#and mourn and yearn together
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thinking about potentially writing a fic about the natural end of my darling's life and 😶
#mmnnph. i know realistically that i would live longer than him but like :'')#i don't want to live without him. i know he'd want me to and that i was able to live before him but having since loved him i don't think i#could stand to live without him again. i'm already dying yearning to be with him but to finally have and then lose him? it might kill me#for real. i've considered this at length before but i'm only now grappling with the reality of likely having to live for years without him#all over again. oh i'd lose it. how could i ever be the same?#i would be living as i am now: yearning for death to be reunited with him. 😔.#we will be brought together eternally through the force. maybe we'll be in flowers or cats or a planet of our own. venus herself.#maybe we'll be reincarnated and get to fall in love all over again.... these thoughts are teethers to cope with the ideas of never being#able to be with him and of losing him once he is found. oh to shatter a glued up mirror.....#to lose him after knowing his love...... it's unbearable. besides i'm already in mourning of his absence from my life.#ellie rambles about stuff#he spun the stars on his fingernails (tag)#death tw#grief tw
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Thinking about possessive Boothill in public that turns into clingy mess in private,,
Boothill lays between your legs on your shared bed, careful not to put his entire weight on you; his cheek nuzzles into your stomach, occasionally peppering it with gentle kisses. A satisfied growl escapes his lips when your hands begin to play with his hair, carding through it and softly scratching his scalp - his snowy hair strands fall through the gaps of your fingers and Boothill pushes his head further into your hand, encouraging you to continue.
The feeling of your touch almost intoxicates him; he yearns to feel it more. He knows he’ll never get tired of it, no - he wants more, now.
He props himself up on his elbow and unexpectedly grabs your arm, sliding his hand up from your wrist to slowly cup his cheek with your palm; Boothill’s eyebrows furrow slightly as he yet again, nuzzles into your hand greedily and closes his eyes.
A smile forms on your face when Boothill presses a kiss in the center of your palm, still having his own, robotic hand over yours - but he’s so gentle with you, maybe even afraid of using a bit more strength with you right now. His raven bangs tickle you ever so slightly, almost if it was a ghost’s touch; your thumb caresses the skin hidden underneath the pitch-black hair, adorned by a few pearly strands of hair that messily sat in the middle.
Your hand makes its way to touch the bangs; he scoffs and mourns the loss of warmth your hand provided, but waits for your next move. His nose inhales sharply when he felt you tuck his bangs behind his ear and pull him closer by his chin.
Boothill hovers above you, face to face.
He wastes no more time and hungrily, yet tenderly, connects your lips together. This time, it’s his palm that cups your face; his mechanized thumb strokes your cheek with affection that no one else has ever seen.
Boothill’s bangs fall to frame his face again; he deepens the kiss.
#sorry I just really wanna play with his hair man#honkai star rail x reader#honkai star rail#hsr x reader#boothill#boothill x reader#boothill hsr#.blurb
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Hunger Games is a love letter.
Hunger Games is a love letter to Prim. A love letter to the gentle, to the healers, to the kindly headstrong, to the wise. A love letter to the defenceless and precious, to those who have seen too much too soon — a love letter to those we yearn to save and, often, can’t.
Hunger Games is a love letter to Madge. A love letter to those who love quietly, to those whose silent actions say a lot more than words ever could. A love letter to the companions whose acceptance and support warm our hearts and touch our souls, to those who stay with us forever — sometimes, regrettably, only in memory.
Hunger Games is a love letter to Johanna. A love letter to the wounded, to those made harsh by loss. A love letter to those who’d rather be loathed than deemed an inconvenience, to those who don’t know how to let people in anymore — a love letter to those who don’t remember what it is to be loved.
Hunger Games is a love letter to Rue. A love letter to the sweet and generous, to the brutally sacrificed, to the victims of injustice. A love letter to those who could have been saved but weren’t, to those who deserved better, to the innocent — a love letter to the children who will be forever mourned.
Hunger Games is a love letter to Finnick. A love letter to those whose pain was made to be spectacle, to the dehumanised and abused. A love letter to those who put up a wall and hide their pain, to the brave and broken, to the soulfully beautiful — to those who sometimes fall to pieces and can’t put them back together.
Hunger Games is a love letter to Haymitch. A love letter to those who never stopped hurting, to those who dismantle themselves to cope with what’s left, to those who’d rather forget. A love letter to those whose self-hatred struggles with all the good they desperately want to do, those who’d love to love, those who are afraid to fall asleep — those who are irreparably torn in the aftermath.
Hunger Games is a love letter to Katniss’ father, whose memory is the only survivor, and to Katniss’ mother, who is left to pick up the pieces.
Hunger Games is a love letter to Peeta, the dandelion in the spring. A love letter to rebirth and hope, to the growth of flowers among the ashes, to the promise of a better future. A love letter to love, the selfless, healing love, the one that breathes life back into starved lungs, the one that makes a home, the unconditional embrace that warms wintery hearts — a love letter to a sunset that calls for dawn.
Hunger Games is a love letter to Katniss, to the fire of a revolution that yearns for peace. A love letter to those who, surrounded by violence, choose compassion, a love letter for the inadequate and chosen, a love letter for those who are exhausted and forced to get up. A love letter for those who, after the fight, seek to rebuild, a love letter for those who are broken and selfless, a love letter for those who tried their hardest to save those they loved — a love letter to the survivors.
#the hunger games#thg#hunger games#a ballad of songbirds and snakes#everlark#katniss and peeta#primrose everdeen#madge undersee#haymitch abernathy#peeta mellark#katniss everdeen#finnick odair#johanna mason#rue the hunger games
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the dynamic im aiming for volokari is whatever ichika and saeki have in the adonis route as well as the agonizing slowburn between yang and liliana over the years and if im extra spicy the denial of feelings before the eventual ardent devotion between reiji and yui
#i want the dynamic that is so on the fence between soft and angst#that it swings like a pendulum#i want volo to suffer for this actions after betraying and playing w akaris heart#i want akari to hide and mask her pain and betrayal esp after nt being able to go back home#i want their reunion to be so filled w bitterness and tension so thick it cant be cut with a chainsaw#yet a part. a very hidden part of them Yearns#but betrayal and heartbreak deny them of what is itching at the deepest creases of their hearts#i want them to be forced to work together to defeat a common evil#for volo to try n break her again#only to hv himself broken into pieces#and when the time comes where akari is abt to be gone forever#instead of being happy. of being able to celebrate.#volo mourns. grieves. laments. SUFFERS.#for he finally realized what was given to him as he was about to lose her#give me THIS kind of vlkr#THIS kind of vlkr is the one i yearn#fafar yaps#about pokemon
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Japanese Denim
spoilers for 2.1 (aventurine's real name), gn reader, soft aventurine hours <33
wc; 944
You don't miss the breath that blows over your face, relief lifting the weight off of his chest. It's you. He's safe. He can slumber for just a moment longer.
Sunlight is unfamiliar with the planes of his face. It dances across it; gold tracing the curves of his jaw, running playfully in and out of the dip and curve of his nose, contrasting the shadows of his bottom lip. It highlights his lashes, blonde and long and casting dainty streaks on top of his cheek bones. Aventurine —no, Kakavasha— is beautiful even in sleep. He feels ethereal beside you, blurred along the edges, you are just barely able to believe him to be tangible, with the way the morning clouds part to shine down upon him. But he's real, and the both of you no longer reside in the opalescent bubbles of Penacony. You're home. He’s home.
There's a strand of hair that coils over the dip of his cheek. Slowly, like approaching a stray, your hand moves to tuck it behind his ear.
His eyes flicker open before you're halfway there.
Kakavasha is a light sleeper. There isn't time for long rests, what with danger shadowing his every step, coiling around his lungs in the form of fear, deadly memories taking the form of nightmares every time he dares to drift off. You mourn the loss of his comfortable sleep, an apology hot on the tip of your tongue, searing it the longer it stays tucked behind your lips, but his eyes flutter shut again before you get the chance. The embers disperse.
You don't miss the breath that blows over your face, relief lifting the weight off of his chest. It's you. He's safe. He can slumber for just a moment longer.
You cross the remainder of the distance between you, fingers brushing over the fullness of his cheek. There is magic in his returned affections, his bare palms holding you there against him, honeyed skin nuzzling into you. He kisses the heel of your palm, sweet and simple, like it's the easiest thing in the world.
“...Good morning,” his voice is weighed down by his drowsiness, nearly gravely from disuse. You realize that this is the latest he's slept in months, without the buzz of his phone interrupting what little time he lends himself to the vulnerability of rest. His words slur together, a change to the steady, calculated speech he uses normally— at the poker table, at the IPC Headquarters, at all times. Like this, though, exposed and sleepy, he's a bit more upfront. A bit less guarded.
“...‘S so earlyyyy…”
And a lot more whiny.
You've become acquainted with Kakavasha’s greed by now. It is his twin, his shadow, mimicking his every movement and curling around him like smoke ; all-consuming and burning through his flesh. So you aren't surprised when the beast bares its fangs, arms entangling around your middle and holding. It's fair— the pair of you are accustomed to loss, to the feeling of holding someone for the last time before the feeling of them fades away like a faraway memory, your own hands move down to hold him, too. For a sweet, blissful moment it is just the two of you. Your breathing rises and falls in tandem with his, blonde locks tickling the crook of your neck and greedy, greedy hands shifting at your back to tug you even closer. There is a void in Kakavasha’s chest, one that yearned for so long —an open wound— for someone to hold onto, completely and freely, only to have its wants go unanswered. But you are here now, wrapped up tight in his arms, peacefully. He'll be damned if he lets go now.
You sigh, and it blows past his ear, “Clingy today, huh?”
How could he not be? When the gods spited him, when everyone in sight turned his back on him, you still stood firmly at his side, unrelenting. You are more than he will ever deserve, but selfishly he still holds you.
Kakavasha stretches, cat-like, and you can see an expanse of pale skin when the silk of his nightshirt shifts with the movement. He settles right back against you, your legs entangled thoroughly.
“You're comfortable. It's nowhere near my fault.”
To make a point, Kakavasha pulls you impossibly closer. He even makes a point to huff, as if offended you even asked.
“Right, right,” your hand is absentmindedly twirling the ends of his hair with your pointer finger— you don't remember when it got there, but doing it feels so natural you don't question it for another second.
“Unfortunately, I’ll have to cut this time short. I need to get up—”
“Why?”
He says it so quickly you can see he even surprises himself —eyes wide and mouth agape— but he recovers, clearing his throat:
“What's the rush? We have a day off for once, remember?”
He’s pouting. He tries to hide it under the weight of his glare, but his bottom lip, chapped from a deep slumber, betrays him. Kakavasha does not beg, and you are the last person to ever get him to try, after all he’s been through, but his bright eyes seem to plead with you.
“Right,” you agree, nodding simply, “But one of us needs to make breakfast,” you see it, the way his brows furrow further and he opens his mouth to protest immediately, “No, it cannot wait. I’m hungry.”
At that, he scoffs.
“Fine.”
Kakavasha swings his legs over the plush of your mattress, getting up in one smooth motion. You don’t have time to ponder what he’s doing– his hand latches onto your arm and pulls you up with him. Your face breaks into a smile– he cannot bear to part with you for even a moment.
“If you insist, we’ll do it together.”
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rbs w/ comments appreciated !!! ty for reading <33
#aventurine x reader#aventurine x you#—stellaronhvnters.#honkai star rail headcanons#honkai star rail imagines#honkai star rail x reader#hsr x reader#hsr aventurine#aventurine hsr#☆.writing
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Hiii!! Firstly, I love your writing and I hope you’re having a great day!! I was hoping to request a Winchester sibling fic where the reader is really comforted by physical touch but is really observant and receptive to the fact their brothers are emotionally constipated and touch starved so the reader has never really asked for it but then one day either just a bad day or bad hunt and the reader just asks the boys to hold them or one of them to sit in the back of the Impala with them? Thank you so so much and I hope you have a lovely day!! 🫶
So close, yet too far.
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Summary: You just really need a hug.
Word Count: 1k
Warnings: Touch Starved, character death mentioned, swearing
p.s. Sorry for the long wait! I've got exams at the moment so they're taking up a lot of my time.
⛧ SPN MASTERLIST ⛧
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Life as a hunter was never still. You were constantly moving. Constantly looking over your shoulder. Constantly chasing what could be your last day on earth. And you wouldn’t ever have said you regretted it. No. In fact, you wouldn’t have changed it for the world. Hunting creatures and saving the world? It was all You couldn’t have imagined a better life…
But sometimes you found yourself wanting life to just slow down for a minute. It was so hectic and you just needed a breath. A hug. With such a busy life, there was no time for just spending quality time with your brothers. Or anyone for that matter. It was an endless cycle: Wake up. Research. Hunt. Drive. Sleep. There was no time for sitting on the couch and watching cheesy movies together. Nor was there any time for curling up together like you used to do when you were smaller. You found yourself yearning for it. For a hug or simply just a gentle arm around your shoulder. It used to bring you so much comfort. But times were tough with all that had happened recently. The three of you were even more on edge than ever before.
Your brothers had always told you that you could ask them for anything. That you could tell them whatever you wanted… but this wasn’t just something you could ask them for. You had seen how they often shunned away from touch. From relationships. Having seen so much pain and having lost so many people…they struggled to allow themselves to let their guard down enough to enjoy a tender moment. Even with you. So no matter how much you yearned for it you could never bring yourself to push the want from your mind and into words.
So when the hunt went worse than you could have imagined you kept quiet.
Dean’s hand was right there; peeking out from the hem of his flannel. His fingers were bloody and calloused, scarred and covered in small cuts and yet his touch was still tender. You felt your own fingers itch to reach out and lace them between his. You wanted for him or Sam to wrap you up in their arms and hold you close. To squeeze your hand. Or a shoulder. But you knew that they had much more pressing matters to deal with that overshadowed “needy little sister”.
You trailed behind them, dragging your feet ever so slightly to kick up the dirt and leave trails between the orange leaves. You did not look up at your brothers because you knew you would see Dean's set jaw and Sam’s pinched eyebrows as they too mourned the hunt.
A small boy had been caught by a shtriga. He had been no older than 5 or 6 with these big, blue eyes that got impossibly wider as the creature stalked toward him. And his scream…it pierced through the air like a beam of light: clear as day yet providing no clarity. No safety like light should bring. Instead it was cold and filled with a gripping terror.
The three of you had been too slow. No matter how hard you dragged your stubborn limbs you couldn’t get to him fast enough. So now you trudged along in silence.
The sight of Baby did not, in fact, provide you with the relief you thought it would. Instead the gleaming of the bonnet against the moonlight just made your stomach churn. You knew that you would all try to bury the memory in a box, deep in the back of your mind. But it was never that easy. They tried hard, but you would hear them late at night. Dean hardly slept as he tried to drink his troubles away and Sam barely left his room. And then there was you who lay awake staring blankly at the ceiling as you wept softly, wrapping your arms around yourself to curl up in a ball. It didn’t bring the same comfort as theirs did, like it had done when you were small and naive when you crawled into their bed after a nightmare. When things weren’t so fucking complicated.
Tears pricked in the corner of your eyes as you reached for the metal handle. You couldn’t do it. You couldn’t sit in silence to be left with your own thoughts. You couldn’t be alone. Not right now.
“Sammy…” Your voice was quiet. Hushed. Barely a whisper pushed out on cracked lips that trembled.
Sam paused, his hand halfway between where he had been picking at the hem of his jeans and the handle of the passenger door. He lifted his head, humming softly in acknowledgement.
“Sit with me… Please.”
“Of course.” His face melted and he moved in one swift movement.
He slid in the backseat, leaning against the door frame and stretching out across the seats. He pulled you in to lean against his side, wrapping his arms around you. You lay your head on his shoulder, snuggling into his side. And began to weep.
“Kiddo?” Sam asked gently. “What’s up?” His hands traced small circles on your arm.
Dean reached over the back of the seat with a concerned look, though part of it could be easily mistaken for fear. “It’s not your fault, Sweetheart-” He started.
“Just…hold me. Please.” You clung onto Sam, your other hand reaching out to settle atop of Dean’s. Their touch was comforting, yet you couldn’t help the wavering as you wept. “I don’t want to be alone right now.”
And so they did. Sam nestled you further into his side, tucking your head beneath his chin and Dean clambered out of his seat to join the two of you in the back. He settled down on your other side, sandwiching you between the two of you. And they held you. They ran their fingers through your hair, held your hand and spoke to you. They held you tight and the three of you stayed close together, with no intention of moving any time soon.
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SPN TAGS:
@defonotashleyr
@aestheticdaisies
@xxrougefangxx
@hell-o-kittys
@inlovewhithafairytale
@harleycao
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#supernatural x reader#supernatural#spn x reader#spn x sister reader#supernatural x sister reader#supernatural x little sister reader#supernatural fanfiction#hurt/comfort#touch starved#Dean Winchester#Dean Winchester x Reader#Dean Winchester x sister reader#Sam Winchester#Sam Winchester x reader#Sam Winchester x sister reader
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No idea where I was going with this but he makes it difficult for me to think.
More Dragon King Bakugou thoughts.
Tw: he calls us “little girl”, if that gives you the ick I’m soz.
It’s difficult for Dragon King Bakugou to treat your body with care. A man who was raised of violence and barbarity, intended from birth to be a vengeful successor who would pillage and rule over Kingdoms with his dragon by his side. The comforting embrace of his mothers hold long forgotten as he seeks pleasure in the death and destruction that follows him.
And although he may seem callous and cold, he’s wholly perceptive of the way you cower from him. Flinching as he moves to hold your arms or cup your face— as though you’re a frightened doe startled by the sudden snap of a twig. For the first time in his life he doesn’t want to be this brute of a man, the bloodthirsty King of Dragons that’s revered around the Country.
You don’t expect him to be soft. Your body already trembles as he steps inside the tent, pulling his thick cloak of furs from around his shoulders as he’s illuminated from the embers of the fire still burning outside. Throwing it down onto your makeshift bed as he tries to make it as comfortable as possible for you, a futile peace offering after stealing you from everything you once knew.
It’s difficult laying beside a man you barely know, even though you’ve been together months now. And you hate the way your body betrays you, turning towards the warmth that exudes from him.
An arm is usually strewn across you throughout the night— whether it’s to keep you from escaping or to keep you safe you’re never certain. But you always find yourself yearning for his touch, desperate to feel comfort from a man you once swore you despised.
His hands are rough, toughened by the harsh elements and fierce battles waged upon nations. The first rough grip of his hand against your hip has your stomach lurching, petrified of how he may handle you like the kill he brings home from hunting, a dead carcas that doesn’t require any sympathy. For Dragon King Bakugou refuses to mourn for the dead. But he fills you with bewilderment as rough callouses catch against your soft skin as he runs them along your body with surprising care.
Bakugou’s warm breath fans your cheek, chapped lips barely hover against your skin as he lingers. The faintest butterfly of a kiss pecks at the corner of your mouth as he lets you decide— for he knows once he starts he will not be able to stop. And you don’t want him to, bridging the gap as you pull him into a gentle kiss.
It’s nothing like you imagined it to be the nights you lay beside him. Allowing your mind to wonder as you pictured him capturing your lips in a bruising kiss, holding you tight and bending you over to claim you as his own.
You can tell he’s holding back, his soft touch nothing like you’ve seen before as he brushes his tongue against your lips. Exploring more unmarked territory as you feel yourself melting into him, finally allowing him to explore new lands as he chances an uncharacteristically gentle grope to your soft breast.
Dragon King Bakugou may be a ruthless, sadistic beast of a man— but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to handle his most prized possession with docious care.
And whilst you indulge in his touches, they’re not enough to satiate the burning hunger that swirls inside you like a molten volcano. The throb between your thighs incessant as you silently beg for him to touch you, to take you— to finally claim you as his own. And you can tell that he’s holding back, because he doesn’t want to hurt you.
Because he knows exactly what he’s capable of.
“There’s no need to be so gentle, my King.”
The words have the blood rushing directly to his cock, pulling the most depraved, sinful growl from deep in his throat as he bares his sharp teeth. As if trying to hold back the final fine threads of resolve that are holding him together— the rope that’s been wearing thin since the first moment he received you.
“I can take it.”
The words leave your lips, but you’re not sure you can. Not now this hulking brute of a man is hovering over you on sturdy knees, crimson eyes darken as he surveys his prey like a predatory wolf. Reaching down to wrap a large palm around the bare column of your neck as he follows the motion, leaning over you to press his lips against the shell of your ear.
“I’m not sure you can, little girl.”
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oh my god,,,, gurl!!!! THE CUSTOMER'S ALWAYS RIGHT fic is sooo good 😫 my heart literally breaks every time I read this story. Thank you for blessing us with this masterpiece <3
THE CUSTOMER'S ALWAYS RIGHT | square one
summary: eddie makes a confession that's been weighing heavy on his heart. you realize that your future with him is haunted by ghosts from your past.
pairing: virgin!eddie munson / f!reader
word count: 16.3k
warnings: hopper, steve, and robin being the reader defense squad, hints at reader's previously poor mental health, mentions of abusive and toxic relationships, a banshees of inisherin quote, b*lly h*rgrove because he needs a warning. (pretend any typos don't exist pls and thank u!)
a/n: guess who's back, back again? ✨✨ i'd apologize for disappearing for a month, but then there'd be apologies in all my notes, so just know that i'm sorry every time i disappear unexpectedly, okay? 🥲 thanks for being so patient! please enjoy this long-awaited installment of tcar ily <3
( PREVIOUSLY ) | ( SERIES MASTERLIST ) | ( NEXT )
Eddie’s got a 1986 Van Halen tape in his boombox and a baby pink heart stitched into the fabric of his shirt. He’s the least metal he’s ever been, but he couldn’t be happier.
You keep your promise to him to patch up his torn Hellfire tee. If anything, you use the absentminded assurance as your excuse to see him again. The night you shared before, all but baring your scarred souls underneath glittering stars and streams of pale moonlight, hadn’t satiated your hunger for him. Eddie left you craving in a way you weren’t used to before — a yearning to be close to him that went beyond the boundaries of physical intimacy.
It was a simple sort of longing. It was a homesickness. A sense of nostalgia for a love you’d never felt before.
You wish you could wear Eddie’s adoration for you like a blanket, wrap yourself in the hand-stitched quilt of many colors and bundle it tighter around your shoulders when the cold comes. You want his softness to hold you in a way you’ve never been able to hold yourself.
You feel swaddled in it, succumbed and cloaked and at peace in all his tenderness. You’ve never been so at ease, so blissfully comforted by the presence of another human being. And Eddie feels all of that, every ounce of warmth you feel, because it pours out of you like rays of sunshine and bathes him in shades of gold.
He didn’t think you could get any softer than you had been that night at Skull Rock, until you were nestled in his unmade bed the next morning. You curled your legs underneath you as you weaved the needle and thread through the tear in his t-shirt, eyes squinted and tongue poking out the side of your mouth in an astute concentration.
All of the sudden, you were marshmallow fluff and honey on toast — made of all things sickly sweet that made his stomach feel suddenly full.
You finish mending the rip in record time and beam when he wears the heart-shaped stitching with pride. The rest of the day thereafter was spent in the tiny confines of his one hundred square-inch bedroom. From there, the both of you came to the silent understanding that you didn't want to spend another day apart.
The weekend had given you a limited sort of freedom, allowed you to pretend that you lived in a world with no responsibilities or anything other than Eddie Eddie Eddie, but adulthood made you no such promises. He had a side job to do to keep himself afloat, and you had a cat that thought it was the end of the world anytime you were gone for longer than a night. Both of those things together meant that the eve of parting was ultimately inevitable.
Every second you spent away from Eddie felt like you were grieving.
You mourned for him in the darkness of your apartment and tried to pretend you weren’t half a person in the cat food aisle at Melvald’s.
You tried to lessen the unbearable distance with phone calls, though it didn’t come nearly as close as feeling his fingers thrumming imaginary beats on your thigh or his heartbeat thudding against your ear.
But his voice filled the emptiness of your one-bedroom apartment and the Eddie Munson shaped hole he’d left just behind your ribcage, and that was good enough for you.
When you weren’t with him, you were roaming around your apartment like some kind of ghost, with the phone tucked between your ear and shoulder and the rotary clutched in your free hand.
You cook yourself dinner with him ranting about his day in your ear. You hold the receiver closer to Bowie and force him to hear her purr when she’s being exceptionally cute. He falls asleep some hours later to the sound of your soft snores, and you wake up the next morning to the sounds of his.
It was pathetic, truly.
You’d be gagging at how sweet it was if it wasn’t happening to you.
But it was.
Every ounce of this sticky sweet goodness was yours, and it tasted just like honey on your tongue.
It was the honeymoon stage times a thousand, all rose-colored and reflecting light — your own personal utopia. It brought with it a heavenly sort of refuge, a bubble of peace you never wanted to pierce.
Eddie basks in the serenity of it all when he finally has you with him again. You’re in his lap, on his lips, and all over him, but it still isn’t quite close enough. He doesn’t think he’ll be satisfied until you’ve successfully melted with him and your limbs have entwined with his like tree roots, destined to remain that way for the next couple of centuries or so.
And it’s weird because he could hardly handle living in such a tiny trailer with Wayne, let alone stomach more than a couple hours with the guys from Hellfire all in one place. But you? You entered his life all at once and now he can’t remember what it was like without you.
He doesn’t particularly want to, if he’s being real honest.
It’s why he’s always less enthused about letting you leave when you’ve both got responsibilities dragging you apart. He begs you to stay with him a few hours more, pleads for you to stick around while he makes a quick deal or an emergency pick-up when Dustin Henderson calls and says he needs a ride.
And you promise you’ll wait on him there, because he makes it virtually impossible to say no to his rosy pouted lips and chocolate syrup puppy dog eyes.
That’s when you run into Wayne for the first time, when Eddie’s out and you’re making breakfast for when he comes back.
French toast and scrambled eggs sizzle on the stove and warm the kitchen with all its cinnamon confections. It makes the man’s face screw up in confusion when he steps inside the trailer because he’s never known Eddie to cook a day in his life. And then his eyes find you — a young, pretty girl all alone in his kitchen with his nephew’s van gone from the drive.
“…Who the hell are you?” he wonders gruffly and pops a cigarette between his lips, totally unbothered.
He’s got no reason to be intimidated by the stranger in his trailer. He’s more confused than anything else, and he’s got this contorted look on his face like he’s blaming the exhaustion from the graveyard shift for his vision of you.
“Oh— my god,” you mumble through the mouthful of whipped cream you’d squeezed into your mouth moments prior. You fight to swallow it all down. “Uh. Hi. I’m, um… I’m Eddie’s... girlfriend?”
It sounds like you’re lying.
In some ways, it feels like you are.
You’ve been spending more time in his trailer than in your own home, but it’s not like either of you has motioned to make anything official just yet.
He eyes you with a tired and heavy gaze, eyes as dark and as infinite as Eddie’s. The man gives you a once-over and then chuckles lowly to himself as he tosses his corduroy jacket onto the back of the recliner and his tin lunchbox to the coffee table.
You shift awkwardly on the other side of the room. “…What is it?”
“When Eddie said he was talkin’ to a pretty girl on the phone every night, I thought he was lyin’,” he admits through hearty chuckles.
It makes you laugh too.
There’s little talking after the fact, besides you offering him some of the breakfast on the stove and him joking that you should come around more often.
You recount the story to Eddie when he returns, utterly mortified about the whole thing. You’re even more embarrassed when the boy finds amusement in your horror and starts to chuckle to himself — not exactly at you, but not with you either.
He laughs louder when you swat at him for it. You clamber on top of him, mattress squeaking mattress under your weight, as you demand him to stop through giggles of your own.
Somewhere down the line, both of you stop caring.
Neither of you is quite sure where the conversation stopped and ended, only that when you started kissing, you couldn’t stop.
They weren’t innocent little pecks, but they weren’t sloppy and full of tongue either. You press your lips together with the intent of being as close as you can to the other, like you haven’t spent every second you could together.
Neither of you will be satisfied until you’ve swallowed each other whole.
And you, you’ve got this ache for him. A swirling of want that’s constantly rippling in your belly for this boy. He’s just not usually under you when it’s happening — and now that he is, the crackling embers have burst into white and blue flames behind your sternum.
Your lips click each time you part, a lewd noise you never want to stop hearing. The sound of it gives you goosebumps, like a good song you’ve just heard on the radio. You wonder if Eddie can feel them as his hands start to creep up beneath your shirt and find purchase along your waist.
You open his mouth with your own and sneak your tongue inside just as you roll your hips over his lap.
It’s the most forthcoming either of you had been in your three-day stint of nonstop talking. Even when you were over at the trailer, totally alone and pressed underneath him, it was otherwise completely innocent. You just make out like a couple of teenagers until one of you wants to make a food run or offers to roll a joint.
And you like that. You like that he doesn’t expect anything from you, but it does get a little agonizing when you’ve tried every attempt to give yourself to him and he just won’t take it.
Like usual, Eddie tenses when he feels you grinding on top of him — partly because he feels a tingle at the base of his spine when he gets instantly half-hard, but mostly because he knows there’s nothing he can do about it.
He keeps preaching to himself it’s not the right time, it’s not the right time, it’s not the right time — but he’s got no idea when it’ll ever be the right time, if it’ll ever be the right time, or if he’ll know it when it comes.
Because he’s had you to himself for days now — no Wayne, no responsibilities, no pressure — with his tongue rutting against yours and your hands fidgeting with the metal buttons of his jeans, and it still doesn’t feel good enough. Eddie doesn’t feel good enough.
He’s not sure if he ever will.
And it’s not you. God, it’s the farthest thing from you. As far as Eddie’s concerned, he’s never had more fun with anyone else. He’s never laughed harder with anyone else. He’s never felt as comfortable with anyone as he’s starting to feel around you. So he’s not entirely sure why he finds the rest of it so hard.
Eddie wants you so bad that the ache of all his yearning is palpable. It’s like the weight of it is what’s keeping him from you — unstoppable force, immovable object, blah, blah, blah.
Either way, it leaves him entirely unable to take things further with you, however much he wants to. There’s something in his way and it’s him.
Your heartache is his own when he has to pull away from you.
“You okay?” you ask him with wide eyes and swollen lips, always so concerned for him.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good,” he’s quick to assure you. He’s still breathless when he fidgets beneath you, trying to prop himself up on his headboard without rubbing his half-hard cock against your thigh.
When he succeeds, he musters a smile that shakes at the edges. “It’s just… you know, not everything… It doesn’t have to be about sex, you know?”
He makes himself as soft as possible for you when he says this. He gets rid of all the usual teasing lilts that tend to lurk on his tongue as the words spill from his mouth. The last thing he wants to do is hurt your feelings or, in some roundabout way, make you think you’re the problem.
He just wants you to know that that isn’t why he’s been wanting to spend so much time with you. There was never an ulterior motive with him other than all the adoration he holds in his hands and his mouth for you.
The strike of hurt that flashes across your face is obvious to only Eddie, who’s spent enough time mapping out your features to know what twitches are ones of discontent. The slight frown that dips between your brows when they scrunch together for half a second comes like a stroke of lightning. It’s a brief flash of purple in the sky that leaves so quickly that it makes you wonder if it was ever there at all.
You fidget on his lap, not resting as comfortably upon him as you had been just moments before. “Oh…” you murmur through soft, jutted-out lips. “Sorry. I, I didn’t—”
“No, it’s not— that’s not what I—” he tries to assure over your insecure stammers, but succeeds only in tripping over himself in return. He cuts himself off with a breathy laugh, shaking his head while his fingers fidget on your hips. “That’s just not what this is about for me, you know? I just… I wanna spend time with you.”
It’s easily the softest thing he’s ever said to you — to anybody, for the matter — and the marshmallow sweetness of it all wraps around you like wisps of pink cotton candy.
Your apprehensiveness twists into something lighter, a pair of twinkling eyes and a bashful smile.
“Oh,” you hum again, obviously more pleased than before. “That’s nice…”
“No one’s ever said that to you before, have they?” Eddie asks you.
He tries to muster a crooked smirk as the words leave his mouth, but he’s got a feeling he already knows the answer. Hearing you affirm his suspicions will do nothing more than make him angry at all the assholes that had you before him, at everyone who taught you that you were good for sex and hardly a thing else.
It makes him wish that he’d gotten to know you sooner. Maybe then you’d understand that he’d be happy just holding you like this and never doing anything more.
You don’t answer him verbally, just shake your head with your lips pursed softly to the side. You look more innocent than anything he’s ever seen before, even with your lipstick smeared on your chin.
He’s still not quite sure how someone could be so reckless with such a fragile thing — to watch you break and not spend the rest of time grieving to know that you’ll never be quite the same again.
There’s a primal instinct that swims in him then, an urge to keep you in his arms and locked in the confines of his trailer forever and ever. He wants to keep the wolves of Hawkins, Indiana from ever getting a whiff of you again. It’d be more than they deserved, anyway.
“God, you have got to get better boyfriends, sweetheart,” Eddie tells you with a playful lilt in his voice despite the anger simmering in his belly.
“Isn’t that what you are?” you giggle.
His world stops.
“Huh?”
You tense at his tenseness. Only when he’s gaping at you does the weight of your words dawn on you. “…Huh?”
The awkward moment goes as quickly as it arrives, chased out by the fit of laughter the two of you are quickly thrown into. Your entwining chuckles rise like smoke in his tiny bedroom and then settle back over you like a fuzzy blanket.
“Are you asking me to be your boyfriend, babe?” Eddie teases.
“Of course not,” you scoff. “Babe.”
“Oh, right, of course not. That would be way too crazy considering we’ve spent, like, every day together and have made each other come… what is it now? Twice?”
“Three times for me,” you correct with you a smile. “You need to catch up, Eddie Spaghetti.”
“Another time?” he offers with a scrunched nose.
“Whenever you want.”
Eddie is grateful for your lack of urgency, even more so for the kiss you press to the tip of his nose.
You peck him on the lips after — once, twice, and then a thiiird, drawn out time — before moving on to his chin and jaw and neck. Whatever part of him you can reach (which is just about everywhere, considering the vantage point you’ve got sitting on his lap), you sprinkle a kiss to it.
It’s an innocent sort of affection, the kind that makes him wonder how it ever came to be in the first place. What evolutionary measures led to this, to you pressing your lips to his skin to show how much you care about him? Eddie doesn’t really want to know the answer, he’s just grateful that it happened in the first place.
You’re so good at it, loving on him. You’re always so kind and so gentle in your way and it makes him feel guilty. There’s a lingering feeling of undeservedness that settles something heavy at the base of his stomach. How could he ever expect you to be so open with him when he hasn’t done the same for you?
A heavy sigh rattles in his deflating chest.
“I gotta tell you something, sweetheart,” he cautions when your lips smack against the thrumming pulse below the left side of his jaw. “Something you’re not gonna like…”
A billion things run through your head all at once. When you part from him, he can see the rollercoaster of emotions each one of them puts you through.
Your first instinct is that he’s got some kind of partner he’s kept hidden from you until now. It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve gone steady with a guy who’s then told you about some other girlfriend he had — or, god forbid, a wife.
But then you realize that you surely would’ve had some sort of inkling if that were the case. There’s no way Eddie would’ve been able to spend every second of his day with you — and then another several hours on the phone when you had to leave — without someone else coming along to burst your bubble.
And so far, there haven’t been any angry wives, just the occasionally confused Uncle Wayne.
Then you start thinking he’s about to tell you he wants an open relationship. The you’re great, but I’m just not ready to settle down yet spiel that you’ve heard a thousand times before. Usually when people say that, they mean that they just don’t want to settle down with you.
You’ll become some douchebag’s fuck toy for a month or more until the girl next door comes around. He gets her knocked up in record time, his family forces him to marry her, and they begin their cushy lives together in the center of some cul-de-sac — really settle down, as it were.
You’re not sure if you could take that from Eddie. You could grin and bear if it you had to, take whatever attention he’s willing to give you because who cares if he’s giving it to someone else on the side? You’re just not sure how long you’d last like that.
And then you start to worry that he’s just going to break up with you entirely — it’s not you, it’s blah, I’ll always care about blah, please don’t tell anyone about how we blah-ed. That whole talk.
All the rest of your worries stop mattering so much because you’ve only just called him your boyfriend. And here he goes, about to end it all before it can really even start. That’d be just your luck, you figure.
“Did I do something wrong?” you caution after a few moments of heavy silence.
Eddie’s bleeding heart wrenches at your words, at how sad they sound spilling from your mouth, and how you immediately think that it’s got something to do with you.
He shakes his head feverishly in response. “No. No, it’s not you. You’re… you’re perfect.”
“Okay…” you concede quietly, voice trembling with a lingering disbelief.
“I just… I haven’t been totally honest with you, you know?” the boy admits before his glimmering chocolate eyes fly open and he corrects himself quickly. “And I haven’t lied to you or anything. Not— Not exactly. I just… I wanna be honest with you… As your boyfriend and all.”
You can tell by the sudden weight in his voice that he’s serious. But the fine coat of glowing rose that splotches Eddie’s cheeks after calling himself your boyfriend for the first time makes you melt.
You smile to yourself and start to trace the heart you’d stitched into his t-shirt with your finger.
“Yeah. I mean, we are about to spend our two minutes anniversary together and everything.”
“Exactly,” the boy huffs out a laugh. It lacks its usual jest, though, because of the ice-cold anxiety that drenches him from head to toe and makes his hands and feet go numb.
His fingers tremble where the rest on your waist, trying and failing to find a comfortable position there because, right about now, Eddie feels the most awkward he’s ever felt.
“I just want you to know that I… I’ve never done this before,” he confesses quietly and with his eyes squeezed shut. He prays that he doesn’t have to be any less vague than that.
Your face twists in confusion — your brows furrow and your nose twitches and your head tilts to the side like a puppy. And then you’re laughing, a soft little thing of a giggle that normally makes his heart sing, though now he can only feel it breaking.
“What…?” he tries to scoff out his own chuckle. “Why are you laughing?”
“Because you’ve already told me that, dummy. That you’ve never felt this way before…” you answer, reciting his own words back to him. You haven’t yet forgotten how he’d looked at you as you said them, pale skin made silk under the moonlight while he sparkled beneath the beams of it and his love for you.
“No, it’s… it’s more than that,” he corrects. “I’ve never even had a girlfriend before you. Or anything really.”
You still don’t seem to understand. You just look on at him with uncertainty.
A quiet “okay?” tumbles from your mouth entwined with a nervous giggle, because you don’t understand what’s got him so somber. He’s never dated anyone, you’ve fucked half of Hawkins — these are just facts that went unsaid before now.
And maybe it’s because you’ve never been with a virgin before, but the thought that Eddie might be one hasn’t seemed to cross your mind at all.
It’s that exact thought that scares him.
Because if it hasn’t already, maybe it’s because you’re avoiding it altogether. And why would he ever be the exception?
He opts to bite the bullet and hopes that his heart doesn’t get broken after.
“I’m a virgin. Okay? I’m a complete, total, proper adult virgin,” he blurts with a brazenness he’d previously lacked when it came to all this. “And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before now, but I didn’t, because I liked you and I was scared. So if you wanna yell at me or if you wanna break up with me before our five-minute anniversary, I totally get it, but I should probably let you know that it’ll rip my little virgin heart to shreds, so…”
Eddie ends his nervous ramble with a trembling, lopsided smile that does little to ease the leaden tension he’s just manufactured in the four walls of his bedroom.
He can’t seem to gauge your reaction after the fact, which is strange because he always knows what you’re thinking.
He knows when you’re laughing with him and not at him. You scrunch your nose and giggle when he tells you a funny joke, then tilt your head back and cackle when he trips over the punchline.
He knows the exact moment when something’s started to bother you — when you get real quiet in your bubble of reserved stillness and your eyes start to glaze over. To anyone else, it might just look like a person who’s keeping to themselves. Eddie’s starting to learn that usually means trouble when it comes to you.
He knows the difference between your gentle sort of sadness and when you’re damn near inconsolable. When you cried at the end of Stand By Me, you smiled at him with a glassy tear-filled gaze, then rolled your eyes when he tried to comfort you. The tears only spilled over when you laughed because Eddie pretended you’d hurt him when you’d shoved him away.
But when you’re really upset about something, you don’t show him at all — you fight to keep it all to yourself until you’ve squished the problem into a tiny enough ball that you can forget about all of it.
This is something different.
There’s too much crossing your mind all at once for him to get a good read of you.
You just gape at him, like you’re trying to figure out if he’s joking or not, and then fighting to understand what it means when you realize he’s being serious.
And just when you’ve started to wrap your head around it all, when your brain remembers how to make words again and you realize you haven’t said anything in several agonizing seconds, a foreign voice sounds from down the hallway.
Not foreign in that it was unfamiliar exactly, just foreign in that you and Eddie had spent so much time alone that you were starting to forget that there was an entire world outside of yourselves. A great big world, filled with a great many people, some of whom were your friends who tended to get pretty worried about you.
“Edward Wayne— why the hell is the Chief in my driveway?” his uncle curses from the living room, sounding like he’s speaking through a cigarette in his mouth.
Eddie himself is immediately freaking the fuck out because he figures he must’ve gotten tipped off again. He tries to calculate the quickest way to get you off of him and to all of his cubby holes full of miscellaneous drugs so he can flush them down the toilet before Jim Hopper busts the door down.
And even though you’re not the drug dealer who’s had cops on their ass since they were fifteen in this equation, you look a whole lot more terrified than Eddie does.
Your eyes go wide and the whites of them swim with terror as you launch yourself off of his lap. You don’t spare another glance back at him, not even when you nearly trip over yourself when you shove your sneakers on your feet and shuffle out of the room. He’s forced to follow behind you like a confused puppy as you bound through the trailer at lightning speed.
The haste of your movements startles even Wayne, who halts mid-puff of his cig when you’re in and out of the living room before he can blink. The opening squeak of the screen door and metal slamming against metal is the only thing that punctuates your exit.
“Would it kill you to answer your damn phone every once in a while?” the powerful timbre of Jim Hopper’s angry voice, of which only the man himself could pull off, is muffled until Eddie cautiously slinks onto the porch behind you.
He finds the chief standing beside the Cruiser he’s parked sideways. The door of it is still flung open. A distant beeping sounds from the ignition.
He’s still got on the pressed khakis of his uniform — complete with the golden badge pinned to his chest, darkened sunglasses on the bridge of his nose, and flat-brimmed hat on his head. Even with the majority of his face covered, it does little to hide the anger that radiates off of him like a hot stove eye.
You remain on the porch, shifting your weight on your feet at the top of the steps. “Okay, Hopper, just listen to me for a second—”
“Three days!” he shouts over you, not deterred by your composed nature. “I have been calling you… for three days! Seventy-two hours. No answer!”
Eddie decides to speak up from behind you despite his better judgment. “Yeah, uh, that was kinda my fault,” he confesses with an awkward laugh. “Wouldn’t let her hang up the phone—”
“I’ll deal with you in a second,” Jim interjects firmly and without thinking. He goes back to berating you with an admirable finesse. “Buckley wanted my head on a pike when I wouldn’t file a missing person’s report in the first twenty-four hours, but seventy-two? She was gonna kill me!”
Rather than argue with him, like every fiber of your being so desperately wants to, you make the difficult choice to concede with a heavy sigh. Because you don’t doubt that Robin was on his ass the second she realized you weren’t answering your phone or at your apartment when she and Steve dropped by.
She did tend to be on the overprotective side, after all, which obviously paired well with her melodramatic disposition.
“I’m sorry, okay? I’ve just been… busy.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard the one before,” the man answers bitterly.
“It’s different, Hopper!”
“I’ve heard the one before, too!”
Eddie can only assume that the both of you are communicating telepathically, what with the way your synchronized glares seem to say a thousand words (probably every curse imaginable, if he had to guess) without your mouths ever moving once.
He stands on the outskirts of it all, feeling a bit stuck in the thorniness of such a tense silence, like any slight movement might cut him.
Jim moves slowly, akin to a creeping snake, as his hands raise to remove the glasses from his face. Their lack reveals the ice-cold glare that was previously hiding beneath them.
“Get in the car—”
“—No,” you reject just as the direction leaves his mouth because you knew it was coming.
Jim inhales sharply and smacks his lips against his teeth, like a father whose child is most ardently testing his patience. He plants his work boot in the gravel and his hand on his hips. His steel gaze goes far off for a moment before flitting back to you again.
“…Get in the car or I put you in handcuffs.”
Your breath hitches at the threat. You squint over at him. “You wouldn’t.”
Jim smiles at you, but it’s more threatening than anything else. “We both know that I would.”
Eddie’s eyes flit between the both of you. He can tell that Hopper’s serious and that you’re trying to decide whether or not to call his bluff, with your arms crossed defensively over your chest and lips pursed in a tight line.
You ultimately decide not to. Because Hopper has, in fact, done that before. And even though the circumstances are very, very different, you wouldn’t put it past him to do it again. So you all but stomp your foot like a protesting child and spin on your heel to storm back inside the trailer.
Eddie’s nervous gaze flits between your disappearing form and the storm cloud of a police chief standing in his driveway. When their eyes lock, he realizes he should probably say something. He cocks his thumb over his shoulder and stammers, “I should— I should probably…”
He doesn’t finish his sentence. He catches the front door before it shuts and slithers through the crack of it to follow in behind you.
“Wait, was he— was he being serious about that?” Eddie wonders once you’re back in his bedroom.
It feels a lot less cozy than it did minutes before, less like the bubble of refuge that you thought nobody could pierce and more like a lonely space that feels entirely too empty. You pluck your things scattered around his room, and it starts to feel less and less like home with parts of you gone from it.
“I don’t know,” you answer within a sigh as you collect your cardigan from the back of his desk chair and shrug the thing back over your shoulders again.
“But it’s happened before?”
“Yeah. Once. When I was…” you confess quietly, then trail off. You get your bag from his nightstand and haphazardly shove your scrunchie, sunglasses, and chapstick into the bottom of it. “…When I was in a bad way— it doesn’t matter now.”
Eddie so desperately wants to pry.
He’d wanted to make a joke before, about the handcuffs — something less than tasteful about them and you and Hopper and some good ol’ freaky deaky that you'd scold him for after. But he decides not to now because you sound so strangely solemn about the whole thing, as though it was a story you buried deep with the intent of never bringing it up again.
“You don’t have to go with him if you don’t want to, you know that, right?”
“Of course, I do,” you scoff at his worries, not nearly as threatened by Jim as the rest of Hawkins. You move to stand in front of him in the center of his room and meet his furrowed brows with a soft grin. “He’s not gonna do anything, he’s just pissed. He’ll berate me on the drive back to my apartment and then it’ll be like nothing ever happened.”
That seems to please Eddie well enough, though he’s still a bit disheartened at your leaving.
“I guess we couldn’t keep spending time together like this, huh?” he teases lightly, like the realization of it doesn’t make his chest ache. “Sorta forgot about the rest of the world… whatever that is.”
“It was fun while it lasted,” you tell him with a shrug and a whimsical sigh.
“Wait for me, will ya?” he jokes, if only to make you laugh and to feel like he’s stuck in some sickly sweet ending of a romcom for a couple moments more.
You roll your eyes at his dramatics but let him wrap you in his arms anyway. His hands find purchase on your elbows, thumbs rubbing soothingly along the outsides of them. “How about a kiss, then?” he offers when the urge to feel you because too great to bear. “For our ten-minute anniversary and all?”
“You never have to ask me, Eds,” you assure with a laugh. You rise to the tips of your toes and he meets you halfway.
Home is in your mouth. It’s warm and cozy and safe there. It’s easily the most familiar place he’s ever known, with your bottom lip nestled between his own. He feels homesick when you part from him.
“You’re not mad at me?” he wonders quietly, feeling a bit like a cowering child from where he stands in front ahead of you — eased only when you shake your head almost immediately in response.
“No. I couldn’t be even if I wanted to, I think.”
“Okay. That’s… That’s good.”
“We can talk about it later, if you want. After I get lurch off my ass.”
He tries not to smile too wide, but it’s hard not to beam every time he looks at you. “Yeah. Sure. I’ll… I’ll see you around, I guess?” he stumbles over himself, having forgotten how to say goodbye to you.
It’s equally as hard for you too, it seems, because you nod at him and turn to leave and then realize once you’re halfway down the hallway that you might not survive if you don’t kiss him again.
So you turn and rush back, catching Eddie with his back turned and spinning him around so you can peck him again. You feel his cheeks heat beneath your palm and his sigh against your cupid’s bow and his lips melt against your own.
You etch each tingling sensation into the edges of your mind in the hope that you won’t drive yourself completely insane when you inevitably start to miss him like crazy.
You focus on that and on him when you find Hopper and his stupid proud dad smirk. It’s the only reason you don’t punch him in the jaw and tuck and roll out of the Cruiser when the silence becomes so slowly insufferable.
You’re starting to think Jim left the radio off on purpose. You’ve never known the guy not to drive around without the strumming of an old-school folk song to accompany him. You figure it must be some sort of intimidation tactic, to make you so uncomfortable that you break. You’re a lot closer to that than either of you realize.
You spare a glance over at the man next to you. He hasn’t looked at you once since you get in the car. He’s got one hand at three o’clock on the steering wheel and the other with its elbow propped up on the door as he scratches at the stubble on his jaw.
He’s too at ease not to be bothered. This is obviously some kind of front he’s putting on to conceal his inner irritation.
You give on the lecture you’d been trying to prepare yourself for and exhale sharply through your nose. Your fingers fidget on your thighs as you kick your restless feet up on the console.
“Get your feet off the dash,” Jim scolds without missing a beat.
You huff and obey. “Okay, this is crazy— can’t you just yell at me already?”
He barely wastes a second.
“I cannot believe you right now!” he seethes through gritted teeth, stewing in a dad-like sort of anger.
“It was three days, Hopper!”
“You know what happened the last time no one heard from you for three days?” he shouts back.
You tip your head back against the seat and groan. You should’ve known he was going to play that card.
He waves an accusatory finger between the both of you. “You and me— we had a deal, remember? You let me check in on you. You agreed to that. You visit your little high school friends, and I see you at work, so I can make sure you’re not off somewhere killing yourself.”
Hopper becomes a casualty to the tense silence he created then, when you don’t retort with some comeback of your own and force him to feel every ounce of pressure from the leaden quiet.
He sighs a great big, too loud sigh and shifts in his seat. His softening gaze flits between you and the road. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean it like that, okay? I just meant it, you know, figuratively. I wasn’t… trying to be mean.”
“When have you ever cared about being mean?” you monotone.
“I don’t,” he assures. “I’m just not trying to hurt your feelings, alright? Jeez…”
You try not to take too much pride in the man’s half-apology, though you’d be lying if you said it wasn’t a little bit rewarding.
Jim Hopper’s practically an iceberg. He only melts for his kid, Joyce Boyers, and you, apparently.
It’s why he’s always so damn protective over you. He’s developed this sort of deep-rooted urge to keep you safe after watching you make every wrong decision a human being could possibly make. And when you mess up, because you do mess up, he feels like it’s partially his fault — that, if he’d done more, he could’ve kept you safer.
It makes you feel like a burden most of the time, but you know it’s above yourself and mostly out of your control.
You’d known of each other for a while before you really met, because a troublemaker and police chief in such a small town are bound to. But somewhere down the line, he found you in a valley of mourning for someone that was still alive and you found him in a black hole of grief for someone who wasn’t. The empty and infinite voids within you both were stitched slowly together all over again.
Jim Hopper was the dad you never had. You were the daughter he couldn’t.
And you thought something might change after he adopted El. You figured he might forget about you because it wasn’t like it was his job to watch after you or anything. Playing pretend always felt nice, but you knew it wasn’t real.
It was to Jim, though, who’d developed a similar adoration for you as the one he had for Sara. He hasn’t been able to forget about you in the same way he hasn’t been able to forget about her.
Every night, after he’s scrubbed the day off his body and washed it all down with a lukewarm beer, he lays on his pull-out bed in the small living room of his cabin and goes through a checklist in his head.
He makes sure that he’s checked on El and reminds himself to wake up early to make her breakfast the next morning before he brings Joyce coffee at Melvald’s — Joyce. She always comes next on his list, always right after El, and then you.
He forces himself to calm down when his blood pressure inevitably spikes at the thought of not having heard from you all day. He reminds himself that he saw you at work on his lunch break and that he’ll see you again tomorrow.
Jim hums to himself as he settles more comfortably into his springy cot, deciding that he’ll try a new wine he can’t pronounce when he sees you at Enzo’s the next day and that he’ll drink it while he rambles about Joyce or El’s new boyfriend.
He drifts to sleep with thoughts of Sara.
You’re as ingrained into his mind as every other person he’s grown to love.
He stopped worrying about never getting you out a long time ago. Like a tomato sauce stain on a dress shirt, he knows he’ll never get you out of his head. He knows even more so that he doesn’t want to — no matter how much you annoy him or how angry you make him when you don’t answer his calls.
“Sorry…” you murmur and swallow down whatever mundane argument you could’ve spewed then, at the result of his sudden warmth. You turn to gaze out the window and trace the edges of the puffy white clouds with your eyes. “I wasn’t thinking about that — the… deal, or whatever… Honestly, I was a little too busy being happier than I think I’ve ever been in my life, so…”
You don’t see the dramatic eye roll he gives you in response, but you can’t miss the hearty groan that spills from his mouth.
“What?” you laugh in response. “Have you never been a kid in love before?”
It’s almost jarring how he goes from huffy to concerned in a fraction of a second. His head snaps over to you, jaw clenched and eyes suddenly stern and swimming with a lingering fear.
“Love?” he repeats like he must’ve heard you wrong. “Love— That’s— That’s what this is?”
You shrug. “I don’t know… Maybe…”
His eyes flutter shut for a moment. “Please don’t tell me you’ve said that to each other yet. This guy was just a crush four days ago.”
“No, Hopper. We haven’t. I mean, he literally just told me he was a virgin, so I don’t think we’re even close to—”
“A virgin?” Jim echoes, voice high-pitched and giddy. He beams at you from beneath his bushy mustache and slaps you a little too hard on your arm when he laughs. “Shit, teacup. Are you runnin’ out of options over there or somethin’?”
You twist your body to hit him back harder with your right hand. “It’s not funny, Hopper,” you scold. “He’s nice.”
“You said that about Hargrove once—”
“This is different,” you monotone before the words have the chance to leave his mouth.
“Yeah? How do you know?”
The question stumps you for a moment because you don’t know — you can’t.
You’d never admit it out loud, but Hopper was right; you’re still not quite sure how you ever could’ve thought that Billy Hargrove was a good guy, but you did. You felt a similar feeling of elation with him as you do now with Eddie, an otherworldly sort of happiness that makes you feel like you’re the only person it’s ever happened to.
And here you are now, sometime later and reveling in the aftermath, still gluing pieces of your shattered heart together.
You treat love like a drug. You use and use and use until it stops being a fun thing and becomes a crutch you can’t live without. That’s always when it starts to hurt you, but you’re in too deep to stop craving it.
And you know it’s bound to happen all over again, but you have to believe Eddie’s different or else you might as well fall into the deep pit of despair you’ve been trying this whole time to crawl out of.
He makes you happy, really really happy, and you’d rather gamble that he hurts you than give it all without even trying.
“I… don’t,” you conclude after a few moments.
Jim seems surprised by your admission, shooting you an incredulous look with his untamed brows raised to his hairline.
You meet his look with a wavering grin. “But he makes me really happy, Hop. Like… It feels like it should be illegal or something. He makes me feel so good my heart hurts. There’s like this—”
“Ugh,” the man grumbles in disgust, sullen all over again.
“I didn’t mean it like that, you weirdo,” you chide.
A grin twitches beneath his mustache in response. “I know you didn’t… ‘Cause Munson’s a virgin.”
“Oh my god!” you groan. “I didn’t even mean to tell you that, okay? Leave him alone— and a swear to god, Hopper, if you make fun of him—”
“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with it, alright? I mean, he’s got the expert around to show him the ropes— ow!” You cut off his stupid joke and accompanying sardonic grin with a fist to his shoulder.
Steve and Robin tend to be quite the formidable duo.
They’ve barely got a brain cell to rub together between them, but there’s still something strangely intimidating about them when they’re both angry. It feels a bit like they’re your I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed parents, and you’re the scolded child taking your lashings in the form of a lecture.
It’s what you feel like now, sitting across from them in your designated booth at Benny’s Burgers — the one by the window in the corner. It’s far enough away from the bustle of the entrance but close enough still to gossip about the assholes you used to know from high school when they walk through the door.
“You scare the shit out of us when you go AWOL like that, you know?” Steve confesses, still soft even though you know there’s a more upset part of himself he keeps hidden for now.
His chocolate gaze flits between you and the pile of fries in the middle of the table that the three of you share. He finds the one covered in the most salt and pops it into his mouth.
“AWOL?” you echo with a distant laugh when you realize how much he sounds like Hopper. “It was three days.”
“Yeah, and you fell off the face of the earth,” Robin retorts, half-muffled through the hearty gulp of strawberry milkshake starting to melt in her mouth.
“You guys are acting like I went halfway across the country,” you scoff. “I was with Eddie. At his trailer.”
“Exactly!”
Steve’s face contorts mid-bite. “Wait, you were with him? The freak?”
It makes you roll your eyes. He’d been too busy hopelessly flirting with the waitress at the counter to hear the entire recounting of your absence to Robin, though it was more of you gushing about it than anything else.
“Yep,” you answer.
“You skipped out on movie night to be with… Eddie Munson?” he reiterates for himself, as though there was any correlation between watching the same three movies while gorging on greasy junk food with your best friends and falling more in love with a guy you were already head over heels for as he tried to explain away the unopened box of condoms collecting dust underneath his bed.
Both are equally fun in their own ways, but totally totally different.
“How did you survive without me, Steven?” you joke back in response.
“He didn’t,” Robin quips.
“So… what? You guys just went on some kinda bender? I don’t get it. Did you just fuck the entire time or something?”
“Well, contrary to popular belief, I can actually spend time with someone and not fuck them—”
“Okay, that’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“And to answer your question — no, we didn’t fuck,” you confess, then elaborate more slowly, a tad bit awkwardly. “Because he told me today that… he is a… virgin.”
Your words seem to settle over each of them differently. Robin stills with her lips wrapped around the candy-cane striped straw then furrows her brows, as though their meaning hits her a few seconds after the fact.
Steve, meanwhile, goes entirely agape in an amazed sort of shock. His eyes go wide, his brows fly up and hide beneath the bangs that hang down over his forehead, and his jaw falls open. And then he starts to smile, a subtle hint of a grin on the corners of his pink lips, like he finds it funny.
“I knew it,” he murmurs to himself.
“…Why are you smiling like that?”
His smirk widens. “That freak said he screwed Vicki Carmichael senior year. I knew he was lying.”
“And why do you look so proud of yourself, exactly?” Robin asks him.
“Because now I feel less bad about never fucking her,” the boy explains like it’s obvious. He set his elbows on the table and gestures wildly with his hands. “I always thought the freak one-upped me because she, like, never gave me the time of day after Hargrove came along, you know? But… It’s good to know that I’m still king.”
His delighted grin is met with confused looks from both you and Robin, who look upon him with twisted eyebrows and squinted eyes.
“Are you not aware of how strange everything that comes out of your mouth is?” you ask him, only partly joking.
“At least that settles why he wouldn’t let you give him a blow job,” the brunette girl concludes with a shrug as she slouches against the booth. “Poor guy was probably shitting bricks about it.”
You realize then that it does make sense, why he’d always been so adamant about your pleasure and never his own. Why he always touched you like you were some fragile thing he might break, and like everything was new to him. Because it was new to him. All of it.
And even though it baffles you to no end how he went his entire life without someone wanting to jump his bones (because truth be told, you’re doing a terrible job at hiding your want to do just that), the fact still remains — Eddie Munson is a virgin.
He’s a virgin with an acute infatuation for the local slut, both of you freaks in your own right.
It just adds more intricacy to a puzzle that already feels so complicated.
“I’ve never been with a virgin before,” you admit quietly, mostly to yourself, as you train your gaze on the straw wrapper you curl around your finger. “It’s different… Scary.”
“Why?” Robin wonders aloud.
“I don’t know. I just— I don’t know what to do now.”
“Just do what you always do,” Steve tells you like it’s that simple. He folds his arms on the table and leans in closer to you. “Experience is good. Okay? Experience is key.”
“No, it’s not that. I think I’m just… I’m scared I’m gonna treat him the way, you know, that I was treated. And I don’t wanna… I don’t wanna do that to him.”
You’re not sure when the shift started, when you stopped being a person to people. You only know that you were something less than that. Somewhere between junior and senior year, you become a plaything that anyone could do anything they wanted to with, and you were too starved for physical affection to tell them otherwise.
You liked the attention. You liked feeling loved, even if it was only for a minute and a half, and all you had to show for it was a pool of cooling come on your belly.
Eddie’s the fragile thing now that you were then.
He was a delicate little thing that can break so easily, something you could split in half if you wanted to.
You don’t.
You want so desperately to be kind, but you’re scared you won’t know how to, because no one’s ever been kind to you.
Steve reaches across the table for you, taking a wild stab at an attempt for affection after several months of being scared to touch you — he did enough of that, he thought, and he’d hurt you. But he can see the lingering ache hiding in your glazed-over eyes and feels an overwhelming urge to quell your worry.
Five warm fingers wrap around your wrist, not too tight or too strong, just enough to stop you from cutting circulation off to the tip of your pointer finger and to remind you that he’s still there.
“Trust me,” he tells you with a sudden soft swimming in his caramel-colored eyes and a smile playing on his lips. “You couldn’t do that to anybody. Not even if you wanted to.”
Your heart nearly stops at his words, at the sheer kindness of them, and at the way he holds you in the soft way you’re used to only Eddie holding you. Your eyes go wide when they flit up to him and then start to sting with the weight of unshed tears.
You’re quick to blink them away though, while you playfully shrug him off and joke — “stop being so nice before I get the wrong idea, Harrington�� — because it’s easier than accepting his tenderness.
Robin takes one look at his fond gaze, all gooey and dripping with honey, and then at your rolling eyes and accompanying shy grin, and groans at the softness of it all. She slides out from the confines of the booth and grumbles something about getting a refill on her milkshake.
“Some fries too, while you’re up?” Steve offers with a hopeful grin.
He’s met with the girl’s signature scowl.
“Please,” you finish for him.
Robin grins. “Anything for you,” she croons, if only to make the boy pout, before skipping off to the counter.
She leans her elbows upon the red wooden laminate top and smiles that same sickly sweet smile for Benny by the grill — no doubt trying to get her refills for free.
Even though the bearded man seems unimpressed with her presence, you know that he’ll give them to her free of charge. He’s always had a soft spot for her, one of the only people in town who could rival his wit.
The door dings open, a familiar and high-pitched chime that often becomes more frequent as the evening progresses. This time it lets in a foreign, bitter breeze when the door swings open and closed again.
You can feel the chill from a distance — it resembles the crispness of autumn despite being comfortably settled in the middle of March. It nearly takes your breath away, prickles your skin and makes you grimace back a shiver.
When your eyes leave Steve, a difficult feat considering he’s doing an alarmingly good impression of a walrus by sticking fries in his upper lip, you find that it wasn’t abnormally cold air at all. It was a Peter Parker spider sense form of anxiety that had felt like a bucket of ice water had been poured over you.
Billy Hargrove used to turn heads when he walked into a room.
Now he just sucks all the air out of it.
And it’s not like you haven’t seen him since the break up; for a while, the asshole was painted on the backs of your eyelids — he all but haunted your consciousness. You’ll see him around town on occasion, in his sunglasses and jean jacket and too-tight denim pants, while he struts around Main Street with his new girlfriend (otherwise known as, his flavors of the month).
You think this is the first time you’ve been in the same room as him since your split, though. It feels like it must be with the way your throat starts to tighten and you forget how to breathe.
All at once, you’re scrambling for an exit. It’s like Billy’s a fire and his smoke is rapidly filling your lungs. Your legs start to tremble when your adrenaline spike. Your brain tells you to get out as quickly as you can before he burns you.
Steve notices the look of fear flood your features like a dark storm cloud. You were laughing just seconds before the door opened, equal parts with him and at him, but now you just looked terrified — like a child who’s just spotted a boogeyman in her closet.
He turns in the booth to find what haunted thing has just caught your eye and finds that it’s worse than any monster you could conjure up. It’s Billy fucking Hargrove, with his pretty hair and his pretty smile and his pretty girl under his arm.
His presence filled targeted, almost. Like he chose to come to this diner, on this day and at this time just to fuck with the group of you.
“Don’t even look at him,” Steve advises when he turns back to you. “Look at me, okay? He’s not even worth it. That asshole doesn’t deserve to ruin our day.”
And you try to listen to him. You try really, really hard to let him change that subject to the cold fries or Robin taking too long or a combination of the two, but you can’t focus on him. You’re already so overwhelmed at the sight of Billy that you can’t focus on anything else but him.
You settle on the fact that you might just have to drag Steve and Robin out by their wrists because you can’t sit in this booth any longer, and you definitely aren’t hungry anymore.
And that’s when he spots you.
Your eyes lock and you freeze, immediately averting your gaze but catching the sudden sparkle in his own as he grins a sly, sadistic grin.
“No way,” you hear him say with a laugh under his breath. The sound of his voice makes you tense. You hadn’t realized how at peace you’d been all this time without having to hear it. Now it feels like so many little needles piercing your skin.
“Fancy seeing you guys here,” he greets after he’s made a b-line for your booth and dragged Vicki Carmichael along with him. He smiles with all of his pearly whites while he smacks pungent wintergreen gum between them.
When he slides into the booth beside you, he does so without invitation, and forces Vicki to slink in next to Steve.
And like it wasn’t already awkward enough, you know Vicki — like, know her, know her. There was a drunken makeout at a Halloween party in ’82. Then a one night stand with her brother before he left for college in ’83. And then her Tom Selleck clone of a father at a sleepover for her eighteenth birthday in ’85.
You’re not exactly proud of it, but you’ve gotten a rather hefty taste of her family tree, and the fact that both of you know it makes it that much more uncomfortable.
“We’re kinda busy here, Hargrove,” Steve tells him when he notices how comfortable he’s making himself in your booth.
“Ooh… Is this a little date?” Billy teases with a grin.
Steve’s face falls. “…No.”
“Oh, right,” he nods, though the sardonic lilt in his voice tells you that he already knew the answer. He crosses his arms on the tabletop and turns to look at you with eyes bluer than any ocean. They flicker up and down your form. Suddenly, you feel self-conscious in your baggy jean and tank top duo.
“You’ve been seeing that guy, haven’t you? What’s his name again? The, uh— the freak?”
“His name is Eddie,” Steve answers for you, defending him because you can’t find the words to.
“That’s it,” Billy snaps his fingers, then points. He nudges you with his shoulder. The familiar feel of his jean jacket against your skin makes you wince. “God, you must be runnin’ out of steam over there, huh? I mean… the freak? Seriously? You couldn’t do any better than that?”
The jokes were tolerable coming from Jim and Steve and Robin — they weren’t funny by any means, but you could stomach them because you knew they were jokes. But this? This was just to hurt you. And it works too easily because Billy knows exactly how to break you. He knows all the wires to cut and buttons to push because the puzzle of shattering your psyche is one he memorized long ago.
“He’s actually a really nice guy,” you manage through a tight throat, still staring at your fidgeting hands.
“Well, that’s good,” he hums like you need his approval. “It’s about time, right?”
You huff and choose to entertain him despite your better judgment. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He only shrugs. “I don’t know... Just, you know, that found a guy willing to settle for you. That’s all.”
“Settle?” you repeat, trying to laugh despite how tiny your voice sounds.
“You know what I mean, c’mon,” the blonde boy chuckles. “Sluts are fun and all, but they’re not the kinda girls you wanna settle down with. Steve knows what I mean.”
“No, I don’t,” Steve monotones quickly and without thinking, gaze hardened and jaw clenched. “And you need to leave.”
“I”m hungry, Billy,” Vicki whines, feeling every ounce of the tension surrounding her — like syrup or quicksand. She slides her permed bangs from her eyes and tucks a rogue strawberry strand behind her ear in a nervous tick. “Can’t we just get something to eat?”
“Alright, alright. I know when I’m not wanted,” Billy chuckles.
You grumble bitterly under your breath. “Apparently not…”
“I’ll see you around, Harrington,” Billy singsongs with a grin that wreaks of insincerity while his girlfriend slides out from the booth. He turns to look at you and squints. “Don’t be a stranger, alright? Matter of fact, point Munson my way, and I’ll give him a few pointers.”
You’re uncowed by his offer and angered by his mention of Eddie. Your eyes are stern and unwavering as you meet his gaze for the first time since he sat down beside you.
“I think you could learn a thing or two from him, actually,” you retort, words sounding sweeter than the venom lingering behind them.
Billy’s grin only widens, impressed by your arguing. “Ooh… I forgot about the mouth you had on you, sweetheart.”
The use of the nickname makes you cringe. It doesn’t sound nearly as fulfilling as it does when it comes from Eddie. Now, it just sounds artificial — degrading.
He leans in close to you like he’s about to tell you a secret and splays his arm along the back of the booth behind you. The nicotine on his breath makes you grimace; it’s intoxicating when it comes from Eddie, disgusting from the boy sitting next to you.
His eyes are bluer so up close, darker than you remember them being, and you notice he’s trimmed his usual stubble to a patchy mustache. He looks like the grown-up version of the boy you used to know, visually more mature but still the same in his way.
“When he gets bored of you — because, let’s be serious, he will get bored of you — you know where to find me,” Billy murmurs to you, a cynical smirk on the edges of his lips. “I’ll make sure you stay nice and broken in for the next dozen guys that want a taste—”
Steve can’t hear a word from where he sits across the booth, but he’s fuming with fists clenched under the table anyway. He hates how close Billy is to you, more so how uncomfortable you look with the proximity and how his words make you flinch.
“Alright, you need to leave,” he blurts. “Now.”
Before the blonde could respond with a quip of his own, Robin all but teleports to the head of the table. She’s standing in front of the four of you suddenly, carrying a basket of fries and a strawberry milkshake and wearing a frown on her face.
“You’re in my seat, dickwad,” she monotones, even though she hadn’t been sitting next to you before. She’s not the least bit threatened by the Californian douchebag.
Billy smiles up at her anyway. “I was wondering where the third musketeer was! Still a carpet muncher, Buckley?”
“Happily.”
“What do ya say me and you head up to Lover’s Lake later?” the boy offers despite his date shifting awkwardly a few feet away. It’s a joke, for reasons that are more than obvious, and that’s what makes it so unbearably unfunny.
He slinks out from the booth. The lack of his warmth is strangely comforting and you’re able to breathe for the first time in five minutes. He stretches his back out when he stands to his full height in front of Robin, then shrugs with his hands splayed on his hips.
“Maybe you just need some good dick. I mean… we’re gonna die anyway, right?”
“I’d rather,” she quips with a rouge-tinted smile.
The way it makes him laugh is startling. He finds a strange humor in being rejected — in most things, really. You still haven’t forgotten the cackles that left his bloodied mouth when Steve delivered blow after blow to the boy’s face in the middle of his living room, like it was all a fun game to him.
That was, of course, before Billy got the upper hand and nearly killed Steve that night. He laughed about it that too, until Max knocked him out with a baseball bat.
He’s got the same grin on his face now as he did then when he turns to look at you. A pink and pretty smirk, just wide enough to reveal the dimple in his left cheek. It’s nothing short of taunting, like he’s mocking you without having to say anything at all.
“Don’t be a stranger, alright?” Billy repeats. He keeps smacking his gum between his teeth and winks at you before spinning on the heel of his boot. He guides Vicki with him to the counter with a hand on the back pocket of her jeans.
Even when Robin slides in next to you and effectively pierces the bubble of tension that had already started to shrink with Billy’s leaving, you still find it hard to breathe. You have to keep reminding yourself, forcing oxygen in and out with wobbling breaths through your nose, or else you just stop altogether.
The other two move on rather quickly, having no trouble finding their voices again after he’s gone. Their words are muffled, though, like they’re underwater.
“I forgot what an asshole he was,” Robin grumbles.
“Well, I didn’t,” Steve retorts, eyes scanning the basket of fries for the most strategic pick of the bunch. “I can still barely breathe through my nose.”
“That’s because you didn’t go to a doctor, dingus.”
“Because I didn’t need a doctor, Robin.”
“Yeah, because being concussed three times in two years is so healthy—”
Your eyes act like magnets as they stay locked on Billy’s form. He leans in closer to Vicki to tell her something, then pats her once on the ass before walking towards the exit again. The door dings when he swings it open. Through the window, you catch him pulling out a red and white pack of cigarettes — the same brand of Marlboro Reds he’s been smoking since he was in middle school.
“You okay?” you hear Steve say, but it sounds too far away for you to realize he’s talking to you.
Robin nudges you with her shoulder to jog you from your stupor. You blink hard once and then turn to her with wide eyes. “What?”
“You doing alright over there?” the girl wonders.
“Yeah,” your answer is too quick and too high-pitched to be true. “Fine.”
“Like, fine as in you’re actually fine, or fine as in, if I leave you alone for too long, I’m gonna find you living under a bridge like a troll?”
You roll your eyes at her. “Fine as in, if someone bums me a cigarette, I’ll be good as new.”
Steve huffs when you hold out the palm of your hand toward him. He’s the only one of you who smokes recreationally enough to carry a lighter and pack of cigs with him. You swear he only keeps it with him because the weight of them makes him feel cool. You’re grateful for them now, though, and for the escape they unexpectedly provide you.
His fingers are warm when they brush your hand. The metal zippo he drops in the center of it is far colder and carries a comforting sort of weight to it. He thumbs a cigarette from the pack for you, and you take it with a sardonic smile and a sickly sweet “thank you, Stevie.”
Robin gets out of the booth to let you slide out of it.
The door chimes again, this time over your head when you open it.
Fresh, spring air nearly knocks you on your ass when it hits you for the first time. You realize then, that you’d forgotten to tell yourself to breathe and now your vision’s all swimmy. The cool breeze tries its hardest to quell your swelling anger, but you’re still at a simmering boil. Fists clenched over the lighter and cig duo in your palm and your sneakers slapping angrily against the cracked pavement.
That’s what signals your arrival, the raging stomps that echo in the alleyway Billy takes his smoke break in.
The boy takes a puff of his cigarette and smirks on the exhale at the sight of you. All he needs is one glance to see how angry he’s made you. It’s an innocent, childlike sort of rage that’s got you all scrunched face and red — a heartbroken girl on a war path.
“I knew you couldn’t resist me, sweetheart,” he taunts with his signature sarcastic smile. He holds his arms at his sides, like he’s waiting for some kind of embrace from you. “You used to be like that all the time — all over me, you know? Clingy.”
“You know what you used to be?” you ask him once you’ve planted yourself a few feet away from him, fists shaking at your sides in a nearly overwhelming mixture of rage and apprehension.
“What’s that?”
“Nice! You used to be nice! Or do you not remember that?” you wonder rhetorically. Your anger fades slowly, an ebbing tide, as a reminiscent sadness eclipses your fury — a flood of blue in all your red.
The sharp frown between your brows crumbles and so does your clenched jaw as your harsh features crumple like a balled-up piece of paper. You look upon the man that broke your heart with all the shattered pieces of it.
“You used to let me sleep over at your place when I was too scared to sleep alone at mine, and you’d bring me food when I told you I hadn’t eaten all day, and you’d take me on drives when you knew I hadn’t left my apartment in days,” you ramble in a single breath, gesticulating wildly with your hands — waving them at him and at you and the still air between. They fall hopelessly to your sides.
“You used to be so sweet, Billy…” you conclude with a wavering breath. Your chest trembles on the inhale as you straighten out your shoulders and lift your chin, trying your best not to look as defeated as you feel. “And you know what you are now?”
Billy grins that stupid grin at you, the one that almost looks kind. Almost. It’s still soft in all its insincerity, like a parent entertaining their kid that’s gone on some meaningless tangent.
“No, sweetheart,” he answers after a beat. “What am I?”
“Not nice.”
He scoffs out a laugh.
“You used to tell me, all the time, how scared you were about ending up like you’re dad—” he tenses at the mention of the man, of his own monster in his own closet. “—He’d beat you black and blue every night, and I’d bandage all your cuts and put makeup on you when you begged, so you could go out and pretend like everything was normal. And you know what? You’re just like him!”
Billy doesn’t cower when you walk closer to him. He’s got no reason to be afraid of you, but your words hit him in a place far deeper than a thousand bloodied fists.
“What he did to you, is exactly what you do to me… Or do you know see that?” you don’t wait for a sarcastic reply, mostly because you wouldn’t see the indicators of it through the tears that blur your vision. “You’re not punching me, but it feels like you are. You break me over and over and over and I have to pretend like everything’s just normal and that we—”
“Real mature of you. To bring out the dad-card,” he interjects, if only to stop your ramblings so that he might not have to hear the truth that comes with them.
“You used to he nice,” you repeat, you agonize, you deflate. “Or… Or did you never use to be?”
The shell of your mind answers for you, paints itself with all the memories you’ve been trying like hell to forget for the past six months. It’s easier to pretend the bad things aren’t real than unravel all the reasons why they were bad to begin with, you find.
The negative memories come together like renaissance paintings — dark and gloomy and blotted with too realistic tears and spatters of blood. The oil stains the backs of your eyelids, destined to remain there forever like paintings in museum that’ll stand the test of time if you nurse them well enough.
You hadn’t yet been able to forget the screams and the cracks of fists colliding with bone. They tend to keep you up at night, even when you squeeze your eyes shut and beg for your memory to be wiped away completely.
Billy crouches over Steve’s chest and pummels wholehearted punches to the boy’s face, never tiring in their force, even well after the boy goes limp underneath him. You beg for him to stop while trying like hell to shield Max from the sight of it all.
For a while, you’d blamed yourself for it — for Max being there in the first place and for Steve’s cuts and bruises.
You’d taken the girl and sought refuge in the Harrington home after witnessing a rather heated fight between Billy and his father. There was a sudden urge within you to take her far away from it before it ended how it always did — in weeping cuts and salty tears and insincere apologies when the cops were called.
But you made it worse anyway.
For Max, for Steve.
And you apologized profusely for it after, cried to the boy in his bathroom while you nursed his cuts like you were the one who put them there.
When he told you it wasn’t your fault, you didn’t believe him. Not until now. Not until you realized that Billy had always been angry — always raging with an ocean of fear and grief and violence.
When he fought with his sister, you thought it was normal, that that’s just what siblings did. But the way she cried to you after couldn’t have been normal. Neither could the unearthly fury that washed over Billy like a riptide when he found out you and Max had sought safety in Steve The Hair Harrington — angered that it was Steve and that he couldn’t be that for the both of you.
And then there was the fights. The yelling and screaming and crying fights that felt like the end of the world every single time. The kind of fights you shouldn’t be having when you’re eighteen. You thought that maybe there was some normalcy in the cheating and the secrecy and Billy’s accompanying assholery because that was all you’d ever known.
Or maybe because you had to tell yourself that was normal in relationships because you didn’t want your’s to end. Billy was the first guy to give a damn about you in ways that went beyond just sex. How were you supposed to just give that up?
But then there’s Eddie — Eddie The Freak Munson, who was really just sunshine wrapped up in leather jackets and wild hair and chunky rings and metal music. He makes you happy. The sort of happy that makes you suspicious because something bad has to counteract all the goodness he makes you feel.
Maybe that’s what this was.
Seeing Billy after having wrapped yourself in a blanket of Eddie’s warmth made you see somehow more clearly. He loves on you so much that it’s made a mockery of everything else.
Whatever you had with Billy wasn’t normal, it was a goddamn shit show. He loved you when it was convenient and then had you believing it was the real thing, that you wouldn’t find it anywhere else, when you tried to leave him.
It was a lie, all of it.
The realization makes you falter.
“Oh, god…” you sigh, voice fragile like cracking glass. “Maybe you never used to be…”
For the first time ever, you see Billy’s grin shake. The edges of it flitter, like he’s fighting to keep the corners quirked up. And his eyes have gone a lighter shade of blue, the way they always did when he blinked back angry tears as he talked about his father.
It isn’t rage glassing his eyes now. It’s something sadder, but still as real — something you never got from him in the two years you were together.
He tries, still, to cover it all up. He smacks his lips against his teeth, sympathetically. “Sorry it took you this long to figure that out.”
The laugh you exhale then is heavy with sadness. Your smile is far away and so is your gaze as you stumble back from him. You turn your head to the edge of the alley where mom’s with strollers and people in fancy suits bustle on the sidewalk and keep your eyes on the strangers that whiz by you’ll probably never see again.
“This is… This is pointless,” you murmur. His lean form is blurry through the burning tears you blink away. “Every time I see you, it’s just more bullshit so let’s just— let’s just leave each other alone, okay?”
Billy takes a puff from his cigarette. When he sighs, white smoke billows from his plump, pink lips. “That’s a shame… I was just thinking that you were the most interesting you’d ever been.”
The ebbing tide that had just left you rushes back in a bubbling scarlet wave. His words don’t make you sad anymore, they just make you angry all over again because you know you don’t deserve them. And you’re not entirely sure why he’s chosen you to antagonize out of all the other girls who’d made the mistake of falling for him, but you’re too far past the point of not caring to ask.
“Bother me again and I tell Chief Hopper,” you threaten even though you don’t feel very threatening just now. “I know you’re not scared of me, but you’d be stupid to be scared of him.”
“Why’s that?” he wonders before sticking the half-gone stick between his lips again.
“Because he runs Hawkins. And he fucking hates you—” for what you did to me, you almost say. You swallow the words down like bile before they have the chance to spew out. “And… And be nice to Vicki. Okay? She’s too good for you. Don’t do to her what you did to me.”
Your plea for another is the last thing you say to Billy before you turn away from him. You wouldn’t be upset if it was the last thing you ever said to him. You’re grateful for the resounding silence that follows. It’s nothing but the sound of your receding footsteps and the soles of his shoes scrapping the concrete as he snuffs out his cigarette.
There is no snarky remark or insincere plea — just two people who used to love each other that have no idea to exist together anymore.
When you step outside the brick confines of the alleyway, you feel as though a fraying string that had always connected the both of you had been finally cut.
It allows you to take a deep breath in for the first time in months. A lungful of fresh air that cleanses you, body and mind.
And when you catch Steve and Robin idling at the corner and doing a terrible job of pretending like they hadn’t just been eavesdropping, you don’t get upset or angry with them — you don’t feel much of anything, really.
You just hand the boy his lighter and unused cigarette and let them comfort you on the drive back to your apartment.
A misery sandwich. That’s what Robin calls the three of you and the heaping pile you lay in.
Your queen-sized bed is in no way meant to accomodate three moderately sized adults, but you make it work anyway, like you always do.
Steve lays on his back, legs crossed and hands tucked under his head. Robin is on her stomach on the other end of the mattress, arms wrapped around the pillow she smushes the side of her face into. You lay between the both of them — on the both of them. Sprawled out sideways, you’ve got your head on propped up on Steve’s ribcage and your legs thrown over Robin’s thighs.
The awkward position is the most comfortable you’ve ever been.
“I can’t believe that asshole had the nerve to show up to the diner on our day,” the boy rants. “And then sit in our booth, I mean— who does he think he is?”
Robin’s response is mostly muffled by the pillow. “I thought he left, like, forever ago.”
“Maybe he just couldn’t stay away. It’s Hawkins, shit attracts shit, right?” Steve answers with a shrug that jostles your head slightly. It doesn’t little to knock you from your stupor, though, where you’ve been stuck for the better part of the day. You pick at the skin around your nails with little regard for how red and raging it's gone.
He notices this and thumps you on your temple — hard enough for you to feel it, gentle enough that it doesn’t hurt you.
You turn your chin to your shoulder to look over at him. He tilts his own head to stare down at you, honey-tinted gaze somehow stern and soft at the same time. “If he bothers you again, I’ll kill him.”
You’re instantly warmed by his protective disposition. You know that he cares about you, even though you like to joke that he doesn’t. Steve hurt you once, made a promise to himself to make it up to you, and then just never left you alone.
You’re grateful for it.
You’re not sure who’d be the butt of every joke if he wasn’t around.
“Good to know,” you answer, nodding against his side and trying to hide the smile he gives you. You fail. “You think if he breaks your nose again, it’ll pop back into place?”
His face falls. “You’re real sweet, you know that?”
You open your mouth to respond, something along the lines of “I’m always sweet. You of all people should know that, Stevie,” before a knock sounds at the front door. It comes in the several rhythmic raps that Eddie is known to give when he’s got a tune stuck in his head.
Apparently now, it’s the chorus to “Why Can’t This Be Love?” The Van Halen song he said he couldn’t stand before you.
Robin huffs at the sound of the muffled taps. She frowns like a child. “Who the hell…?”
“It’s just Eddie,” you affirm through a half-hearted grunt as you rise from your comfy position.
That brightens the two of them up almost immediately. Her and Steve share a look you can’t place as they grin at one another. Then they turn back to you with identical mischievous twinkles in their eyes. “Your boyfriend is here,” the former of the two singsongs.
You roll your eyes, but make no move to correct her.
When you stand from the bed and make the short journey towards the door, you hear the patter of their feet following close behind you.
“Gonna go all the way tonight?” Steve teases and jabs you on the shoulder. “Do you want us to leave?”
“No, nothing is happening. And yes, I think you should leave,” you monotone playfully.
Robin rushes past you suddenly and grabs the brass door handle before you’re able. She swings it open without thinking twice about it. Her sudden appearance, coupled with the fact that it isn’t you, startles the man on the other side of the door.
Eddie’s umber eyes go wide, brows raising and disappearing beneath his fluffy bangs, as his head jerks back.
“Eddie Munson,” the girl full-names the stranger she’s never spoken a word to before now. She leans against the doorway and effectively blocks the boy’s view of you. Steve, who squeezes himself in beside her, doesn’t make it any easier. “Fancy seeing you here.”
“You too, Buckley…” he wavers, trying to peer past them for any sight of you.
“Perfect timing, Eds,” you call out from behind them. “They were just about to leave.”
He’s relieved at the sound of your voice — even more so at your appearance when the two in front of you step off to the side to toe on their sneakers.
You don’t look much different than when he saw you last. You’ve put on some makeup that’s started to smudge after the long day and changed your baggy sweatshirt for a more fitted tank top and boxers, but other than that you’re still the same. Still familiar and comforting in your way, a home away from home.
His smile is a tired one and it wobbles at the edges. “Oh, shit, am I— am I interrupting something?”
“No,” you’re quick to reassure him. “You’re saving me, actually.”
“Oh, give me a break,” Steve scoffs. “You love us.”
The boy pulls you into a hug before he leaves, and it’s not the rarest thing in the world, but embraces like this do tend to be few and far between. He whispers “use protection” in your ear and then a sharp “ow!” when you jab him in the ribs.
He and Robin smile kindly at Eddie when they walk by him and out the door, but waste barely a second before turning back around and grinning wildly at you. Steve flashes you a thumbs up while she mouths a cartoonish ‘good luck’ — like it’s the first time you and Eddie had ever been alone together. Like they were just on your ass about having been with him this whole time.
You usher Eddie and shut the door behind them. A quiet sort of peace settles on the apartment like a weighted blanket. The boy revels in every bit of its warmth.
Exhaustion drips from him like syrup. He’s sticky with it. His eyes have lost their usual twinkle, weighed down now with the burden of his fatigue. His face has lost most of its color, leaving a pale sheath of monotoned skin, and his hair is wilder than normal, with an unintentional sort of ruggedness to his curls.
It’s what being without you has done to him.
“You okay?” you ask him softly. It almost makes him want to cry.
“Yeah,” he answers anyway and idles in the spot where your kitchen meets your living room. “Just had a pretty shitty day. Wanted to spend time with you.”
“Me too… About the wanting to spend time with you part— and the shitty day part, too, I guess.”
Eddie smiles at your rambling, but purses it to the side to conceal it from you. “And since it is just about our…” he trails off and bends his elbow to check the watch on his wrist. “…Twelve hour anniversary, I picked us up some takeout.”
He sets the plastic bag on the counter. The red logo of Oriental Jade on the side of it makes your stomach roll with a distant hunger. You hadn’t realized how starved you were feeling after you abandoned your early dinner at Benny’s. It makes you more grateful for Eddie, who always seems to be on the same wavelength as you without even trying.
“Keep this up and we’ll be married before we hit hour twenty-four,” you joke as you rifle through the cartons — chow mein, sweet and sour chicken, dumplings, the works.
Eddie settles in next to you, propping his elbows on the countertop. “Well, I’m pretty sure the courthouse opens at nine, so… What were you thinking for the honeymoon? Hawaii? Bora Bora?”
“How about a cabin in the woods where no one can find us?”
“Hmm… Spooky. Sexy. I’m into it.”
You settle in the living room and eat on the couch while She Ra re-runs play on the television. You try to teach Eddie how to use chopsticks, though he can only work them with his non-dominant hand and all the wrong finger placements. You think it’s cute to watch him fumble with them, and you giggle about it until you’re scolding him for trying to feed Bowie some noodles. He laughs as you swat at him.
When all the containers are fully scrapped clean and tossed in the recycling bin, you migrate to the bedroom — which is perhaps too raunchy a phrase to use when the two of you only bury yourselves under the covers to talk shit.
Eddie drags out the chunky box fan you use when the air conditioner goes out in the summer — because it always goes out in the summer — and props it on the chest at the foot of your bed so the covers will billow around the both of you. “And it’s perfect because we can stay in the fort forever and not get hot,” he tells you, all giddy about it like he's a kid again.
“What if I get cold?” you retort.
Without missing a beat, he answers, “Well, lucky enough for you, I know several ways I can warm you up, sweetheart.”
He ditches his leather jacket and strips down to his boxers and settles in beside you underneath the blankets. The two of you lay shoulder to shoulder while you trace absentminded patterns on the palm of his hand and tell him about your day.
You make sure to leave out all the re-traumatizing-Billy-Hargrove bits, though. You focus mainly on the tense drive with Hopper and the small fight you’d had with Steve on the drive to the diner later that afternoon about the lyrics to Love My Way (both of you had been wrong).
Eddie tries his hardest to focus on your story and your fleeting touches, but he’s too far in his own head. You tell him all these things but he can’t stop thinking about himself — about whether or not you might’ve brought him up somewhere in between.
He wouldn’t have blamed you, if you had. Steve and Robin are your closest friends and, for whatever reason, so is Chief Hopper, you’re bound to bring him up eventually. He was just hoping it would’ve been in a better capacity. Maybe about how kind he was or what a god he was in bed — not how he could only be one of those things because he’d never been anything in bed.
“It doesn’t make things weird between us, does it?” he wonders out of the blue.
You halt mid-sentence and turn to him with furrowed brows. “What?”
Eddie realizes then, that the first half of the conversation with you had only happened in his head. He prays that it’s too dark beneath the covers for you to see how red his cheeks get. “Just… What we talked about this morning. About me… you know…” He finds it hard to say the words. Or any of them at all.
“Why would it make things weird?”
“I don’t know. Because I wasn’t… totally honest with you, I guess? I feel a little bad about it, you know?”
“It’s okay,” you assure and turn on your side to be closer to him. Eddie stays on his back, more than happy to let you cuddle further into him. “I guess I do wish you’d said something before, though.”
His chest tightens. “I’m sorry. I just… I didn’t know how to—”
“I’m not saying it to make you feel bad!” you interject quickly when you catch the spiral of regret he was about to twist himself into. You curl tighter into his side, tossing a leg over his thigh and wrapping your hand around his bicep in an effort to melt with him. When he turns to face you, your noses nearly brush.
“That’s not how I meant it. I just meant that, if I’d known before, I wouldn’t have… I would’ve taken things slower. I wouldn’t have been so, you know, so all over you.”
He hates how apologetic you sound. Like there was ever an ounce of him that would want to take back what happened that night at his trailer or a part of him that might hate how much you love on him.
“I liked it. I do like it.”
“Maybe we can just start over,” you offer. “Pretend like none of that ever happened.”
Eddie knows there’s no way in hell he’ll be able to forget about a single damn thing — not his cum stained jeans and how you looked so pretty washing them for him, not the feel of your tits in his mouth or you wrapped around his fingers, not how you made him blow his load all over his fist just by talking to him.
He goes along with it anyway, though, just for you.
“Okay...” he nods slowly, then squints over at you. “You’re still my girlfriend, though, right?”
“Of course I am,” you giggle.
He grins proudly to himself. “Well then… Hope it’s not too early to have our first kiss then?”
It makes you roll your eyes because it’s such an Eddie Munson way of asking to kiss you. You told him earlier the day that he never had to ask you — in fact, you’d prefer it if he’d just kiss you out of the blue and take your breath away without you ever knowing it was coming. But there was something foreign and sweet in his little reassurances.
“Kiss me silly, Eddie Spaghetti,” you beam. He twists on his side to press tiny pecks to your smile.
It’s rather strange, you find, to kiss someone this way without the intention of it ever becoming something more. You kiss him just to kiss him — just to map the outline of his cupid’s bow and memorize the pattern of his tongue. Just to feel him, as much of him as your mouth will allow you to.
With one arm curled under his head and the other cradling your jaw, when his watch alarms — high-pitched beepbeepbeeps in quick succession — it’s sudden and close to your ear.
Your lips click in protest when they part. His are pink and swollen and glossy with your spit. He smiles with them. “Happy twelve hour anniversary, sweetheart.”
“How long are you gonna make that stupid joke?” you laugh like your heart isn’t swelling so much you’re scared it might burst entirely.
“Uh, I was thinking… forever. Yeah. That sounds about right,” he concludes after a moment of feigned thought. He turns his watch off again and you swear you see him set for another twelve hours from now.
“Forever?” you echo.
“Uh-huh. Forever—” he presses his lips to yours once. “—And ever—” Twice. “—And ever.”
Eddie kisses you until you’re flat on your back and surrendering to each of his tiny little pecks. You twist your hands in his hair and let him love on you a little while more. You giggle when his mouth trails from your lips to your chin to your jaw to your neck. Please don’t get bored of me, you beg silently within your laughter.
I don’t think I could even if I wanted to, he answers with each kiss his sprinkles to your starved skin. How could I, when you’re the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me?
#published by bug#eddie munson x reader#stranger things x reader#eddie munson imagine#eddie munson smut#eddie munson#eddie munson fanfic#stranger things#eddie munson fic#virgin!eddie munson x reader#virgin!eddie munson
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Don't think about Lucien Vanserra witnessing the unspeakable: his world crumbling as the love of his life is ripped away from him and murdered right before his eyes. Don't picture his brothers holding him back, making him watch it all - every excruciating detail - as he's powerless to stop it.
Forget the image of him, broken and bleeding, dragging himself to the sanctuary of the Spring Court boundary, barely making it over the line before his knees give out beneath him. Don’t think about the emptiness that surely follows, nor the weight of his grief so heavy it's a wonder he could even stand to make it to safety in the first place. Don’t think about all the times on his journey he just wanted to give up altogether, but pushed on so that Jesminda’s death was not in vain.
Don't think about him having to turn against two of his own brothers, killing them in a twisted act of vengeance that feels nothing like the justice he sought. Resist the thought of him taking weeks, months, (years??) to mourn in solitude because Tamlin, though knowing loss to this magnitude as well, could not possibly navigate the depths of Lucien's grief. Thus, Lucien was left to weather his storm of sorrow and loss the same way Tamlin had weathered his own - alone - hiding away from a world that had taken everything from him
Don’t picture him upon the dawn-kissed roof of the Spring manor, where the dance of pinks and oranges and blues in the sky only seems to deepen his yearning for an Autumn forever lost to him. And don’t think about how in the Spring Court he has found some kind of solace... but never peace. How despite finding a home there, his soul remains restless, wandering, always running from the shadows of his past. Running from his future. Running from himself.
And please don’t think about how Lucien's gratefulness to Tamlin for giving him something close to a family results in a loyalty so profound that he'd walk into hell for him. Which he does - right into Amarantha’s clutches - only to come back less than whole, another piece of him stolen away.
That beauty he was known for? Gone.
Just like everything else.
Don’t imagine Lucien slowly piecing himself back together - inch by painstaking inch. Forget about the way he masters the art of sarcasm and humor, how he wields his wit like a shield to keep others at bay, to convince them, and maybe himself, that he's not hurting as much as he is. That beneath the quips and the easy smiles lies a well of pain and self-doubt so deep it's become part of who he is. That this levity he brings into every room is, in truth, the heaviest thing he carries.
And hey. Don't think about Lucien giving up any hope of being wanted, of being loved again. That his chance at having a mate, a true partner, was as dead as his former lover.
Or how, in a twist that must have amused fate itself, the Cauldron surprises him with a mate in Elain Archeron: his undeniable yet unwilling counterpart. How from nowhere, a bond snaps into place, redefining his destiny and sealing a connection that he'd long since given up on.
And don't think about how when Lucien's eyes meet Elain’s, somewhere beneath all the layers of loss and hurt and betrayal…. a spark of hope dares to ignite once more.
And then absolutely don't let your thoughts wander to his heart being trampled on, again, when he realizes that Elain - like everyone else - doesn’t want him. But at this point he’s not even surprised. It’s just another sharp sting in a lifetime's collection of disappointments and cruel irony. Don't dwell on how he's gotten so used to the taste of rejection and the feeling of being unworthy that he doesn't even think about trying to change her mind about him. Because, what's the point, right? Why bother when history has shown him, time and time again, that even just hoping seems to lead him to more pain?
Don’t think about how despite this, he still seeks her out just enough to show he’s willing to give it a shot if she is. How against his every instinct to protect himself, he keeps himself open to the slightest possibility of her, knowing it just leaves the door open to be hurt. And don't think about how every time Elain shies away from him, every time she looks through him or chooses to keep her distance, it just reinforces his walls, makes him retreat a little more behind his carefully constructed façade. Because facing that rejection head-on, acknowledging it, would mean admitting to himself that he's still holding onto a sliver of hope that maybe, just maybe, she could see past the surface. That she could want him, not despite of all he's been through, but because of it. That she could be the one to see him, really see him, and not turn away.
So, yeah, don’t go there.
It's easier to laugh it off, to pretend it doesn't matter, than to face the possibility of another door closing in his face. Easier to keep up the act, to be the Lucien everyone expects - charming, sarcastic, unbothered - than to risk showing just how much Elain's avoidance cuts him to the core.
But don’t think about it.
Because acknowledging that Lucien's humor and charm are just his way of coping? That means seeing the depth of his loneliness, the real Lucien who's been hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone to care enough to look closer. And understanding that? It's realizing that beneath the façade, Lucien's just waiting for someone to prove him wrong, to show him he's worth the risk, worth the love he's convinced himself he doesn't deserve.
And Elain, with her quiet strength and her own hidden depths, might just be the one to see the real Lucien. To challenge the walls he's built around himself, if only he could believe, one more time, that he's worthy of being chosen, of being loved.
But perhaps Mor is right - they aren’t ready. And Lucien’s not sure he’s ready to gamble his heart on hope again.
Not yet, anyway.
So, really, don’t think about it—unless you’re ready to root for them, to believe in the kind of love that could be their light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Because Lucien and Elain? They could be something epic, a testament to the power of second chances and the strength of a love that comes when you least expect it but most need it. That their path isn’t just about two people finding love in an unfair world that has taken the things they both hold dear; it’s a journey of coming back to life after being lost in the dark for far too long.
So yeah, just don’t. It’s a lot.
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LEECH.
| a collection of one-shots. collection masterlist.
DISCLAIMER: this fic is simply a work of fiction and is in no way, shape, or form claiming to be a reflection of how leon kennedy is canonically portrayed as a character. this is an au, meaning it is an alternate reality written for fun, so please heed this warning and keep it in mind while you read.
— to join the taglist, follow the link here and choose “leon kennedy” in the character list.
collection songbook
leon kennedy x fem!reader
word count; 1,656
warnings; leon is a stalker, leon's also a bit of a loser!, themes of dark!leon, allusions to smut, mentions of oral (m & f receiving)
summary; letting her go was easily the biggest mistake leon has ever made, and he's made more than he can count. so when he finds her again, he vows she’ll be the one thing he clings to, like a leech in skin.
Leon never had a place to call his own, but he did have a home, once.
Home was a girl, home was a medic who, by patching him up that first time in the training grounds, prompted a rumbling from deep within his belly for a hunger he’d never had before, making him yearn for something constant, something domestic, something normal.
Because Leon Kennedy’s life was far from it. Years of being in all the wrong places at all the wrong times made certain of that. There was nothing normal about him to begin with anyways, even before that shitshow of a first day on duty at R.P.D..
Although not many tried, many failed to truly understand Leon Kennedy. Before there was a top secret government agent, there was a cop and before there was a cop, there was a teenager and before there was a teenager there was just a child, mourning the loss of parents he never got the chance to really know.
But that was all just the surface-level shit.
Everyone, at least on a business standpoint, knew about Leon’s past, why he was so eager to be an officer in the first place. But no one gave a shit about the in between. Nobody really cared for who Leon Kennedy was at his core, beneath all the blood, sweat, gore, and tears.
Nobody did— except for her.
Leon’s home once looked at him with a tenderness so devastating, it was like its own cataclysmic event. Every time she looked at him with eyes so warm like a crackling fire in the hearth on a cold, winter night, eyebrows pinched and brow furrowed, it was like the Earth was collapsing around him. The world was caving in and Leon didn’t care because all he could see was her: listening to him, eager to know more, wanting to help him.
He could still see her eyes every night when he closed his and he could still hear her voice, her breathing, the little sounds she made in those moments they shared when they burned the brightest. His skin still buzzed where her lips once touched him, although each day that passed by, the burn her kiss left upon his flesh gradually faded, so faint now, he was holding on to cinders. Leon would toss and turn in whatever bed he ended up in every night, willing the memory of their last night together back to the forefront of his brain, clinging on to the dying embers left in her lips’ wake.
Her kiss felt fainter tonight than it ever had before.
The feeling was nearly painful.
Leon ripped the thin duvet off of his body, swinging his legs over the side of the mattress that was more like a box spring than anything. The motel room he’d ended up in after the last mission was small, the walls were yellow with grime, the curtains over the window thin and ripped, allowing the orange light from the lamppost outside to spill in. There were small, dark ovals on the floor in the corner that were surely cockroaches, but Leon didn’t spare them a second glance as he zipped up his jeans— he’d slept in far worse places than this.
He tugged on the sheepskin leather jacket that had since been draped over the top of the withering dresser, stepping into his boots and bending at the waist from the edge of the mattress to lace them up. The alarm on the nightstand read 4:00 in big, red numbers that blinked after him as he stuffed his room key into his pocket, slipping out the door.
The air was cold and fog rolled in the low-lit parking lot, curls of smoky air visible in the lamplight. Leon could see his breath in misty clouds with each step he took and he stuffed his hands into his pockets, disappearing into the fog.
She haunted his reverie as if she were a parasite, a sickness he couldn’t heal from. He still saw her the day she told him she was leaving, still felt the bile that bubbled in his throat, still saw the tears that fell in droplets of rain down her cheeks. He still felt the weight of the words he’d said, still remembered her shaking her head, could still hear her voice curling around his ears like a ghostly whisper, saying “you have to let me go.”
He watched her walk away, let her go as she asked then, and perhaps, Leon should’ve tried to move on. Perhaps he should’ve let her go as she had asked, should’ve pushed himself harder in training, pushed himself harder in his missions so that maybe he could have forgotten her.
But he was still right where she left him.
Ever since she left, he’d been stuck as if he were in a time loop, reliving the day he let her walk away from him over and over again like it was some form of punishment, his own personal hell. He’d spent damn near every second that passed after that day trying to claw his way back to her, hanging on tooth and nail. He had to ask through virtually the entire medical team until he finally, finally found her.
He told himself he wouldn’t do this, told himself he’d wait until the morning where he could show up at her door, properly knock and engage in conversation. He tried desperately to resist the ache he now yielded to.
The place was caught in between a shithole and adequacy. It was a hell of a lot better than a vast majority of the places Leon had slept, at least. His footsteps echoed through the hallway as he neared her door, Room 210. He fished for his pocket knife in the front pocket of his jeans, unsheathing the switchblade before glancing around the hall.
Empty.
He leaned down to the lock and slowly, as to not make any more noise than necessary, inserted the blade, inch by inch until the tip reached the end. He twisted the hilt until there was a click, steadily sliding the knife back out and switching it closed, tucking it safely away back in his pocket.
The knob was cool against his fingertips as he twisted it, carefully pushing open the door, grimacing when it squeaked. He stepped inside the dark apartment, the shadows embracing him as if he were an old friend. Once he’d managed to close the door, he crept his way through the apartment, between half unpacked moving boxes and furniture.
The walls were bare for the most part, save for a painting above the television in the living room. Leon couldn’t quite discern what it was in the darkness, but through the sliver in the door beside it, he could just make out the shape of a footboard.
His heart pounded against his chest as he inched towards the bedroom door, palms against the wood, cautiously pushing open just enough to allow his body to slither through.
And there she was.
Leon’s home was a woman buried beneath the covers, turned on her side with an arm folded beneath her pillow. Home was the woman deep in slumber, lashes flush to her cheeks, oblivious to the man standing at her bedside.
Leon drew in a deep breath as he kneeled beside her, his fingers just itching to wipe the loose strand of hair away from her face. It’d been so long since the last time he’d seen her in the flesh and he’d counted down those long, agonizing days that eventually led him to this moment. The days were long and hard but finally, he’d made his way back to her.
The lips that used to kiss his, that used to part when she gasped, that wrapped around his cock when his fingers were woven through her hair were now pressed together in a line. The chest he’d sometimes lay on at night, the chest he’d knead in either of his palms, the chest he’d leave his marks upon rose and fell with her every breath. He wondered if any of his marks still tainted her skin, or if the time they’d spent apart had been enough to fade them away.
The eyes that still haunted him, even in this moment, were closed but still, their hue was forever ingrained in his memory. Leon’s fingers twitched as he raised a hand towards her face, shivering as he brushed the backs of his knuckles delicately across her cheek, the pad of his thumb just barely soothing over one of her closed eyelids. He swiped the loose strand of hair away from his face gently, the tip of his forefinger delicately tracing the curve of her ear.
The skin he’d been craving and yearning to touch was warm, a stark contrast from the cool of his own. Memories of nights that had passed with his arms wrapped around her naked body, with her breasts against his chest, their legs intertwined flashed in his mind. Memories of his palms soothing up and down her waist, his hands between the soft flesh of her thighs, his lips against her center made his mouth part in a gasp.
How he longed to shake her awake, to look in her eyes, to feel her again. How he longed to tangle his fingers up in her hair and push her lips against his in a searing kiss that would forever scar him but feel so damn good all the while.
But he wouldn’t wake her, not now.
For tonight, he’d settle on the fact that he’d found her, that he could see her once again. Seeing her again set that old flame in the pit of his belly ablaze once more, fueling that craving he had for something constant, something domestic, something normal.
Normalcy was hard, his line of work made certain of that. Nobody normal had seen the amount of shit he had, nor had the amount of blood on his hands that tainted his. Normalcy was practically a myth, normalcy sounded more outrageous than the outrageous did to him.
Normalcy may have been out of reach before, yes, but now— now it felt closer than ever. If becoming a leech, a blood-sucking parasite with its teeth sunken deep into skin was what he had to do to achieve it, then so be it. He was so tired of letting everything he’d ever wanted slip out of his reach— so when he sunk down onto the floor with his back against the wall, gaze still fixed on the woman slumbering upon the bed, he vowed to let this be the one thing he cling to.
a/n; SO... SURPRISE! i got the idea for this while driving to work this past tuesday morning and couldn't stop thinking about it my entire shift lol i'm really excited to write more for this collection, so stay tuned for further one-shots! i just ask for your patience-- i'm a college student with a job! :) anyways, i hope you all enjoyed this little introduction to the collection :)
❕❕the next fic in the collection will be posted april 14th at 3 pm cst
💿 if you enjoyed, please consider reblogging or even leaving a reply to let me know! it means the entire world to me 🫶
TAGLIST
@corruptcoder @chaoticevilbakugo @luckypurins @glovesandhorror @xoxostarlet @illsksm @echo1200 @d3adp00ls @woahhajime @leonkennedygvrl
#leon kennedy x you#leon kennedy x reader#leon kennedy#leon resident evil#leon s kennedy#leon x reader#leon x you#leon x y/n#leon kennedy x y/n#resident evil#pasukiyo's leech collection
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i love you more than you'll ever know
fandom: genshin impact
characters: albedo, venti, zhongli, xiao, wanderer
reader type: gender neutral
summary: yearning for someone came hand in hand with heartache.
genre: angst and fluff, hurt/comfort.
warnings: implied reader's death, also implied character death (xiao and wanderer kinda uh want to unlive themselves but not explicitly? i think?), mourning, slight sumeru spoilers for wanderer's. written as of 3.2 update.
notes: inspired by hikaru utada's one last kiss. might do a part two, not sure when it'll be ready haha. xiao's and wanderer's are longer because i love them and i was feeling sadder as i wrote them so lol there they are. i'm sleepy but i wanted to finish these... i'll see if theres anything i need to edit tomorrow.
The meaning of this world, the truth of this world, Albedo thinks, is held within your hands. It is perhaps not the one he was looking for, or the one he had been expected to find, but personally? He would take this as the truth of the world.
Love is the truth of this world, the meaning of all sentient existence. The love one takes and gives, selflessly yet selfish al the same. The kind of love one feels from friends and family and lovers. Love is what really gives the world a meaning for those who live in it.
And for him, it is your love that fills his life with a new meaning.
Love that made him step away from experiments and investigation to take a stroll through the city, love that made him blush and giggle, love that brought a foreign yet sweet warm sensation to his chest, love that you held within your hands every time your fingers intertwined.
Love that somehow, with no reasoning or explanation, survived through all the uncertainty of fate, and the undeniable, unescapable cycle of life and death.
When your and Albedo's story is forced to come to a stop, he won't deny he felt his whole world came crashing down. Yet, more than anything, he feels grateful.
Perhaps at that time, he still would not find the truth of the world his master wanted him to. But one thing is for sure, and that's because of you, and everything you taught him.
If time and chance allow it, his love for you will be immortalized in paintings exhibited in museums; depictions of you and him, and you, you, you and you. Even when he, himself, has long since disappeared, that last trace of your love, of the truth of his world, will be preserved.
For Venti, freedom is everything. He would never tie you down so you could stay with him, even if that is what he would want the most. However, that also means he will not stop you if you, of your own free will, decide to spend the rest of your life with him.
He is selfish, just not selfish enough to decide what is best for you in your stead. This is why, he wholeheartedly decides to love you back without holding anything back, living each day like it is the last, enjoying the present doing anything and everything and nothing all at the same time.
It's ballads and tales, it's drinking and laughing at his silly shenanigans when he gets drunk, it's enjoying the breezes as you glide together and resting on the green hills and valleys of Mondstadt together, every day something new, every day a new memory to keep.
But, he knows, this won't last.
He is very well acquainted with loss, and the fragility of human life.
That is why he insisted on spending so much time together, it is why he was always clingy whenever the timing was right, why he insisted on making you laugh and smile every single day you were together.
The years spent together may seem long to you, even as you took your final breath. Yet, for him, it truly felt like it had been merely the blink of an eye. A momentary sigh, a brief instant of happiness.
Venti will sing ballads of you, for an audience of people or the always reliable, always present audience of the winds. And he knows that, even once his days come to an end, and until the end of this world, your love will be preserved, for eternities to come.
There is, after all, no world where the wind doesn't blow, even if it has come to an stop.
For Zhongli, contracts are everything. In his eyes, promises made are promises kept, and that is precisely what he does.
To you, he promised his love. For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, in life and death. In his own experience and words, everything must come to an end and every journey has its final day, but there is no need to rush. This is why, he never makes it a point to consciously think about the clock mercilessly ticking by as you spend your life with him.
Zhongli, the human, lives with you and shares countless experiences after experiences with you. From the simplest glance to the longest conversation to the harshest of arguments to the sweetest of kisses, Zhongli makes sure to live it with you, in the present moment, mind focused on here and now, carving each memory into his heart with the same precision an artist would carve a statue out of the finest jade.
The former god understands and accepts your mortality, and accepts it as a part of what makes you be who you are. He accepts it, and holds your hand, ever so resilient, as you take your last breaths, and bids you goodbye with a grateful smile and teary eyes.
Perhaps the legends of the mighty God of Contracts will never talk about your love, but even if there is no one left to share your memories with him, until erosion eventually claims him too, his heart won't stop beating for you.
Xiao would be lying if he said he never once doubted your sanity in the time he's known you. After all, why would you do something so terrible to yourself like willingly spending time with him? You must've been insane, he thought.
But, in reality, he was glad you were that little bit insane enough to open a space for him in your life.
From the very start, he's known you wouldn't be there forever. He is all too aware of how fragile life is, of how ephemeral you truly are. Like the sweetest of dreams, you feel like a fragile illusion of happiness that will be gone in the blink of an eye. Oh, but you are real, you are oh so real, and he knows it when you cradle his face with your hands and gently wipe the tears that silently fall down from his tired eyes that stare ahead, filled with complicated emotions, on a face far too unused to emoting, on a body far too small for the true amount of feelings that resided within it.
And he is quiet but his mind is loud, keeps him hyper aware of how short these moments of joy and peace are with you. And, although he would've never blamed you if you ever decided to leave him of your own will, he is glad you never did, he is glad that you would never do so. He is glad that you decided to spend your days with him, glad you were patient enough to wait for him to learn how to properly love you, glad you let him love you.
The days spent with you are easily the best fragment of Xiao's life. Short-lived, ephemeral, dreamlike, everything. Unforgettable.
He would like to keep you forever. His most selfish, impossible dream is for you to stay forever by his side. Greedy he is, but never enough to burden you with such thoughts. Instead, he took every opportunity he had to spend time with you, no matter what you were doing, he wanted to be there, even if it was in a place he didn't like, he didn't want to waste a single second of your life.
When you depart from the world of the living, a part of him leaves with you.
And, Xiao knew when he fell in love. You would be the death of him.
He won't last long after you leave.
He'll do his best to live, because he knows you would want him to live, but he truly won't be able to do so for long.
Legends will speak of the tragically beautiful love that Liyue's last Yaksha had towards a human, speak of how he learned how to be human for love, of how his love was so intense and pure it was the only thing that kept him tied to the world of the living for years to come.
And when Xiao's time comes, he smiles as he sheds tears and looks up at the infinite blue sky.
When the light leaves his eyes, and his last breath is a sweet proclamation of his everlasting love for you, he knows.
He will see you in another life, in another world.
It took him three betrayals to finally understand: the world is an elaborated tapestry of lies.
It took him pain and humiliation, having his one purpose taken away, for him to understand: just because you want something, that does not mean you will get it. No matter what you do, if the world decides you won't have it, then you won't.
Receiving kindness from the dendro archon was and the blessing of an anemo vision were some of the things that set him on the right path to find his true wishes on his own, but most importantly, your existence in his life made something inside him turn and twist. You filled him with an achingly bittersweet yearning to love and be loved, you made him want to trust, made him willing to endure pain and betrayal if it meant he could spend eternity with you.
Eternity, the concept that his creator was (or still is, he wouldn't know) so obsessed with, obsessed with enough to discard him like worthless dross and abandon him to fend for himself with no instructions or expectations. Now, Wanderer felt as though he could understand her just a bit.
Or maybe a lot.
Eternity stretches things over a long time, but each moment within it becomes all the more fragile.
Nevertheless, when he had you, when you loved him, he finally understood why his mother was so desperate back then to attain eternity. He, too, when affronted with the harsh reality that you and your comforting warmth would not be around for long, desperately wished for a miracle to happen so he could stay forever with you. You living forever or him going with you once you left, he cared not, he only wanted you you you you and nothing else.
But, as he discovered, after long periods of anger and denial over painful feelings, acceptance is sure to come.
You are not like him in the slightest. Born human, with a heart of your own, knowing kindness and happiness from people around you, while his body was just a mere imitation of human flesh, an empty husk unfit for the only task he was created to perform. Yet, you still loved him as though he was not an easily replaceable abomination, but a human.
After you're gone, he cries the most he's ever cried. Rests his head on your chest that has long since stopped moving up and down with your breathing while his ears are met with silence when before he would listen to your comforting heartbeat, and he cries.
It will be long before the life of the Wanderer comes to an end- after all, he was created to endure an eternity functioning. Every dawn and every sunset, every passing breeze and station, he will remind the days you were together, and smile, as the empty space in his chest weeps silently, waiting, longing, hoping there exists a day in which he can meet you again.
For now, now that you're not with him anymore, he would simply keep walking, chasing the breeze that blows on a bright afternoon.
fallinfl0wers. 2022.
#melwritesgenshin#melodywritings#genshin impact headcanon#genshin scenarios#genshin impact scenarios#genshin impact imagines#genshin impact x reader#genshin x reader#genshin x you#genshin x y/n#genshin impact x you#genshin impact x y/n#albedo x y/n#albedo x reader#albedo x you#albedo angst#albedo fluff#venti x reader#venti x you#venti x y/n#venti angst#venti fluff#zhongli x reader#zhongli x you#zhongli x y/n#zhongli angst#zhongli fluff#xiao x reader#xiao x you#xiao x y/n
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"When He’s all but Forgotten How to Love Again" - Astarion x GN!Reader - Series Masterlist
Pairing: Astarion x GN!Reader (Elf!Tav for plot reasons)
Genre: Reincarnation, Angst, Mystery, Slow burn
Rating: Explicit, 18+
Tags: Gender-Neutral Pronouns, POV Second Person, Canon-Typical Violence, cw: blood, cw: Astarion's entire backstory, cw: sex, Eventual Smut, Eventual Romance, Eventual Fluff, Grief, Mourning, Developing Relationship
Series WC: 113k words and ongoing, 21/?? chapters
Summary: An Elf-Tav reincarnation story where Reincarnated!Tav dreams about Astarion in their nightly reveries and eventually seeks him out once they reach maturity. Things definitely totally go well.
Author’s Notes: I'm bringing over some of my multi-chapter fics from AO3, so if you've already read this, ty!! I love you and appreciate you so much! I will continue to add chapters as I format them, but the full fic is available on AO3 here if you're feeling like a binge.
Heads up-- while there will be explicit moments, this is first and foremost focused on romantic tension and yearning, asking the question: 'Would you still love me if I was someone completely different?’ Explicit scenes will be few and far between and very much focused on their feelings. It’s essentially an established relationship slow burn?
This has unascended Astarion, “good” choices are made in the original timeline, Tav needs to be an elf for this to work, but otherwise no specifics on past Tav. Present day Tav is a magic-user.
Chapters:
Chapter 1: Knifes and Nightmares
At 12 years old, you first dream of the Pale Elf. The encounter scares you and sets you on your path forward.
Chapter 2: The Second Encounter with the Pale Elf
Nearly 19, you think you have a handle of your past lives. However, not all of your past lives are created equal.
Chapter 3: What it Means to Love
Now 29, you're still trying to piece together parts of your past. In particular, what exactly was your relationship with Astarion?
Chapter 4: In this Lifetime
Now 99-years-old, you've managed to ignore your worst impulses to run off to Baldur's Gate. One night's reverie finally breaks you.
Chapter 5: Guidance from a Druid
After finally setting off to find Astarion, you receive a confounding memory from your past life. Ignoring what it might mean, you focus on your task and visiting Halsin, one of your past-self's friends.
Chapter 6: The Man of your Dreams
You make your way toward Astarion, trying your best to prepare for the encounter to come.
Chapter 7: Just One Night
You plead your case to the vampire.
Chapter 8: Who You Have Become
You try to learn more of who Astarion's become, while also trying to convince him of who you were.
Chapter 9: Ghosts of You
After he storms off, you try to track Astarion down only to find yourself on a trip down memory lane. Once you do catch his trail, you’re surprised to see where he’s gone.
Chapter 10: Overheard in the Underdark
You traverse a new landscape, looking for Astarion. What you find might be more than you bargain for, and what you hear might be too much to handle.
Chapter 11: An Interrogation
You spend the night in vampire prison and have a difficult conversation.
Chapter 12: The Source of his Pain
As you aim to leave and never look back, Astarion realizes that perhaps *he's* the one that made the mistake.
Chapter 13: And They Were Roommates
You and Astarion try to find a common ground between you. Things are awkward and tentative, and progress is anything but linear.
Chapter 14: A Blossoming Friendship
Now in your second week of living together, you and Astarion have to get past some of the hurdles your first week introduced, all while getting a bit closer along the way.
Chapter 15: More than Friends Pt. 1
Push finally comes to shove. As fun as living in the present is, Astarion forgets that present dangers are still very, very real. Afterward, emotions run high, and you find yourself in a familiar predicament.
Chapter 16: More than Friends Pt. 2
After talking through the previous night's tryst, emotions are confused, pasts are divulged, and everything comes to a head when your heart and soul want different things.
Chapter 17: What We are Now
When you’re left to your own devices, you find yourself knee-deep in mystery. Despite all of this, Astarion never leaves your mind. And perhaps you never leave his.
Chapter 18: Traveling with a Friend
You and Astarion travel together to Waterdeep. Emotions run high as you reconnect and reestablish your boundaries.
Chapter 19: The Wizard’s Tower
After traveling through Waterdeep, you and Astarion finally arrive at Gale's tower. Introductions are made, tours are had, and the relationship between yourself and Astarion continues to remain complicated.
Chapter 20: Sweets and Shopping
After receiving some advice from Gale, you and Astarion spend the day shopping and talking through your friendship.
Chapter 21: Dansarra’s Delights
Your wizard friend gives you a nigh impossible task, and you spend the day trying to find your opening to complete it.
Chapter 22 - TBA
...
#astarion#astarion x tav#fanfic#astarion fic#astarion x reader#astarion fanfiction#astarion fanfic#astarion masterlist#gn reader#astarion x gn reader#astarion x gn!tav#astarion baldurs gate#bg3 astarion#when he's all but forgotten how to love again#whabfhtla#reincarnation trope#elf!tav#astarion x you#astarion slowburn
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In the mood for...
Jan 16th
LINK LIMIT REACHED (please look in replies for more recs ^^)
~*~
1. Hello, looking for fics that discuss or focus around wy being in a different body and yeah kinda just focused around that. thanks!
the soft animal by cafecliche (T, 5k, wangxian, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, the physicality of moving on: the fic, LWJ is the best husband, Podfic Available, (the presence of) MXY, and a whole bunch of Baby Lans)
a better world by ilip13 (G, 1k, WangXian,
Post-Canon, Established Relationship, Slice of Life, Soft WangXian, mild body dysphoria, Hopeful Ending)
a kind of emptiness by ScarlettStorm (E, 11k, WangXian, Post-Canon, Established Relationship, Eating Disorders, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Eating Disorder Recovery, low angst, Happy Ending, seriously in spite of the tags this fic is very soft, Tender smut, Frottage, Praise Kink, Additional Warnings In Author's Note)
~*~
2. hopefully something similar to this
thank u!! @/weiwuxianfan34
hunters seeking solid ground by Attila (E, 23k, WangXian, Canon Compliant, discussion of canon character death, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, bed sharing, Getting Together, Yearning, Literal Sleeping Together, Really Excessive Amounts of Hurt/Comfort)
~*~
3. Hi, for the next itmf, do you guys have and lwj/wwx/lxc recs? Like with the three of them together in a relationship. It can be cannon era or modern era, I don't really mind either but I would prefer cannon era. Thank you for the help.
our close and kindred ties by exmanhater (E, 41k, WangXianXi, Pregnancy Kink, Incest, almost incest, Post-Canon, Gender Changes, Always a Different Sex, Cunnilingus, Vaginal Sex, Riding, Vaginal Fingering, Established Relationship, Situational Incest Only, POV Outsider, Pregnancy, Family Feels, Fluff, Incest Adjacent, Threesome - F/F/M, Relationship Negotiation, (slight) Pregnancy Kink, Kid Fic, Parenting, Inappropriate Use of Gūsū Lán Forehead Ribbon, Double Penetration, LWJ is a service top, Strap-Ons, Anal Sex, Light Bondage, Light Dom/sub, Restraints, Parenthood) has f!wangxian but otherwise i think it's post-canon-ish setting?
oh we have moved forward in pain by rainbowshoes (E, 47k, WangXianXi, past 3zun, past Niecest, Incest, Post-Betrayal Depression, Severe depressive episodes, Bruises, Bite marks, Consensual sexual injuries, Self harm through sex, self harm ideation, Nightmares, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Excessive Drinking, Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Scars, Past Child Abuse, implied ace jc, Explicit Sexual Content, Guilt, Canon-verse version of safe-wording out, Canon-verse version of subdrop, Child Abuse, discussion of death and murder, Discussion of wwx’s first time in the burial mounds, Broken Bones, Starvation, eating corpses, Insecurity not-so-accidental child acquisition, Angst with a Happy Ending, Sort Of, Sibling Incest, mix and mash Mashup of cql verse and novel, anti-lqr)
set my soul alight Series by Skadiseven (E, 42k, WangXianXi, Modern AU, Jadecest, Sibling Incest, Toronto, Halloween Costumes, Halloween, Canada, Jade Xianwich, WWX POV, Power Play, LXC POV, Rough Sex, Intercrural Sex, Oral Sex, Anal Sex, Aftercare, Sort Of)
take this weight of mine by soliloqui (E, 84k, WangXianXi, Post-Canon, LXC in Seclusion, Depression, touch starvation, Self-Harm, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Attempt, PTSD, Panic Attacks, Dissociation, Canon-Typical Violence, Unreliable Narrator, Dual Cultivation, mild fuck-or-die, Mild Consent Issues, please check end notes of chapter 2 for more information, Sibling Incest, Hurt/Comfort, gentle smut, Healing, demisexual LXC, demisexual lwj, Protective LWJ, Protective LXC, Protective WWX, lqr's a++ parenting, Angst with a Happy Ending)
🔒Embers by xantissa (E, 38k, WangXian, XiXian, WangXianXi, Jadecest, Angst, drama, Fluff, Falling In Love, sex pollen trope (curse), dub con, Comfort, Grief, Forgiveness, Happy Ending, Sibling Incest, Switching, Flirting, Learning to live again, Magic, Curses, Everyone is Badass, lwj has a sense of humor, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Threesome - M/M/M, Slow Burn, Angst and Hurt/Comfort)
🔒Magnificent by Anonymous (E, 36k, WangXianXi, Post-Canon, Sibling Incest, Threesome - M/M/M, Deepthroating, Mutual Masturbation, Nipple Play, Blow Jobs, Jadecest, Light Angst, Past NieLan, Sharing a Bed, Canon Compliant, Top LWJ, Switch LXC, Switch WWX, Spitroasting, Face-Fucking, Come Eating, Snowballing, Facials, Praise Kink, over-stimulation, Ass to Mouth, Intercrural Sex, Laughter During Sex, Rimming, Come as Lube, Magical Healing Cock, i guess, Come play)
给我再去相信的勇气 // the courage to believe by howodd5ever (E, 55k, WangXian, WangXianXi, Threesome - M/M/M, Jadecest, Burial Mounds Settlement Days, Undernegotiated Kink, Choking, Spanking, Dom/sub, Rough Sex, dub con but trust me wei ying is into it, Polyamory, Getting Together, First Times, porn with a tiny bit of plot if you squint, Bottom wwx, bratty WWX, Marks, WWX Has a Breeding Kink, mostly cql canon timeline but otherwise franken-canon, angst but not about the poly stuff, Cockwarming, a little rimming as a treat)
Fraternal Fissures by Foregone_Shadow (E, 33k, Jadecest, WangXianXi, Angst with a Happy Ending, Threesome - M/M/M, Dual Cultivation, Healing Sex, Anal Sex, Anal Fingering, Sibling Incest, Explicit Sexual Content, Possessive Behavior, Possessive Sex, Somnophilia, Reference to relationships between 3zun, POV Alternating, Oral Sex, Rough Oral Sex, Tender Sex, Mentions of Suicidal Thoughts, Care and aftercare, Bondage, dom!lwj, Sub!lxc, Top / Bottom Versatile Characters, LWJ is canonically huge, Size Kink, Porn with Feelings, Porn With Plot, Light BDSM, Voyeurism, Depression, Dubious Consent, LWJ talks dirty, Marathon Sex, switch!WWX, Lots of bathing, gagging, Blindfolds, Inappropriate Use of Gūsū Lán Forehead Ribbon, Belly Kink, Orgasm Denial, Prostate Play)
~*~
4. hello! this is an itmf request. i would love:
A) recs on good case fics - i have a soft spot for those that take place during the cloud recesses study arc, but any and all case fic recs welcome :)
B) recs on de-aging/age regression fics - whether wangxian or other characters. thank you thank you! @/potatokunst
4A)
see you yesterday by glyphic (M, 138k,
WIP, WangXian, Modern with Magic, Ghost Hunters, Time Loop, Case Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Memory Loss, Angst with a Happy Ending, Slow Burn) if OP is open to modern AUs
🔒 Wish I could forget the taste of your skin and the feel of your hands pinning me down by KizuKatana (E, 63k, wangxian, WQ & WWX & WN, Modern Cultivation, weapons-grade thirst, Getting Back Together, Trying REALLY hard to not still like your Ex, but failing, BAMF WWX, BAMF LWJ, Canon Divergence, Case Fic, LWJ’s canonically big dick, sort of a ‘thirsting for your co-worker ex’ vibe, it eventually gets worked out, Mutual Pining, Guest-starring LWJ’s canonically poor communication choices after romantic cave encounters, novel canon relationship dynamics, basically this fic is about escalating sexual tension)
🔒 Vagabond by xantissa (E, 65k, wangxian, Slow Burn, Mystery, Anal Sex, Oral Sex, Frottage, Case Fic, murders, Supernatural, Angst, Fluff, those two are so in love it hurts, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, badass LXC, Canon-Typical Violence, topLWJ, Bottom LWJ)
build me no shrines by occultings (microcomets) (M, 54k, WangXian, Slow Burn, Mutual Pining, First Time, Getting Together, Confessions, Sharing a Bed, Hair Washing, Sentient Burial Mounds, Case Fic, Post-Canon, CQL Compliant, Hurt/Comfort, Whump, Light Angst, Flashbacks, mild body horror, foot washing, Happy Ending, Non-Sexual Intimacy, …then sexual intimacy, [Podfic] build me no shrines by flamingwell)
爱不释手; never let me go by yiqie (E, 68k, WangXian, Case Fic, Blood and Injury, Demons, Body Horror)
in your skin by darkredloveknot (enheduane) (E, 10k, WangXian, Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Getting Together, Horror, Body Horror, Blood and Gore, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions, Non-Consensual Body Modification, kinda??, Reflections over death and self-worth, mentions of canon suicide, Near Death Experiences, [Podfic] in your skin by flamingwell)
there was recently a whole event about casefics! Not all of them are wangxian but a lot are so maybe one will catch your interest
💖 I’d be the one to hold you down (kiss you so hard) by AlfAlfAlfAlfAlf & tardigradeschool (E, 85k, wangxian, JGY/LXC, NMJ/LXC, modern, leverage au, canon-typical violence, unhealthy relationships, depression, heists, found family, murder, hurt/comfort, angst w/ happy ending)
🧡 moonlight caught in mutton fat by Raitelzen (T, 45k, WangXian, Case Fic, Curses, Curse Breaking, Transformation, mild body horror, Hurt LWJ, Ghosts)
Your Hand in Mine by cerbykerby (T, 20k, WangXian, Humor, Comedy, Pining, cursed to hold hands, Light Angst, Sharing a Bed, First Dates, Embarrassment, Fluff, bathing together, Canon Compliant)
Linger in the Sun by etymologyplayground (T, 39k, WangXian, JC & WWX, Case Fic, Intimacy, Curses, Canon Compliant, Post-Canon, Cuddling & Snuggling, Getting Together, Romance, Sexual Tension, Scent Kink, m.. maybe??, its not as intense as a kink, Fluff, Scars, Sharing a Bed, Nonverbal Communication)
this river runs to you by sundiscus (T, 53k, WangXian, Modern with Magic, Mutual Pining, Dragons, Literal Sleeping Together, Tender wound tending)
4B)
grow by cafecliche (T, 14k, WangXian, Age Regression/De-Aging, Character Study, Post-Canon, podfic available)
home is where we are by halfdemonvash (T, 17k, wangxian, JC & WWX, Twin Prides of Yúnmèng are Bad at Communicating, JC & WWX Reconciliation, but only somewhat because these these things take time, Age Regression/De-Aging, Angst and Feels, Hijinks & Shenanigans, accidental baby acquisition but it's actually your older brother, references to wwx's past being homeless, and also his past food insecurity, rated T for jiang cheng's language, and light sexual content in the beginning, Post-Canon, Yúnmèng Siblings Feels, Junior Trio Shenanigans)
Bringing Up JC by Mikkeneko (T, 31k, JC & WWX, JC & JL JL & WWX, JL & LSZ, Kid Fic, Age Regression/De-Aging, Fluff and Angst, anticipate about one part kid cuteness to two parts angst, Reparenting, reliving trauma, unpacking JC's childhood issues, no therapy in the jianghu so this will have to do, Take Care reveal, Yúnmèng Siblings Feels, JC & WWX Reconciliation, WWX Is Good With Children, WWX Has a Fear of Dogs, Golden Core Reveal)
🔒 Silver & Gold by beeswaxing (E, 162k, wangxian, post-canon, de-aging, fluff & angst, happy ending, fix-it of sorts, family bonding, established relationship, non-sexual intimacy, BAMF WWX, pining, protective WWX)
found your writing on my wall by howodd5ever (T, 25k, WangXian, JC & LWJ, JC & WWX, Accidental Baby Acquisition, De-aged WWX, Post-Canon, Getting Together, Referenced Child Neglect, discussion of parental loss, child food insecurity, Case Fic, kind of, Nightmares)
🔒suddenly an old song fills my heart with home, my eyes with tears by RoseThorne (T, 724, WangXian, JC & WWX, Curses, Rebirth, Memories, Memory Loss, Age Regression/De-Aging, Recovered Memories, POV Third Person)
~*~
5. Hi, I am looking for fics in the canon-ish setting where characters undergo major injuries or illnesses that disable them but they are still bamf? (Last part added to a FF)
we’re starting at the end by Miss_Enthusiasimal (M, 92k, WangXian, JC & WWX, Time Travel, Canon Divergence, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Golden Core Reveal, Burial Mounds, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Starvation, emaciation, Cannibalism, Self-Harm, Amputation, Suicidal Thoughts, Sunshot Campaign, let JZX and WWX be friends club) WWX loses a leg & continues fighting the SSC with no-one being the wiser
🔒 no new age by everythingispoetry (M, 146k, wangxian, LSZ & LWJ, LXC/JGY, LXC/NMJ, Canon Divergence, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Permanent Injury, Recovery, Disability, Parenthood, Character Study, Thirteen Years of WWX's Death, Growing Up, Family Dynamics, Self-Discovery, Mental Health Issues, Grief/Mourning, Families of Choice, Developing Relationship) LWJ is left disabled by the 33 lashes punishment, & pushes through it, which I would think qualifies for BAMF status
🧡 Company by WithBroomBefore (T, 29k, WangXian, Canon Divergence, Pre-Relationship, Getting Together, POV LWJ, Fix-It, Pre-Canon, at least to start, WWX goes to Cloud Recesses, But Not In The Usual Way, fear of character death, Everybody Lives, Hurt/Comfort, Happy Ending, Light Angst, good teacher LQR, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, brief discussion of past minor character suicide, Kitten, Not YZY Friendly)
🔒 a star called sun by thelastdboy (E, 120k, wangxian, SL/XXC, JC & JYL & WWX, JYL & LWJ, WWX & WN & WQ, JYL/JZX, Canon Divergence after Xuanwu Cave, Fall of Lotus Pier, But worse!, Power Imbalance, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Not Everyone Dies AU, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Canon-Typical Violence, Sunshot Campaign, Miscommunication, Heavy Angst with a Happy Ending, Slow Burn, Major Character Injury, Loss of Limbs, Chronic Illness, Seizures, WWX's Three Months in the Burial Mounds, Wēn Remnants Live, Wēn Remnants Deserve Better, WWX Creates a Sect | Yílíng Wèi Sect, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Hurt/Comfort, Selectively Mute LWJ, Service Animals, Crows)
Obscuring the Sun by Karmiya (E, 24k, WIP, WangXian, WWX & WN, the sunshot campaign, Past Domestic Abuse)
~*~
6. ITMF a fic where preferably wwx is an amputee but lwj is okay too and I’d also prefer it in modern setting but again cannon timeline is fine as well @/zerokogane
we’re starting at the end by Miss_Enthusiasimal (M, 92k, WangXian, JC & WWX, Time Travel, Canon Divergence, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Golden Core Reveal, Burial Mounds, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Starvation, emaciation, Cannibalism, Self-Harm, Amputation, Suicidal Thoughts, Sunshot Campaign, let JZX and WWX be friends club) link in #5
🔒some things go forward by everythingispoetry (T, 73k, WangXian, Modern AU, Hospitals, Teenage Drama, Slow Burn, Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Happy Ending)
Work in Tandem by MimiSpearmint (E, 23k, WangXian, Modern with Magic, Single Parent LWJ, when you just want disability-led sword lessons for your child, swordflight instructor!wwx, swordflight instructor!lwj, Fluff, give lwj friends agenda, Protective LWJ, Getting Together, Intercrural Sex, Choking, Oral Sex, Rough Sex, Implied off-screen D/s negotiations)
~*~
7. Hey! Do have any recs where wwx never loses his golden core? Like the Just Say Yes series? Could be an au, or anything. Thank you!
Lessons relearned by Iamnotawriter (T, 44k, WangXian, LQR & WWX, Not YZY Friendly, Time Travel Fix-It, Angst with a Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Inventor WWX, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, No Golden Core Transfer, YZY Bashing)
Until The World Embraces Me Home by azri (T, 5k, WIP, WangXian, Canon Divergence, YLLZ LWJ, LWJ Has No Golden Core, Role Reversal, Not LXC Friendly, Not JC Friendly, Not cultivation world friendly overall tbh, Sunshot Campaign, Friends to Lovers, Temporary Character Death, WangXian Get a Happy Ending) LZ loses his core but WY keeps his
A Thousand Things by tickertape (M, 108k, wangxian, canon divergence, WWX is not adopted by Jiangs, develping friendships, miscommunication, misunderstanding, nightmares, panic attacks, hurt/comfort, slow burn)
~*~
8. Hi, itmf recently completed wips. What's new and good is ready for the binge reading. Thank you! @/best-before-end
pale shadows of forgotten names by Chrononautical (T, 56k, wangxian, Madam Lán Lives, Madam Lán Deserves Better, Good Sibling LXC, Badass LXC, He gets there in the end it just takes a while, Not particularly JGY friendly, Gūsū Lán Sect Rules, Canon-Typical Behavior, Unresolved Sexual Tension, the universal fear of growing up to become one of your parents, Canon Divergence, Everyone Lives AU, Except WN but he's very polite, Arranged Marriage, Forced Marriage, Imprisonment, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, not between wangxian, Drunk LWJ, to lighten the mood, Fluff and Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Traumatized WWX, though he will not admit it, Taking time to heal, canon-typical communication skills)
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9. Hello! I am in the mood for a wangxian arranged marriage fanfic. I would prefer a longer story (over 50k words, if possible). It can be canon or even AU. I would like the story to focus not only on the relationship between LZ and WY but also on the politics behind it. It can also be omegaverse. It would be great if their relationship is rocky at first and then becomes better. If there's more fanfics like this, I would be grateful for all of them. Thank you very much. @/broodyelii
Concord by Deastar (T, 41k, WangXian, Arranged Marriage, Gūsū Lán Sect Rules, Depression, Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending)
🧡 a stone to break your soul, a song to save it by rikke (M, 179k, WangXian, Canon Divergence, Arranged Marriage) Definitely meets the length criteria, though its been long enough since I last read it that I don't recall how much it went into the politics of the marriage
love, in fire and blood by cicer (E, 360k, wangxian, immortal WWX, slow burn, pining, arranged marriages)
❤️ A Myriad of Blossoms by Itszero (E, 56k, WangXian, Canon Divergence, Arranged Marriage, Forced Marriage, YLLZ WWX, Hurt LWJ, Cruel wwx, he's cruel until he's not, Protective WWX, Caring WWX, Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, Eventual Smut, Bottom LWJ, Dark WWX)
The Scarlet Lotus by rainbowninja167 (M, 137k, WangXian, Marriage of Convenience, Secret Identity, Fix-It, Angst with a Happy Ending, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Canon-Typical Violence, canon-typical war crimes, Yunmeng Bros, the mortifying ordeal of getting seduced by your own husband, nonlinear chronology we die like cql, just kidding nobody dies in this fic, Slow Burn, Mutual Pining, Miscommunication)
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10. Itmf wangxian fics with WWX in peril (happy ending only please).
pitfalls of greed by glitteringmoonlight (T, 3k, wangxian, post-canon, outsider pov, BAMF WWX, kidnapping, violence)
❤️ kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight by AlfAlfAlfAlfAlf, tardigradeschool (T, 75k, WangXian, Hurt/Comfort, Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Eventual Happy Ending, Getting Together, Burial Mounds Settlement Days, Inspired by The Parent Trap (1998), Kid Fic, teen shenanigans, two a-yuans, Fluff and Angst)
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11. I am currently reading "Get it right (mdzs time travel) Series" by AmiraAlzilu (AO3) and now I'm ITMF for a time travel fic where LXC and LQR are specifically called out for their lack of trust in LWJ witness testimony (aka child/elders in the Burial Mounds) and believing a sworn brother over family. Bonus for a) apologies or b) digging a deeper hole aka surely LWJ is mistaken, Meng Yao would never, I'm looking at you chapter 15 to 17 of this fic LXC (yes I'm salty). Bonus bonus for consequences on LXC's loose lips telling things to others he was asked to keep in confidence.... @/mreisse
I'm #11, and you know what? Recs calling out LXC and LQR is also fine :)
Weep You No More, Sad Fountains by athena_crikey (T, 59k, wangxian, LXC & LWJ, LXC & JGY, Canon Divergence, Fix-it fic, Whump, Curses, Fever, Delirium, Stabbing, Loneliness, Confessions, LWJ's emotional repression, WWX giving everything as always, LXC realising sympathy is not support, LQR Being an Asshole) Okay so this isn't a time travel fic, so feel free to disregard, BUT! Does have LXC coming to WWX for help & seeing the truth, & characters calling him tf out on how it took him this long, so requester may still be interested
~*~
12. this is an itmf ask!!
fics where wwx is in his full yiling patriarch glory, I want to see scary yllz, possessive yllz (for lwj ofc) anything. longer fics pls but anything is fine, just no wips please haha!!
🔒hold me fast, fear me not by cicer (M, 16k, WangXian, Canon Divergence, Fairy Tale Elements, Mpreg, Bottom LWJ/Top WWX, YLLZ WWX, brief reference to abortificants, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, may be interpreted as noncon by some)
curse of the dragon emperor by lulu_kitty (E, 96k, WangXian, Dragon AU, Canon Divergence, Mythology References, Identity Porn, Cursed WWX, Trans LWJ, Trans Male Character, Misgendering, Canon-Typical Violence, Gender Dysphoria, gender euphoria, Phoenixes, Dragon WWX, Fox WWX, Double Penetration in Two Holes, Vaginal Sex, Anal Sex, Cunnilingus, Bottom LWJ/Top WWX, Dirty Talk, Submissive LWJ, Trauma, WWX Has PTSD, Minor Character Death, Prince WWX, Emperor WWX, Soulmates, Arranged Marriage, Mpreg, Trans Male Pregnancy, Size Difference, Dragonxian has two dicks, YLLZ WWX, technically!, It's more like YLLZ adjacent)
your darkest roads by comefeedtherainn (E, 76k, WangXian, YLLZ WWX, non-yunmeng wwx, Kinda, No Golden Core Transfer, Dark WWX, d/s dynamics, No noncon, playing with subverting some tropes/expectations)
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13. I swear the only reason I can still consume Wangxian content daily is because of your recommendations.
There’s a couple fics I’ve been craving for a while and haven’t been able to find any I really love, so any help/ recommendations would be much appreciated!
A) Lan Xichen focused fics. It’s so hard to find fics that centre him.
B) Lan Sizhui focused fics. Mainly him with his dads/ family, but also him remembering his past would be great! Baby or adult A-yuan.
C) Wangxian being parents. Wei Wuxian being single parent. Just them being amazing dad’s content.
I’d appreciate any of these prompts 💞✨💫 @/jinxedjaz
13A)
Chapter 2 of Every Mother's Son by Chrononautical (T, 11k, Madam Lan & WWX, Madam Lan & LWJ, Madam Lan & Lxc, wangxian, Madam Lán Lives, Madam Lán Deserves Better, Madam Lán Leaves Cloud Recesses, Madam Lan rescues women from abusive husbands in feudal Japan and honestly that's so valid of her, mentions of rape/non-con between Madam Lan & QHJ, Give Madam Lan a name of her own, let Madam Lan find out that QHJ died in a fire as a treat, now with bonus Lan Xichen!) chapter 1 is more focused on LWJ and WWX, I recommend both :)
Weep You No More, Sad Fountains by athena_crikey (T, 59k, wangxian, LXC & LWJ, LXC & JGY, Canon Divergence, Fix-it fic, Whump, Curses, Fever, Delirium, Stabbing, Loneliness, Confessions, LWJ's emotional repression, WWX giving everything as always, LXC realising sympathy is not support, LQR Being an Asshole) link in #11
i told you when i came i was a stranger by Caramelized (M, 50k, OFC/LXC, minor WangXian, Isekai, Transmigration, Fix-It, Canon Divergence, Amateur cartography, Butterfly Effect, Sunshot Campaign, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, No Golden Core Transfer, Dimension Travel, Politics, LXC the politician, Self-Insert, Foreknowledge, Angst with a Happy Ending) it's SI/OC but heavily features LXC (including some chapters from his POV). also has one of my favorite characterizations of LXC i've seen in fic
To Love What Is Mortal by treemaidengeek (T, 22k, LXC/SL, Post-Canon, Grief/Mourning, Fluff and Angst, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, [Podfic] To Love What Is Mortal by flamingwell) as well as most of the works in this series.
Gentle Exile by rynleaf (E, 9k, LXC/SL, Post-Canon, Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, References to Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Character Study, Epistolary, Post-Canon Exploration, [PODFIC] Gentle Exile by flamingwell, semperfiona_podfic (semperfiona))
13B)
When You Wake, 怎能当梦一场 by acertainrogue (T, 39k, WangXian, WWX is in a coma, Angst with a Happy Ending, Modern AU, Single Dad LWJ, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Parenthood, YZY's A+ Parenting, JFM's A+ parenting, wangxian family) this is completely from lsz's pov
this blood in my mouth by ShanaStoryteller (Not Rated, 3k, WangXian, LSZ & WWX & LWJ, Post-Canon, POV LXC)
The Living Looked That Day by violettressed (T, 19k, LSZ & WN, WangXian, Post-Canon, Canon Compliant, Ritualistic Self-Harm, Mild Gore)
🧡 Lan Sizhui Sees Dead People Series by darkbrokenreaper (T, 30k, WIP, WangXian, LWJ & LSZ, JC & LSZ, Canon Divergence, Fluff, Kid Fic, Hurt/Comfort, lsz sees dead people, Paranormal)
as i stumble homewards by the_pretzel (T, 27k, wangxian, canonical character death, found family, food issues, trauma, LSZ pov, angst w/ happy ending, fluff) LSZ raised by ghost!WWX
Symmetry by Vir_Abelasan (M, 13k, WangXian, LSZ & WWX, One-Sided ChengXian, One-Sided ChengZhui, Canon Divergence, LSZ is raised by wwx, Wwx still dies sorry, Revenge, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Dark LSZ, Manipulation, Power Imbalance, Torture, Not JC Friendly, JC’s Canonical 13 Years Murder Spree, BAMF LSZ, WangXian Get a Happy Ending, LSZ Gets to Go Apeshit) LSZ gets to have a lil revenge, as a treat
Remember, Remember by Izzyaro (Isilarma) (G, 1k, LSZ & WN, LJY & LSZ, Character Study, Post-Canon, Family, Families of Choice, Grief/Mourning, Angry LSZ, LSZ Needs a Hug, not for jc fans, LSZ gets a hug) LSZ remembers a few things, & gets to be angry
the kite string and the anchor rope by fleurdeliser (M, 39k, wangxian, after yiling date, sick child) LSZ is sick for a chunk of this but is still the central character
keeping score by hauntedotamatone (T, 6k, LSZ & WWX, Background WangXian, the opposite of reconciliation, Protective WWX, Duelling, Grief/Mourning, not for jc fans, Swordfighting, Resentment, LSZ centric, No JC & WWX Reconciliation) featuring protective dad WWX
Would You Come Home? by s6115 (Not rated, 46k, WangXian, Junior Quartet Centric, Time Travel Fix-It, Canon Divergence, Junior Quartet Dynamics) being a coming-of-age type story as LSZ discovers his past with WWX
13C)
emergent properties by luckymarrow (E, 8k, WangXian, Modern AU, Family Fluff, Trans Male Character, Trans LWJ, Queer Families, Queer Youth, Adoption, Baby LSZ, Teen MXY, Crossdressing, but not as a kinkgender expression, Dilf4Dilf Wangxian, Penis In Vagina Sex, Blow Jobs, Domestic Fluff, Fluff and Smut, gender euphoria, Cunnilingus)
at no other time by luckymarrow (M, 2k, WangXian, Modern AU, Queer Families, Queer Youth, Child LSZ, Family Fluff, Non-Explicit Sex, farming, Wangxian Run an Organic Farm as God Intended, Found Family, Families of Choice, Adoption, Trans Male Character, Married WangXian, Established Relationship)
Across the street to another life by danegen (M, 99k, WangXian, Modern AU, unleashed au, Family Fluff, Set in America, Hurt/Comfort, Past Child Abuse, Addiction, Crime, Amnesia, Ableist Language, another fridged mother, POV Alternating, past wwx/ofc, past wwx/omc, Medium parent YZY, A-Yuan is wwx’s biological son, Musicians, Happy Ending) this one also has WangXian being great parents, but it's not the main plot of the story.
my little love by mellowflicker (T, 54k, WangXian, Modern AU, Single Parent WWX, kindergarten teacher!lwj, Kid Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Domestic Fluff, Pining)
box your errors by mellowflicker (T, 42k, WangXian, Modern AU, single dad lwj, Domestic Fluff, Family Issues, Slow Burn, Kid Fic, let lwj have friends agenda, Hurt/Comfort, Pining)
❤️ Seen and not heard by eatmyass (E, 51k, wangxian, case fic, no sunshot, kid fic, dadxian, strangers to lovers, found family, LWJ pov, pining, fake/pretend relationship, first time, falling in love)
❤️ Attempting the Impossible by Ariaste for williedustice (T, 36k, WangXian, JC & WWX, Post-Canon, Yunmeng Bros Reconciliation, Adoption, Family Fluff, Kid fic, Family drama, Fluff, [PODFIC] Attempting the Impossible by Ariaste by lunatique)
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14. thanks for your hard work admins! itmf darkji fics :) once again, ty!!
~*~
15. Can you please give me all the Fic Recs you can find on A) WWX getting his body back? Post canon. I’m struggling to find them. And also B) post canon reconciliation docs with JC and Jin ling, and/or C) post canon fica where wwx night hunts and gets injured, and nearly dies? And worries everyone. Please and thank you. @/the-daydreamer
15A)
Touch That Body, (It's Not Mine) by brrrrrRawr (T, 3k, WangXian, WWX in WWX's original body, Fluff, Pet Names, Blushing, No Smut, Genius WWX, yunmeng bros reconciliation, endgame lotus pier, big bro wwx rights, also dad wwx rights, BAMF WWX, Bad Writing, Body Dysphoria, So OOC)
15B)
Rotten Work by ShanaStoryteller (Not Rated, 63k, WangXian, WWX & JL, Post-Canon, Protective WWX, Protective JL, Yunmeng Bros Reconciliation, Reluctant Matchmaker JL, [PODFIC] Rotten Work by sakizar) qualifies for both 15B and 15C
Twelve Moons and a Fortnight by stiltonbasket (M, 290k, WangXian, Humor, Slow Burn, Post-Canon Fix-It, Long-Distance Relationship, Epistolary, Love Letters, Family Feels, a-qing lives, teenage romance, Adoption, Romantic Comedy, Happy Ending, Weddings, Case Fic, Parenthood, Politics) this fic works for both b and c I think
Imprints by Lisa_Telramor (G, 47k, WangXian, accidental puppy adoption, Humor, Panic Attacks, phobia recovery, Post-Canon, JC & WWX Reconciliation, Poor Life Choices, Self-Acceptance, Developing Relationship, fluff with a side of anxiety lol, WWX adopts a puppy, Dogs)
other side of paradise by blueseam (T, 12k, JC & WWX & JL, Post-Canon, Platonic hair-washing, excessive amounts of communication, Emotional Hurt/Comfort)
singing through the dark by twigofwillow (G, 13k, JL & WWX, WangXian, Post-Canon, Yunmeng bros reconciliation if you squint, angst with a tiny bit of fluff)
everyone else is spring bound by Lise (T, 18k, JC & WWX, Post-Canon, Post-Finale, Dysfunctional Family, Family Bonding, Minor WangXian, Yunmeng bros Reconciliation, JC Needs a Hug, POV JC, Family Feels, Light Angst, Reconciliation, Awkward Conversations)
some good mistakes by Lise (T, 18k, WangXian, JC & WWX, Post-Canon, Road trips, rescue Missions, Hurt/Comfort, Awkward Conversations, Yunmeng Bros Reconciliation, [Podfic] some good mistakes by kisahawklin )
an aging wound by Lise (G, 7k, JC & WWX, POV WWX, Post-Canon, Yunmeng bros Reconciliation, Awkward Conversations, Light Angst, but mostly just the awkward conversations, Dysfunctional Family, Post-The Untamed (TV), Twin Prides of Yúnmèng Dynamics, Twin Prides of Yúnmèng Feels)
With Absolute Splendor by Lise (T, 43k, WangXian, JC & WWX, Post-Canon, Wedding planning, Yunmeng Bros Reconciliation, Complicated Relationships, Angst with a happy ending, [Podfic] With Absolute Splendor by kisahawklin, [PODFIC] With Absolute Splendor by Gwogobo)
Jiang Cheng goes Traveling Series by gbuzy12 (G, 11k, JC & LWJ, JC & WWX, Light Angst Post-Canon, yunmeng bros reconciliation)
Reeds in the Wind by merakily (T, 26k, WangXian, Post-Canon, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Yunmeng bros Reconciliation, Rabbit Therapy, Sewing Therapy, PTSD, Emotional Baggage, Hurt/Comfort, JC is Bad at Feelings, JC Needs a Hug)
15C)
let the yoke fall from our shoulders by occultings (microcomets) (G, 2k, WangXian, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Character Study, Mentions of Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Gūsū Lán Juniors Dynamics, Happy Ending, Family Feels, Established Relationship)
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16. Any fanfiction about the xicheng ship.
Audience of One by WinterDreams (T, 181k, XiCheng, WangXian, XuanLi, Modern AU, Celebrities, Inspired by 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Singer LXC, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Everyone Needs A Hug, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Slow Burn, Family Feels, Family Bonding, past emotional abuse, Post-Betrayal, Venerated Triad Feels, Yunmeng Duo Feels, Nightmares, Fluff and Angst, Babysitter Ā-Qìng, Domestic Fluff, SongXiao mentioned relationship, Soft XiCheng, Eventual Happy Ending, implied MingYao)
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17. pls rec some post canon fluff :)
with such a suffering, such a deadly life
by cqlorphan (T, 7k, wangxian, post-canon, curses, curse breaking, getting together, angst w/ happy ending, fluff, hurt/comfort, affection, touch-starved LWJ, LWJ whump, cuddling & snuggling, love confessions)
Continuation by thefaceofno (T, 13k, WangXian, Canon Continuation, wwx builds a lotus pond in cloud recesses, Hair Brushing, Angst with a Happy Ending, Light Angst, Pining, gay disaster lwj, Post-Canon Fix-It)
Deeper grows my longing by feyburner (T, 4k, WangXian, Post-Canon, Getting Together, First Kiss, Deeper grows my longing [podfic] by someplacelikebolivia)
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If you didn’t get an answer to your ask here, don’t forget to make use of @mdzs-kinkmeme and MDZS KINK MEME on Dreamwidth. Authors actually do use them for ideas. You may get what you order!***Your prompt doesn’t have to be kink! Fluff, crack, whatever - it’s all good!***
#wangxian#mdzs#wangxian fic recs#i'm in the mood for a fic#the untamed#wangxian fic search#wangxianficfinder#long post
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p.2 asahi x feral reader w/ a size k!nk
this is gonna get so fucking good ya'll i love thisss!! it's fun writing this sweet guy be a little dirty lmao
warnings. nsfw. minors DNI
info. nsfw / build-up to more smut / phone sex / mutual masturbation / blue balls / suggestive conversation / gentle giant!asahi / mutual size kink / sweet asahi / long-mid distance issues / kuroo's sister!reader / kuroo cockblocking / kuroo being protective / 2.3k words / multipart series so reply to be added to taglist!
haikyuu collection. more hq here! part one here.
more links. my ao3. masterlist. requests open!
Your pencil twirled, tap-tap-tapping against your half-filled page of notes as you searched for the next header to copy for this dreadful, draining history class.
Anything to distract you from the fact that he hadn't called you.
The game was Tuesday- now it was Friday evening, and still, no word from him. Maybe you had something in your teeth when you spoke to him, or you smelled bad, or he just didn't like your hair. You had dedicated hours trying to figure it out.
A phone call was hard evidence he was interested in you. Practically a 'yes' to your fantasies, which had only gotten more unhinged with the hurt of this perceived rejection.
He still remained just a few minutes worth of your real energy on some ordinary day. But God, how you mourned for what could've been. How he would've filled you up, wrecking you with the satisfaction and excitement you yearned for.
buzz buzz. buzz buzz. buzz buzz. buzz buzz.
The sound initially deepened your already lackluster mood, because you learned to be disappointed with every call that wasn't from a Miyagi area code.
You were grateful that your eyes happened to glaze over the screen before you completed the swipe to ignore it.
A piercing scream of delight filled your entire house through a cracked bedroom door.
Tetsuro's unwanted, grating voice across the hall shattered your elevated state of bliss:
"SHUT UP!"
"YOU SHUT UP! I'M ON THE PHONE!"
You took a deep breath on the fifth ring and, shaking off the nerves by standing up out of your swivel chair, you swiped across the screen to answer.
"Hello?"
"Hey, is this (Y/n)?" A deep, rumbly voice made your knees weak.
"Y-es," Your voice cracked, tummy tingly, "Is this- Asahi?"
His name left your lips so well. You fell onto your back on your bed, pressing your thighs together at the sound of his reply.
"Yeah, that's me."
You hadn't heard his voice before, thinking hard about it now, because he didn't say anything to you in person.
"I thought you wouldn't call," You bit your lip in restraint, but kept the tension in your belly, "Why'd you keep me waiting for so long?"
A grumbly sigh on the other end gave you a full-body shiver. You crossed your legs.
"I was nervous," He admitted.
The giant did have a heart, after all. Curious, you smiled and looked up.
Your face fell.
"Get out of my room!" You shouted at Tetsuro, who was lingering in the doorway.
"How long have you been in here?!"
"I'm not in your room," He tested you by putting a foot inside, and didn't answer your question, instead pressing his own, "Who the hell are you talking to?"
It reminded you: A quick 'Hold on' and what you thought was the mute button--
You scrambled across your bed to the doorway to close it, but he dove out of the way and you ended up shutting him in. You flung it open again.
"Get out!!"
The demon-spawn was making for your phone, so you leaped onto his back and weighed him down to the floor instead.
"It better not be--," He grunted with effort as he shoved you off by the face, "Some country-bumpkin prick!"
There was no contact on the screen, so he couldn't be sure who you were talking to even with your phone in his hand.
"Who is this?" He interrogated, his torso leaning on your bed, his knee on your chest to keep you down.
You punched his leg over, over, and over again. He swatted at you while looking at your phone to figure out why nobody was responding to him.
It gave you the opportunity to push him off while his balance was uneven. You slapped your phone out of his hand and it clattered to the floor.
There was a violent hush over the two of you.
Tetsuro rose of his own accord, dodging a slap, and kicked your phone far under your bed with a grumble.
"Like I'm gonna just let that happen."
The door slammed behind him. You skittered up, opened it, then called after him, "Stay out!!"
You made sure to lock and barricade it this time.
When you leaned down to find your phone, it was impossible to reach with your hands or legs from either side of the bed. That asshole had made sure to kick it just far enough to make you get creative.
You had to tie together a ruler and a clothing hanger to retrieve it, then use your foot to leverage it out.
To your relief, the call was still active. But it wasn't muted.
Heart sunk halfway down your ribcage, you asked a grim question, "How much of that did you hear?"
His chuckle lifted your spirits instantly.
Almost as a conditioned response, you glanced to the door. It was still secure.
"I'm so sorry, my brother is the worst." You grumbled, climbing back into your bed with a sore face, hand, and knee.
Asahi's tone was clear and smooth.
"It sounds like he just wants to keep you out of trouble."
Your body jumpstarted again at that word. You wanted all the trouble he had to offer. You couldn't help but giggle, since his response sounded as if he was referring to himself.
"I know how to handle myself," You grinned, "I'm only a year younger than him."
"He's a senior, isn't he?"
"Mhm."
"So you're a second-year."
"Mhmm," You could listen to him talk all day. Your hand rubbed over your prickled chest, savoring his voice against your ear.
"Good. I feel like less of a creep, now."
In his admission you could hear his lips curl into a smile- your covered your mouth and kicked your legs in the air.
"Don't tell me you thought I was a first-year," You teased with false surprise.
"I-," He sighed, a little labored, and something shifted against the receiver, "Knew it was a possibility."
His standards aside, your interest moved to the extra sound on his end of the line. You prayed it was something risque.
"What else do you wanna know about me?" You stretched your legs up and watched your blank ceiling, biting your lip in wait for his response.
The way he towered over you- his frame was perfect for your fantasies. You imagined him leaning over you now, legs draped over his massive shoulders.
"What made you want to give me your number?"
Another shift, a heavy sigh. You couldn't raise the volume any higher, nor could you hold the phone any closer to your ear to try to hear what he was doing.
In the hopes that he was dirtier than he wanted to let on, you smiled at the freedom to paint his imagination.
"Hmm..." You drawled.
An eager hand dipped between your legs, with one last glance to the door, and you palmed yourself through your shorts while you spoke.
"Your serve really did it for me," As you recalled that last hit, you heard him shift again, "I like your look- y'know, the whole samurai vibe--,"
Asahi laughed a little, making you grin.
"-I think it's really hot."
A pause. "Wait- really?"
"Yeah!" You giggled, "You're a good mix of cute and scary, that's a huge turn-on."
"Wow."
Maybe it was a bit forward of you to say, but so was everything else until this point. Your breath stalled, hoping that was a good wow. It felt so quiet for so long. Everything was still on both sides.
You sat up after a few moments, pulse quickening, and you bit your finger to keep from blurting out another stupid claim. It must've been too much- you were just about to hang up when you heard a quiet, different tone through the speaker.
"What are you wearing right now?"
Mouth open, you made sure to click mute before squealing into your pillow-- when you came up, teary-eyed from the pressure and excitement, you had to catch your breath.
Your voice was slightly hoarse when you unmuted yourself and asked, calmly, "Do you want me to lie to you?"
Thrown in a dumbing whirl of arousal, you went to reach for a vibrator, but realized the sound would probably be too much. You opted for your own fingers instead and tried hard to visualize his heavy hand over yours.
"Shit-," He huffed an uneven sigh, "Go for it."
Did he have any idea how sexy he sounded? You hoped he did- you hoped he knew exactly how to touch you, pleasure you, break you, then put you back together.
Your raised, flirty tone didn't match your answer, "Nothing."
The rumble of his laugh guided your hand to swirl small, soft circles around your clit. Your chest rose and fell a little faster, chasing the budding tightness that was finally coming back to you.
"What are you doing right now?" You couldn't help but ask. It was too tempting to wait around for him to tell you.
"Mm, I'm talkin' to you," He evaded. His smirk was audible through the phone.
His slight regional accent was so perfect. To Hell with city boys, you wanted this big, gruff countryside boy.
He laughed at your whine.
"I wish you weren't so far away," His tone lowered to a bare mutter- it was dripping in lust, but he covered it with a thin veil of wariness.
Your fingers felt so good, but his reminder only made you more sensitive to how you could never fulfill the ache deep inside without him right here, in Tokyo.
You could appreciate how he still kept his cards close. You weren't as patient as him- but upon your inevitable frustration that he wasn't as candid as you, the realization that it was the safer outcome dawned on you. If he wasn't so careful, he might hurt you.
Still, you were riding gentle, pleasant waves while you daydreamed through your response.
"How long would a train ride be?"
He didn't have to tell you how pretty you sounded for you to know. The little raise at the end of your sentence, the tiny waiver in your voice, you knew he liked it.
The quiet seethe on his end confirmed this. He told you without having to look it up, "Hour and a half."
Your pussy practically shut down.
"I could do that," You lied. Your brother would explode if he found out you hopped on a bullet train by yourself to go see some Karasuno boy- and he would. He always did.
Another low laugh. It fixed everything. You threw your head back again, fingers in your mouth so your fingers could slide a little better.
"Don't sound so disappointed," He cooed, "Me and the guys are gonna be in town for the weekend- and I was just thinkin'--,"
"Oh my god, yes. Whatever you're about to say, yes."
His distant 'Damn' away from the phone made you blush. You stopped touching yourself, just for the time being.
"There's just one problem."
You waited for the reveal without responding, then realized he wanted you to ask him.
"What?" You giggled at the weird pause.
His laugh was faint through the rest of his point, "Your brother."
You squinted at your ceiling again with a grumpy sigh. He was right. In fact, you were sure he didn't know the extent of how right he was. Your family was on Life360, and he had your location at all times.
If you turned your phone off, or deleted the app, or put it on 'battery saving-mode' he'd know, and it would be more ground to question you on.
It wasn't the tattling that bothered you, it was his nosiness in the first place.
The last time you snuck out to go see a boy further in the city, he followed you and ruined your movie date by kicking the back of his chair for half of the film. He drove you home and grilled you the entire way back.
"Fuck," You sighed, sitting up with a bit of a tummy-ache from your abandoned orgasm, "Yeah."
It sounded like he was moving again, but he was less flirty, and it made you think he maybe put his dick back up to think better.
"He actually called our team captain, Daichi. We were uh, still on the way back from the game. On the bus. And he put it on speaker."
Your jaw dropped again.
"Said he'd- ha-ha, he said he'd castrate anyone who touched you."
An annoyed sound left you.
"Don't tell me you believe that," You laughed pitifully.
Part of you believed it, so you wouldn't blame him if he did. That same days-long disappointment was creeping back.
Asahi considered his answer. He landed on, "I think... ah, I don't know. I think being cautious is smart."
You nodded slowly, but he couldn't see.
"I still wanna see ya," He added.
You grinned, relieved, and a little aroused again at his drawl, "Good."
It still left the obvious problem. You deliberated on what you could do. A glance to the locked door gave you one idea. Another glance to the window elaborated on it.
How could you see him, not leave the house, and have your brother not know at the same time?
Your question was slow as you slid off of your mattress and started to test the reliability of your window frame.
"How good are you at climbing?"
taglist.
thank ya'll for supporting this!!! i love this series it's so fun to write so i'm glad other people do too!! reply to be added to existing list :)
@valiantqueengarden @rinheartshyunlix @alpha-mommy69 @yuyunhoo @insertamazingnamehere @kreishin
masterlist.
requests. (including what you might want to see in the next 2 parts)
#takesone#x reader#haikyu fluff#haikyu x reader#haikyuu#haikyuu asahi#asahi x reader#asahi azumane#haikyuu scenarios#haikyuu imagines#azumane asahi#haikyuu fluff#haikyuu smut#haikyuu x reader#haikyuu smau#haikyuu x you#haikyuu fanfiction#hq x reader#azumane asahi x reader#asahi x reader smut#asahi azumane x reader smut#haikyuu asahi azumane#haiku#asahi smut#asahi azumane smut#size difference#size k!nk#size difference asahi
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Evening Rituals
The sun might be lost for Astarion, but what he can hold onto are the sunsets once the sun itself has hidden beyond the horizon.
And so he sits and watches - and you hope to help him mend what's broken.
MASTERLIST | AO3
Author's Note: I wrote this after I thought of that recent headcanon of Astarion liking to catch as much of a sunset as possible - because they're beautiful and we all know he loves beautiful things. Coincidentally the sky this morning - although it was a sunrise - was just as I imagined it for this piece.
Pairing: Astarion/GN!Tav (You)
Warnings: light mention of past trauma
Wordcount: 1k
Song: Am I Dreaming - Lil Nas X ft. Miley Cyrus
~~~
The room was dark so the sky could be more vibrant.
At least that’s what Astarion always said when he insisted on getting up as soon as the last golden ray of the setting sun had climbed down below the horizon. He’d thrown open the thick brocade curtains covering the tall window in your room, only to do the same with the window and then perch on the window sill: one leg drawn up, the other hanging casually down from the little nook and his head up towards the gradient sky.
His posture seemed casual enough. Inviting you to think that he was merely languidly relaxing. But for you who’d become accustomed to carefully notice even the most minute of details of your lover, you saw the tension in his spine and the way he leaned towards the last moments of daylight. The way his eyes spoke of yearning and a dear one lost.
It had become an evening ritual this. Since evenings were now the start of your days.
It had been merely a couple of days since your final battle for Baldur’s Gate and so for the time being you’d chosen to remain in the relative comfort of the Elfsong tavern. Until things had blown over a bit, the dust settled.
One of those things being how your vampire had been forced back into the night.
And how he hadn’t been ready for it. Although, if you were quite honest with yourself, who could have ever expected him to be ready for something as cruel as that?
Astarion fully hadn’t been prepared for this sort of breakup yet. That’s what he’d said several times. Sometimes half-joking, sometimes with as much earnestness as you’d heard from the man.
And you knew that even his new found, undying and powerful love for you could only take the sharpest edge off the pain all this was causing him.
He was mourning the loss of the sun. The griefing doubled by it being the second time it had been taken from him.
Because a heart already shattered into pieces, already once broken and barely just starting to stick together again was so prone to breaking down even more.
And so Astarion sat and watched how the last remains of sunlight slowly got drawn from the skies every evening. Observed how the colours changed from simmering, liquid gold at the rim and got drowned out by all shades of the colour blue imaginable. Like a curtain dragged down over the city ever so slowly - until glittering stars and a vibrant moon brought some solace with their silver light. As if offering a soft caress as a small apology to the vampire who would have to make do with them instead from now on.
And you sat with him every night, trying to offer additional comfort even though you knew that even you couldn’t substitute all the warmth of golden daylight. At least you wanted to be there for him while he was trying to mend the pieces as best he could.
It might not have been healthy how Astarion clung to shreds of what was left. But could you really blame him? You saw the pain in his crimson eyes every evening once he had settled down to watch, how he practically made himself sit through the pain time and time again. It tortured you.
But you also noticed the spark on his face, at least a silver lining. When he smiled and whispered to himself how beautiful it looked. “Almost as beautiful as you,” he joked sometimes. And then you smiled at him or kissed him. But not for too long as to not to keep him from his moment of serenity.
Mostly the two of you remained silent. You needn’t speak about this, it was an unspoken agreement between you. And a lot of thoughts must be going through Astarion’s mind at any given time. Two centuries were a hefty time span to sort through. And you felt he needed these moments to slowly work through it. To patiently let the major dust storm settle and see how pieces fit together after that. So usually you just stayed with him, observed him as much as the sunset sky, while you hoped you’d be a piece in the puzzle once he would have figured it all out.
Today you had quickly went down to the taproom to get yourself a mug of hot tea while Astarion had already flung open the window to perform his routine.
When you returned he was already there, head leaning against the window frame, one leg up and angled, softly swaying to a melody only the vampire heard.
Kneeling down in front of the window on a pillow you set down your cup on the window sill and then your head on top of your arms right next to it. Vapour curled lazily from the boiling hot beverage you’d brought for yourself, dissipating somewhere towards its way up to the flamboyant sunset.
The sky was different today. Mixed with the usual oranges, yellows and and blues was a breathtaking blend of purples and pinks, stroked over with some soft sheens of clouds that glowed even more vibrantly with the unusual colours.
Astarion was mesmerised, mouth slightly agape, as if he’d never seen something similar. Truly the way he could admire every single instance of the sky darkening slowly had you in awe and broke your heart simultaneously.
The vampire loved beautiful things, loved to look at them, again and again. And if that was what remained, he would hold onto it.
You took him in, took careful note of how his profile outlined darkly against the softer pastels of the early night, eyes shining. The warm light tones painted him softly - in a way that made your heart ache even more.
Astarion noticed you watch him and smiled at you lovingly - and just a little wicked. You hoped you saw a tiny bit less aching in it today. He stretched out his hand to stroke your hair softly while not breaking eye contact. He admired you very similarly to how you had been looking at him. And to how he previously had drank in the dusk sky.
Tonight his eyes didn’t stray from you while the colours slowly gave way to the darkness of the night.
The pain and the beauty of sunsets might be fleeting. Always prone to betray one.
But you were there. And you stayed even beyond darkness.
Taglist (DM if you want to be added please): @spacebarbarianweird @sunfire-ancunin @tragedybunny @dependsonthedream @tallymonster @magazzne @micropoe10 @aoirohi @my-bunny-prince @lumienyx @fayeriess @darlingxdragon @hereliesblackdragon @ayselluna @ajokeformur-ray @i-cant-get-into-my-other-account @rikuyrk06 @marina-and-the-memes
#astarion#baldur's gate 3#astarion ancunin#fanfiction#astarion x tav#bg3 spoilers#baldur's gate iii#baldurs gate#astarion x mc#astarion x oc#astarion x you#astarion x reader#bg3
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HOW AOT CHARACTERS KISS YOU
Featuring; Eren, Mikasa, Armin
(- Fluff & Angst )
Armin's lips meet yours and gentle caress always engulfs your senses. You can't help but get lost in the tangles of his golden strands as they tickle your fingers. You move closer, your other hand softly cupping the soft rosey flesh of his cheek. A soft whimper escapes his lips, but he is desperately trying to hold himself together. This kiss belongs to you, and Armin understands that. You take from him whatever you want.
Armin's trembling hands rest on his lap, barely able to control the fiery desire raging inside him. The mere thought of losing you, the one person he loves so dearly, terrifies him to the core. It's why he's so desperate, so eager, when your thighs brush against his, as if begging for him to give himself entirely. You watch in awe as your delicate fingers move with calculated precision, unbuttoning each button of his shirt slowly.
Every soft noise escaping his mouth causes a stir of excitement within you, knowing how much he's aching for you. Armin loves you so intensely, with every part of his being, that the way he kisses you is nothing less than pure devotion. His lips are gentle, yet they convey a ferocity of emotion that takes your breath away. They dance against yours, gliding across the soft, smooth skin of your lips. Every detail is magnified: the way his mouth tastes, the subtle way his tongue plays against yours, the way his lips form a perfect seal against yours. The feel of his skin, the rise and fall of his chest, and the beating of his heart are all encompassing, fueling your passion with every passing second.
Amidst all the losses he's endured, from losing his friends and comrades to losing his innocence, the last thing he can bear is losing you.
"Never let me go," Armin whispered softly, his eyes searching yours for some reassurance that you were both thinking the same thing. "Never," you replied, pressing your lips firmly against his once again.
Eren's intense love for you is almost suffocating at times. He's never quite comfortable unless he's right beside you, touching you in some way, and if he can't be, he's on edge, fidgeting and muttering under his breath. He'll glance your way with a flushed face and a quickening heart rate, desperate for your attention and affection. The tips of his ears always burn bright red when you catch him staring at you, which only happens about every other minute.
And when he finally gives in to his hunger and kisses you, it's not elegant or polished. It's needy, it's messy, and it's full of fervor. Eren will seize your lips as if he can't get enough, biting, nibbling, and sucking as if his very existence depended on it. The only thing he wants in that moment is you, all of you. Eren's devotion to you is a flame that burns bright and unrelenting.
As he clutches you to his chest, he lets out soft whimpers and moans, completely lost in the ecstasy of the moment. You feel his forehead pressing against yours, his tears slipping through closed eyelids, as if he's mourning the fact that this can't last forever. "I'm sorry," he whispers, barely able to choke out the words through his emotions. You can hear the pain in his voice, and it breaks your heart. "For what?" you ask softly, searching his eyes for an answer.
But he can't bring himself to say it, not with the way you're looking at him with those eyes. So he shakes his head instead, a silent admission that he'll always love you, even if one day he’s not there anymore to say it.
Mikasa's longing for your kisses is intense, a desperate need that surpasses that of food and water. It's as though the very essence of her being yearns for the taste of your lips and the warmth of your embrace. Without your affection, she feels like a shell of herself - hungry, thirsty, and lost. She's a warrior on the battlefield, fierce and unstoppable. But when it comes to matters of the heart, Mikasa is bashful and unsure.
Her cheeks flush with embarrassment when she’s pushing her tongue into your mouth, of feeling your hands roam over her uniform. And yet, the desire she feels for you outweighs her shyness.
Mikasa frequently ponders if you are aware of just how much she adores you—how your presence holds an immeasurable significance in her life, yet her thoughts are consistently interrupted by the sensation of her fingers delicately gliding across the tender skin of your neck.
She whispers your name, barely audible over the cacophony of your whimpers. Her plea is soft but urgent. Your arms wrap around her, holding her close as your tongues dance together. The taste of her mouth is sweet, addictive, and you can't get enough of her. She's yours, body and soul, and you know in that moment that nothing will ever tear you apart "Please," she begs, "Kiss me again and make everything okay."
#aot fanfiction#aot x you#aot angst#aot x reader#eren x reader#eren x you#mikasa smut#eren x black fem!reader#mikasa fluff#mikasa x reader#eren jeager x reader#armin arlet x reader#armin x reader#armin arlet x you#eren x black reader smut#eren x black reader fluff#shingeki no kyojin mikasa#mikasa x you#aot fluff#aot headcanons#armin arlet headcanons#eren jeager x y/n
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