss. It was a scream that your whole family felt. Your dad had been numb from shock during the whole ordeal, but when he heard you, he broke. Tears fell from his eyes as he kept hugging you, whispering sweet and comforting words in your ear.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Later, once all of the light from the sky left, your brother was taken by your mother into the water after his body was prepared. As you looked into the sky while swimming next to your family, something felt different. The stars seemed brighter, and it seemed like there were more of them that night. While you lost a brother, the earth gained a bright and strong soul. Your other half resided in the stars. It was what you told yourself to keep you from crying again, even if there were no tears left to cry, you knew you could start sobbing again if you wanted to.

Before you let the rest of your family take Neteyam down into the water, you took his necklaces off of him, holding them in your hand as you climbed back onto the rocks, knowing you wouldn’t be able to watch your twin’s body disappear.

Leaving your family to grieve, you went to find the ikran that you and Neteyam rode on the way to the Metkayina.

It was only as you mounted the creature and were prepared to leave when your family found you. Tuk tried to go to you, but Kiri held her back. Your mom said your name, and you looked at her, emotionally numb and full of pain at the same time.

“Where are you going?” Your dad asked, pulling your attention to him.

“He wanted to go home.” You said, putting Neteyam’s smaller necklace around your neck, holding the bigger one he wore in your hand. “I’m taking him home.” Once you finished talking, the ikran you were on flew off, headed towards home. You didn’t look back at your family, knowing that it would break you. But you also knew you would see them again. But for now, you needed to bring your brother home, and you needed to grieve his death in the place the two of you felt most alive.

A/N - (I sincerely apologize for this.)

#neteyam sully #neteyam #neteyam x reader #atwow neteyam #avatar neteyam #sully family x reader #lo'ak x sister!reader #neteyam x sister!reader #tuk x sister!reader #kiri x sister!reader #dad!jake sully x reader #mom!neytiri x reader #sully family #neteyam angst

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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 1 year

Text

North To The Future [Chapter 15: Drive] [Series Finale]

The year is now 2000. You are just beginning your veterinary practice in Juneau, Alaska. Aegon is a mysterious, troubled newcomer to town. You kind of hate him. You are also kind of obsessed with him. Falling for him might legitimately ruin your life…but can you help it? Oh, and there’s a serial killer on the loose known only as the Ice Fisher.

Chapter warnings: Language, alcoholism, addiction, murder, violence, character deaths.

Word count: 7.3k.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

Taglist: @elsolario @ladylannisterxo @doingfondue @tclegane @quartzs-posts @liathelioness @aemcndtargaryen @thelittleswanao3 @burningcoffeetimetravel @poohxlove @borikenlove @myspotofcraziness @travelingmypassion @graykageyama @skythighs @lauraneedstochill @darlingimafangirl @charenlie @thewew @eddies-bat-tattoos @minttea07 @joliettes @trifoliumviridi @bornbetter @flowerpotmage @thewitch-lives @tempt-ress @padfooteyes @teenagecriminalmastermind @chelsey01 @anditsmywholeheart @heliosscribbles @killerqueen-ofwillowgreen @narwhal-swimmingintheocean @tillyt04 @cicaspair418 @fan-goddess

A/N: This is the fic I almost never wrote because I didn’t think anyone would be interested in some random, angsty, 1990s, Alaskan, crime-thriller AU. Thank you for proving me wrong. I hope you enjoy the ending. 💜

Almost everything about your existence is pure chance; it’s the most freeing and horrifying truth imaginable. There’s the genetic lottery and corporate downsizing, revolutions and hurricanes, plagues, asteroids, famines, faulty airplanes and malignant blooms of cells and drunk drivers. There are 100 billion planets in this galaxy and your atoms ended up on the one called Earth. After all that, do you really think what you want matters? So make all the choices you like, all the nail-biting deliberations and promises and vows, weigh costs and benefits, do research, roll dice, ask astrologers and palm readers, start over every New Year because that’s something we tell ourselves is possible. The fact that you exist at all is one big cosmic coin flip. If you think you’re the one driving, you’re dead fucking wrong. You’re the speck of dust on a windshield, the spin of a roulette wheel. You’re a flash of silver in the universe’s pinball machine.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about chance, okay? My family is one of the wealthiest in the Western Hemisphere, and I didn’t do anything to earn that. I was born first, and I definitely didn’t do anything to earn that, Jesus Christ, what a chromosomal fuckup. I inherited an affliction that others get to live without. I can’t imagine what it feels like to wake up and not be horrified by myself, my shortcomings, my failures: too small, too stupid, too wild, too weak. And the first time someone says something like that to you, you want to apologize, you want to drop to your knees and cling to them and beg for absolution, maybe even the first hundred times, the first thousand. And then it just starts to piss you off. Yeah, I know, I’ve heard it all before, why would you expect anything different? Isn’t this getting old, Mom? Maybe you’re the stupid one, Dad, if you think you could cut me and anything but disappointments would fall out. I’m not horrified by the fact that I’m an addict. The horror came first. The horror is what led to all the rest of it.

One day when I was in 10th Grade—I was slumped way down in my chair and drinking vodka out of an Evian water bottle—my American History teacher, purely by chance, assigned me to make a poster about Juneau, Alaska. Some other kid got Los Angeles (Hollywood! The Whisky a Go Go!) and another got Chicago (the Mob!) and another got Nashville (Johnny Cash!) and some jock moron I hated got Baltimore (um, crabs? the War of 1812…?), but I got fucking Juneau, Alaska. I thought this was so unjust that I never forgot it, the fact that I had to get up in front of the class with my pathetic Crayolas-and-magazine-cutouts poster and pretend that Juneau was a place that mattered, that microscopic cloud-covered relic of a late-1800s gold mining settlement on the shores of the Gastineau Channel. Juneau was never on my list of cities to run to. It just wasn’t. It didn’t have anything I wanted. But when I started thinking about places where I could really disappear, where no one would ever bother looking, where days are short and dark and incurious and irrelevant…well, that sounds like Juneau, right?

Let me tell you something about the night I left. I’ve been more messed up, yeah, and I’ve hurt people worse, and I’ve been closer to death, I’ve been one more powder-white gram on the scale away from oblivion; but I’ve never felt that fucking low. I can’t decide if I wish I’d never gone to Juneau at all. I can’t decide if it was a blessing or a curse.

My flight is a red-eye with a layover in Ketchikan, American Airlines, bound for Seattle. Sunfyre has the window seat. He’s wearing the bright red Service Dog vest that I once stole for him specifically for such occasions. My dog fly with the cargo? My dog?! Bill Clinton will be elected pope first. Sunfyre is chewing contently on Milk-Bones and watching the sun rise over the Pacific Ocean. He knows the drill. We’ll touchdown and deplane, and then…and then…

And then we’ll start over again somewhere new. I’ll find a flight board and pick a destination; Seattle is a hub, with spokes leading everywhere. I could go south, to Galveston, Lafayette, Biloxi, someplace where it gets hot, someplace where I can sweat her out of me, purge every cell that still remembers what she felt like. I could go west, fading into mountains or cornfields, vapid infinitesimal towns in Montana, Iowa, Idaho, Nebraska. I could go to New England or the Great Lakes or freaking Hawaii, sleep in hammocks, swim with sea turtles, drink my rum and Cokes out of coconut shells. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that nowhere really sounds good to me. My legs are suddenly tired of running. There’s an ache that rattles down to the bone.

I don’t have to tell you that I love her, right? It’s not so easy for me to say. But it’s true, and it’s beautiful, and it’s torture, and it’s a dream. It’s pain that flays you alive and then builds you back again, layers of fresh muscle and tendons and veins growing over ribs and vertebrae like a trellis thick with ivy. It’s not a high. It’s just the best life can get down here on earth. It’s the ocean, it’s the Northern Lights.

I’m swimming in a black hoodie that is three sizes too big; I haven’t slept and I’m pale and raccoon-eyed, looking like death, feeling worse. When the stewardess rolls by with her clattering cart just slim enough to fit through the aisle, I order a cup of water for Sunfyre and a double rum and Coke for myself. It arrives with two blood-red cherries bobbing in a caramel-dark carbonated sea. The guy in the next seat over gives me a judgmental little eyebrow raise.

“That doesn’t look like breakfast,” he says.

I bite off both cherries—juice dribbling down my chin, wiped away with a sleeve—and throw the stems over my shoulder. The lady sitting behind me yelps in disgust. “Because it’s dessert.”

The man smiles and shakes his head, one of those I shouldn’t find it funny but I do sort of looks. I inspire a lot of those. He’s maybe mid-thirties, long hair and ripped jeans, very punk rock, cool as hell. There is a constellation of pins on his denim jacket. One of them has a roman numeral 10 on it, a stark X nestled inside a triangle. Unity, Service, Recovery, the gold letters say. To Thine Own Self Be True. It’s an Alcoholics Anonymous pin. What are the chances?

He catches me staring, and I ask: “Does it really make you a better man?”

“It doesn’t make you better. It just makes you real.” He smiles again, patient and kind. “It makes your emotions and experiences real, your relationships real. And so you become whatever version of yourself you were always supposed to be. But you have to want it. Not your wife, not your parents or your kids, not your pastor, not your friends, not your parole officer. You.”

I speak without knowing what I’m going to say. “I want it.”

“Yes, I think you do.”

He sees a lot, I think, as the plane descends into the grey fogbank of Seattle. 20/20.

When we land, the man squeezes into a cab with me and Sunfyre—he sniffles into a Kleenex for a while before reluctantly admitting that he’s allergic to dogs—and pays the fare. The cab’s worn brakes squeal to a stop outside a residential treatment center on the banks of the Puget Sound. When we step out onto the sidewalk, I ask the man if he’s going to take me to get one last drink first. He laughs in my face. Fucking jerk.

He pulls out a black Sharpie and rummages through his pockets, his wallet. He can’t find a scrap of paper. He writes his phone number on the underside of my arm instead. “You call me, okay?” he says. “Call me when you get out. Call me before you get out, if you need to. I don’t care if it’s in five minutes, I don’t care if it’s at 2 a.m. You just make sure you call.”

“Why would you do this? I mean, you don’t even know me. You have no idea who I am.”

“Because once, years ago, someone did the same thing for me, and someone did it for her too. Maybe one day you’ll be able to pay it forward. I don’t care who you are or where you’ve been. It doesn’t matter to me. I’d like to think that we’re all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

And then he waits for me to go inside. He doesn’t leave until he watches me check in at reception on the other side of the rain-flecked glass. Outside, a brand new day is beginning. A misty sun rises as pieces of the sky fall.

Sunfyre trots into the lobby alongside me, panting cheerfully, shaking the perpetual Seattle drizzle from his fur. There’s a girl at the front desk, just a girl, and that’s the other thing that’s different now. She’s not a maybe-future-one-of-my-girls. She’s just like anyone else. I already have a girl. I mean, I don’t anymore, not really. But I still do.

I throw my things onto the counter: my single suitcase, my tattered wallet, my bundle of cash held together with rubber bands, my scraped-up electric guitar.

“Checking in?” the girl asks.

“Yeah.”

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes, I guess.”

She opens my wallet, reads my license, blinks in bewilderment. “Aegon…?”

I sigh dramatically. “It’s Greek.”

~~~~~~~~~~

You dream of him; and when you do, he’s always smiling. He’s reading your palm in an empty Taco Bell, he’s kissing you under the Northern Lights, he’s regaling your parents with stories—of lobster fishing in Portland, of cattle ranching in Denver—all through Thanksgiving dinner, he’s undressing you in his moonlit apartment, he’s climbing into your bed. He’s not angry, he’s not ruined, he’s not running away. He’s exactly as you remember him in his best moments. He’s all chaotic white-blond hair and weightless light, sharp laughter and bright eyes. And each morning there’s a splinter-thin moment before you remember that he’s gone. That’s the worst part, really. You always knew it would be. You can’t even begin to forget him.

Your friends want to help you, but they don’t know how. Neither do your parents. Your dad gets an atlas from the study, throws it down on the dining room table, and opens it to a map of the world. “Pick anyplace and we’ll go there,” he says. “We’ll close the vet clinic for two weeks and we’ll all go.” But you can’t give him a single name: not Athens, or Paris, or Buenos Ares, or Cairo, or New York City, or Rome, or Tokyo, or anywhere else for that matter. It’s the strangest thing. All your life you’ve been waiting to get out of Juneau, but now nowhere sounds good to you. And maybe that’s a lesson you wish you’d never learned: sometimes freedom is less about places than it is about people.

The blood on the equipment recovered from Trent’s apartment matches DNA from the first three victims. He is charged with eight counts of first-degree murder and held awaiting trial in the Lemon Creek Correctional Center. His family visits him faithfully each week. His lawyer is exasperated that he won’t plead guilty and spare his parents the humiliation and expense of a protracted court battle. But Trent’s story never changes: he’s innocent, he’s never killed anybody, he doesn’t understand how the blood could have been found on his belongings. He wants to know exactly what items the police tested; he and his lawyer are still waiting for the prosecutor to turn over all the details during discovery. In the midst of the scandal, the upheaval, you fade into the backdrop like the stars behind fog. People talk around you and through you. They offer gaps that you don’t care enough to fill in. Drinks clink, whispers fly, conspiracies are exchanged between pool shots. You watch the days grow longer and wait for the future to arrive. You don’t know what it will look like, you can’t even begin to fathom it. But surely there must be a future. Life goes on. It did for your mom after Jesse. It will for you too.

A week after Aegon leaves, there is a knock at your parents’ front door. You open it to find Aemond standing there in the muted amber-pink afternoon light. His hair is long and loose, his Armani suit immaculately tailored, his BlackBerry nestled in his right hand. He glances up from it at you and his jaw falls open. And only then do you realize how awful you must look.

You tell Aemond, your voice hushed and heavy, ankles in quick-drying cement: “I don’t know where he is.”

“No, I can see that,” Aemond replies, dull horror in his blue eye. Then he turns around and strides halfway down the driveway towards the street, where a cab idles as it waits for him, engine exhaust pouring into the air like smoke from a firepit.

“How’s your dad?” you call after him when you get your bearings.

He pauses under the dwindling light. “Alive. For now.” And then Aemond considers you for a while. “I suppose if I ever want to find you again, I know where to look.”

You nod. “I’ll be here.”

I’ll always be here.

A month crawls by like a wounded animal, dead leaves snared in the fur of its belly. The flesh on your thigh knits back together. The things that Aegon ordered show up in Juneau, packages left on the front porch and stuffed into the moose-shaped mailbox like Christmas gifts in a stocking. You pack these remnants of him—Zoobooks and cooking accessories, knives and Chia Pets—into a cardboard box and tuck it away in a dusty, cobwebbed corner of the attic, and you’re aware the entire time that this has happened before, almost exactly twenty years ago. When your dad puts a Third Eye Blind or Red Hot Chili Peppers or Oasis album on his record player, you find some excuse to leave the room. When you tack magazine cutouts of beaches and cityscapes to your bedroom walls, all you can think about is where Aegon might be now. You wonder where he works during the day, a surf shop or a construction site or a farm or a fishing boat; you wonder who he spends his nights with.

I’ll always be here. Even if I leave, I’ll always be here.

~~~~~~~~~~

Twenty years ago to the day, almost to the hour, a man fell into the Gastineau Channel and drowned. They found water in his lungs, though the autopsy was only a formality, an afterthought; Jesse had a reputation in Juneau, and no one was particularly surprised to see how his story ended. There were abrasions on his back and shoulders, contusions on his wrists, but so what? He probably tripped half a dozen times before he tumbled over some guardrail and into the frigid black water. There was a bloody mess of an impact wound on the side of his face, but who cares? The blood alcohol concentration doesn’t lie. The man was wasted, and more than that he was a waste. If his premature demise hadn’t been then, it would have been later, in a week or a month or a year. And when someone like that goes, there’s a sigh of relief that accompanies the misery, isn’t there? There’s the sense of a weight being lifted from a scale.

You’re sitting in Ursa Minor at the usual booth, but the bar is practically empty. It’s Valentine’s Day. Joyce is with Rob, Kimmie is with Brad; Heather’s parents have spirited her away on a short vacation to Sitka to try to take their minds off Trent’s imminent lifelong incarceration. Your mom and dad’s February 14th tradition is cooking a homemade Italian dinner together—pasta, bread with herbs and olive oil, caprese salad, tiramisu—and then settling in for a romantic Blockbuster rental. This year, it’s Runaway Bride. Your mom loves Julia Roberts. They didn’t ask for privacy, but you gave it to them anyway. Kimmie offered to drop you off at Ursa Minor and then drive you home after her date with Brad so you could drink away your sorrows without having to worry about calling a ride. So now Kimmie is getting wined, dined, and plied with boxed chocolates at the Red Dog Saloon while you drain appletinis and flip through one of Jesse’s journals, not knowing what you’re looking for.

Dale is washing pint glasses in the sink behind the bar and humming cheerfully along to a Cake CD. It’s just you and him tonight; evidently, Dale doesn’t have a hot date either. It was nice of him to eschew the usual Shania Twain or Sheryl Crow soundtrack. He’s trying to spare you from any crooning love songs. He must have forgotten that Cake has its own little slice of relevance in your memories of Aegon, those memories that refuse to fade, ink in your skin as dark as night.

Your fingerprints trace Jesse’s scrawling, handwritten letters. It’s his very last journal, the last words he ever wrote. His final entry is unremarkable, a lucid recollection of his latest woodcarving project: it’s a family of tiny bears, three of them. He says he wants the cub to have the same slope of your cheeks, the shape of your eyes. And it’s just like your mom said. It really did seem like he was getting better.

You flip to the next page, blank. The heading reads: Thursday, February 14th, 1980.

You go back a few days. And your gaze catches on words that you’ve read before, months ago, back when the journals were a new discovery like striking oil. The entry is from Saturday the 9th. It ends with an unceremonious bullet point of a reminder: dinner w/ Dale on Thursday.

You leaf forward to Thursday, to the blank page that tells you nothing. Back to the 9th, forward to the 14th, again, again. Valentine’s Day 1980, before Dale had married his wife, after your mom had stopped trying to make plans with Jesse, maybe even rebelled against them; just two unromantic, discarded men with a vacant slot in their calendars and troubles to drink into submission. Except that Jesse never came home.

Dinner with Dale, you think dizzily. Dinner with Dale on the night he died.

The opening notes of The Distance shout from the stereo. Everything suddenly feels very loud.

Reluctantly crouched at the starting line,

Engines pumping and thumping in time…

What had Aegon said about that song before you sang it together, stomping and staggering across the hardwood floor? It’s not about NASCAR, it’s about a journey!

Outside, it’s a rare clear night in Juneau. The Northern Lights are a kaleidoscopic ribbon against indigo night, the sky a mausoleum of stars. And you remember when Aegon sang Everlong, when he grabbed your hand, led you upstairs to the roof, kissed you for the first time under the ethereal, shimmering curtain of green and purple and blue…before Heather had interrupted to tell you that Dale was closing the bar. He was irritable, he was tired; he wanted to go home.

The arena is empty except for one man,

Still driving and striving as fast as he can…

And then they found a body, didn’t they? Yes, you can remember being in Aegon’s apartment and hearing the police cars zoom by. You remember the red-and-blue flashes on his face. You remember thinking they looked like sapphires and rubies, the ocean and blood.

The sun has gone down and the moon has come up

And long ago somebody left with the cup,

But he’s driving and striving and hugging the turns

And thinking of someone for whom he still burns…

Icy claws glide down the length of your spine. Memories play back with a focused clarity that you didn’t have before: Dale groggy and yawning just before they found the fifth victim at Christmas, and again before they found the eighth the same night Trent dragged you—shrieking, bleeding, virtually naked—out of your Jeep. You remember Dale at your parents’ New Year’s Eve party talking about how maybe the killer was an athlete with brain damage from CTE. You remember him offering to give Trent a box of his old equipment from when he was a park ranger. You remember him watching as Trent towered over you here in Ursa Minor with a cue stick clenched in his fist, demanding to know where you had been the night before, Dale’s eyes gleaming with disapproval and fascination and…and…oh god, opportunity.

He’s going the distance,

He’s going for speed,

She’s all alone (all alone)

All alone in her time of need…

And now Aegon’s long gone, but you’re still here. And so is the Ice Fisher.

You’re staring at Dale, eyes huge and glossy with terror. He glances up, gives you a brief casual smile, looks down at the pint glasses again. And then his eyes come back to you. He sees you and you see him, really see him, and it’s the first time in your life that you can recall him being a centerpiece instead of an ornament for gazes to skate over like ice, wallpaper or taxidermy deer heads or a mirror. And you watch as the thing that lives inside Dale stirs awake. It is a shadow with fangs, talons, barbs down its spine, a weblike scribble of a brain loud with the echoes of screams; and it unfurls and fills him completely, all the way to his fingerprints. It possesses him, it eclipses him.

It’s Dale, you realize like a bullet slicing through an aorta, spilling an ocean of hot blood. It was him twenty years ago and it’s him now.

You gasp and fumble for the cannister of bear mace still clipped to your purse. Dale crosses the room with staggering swiftness, like a wolf, like a storm, one pint glass still gripped in his hand. He reaches you just as your thumb presses down on the cannister’s release tab. The rust-colored mist spews not directly into his face but into the room; Dale is hacking and rasping, you both are, but he isn’t in too much pain to haul you out of the booth and onto the floor. You’re screaming, you’re clawing at him, your eyes feel like they’re on fire, tiny pinpoint infernos that drill down to the bone. You can feel the ice-cold juice and schnapps and vodka of your appletini, knocked off the table when you fell, soaking through the back of your sweater. You can feel pebbles of glass as they burrow into your flesh. You are dimly aware of a barstool tumbling over as you struggle with Dale.

“No!” you cry into the monstrous hand that he clamps over your mouth. “No—!”

Dale brings the bottom of the pint glass down on your head. The Distance lyrics—she’s hoping in time that her memories will fade—swirl around inside your fractured skull.

Silence descends like a curtain, shadows in, lights out.

~~~~~~~~~~

I knock, and he opens the door. The house smells like fresh bread and alfredo sauce, rosemary and crushed garlic. My rental—a Toyota 4Runner, I remember what she said about the Nova being a bad idea in Alaska—is parked in the driveway behind her Jeep. Sunfyre is standing beside me, eyes sparkling, smiling with that unburdened-by-intellect innocence that dogs have. There’s a bouquet of blue-dyed roses in my left hand, cool melancholy blooms of life like seawater, like bruises.

“Hi,” I say to her dad as he stands in the doorway. “It’s good to see you again.”

“It’s good to see you too, Aegon.” He’s not just staring at me in the artificial front porch light; he’s gawking, he’s damn near speechless. “Wow. Wow. It’s really good to see you.”

Yeah, I know I look different. The dark rings around my eyes have vanished, my face is less puffy, my hair is trimmed and healthy and mostly out of my face, I stand taller. I’m wearing a white turtleneck sweater and a leather jacket, black skinny jeans, my combat boots. I have a red chip in my pocket that I can’t fucking wait to show her: 1 month sober. On the first day, you think you’re going to die, and on the second day you wish you would. But you don’t. You live, and that starts out as a grisly inconvenience, and then you get a taste for it. “You can probably guess who I’m looking for.”

“Yeah, I reckon I can,” her dad says. “But she’s not here right now. She went to Ursa Minor.”

I grin, a crooked little curl of the lips. “I think I remember how to get there.”

I hop back into the 4Runner with Sunfyre and pull out into the street, snow and ice chomping under the tires. I had missed driving, I realize now. I got so used to almost never being able to do it that I forgot how good it feels to turn the wheel yourself, to watch the speedometer ramp up when you decide you want to fly. Ten minutes later, I swerve into Ursa Minor’s deserted parking lot and screech to a stop across three separate spaces.

“Oh, what the fuck!” I choke out as I step into the bar, coughing into my sleeve. The blue roses tumble out of my hand. Ursa Minor is empty, but there’s something in the air, something invisible that drives scorching, stinging needles into my eyes and my sinuses. Tears stream down my face; my exposed skin prickles and burns. Sunfyre sneezes over and over again and lingers in the doorway, gulping in fresh night wind from outside. There’s shattered glass and green liquid on the hardwood floor. There’s an upturned barstool. The stereo is playing Cake’s cover of Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps.

What the hell happened here—?

And then I see it: the cannister of bear mace that had rolled under the booth, the same one she and her friends always sat in.

She used the bear mace. She finally used it. But why?

There’s blood on the floor. There’s blood on the table too. There’s a tattered, olive-green journal opened to a blank page. The pieces slide closer and closer and then link together, an explosion in my mind like fireworks.

I bolt outside and study the snow-covered parking lot. There are fresh tire tracks there under the murky luminescence of the streetlights; they lead out to the main road and then north towards the lakes.

“No,” I whisper to no one but the fierce wind, the sky threaded with the opalescent Northern Lights. “No, no, no…”

I sprint back inside Ursa Minor, get the phone Dale keeps behind the bar, and call the cops. “Stay where you are,” the 911 dispatcher instructs me sternly. “Wait for the police, do not attempt to investigate yourself, do not attempt to intervene—”

“Yeah, fuck that,” I say, and slam the receiver into the cradle. Then I swipe the black 8 ball off the pool table.

I load Sunfyre into the 4Runner and spin out of the parking lot, following the parallel lines of tire tracks like the etching of veins beneath skin.

~~~~~~~~~~

There’s a sound, rough and grating; and then you realize that it’s you being dragged across the ice. When your eyes flutter open, you see the uninterrupted sky: indigo night, distant stars, the Northern Lights. Your clothes are wet with snow; it’s so cold that the fabric is freezing, stiff and crackling when you try to move. Dale is lugging you over the frozen lake by the collar of your sweater. It’s choking you, but of course that doesn’t matter much. He’s about to kill you anyway.

“It’s not right,” Dale mutters, and you’re aware through the disorientation and the fog-like cloud of pain that he’s not really talking to you. “Your mom’s a nice lady. It’s not right that she had to lose two people this way, she doesn’t deserve that. Oh well. It can’t be helped now, can it?”

You whimper something, disjointed helpless words. Please, hurts, don’t, please.

“It’s not me,” Dale says, as if it’s perfectly logical. “I mean, not really. It’s this part of me that I can’t cut out. I can only feed it so it goes away for a while. It quiets down sometimes, it hibernates like a bear in the winter…but it always comes back. And my god, is it hungry.”

You smack clumsily, futilely at his hands as he hauls you over the ice. Dale doesn’t seem to notice.

“You have to make it look like an accident. That’s the ticket, if you don’t want anybody to know. You shove a hiker from a ledge, a drunk into the ocean. I did that for a long time, never raised suspicion. Never pinged on anyone’s radar. Jesse was the hardest, though. Good lord, did he fight. Had to pour a bottle of Everclear down his throat. Had to make it look like he was drinking that night. He wasn’t, which was unusual. Kept saying he wanted to turn things around. I think you had something to do with that. Now this? You were never supposed to be here, ladybug. What a shame. What a goddamn shame.”

Consciousness is a river that you dip in and out of; blackness crumbles around the edges of your vision, collapses in, recedes, swells again like a wave. You moan, you beg, you struggle as much as you can. It’s not much. It might as well be nothing.

“Things were easier after I got married,” Dale continues. He has a large hiking backpack slung over his broad shoulders, you see now. It jostles from side to side as he drags you. You know what’s in there: a chisel to break the ice, fishing line to strangle you. “Having someone else there all the time, it was a distraction. And it kept that thing inside me…not tame, no, I wouldn’t say that. But chained up down in the basement, maybe. Now I’m alone again. And when the chains start rattling, there’s nothing to stop me from hearing them.”

You get your feet under you, twist around, and slam your fists into Dale’s chest as hard as you can. He laughs in a baritone rumble and shoves you back down onto the ice; your head hits the ground, and you can feel yourself fading again, the last wisps of sunlight at dusk.

“Sometimes you want to hide,” Dale says. “And sometimes you don’t. I was ready to stop hiding. I can’t tell you what a high it was every time they found a body. The news, the ceaseless chattering around town, the name they gave me…incredible. Exhilarating. I couldn’t sleep for days after each kill. I’d toss and turn all night imagining what the headlines would be. Let me tell you, ladybug. I’ve never tried heroin, and I never need to. It can’t possibly be better than this.”

What will happen to my parents? you think, heartbreak gutting you, dull knifes rearranging your organs. What will happen to Heather and Kimmie and Joyce? What will happen when Aegon finds out he left too soon?

“I knew I needed someone to pin it on,” Dale informs you calmly. “Didn’t take anyone who went to the bar, didn’t take anyone who could be traced back to me. And still, I knew they’d figure it out eventually if I didn’t give them another suspect. At first, I was thinking I might use Aegon. He was a little small, sure, but he showed up around the right time and he was an outsider. Then I saw the way Trent was with you…aggressive, menacing…and I knew it had to be him. It was almost too easy. I planted the seeds, and good lord did they grow.”

“They’ll know,” you croak. “If you kill me, the police will find my body and they’ll know Trent’s not the Ice Fisher.”

Hideously, horribly, Dale smiles down at you. “Oh, ladybug, I don’t think they’ll ever find you. They found the others because I wanted them to. And no one is looking for victims anymore. Once you sink, I’ll cover up the hole with ice and snow. No blood, no signs. People will assume you’re a runaway. It was just too much, wasn’t it? Trent getting arrested, Aegon leaving town. Maybe you ran off after him. Maybe you threw yourself in the channel. Who could say? No, your bones will become silt, your name will slowly disappear from Juneau. And in ten or twenty years, your parents will have you declared dead in absentia. That’s my best guess. That’s how it will go.”

“No,” you sob, battling against the hands knotted into the collar of your sweater. “No—!”

His knuckles bash the side of your head, and a black silence rolls in like high tide, engulfs you, drowns you. When you swim back up into consciousness again, Dale is a few yards from you and drilling a hole in the ice with his chisel. You try to crawl away and promptly collapse, frail and boneless. He glances over at you, chuckles pleasantly, and then begins using a hatchet to widen the opening.

No, you think, hooking your fingers into the snow and dragging yourself towards the forest. No, no, no…

Dale’s ready for you. He walks over, grabs both of your ankles, tugs you with terrifying ease to the hole in the ice. Then he has a length of fishing line in his hands, and he’s looping it around your throat again and again, and he’s tightening it until the needle-thin nylon wire bites into your flesh, spilling tendrils of blood. You know you don’t have a chance, but you try; you owe it to your parents to try. You claw at the fishing line and you struggle and you cry out in hoarse, useless screams—

And then you hear something that doesn’t make any sense. Through the darkness, through the wind, there are the barks of a dog. Sunfyre rockets into your dimming field of vision and jumps on Dale, snarling and growling and snapping at his hands, his face. Dale flings the dog away, and as he’s distracted, Aegon arrives. He’s holding—ludicrously—a black 8 ball from a pool table, and he smashes it into Dale’s head. A sick, wet, crushing sound ricochets, cracked bone cushioned by flesh, and Dale howls as he rolls onto his side and covers his head with his hands.

He peers up at Aegon, furious and pained and stunned. “You?!”

“Me.” Aegon’s voice is dark and low like thunder, like the iron gale of storms over the ocean. “And I’m a killer.”

He lunges at Dale, still wielding the 8 ball. Dale’s massive hand juts out and closes around Aegon’s wrist, and then he yanks him to the ground. They’re grappling on the snow and ice, they’re striking out with knuckles and elbows, they’re ripping at each other with their bare hands. You’re trying to unravel the fishing line still coiled around your throat, panting in deep, frantic breaths so you can see and think clearly, so you can scramble to your feet, so you can help Aegon. And then Dale gets away from him just long enough to grab you again, to wrap the ends of the fishing line around his fingers. He delivers one last macerating blow to your skull, pulls you by your throat to the gaping hole in the ice, and shoves you through.

The water is so cold it’s paralyzing. There is a thought that seizes you—so overwhelming, so strangely rational—that says all you have to do is stay where you are, to wait a little longer, and then you’ll never hurt again, you’ll never be disappointed or caged, you’ll never be anything. And you think of all the lives you could have lived, all the places you could have gone: cities and beaches and deserts and valleys, gardens and rivers, ruins and glass. You were always so afraid of really going after them. What the hell were you so afraid of? Everything worth fearing is right here in Juneau.

I can still do those things. I can still live. And I can still help Aegon.

You jolt out of your inertia and clamber madly for the surface. But you don’t hit frigid open air; you hit ice, ice too thick to break through, ice too thick for more than a murmur of light to penetrate. Your palms press against the semitransparent wall; bubbles of carbon dioxide spurt from your nose and mouth. You feel for the opening that Dale made, but you don’t know where it is. You are lost beneath the ice, running out of air, fading rapidly. Then you hear Jesse—and you aren’t sure how you know what his voice sounds like, but you do—speaking softly and kindly to you, comforting you, telling you which way to go.

I’m sorry that no one knows the truth, you say without speaking. I’m sorry we thought you destroyed yourself. I’m sorry you never got the chance to truly live.

You were all better off without me anyway, he answers, without any bitterness at all. And that’s true, isn’t it?

There is a great disruption that rocks through the water. New currents stir into existence, fresh waves spring out of the darkness. And then someone takes your hand and draws you towards a noise, muffled through the ice and water: a dog barking, you realize. Then your palms find the opening and you inhale brutally cold air into your aching lungs, the best you’ve ever tasted. Aegon helps pull you through the hole and out of the lake, out of the jaws of oblivion.

You lie together on the ice, breathing in gasps that turn to mist in the night wind. Dale’s body is sprawled several yards away. The hatchet he’d used to break up the ice is buried in his neck, spine severed, eyes slick and vacant. You can see reflections of the Northern Lights flickering in them.

“You came back,” you whisper to Aegon as whirling police sirens approach, the lights dancing on his face: blue like the ocean, red like fire and blood.

“Of course I came back, Appletini,” he says, laughing with frenzied relief, kissing your cheeks and forehead over and over again, lake water dripping from his hair. Sunfyre jumps around you both, yapping ecstatically, his tail wagging. “I couldn’t leave without my Juneau girl.”

~~~~~~~~~~

There’s wind, but it isn’t sharp like a blade. There’s a sky, but it isn’t cloaked in cloud cover or fog. The boats that bob in the surf are sailboats and cruisers, not fishing vessels. Dolphins crest out of the sun-speckled waves like someone coming up from a dream.

It’s June 9th, and you’re soaring down the Pacific Coast Highway in the red Ford Mustang convertible you rented after the plane touched down in Seattle. Aegon is in the driver’s seat, black sunglasses and white T-shirt, his hair whipping in the breeze. He has one hand on the wheel and the other behind your headrest. Sunfyre is in the backseat, grinning like only dogs can. You turn up the song on the radio: Drive by Incubus.

You and Aegon had stayed in Juneau long enough for your skull to heal, and for your parents to find someone else to take over the vet clinic. They settled on a 32-year-old from Detroit: Justin McNair, a former Marine like your dad, and he either has no family or a bad one because he never wants to talk about them. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter which it is; perhaps sometimes they’re just about the same thing. Your parents have already basically adopted him. He eats dinner with them three times a week and calls your dad when he needs help with house maintenance or scaring a moose away from his truck. And just before you went south, Aegon showed him how to make the world’s best hot chocolate.

You send postcards back to Juneau from each town you stop in. Heather’s bon voyage gift to you had been an indecently revealing swimsuit. Joyce appeared with—what else?—a stack of books fit for leisurely beach reading. And Kimmie gave you, however bizarrely, a compass. So you don’t get lost, she had said with an innocuous little smile. You honestly couldn’t tell if she was joking.

During his one month in jail, Trent learned how to meditate and do yoga. He’s still kind of a dumbass, but he’s also a supposedly devout vegan Buddhist, and he had the decency to leave you alone aside from an apology letter that he slid into the moose-shaped mailbox: handwritten, six pages, lots of spelling and grammatical errors. Oh, and he finally got that job with the Forest Service, probably mostly due to his high-profile wrongful detainment. Now hikers get to swoon over his muscles and hair flips.

You’ll go back to Juneau, of course. Maybe just for visits, maybe for more than that someday. But it will never feel like a cage again.

Aegon calls Aemond every two or three days, a habit he started when he was in rehab. At first it was by necessity—he needed someone to pay the $30,000 bill—but now you think he secretly looks forward to it. He updates Aemond about how the road trip is going and reassures him that the plan hasn’t changed: south to San Diego, and then cutting east across the country to Miami. You don’t know what exactly life will look like there, and neither does Aegon. That’s not the important thing about going. Part of AA is making amends, and Aegon has a lot of work to do in that respect. He wants to go back to Miami, he says. He’s ready to go back.

San Diego is exactly like Aegon once told you it would be. You weave through the rust-colored peaks of the Laguna Mountains and there’s the Pacific Ocean, glittering and sapphire-blue, peppered with surfers and sea lions. It’s hot and it’s beautiful beyond words and everything grows there: ivy, cactuses, palm trees, calla lilies, roses. And for the first time that you can remember, the world feels breathtakingly, impossibly big. You get carryout from an unassuming restaurant called The Taco Stand, and then Aegon parks the convertible in La Jolla. You walk down the steps carved into the cliffside, paper bags in your hands full of tacos and churros, Aegon carrying Sunfyre so the dog won’t slip.

You sit together on the golden sand and watch the 8:00 p.m. sun sink into the waves, Aegon’s arm around your waist, your fingers tucking his lock of silvery hair behind his ear. And then he takes your hand, kneads it until it’s sinuous and relaxed, and reads the lines of your palm in the amber dusk like firelight.

“It says you’re happy,” he tells you. “And that you’re free.”

“I am,” you reply, smiling as the ocean stretches out like the arm of a galaxy: the ancient past, the infinite future.

#aegon ii #aegon targaryen x reader #aegon targaryen ii #aegon x reader #aegon targaryen #aegon ii targaryen #aegon x y/n #aegon x you #nttf #north to the future

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bloodyquillink-blog · 6 months

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hi i’m not sure if your taking requests, but if you are can you do a logan walker x reader where the reader and logan were engaged before logan got taken by rorke, and when he gets saved he’s a completely different person and is closed off and even more quiet, but when one of rorkes members send a message to the ghosts team saying they want to take the reader now aswell, logan gets super protective and opens up to her about eveything that happened? if not totally ok!! thank you so much!!

A/N: I am and thank you for being my first tumblr request! I hope I’ve done you justice with this.

Warnings: Big angst, hurt/comfort, descriptions of injuries and torture methods (if I missed anything please let me know)

Word Count: 4.4K

To Be Changed, Logan Walker x Reader

Your marriage was so happy and perfect, even though the world wasn’t. Despite the fear of your whole wedding being destroyed before you and Logan even put on the rings and said your vows, that didn’t stop either of you. If you were going to die, you might as well die tied to one another, surrounded by the people you treasure most. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. The wedding went without a hitch, ignoring the occasional pitches of anxiety that bubbled in everyone's stomachs. There was a beautiful mountain that overlooked a nearby beach, it felt like the clouds parted just for you two that day. The sun shone down on the white you and Logan wore. The red rose in his breast pocket, the artificial one you gave him when you went on your first date, was accentuated by the surrounding colors of blue water and green grass.

Logan was usually fairly quiet, but that day when he said his vows, he spoke more than you did. He managed to avoid stuttering, though you could feel his hands shaking. You were so proud of him and each word from his lips warmed your heart. That alone let you know that this was the right decision, the only one.

Before you cut the cake, he whispered to you, “I can’t find the words to describe how much stronger you make me feel.” You looked at him, confused and curious, before he continued. “I barely speak to my own family and brothers, maybe because I don’t need to… but you changed that. Now, I’m just droning on and on about whatever’s happening at the moment. Because of you. Hell, my mom barely heard me talk this much.” He wrapped his arms around you, cupping your hands that held the knife for the cake. “I bet she’s watching us now. She’d love you so much.” And with that, you both cut the first slice.

A quote floated through your mind, “To be loved is to be changed.” and by God, did you change Logan.

That’s what made today so painful.

That’s why you sat on the floor in front of the front door to you and Logan’s home. That’s why David held you, holding the back of your head so you didn’t see him silently crying while you sobbed. You held Logan’s mask and dogtags close to your heart. Eventually, Keegan and Merrick had come out of the car they drove here. Keegan knelt down to rub your back, attempting to comfort you as best as he could. Merrick told you more than he, as a Captain, should tell any civilian. He’d made an exception for you. Seeing as he had a job to protect his best friend's children in the most dangerous job they could all have now, you joked that Logan and David were his adopted kids.

He never denied it. Because of that, you might as well have been his adopted kid, now in-law too. And as that in-law, it was his job to tell you that Logan was, for better or worse, not dead. You looked up at him with tears still falling. He explained what happened from the beginning. A man, a horrible man, named Rorke who was a former Ghost that the Federation destroyed and turned into something repulsive. David added that it was Rorke who had dragged Logan away on that beach. That fucking beach. He explained how it was his own fault for not doing more, for not saving him despite his injuries that, even now, two weeks after, he was still healing from.

You almost slapped him. You wanted to slap Merrick too. You were heartbroken and afraid and every negative emotion you could possibly feel nearly boiled over. You sat on the couch, the men around you as they tried to help you breathe. When you calmed down enough to speak coherently, you asked a simple question:

“Will we ever see him again? Alive?”

Merrick answered, as hopeful as he could be.

“We’ll do everything we can to make sure we will.”

That’s all you could really ask for. David moved and carefully dug into his front pocket before he pulled out his hand and offered something small and shiny. It was Logan’s ring. Both of your rings were made of titanium for its durability, Logan was worried about scratching or otherwise damaging it, so he chose titanium. Strong and durable. You had told him it reminded you of his personality, how he just kept going under all circumstances. You would’ve started crying again if this alone hadn’t already exhausted you. As much as you wanted to hold all of Logan’s things to try to feel like he was with you, you handed his mask and dog tags to Hesh. You knew where the mask came from. Who originally wore it.

“I think they’d want you to hold these.” you said, quiet as ever. David knew you weren’t just talking about Logan, but their father, Elias the “Scarecrow”, as well. He grabbed the mask and tags, putting the tags on and clutching the mask like a lifeline. As everyone stood up and walked to the door, you hugged David and whispered to him, your voice still shaking.

“It’s not your fault. I know he doesn’t blame you. I don’t either.”

“Thank you,” He paused, “I’ll do everything in my power to bring him back to you.”

You hugged Merrick and Keegan before they walked back to the car.

“Be safe!” You called out. A useless but well-intentioned farewell to the soldiers. They waved back before pulling out of the driveway, leaving you alone.

That night, you took Logan’s ring and put the chain of your favorite necklace, one he had given you before your marriage, through the ring and laid it around your neck. You cried, holding his cold pillow and wearing an old hoodie you’d stolen from his closet while he was gone. Your body ached with every sob.

Three months later, you began cleaning the house before the depression that kept you in your room most of the time got too bad. It helped a little, going through every nook and cranny. You even went into the attic. Any time either of you traversed into the usually dark storage, it would end with you holding the giant vacuum, claiming you saw a spider the size of your head while Logan chuckled. After a bit, he’d go up with a flashlight only to find some critter that got stuck up there because of a hole. Once he’d patched up the hole and cleaned out as much as he could, it all felt more comfortable.

As you looked through old boxes, you found pictures. The oldest going back to when you both first met. It was a charity for veterans in your old town where Logan, David and Elias were stationed. There were games you and your friends played, competing. At one point, Elias jokingly joined in which pulled David and, naturally, Logan. As the night went on, you and Logan got closer. He barely spoke but his chuckles at your comments were enough for you.

“I was so close to winning! You gotta give me credit for that!” You argued, cheeks hurting from smiling so much. You turned to see Logan looking at you, his brow raised and smirking.

“How? You’re 25 points behind me.” He remarked.

“I would’ve won if… if I had been playing with someone other than you!”

“Like who?”

“One of my friends, probably Ash!”

“You have 10 points.” Each time the tiny basketballs went in the hoop, it was 5 points.

“Yes and I would be 10 points ahead of them which means I would win!” He practically wheezed at that as you giggled. You looked over to see David and Elias staring at the both of you, wide smiles plastered on their faces.

You kept looking through the box. Finding photos from the day you met Keegan and Merrick, then the day you visited Mrs. Walker’s grave for the first time. You stared at that picture of Logan and David sitting together in front of the stone. It was so peaceful.

You held the photo to your chest and thought of Logan. You whispered to yourself, “Please, please protect him. Keep all of them safe. I just want them to be happy… Elias and Diane, please watch over all of them.”.

Another three months later, you hadn’t heard from David, Keegan, Merrick or any other military personnel. It had been a total of eleven months since you last saw your husband. You were Logan’s emergency contact and many people aside from the Ghosts knew you, so if something happened then someone would contact you. This should be comforting. No one calling you means no one’s dead, right? Nothing bad. So why were you so anxious? You couldn’t reach anyone so maybe something did happen and-

Your phone rang. It was David. You answered immediately.

“David? What happened? Where have you been?”

“Come outside, I have to show you something.”

It’d been a long time since you ran that fast. David sat in his truck, as you ran over to the passenger side, he leaned to open the door from his seat. As soon as your door closed and you buckled in, he began driving.

“David, what’s going on?”

He inhaled through his nose, you noticed how hard he was gripping the wheel and that he was going a bit fast. He was a careful driver normally. If he was amongst civilians, he was calm and never dared going above the speed limit in case there was a child or a dog or pedestrian walking when and where they shouldn’t be. This drive, however, was different. Something happened.

“We got him.” He looked at you, your eyes wide as they slowly filled with tears. “He’s back.”

“W-when did he get back?” You stuttered.

“Almost two weeks ago-” You opened your mouth to speak but David put his hand up. You waited. “Knowing Rorke and his history, we kept Logan on base to heal some and do some mental evaluations.”

“David…”

“I need to warn you right now, he’s not gonna be the same man you knew before all this shit happened. He’s gonna have a lot of recovering to do.”

David went on to explain Rorke and what the Federation did to him. You were quiet.

“Did he do all of that to Logan?”

“We aren’t sure. We just know that whatever it was wasn’t good. He’s clear to come home today if both of you are ready, but I just needed to tell you.” Good thing the house was clean.

“Thank you, David. I know this has probably been harder on you than anyone.” David tried to laugh.

“I mean it’s my job-” You put your hand on his shoulder.

“You know what I mean. Thank you. Seriously.” He exhaled slowly, he seemed to relax a little.

“You’re welcome.”

“You can come by whenever you like if Logan comes back. Maybe just give me a warning, ok?”

“I will. I promise.”

David parked the truck after you checked in at the front gate. Your heart beat rapidly despite the slow walk through the base. You recognized some of the men and gave a half-hearted wave when they greeted you. You could already tell. They knew why you were here.

You walked into the base hospital. David took you down numerous hallways you knew there was a chance you’d see one day but never expected, never wanted to walk down. But this was for Logan. David opened the door to the room you stood in front of.

You couldn’t tell if your heart was breaking or if you were having a heart attack or what…

There he was, sitting against the bed he must’ve been in since returning, looking at you.

Logan was in a hospital gown, his arms and legs below the knee exposed. The skin was covered in jagged scars and stitches that were still such a dark and aggressive red. Along with that were numerous bruises, a painful variety of purples, yellows, and green in some spots. His right arm in a cast and sling. On his other hand, his ring and finger are wrapped, probably broken or dislocated. You notice how his left shoulder and upper arm seem to be wrapped with gauze. You don’t want to imagine what injuries he must have that you can’t see.

His face. His handsome face. He looks so tired. Logan turned towards you and tried to limp over, using the bed for stability. You rushed forward instinctually. Once he was close enough, he slowly wrapped his unbroken arm around your back. You looked at him. He had dark circles under his eyes, faded bruising on his left cheekbone, two intersected scars ran across his face. One started between his eyebrows to his cheek. The second from the middle of his chin, across his lips until it passed the other scar on that same cheek. His skin was cool and pale, unlike the warm complexion he had prior to the kidnapping.

You ended up staying for about two hours before you got a list of medications from doctors, some extra gauze wraps and a pamphlet detailing how to handle a deep second degree burn at home. That was why his shoulder and arm were wrapped. You said goodbye to David, Keegan and Merrick soon after.

The first few weeks, Logan mostly stayed in bed. Every day you checked his injuries, the stitches and the burn, to make sure there was no infection and they were healing properly. By the fourth week or so, the burn had healed, leaving behind a large patch of discolored skin. At nearly the sixth week, his cast was removed. His arm and fingers had healed well and correctly. David had told you that when Logan was taken, his arm was broken. When he was found, his arm had healed incorrectly as a result of improper care, assuming any care was given, so the doctors had to re-break it before putting it in the cast.

After the seventh week, Logan was able to walk around without limping. However, he mostly just stayed in your room. Sometimes, you’d spend the day in the living room in hopes it would coax him out. It didn’t work. You cooked his favorite meals but he would usually bring the food back to the room. When it was time for bed, you essentially snuck around the room to avoid scaring him in case he was sleeping. You were pretty sure he wasn’t sleeping, at least not as much as he should’ve been. It remained this way for a few more weeks.

A month and a half into Logan being back home and he’d uttered a scarce amount of words. “Okay”, “alright”, “yes”, “no” and whatever else kept his sentences short. He barely talked to you anymore. Of course, you kept David updated as often as possible. You felt like he just wasn’t there. Now, he was more of a ghost than ever.

Two months in and he started going to the base again. For what? You don’t know. You had asked where he was going, dressed in his “soldier getup” as you called it.

“I’m going to work. Can’t be late. I’ll be back later.” He’d stated hastily before heading out. This continued on for another two weeks until you decided to talk to him before he left.

“Logan, honey, can we talk?”

“Um… sure, but I have to leave before 9.” He was trying to rush again.

“I wanted to ask about that actually…” He looked at you, mostly expressionless. “You were just gone for almost, what, six months? Why are they having you back at work when you might as well have just finished actually healing?”

“I… There’s still work to be done.” he stuttered. You cocked your head. You turned to him from your position on the couch.

“What work?” you asked slowly and quietly. You knew he wasn’t lying. You didn’t want him to think you thought he was lying. You wanted to keep the conversation calm so he wasn’t overwhelmed.

“It’s a lot. I don’t think- right now isn’t the right time.” he began to turn.

“We can talk later if that’s better, but I just want to know. I’m worried about you.”

“You don’t need to worry, I just need to do some things.” His voice carried no emotion. He was almost at the door when you stood suddenly.

“Logan, I just want to understand!” Logan stopped in his tracks. You stared at his back. “I want to just talk, please… I know your job is important and I don’t want to get in the way with complaining…” Your voice cracked. You wrapped your arms around yourself. Logan was here, in the same house as you. You stared at him but you felt lonelier than ever. “You’re so far away, Logan… and… and I know there was so much that happened and we didn’t know if we’d ever see each other again, but we’re together now!” You walked closer to him. He heard your steps but he stayed still. “We don’t have to act like nothing happened. We couldn’t if we wanted to, I know that… but please talk to me again. I married you because I love you. I married you and everything that came with you. I said those vows and ‘in sickness and in health’ because even when you’re hurting, I’ll be there. I’m here right now! But I need you to let me be there. I need you to stop hiding yourself away from me. I want to know you again, Logan.” Your breathing had picked up as tears welled up in your eyes.

Time just stopped. You turned and sat back on the couch facing away from him. You quietly wept into your hands as everything just seemed to spill over. You had reached your boiling point. You didn’t hear the footsteps coming to you until you opened your eyes and noticed the giant boots that faced your much smaller feet. A large pair of hands slowly removed your hands from your face, one tilted your head up.

You saw Logan’s beautiful eyes, a sort of hazel that seemed gold in the light. He slowly knelt down in front of you and hugged you. Not like the barely there hug he mustered at the hospital when he couldn’t even walk on his own. He pulled you tight against him and you immediately curled around him as you sobbed. He let you. Logan pulled back after a moment and held your face. He wiped your tears with his thumbs.

“I love you too… more than anything.” He stared into your reddening, tear-filled eyes for a moment before sighing as he sat next to you. You held his hand, his thumb stroked your knuckles as he thought about his next words. “A couple days ago,” he started, “something happened. I can’t tell you what yet but it was cause for concern. Especially with Ghost team.” He paused and looked at you, directly into you. “I want to tell you everything, but it’s going to be a lot to process and it’ll probably be scary. I don’t want you to deal with this, with all the problems coming to us because of Rorke but you’re right to want to know what’s happening and you deserve to know.” You looked at the time, 8:55 A.M. You stood, Logan followed, still holding your hand. He pressed your hand against his chest and over his heart.

“I love you.” You whispered.

“I love you too. I’ll talk to Merrick today and I’ll try to get home as early as I can. We can talk about everything while we make dinner.”

“Together?”

“Together. I’ll call you if anything comes up and if you need me to, I can get groceries, ok?” You nodded. This is all you asked for. You hugged Logan tightly as he wrapped himself around you. You walked him to the door where he kissed you goodbye, on the lips. It felt like it had been forever since you’d done that. You stopped him before he moved. He almost retorted when you pulled off the necklace you still had on. He stared at the ring hanging from it. You took the ring off and put it back on his hand. He stared at it for a moment and smiled. A tired little smile that took so much weight off of you. Logan grabbed the necklace and took the time to put it back around your neck before he kissed you again.

“Thank you.” He whispered, still smiling. You smiled back as he walked to the car, waving when he began to drive. It had only been 10 minutes at most but those 10 minutes were so freeing. The rest of the morning you spent outside, reading and occasionally texting your friends when they checked in. The sun warmed your skin and the air was so fresh. You went back inside around 3 P.M when Logan called you:

Logan: “I can come back home around 6 tonight.”

You: “Sounds good, any ideas for dinner?”

Logan: “I could really go for lasagna.”

You: “Can you stop at the store on your way back? I have a list!”

Logan: “Yeah, just send it to me.”

With that, you texted everything you needed before moving to clean up the kitchen and free up space.

Later that night, Logan returned with everything you asked for plus a tub of ice cream. Your favorite flavor. You got to cooking, boiling the sheets and preparing the sauce while the oven preheated. You cooked together, like old times. It had been so long. Music quietly played as you both took turns tasting everything. A little extra salt and paprika here, with some pepper too. You laid down the floppy lasagna sheets while Logan poured the sauce over top then you both spread your favorite cheeses before adding more sheets and so on. While the lasagna was in the oven, you sat on the couch together. Logan held you in his arms as you stroked the hair on the back of his neck. After savoring the peace of the moment, Logan started talking.

When he was kidnapped, Rorke had put him through the same trials he himself had experienced. Being force fed poisoned food was the start until Rorke seemed to grow bored and eventually forced him to eat the plants the poison had been extracted from. Logan told you everything. All the grim details. At some points, you actually felt nauseous just hearing the horrors. When he was almost done talking about what he was forced to endure, you just held him and continued to encourage him to talk. He held you tight as he explained. The beatings he was put through. The way his arm healed wrong and he could hardly use it without feeling pain.

Then he looked at you. You felt so fragile with the way he looked at you with his tired eyes. He spoke again.

“Rorke knows about you.”

You never met this man in your life, never saw pictures. But he was like a boogeyman. He could appear from under your bed at any moment.

“His soldiers… left us a message… Threatening to take me again. They said this time they’d take you too.”

That’s why he was going back to base. To work with his brother and everyone to make sure nothing happened. You didn’t live far from the base but they were thinking about bringing you on post to be cautious. That’s why Logan went back to work so soon. To protect you. That’s why he was telling you all of this now, to further protect you.

You were scared. Hearing about something like this happening was one thing, but knowing the man who stole your husband and almost broke him from the inside out was completely different. Especially when you knew that he wanted you too. Oh god. Logan held you and told you that the two of you could always move on base where you’d be protected and closer to him. You’d be amongst him and the other soldiers and Riley, Hesh’s dog. They wouldn’t let anything happen. And so you agreed. That night you just focused on being together, holding one another and eating your delicious lasagna as you reminisced together.

Over the course of the next week, you brought as many of your necessities over to base where you and Logan continued living together. You met some friends of his and their partners, gaining your own group of friends not long after moving. Some had even assisted in bringing more of your things over when Logan had to work.

Later down the line, the Ghost team flew out. You weren’t told anything about what the mission entailed, but when Logan came to you, mask on, and put his ring in your hand before kissing you goodbye, you had an idea.

“I will make sure no one, not a single person touches you. Not a single damn person. I will keep it that way. I promise.” He whispered, voice more stern than ever.

Your friends on base were all a wonderful support system during the next week they were gone for. You weren’t able to reach out again but you believed in them. You took care of Riley, who’d grown to love you.

When the week was done, they came back and Logan had made a beeline for you. You were reading, his ring back on your necklace when the door opened and your husband walked in, covered in dirt and other unidentifiable muck and alive. You rushed to jump into his arms and kiss him, ignoring the weird taste of said dirt in your mouth. You gave his ring back, ignoring the dirt that was on his hands too. While you held him, he whispered in your ear, “It’s all over now. We can go home.”.

So you did. David, Keegan and Merrick were kind enough to assist with moving your things back over and checking your house for anything that wasn’t meant to be there, anything that indicated a break in. Shit, they’d even checked the vents too. When that was all done, you made lasagna for them and spent the evening laughing together and savoring the peace that had finally come over the world again. Later, you and Logan laid in bed together, happy as ever and whispered sweet words to each other. Both of you could finally get some rest.

The end, thank you for reading! I will also post this on my ao3 @ RiversSong82

#cod ghosts #cod ghosts fanfiction #cod fanfiction #cod fanfic #logan walker #cod logan walker #logan walker x reader #logan walker x m!reader #logan walker x f!reader #logan walker x gn!reader #quill writes

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