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astralsweetness · 4 years

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Set my soul on fire (make me wild) || Hui/Reader (M)

➣ I was originally going to write a LOT more smut (I had so much planned that I never got to!!! ugh).. Maybe I’ll have to do a part 2 or something 👀 the amount of time i spent looking at pics of his studio just so that one scene would be accurate is insane Title from the song ‘Queen of Disaster’. Very briefly proof-read, so please feel free to inform me of typos!

➣ Hui/Reader | Hui drunkenly kisses the reader without explicit consent but owns up to it bcs I’m tired of every other fic that includes this trope just glossing over it | Smut warnings include: masturbation, fingering, hair-pulling (implied), biting (mostly implied), oral + snowballing, slight pain/masochism (implied), some humiliation/degradation + some praise, referenced submissive headspace, and all of them apply to Hui lmao. Also it’s mentioned that Hui isn’t strictly heterosexual and if that bothers you then idk what to tell you

➣ “He is hanging off your every word and you suddenly feel like you have a choice to make - it’s one you don’t think about for more than a second, because you realize that you don’t need to.”

Hui knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that you had completely ruined his life just by existing in it.

It wasn’t a bad thing, necessarily. The feeling he got whenever you smiled at him, for example, was definitely not a bad thing. The way his skin tingled whenever you brushed against him was.. bothersome, but not a bad thing. The way his heart sped up and beat almost painfully hard whenever he indulged in his regular skinship with you wasn’t particularly bad, but he’d stopped doing that recently just as a preservation strategy so he didn’t die in the next year from a heart attack. (He was a naturally touchy person, and he wasn’t completely sure how he felt at having to stop that with you specifically.)

The way his mind constantly drifted to thoughts of you was starting to become an issue though, as was how he tensed up whenever you got even moderately close to him. You’d started to notice, and he had no idea how to tell you that it was happening because of that one time the rest of the boys had ‘accidentally’ forced the two of you to be pressed against one another in an elevator, and that just the knowledge that your breasts were pressing against his arm had him fighting to not get hard like some sort of teenager. He wasn’t totally sure how successful he’d be the next time if something similar happened.

Still, you were, as far as he was concerned, completely unattainable, and that in itself was a problem. He’d experienced his fair share of heartaches and heartbreaks before, but this was.. different. At least in those circumstances he’d gotten a definitive answer.

With you though, he couldn’t even bring himself to ask, had resigned himself to pining over you like a kid with a crush.

If you hadn’t ruined his life then you sure as hell had made it harder.

.｡..｡.

When Hui gets a knock on his studio door around six pm he’s not particularly surprised – lately his members had taken to dropping in to make sure he had eaten something that day. (Usually he had not.)

He is surprised to see you standing alongside Yuto when he opens the door, so he glances at the maknae suspiciously – Yuto seems perfectly innocent, but Hui wasn’t exactly sure how much of that was an act.

“Hyung, did you eat today?” The younger boy holds up a bag as an offering – it doesn’t look like the regular convenience store food the boys would usually grab for him, so Hui accepts it hesitantly.

“I was originally just going to bring food for Hyunggu, since he was apparently starving in his studio or something, but then he mentioned that you never ate either, so..” You’re looking at him like you’re vaguely disappointed, and it makes a funny feeling tighten in his chest so he pretends to be completely absorbed with looking through the bag. He’s not sure where you got the food from, but it was mostly stuff that he actually liked. “I went to a place Hyunggu wanted, but he told me what he thought you’d like from there – I hope he was right.”

“This – you didn’t have to do this.” It’s nice not being the one buying things for once, he has to admit that to himself, but he still felt a bit bad that you’d felt the need to bring him anything at all. “Thank you, though.”

“You’re right, I didn’t have to. I wanted to – just like I wanted to bring Yuto food too when Hyunggu told me he was also here.” You’ve perched on the edge of his small leather couch and he wonders if you’d ever been in here before – he honestly can’t remember, though with how hyper-aware he was of you it was pretty safe to assume you hadn’t been. Yuto’s lingering near the door quietly, watching you and he interact, and he feels like the younger is analyzing what was happening.

“Thank you for it – I should go eat it now, while it’s still warm.” Yuto’s gentle bass of a voice is almost soothing, but Hui shoots him a look anyway because he suddenly knew what was happening. His maknaes were downright masterminds when it came to plans like this, and he can’t think of any way to get Yuto to stay before you bid him a cheerful goodbye as the Japanese boy smiles at the both of you as he carefully closes the door.

“Should I go too? I don’t want to distract you or be a bother or anything.” Your question is so sincere that he just looks at you for a few moments, tries to figure out a way to say ‘Yes, you do distract me and bother me, but definitely not in the way you’re thinking’. He finally settles on a single head shake, clearing a small portion of one of his desks to place the food on.

“Did you already eat?”

“No, but I’m fine.” Your answer is quiet, and he glances over to see you gazing around his studio – he feels vaguely embarrassed, though he’s not particularly sure why. His studio is remarkably small, it’s true, but he’s not actually ashamed of anything in it.

“You’ve never been in here before?” He’s pretty sure you haven’t, but there’s no harm in confirming it. You’d been focused intently on reading the names on his soccer jerseys, but once he speaks you turn all that intense concentration on to him and his mouth goes dry.

“Nope. Not that I remember, anyway, and I’m pretty sure I’d remember that.” You’re smiling at him and he doesn’t know why that’s something you’d remember, but your smile makes him not really care about the particulars. “Now eat, Hui.”

He raises his eyebrows at the parental tone you’ve adopted but says nothing, knowing there was no way he could get out of it now – and honestly, he didn’t really want to. He was really fucking hungry, and the meat you’d brought him smelled delicious.

It’s only as he’s taking his first bite (which is excellent by the way, Hyunggu apparently had a very good taste in restaurants) that he remembers what you said about not eating and makes a stupid split-second decision. (He’s never been one to think about things like this too much before blindly doing them, which was probably a problem, come to think of it.)

“Here –“ He holds the strip of bulgogi out towards you, one hand underneath, the sound of his heartbeat a constant background theme song. “Say ‘ah’~” And it’s so easy to pretend, to act like he’s just being friendly, to tinge everything he says with a bit of aegyo – you roll your eyes at him but accept the food anyway.

It’s not easy to ignore the intimacy of an act like this, to ignore the way he’s hit with a sudden yearning deep in his chest to be able to feed you food whenever, like a real significant other could.

“Thank you, but no more! This food is for you.”

“Okay, okay.”

The silence that slips back afterwards is mostly comfortable – you seem determined to make sure he eats, so while he does so you go back to gazing around his studio. Hui feels like there really wasn’t that much to look at, but you hadn’t looked bored yet, taking in the contents of his desk and then computer monitor. He realizes belatedly that he still had the windows open for some of their unreleased tracks, but when he glances at you again you’ve already moved on from them, so he leaves them where they are.

“Are you still seeing that one guy?” It’s easy conversation, light and carefree even if the topic makes him feel a bit bitter – as much as the knowledge of you seeing other people ate away at him he knows it would bother him more if you didn’t feel comfortable talking with him about it at all. Being able to be a close friend you confided in was something he cared more about than not feeling jealous.

“Oh – no, I’m not.” Your tone is carefully disinterested, but he can see through it well enough by now. Still, he doesn’t say anything, just turns so he’s fully facing you, focused and listening. “We just had a – confliction of interests I guess you could say.” You laugh softly at your wording and he laughs too, even if he doesn’t totally understand what you mean.

“And that means, what, exactly?”

“He thought women should be submissive during sex, and I disagreed.” ..Oh. Hui’s gaze darts away as he tries to process that – it wasn’t that you talking about sex was surprising. He was used to talking with you about intimately private things like this, though that was before this annoying infatuation with you had manifested into the tiresome nuisance it was now. Still, you’d never exactly stated your.. affinities towards any one thing.

“Ah.. is that so?” He sounds much hoarser than he’d meant to, like he’d choked on something – he still can’t look at you, because suddenly all he can think about is what that meant, if it meant leather and pain or lace and sweetness, if it meant scathing words or saccharine praises.

“Are you blushing?” You’re leaning forward off his couch, grinning and trying to get a look at his face, one of your hands on his knee to keep him from turning away from you - and he realizes that yes, he is fucking blushing, and the place you were touching him felt like it was blistering with heat. “Well, at least you’re not getting all upset with me for injuring your masculine pride or whatever by being a woman who doesn’t like to –“

“Okay! Okay okay, please take mercy on me!” His slightly exaggerated whining is met with your laughter, and his face feels like it’s on fucking fire, but he can’t look away from you now that he’d accidentally met your gaze.

“Sorry – you’re just so cute when you’re flustered!” And he knows he shouldn’t take this as anything more than friendly teasing, just like whenever Hyunggu would call him ‘cute’ whenever he got scared of something, but your words still make something short-circuit in his brain and he swears to everything that you will be the death of him.

“I’m – sorry things didn’t work out with him, but you’re really going to kill me if you keep this up.” And it’s not even a lie – he is ninety-eight percent sure that if you keep talking like this without giving him time to recuperate then he was just going to over-heat and pass out.

“I should go anyway, I’ve distracted you long enough – I didn’t go too far, did I?” You’ve stood up now and are looking down at him with a worried smile, so he just shakes his head because he’s pretty sure if he tried to talk he’d say something stupid like ‘No, I definitely didn’t mind hearing you say that, and while you’re at it please tell me some more’. “I’ll talk to you later, okay? Make sure you eat it all!”

He manages a “goodbye” that sounds sort of like he wasn’t dying, waving to you until you leave and his studio door beeps to signify that it was locked again.

“For fuck’s sake..” Hui forces himself to breathe deep, tries to will some of the heat to leave his face. He really didn’t know why he was getting so flustered over something like this – he wasn’t usually the type. Was it just because it was you? Because he definitely wouldn’t mind if you preferred to be dominant?

Hui curses again, a quiet ‘fuck’ that doesn’t really encompass everything he’s feeling but seems to be the best he can manage. Fuck indeed. He was so fucked.

.｡..｡.

The next time Hui’s in his studio he does his best to forget about the conversation the two of you had had last in there, tries to forget the way his entire body had lit up when you touched his leg, tries to forget the way you’d smiled so sweetly when he fed you.

It doesn’t go well.

To be honest, he didn’t do things like this often – he was busy most of the time, and if he was in his studio then he usually had something he needed to work on instead. But being in this room less than twenty-four hours after you had off-handedly mentioned that you liked to take a more dominant approach in the bedroom had him unable to concentrate on anything else, though he had made a valiant effort for an upwards of fifteen minutes.

With an agitated huff he’s pushing his chair back from his desk with more force than necessary, moving to make sure his studio’s door was locked before taking a seat on the edge of his couch. For a moment he contemplates if he’s really going to do this, runs an aggressive hand through his dyed silver hair and then curses the tingling pain it brings that he doesn’t quite hate as much as he should in the moment.

There’s a lingering feeling of shame and a much stronger feeling of embarrassment covering his body when he reaches for himself, though it only lasts for a few moments until the feeling of the rough friction of his palm through his jeans overpowers anything else.

Hui tips his head back with a soft moan before he remembers he needs to keep quiet, bites his lip when he unzips himself so he can wrap his fingers around his cock more easily. He’s rough, impatient, wants to finish fast but also likes the slight bit of pain – he full body shudders when he finally tugs the waistband of his briefs down and feels the cold air hit him, falling back onto his forearm. He knows, for a fact, that there’s a small bottle of lube in one of his drawers somewhere, but he doesn’t bother looking for it – he’s slick enough as is, and the slight pain keeps him grounded, keeps him from getting into it enough that he wouldn’t be able to monitor his volume.

There’s a slight urgency surrounding it all that is always there when doing something like this in a semi-public place, and he gives into it this time and allows it to urge him on quicker, fucking into his fist like he was going to get caught at any second.

He wants to drag this out, wants to get this over with, wants to think about anything else or feel the need to pull up some dirty video on his phone to finish, but all he can think about is you, you, you – he wonders what it would be like if you were the one stroking him instead, if you’d take pity on him or would be ruthless, if you’d whisper sweet compliments into his skin or humiliate him with biting words, if you’d bite at his neck, he really wanted you to bite at his neck and mark him up –

He orgasms with a choked off cry, hastily shoves the back of his wrist against his teeth to try to keep quiet as his hips buck sloppily into the loose circle of his fingers. He’s never been particularly quiet, and another wave of arousal washes over him as he imagines you telling him to keep it down, warning him that you’d have to gag him otherwise. He whimpers pitifully at the thought and tries to shut his mind down, feeling overstimulated both physically and mentally.

His fingers are sticky, the warmth quickly drying on his skin, and he feels much too hot, a thin sheen of sweat clinging to his skin alongside a layer of shame. He’s not totally sure why but he feels like he’s just made everything worse, like somehow he’d crossed a line and now being around you was going to be ten times harder.

He also feels like this was inevitable though, that his attraction to you had been building for so long that if he hadn’t found a release for it somewhere then he would have gone insane.

Or maybe he’s insane now, now that he’d done something this dirty and depraved. He really didn’t know, gaze still just a bit glassy and unfocused.

What he did know was that he was completely and utterly fucked at this point, collapses onto his back and lets his aching forearm finally take a break as his eyes slide shut in defeat.

.｡..｡.

“You’re not serious.”

“Of course we are, hyung – why, do you have a problem with it?”

Hongseok is taunting him, like he always does, and Hui would usually play along and tease him back but he feels completely thrown off guard and does nothing more than blink at all of them incredulously. His lack of a playful reaction in return has Hongseok softening a bit at the edges, but Hyunggu isn’t nearly as merciful.

“What’s the problem with it? You’ve been wanting us to do something bonding like this for a while, and now we have a time to do it, a reason to do it, and someone to make sure we don’t screw it all up by doing something stupid when we’re drunk.”

“We didn’t force her, hyung, she offered when we asked.” Yuto’s trying to alleviate Hui’s concerns, but he’s way off base – still, he’s trying, so Hui manages what he hopes is more smile than it is grimace in the Japanese boy’s direction.

“We want to drink, she doesn’t like drinking, and we have a few days off because Road to Kingdom ended – what are you so worried about?” Changgu asks him, kind and sincere as always – Hui doesn’t trust him for a minute, but he can’t fight the natural urge to tell everyone what his issue was anyway. God, he hated them sometimes. (They were his family, and he supposed sometimes you just had to hate your family.)

“You all know my – my problem with her.”

“Yeah, we know you want to –“

“Date her.” Wooseok cuts Shinwon off at the last second, modifying whatever it was his hyung had been about to say – Shinwon looks both annoyed and scandalized that Wooseok had thought he was going to say anything else. Hui does his best to ignore them.

“You really thought I’d be okay with her being the one watching over us while we drank? Knowing that none of us can drink well?” He swore he could literally feel his stress levels rising – it wasn’t like he was an embarrassing drunk or anything, but he knew he had an incredibly low tolerance for it, and he also knew that if the entire group was drinking then they were just going to end up egging one another on until everyone was truly smashed.

“Well, you’re going to have to be okay with it, hyung.” Hyunggu, always the hard-ass, insists forcefully – he doesn’t say it unkindly, but he says it in a tone that brooks no room for disagreement. It’s more Kino’s voice than it is Hyunggu’s, scarily similar to when they’re in the practice room.

Hui knows he could override it with hyung or leader seniority, knows Hyunggu is watching him carefully to see if it’s actually something the elder couldn’t deal with.

He ultimately says nothing, just sighs in a way that lets everyone else know he’s acquiesced – the resulting cheer brings a small smile to his face, even if he still feels uneasy about how the planned drinking night would go. He knew that when it came to both his members and you in one building with alcohol involved there was no way he wasn’t royally fucked.

.｡..｡.

The night goes exactly as you expected it to – none of the Pentagon members could hold their liquor particularly well, which meant that after an hour and a half they were all at their limits. (It was honestly kind of funny to watch. They were all so intent on getting one another drunk that they weren’t really even paying attention to the way everyone was sabotaging each other by constantly keeping the cups full.)

Still, that meant you were mostly trying to make sure they didn’t kill or injure themselves somehow. It wasn’t too hard of a task, though you did have to threaten both Wooseok and Hyunggu to keep them from climbing on top of the only coffee table Dorm A had. You were pretty sure the glass would just shatter under their combined weight. Hyunggu had targeted you with an impressive pout after that, but he’d lost interest pretty quickly when Yuto had fallen asleep - not that you blamed him, the rapper was sort of adorable when he slept.

It also meant that when Hui got up to get water – he swore that’s what he was getting, at least – you followed him. The man was a menace in the kitchen when he was sober, you were almost afraid to imagine what he’d manage to do when he was drunk. Just his presence alone might cause the stove to burst into flames or something. He was seriously cursed.

“Why are you following me?” His question is just a bit slurred together, almost sounding more like he was incredibly sleepy instead of drunk – you figure it’s because he hadn’t had as much to drink, but you weren’t really sure. You hadn’t been monitoring how much any person drank, more concerned with keeping them alive. (They could manage to injure themselves sitting on the floor sober, so being drunk just made your job several times harder.)

“Just checking.” You murmur – he raises his eyebrows at your comment but doesn’t say anything else, turning to grab a glass from one of the cupboards. You watch him for four whole seconds before you decide he’s about to knock several of them to the floor, stepping forward to reach for it instead. Maybe you’d been wrong about how much he had drank.

“I could have gotten it..” His petulance makes you smile, doing your best not to laugh at the little “hmph” he gives you when you inform him that no, he probably could not have.

“Just let me take care of you, you big baby. At least this way I can make sure you’re getting only water.”

“That is all I was getting..” He’s still sulking when you hand it to him, face flushed from the culmination of everything he’d drank tonight. You force your gaze away when he begins to drink – even drunk off his ass he was still an infuriatingly confusing mix of handsome and cute, and you resolutely did not want to watch his throat when he swallowed.

The sound of glass hitting a bit too hard on a solid surface startles you – Hui’s set his glass down incredibly close to your hand, depth perception just a bit fucked. You want to open your mouth to scold him for the close call, but his body heat is incredibly distracting, and he’s raising one of his hands and your breath catches in your throat.

He cages you in against the dorm’s sink, one hand on the side of your neck – to angle the kiss better or to steady himself you weren’t sure – with the other bracing himself as he presses his lips to yours. He’s so ultra-hot against your body, tastes of the same fruity drink Shinwon had been pressing into his hand all evening, the metal of his belt buckle biting into your stomach.

It’s not until he gives a soft breathy moan into your mouth that you realize you’ve been kissing him back for the past thirty seconds in his own kitchen, heedless of the rest of his members in the adjoining room or the fact that he was drunk enough he could barely stand without assistance. You press at his shoulders with minimal force, missing the pressure of his lips when he instantly moves away.

“What..?” He looks immensely confused, and you feel awful for kissing him back when you weren’t totally sure he was even aware of what he was doing. “Why’d you push me away?“

“Hui –“

“You kissed me back, so why’d y –“

“I just don’t want you to do something you’re going to regret later, Hwitaek.” You hope the use of his full name will get through to him – it seems it does, in some regard, because while he chokes out a half-disbelieving and half-tormented laugh he still pauses and blinks at you slowly like he was trying to carefully choose his next words.

“You act like I haven’t wanted to do this since the first time I met you.” And oh, his voice is just a bit huskier, a bit slurred on the syllables, but he says them carefully and you know that, at the very least, Drunk Hui meant them.

The problem was that you didn’t know if Sober Hui would agree.

“You should go to bed, Hui.” You say this instead of saying all the other things crowding the tip of your tongue, instead of grabbing him by the collar and kissing him again – alcohol took away a person’s consent, and you weren’t about to take a chance to pressure Hui into doing something you weren’t sure he wanted in the first place.

“No one else has gone to bed yet..” Now he’s sulking – but this is normal, this you can deal with. You can pretend like your lips didn’t still tingle where his had been touching, can pretend like you weren’t already addicted to the feeling.

“That’s not really a valid argument considering Yuto’s fallen asleep twice already.” You counter, watching the way he bites at his bottom lip in frustration – you know it for what it is, and it still seems coy to you instead, like he’s trying to seduce you.

God, what was wrong with you? He was just pouting now, brow furrowed, and you feel absolutely pathetic for seeing his current actions as anything other than what they really were.

It didn’t matter how attractive or desirable you found him, you couldn’t in good conscience do anything while he was so inebriated.

“Come on, Hui – let’s get you to bed so I can get back to the other boys to make sure they haven’t done something stupid, like coercing Hongseok into wrestling Changgu shirtless. Again.”

“It wasn’t that stupid –“

“They literally broke a bookshelf with their bodies, be quiet.” The banter comes easily, is normal and comfortable – it’s easy to pretend like he hadn’t just been kissing you, like you hadn’t just been fantasizing about him seducing you of his own free will. His skin is warm underneath your fingertips, flushed from the alcohol, as you direct him by the bicep down the hall and to his room.

You’re rarely in here – he’s rarely in here, actually, considering how much time he spends at his studio, how often he sleeps there. Because of that his room is sparsely decorated, an incredibly faint lingering smell of the cologne he occasionally wore clinging to the edges of some of the surfaces. It’s a heady scent that you do your absolute best to ignore, because it brings to mind images of him whenever he bothered to get extra dressed up, devastatingly handsome.

He lets you guide him over to his bed with zero fuss but turns back towards you when his knees hit the edge of it, one hand coming up to caress your cheek. It’s a deceptively gentle action, and you know you should really stop him, but you don’t move when he leans in to kiss you again. Underneath the flavor of alcohol there’s a distinctive taste that is purely him, and you know if you weren’t addicted to kissing him before then you definitely were now.

When you nip at his bottom lip and he lets out a shuddering moan you realize what you’re doing, try to pull away as fast as you can – this wasn’t fair to him, when he wasn’t in his right mind – but he catches you with a hand frantically landing on your waist, dropping his head to litter kisses along your jaw and then throat. You try to ignore the way your legs go weak at the feeling.

“Please –“ It’s more of a whine than a plea, but you feel it against the skin of your neck all the same, the words dragged along your pulse-point like a searing flame. “If we don’t now, then I don’t think –“

“You need to sleep.” It takes every ounce of willpower inside of you to ignore the wetness pooling between your legs, the insistent hard press of his cock against your thigh, the way his whimper when you push at his chest vibrates along the skin of your shoulder where he presses one last desperate kiss. “We can – we’ll talk about it in the morning.” You continue to push him gently back until he’s sitting on the edge of his bed, gazing up at you through his eyelashes, flushed and looking five different kinds of wrecked. Your entire nervous system threatens to shut down at the sight and you’re not sure that you can keep your promise about talking about it tomorrow.

He’s apparently not sure of it either, expression pinched and distraught when you press him insistently by the shoulders back onto his bed. His hair is ruffled and his eyes are glazed (from the alcohol or lust, you weren’t sure), his lips slick and kiss-bruised –

You tear your gaze away and force yourself to breathe again. When you look back Hui’s thrown a forearm over his eyes, bottom lip snagged between his teeth, breathing labored.

It takes ten seconds before you’re out of the room, clicking the door shut as quietly as you can, trying to erase the imagery of tears staining his face.

.｡..｡.

When Hui wakes up it’s to a pounding head and the vaguely disgusting feeling you get when you sleep in your clothes on top of your covers. His entire body hurts and he makes the same promise he always does when he wakes up like this, the same one he’s never kept – he’ll never drink again. Or, at the very least, he’ll never drink that much again.

His whole room spins when he pushes himself up, groaning softly at the way he feels like the world tilts dangerously on its axis as he slides his legs off the edge of his mattress. It’s only because of this world-shifting that he notices Wooseok asleep on the other side of his bed, all his long limbs drawn in as close as possible, his brow furrowed in his sleep.

He wonders when the maknae had ended up here and how they’d decided on rooms while he goes to the pain-staking process of draping one of his extra blankets over the tall boy. The world is still too bright (even with his blinds shut) and every step he takes feels a bit like walking through mud, but when he sees the way Wooseok slightly relaxes after being covered it all feels worth it.

The trek from his room to the kitchen feels like it takes much longer than it should, but at the very least the suspiciously long stretch of the dorm gives ample time for his headache to shift from excruciating to manageable. He was going to find the bottle of Aspirin, take all of them, and then go the fuck back to sleep. (Okay, maybe one of those was an exaggeration, but it sure felt like he could use that many painkillers.)

“Good morning.” He almost chokes when he hears your voice, a sudden onslaught of memories causing his face to heat up – you weren’t even looking at him, busying yourself with the small skillet Hongseok kept religiously cleaned. Hui wasn’t sure if his nausea was due to the smell of food or the way all he could think about was how he had – stupidly, why the fuck had he done that – kissed you and then tried to get you into bed with him.

“..Morning.” He hopes you take his lackluster response as a product of his hangover, sliding into one of the chairs at the kitchen table so he can bury his head in his hands.

“That bad, huh? You’re going to have to learn to tell Shinwon ‘no’ when he offers you drinks, you know.” He looks up to see you placing what he assumes is an Aspirin down on the table in front of him, already turned back to grab him water. He’s not sure if he’s glad you mistook his suffering as the results of a hangover or not.

“Thanks.” He waits until you hand him the glass before he takes the medicine, downing the rest of the contents when he realizes just how thirsty he was. He can feel the weight of your gaze still on him and it makes the blood in his veins feel like ice, knowing you had to remember the exact same things he (suddenly) did.

“If it makes you feel any better, Hongseok is way worse off than you right now. I honestly can’t believe he’s such a lightweight sometimes…” Your tone is sympathetic, but all Hui feels is a slight smug happiness at there being someone else who was, at the very least, suffering more than he currently was. At least Hongseok hadn’t had the chance to do anything stupid with someone he liked last night, like Hui had. “Honestly, it’s sort of impressive.”

“Huh?” He’d stopped listening to you by pure accident, forces himself to refocus on you – which just causes his eyes to instantly lock on to your lips, face heating up because not only does he remember kissing them, he remembers what they felt like and tasted like and he has to fight to tear his gaze away. God he was so fucked.

“How many lightweights you have in your band. In a group of nine you’d think it’d be more even, but, like.. almost all of you can’t hold your liquor. It’s kind of impressive.” You’re back to focusing on whatever it is you’re cooking – he only just now notices you also have ramen boiling in their small stove to the side, the dull bubbling of the water having blended into background noise long before he’d realized it had been there.

“Are they okay?” He’s sure they are, but there’s some deeply ingrained part of him that feels required to check – the soft smile you give him in response makes him feel like he’s in high school again whenever his crush would focus on him and him alone, and he isn’t sure what to do with that feeling now that he’s twenty eight years old, so he looks down at his empty cup instead.

“They’ll be okay. Wooseokkie ended up in your room – I’m sure you noticed him.” You wait for him to glance at you and nod before continuing. “Hongseok and Changgu ended up in the same room together, which worked out well considering Changgu’s probably the only one who could sleep through Hongseok’s pitiful whining about his hangover anyway. Hyunggu and Yuto shared a room, I think – which I guess means Shinwon ended up alone. Any guess on whether he’ll be happy or upset about that?”

“It could be either.” He responds, mostly because it’s true (Shinwon’s moods were hard to predict sometimes) but partly because talking about his members was something he could easily do, something that felt familiar and normal. It felt safe and far away from the topic he didn’t want to think about. (But he was thinking about it anyway, could remember your warmth when your body was pressed against his, could remember the way you kissed him back bruisingly and made him want nothing more than for you to wreck him every day of his life.)

“Oh, right – Yanan’s in China, by the way, and Jinho’s in the military.”

“Thanks.” His response is a dry remark at the way you were trying to tease him – like he didn’t know where Yanan was and wasn’t constantly in contact with the soon-to-be actor, like he didn’t think about Jinho every single day and wonder if he was doing well. “What would I do without your incredibly timely information.”

You just roll your eyes at him and turn to the ramen – he wonders who you’re making it for before realizing it was probably for whoever woke up hungry. That realization makes a certain spot in his chest warm, and he tries to ignore it because for fuck’s sake, not now.

“I knew it was going to go badly..” He mutters to himself – you hum questioningly and he blinks, surprised you heard him and instantly trying to reach for a half-truth that you’d believe. “Drinking so much, I mean.” Not totally a lie, which meant he could say it and have it sound mostly believable. To his relief you seem to take it at face value.

A silence stretches out between the two of you – it seems comfortable for you, but he feels like his skin is crawling, waiting for the moment you spring the dreaded conversation on him. He can’t think of any more topics to bring up to stall it.

“Hwitaek.” The tone of your voice makes his heart drop into his stomach and freezes over any warmth he’d been feeling because he knows the conversation that is now seconds away from happening is going to be one he didn’t ever want to have. “I think we should talk about what happened last night.”

“What happened?” He tries to brush it off like he didn’t remember, but his voice wavers just a bit and he can’t meet your gaze and he knows that you don’t buy it for a second.

“We have to.” Your voice is soft, gentle, and he hates it because he feels like you’re trying to be as kind as possible, and that didn’t bode well for how the conversation was going to go. “Did you do what you did because you were drunk, or because you were drunk and wanted to?”

Your gaze has him pinned to the seat, his own eyes wide and brain trying to stutter through any excuse he could think of, and when that didn’t work, trying to think of some way he could play it all off as a joke, or as him just being an overly friendly drunk.

You won’t believe anything but the truth, he can tell, and he was a shit liar even when he wasn’t hungover and panicked.

“I –“ He doesn’t know what he’s going to say, probably something stupid like ‘I love you, and I don’t know when I knew that but I’ve always wanted to kiss you, I was drunk but it let me do what I always wanted to do’ but he’s saved by Hyunggu walking into the kitchen, rubbing at his eyes and looking a bit less like hell than Hui felt.

“I think I’m dying..” The maknae grumbles, and your attention shifts to him and getting him something to help his headache. Hui tries to feel relieved that the conversation had been dropped, but the look you send him once over Hyunggu’s shoulder says, ‘We’re not done talking about this’ and he feels sick all over again. He was so fucked.

.｡..｡.

It isn’t until he escapes to his studio later that day, having basically inhaled an entire cup of coffee to try to fight off both his hangover and his exhaustion, that he realizes that aside from all his personal problems with how the night before had went he had essentially pushed himself on you and then not allowed you an avenue to talk to him about it.

And that makes him feel even more sick, because there had been a chance you’d just wanted closure of some kind considering he had basically drunkenly assaulted you, and all he’d done was avoid the issue entirely when you tried to talk to him about it.

Fuck. Fuck, he was the worst.

He’d been so worried about rejection that he hadn’t even thought about the fact that you’d never consented to being kissed – or, fuck, being propositioned for sex – in the first place.

He runs both hands through his hair aggressively, ruffling it in the slightly painful way he usually did whenever he did something he wasn’t happy with – he feels anxiety sitting cold in his stomach, fear that not only would you hate him but that he’d ended up hurting you or breaking your trust in him all because he’d gotten stupidly drunk.

Pushing down the steadily rising nausea, he reaches for his phone and almost calls you, deciding at the last moment to text you a simple ‘You’re right, we need to talk’ instead. He’d already fucked up once, he didn’t want to force you into the conversation by calling you unexpectedly. As an afterthought he adds a quickly typed ‘I’m sorry I tried to avoid it before’, because despite how nervous the thought makes him, he is genuinely sorry. (Sorry for everything, in fact.)

He tries to busy himself with unfinished tracks while waiting for you to respond, listens to the same snippet of some demo Yuto had sent him six times without really ever hearing the notes, does his absolute best to ignore how one of the last times he was in here he’d ended up touching himself to the thought of you. With everything that had happened since he feels fucking disgusting at the thought of it.

When his phone vibrates he essentially lunges for it – it wasn’t like he’d been making progress on anything anyway – heart hammering in his throat as he opens your messages.

‘It’s okay. In person or by a call?’

He wants to fucking cry at how nice you’re being, at giving him the option to choose a less personal route – but he knows that you were the one who’d taken the brunt of the incident, that all he was really worried about was rejection and being embarrassed. His fingers tap out ‘I’m embarrassed, but it’s up to you’ before deleting the first part before sending. He didn’t want you to feel like he was trying to pressure you into one choice or the other at this point.

‘Knowing you, and seeing how you reacted this morning, I think you’d die if we did it in person lol I’ll call you’

He tries to fight the weak smile your text causes – you always make him smile, and this is no different, but he can’t tell if you’re genuinely okay or not through text and it worries him. You’d seemed fine this morning, almost painfully nonchalant – too nonchalant? He wasn’t sure if he was overthinking things now or not – but he’d been hungover and tired.

You don’t call right away, and he resigns himself to waiting out another five or so minutes in this sickening state of anxiety, selecting and re-selecting the exact same clip of audio over and over just so he can pretend he’s doing something, so he can try to occupy his brain.

When his phone does ring he slams his knee into the table in surprise, high-strung and nervous. He barely even feels the tingling pain.

“I’m so sorry.” He blurts out the instant he answers, muttering a soft fuck under his breath afterwards. He’d wanted to give you time to speak, but he was buzzing with an anxious and guilty energy that had him speaking before he even realized he was.

“What?” Your question sounds more surprised than legitimately confused, like you hadn’t expected him to just start talking immediately. He rakes a hand through his hair again and then keeps it there, fisted, trying to ground himself with the tiny bit of pain as his breathing speeds up.

“About last night – I’m so sorry, I just – I was drunk, and that’s no excuse for what I did, I wasn’t thinking and I’m so fucking sorry. Are – are you okay? Am I allowed to ask that?” He feels like he’s right on the verge of panicking and he hates it, because you were the victim here, not him.

“I –“ You only pause to collect your thoughts for a heartbeat, but he feels the moment stretch on endlessly, sees ninety different scenarios play out and discards every positive one immediately. “Hui, you’re – god you’re so sweet.”

“What?” It’s more of an exhale than a word, because you didn’t sound angry, or hurt, you just sounded slightly amused and grateful, and he doesn’t want to get his hopes up but you didn’t sound upset.

“You’re right, what you did was wrong and shitty, and you suck for doing it.” You pause to breathe, and it reminds him he needs to breathe, his gaze darting along one of his computer monitors without really seeing anything. “But it’s sweet of you to apologize. You should, but most people wouldn’t.”

“I should have this morning.” He murmurs quietly, fingers gripping his phone so tightly they’ve begun to ache. “I was selfish and didn’t even think about it. I really am so fucking sorry.”

“I know, Hui. I believe you. You suck at lying anyway, if you weren’t sorry then I’d be able to tell.” You’re laughing again, and he tries to join you, but it sounds weak. His entire body feels like it’s melted into nothing – he didn’t even care if you rejected him at this point, you didn’t hate him and that was good enough. “But I kissed you back, Hui. Multiple times, actually.”

“…..what?” He can’t think of anything else to say – he had remembered you kissing him back, of course he did, but it all sort of blurred together at one point and he wasn’t sure that any of it had definitively happened. “I – I know – I mean, I thought you did, but you could have just, I don’t know, been trying.. to.. get me to go away by not resisting..?” Some drunks became irate when told ‘no’, and while he knew he wasn’t one of them – and he had a feeling you did too – that didn’t mean you hadn’t just been trying to protect yourself.

“God you’re sweet.” Your sudden, repeated statement is quiet, almost like you hadn’t meant him to hear it – he doesn’t say anything, doing his best to just breathe, doing his best to act his fucking age and not like some kid who needed instant reassurance. You were the one who deserved reassurance in this situation. “I kissed you because I wanted to, Hui. It’s very kind of you to be so concerned, but you’re about the least threatening drunk I’ve ever encountered. I could have probably pushed you off me with one hand – actually, I did push you off me with one hand, when we were in the kitchen.”

“I – you – you wanted to.” It’s a statement because he’s stuck trying to process this new information, because this wasn’t a rejection (he thinks it’s not, at least), because you didn’t hate him, because the way all the anxiety induced adrenaline had leeched out of his body was leaving him feeling even more exhausted than before.

“I actually wanted to tell you that I was sorry – since I kissed you back and all, but you were drunk so it wasn’t really like you were –“

“I wanted to – I wanted you to.” He says the words too fast, trips over them, but he knows you understood by the way you went silent on the other end. He appreciated the apology, really, he did, but not only did he not think it was needed, he also couldn’t stand listening to you apologize for kissing him back when he had been dreaming about this moment for way too fucking long.

And he wants to tell you that, but you’re still silent and he’s beginning to wonder if he somehow read this entire situation wrong.

“..I don’t know what to say now.” You admit softly, and he lets out a silent exhale when he realizes you’re just being shy. He wasn’t used to that side of you, but already he knew he found it adorable, just like the rest of you.

“You can’t be more embarrassed than me, if you are then neither of us will be able to talk.” He’s laughing quietly now, feeling.. not quite comfortable yet, but definitely on the way there. You hadn’t really made any declaration of love for him, but you had reciprocated his kiss, at the very least.

“Oh, you need me to be confident?” There’s a teasing tone in your voice that is more commonplace than the shy one from before, and he already knew just by the sound of it that whatever you’re going to say next is going to affect him in some way.

“It’d be helpful.”

“Then I’d say we need to try that whole kissing thing again, but without the alcohol. It really ruined the experience last time, don’t you think?” He suddenly can’t breathe again, mouth opening and then closing at your statement – not that you care about his lack of a response, since you continue without him saying anything. “It could have led to so many fun places if you hadn’t been drunk.” A pause, where his heartbeat pounds in his head and his mouth has gone dry. When you speak again he can tell you’re doing your best to keep up your confident façade. “..Is that okay with you?”

“Yes.” He says this on a relieved breath, face still hot but body covered in excited, adrenaline filled tingles. You were really putting him through an emotional workout this morning, but at this point he wouldn’t dare complain. “Please. I’ve wanted –“

He cuts himself off before he can say anything more embarrassing, about how long he’s wanted to do something like that, to hear you say something like that, how he’s fantasized and day-dreamed about it for way too long. He flushes even more when he can hear your gentle laughter on the other line.

“You mentioned something like that last night. I wanted to ask about it actually –“

“Oh, wow, I am super busy right now doing leader things, just.. so busy. I couldn’t possibly talk to you anymore, I’m just so extremely busy.”

“Jerk.” This time when you laugh he laughs with you, a real laugh instead of the weak one he’d offered you earlier. “Okay, fine, go do your suddenly important work – but I’m definitely interrogating you about that later, it’s just too interesting to pass up. Bye Hwitaek.”

“Bye.”

It’s so like you to cut the conversation short whenever he mentioned his work – you never wanted to genuinely distract him, and it was one of the things he liked about you.

Loved about you.

Fuck. Fuck.

He can’t contain his laugh of disbelief and giddiness, setting his phone down on his desk so he can cover his face with both of his hands, running them through his hair and pushing it back away from his eyes.

You said you’d wanted to kiss him. You had kissed him. He hadn’t imagined it.

You’d said you wanted to kiss him again.

His phone vibrates and he lowers his hands to glance at it, sees it’s a text from you, and already he can feel that warm, lightweight feeling in his chest just at the sight of it.

God, he was so fucked – but with how this had turned out, he really couldn’t complain at all, nor did he want to.

.｡..｡.

Trying the ‘kissing thing’ again, as you had put it to him on the phone, turned out to be a nebulous concept – not that Hui really expected anything else, but it was a bit disappointing to finally get an answer (a positive one at that) only to be unable to meet up with you again. Not that getting to text you often wasn’t wonderful – it was, and he felt the need to make that abundantly clear (though he was pretty sure you knew that, considering he actually paid attention to his phone now just so he could respond to you) – it was just a bit frustrating to finally have permission to do the things he’d been dreaming about, like kissing you, and then be barred from doing it by forces outside of his control.

As it was, it was nearing the end of the second week since the ’confession’ had happened, and he was only just now finding time to head over to your place after working all day. It was late (nearing four am, he noticed with a groan) and his muscles ached from practice and his eyes ached from composing all day but he would be damned if he’d let another chance to spend time with you slip by him without leaping for it.

“You look so attractive.” It’s the first thing out of your mouth when you see him at your door – Hui laughs the soft sort of laugh he does when he’s a bit nervous, bending to unlace his shoes. It’s not rare of you to compliment him – in fact, you usually did, because it was true and he deserved all the kind words you could heap on him – but something about the circumstances makes it feel different this time, charges the air with a sort of excited, nervous tension.

“Really? I came over right after practice, I can’t look that good..” He trails off, shy, and you look him over again. It’s true that he looks a bit tired and run down, but the dim low lighting of your entryway paints his skin golden and throws his profile into a mix of soft shadows and gentle lines, illuminates his silver hair into a gradient of golden blonde to dusky gray.

“You look good, trust me.” It’s all you can say – everything else gets stuck in your head, muddling itself before it can get to your tongue. You hope to one day be able to properly put into words just how beautiful he is to you, but you’re in no rush to do it now, you have time. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay tomorrow?”

“If I passed up on this chance then I might legitimately die.” He says it so seriously that you laugh, and the way his expression smooths out into a warm smile has your heart beating erratically. God, he didn’t play fair at all.

“Well, if you’re sure..” You take the chance to step closer to him during the slight lull in conversation – he blinks at you once, still smiling, but the smile freezes on his face when you nonchalantly place your arms around his neck. You can feel the way he’s tensed at the new, intimate position, and it’s absolutely adorable how he clearly wants to reciprocate in some way but resolutely keeps his arms at his sides. “You –“

“Can I kiss you?” He says it all in one breath, interrupting you, rushed and embarrassed but also like he craves it, like he might die if he didn’t get your permission to do so. It’s the cutest thing in the world and a surge of heat floods your bloodstream at the tone of his voice, the look in his eyes. “Please.” He tacks it on at the end, a quiet whisper, so fucking good and sweet and perfect.

“Of course, baby.” The words are barely out of your mouth before he’s surging forward to connect your lips, his hands landing on your waist and a soft sound of pleasure escaping him as a sigh. The pet-name of ‘baby’ is one you learned that he liked recently, and while it had been deliciously fun to tease him with it through text and over the phone it was something else entirely to see the way he responded to it in person, the rich sunset color of his eyes softening into something more gentle and pliant.

The way Hui kisses now is slightly different than when he’d been drunk – it’s more assured, more precise, and while it still holds that level of desperation from before there’s something a bit less rushed about it, something more confident and not as nervous as before.

There's something infinitely better about doing it this way, Hui thinks, better than anything he'd fantasized about or hazily remembered from when he'd been drunk. Every single one of his senses is attuned to you and you alone, and nothing exists outside of the two of you kissing, the weight of your arms on his shoulders, the feeling of your nails lightly scraping at the nape of his neck, the rough feeling of your clothing beneath the pads of his fingers at your hips. Your lips press and slide against his constantly before parting for a few brief seconds, and he chases the faint swipe of your tongue against his bottom lip with his own, whining when you don't instantly give in to his demands.

By the time you nip at his lip he's completely given up on leading the kiss, opens his mouth and moans high and sweet when your tongue leaves a blazing trail of pure fire in its wake. His lips are kiss-bruised and tingling, the sensation imprinting on him that this was real, you were really kissing him, he wasn't going to suddenly wake up and realize it was all a dream.

When you pull away from him he follows you for a moment, stopping only when you cup his cheek in one hand and slide your thumb across his bottom lip. His gaze is glazed and he looks so thoroughly wrecked from simply getting kissed that you feel another surge of heat flood your system.

"Good?" Your whispered question barely makes it through to him, but when it does he blinks a few times to force the haze from his mind and nods, grip on your waist tightening, grounding him. You’ve never seen someone look more adorable.

“Yeah.” His voice is slightly hoarse and you give in to the urge to kiss his throat tenderly – when he tilts his head back with a sigh you trail your lips up to his jaw. “Yeah, it’s – great.”

You can feel the heat of his skin against your face, leave open-mouthed kisses from the spot under his ear (which makes him shiver in a way that you immediately catalogue in your mind) in a line down to the collar of the light-weight hoodie he’d worn for practice.

“I wish I could mark you up here..” Your lamentations are met with a literal fucking whine from Hui, one of his hands coming up to grip unsteadily at the crook of your arm like the mere comment had made him unsteady. “Oh? Is that something you’d want? For me to bruise you up so prettily that there’d be no way you could cover it?”

He nods, not trusting his own voice, head full of fantasies where you could do that, where you’d be able to sink your teeth into him, suck dark marks into his skin that wouldn’t fade and that his members would tease him about. (But even in his fantasies his members are there, a constant, and he knows that there’s no other timeline better than the one he’s currently living in.)

“Hwitaek.” You say his name softly, wrap a hand around the back of his neck to make him look at you – his gaze is disconnected, lingers on your lips before your silence registers as he meets your eyes. “I think we should talk about what we both want out of tonight.”

“Yeah – okay, okay.” Fondly, you watch as he takes a small step back and forces himself to become more present, a bit of clarity re-entering his eyes. You notice that he hadn’t stepped far enough away that either of you had to stop touching one another though, and it makes a part of your heart warm with affection. “That’s probably a good idea.”

He lets you lead him further into your house, glances around in interest but doesn’t stop you – he thinks (hopes) he’ll have more time later to become acquainted with this place.

“So, Hui –“ He perks up at you speaking to him, and it’s so cute that you have to stop just to recollect your thoughts. He peers around your room with thinly veiled interest but keeps glancing back at you like you’re the most interesting thing in existence. It’s flattering and adorable. “Considering we’ve talked about it before you know that I prefer to be more dominant, and you –“

“Find it incredibly hot?” He finishes your sentence for you, a happy little smirk on his face at your surprised expression as he darts in to kiss you once, quick and chaste and filled with delight.

“I – I was going to say, ‘you’re okay with it’, but what you said was so much better.” You’re smiling now too, still a bit shell-shocked – really, what sort of luck did you have for an incredibly attractive and sweet guy to also be down for being submissive for you? – but definitely not complaining. You cup his face in your hands and draw him towards you again for a sweet kiss – it lingers just on the side of ‘too passionate’, but neither one of you have enough self-control to reign it back in. You can feel his flush underneath your fingertips. “How did I ever get this lucky?”

“Should I say the cliché thing about thinking the same thing?” His voice is soft, one of his hands coming up to slip underneath your own, fingers curling around your palm. “Because I was.”

“You really are a hopeless romantic sometimes, you know that?” You couple your rhetorical question with another kiss – you were one hundred percent addicted to them now, you knew that for a fact. “We should really talk about what you’re comfortable with happening tonight, Hui.”

He must not be thinking clearly (he’s not, all he can think about is you and how you keep kissing him and how it’s all he’s ever wanted in his entire life) because he says “anything” in a strained whisper, breathless and needy before anything has even happened.

“Anything?” You can’t hide the surprise in your voice, though you try to soften it at the last second – he flinches anyway, like he was embarrassed with how eager he had come across, his gaze somewhere at your hip now. “’Anything’ is a dangerous thing to say, Hwitaek. What if all I wanted to do was finger-fuck you?”

He knows you were joking – he can hear it in your voice, the way you’ve tried to lighten the mood to make him more comfortable. He appreciates it, but it does absolutely nothing for him considering the effect your words had on him. “…I wouldn’t mind that.”

“Really?” Again you’re surprised, but this time you seem slightly eager – he raises his gaze to assess the situation, and yes, you did look interested. The excited, nervous little fire burning in his core feels a bit stronger suddenly. All he can do is nod, mute in the face of your presence, your power, your effortless aura that has him sinking down gratefully onto your bed at the slightest push of your hand against his chest.

Your fingers press at him, hard, and he feels breathless when they slide underneath his hoodie and t-shirt both in one go, hitch it up to above his navel. He thinks about all the marks you could leave on him there, hidden under clothing between promotions, and the sly grin you share with him when your fingernails rake a teasingly shuddering line down his side makes him think you have the exact same ideas he does.

Those two articles of clothing are lost quickly, dropped somewhere over the side of your bed as you kneel between his legs and kiss him until he can’t breathe, a wonderful feeling that has him drifting along in hazy bliss until he realizes what you’re doing.

“You’re a bit more dressed than I am, suddenly..” He tries to make it teasing but it comes out as something soft and reverent, and your lips when they smile at him are a slash of color that he can’t tear his eyes away from. He can feel your curious fingers dipping under the waistband of his athletic joggers and he does his best not to lose his fucking mind at the connotations of it.

“That’ll come. Later. Let me focus on you first, Hwitaek.” And how could he even argue with that? Why would he argue that? He’d have time to see your body later – and to be completely honest, he was perfectly happy with seeing however much of you that you were comfortable showing him.

(Still, he thinks, as you gently push him to lie down on your bed, he hoped you weren’t too uncomfortable with showing your body. As you drag the fabric of his briefs slowly down his legs he thinks about how much he really wants to eat you out, and what a shame it’d be if you weren’t comfortable with that. Regardless, he’d find some way to pay his respects to you and your body, even if his regular go-to’s turned out to not be an option.)

“You’ve done this before?” He doesn’t sound nervous, just questioning, having slung a forearm across his eyes. You let him leave it there for now, knowing he must feel a bit vulnerable in his current position.

“Mhm, I have – and you?” It’s almost laughable how casually the two of you are speaking, like you hadn’t just been feeling him up and wasn’t currently in the middle of warming lube on your fingers. When he nods you hum and use your clean hand to grip him under the knee, pulling it up high enough you can place a kiss on the inside of it. An amused laugh leaves him in the form of a surprised exhale at the surprisingly tender action.

“I have – don’t worry, I’m not new to all of this.” You can’t see his eyes but you can see the rest of his face, see that he’s still smiling – you keep a close eye on his expression as you circle his rim teasingly, watching with rapt attention the way the smile disappears as he tenses with a soft sound that’s not quite a gasp before forcing himself to relax again.

“With women or men?” You keep it casual, careful to keep your voice unaffected, and he laughs again but it’s more disbelieving this time, pulls his legs up so his knees bracket you on either side.

“Yes.” Hui simply answers, and it’s your turn to laugh, your free hand smoothing soothing circles into his bare hip. You think he looks absolutely beautiful like this, spread out just for you and you alone, a small notch in his brow from the way his expression has twisted as you carefully slip your first finger in.

“You’re really cute like this, all vulnerable and naked for me.” You’re teasing him, testing the waters – from the way he flushes though, the little hitch upwards that his hips make, you think you might have just discovered something fun. “Hui, do you like me talking to you like that?”

He doesn’t answer you right away, moves his arm so he can look down at you between his legs. Something about it must get to him, because he just looks at you for a moment or two, like he was trying to imprint the visual in his mind.

“You can add another.” He says instead, all breathy and soft like you’d already ruined him, wrecked him into pieces. It’s incredibly endearing, you think, dropping your gaze to where his cock sits red and shiny and untouched against his lower stomach, a small mess of pre-cum already smeared onto his skin. That was also endearing.

“I’ve barely even stretched you yet..” Your disbelieving murmur is clearly heard by him, and you raise your gaze to meet his as you test the waters with a second finger. It’s definitely tight (tighter than you would have preferred, if only for his own safety), but Hui just moans and shifts his hips more towards you, digging into your pillow as he tips his head back. “Oh – Hui the size queen, huh? Is that it?”

He laughs, but it tapers off into a sound closer to a moan than anything else. “I don’t think I’ve ever been called that before.”

“Does it suit you?” You keep one hand splayed flat on one of his hips – he’s doing a wonderful job at not moving overly much, but by doing this you can feel every small tremor that goes through his body, can feel his muscles tense each time he forces himself to stay still. “If I end up fucking you one day am I going to have to make sure it’s sized big enough to totally wreck you?” Your question is coupled with an inquisitive upwards quirk of your fingers, and he nearly kicks you in surprise at the liquid arousal that floods through his body at the feeling. (You teasingly bite at his lower calf for it, and the soft sound he makes as you press your teeth into him is definitely something you file away for later.)

“I know you’re just teasing me, but -“ He licks his lips, tries to gather his focus again as you add a third finger. It burns in such an exquisite way that it’s hard to concentrate on anything else except for the current points of contact between you and him.

“Do you want me to stop?” A pause. “Hui, look at me.”

He obeys, meets your analyzing gaze and offers a slightly strained smile as he thinks about your question – though he doesn’t think for very long, a burst of wonderful, embarrassed heat curling across his chest and through his stomach when he lets his upper body drop back down to the bed, shaking his head ‘no’.

“Oh, Hwitaek..” You sound vaguely pitying, and he hates it, but he loves it. “You’re just a little boy who likes to be teased and humiliated, is that it?”

He feels so small with you talking to him like that, like his body was three sizes too big for his skin and he was burning up from the inside out – whenever the heat becomes too much all he has to do is open his eyes and see you looking at him (you’re always looking at him, and it takes his breath away because the way you watch him makes him feel like he’s something special, something that should be treasured) and suddenly everything was okay again. It was like you were the one stoking the flames of his desire, but you could also cause that blistering heat to ebb away whenever it became too much.

He realizes he hasn’t answered you yet and frantically nods, heart threatening to dissolve into something sticky and sweet at the way your expression softens.

“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we’re not going to delve too deep into that tonight without talking about it in more detail later.” He nods, because he really does understand (despite the slight burst of disappointment) and he appreciates that you want to talk out what his limits are first. “Besides, how am I supposed to talk to you like that when you’ve been so good for me this entire time? So pretty and vocal.”

He can’t help the whine that tears itself from his throat at your phrasing – it didn’t matter what you were saying to him anymore, every single word embedded itself into his skin and worked its way through his body like an electric shock.

“Oh? Sweet boy - are you an adorable whore for both degradation and praise?” He doesn’t even bother saying anything this time, just shuts his eyes tight - he knows you already know the answer, can read him so well it’s almost like his desires were written out on his skin in black ink. “That’s so cute. You’re just so responsive to everything, aren’t you? I love that - anything I say or do I’ll get a direct response to, won’t I, Hwitaek?” You wait until he nods, his eyes still shut, before taking the opportunity given to you. Your lips press a teasing kiss into the line of his pelvis, giggling softly against his skin when he gasps above you. “Yeah, just like that. So beautiful, Hui, and all for me.”

Yes, all for you he thinks, and even his thoughts are getting mixed up and hazy now because you’ve wrapped your fingers around him loosely and he is so slick already, the feeling of your thumb swiping across the head of his cock, tracing the lines of precum down the shaft to where they’ve collected on his skin causing his entire body to twitch in a mess of stimulation.

“Oh, baby, you’re so wet for me already.” He can’t focus on anything, can’t think of anything, hears your voice through the haze like it’s faraway and he’s drifting underwater. He tries to force himself to be more present, tries to physically drag himself out of those depths, but you’re cooing at him sweetly and running your fingers over his cock softly, and any amount of shame he might have felt at having fallen so far into this headspace is eradicated by the sugar-laced kisses you press into his side.

“You really can’t keep quiet, can you?” Your voice is sweet but laced with amusement, and you can feel the way he throbs in your hand at the slightly degrading comment. “You sound like you’re going to cum just from three of my fingers – are you, baby? You going to make a mess of yourself before we even get to do anything?”

“Fuck..” Hui’s entire body feels like it’s on fucking fire, and when you duck your head to suck a bruise onto the inside of his thigh it’s all he can do to keep from crying out even louder. You were right, he couldn’t keep quiet, his head swimming and his fingers curled so tightly into your sheets that he could barely feel them anymore. “I’m – you’re –“ He can’t concentrate, can barely speak, and he knows his words come out more as whines anyway.

“Do you think it’ll be okay if you cum now?” You’ve stopped moving entirely and his whole body feels like it’s buzzing, his hips trying to rock back onto your fingers or up into your hand with no real success as the haze slowly recedes from his mind enough for him to be able to form full sentences

“Y-yeah.” He pushes himself up onto his forearms to be able to look down at you, groan catching in his throat when he sees the way you’re peering at him openly, watching him with beautiful eyes and a graceful flush on your face, one of your hands slick with his pre-cum and the other still wickedly deep. He’d never been more sure of the fact that he loved you than this exact moment. “If – if you give me a little bit afterwards, it’ll be fine.” He knows he sounds breathless and wrecked already, but you smile so sweetly at him anyway, like he was something precious to you, and he feels like the ground and the bed he was lying on had just suddenly disappeared at the sight.

And then you’re lowering your head and wrapping your lips around him and it’s all he can do to keep his eyes open – you hadn’t eased him into it, hadn’t given him any indication of your plans at all. One moment you were asking him about his refractory period and the next you were doing things with your tongue and mouth that he couldn’t even begin to fathom, your fingers once again brushing against that spot deep inside of him that has him keening.

He’s not going to last much longer; he knows that with a sudden certainty that has him trying to warn you but is more disjointed pleas for you to not stop than they are anything else.

One of his hands grasps for your shoulder blindly when he hits his peak, fingers curling into your skin as he spills himself onto your tongue. It’s blindingly hot and you can see the way he fights to keep his eyes open to watch, brow furrowed and mouth open almost like he was in some sort of pained ecstasy as you continue to finger-fuck him through it until he’s trembling.

When you stick your tongue out at him tauntingly and show him the mess he made Hui groans from deep within his chest like you’re torturing him, sits up abruptly and crashes his mouth into yours. It’s messy and dirty and he licks into your mouth aggressively, chasing all essence of himself off your tongue and onto his own with a moan that rattles your bones. You do your best to withdraw your fingers as gently as possible but he whimpers at the feeling anyway, drops his head to begin kissing a sloppy trail from your jaw down to your neck.

“You’re so dirty..” Your head is spinning and you feel short of breath - each time you inhale his chest knocks against yours as he heaves his own breaths, though he refuses to pull away from your skin for long enough for him to be able to recover as quickly. You think you feel him murmur a soft sound of agreement to your statement against your collarbone.

As soon as you can wrest a big enough part of yourself back under control you lean back, holding him securely away with your thumb and forefinger gripping his chin. Hui looks at you with an expression of wrecked reverence, the perfect picture of debauchery, and you know that right here, right now, at five something am in your bedroom, he would do literally anything you asked – that at this point in time it was no longer your room, with the window showing glimpses of the outside world, the sounds of cars going past. This place, this moment in time, it was now something disconnected and intangible, where he had given you explicit trust (perhaps foolishly, considering how inchoate your relationship was) to control and lead him. To take care of him in whatever way you see fit.

And you know that right here, right now, in this nebulous place that the two of you occupied, you would strive to make sure he never regretted giving you that permission.

“Hwitaek.” Your voice is breathier than you expected – you sounded like you’d been kissed hard. You sounded like you were in love. “Hwitaek, you are messy and crude – you are such a dirty boy, and you’ve hidden that from me for years.” He is hanging off your every word and you suddenly feel like you have a choice to make.

It’s one you don’t think about for more than a second, because you realize that you don’t need to.

“And, Hwitaek – you are so perfect for me.”

.｡..｡. .｡..｡.

“You know something?” Hui says it casually, out of nowhere, hand still rubbing nonsense patterns into the skin of your lower back after having crept underneath your shirt some twenty minutes ago just for the skin to skin contact. He’s not focused on anything else but relaxing in his bed at the dorm with you, thoughts about producing and writing lyrics and being a leader far from his mind.

“Hmm?” Your head rests on his chest, listening to his heartbeat – it’s a comforting sound, if not slightly faster than average, and when you close your eyes you can hear it mix with the soft (and sometimes not so soft) sound of some of his boys arguing or laughing or just living somewhere else in the dorm, outside his shut door.

He still hasn’t spoken so you lift your head and gaze at him, admire his features as he looks back at you with an expression so tender you’re almost afraid to have the weight of it on you. His hair is back to brown now, cut a bit shorter than before, and you stretch an arm out to run your fingers through it lazily, watch as he leans into it but keeps looking at you.

“I think you’re perfect for me, too.” His voice is warm, probably what sunshine would sound like if it was an auditory thing, and you blink at him in confusion for a few moments before you understand what he’s referencing, press your smile into his until it turns into a gentle, surging kiss.

It’s not quite an I love you, something adjacent to it, almost there but not exactly.

And neither of you say those words yet, just smile and look at each other and press kiss after sugared kiss into each other’s skin, interlace your fingers and marvel at the way affection seems to blossom for one another in both your ribcages at the simplest of actions.

The two of you weren’t in any rush. You had time.

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amillionsmiles · 4 years

Text

vieni a vivere (Steve/Natasha)

Title: vieni a vivere Summary: Sometimes Steve would choose to sit in the corner of a piazza and people-watch, sketching. Natasha would venture off on her own, ducking into colorful leather shops, chasing the dribble of her melting gelato with her tongue. Once, she stopped on the street for a caricature artist. It amused her, to be studied and then so deliberately exaggerated. / Natasha, Steve, and a whirlwind tour of Italy. A/N: This is an AU in which Clint sacrifices himself at Vormir instead and Steve doesn’t time jump at the end. It’s been languishing in my drafts for the better part of the past 8 months but here it is!

{Read and review here} or continue under the cut.

“Natasha,” said Clint, every syllable another twitch of his fingers, his hand working itself free from her grip. “I’m not saving you from dying. I’m asking you to live.”

There was no safehouse in which to disappear from grief.

So Natasha went to Missouri, where Laura Barton took one look at her and knew. A flock of birds carved through the clear blue sky. The tall, dry stalks of wheat stood at attention. Cooper, Lila, and Nate came running in from the fields to find their mother and their Auntie Nat collapsed on the porch, holding each other, rocking.

“I had a hunch,” Laura admitted later, after they had done their best to tuck the children into bed. “When he didn’t call.”

“I’m sorry,” Natasha tried for the third, fourth, fifth time, the bile rising in her throat again. “We tried so hard. I wanted—”

“Five years.” Laura rest her head against the wall. She looked as young as the day Natasha had met her, except for her eyes. They fixated just over Natasha’s shoulder, on the family photo framed above the dresser. “It didn’t feel like that. You know I wouldn’t believe it, if not for… he finished the shed while we were gone.”

“Never could keep himself still,” said Natasha, thinking of Tokyo and the rain and the erratic dot she’d followed on the holo-map at her desk. The gentler things, too: bandaging her wounds that first time, when she’d been nothing but startled and feral. Rushing to hold a three-year-old Cooper as he climbed Clint like a tree. Dragging the couch one way, then another, then back again.

“Will you stay?” Laura’s voice broke her from the memory.

Every part of the house creaked with his presence. The bookshelves, the floorboards, the bottom drawer he’d stubbornly cleared out the very first time he’d brought her by because it’s you, Natasha, damnit, now hand me your things. It hurt, but it was a hurt she owed him gladly, and Natasha closed her eyes and let it seep into her bones.

“Yes.”

Lila had Clint’s steady hands, the same way of looking down her nose and tilting her chin back. Cooper had his squint and his hair. Nate had his smile.

For a time it was enough, being their aunt. Reading picture books. Cutting the crusts off sandwiches. Sometimes Nate woke up in the middle of the night crying for his dad and Natasha would lay there, listening as Laura tried to comfort him. It got better. It got worse.

“Nobody in this house blames you for what happened,” Laura said from the doorway, watching Natasha fold a shirt and tuck it away in her duffel.

“I know.” The arrow necklace at her throat burned.

“Will you come back?” Lila asked as they bid their goodbyes. She was getting tall, the top of her head nearly at Natasha’s collarbone. Natasha ran a hand down the braid she’d tied for Lila that morning and closed her eyes, squeezing the girl closer.

“Promise,” she said, because she’d helped bring this world back and she’d be damned if she let it do anything to stop her.

On the way to the airport, she called Sam.

“Journaling helps.”

They sat in Sam’s office. The oak furniture gleamed warm and familiar. He had a bruise on his right cheek, but other than that he looked healthy. Fulfilled, even. Natasha glanced at the shield propped behind his desk; Sam followed her gaze toward it and nodded, leaning forward.

“You know what he said when he gave it to me?”

“What?”

“‘We got the world back, but it’s a new one. Maybe I need something new, too.’” He tilted his head.

“I have a list,” Natasha said quietly. “Not of targets. Places.”

Sam smiled. “There you go. That’s a start.”

She found Steve at a sunny gym studio in Brooklyn teaching a class of 30-year-old women how to punch.

“Be honest, now,” she said as they entered the juice and salad bar right next door, “how many dates have you been asked on?”

“None,” Steve said, making it a point to study the menu even though Natasha’s reconnaissance had shown her that he came here every day after work. “I keep things strictly professional.”

They found a table by one of the windows. Natasha took a sip of her smoothie and wrinkled her nose—a bit heavy on the carrots, but it tasted healthy, at least.

“Does this new job of yours come with vacation?”

Steve set down his fork, lettuce and chicken drizzled with peanut sauce still stuck on its tines. The gray instructor’s V-neck looked good on him, the studio’s logo printed neatly in black.

“What’s this about, Nat?”

“I’m thinking of traveling for a while.” She focused on the straw in front of her, rolling it between index finger and thumb. “I’m trying to figure out who to be without… all of it.”

Steve leaned back in his chair. His finger tapped against the table once, twice.

He had a right to say no, Natasha told herself. When they’d told each other to get lives, neither had stipulated what that had to look like. Soul-searching was probably more effective when done alone, anyways.

But that didn’t stop the surge of relief when he said, “I’m in.”

The park swing squeaked under her weight.

“Sorry to take him from you.”

Bucky half-squinted at her, then swept his gaze farther out. They had come a long way since Soviet slugs and the freeway, Sam’s car.

“Nah, he needs this as much as you do. Just do me a favor and bring him back in one piece, will you?”

Natasha nudged him with her shoe. Bucky scuffed the gravel right back.

“Take care of yourself,” he added, a little softer. “Don’t let it chase you down.”

Natasha hadn’t flown internationally in a good, old-fashioned commercial airline for years, and she planned on enjoying every minute of the eight-hour journey. For the first hour and a half she busied herself finishing Ancillary Justice on her kindle, Dean Martin crooning Mambo Italiano in her ear through the in-flight music selection.

She’d chosen Italy because she liked the way the language burst free of your mouth. That, and she appreciated the scrappiness of the country: a patchwork history of kingdoms, duchies, and republics expanding and contracting, managing to unify; the fierce sense of local identity married with proud celebration of a Roman past. Natasha cared little for regimes, but she admired the people who lived through them.

“Last time I was in Italy was 1943,” Steve said on hour 3, peeling back the plastic wrap on the salmon and penne they’d be given for dinner. “I only really got to see the military camps, though.”

“Well, I promise not to make you deliver any rousing speeches,” said Natasha. “This trip is strictly pleasure. No business.”

“Not gonna argue with that.” He caught her reading the captions off his screen and took the earbud from his left ear, offering it to her. “You know you’ve got your own monitor, right?”

“Shut up, Rogers, I’m trying to watch this movie.”

Cinque Terre looked like someone had taken a grandmother’s box of buttons and threads and sent it tumbling into the sea. The houses sprawled on top of each other in an assortment of confectionary colors—pale blues and pinks, lemon yellow, deep red.

On the trail down from Vernazza to Corniglia, Natasha stopped to admire Monterossa in the distance, the sun beating down between her shoulder blades. Steve stood beside her, hands on his hips as he surveyed the landscape. He cut a striking figure with his CamelBak; more than one group of hikers passing them by craned their necks to spare a second glance. It wasn’t because of the Cap aura, though. He just looked—handsome. Nice. The kind of guy you’d stop at the side of the road for if he held his thumb out as a hitchhiker.

A mosquito landed on his bicep and Natasha reached over to smack it, flicking its remains off the palm of her hand.

“Can’t have any of these guys flying around with your super serum in their bodies,” she teased. “What do you think would happen?”

Steve cracked a grin. “They’d probably be even more stubborn and harder to kill.”

Loose gravel crunched on the path beside them. A group of elderly—Natasha guessed they must be in their early 80s—walked by. The man in the front wore a navy baseball cap and held a rust orange walking stick. He was telling a story about his trek along the Camino de Santiago but paused to appraise them.

“Stopped already?”

“We’re pacing ourselves,” Natasha said cheerfully.

“Don’t let us old geezers beat you!” he called over his shoulder, continuing on; one of the women in the group joked, “If I sat down to rest I think I’d throw out my hip getting back up,” and the rest of them laughed, the sound swallowed by the green trees and cliffside terraces as they rounded the bend. Natasha wondered, not for the first time, if this was what having parents and grandparents would have felt like.

“Should we catch up to them and tell them your actual age?”

In response, Steve hopped off the rock. “Come on, Romanoff,” he said, and for a moment they were the newly minted leaders of a ragtag team of superheroes again—the clipboard’s weight in her hand, their footsteps in sync as they went out to meet Wanda and Vision and the rest—then let’s whip them into shape. Who else could she have stood by all these years?

“I’m not getting any younger!” called Steve, already at the bottom of the hill, the asshole—rolling her eyes, Natasha followed.

The dream always started in the water.

The purple dunes around her brought her splashing to her feet. Above her, the eclipsed sun winked, and she was back on Vormir’s unforgiving peak, shoulder screaming in pain as she tried to reel Clint’s dead weight up.

Natasha—

No, no, no—you bastard, don’t let go, don’t you dare let go—

Like a fish, Clint’s hand wriggled out of hers. The cry tore free of her throat and she clawed at the air, fingernails digging into—

“Nat. Nat.”

An arm wrapped around her waist, holding her up. The rocking motion brought her to her senses and she turned, burrowing her nose into Steve’s shoulder, needing to be anywhere else. He smelled like cotton and lavender, courtesy of their Airbnb host’s shower gel, the fabric of his tank top well-worn and familiar, more gray than white in the darkness.

“Hey,” he murmured.

The last time he’d held her this close they’d been in a bunker in New Jersey, hoping to survive a missile. Somehow, it seemed like a simpler time.

Deep breaths, Natasha. Count to ten. She did it in Russian, then twice more in French and Italian. When it no longer felt as if her heart were plummeting through her stomach, she pulled back.

“You good?” Steve pushed a lock of hair away from her forehead, eyes searching hers.

“Yeah.” It came out strained—a sound that wanted to be a laugh but couldn’t. “It’s just—” She raised her hand and made a twisting motion with her fingers. “You know.”

Steve leaned back against the headboard to give her space. A small strip of carpet and a bedside table separated their beds, and Natasha noted the disarray of his sheets, the evidence of haste. None of it betrayed by his face, which adopted a careful expression as he studied her now.

“I have a question. You don’t have to answer it right this moment.”

“What is it.”

“This trip, Nat… is it for yourself? Or is it for Clint?”

I’m not saving you from dying, Natasha. I’m asking you to live.

Trick question, Rogers, Natasha wanted to say. There is no me—the way I am now—without Clint.

“I just need to know. We promised we’d always be honest with each other.”

He was hurting, too. When they’d first been partnered together all those long years ago, Natasha had been drawn to his loneliness; it had fascinated her, the idea of America’s golden boy left behind by everyone he’d known. Now she knew better, of course. The dry humor and the rule-breaking, the furrow between those blue eyes, the black and white photograph tucked away in a pocket watch, kept close to the heart.

“What about you?” she asked. “Who are you traveling to leave behind?”

Steve considered, looking to the side. She tried to follow his gaze but couldn’t make out what he was looking at in the dark, if maybe he was just admiring the paisley wallpaper instead.

“My old self,” he said, finally. “He’s a stubborn bastard, though. Keeps running to catch up.”

Natasha cracked a smile. “Mine likes waiting in the shadows.”

“Let’s make a deal, then,” said Steve, extending a hand. “Whichever of us gets to the other side of this first, we pull the other one along, okay?”

She took it and squeezed and thought: don’t let go.

“It’s not very high up,” Steve said, frowning at the balcony.

Natasha adjusted the braid over her left shoulder. “People were shorter back then. What, does the lack of height kill the romance for you?”

“Not exactly.”

He was right, though: Juliet’s balcony was little more than a pink stone box jutting out into the courtyard, ivy crawling up the wall next to it. They’d passed through a graffiti-covered and gum-strewn wall to get to it, a little tunnel off the wider, smoother street of Via Capello. Natasha liked that about Verona: the streets were clean and broad, yet the city was still small enough that you felt cradled by it. Charming.

In the interest of being less conspicuous, Steve had worn a baseball cap, but that didn’t stop a few people from sneaking photos. Sunnily, he overlooked them, choosing to focus on the bronze statue in the corner, polished golden by the touch of thousands of hands.

“So let me get this straight,” he said, reading the informational plaque nearby, “touching Juliet’s right breast is supposed to bring good luck?”

“In love, specifically,” Natasha clarified. “You should do it. When’s the last time you went on a date?”

“Not this again, Nat.”

“I’m just saying, we brought the other half of Earth’s population back. Your odds are no longer as shitty. Not that they were that bad to begin with.”

“Oh, yeah?” The smile he leveled at her was disarming. It took her by surprise—ten years by his side, yet the supersoldier still had a few new tricks.

Deflecting, Natasha said: “Speaking of breasts, you know you grab your left boob when you’re laughing.”

Steve looked scandalized. “I do not.”

She reached over and twisted.

“Natasha.”

“For good luck,” she cackled, merciless, and darted away.

After fighting aliens, traveling to other galaxies, and resurrecting half of existence, these were the things Natasha believed in: warm pelmeni, a good dye job, and the quiet grandeur of churches, even if she wasn’t so sure about God. Florence’s church to capita ratio kept her plenty busy. It wasn’t that she was chasing salvation or forgiveness, necessarily. Just that stained glass and measured arches gave her a certain peace of mind, one she still struggled to reclaim at night.

She hadn’t realized how deeply it had infiltrated her routine until she and Steve checked into their Airbnb.

“There’s a couch in the main room,” said Steve as they eyed the sole bed.

It had become a sort of symbiosis. Steve got in his head during the day, so Natasha planned itineraries to keep them busy. Natasha mourned at night, so Steve comforted her. It happened frequently and without much discussion. Sometimes he went back to his own mattress, but more often, they drifted back to sleep alongside each other—so often, apparently, that her subconscious had stopped looking for two separate beds when she made reservations.

“We can share,” Natasha decided, tossing her duffel at the base of the bed and moving to check out the bathroom. “We’re adults.”

The old Natasha would have thought things over a little more, perhaps. Weighed the merits and drawbacks of this arrangement, what it meant to sleep beside but not sleep with. Especially Steve, who had a funny way of looking at her sometimes as she argued with street vendors or pulled them into random courtyards—a weighted pause, filled with equal parts exasperation, amusement, and an affection that Natasha hesitated to name. The new Natasha went to bed with her hair wet and a towel on her pillow and woke up with her cheek pressed against his bicep, Steve already alert and scrolling through his phone with his free hand. Upon sensing her stir, he glanced over, eyebrows slightly raised. If she weren’t so good at feigning nonchalance, she’d have blushed.

Instead, she probed: “What are you thinking, Rogers?”

“I’m thinking,” he said, setting his phone down and shifting to prop himself up on an elbow, “that we should talk about this thing between us.”

She wrinkled her nose. “‘Thing?’”

“Unless you’ve got a better name for it.”

“Here in the 21st century, we don’t care much for labels.”

“So I’ve been reading. The Atlantic paints a kind of grim landscape for love. Did you know that we’re in the middle of a sex recession?”

Natasha rolled over so that she was on her stomach, cheek pillowed on the backs of her hands. “Are you propositioning me right now, Steve?”

“No, but.” He shrugged, considering. “I hear friends with benefits is all the rage.”

Natasha laughed. “The ‘benefits’ part of that isn’t talking about retirement.”

Slowly, Steve blinked at her, the picture of feigned innocence. “Isn’t it?”

Natasha wasn’t stupid. The five years post-Snap had wrung it out of her, but she remembered flirting. For her, it had been a game. When needed, a weapon or a wall.

Steve, though. He meant what he gave. Subtle but honest: an invitation, there for the taking, if she wanted it.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. When Natasha had been younger, her list of wants was small: bread, water, the light of another day. Then they’d grown loftier: acceptance, redemption.

Steve smiled, and she thought that perhaps there was room for something in between.

They didn’t spend all their time together. Sometimes Steve would choose to sit in the corner of a piazza and people-watch, sketching. Natasha would venture off on her own, ducking into colorful leather shops, chasing the dribble of her melting gelato with her tongue. Once, she stopped on the street for a caricature artist. It amused her, to be studied and then so deliberately exaggerated.

“Hmph,” Steve grumbled later, examining the picture. “I could have drawn you for free.”

The light through the curtains created a glare on his tablet, which was open to the day’s crossword. Steve had started them as part of his cultural catch-up. Natasha often helped due to her arsenal of disparate factoids and interests, courtesy of all the covers she’d shuffled through over the years.

“Work in Italy,” Steve read. “Five letters.”

“Opera,” Natasha said, not missing a beat as she stirred some honey into her tea. The under-the-breath hm of satisfaction told her that she’d guessed correctly.

“We should see one.”

“Not a bad plan,” said Natasha, finally joining him at the small, tiled table near the window. “Are you feeling more Puccini or Verdi?”

“Nobody likes a know-it-all,” Steve said, though the smile playing on his lips told her otherwise.

“Funny,” Natasha quipped. “I thought that was why you kept me around.”

She went in a floor-length black gown. The old training said it was because black hid most stains, and knife and gun were easily stowed in a garter. But the truth was that Natasha had chosen it because she liked the way Steve’s eyes lingered on her just a bit longer, and the low-cut back meant she felt every callus on his palm when he put a hand to support her as they climbed up the stairs to their seats.

“You know I’ve done this before.”

“It crossed my mind once or twice.” Gallantly, Steve offered an arm. “Do you object?”

Somewhere, there was a movie like this—a swell of string music, a camera rolling. Steve’s bowtie sat as a dark knot at the base of his neck. You clean up well, Natasha had said earlier that evening, but what she’d meant was: I’m glad it’s you.

They settled in, the stage gilded and opulent. When in Rome, Natasha thought, the velvet seats plush against her back. She tapped her heels against the floor once, testing the acoustics of what she could hear. Two rows over, a French couple murmured to each other.

Natasha had attended operas before, as covers. And so, when the first deep note was sung, she looked to Steve. Saw the way he straightened and leaned forward slightly, as if someone had extended a hook into his chest and tugged him forward. An intensity overtook her, because in that moment he wasn’t supersoldier or teammate or partner, just achingly unguarded, human in a way that hurt. Human in a way that she could have.

When intermission came, she excused herself to the balcony to get some air. Happiness winded her. For so long, all her contentment had been inextricable from relief—at having been accepted, at having survived. To have it stand on its own felt impossible; a gauntlet not meant for her to wear, a feeling she couldn’t possibly hold in this way.

“Nat.” Steve’s voice sounded from behind her. “Are you okay?”

Blinking through watery eyes, she turned. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to go all Pretty Woman on you.”

The corner of Steve’s mouth tightened and he took a step forward. He wore disappointment well. She could appreciate it even if she hated that it was being directed toward her.

“Don’t do that, Nat,” he said, quiet.

“Do what?”

“Play pretend. Wasn’t that the point of this trip? To find out who you were underneath it all? To just let yourself be?” And oh, hadn’t he said the same thing to Tony, when they were younger and snapping at each other’s throats, and how did she balance that against a world in which Tony was dead. What did it mean to want something for herself, after everything? To want this?

“What are you when you aren’t planning, or fighting?” pressed Steve, and he was too much bright and too much close but Natasha wanted, just once, to step into a blaze of her own making; not because her back was against a wall or because there were regimes to topple, but because she felt deserving of the life she’d live on the other side.

“I’m terrified,” she confessed.

“Me, too,” he said, and held her. And didn’t let go.

When the alarm went off, Steve mumbled against her shoulder: “I’m gonna be honest with you—I’m getting kinda sick of all these churches.”

The old adage was that in Italy, the farther south one traveled, the slower life became. Bright-colored Sicily coated Natasha’s edges like a candy drop, crystallizing her in its sparkling waters, the lush gooeyness of cheese spilling from fresh arancini.

Sated, still, from last night’s wine and seafood, Natasha turned in the circle of Steve’s arms, conjuring her most doe-eyed expression. “That’s not very schoolboy of you.”

An arched eyebrow. The ghost of a kiss on her collarbone. The stroke of his thumb over her forearm set the hairs there standing on end. “Maybe there’s something else I’d like to worship.”

The laugh pealed free from her chest before she could stop it. “Oh, no. How long have you been sitting on that one?”

“Since Florence, at least.” Steve grinned, unrepentant, and she could write paeans to those particular shades of blue, the sweet softness of a good night’s sleep hiding in the crinkles by his eyes. The clock by their bedside read 9:00 AM.

“Maybe we could sleep in,” Natasha agreed. If it meant more time with Steve’s bedhead, and this particular warmth. Natasha was finding that, given full license, she was a greedy person: about food, about hot water, about touch. And time. Time wasn’t something she’d given herself permission to hoard, before. So, too, with Steve. Selfishness—maybe that was part of living, too. They could both do with a little more of it.

“Right answer,” said Steve, tucking his face against her neck happily. He fell back asleep easily; Natasha followed soon after.

At night, jasmine in the garden. The moon, full and forgiving. Natasha, alone, on the balcony, listening to the waves lapping—proof of a planet in motion, orbiting around a burning star. Clint, adjusting the aid in his ear, cocking his head in the wind.

Hear that, Natasha?

A song for the living.

A song for you.

#romanogers #natasha romanoff #steve rogers #natasha romanov #avengers endgame #my writing #ff: mcu #fanfiction #otp: how about a friend

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purplesurveys · 3 years

Text

1063

survey by pinkchocolate

Have you done any of the same things as me this year? (2020 edition)

Planned a shopping spree with a friend?

Visited a shopping centre/mall? Malls are extremely commonplace here and honestly they already serve as the main tourist attractions if you find yourself in Manila, which is why Manila has never been a popular tourist destination itself (foreign tourists usually head to neighboring provinces, which is smart on their end). I’ve been to malls at least 20-30 times this year, but that’s only because of the pandemic. I probably go close to 50-70 times in a normal year.

Had lunch with a friend? Yeah I caught lunch with Angela a couple times at the start of the year. I had a one-photo-a-day gimmick on Instagram, and I’m pretty sure I have a photo of her in there during one of our lunch dates.

Ordered pizza at a restaurant? Again, at the start of the year. Gab and I loved Italian restaurants so we definitely ordered pizza several times.

Been in a department store? I needed to briefly enter one a couple of weeks ago to look for gift wrappers.

Bought pretty new lingerie?

Had coffee with a friend? Yeah Gab and I had study dates at coffee shops every single week. Now, obviously, I just take myself.

Bought DVDs?

Had a cold?

Bought toiletries as a gift for someone else?

Had dinner in a restaurant with your family? Yeah I’m fairly certain we did this at least a couple of times between January and early March. The last time I dined in anywhere was a month ago, but I was only with my parents and my siblings didn’t come along.

Had one of your kitchen appliances break? Our plumbing is a little fucked in general and sometimes we’ll have minor leaks on the floor. My dad’s knives have also gotten a bit dull, so I got him a new knife set for Christmas. But no damage to appliances.

Watched a movie at the cinema?

Struggled for food when the panic buying began? We struggled in that it was a bitch to enter the groceries at first. My dad did the grocieries for us during that time and that was back when they strictly enforced the number of people allowed in the supermarket at one time; and no matter how early he queued, there was always already a line that got there before him. He’d wait around three hours and once he was finally let in, a bunch of alleys or sections in the grocery would already be empty or at least close to becoming empty. We never went hungry or had to skip meals or anything like that, but I do remember having to make do with lesser-known brands we never used before because sometimes those would be the only options left at the grocery.

Wanted to hug a friend, but didn't because you had to social distance? I hugged Angela when I saw her a couple of days ago, and I also hugged Gab when we were still together.

Felt afraid of Covid? My fears over it have tamed over the year, to be honest; but I’m still wary, of course. I hate it when people stand near me and I follow the safety protocols everywhere I go.

Felt afraid to leave the house? Only during the peak of the virus, from March to around May or June. Nowadays I kinda have to go out every now and then for the sake of my sanity.

Deliberately avoided watching the news because it made you feel upset? I mean I took up journ lol so I always watch the news, no matter how upsetting it can get. The one and only time I remember asking my sister to switch the channel was when there was a report on animal abuse.

Had to cancel plans for your birthday? I didn’t have plans for it in the first place, or at least I didn’t have the chance to make them yet, so I’m glad there was nothing to cancel.

Spent your birthday at home? This was the only choice I had. My birthday fell on the most serious and strictest phase of the quarantine, and this was back when nothing was open yet.

Collected a parcel from your doorstep? Online shopping is a norm for me now, lol. I used to not trust it, but now I probably buy at least one item a week.

Eaten an entire box of chocolates in one day? I don’t even like chocolate that much. That sounds so uncomfortably sweet.

Drank fruit flavoured cider?

Eaten birthday cake? Sure, we had cake for my mom’s, my aunt’s, and my cousin’s/godson’s birthdays.

Had a grandparent move into long-term care? My remaining grandparents are all fortunately still very healthy.

Kept a journal of your thoughts and feelings during lockdown? This is technically it, whether’s there’s a lockdown or not. I tried starting a journal after my breakup, but I couldn’t keep it up because my wrist strains easily from handwriting now, hahaha. I find that doing surveys suffice.

Had distressing dreams/nightmares related to the pandemic? No, but about other pressing events in my life.

Felt concerned about your financial situation? Not mine but my family’s.

Returned to a social platform that you took a break from? I left Facebook for a few months after the breakup. I’m back on it again because I had missed the memes, but I also want to permanently delete that account for good, open a new one, and just add the people I want to keep having in my circle. Like I love Gabie’s family to death but I don’t see the point in being Facebook friends with them still, and it actually feels kinda awkward now still seeing them on my list. Idk. We’ll see. I might keep my account or start a new one altogether.

Missed a past hobby or interest? I mean I missed going to malls and bars and going out with my friends, if that counts as an interest. I had to do much less of that this year.

Started a new hobby? I started doing embroidery about a month ago, and a few days ago I started working out. My body is as sore as all fuck, but at least it makes me feel good about myself. For the new year, I also plan on starting a skincare routine after 22 years of not doing anything with my face lol and maybeeee start experimenting with coffee and buy different kinds of beans just because?? Idk, I have a lot of cute hobbies planned out for next year haha I’m excited to see how it goes.

Joined some new Facebook groups? Both for work and personal purposes, yep.

Made some new friends online? I definitely like that I’ve become closer and more familiar with the survey community here. I feel like I barely interacted with anyone pre-Covid, when real life was still a bit more hectic and when it was more difficult to find time to relax and sit down and read everyone’s answers. I also became friends with Justine, Angel, and Bianca when I started as an intern at my workplace.

Felt annoyed because you saw someone without a mask? Everyone wears a mask in public, and there are always people assigned to monitor and lightly scold those stubborn enough to take their masks off. So this isn’t the case, but what I do find annoying is when people stand or walk too close to you. Just last week at the grocery this lady was close enough to be breathing down my neck when I was lining up at the cashier; being non-confrontational for the most part, it felt like being in the deepest pit of hell.

Felt like people were staring at you when you wore a mask? I feel like people are more likely to stare at people who DON’T have a mask.

Bought new stationery? My sister has tons of stationery in her room for whatever reason; when I need one to write short notes or letters, I just ask for some from her.

Video-called your extended family and friends? For sure. We did this a lot especially during the earlier parts of the year.

Written a letter to someone you missed?

Disagreed with the behaviour of a friend?

Felt surprised when someone wanted to be your friend? No one directly said it to me; but as an intern on my first day of the job, it was a really pleasant surprise to find that the co-interns I was going to be with weren’t boring, unemotional cogs who just aimed to do work. They were HILARIOUS from the get-go, was confused as fuck about work, and I could see they just wanted to make our tiny intern family a close-knit and happy group, to which I gladly agreed and went along with.

Bought a new pair of shoes? I got new shoes meant for my first job interview, but I haven’t gotten any brand new sneakers in a while :(

Replaced some toiletries that you ran out of during lockdown? I guess? Toiletries are necessities, so.

Bought some new books? I read new ones, but I didn’t buy them. Some I saw copies of on the internet; one was given as a gift to me.

Bought new cosmetics? I don’t use those.

Received a belated birthday present?

Received a present from a friend overseas?

Discovered a new author that you liked?

Felt like you were drifting away from people you were once close to? *A person. Yeah, well.

Found out that someone you knew had contracted Covid? She’s a mutual friend from my high school days. We aren’t close but we’ve kept in touch by still following each other on social media. She wrote about her experience with Covid on a blog entry.

Realised you had formed a deep connection with someone? I got a lot closer with Andi both because we had to work together for our thesis and because they were there for me, unconditionally and untiringly, when I was coping with my breakup and was in rough shape.

Worried about the financial situation of someone close to you? Of my family, like I said, yes. We had to sell the Vitara because the money that pours into the household monthly isn’t enough to keep paying for it. To be fair, that car was a very big impulse buy by my dad, so we didn’t and don’t feel too bad about losing it hahaha.

Let your guard down to someone? I don’t think so. I was on red alert this year since Gab increasingly broke my trust.

Had an issue with something on social media? Yeah, but I don’t want to get into it. That was such a long time ago and is so irrelevant now.

Felt disconnected from others? I deliberately did so three months ago, so much so that I had acquaintances I barely talked to since graduating talk to Andi and ask where I’ve been.

Changed your internet provider? We’ve had the same one for like 8-9 years now. It works pretty okay for five people who stream videos all day, so we haven’t felt the need to switch.

Felt fortunate/thankful? I mean I’m here, scar-less, and happy with myself on December 31, 2020, right?

Tried some new foods that you enjoyed? Baked sushi is so fucking good.

Re-read a book that you loved? Crazy Is My Superpower by AJ Mendez (aka my favorite girl wrestler, AJ Lee) is always a good read to come back to.

#survey #surveys

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pinkyiepumpkin · 5 years

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Amino Rant

Don’t Use Art Amino

I’ve seen a lot of people get paid to endorse Amino on their Youtube channels, Instagram stories, etc. Amino has some cool features, such as the ability to join communities aligning with your interests and the ability to create your own “Amino”, but it’s severely lacking in structure and supervision, damaging the experience. For me personally, I’ve tried amino , gained a decent, yet small following (which does nothing), made a few friends (most of whom have left now), gotten featured (which meant little), more than I have ever achieved on any other site -- yet I hated every second of it. Why? Well there’s a few reasons.

Curators cause more issues than they solve.

You know how I said the Amino community mainly consists of over sensitive, melodramatic individuals? Well they let them run the app too. On an amino, any person can become a curator with approval, which means they immediately gain the powers to disable posts, shut down chats, and ban accounts. This sounds like a good idea in theory -- Amino curators can appoint other leaders so that the creators don’t have to invest in a massive amount of staff to monitor and conduct each individual Amino. But, when you appoint a ridiculous amount of curators, give them all the powers off a staff member with little supervision, and set no rules to hold them accountable for their actions, what happens? Pure chaos. Users who receive the power to be Curators get a ridiculous superiority complex. It’s almost like making the “cool kids club”. These curators are rude, unprofessional, and ban-happy. I’ve seen whole chats shut down because one person was causing issues and the curators liked them (therefore didn’t want to ban their account). I’ve had curators disable my posts for a vague reason and completely ignore me when I ask for more clarification. I’ve seen people completely banned from the app because they simply disagreed with a popular user or a curator. By the way, there’s not even away to report curators. There’s not one set rule in the guidelines that tells you how to appeal an issue or report a curator -- they simply don’t care about their members.

Your follower count means nothing.

On most websites, your following is important to the algorithm and how many people are able to find your account. Your followers see your posts because they chose to, your page grows, and you get more interactions with your posts which in turn increases your chance of showing up in other people’s recommended feeds. This doesn’t happen on Amino. The site opens onto the featured page, so you instantly see curator-approved material before your own following feed. The layout of the amino itself is confusing and crowded, and it actually took me a while to realize i could even access my following feed. Even then, most users don’t even bother with it. Instead, they usually remain on the featured page and the latest feed. Because of this, you may gain a large following, but your followers will almost never see your post unless it gets featured. And you know how you get featured? By curator approval (and we all know how great they are). Even after being featured, it’s a one time dose of five minutes of fame before you return to no one seeing your posts and no one interacting with them. The majority of your likes will come from random people seeing it on the recent page before it immediately disappears underneath hundreds of other posts.

You’re not allowed to raise awareness for mental health.

Art is often an outlet for those with mental illness. It’s a coping mechanism, and artists can also find solace in knowing others are struggling just as they are. For some, letting out their frustrations and thoughts in healthy conversation with others who have had similar experiences is therapeutic and can even save some from falling deeper into despair. How ever, this is absolutely unquestionably unallowed on the art Amino. You are never, EVER allowed to mention depression, or suicide, or thoughts of self harm, even if you’re venting and reaching out for help and include a trigger warning. The Amino specifically states: “The following are strictly prohibited: In-depth discussions...on the topics of depression, self-harm, and suicide.” That’s right kids! Bottle up your feelings! Don’t share your struggles! And make sure to never, ever reach out for help because we WILL ban you!

Making your own Amino is nearly impossible.

Okay, so you’re probably like “Connie if you don’t like the rules, just make your own Amino!” Yeah right. The guidelines for being able to list your Amino publicly make it nearly impossible to get started. First, you have to download a separate app to create your Amino. Then, you have to create at least 10 posts. Next, you must have 15 members, which you must find without advertising on another amino because most of them have rules specifically against that. Then, you must appoint at least one other curator, and each of you have to spend at least 10 minutes on the app every. Single. Day. Your Amino also must be 4 days old. If you manage all this, you can finally submit it for others to see, that is IF Amino approves it.

Amino has predators.

I haven’t personally experienced this, but I noticed a lot of parents complaining in the reviews that strangers are trying to bait children into sexually-explicit conversations and who knows what else. I don’t know what Amino is actively doing to combat this, since I haven’t seen them say anything about it themselves or address it. However I think it should be noted so that parents are aware of it, ESPECIALLY because I’ve seen a lot of youtubers endorse the app through paid promotions.

In conclusion, Amino sucks and you should use other art sharing sites instead.

For the record, these are things that I personally have experienced in the year I’ve used the app. Others may have had a more pleasant, or even a more negative experience. I’d like to know how your experience was!

https://rottenwebsites.miraheze.org/wiki/Amino_Apps ←- website that talks about issues i missed/ didn't experience

#art amino #amino #amino apps #art sharing #amino trouble #rant #whining #reddit #art sites #amino problems #problems #long post #long read #article #complaint #complaining #mental health #mental health awareness

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the-blind-geisha · 6 years

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Ignis Scientia x Princess!Reader - As You Wish, My Lady {Chapter 2}

A/N: The description will be the same here as I am not keen on writing too much about the chapter in question to give away plots ahead. The other names are listed below and will be linked in time when I get to their respected stories. I made this one a bit shorter for many reasons and deleted a scene I hadn’t the energy to put in, but, enjoy.

Keep in mind, these are all strictly AU based—in a world where the bros might not have even met and or the layout and archetypes of the world have changed. For this one, Altissia has its own royalty ruling over Accordo. Enjoy~. If I find the time, inspiration or the response is good, I may add more to them.

Pairing: Ignis Scientia x Princess!Reader

Desc: He’s been there through everything—your ups, your downs, and listened to the worst of it all. He practically raised you when your parents were too busy to be around, and he, Ignis Scientia, became your everything. But perhaps you trusted him with far more than you were supposed to…

Rated: This story has been edited and can be found unedited on AO3 under my pen name Oreana! The file name of the story remains the same!

Words: 8,237

<<Previous | Next >>

At most nights you found your bed cold while others you found it accompanied by the presence of your advisor after you managed to sneak Ignis into your bedroom in the late evening hours of Altissia with the life of the palace dying around you for the day. It was innocent when it came to the private, sensual exploration of one another—at least, that’s what you told yourself and he perhaps did in turn as Ignis fell to your side in worshipping want without much effort on your part. He was still learning just as you were, but in the passing days of such intimacy, he seemed to pick up quickly on what excited you the most and what delayed such peak delight.

It was hard for you to say you knew what aroused and urged him into such stimulating states of euphoria as Ignis was content to bow to your needs over letting you tending to him. If you were to be honest with yourself, in the beginning you would have had it no other way as it left a sickening emptiness inside of you for not having the balmy breath of his moans and tender moving words upon your bare skin, the lingering and loving taste of his kiss upon your lips and the ever subtle way his fingers graced your figure as if to take in every part of you.

{EDITED}

“You always pull away too fast for my taste,” you panted breathlessly, wishing he’d at least let you embrace him for a moment longer and enjoy in the warmth that was contained in your body.

“Just being cautious,” Ignis reminded you, as he tossed what had been done to the trash bin nearby. “I’d rather you be cross with me than I have a bigger mess to clean up in time, Y/N.”

It seemed the first time was still an anxious thought on his plate. You knew day in and day out he still worried over the possibility he may have gotten you pregnant as he was always watching you closely—asking you how you felt and monitoring everything else that could be a telling sign of a baby on the way. In all honesty, it was starting to get you stressed and you would playfully smack his shoulder and tell him to relax.

As he did away with the used condom and found his spot there under the covers with you, you playfully spat at him with your arm draped across his chest, which was still dewed with sweat, rising and falling ever so calmly to regain his breath. “You are such a worrier, I swear. Nothing bad is going to happen,” you soothed, kissing the side of his neck to feel as it moved against your lips when he swallowed.

“If we remain guarded, yes, my Lady—that is true,” your advisor corrected as he took care in handling with the lamplight to be certain it was off and only the moonlight cascading through the curtains gave any form of silhouette to Ignis in the coming moments. His hand moved, grasping yours to let it lay pleasantly to rest on his upper abdomen. “How do you feel? Are you alright?”

It was a different type of question than the last few earlier in the day. Ignis seemed always intent to be certain he didn’t over do it in regards to aggression or being too slow for your liking. “Just fine,” you answered, finding comfort near the nook of his neck. “I wish you’d let me enjoy exploring you sometime.”

With your hand in his own, he escorted your knuckles near his lips where he kissed you there again and again as if to praise you once more in his own ways. The more you focused on the way he kissed you, the more you realized it almost felt…different in some manner. In the heat of the moment, you didn’t focus too much on it, but you did feel special and as though you were the only thing that mattered to him. “Mmm, in time, my Princess. As of current, I am merely wishing to be spoiled first.”

You gave him a funny look that was no doubt lost in the darkness and him without his glasses. “You call pampering me being the one who is spoiled here?” A small laugh escaped you. “I’d say it was the other way around.”

In the darkness of the room, you heard his own quiet chortle that was barricaded in his throat. “Indeed,” Ignis said cryptically. “Soon his Highness Anduin will be here to give you the proper pleasure you so desire.” His words seemed to teeter between honesty and some form of somber tenor that you could swear you heard in his speech. “I am learning what I too can before he takes his seat beside you in a few weeks.”

A frown lingered upon your features as your fingers curled tightly on Ignis’ touch to show him support. “Actually, the problems still occurring within Niflheim are keeping him busy, so it may be another month or so till he shows up.” You sighed softly at the thought but a part of you found relief as well knowing it meant it gave you more times with Ignis.

Ignis merely hummed as if to ponder that over, giving you no indication how he truly felt even as he kissed your forehead in the veil of night shrouding your room. “Have you ever planned what you will do upon his arrival here? I heard his Majesty speaking of marriage when tending to breakfast. ”

“Of course he would be planning that already,” you groaned with a roll of your eyes. “I am sure the sooner they place my life in someone else’s hands, the happier they’ll be.”

“Y/N…” Ignis said in a scolding tone as he didn’t like it too much when you spoke in dishonor of your parents.

Frowning at his desires to silence you, your eyes flashed up at where you could just see your advisor in the dim lighting, which haloed his form. “I am not even going to apologize, Iggy… When I was sick and wrestling horribly with the aftermath of that daemon attack, you were the one running to my bedside to be sure I was okay and feeding me, bathing me and even helping me with my leg muscles until I could manage to walk on my own again. I only saw my parents a handful of times…” The pain of that struck at you harder than it should have, doing all you could to keep your tears at bay. “What parents do that to their bedridden child…?”

Ignis was quiet, uncertain of what even he could say in the royals’ defense. He seemed to ponder quietly back on those times at your mere mentioning of it given his sudden silence.

“Ignis?”

“Mm?”

“When I was out cold for several days, who was there beside me through most of it?” A part of you was scared to ask, but you had to know.

“My Lady, please…” Ignis sighed, massaging the space between his eyes as if to combat a minor migraine the question agitated.

“Who was it, Ignis!” you demanded to know in a higher whisper.

A sigh prompted his chest to rise and fall and you felt it against the arm that draped over him. “Your father came to your side as often as he could as did your mother…I, however, was there through most of it.” He tried to relax after releasing that bit of knowledge to you. “I was trying to get you to eat when you would be semi-conscious, but there were moments you would react violently to anything your body attempted to ingest, and I became frightened that you would die in my arms with how starved and dehydrated your body was becoming. I prayed to the gods every night that you would be alright, so when you finally roused, I felt my prayers had been answered even if you were in the most vile pain of your life.”

A sigh escaped your nostrils, finding some kindness in at least Ignis being there with you through most of it. “Hmph…well, because of the way they’ve treated me, I’ve made it a mission to make it unfeasible for any ‘true’ match to be one that’s idealistic for me.”

You felt Ignis turn at your confession. “Example…?”

“As a little girl, I used to tell my parents that if a man truly loved me, he would do the impossible for me.” Arm remaining at rest lazily across his chest, you smiled to yourself at the innocents of the memory while nuzzling against his bare form. “If he wanted to win my heart, he’d have to get me the very thing I ever wanted.”

“Such as?”

“A star—the brightest start from the northern most part of the sky,” you answered without restraint. “When my parents told me what I was asking for was impractical, I kept with it regardless.” A bitter frown tugged upon the corners of your lips. “I know no man could do this, but if that is the case, no man I marry or they force me to wed will be worthy of my heart.”

The bed moaned ever slightly under Ignis’ minor movements. You expected he would equally laugh at you and tell you that it was merely a child’s wish of a dream, but he didn’t. “And what if a man did bend to such a request or, perhaps, gave you something close to this innocent dream?”

You couldn’t contain the harsh laugh that sputtered past your lips as if to scoff that could happen. “If a man actually got me a star from the sky I would tell my parents ‘no, this is the one’ and marry him instead regardless of what they would say or do to me.” A pleasant sigh escaped you, eyes feeling a bit heavy as exhaustion was starting to set in given the early rise you always had to do day in and day out. “If he got me something close, well…good enough, I suppose, and I would see it as a nice gesture.”

Noting your tone labored with weariness, Ignis’ fingers brushed against your hair as if to urge you into the idea of sleep. “You should rest, my Lady. Tomorrow is another early day for us both.” His words whispered in kind upon your forehead before he planted a tender kiss there to seal such a sentiment.

Eyes already closed, you heard his words pleasantly rumbling from within his chest against your ear. “Mm…hmm…” you wearily responded, the sounds of everything thereafter becoming near to a dream. The lullaby like breathing patterns of Ignis ignited your passion to sleep as did the occasional creak of the bed when he would shift on the mattress.

Silence…but…

“I love you…”

The words came from somewhere in your mind, but with how you teetered from reality and the dreaming world, you weren’t sure if they were truly said by Ignis or you merely dreamed it as your body was too exhausted to respond to such a damning phrase.

There were times you wished you could leave the suffocation of the palace walls whenever Ignis had to venture beyond them to head to the market to get food for the coming week or so whenever there was a shortage on ingredients. However, the times he usually ventured to do so, you were ordered to remain studying under the watchful eye of your music teacher who was relentless in his teachings of the piano. Ever you were to miss a key—a lazy mistake—he would swat the back of your hand with the music baton he carried. You deemed his ways harsh, but a princess had to be cultured and pass as the ever perfect lady even if it apparently meant a harsh teacher to have you be so.

While your hands ached less (at least) after the lesson, you were disappointed to notice Ignis had yet to return to the palace. Digging into your pocket for your phone, you sent him a text to be certain he was at least on his way back as you wanted to have him in your arms again.

Y/N (11:46 AM): Iggy, you left like three hours ago. Where are you?

You waited impatiently, sitting down on your bed as you knew he was usually pretty good at responding given how often he monitored his phone. The moment your device sprung to life with a quick reply, you smiled at just seeing his name.

Ignis (11:47 AM): Still at the market, Lady Y/N. Was there something urgent that needed tending to?

Pondering how to put it delicately as you didn’t want to get him into too much trouble, you rolled your tongue over your lower lip with a playful grin following shortly after as you typed your response knowing messages could be deleted if it came down to it.

Y/N (11:50 AM): How about my body and my heart? lol

Seemed the response caught him by surprise or he was busy as the advisor didn’t answer right away making you wonder what might have obtained his attention at the moment. When the warning of an incoming message being made showed up on his side, you waited eagerly for his reply just enjoying in flustering him a bit.

Ignis (11:56 AM): Princess, you’re going to get me in trouble. Try to keep such pressing needs for a more private setting.

Now that was just making you want to bother him all the more as you loved messing with him just to watch his reaction even if it had to be through text messages. However, you were aware you couldn’t get too out of hand as he was in a public environment and the last thing you wanted was for anybody to get the idea the advisor was indeed sleeping with the Princess of Altissia.

Y/N (12:00 PM): But I am just sitting here in desperate need for you to love me once more.

Again, his response delayed quite heavily that time as though a word you may have said threw him off of his guard. You didn’t read too much into it, but the response you got was hardly one you were expecting given the length of time it took him to answer.

Ignis (12:11 PM): Oh?

You jerked your head back with a raise of your brow. Was this guy for real? Ignis knew how to romance just fine in person but texting seemed to be something new all together with anything other than business matters.

Y/N (12:12 PM): What do you mean ‘oh’? lol I want you to tend to me, if you catch my drift, Iggy.

Again, he seemed to take awhile to answer but this time it was more his typing given the icon that notified he was responding. It made you curious if he was wondering what to even say or if he was embarrassed to say it.

Ignis (12:19 PM): Never mind that. Did you really want me to love you?

The question read more literal than sensual. Were lines getting blurred for him or was he really just this bad at texting discreetly in regards to sexual matters or any matter of the heart? Perhaps it was better to be a bit more forward at the current time? You loved Ignis but…laws and even a betrothal kept you from wanting to care to love him more than you did, so you merely kept him at arm’s length when it dealt with your heart.

Y/N (12:23 PM): I know I want you in my bed, letting me be the one to fuck you this time. I don’t want you having all the power.

Ignis (12:25 PM): How…poetic. I am going to have to delete that, Lady Y/N, just so you know. I don’t need anybody finding that message by happenstance. I’ll be home in just a little while. Try to keep your thirst a bit more prudent and hushed.

You still couldn’t help but laugh to yourself and roll your eyes at his behavior, putting your phone to rest on the nightstand nearby in your bedroom for the time being. However, in the silence of the room, you couldn’t resist the biting anxiousness, which crept upon you, to where it was starting to upset your stomach a bit and make you feel slightly nauseated.

Was he forgetting why you were doing this? You had a fondness to Ignis, of course—he put up with a lot of your tantrums and down moments where you felt lonely or though the world didn’t care, but to add a word such as ‘love’ into it was a bit…forbidden. If your father or mother found out about it, he would be punished severely, and you looked down upon as a dishonor to the family name (the last part something you could handle as you weren’t exactly walking with pride in their name to begin with). Ignis would no doubt be whipped, thrown out of the city to be fed to the daemons…made a villain to all in Eos for his unspeakable acts against a woman of royalty…you couldn’t help but dry heave at the very thought of waking up without him, leaving you to make haste to the bathroom incase something did indeed manage to come up beyond worry.

You continued to think on the consequences in the coming hour as Ignis had indeed arrived home but was busy putting away the things he bought in the kitchen and other respectable places of the palace with you ignoring his ‘I’m back’ message that lingered on your phone.

“Just need to remind him it’s platonic and nothing else,” you whispered to yourself, biting at your thumbnail in thought. “Soon Anduin will be here, and then this will all stop. Nobody will know…Ignis will be safe.” There came a knock at your door, making you move your finger from your mouth though still a bit nervous as you weren’t sure how loud your self mutterings were. “C-Come in.”

Given the elegance of the knock, you weren’t surprised it was Ignis when he graced the room. “I am unaware if you received my message, Lady Y/N,” Ignis began as he fixed his gloves upon his hands with a gentle tug of the fabric when entering further, “but I have, indeed, returned to aid you as you so beckoned before.” Noting the way you looked on the bed, the advisor hurried to your side to supportively touch your upper arm. “Y/N? Something the matter?”

Your eyes graced his and it was there you breathed out your worries as they seemed to melt away regardless under his touch and the mere caring look in his eyes. Wrapping your arms around his neck, you brought him in close, nuzzling into the nape of his neck. Ignis seemed to freeze at the physical response, in time he did sweetly embrace your body with his palm moving in a supportive and loving up and down motion. “I just…missed you.”

It wasn’t the honest truth but it wasn’t a horrible lie either. You didn’t want it to end—this fake union with Ignis—but you didn’t want him to fall under your selfish wants either.

Ignis could tell your words harbored some form of falseness to them but it wasn’t bitter in any form. He did pull just a bit of the way from your embrace, fixing his glasses on the slope of his nose when they began to bother him and he gave a curious gaze to you. “A fraction of that I believe, my Lady…but I won’t force you to divulge the rest.” Ignis gracefully moved once more, kissing the corner of your lips.

Again, the kiss felt different than the times before. It went from feeling bland with no reason other than to excite you to a kiss of meaning—a kiss to lovingly conceal the pain that was forcing you to speak erroneously. It made your heart ache in some manner. Instead of it healing, it stirred the nausea yet again, but you swallowed it down to your gut once more. Hands to his cheeks, you got the advisor to gaze at you. “Let me be the one to show you pleasure this time. I’ve never had the chance to.”

Ignis’ green eyes shifted about curiously as if expecting you to say more. When that precious word didn’t seem to come forth, he nasally sighed discreetly. “As you wish, my Lady.”

{EDITED}

It was the middle of the day but both of you cared very little—leaving you to rest under the covers in the afterglow of your time together. The ever tender beating of Ignis’ heart escorted you into a pleasant slumber…at least until the nightmares of your worries caught up with you.

The dream was silent for a time, but you hardly needed sounds or words to understand what was being portrayed in the vivid reaches of your mind. Ignis before the council, your father and mother furious as your father pointed accusingly at the advisor who remained bowed in submission to their words that shouted into a void of nothingness that made you realize, as a figment of yourself stood in the crowd beyond reach of him, your father was sentencing Ignis in punishment for touching you in such a manner.

Ignis seemed to stand firm regardless, head bowed as he kept his hands clenched at his side. His lip lowering dejectedly at the news, you saw yourself scream while trying to reach out for him only to have the guards keep you at bay as two others near your advisor took him by the arm and jerked him away from the eyes of the council and the rulers of Altissia who whispered back and forth to each other with disgust at what was uncovered before them. Still, you fought to try and reach out to him but it felt as though he were miles from you, the distance between you only worsening as he was forced from the throne room.

The loud closing of the throne room doors echoed in the back of your mind as you screamed a sort of cry that became more audible in time with tears streaming down your face. The very tormenting thought you would never see him again gnawed at you. He was gone, and never again would you wake up to see him there before you no matter how much you wished it.

All because of your selfish needs and wants…

“IGNIS!”

A heated gasp of fright brought you back to yourself in the bed you almost forgot you had fallen asleep in an hour or so ago. Even if Ignis was very much beside you, you hadn’t time to react or care to in order to find comfort in the idea as you felt sick to your stomach at the tormenting thought that felt real for that moment you endured it. Throwing the covers off of yourself, you stumbled forward before rushing to your wastebasket to gag and heave violently to where the remains of your breakfast emptied from your stomach.

“Y/N…!” Ignis called to you, panicked and uncertain of what could have caused such a reaction as he took to his feet and hurried beside you to be certain you were alright. “What ever is the matter?” he asked, rubbing your back to try and settle you.

It was embarrassing to be seen as this, but you hadn’t the stomach lately to be able to handle the intrusive thoughts as of late that plagued you at the very idea the two of you could be found out and Ignis banished…or worse. Hand to your chest as you stuttered and shook from the aftermath of the vile act, you felt Ignis’ touch in time upon your grasp before he ushered a tissue for you to use to clean your mouth with if you so chose. “A…a nightmare…A horrible…horrible dream.” You gulped, trying to keep down the temptation of vomiting once more.

Ignis let you speak, trying to bring you back down to a calm state with a gentle ‘shush’ now and again. “It was merely a bad dream, Lady Y/N,” he reminded you in relief.

“Gah…!” you gasped, eyes closed tightly as tears threatened to form at the very thought you could lose the one person you cared for. “By Leviathan…! I just…” Moving your quivering lip inward, you fell against Ignis’ chest as you tried to recover from the traumatizing thought. “Gods, I thought I lost you…I thought I was going to lose you, and I still do worry about it…”

It was gibberish to him. Ignis merely rubbed your arm opposite of him to continue to sooth you. “I am right here, Y/N,” he reminded you quietly, his words seeming heavy with some thought of personal matters. “Have these thoughts been making you ill lately…?”

“I-I guess,” you murmured, taking to your feet in time when Ignis escorted you to rise. “My stomach’s been all kinds of shit anyways, and I guess the nightmares don’t help that much.”

Ignis’ hold on your arms seemed to tighten, making you gaze upward at him as he seemed to dread speaking afterward when moving you back to the bed given the fact you were still unclothed. “Princess…when was your last period?”

Having that question given to you, you found yourself struggling for an answer as you hadn’t cared to think about it as you were enjoying in the personal company with Ignis for so long. “Umm…I don’t…I haven’t had it yet.” Seeing the risen panic in his expression, you quickly raised your hands. “Don’t freak out! I-I’m just late! I’m sure of it!”

He sighed, shaking his head as he took to his clothing to redress himself in a hasty manner before tending to your trashcan you had thrown up within. “I’ll return in a moment…”

Left alone in your bedroom, you too did your best to get decent as a fretful chill washed over you. One time…it was one time! Some women had to try many times before they could get pregnant—why would you be special? Again and again, you tried to convince yourself it was merely your nerves messing with you in terms of your upset stomach lately. It made sense…right?

Upon Ignis’ return, he came back with your cleaned trashcan but also removed a small box he kept hidden in his coat to hand to you. “A pregnancy test,” he whispered. “Go to the bathroom, and don’t let anybody see that. Don’t discard it in the trash there either—bring everything back to me.”

“When did you get this?” you asked, wondering if he was always skeptical after your first time together or he had known sooner than you in some ways something might be wrong.

“After our first and last moment together without contraceptives, my Lady.” Ignis nodded nervously towards the bedroom door. “Go. I’ll be waiting here as I tidy your bedroom a bit.”

Your feet felt glued to the floor till you managed to make your way to the bedroom door and down the hall to the public washroom in the palace in haste with the box covered. I’m not pregnant. I’m not…! You mentally insisted again and again, heart beating wildly in fear of the truth, praying with all of your might that it was indeed just nerves and nothing more.

If you were pregnant…there would be no lie you could truly tell in order to take the blame away from Ignis as very few men acted with interest of your needs beyond him.

It was agonizing waiting for the end result, but what was worse was getting it when you noted that the test had come back positive much to your dismay. Tears blurring your vision, your hands trembled as you wanted to throw it away and pretend nothing ever happened, but you knew why Ignis demanded you bring everything back—not just so he’d have knowledge of it but also so none of the servants could find it when cleaning up. Sitting upon the rim of the bathtub, you covered your face with your hands and began to cry uncontrollably in silence.

What now…? You were going to put an end to it all after that horrible nightmare and the painful thought of losing Ignis if this was ever exposed. Now, there was no way to stop this. In the end, you could very well lose him after all.

Hiding everything out of sight of any prying eyes in the hallway, you made it back down to your bedroom where you saw Ignis sitting there in anxious wait for your return. As he took to his feet to ask you what the news was, he held back the words as the defeated expression on your face spoke volumes to him.

“Y/N…” Ignis began, his head rolling to the side to where his shoulders slumped in defeat of the mere look of what the news was to be.

You shut and locked the door in haste, hurrying over towards him to hug him tightly and barricade the horrible sobbing sound that shook past your lips against his chest. “I-I’m sorry! I’m so, so sorry…! I didn’t mean to be this careless…!” Your hold was tight…unmovable as you feared the moment you released him you would never see him again. “What are we going to do…?”

Ignis’ sigh was heavy and deep with a form of regret and fear equal to your own, but he did his best to conceal it and remain a pillar for you to stand on. “I will speak with the King tomorrow about this—.”

“NO!” the words accidentally shot forth, your grip upon his coat tightening in desperation. Ignis paused in his speech, head jerking back at the sudden response. “L-Listen—Anduin will be here eventually, and I can sleep with him, and nobody will know the difference! They won’t know it’s yours!”

Ignis’ expression went from shocked and worried to stern and cold at the mere thought. “You would dare keep this from His Majesty, your betrothed and worse yet—keep my child from the truth of who I am?”

You shook your head in disbelief at his words, unable to understand why Ignis would be so willing to take the fall for this accident. “If it means you being safe and not alienated before all of Eos in the papers? Yes!”

His brow wrinkled in dismay, a sort of frown of anger you’d never had the opportunity to see on him before. “Princess, I am willing to make my mistakes right no matter the cost while you wish to hide behind a barrier of deception.” His tone was that of scolding you for your decision in the matter. “I refuse—I vehemently refuse—to have my child grown up in this palace without knowing I am its father while some other man gladly takes that title away from me! I will not just be its caretaker!” His words hardened, shouting so firmly you began to worry someone else beyond the walls would hear the truth you were desperate to keep buried.

“Ignis, it was an accident!” you reminded him, feeling your breath leave you as he moved unemotionally away from your touch. “You weren’t meant to be the father of any child I was to have!”

Again, his green eyes widened in a mixture of feelings hard for you to pin down in the heat of the moment, but you could sense a form of pain in the expression. His teeth bared in disgust at your statement, peering at you as though you had attempted to become some villain in his eyes by denying him something he wanted. “I am going to speak to the King about this matter regardless of what you may wish, my Lady—that is the end of that.”

Hearing him threaten such a thing as he attempted to leave the room, you panicked and lashed out by accident. “I forbid you to, Ignis! I-I order you to stand down!” you retaliated, a foul taste in your mouth arising at treating him like he was nothing more than an advisor and less of a friend you had grown close to.

Ignis stopped dead in his tracks, hand just inches from the doorknob when he heard your words. He turned slowly, the look in his eyes that of shock and a form of disgust that you would treat him as such given the past month you two had been intimate with one another. “You order me to, my Lady?” he asked, trying to be certain he heard you right as he turned on his heels to face you once more. “You would do this to me? You would use your power over me to silence me so!”

His words continued to growl with aggression as he gestured to himself, making you sick to your stomach yet again at the very idea you had to do this just to try and keep him safe from what you deemed a horrible fate. Tears welling in your eyes, you backed up slightly from his advances towards you with your fingers fidgeting with one another. “I want you…I want you safe, Ignis…” you whimpered, teeth biting upon your lower lip as it quivered in inner repulsion at what you were forcing him to do. “I-I don’t want to lose you…! You’re the only friend I have!”

His back straightened, face relaxed only a portion at your response to him. “Then what friend orders the other’s silence…?” Ignis asked, his words labored with pain at releasing them from their dwelling in his throat. “What friend treats the other lesser than?” You heard his arms fall to his sides as if in defeat, your teary gaze downward at your feet as you were too ashamed to look at him. “I truly thought I meant something far more to you, Princess.”

“Ignis, I’m sorry!” you screamed, fingers buried within your hair before harshly removing them as you felt like you were losing him no matter what given the direction of the conversation.

Ignis looked away when your eyes graced his. Body limp with surrender, he turned once more with his arms rising and falling shortly after as if to shove away the conversation, headed for the door to leave. “Speak with me again when you are far more reasonable, my Lady,” he murmured in a quieter tone before opening your bedroom doors and excusing himself.

You hadn’t the drive or the want to follow him. Collapsing to your knees there in the silence of your bedroom, you covered your mouth to stop yourself from wanting to scream once more as your tears continued to mark your features. Embracing yourself, you trembled uncontrollably at the very fear of losing the only thing that mattered—him.

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ellana-ravenwood · 7 years

Text

A belated Halloween - Batsis (reader) x Batfam

Prompt 8 : Came to investigate someone screaming next door.

Well, here it is, 25 days late, a story for Halloween haha. Hum. Yeah. Anyway, some Batsis stuffs because I’ve had requests to have more of her around here :-). So...Yay for some siblings bonding around a horror film and acting like they’re not scared ! Boom, hope you’ll like it :

You can find my masterlist here : @ella-ravenwood-archives

________________________________________________

Your father is the first one that noticed, on the 25th of november, that this year, it didn’t happen...and the fact that none of you realized it broke his heart.

He had to do something about it.

As far as he could remember, it’s the first time, since this little tradition of yours started, that you guys skipped it ! Without even knowing !

Yes, he had to do something about it. Because in a way, it was his fault.

************

It all started when you were six. Dick was about fourteen, Jason eleven, and Tim nine. Damian wasn’t around yet.

It was a complete accident really.

Halloween was always the busiest night for Batman.

It seemed that all the freaks in Gotham came out at that time of the year.

It was so bad, that more often than not, and though it killed him to do so, the great Batman would have to ask Superman or Wonder Woman for help.

Sometimes both.

Halloween was always the busiest night for Batman and...He always forbid any of his children to go out with him on that day.

Dick and Jason were already accomplished Robins by that time, and Tim was almost ready. You were too young for your father to let you out at all, too young to be a vigilante yet (your dad thought he should give you a few more years, your mom, Catwoman, thought so too...at least to fight off crime, because she already took you on a few...hum, “robberies”. Needless to say, your father didn't know. You and your mom were great at keeping secrets).

So each Halloween, you and your brothers would stay at home (no kids could trick or treat in Gotham...) and would just eat tons of candies previously bought by Alfred. Your beloved butler, that you came to see as your grandfather, would hide candies all around the mansion to give you a semblance of actual Halloween, and it would always be so fun !

But this year, fate had decided otherwise.

The year you were six, Halloween was a particularly rough night for Gotham, and Alfred was too busy helping your father by monitoring the Batcomputer to really take care of you guys, to keep an eye on what was going on.

Fortunately, he trusted Dick and Jason, who were rather mature boys, to take care of you and Tim. Besides, he tested both of them before, to make sure they were ready to take care of their younger siblings. They were responsible and mature enough for it. And you and Tim were calm and behaved children anyway.

Alfred trusted Dick especially and, oh it was a mistake...Because contrary to popular belief, contrary to what your father and Al’ thought, the “horror movie night” was your oldest brother’s idea, not Jason’s.

It was around 9pm, you guys had found all the candies already, and it was suppose to be yours and Tim’s bedtime (in the Wayne household, when you reach the age of ten, you can stay up a bit longer).

But Dick, being the best brother in the World, just couldn’t tell you guys to go to bed while there was still so much you could all do !

Well of course right now, you guys were all in the living room, splayed on couches and armchairs, not really knowing what to do with yourselves.

Tim proposed to play video games, but that was ruled out by Jason who pointed out it always ended up in all of you being way too excited, which would lead to you guys misbehaving and such, and Alfred was counting on him and Dick to make sure such things wouldn’t happen. Tim pouted for a few minutes but he got over it pretty fast because...yeah, fair point.

You wanted to play hide and seek but...knowing both your father and Alfred weren’t in the actual house freaked you out too much (what if there were monsters ?! BIG ONES ?!), and you vetoed that out yourself (making your brothers chuckle in the process).

Jason had a lot of ideas of things to do, but all of them involved something that would probably get you in trouble and...Well, that night, Jason discovered something about himself : he kinda liked danger and doing things he wasn’t suppose to do. But with his younger siblings around ? No way Jose.

And that’s when the idea came to Dick’s mind.

He recalled watching TV, the night before, in his room (which was strictly forbidden but hey, who was going to enforce that rule really ?), and seeing an add for a “special Halloween movie night”.

This is when it happened.

The year you were six. One of the roughest night your father ever had.

This is when the “horror movie night” tradition started.

Of course your father and Alfred weren’t really happy when they realized that you guys watched movies you weren’t suppose to but...They didn’t have the heart to stop you from doing it, because it was just so damn cute how, the morning after Halloween, they often found you all cuddled up in the same bed, because you were too scared to sleep alone (though none of you would admit that you were actually scared).

When Damian arrived, he simply joined in, and oh your father’s bed was so crammed every Halloween night, even now, while Dick was in his early twenties and you all were old enough not to be scared anymore...

Yes. It all started on the year you were six, on Halloween night. On the roughest night your father ever had...and oh, it was a perfect timing.

That night, you got forever traumatized of dolls (your father had to remove any dolls you had in your bedroom the next day...oh he could just recall your tiny body hiding behind him while he was carefully removing all of them, and oh cute you were, clutching his leg and telling him to be careful because they were “vicious creatures”) because of a certain movie called “Child’s Play”, and had a nightmare...which made you run across the corridor directly to your dad’s bedroom, very early in the morning, as he was just crashing down on it.

Bruce Wayne was battered and bruised, and had a terrible night and...comforting his sweet daughter with cuddles and soothing kisses was the perfect way to cheer him up.

That morning, after one of the roughest night of his life (right behind the one when he lost his parents...), Bruce Wayne couldn’t stop smiling, feeling his sons all gathered around him, and you safe and warm, holding him tight in your arms, asleep on his chest.

Maybe “horror movie night” wasn’t such a bad thing...

************

On the contrary. Through the years (almost fifteen now), “horror movie night at the Manor” became a great night of bonding for the Wayne siblings.

Damian arrived in you guys’ life a few months before Halloween, years ago, and it’s only on that “fateful” night, gathered around a horror film, that you all finally managed to crack his shell, and that he truly became a part of the family.

That for the first time, he really did consider you guys his family, and oh he would die for you all !

Yes. That night was important, it was a time where you could all relax and...but that was a lie. Halloween started to become less and less that night of “eating too many candies and scaring your younger sibling”, and more and more...”stress”.

Your father felt guilty that you forgot about this tradition this year...By now, all of you guys would go out to help him on Halloween night, but you’d always come back to watch a film, no matter how tired you all were !

But this year’s Halloween resembled the one that happened when you were six. A particularly rough one.

And your father felt guilty.

Because the reason his children, didn’t even notice that this year, they didn’t watch a horror film all together on Halloween night, was because they helped him more than usually.

Was because you were worried about him.

Truthfully, he wasn’t getting any younger and nowadays, you and your brothers would be out with him every nights, watching his back at all time.

And there was no way that on the worst night in Gotham you’d leave him go out alone...You couldn’t loose your father ! This time however, you all got beaten up pretty badly, and skipped the movie and oh Bruce couldn’t let that pass !

He was going to make things right. He had to.

************

Needless to say that, at first, you were all rather confused.

Off patrol ? All of you at the same time ?

Usually, only one or two (max) of you would stay home (rarely happened anyway). If you guys needed time off or if you were injured and needed to rest, the others would still be up and...why was your father telling all of you to stay home ? This was so weird.

It’s only when he silently entered the living room, where you and your brothers were all sitting on the biggest couch (big enough for the five of you to sit comfortably), that you understood what he was doing.

And oh it was such a relief !

For a few minutes, all of you were trying to remember what you might have done to make him take such a decision. If you did anything wrong and such...But no. No you didn’t. On the contrary, you were all starting to take yourselves too seriously, and the last thing Bruce Wayne wanted for his children, was for them to be too much like him.

But when you all saw that he had in his hands a few horror film he knew you never watched, and you all smiled widely and had trouble hiding your excitement...he knew that he didn’t have to worry about you turning into him (he often worried about that, especially when it concerned you and Damian, as you guys looked like him quite a bit, and unfortunately got some of his personality traits...But you were also both fiercely independents ! Selina never understood why your dad was always so worried about you being like him, because she loved the fact that you were also quite like her, never letting anyone walk on her feet and such ! But...well, Selina was Selina, your mom was a special one).

************

“The Grudge” won the vote.

The Japanese version, not the american one with Buffy (it always made your brothers laugh, how you could remember incredible details, including almost every line of dialogue in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer), but could never remember Sarah Michelle Gellar’s name and always called her by the character that made her famous : “Buffy Summers”).

It was an absolutely terrifying movie and not even ten minutes in you were already clutching your closest brother...who just happened to be Damian.

The boy didn’t seem to mind at all though. Because it gave him an excuse to hide his face in your arms whenever he got too scared !

It’s funny, really, how the children of one of the most feared man in the World, how Batman’s kids, were always so scared of horror films.

You blamed your vivid imaginations and the fact that you knew this things in horror films could happen in real life...You all saw so much shit already, that really, nothing surprised you. And yet, you were still terrified.

Maybe it was because, unlike most people who thought monsters and such things didn’t exist, you knew better ? Because for real, what happened in some of those horror films could and did happen in real life ?

Your father taught all of you to use your fear to your advantage, and in a fight, you could all easily do it...But here ? In the comfort of your own home ? Not as alert as you would be ? Oh you could just let go ! No more control over your emotions, and if you let out a scream at a particularly good jump scare ? Then so be it !

There was no competition on those nights. It wasn’t about who would not be scared or whatever. It was about enjoying a moment all together, knowing that if anything was really to happen, you could count on your siblings to be right there with you.

On those night, when it was just you guys, you could let go of that “I’m fearless” persona you put on most of your lives. Because it was just you. You knew each other well enough to know how to read each others. And you wouldn’t judge. Nope. So you could be scared.

************

Half an hour in the movie, and that was it. Your favorite moment of the year.

You always started all sitting on your own little spot on the couch, the middle being empty (that was your dad’s spot)...but as the movies would get scarier and scarier, you’d all instinctly reach for that empty spot, where your father was suppose to be, to just all meet in the middle and start to just...hold each other.

That night, on the 25th of November (but let’s just act as if it was a regular Halloween night), you were all quite tired, and this enhanced the way you would get scared.

All it took was Damian screaming a bit loudly at one small jump scare to make the rest of you squeal and reach for each others.

All it took was a fraction of a second in the movie, and boom, you were all sitting wrapped in a blanket, cuddled against each others.

Jason was in the middle that year, and in a way, it was perfect, as he was the tallest one out of all of you. You were on his right side, with Damian in your arms, while Tim was on his left side, Dick’s head on his shoulder.

A bundle of scaredy bats.

Happy scared ones as well...somehow, you all loved being scared and...

-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH !!!!!!!!

A screeching and piercing screams resonate in the entire Manor and you all jump, startled. Not a sound escape your mouths though, as right now, you feel genuine fear.

This is your home. Your comfort zone. Nothing is actually suppose to happen to you in here and eat...Where the Hell did that screech came from ? Who was it ? Or...Who was it ?

Suddenly, Dick regrets all of the jokes he ever made about ghosts roaming Wayne Manor, trying to scare his younger siblings because...what if ?

You’re the first one to react :

-The Hell was that ?

Your voice startles your brothers a bit more and, instinctively, you all clutch to each other even tighter. But...you know you got to move because...

-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaarghlllh !

A gurgle ! It ended in a weird and terrifying gurgle ! JUST LIKE IN THE MOVIE YOU WERE WATCHING !!

Panic surged by itself in your hearts, even though it was unreasonable and even though it went completely against everything your father ever taught you.

The fact was, that you were all in a state of “on edge”, as you’d call it. You all let your guards down, ready to be scared by a movie, so an actual real life sound ?

It was terrifying. Especially on Halloween night ! (Though it was actually November 25th).

As a whole, not letting go of anyone, you all stood up, and turned toward the sound. The lights were off, and the way the darkness mixed with the faint light from the TV was absolutely nerve wracking.

Suddenly, you all became very paranoid about what was behind you and you instictivly formed a circle so you could see everywhere...Without uttering a word, you all moved to the light to turn it on and held your breaths...

The room was empty. Reluctantly, you guys let go of each others...Dick starts :

-So, you guys heard it too then ?

-No Dick, we didn’t, that’s why we’re all totally freaked out right now !

Tim rolls his eyes at his brother, and this earns him a small tap behind his head by Jason. The Red Hood says :

-Yeah, like smart ass over there pointed out, we definitely heard. Should we...

-If you say “investigate”, I swear I’m going to punch you in the face Jason !

-Come on (Y/N) ! We got to ! Someone might need our help !

-Or it could be a ghost or a serial killer waiting for us to...Oh don’t make that face at me.

If Jason was in a horror film, he would be the one that almost survives at the end. The one that is the most helpful since the beginning and that takes the least terrible decision. But also the one that would die because he wanted to save someone, and in the process, get everyone else killed because he was just too damn good at convincing them to go !

-Hey, guys, it’s us ! We once fought against armies of monsters on Apokolips ! What could be worst than that ?

-...Fighting an army of monsters in our own house ?

-You’re not being very helpful (Y/N).

-Sorry, I’m just a little freaked out like, what was that ?!

-We’ll know only if we go investigate.

-Ooooor, we take one of dad’s car and leave the Manor for the night...

-And leave him and Alfred alone to face whatever made that sound ?

In retrospect, you’d all think about this episode and wonder : “...Why were we all so damn dumb ? Why were we acting like horror film characters ?”.

Your father would tell you that you needed to cut yourselves some slack, to take it easy. It was alright, sometimes, some situations just...felt different.

Like tonight. After a terrifying horror film, you guys letting your guards down and letting your “weakness” surface to enjoy the moment, a screeching sound was enough to freak you all out and to make you act a bit stupid.

In retrospect, you’d all think about this moment and wonder : “...Why did I actually think there was a damn ghost in my house ?”

In retrospect only. When you guys would all be calmed down and not “on edge” mode. When you guys would be chiller.

When the situation would be over, and you could actually review it...Force was to admit that, when you were living something, it was different later on, when your mind was calmer.

************

Another screech sounded all around the Manor and that was it. You knew you guys had to go check it out...

You took hold of a lamp, Damian of a very heavy book, Tim of his laptop, Jason raised his own fist and Dick grabbed a broom left in the corner.

Again, it was quite idiotic really. You guys were all highly trained warriors, and had tons of weapons hidden around the house. Actual weapons. Like Tim’s baton, or Dick’s sticks...But in the moment, right now, with your minds clouded by fatigue and fear, a lamp, a heavy book, a laptop, fists and a broom seemed like the perfect weapons against whatever entity was haunting your house.

-Ok, let’s stick together then.

Tim and Damian were walking backward to make sure nothing would creep on you, while you and your eldest brothers were looking straight ahead, walking in a line.

As you were walking through your dark house (seriously, why none of you pushed any button to turn the lights on !?), you all grew more scared each seconds, starting to imagine what was there.

Maybe very much like in the movie, it was a ghost jealous that you were living, that was after your soul ? But you all liked your souls very much ! You wanted to keep it !

************

Here. It came from here.

You went through the entire mansion before being able to properly localize the source of the screech. And you had time to hear it about four more times.

It definitely came from behind that door.

The attic door. But of course.

It was quite crazy, really, how all of you guys managed to completely forget about any training you received in your life. About how suddenly, you weren’t the kids of the mighty Batman, but some random horror movie teens being terrified by a random entity !

But you were all humans. Sometimes, you did things you couldn’t quite explain yourselves. Later on, with your brain calm and your body well rested...Later on you wouldn’t even be able to understand what when through all of you guys’ mind ! But it was a common thing, and your father would reassure you.

Yes. You were only humans.

And boom here goes yet another freaky shriek from behind THAT door.

Jason and Dick approach it. They’re the oldest, if something is to grab them and steal their souls, they’d rather be the first one to go. They couldn’t bear the thought of loosing any of you, they couldn’t live with the thought of them being surviving all this and you...oh but what the hell were they even thinking ?

They went to open the door, ready to sacrifice themselves for you and...before they could reach the doorknob, the door opened by itself, and...It was just dark and scary in there.

-Turn on the goddamn light for Heaven’s sake !

Damian’s voice makes all of you jump and automatically, you reach for the nearest light and...it doesn’t turn on. It doesn’t !

Your brothers realize that after you frantically click the button.

You squeezed together a bit more and Jason and Dick almost ran back to you guys, wrapping themselves around you, and looking at the darkness from the attic door...the screech sounded again, but this time low and..Menacing ?

You took your phone and turned on the flashlight, your brothers imitated you, and you all turned your lights toward the attic.

This was the moment, in horror films, where the heroes would fight back and...most likely die. So it’s with not-so-sure footstep that, once again, you all walk forward toward the dark, pointing your lights in every direction.

Going through the door is harder than it should be, as you guys all tried to go through at the same time...but you still manage to go in, almost falling on the floor, but catching each others up, as you always do.

The room seems empty and you...All Hell suddenly breaks loose.

Your phones turn off and you’re in the dark again, instinctively forming a circle, backs against backs, so you can “see” all around.

Lightning illuminate the room and...lightning ? But it’s snowing outside, not raining and there’s definitely no thunderstorm around !

The screech surrounds you. It’s everywhere. And it’s definitely not natural and...Tim. Tim screams and you all turn as one as you grab him before he gets grab.

It was so close...But the thing comes back and you all jump out of its way, scared to death. You whip your weapons around but don’t seem to touch the thing...it’s definitely something supernatural !

The lightning lights the room once more and you can almost see it. It’s like something out of one of your nightmare...dark, tall, the face of something that would be Dracula’s and Big Foot’s kid, and it goes around so fast !

It comes back, and you and your brothers take a few steps back instinctively, to save your damn life, making sure all of you are out of reach.

Damian trips and falls on his ass, and the little sounds he makes, as he doesn’t quite hurt himself but still, makes you see red. No one, NO ONE hurts your brother ! You turn around and when you “feel” the thing coming back, you hit it with all your might with the lamp and...

-Outch !

...Outch ? And, wait...that was an “ouch” you could recognize easily...

-...Dad ?

Suddenly, the lights turn on and blind you and your brothers.

And surely enough, your father is there, on the floor, holding his...oh, let’s just say you aimed perfectly with the lamps. Right between the thighs.

Alfred is in the corner of the room, with a remote in his hands and...You’re all so confused.

You blink like idiots for a while, and it’s only your beloved butler’s laugh that brings you back to reality. It’s only when Alfred full on burst out laughing that you finally realize what’s going on.

A prank.

A stupid prank.

-Oh my children you should see your faces ! Iconic ! You all look so dumbfounded and hahahahahaha.

It’s probably the first time you hear Alfred let go that much, that you hear him laugh so loudly...Come to think of it, it was probably one of the few times you heard your father say “ouch” as well.

************

And here you all are once again, in the living room, with your father at his rightful place, in the middle of the couch.

He has a bag of ice resting on in between his thighs, but he can’t help but smile. Because oh you guys are still a bit out of it, and it’s so good to see his kids, that are usually such damn “smart asses”, being just...not really understanding what’s going on.

And so he starts to tell the story.

-It’s something I always kinda wanted to do really. But I...Well, I never got to, because you all know how Halloween nights are. But I’ve had that in my mind for years. It was to teach you a lesson, because needless to say, I wasn’t very happy about you guys watching horror films. However if I’m being honest...I always kinda wanted to do it because I thought it would be hilarious. And oh I was right !

Your father, just like Alfred, goes again in a fit of laughter (last time, when you all were still in the attic, he couldn’t quite laugh...your aim was really good).

Tim scoffs and says :

-So...All of this was just a...Very elaborate joke to scare us ?

-Yes ! Hahahahahaha.

Damian narrows his eyes at his father and takes the lamp that you still held in your hands and...Your dad stops laughing instantly and puts his hands protectively on his crotch, while Dick and Jason are snickering and you...you have the brightest smile ever.

Your dad looks at you, and tries to ignore his heart melting at seeing you smile in such a way...It has been so long, since he saw you like that. You all were so damn stressed and serious nowadays...he missed his little munchkins who were just smiling and laughing all the time.

He missed seeing your smile, the one that always soothed him, the one that has been around ever since you were a baby...He gives you a questioning look and you say :

-Since how long have you been planning this ?

Your dad gives that trademark half-smile of his and answers :

-More years than I dare to admit...

-So all those years, you’ve been wanting to scare us on Halloween night but you couldn’t because you were too busy right ?

-Yes.

You smile even more, and goes to sit next to your dad, hugging him tightly.

-This is definitely the best Halloween I’ve ever had.

It takes a few minutes for all your dumb family to catch your drift. But eventually, they understand...

You got to spend quality times with your brothers, talking, laughing, and cuddling with them. You got confirmation that any of them would die for you, and you would do the same. That you all got each others’ back at all time. You ate too much candies, drunk too much tea (but was there ever too much ?). You made the usually so calm and collected Alfred laugh his ass off.

And above all, above all...Your father took a night off just to plan a somewhat elaborate jokes to scare his adult children. He created a machine to that would turn your phones off so you’d end up in the dark, connected said machine to the house lights so the dark thing would be sure, he put on a ridiculous costumes (which, by the way, in the light, didn’t look scary at all anymore), he made stupid screaming sounds, he put lights outside the house to act as lightnings...

Your father, your stoic and “I have a duty always all nights” father, took a night off just for that and...really, it meant everything in the World.

You and your brothers were more important than anything else for him. Sometimes, you’d doubt that, because of course he loves you but he would always be so busy and focus ! But no.

You were more important.

The great Batman took an entire night off of his night duties just to scare his children (who weren’t even children anymore, except for Damian, who just turned fourteen).

The great Batman...Who was now suffocating under his sons jumping on him (they were never too old to cuddle right ?) and trying to annoy him.

Alfred looked at the scene fondly, and as your eyes met his, you thought you saw a tear run down his face.

Yes. This was definitely the best Halloween ever. Even though it was technically November 25th...

________________________________

Definitely feel very insecure about this one. Cause like, I made you guys wait and...uh. Meh. I wrote it while very VERY tired and a bit drunk (after coming home from a Halloween party) and had to change parts cause obviously I wrote this on October 31st while we’re not almost at the end of November, and yeah ok it’s shit.

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chasiingfreedom-blog · 6 years

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██▒ GENERAL

NAME: unknown, but for all intents and purposes he goes by Finn ALIAS(ES): FN-2187, Eight-Seven, Traitor, Big Deal GENDER: male AGE: 23 DATE OF BIRTH: 11 ABY OCCUPATION: Stormtrooper, unofficial leader of his four-unit FN squad, ex-Stormtrooper/Defector, almost-space pirate, Resistance/Rebel Scum, Prince of Artorias, Grey Jedi ( FITE ME IN THE CLUB THIS WILL 5EVER BE MY FAV THEORY ).

██▒ APPEARANCE

EYE COLOR: Dark brown HAIR COLOR: Jet black HEIGHT: 5′10″ SCARS: A lifetime worth of various physical scars from training with the First Order. The most prominent are the ones that can’t be seen, the scars littered across his brain and upon his heart. BURNS: The lightsaber burns that cauterized into scars from his battle with Kylo Ren, on his right shoulder and across his back.

OVERWEIGHT: Being overweight doesn’t exactly meet First Order specifications, where BMI is a definitely a thing that’s closely monitored and maintained. It’s also hard to overindulge when you’re only ever given a set amount of food that wasn’t designed for flavour but nutrients and efficiency. Finn might really go hard when he experiences first hand what real food could taste like, but keeping fit has been ingrained in him that going overweight wouldn’t be an issue even then. UNDERWEIGHT: He was as close as he was going to get to being underweight as a kid, where the First Order trained them hard from the get go and he was slow at eating at first that his food was always taken away when he didn’t eat fast enough in the allotted time and he’d burn more calories than he ate.

██▒ FAVORITE

COLOR: Anything but red or white. Maybe shades of brown, like the colour of his jacket, the first thing he’d ever owned, the colour of Poe’s eyes, the colour of Rey’s hair… HAIR COLOR: No preference. EYE COLOR: No preference. SONG: If it’s not First Order-issued he’d love it. Probably something instrumental, so he can feel the music without having to worry about language barriers or not understanding the themes he’s not used to yet. MOVIE: Something comedic, since life could always use some laughter, or dramatic, to focus on other people’s problems than his own, or something educational, since Finn loves to learn new things. TV SHOW: Generally same genres as movies? In a modern verse he’d definitely be the type to watch National Geographic or HGTV and yell at people who chose the wrong house on House Hunters lmaO Definitely be crying a river at This Is Us. FOOD: Anything; he has a lot to make up for after years of food that tasted like cardboard. Something with lots of protein because he’s used to that or something he can eat with his hands/finger food, because he’d get taste and touch sensations in one. DRINK: Water, protein shakes ( unfortuately or not ). Much like food, he has a lot of make up for and try. He’d be more reluctant on alcoholic drinks since he’d like to be alert but he’d want to taste it at least once. BOOK: Something educational, like history that he has obviously been taught wrong on in the First Order or mission reports PASSED UNIVERSITY: Never been. In a modern verse you bet your ass he passed in the top one percentile. HAD SEX: Not yet 8D HAD SEX IN PUBLIC: No, and though he would literally have no shame in doing so ( communal sonics are a thing in the First Order okay, he wouldn’t blink an eye at a naked body, male or female ) he wouldn’t necessarily be open to it? It’s just a very private moment that he’d like to keep between him and his partner and not share with curious onlookers. GOTTEN PREGNANT: No ( but you know what Oscar said, you dunno what’s going on with these aliens anything’s possible lmao ) KISSED A BOY: Yes ( fite me in the pit he kissed Slip okay ) KISSED A GIRL: Yes ( thanks Rose ) GOTTEN TATTOOS: There was a time I believed the First Order, like, tattooed barcodes of stormtrooper’s designation somewhere but I’m not sure where I am with that. Either way it’s something he’d be open to, whether to cover that up or just because. GOTTEN PIERCINGS: No. Not sure if he ever get a piercing? On the off chance that he would it’d probably be something not conventional like a nipple piercing or something lmAO HAD A BROKEN HEART: Yes, and not strictly in the romantic sense. BEEN IN LOVE: He could’ve been? How does one ever know they’re in love tbh STAYED UP FOR MORE THAN 24 HOURS: It’s not really a thing that happens in the First Order, but I feel like that first night after he crashed on Jakku would’ve been the first he’s ever been up for more than a day because it was just not safe to sleep.

██▒ ARE THEY

A VIRGIN: Yes. Who wants to help change that 8D A KISSER: He would love kissing. SCARED EASILY: He’s high-strung and paranoid for sure, but escaping from the First Order who would kill him on sight ( or worse, capture and re-condition him ) tends to do that to a person. He’s also quite afraid of losing the people he cares about or seeing them in danger, especially to the First Order ( Finn screaming Rey’s name in TFA will forever haunt me ). JEALOUS EASILY: Envious, not jealous. He’s never really had anything or anyone to lose to be jealous of. The only thing of value he ever had was his position as “teacher’s pet”, and he was more worried about losing the praise that he longed for than being bitter about someone else receiving it instead. He would always focus on the pain of losing something than the anger of losing it that usually goes with jealously. TRUSTWORTHY: In spite of the environment he’s had to grow up in, Finn is someone you can put your trust in, if you could get past his past. He doesn’t lie often ( partly because he’s rather bad at it ), and when he does his heart is in the right place; whether it’s to save his life ( saying he was with the Resistance ) or to save another’s life ( both times to save and protect Rey ). He’s incredibly loyal to those he trusts, but it’s gaining his trust that’s the issue. DOMINANT: On the battlefield, for sure. It’s what he’s been trained to do, what’s gotten him considered to be promoted, after all. In terms of intimately, he could be? Top from the bottom lmao It’s more something he’d rather share than take on solo. SUBMISSIVE: As good as a leader as Finn could be on the battlefield, he's also pretty good at taking orders ( except for, y’know, orders he doesn’t fully agree with ). Intimately, again, it’s something he’d like to share. But if anyone’s deserving of being doted and loved on it’s Finn, and he would never be with someone he didn’t trust and feel comfortable enough to be submissive with. A lot of people would think he'd want complete control of his life after everything he’s been through, but sometimes he would just want to let go and know that someone would be there for him. IN LOVE: thread dependent. SINGLE: Currently, yes.

██▒ RANDOM QUESTIONS

HAVE THEY HARMED THEMSELVES: Not in the conventional way. Finn beats himself up real good in his head and it shows in how he views himself. He also tends to push himself past his limits physically like he did right after he woke up from a coma, which stems from his time in the First Order where he had to be the best, had to be useful to have any purpose. THOUGHT OF SUICIDE / ATTEMPTED SUICIDE: A lot of people would call what happened on Crait a suicide mission, but Finn didn’t see it so much as wanting to kill himself and more like the canon had to be stopped, the First Order needed to be stopped, and this was the only way to do it and he was hell-bent on completing it. Finn doesn’t want to die, especially not before he’s truly even lived, but ironically he constantly finds himself in situations where death as an outcome is very likely. WANTED TO KILL SOMEONE: Wanted to kill someone, no. Wanted to wreck someone until an inch of their life, or wish someone fell off a cliff and died, definitely, but he wouldn’t want to actually kill someone himself. It’s not something he enjoys. Besides, there are worse things than death that could be done. DROVE A CAR: He can pilot speeders. HAVE/HAD A JOB: No, unless you consider being forced to become a stormtrooper a job ( though even if you did he never got paid for it, nor will he get paid for being a part of the Resistance so... ). He almost had a job had he joined Sidon Ithano’s crew on Takodana, if that counts? lmao

██▒ FAMILY

SIBLINGS: verse dependent ( *winks at @starsrebcrn* ) PARENTS: unknown ( verse dependent ) CHILDREN: None unless you count BB-8 wut, but if you don’t think Finn would take in the kids that he saves from Project Resurrection ( yeah, there’s an official name to the First Order kidnapping children and forcing them to be stormtroopers ) then you don’t know Finn. PETS: None, but Big Deal Jr. the Huttlet was a thing that’s lmAO ( @ziinariya knows what’s up ) and I can get on board Finn owning a dog named BB-9E.

RULES: repost, dont reblog! TAGGED BY: @stillsolo TAGGING: @glaadiolus @starsrebcrn @ziinariya @wingresistance @roguecaptain @crowningcarnage @cobaltsister @dvrksiider @rosehoped @disacquiesce @madecur @ariadne-inthesky @neversith @lightsiided @scavengered @hopegave @nctsith @chisparks @rebellionheir + anyone who wants to do it tag me!

#long ass post warning #y'all know the drill you don't gotta do this of course <3 #♚◜ уσυ ∂σи’т киσω α тнιиg αвσυт мε 「 about finn 」#♚◜ HEADCANON

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jhieneration · 4 years

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THE BRIEF WONDEROUS LIFE OF JOULES

“Family:

where life begins

and love never ends”

My ideal family is simple to be honest. All I ever want is a complete, harmonious, and loving family. My target age to get married is at least 30. I want to have a husband who is hardworking, family-centered, faithful, and loving to his wife and children. Good looks is preferable but not necessarily a must. Also, I prefer someone who is open-minded and is a cultured man. Someone who will be there through best or worst. Most importantly, a man who respects and values himself. I see my family living in a beautiful huge two-storey house in either America or Europe. We will also have pets (cat and dog). My husband and I shall enjoy our marriage life to the fullest before we finally settle down and have kids. I see myself traveling with him and do things that we both love together. After a year or two, I’d give birth to our eldest. I do have high hopes that it will be a boy. I see myself getting so stressed because of sleepless nights and doing things that all first-time moms experience. We’d bond together as a family. My husband and I do our best to balance and manage our career and personal lives to ensure that we’re thriving in our chosen career paths and at the same time making sure that we will have plentiful quality time together as a couple and family. Four or five years later, we are blessed with another bouncing baby girl. I want our children to be respectful, open-minded, multicultural, values family, kind, and confident. I might spank them but not to the point where they fear me and are traumatized because of me. If they make a mistake, I’ll let them be and give advice about life. I want to be their personal cheerleader, human diary and a best friend mom at the same time. I see my family traveling all around the world together. Making memories and spending our happiness and sadness moments together as a family. A tight-knit family that walks the flowery path together until the very end.

Originally, my chosen career path would be in the field of Psychology. I want to be a Psychologist, not only because it pays well and is directly related with my college degree, but because I’m doing it mostly for myself. I want to help others, to heal from my unresolved problems/issues & “traumas” and have deeper understanding about myself.

“The secret to happiness is freedom,

And the secret to freedom is courage”

-Thucydides

The job that I might perhaps choose to willingly do it without pay, I’d choose to become a travel vlogger. The reason why is because I really want to travel and take advantage of the freedom that I have once I have my own life without having to rely on my parents. Ever since I was a young child, I never really got the chance to fully enjoy the things that I want to do because my parents strictly supervise me for 24 hours and 7 times a week. I want to see new things, explore, taste different cuisines, and experience different cultures from all around the world. At the same time, I get to share these intimate and meaningful memories with other people through vlogging. I can also encourage them to try such things or raise awareness. The bonus part is that I can ask suggestions from them if ever I wanted something that can only be suggested from a native. I can always earn money in a different way but the things that I have personally witnessed and experienced is something that nobody could ever take it away from me.

WINGS by LITTLE MIX is a song that kind of depicts what I’m feeling right now in regards to doing what I like and that I will freely enjoy despite the circumstances and such. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOQDsmEqVt8

My retirement plan is basically to enjoy the remaining time that I have on Earth. When I’m in my 50s or 60s, I will retire. I will solely rely on my retirement funds, savings, and businesses that I have put up when I was in my late 30s or 40s. I see myself having a bountiful of blessings that I have earned and worked hard for. I see myself spending much more time with my family. We will go camping, road trips and travel around more often. I can also see myself gradually fulfilling my bucket list such as doing extreme activities and many more. I will do more charity work and personally volunteer to various activities in our community. I see myself doing random things that I have never done before. My husband and I will move into a suburb area and buy a ranch in a somewhat rural area. We will be living in a cozy house with our beloved cat and helper dog. I will also be able to visit my siblings more often and some relatives back in my native country. I can also see myself throwing a reunion party with my former coworkers and friends. My husband might get annoyed because I have become more sociable and energetic. I’m also going to write a book that depicts my whole life. I will write everything that has happened to me and basically my life journey. After this, I will pass it on to my children and future generations so that they will always remember me. This can also serve as a guide about life and they can further learn about life; how to do a certain thing in a good way, how to avoid bad things, and how to live life to the fullest without any regrets. Unfortunately, I would have to closely monitor my health by exercising more often, eat and live healthy. I can finally find a new habit that will keep me entertained and help my mind and body to be active. Lastly, I will do things that I was initially skeptical about and things that I have never really got the chance to do so.

Being a retiree is a drastic change that some people find it intimidating. However, if this kind of vivid imagery that I have regarding my retirement in the future, I would truly be happy and feel content. I FEEL GOOD by JAMES BROWN is a song that has a vibe that fits really with it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5TqIdff_DQ

#blog8 #psych201 #devpsy

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buckyscrystalqueen · 7 years

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Fate: Part 5

Pairings: Alpha!Bucky x Omega!Reader

Warnings: Fluff, Angst, Swearing.

Word Count: 5,518

A/N: First time writing A/B/O so please be gentle. Figured I’d drop a new story for the new blog. Enjoy it, y’all!

My {Heart in Ink} Masterlist

Fate Masterlist Aesthetic by @ravenangel33

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You shifted in your nest and gently pushed on Ryan to get him to stop his direct kicks to your lungs as Bucky softly snored next to you. You glanced over and glared at him; it had been at least two days since you had gotten any sleep, and turned up the TV a tiny bit. You sighed as you pushed at Ryan again, silently begging him to move when suddenly all three pups kicked hard at the same time and went still. Your heart clenched and you jabbed at Ryan again, receiving no reaction.

“Alpha!” You screamed as you jabbed at Allie and Mason. Bucky sat bolt up right in bed as tears started pouring down your cheeks. “Something’s wrong.”

“FRIDAY, wake up every nurse and doctor in the compound and tell them it’s an emergency with the pups.” He roared as he scooped you into his arms and ran out of the bedroom. “Hang on, Omega. I got you.” Your head bobbed in agreement as you continued to poke at your pups, begging them to move as your mate ran down the three flights of stairs from your floor to the med bay.

“Please babies! Move!” You pleaded as he kicked open the med bay door.

“What happened?” Cara shouted over your tears as she pulled a lab coat on over her Scooby-Doo pajamas.

“They just stopped moving and they won’t kick back.” You sobbed to her and Bruce as Bucky put you down gently on a hospital bed.

“We gotta get them out. They’re at term and are probably going into destress.” Helen said as she pulled her hair back. “FRIDAY, wake up Steve and get him down here to help hold her down, we don’t have time to anesthetize her completely.”

“Wait, you can’t just cut her open.” Bucky said over the shouts of the doctors as he followed you and the two doctors down the hall toward the OR, dodging nurses as they dashed around to get supplies.

“We don’t have another choice. We need to get the pups out.” Bruce said as he guided the bed into the OR.

“Alpha, the pups.” You cried as Cara grabbed your arm and took the IV one of the nurses was handing her.

“We’ll need you to hold her shoulders down.” Helen said as she handed a syringe of pup-safe anesthetic that would take a few minutes you didn’t have to completely kick in to Cara as Bruce started hooking you up to monitors. Bucky didn’t move as Steve slid into the OR. Cara gave him a quick run down as Helen applied a local anesthetic to try to take the edge off.

“Buck, look at me.” Steve said as he grabbed his friends arms and turned him away from you. His terror filled eyes found his friends and Steve pointed at you. “We need to get the pups out. It’s priority. Your mission is to keep your Omega still and calm. Hold her down and keep talking to her. She will be fine, OK?” Bucky nodded mechanically as his friend pushed him toward you. Bucky was moved so he stood over your head and he leaned down and put his arms over your shoulders and across your chest.

“Alpha…” You sobbed as your arms were strapped to the table so you couldn’t push anyone away to get away from the pain. He nodded and licked his lips as Steve threw his weight over your legs at the same moment Cara made the first incision. Your blood curdling scream filled the room; shattering Bucky’s heart as he fought his Alpha instincts to take away your pain.

“I know, Omega. I know. Hey, focus on me, doll.” He said over the doctors and nurses talking as he moved directly in your line of sight. Your eyes found his tear soaked eyes as the three doctors fought to get the pups out and to try to get you numb enough so you wouldn’t feel it.

“Hey, what do you say, after all this is done, you, me and our pups lay in the nest and finish watching that zombie show you like? You know, the one with the cannibal group and the train tracks? We’ll sit and traumatize our pups like good parents with that.” You nodded in agreement as another blast of pain, thankfully less than the first one ripped through you. Your body lurched only slightly under the full weight of two super soldiers holding you down.

“Here’s the first pup.” Cara said as she pulled Mason from your womb with a smile. A smile spread across your face as your blurry son was lifted into your line of sight.

“Mason.” You whispered weakly as he was passed off to a nurse. Bucky choked a laugh as he looked back down at you.

“You’re doing great, (Y/N).” He said as you looked back up at him. His face blurred before you and you tried to blink your eyes as Mason’s tiny cries filled your mind.

“She’s losing a lot of blood.” A nurse shouted miles away as Bucky’s weight was moved from your upper body.

“Omega!” He screamed as you let your eyes fall closed; too tired to keep them open any longer. “(Y/N)!”

“We got two.” Someone shouted before you let yourself give in to your exhaustion.

——

You could hear Bucky’s soft snores and the steady beep of some kind of machine as you woke up from your much needed nap and for a moment, you wondered why the snores sounded father away than normal. You forced your eyes open and and blinked against the blinding, white light before reality set in. You were in a hospital bed in what you assumed was the med bay. The beeping was from a heart monitor that was up over your right shoulder. The snoring came from a chair right beside your bed to your left.

Bucky looked broken. He had obvious tear tracks stained on his cheeks and despite being asleep, he looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks. His hair was tied back in a messy bun and he was still wearing the same, blood covered wife beater and pajama pants he had on… wait a minute. How long ago was it? Your pups…

“Alpha…” You croaked, your throat dry from lack of water. Bucky lurched from his nap and shot out of his chair.

“Thank God.” He whispered as fresh tears formed in his eyes and slid down his cheeks. He sat down on the bed by your hip with a smile.

“The pups.” You inquired as he grabbed a cup of water off the bedside table and offered you the straw.

“They’re all fine. They’re right h…”

“How big?” Tears formed in your eyes as you forced yourself to take a drink of water. His smile got even bigger and he shook his head.

“They’re perfect.” He said as he put the glass back down and sat your bed up. He hit the call button on the wall before he reached over and pulled the bassinet style, three pup stroller Tony had made you. Your pups laid side by side in the stroller with their limbs wrapped around each other. He had Mason and Ryan on either side of Allie and you were so grateful that they were all still so tiny. You let out a choked sob as you carefully moved your legs off the side of the bed to get closer.

“My babies.” You sobbed as you reached out and gently ran your finger down Ryan’s cheek. You felt the bed shift as Bucky sat down next to you and pulled the stroller closer.

“You scared the shit out of me.” He whispered as he wrapped his metal arm around you and pulled you into his side. “You…” You looked up at him as tears poured down his cheeks.

“I’m here.” You said softly as you put your hand on his thigh. “Right here, Alpha.” He nodded as he turned and pulled you into his arms.

“Don’t do that to me again.” He whispered into your neck. “I can’t live without you.” You nodded and wrapped your arms around him.

“I won’t.”

“Hey… she’s awake.” Cara said softly as she and Helen came into the room. You forced yourself away from Bucky to look at them as the two of you wiped your tears away.

“Thank you. Both of you…” Helen swiped her hand at you as she took a seat in the chair Bucky had been sleeping in.

“We just did our job. Those three are actually the first pups I have ever delivered so thank you for the opportunity.” You smiled as you looked over at your sleeping pups before looking back at the doctors.

“So what happened?” Cara sighed as she grabbed the wheelie chair and brought it over between the stroller and the chair with a half smile.

“You lost a lot of blood a little too fast and passed out. We had to get the pups out and that caused more blood loss. We did lose you once but the second we got Allie out, we brought you back, got you stable…”

“Then we put you in the cradle. Took half a day but we got your white count back up and your incision healed. You’re as good as new.” Helen said as she stood up and began removing your heart monitor with a smile.

“You were only out two days. The pups were all perfectly healthy and didn’t need to spend anytime in the NICU but we knew that. They have all held the same weights and lengths that they did in utero.” You nodded at Cara’s words as you looked back at your sleeping pups.

“How is that possible?” The two woman shrugged as Helen tossed the EKG leads on the bed behind you and sat back down.

“We believe that, with Bucky’s regenerative healing because of the serum, the pups simply grew fast initially to essentially ‘heal’ themselves. Once they hit term where everything was working properly, they stopped having to ‘heal’ themselves and just… started to be pups.”

“Your mate insisted that you wanted to strictly breastfeed and with his help in holding them since you couldn’t, all three have a great latch. Pups are cleared and we were just waiting for you to wake up. With the cradle doing all the work, we have no reason to keep you here so if you wanna go upstairs and watch The Walking Dead for days on end, feel free.” You smiled at the faint memory of Bucky’s promise and nodded.

“Yes, please.” The two doctors smiled as they stood up from their chairs. Bucky pushed the stroller back a little bit and helped you too your feet as Cara and Helen headed out the door.

“I’d still like to keep a close eye on them for possible growth spurts. Not every day but twice a week for the first month, if that’s OK?” You nodded at Cara as you gently stretched your slightly stiff muscles.

“Just tell us when you want us to come down.” She nodded at you and headed out the door after Helen as you grabbed the handle of the stroller.

“Let’s go home, doll.” Bucky said softly as he put his hand on your lower back… just in case. “I’ll worry about letting everyone know you’re up. Wouldn’t let anyone come down to see them until you got to see them first.” You smiled up at him as you pushed the strollers toward the elevators at the end of the med bay.

“You’re too cute, Alpha.” You purred as he pushed the elevator button. He shrugged as he hiked your massive diaper bag up on his shoulder.

“I’m just so glad you’re finally awake.” You nodded in agreement as you both stepped into the elevator.

“Me, too.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As your pups grew, you definitely saw how the serum had subtle impacts on your pups lives. General milestones were met almost too easily; all three of them held their heads up at one month old, moved from front to back and back to front easily at two months, at four and a half months, all three of them sat up continuously by themselves with no support and by five and a half, they were crawling. All three were definitely developing their own personalities, even at such a young age, but no matter how quickly they were accomplishing their milestones, none of them were in a rush to grow up. It wasn’t until December, when they were six months old, that the serum effects really started to show.

Ryan was first. You were all sitting in your nest, watching Toy Story 3 while you nursed before the pups went to bed. As you fed Mason, Allie laid curled up and half asleep on Bucky’s chest like she did every single night. Ryan sat perched on his right shoulder, enthralled with the bright colors on the screen.

“So sad.” You whispered as you watched the toys heading toward the fiery furnace. You couldn't stop the couple tears that fell from your eyes. You saw Ryan look over at you out of the corner of your eye and he immediately crawled over next to you. You felt his little hand land on your arm for only a moment before a calm feeling blanketed your body. You had seen him do the same thing to Allie when she would cry but you always thought it was just a sibling thing.

“What the?” You looked down at your pup as he watched your face. You heard Bucky ask ‘what’ as Ryan simply smiled, pat your arm once and looked back at the TV with his hand still on your arm. “He just…” You looked over at Bucky before looking back at Ryan, utterly confused.

“What, doll?” You looked back over at him and shook your head as you tried to figure out how to explain it.

“He just calmed me down.” Bucky cocked an eyebrow as you both looked down at Ryan again. “Wait, pretend to be mad.” Your mate looked at you like you were crazy before he growled.

“Turn off the TV.” He snapped, with false anger. Ryan’s head darted over toward him for a moment as Bucky forced himself to be mad. Almost as if he knew his daddy was faking, he simply turned back to the TV and put his hands in his lap. You couldn’t help but laugh as Mason wiggled away from your breast to watch the movie in your lap.

“Wait, I have an idea.” You said as you pat Mason’s back. You reached over, grabbed your cell phone and called down to Aaron. He picked up on the second ring.

“Hey, sunshine.” He cooed.

“Hey… I need a favor. If you and Max aren’t doing anything can you come up here, pretending that your fighting? Stand right up against the bed so Ryan can get to your hands or arms.” You heard Aaron stutter a bit on the other end.

“Ummm… yea, sure. We’ll be right up.” You thanked him and hung up the phone as you ran your hand over the back of your middle pup’s head. It was only a minute before Aaron and Max’s fake shouts echoed through the house before they stormed into the bedroom. “Sunshine, can you tell him I need a dog?”

“We don’t need a dog, Omega!” Max shouted as the two of them stood right up against the bed. All four adults watched as Ryan panicked and quickly crawled over to the two men. They continued to fake fight for only a moment as Ryan grabbed both their hands.

“Whoa!” Aaron said as he looked at his nephew. “Did he do that?” You nodded as Ryan looked up at his two uncles to make sure they were OK before crawling back over and sitting down on Bucky’s shoulder again.

“That’s really weird.” Max said as he looked at his hand.

“Man, now I wanna know what he does.” Bucky complained as he looked up at his son.

“Well now that we settled whatever you were figuring out, we were just about to find out who got the last rose.” You smiled at Aaron as he grabbed Max’s hand and pulled him toward the door.

“Sorry about your luck, man.” Bucky said to Max. “I get to watch Disney.” You rolled your eyes as you waved to your friends.

“Thanks, loves.” You looked over at Bucky as the closing credits to the movie began to roll. “You’ll see it eventually, Alpha.” He huffed as he wrapped one hand around Allie and held Ryan to his shoulder with the other.

“Yea, I know.” He sighed as he got up and headed toward the nursery to get your three pups ready for bed.

——

You were getting ready for Christmas Eve brunch with Bucky for your anniversary when Allie revealed her little trick. You were standing in your bathroom, fixing your hair when Bucky screamed your name. Your heart stopped as your brush clattered to the ground and you sprinted out into your living room where Bucky, Wanda and Vision were all staring at your baby girl.

“What?” You nearly shouted as you looked between the three of them. “Why are you screaming?” Bucky looked back at you before looking back at his giggling daughter.

“Can you show mommy? Show mommy your trick, Allie.” You walked toward the couch and looked at Allie with your eyebrow raised. She smiled at you before looking back over at Vision. She took a deep breath and her whole body started to shake. You half expected her to scream when suddenly, she turned purple. You yelped and lurched toward your pup as she exhaled and changed back to normal. She simply giggled and clapped her hands.

“What the hell is that?” You asked as you looked at your pup.

“She just turned purple! I don’t know!” Bucky said as he got up to look at his little princess.

“It would appear she is a shape shifter.” Vision said simply as if it were no big deal.

“Jeeezzza…” You groaned as you moved to sit down on the couch. You took a deep breath and sighed as you stood your daughter on your knees. “Welp. That makes two of you more special.”

“It would make sense. Technically, their genes are already mutated so show…”

“Vis!” Wanda snapped over Bucky’s deep growl as she whacked his arm. “You can’t say stuff like that.”

“They aren’t mutated!” Bucky snapped as he got up and took Allie from you. You knew he felt personally responsible for everything that was going on with your pups. You sighed as he waited by the bedroom door for Mason and Ryan as they crawled after him to protect their sister before he toed it closed to hide himself in your nest. With a sigh, you looked over at Vision and Wanda.

“Looks like we won’t be needing you after all today.”

“I’m so sorry, (Y/N).” Wanda said softly as she stood up and pulled Vision up with her. “He didn’t mean anything by it.” You nodded, forcing yourself to remain calm and not react the way you wanted to to protect your pups as you kissed her cheek.

“I know. It’s just… it’s a sensitive topic.” She nodded in understanding and pushed her mate toward the stairs.

“We’ll see you for dinner tomorrow, yea?” You gave her a half smile and nodded.

“Sounds good. Thanks again.” You didn’t even wait for them to completely leave before you headed into the bedroom and closed the door behind you. Bucky was already sitting on the bed turning on ‘Micky Mouse Clubhouse’ from your DVR with all three pups on his lap. He took one look at you and you could see the pain and anger in his eyes.

“They are normal.” He said as you stepped out of your dress and grabbed a tank top from your dresser drawer.

“They are special but yes, they are normal like everyone else.” You climbed onto the middle of the bed and leaned against the headboard beside Bucky. His head fell to your shoulder as the two of you watched your pride and joys happily watch TV.

“People are going to make fun of them.” He said softly as he put his metal hand on Mason’s side. Tears welled in your eyes at the reality as your oldest leaned back until he fell against his fathers chest.

“So, we prepare them. There are other people out there like our pups, Alpha. Ours aren’t the only ones. And besides, from what we can see Ryan and Allie can control their gifts. And if Mason has them, so can he. So, when they get old enough to be around people outside our family, they will be in complete control.” You felt Bucky’s head nod a fraction of an inch and you gently maneuvered your arm behind his head. After a moment, you let out a soft chuckle.

“And besides, if someone makes fun of one of our pups, they have to deal with not only the other two pups, but the vicious mommy and the ex-assassin daddy with the metal arm. They’re screwed then.” You could feel his cheek twitch into a smile against your shoulder as he reached out and laced his fingers with yours.

“Sorry I messed up our anniversary.” You shook your head and gently kissed his forehead.

“There is absolutely no place I would rather be right now.”

——

Mason, not wanting to be out done by his brother and sister, showed his skill the very next day during Tony’s Christmas Day dinner. You were sitting with Aaron, Nat and Wanda, watching Bucky and Steve play with the pups and some of the toys ‘Iron Santa’ had brought the triplets that evening, when Mason found something completely different he wanted to play with.

“No, Mason. That’s not ours.” You scolded softly as he grabbed the strap of Thor’s precious hammer.

“Oh, let the boy play.” Thor called out as he came over to watch. “He can do no harm.” Your eyebrow arched as you slowly sat back in your chair.

“You obviously do not have pups.” You teased as Mason sat down on the ground behind the hammer. Thor chuckled as Mason grabbed the strap in his fat, little fist.

“Silly woman, this is Mjölnir! Only the…” His words were cut off instantly as a loud scraping, scratch noise echoed throughout the room. Everyone got dead silent as Mason tilted his head to the side and looked at the hammer again.

“Did he just…?” Tony asked as Mason grabbed the strap again and pulled the hammer toward him a full inch.

“He just moved the hammer.” Clint gasped as Mason crawled around and looked at the side. He studied it for a moment as the group of stunned adults watched in awe. Hesitantly, your pup reached out, shoved the top part of it and knocked it to the side with a bang. The loud noise made him and your two other pups jump before they all burst into tears.

“He just moved the hammer.” Natasha said in shock as you picked up Mason while Bucky comforted Allie and Ryan.

“Jesus, Barnes. What kinda mutant spawn did you create?” Sam teased with a laugh. The hairs on the back of your neck stood on end as deep growl rolled out of your and Bucky’s chest. Before he could react, you lurched forward and slammed your fist into Sam’s jaw, sending him flying to the floor.

“Mutant spawn? Who the fuck do you think you are, Bird boy?” You spat, not caring that you were going for the low blow. You pointed your finger at him as the triplets screamed from the noise. “Don’t you dare disrespect my pups like that again just because you’re jealous that a six month old can move a hammer you wished you could pick up. If you even look at my pups ever again and I will fucking kill you, do you understand me?” Sam nodded rapidly as he scrambled across the floor away from you. You had never in your life struck anyone let alone an Alpha but you were tired of hearing people talk negatively about something your family can’t control.

“Yea, my pups are special. Ryan can change peoples emotions, Allie can turn purple and Mason knocked over a magic hammer. You guys have an issue with it, take it up with me.” You spun on your heel toward Bucky and gestured for your pups. “Give ‘em. I’m taking our ‘mutants’ home.” The growl he had started with yours was still rolling in his chest as he passed you Ryan and stood up with Allie. He glared daggers at Sam, who he was never a fan of in the first place as Aaron came over with your purse.

“I’ll bring up the pup’s t-o-y-s in a little while, OK?” You nodded at him, gave him a quick kiss and stormed out of the main living room and towards your elevators. You kicked the elevator button hard and jostled your sons up in your arms. Neither of you could say a word as you got into the elevator and headed up to your house with three crying pups.

“You did the right thing.” Bucky finally said as the doors opened to your house. You made it two steps into your home before you burst into tears.

“My babies” You sobbed as you sank to the ground to cry with your sons. Bucky immediately moved Allie into your arms between her brothers, picked all four of you up and carried you to your room. He set you all down in the middle of the bed and pulled off your heels. “Can I just start killin’ people?” Despite how angry he was, a small smile spread across his face as he unbuttoned his dress shirt.

“No, because I’m not physically capable of breast feeding.” It took you both only a moment as he toed off his shoes before you burst out laughing. You sat up with your pups and started taking off their Christmas outfits as Bucky headed out to the living room to grab a few toys for a quiet family night. You thanked God you had though to take a cute family photo before dinner.

“I think Santa went a little overboard.” He said as he dropped a large armful of toys in the middle of the nest. You shrugged as your sniffling pups instantly cheered up and started grabbing toys to play with.

“I’m just gunna start punching people when they make fun of our pups.” You said as Bucky got onto the bed and laid his head on your lap.

“You’re quiet frightening for an Omega, doll.” He teased as he rested his hand on your shin and started to brush his thumb back and forth against your skin. “But next time, I’m knocking Wilson out. It’s been a long time coming.” You giggled as you watched Mason race a Fisher Price toy car up Bucky’s leg.

“Deal.” You casually ran your fingers through his long, brown hair as Allie babbled away to her new doll and Ryan played with an activity triangle that had a dozen of so parts that rattled, spun and twisted. After a few minutes, you felt Bucky chuckle as he looked up at you.

“Did you call him ‘Bird boy’?”

“That I did.” He laughed as he laid his head back down on your leg.

“That’s freaking priceless.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You sat on the couch, lost in thought with an ignored cup of coffee in your hands as your pups played with their Christmas presents in front of you. You realized that morning what Mason’s ‘gift’ really was when he effortlessly lifted one side of the couch up for Allie when the ball she was playing with slipped from her hands and rolled under it. As you watched your baby boy set the couch back down and simply crawl away, you felt conflicted.

You loved your pups with every fiber of your being. You would lay down your life for them in a moment without a second thought. But you knew what the world looked like for ‘mutants’. They were feared, beaten and even killed every single day just for being different. Despite being the pups of an Avenger, your pups would never live a normal life; your babies would always have to live in fear.

“Omega, are you with me?” Your head whipped toward the sound of Bucky’s voice as he headed toward the kitchen to grab a bottle of water after his workout.

“Sorry, Alpha. Just… day dreaming.” He looked back over at you, catching the sadness in your eyes that you were trying to hide in your voice. You met his eyes for only a moment before you looked back at your pups. He sighed and downed his water as he walked over to the couch.

“You gotta stop thinking about it, Omega.” He sighed as he sat down beside you.

“How can I not?” You asked as you looked back over at him. You watched his brow furrow ever so slightly as he scented the air.

“Shit… your heats are starting back up.” You nodded and looked at your cold coffee.

“You’re going into rut soon, too. I can feel it. Started in the middle of the night.” Tears welled in your eyes as they found your mate’s once more. “You know what they do to people like them. Sure we can protect them here, make them Avengers when they’re old enough. But they will never go to a real school or have friends their age.

Every time they go outside they’ll have to wonder… ‘is this the time someone realizes I’m different?’ We don’t even know if they follow the standard class system… if they will ever find mates.” You felt a tiny hand gently land on your leg seconds before a calm blanket surrounded you. With a small smile, you put your coffee mug on the table beside the couch and picked up your worried middle child. “Mommy’s OK, sweet boy.” You purred as he gently put one hand on your cheek and the other on his daddy’s knee. You looked over at Bucky and gave him a small smile as you rubbed your hand on Ryan’s back.

“This is no one’s fault, Alpha. I know you blame yourself but I don’t. This could happen to anyone. Aaron and Max… Tony and Pepper… even me and a different Alpha. It is what it is; it’s the nature of this world. I would never, ever wish our pups were different from who they are and I would gladly have more pups tomorrow if you wanted a bigger family even if I knew they would turn out the same way. I just need to know they are going to be OK.”

“They would never not be OK.” He said softly as he let Ryan climb into his lap to calm him down. “Omega, being my pups, they couldn’t be completely normal, you know that. If it’s not people attacking mutants, it’s HYDRA coming after the Winter Soldier’s pups. I know you don’t blame me; I still do, but I’m working on that. Doll, I wish, so badly that I had met you before I was forced to become the monster I was. But I can tell you this, I am in this with you. I love you. And as your Alpha, I will protect you and my family.” He gave you a small smile as Ryan continually pat his cheek to keep him calm.

“(Y/N), I’m scared, too. Scared that I’m not strong enough to protect all of you. Scared that someone will hurt our pups or you. Scared that, even though they ‘fixed me’ I will revert or HYRDA will find us. But like Steve told me this morning, we can live in fear of what could be or we can accept our fates.” He gave you a small smile as he reached out and took your hand.

“Fate brought us together. We were born 70 years apart, there is no way we should have ever mated. But we did and we got this little guy.” He looked at Ryan with a smile before looking at his other two pups, who were now sitting on the floor next to the couch. “And these two little monsters.” He growled playfully as you both reached down, picked up a pup and got them comfortable on your laps. You looked at your little family with a smile as Mason curled up against your chest. You watched Allie curl into Ryan against Bucky as your fiancé smiled at you. “This is our fate. And I wouldn’t change it for the world. Scary or not, normal or not. It’s ours.”

#Bucky x Reader #Fate #Fate Series #A/B/O

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