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seventhcallisto · 3 months

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WIDER. ot8

In which the ninth member of ateez tries a few different things with her boyfriends... VERY NSFW. MINORS DO NOT INTERACT.

Hiii todays my 21st birthday nd I was wondering if I can get the nastiest smut u got for ot8 or just any member please —asked @bratty-tingz

Hi birthday pookie! Nasty 0t8 just for you !!

Content: ot8 bf!ateez x afab!reader (she/her pronouns/nns) anal(f!rec), double penetration, mentioned at triple, lots and lots of cum, unprotected sex (not sponsored) there's a lot, read at ur own risk.

"Just like that baby" you squirm "s too much min-" he scoffs, lightly, teasingly, tensing his hands around your cheeks to keep your spread open, a strangled groan emitting from his throat. "Come on, you can handle it, you've taken it before sweet girl" seonghwa murmurs, using his knees to spread your thighs wider on mingis lap. "It's just one gorgeous, how're gonna take another cock if you can't even handle one baby?" Hongjoong coos, swiping the sweat from your forehead. You pout, coming up to interlace your hands sweetly with his over your cheek.

Mingi bottoms out with your hips slinking down on him, his thigh twitching under the weight of your body on his. A shudder gasp wracks his lungs, your face scrunching at the stretch. God, truly, you didn't know if you could take another.

With a few seconds to adjust, the bed is dipping behind you, San kissing your shoulder gently the minute he feels your skin against his. His tip pressed against your already filled hole. "San! Wait! Please, s'can't" you shuddered, mingi was already big enough to take up the entirety of your cunt. Leaving you full, but to have san pressing into the same hole, with his lubed up dick trying to slip in. You were really doubting the fit. "Just let it happen, sweet girl," the same man presses kisses to your shoulder, nipping softly. His hands encase your waist. You shudder on mingis thighs, clenching every so often as san tries to line himself up again.

Mingi pats your bum, spreading you further so san can see where he's working. "y'squeezing love, please relax or m gonna- fuck" The minute you feel san go to press in again, you drop your head down on mingis own wide shoulder. "she's right. Why's your dick gotta be so big, mingi? Fucking hell" san groans at the squeeze of the tight ring of your cunt, completely stretched out from earlier endeavors but still holding mingi in the tightest of suctioned grips. Mingi gently lifts you by your hips, easing out an inch. "B-Better?" The pink haired member tuts, looking behind at san. San nods mindlessly, the added space helping him to slot his cock farther in a few more inches. You whimper, jolting from the sensation of two of them inside you.

San squeezes your waist so you can't move. "Just like that sweetheart," seonghwa speaks up, "look at how stuffed you are, taking them so well" he reaches for your palm against mingis chest, placing it over the bulge on your stomach. Your eyes swing open the minute a rough hand grabs your chin, tilting you to look down at yourself. "He said look." Mingi hisses. Throbbing from inside your walls, his lip under his teeth. Eyes slotted over your face to watch your eyes widen. It's ridiculous. You could hardly comprehend how much space they've taken up on your insides. San continues his assault on your neck, bruising hickeys into your skin.

Mingis hips jolt up, sending himself all the way in, and slipping san further with him. You moan, biting his shoulder from the movement. Sans groan meets your ear, his breath fanning against your neck.

"mingi, ah- shit- give her a second"

Your cunt continuously squeezing around the two of them has mingi breathing heavy, even when San scoots himself to sheath himself all the way inside your hot walls. Mingi stutters, his eyes clenching shut.

"Fuck I can't do it, I'm going crazy here" he whimpers from above you. He might feel terrible later, but the added stimulus from sans cock throbbing against his own has his hips moving on their own, rutting his dick up against your walls and the other hard length propped against his own. It's a feeling that has mingis core vibrating, building up his orgasm quicker than he can ever proudly admit. "Fuck! Fuck! fine!" San leans back, timing his thrusts up with mingi so you're lulled between the two of them. His heavy palms firm on your hips to hold you down to them. His dark eyes watch you suck the both of them in, bent over mingi so you can rest with your head against his shoulder. You whimper every time they slip just the tiniest bit out, gasping just as loudly when they both bottom in.

Seonghwa groans from next to you. You could hear the audible click of hongjoongs tongue when he watches his other members begin to lose it. "Guess you'll have to wait your turn now," he murmurs to seonghwa, slotting himself against your hip on the other side, opposite seonghwa. He palms the bulge on your stomach, admiring the way it moves when the two members behind you bottom inside. His fingers begin trailing down to your clit, stimulating it with small circles. You twitch against mingis shoulder, grasping hongjoongs hand in yours. "Please- please wait-" you spasm in his hold, throwing your hip away and back into sans thrusts. Hongjoong chuckles. Resisting the way you pull at his hand.

His assault on your clit begins the minute san speads up his thrusts, pushing and pulling you back onto mingi and him. Mingi-, who just so happens to not be doing the work. His head thrown back against the headboard, and his eyes clenched shut. San snaps him out of it, unlatching one of his hands to trail up mingis chest and squeeze his pink nipple between his fingertips. From the pinch, mingi shoots up and smacks his hand away, hissing at the pain.

"Mingi, you better move or I'm pulling her off you and fucking her myself"

Mingi groans, his eyebrows pull taunt. He leans up to swallow your moans with his own, rolling his hips in time with san, sloppy and uncoordinated. But he's trying, even when he keeps twitching inside you the moment he feels you pulse from hongjoong simply rubbing your clit. "Look at that baby, you got mingi about to cum just from having him inside and seonghwa so desperate for you" hongjoong teases, his tone heavy as he leans on your shoulder. Seonghwa has slotted himself against the bed, working his thighs open and jerking himself off to the best of his ability. His thighs shake just out of view. His dark eyes lidded from the way he stares at the scene.

"It's all for you"

Your nth orgasms of the night starts the moment hongjoong stops talking, drawing you over the edge with quicker circles across your swollen bud. You shiver and shake in their grasp, trying and failing to leave the assault on your clit. Mingi unlatches himself from your lips, trailing his head down to bit and suck on your collarbone, leaving more marks anywhere he can get his teeth. You completely go limp, clawing at hongjoongs fingers on your now overstimulated nub. "Please! Joong fuck!- it's too much!" You whimper loudly, pulling away from his continuous movement and falling back into San. The dark-haired male chuckles against your back, plowing himself back in with mingi every time he thrusts. His hand placed firm on your shoulder to pull you down on his every thrust.

"Cumming-" mingi chokes before he's spilling his seed, painting your walls with his cum. He tenses up, leaning onto his palm so he can thrust the rest of himself up and into you. Drawing his orgasm on with yours. You tremble in their grips, hongjoong swirling your attacked clit with his pretty fingers. San slows his thrusts the minute he feels mingis cum leaking around him. "That's it- oh fuck" he groans loudly when he shoots his own load, digging himself as deep as possible inside you.

His thrusts slow to lazy rolls, hongjoong removing his fingers the minute he sees san cum.

You fall over mingi, heaving into his chest, shuddering every second. San is the first to pull out, pushing against mingis heavy palms to spread your cheeks wider. His cum and mingis cascading out of your ruined cunt. "Keep it all in there," he trails off, scooping it back into your cunt. You squeeze around mingi, the same member hissing, attempting to pull himself out of you the longer he softens inside.

"m gonna get you a towel babe, just- give me a minute," mingi heaves quietly, patting your ass. "Hyung?" San trails off from behind you, you glance to the eldest, stripped down to his comfy black slacks, his arm is thrown over his eyes, his chest glistening with sweat.

His cock- still hard- bobs against his stomach when he breathes roughly. Jerking his cock must not have worked, cause the guy is dying, audibly whimpering the longer you all stare. When mingi pulls out, he hands you off to hongjoong, the older member kissing your sweaty hairline, lifting you so he can crawl on his knees over to seonghwa.

San and mingi are both heaving on the bed, digging themselves into the mattress side by side, attempting to gain their strength.

He lowers you on the eldest members' lap, cum soaked cunt pressing down on his rock hard dick. Seonghwa moving his arms to hold you, bringing you down into his sloppy kiss. He whimpers in your grasp, slobbering into your mouth messily. Hongjoong lines his tip to your back end, circling his tip against your anus.

The sensation has you jolting, moaning into the eldest members' mouths. Seonghwa pulls off you with a string attached, passing his cock over your folds. His black hair falls in waves over his sweaty face, eyes lidded and lips tainted red from all of the kissing and biting. His eyes slowly cascading down your body to watch himself pass over your clit, his hand holding the base of his longer cock, his other one gripping your thigh.

You twitch at every slick pass of his cockhead, easing back down when hongjoong holds your hips.

"Is wooyoung back?"

The front door slams open, causing the five of you on the bed to jolt. Wooyoungs shouting, the crinkled sound of a bag in his hand. The rest of the members followed behind him quietly through the door.

"I got the lube!"

He couldn't be any louder, his heavy feet stomping his way into your shared bedroom. He scoffs at the sight, pouting into his words. He wiggles the bag in his palm. "That's so not fair! I called dibs!" The younger member points an accusing finger at the leader, whining into his words. Hongjoong smirks in reply, slotting forward to steal the bag from wooyoungs grasp.

The younger gasps loudly. "And put some pants on!" He shoves sans legs out of the way to crawl the rest of the way on the bed, stealing your breath away from seonghwa so he can suck your lips into his. His cold palms meet your breasts, squeezing harshly. You moan in pain, swallowed by his tongue prodding around your mouth and greedily eating you up. San kicks his hip as an act of revenge for pushing him out of the way. Pushing himself up to follow in mingis footsteps, dressing their lower halves to step out of the bedroom.

The younger guy's kiss breaks cause of the kick. Wooyoung isn't deterred. He immediately slots himself forward, biting the skin under your ear. The pop of a lid catches your attention, turning from the eager, dark-haired man.

Hongjoong kisses your shoulder the minute he sees your face turn towards him, his hand rubbing the sticky lube between his fingers. Seonghwas hands hold your hips and push you down so he can slot himself inside you. No warning is needed. It's not like you aren't already pretty lubed up as it is. His long nimble dick reaching the depth of you the second he bottoms out, his head thrown back in bliss and mouth ajar.

Gosh, your boyfriends are so pretty.

Hongjoongs fingers slotted to your behind, taking the mounds and slipping his fingers down to your second hole. Wooyoung watches, eyes lidded and breath heavy from his tongue. Despite your best efforts, you're squeezing seonghwa. His breath gets caught in his throat every time, eyes fluttering, he's doing his best to hold back, even as hongjoong preps your ass to take him. His nimble fingers scissor your tight hole open, the stretch is different back there, a lot less proper compared to your pussy which he spends hours on. You grind back down on them, the difference causing you to feel light headed.

"You like that?" Hongjoong teases with a hum, burying his fingers to the hilt inside you. "Like your pretty ass being full of fingers? Our dirty girl," his tongue clicks, fingers pulling out quickly. Your face overheats at the embarrassing whine you let slip. The rhythm is gone, and so is the feeling. You sigh against seonghwas chest, hands propped up on either side of his head. Seonghwas face is blissed out, his mouth pulled open the longer he has to wait, his eyes scrunched. Cockwarming him as he waits for hongjoong to finish. He doesn't have to wait long, the tip of hongjoongs cock pressing into your other hole.

"Will it fit?" You whisper to the man behind you, grabbing his hand on your waist. He hums, teasing the head of his cock in. "I'll make it fit, baby." He bends down to kiss your shoulder, glancing at wooyoung. "Don't do what I'm about to do" wooyoungs face scrunches at the captains words.

Hongjoong bottoms out with one harsh thrust forward, his length pushing all the way to the hilt. Your moan is ungodly, louder than ever intended. You tremble above seonghwa, who moans quietly, trembling just as much as you are. "Ah- shit, That felt so good," he admits, dragging your down farther onto his cock. The thin barrier pushing his and hongjoong together.

Hongjoong starts his pace, drawing himself all the way out to slam back into you, plunging your insides thoroughly. You meet his thrusts the best you can, easing yourself around seonghwas upward spiral, his hips swirling to meet yours every time hongjoong bottoms out. "s'soso good sweet girl, keep doing that- mm" seonghwa mutters, lost in his own bliss.

The feeling of the two of them scrapping your insides has you drooling. Eyes clenching harshly. A pair of hands grabs your face, and the sound of a zipper drops. Wooyoungs pretty cock stands hard and erect in front of you, tip leaking with beads of cum, his face looks tortured, his hand sliding up and down his shaft slowly.

You take him in your hands, cutting off his words without a thought. Every time hongjoong and seonghwa thrust into you, you lose your train of thought. Deciding to just take wooyoung on your tongue, you plant his firm cock all the way in your mouth. His whimper is loud, louder than the two men plowing into you. Like he's being tortured. You love when wooyoung whines, his hands coming up to hold your hair from your face, his grip is rough, but he has the right idea. You thank him with a hum, his hips stuttering up and his cock sliding forward. His head throws back, eyebrows furrowed down over his forehead.

"Fuck! I didn't even get to ask-" he whimpers again, rutting himself forward down your throat. You breath through what you can, planting your hand against his thigh to steady yourself against the other men's relentless thrusts. Seonghwas pace is growing sloppy, his breathing harsh against your chest. You take what you can in your mouth from wooyoung, wrapping your hand around the rest of his length to pump him. He writhes in your grasp, curling in on himself the moment you hollow your cheeks around him.

Hongjoongs rough grip on your hips falters, his breath fanning against your shoulders. "cumming, cumming- oh god" seonghwa hiccups, thighs curling upwards, he pumps himself the last of the way inside you, dragging your waist down onto him. You shudder from the warmth, pulling off wooyoung to moan from the feeling of seonghwa throbbing inside you. Wooyoung ruts into your palm the best he can, using your hand to get himself off.

Seonghwa fingers sneak up to rub your swollen clit, your moan getting caught off. You twitch, moaning loudly. "Its- too much seonghwa- oh my god" you cry, watching the older member place his lower lip down under his teeth. The overstimulation was getting to him, and if you both didn't come soon he was going to pass out.

His pretty finger swirls your sensitive bundle, getting you there as close as youcam manage. "oh- m'fuck I'm-" you cry with a guttural call of seonghwa and hongjoongs name. Hongjoons thrusts faltering the minute he feels you come. "I can feel you squeezing me from back here baby- feel so perfect-" he groans, snapping his hips forward. Sweat dripping from his chin.

Hongjoong tilts over the edge, splattering your second hole with his entire load, buried to the hilt.

You were thoroughly ruined, struggling to place the tip of wooyoung on your tongue to suck him the rest of the way off. Grasping the rest of him in a tight hold and abusing his length into your palm. He whines loudly when he cums, crying through the overstimulation of your cheeks continue to hollow out around him. His cum swallowed down by your throat greedily. "Babe- bab- Please! Fuck i can't-"

Wooyoung palms your head off of him, popping your lips off his tip. He twitches, falling against the bed to roll away from your assault. You lick up what spelt on your fingertips.

"You owe me ten bucks" a voice erupts from the entrance, it's jonghos. Tuning in to watch the scene in front of him from the doorway. "Ah really? I had high hopes" yeosang mumbles back from the living room. Wooyoung shoots up from the bed, tucking himself back into his pants. "Are yall making bets?!" He stumbles after the youngest.

Hongjoong slowly begins to pull out of you, cooing at the way you slink forward into seonghwa. The dark haired member remaining inside you, his hands stroking your back comfortably. He trails kisses against your jaw, distracting you for a moment so the leader can slip out of you.

Seonghwas out next, completely deflating under you. His heavy palms smoothing the free skin on your lower back.

It's been a while since you were sandwiched between your boyfriends, with touring all month, especially with your birthday around the corner, everyone is spent, completely exhausted. You wouldn't hold it against any of them for having only one round in them, they've worked so hard, your boyfriends just wanting to spend your special day under the sheets with you.

Well, that wasn't going to happen, so the minute you all got off after another day of performing on stage for thousands, you could hardly keep your knees from shaking, exhausted from the concert. It still happened to be your birthday the next day, overdue for a birthday live. Which was a relief, only cause you didn't have to stand the entirety of it.

As soon as you had returned to your dorm, you were melting at the idea of rose peddles and a cute dinner set up in the livingroom, your boyfriends all propped in suits. Despite your better judgment, you know they were stepping out of their comfort time to give you the best they could do for the moment.

It was sweet, you adored the idea of having a home made and comfortable late evening. Especially when later you finally could get them in the real sheets. At some point, you genuinely didn't know when, they had all switched out of those same pristine suits for more casual clothing. You loved seeing them comfortable, but it had been weeks since you were able to touch any of them properly, so seeing them completely naked was a better sight.

Which is where you were now, heaving on seonghwas chest and almost completely jelly. "Love?" Yeosang cooed, palming your hair from your sweaty face, when did he come in? "Yeosang" you pawed at his chest, hooking your finger into his shirt to pull him down, kissing his lips softly. "Hi love, drink up" yeosang offered a waterbottle up to your lips. You gulp down the content, pushing it once you find you've drank enough.

Seonghwa scoots out from under you, placed next to hongjoong so he can comfortably lay without being half off the bed, the other member dragging him into his side so they can lay together. Yeosang swipes the drool on the side of your lips, pecking the corners after and then sweetly taking your swollen lips into his perfectly natural ones. Gentle and soft the way they brush against yours, dancing and playing with your bottom lip. He breaks away to set the waterbottle to the side, holding a hand out to make sure you're stable even if you're on all fours in front of him.

Yeosang feels you tug on his pants. His head stuttering back to look at you. "Need you inside too yeo, will you please fuck me?"

Who is he to deny any of your pleas? It's your birthday for fucks sake. He wastes no time in helping you face him, your front pressed to his chest. His shirt disregarded somewhere in the room, he lines his tip with your cum stained hole, smearing the amount of cum still lingering around you. Your arms slot over his shoulders, pulling him in tightly. His eyes never falter, pulling you by the thighs to get closer to him. He teases his cockhead against your hole, watching your tortured face with lidded eyes. "Yeosang" you draw out, wiggling your hips against his grasp, he chuckles, glancing down at the pout on your features. "What, can't handle a little foreplay?" He tuts, shaking his head lightly. "You just had four cocks using both of these pretty holes, you still need more? You're starting to sound greedy" he mumbles against your lips, teasingly pulling away the moment he sees your eyes glance down to them.

"It's okay, I love how greedy this pussy is for us" yeosang swipes himself through your folds one more time, pushing his way past your entrance, your eyes stutter closed, before he's yanking you back to look at him by his hand on your jaw. "I want to see you when I split you on my cock" his whisper is harsh, his eyes equally as so. Drowning you in the darkness of them the more he bottoms inside.

The bed dips behind you, heavy and squeaky. Yeosangs eyebrow perks up, glancing behind you. Yunhos soft voice coos your worries, placing gentle kisses against the expansion of your neck. "Look at that, such a champ. Think you could take one more?" Your mind is elsewhere, the second yeosangs pelvis meets yours, you can't help where your mind goes. "Answer him" yeosang encourages, jolting you up when he moves to get more comfortable against the headboard. "Yes I can take one more" your eyes cloud over, pressing your head into the junction of yeosangs neck to push your back out for yunho.

Yunhos smooth hand slap against your cheeks. You yelp, "That's so mean. You listen to yeosang but not me?" His hands sting, playing with the flesh he just bruised. You whimper against him, pressing against his touch the more he pushes against you. "m sorry yun" you pout, throwing your head back to look at your bigger boyfriend. He thinks about it, glaring down at your leaking hole.

"That's okay baby, just gonna give you a reminder of what my name is"

The tight walls of your second hole has yunho gasping, had you really been prepped enough? His cock eases in slowly. Glancing to the captain who's watching the show quietly from the side. Hongjoong catches his gaze, licking his lips as he smirks. "I prepped her, she's just tight" hongjoong sighs, as if reminiscing on being inside you. He's already gathering his clothing, slotting them over his hip and passing seonghwa his shirt.

"S'that right babe? Just got a tight little ass?" Yunho teases, holding your waist against him to bottom inside. The filling you're having leaving you willful to however they move you. Yeosangs hands pulling your thighs farther apart. Yeosang pulls out until he's halfway in, smoothing his hips up to begin an unrelenting pace against your cervix. Your breath is already intense, picking up moans the quicker he gets and the more yunho moves to his strokes.

The unison to each of them has you feeling like jello, clenching when yeosangs tip hits that gummy spot inside you, your toes curling against the sheet.

"Already, love? You last just as long as wooyoung"

The teasing phrase has you whimpering, poor wooyoung, and poor you. Your boyfriends could be mean when they really wanted. Especially yeosang, yunho, on the hand was more teasing. Yunhos long finger come over to circle your clit for the nth time that evening, waves of electricity bouncing off your body as every pass of his fingertips get you to comming quicker.

"Right there! Oh- pleasepleaseplease" you chant, vision whitening just as you cum, yeosang stutters with you. Cumming just as abruptly as you do. His head thrown against the headboard, breathy groans off the tip of his tongue and into the sex filled air. Sweat beads off yunhos forehead, watching your ass swallow his every thrust greedily. His fingers loosing their temple against your swollen and definitely abused clit. He flattens his hips against yours, cumming shortly with a shuddered gasp.

You take in all in both sides, falling into yeosang the second yunho begins to pull himself from your used hole. Your breathy whimper soothed down by yeosangs kisses against your temple. His hands holding your hip back so he can also pull himself out of you. The gloops of cum is an unruly sight, the towel mingi had promised placed on the side table. Yeosang scoops it up for you instead, kissing your face and then passing it to yunho to clean your behind.

"You did so good pretty" yeosang hums, nuzzling against your collarbone. "Mm yea, took it so well" yunho continues on for the other deep haired man, swiping the towel against your ass. You lay sideways on the bed the minute yeosang scoots away from you, gathering the soiled towel from the taller members grasp and leaving. Yunho swipes his thumb across your hip, kissing the skin softly. Jonghos soft head is poking in from the doorway, seemingly let off the hook from wooyoung. Yunho snickers, scooting off the end of the bed in his own pants, having put them on the second he pulled out of you.

You beckon the youngest with open arms, catching his strong hold in you own. He preens at the affection, loving your touch. "We don't have to if-" "jongho, if you don't take your pants off I'm going to rip them off" you murmur against his lips, adjusting so your on your tummy facing him. Jongho gulps quietly, fishing his hard on from his briefs.

You gather the saliva in your mouth, spitting it into your palm so you can begin pumping his swollen length. Hard and on standby for far too long. His eyes stutter close every so often the harder you tug, his hands finding each side of your cheeks. "Keep doing that" he moans quietly, helping your head to ease his cock down your throat. His breathy groans music to your ears, you take all of him down, kissing the patch of hair at the base of his cock. He watches you do so, eyes lidded and mouth lulled open.

"That's so hot," his hands come to wrap around your throat, pressing on his length buried to the hilt inside. He shudders against the pressure, tutting forward and throwing his head back whenever you gag. He loves the sound, bottoming in and out with every thrust. Your hands are placed on either side of his pant covered thighs, holding yourself carefully against his pace against your throat. Watching his eyes cloud and begin to get heavier the seconds pass inside your wet cavern. It's really not taking long for jongho to start pushing your head down himself, watching you gag and near up at such a big cock down your throat.

He breaths out a half-assed apology, rutting forward to slot himself between your lips and then pulling back to the hilt so he can watch the drool shake out of your mouth and around his hard cock.

"Babe, 'm gonna cum in your pretty throat okay?" He whimpers quietly, moaning through every rough suck or slurp played through your mind. Jonghos sloppy pace slowing the minute he looks back down at your teary gaze.

He cums down your throat, pooling around the corner of your lips and dripping off your face.

Fuck, what a good day.

#ateez smut #ot8 smut #ateez hard hours #ateez hard asks #mingi smut #san smut #hongjoong smut #seonghwa smut #wooyoung smut #yeosang smut #yunho smut #jongho smut

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satoruxx · 5 months

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ANGEL ON MY SHOULDER.

✧ PAIRING: gojo satoru x reader, geto suguru x reader (hinted) | 5k words

✧ SUMMARY: ghost!reader, major character death, jjk manga spoilers, so much angst bc you literally die lmao, longing, mutual pining, suppressed feelings, everyone sucks at love, some fluff, banter, might be slightly suggestive, lots of hinted feelings (read: suguru), arguments, overall this is painful so read if you enjoy angst !!

✧ RHEYA'S NOTE: this idea randomly came to me before i went to bed a few days ago and in the spirit of halloween, i figured why not? i live off of angst and need to share the pain with everyone lmao oops. this is late for halloween tho my bad !!

i. 2007

satoru brings one more flower than he did the day before. morning glories again, of course, but an extra one. he had added one more to the the bunch every day since the day you died. the first day, he brought three, wrapped with a cheap blue ribbon that he found in his desk drawer. it was hardly a respectable bouquet, but those three flowers were the ones he'd grown for you, so it only seemed fitting.

he didn't care much for gardening. but one day you asked shoko what her favorite flowers were so you could give her some on valentine's day. she asked you what yours were so she could return the favor.

satoru never forgot morning glories after that day.

he's not even sure if morning glories are appropriate to bring to a grave, but he knows you'd like them.

you would tell him it didn't matter anyway.

ii. 2007

(suguru did not cry when you died. satoru watched, intently, because there was nothing in the universe that his six eyes couldn't catch. he waited for it, even a sliver of emotion that would betray suguru's bleeding heart, but he gave nothing. he just stood in front of the stone that marked the end of your life with a deep stare. something had settled there in his eyes, cold and resolute.

a few months before you died, you had told satoru that there was something wrong with suguru. you said that he'd been distant, somewhere far away, and you worried for him. you always did, so open with your affection for him.

"don't want him to get lost." you had hummed, your shoulder brushing against satoru's as you raise the mango ice pop he brought you to your mouth. satoru watches your lips out of the corner of his eyes, his stomach flipping eagerly even as he keeps his face impassive.

"he said it was just the summer heat," he answers, ignoring the sweet mango juice dripping down his knuckles. "should be nothing."

you don't look all that convinced, turning your head to look up at him with meaningful glance. "you sure?"

he stares at you for a lengthy second, cerulean eyes darting over your facial features, before he reaches up and knocks his knuckle against your forehead. "yeah. he'll be fine." he assures, and your shoulders relax as you continue to eat the ice pop.

you were right about it all. four days after you die, suguru massacres an entire village.)

iii. 2008

satoru shifts in his bed, grunting quietly he begins to stretch his stiff joints. his eyes crack open, still heavy with sleep as he waits for his dark ceiling to come into focus. except it doesn't, because all he can see are a pair of very familiar looking eyes. unsaturated, but still so obviously the color he once knew. his own eyes snap open, all traces of sleep gone as he finally makes out someone who looks exactly like you, perched on his stomach with a confused and slightly panicked expression.

he shoots up, and you pull back a little. it looks like you're on his lap, and yet he can't feel you on him at all. he gulps.

"hey toru." you say quietly, and his stomach drops. the same eyes, the same voice. gods above.

"you're dead," he says simply, trying not to betray the way his pulse is jumping at even the smallest glimpse of you again. "you're not real."

"i'm dead," you confirm, nodding your head as you look down at your translucent palms. "but i'm here somehow."

he sucks in a breath, reaching out a hand as if to touch you. the disappointment he feels when it passes through your form is sickening.

you smile shakily, shrugging your shoulders as you attempt to make light of the situation.

"guess i couldn't stay away."

he stares at you for minutes without saying a word and you stare back, equally silent.

iv. 2007

(nanami had carried your body back, his teeth gritted as his blonde hair fell over his eyes. satoru never brought it up, but he knew that nanami remained bothered by it for the rest of his life. your death was bad timing, especially after they had just lost haibara a few weeks prior.

nanami had no reason to blame himself though. if anything, it was satoru's fault you were gone.

shoko had called him from the infirmary, her voice hard and pinched as she spat out three words: "get down here."

when satoru saw your body, he didn't say a word. just took a few long strides until he was at the table where nanami had placed you down. your eyes were shut, face resting in a way that seemed so unnatural. he opened his mouth to ask shoko something, but felt like he was choking on air, so he stopped himself.

then he grabbed your limp fingers, squeezed them gently. they were still a little warm, but not as warm as you usually run. shoko didn't say anything, just stood there with her hands clenched, short brown hair falling over her dark eyes.

satoru remained there for the next thirty minutes, waiting for you to sit up and laugh at the prank you were no doubt pulling. as if your blood wasn't still dripping all over the table.

shoko was the one who finally pulled a sheet over your body with shaking hands. she didn't look satoru in the eye, and didn't spare a glance when suguru burst into the room ten minutes later.)

v. 2008

it takes satoru a while to get used to the fact that you're not physically there. he has to bite his tongue when he moves to bump your shoulder or flick your forehead only to find that his skin goes right through yours. you always give him that same little rueful smile, and he sighs to himself.

he doesn't make an effort to figure out why you're there. he figures it's similar to how jujutsu users can come back as curses due to strong feelings. when he thinks about it though, guilt lodges itself into his throat, because the first thought he had when he heard you were entering death's door was no, don't you dare die.

every day he wonders if he's the one who cursed you to stay.

you act like it doesn't matter, hovering around him as he busies himself in his empty room. at first you're quiet, as though you've forgotten how to speak to him in your incorporeal form. but then you start asking him questions, and it's one question that satoru dreads to answer that you finally bring up.

"where's suguru?"

he's not stupid. he knows there's more you think of suguru than you've ever revealed. of course you'd want to know. but that doesn't mean he wants to be the one to tell you. you had died with nothing but a good impression of geto suguru. you'd probably died with your feelings for him still intact too.

it'd be selfish of satoru to ruin that.

"nothing, don't worry about it," he dismisses, voice clipped as he busies himself with preparing dinner. he knows that won't deter you.

you huff, moving to hover in his line of sight. you cross your arms as you glare at him seriously, and satoru hates how nostalgic your expression makes him feel. he tongues his cheek before sighing.

"he's gone." satoru answers simply. he tries to keep his tone even but it comes out bitter and strained. he can hear your quiet gasp, and feels your form move closer to him. if you were alive, he'd be able to feel your breath on his skin now.

"what do you mean, gone?"

satoru sighs again, turning to look at you completely. he hated everything about this. "he left school. went crazy. killed a bunch of people, including his parents."

he would've laughed at the comical way your jaw dropped if you didn't look so hurt. you sputter over your words as he picks up his bowl and moves to the table, trailing after him and demanding more information.

he doesn't hesitate to share, because he's always hated keeping secrets from you. you had this uncanny ability to see straight through him, and it never failed to make him feel unsettled. so he tells you everything that happened in the few weeks after you died. suguru leaving, their confrontation in shinjuku, his plans for non-sorcerers. he leaves nothing unsaid.

when he's done, he finally looks at you, trying to gauge your reaction. but you're just staring at his food with a bitter expression, brows pinched and lips pursed. satoru says your name once.

you glance at him, and it's too quick for him to look for any accusation in it. doesn't matter though, because he's ready to own up to his mistakes.

"you were right back then. about suguru." satoru admits quietly, turning to his food. he doesn't want to look at you anymore, because he's scared you'll show him how disappointed you are with him.

you don't say anything in response. but you sit down at the small dining table and watch him eat with soft eyes, one bite at a time. satoru doesn't admit it, but the whole time he imagines that you're gently rubbing his shoulder, and he thinks he hasn't missed you more than in that moment.

vi. 2007

(it was satoru's fault you died. if he hadn't been so selfish, you'd still be next to him, shoulder brushing his as the two of you walked through the streets of tokyo.

you had knocked on his door that morning before you had left for your last mission, rocking on your heels. he opened it groggily, still half asleep.

"you going on a mission?" satoru had yawned, drowsy eyes trailing over your uniform. you nod with a grin.

"mhm, with nanami. there are two separate areas with curses though, so we'll split up when we get there. should be simple enough." you shrug, toying with the collar of your uniform jacket.

satoru decides to be annoying. "then why are you here disturbing my sleep? get out." he groans dramatically, peering at you with narrowed eyes. you smack his arm, scoffing. you've stopped questioning why he keeps his infinity down for you do those things to him.

"i was gonna ask if you wanted to come with," you hiss, crossing your arms defensively. "but i'm taking it back, asshole."

he grins. "what? can't stay away?"

you roll your eyes, shaking your head with a sarcastic laugh. "don't flatter yourself."

satoru pauses for a second. "i was gonna go back to sleep." he admits, feeling a little guilty. he had just come back from a mission the night before, and he doesn't feel like leaving again. he doesn't know how to say that to you though.

but you see right through him, like you always do.

"you've been going on missions a lot lately," you smile earnestly, patting his shoulder. "no wonder you're tired."

"'m the strongest, i don't get tired." he protests, crossing his arms with a scoff. you roll your eyes again, sticking your tongue out at him as you heft your weapon over your shoulder.

"keep it up and you're seriously gonna fry your brain or something," you say with a shake of your head, eyes betraying your concern for him. he notices it, and tries to smother down the way it makes his stomach flip. "i'll be fine. you can come on my next mission with me."

fair enough, he thinks. he hadn't gone on missions with you or suguru in a while. he should remember to ask yaga to let him go on your next one. just the two of you. you and him. maybe he'd buy you a mango ice pop on the way back.

"fine." he acquiesces easily, not even thinking to protest. he'll see you later anyway, so he'll talk to you more when you get back.

you smirk a little, motioning to his bedhead, before gently kicking his shin. "go back to sleep then, stupid."

he rolls his eyes, reaching up to knock his knuckle against your forehead like he always does. "whatever. bring me some sweets on your way back, yeah?"

the laugh you give him as he shuts the door is the last thing he ever hears from you.

he should've gone with you.)

vii. 2012

satoru hates the way you're looking at him right now.

it was a stupid little mistake. he had gone to see little megumi and tsumiki earlier that afternoon, and as usual, you had tagged along with him. you'd watched him raise up the two kids over the last few years, never failing to tease about his newly acquired fatherhood, or how much he seemed to care about them despite his efforts to hide it. he didn't ever think to say that you'd helped him raise them up too. even in your incorporeal form you'd always been around to tell him what meals he could prep or to remind him that megumi liked black forest cake for his birthdays.

he'd gotten so used to you being around and he slipped up once. that afternoon when he had walked megumi home from school, teasing and poking fun at the kid, he'd made a stupid joke. megumi had rolled his eyes and told him to shut up.

and then without thinking, satoru had turned to you as you hovered next to him and groaned your name out dramatically before whining, "this kid is so mean to me!"

your eyes widened immediately, and if you were alive he'd probably see the color drain from your face. his stomach had sank and he couldn't tear his eyes away from you, even when megumi glanced at him with a raised brow.

"who are you talking to?" he asked, and satoru gulped, shaking his head as he broke eye contact with you to look down at the kid.

"nobody." he had answered.

he tries to ignore the meaningful stare you pin him with for the rest of the afternoon, hoping that you'll just forget about it. but as soon as satoru has left the kids and he's back in his own room, you're on him. he busies himself with making a cup of hot chocolate, even though he feels sick to his stomach.

"satoru you have to figure out how to get rid of me!" you plead, eyes so sad it makes his stomach churn. "i'm gonna drive you insane!"

"i'm fine!" he snaps back, shaking his head as he takes a sip from his mug, the warmth distracting him from whatever it was you were trying to remind him of. he places it down on the table in front of him and crosses his arms defensively. "it was a stupid mistake. won't happen again."

you shimmer in and out of focus, manifesting in front of him with a glare, though your eyes are still the same. wounded and hurt. "it wasn't and you know it! you can't keep living like this. i've been haunting you for years, toru!"

"well who asked you to go ahead and die?!" he yells without thinking, and it's like he sees your hurt bubble forth in slow motion.

"i went and died because i made a stupid mistake on a mission! quit blaming yourself, you dumbass!" you shout, voice raised higher than he's ever heard it.

satoru's mug shatters against the wall.

the two of you immediately turn to look at the mess with wide eyes, before slowly turning to each other to ensure that it really did happen.

"how'd you do that?" satoru asks quietly, his voice strained as he takes a few long strides towards you. you look down at your hand, the same one that you had lifted to swipe at his mug during your fit of rage. you look back up at him with wide eyes and parted lips. satoru's head is pounding, some kind of sick hope stirring within him. "you had to have touched it."

"i don't…" you trail off, voice filled with awe and a bit of fear. satoru reaches up a hand, ignoring the tremble in it, and moves to touch your face. he will never admit to the amount of times he begs in his head, please please please.

his hand goes straight though your skin, and your eyes soften. satoru lets out a breath he didn't know he was holding, hiding his disappointment as he takes a step back and turns away.

viii. 2006

(satoru thinks gardening is ridiculous. plants are so fragile, needing to be constantly monitored and cared for like children. he can't understand why anyone would choose to garden as a hobby when there were less stressful things to do in spare time.

even the process was time consuming, he realizes as he scoops out piles of dirt into the small pots he had set out on his windowsill.

he thinks back to the silly little grin you had on your face as you answered shoko's question.

"morning glory," you had said, leaning against her shoulder. "i like the way they open in the morning and close at night."

shoko hummed, staring at the sky even as satoru quietly eavesdropped. "you got a favorite color?"

"the blue ones," you answered. "they're the prettiest."

your voice echoes in his head as he places the seeds into the soil, and he sighs heavily. why he was doing this for you was beyond him.

the thought makes him annoyed, and he huffs in frustration the entire time he plants them. gardening had to be the stupidest hobby ever.

and yet when three blue morning glories bloom against his windowsill, he can't hold back his grin.)

ix. 2017

satoru's grateful that you don't watch him kill suguru.

he tells you to go, and you give suguru a long stare, face pinched and sour even though your translucent eyes are shining. it's a shame suguru can't see you though, because satoru thinks you look so pretty. suguru would've been lucky to have you be the last thing he ever saw.

you turn away and disappear without a word, and after one last exchange, satoru finishes the job.

it's only after he watches rika's final goodbye to yuta does he realize the extent of what a goodbye even means. he'd said one to suguru, and yet he can't help but miss him as he walks back home. he wonders if suguru wouldn't have had to die if you were still around.

satoru had never gotten a goodbye with you though. you're somehow still with him, but he misses you so much. it puts an ugly feeling in his gut, twisted and dark. it weighs down on his shoulders as he finally opens the door to his room, heavy and overwhelming as he sees you sitting on his bed, face vacant.

he says your name, and you don't move. he takes a seat next to you, and something about your sad expression makes him so unbelievably angry.

"quit being sad about it," he finally spits out, the truthful extent of his feelings coming out. "it's not like you're even alive that you'd be able to see him."

you scoff as you give him a sidelong glare. "what's that supposed to mean? one of my closest friends just died and you expect me not to be upset about it?"

"at least he'll find a way to you!" satoru hisses, clenching his fists so hard that his nails leave crescents in his skin. "you two can have fun together for all of eternity."

there's a tense silence that follows as he grits his teeth, turning away from you. he's so disgusted right now. with suguru, with you, with himself.

"i'm all by myself." satoru mutters bitterly, the words so foreign on his tongue as the truth hits him.

god he misses you so much.

he suddenly feels a sharp thwack on the back of his head and he's turning around with wide eyes.

"don't you dare forget about shoko!" you hiss, tears in your eyes as you glare at him, hand raised. "i'll never forgive you!"

his throat goes dry, because the smack you just gave him was the first time you'd touched him since the day you died. there's a storm in his throat that threatens to break free, but he tries to keep it lodged in his throat. even with your teary eyes, he thinks you look just as pretty as you did with life flowing through you.

he misses suguru. he knows you do too, because there are translucent tears dripping down your cheeks and he has never ached to touch you more. but he can't because you're dead.

you remain in front of him all night, barely saying a word in between your sniffles. he doesn't say anything either, just watching you.

he doesn't know what there is to say. the only thing he ever wishes he got to say to you was goodbye. but you're here, in front of him, so a goodbye seems pointless.

when the sun comes up, you wish him a merry christmas, and he swears you never left him.

satoru says it back to you. you smile sadly.

he misses you so much.

x. 2007

(satoru had cleaned out your dorm room three days after you died.

he didn't really understand why he was doing it so early. shoko had frowned when he told her that he planned to pack away your things, frowned in a way that made her look like she disagreed.

well even if she did disagree, it didn't stop her from sitting in your desk chair, chewing on her nail quietly as she watched satoru fold your clothes. he didn't even understand why he was doing this.

maybe it was because every time he walked past your empty dorm room he felt sick to his stomach. there was a twisting feeling in his gut when he realized that you'd never curl up in that bed again. never sit by the window with a grin watching him and suguru bicker as they threw playing cards on the floor. he figured the faster he got rid of your remnants, the quicker the feeling would go away.

that's what he's hoping anyway. but when he picks up your jujutsu uniform he feels something claw at his throat, and he unconsciously digs his fingers into the fabric. he hears a sigh from behind him and then shoko is at his side, wordlessly easing the cloth from his hand. she lays it on the bed, smoothing out the wrinkles before folding it carefully. when she places it into the box, satoru thinks her hands shake a bit.

there's a bitter expression on shoko's face that he's never seen before, and it makes his stomach twist.

they work on your room for the next few hours, until the sun has disappeared behind the horizon and the cool evening breeze bullies its way into your old space. neither of them say anything, save for the occasional nostalgic hum as they remember something that you did or they're reminded of the story behind one of the trinkets in your room. otherwise it's silent, and for a second satoru feels like he can hear your laugh.

it isn't until night has completely fallen that they are interrupted.

"what are you doing?"

satoru turns around just as shoko looks up, both of them finding suguru standing in the doorway. he hadn't taken a step in yet, eyes still trailing over the emptiness of your old room from behind an uncrossed line.

"cleaning." satoru answers, his voice oddly clipped.

"it wasn't messy…" suguru mutters back, his lips slanting in such an unusual way. there was an uncharacteristically determined look in his eyes, as though there was something in him that was struggling to burst forth. satoru didn't understand what it was.

"never said it was." satoru replies noncommittally. he hears shoko inhale deeply, shifting in your old chair as she watches the two of them stare at each other. there's a tense silence as he notices suguru frown.

satoru can't remember the last time he even had a full conversation with suguru. he remembers seeing you leave for your last mission, and he wants to kick himself for not asking earlier to be sent on group missions with the two of you.

even now, he doesn't really know what to say to suguru. all he can do is tighten his fingers around the edge of the box with your stuff neatly packed in, and watch his best friend sigh.

suguru wets his lips, eyes darting over your desk. there's an odd expression on his face, and his brows pinch as he notices something. then suguru reaches out to pick up an old polaroid, and satoru knows exactly which one it is. your arms slung around suguru's shoulders, smile so wide your cheeks probably hurt. suguru's expression was uncharacteristically gentle.

satoru remembers it so well, because he's the one who took the picture.

suguru looks at the polaroid without a word, rubbing the corner between his thumb and forefinger, and his expression suddenly mirrors the gentleness in the picture. his eyes remain stormy, deep and unsettling as he reaches conclusions that satoru will never understand.

the three of them stay quiet for a few minutes, even though satoru has so many questions that he can't figure out how to phrase. shoko toys with a cigarette between her lips, leaving it unlit because you've always hated the smell of smoke. suguru just stands there, silently eyeing your unfiltered smile through the lens of a camera.

satoru wonders if suguru's trying to say goodbye to you. he doesn't ask, and suguru doesn't say.

only after something had clicked in suguru's eyes, did satoru realize something was over. he couldn't help but feel like he had just buried you in that cardboard box with all your things, and he swallows hard.

then suguru clenches his fists, veins flexing as he looks around your room, almost like he was committing it to memory. satoru didn't understand why; it's not like suguru couldn't come see your room anytime he wanted.

then he turns away, hand lingering on the doorframe heavily, without another word.

just as suguru walks away, satoru thinks he hears your voice whispering in his ear.

"don't want him to get lost."

xi. 2018

something is wrong. something happened. something is wrong.

satoru knows he needs to wake up. but he's so tired, so exhausted from carrying on all by himself. he suddenly remembers the taste of frozen mango, sweet and chilled, and he wants to keep thinking about it for the rest of eternity.

but something is wong. he needs to wake up.

the minute satoru forces his eyes open, he can ignore the taste of blood in his mouth because you're there.

you're kneeling at his side, sunlight shining behind your head in a way that makes you look almost angelic. he'd believe it if you said you were an angel, because you've been dead for so long now.

you'd been a ghost for so many years, hovering around him and getting him through everything that had come his way. isn't that what guardian angels were supposed to do, guiding humans through their own trials? isn't that what you were doing to him since the day you died and came back to him?

you'd been a ghost. you'd been his angel. you'd been haunting him.

you'll always haunt him.

you seem to know it too, because the expression on your face is understanding, soft and yet so sad.

for what seems like the millionth time in his life, satoru aches to touch you.

he tries to move his hand but finds that he can't. synapses misfire. he can't feel his body anymore.

he wants to touch you. gods above, he wants to touch you so badly. please just this one last wish.

your translucent forms shimmers in the sunlight, and satoru can't tell if he's hallucinating or not because you suddenly seem to become fully physical. the particles of your form solidify, slowly filling with more color until you don't look quite so dilute. the saturation of your eye color comes back, and satoru can't look away because he's never seen a ghost so pretty before.

his breath hitches as you gently cup his cheek in your palm, warm and gentle. the melancholic look on your face makes his eyes sting.

"it's good to see you." he says with a weak smile, ignoring the metallic taste on his tongue. his breath is short, mind racing because your skin is on his again. finally, after so many years. you're so soft, just like he remembers.

"you weren't supposed to join me this quick." you sigh, eyes shining as you smile down at him ruefully. your thumb brushes over his bottom lip, and satoru's cerulean eyes flutter.

no. no more waiting. he'd missed you too much. he doesn't have it in him to stay away from you anymore. he'd done it long enough. your fingers tremble against his skin and he almost laughs.

no more haunting.

there's a resolute part of him that knows you'll be the first thing he sees when he gets to wake up again. he decides that, when he does, he'll get you a mango ice pop and plant some morning glories with you.

his eyes fall shut with a sigh.

"guess i couldn't stay away."

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hopelesslyromanticshark · 1 month

Note

hey bff! can u do percy x a daughter of psyche? who has the gift of empathy and can heal emotional pain, but it drains her so percy is really protective!

⋆⭒˚.⋆ percy jackson x daughter of psyche! reader hcs

content: percy jackson x daughter of psyche! reader hcs warning: none this one is too soft for any warnings author's note: okay okay i did my research on psyche for this one and just...awwwwwww wtf its so sweet her and eros like wtfffffff why can't i have a tragic greek love yall doom me with the narrative i beg

you have bewitched him, body and soul

drawn in instantly

im sorry but you would be too if you heard of a girl that could basically heal all of your trauma

very popular among the demigods for that reason

borderline harassed and forced into help ease the emotional pain that a lot of them suffer from

and you wanted to help, truly you did, but it was hard when it took so much out of you

but you just pushed through, wanting the others to feel peace even if it cost you your own

you did it out of your cabin, as you knew chiron would try and stop you, scheduling times for them to sneak in and out

you were on your eight demigod of the day, your vision fuzzy but your hands out stretched as you needed a point of contact to heal them

but then instead of grasping your hands, the fuzzy blob in front of you gripped your shoulders

you could just make out dark hair and what looked to be green eyes before your body gave out on you

after what felt like hours, your eyes fluttered open, and you could feel your ladybug pillowpet under your head, which you turned towards the door of your cabin

there percy stood, shooing away another camper

"but-"

"look at her. she'll kill herself to keep you all happy. let her rest. i won't ask again," percy hissed before closing the door, shaking his head as he approaching you, kneeling beside your bed

"welcome back to the land of the living."

"who was that? are they alright?! i'm sure i could-"

"and i'm sure you could, too. but i won't let ya. you're off for the rest of the week," percy argued and raised a brow at you as you opened your mouth to argue.

you swallowed your argument, nodding your head and offering him a soft smile, which he returned

that was the first time you met and from that point on, it was hard to find one without the other

it got worse once you two started dating

percy might as well have glued his hand into your back pocket of your jeans, as it seemed to never leave

and no matter how much you offer, percy refuses to let you use your powers on him

he thinks it would be an abuse of his position as boyfriend

what he doesn't know, is while he sleeps with his head in your lap and you comb your fingers through his dark hair, you do little spurts of it

nothing major or serious enough for him to notice, but just to give him a little peace of mind here and there

but, for her birthday, once everyone else had left, you offered your services up to sally

percy had told you enough about gabe to leave you, every the pacificist, raging and seething with anger

sally was hesitant but agreed, you two sitting criss cross apple sauce in her bedroom on some rug paul had insisted on

you took her hands into yours and talked through the process, which you typically didn't do with the demigods

you walked her through her own emotions, why she was feeling that, why she dealt with that the way she did, how she might do better next time

you were both crying not even half way through

she pulled you into the tightest hug after, thanking you so many times you lost count

then she sent you home with a boat load of cookies, which she made percy swear on his father not to steal

you were sweet enough to give him a third of your ration, but that's it!! (he ended up with a half, bc you love that boy far too much)

he finds it very amusing to be like 'she's an empath ' at inappropriate times

"she just killed two monsters"

"she's an empath"

"percy! you're girlfriend is crying bc mr. d won't give her another marshmallow!"

"what can i say, she's an empath."

"hey, is that your girlfriend?? she's currently hugging a tree and refuses to let go because she thinks it was a lover in a past life."

"she's an empath- wait, what?"

idk but you are very jane austen coded, you just are

soft and ancient loves are sooooo you!!

those kind of loves where their souls are clearly tied in a neat little bow

percy buys you all those fancy cover versions of the books, making sure they match your aesthetic and all the things

just a boy being protective over his soft babygirl idk what to tell you

#postcards from covey ౨ৎ #all my love ౨ৎ #pjo #pjo fandom #hoo #percy jackon and the olympians #percy jackson #percy jackson x reader

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burntheedges · 11 days

Text

Passing Notes: NSFW

Joel Miller x f!reader | 18+ | 1.6k words | Passing Notes masterlist

summary: A handsome stranger looks over your shoulder at the worst possible moment.

a/n: This one goes out to all of the folks on Discord who know the terror of opening the wrong channel in public. Happy @swiftiscruff exchange! I'm tagging you all at the bottom because the list is long lol!

tags/warnings: food and drink mention, flirting, reader gets caught looking at smutty gifs and images in public, smutty images of: p-in-v sex, manhandling, oral (f!receiving), reader walks and sits at a cafe (otherwise not described)

...

You sank into the last open seat, thankfully one of the ones by the window that wasn’t too cramped. It even had an outlet. You sighed as you stretched out your legs under the table. The walk to the coffee shop from your office wasn’t too long, but at the end of the day it was tiresome. You were lucky to find this seat, even if it was at a long table with other patrons already sitting around it.

You started to set up your area with your coffee, laptop, and phone arranged just how you liked. You’d decided on the way here to treat yourself to your favorite snack, too, and you’d managed to snag the last one from the display case.

As you settled in, you glanced to your right and noticed he was back. The guy. Sitting right next to you.

He happened to look up at the same moment you looked at him, and he met your eye. You smiled, shy, and he smiled back, nodding in recognition. You looked away, flustered.

You’d first noticed him almost a month before, and at least 4 or 5 times since. He was sometimes there at the same time as you, and you couldn’t believe you missed him at the table as you dashed to this last open chair. You’d never spoken to him, but you’d definitely had a few moments of lingering eye contact. You were thinking you might have the courage to talk to him… soon. One day soon. Definitely not today.

The thing was, he was almost absurdly attractive. He had short, messy curls that tumbled over his forehead and your fingers twitched with the urge to brush them back. His scruffy beard begged for you to touch it, too, to cup his face between your palms. His t-shirt stretched around his biceps in a way that caught your eye and held it until you started to feel like a creep.

And his ass always looked good in his jeans.

You didn’t know a lot about him. He usually had paperwork with him, sometimes a book. You knew he was nice to the baristas, at least. You’d caught him sliding some money into the tip jar on more than one occasion, and once you’d even seen him step between the barista and an angry customer in a suit. After a few moments of tense conversation that you couldn’t hear, the angry guy had stormed out, and he had turned to comfort the barista.

You bit your lip as you grabbed your phone, trying to distract yourself and catch up on your notifications. You’d never sat this close to him before and it was making your head start to spin. He was barely two feet away from you and you were hyper aware of him and his warmth, like it was radiating off of him, all down the right side of your body. You tried not to glance at him too much, but he seemed to be engrossed in his work. You took a deep breath and shook out your shoulders.

Soon enough you were idly scrolling Discord, chin in hand. You sighed as you clicked through the channels you needed to catch up on, and without thinking about it, you clicked on the “NSFW inspo” channel.

Before you could second guess the choice to check this particular channel in such a public place, the channel loaded and you hastily tilted your phone towards the window. If you were going to look at this channel, you weren’t going to do it where he could see you. You curled forward over your phone, trying to make sure no one could look over your shoulder at your screen.

You were met with a gif of a man and a woman lying on a bed, facing the camera and caught right in the middle of having sex. He had her leg pulled up around his hip, opening her pussy to your view as he thrust inside with his (extremely large, you noted) cock. Her head was thrown back and his eyes were locked on her open mouth. You tore your eyes away from the gif to read the messages above it.

“I’m writing smut and I’m stuck. it needs… something. Inspo?” “I got you”

You snorted and moved your thumb to start to scroll past the image. The next few messages were people agreeing, and then another gif – a close up on a woman’s hips from the side as a man’s large hands came into view and slowly bent her legs towards her chest. You couldn’t even see their faces, but his hands were so big. You felt your breath hitch. You blinked.

In the next one, the camera had come in close to focus on a woman’s pussy from a high angle with her legs spread wide. You could see a man’s knees as he knelt close to her. With a firm grip at the base, he rubbed his cock up and down her slit, teasing at her clit before sliding it back down. He thrust his cock inside of her cunt and then slowly pushed all the way forward. You felt a shiver go down your spine when their hips met.

You scrolled slowly through a few more gifs and some fan art – and damn was the person who needed that inspiration getting what they asked for, including some very risque fan art of a certain Mandalorian with only one area exposed – when your attention was caught and you paused, staring, unable to look away.

It was another side view of two people, and in this gif the woman was lying back on the bed, clutching at the sheets. Her back arched and her mouth opened wide as she tried to look down and catch sight of the man. Your eyes trailed down her body to find him with his head between her legs, eyes locked on her face as he licked a stripe up her pussy with the flat of his tongue.

Something about the intensity of his eye contact and the way he held onto her thighs made you stare. You were caught, lingering over the gif as it repeated, watching the way he licked at her pussy over and over and over again.

You didn’t notice at the time, but you were so mesmerized that you’d stopped being quite so careful about the angle of your phone screen.

Suddenly you felt the slightest puff of air against your right ear, followed by a low voice, murmuring, “you sure are brave, darlin’, to be lookin’ at somethin’ like that in public.”

You gasped and almost threw your phone in the air, whirling to the right. Your phone tumbled to the table and landed screen-up, thankfully shielded from the rest of the table by your open laptop.

But not from him.

You met his eyes and realized his gaze was dark and intent, but he was smiling at you. In your peripheral vision you could still see the movement of the gif on your phone screen but you couldn’t look away from him.

“Shit,” you breathed. “I mean, um, sorry? Let me–” you reached out towards your phone, but he caught your hand and placed it on the table. He squeezed once, gently, before resting his hand next to yours.

“No need to apologize. I will say I was surprised to glance over and see just what had you starin’ like that, though.” He raised his eyebrows at you and you felt your cheeks burn. “You know, darlin’, this isn’t exactly the way I was plannin’ on talkin’ to you, but I couldn’t resist.”

You blinked, feeling like you were a step behind this entire conversation. “You were planning on talking to me?”

He tilted his head and settled his left hand on the back of your chair so he could lean even closer. “Was it not obvious? Thought you’d caught me starin’ more than a few times.”

You smiled and nodded. “Well, then you must have caught me staring, too.”

He grinned. “Sure did, beautiful. But then I looked over and saw that,” at his words you both looked down and saw the gif still playing on your phone screen. You made a wordless noise and tried to reach for it again, but he stopped you. Again. “Well, just had to say something. Hard not to think of how much I’ve been wanting to kiss you when I look over and you're watching that, after all.”

You weren’t sure your brain was still functioning. He was leaning in close, and all it would take was for you to cross the few inches between you and you could be kissing him. Right then. “You want to k– kiss me?”

He nodded. “Yeah, darlin’, I do.” His voice got even lower and quieter. “I’ll kiss you anywhere you’d like.” He leaned forward and put his mouth right next to your ear. Your eyes caught on the gif, still looping, and you stared at it as he murmured, “figure any woman who’s starin’ so hard at something like that in public must be mighty interested. Bet she knows just what she likes, too. Well, let me tell you something, darlin’ – I would love to give you just that. Do it right, how you like. And I don’t mean to boast, you know, but I know my way around.” You shivered and your mouth fell open. As he leaned back, you met his eyes again and you had no idea what your face was doing.

“Name’s Joel Miller. Can I take you out tonight, beautiful?”

You grinned wide and introduced yourself. “I’d love that, Joel Miller.” He darted forward and pressed a soft kiss to the corner of your mouth, and you sighed.

“Good. And then maybe afterwards I can have some dessert.” He winked and you laughed, finally reaching for your phone to turn off the screen.

...

For @beardedjoel @gasolinerainbowpuddles @huffle-punk @jupiter-soups @whxtedreams

@noxturnalpascal @pastelnap @janaispunk @covetyou @chronically-ghosted

@jobean12-blog @punkette1026 @dilfspitdrinker @futuraa-free @skittlesfics

@ashleymsnodgrass @joelsflannel @thefrogdalorian @100ottersonaplanecalledgerti

#PPCUGiftExchange2024 #joel miller x reader #joel miller x f!reader #joel miller x you #joel miller smut #joel miller fanfiction #joel miller fic #tlou fic #x reader #bte friendship exchange

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dreamescapeswriting · 3 months

Text

Easy Like A Sunday morning ~ BC

WORD COUNT: 2.7K

GENRE: comfort for family drama, argument between couple, established relationships, angsty, with soft ending

PAIRING: Chan x GN !Reader

⤜Copyright: © DreamEscapesWriting - January 2024

⤜MASTERLIST

The sun beamed through the cracks in the bedroom blinds as you lay with your head on Chan's chest, your fingers running up and down his chest softly as the two of you lay there for what felt like forever. Sundays were always the best for the two of you, neither of you had to work which meant you could spend all day in bed if you felt like it, which nine times out of ten you always did.

You'd lay in bed, tangled in the sheets enjoying the warmth of a lazy Sunday morning, doing nothing but eat and laugh together as you shared moments you couldn't wait to tell your future kids about.

"I love lazy Sundays with you," You said with a giant smile, your hands drawing invisible patterns into Chan's bare chest as he smiled and let out a content sigh.

There was nowhere else he'd rather be than with you, work had been stressful to him all week and this had been exactly what he needed to unwind from the chaos of his boss. The two of you needed this time together to just relax, sometimes it was the only thing you had to look forward to after a shitty time at work.

"Me too...No rush...No plans," He sighs happily as he stretches his legs in the bed making you giggle a little at him as he finally stopped and wrapped his arm around your waist,

"Just us, TV and lots of food." He finished as you let out a giggle. The two of you would always cook for one another, taking turns every Sunday to see who would cook for the other and this week it had been you.

So you'd made you both some breakfast wraps which had gone down a treat with Chan who'd already had three from you.

"We should do this on Saturdays too," You mumbled, turning to lay with your chin resting on your boyfriend's chest and smiling a little. Saturdays were usually reserved for spending time with your family but after the big blowout you'd had with them yesterday you were hoping you'd limit your time with them as much as humanly possible.

"I thought you were always busy on Saturdays..." Chan trailed off a little trying not to seem as hurt as he was by never getting to spend the full weekend with you but it was confusing for him. The two of you had been together for almost five months now and you'd never been free on Saturdays and whenever he asked you about it, you'd brushed it off as nothing or told him you were working.

"Turns out I might be free more often now," You smiled weakly and looked at Chan who appeared to be elsewhere in his own mind so you bit your lip and turned his head to look at you.

"I love you." You whispered before reaching across and kissing him softly. Chan's arms wrapped around you as he pulled you closer to him, his worries melting away as he shared a peaceful kiss with you. As you moved to straddle his lap something sounded downstairs and you stalled completely, your hands resting on Chan's bare chest and you frowned.

No one else had a key except for Chan - who was present and accounted for and...

"Shit!" You hissed out, rushing over to the end of the bed and throwing Chan's clothes in his direction, you looked at him to see him frowning at you.

"What?! Who is it?!" Chan sat bolt upright, panicking as you rushed to find your own clothes, you didn't have time to explain anything to him right now, all you needed to do was hurry up and get dressed before someone walked into your room.

"Yn, this would be a bad time to tell me you're secretly married with a husband." Chan chuckled lightly trying to make you talk to him but you shook your head at him, whimpering a little as you heard the front door slam shut.

"I'm not..I-I just- You need to go."

"What? Why?" The confusion was written across his face as he got dressed, grabbing his bag from your hands as you swallowed a lump that was in your throat.

"Yn! Get down here! We need to talk!" Your mother's voice screeched from down the stairs making your whole body tense up so hard you were afraid you were never gonna move again.

"Y-You need to get out of here before they see you," Your voice barely grew louder than a whisper but Chan heard you as he frowned,

"Why can't they see me?" Chan's voice came out in a whisper too and you cringed as you heard your brothers rumbling around in the kitchen,

"P-Please." Your shakey voice made Chan panic but he nodded his head, a little unsure as to where all of this was coming through.

The two of you had been going out long enough that you could easily meet one another's family, hell, you'd already met Chan's and they all adored you. Whenever Chan had asked about your family, you'd told him it was "complicated" and that you weren't that close but for them to walk into your home it seemed pretty close to him,

"Explain to me what's going on." He wasn't demanding but more concerned, your mother sounded pissed off and he wasn't going to leave you alone if you were worried about them.

"I will...later, I'll distract them and you can go out the front door." You looked out of the blinds to make sure none of them were waiting in the back and you made your way to the bedroom door, your heart racing rapidly inside of your chest.

"Yn," Chan whispered, his chest aching a little at the thought of you hiding him like he was some kind of dirty secret. All of your friends had met him, even your co-workers but you weren't introducing him to the people that mattered most and it pained him.

"I have to go. Please just leave." You barely gave him any chance to fight you on it before you walked out of the bedroom door and headed toward the living room.

"It's too late for you to still be in bed, you shouldn't sleep so much." Your mother's voice carried to the bedroom and Chan waited until he heard you shut the living room door before making a break for it.

The front door to your boyfriend's place creaked open as you stepped inside, your shoulders slumped as you let out an exasperated sigh and kicked off your shoes. You expected to see Chan waiting for you with open arms but he was nowhere to be seen.

"Chan?" You called out before walking further into the home but something felt completely off about it all. The living room felt uneasy and the air felt thick with tension as you noticed the dim lights and Chan sitting in a chair staring at you with a frustrated look on his face.

The air felt heavy as if it was carrying the weight of all the unspoken words between you and Chan from earlier in the morning.

"Chan-" You started but never got to finish,

"We've been together for five months and you've never introduced me to your family." You knew the two of you were going to talk about this tonight but you were hoping you could do it within the comfort of your boyfriend's arms.

"Chan, it's complicated." You breathed out, dropping your bag onto the floor and taking in a deep breath. You'd been trying to figure out where to start with this all day but you still didn't know how or even where to begin.

"Complicated? What seems complicated because they all seemed pretty happy to swing by your place today." He grumbled at you, you looked down at the floor before switching your gaze back to Chan who was staring daggers at you.

"They weren't invited." You mumbled a little because they weren't. They weren't supposed to use the key unless there was an emergency and after the fight you'd had the previous day you figured they'd never wanna see you again anyway.

"They're family, they come whenever they want. My family is the same." Chan reminded you and you rolled your eyes a little. Chan's family were great, they came around but announced it first, and sometimes sent a quick text to prepare him but yours weren't like that.

"Yeah, well your family is different than mine." Your family were different than most, they would drop by unannounced or call you at work demanding you leave and go to them right away.

"How?" He arched a brow at you. All day he'd been left to stew in his own thoughts and he'd come to one conclusion about everything and that was that you were ashamed to be with him and that was why you hadn't introduced him yet.

"It's-"

"Complicated," You both said at the same time before Chan let out a loud scoff at you, shaking his head before sitting down in the chair. This felt like a losing battle every single time he brought up the subject of your family,

"We've talked about it all before and you always brush it off. I feel like a dirty little secret."

"You're not a secret, Chan...It's just-"

"Just what?!" He finally yelled, losing his patience with you as tears built in his eyes. He wasn't the type to cry in front of you but he was losing his will and needed to know if there was something wrong with him that you would hide part of yourself away from him.

"They're just...They're different," Tears began to well up in your eyes as you stared at him. Your family had been one of the main reasons you swore off dating for the longest time. You'd never wanted to have to introduce anyone to your family so long as you could have helped it.

"Are you ashamed of me? Is that why we haven't been introduced?" He questioned, staring at you as you sniffled a little, you never wanted him to feel that way because of something you were doing. It had nothing to do with him and all to do with your family,

"No...Chan, it's not that," You sighed shaking your head.

"I just need some more time to figure out how to handle this." You explained, taking in deep breaths but Chan was through with waiting if it meant hiding behind closed doors and sneaking out of the house like he was a teenager.

"Time won't solve anything if we don't face it! We're supposed to be a team...Yn..." You stared at him as you felt the doubt hanging over you like a dark cloud.

You'd been taught never to depend on anyone else no matter what but Chan had been breaking that thought ever since the two of you had met. He'd been breaking every lesson your family had hammered into you over the years and you loved him for it.

"Let me in, Yn...Let me be there for you,"

"I need...time." Your voice cracked as Chan growled a little, standing up and staring at you.

"How much time do you need? Huh? This affecting our relationship and I can't just keep waiting around for you to be ready." Your eyes landed on his as you shook your head. It sounded like he was getting ready to break up with you and the whole point of hiding him from your family was to avoid that,

"Chan, please." You pleaded desperately with him, reaching out for his hands but he stepped further away from you, shaking his head.

"I love you, Chan, and I want to be with you just give me...a little time to figure things out with them." You begged, watching as Chan's eyes softened a little.

"I want to be with you too Yn but we can't keep avoiding it. It isn't fair on either of us." You sighed a little rubbing the bridge of your nose and nodding, you knew he was right but it didn't make you feel any better about all of this,

"We're not teenagers, I don't want to sneak around anymore." He finished and you looked up at him.

"My family are...They have certain beliefs." You told him plainly, sitting down on the edge of his sofa and trying to figure out the best way to approach all of this. It wasn't religion-based but your family believed that certain things had to be a certain way for families to be able to work and grow. It was safe to say you didn't share a lot of their beliefs since you'd done everything you could to get away from them ever since you were at a legal age to do so.

"They have a whole thing about dating, I'm not supposed to date anybody without them giving their approval," You scoffed a little and shook your head as you finally let it off your chest, a weight felt as though it was coming straight off you as well

"You know, it took me almost six years to convince them to let me move out."

"Let you?" Chan asked softly as he sat down on the chair, staring at you as he waited for you to elaborate on it some more,

"I wasn't allowed to work either, they stopped me working. Claiming I needed to be a homemaker for your future partner."

"But you weren't married to anyone..." Chan hoped you weren't since the two of you had been dating for so long and you laughed dryly and shook your head,

"No, but they had plans for me and I broke them down so I wouldn't have to fit in the mould that they had for me."

"Yn.." He whispered, sympathy leaking from his words as he moved to kneel on the spot in front of you, your eyes finding his as you finally let the damn break and you told him everything.

"Every Saturday is reserved for them. I have to go around there, and we talk about work and life at home it was the condition they had for letting me move out...That and no dating," You laughed dryly and Chan moved to sit beside you, holding your hand tightly.

"I hadn't told them about us yet because I didn't want them to rush me back to their place...To shield me away and I certainly don't want them to judge you." You looked at him with tears running down your cheeks.

"I'm scared I'll lose you." Chan grabbed your hand in his and squeezed them softly. There was no way on this earth that he was ever going to let you go without a great fight,

"You're not going to lose me...Ever and you're certainly not going to face it alone, Yn. I'm here for you, no matter what." He told you and you smiled weakly, you wanted to believe him but if your family were set on something they weren't just going to back down from it.

"I appreciate it, Chan, but they're difficult." You told him as he gently wiped the tears from your cheeks and shook his head, he didn't care how difficult they were he was never going to let you go through any of it alone.

"Then we can stay hidden as long as you need but sooner or later you'll have to face them...I plan on making you my future spouse and spending forever with you." Your cheeks began to heat as you looked at him,

"We're in this together, I love you." He whispered before kissing your forehead, your chest tightening a little as you nodded.,

"I love you too and I'll tell them...eventually. I just-"

"We'll tell them together whenever you're ready." He said, cutting you off and kissing your cheek softly. You thought about it and laughed a little, they were going to hate you introducing a man you'd already been dating for months.

"They won't like it."

"Then they'll have to get over it. If they try and take you from me they'll have a big fight on their hands." He winked at you before you cuddled into his chest, relaxing for the first time since that morning and letting out a small and happy sigh.

"Let's go upstairs and finish our lazy day." He told you before you kissed him softly and made your way toward the staircase.

"I'll be up, I'm going to order your favourite." He chuckled as he watched you happily jogging up the stairs to his bedroom.

@chiisaiblog @sw33tnight @kaitieskidmore97 @laylasbunbunny @stayconnecteed @saymyspringrain @toplinehyunjin @katnisspeetaprim @acciocriativity @just-aelia @choisoorin @straykids5star @midnightfrog625 @beccaskz @scarletemeterio @halesandy @junhannies @gothic4under4lord @lixie-phoria @soulphoenix1618 @aerastus @jin-from-the-block @lensfilm @elizaschuyler18 @piratequeen-impact @kpopsstuffs @chaeyoungs @delulu18 @xyahrinx @katsukis1wife @anthropologymajorkpopmultistan @blairscott @4-chan-inpadella @niktwazny303 @moonlight-the-writer @armystay89 @hadassahchan @yxngbxkkie @myyouthdonut @extrhotjne @ca11me3mily @elissasimp @xakx @sleepb @kittymaryam-thebrowniefairy @kpopmenace143 @minhosify @loveforred @b1nn1e-1s-cut3

#skz #skz x reader #skz imagine #skz imagines #stray kids #stray kids x reader #stray kids imagine #stray kids imagines #bang chan #bang chan x reader #bang chan imagine #bang chan imagines #chan #chan x reader #chan imagine #chan imagines

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mysecretlittlelibrary · 1 year

Text

Honey Don't Feed It, It Will Come Back

Pairing: Reader x Venom

Word Count: 2.9k

Warnings: alright got lots to cover; dubcon/coercion, oral (f receiving), multiple orgasms, tentacle fucking, DP, anal, praise, a little size kink here and there, pet names, unprotected monster sex, creampie, overstimulation, forced orgasm - I think I got everything also a brief moment of harassment at the beginning and like standard venom level violence oh and there's mention of food habits so ya know

Genre: Smut... just smut and it's like... almost a dark fic

Summary: Venom takes an extreme liking to you because of your kindness after he saves your life || “Don’t let it in with no intention to keep it Jesus Christ // Don’t be kind to it // Honey don’t feed it, it will come back” ~ It Will Come Back by Hozier

***

You huff to yourself as you shut off your computer. You've been working all evening and if you don't make a point to leave and get something to eat now you might skip dinner by accident. Again. You quickly dial your local Chinese takeout place and order your usual as you lock up your apartment. You figure by the time you walk there to pick it up, it'll be ready. You get your food pretty soon after you get there, and wish the workers goodnight before you head back home. It's kind of cool outside tonight, especially for the summer and you're enjoying your walk through the city.

"A pretty lady like you should really avoid walking around alone so late." A voice snarls from behind you. You roll your eyes and keep walking, intent on ignoring the catcaller.

"Hey sweetheart we're talking to you!" A second voice chimes in and you try to subtly increase your pace as you steel your nerves. You gasp when a hand grabs your arm and yanks you backwards.

"It's rude to ignore people." The first voice sneers in your face, his grip tightening on your bicep.

"Let go of me." You huff trying to pull your arm out of his grasp.

"Not a chance."

"HEY! YOU SHOULD PICK ON SOMEONE YOUR OWN SIZE!" A voice growls and you stumble back when a large shadow plucks the man holding you away from you.

"Oh my God." You gasp falling against the wall behind you. A large shiny creature dangles the one man high in the air.

"IT'S NOT NICE TO GRAB LADIES WALKING HOME!" The monster scolds him.

"H-hey man, we weren't doing nothing." The man tries to appease the giant while the second guy finally snaps out of his stupor and takes off in the other direction.

"HEY! GET BACK HERE! I DON'T LIKE CHASING MY FOOD!" The monster stretches something resembling a tentacle towards the second guy, grabbing his ankle and pulling him back to hang next to the first.

"S-she's fine, see?"

"ONLY BECAUSE I CAME." What you assume are the creature's eyes narrow at them both. "YOU DIDN'T GRAB HER, BUT IF I EVER SEE YOU BOTHERING SOMEONE AGAIN I WILL EAT YOUR BRAIN!" The creature drops the second guy and he practically trips over his feet as he scrambles away. "YOU I WILL EAT NOW!" The creature says to guy one, dangling him over his mouth. The man lets out a scream that is cut off suddenly as you watch the creature bite off his head.

"Holy shit." You whisper. The monster tosses what's left of the guy down an alley and you vaguely hear his body clunk against something, likely a garbage bin.

"ARE YOU OKAY?"

"I- I'm fine. Thank you."

"YOU'RE WELCOME."

"Who are you?" You ask quietly.

"WE ARE VENOM."

"We?" You frown. Black tar-like goo slowly retracts to reveal a man's face.

"I'm Eddie. The- black goo is an alien, Venom."

"What like that body snatchers movie?"

"Not quite, I'm still in control here. We work as a team." Eddie explains.

"Well- thank you for, helping me with those guys but you didn't have to eat that one."

"It's how I appease the big guy. He gets sustenance from some chemical only found in brains and chocolate."

"Phenethylamine?" You ask.

"You know what it is?"

"Well yeah I- I work for a chem lab." You tell him. He's quiet for a moment before he sighs.

"Venom is insisting we offer to walk you home. If you're okay with that." Eddie says.

"I wouldn't want you to go out of your way I mean-"

"WE WANT TO! WE CAN MAKE SURE YOU'RE SAFE!" Venom reappears, swallowing Eddie's face behind black goo and stark white eyes.

"Alright well, it's only a couple of blocks. I suggest you, de-alien though I think people would freak out seeing an eight foot mass of black goo."

"I AM SEVEN FEET AND SIX INCHES! WE MEASURED!"

"Still you'd draw way too much attention to yourself like that."

"FINE." Venom relents and retracts into Eddie.

"That is so- fascinating." You mutter.

"Trust me, it loses its novelty." Eddie says. "Lead the way." He adds.

"Have you been this way your whole life?" You ask as you walk with him towards your apartment.

"What? With the alien? No, no this was an unfortunate accident. I simply can't get rid of him now." Eddie says.

"Do you not get along?" You frown.

"Not always. It's like having a roommate you can't hide from in your room when you're annoyed with them."

"Huh- so where does he, go? Like when you're out here... where is he?"

"That's a complicated question." He scoffs. "I never got your name." He looks at you.

"Sorry! It's y/n. I guess the whole scientist's curiosity thing got the best of me." You mutter.

"No need to apologize." He shakes his head. Eddie walks you all the way up to your apartment before attempting to part ways.

"Would you- like to come in?" You ask before you can chicken out.

"I wouldn't want to impose. It's late and-"

"It's the least I can do. You basically just saved my life. I'd like to thank you." You say.

"Well Venom wants to stay so I guess it couldn't hurt." Eddie says.

"Great! Make yourself at home. Would you like anything? I don't have brains but I certainly have a bag of chocolate if Venom would like any." You offer as he follows you in.

"Abagof chocolate? Stocking up early for Halloween?" He jokes sitting on your couch.

"No not yet. I have a coworker that has one hell of a sweet tooth and I recently learned that he works best when incentivized so, if ever we're working late chocolate actually helps him stay focused. But if we're not careful he'll tear through the whole bag in like three hours, it's kind of impressive actually." You laugh.

"Oh if you think that's impressive wait til you see what V can do. He'll tear through it in like three minutes. If he stops to take the wrapping off anyway. Usually though he just chucks the whole thing back and then- spits back up the trash like a cat with a hairball." Eddie scoffs.

"Well- that's... compact at least." You muse pulling the bag of candy from your pantry.

"That's one way to look at it."

"Did you want food by the way? I was out picking up Chinese in the first place. There's definitely enough to share." You say grabbing plates. You usually order enough to have leftovers so you can definitely give some to your guest, you'll just not have as much left over.

"Oh I'm not all that hungry but-"

"I'LL HAVE THAT CHOCOLATE PLEASE!" Venom's head emerges from behind Eddie to chime in.

"Of course. Eddie are you sure you don't want anything?"

"HE EATS BEFORE WE GO OUT AT NIGHT." Venom tells you.

"Well I feel weird eating if my guests aren't so you'll have to have something. You want chips or pretzels or something?"

"HE LIKES CHEESY SNACKS. DO YOU HAVE ANY OF THE CORN TRIANGLES?" Venom asks.

"Corn triangles?" You frown.

"THEY'RE ORANGE IN A RED BAG."

"Doritos? Sure I have some."

"HE'LL EAT THOSE."

"Venom I said I wasn't hungry." Eddie grumbles.

"AND SHE SAID SHE WON'T EAT IF YOU DON'T SO EAT THE CORN TRIANGLES." Venom glares at him.

"You guys argue like a married couple." You giggle. You grab the bag of chips, the bag of chocolate, and a plate before joining them on your couch.

"Honestly we aren't too far off." Eddie chuckles taking the chips from you. A slimy black appendage wraps around the chocolate and pulls it almost out of view entirely.

"Oh- are you guys in a relationship?" You ask curiously as you dump half of the takeout box onto your plate.

"Something to that effect. I mean- he's kinda inside my body like all the time. No such thing as privacy with him around." He shrugs.

"So- does your diet affect his, or vice versa?" You ask between bites of your dinner.

"Only psychologically."

"What?"

"The first few times you eat another person are kinda traumatizing but you get used to it. We have separate digestive systems so- I'm technically not consuming human brains."

"HE NEARLY HAD A PANIC ATTACK THE FIRST TIME I ATE SOMEONE BUT I WAS SAVING HIS LIFE." Venom chimes in and you realize the full bag of candy you gave him is now just a ball of trash.

"Venom." Eddie rolls his eyes.

"You know I feel like a brain eating vigilante would draw attention- even in a city like New York." You frown.

"I'm careful." Eddie says.

"Oh yeah? I don't think tossing that guy in what I assume is a dumpster tonight screams careful."

"V got carried away. We'll take care of it before anyone sees it in the morning."

"I'M ONLY ALLOWED TO EAT BAD GUYS. NO ONE CARES IF YOU EAT BAD GUYS." Venom says with what you think is a smile.

"Not quite, cops still care but that's we we're careful about it." Eddie tells him.

"WE COULD EAT THE COPS!"

"It'd be hard to eat all of the NYPD I think." You muse.

"I COULD TOTALLY DO IT."

"No we are not eating cops. Bad guys, remember?" Eddie sighs.

"Depending on who you ask cops do fall under that category." You shrug.

"REALLY?!"

"Don't rile him up." Eddie points at you in warning while you laugh.

"I wasn't trying to I promise." You say with a wide smile that makes it hard for Eddie to keep his stern expression.

"Sure. I'd love to stay but we do have to take care of that creep in the dumpster before sunrise so- we should probably head out." Eddie stands.

"Of course. Thanks again for your help tonight." You say standing with him to walk him out.

"Not a problem. Thanks for the snacks."

"You're welcome. If you need anything, door's always open." You smile.

"BYE Y/N! WE'LL SEE YOU AGAIN." Venom says before disappearing.

"Have a goodnight." Eddie nods before turning down the hall. You lock your door and finish your food with thoughts of the curious duo staying at the front of your mind even as you get ready for bed that night.

"I REALLY LIKED HER." Venom declares to Eddie.

"Yeah, she was nice."

"WE SHOULD GO SEE HER AGAIN TOMORROW."

"No. We can't just pop up at her place for no reason."

"WHY NOT? SHE SAID THE DOOR WAS ALWAYS OPEN."

"She did not mean it literally it's just a nice thing people say V. We're not going back there tomorrow. End of discussion." Eddie says and when Venom doesn't respond he assumes he's relenting. He's not actually, but Venom is learning to pick and choose his battles when it comes to Eddie so he'll keep his plans to himself for now.

The next night a knock on your window surprises you while you're watching a movie. You gasp when you see Venom smiling and waving frantically at you. You rush to pull the window open and he climbs inside quickly.

"Venom? What are you doing? Is everything okay?" You frown.

"EVERYTHING IS FINE. I JUST WANTED TO SEE YOU AGAIN." He says looking down at you. His gaze makes you conscious of the fact that you're in a small tank top and a pair of shorts.

"You know you could've used the front door. Right?" You ask walking to your kitchen to put distance between you.

"I THOUGHT I'D DRAW TOO MUCH ATTENTION WALKING INTO YOUR BUILDING." Venom shrugs looking around your apartment.

"You would but Eddie wouldn't."

"HE WOULDN'T COME IF I ASKED HIM."

"So- wait you basically dragged him here?"

"SOMETHING LIKE THAT. HE SAID WE COULDN'T JUST COME SEE YOU EVEN THOUGH YOU SAID THE DOOR WAS ALWAYS OPEN."

"You guysarebasically an old married couple." You laugh. "You ate the whole bag of chocolate yesterday but I did run to a corner store today and pick up a Hershey bar so- you can have that if you'd like." You tell him.

"I DIDN'T COME HERE TO GET CHOCOLATE." He says with something in his voice that you totally miss while rumaging through your fridge.

"Really? I figure with your size you're like always hungry." You muse turning towards him. It's then that you realize how his eyes are focused on you in a way you can only describe as predatory.

"I WANT SOMETHING ELSE FROM YOU." He says practically boxing you in the kitchen.

"Unless you're here to eat me I don't have a brain lying around to give you." You quip trying to slow your increasing heartrate.

"I WILL EAT YOU, BUT NOT YOUR BRAIN."

"What?" You breathe out, the fear you're feeling now mixing with confusion and lust you try to tamper down.

"YOU DON'T FEAR ME LIKE OTHERS DO."

"In general? No I don't fear you but- right now I'm unsure how to feel."

"WHY? I WON'T HURT YOU."

"You just said you're going to eat me."

"IN A WAY YOU WILL ENJOY." Venom cages you against the counter, and you shrink back

"Venom now wait a second-"

"I'LL TREAT YOU VERY WELL."

"That's not-"

"YOU WANT ME- I CAN SMELL IT. WHY DENY IT?"

"You can smell it?"

"OF COURSE I CAN."

"Oh-"

"JUST LET ME HAVE YOU Y/N. LET MEDEVOURYOU." Venom says. You pause for a moment to consider your options.

"O-okay." You say quietly and his arm wraps around you immediately crowding your space. You gasp when he pulls your shorts off so fast you're surprised they didn't rip. He lifts you up onto his shoulders as if you're a bag of feathers and his tongue snakes out of his mouth and between your legs before you can prepare. Venom laps at your cunt with fervour, your legs squeezing around his head at the way pleasure builds between your legs. You're pressed up against the cabinets as he slurps up your juices like he's dehydrated.

"TASTES SO GOOD." He growls out as his tongue thrusts in and out of you eagerly. His tongue is thick and long, almost impossibly so as it fills you so well. You squirm against his mouth chasing your release that you can feel approaching quickly.

"Venom- I'm, fuck I'm close." You whine.

"DO IT. LET ME TASTE YOUR RELEASE." Venom orders and the way his tongue moves against you as he talks is enough to send you over the edge with a cry. You barely realize Venom lowering you from his shoulders and you hardly have a moment to recover before he's impaling you on his dick. Your back arches at the way he fills you.

"Fuck!" You moan out and Venom practically roars when your walls contract around him.

"YOU'RE SO TIGHT." Venom groans. He tightens his grip on you and sets a pace, raising and lowering you on him with ease.

"God you're big." You whimper falling forward against him as he uses you like a human fleshlight. You claw at his arms, trying to ground yourself while he fucks you open. Tentacle like appendages suddenly appear and wrap around your breasts, teasing your nipples.

"SO PRETTY." He smiles at the way your face contorts with pleasure and bends down enough to kiss you. His tongue invades your mouth in an overwhelming way, swallowing your moans. You can hardly tell where he ends and you begin, it's like he's everywhere at once. More tentacles appear, one teasing your back entrance while another toys with your clit. He pulls away from your mouth as he continues to prod at your ass without slowing his pace. "I WANT YOU HERE TOO, YOU'LL LET ME HAVE YOU HERE, WON'T YOU?" Venom asks while rubbing tight circles against your clit. You're drowning in pleasure and barely able to register is question as another orgasm builds inside you. "COME ON MY LITTLE MORSEL. TELL ME I CAN DO IT." Venom coaxes, fucking you harder, teasing you more.

"Yes! Fuck yes Venom! You can do anything! Fuck!" You cry out shaking as he rips your second orgasm from you. At that moment, Venom thrusts into into your ass and another scream falls from your lips. If you thought he was everywhere before, now it's even more overwhelming as he fucks you onto his dick in time with the tentacle moving in your ass.

"YESSSSSS." He hisses out.

"V-Venom 's it's too much." You whimper, every part in your body feels too hot.

"YOU CAN TAKE IT. YOU SAID I CAN DO ANYTHING TO YOU. I'M GOING TO RUIN YOU." He says. His tongue snakes out of his mouth and slithers down your chest, lapping at one nipple while a tentacle continues to work the other. It's too much and the speed with which your third orgasm starts building scares you. He very well might actually devour you at this rate. "YOU'RE TAKING ME SO WELL. YOU WERE MADE FOR THIS."

"I- I- please Venom- fucking hell-" Your whimpers are hardly coherent as pleasure threatens to consume you.

"I CAN FEEL ANOTHER ORGASM COMING. LET GO FOR ME MORSEL. GIVE IN." Venom beguiles, his touch returning to your clit to push you over the edge. With the way he works every part of you there's no stopping your release when it gushes from you. "SO GOOD. ANOTHER." He commands.

"I- wait Venom wait- too soon." You plead breathlessly.

"I WANT ANOTHER I'LL TAKE ANOTHER."

"I can't- n-not yet."

"YOU CAN BECAUSE I'M GOING TO MAKE YOU." He declares as he continues rubbing against your too sensitive clit. You try to squirm away from his ministrations but with him filling your holes you're unable to run as he plays with your most sensitive areas.

"S-shit Venom please I-"

"JUST ONE MORE. ONE MORE AND I'LL LET YOU HAVE A BREAK." He promises and it's enough to send you over the edge a fourth time with a weak whimper. Venom lets up on your clit, focusing now, on his own release. He drives into you, little whines still falling from your lips as exhaustion sets in. "I COULD STAY LIKE THIS FOREVER." He declares with a grunt as he floods your walls with evidence of his orgasm. He stands there holding you for a while, wondering if moving you would break you. Eventually, he moves you to the couch and lays with you on top of him. Now that he's experienced this, knows the warmth of you, it's something he refuses to go without again. Whether you want this or not Venom is yours now and will always find his way back to you.

***

#marvel #marvel fanfiction #venom x reader #venom fanfiction #venom #eddie brock #venom smut

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fyorina · 4 days

Text

ᡣ𐭩 TO SOMEONE FROM A WARM CLIMATE

FEATURING: beast dazai osamu

SUMMARY: you're with him. you're actually with him. everything all of the other dazais have got to experience, he now can too. in his exhilaration, he almost forgets about the threats lurking on the horizon. until you slap him in the face with it, that is. {wordcount: 18k; fem!reader; romance & tragedy}

AUTHOR'S NOTES: PART THREEEEEEE i had a particularly terrible day today guys hahahh literally everything that could go wrong went wrong </3 i'm very tired, but i hope you guys enjoy this installment. for all of u who read badlands, we have a very anticipated parallel scene in this one. + i added a little surprise pov at the end heheh

GENERAL WARNINGS: again, i'll just leave this warning on every chapter - dazai struggles a lot with disassociation/derealization & losing himself in the pages of the book. + we have a bit more of unhinged thought processes on dazai's end which becomes particularly apparent during one of these scenes. as always please let me know if i forgot any warnings

SEE: UNREAL UNEARTH SERIES MASTERLIST READ: BADLANDS SIDE A

You wake up from what might be the best sleep of your life to the sun peeking through the blinds of an unfamiliar bedroom.

It takes a few moments for you to regain your bearings, yawning and stretching as you sit up in the bed, trying to figure out where you are. It’s fancy, fancier than anything you’ve ever come across before. The dark sheets are soft and silky against your skin, you swear that this must be what clouds feel like. The room itself is a bit odd—large but empty, there’s a dresser on the far wall and a nightstand next to the bed, but there are no trinkets or knick knacks that usually litter a person’s bedroom. It’s almost reminiscent of a hotel room, you think.

Your gaze drifts over to the side, where a vast window looks over the city. You can hardly see the view through the blinds, but you can tell you’re high enough that only clouds can be seen below, no sign of the bustling city that you know rests beneath you. Your hazy mind starts to remember what happened last night: the club, the convenience store, your apartment, the leak. Dazai.

Dazai.

Your face immediately feels hot, hand coming up to curl your fingers around your mouth as you realize whose room you’re in. Your eyes flicker around the room nervously even though you know he’s not in here with you. You wonder what time it is, you reach around for your phone to check but you must’ve dropped it somewhere in your exhaustion last night—hopefully somewhere in his apartment (can this even be considered an apartment? it’s huge!) Maybe he’s waiting for you out in the main room of his penthouse, you hope he is. You also hope that he got some sleep last night, you remember that he insisted for you to take the bed but you still feel bad that you usurped his room from him.

… Although it’s not much of a room. Big and fancy with a view that costs more than your life, yeah, but nothing that makes it his. Like a husk. A house, not a home. The bed doesn’t even smell like him—well, you can’t say you know for sure what he smells like besides the cologne he sported in your past few meetings with him, but you know it doesn’t smell like him because it doesn’t smell like anything. Only the faint smell of old detergent meets your nose, not a single other sign that someone has been living here.

You push the covers off of you and swing your feet over the side of the bed, stretching again as you kick your feet out with another yawn. You think this might be the first time in months that you haven’t woken up with an aching back or sore neck and you can’t help but cast a longing look back at Dazai’s bed, wishing you could steal it and drag it back to your apartment to replace your ruined bed.

You don’t bother changing as you drag your way out of his bedroom; you’re decent enough in a burgundy camisole and matching pair of shorts. Yes, you’d chosen your nicer pajamas because yes, you’d still been hoping maybe something would happen between the two of you. You hadn’t realized how hard the exhaustion was going to hit until too late.

Maybe something can still happen, you giggle a bit to yourself as you open the door to his apartment and then stop yourself immediately, horrified at yourself. You wonder when you became like this. You swear you don’t usually go around desperate for sex like this, you feel like a bit embarrassed, honestly, that your train of thought keeps leading this way but you blame Dazai because he’s plain cruel for flirting with you as intimately as he does without even sparing you a kiss. It’s like he’s trying to drive you crazy. You’re becoming even more convinced that the man set some sort of spell over you.

“Gooooood morning!” you sing, your voice still tinged with sleep as you exit the bedroom and catch sight of the object of your desires lounging back on the dark couch in the main room of his penthouse—penthouse, insanity—typing away at his phone with a frown. He’s dressed in the same outfit he was in last night, which is also the same outfit that he wore last week, and every other week before that—you wonder if he just didn’t change or if he has a dozen pairs of the same outfit.

Dazai doesn’t respond, gaze cutting upward, a bit too wide to be casual. The expression on his face is entirely indecipherable, something caught between shock and an emotion you can’t quite place, but it’s softer, you think, maybe a bit sadder too. You brush it off, wondering if he forgot you were here, which would be embarrassing but also a bit ridiculous. So, you think that maybe you just look like a mess after waking up. You should have brushed your hair before coming out of the room, you don’t even know if you brought a brush with you last night. You can’t remember.

You plop yourself down onto the couch next to him. Laying the side of your head against the cushions and curling up a bit, you position your body to face him as you say, “Your… apartment is so nice.” There’s a longing lilt to your voice as you speak. “If you’re not careful, I might never leave.”

It’s a joke, of course, you don’t want to intrude, but you think your life would be one hundred times easier if you were living in a place like this rather than your small, shitty apartment. Plus, you get a view and you’re not talking about the city. Dazai looks gorgeous beneath the mid-morning light, you think. Well, he’s been gorgeous every time you’ve seen him but you think especially so now, with the way his smooth skin glows and his dark eyes look almost gold beneath the sun rays, but you notice the dark bag beneath his visible eye and guiltily, you wonder if he got any sleep last night. He’d long abandoned his phone, attention on you, and you feel warm beneath his gaze.

“I don’t think I’d mind that all too much,” he murmurs, eye curved up as smiles softly.

You’re flustered, instantly, and your face feels hot as you avert your gaze to the coffee table in front of you. Your eyes focus on a familiar item sitting on it and you light up, reaching out for it. “My phone! You found it!”

You pull it toward you and unlock it, frowning when you realize that you must’ve left it open on your landlord’s contact information last night, trying to figure out what you should message him. You sigh as your tip your head back against the couch, realizing that you’re going to have to deal with all of this today. Fighting with your landlord about the leak, ordering a new mattress and a new laptop—god, you don’t even think you can afford that right now, you’re going to have to place a deposit down for your seat at school soon and then figure out tuition.

“You dropped it outside the room,” Dazai notes, drawing your attention back to him as he nods at the phone. “How did you sleep?”

“Better than I have in years,” you sigh wistfully, letting your head fall to the side to look at him. “You have to tell me where you got your mattress. This is the first time I haven’t woken up with a shitty back in forever… especially considering I need a new one because my ceiling decided to drop gallons of water on my bed.”

“Gin-chan would know,” Dazai says, and you can’t help but notice how his gaze seems to track down a bit to your lips as you speak. You try not to smile a bit. You think you fail. You do shift a bit closer. Subtly. You think he notices if the way his tongue darts out to wet his lips says anything about it. His words hardly register until he says, “I have to leave in a bit for a meeting, she’ll come make sure you’re okay and see if you need anything.”

Irrationally, your heart drops with the illogical fear that maybe you’re reading into things because who is Gin-chan and why does she know what type of mattress Dazai has? Maybe it’s not irrational, because that’s odd, isn’t it? Who would know what type of mattress someone has besides like… a wife? But wouldn’t he have mentioned a wife or a girlfriend in the past few weeks? Of course, he would have… right? You didn’t notice a ring, but you don’t want to be obvious and look down to check now. There’s no way he’s the type to cheat anyway, so you assume you’re just missing something—unless they’re not on good terms with each other but haven’t divorced? But… Your thoughts begin to spiral, rapidly and terribly, because you are not a homewrecker, you swear, but you don’t think you’ve ever wanted someone more than Dazai Osamu.

Dazai’s smile sharpens a bit, dark eye flashing playfully, as if he knows exactly what you’re thinking. He leans his head in a bit more, so close that you swear you can count every single individual eyelash, so close that your breath catches when the tip of his nose brushes yours. “Gin-chan is my secretary, I brought her off the streets when she was a child. She’s a sweet girl, I’m sure you’ll get along.”

Oh, you’re so cruel, Dazai Osamu.

You hate that you instantly feel relieved.

You hate even more that he definitely notices.

He leans in a bit closer, your breath hitches, but just when you swear his lips are about to brush yours for the first time, he pulls back to sit up straight again. His cheeks are dusted red, welcome evidence that you’re not the only one who was flustered by his proximity.

You clear your throat in a desperate attempt to regain some sense of control over yourself and then try to change the subject. “What type of meeting do you have?” you ask curiously, and then immediately amend the question, realizing this is your chance to question him about his job again, “What do you even do?”

Dazai hesitates, just like he did the last time you asked this question. You think he might try to avoid the question again but instead he says, “I took over my… father’s company a few years ago. I’ve been running it since.”

Your eyebrows shoot up a bit, impressed, although you notice how he seems a bit bitter at the mention of his father. “Really?” you ask, surprised. He can’t be much older than you. What was he eighteen, nineteen when he took over? “What type of company?”

“It’s a… sort of conglomerate. We have stakes in a bunch of different industries,” he tells you, dark hair falling in his eyes as he rests his head back against the couch. His eyes don’t leave you once, almost as if he’s drinking in the sight of you, you can’t control the way your heart races beneath his gaze. He reaches out, fingers brushing your skin in a way that makes goosebumps rise, and you can hardly breathe as he fixes the strap of your camisole, you hadn’t even realized it had slipped off your shoulder.

His fingers linger for a moment before he drops his hand back to his lap; you long for his touch again instantly.

“That sounds like a lot of work,” you say quietly, and suddenly Dazai looks a lot older and much more tired, gaze flickering down to his lap.

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “It is.”

You’re not sure what to say for a moment, so instead, you decide to reach out and grab his hand, intertwining your fingers with his and squeezing gently. He doesn’t hold your hand back at first, staring at where your hands are connected with a conflicted, unreadable expression, but you don’t let it bother you, holding his hand just a bit tighter before saying: “Well, I’m sure you’re doing a good job.”

He lets out a puff of air, sighing, and then finally, his fingers tighten around yours.

A bit too tight, but you don’t mind.

He doesn’t look like he believes you, and you think that’s a bit sad but you’re not sure what else to say, or even if there’s anything else to say. Dazai’s gaze flickers back up to meet yours and you think that you might not be breathing again. You’re hyper aware of his touch, the way his fingers curl around yours, thumb absently rubbing soft circles on the back of your hand. He’s close—you hadn’t realized just how close the two of you had gotten as you spoke. You’re leaning forward and he’s leaning in, both of your heads resting against the back of the couch.

You could kiss him, the thought rings through your head again. Your throat feels tight, the silence between you is comfortable but tense, as if he can sense the thoughts ricocheting through your head and is battling with his own. He shifts forward a bit more, gaze dropping down to your lips, and you brace yourself, tilting your face up a bit and then-

“Sir?”

You draw back right away, embarrassed, eyes cutting across the room where a girl with long dark hair stands, cheeks flushed and gray eyes averted up to the ceiling. She’s young, no older than seventeen or eighteen, and dressed in a sleek black suit. Is this Gin?

“Gin-chan.” Dazai confirms your suspicions as he greets the girl easily. “Is something the matter?”

“Chuuya-san is in your office,” Gin says, careful to keep her voice formal despite the way her face is on fire. “The executives have been waiting in the conference room on the thirty-eighth floor for twenty minutes. He says if you don’t come out, he’ll come in here and drag you out.”

Dazai sighs dramatically, eyes sliding shut. “Chuuya always has the worst timing,” he complains, rising to his feet. “Gin-chan, tend to my lovely guest while I’m gone, would you?”

Gin finally turns her gaze on Dazai, a bit surprised. “You don’t want me coming with you, sir?”

Dazai waves her off. “I’m giving you a more important job. I’ll make the slug take meeting notes. He’ll love that,” he says with an easy smile before looking down at you. “I’ll be back later tonight… wait for me?”

You stare up at him, breathless. You have to force yourself to nod. “Yeah,” you finally agree, voice wavering. “I’ll wait for you.”

The smile he gives you is brilliant, eye shining in a way that puts the night sky to shame.

You think you could stare at it forever.

His fingers burn.

Dazai can hardly pay attention to the meeting taking place around him as he stares down at his hand, the ghost of your touch still warming his skin. He feels giddy, his chest light and heart erratic in his chest. You’re upstairs. You’re in his room. You were in his bed this morning. You told him good morning. You came out and joined him on the couch while you were still in your night clothes. You almost kissed him. You almost kissed him. He almost kissed you. He would have, had Gin not showed up.

God, it was like something out of one of his dreams, one of the vague memories that haunt him when he’s at his lowest. When he’d wake up with wet cheeks and a tight chest, throat thick with aching desire and longing for a life that he never thought he’d have.

But he has it.

He has it.

He has you.

“Where is Gin-chan?” Kouyou’s voice tears Dazai from his thoughts. Dazai turns his gaze onto the woman, careful to keep his expression void of any of the emotions coursing through his body. “She is supposed to be attached at your hip, no?”

Dazai tilts his head to the side. “Gin-chan is busy with more important matters,” Dazai says dismissively.

Kouyou lets out a noise caught between a puff of amusement and shock, covering the lower half of her face with her fan as she watches Dazai with calculating eyes. Dazai wonders if she knows that you’re here, if Chuuya had mentioned anything to her already and this is just a test to see his reaction to her prodding.

“More important matters than the first meeting with all five of your executives in the same place in two years?” Kouyou presses, fanning her fan lightly as she tilts her head to the side.

“Yes,” is all Dazai says in response, not leaving any more room for conversation on the topic. He sees Chuuya roll his eyes from the corner of his vision, knowing just what Gin is up to.

“What is this meeting about anyway?” Ace suddenly speaks up, looking irate from where he’s sitting at the round table, leg folded over his knee as he looks around the room disdainfully. “This is disturbing my casinos, I had integral meetings with shareholders this morning that I had to reschedule.”

“If your casinos are so easily disrupted, perhaps they’re not quite as valuable as you keep making them out to be.” Piano Man gives Ace a demure smile as he speaks, veiling the venom dripping from his words—the most recently promoted of the five executives has no mercy when it comes to taking digs at the self proclaimed Jewel King.

Ace’s head snaps in Piano Man’s direction, lips turning down and eyes icy. Dazai wonders curiously if the man would snap something back with Chuuya sitting right next to him—that would be the end of that, Chuuya has always been viciously protective over his Flags. Dazai never liked Ace, knowing that the man is loyal only to himself, but he’s brought in masses of money and information to the Port Mafia. He considers whether or not he should step in, but decides to just watch idly, unsure of if he’s entertained or bored, folding his hands on the table and letting his head fall to the side lazily.

He wants to go back upstairs. Back to you. He’s tired of this already, every day it’s been something new the past few weeks—issues with the military police, issues with low ring organizations that seem to think they can play with the big leagues, issues internally. He wonders what you and Gin might be talking about, and then bitterly, he thinks it should be him sitting up there talking to you.

“This is about the Russians?” Verlaine drawls, looking severely unimpressed with the tension at the round table as he looks between Kouyou, Chuuya and Dazai. “I’ve heard from some of my birds that Nabakov’s men were spotted in the Sakae and Kanagawa wards. Interesting, no?”

Sakae and Kanagawa?

Dazai suddenly is a lot more attentive to the conversation at hand, if only because your apartment is around those wards. He was already reluctant thinking of letting you go back there, knowing that it’s not the best area in the city, but now? The thought makes his stomach churn, blunt nails digging into the wood of the round tables.

It’s not an option.

It’s not.

Kouyou raises a parchment between two fingers to show off to the rest of the executives before passing it over to Dazai, who stares at it distastefully for a moment before plucking it from her hand. He scans the words rapidly, lips twisting down into a deep frown the more he reads.

“What is it?” Chuuya asks impatiently, fingers thrumming on the table as Dazai reads.

“A missive from the Pale Flame,” Kouyou tells him, voice smooth and curious, eyes not leaving Dazai once as she waits for his reaction to it. “Nabokov wishes to personally apologize for not coming to the meeting himself two months ago. He claims that he’s coming to Tokyo to handle an issue regarding one of his major narcotics suppliers in three weeks and wants to host us under the guise of a business event to make amends and prove his dedication to our continuing alliance.”

The war in the mainland is over, the realization hits him hard, like he’s been doused in freezing water and struck with a train all at once. His vision begins to tunnel, just a bit, but enough for him to know he has to pull himself back together before it gets worse, but it’s hard because the implications of that-

“That’s not suspicious at all,” Piano Man sighs whimsically. “Since when does Nabokov care for apologies and amends? The man’s pride goes beyond the heights of the moon.”

“War must be going that badly,” Ace scoffs, amused. “I suppose we chose right in declining their pleas for support.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure,” Piano Man says flippantly, side-eyeing Ace blatantly.

Ace’s expression twists, but as soon as it does, it smooths out again, and a slow smirk is curling at the edges of his lips. He parts his lips to dole out a side comment and Dazai chooses to tune out the petty arguments, focusing on his own dilemma.

It can’t be a coincidence. Right when he finally starts accepting you into his life, the three way war plaguing the Russian underworld comes to an end and the threat that Dostoevsky poses to you becomes all the more present. Fate, the word haunts him, curses him, he wants to spit in its face but every passing day reminds him that the gods must be laughing down at him.

Doubt begins to riddle his chest, festering and spreading—should he send you away? Pretend that the past few weeks never happened and send you off to one of your friend’s apartments? But what if someone already saw him with you? If the wrong person saw, and he sent you away, he’d be signing your death sentence himself.

“What do you think?” Kouyou addresses him, drawing Dazai from his spiraling thoughts.

“The war between Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Nabokov ended,” Dazai says, staring down at the table as his mind races. “The missive is a declaration of war.”

“Why would Nabokov declare war on us?” Ace asks doubtfully, leaning back in his chair. “For not giving him support?”

“Nabokov is a puppet.” Dazai’s tongue slides against the back of his teeth, trying to piece together what the best course of action to take would be. He’d been sure that the territory wars in Russia would last at least another two to three months. He’s sure that Dostoevsky is behind the missive, he doubts that Tolstoy would make a move into Yokohama, he’d prefer to move west, but he needs confirmation. But if it is Dostoevsky… Why has this timeline sped up so much? Dostoevsky isn’t supposed to officially make a move in Yokohama until after the Guild. The thought is cold and unnerving, he doesn’t like it. He’s been basing all of his plans around his knowledge of the other universes, so why is everything changing suddenly? He turns his attention to Ace and Verlaine, “Find out if Tolstoy or Dostoevsky came out on top.”

He has his suspicions, but he needs it confirmed before he makes any more plans. He has to be careful now, excruciatingly so. He can’t risk anything now that you’re with him and the threat of Dostoevsky has become exceedingly more imminent. However cautious and meticulous he’s been the past seven years, he needs to up it tenfold. He needs Dostoevsky six feet under. He needs Christie six feet under.

And most importantly, he needs to keep you safe, locked in the ivory tower, ignorant to the looming threats until Dazai has properly handled them.

But to do that, he needs to convince you to stay.

How is he supposed to do that without setting off alarm bells?

“What of the business event that we’ve been invited to?” Piano Man asks, white hair falling into his face as he tilts his head to the side. “Do we attend or tell him to shove it?”

“How eloquent,” Ace digs, but goes silent when Dazai gives him a icy look, no longer in the mood for their petty back and forth.

“We attend,” Dazai answers, exhaling as he turns his attention to the side, looking out the bulletproof window giving a vast view of the city’s busiest ports. “If it’s under the guise of a business event, there will be plenty of legitimate corporations there to use as shields should things go wrong, but the Russians aren’t stupid enough for that regardless. They won’t spill blood on foreign land in view of people who live in the light, it’s the fastest way for them to get the Special Division or the Hunting Dogs sicced on them. This will be the easiest way to gather information… and to try to take out the mastermind.”

Chuuya does not look happy with Dazai’s declaration, likely already tallying all of the things that could go wrong. It’ll be the easiest way to get to Dostoevsky, yes, but it’ll also be the easiest way for them to get to Dazai. Dazai is not stupid and he knows he has to be especially vigilant now, but no progress will be made unless some gambles are made—Fyodor Dostoevsky is slimy and slippery in every universe, for Dazai to get his hands on the man, he’s going to have to take a few risks. Dazai just has to ensure said risks are minimal, because every risk he takes is a risk to you too.

God, he feels sick, his head hurts so badly that he thinks he might die. If he was any other version of himself, he could drag himself to you and bury himself in your arms, a surefire way of making the pain disappear. But he’s not any other version of himself—he’s him, and he’s so bitter, because even when he has you, he doesn’t really have you, not in the way that he wants.

“Meeting dismissed,” Dazai says coldly, hardly sparing his executives another look. He’s ready to go back upstairs and be with you, even if he’s not ready to put that mask back on yet, terrified of scaring you away. “Get me the information I asked for.”

There’s a few spattered agreements and farewells. Verlaine, Ace and Piano Man all file out of the conference room. Kouyou and Chuuya stay behind. Dazai’s eyes slide shut, waiting for whatever the two have to say.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Chuuya finally says, voice gruff and Dazai doesn’t have to look at him to know that his fingers are probably digging into his palms in frustration. “Things are about to get bad. Don’t let some girl distract you from what’s important.”

Dazai looks up at Chuuya now, slowly, gaze glacial. If Chuuya were anyone else, he would’ve backed down or apologized, but Chuuya is Chuuya, so he only raises his chin, jaw tightening when he realizes that he pissed off Dazai with that comment.

You are what’s important, is what Dazai wants to say in your defense. He’s done all of this for you—you and Odasaku, but he bites the words back, resorting instead to turning his gaze to Kouyou, dismissing Chuuya without a word. Chuuya scoffs loudly and then he spins on his heel with a swish of his coat and storms out of the meeting room.

Dazai tilts his head to the side, daring Kouyou to mention it. The woman only raises her eyebrows, a knowing expression painted on her face, as always.

“One of my girls got their hands on a Russian suspected of being a member of the House of the Dead,” Kouyou says, fanning her face gently. “We’ve been unsuccessful so far in getting him to reveal any information. It could be useful in figuring out whether Tolstoy or Dostoevsky came out on top.”

Dazai exhales, because of course he can’t go right back to you, when has life ever been so easy for him? He pushes himself to his feet, body on automatic as he makes his way out of the meeting room and toward the elevator.

It’s fine, he tells himself, he’ll be back to you soon.

He just has to make this fast, and Dazai is never as efficient as he is when he has you as motivation.

Dazai is careful to make sure that no blood stains his face or hands as he leans back against the wall of the elevator. Getting the information out of the rat hadn’t taken too long once he got there, but the following conversation with Kouyou took an eternity. He watches the floors tick upward from the twenty-second floor all the way up to the forty-sixth, back to his penthouse where you’re hopefully still waiting. An irrational fear claws at his chest, that you slipped away and left the building, descending back down into the city that’s quickly threatening to become an imminent warzone. He knows it’s illogical, Gin would have told him if you left so you must still be up there, but a part of him can’t bring himself to believe it.

“I’ll wait for you.”

Your face blends with another version of yourself as he lets his eyes slide shut. The image of his apartment shifting into an unfamiliar hotel room. The atmosphere is much more somber in the hotel room, Dazai feels anxiety swelling in his throat and hope bubbling in his chest no matter how hard he tries to push it away as those very same words ring through his head. In a desperate attempt to sideline the emotions he can’t seem to control, he leans in to press his lips against yours. His own breath catches as the memory floods through him—he can feel the pads of his fingers burning as he pushes you back against the bed, his heart racing as his body hovers above yours, his mind foggy and dizzy as he kisses you so deeply that he think he might die from lack of air to his lungs. His tongue brushes against your bottom lip, his body slides on top of yours, hips slotting between your thighs and then-

Ding.

His eyes snap back open as he’s forced back to reality, the sharp trill of the elevator drawing him from the maze of the pages just as the doors slide open. He’s hardly able to settle down, sweaty palms wiping at his black jacket and tongue pressing to the roof of his mouth as he steps out of the elevator and into his penthouse, praying he doesn’t look half as frazzled as he feels.

It’s so bright, he thinks to himself, unused to having so much sunlight in his penthouse, usually keeping the windows blacked out just as he does in his office, but he figured you’d find that a bit odd so he made sure to fix it before you woke up in the morning. His gaze drags across the room, and he hates that his pulse spikes when he doesn’t immediately spot you, but it’s only a momentary spike when he realizes that you’re laying on the couch with Gin, some unfamiliar show playing in the background as you waves your arms around, talking rapidly.

He doesn’t move for a moment, standing there, admiring you—the way your skin glows beneath the sun, the way you smile widely, eyes glittering as you speak. You’re so animated. So alive. Dazai just can’t get used to it. He wonders if this is what his life would be like every day, if you stayed around. Waking up to you in the morning, relaxing with you under the early sun before he goes off to deal with his work, coming home to you waiting for him on the couch. Realistically, he knows it’s not that simple—you have your own goals and dreams and Dazai swore that in this life, he’d make sure you’d achieve them, so you can’t just sit around his penthouse all day until he comes back… but maybe it’s a practical enough to hope for the next few weeks until Dostoevsky is handled.

But first, he has to make sure you stay here and not try to go off with one of your friends, which will be a trial in itself. He’s not sure how to go about it yet, so he just needs to have faith that it’s not something you bring up right away.

Gin catches sight of him first, rising to her feet instantly, hands locked behind her back. “Sir,” she greets, nodding her head down a bit in respect.

You perk up at her words, leaning up to finally catch sight of him, peeking your head over the back of the couch and then raising your hand to wave at him. “Welcome back,” you say with a grin. “How was the meeting?”

Gin bids you a quiet goodbye before making her way out of Dazai’s place back into the office, leaving Dazai alone with you.

“Agonizing,” he answers truthfully, voice a low drawl as the corner of his lips instinctively curls up at the sight of you. He doesn’t come any closer, leaning back against the wall as you prop yourself up on the back of the sofa to look at him, resting your cheek on your folded arms.

A smile spreads across your face at his words, amused, and he wonders distantly if you would be even half as amused if you knew what the meeting was about or what he had to do afterward. The thought nearly makes his own smile falter, throat spasming. No matter how easily you might’ve accepted him and his past in the other universes, he knows that it won’t be the same in this one because it’s not his past. Not for the first time, he’s viciously jealous of all of his other selves—not only because of their relationship with you, but because they hadn’t needed to go to the depths of hell that he has had to in the name of keeping you and Odasaku safe.

It’s so hard. Lonely. The other Dazais always liked to insist that they were alone but they weren’t—not really. They always had so many people surrounding them even if they refused to accept it, meanwhile he-

He has nothing. Even now when you’re here, he knows that he’ll never be able to have you as intimately as the other Dazais did. He’ll never be able to open up to you like they did, rely on you like they did. He can’t because of the risk it would bring to the fragile stability of this world. He can’t because if you knew the truth, it would drive you away.

He’s so tired.

He’s not sure what you must see on his face, but your expression falls a bit as you look at him. You push yourself to your feet and he can’t help but notice that you’d changed out of your pajamas into a pair of leggings and a burgundy sweater. He also notices, a bit more dreadfully, that the duffle you’d brought last night is sitting outside his bedroom door, packed.

“I messaged one of my friends,” you say, voice a bit awkward, a jolt of panic shoots through him, realizing that you are bringing this up right away and he hasn’t had time to figure out how to go about convincing you to stay. “She said I could stay with her until my apartment is fixed, so I won’t be bothering you much longer. Thanks for letting me stay the night.”

Dazai hardly refrains from sighing and letting his eyes slide shut in frustration.

He really can’t get a break.

“I…” he trails off, unsure of what to say. He could tell you that it’s not a bother, but he doubts you would believe that, and how is he supposed to insist without coming across as shady? He has to try though. “It’s not a bother. You can stay here as long as you want.”

It won’t be enough, and he knows it from the way you immediately shake your head, sitting back on your heels to look at him head on. “I appreciate it, but I don’t want to intrude.”

His mind races as he tries to figure out what to say but it’s hard to think with dark talons pulling at his brain, images of you flashing before his eyes—limp in his arms as he tries to shake you awake (futile, your skin was already cold when he got back from work), unmoving on the floor of your apartment as he stands at the door (he’d only stepped outside for a moment), the fear in your eyes as you topple back over the side of the roof (he can’t get to you in time. he never can.)

“It’s no intrusion… Truthfully, it gets a bit lonely here on my own,” Dazai finally admits, his voice sounds faraway to his own ears as he struggles to ground himself from the foreign memories, he hopes it doesn’t come across that way to you. He can see your face shift a bit at his words, brows furrowing and lips turning downward—not pity, thankfully because he hates pity, but more so understanding. Hooked, he realizes and then deals what will hopefully be the final blow: “I really wouldn’t mind the company.”

Your lips part to say something but no words leave them. You stare at him for a moment, looking between your duffle and your phone and then back to him. He waits, breathless, because he doesn’t know what he’s going to do if you say no, if you insist on leaving. He can’t let you leave, not until the threats have been dealt with, he refuses to sign your execution warrant—he can live with you hating him, even if the thought makes him sick, he can’t live in a world without you.

Finally, you give him a smile.

“I mean, it would definitely be easier getting my work done here than in her cramped apartment, it’s hardly big enough for her and her boyfriend, much less me on top of that,” you say with a laugh, rubbing the back of your neck. “If you’re sure…”

Dazai has to physically restrain himself from letting out a sigh of relief.

“I’m sure,” he murmurs.

You light up and then look back at the television. “Well, I found a few movies I want to watch, if you’re up for it?” you ask with a hesitant smile.

Dazai gives you a soft, matching smile. “I’d love to.”

Oh, god, how did you end up like this?

You can hardly breathe properly, legs tossed over Dazai’s lap, head resting on his shoulder, his arm curled around you. The movie is still playing in the background but you’re hardly following the plot anymore, too focused on the feeling of Dazai’s thumb rubbing idle circles over your hip. You don’t even know if he’s aware he’s doing it, but it has your entire attention—your heart is racing, you’re sure he must be able to feel it, he’s just being courteous in not mentioning it, and your body feels hot. Every now and then, his thumb dips a bit lower and you swear he must know what he’s doing but he’s barely sparing you a glance, engrossed with the movie playing on the disgustingly large television mounted on his wall.

The movie that you had been excited to watch but now can’t even recall what the plot is.

And it’s so odd. You don’t like cuddling. Or, you thought you didn’t like cuddling. Whenever your past partners tried to cuddle up next to you to watch a movie, or at night before bed, you’d grimace and try to subtly shift away, but now? You’re leaning into him, you find comfort in the arm draped around you and the fingers drawing absent patterns on your hip, you find warmth in the way your body is tucked against his.

It’s absurd, you think, why is he so different from everyone else?

Your friends think you’re crazy. When you texted one of them to ask for a place to stay until your apartment is fixed, and then abruptly said nevermind because Dazai offered to let you stay at his, you were hit with five calls in a row and a spam of texts ranging from: “wym ur staying with that random guy you met at a bar two months ago???” to “girl ur crazy, this is stranger danger 101. you were literally just complaining about how you know NOTHING about this man. i am NOT coming to ur funeral.”

The last one is a lie, Kei would come to your funeral and she’d cry like a baby while stuttering through the eulogy, but it’s no issue because there won’t be a funeral. Regardless, you still shut your phone off because the vibrations were getting irritating, but now, you kind of wished you still had your phone to peek at because you can’t focus on the movie and you need something to distract you from Dazai’s touch otherwise you’re bound to make a complete fool out of yourself.

You spare a look up at him—just a quick glimpse, but it proves to be a fatal mistake.

He’s already looking at you.

There’s a fond expression on his face, a warm look in his eye. When he realizes you’ve caught him, his lips tilt upward and he says, “You haven’t been watching the movie.”

A soft accusation. Teasing. It leaves you a bit flustered. You want to look away but you can’t bring yourself to.

“Guilty,” you manage to get out, giving him a sheepish smile.

“I thought you wanted to watch it.” His voice is so soft and light that it makes goosebumps rise to your skin. He keeps his tone low so as to not disturb the atmosphere between the two of you, and it only serves to further the yearning you feel for him, eyes darting down to his lips as he speaks. His gaze sharpens a bit, pupil dilating when he notices where your eyes had tracked down to. Your mouth dries.

“I did,” you whisper, leaving the implication in the air that something far more interesting has caught your attention, breath catching as your eyes lift back to his, wishing that you could know what he’s thinking. You can see his mind racing, as if he’s fighting with himself about something and then-

And then he kisses you.

He leans in just enough to brush his lips against yours, brief and hesitant, as if he’s just testing the waters. And it’s electrifying, you don’t think you’ve ever felt anything quite like it. Every other kiss you’ve had pales in comparison to the faintest brush of his lips to yours. His eye searches your face as soon as he pulls back, as if to make sure you’re okay with this; you can see the hint of something edging on desperation as his gaze flits back and forth between your eyes. He wants to know you’re okay with this, needs to know.

You don’t waste a second as you lean forward, hand coming up to cup the side of his neck as you press your lips against his. You don’t have the same hesitancy that he does, heart thudding in your chest as your fingers intertwine with the curls at the nape of his neck, your body flush to his. His lips are chapped, but you don’t mind—it feels familiar somehow, almost comforting. You can feel the rough material of his bandages brushing your cheek but you only press closer. He tastes like fine whiskey and faintly of iron, a strange combination but you can’t get enough of it.

He’s still hesitant, you can feel it in the slow way he kisses you. His fingers twitch from where they’re resting on his lap, as if he’s itching to reach out and touch you but doesn’t know if he should. Your hand slides up from his neck to the back of his head to pull him impossibly closer, tongue darting out to drag against his bottom lip, and that seems to be all of the push he needs.

His hand comes to rest on your waist, fingers biting a bit too deeply into your skin but you don’t mind. One swift motion and he’s laying you back against the cushions, body sliding on top of yours, his other hand shifting upward, large palm cupping your cheeks as he tilts your head back to deepen the kiss. Your eyes flutter shut, you let out a soft, pleased sigh into his mouth when you feel his tongue tracing your inner lip.

You think you could kiss him forever, you realize, heat pooling in your stomach and a fluttery feeling spreading through your chest. The hand on your waist slides down a bit to your thigh and your breath hitches when he parts them just enough for him to slot his hips between them, and god, you want him.

You think your heart might fly out of your chest, and you don’t know why you’re so nervous. You have casual sex all the time to relieve stress but nothing about this feels casual, it feels so intimate; you let out a shaky breath as Dazai’s lips drag from yours to kiss the corner of your mouth, trailing down to your jaw, nipping at the spot behind your ear that always makes you shudder (god, how does he know your body so well already? it’s unfair, you might die), tongue tracing the underside of your jaw lightly, he kisses down your neck, teeth ghosting your pulse point and one of your legs instinctively hooks around his waist, dragging his body closer until you can feel him pressed up against you and-

A screech comes from the television.

You jolt, he jolts, both of you startled, having forgotten that the movie was even playing in the background, too lost in the feeling of one another. Your chest rises and falls rapidly as you try to reorient yourself, leg slipping from his waist to rest back down on the couch.

The moment is ruined, naturally, all too hyper aware of the scene playing in the background and embarrassed by how quickly that had escalated. Dazai’s cheeks are dusted red as he shifts off of you back into a sitting position, and his lips are wet and swollen, and so very tempting.

You want to kiss him again, so you do.

You sit up and cup his cheek to tilt his face in your direction, pressing your lips to his in a short and sweet kiss. You smile against his lips before pulling back and tucking yourself back into his side, gaze focusing back on the movie.

He lets out a puff of air that sounds distinctly close to a laugh before he wraps his arm back around you, warm and comforting, casual, as if it’s something he’s done a thousand times before, and you think Kei can suck it, because you’re starting to think that the ‘random stranger at the bar’ might become the best decision of your life.

A few days later, you’re stretching on a yoga mat looking out down upon the vast city below, Akutagawa Gin is sat pretty on a barstool next to where you’re stretching, one leg crossed over her knee, rapidly tapping at her phone as she finishes up some emails for Dazai, who’s god knows where dealing with whatever business Dazai Osamu deals with.

“It’s a bit weird that they’re taking so long to fix my apartment, isn’t it?” you ask absently, grimacing as you shift into a pose that pulls at all of the wrong muscles. “Usually it doesn’t take more than a day or two.”

You still don’t really know what Dazai’s company is, you were only able to find vague scraps online about the Mori Corporation: a massive, affluent conglomerate that formed seven years ago. Apparently, it has a hand in just about every industry from technology to shipping, so you suppose it makes sense that Dazai is hardly ever around, but you’re finding yourself increasingly bored. There’s only so much time you can spend in the same apartment, no matter how big or fancy it may be. The days have been incredibly repetitive with Dazai leaving for his work meetings, you relaxing and getting some of your work done, talking to Gin, and then Dazai coming back late at night.

“You’re probably not the only apartment that had a leak,” Gin says, astute as always. “Your landlord might just be getting to the others first, and if they’re half as bad as yours was, it’ll probably take a bit.”

You scowl. “It would be just like him to leave me for last,” you say, half to yourself as you sit back on your heels, looking over at Gin. “I swear this man has had something out for me since I moved in. Did I tell you about the time he took three weeks to get back to me about a work order I put in for my sink? Three weeks. I had to wash all of my dishes at my neighbor’s place. How embarrassing is that?”

Gin looks amused, gray eyes lifting from her phone to look down at you from where she’s sitting. “Multiple times, in fact.”

“Well, I’m going to tell you again,” you say matter-of-factly before launching into a tirade that you can recite word for word in your sleep from how often you’ve vented about it to people over the past two years. In your defense, it was absolutely ridiculous, it never should’ve taken that long, but you digress.

You like Gin, you decide as she listens intently to the same rant she’s heard at least three times over the past week, nodding along and adding supportive commentary when necessary. Well, you decided you liked her the first time you met her, but you’re just reaffirming it now. For as formal and professional she is, she always gets a certain gleam in her eye when she talks to you, and you can actually see her for the eighteen year old she is, rather than just as the secretary of the boss of one of the biggest corporations in Japan.

You think she likes you too, you muse as you finish off your rant and go back to laying like a starfish on the yoga mat, not in the mood to do any more stretching. She always lights up a bit whenever Dazai tells her to spend the day with you instead of following him around. You’re not sure why he does it, you figure he’s probably making things harder on himself by not having her around, but you’re not going to complain because you think you’d go crazy with no one to talk to.

But even if she does like you, she’s still not very forward with information about Dazai and the Mori Corporation. She tends to change the topic whenever you bring it up, or sometimes she just gives you that look, the one that tells you that she isn’t going to say anything about it. You think it’s a bit weird that they’re so secretive about it, but you suppose she just doesn’t want to speak on behalf of Dazai when you ask about him, and the whole secrecy about the business probably has to do with trade secrets or something

Although you don’t really think you’re asking questions that could even scarcely tap into trade secrets, but you think that maybe they’re just paranoid. Probably for good reason if the business is half as influential and lucrative as the few things you’ve found online claim it is, but still, knowing that doesn’t make you any less curious.

“Hey, Gin-chan.” You decide to get an early start on today’s attempt to whittle information out of the girl. When she looks at you questioningly, you turn your head to the side to look at her. “Is Dazai okay?”

Gin looks a bit startled by your question, but you only wait for an answer. You think he must be having trouble with something regarding his business because every day he comes back to his place later and more stressed, you can see it in his face when he walks in, the dullness in his eye and the way he can hardly cover it up before you catch sight of him. You don’t know why he’s so intent on hiding the exhaustion from you but you wish he wouldn’t.

“Why do you ask?” Gin questions carefully, as if she doesn’t know how to answer the question which pretty much confirms that something is wrong.

“I figure he must be having trouble with something in his company,” you say absently, watching Gin blink in surprise, another confirmation that you might be onto something. “He comes back to the penthouse later every day, and more tired. And even when he’s here, he spends most of the time on his phone unless he turns it off. You’ve been on your phone more often the past two days too, so I figure it’s connected.”

Gin hesitates and then she says, “We are… having difficulty with a rival company,” she finally says, and you sit up to look up at her again, leaning back on your hands. “They are trying to push us out of some key industries in Tokyo and Yokohama. Their… CEO is hosting an event in two weeks that we’re supposed to be attending, along with many of our subsidiaries. We’ve been trying to prepare for it while dealing with some other internal issues. He’s probably just… drained.”

This time, you hesitate, a lump forming in your throat as her words register because how fucked up is it that he’s so drained from work and then has to come back to his penthouse and entertain you? Guilt swells in your chest, you don’t even know where he’s been sleeping because he’s been so dead set on you taking the bed that he won’t even hear your arguments on it.

“Should I… go stay with my friend then?” you ask hesitantly, and when Gin gives you a half-alarmed, half-concerned look, you elaborate: “I just… feel bad, I guess. That he’s dealing with so much work and can’t even have a space to decompress when he finishes because I’m here.”

Gin says your name with so much humor that you’re almost insulted, but there’s a glitter in her eyes as she looks at you, so any complaint you have promptly dies. “Being with you is decompressing to him,” she says quietly, and though warmth spreads through you at the words, you’re still doubtful.

“I don’t know,” you say, unconvinced. “I see the way he tries to hide how exhausted he is whenever he sees me. He shouldn’t have to put in so much effort to mask himself in his home just because I’m here.”

Gin doesn’t respond for a moment, gaze flickering down to the floor, but when she speaks, her voice is soft.

“He’s always so lonely,” she says, more to herself than anything else, but then she raises her eyes to meet yours, “no matter how many people are around him, he’s always so cut off from everyone, refusing to let anyone get close… except when he’s with you. In all of the years that I’ve known him, I’ve only ever seen him happy when he’s with you.”

You stare at Gin, lips parted to respond but no words leave them.

Instead, Gin continues, “He… had to step up at a very young age. He was sixteen when he found me in Suribachi and even back then he was just so… empty. I’ve never seen him actually acting his age except when he’s with you, or talking about you. So-”

Gin is interrupted abruptly by her phone ringing. She looks down and gives you an apologetic look before answering the call and wandering off to the other room, leaving you to your thoughts. Your throat still feels swollen, but with a far more pleasant emotion now. A small smile tugs at the edges of your lips, hand pressed to your chest as if you can physically slow the erratic pace of your heart. Your face feels warm and a giggle slips from your lips as you flop back down to the yoga mat, staring up at the ceiling.

Or, well, it’s not entirely pleasant. A heavier feeling settles on your chest as Gin’s words about what Dazai used to be like—still is like, whenever you’re not around—process through your head. It’s not like you didn’t have any sort of inkling about it, you’ve known that there’s more than meets the eye about Dazai Osamu since the first night you met him, and the past week you’ve spent with him only has made you more sure of it. His mind drifts off so often, eyes faraway and expression so vacant that sometimes it takes a few tries for you to get him to come back to you.

You don’t mind, but it does make you sad to know that he’s been like this for as long as Gin has known him, and since the only time she’s ever seen him even partially happy is when he’s with you, you can’t help but wonder how many years he spent depressed and isolated. And you’re realizing, a bit scared, that you’re starting to care for Dazai a lot because the first thought that crosses your mind is that you wish you’d met him sooner so he didn’t have to spend all of this time alone.

You sit up straight, alarmed by your own thoughts, because yes, you’re enamored by Dazai and you have been since you met him almost two months ago, but you didn’t think you were falling for him yet—not like that at least. It’s absurd, you still hardly know much about his personal life. You don’t know about his family besides for the fact he took over his father’s company, you don’t know anything about said company besides the scraps you found online but… but you remember the way he kisses you gently, and the way his expression always softens when his gaze falls on you, and the way whenever you speak, he’s always giving you his full attention no matter how inane the topic might be, willing to listen to you ramble on about all of the books you’ve read and gossip with you about your ex-coworkers and drama happening in your friend group and-

Oh.

Yeah. You might be falling for him.

Your hand rises to your lips, mind racing and spiraling all at the same time and you realize that you really, really need fresh air. Promptly, you remember that you’d meant to ask Gin to order some groceries because Dazai’s kitchen is about as bare as his bedroom, and you’ve been craving some specific snacks anyway; you also wanted to have her order some actual food so you can make something to try to make Dazai eat more because you’ve noticed he doesn’t eat all too much and you don’t think that’s very healthy considering how much stress he’s under. You’re not the best at cooking, but you can make do and just pray that he likes it.

A perfect excuse. You’ll run out and grab some groceries, maybe take a walk in the nearby park to clear your thoughts and come to terms with the realization you’d just come to, and then come back and do something nice for Dazai.

Decision made, you bound over to the door Gin disappeared into so you can let her know where you’re heading, but when you peek your head into Dazai’s office, you see Gin in deep conversation with someone over the phone, brows creased and frown on her lips as she stares down at some of the paperwork on Dazai’s desk. She looks distinctly frustrated and slightly distressed, so you decide not to bother her. Instead, you just close the door quietly and make your way over to the elevator, stepping inside when it finally reaches the top floor and pressing the button for the lobby.

You won’t be long anyway, you doubt she’ll even notice you’re gone.

The elevator dings as it reaches the first floor of the massive building and you adjust your purse over your shoulder as you step into the lobby—it’s massive and bustling with dozens of people. You haven’t been back down here since he brought you here a few days ago, and you’d been too exhausted to really be able to gather your bearings, plus it had been the middle of the night and not as many people had been around.

You’re hardly able to peek around for half a minute before someone runs into you.

You let out a quiet yelp, startled, blinking as your gaze focuses on the man who’d bumped into you. He’s a bit on the short side with fair skin and light freckles dotting his nose and cheeks, bi-colored eyes—one brown and the other blue—narrowed as he studies you. He’s pretty, you think. Not quite as pretty as Dazai, but definitely attractive. Or he would be, if he wasn’t staring at you with such an unpleasant expression.

You half-think he’s about to demand that you apologize even though he’s the one who bumped into you, and you think if he does, you’re going to have serious problems with him, but instead, a vague recognition flashes through his eyes as he finally speaks. Although, you can’t help but notice he still is looking at you with distinct displeasure even after recognizing you.

“You��re the girl that’s been living up with the boss,” the man says, his voice is cool and guarded and you feel a bit uncomfortable under his stare. You’ve always been particularly good at reading people, and you can tell at first glance that he does not want you here. “Where are you going?”

You don’t know why it’s any of his business, but you say: “Out. I’ve been cooped up for almost a week. Plus, I don’t know how Dazai feeds himself, he has literally no food in his place.”

“Does he know you’re going out?” he asks, eyes narrowing onto you as he tilts his head to the side.

You bristle, not liking his tone. “He’s not my keeper.”

“No, but he’s gone out of his way to give you a place to stay when he didn’t have to. The least you can do is let him know when you’re going in and out.” The man matches your sharp tone with his own and you wither a bit, because he’s right, even if he is being a bit of an ass about it.

“Gin-chan was busy,” you mutter. “I’ll text him.”

The man lets out a sigh of what can only be utter suffering, lifting his head to look up to the ceiling as if asking a higher deity ‘why me?’ You have no idea what’s going through his head, and you just want to slip out of the building and drink in some fresh air and sunlight, but the last thing you expect is for him to look back at you and ask:

“Want company?”

You blink, wondering if he’s fucking with you, but he only stares at you, expression flat as he waits for a response.

“I-” You’re about to say no, you aren’t particularly looking for company, but then you realize that this might be a chance to try to gather some more information about Dazai. You quickly amend to a: “Yeah, sure… What’s your name anyway?”

“Nakahara Chuuya,” he tells you, voice a bit brusque. “Just call me Chuuya.”

Dazai comes home to an empty penthouse.

For a moment, he doesn’t react. The unconscious smile that had begun to curve to his lips while taking the elevator back up to the top floor of the headquarters falls instantly as his dark gaze sweeps across the room that you’re usually lounging in with Gin only to find it eerily silent, void of the laughter he’d become desperately used to the past few days.

He doesn’t let the panic hit right away, not even bothering to slide his coat off before making his way over to his bedroom, wondering if you’d decided to take a nap. He very much does feel a distinct spike in his heart rate when you’re not in there either. He stands there for a moment—Gin is still up here, she would have called down if she had to leave, so where are you?

Where are you?

Dazai suddenly feels sick to his stomach, a bit dizzy on his feet.

Did you leave?

Why did you leave?

Did you go into his office? Find something implicating his position in the Port Mafia?

Or did you just get sick of staying in the same place so many days in the row? Why wouldn’t you tell him if that were the case?

Maybe you were just sick of him.

His vision spins a bit, he presses his hand against the frame of his bedroom door to steady himself. Stop it, he tells himself, inhaling deeply once to try to get his head back on straight. But he can’t, he can feel numbness spreading through his chest viciously at the thought of you leaving. The void returns with a vengeance, consuming him entirely, and it’s only the thought of the chance of you being in danger out there alone that pushes him forward. He needs Gin to tell him what the fuck is going on.

What does he do if you left on your own voilition?

Dazai’s head is not sitting on his shoulders properly. It can’t be. Everything looks wrong, everything feels wrong. His hand drops down to his side, resorting back to the technique he had to use before he met you—he steadily taps your name against his thigh as he forces himself to walk across the room to his office, to where Gin must be, to get some answers. But even your name isn’t enough to keep him grounded.

He’s holding you in his arms. You’re so cold. There’s blood everywhere. They’re telling him to let you go. He can’t. He never can.

He’s reaching out to you, desperately trying to grab your hand before you topple over the side of the roof. He never makes it.

He has to make a choice. A life for a life. He always chooses to save you. It doesn’t matter—they always kill you anyway.

Nausea builds in his throat, he forces it back down, and when he opens the door to his office it’s a bit too aggressive. Gin’s head snaps up from where she was working at Dazai’s desk, flipping through papers with creased brows as she tries to put together the list of suspects. She stands up instantly at the sight of him, lips parting to greet him. He doesn’t let her.

“Where is she?”

The words come out cold and cutting, a far cry from the awful emotions wreaking havoc on his chest and mind. To his absolute distress, Gin only looks confused at his words, lowering the phone and bidding goodbye to who he can only assume is Kouyou as she asks:

“... What do you mean?”

Fuck. Dazai takes a step back out of his office, back into the living room of his penthouse. His head feels all hazy, his vision starts spinning more. Fuck. You had to have left on your own. There’s no way anyone is getting all the way up to the top floor through all of the guards, and if they did, they wouldn’t leave Gin alive. Fuck.

Where did you go?

There’s blood. Too much blood. Or is it water? He’s dragging you out of the water. And then his fingers are meeting air, the tips of his fingers just barely scraping yours before you plummet down, down, down.

Why the fuck did no one say anything to him?

He can hear Gin talking, but her words go in one ear out the other. Dazai pulls out his phone, double, triple, quadruple checking to make sure he got no messages. None from you (his chest hurts). None from either of the Black Lizard captains. None from Atsushi. None from Kyouka. None from Chuuya. All people who should have feasibly noticed you leaving the headquarters.

Dazai has never done well with emotions, negative or positive, but he thinks fear is the worst of all and he’s been plagued with it since the moment he’s come in contact with the Book. Fear of the future, fear of making a mistake, fear of fate.

Fear is the mind-killer. The quote rings through his head over and over again, damning and true. It’s the one emotion that paralyzes him, puts him into a state that makes him incapable of making decisions. Fear of one thing turns into fear of another—it’s a ceaseless cycle, and a ruinous one. Fear of you leaving him turns into fear of you being vulnerable and then to fear of you being targeted and then to fear of you being dead, and already he can feel numbness spreading from his chest to his limbs. He thinks he feels Gin touch his arm but he can’t even turn his head to look.

So he does the only thing he knows how to do: he channels it into something else. He funnels the fear into something more familiar, something more welcome.

First, it turns into frustration—another emotion capable of incapacitation, but one that’s far more manageable. He jerks away from Gin, grip tightening on his phone as he paces back across the room. His thoughts begin to race, a red fog clouding his mind as he wonders why the fuck no one told him that you left, and if no one knows that you left, then Dazai is going to have to have serious fucking words with all of the security details posted throughout the building because that sort of laxness is not acceptable.

He doesn’t even know who he should message. Atsushi? The boy might close in on himself and shut down for failure and Dazai cannot afford to deal with that. Chuuya? Not an option, Chuuya would be the last person to go to about you seeing how often he actively expresses his distaste for your presence in the building, Dazai doesn’t want to give him more ammunition about you. Hirotsu? Might be the best option, the Black Lizards are quick and efficient, they’ll be able to track you down fast, but if he sends the Black Lizards he needs to figure out what he’s going to do.

What is he going to do?

God, he doesn’t know. The red starts to tint blue as a helpless feeling sweeps over him. He doesn’t know what to do. You left on your own, he doesn’t know why and he doesn’t know if you have any intentions on coming back. He doesn’t know what to do if you don’t plan on coming back. His whole reasoning behind the decision to indulge in you was centered on the fact that he could protect you in this lifetime, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep you in the ivory tower forever but he hoped he’d at least have a little longer to try to figure out a plan.

And the fact that you didn’t even tell him that you were leaving doesn’t bode well—again, the fleeting, anxiety-inducing thought of you stumbling upon something that you shouldn’t have crosses through his head but he pushes it away. Maybe you left because you were bored, because he wasn’t around and Gin was busy, he can try to fix that. He can fix that. Maybe he’ll even convince you to come back.

But if he can’t…

He has two options:

He can put protection details on you, it would be an extension of Port Mafia resources that will face a lot of push back from his executives considering they’re approaching a gang war with the now united forces of Dostoevsky, Nabokov and Tolstoy, but he doesn’t give a fuck about what his executives think, you and Odasaku are the only things that matter in this universe so he’ll do whatever it takes to make sure you’re safe. But regardless of what his executives think, the main issue with this option is that your safety is not guaranteed. It’ll only take one slip up for your life to be forfeit and for everything that Dazai has built and sacrificed to be flushed down the drain.

That leaves option two. Forcing you to stay in the tower. Locking you up until he can ensure that there are no more threats to you (there may always be threats to you). You’d hate him, surely, and is he capable of living in a universe where you hate him? He has to be, if it means your safety. But that isn’t the life that he wants for you. He wants you to live, achieve all of the dreams you were never able to in all of the other universes, you can’t do that if you’re locked up.

Dazai feels sick. Regret starts to churn his stomach. He never should have approached you. He never should have indulged. He never should have convinced himself that he could keep you safe because he can’t. It’s fate. Fate. Fate.

The word twists the cloud fogging his vision, the ugly color that formed of the mixed blues and reds turns darker, until an inky black is creeping into his vision. Fate, he hates the word, he hates the inevitability, he hates himself for dancing right along with the strings that have been placed on him by the cruel gods above, even when he knew what would happen if he did. The weight of the gun hidden in his jacket starts to weigh all the more heavily, his fingers twitch toward it, desperate to feel the familiar weight of it in his hand. And then-

And then the elevator dings.

Dazai’s gaze cuts to the side, sharp and cold, and it’s only when the elevator doors slide open and your pretty laugh rings through the air that Dazai’s world is finally set straight again. The color returns, the numbness disappears, the void is pushed away for another day. His eyes land on you, and the bright smile painted on your lips as you bound back into his penthouse.

“You’re back early!” you say, delighted, and Dazai can only hope and pray that you can’t tell how badly he’s spiraled because you weren’t around. He thinks you can, of course you can, because your smile falters a bit but then it brightens again as you make your way over to him and-

Oh.

All of the tension in his body melts away as you make your way over to him with a skip in your step and lean up on your tiptoes to wrap your arms around his shoulders. Dazai lets out a breath, too sharp and too shaky for you to not notice with how close you are to his face, but he can hardly bring himself to care as he brings trembling hands to wrap around your waist. He basks in the feeling of your warmth and if any of the numbness had threatened to linger, it’s certainly gone now as he calms himself down by setting his heart in pace with yours as he feels it thump steadily against his chest.

“Where did you go?” His voice is hoarse, as much as he tries to make the question seem light.

“You have no food, Dazai,” you complain, and you don’t seem to care that he’s definitely hugging you for a bit too long, propping your chin on his chest to look up at him. “Plus, as fancy as your penthouse is, I can’t sit around in the same place for days. I wanted to go out on a walk. So I ran to the store to pick up some groceries. I thought I’d make it back before you, I wanted to try to make something for dinner. I saw a pasta recipe while I was scrolling through Instagram that I want to try out, although I should probably test it out on my own before feeding you any. It usually takes me a few tries to get a recipe down and the first few attempts are more akin to toxic waste than actual food…”

You ramble, probably because you can tell how out of it he is and it’s scary how easily you can see through him because he thinks it’s only a matter of time before you see through to what he really is. But for now, he lets his eyes slide shut as he loses himself in your voice, and he feels silly for thinking that you would leave without saying anything.

He knows you better than anyone else in the world. Anyone else in any world. Maybe even better than you yourself. He should have known better. You would never do that, no matter what you learn about him, no matter what he does. It’s not who you are—you’re always so stringent on communication, you can’t sleep until an argument is settled properly. It’s something he’s hated in other universes, because he’s flighty and can’t handle confrontation, but he thinks it’s something that he should rely on in this one, because he knows that no matter what you might learn, you’ll always sit down to give him the chance of a proper conversation rather than just ghosting him.

He spiraled for nothing.

He’s not drawn back to the present until he hears:

“... and Chuuya is so cool, by the way. Why didn’t you introduce me to him sooner? He has an ability, I’ve never met an ability user before. I made him carry all of the groceries, and he did it like it was nothing. Gravity manipulation? Did you know in undergrad, I wanted to major in physics—I tried to actually, but had to drop 101 because apparently my brain is not cut out for the sciences. Or mathematics. It was kind of embarrassing actually, who has to drop out of a 101 class?”

In your spiel, only one word—one name—matters. His eyes reopen, he makes sure to keep his body lax in your arms as you lean against him so you can’t feel his sudden shift in mood. His gaze is cold and cutting again, lifting from you to behind you, where he finally lays his eyes upon the person with you.

Chuuya stands there, dozens of grocery bags hanging off his arms, a faint red glow around each of them signaling that he’s using his ability. Dazai’s expression is lethal as he stares at his executive, but Chuuya’s lip only curls up in a half-snarl, as if daring Dazai to say anything, before he makes his way out of the elevator to bring the grocery bags into his kitchen.

And Dazai can’t say anything, not this time, because he’s already figured out what happened: you must have tried to leave on your own when Gin was busy because you were bored, and Chuuya ran into you and tagged along so you wouldn’t be defenseless should someone target you to get to him, in spite of how he feels about you and your presence in the building.

Dazai bites his tongue, for once, and instead focuses back down at you. His expression softens when he catches you looking up at him, curious, and he tucks a strand of hair behind your ear.

“You should have texted me,” he murmurs. “I would’ve told you I had a quick day today, we could’ve gone together.”

Your expression twists a bit in irritation. His eyebrows shoot up in surprise.

“I did text you,” you say, indignant, and Dazai’s brows furrow and you immediately draw back to pull out your phone. He misses your warmth instantly, but forces away the longing. Your lips part a bit as you look down at the screen, a sheepish expression on your face as you say: “... I thought I texted you, evidently, it did not go through.”

Dazai lets out a puff of air, half-amusement, half-disbelief, because of course it was a matter of miscommunication, and he thinks again that he should have known better. Logically, what he assumed was so unlikely that it shouldn’t have even crossed his mind, but evidently, you turning him into an illogical and emotional fool is something universal across all of the different worlds.

But he still remembers the one fleeting thought he had earlier—that you were bored, and probably lonely sitting up here all day, especially when Gin is busy dealing with Port Mafia matters. This is bound to happen again, and next time, he might not be lucky enough to have someone catch you slipping out of the building.

So, he’ll have to do something about it himself, make sure you’re not bored enough to leave the building and unwittingly place yourself in danger, he decides, pleased.

“Would you…” Dazai hesitates as he looks down at you, uncharacteristically nervous. You tilt your head to the side curiously. “Would you want to go on a date with me tomorrow?”

A smile splits across your face.

“Is that even a question?”

Dazai’s woken up by someone shaking his shoulder.

Realistically, he knows that no enemy is able to make it to the top level of the Port Mafia’s most well-protected tower—it’s impenetrable, if the masses of armed guards on the lower floors aren’t enough to keep out intruders, then the Black Lizards on the middle floors would be more than enough, and if even they aren’t, Atsushi and Chuuya are stationed on the higher floors, ready to jump into action at a moment’s notice. Still, he’s startled, unsure of who would be in his office waking him up at this time and caught off guard because he hadn’t even meant to fall asleep, so instinctively, he’s reaching for the gun hidden at his side, eyes a bit wild as he jolts up, trying to figure out what’s going on.

“Sorry.” He only settles down when he hears your voice coming from his side, apologetic and little over a whisper as to not alarm him anymore than he already is. Instantly, his fingers loosen around the grip of his gun, a lump in his throat when he realizes that he almost pulled a gun on you. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Dazai shakes his head as soon as your words process, still trying to gather his bearings. He’s in his office, he must’ve fell asleep while looking over paperwork at his desk—plans for the upcoming event hosted by Nabokov, and a list of all of the possible informants that could be leaking information to Dostoevsky’s rats because one too many of the Port Mafia’s warehouse’s have been raided by the military police in the past few weeks for Dazai to be comfortable with, and he knows Dostoevsky is behind it because the man has been leaving little clues like it’s some sort of game to him. Dazai thinks that they should just kill all of the suspects and be done with it—if someone is even being suspected of having betrayed the Port Mafia, then they’re doing something severely wrong, but Kouyou advised him to go about this the right way.

Subtly, so as to not draw your attention, he shifts to cover the papers and then gives you his full attention, curious as to what you’re doing up so early because the sun hasn’t even risen yet. He’s been trying to make sure that he wakes up before you so that you don’t come looking for him in here, knowing where this is the most likely place where you’d stumble upon something that incriminates him as a mafioso rather than a businessman.

“You didn’t,” he lies through his teeth, voice a bit hoarse from sleep. “Is something wrong?”

You’re still dressed in your pajamas, but you have a fluffy rube wrapped around you and a soft smile on your face that makes Dazai’s chest swell. Your eyes are bright, gleaming with a type of excitement that has him tilting his head in curiosity, waiting to see what you have to say.

“Do you have access to the roof of the building?” you ask him, voice still hushed but tinged with more enthusiasm. When he nods, a smile splits across your face. “Can we go up there?”

Dazai doesn’t have the willpower to deny you anything, so there’s no hesitation as he says: “Of course.” But then as he rises to his feet, pulling on his long, black coat that he’d shrugged off at some point last night, he looks at you and asks, “Why?”

“I like watching sunrises,” you say, bounding over to the elevator and waiting for him to follow. He does, of course. He would follow you anywhere. Everywhere. He dreads the day you go somewhere he can’t follow. It’s inevitable—he doesn’t believe in the existence of heaven, but if there is one, you would go there, and he won’t. There’s too much blood on his hands, staining his skin no matter how much he scrubs it raw, and the blood that runs within him is black and corrupted, beyond any type of remedy. “I want to see one from the highest point in the city.”

Oh. Dazai’s heart leaps to his throat when he realizes what’s about to happen, pulling his access key from his pocket and swiping it against the pad to allow access to the roof. Some things differ across all of the universes: the way you meet him (although you’re always the one to find him), the way you die (he always finds you though), sometimes it takes a while for the two of you to progress past the friends stage, but it’s usually not too long.

Everything varies except for one thing: the sunrises. In every universe, you have an obsession with them: you like watching them, seeing as many new ones as you possibly can. You explained to him once that it was because it helps you move forward, gives you hope, a reason to wake up each morning. The infatuation with them began after your brother’s death in the other universes when you couldn’t find any reason to keep going on your own so you sought one out in the sunrises—although this is something you only opened up to him about in one universe, in all of the others, you’ve hidden your past struggles with depression from him. He’s not sure why, maybe just because you don’t want to burden him with them.

It would be just like you, trying to share the weight of all of his burdens but shouldering yours on your own.

He wonders if you’ll tell him in this one. He wonders what made that universe’s Dazai so special. He feels viciously jealous and for a moment, irrationally hates his other self, only finding solace in the fact that all of the other Dazais would probably feel just as scorned over the fact that only one of them got special treatment.

He thinks you can sense the deterioration of his thoughts, because you reach out and lace your fingers with his as you lean against the back of the elevator, waiting to get to the top floor. His grip on your hand is a bit too tight, he thinks, but it keeps him grounded. You’re here. You’re with him. All of the other universes don’t matter. Only this one does.

His lips part to speak, to fill the silence, but no words leave them. He thinks he’s spoken more these past two months with you than he has in his entire life. He never has any desire to speak unless he’s with you, and then he’ll find any reason to speak if it means he can hear your voice.

“You don’t have to sleep in your office, you know?” you say abruptly, voice quiet. You’re not looking at him, he wonders if you’re embarrassed at whatever you’re about to say because you hesitate as you add, “I know I’ve pretty much commandeered your room but… I wouldn’t mind sharing a bed with you. This is your place, you should be comfortable too.”

Dazai thinks his face might be on fire, all of the air whooshing from his lungs at your words because of course, it’s something he’s thought of, dreamed of, but he never imagined you would just offer it up like that. He’s quiet for too long, evidently, because you seem to be more embarrassed. Just as he’s about to force something out, the elevator doors slide open and you’re rushing forward, yanking him along, as if to pretend you never said anything and Dazai can’t help the small smile that curves onto his lips.

“That would be nice,” he tells you quietly, he doesn’t know if you hear but he thinks you do because your grip on his hand tightens.

The air is bitterly cold as high up as the two of you are, and the wind is wicked. He thinks that you’re definitely not dressed warm enough, a robe isn't nearly enough to shield from this type of cold, but you look unbothered, an exhilarated smile painted on your face as you drag him dangerously close to the edge of the roof, and Dazai can’t help the way his anxiety spikes—not for his sake, but for yours. His grip on your hand tightens a bit but you only plop down at the edge of the roof, tugging his arm gently as a way of beckoning him to sit with you.

He does. Of course, he does.

His legs dangle off the side of the roof, thigh pressed against yours, and you keep your fingers laced with his, holding his hand on your lap. You stare ahead, eyes bright and excited as you wait for the sunrise. He stares at you, captivated. A part of him is still convinced this is all some twisted dream that his mind conjured to torture him—that he’s going to wake up slumped over on his desk to an empty apartment with only the faint memory of you to console himself with.

Desperately, he wonders if there were any other universes like this, if this is just another spiral into the pages of the Book, just one more intense and more vivid than all of the rest. He knows there were universes where he stayed with the Port Mafia, universes where he became its boss—but he was older in those, in his mid or late twenties. No, this is his universe, it has to be, right? Right?

He doesn’t realize that his grip on your hand has tightened until you look over at him, and instantly, he loosens it, but you only tighten yours in response. Your eyes meet his and suddenly Dazai is breathless, unsure of what to say or do. You always look at him as if you’re looking into him, not at him, not like everyone else. It’s unnerving. He hates it. He loves it.

“Are you okay?” you ask him, knocking your shoulder into his.

The smile on his face doesn’t necessarily meet his eyes, but the words he speaks are probably the most genuine that he’s ever uttered in his entire life. “When I’m with you? Always.”

Your expression softens, although he can’t help but notice that you don’t seem entirely placated by his response. He’s grateful that you don’t push though, because he doesn’t want to lie to you. You lean over though, resting your head on his bicep, and his breath hitches when you bring your free hand to your lap too, cradling his hand in both of yours. He forces himself to look ahead again, not wanting you to see the way his visible eye has suddenly become misty.

You trace absent patterns on his skin as you wait for the sun to break over the horizon and Dazai is lost to his thoughts once more, heart suddenly clogging his throat as he realizes that yes, this is his universe and yes, you are here. With him. He doesn’t have to cling to the vague memories of your warm touch and sweet words, not when you’re sitting next to him and giving him them now. Why is he trying to drift off into the pages when he has you here? In a universe where Dazai was certain he’d never experience the tenderness your presence brought him, he should be savoring this.

“Gin told me the other day that you guys are having trouble with a rival company,” you say quietly, and that draws him back to the present, brows furrowing as he wonders just how much Gin told you, mind racing as he tries to figure out where exactly this conversation is going. “That you guys are trying to prepare for an event they’re hosting in a week. I don’t want you to… worry about me or anything while you’re busy getting ready for all of that… Maybe that’s a bit presumptuous of me to assume but I just… I don’t know. I know you’ve been stressed about it, I don’t want to put more on you.”

Dazai lets out a quiet puff of air. “You see right through me, don’t you?” he murmurs, voice gentle and fond as his gaze drifts over you. “You don’t have to worry about that. You don’t put any stress on me.”

You look a bit flustered at his words, glancing down at your lap, at where his fingers are still laced with yours. You squeeze them tighter for a second and then look back out at the horizon. “... I’m glad,” you tell him softly. “I’ll keep out of your way the weekend of, though. I already talked to one of my friends, she’s going to let me stay with her for the weekend. Well. Assuming my apartment isn’t fixed by then. I still can’t believe it’s taking so long.”

The fondness is gone. Dazai’s world crashes and burns.

It’s only sheer willpower that prevents his sudden burst of anxiety from showing on his face. He turns his gaze out to the horizon now, staring ahead as he tries to figure out how to tell you no without sounding psychotic.

His tongue presses to the roof of his mouth, the nails of his free hand scrape painfully against the rooftop as he desperately tries to fumble together a plan. You cannot leave the tower the night of the event. There’s already a high chance that Dostoevsky knows about you—Dazai knows there’s a spy in the Port Mafia and he doesn’t know if they’ve spotted you around the base. You’ve been leaving the headquarters more frequently during the day since that day with Chuuya; Dazai is never able to join you but he makes sure that Tachihara, Chuuya or Atsushi are with you on the chance that you’re targeted.

If he’s being realistic, there’s no shot that Dostoevsky doesn’t know of you already, and if you’re out and about while the entire Port Mafia is readying for this event… No one would be left for him to station a protection detail on you, and it would be just like Dostoevsky to capitalize on that as he has in so many other universes, having you killed when no one is around to protect you.

God, is this it?

The words ring through his head. Cold. Damning. His bones feel as if they’d been thrown into a blast chiller and stuck back inside of his body. His stomach churns. Is this it? Is this how it’s going to happen?

He can’t let it happen. How does he prevent it?

How does he prevent it?

He thinks there’s only one way, but it leaves a sour taste in his mouth because it’s nearly as risky as letting you go off on your own, the only difference being that he would at least have some semblance of control over the situation.

“Oh,” he finally forces out, the words sound distant and hoarse even to his own ears.

You look at him. Fatal. You can always read right through him, he has to make his decision quick.

“You sound… disappointed,” you say hesitantly.

He makes his decision, and he prays to any god that will listen that it doesn’t backfire.

“I was… going to ask you to be my date to the event, actually,” he says, careful to not look at you and give you even more of a window into his mind. He feels the way you straighten at his words. Hooked. He continues with, “... but if you already made plans with your friend…”

“Really?” you breathe out, your grip on his hand is tight, he can feel the way your fingers are trembling around his.

“Really,” he tells you softly, finally daring to look at you.

Your eyes are shining, the expression on your face so open and unguarded that Dazai almost feels bad for lying, but you don’t have to know the truth, that the only reason he’s inviting you with him is because he can’t have you going out and about alone. Not now. Not until Dostoevsky is dead.

But once Dostoevsky is dead, then what about all of the other threats? Agatha Christie? All of the enemies he’s made in this lifetime? When does it end?

He can’t think about that right now. He has to tackle the issue at hand first.

You turn your head to look back out at the horizon, a smile edging at the corners of your lips. “I would love to be your date,” you say so quietly that Dazai almost doesn’t hear you.

But he does, and he can’t hold back a relieved breath this time as he squeezes your hand.

A comfortable silence washes over the two of you as you wait for the sunrise, and Dazai doesn’t think he’s ever felt more at home. He’s still tired, undoubtedly; he hadn’t meant to fall asleep last night because he knew damn well that he’d only be more tired when he woke up, it would’ve been easier to just stay up the whole night. But now, he’s so at ease with you that he could almost fall back asleep—and that’s a feat in itself because Dazai hardly sleeps, and never feels comfortable enough to do so, he only ever sleeps when he's too exhausted to keep going. You’re so warm, so home, how could his eyes not start drooping shut?

“You know why they’re so great?” you suddenly ask, drawing him out of the drowsy state he was threatening to fall into. You’re still looking ahead, but he’s looking back down at you now.

It’s close—the sun is about to rise, and he doesn’t care to see it himself, he cares to see you. He wants to see how the orange hues reflect in your eyes, the way your skin glows beneath the golden rays; he thinks it’s a holy experience, Dazai has felt the whirlwind of emotions that all of the other Dazais go through the first time they see you beneath the rising sun and he never thought he’d be able to feel it for himself.

“Because no two are ever the same?” His voice is soft and hesitant, and he’s not thinking as he speaks. He doesn’t even register what he said until you’re pulling your head off of his shoulder to look at him again, eyes wide, delighted.

“Yeah!” You toss him such a stunning smile that it almost physically dazes him. “You get it.”

He doesn’t have the heart to admit that he’s a fraud, closing in on himself a bit, but you don’t notice, head turning straight again.

“They give me something to look forward to,” you say, a bit quieter again. Your gaze is distant as you look out into the sky, as if you’re seeing something that’s not actually there. “I want to see as many of them as I can.”

Dazai once tried to find the same comfort in sunrises that you did. It was when he first came up with his plan and he realized that he’d never get the chance to be with you, and he’d never get the chance to call Odasaku a friend. He came up here, actually, and watched the sunrise in this very spot. It was bitter and cold. It made him sick to his stomach. It made him feel emptier than he already was. And he realized that there was no beauty or appeal to them unless you were at his side.

“We should…”

You trail off as you turn to look at him again suddenly and Dazai’s lips part to warn you that you’re going to miss the best part—your favorite part, as you’ve told him (not him) over and over again. But the words die on his tongue as the sun breaks over the horizon and wow, he understands it.

He understands it. God, he understands it. Everything he’s felt through the other Dazais pale in comparison to the sight before him and how it entirely devastates the thin thread of control he has on his emotions whenever he’s with you. Enamored. Captivated. His chest feels tight and his throat feels swollen and Dazai is in love. He is so completely and irrevocably in love that he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to recover.

Suddenly, he understands why so many of the other Dazais have come to terms with their feelings for you at this moment.

The sunrise washes over you and Dazai thinks you’re utterly angelic. Your eyes reflect the myriad of colors sweeping over the horizon, your skin glows beneath the red and gold hues. You’re beautiful, unreally so. Too divine for someone like him to lay his tainted fingers upon. He’s suddenly hyper aware of how his shoulder is brushing yours and how your fingers are laced with his. He thinks he should pull away, spare you from his putrid touch, but he couldn’t even if he wanted to, and he doesn’t want to, because he’s so wholly selfish that he would rather condemn you to ruin than part from you.

“We should watch them together,” you finally say, and your eyes don’t leave his and you’re missing the sunrise but you don’t seem to mind, searching his face desperately for an answer.

It takes an embarrassingly long time for your words to process, but when they do, Dazai thinks there’s no way he’s going to be able to hide the sudden urge he feels to cry.

“Yeah,” he says. His voice cracks, he can’t even bring himself to care. “Yeah, we should.”

Nakahara Chuuya is livid when he gets a notification to his phone about the roof suddenly being accessed, knowing damn well only one other person can get up there. The vibrations from his phone wake him up, and then the subsequent spike of panic that shoots through him when he realizes what the notification is and what the implications of it are is more than enough to have him throwing himself out of bed and sprinting up the stairs, realizing that the elevator will take far too long.

It takes him a total of two minutes to get up to the roof from the thirty-second floor, and by the time he gets there, he’s so full of rage that Chuuya feels like he might explode. The last time Dazai went up to the roof, he was six bottles deep and Chuuya was hardly able to grab him before he toppled over the edge, and Chuuya is not in the mood to deal with that this early in the morning.

Chuuya hadn’t thought this would be an issue now, not with you here because although Chuuya still doesn’t know quite who you are or how you’ve managed to get Dazai Osamu under your thumb, he knows that Dazai is not the Dazai that Chuuya knows whenever you’re around. And Chuuya doesn’t get it, you’re nice enough, pleasant to talk to and pleasant to look at, but he doesn’t think that there’s anything special about you. Not special enough to have Dazai so entirely enamored by you that he’s starting to put the Port Mafia second, at least.

Apparently not enamored enough to stop from getting shit-faced and suicidal, though.

Chuuya’s jaw tightens as he pushes open the door to the roof and-

And he freezes.

The fury slowly starts to dissipate as he catches sight of where you’re sitting at the edge of the roof with Dazai as the sun finally starts to rise. He thinks he should leave, go back down and get a few more hours of sleep before he has to meet Kouyou and Hirotsu at ten to go over the protection details for the event Nabokov is hosting, but he can’t help the way he hesitates, watching how absolutely infatuated Dazai looks as the sun rays sweep over you. Less like the cold and cruel boss of the Port Mafia that Chuuya’s become used to over the past few years, and more like the kid he met at fifteen, the one who disappeared and turned into a shell of himself after a few months of Chuuya knowing him.

Chuuya never understood why. The only time he ever got close was that night on the roof when he started breaking down after Chuuya stopped him from jumping, but even then Dazai refused to explain anything to him. It pissed him off, honestly, because they were supposed to be partners. Chuuya was supposed to have the asshole’s back, no matter how infuriating he may be, but something changed a few months before Dazai’s sixteenth birthday and whatever it was, it entirely killed off anything left of the Dazai that Chuuya knew. No matter how much he demanded to know what happened, Dazai blew him off—dismissive at first, then cruelly, until Chuuya finally had enough and let it be.

If he wanted to go off and be a husk of himself, then so be it, far be it from Chuuya to stop him.

But now…

Chuuya lets out a quiet huff, shaking his head, drawing his eyes from where Dazai is looking at you as if you’re the only thing in the world that matters, stars in his eyes and a soft smile on his lips, to look up at the sky. He supposes it doesn’t quite matter if he doesn’t understand what’s so special about you to make Dazai act like this, just the fact that you do is enough—and if it turns out this is all some scheme by one of the Port Mafia’s enemies to get close to Dazai, Chuuya will do what he has to do. He always does.

He thinks he should still grab Dazai—if Chuuya remembers correctly, he has a meeting with Ace in twenty minutes, but he takes one last look at where you’re sitting with him and lets out another heavy sigh, shaking his head and deciding that he’ll just handle the meeting. He’s been meaning to have a word with the man about his business in eastern Russia anyway.

He closes the door quietly, heading back inside, all of the lingering resentment and anger washed away; he lets Dazai indulge, if only because he knows nothing good ever lasts in this line of work. It’s only a matter of time before his luck runs out.

#ᡣ𐭩 carina’s archives #dazai x reader #dazai x you #dazai osamu x reader #dazai osamu x you #bungo stray dogs x reader #bungo stray dogs x you #bsd x reader #bsd x you

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secretgamergirl · 5 months

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How a Computer Works - Part 1 (Components)

I am about to teach you on a real fundamental, connecting up electronic components level, how a computer actually works. Before I get into the meat of this though (you can just skip down below the fold if you don't care), here's the reasons I'm sitting doing so in this format:

Like a decade or two ago, companies Facebook pushed this whole "pivot to video" idea on the whole internet with some completely faked data, convincing everyone that everything had to be a video, and we need to start pushing back against that. Especially for stuff like complex explanations of things or instructions, it's much more efficient to just explain things clearly in text, maybe with some visual aids, so people can easily search, scan, and skip around between sections. It's also a hell of a lot easier to host things long term, and you can even print out a text based explainer and not need a computer to read it, keep it on a desk, highlight it, etc.

People are so clueless about how computers actually work that they start really thinking like it's all magical. Even programmers. Aside from how proper knowledge lets you get more out of them, this leads to people spouting off total nonsense about "teaching sand to think" or "everything is just 1s and 0s" or "this 'AI' a con artist who was trying to sell me NFTs a month ago probably really is an amazing creative thinking machine that can do everything he says!"

We used to have this cultural value going where it was expected that if you owned something and used it day to day, you'd have enough basic knowledge of how it worked that if it stopped working you could open it up, see what was wrong, and maybe fix it on your own, or maybe even put one together again from scratch, and that's obviously worth bringing back.

I'm personally working on a totally bonkers DIY project and I'd like to hype up like-minded people for when it gets farther along.

So all that said, have a standard reminder that I am completely reliant on Patreon donations to survive, keep updating this blog, and ideally start getting some PCBs and chips and a nice oscilloscope to get that mystery project off the ground.

Electricity probably doesn't work like how you were taught (and my explanation shouldn't be trusted too far either).

I remember, growing up, hearing all sorts of things about electricity having this sort of magical ability to always find the shortest possible path to where it needs to get, flowing like water, and a bunch of other things that are kind of useful for explaining how a Faraday cage or a lightning rod works, and not conflicting with how simple electronics will have a battery and then a single line of wire going through like a switch and a light bulb or whatever back to the other end of the battery.

If you had this idea drilled into your head hard enough, you might end up thinking that if we have a wire hooked to the negative end of a battery stretching off to the east, and another wire stretching off to the east from the positive end, and we bridge between the two in several places with an LED or something soldered to both ends, only the westernmost one is going to light up, because hey, the shortest path is the one that turns off as quickly as possible to connect to the other side, right? Well turns out no, all three are going to light up, because that "shortest path" thing is a total misunderstanding.

Here's how it actually works, roughly. If you took basic high school chemistry, you learned about how the periodic table is set up, right? A given atom, normally, has whatever number of protons in the core, and the same number of electrons, whipping all over around it, being attracted to those protons but repelled by each other, and there's particular counts of electrons which are super chill with that arrangement so we put those elements in the same column as each other, and then as you count up from those, you get the elements between those either have some electrons that don't fit all tight packed in the tight orbit and just kinda hang out all wide and lonely and "want to" buddy up with another atom that has more room, up to the half full column that can kinda go either way, then as we approach the next happy number they "want to" have a little more company to get right to that cozy tight packed number, and when you have "extra" electrons and "missing" electrons other atoms kinda cozy up and share so they hit those good noble gas counts.

I'm sure real experts want to scream at me for both that and this, but this is basically how electricity works. You have a big pile of something at the "positive" end that's "missing electrons" (for the above reason or maybe actually ionized so they really aren't there), and a "negative" end that's got spares. Then you make wires out of stuff from those middle of the road elements that have awkward electron counts and don't mind buddying up (and also high melting points and some other handy qualities) and you hook those in there. And the electron clouds on all the atoms in the wire get kinda pulled towards the positive side because there's more room over there, but if they full on leave their nucleus needs more electron pals, so yeah neighbors get pulled over, and the whole wire connected to the positive bit ends up with a positive charge to it, and the whole wire on the negative bit is negatively charged, and so yeah, anywhere you bridge the gap between the two, the electrons are pretty stoked about balancing out these two big awkward compromises and they'll start conga lining over to balance things out, and while they're at it they'll light up lights or shake speakers or spin motors or activate electromagnets or whatever other rad things you've worked out how to make happen with a live electric current.

Insulators, Resistors, Waves, and Capacitors

Oh and we typically surround these wires made of things that are super happy about sharing electrons around with materials that are very much "I'm good, thanks," but this isn't an all or nothing system and there's stuff you can connect between the positive and negative ends of things that still pass the current along, but only so much so fast. We use those to make resistors, and those are handy because sometimes you don't want to put all the juice you have through something because it would damage it, and having a resistor anywhere along a path you're putting current through puts a cap on that flow, and also sometimes you might want a wire connected to positive or negative with a really strong resistor so it'll have SOME sort of default charge, but if we get a free(r) flowing connection attached to that wire somewhere else that opens sometimes, screw that little trickle going one way, we're leaning everyone the other way for now.

The other thing with electricity is is that the flow here isn't a basic yes/no thing. How enthusiastically those electrons are getting pulled depends on the difference in charge at the positive and negative ends, and also if you're running super long wires then even if they conduct real good, having all that space to spread along is going to kinda slow things to a trickle, AND the whole thing is kinda going to have some inherent bounciness to it both because we're dealing with electrons whipping and spinning all over and because, since it's a property that's actually useful for a lot of things we do with electricity, the power coming out of the wall has this intentional wobbly nature because we've actually got this ridiculous spinny thing going on that's constantly flip flopping which prong of the socket is positive and which is negative and point is we get these sine waves of strength by default, and they kinda flop over if we're going really far.

Of course there's also a lot of times when you really want to not have your current flow flickering on and off all the time, but hey fortunately one of the first neat little electronic components we ever worked out are capacitors... and look, I'm going to be straight with you. I don't really get capacitors, but the basic idea is you've got two wires that go to big wide plates, and between those you have something that doesn't conduct the electricity normally, but they're so close the electromagnetic fields are like vibing, and then if you disconnect them from the flow they were almost conducting and/or they get charged to their limit, they just can't deal with being so charged up and they'll bridge their own gap and let it out. So basically you give them electricity to hold onto for a bit then pass along, and various sizes of them are super handy if you want to have a delay between throwing a switch and having things start doing their thing, or keeping stuff going after you break a connection, or you make a little branching path where one branch connects all regular and the other goes through a capacitor, and the electricity which is coming in in little pulses effectively comes out as a relatively steady stream because every time it'd cut out the capacity lets its charge go.

We don't just have switches, we have potentiometers.

OK, so... all of the above is just sort of about having a current and maybe worrying about how strong it is, but other than explaining how you can just kinda have main power rails running all over, and just hook stuff across them all willy-nilly rather than being forced to put everything in one big line, but still, all you can do with that is turn the whole thing on and off by breaking the circuit. Incidentally, switches, buttons, keys, and anything else you use to control the behavior of any electronic device really are just physically touching loose wires together or pulling them apart... well wait no, not all, this is a good bit to know.

None of this is actually pass/fail, really, there's wave amplitudes and how big a difference we have between the all. So when you have like, a volume knob, that's a potentiometer, which is a simple little thing where you've got your wire, it's going through a resistor, and then we have another wire we're scraping back and forth along the resistor, using a knob, usually, and the idea is the current only has to go through X percent of the resistor to get to the wire you're moving, which proportionately reduces the resistance. So you have like a 20 volt current, you've got a resistor that'll drop that down to 5 or so, but then you move this other wire down along and you've got this whole dynamic range and you can fine tune it to 15 or 10 or whatever coming down that wire. And what's nice about this again, what's actually coming down the wire is this wobbily wave of current, it's not really just "on" or "off, and as you add resistance, the wobble stays the same, it's just the peaks and valleys get closer to being just flat. Which is great if you're making, say, a knob to control volume, or brightness, or anything you want variable intensity in really.

Hey hey, it's a relay!

Again, a lot of the earliest stuff people did with electronics was really dependent on that analog wobbly waveform angle. Particularly for reproducing sound, and particularly the signals of a telegraph. Those had to travel down wires for absurd distances, and as previously stated, when you do that the signal is going to eventually decay to nothing. But then someone came up with this really basic idea where every so often along those super long wires, you set something up that takes the old signal and uses it to start a new one. They called them relays, because you know, it's like a relay race.

If you know how an electromagnet works (something about the field generated when you coil a bunch of copper wire around an iron core and run an electric current through it), a relay is super simple. You've got an electromagnet in the first circuit you're running, presumably right by where it's going to hit the big charged endpoint, and that magnetically pulls a tab of metal that's acting as a switch on a new circuit. As long as you've got enough juice left to activate the magnet, you slam that switch and voom you've got all the voltage you can generate on the new line.

Relays don't get used too much in other stuff, being unpopular at the time for not being all analog and wobbily (slamming that switch back and forth IS going to be a very binary on or off sorta thing), and they make this loud clacking noise that's actually just super cool to hear in devices that do use them (pinball machines are one of the main surviving use cases I believe) but could be annoying in some cases. What's also neat is that they're a logical AND gate. That is, if you have current flowing into the magnet, AND you have current flowing into the new wire up to the switch, you have it flowing out through the far side of the switch, but if either of those isn't true, nothing happens. Logic gates, to get ahead of myself a bit, are kinda the whole thing with computers, but we still need the rest of them. So for these purposes, relays re only neat if it's the most power and space efficient AND gate you have access to.

Oh and come to think of it, there's no reason we need to have that magnet closing the circuit when it's doing its thing. We could have it closed by default and yank it open by the magnet. Hey, now we're inverting whatever we're getting on the first wire! Neat!

Relay computers clack too loud! Gimme vacuum tubes!

So... let's take a look at the other main thing people used electricity for before coming up with the whole computer thing, our old friend the light bulb! Now I already touched a bit on the whole wacky alternating current thing, and I think this is actually one of the cases that eventually lead to it being adopted so widely, but the earliest light bulbs tended to just use normal direct current, where again, you've got the positive end and the negative end, and we just take a little filament of whatever we have handy that glows when you run enough of a current through it, and we put that in a big glass bulb and pump out all the air we can, because if we don't, the oxygen in there is probably going to change that from glowing a bit to straight up catching on fire and burning immediately.

But, we have a new weird little problem, because of the physics behind that glowing. Making something hot, on a molecular level, is just kinda adding energy to the system so everything jitters around more violently, and if you get something hot enough that it glows, you're getting it all twitchy enough for tinier particles to just fly the hell off it. Specifically photons, that's the light bit, but also hey, remember, electrons are just kinda free moving and whipping all over looking for their naked proton pals... and hey, inside this big glass bulb, we've got that other end of the wire with the more positive charge to it. Why bother wandering up this whole coily filament when we're in a vacuum and there's nothing to get in the way if we just leap straight over that gap? So... they do that, and they're coming in fast and on elliptical approaches and all, so a bunch of electrons overshoot and smack into the glass on the far side, and now one side of every light bulb is getting all gross and burnt from that and turning all brown and we can't have that.

So again, part of the fix is we switched to alternating current so it's at least splitting those wild jumps up to either side, but before that, someone tried to solve this by just... kinda putting a backboard in there. Stick a big metal plate on the end of another wire in the bulb connected to a positive charge, and now OK, all those maverick electrons smack into here and aren't messing up the glass, but also hey, this is a neat little thing. Those electrons are making that hop because they're all hot and bothered. If we're not heating up the plate they're jumping to, and there's no real reason we'd want to, then if we had a negative signal over on that side... nothing would happen. Electrons aren't getting all antsy and jumping back.

So now we have a diode! The name comes because we have two (di-) electrodes (-ode) we care about in the bulb (we're just kind of ignoring the negative one), and it's a one way street for our circuit. That's useful for a lot of stuff, like not having electricity flow backwards through complex systems and mess things up, converting AC to DC (when it flips, current won't flow through the diode so we lop off the bottom of the wave, and hey, we can do that thing with capacitors to release their current during those cutoffs, and if we're clever we can get a pretty steady high).

More electrodes! More electrodes!

So a bit after someone worked out this whole vacuum tube diode thing, someone went hey, what if it was a triode? So, let's stick another electrode in there, and this one just kinda curves around in the middle, just kinda making a grate or a mesh grid, between our hot always flowing filament and that catch plate we're keeping positively charged when it's doing stuff. Well this works in a neat way. If there's a negative charge on it, it's going to be pushing back on those electrons jumping over, and if there's a positive charge on it, it's going to help pull those electrons over (it's all thin, so they're going to shoot right past it, especially if there's way more of a positive charge over on the plate... and here's the super cool part- This is an analog thing. If we have a relatively big negative charge, it's going to repel everything, if it's a relatively big positive, it's going to pull a ton across, if it's right in the middle, it's like it wasn't even in there, and you can have tiny charges for all the gradients in between.

We don't need a huge charge for any of this though, because we're just helping or hindering the big jump from the high voltage stuff, and huh, weren't we doing this whole weak current controlling a strong current thing before with the relay? We were! And this is doing the same thing! Except now we're doing it all analog style, not slapping switch with a magnet, and we can make those wavy currents peak higher or lower and cool, now we can have phone lines boost over long distances too, and make volume knobs, and all that good stuff.

The relay version of this had that cool trick though where you could flip the output. Can we still flip the output? We sure can, we just need some other toys in the mix. See we keep talking about positive charges and negative charges at the ends of our circuits, but these are relative things. I mentioned way back when how you can use resistors to throttle how much of a current we've got, so you can run two wires to that grid in the triode. One connects to a negative charge and the other positive, with resistors on both those lines, and a switch that can break the connection on the positive end. If the positive is disconnected, we've got a negative charge on the grid, since it's all we've got, but if we connect it, and the resistor to the negative end really limits flow, we're positive in the section the grid's in. And over on the side with the collecting plate, we branch off with another resistor setup so the negative charge on that side is normally the only viable connection for a positive, but when we flip the grid to positive, we're jumping across the gap in the vacuum tube, and that's a big open flow so we'll just take those electrons instead of the ones that have to squeeze through a tight resistor to get there.

That explanation is probably a bit hard to follow because I'm over here trying to explain it based on how the electrons are actually getting pulled around. In the world of electronics everyone decided to just pretend the flow is going the other way because it makes stuff easier to follow. So pretend we have magical positrons that go the other way and if they have nothing better to do they go down the path where we have all the fun stuff further down the circuit lighting lights and all that even though it's a tight squeeze through a resistor, because there's a yucky double negative in the triode and that's worse, but we have the switch rigged up to make that a nice positive go signal to the resistance free promised land with a bonus booster to cut across, so we're just gonna go that way when the grid signal's connected.

Oh and you can make other sorts of logic circuits or double up on them in a single tube if you add more grids and such, which we did for a while, but not really relevant these days.

Cool history lesson but I know there's no relays or vacuum tubes in my computer.

Right, so the above things are how we used to make computers, but they were super bulky, and you'd have to deal with how relays are super loud and kinda slow, and vacuum tubes need a big power draw and get hot. What we use instead of either of those these days are transistors. See after spending a good number of years working out all this circuit flow stuff with vacuum tubes we eventually focused on how the real important thing in all of this is how with the right materials you can make a little juncture where current flows between a positive and negative charge if a third wire going in there is also positively charged, but if it's negatively charged we're pulling over. And turns out there is a WAY more efficient way of doing that if you take a chunk of good ol' middle of the electron road silicon, and just kinda lightly paint the side of it with just the tiniest amount of positive leaning and negative leaning elements on the sides.

Really transistors don't require understanding anything new past the large number of topics already covered here, they're just more compact about it. Positive leaning bit, negative leaning bit, wildcard in the middle, like a vacuum tube. Based on the concepts of pulling electrons around from chemistry, like a circuit in general. The control wire in the middle kinda works in just a pass-fail sort of way, like a relay. They're just really nice compared to the older alternatives because they don't make noise or have moving parts to wear down, you don't have to run enough current through them for metal to start glowing and the whole room to heat up, and you can make them small. Absurdly small. Like... need an electron microscope to see them small.

And of course you can also make an inverter super tiny like that, and a diode (while you're at it you can use special materials or phosphors to make them light emitting, go LEDs!) and resistors can get pretty damn small if you just use less of a more resistant material, capacitors I think have a limit to how tiny you can get, practically, but yeah, you now know enough of the basic fundamentals of how computers work to throw some logic gates together. We've covered how a relay, triode, or transistor function as an AND gate. An OR gate is super easy, you just stick diodes on two wires so you don't have messy backflow then connect them together and lead off there. If you can get your head around wiring up an inverter (AKA NOT), hey, stick one after an AND to get a NAND, or an OR to get a NOR. You can work out XOR and XNOR from there right? Just build 4 NANDs, pass input A into gates 1 and 2, B into 2 and 3, 2's output into 1 and 3, 1 and 3's output into 4 for a XOR, use NORs instead for a XNOR. That's all of them right? So now just build a ton of those and arrange them into a computer. It's all logic and math from there.

Oh right. It's... an absurd amount of logic and math, and I can only fit so many words in a blog post. So we'll have to go all...

CONTINUED IN PART 2!

Meanwhile, again, if you can spare some cash I'd really appreciate it.

#computers #computer science #history #electronics #education #relays #transistors #vacuum tubes

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