#but could be read platonic | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

paperultra · 6 months

Text

eye to eye.

Pairing: OPLA!Monkey D. Luffy x Reader Word Count: 781 words Warnings: None

He’s been staring for five minutes now.

Five minutes and thirty-three seconds, to be exact. Twenty-seven more seconds and it’ll be six minutes, and you don’t know if you can handle six minutes of him looking at you; everyone on this ship has fallen prey to those big brown eyes, and you are certainly no exception – how many times have you scraped off the last portion of your meal onto his plate, or let him trail after you and chatter away while you did inventory, or sat on the figurehead with him despite your fear of heights because of those eyes? The answer is more than once, and you know you’d do it again in a heartbeat as you finally look up from your newspaper.

“You need anything, Luffy?”

“Nope,” he says.

He continues to stare at you, that achingly wide, sunny grin on his face. You blink. He does too.

“Are you sure?”

“Yep.”

“... Well,” you say slowly, more befuddled as the seconds tick by – surely, it’s now been over six minutes – “do you want something?”

(There is always a ninety-two percent chance that Luffy wants something, concrete or not. Seventy percent of the time it is concrete, and the thing he wants is food.)

Luffy shakes his head. He props his elbows onto his knees and rests his chin in his hands, and you swear you see his eyes sparkle underneath the tattered brim of his straw hat.

“I just like looking at your face,” he chirps.

The force of those few words is enough to stop your heart in your chest. It stutters in place, then starts again, jumping with glee.

“H-Huh?”

“I like looking at your face,” he repeats as if you didn’t hear it the first time.

You lick your lips, grappling for something to say in response to such a strange answer. “It’s … it’s not much to look at,” you finally say, curling up out of habit. “There’re better faces out there.”

“But I want to look at yours.” Luffy jabs a finger towards you. You shrink back a bit, cheeks beginning to warm. “And there’s lots to look at, like your nose and eyes and stuff.”

You wonder if you should take that as a compliment. But Luffy doesn't do compliments; he only does the truth, and maybe that makes what he’s said infinitely more valuable.

"Thanks for noticing," you reply, awkward but fond. He nods happily, and you find yourself adding, "I like looking at your face too."

It's not a lie, nor an attempt to return the favor. You do like looking at Luffy's face. You like the wild, coal-black curls framing it, the perpetually goofy smile, the scar, the eyes that turn into dark honey in the sunlight. The eyes that look back at you and promise freedom and joy and everything good the world has to offer.

"You do?" He sounds very pleased and scoots closer. "That's great! We can look at each other."

"Won't that get boring after a while?"

"If it does, we can go and eat something."

You snort, face now very hot as you move to sit cross-legged. "You're funny, Luffy."

And so you look at Luffy, and Luffy looks at you, knees touching and the room still with a few rare seconds of contemplative silence. A few seconds, because that is all you can take before you dissolve into giggles, half flustered and half entertained. (This is how you often are around him nowadays.)

It isn't long before Luffy joins you, and the two of you end up lying on the floor, cackling until you're out of breath.

"Ahhh! That was fun," Luffy gasps once he can speak coherently again. "Now let's get something to eat!"

"You're bored already?" you ask in between gulps of air.

"No, but I'm hungry." With a grunt, he rolls back and catapults himself onto his feet, then picks you up and sets you down to stand before tugging on your arm. "Let's ask Sanji to make us a snack."

You nod, and soon enough, the floor of the Going Merry thrums with the sound of two scruffy pairs of shoes running over it, laughter bouncing off the walls as Luffy's hand grips yours. It's the same way he holds your heart, tightly but kindly. You squeeze back.

Three words balance on the tip of your tongue. You swallow them.

One day, you think. One day, he will look at you like he did today, and you will tell him how much a person like him means to a person like you.

But right now, you're going to ask Sanji to make you and Luffy something to eat.

#opla #one piece #luffy x reader #monkey d. luffy x reader #monkey d. luffy #luffy #opla luffy #one piece live action #opla fanfiction #one piece fanfiction #reader insert #this could also be read as platonic tbh #i think all of luffy's friends are platonically in love w him a lil bit :))#finally wrote a fic for our favorite captain of the straw hats !!! he's such a silly guy lol i love him

687 notes · View notes

carolperkinsexgirlfriend · 7 months

Text

Platonic Stobin Mind-Reading AU Part 2

Part 1

The house is quiet when Steve slips in. It always is, now.

He toes his shoes off, unable to bend over enough to untie the laces. His ribs protest the slight hunch of his shoulders, stomach roiling in queasy warning to not curl in further.

The house is quiet, but Steve can almost feel the warmth of an arm around his shoulders. And he doesn’t feel alone. He looks around the foyer, almost waiting for his parents, or hell, the ghost of Hopper to appear. Nothing does.

He’s leaving smatterings of blood and mud with every step, speckling the white carpet in signs of life as he flicks on every lightswitch on his way toward the stairs. He pauses at the bottom, staring up at the insurmountable obstacle to his bed. With a sigh, he turns his back on the climb and stumbles his way toward the couch in the living room, collapsing down into it. Blood is already smearing into the velvety green of its cushions. He ignores the little voice in his head that sounds alarmingly like his Mother, berating him for leaving so many signs of life in her pristine house for lifeless dolls.

Steve falls asleep, alone in his empty house. The comforting weight is still around his shoulders.

It’s still dark when he wakes up, gasping around a nightmare he doesn’t remember having. His stomach roils with fear, like he’s still down in the Russian bunker, begging to keep his fingernails attached to his body. There’s no more comforting weight across his shoulders. He still doesn’t feel alone.

Steve leans across the couch and vomits. There’s very little left in him, popcorn dissolved into green stomach acid. The carpet’s beginning to look like Christmas come early. If she comes back, his Mother will not be pleased.

He doesn’t get up to clean it, exhaustion hitting hard even as the fear persists. He falls back asleep, wakes up mid-nightmare to a pounding at the door.

He stares at the ceiling, stuck still half in nightmare with the pounding of demodog feet echoing through the bunker where Robin and Steve are still tied back to back, her head pressed to the back of his own, Dustin’s screams filling the air as Steve writhes desperately to free himself and protect the kid.

Someone is still pounding at his door. He stumbles off the couch, ribs screaming, head spinning, ears buzzing, eyes half closed against the light as he opens the door, unable to even see who’s in front of him.

“Dingus, where have you been?” they say. Steve forces his eyes open wider past the light and pulsing of his head, willing his swollen eyes to make out Robin’s face. “I’ve been knocking for like five minutes! I was starting to think you were dead! And I was getting so scared that you’d gone off in the woods to die. Cats do that, you know.”

Steve blinks at her, struggling to keep up with her tirade. “Huh?”

Robin rolls her eyes. She steps into the house, making to shove past him where he’s blocking her entry. “Oh just let me in, it’s so hot out–”

She stops talking when her elbow hits his forearm. Stops moving too. Steve stares past her into the empty driveway, wisps of her hair tickling his cheek.

There’s relief coursing through him, thoughts running through his mind that can’t be his own–Thank god he’s alright, I thought he died, what would I have done? Thank god–can’t believe I care about Steve the hair Harrington enough to show up at his house uninvited, what kind of bizarro world are we living in, this is weirder than that flesh monster I swear to god–

Steve stumbles back, spine connecting painfully with the doorknob as the door swings back loudly into the wall with the force of his weight. Robin’s looking at him, eyes wide. There’s a bruise blooming on her cheekbone. Even past the confusion, he’s overwhelmed with the relief that she’s here, standing in front of him, whole and alive.

She reaches her hand out slowly, like he’s a stray cat that could be spooked at any moment. Her fingers latch onto his forearm, curling around it tight enough that her fingers dig into his flesh.

–that supposed to be what a demodog looks like? Dustin was really underselling it, I think I’d take Russian’s any day, aww Dingus was worried about me, wait wait wait, how do I know that he, did he sleep in that stupid outfit? where are his parents? why can I see–

Steve wrenches his arm free, ignoring the stinging of Robin’s fingernails scraping across his flesh. They stare at each other. Steve can feel himself breathing too fast. Wisps of Robin’s hair are sticking to her forehead with sweat. The door is still open.

“Dingus?”

“Good thing you’ve gotta breathe or I don’t think I’d ever get a word in,” Steve says without thought.

Robin brings her hand up to her mouth, eyes widening impossibly further. “Were you thinking about the demodogs?”

“Were you thinking that us being friends is weirder than the mind flayer?”

Robin drops her hand and smiles. “We’re friends?” she asks, voice chipper. “Wait, no! What is going on!”

They stare at each other some more. Robin looks manic, like she’s trying to pop her eyes out of her skull with the force of her stare. Steve, without looking away, reaches behind himself for the knob still pressed into his spin and slowly closes the door.

“Did you have a nightmare last night and throw up?” Robin nods. “Did your Dad have his arm around your shoulders?” Nod. “Well, shit.”

He finally turns away, stumbling back to the couch and gently settling down, leaving enough room for Robin beside him.

They settle like two, hunched quotations, knees settled together, hair brushing with how closely they’re eying each other.

“Anything?” Robin asks.

Steve hums, squinting his eyes with the focus of his concentration. Her eyes are blue, unlined but all but the barest remnants of smudges from her usual make-up. She looks a wreck. He’s pretty sure he loves her.

Are you excited right now?” he asks because he feels it bubbling up his throat, like someone’s just barely holding back a deluge of words, and it’s not him.

She scoffs, rolling her eyes up toward her head. “How are you not?” she demands, pulling her hands away from her knees to gesticulate in the scant air separating their bodies. “This is like superpower territory, Steve! We can read minds!”

Steve swallows around the excitement, feels his own warmth curl up in his chest at her joy. “So far only each others.”

Robin jolts, hands coming to clutch at the fabric across her chest, fist tight. “Oh,” she breathes. “Is that what you’re feeling?”

There’s something else clogging up his throat now. Not words. Tears, maybe. Steve looks down at his own bloody hands, trying to make words where only feelings exist, then remembers he doesn’t have to. He reaches out, snatches her hand, and lets himself feel.

“Why are you picturing us making Thanksgiving dinner together?” she asks, laughing even as tears bubble out of her eyes. Always a sympathetic crier, his own begin to well.

“We’re like, stuck together now, right?” He lets go of her hand, gets rid of the distracting feedback loop of two minds thinking around each other. “That like makes us–family?”

Robin sobs and launches herself into his arms. Unfortunately, the pressure on his ribs is violent enough to almost make him vomit again. Maybe he makes a noise of pain, or maybe she gets some sense of the way his vision is whiting out from pain through his thoughts, but she scrabbles backwards instantly, hands shuffling her further and further away until her back hits the armrest at the other side of the couch.

“Sorry! I’m sorry! I just got caught up in the moment, and forgot you’re totally fucked, and dingus! Shouldn’t you be in the hospital? Because all I saw there was a white light, and that doesn’t mean you’re dying, does it? Did I kill you?”

Steve laughs but it comes out more as a cough as agony falls back into the bearable threshold of pain. “I’m fine, Robin,” he says, eyes squeezed closed as he eases himself back into a fully seated position. “I got checked out in the ambulance, same as you.”

Robin, uncharacteristically, doesn’t respond. When Steve opens his eyes, all signs of tears are gone from her face, replaced with a look that clearly shows how done with his bullshit he feels. “And they told you that you were fine?” she demands.

“This all just needs to heal on its own,” he says, gesturing from his face down his torso.

Robin scoots back over to poke his cheek with her finger. He can hear her thinking about the likelihood of him being full of shit, the pros and cons of kidnapping him via her Dad’s SUV. Steve slaps her finger away, but whatever she must’ve gleaned from his own mind satisfied her enough that she doesn’t make a move toward the door or the phone.

She eyes him up and down, gaze traveling down his bloody form, to the splotches he’s left on the couch, and the slowly-developing stains on the carpet, grimacing in disgust.

“Okay, Dingus,” she says, clapping her hands sharply enough to make his ears ring. “Game plan time. You need a shower and a change of clothes pronto. Then–have you eaten?”

“I’ll be in trouble if I don’t clean this up.” He’s too worn out to even bother gesturing at the carnage surrounding them, much less bending around his ribs to scrub.

A furrow forms between Robin’s eyebrows as she contemplates him, mouth pursed like she’s trying to solve complex algebra. Or no, she’smart enough for that to be a breeze. So more like she’s trying to figure out how to scoop his brain out and blow on it until it works better.

“Where are your cleaning supplies?” she asks.

“Robin–”

“No. You’re hurt, and I’m fine. Go take a shower.” Like she can sense him looking, her hand jumps up to cover the singular bruise on her cheekbone. “It’s not the same. Where are the cleaning supplies?”

Her words are so harsh, that he speaks before thinking: “down the hallway in the closet.”

She jumps up, walking with her usual frenetic energy as Steve tries and fails to will himself to get up and stop her. It’s only a few moments after he hears the closet door click open that she shouts, “go shower!”

He goes.

Steve has to peel his uniform off. Mud and puke and blood have dried and merged to his skin. Scabs open where he pulls until he can leave the whole thing crumpled into the smallest ball he can manage in the trash can, salvaging only his nametag as a keepsake, wondering idly if Robin will switch him.

The shower hurts, but he feels divinely clean as he bends over just enough to shuffle into clean sweatpants and an old Hawkins swim team shirt from sophomore year, washed and worn enough to be soft against his skin. He doesn’t put products in his hair, doesn’t even brush it, all remaining energy used in stumbling down the stairs to stop Robin from overworking herself needlessly.

The air smells like a janitor’s closet, enough concoctions mixed together on his Mother’s carpet to wage chemical warfare. Robin’s on her hands and knees, scrubbing ferociously with a scrub brush at the grout between tiles at the entryway. Steve steps around the couch, peering down at the carpet, off-color with cleaner instead of his various bodily fluids. The couch is similarly immaculate, velvety cushions rubbed roughly against the grain from Robin’s ruthless cleaning.

“I threw away your shoes,” Robin calls as she gathers up the cleaning supplies surrounding her and stumbles her way back toward the closet. “There was a concerning amount of blood pooled in the soles, Dingus. Ain’t no way that was all coming out.”

Steve looks around at his clean living room again. All this work, and all he can feel from Robin is pleased satisfaction. Steve feels like he’s going to cry.

“I threw away my uniform.”

Robin laughs. “It’s not like we’re gonna need them anymore.”

Steve pulls the nametag out of his pocket. The stupid anchor is flecked with blood but otherwise it’s pristine. He holds it out to Robin when she troops back into the room.

“You can be me,” he says.

Her eyes light up as she takes it and immediately affixes it onto the front of her shirt. She shuffles back to the side of the couch where she’d tucked her backpack and riffles through it, murmuring quietly enough that he can’t quite make it out. She gives a cute little Ah-ha! When she finds whatever she’s looking for before skipping back over to him, grin crooked it’s so big.

“We can trade.” And there, tucked in her palm is her own, slightly charred name tag. She pins it to his shirt, pricking him with the pointy end before finally settling it in place. “You can be Robin, and I can be Steve!”

It settles easy around his shoulders, like he really can take a step back. Be someone else. Breathe. “I’m Robin,” he murmurs.

She smacks his chest over the nametag, gentle enough to barely hurt.

“Well Robin, what’s for lunch?”

They eat sandwiches in front of the TV. Robin complains about his movie collection, even as she jumps up and down excitedly and puts in Grease. It’s comfortable, easy to forget who’s dead, and who’s injured, and how fucked up their brains are now. It’s between The Breakfast Club and Fast Times that Robin gasps, sitting bolt upright and slapping his thigh.

“Truth serum, Steve! It was truth serum!”

“What was?”

“They wanted to open our minds!”

Steve, up until this point, had thought that was obvious, didn’t realize that for once she was trailing just a bit behind him in the obvious revelations category. “Yeah, and they did.” Robin’s nodding like she can’t stop. He puts his palm flat on her head and holds it still. “Opened them so wide we swallowed each others.”

Steve can’t tell who’s thinking it, but suddenly he's picturing two brains in horrible sailor outfits and terrible mouths that hit a little too close to the demogorgon. One’s mouth is open wide enough to eat the other whole. Then they’re laughing, uproariously, like they’re watching the same funny little show, like the television hasn’t turned to static in front of them.

“Now we can’t keep any of the truths from each other,” Robin says at the same time she’s thinking about that embarrassing crush she’d had on her seventh grade teacher.

In a bid to even the playing field, Steve thinks about little Sally Perkins who he’d liked so much in fourth grade that he’d smashed a grasshopper into her hair and had to miss out on the rest of recess. She’d never talked to him again.

Robin laughs but still shuffles away so his fingers aren’t touching her scalp anymore. Her thoughts flit away, but her hazy contentment lingers.

Steve gets up to switch out the movies, brain buzzing away. “Okay so I feel what you feel, right?” he asks, not waiting for a response. “And I can hear what you’re thinking when we touch.”

“You can hear it?”

Steve starts up the movie and sits back in his place on the couch. Robin looks horrified by this. “You can’t?”

“No!” she shouts, forgetting herself enough to smack her hand into his shoulder, jostling his numerous injuries. Robin grimaces, “Sorry, it’s just, you can just hear what I’m thinking? You can’t like, see anything?”

“You can see things?” Steven demands.

“Holy shit!” Robin bounces up on her knees and just keeps doing it, like a kid excited to open presents on Christmas. “Do you know what this means?”

Steve looks over at her, eyebrow furrowed. “That you’re a–girl?”

“No!” Robin stops bouncing. “I mean, yeah. But no, Steve. What the fuck?”

“I just mean that’s like the only difference between us, right? What else could it be?”

He can feel amusement bubbling up in her stomach, but Robin just stares at him, like she’s too stunned to laugh. “I just meant that some smarty pants scientist should like study us. Because like, we’re proof that some people think differently right? Me all in words and you all in these fancy schmancy pictures! That has nothing to do with our genders, Harrington. That shit’s made up!”

Steve doesn’t know how he feels about being studied by scientists. He’d heard about mini Byers time with those Upside Down quacks and wasn’t sure he was interested in his own stay. It would be nice to have someone who knew what they were doing to help them navigate whatever minefield they’d found themselves in but not at the cost of Robin’s safety. But if they just need a smarty pants who think they know everything then–”Henderson’s smart.”

“You want to call your children?” Robin asks, laughing.

“Think about it!” he replies, slapping the couch. “The lab people are all sketchy, and I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to be locked up without sunlight for the next hundred years.”

“Okay, yeah but–”

“Your parents aren’t in the know, and I’m practically an orphan. Hopper died.” Steve cuts out, choked up over the thought just like he had been in the mall parking lot when he’d first been told. Robin squeezes his calf. “That takes Joyce out of the running since she's grieving and shit. That just leaves the kids!”

“What about Nan–”

“Things are still kind of weird with Nancy and Jonathan, Rob!” he says, running his fingers through his hair and pulling sharp enough to burn. “If we have to, sure, call her, but I don’t know if this counts as the kind of life or death scenario I would do that in.”

Robin sighs, folding over until her head’s on his thigh, stomach pressed into his calves. “Can we call him tomorrow?” she asks, voice muffled by the cotton of his sweatpants. “My head’s killing me and that kid is so shrill.”

Steve runs his fingers through her hair, coming it back from her face. His fingers come in contact with her forehead long enough to get a quick burst of–feels nice, I wonder if this is why all the girls liked him, or if it was all those rumors I heard about his mouth, eww eww gross don’t think about–before her thoughts cut out. “Tomorrow,” he agrees.

They settle in to keep vegetating, Steve slumping further into the arm rest, Robin turning her head and wrapping her arms around his calf. The quiet lasts for ten more minutes before Steve just has to ask, “What do you mean gender is made up?”

Robin cackles.

#this could be read alone. part 1 is more of a prologue #platonic stobin mind-reading au #platonic stobin #steve harrington #robin buckley #stranger things #my fic

342 notes · View notes