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lumosinlove · 1 month

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Vaincre

June part v

You and me Sunday driving

Not arriving, on our way back home

Finn couldn’t remember the last time it had been just him and Logan for more than a couple hours.

Leo had seemed content if not exhausted when he’d let them drive him to the airport to meet his parents. The fact that he had only packed his weekend bag made something settle in Finn. He still felt guilty about the way he had reacted. He was better than that now. He knew he was.

While they were saying goodbye in departures, Logan and Leo wrapped up in each other, Eloise had pulled Finn aside.

“Finn, honey,” she’d said. “We’ll take good care of him. He’ll be back to you in no time at all.”

Finn had smiled. “Don’t I know it.”

Eloise had just put a hand on his cheek. Those blue eyes saw right through him, just like her son’s. “I know my Leo. I know him better than anything or anyone in this world. And I know Logan’s going to be busy, but you give him a week at home with me, you let me take care of him, and then I swear, on my most secret sauce, he’s going to want you.”

Finn hadn’t known just what to say.

Finn opened his eyes in Logan’s New York bedroom. His realized that his head didn’t hurt. His shoulder ached a little but with none of the sharpness. Usually when he woke up he had to clear all the pain away with gentle blinks, water, and small rolls of his shoulder and neck.

Finn had taken Logan out to dinner last night and watched him laugh at his jokes and sip red wine. There was just something about Logan with a delicate wine glass in his hand. They’d curled up in bed and they had talked until they were too tired for complete sentences.He felt clear.

He felt good.

It only got better when he turned his head to look at the source of the soft, even breathing beside him.

Logan was beautiful in sleep. He always had been. His head, as usual, had migrated off of his own pillow and onto Finn’s good arm. Finn slept with two barnacles, and maybe sometimes he woke up sweating, way overheated, but he wouldn’t move them for the world. Careful not to shift his arm too much, Finn turned on his side and settled a hand over the dip of Logan’s waist. He was at the height of his strength right now, the season had done all of its work on him. Finn drew a thumb along the cut of muscles that slanted down from his hip bone, disappearing below his pajama pants.

Almost immediately, Logan stirred, thick eyelashes moving as he began to wake up.

“You know what I remember?” Finn whispered.

“Mm,” Logan said, still half-asleep. He hadn’t even opened his eyes yet.

“Every morning when I would wake up early for my run. You know, back at school. I would keep my eyes closed for a second. Because some of my mornings were good, but some of them were great.” He reached out for a perfect curl of Logan’s hair and gently pinched the end of it between his fingers. “Guess what the difference was?”

Logan turned his face so that his mouth brushed Finn’s skin. Eyes still closed. Face still the picture of peace.

“I’d look over across the room at your bed. Sometimes you’d have your back towards me…Those were good mornings, don’t get me wrong. You have a very nice back.”

A small smile overtook Logan’s face, even though he was still lulled with closed eyes—Finn knew his voice did that to him.

“But sometimes,” Finn said quietly. “You would be facing me. And I’d get to just lay there and look at you for as long as I wanted. Sleepyhead.”

Logan inhaled slowly and opened his eyes.

Green.

“Good morning, gorgeous,” Finn whispered. “It’s you and me today.”

Logan shuffled closer to him, freeing Finn’s arm as his head shifted to his chest. Finn curled his arm low on Logan’s back, dipping his fingers below the band of his pajama pants—Leo’s. They had pooled around his feet as he walked around the apartment last night.

“Take you on a date,” Logan said, voice deeper from sleep—Finn didn’t know why that happened but he hoped it never stopped. “Show you the city.”

Finn laughed. “You show me New York City.”

“Ouais.”

“Hm.” He traced a finger down Logan’s spine and felt him move into the touch. “Whatever you say.”

“I know it better now. Than you.”

Finn smacked him on his hip. Logan just smiled and pushed his face into Finn’s neck. He said something unintelligible in French.

“Par-don?”

Logan pulled back to look at him. “I say I love you in my bed.”

“Oh. Well, I fucking adore you, you know, wherever.”

Logan pressed a kiss to Finn’s mouth and then nestled back down against his chest, close to the thump of his heart.

Finn smiled.

“Are you smiling?” Logan asked from his nook.

“Yeah.”

“What?”

Finn didn’t answer right away. He slid his fingers through Logan’s hair. “Because I got you.”

Logan looked up at him, his chin propped on Finn’s chest.

“Nice not having the sling in the way,” Finn said, rubbing his thumb over the high of Logan’s cheek. “What’s that look you’re giving me?”

Logan just kept looking at him.

“What?” Finn laughed. “Hold still.” He brought his thumb up to ever so gently touch Logan’s eyelashes. When he pulled it away, there was a single, dark lash on the pad. “Make a wish.”

Logan looked down at the eyelash, then reached out and took it from him. With it balanced carefully on his own fingertip, he let it fall against Finn’s own cheek, a small, dark line among all the freckles.

“I don’t think that’s how it works,” Finn said, but his heart had picked up.

“Ouais.” Logan pushed forward, settling his weight on Finn’s chest but keeping it off his shoulder, and kissed him again. “Good morning, Rouge.”

“Morning.”

Logan pushed forward more to kiss Finn again, hand appearing from beneath the warm comforter to tangle in Finn’s hair. “Stay here for now.”

“Hm?”

“We stay here for a little longer.”

“Good,” Finn said, following it with a playful bite to Logan’s lower lip.

Logan made a slightly disgruntled sound. “My back hurts a little.”

Finn frowned. “Oh?”

“Not bad, but can you…” Logan gave Finn’s foot a little kick and Finn laughed.

“Yes, sir.” Finn reached down to dig his fingers into the hard muscle of Logan’s lower back. Logan groaned and dropped his forehead down against Finn’s chest. Finn smiled. “There?”

“How did you know? Fuck, that hurts—non, non, it’s good, keep, keep…”

“I know everything about you,” Finn whispered—his best attempt at creepy. Logan just went limp against his chest and let him ease the tight knot. “Jesus, Lo. Put some heat on that.”

“Ouais,” Logan said. He lifted his head again. “You do know everything about me, don’t you.”

Finn smiled. “Yeah. Now, what else can I do?”

Logan’s eyes brightened up a little. “I want to kiss you.”

“Oh, you’re looking for a little make out sesh?”

Logan wrinkled his nose. “Sesh.”

“Little college action.”

“Action?”

“As though we were in our old dorm,” Finn said, giving the mattress a thump with his good hand. “This bed’s bigger than that one.”

“Hm,” Logan laughed softly, looking over at the spare mattress. “Leo.”

“He’ll be home soon.”

Logan nodded. “Imagine how much time we would have spent just…in one of our beds. Back then.”

“Maybe we would have pushed the two of them together,” Finn said.

They could have. It sent a little thrill up Finn’s spine just thinking about it. Anyone who would have walked in their room would have known they were each others.

Finn tucked a curl behind Logan’s ear. “And we’re just all settled in. There’s no practice tomorrow…First day of summer. No homework.”

Logan rolled his eyes but he was grinning. “Percy’s gonna knock on our door and ask if we want to go to the bars, and we’re gonna ignore him…” He dragged his lips over Finn’s jaw to find his mouth again. “Because you’re such a good kisser. And I can’t stop.”

“Huh.” Finn’s hand smoothed over Logan’s hip, pushing the elastic band down closer to the swell of his ass. Smooth, tan skin.

“I never want to stop,” Logan said. “And Perc finally leaves us alone, and we get food delivered and we watch that show you love—what…I don’t know but we’re not watching anyway because I can’t stop kissing you…” His kisses were hard and relentless and Finn was on fire. The most perfect burn, whiskey-like. “You’ve been mine since the first day.”

Finn felt his brows draw together as he kissed Logan. He loved him talking like this. Everything in him loved it.

“I didn’t really expect you to play along,” Finn said.

“Not playing,” Logan said. “This is our life now.”

“Oh,” Finn whispered. “Oh, Lo…”

“Go to a bagel shop this morning?” Logan mumbled.

“I love the way you say bagel.”

Logan bit his lower lip and pulled gently.

“Bah-g-elle,” Finn whispered and hitched Logan’s leg up further over his hips. He knew it would stretch out his back nicely—and he knew he was right when Logan hummed happily. He moved his hand from Logan’s ass and dug two knuckles against the knot in his lower back.

“Yeah,” Logan breathed. “B-ay-gal.”

“No, don’t say it like me, say it like you.”

Logan bent to mouth over Finn’s mending shoulder. “Bagel.”

“Hm, yeah.” Finn snorted. “I really want Le to call and we’re just like, bah-gel, bay-gal, bah-bay.”

Logan laughed probably too hard at that, but Finn could tell they were both a little giddy. Logan was filling his chest up with happiness that was going to spill right out of him. Once he started laughing, he found that he couldn’t stop. Logan was shaking against him, hiding his grin in his neck. It got Finn going all over again.

Logan leaned back, smile wide. “Bah-bay.”

Finn put a hand over his eyes. “Oh my God, I can’t breathe. Bah-bay.”

“It’s not even funny,” Logan said, which sent them both into silent laughter again.

They quieted slowly, temples leaning together. Breathing in sync. This. This had never been in question—this part of them. Even in the times when Logan had taken Finn apart, told him no, told him nothing…Finn had never felt like they’d lose this part of them. Maybe that didn’t make sense, but it was true.

“You gonna win a Cup for me?” Finn whispered. He traced patterns on Logan’s back. A one and a zero. An L, E, O.

Logan nodded. “Mhm. Wr—r…” He sighed when Finn smiled. Finn felt kiss-stupid. “Rather win it with you.”

“Oo-wa-rather,” Finn whispered, and then took Logan’s chin between his fingers and melted Logan’s protests right out of his mouth. He kept Logan in place, kept the kiss gentle, tracing his tongue along Logan’s bottom lip. “I love everything you say.”

“How ‘bout them apples,” Logan mumbled and then cracked himself up.

Finn pressed his smile right into Logan’s cheek, making him turn his head to be caught in another kiss. “Mfh—okay, you’re just sticking your tongue in my mouth now.” Logan got back at him by licking a strip up his neck. Finn’s voice cracked when he said, “Weirdo.”

The bagel shop was one Finn hadn’t been to before. Logan had found it. He’d known Finn would love the black and white tiled floor and he had been right. Finn had scored them a table outside while Logan waited for their orders. Finn watched him through the window. He had taken two Advil and was stretching out his back when their order number was called. Finn caught the way the girl who handed him the bags looked at him. She and her friend had been watching the flex and stretch of his arms, too. Finn smiled to himself. Ha-ha-ha.

“Extra capers. Crazy.” Logan said when he sat down. He had two iced coffees as well. Finn’s was black, Logan’s was a light, light brown with milk. There were three sugar packets on the table and Finn watched as Logan ripped them open, popped the lid on his cup, and shook them in. Logan’s hair was still wet and he wasn’t wearing a hat. He had a sort of rust colored shirt, almost pink, and Finn couldn’t really stop looking at him. It was so different from his dark grays and greens. The breeze ruffled his curling hair.

“You look…” Finn said, then bit his straw between his teeth.

Logan arched a brow, unwrapping his bagel. He stuck a finger in his mouth when he got cream cheese on it. “Quoi.”

“Is that shirt new?”

“Ouais…” Logan looked down at it. “What’s wrong?”

Finn shook his head quickly. “No, no…You look good, baby.”

Logan didn’t look convinced and Finn laughed.

“No, I just never see you wear that color. I thought it was Leo’s. It surprised me. And—yeah, I just think you look good.”

Logan looked down at his bagel, his cheeks going a little pink to Finn’s delight.

“I went shopping,” Logan said grudgingly.

Finn’s eyebrows rose. Logan didn’t like clothes shopping. At all. Any other type, fine, but the kind where someone looks at you and tries to help you? No way. “Really.”

“Yes.”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“Really…”

Logan huffed. “Finn.”

“With who? Alex?”

Logan took a big bite. He chewed. He took a sip of his coffee.

Finn gasped and slapped the table with his hands. The metal thrummed beneath his touch. “Oh. So Luke Deveaux gets to take you shopping but when I try—I see. Okay. I see.”

Logan was biting back a smile and Finn turned his chair sideways, away from Logan. Logan laughed and reached across the table to catch his hand.

“Non. You can take me shopping if you want.”

“Well, I don’t see a purpose to it now.” Finn was having fun with this. He angled his chin completely away from Logan and yanked his hand away with a flourish to pick up his coffee. “I see how it is.”

Logan groaned through his laugh. “Fi-i-nn.”

“He takes you shopping, he takes you running…”

With a scoff, Logan scooted his chair back. He stood over Finn. Finn put his sunglasses on.

“When Luke and I go shopping, we buy clothes,” Logan said. He leaned down, one hand braced on the back of Finn’s chair. Those green eyes didn’t let Finn look away from him. Not when he was this close. “We try on our different outfits and we’re in and out within the hour.”

“Good for you two. Very efficient.”

To Finn’s surprise, Logan turned to the side a little and sat himself right in Finn’s lap, all the warm, heavy strength of him. His arm went around Finn’s shoulders, the other flat-palmed against his chest. He could probably feel the way Finn’s heart picked up when he leaned in close and brushed his lips over Finn’s jaw. God, Finn hoped those girls were watching. Ha-ha.

“When you take me shopping…I want to pull you into the dressing room.” A soft kiss pressed to Finn’s neck. “I want to lock the door behind us and I want you to fuck me right there…” Another kiss. “In front of the mirror…” A gentle bite and, behind Finn’s glasses, his eyes slipped closed. “Where I can see how good you look when you’re about to make me come. When you’re trying to keep me quiet…”

Finn’s hand snapped to Logan’s hip. Logan smiled—Finn felt it. “You’d be so good at keeping your voice steady when someone knocks on the door…” Logan put on a slightly higher voice. “‘You finding everything okay?’” Logan pressed his mouth harder against Finn’s throat. “You’d be so good at it. ‘Oh, thanks so much…We’re fantastic.’”

“Logan.” Finn was starting to get hard in his shorts, pressing up against Logan’s thighs. He eased his palm over those strong thighs, fingers creeping up the inner seam of Logan’s shorts. Logan was sporting a semi and he knew Finn could see.

“So, please,” Logan said. “Take me shopping.”

And just like that, Logan was off of his lap. Finn swung his chair back inwards with a groan, shuffling his legs underneath the table. He took a sip of his iced coffee then held the cup to his cheek. “What the fuck.”

Logan returned to his own chair much more smoothly. God, if he had looked good in the dark pink a second ago, it was nothing compared to how he looked with that color flushing his cheeks. Finn needed a second. He picked up his food and tried to get his insides to stop throbbing.

“If it was one of those doors,” he said around a bite, “that don’t go all the way to the floor—”

“That would be so embarrassing,” Logan said, then grinned. “For the person who caught us, I mean.”

Finn just shook his head. “You liar. You’d be so nervous.”

“Try me.” Logan took another bite of his bagel and Finn swore, he swore, Logan made a show of licking the cream cheese. Logan looked at him all the while, green eyes playful. Finn didn’t know what unimaginably hot thing was going to come out of his mouth next. Did he want to go to the bathroom right now? Did he want to go home? Did he want to go shopping? Because Finn would. He would.

“Bah-bay,” Logan said.

Finn laughed so hard he dropped his coffee.

They had cleaned out their lockers. They had said see you at the lake to Remus’ parents. They had had one last dinner with as much of the team as they could—minus any New York stragglers—Kasey, Finn, Leo… They closed up their Gryffindor House. Sirius’ eyes had followed Remus around as he filled out his checklist. They had a final breakfast at their diner spot before hitting the road. Julian had been standing on the wrap-around porch, waving both of his hands as they pulled into the driveway. The grill had been going, his father raising the tongs in salute.

“Mm,” Sirius said, turning off the engine. “I’d kill for your dad’s steak.”

Remus laughed as he popped the door. “You know, I think he’ll just give it to you easily enough.”

After everything, those first two days felt like a fever dream. Afternoon swims. Sirius’ smile in the campfire light, laughing at something his mother had said. Sirius, wrapped up in the old-as-time blankets, snug in the bed Remus had been sleeping in since he was a child. Julian and Sirius tossing a football on the beach. Playing street hockey in the driveway. Watching people recognize Sirius in the little harbor breakfast spot—and, Remus had to keep realizing, watching them recognize him. Sirius’ big hands around a sharpie as he knelt to sign a little kid’s shirt.

Remus was now in the kitchen mashing up avocados for guacamole while his mom mixed a pitcher of margaritas. The dining room table was covered with place cards, flower combinations, and menus from the restaurant down the road. In just over a month, they’d bring their grills to the house for pulled-pork. They’d mix huge bowls of coleslaw, they’d chop up watermelon and make it into ice cream during dinner. Remus hadn’t had any time to worry about these things, and then suddenly he’d had nothing but time. Thank God for Hope Lupin.

“So, Lily and James are arriving in a week, right?” Hope said. “And Harry of course.”

“Yeah,” Remus said. “Sirius thought Harry would love the beach.”

“Lakes are good for babies,” Hope said. “Nice shallow water. Easy to watch. I always loved bringing you and Jules here. It’ll be sweet to see little Harry again.”

The back door slammed and Remus looked up at the sound of Julian’s laugh. He saw his mom smile.

“Shoes off!” she called. “No sand in the house, please! Or you’re doing the sweeping!”

There was a scuffle of shoes coming off and hockey sticks being leaned against walls, and then Julian bounded into the kitchen. Sirius followed a moment later.

Remus didn’t even think Sirius was making a show of how he leaned back against the refrigerator, sweating. “Jesus, Lupin.”

“Yes?” Remus said.

“Non,” Sirius panted. He jerked his chin at Julian. “That one.”

Remus raised his eyebrows. “Julian Lupin? Did you beat up my boyfriend?”

Julian swallowed a long drink of water and raised his eyebrows right back. “You mean your fiancé?”

Sirius laughed, using his t-shirt to wipe his face. Remus let his eyes catch on his stomach for a moment.

“Yes,” Remus said. “I mean my fiancé.”

“Then yeah,” Julian said. “I did.”

“He did,” Sirius agreed. When Julian wasn’t looking, Remus raised an eyebrow, and Sirius’ grin gave him away.

Sweetest boy on Earth.

“I’m going to take a shower if I have time?” Sirius said, eyes on Hope.

“You certainly do,” Hope said. “We’re on lake time, honey! Woo!”

“D’accord.” Sirius paused as he passed by Remus and settled a hand on his hip. “Salut, mon amor.”

“Hi,” Remus said.

“Be back soon.” Sirius pressed a kiss to his neck and disappeared towards the stairs.

“Re, will you take the clothes in from the line and bring them upstairs? I think it might rain a little tonight. Julian, finish up that guacamole, hon.”

“Kay,” Julian said. “Can I have a sip of a margarita?”

“You can have a baby one because you’re my baby,” Hope said.

Julian rolled his eyes, but he kissed her cheek. “Thanks, Mama.”

On his way out, Remus kissed her other cheek.

Outside, the breeze did smell a little like rain, but the sun over the lake felt like summer. The wind was warm. The small nets were still set up for Sirius and Julian’s game of hockey. Remus walked around the side of the house towards the lake and found the clothes swaying in the breeze. A few of Sirius’ t-shirts hung together. Worn Lions ones from seasons past. Remus took one down and held it. He remembered this from Sirius’ second season. He brought it to his nose. It smelled like Sirius and like the cottage. Like the lake air and the detergent his mom used here.

Remus could have wrapped himself entirely in that smell.

He heard the shower cut off right as he reached the top creaky step. He set Julian’s clothes on his bed, his parents’ on theirs, and brought the basket into their own bedroom. He set Sirius’ shirts on the bed to fold. He was laying out a sweatshirt that hadn’t quite dried when the Sirius came in with a towel wrapped around his waist. Like always, he stubbed his toe on the frog-shaped metal doorstop.

“Merde,” Sirius cursed.

“You think you would have learned by now.”

Sirius nudged the heavy metal frog a little under the old dresser. “Me too.”

Sirius stole a shirt off of the pile Remus was folding. Remus watched quietly as he dropped his towel and shook it through his wet hair a few times. He’d gotten it cut before they left. He had a bit of a tan line, the part of his neck which his hair had covered was pale, but the sun would change that soon. The summer would change change many things. Sirius’ body still held every ounce of muscle built up throughout the season. Remus knew what each ridge and valley felt like. His shoulders and back looked like heaven in the light coming through their bedroom window. That would soften over the next months.

Sirius turned once he’d pulled his shorts on and laughed. “You keep staring.”

Remus looked down and smiled. “Oh, I just like your haircut, that’s all.”

“That’s all?”

Remus eyed the way the t-shirt stretched across his chest and shoulders. “You’ve got play-off shoulders going on.”

Sirius stepped towards him. He tossed the sweatshirt Remus was holding away and settled his hands on Remus’ hips. “So do you.”

Sirius’ kiss was heavy and slow. They hardly broke before a new one sent Remus’ head spinning.

“Remus!” Julian’s voice called up the stairs.

Remus didn’t reply. He wrapped Sirius up tighter against him. The bed creaked as Sirius pressed him against one of the posts. The wooden carved flower dug into the small of Remus’ back but Remus didn’t care. He felt like they hadn’t been alone in decades. Regulus in Gryffindor, his family here…

“I wish…” Remus panted as Sirius leaned down to kiss his neck. “You’re so…” His eyes slipped closed.

“Re-mus,” Julian called. “Mom won’t let me have a margarita and chips until everyone’s here.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Remus whispered, sounding almost forlorn to himself. With all his strength, he gave Sirius’ chest a little push. Sirius barely moved and Remus caught a flash of his smile when he dragged his mouth along Remus’ jaw to kiss him again.

“Remus!”

“Yeah—one second!” Remus called down, hoping he sounded at least a little normal.

“It’s been like fifty seconds!”

“On our way, Jules!” Sirius called—then he went right back to kissing Remus. Long, deadly-good kisses that made Remus feel like he was about to lose his footing. That was a good move, though. Julian never talked back to Sirius.

“Okay, cool!” Julian called back, much more happily.

Sirius laughed softly. Remus pushed his hands under Sirius’ shirt and rested his forehead against his shoulder. He spread his palms over Sirius’ stomach before sliding them around his hips to his back.

“Is this helping you?” Sirius asked. He was standing there almost patiently, dark eyes amused.

“Not even a little, but it’s nice anyway.”

Sirius took Remus’ hands in his and kissed his knuckles. “Allez. We’re holding up dinner.”

“What took you so long?” Julian dug his chip into the guacamole and sighed happily as he chewed. At least someone was satisfied.

“Sorry, I was getting dressed,” Sirius said. “Re was just putting away the laundry.”

“Jules,” Lyall laughed. He’d come in from the garden. “Leave them alone.”

Julian seemed to think this over. “Do you guys want to play another hockey game after dinner?”

“Sorry, Jules, Sirius is all mine after dinner.” When Julian stuck his tongue out at Remus, Remus did it right back. Beneath the table, Sirius took his hand.

#Vaincre lumosinlove #sweater weather lumosinlove #remus lupin #sirius black #sports au #finn o'hara #Logan tremblay #finnlo

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rustboxstarr · 11 months

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🥀First times for everything🥀

Summary: Just some good ole' fashioned grinding my guys

Pairings: Virgin!Eddie x Plussize!Reader

CW: kissing, groping, smut, grinding, cumming in boxers 😈, slight miscommunication, new relationship, reader referred to as fat by herself because what is so wrong with that? it's an adjective!

Word count: 3.9k

A/N:This was supposed to be a blurb, I very obviously failed..

Check out my other works!

You strolled down the hall adjoining the cafeteria with an arm laced with Robins as you laughed about a previous endeavor in class, Jason had been told to shut it after talking all class and almost peed himself when he wasn't excused to the bathroom with a pass. The early June weather didn't feel as if you had just left spring, it felt like you were in the pique of august in some exotic country judging by the sun blazing down on you, allowing your body to break out in a light sweat whenever you were outside too long. The temperature was up in the three digits category every single day, so automatically baggy jeans and t-shirts turned into shorts and the occasional crop top. Today was that day, you had gotten a few stares, but that was inevitable being a fat girl wearing shorts that barely covered your ass and naturally weighty breasts on display under the white halter top, you would like to think it was a modest amount of cleavage, unfortunately that was only the case for you, for others you looked like you might have been trying too hard, there was no way you were going to care however, it was too damn hot outside to dress any lighter than this. You were pleasantly surprised that the shorts hadn't been bothering you but you dismissed the fact of no chafing due to the short walks between classes and cool air blasting through the school leaving your thighs dry and smooth as they rubbed together when you walked.

“Oooh, loverboy is here” Robin grabbed your attention and drew it down to the end of the hall to see your boyfriend leant up against the lockers, black t-shirt with some band on it you couldn't read from so far away and a simple pair of green cargo shorts. “oh and he’s waiting by your locker, how cute” Robin grinned sarcastically. You rolled your eyes at her antics, “Oh I just realized you never told me if you.. you know” she widened her eyes excitedly, “Jesus Robin, you are too invested in other people's lives” that was not the answer she was looking for and that was made clear when she shook her head expectantly. “If you must know” you rolled your eyes again “No Eddie and I have not had sex”. You stopped in the middle of the hall, pulling her to the side so you wouldn't arrive where Eddie was, mid conversation.

“Why not dude? What on earth are you waiting for?” she was undoubtedly exasperated with the situation, you were together, you had talked about sex with Eddie and she had heard from Steve that he had briefly ventured into the subject so what was the big deal?!

“Everyones not sexcrazed teenagers like you and Steve, humping like bunnies” you sneered “Ew when you say that it sounds like you mean were fucking each other” she pulled a face. “Obviously not, I just mean, Steve dates anyone in sight” you gestured to yourself, as if saying he even dates fat girls “-and you and Vickie seem to be how do I say this?” you pondered “Horny as fuck” you grinned. “So are you and Eddie” she drew her eyebrows up dramatically as if she knew something you didn't. “We don’t know that, for all I know Eddie isn't even ready to do that stuff” you explained. “Welllll” Robin bounced on the balls of her feet “I mean, he’s a 19 year old guy, they're all horny fucks. He might just be waiting for you to tell him you're ready” that was in fact the case, but you didn't know that.

“I feel like if he was he would say something” you raised your eyebrows as you began treading slowly down the hall again, “You realize you haven't told him you're ready” she rolled her eyes out of your view “I think he would know I’m ready” you countered.

“Sure, because boys are so well known for their knowledge of the female species, Eddie!” she held her hands out as a greeting. Eddie frowned slightly at her dramatic hello “Hey.. Robin” he answered her cautiously. “Alrighty well I’m gonna head to History, I’ll leave you too lovebirds be” she smirked earning a sneer from you as she began walking. She turned around behind Eddie's back to face you and made a lude scene in the hall, pretending to thrust into someone from behind while making awfully exaggerated faces of pleasure. Your stare at her drew Eddie's attention making him look behind him, Robin stopped abruptly and spun around to speed walk to class.

“Hey” you smiled, stretching up to place a peck to his lips which he happily returned. “Only have a few minutes, I have history too” he explained as you opened your locker to switch out your books “But I wanted to ask, um Wayne, is uh out tonight, if you want to you know come over, we don't have to do anything!” he was quick to stress that fact “but I just thought it might be nice, watch Tv without a 60 year old man hovering around us” he grinned “and uh we got the AC going so it'll be cool” he brought his hand to the back of his neck to scratch and it with the pads of his fingers.

“Yeah, I’d love to, I’ll just tell Steve I don't need a ride and I’ll go home with you yeah?” you closed your locker, limply holding your math textbook between both hands resting on your stomach. “Yeah sounds good” he smiled down at you, as you met his eyes you saw his attention was brought further down, to your boobs which were now firmly pressed together from the way you were holding your textbooks. You felt slightly awkward under his gaze but the moment only lasted a second or so before he cleared his throat and looked back at you “I’ll uh, be in the parking lot when you end” “Can’t wait” you grinned as you pecked him on the lips again. Before you could draw back Eddie's hand was quick to grab at your neck to hold you to him for just a few seconds longer. You swallowed as you drew apart, “Ok, bye” you forced a smile and quickly walked away. God could you be more awkward??

–

“You ok?” Robin asked as Eddie folded himself into the wooden chair next to her. “What? Oh, yeah all good” he smiled but Robin only squinted at him, a slight smirk played on her lips as she leant back, waiting for the class to start. As casual as she could be she commented “Cute top Y/N wore today right?” she was trying very hard to fight the smirk, it was proven even more difficult as she turned her head to the side to see Eddie with raised eyebrows, he coughed “Uh, yeah, didn't- didn't really notice it” he tried explaining away. Robin only nodded, silently laughing maniacally in her head.

–

“Welcome to my humble abode” Eddie grinned as he swung through the door gesturing you to enter first, you chuckled “I’m familiar with it”, both of you slipped off your shoes and dropped your school bags to the floor. “So uh” Eddie clapped his hands together before holding them firmly behind his back, trying not to rock back and forth with nerves “What do you want to do, we can watch a movie, listen to music in my room and uh…” he wasn't sure how exactly he had planned on finishing that sentence. “Make out?” you grinned “I-I mean, only- only if you want to” what was his issue with just saying one word once when he was talking, shut the fuck up Eddie, why are you so nervous, shes your girlfriend you idiot.

You looked up at him through squinted eyelids, tilting your head to the side “Do you want to?” you had kissed before, sure, indulged in a little tongue, sat next to each other on a bench and awkwardly facing each other but never close to each other, not in someone's bed. “Only if you want to” he deadpanned now, head tilting down to look you straight in the eye, wishing he could understand what was going through your head. You were about to repeat his words back to him, or even say you wouldn't mind it, but maybe if you were clear with Eddie he would be clear with you so you opted for saying it right out “I want to” Eddie's eyes widened. “Do you?” you asked slowly, voice slightly firm “Y-yes, yes” he was nodding vigorously “I want to” you giggled at him “Well come on then” you slipped your palm into his, letting him stumble with you to his bedroom. Before you had a chance to sit down Eddie asked “Music?” trying to avoid your gaze. “Yes” you stated looking him dead in the eyes before grinning “But I’m picking”.

Eddie clambered onto his bed as you went through music collection. How was he supposed to sit, in the middle against the headboard? To the side so you could sit next to him? Should he lie down? Would you be comfortable with lying down or would he seem like a creep? Was he supposed to be on top? Fuck he was getting in his head, fucking relax. He chose to sit in the middle of the bed, resting against the headboard, this way if you wanted to you could.. sit in his lap.. or next to him, he made sure there was still room for you.

Just as he was trying to relax and calm his nerves he looked over at you bent at the waist to read the backs of each cassette. His heartbeat rose and an audible gulp was heard through the room as he noticed you. With your particular position your shorts had risen up your hips, wedging between your thighs, seam pressing at your puffy cunt and giving him a clear view of half your ass. He tried to look away, find just one other thing in the room that could catch his interest but it was impossible, his eyes snapped back to you, he rolled his eyes back as if just the sight of you alone was giving him pleasure, which, it was. He took the opportunity to sneakily and quietly adjust himself, forcing his now hard cock to sit straight and under the hem of his boxers, that would definitely make his little issue less noticeable.

You stood up only a moment later, popping in the A side of the cassette Whodini, Escape. It was a surprise to see Eddie actually had Hip-pop in his house but judging by the size of his collection it seemed reasonable. You rocked your head from side to side with the beat of the music as you turned to Eddie, who sat fiddling with his rings in his lap. Now it was your turn to freak out about the sitting position, you pushed it down and took a breath. You weren't necessarily that excited about sitting on top of Eddie, you were heavy, what if you were too heavy? What if he didnt like you sitting in his lap? But you chose to power through, climbing onto the bed and swinging a leg over his and settling on his mid thighs. Eddie's wide eyes stared up at you, it was unbearable, you didn't want to think you did something wrong so you just quickly attached your lips to his.

Eddie closed his eyes with a sigh, releasing the tension in his shoulders. As your hands grazed his arms and settled on each side of his neck Eddie drew his hands up to hold lightly at your waist. The kiss lasted a few seconds before you drew back to look at him, you didn't really get a chance though because soon enough Eddie leaned forward searching your lips again, with gentle movements you got him to settle back against the headboard and pecked against his lips. As you kissed him again you felt Eddie's tongue poking slightly at your flesh, nonverbal asking you to part your lips, you did, and you almost swooned when you felt his tongue graze yours, cinnamon gum tasting at the tip of your tongue. A low groan spilled from Eddie's lips as he grew more brave and licked more of your tongue. It was as if both of your bodies just knew and molded together, tongues swiping at each other with growing confidence and force. Eddie's hands began to grip harder at your hips making you notice it more, you chanced it and grabbed his right hand.

His grip immediately loosened, thinking he might have held you too hard but gasped when he felt you guide his hands to your boob. He muttered a “fuck” against your lips as his fingers pushed into the soft skin. His grip on your hip went back to its former strength as he palmed at you desperately. You hummed against him at the feeling and continued kissing him. Relishing in the feeling of Eddie's greedy hand altering between squeezing harshly and simply holding you.

He couldn't hold it in anymore though, he was straining desperately against his boxers and he needed some sort of release. You made a shocked whine when his hand left your boob to find its place on your hip again. Eddie forcefully pulled you flush against his chest, moving you from his thighs to sit right down on his clothed cock. You let out a loud gasp as you felt his hard length pressing right against your covered cunt, you parted your thighs to open your lips up to sit firmly on him, allowing his previous adjustment to sit deliciously pressed to your clit. Eddie's hands instinctively pushed over your shorts as he moved his hands from your hips to grab a hefty handful of your ass, causing you to push down on him. You let out a low moan at the feeling, desperately kissing his lips again to taste him.

When Eddie pulled you towards him with his grip still firm on you over the denim, you pulled away from him. Wide eyes staring down at him in surprise. Eddie's lips curled into a slight smirk and adjusted his footing on the bed, to push you up against him with his knee as his hands encouraged you to grind against him, his hands pushing you back and forth until you got the memo and began grinding against him. One hand left his shoulder to grip at the headboard behind him, supporting you in grinding against him in a particularly hard stroke as you watched Eddie's mouth fall open and his eyes flutter closed at the sensation. You forced your hips forward again, a long stroke where you could feel your clit hit slightly past the ridge of his head earned a loud groan from Eddie as his head fell back, hair brushing lightly against your hand.

With each movement of your hips, slowly but each stroke daring longer and longer Eddie groaned beneath you, suddenly you missed the touch of his lips against yours so you bent down slightly to capture his plump flesh in a light bite which turned into a kiss. Eddie grasped desperately at the fat of your ass as he timidly licked into your mouth. The long strokes ran faster as you found your position above him and confidence overthrew your nervousness, you hungrily grinded against his cock, the seam of your shorts perfectly placed against your clit as the first thrust of his hips forced it harder into the delicate nub.

With that first thrust you couldn't help the loud slightly pornographic moan that fell from your lips, it had Eddie slowing his tackle on your mouth to watch in awe as he thrusted again, swallowing hard at the sound of a second moan. With the release of his lips you closed your eyes, your head rolling over on your shoulders to face the ceiling. Eddie stared at you, his mouth falling open as he watched your face intently. He thrust his hips again, harder this time to hear a now proper loud sultry moan echo in the room. Had you opened your eyes you would have seen the surprise and excitement on is face at your reactions, but you were too focused on revelling at the fact that your clit was being treated with perfect friction with each passing second.

His hands went back to forcing you back and forth over him, the efforts of his knee, his hands, your hips and his hands moving you back and forth made you move faster and faster against him. Unabashedly your moans picked up to short and high pitched with each force of your hips. Eddie groaned as you purposely pushed your weight down on him and it distracted him from watching you. He went back to falling against the headboard with his eyelids shut but eyes rolling to the back of his skull beneath them.

His groans of delight turned into deep moans when the pace picked up to impatiently fast, rubbing over his dick as quickly as you could. Not only was he getting some much needed relief but soon he felt the relief turn into active pleasure, his eyes flew open in an instant, fuck if you continued like this he was going to cum in his jeans. Jesus christ he would look so pathetic if he couldn't even hold it when you were simply making out. Was this making out? You weren't even kissing him?-

On the other side of the interaction was you, eyes squeezed tightly shut as your mouth dropped open to an exaggerated ‘o’ simply in the moment and not caring one bit that you might complete, it wasn't even the possibility, you knew that with only another minute you would come. And you chased that while picking the pace up once again averaging four strokes with each second, tits bouncing as you pushed yourself down on him.

-Would you be grossed out if he came? Would it be weird? Fuuuuck he was clenching his stomach now, willing his body to slow down, but he couldn't when you felt so damn good. “Shit” it was the first word you had said since walking into his room, and it snapped him right out of his overthinking “- Eddie, I’m gonna cum” you whined. “Wait really?” hang on, if you were cumming, he could too right? “Yeah” it was an answer to his question but it came out as a long moan as you rocked against him. Well that was all the answer Eddie needed and he relaxed, he was shocked that it was even possible but he forced you to rock faster and faster, now fully accepting the pleasure it was causing him. You moans came out louder and louder, almost like high pitched squeaks with each thrust.

They grew shorter and louder, building up to the inevitable orgasm you were experiencing, you repeated a string of “fuck, fuck, fuck” until finally Eddie heard one loud scream of a moan as your head became even heavier on your shoulders forcing you to almost fall onto your back before Eddie reached up quickly to hold at your back, one hand tightly wrapped around your waist while one splayed between your shoulderblades. Your hand moved from the headboard to grip at his shoulders as you rocked through your orgasm. Eddie had been so fixed on watching you that he hadn't even realized he too was at the brink of the edge “Mother fu- SHIIIIIT” he groaned as he curled in on himself, his forehead finding support against your cleavage as his body portrayed the action of a dry heave. He felt the thick ropes of cum shoot out of his slit to paint the inside of his boxers and create a sticky mess.

You were now panting heavily as a hand found its way to slither through his curls and hold you softly against your boobs while Eddie shook beneath you. When you finally came down from your high, only 15 seconds after the fact, you became aware that Eddie was still seemingly cumming. You watched in shock as he groaned beneath you and shook uncontrollably until finally what must have been a whole half minute he stilled and heaved heavily. His heavy breathing forces your hand on his shoulder to follow up and down.

You giggled at him as Eddie moved from your tits to fall back against his pillows, a light sheen of sweat holding his bangs to his forehead as he panted. “Jesus, is this how you normally are?” you joked “Gonna get me pregnant if you cum that hard, probably break the condom” Eddie's eyes opened to look at you through a frown of confusion “I don't know” you answered sheepishly at your weird joke, but Eddie only burst out into a loud laugh, it was intoxicating and led you to join in as well.

The laughter finally died down “I have actually never cum that hard in my life, so no need to worry” he joked. “I’ve uh never actually uh done this before” he gestured between your bodies “Or anything really” you couldn't help the snort that left your throat, Eddie went back to frowning at you “I’m, I’m sorry” now you couldn't help that the loud obnoxious giggle “no no really I’m sorry” you breathed, why was this even funny you had no idea “I, uh, I kinda figured, you didn't really make a move” you explained.

Eddie pulled a face “Hey, I didn't make a move because I wanted to be respectful of you” he argued “I didn't know if you were like, ready for stuff like this yet” he explained. “Oh that's so sweet” a squeak bubbled up behind your lips as you fought hard not to laugh again “What is so funny?!” Eddie asked exasperatedly, you instinctively went to cover your mouth as you scrunched your face up “It's not funny I swear” you told him after taking a deep breath. “Well it seems to be for you”, you looked at him with a much needed serious expression “It's not funny, it is really sweet, it’s just that, I dated Steve” Eddie shook his head desperately, while blinking profusely with his eyes closed “Sorry, dated? I thought you said you went out like one time” Eddie stressed the one by holding his finger out. You grabbed it and laced your fingers with his. “I didn’t want to tell you because I knew I’d scare you off, and I really wanted you to ask me out” you gave him an apologetic look “Robin, kinda told me to wait with that whole thing, she said you'd be insecure”

“Fucking Robin” Eddie scoffed, with a roll of his eyes before he they suddenly zoned in on you again “Wait, so how experienced are you?” he asked. “Well I’m not a virgin” Eddie's face fell at that “But!” you interjected before he could say something “If it helps, I’ve never cum that quickly or hard with Steve, or ever really” at that fact Eddie's face broke into a grin “That does help actually” you smiled at him.

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scarletwinterxx · 11 months

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lee and lily - haechan dad scenario

hello!! just wanted to write a quick haechan fluff. haechan as a girl dad, i just know he'll be the most gentle and caring and whipped dad 🥺😭

if you have a request or scenario you want me to do, just send me a message I'll see what I can do😊💌

For my other works you can check them out here, and for my other story series’ you can check them out here.

and if you want, u can buy me coffee(totally optional but any donation is very much appreciated!) thank you🥺💛

All works are copyrighted ©scarletwinterxx 2023 . Do not repost, re-write without the permission of author.

(gif not mine, credits to rightful owner)

"Honey, I'm home! oh what are you doing there, angelbug?"

Haechan stops by the doorway when he spots his daughter sitting on the bottom step with her arms crossed and a frown on her cute little face

"Time out" his daughter answers with a pout, Haechan had to hold back his laugh just in case you're around watching. He tries not to get in your way whenever you discipline your 4 year-old daughter, he did it once and he ended up in trouble with you too.

You always tell him she's too spoiled, how can he not spoil her though?

Lee Nari, you and Haechan's first born. Baby girl was born on June 06, yes the same day as your husband. The two of you were enjoying his birthday dinner at home with his family when it happened, it was to say the least a very dramatic way of entering the world. Little Nari knew how to announce her entrance, a few hours later she was born.

Since then she's been yours and Haechan's world. You can control yourself when it comes to giving her what she wants and teaching her how the real world works but her father is a whole another story.

If Haechan could, he'd give Nari the world on a silver platter. When she was a newborn, she would make the slightest little baby noise and Haechan would be on his feet checking on her.

You adore it. You love how he loves his daughter. There's no doubt she'll have one man loving her truly for the rest of her life. As long as Haechan is around, Nari would be loved and cared for and protected.

Walking towards his daughter before crouching down to meet her eyes,

"Did you do something that you weren't suppose to?" he asks

"She drew on the wall with markers, then when I asked her if she did it she said Uju did" this time Haechan let out a chuckle when he heard your explanation, looking up the staircase to see you standing with a rag and bottlespray in your hands. Probably cleaning up the mess little Nari made.

"Who knew our dog was an artist" he jokes, he stands up before cupping his hand over Nari's ears "How long has it been?" referring to her being on time out

"Like 5 minutes, atleast talk to her Hyuck. She's getting cheekier and cheekier by the day, and you're not helping" you told your husband, walking down the stair

"I do help" "Yeah, help her with getting away with things" you counter

"Okay, you're not wrong. Not my fault I can't say no to our baby, she can do no wrong in my eyes" he says, you give him a pointed look. One he understood even without words.

"I'll talk to her" he tells you before looking down to Nari

"Let's go, Nari. We'll help mommy clean up, okay?" he says as he picks up his daughter in his arms.

Before the two Lee's make their way upstairs, Haechan speaks again

"Now, what do we say to mommy?" he asks Nari who is currently playing with the button on his shirt

"Sorry, mommy" Nari mumbles

"Doesn't count if you don't look in her eyes. Now try again" he tells her gently.

You don't talk, just stood beside the daddy and daughter duo. Haechan has always been the energetic, all-out type of person. But when he's with his little girl, he's the most gentle man.

The little Lee looks up and look at you with a small pout on her lips, "Sorry, mommy"

Haechan looks at you, waiting for you to succumb under her powers just like he always do. Like he had when he first held her in his arms. Like how he'll always be for the rest of his life.

"Don't do it again okay, and don't lie to mommy when I ask you. I forgive you" you tell her with a small smile. Leaning over to give her a kiss on the head

"Hey, where's my kiss?" Haechan says, earning an eye roll from you but you comply nonetheless.

After all, Nari isn't the only Lee who has you wrapped around their finger.

Giving Haechan a quick kiss on the lips before passing the rag and spray bottle to him. "Goodluck, love you" you tease him, lightly pushing him upstairs.

"You see angellove, there's this thing in your playroom. The coloring books and canvass I got you, you can paint and draw on them all day so that you and I don't have to clean. And mommy won't get mad, she's scary when she's mad"

"Lee Donghyuck!"

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entomolog-t · 9 months

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Bite Me - Chapter 2

Chapter 2 is here!! Slight deviations from the OG lil comic, but that just means I will have to redraw it. Aedes is having a pretty rough night.

Taglist: @smallsday @ratcatcher0325 @not-a-space-alien

- - - -

Previous Chapter: Chapter 1

Next Chapter: Chapter 3

Word count: 1686

CW: Mentions of blood, Adult language

June Murphy sits bolt upright, awaking to a sharp pain on her neck. A small but significant weight falls onto her lap as her mind blinks away the remnants of a dream. Confused, she looks down, squinting in the dark of her room. There was something on her lap-

It moved.

The sudden movement catches June off guard- a startled yelp escaping her lips. Something was in her bed. Something alive. Was there a mouse in her bed?? A rat?? The… thing takes off, scrambling in a way that causes her unease to rise. It didn't move right- It's limbs too long for a rodent, it's body far too thin. What could it- before she could finish her thought, it stood.

She didn’t scream - she couldn’t. Fear seemed to constrict her voice into some strained combination between a gasp and a yell.

What the fuck was in her bed!?

This felt like it should be a dream... but everything, despite the absurdity, felt very, very real. Yet, as if under the influence of some bizarre feral instinct, she feels like a bystander as she watches her hand shoot out, catching the figure in a tight fist. As soon as her fingers clasp around it she feels it squirm and thrash within her grasp, weird not-rodent legs kicking wildly. She shudders. It… it was snarling… was it feral? She feels as it claws into the flesh of her palm and a sense of dread wells up along with the pain; What if this thing was rabid?

In the dark of her room, June struggled to make out details, but whatever it was it did not like being caught. Steeling her nerves, she hesitantly brings it closer to her face. Her movement seems to only result in more frenzied struggles from the…the… What the Hell was that??

She blinks.

The scene before her is beyond surreal. A man- a very tiny man- thrashed about wildly in her grasp. As her eyes adjust to the dark, they meet with its- his own; wide with horror.

Her gaze falls to his lips- smeared red with blood. It gives a terrified little cry, sounding all too human in its fear.

All at once, June was wide awake.

It… it really was a man. A very tiny and very terrified man in her hand… A million questions seem to sound off at once in her mind. Was it really a man?? Maybe he was some sort of …creature?? Could he speak? Why was he in her house? Her last question fills her with a growing sense of horror at the snarling being in her hand…Why… Why was he in her bed?

The creature snarls, and before June has time to react- the creature bites, her hand releasing reflexively. She watches in horrified fascination as the thing jumps, diving off the side of her bed, its desperation all too clear in the way it scrambles to its feet.

The tiny frame of the… the what? The creature? The word felt wrong in her mind. That was no creature. That… that was a man. She watched as the tiny frame of the something darted around the corner of her desk. June felt like her brain was on autopilot. In a flash she was out of bed and dropping to her hands and knees, sliding herself in place between the door and the…. The… being.

“No, no, no, no-” A flurry of desperate words came from the creature. June drew in a sharp breath at the sound… It could speak. For a second, the thought sent a shiver down her spine. What the Hell had she found? As her eyes strained to adjust in the dark, she began to make out more details in its form. It moved erratically; head on a swivel- until its gaze settled on her… She felt uneasy. It looked intelligent… It looked like a man.

He was long limbed and lean, with a mess of black hair cut short at the sides. Her eyes were drawn to his ears, long and pointed and certainly not human. Was he an… elf ? A fairy? Despite him being directly in front of her, her mind dismissed the thought. That was ridiculous… Though, this whole situation was ridiculous, wasn’t it?

His chest heaved he backed himself into the corner of where her desk met the wall. It… he stared up at her, his large ears pinned back. She thought she might have glimpsed tears glittering in those tiny eyes… but more unnervingly, she could very easily see the blood on his lips. As he catches her eyes on his face, he frantically wipes the blood away- his movements unnaturally quick.

"Please." His voice, far deeper than she would have expected, cracked as he spoke. The sound made June wince, "Don't…" He stared up at her, eyes wide as he choked out his words "-hurt me."

His words caught her off guard- why would she… she wouldn’t- oh. June sees the way the little man holds his side. Had she hurt him when she grabbed him? She hadn’t meant to but… she certainly hadn’t been gentle in her panic either.

"Oh… no-I …I would never…." June struggled to find the words. She was still battling with the absurdity of the situation and his near palpable fear seemed to catch her off guard. For a moment, a fraction of the tension leaves the little man's frame. Almost as if acting on its own, June’s hand slowly reaches forward, wanting to comfort the pitiful sight.

The movement, however subtle, did not go over well. The man fell back, his back pressed firmly in the corner of her desk and the wall. Had there been even the slightest gap between the two June had no doubt he would have shoved himself between the two to avoid her touch. His face twists to a look of complete terror- eyes desperate and pleading.

“No! No, please!” She froze. Never in her life had she heard a voice so filled with fear, “Stay away from me!” June immediately withdrew her hand. His chest rose and fell with such speed it made her sick to her stomach. She felt her throat tighten… the thought of causing someone so much distress was overwhelming to the point of suffocating. She racked her brain for something-anything to say, but his shakey words interrupted her frenzied thoughts.

"Are you trying to catch or-" his voice faltered, "-kill me?"

Oh.

She grimaced. June didn't like that question… mainly because she was all too aware of her answer.

"If I'm being honest," she began, the words feeling like sandpaper on her tongue, "I do want to …um, catch you." She cringed. The word itself seemed to catch on her tongue..it felt dirty. You didn't catch a … a person. Was that what he was? But people… well people certainly weren't this small- And he was in her house! At the very least she deserved some answers... But even as those thoughts rose in her mind she knew all too well that they were just justification for a much greater force at play; curiosity. For a brief moment, the little man's breathing stops, his jaw agape, frozen from her admission. June watches as he looks quickly to her side, clearly looking to make a dash, then thinking better of it. As his eyes square back to her there seems to be a shift in his demeanor. She fumbles with her words, trying to elaborate in a way that doesn’t sound so blatantly awful, “I mean- It.. its not-”

“-And what if I don’t want to be caught?” There's venom in his words. His voice is angry… accusatory, but most potent of all, his voice is racked with fear. The raw emotion distills an unease June, as if the potency is just too much to take in. There was no lying to herself, no pretending she was unaware. Even in the dark corner of her room his fear was clear as day, and she knew without a doubt she was the source. Yet, his fear of her wasn't quite the source of her unease. No… it was that she knew she had all the power to stop it. She could just let him leave, whatever he was… but she wanted- no, she needed answers. She refused to outright think it, but the concept was still there in her mind, abstract and untouched; Until she got answers, his feelings came second to her own.

“If you didn’t want to be caught by me, then just what were you doing in my house?”

All at once he goes rigid. Petrified.

Shit.

June swallows her frustration, immediately back peddling.

“Look, you’re not- I don’t have to ca-” June sighs, rubbing her temples. There really was no good way to word this. "You don't have to be… caught…” The word still sticks in her throat, “I.. I just need some answers.”

She swallowed. Both literally as well as the guilt that gnawed at the edges of her mind. He looked horrified.

“I.. I really don't want to scare you... I just… don't want you to leave…Not before I get some answers.” June grits her teeth. Each of her responses left a foul taste in her mouth. She knows what her words truly mean; you’re my hostage until I get what I want. She pushes that thought deep down, wanting to forget her disgust.

“I don't have to be caught as long as I don't leave??” His fear seemed to evaporate for a split second as fury bled into its place, “Being caught and not leaving are the same damn if the premise is I don't want to be here!!” Just as fast as the rage had filled him it left… deflating him. His expression turned desperate, "And what happens if I try to leave, huh?" June sees tears welling up in his eyes. "Would you just catch me then?"

“I-” June’s voice falters. She knows her answer instantly, worse yet, she knows the shame on her face makes it clear.

" … I'm sorry."

#The snack that smiles back : June #Although more like the snack that talks back cause this girl wants answers #Ye old G/t debate: are you a trespasser or are you being held hostage?#g/t #giant/tiny #Entowrites #Bite me #JuneOC #AedesOC #G/t writing #G/t story #Tiny man #Tiny vampire #giantess

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meguminne · 11 months

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a harbinger’s love , ࿐ ࿔*:･ﾟ

their immense loyalty and love are second to none for the tsaritsa, including his. how unfortunate, ( for you. ) pantalone x reader presented by meguminne. [june 29, 2023]

loving a harbinger has never been easy, nor has anyone claimed it to be that. you know about their underhanded tactics and unshakable resolve to serve the tsaritsa, but there was something — or rather someone — that drew you closer towards the fatui.

it wasn’t his incredibly dashing good looks ( though you can argue it was a contributing factor ) nor his outstanding wealth that you think could rival the qixing’s, but it was his gentlest of smile and touch directed towards you, and only you.

what makes you special? you wonder.

he has an ulterior motive, he can’t possibly have one when you’re just you.

he sees some use out of you, that can’t be practical since you’re an average civilian.

you must remind him of someone else, you can’t prove that thought right or wrong. truth be told, despite the countless of hours and minutes you’ve spent with this man, you could never understand nor even grasp what’s brewing in his mind. you barely know him but you feel like he’s everything to you.

“darling?” gloved hands reach out to touch your hand, the rich snezhnayan fabric did little to muffle his frigid touch. as someone who's so warm towards you, you do find him rather cold; even in warmer climates. as though he was still distant despite how he acts. — “are you alright?” his voice is like honey, sweet and far too alluring to even consider the fact he was being deceitful with his worry.

“i’m fine, my love.” you smile in return, holding onto his hand, interlocking your fingers together with his.

“do not be like that, i can tell something’s bothering you.” he laughs in return; squeezing your hand softly and the sting of the cold metals around his fingers slightly burn your skin.

‘is there a reason why you love me?’ you let those words die on your lips as letting them slip might just ruin everything, destroy the illusion of a perfect life he has built for you. — you’re only ruining it with your constant worrying, why not just accept it as it is and not think about it?

no, no, you cannot just accept it! it has been two years and seven months since he first proclaimed his love for you after visiting your humble shop again and again, it has been a year and six months since you moved into his luxurious mansion and it has been only seven months since the world came to know you as the regrator’s wife. — and despite all the time that has passed, you still haven’t figured out why on earth he’s so in-love with you! there must be a reason, it cannot be chalked up to mere love at first sight.

you were swept away by his allure, his handsome face; his elegant disposition and the way he treats you and you were drunken with his love yet whenever you sober up, you can’t help but wonder. a torturous cycle of highs and lows! you can’t help but think you will be used as a sacrificial pawn in this game of chess the fatui is playing with the rest of the world!

“the fair lady’s death has me a bit shaken up,” you lie through your teeth; as someone who is married to one of the fatui’s higher-up’s, you’ve grown fluent in deceit as well. “that traveler proves to be a threat towards your goal.”

“our goal,” he says softly. “but you are correct, i must admit that that outlander’s meddling has thwarted our original plans but fear not, signora’s death was a necessary sacrifice towards teyvat’s better future.”

you nod, “of course. i have no doubt that the fatui will turn out to be victorious, not a single shadow of doubt. i am simply worried for your wellbeing, please be careful my love.” — despite what it seems, you truly do care about his wellbeing, for even though you doubt his intentions with loving you is pure, you can admit that you have fallen for the harbinger.

the regrator chuckles, amused at your concern, as he leans in to press a soft chaste kiss by the corner of your lips, “you worry enough for the both of us, fear not. i’ll be alright, i have a wife to return to, after all.”

it does little to ease your worries, his smile was stasis on his face and you can’t tell what he was planning or even thinking but the reflection of your figure in his lenses makes you think that it involved you.

#genshin angst #genshin impact #the regrator #pantalone x reader #genshin x reader #genshin #genshin reader #pantalone #fatui x reader #fatui #the reader is plagued by constant doubts #and worries #but hey arent we all #genshin fluff #the regrator genshin #pantalone genshin #x reader #reader angst #meguminne

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seeminglydark · 11 months

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Idk if this means anything to you but I'm a comic artist who's had a hard time doing art for a few years. The first four was because of life hardship and lack of time/chronic pain, but now lately I've had time but a mental block. I'm creeping up on 30 and felt bad about myself for "missing out" on my opportunity to be a comic artist. It was really validating to see you post about being 41 (correct me if I'm wrong) especially since you have such wonderful comics that I've been following for a while now. It makes me feel less like I'm wasting my time putting my things in order when I "should" be drawing.

Hopefully this doesn't come across as offensive or anything. It was just comforting and validating. Anyway, big fan! Love your characters a whole lot and hope you have a good day!

Dear Anon

I am 41 years old. I have wanted to make comics my entire life. before my dad got sick, and my childhood kinda fell apart, all i did was draw. after that, i used the stories in my head to cope. life moved on. i was convinced not to accept a partial scholarship to an art school in California. life got hard. i worked at a hotel, and after i escaped an abusive relationship at 22 i hitchhiked/bused far far away to start over. i tried to make comics again, but i had to survive, and so i got another job doing the only thing i knew how to do, hotels. and i worked. and worked. and life got harder and times got heavier and i didn't get time to draw and i worked double hours, 15 to 17 hours a day. and i went four years without drawing a single thing.

i kept working myself into the ground. i was 29 now. i picked up a pen again and drew a red haired boy. he had a hard life and no love and no friends. his problems were on the outside, for everyone to see. he ran away but his problems went with him.

i was 32. surely i was too old now. my time to be an artist was gone. i had no school. no hope. i was so far behind the younger gen i saw online. i cried. all the time. i wrote stories in my email drafts while i worked shifts. i stayed up late trying to learn how to draw again. i cried some more. the boy grew. i called him Fiach. worthy. a raven. later i renamed him Avery. he was like a bird, he had wings, he was my hope. i started writing some friends for him. the people i wished i had around me.

i started finding time and space. i got a new job, something where i was lucky enough to set my own hours. for the first time i had a partner who believed in me. things were hard. but i was drawing now. and that helped.

i went on a road trip and i started drawing pages of an unnamed story on 6 by 8 paper in a sketchbook. i drew 20 of them. 'what could i call this?' i thought. Nothing Seems as Dark...no says my partner. Seemingly Dark. he made me a logo. i was 35. i bought an ipad, i cant do this on paper, its too much story i have too much to say. so i learned how to draw digitally by tracing my own trad art pages.

I spoke to my dad for the last time on June 17th, fathers day that year. he said 'you're good. i'm proud. and you're gonna do amazing things. none of this is your fault. and we will speak again soon.' i didn't know id never hear his voice again. he died a week later.

i turned 36. i kept trying. i'm old, i don't understand the internet. how can i share this?

i stumbled across Lore Olympus. i was introduced to webcomics. id read comics online before but the thought never occurred to me. i opened an account on Tapas. and then i stared at it. what if no one likes it. what if its bad. my art isn't good. i should wait til i'm better. but will i ever really be better? or will i always believe that tomorrow is better? do it now. if even one person gets something out of this story, this story about a boy who is you, a boy who looking for hope, a boy who might make it, then that is enough isn't it.

June 17th 2018 i launched Seemingly Dark.

SD's five year anniversary is in a week. 0ver 700 pages. leaps and bounds in progress with my skills. a printed comic under my belt as of monday. i was always a storyteller. but i was always an artist too.

I am 41 years old, dear anon. I did not truly embark on this journey til i was 35. life got in the way. even now, chronic illness gets in the way. but its worth it. its never ever too late. i believe in you the way my dad believed in me. i reset my life again and again. but I was always an artist. and if thats who you are, and who you want to be, even if things dont go the way you wished they could, you're an artist too.

im 41 years old. i speak about my age, even though i often feel too old to belong in spaces, cuz really, in this case age is just a number. take care of yourself. do what you need to do. and little by little, when your able, carve out your space until it becomes more of a habit. sometimes i think about all the years i lost not drawing or creating. but there's a lot of factors that make me believe had i made my story then, it wouldn't be the story it is now, i needed to live a bit. i needed to find myself. i know this was long, but i just wanted you to see i also had to put my life in order, and getting notes like this reminds me it wasnt at all a waste. im glad i could offer you some comfort. thats honestly the best compliment i could ever receive.

TL;dR I was 35 when i sat down and seriously started making comics, because life always got in the way and so did my confidence. i always feared being too old. im 41 now, still going strong.

#rj rambles #this is really long im sorry anon #i think my late comic blooming story is kinda important for people to hear #thankyou for giving me a reason to tell it

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ikemenomegas · 11 months

Text

Anchor (up to me love)

Eleven days late, but this is my first entry for Mermay (can we call it June-aid then?) Thank you all so much for your patience. This is the longest one-shot I have written to date and while I'm not completely satisfied with it, I'm proud enough of finishing it. Of course the title references the song by Novo Amor

pairing: Mermaid!Uchiha Sasuke x Reader

word count: 10,014

cw: mentions of drowning, description of wounds, an attempt made at transformation body horror, mentions of death of parents but I couldn't kill Sasuke's entire family again... seemed too cruel to put him in a universe where that happens every single time.

Ao3 link for those who prefer reading there

You heard the thrashing sound first, like an animal caught in a trap, and then you heard the voice, which was far more human.

You knew better than to approach a beast, but on the shores of your own kingdom, you couldn’t in good conscience leave someone to fend for themselves. Especially if they were too injured to drag themselves inland.

The shoreline was studded with sharp stones, broken long ago from cliffs that had since retreated from the sea. They concealed the figure until you were nearly upon him. He was partially submerged, but you could smell the blood, see its thick wash in the water. It turned the foam churned up around him a rusty, raspberry tea color. He groaned, pressing a handful of some shredded fiber to the wound on his chest.

You gasped, involuntary, and he turned, whipped around with teeth bared.

That’s how you saw them: the sharp incisors and all the sharp teeth after that. Inhuman, made to tear. You almost couldn’t believe it, even when you looked below the syrupy, red water and saw the tail, the diaphanous fins drawing in close so it was nearly whip-like, flicking a warning.

You froze, spreading your fingers wide on the stone to show that you carried no weapon in your hands.

“Let me help,” you breathed, unsure whether to retreat, but afraid to appear threatening.

The mer flinched back. There was a ruddy tint to his eyes, which was more apparent depending on the subtle angling of his head. He looked scared, pain flashing across his expression when he moved wrong.

“Why?” he hissed back after a tense pause, strained. His voice was faintly accented, but not really different from the tones of the northernmost islands in the archipelago kingdom to which you belonged.

There wasn’t a good reason, except that something magic and nearly relegated to legend was in front of you and you did not want to see it die, not at the hands of hungry predators. If he had been a man you would have helped him to shore, ran for a doctor, but you didn’t think the creature in front of you would tolerate more human hands.

You tore a strip off the long linen wrapping over your arms and body in a kind of tunic. You poured water from a skin on your hip over the makeshift compress and then passed it to the stranger as a gesture of goodwill. Freshwater drew poison from wounds of the sea.

The mer looked blearily at your outstretched hand and took the cloth. He hissed when it pressed against part of the wound but did not let go, pressing harder until the compress was half stained with his blood.

He eyed you warily. He made another pained noise as he pulled the compress from his torn flesh. It made a horrible wet sound as it pealed away. He held it out for you to pour more water upon it. You did and tore another strip from your clothing for another field dressing.

“There is danger in remaining in the open sea while you heal,” you said softly.

He had bound his wound best he could with pieces of your clothing and the bleeding had eased some, although not much.

He narrowed his eyes as though measuring your intention.

“There's a cove, not far from here. I can show you,” you offered

“Where?” he was demanding but you could hear the uncertainty in his voice.

You sidled carefully around him, angling towards the water.

“We have to swim to get there.”

He nodded, tense but for now acquiescing to the logic in your words.

You carefully tied what was left of your clothing so that no trailing ends risked snagging as you swam and waded deeper into the water. It was warm, but you still shivered at the faint chill against your skin and the mer’s proximity as you slipped into the ocean.

You moved slowly, aware of the mermaid's injuries. It was not a long way to go to the hidden entrance to a place you had discovered years before. You hesitated only for a moment, and then dipped underwater. This put you firmly in the mermaid’s natural habitat. It was, in a way, a show of trust. You dived deeper and deeper, ignoring the pressure in your ears and your chest. The sounds of the mermaid swimming behind you were somewhat unnerving. They were the sounds of a creature both larger and stronger than you in the water, and he was following you. You shook the thought away, moving water with your hands to propel yourself down to the underwater tunnel burrowing between stone and coral and two the protected lagoon beyond.

You pulled yourself through carefully, flicking your feet in small precise motions to avoid drifting into the rough, salt pocked stone. The place you were taking the mer was safe precisely because it was a place difficult to reach both by land and by sea. On land, this bit of coast belonged to the royal family alone; by sea, the pathways through these closely sentried rocks twisted and turned, making a treacherous labyrinth below and a shielding wall above.

You took careful stock of your air. Even though you had been underwater for more than a minute already, this blessing of your noble blood would not last forever. You followed the signs placed long ago to guide swimmers who knew where they wanted to go, and within another handful of minutes emerged into the wide clear waters of an ardent bay.

The slow speed of your only human limbs was perhaps a good thing. The mer following you was visibly exhausted even after what should have been a short journey for him. You led him close to the edge of the water where shallow scoops filled with soft sand and colorful corals and waving fronds of seaweed made comfortable little environments. Too deep for a human to rest in, but it seemed perfect for an injured sea creature.

You pulled yourself up onto the smooth stone bordering the little cove.

“I’ll be back,” you promised.

The mer looked up at you, lines of exhaustion on his face. After a moment, you untied a bracelet from your wrist, made from woven threads of golden sea-silk and three beads, green and red and black strung along it. You offered it to the mer.

“I don’t wish for you to feel trapped here. If at any time you wish to leave, find this color in the wall.” You pointed to the red veined stone. You moved your finger to the black stone and then the green. “Follow the tunnel marked in this order. To return, follow the reverse pattern.”

He reached out for the bracelet, plucking it from your palm without touching your skin.

“I'll come back,” you said once again.

The mer just swished his tail and said nothing to your promise.

You slipped back into the castle, feet bare, hair and clothes dripping.

A strong, musical voice called your name. “How many times have I told you not to track water inside,” Mei said, exasperated.

“I’ll clean it up.”

She sighed. “Aren’t there better things to do with your time?”

You looked blankly back at the trail of droplets and footprints, but your mind was already racing ahead to the things you needed, what you could leave at the lagoon in case it was difficult to return or the mer wanted space while he healed, what kind of books could be in the library, what kind of medicines could work on –

Your sister called your name again. “Are you listening?”

You turned her, half startled.

She sighed again and waved you onward. “Go on.”

She gave you a soft look when you all but beamed at her and continued on your way.

The mermaid’s injury was severe. You spent the next few weeks going down to the lagoon as often as you could. You brought amphorae of fresh water, pots of fresh and salt preserved food - as much fish as you could bring until the mermaid expressed his frustration at the lack of variety and you tried bringing him things from the land, which he seemed to enjoy and eat easily enough - bandages and medicines, sea plants that he instructed you to fetch with imperious expectation, and whatever new knowledge you could scrounge up from the palace library. And what you got in turn was a name.

Sasuke.

It was a beautiful name, you thought, sibilant as the shushing sea, with a bite at the end like cold spray thrown up by a crashing wave. The more days you spent with him, the more obvious his beauty became to you. It was not only a physical attraction, although he made you wish that your skills in the visual arts could properly capture him. If you could paint, you thought you could spend years creating echoes of the way his fins rippled as he moved, a language all their own. After that, you could spend years imitating the gleaming flash of his eyes, as multifaceted as any expert cut stone, dark like lacquer or ink, then lit from within like garnets or rubies.

He was prickly as a lionfish and as curious as a kitten. He never seemed overly delighted when you visited, but if you were gone for more than a day or two, he demanded to know where you had been.

“I have duties to attend to in the castle,” you explained one day. You and Sasuke were taking refuge in the shadow of a cliff as you helped smear a strong, green scented paste on new linen strips with which to bind Sasuke’s freshly washed wound. It still bled sluggishly when exposed, deep as it had been, but it did not seem to be infected.

“You’re not stealing all this stuff, are you?”

You snorted an inelegant laugh. “No.”

He let you help him tie the bandages. Sasuke flicked his tail in such precise movements to stay in place. You didn’t know of anyone who had been this close to a mermaid in decades. The dreamy tales told by sailors carried a wishful magic all their own, but were not likely factual unless there was a mermaid or several sitting clear as day on every spit of land and jut of rock from here to the Land of Whirlpools. All the recorded accounts you had found so far were recollections from those who sailed, who watched at the boundaries of day and night, who weren’t sure what they saw.

“The queen of this country-” you tied the last bandage in a knot that could still be released even once the cloth was swollen with water - “she’s my elder sister. It means I got to grow up in the palace, without everyone paying attention to what I was doing.”

Sasuke went very quiet.

“I know a lot of secret ways in and out.” You glanced up to where the curving roofs of the tallest buildings were barely visible from the cliff upon which it was perched. “And I get to learn anything I want.” There were lots of things you could do that Mei couldn’t, or wasn’t allowed. It wasn’t a bad life. You had always known this. It was just a little lonely.

“Do you need anything else?” you asked the mer.

He propped himself up on the rocks. You could count the faint lines of the gills still left uncovered by bandages on his ribs. They sealed themselves when he was above the waterline for any significant amount of time, which was one of the many fascinating things about him. He looked for all intents and purposes to be ignoring you as he basked on the sun, but his head was tilted towards you.

You pulled a book from within your clothes, flipped back a few pages and then settled against a rock to begin reading out loud.

The next day, you spotted the bracelet you had given him fastened around his wrist.

It had been almost a month when you finally asked Sasuke where his injuries came from. There was no pattern to the wound before, the flesh too torn for you to guess at what had caused it. You had also grown to know Sasuke better in the hours and hours you spent at the site of his convalescence. He carried with him a deep vortex of sadness and anger. It went far deeper than the visible wound.

“I don’t want to explain,” he growled as you mixed a different poultice in a silver dipped mortar. Behind that growl was that vortex, its screaming, all consuming noise.

You had never met someone like this, who had that much hurt inside. It was frightening. You had no idea what it would do to him to touch those memories, but something inside of you told you that you had to know. That not to know would be to miss some vital part of who Sasuke was.

Your fingers stilled on the mortar. “You don’t have to.”

Yet he did not leave. You did not begin to mix the medicine again.

As a child, you had been lost once in one of the terrible typhoons that struck the coast of this kingdom. It had come on suddenly, darkening the sky and obscuring both the path ahead and behind. A strange sound had joined in with the howling winds, almost like singing. Without anything else to give you direction, you had followed the sound until you came to the edge of the sea. The storm had churned the water gray and foamy white and cold, forbidding blue so dark it was nearly black. You had tucked yourself into a cluster of stones and brush, your knees pulled up to your chest. The storm had screamed around you, you were soaked through. Who knew how long you had been out there, but it was long enough that you were convinced that all there would ever be was the shrieking sound of the typhoon and the sideways driven rain. The reprieve of the eye had come on with a sudden silence.

You only realized that you were humming through the memory when the odd look Sasuke was giving you cut through your blank recollections. There were half crushed purple flowers and the variegated green mush of herbs under your hands, their scent in the air, salt on your lips, the soft lap of waves interrupted by Sasuke’s agitated movements, his eyes before you, touched red like the day you’d met him.

He moved forward, warrier than he’d been even on the day you found him. Closer.

And then some spell was broken and with a flick of his tail he vanished. The water barely rippled. A set of perfect concentric rings faded from the point he had been hardly a second before. For the first time, it was overtly apparent that Sasuke had all the marks of a deadly predator, of a monster from the deep. It did not scare you as much as it should have.

All of the books in the palace library said that mermaids were magical creatures, that they had an inborn resilience, speed and strength greater than a human, could breath both air and water, and could sing to charm men off the rocks. But despite all of Sasuke’s strength, he had come to you with a terrible wound that pulled skin and muscle as it healed, and went nearly to the bone. Your own little spells helped the healing process along. You believed that it had likely kept him from dying. It didn’t stop the slow, painful experience from taking over three months before the wound was intact enough to be without bandages for long, for Sasuke to swim with only a small wince as he turned.

You were removing the last of the linen wraps when Sasuke spoke in a low voice. “What do you know of my world? The world beneath the surface.”

You sat back, coiling the length of cloth neatly on the pile beside you.

There were very old accounts among all of the old documents you combed through in the dead of night as the sea shushed outside the windows. They spoke with an authority that indicated either brilliant enough imagination to include the utterly mundane aspects of formal proceedings, or a realism only gained by being present to witness the comings and goings of powers that were beyond the Land of Water’s borders.

Since Sasuke’s sudden arrival, you had imagined them often, wondered what role he might play. He had a proud bearing that was familiar from interacting with nobility, a precise grace that made you wonder if fighting was a regular occurrence for him, and a casual entitlement that said he was used to getting what he wanted one way or another. But you had seen these things among common folk as well. There were warriors at court from the inland farms or outlying islands who had fought their way through prejudices and more difficult circumstances who had earned every ounce of their pride and poise.

“If it is even a little like what I have read about, it is as complex or more so than the world above, but all our information is very old.”

You could not quite figure out why it stopped. There was a season of the usual terrible storms, and then slowly, nothing but supposed myths.

“But in my world, I have seen assassinations, and diplomatic disasters, and houses nearly wiped from the map.” The last words nearly broke on your tongue. All of these things had happened to your family, but you and Mei had survived it.

Sasuke carefully rotated his shoulder, looking thoughtful while he prodded at the new skin on the edges of the wound.

“You’ve fought for your life, before,” he said.

“Yes.” It was all you could say. Sasuke wasn’t asking. You didn’t know how he knew. Even Mei kept the details of your survival quiet. Not exactly secret, but the information was no longer shared frequently and few people would even think to ask. The Queen was the center of your scattered island nation. But your sister was the most important person in your life, the only family you had left. You would do anything for her, even though she could not do everything she might want to for you.

“Tell me,” he demanded.

You told him the memories that had sprang to mind and others – of those terrifying nights with the handle of a knife clutched in your fist, picking out paths by starlight, first with your father, and then with guards, and then alone until Mei, barely sixteen herself, had found you.

Sasuke drifted out of arm’s reach as you told the story that you had never told anyone. There had never been any need. The only one who knew almost every detail had lived through it with you, and neither of you spoke of it, even when the burden of ruling weighed heavily on her shoulders. You would sit side by side with a pot of tea cooling between you, and the question What would our parents do? hovered between you, unspoken.

He watched you narrowly, like some kind of magistrate, weighing every word. If you were younger, it would have filled your blood with ice cold fury. Who was anyone else to judge the impact of your experience?

Now, the words poured from your like water from a spring. You weren’t sure why, except that you knew that in order to know someone, sometimes you had to be known. And Sasuke would not stay in this tiny lagoon forever. He was restless in his healing. You already suspected that he was roaming beyond the bounds of the lagoon, following the secret pathways and tunnels carved through the rocks and going invisibly along the coast where you had found him.

Mei’s rise to her position had not been a triumphant, immediate affair. As little as three years ago, there had been assassins in your room, then blood on your hands, dripping to your wrists. You had left a trail of lopsided, tacky footprints as you had run, silent and with a denying scream in your chest, disguised as a low and continuous, thundering growl, to Mei’s wing, only to find her in a similar state, hair disarrayed, wearing only the web-worked armor she almost never took off and her most trusted student, Chojuro, with a freshly headless corpse at his feet.

Sasuke’s delicately webbed hands periodically flexed closed, betraying his feelings. The bony ridges on the knuckles stuck out only barely, and his quick growing claws were tucked away, but it made the protective feature on his hands more noticeable. Maybe because even with the translucent membrane halfway up his fingers, his hands were no less dextrous than yours. It was easy to forget the ways in which he was built to defend himself.

So, it was no short, victorious tale. This was not the version sung by performers across the archipelago, of the powerful queen in her castle by the sea who weeded out the violence sowed by the fallen kings of the last two generations, who raised islands from the ocean itself.

You left this part out, but there are never any songs about you. You are always and only the last princeps iuventutis, by the side of the queen. You were content enough, being a player at her side, but it had made you realize more than once that no one realized that you had also lived through what it had taken to restore Mei to the throne.

The shadows had shortened significantly by the time you finally trailed into silence. Sasuke seemed… it was difficult to tell through the haze of your own emotions. You felt dizzy from the telling, stunned.

When Sasuke began speaking, it was as though every word was torn from him, his discomfort palpable. You wondered if his story was also unused to being told.

He told you a story that ended roughly where yours had began, and it made you wince at the way it was like your first taste of loneliness, but echoed and repeated until it was magnified. Humans did not form pods, but they were similar to families, although apparently more central to survival below the waves. They were often related units, but they hunted together, fought together, played together. They were units of power in the few great cities jutting out from the unseen crust of the earth or drifting along among the currents.

Some of them were bound by more, by a strength of affection you might have had a hard time understanding if you did not have Mei and only Mei, and understand what it meant to lose everyone else, to lose all bonds of loyalty and love and never feel safe to make new ones. Mei despaired over your alone-ness. She had Chojuro and old Ao and Kirimi. You haven’t been able to find anyone like that.

Sasuke painted broad strokes first, and then filled in the details, as though he was distracted by the details of his own memories. He talked about the billowing clouds of crimson, like a bloody dawn, in the twisting corals when he returned from his evening studies - he would have been some underwater equivalent of a scholar warrior, his own brother’s confidant and blade, had slaughter not come to his city-kingdom.

The attackers, whoever they were, had set both city and survivors adrift. His brother refused to tell him who the culprits were. He refused to show Sasuke how to return home, driving him back to the open waters in the name of safety each time he came close. And he has come so close.

The part of you that knew intimately how even coming home is never coming home after something like the razing of a city, the killing of all the little things that made a family, understood even though your heart hurt for him. Sasuke had a sharp tongue, thorns, but like those plants with thorns, his barbs guarded something delicate and precious. He had a heart that loved so fiercely and truly that you yourself wanted to receive even a little of that emotion, as though it might spark back to life the cold ash of your own heart.

Sasuke’s brother would not let Sasuke use the skill he developed for tracking to take back that home that was first taken from him. So, he has done the one thing Itachi was not there to stop him from doing, which was to find an answer to the other half of the equation. What had attacked the drifting City of Leaves.

That was where the wounds came from.

The city of Sasuke’s birth followed new currents now, settled into a new and still unpredictable course. Forbidden from it and not knowing who still lived within, Sasuke hunted alone.

He tried to hide it with pride, but you saw that hollowness in him. Even though you understood his brother’s desire to preserve Sasuke’s childhood recollections, to keep him away from the dangers of what you guessed was the ongoing conflict within that hidden city-kingdom, it seemed cruel to condemn him to years of not knowing, of trying to deny him vengeance.

And so he was here.

Victorious, which made you somehow proud of him, but also hurt, which made you hurt for him in a way that was unfamiliar. Sasuke had defeated a mer that could cause water to boil, enabling him to do things like create mud that burned, as well as acid, and made interacting with him a deadly endeavor. It was a testament to his skill that he had survived as far as he had already.

It was not Sasuke’s absent brother’s fault that he could not be in two places at once. So perhaps…

The answer came to you with sudden clarity, over Sasuke’s drifting silence. His gaze had wandered away from you, and now he looked down at the ripples of water as the tiny waves in the hidden cove broke themselves upon him.

“Be with me.”

He looked up at you, sharp and quick and a certain shiver went through him that was utterly inhuman.

A slightly abashed heat rushed through your body at your own sudden boldness. You couldn’t take it back though. You had never been more certain of anything in your life.

Sasuke answered with a sardonic smile. It made you wonder who – if – there were others who had offered themselves as companions. He had a beautiful face by human standards. You didn’t know if it was the same among the mer, but you imagined that his skill and the sheer strength of his will would be valued anywhere. He smiled with sharp teeth and when it felt as though some silent laughter at your expense was finished, he had found the words to cut through whatever small fantasy you had been concocting.

“Will you offer me a life on land where each step is like knives? Where I will never meet one of my own kind again?”

You winced back because you had seen these old stories too. They were not what you thought of in that moment, but they were also not not what you thought of. And the way he said it, you knew if he truly believed there was nothing left, he would leave behind the sea no question and walk on knives the rest of his life to be with you. But you would never want him in real pain. It was why you went towards instead of away from him when you first laid eyes on him.

And you would never ask him to trade one loneliness for another.

“Be as you are-” your voice was shaking “-with me.”

It was as though every star you had followed on those moonless nights as a child were aligning, making out a path for you to follow. They led here.

“Why?” Sasuke asked, demanded. His voice was rough. You had surprised him.

Here you knew to tread carefully, but you were dizzy too with the feeling of finding a way out of a place you had never realized that maybe you could leave.

“I told you what made me this way,” you said. Your voice was rough too. The telling had lodged against some old hurt deep in your spirit and that place which you had once thought a well healed scar seemed much closer to the surface than before he had demanded the explanation.

“I want to hear you say it,” Sasuke said. Your skin prickled in sympathetic fear, because no matter how angry he tried to sound, the truth of his emotion was what you heard.

“I don’t feel at home here anymore,” you admitted, terrified.

“You’ve never lived below the water,” Sasuke replied, harsh but in the sort of way that meant it was the only way he knew to keep his voice from breaking.

“You’ve never lived on land,” you countered. “And besides, we have both survived worse. I would find a way.” For you, you did not say.

He gazed at you, frustrated, unsatisfied, and you knew that you had not yet provided an answer.

You swallowed. The strip of linen was wound tight between your hands, striping your fingers with marks, but you hardly noticed. The truth would tear your heart wide open. But maybe that was what was needed. Wound for wound.

“These months I’ve spent with you… when I’m with you, I don’t feel alone.” What was love after all, but knowing that somewhere in the world, you were not alone?

Sasuke’s throat bobbed, the gill slits between his ribs fluttered as he drew in water, faster, like a land dweller breathing hard.

“It would take magic beyond either of us now to transform.”

But he didn’t deny, did not refuse.

“I’ll find a way.” Your gaze burned into his with the force of your vow.

The faint furrow of Sasuke’s brow smoothed out.

“You can try. I’d help but–” he gestured down at himself, at the raw, spidering wound starring from the center of his chest and bursting again at points across his back.

You shook your head. “Don’t go anywhere,” you entreated. “Not yet.”

He nodded easily. He was well on his way to healing but still not as strong as he had been before battling the gold-tailed heat-creating mer.

“What would you do?” you asked after a moment, habitually inquisitive. There were questions a princeps could ask that a queen could not, but you were also just a tiny bit nosy about things you were curious about.

Sasuke smirked a bit, one corner of his mouth turning up. “We go find a witch.” He put a sound behind the word “witch”, the language of his people, and it sent a warning prickle up your spine.

“Oh,” you agreed quietly. “Don’t do that.”

Sasuke snorted in a pale acknowledgement of the humor remaining in the situation and then went quiet.

It took you five feverish weeks. Five weeks of pouring over manuscripts deeper and deeper in the palace archives, of searching for the faintest scrap of a hint of the kind of magic that would let one of your kind stay underwater for a change you knew would be maybe once in a lifetime. A less focussed part of your mind reworked through what you read to see if any of it could bring Sasuke on land with you, without pain, and not forever, but long enough to give him an unexpected advantage over his still numerous and yet unknown enemies. The second thing did not yield anything that you could use.

Not on land at least. There were holes once you dug deep enough, crawled far enough through the records, where maybe this old magic existed somewhere else and a chance at love did not come with so steep a price.

You had five weeks to realize what you would be giving up. Nothing felt like home, but someone did, and you would be leaving her.

The day you finally found the door to your answer, you crawled into Mei’s bed once nightfall came. You had not done this since you were very small, since before the palace walls were stained with ash and blood. Ash and blood – two of the oldest conduits for great magic.

She hummed, stroked a hand down your back. You could feel her palm through the silk of your pajamas.

“You’ve been busy lately.” She was imitating a song your parents used to use to get the two of you to rest, even when so excited you were fairly swimming through your bedding like a pair of fingerlings.

It was only now, after spending so much time with Sasuke, so much time trying to find every fact you could about something that was supposed to be purely mythical, that you suspected it was the same song, almost exactly. That was another of the gifts a remnant of blood-from-the-sea gave its children.

“There is much of the world to know,” you said.

“Yes,” Mei replied, “There is. Our kingdom is such a small part of it.” She said this thoughtfully, as though recalling all the months and years of struggle to get to this place, to a semblance of peace. “– of the earth and the sea.”

Practice and familiarity kept you from stiffening with suspicion and surprise. Mei’s fingers similarly did not pause in their gentle pass up and down your spine.

She must know. She was the queen and she made it her job to know everything so the betrayal that stole your family would never happen again. It would make things easier. Loving your sister did not always make it easy to tell her what was in the halls of your heart.

“What would you do,” you asked her without change in inflection, “to give me a chance at happiness?”

After a pause, she said: “Anything, last blood of mine.” She pressed a kiss to your brow and then blew out the lights with a blink and flick of her fingers. “Almost anything.”

You went down to the lagoon the next day, at dawn. Sasuke was used to impatience, anticipation. He only looked at you curiously, did not ask if you had discovered the magic you would need. You turned a roll in your hands.

There were things that Sasuke had found he very much enjoyed from the world above. Fruits and vegetables were different, brighter. Bread, which he had never really had before. You brought them all often, trying to show him as many wonders from the surface as possible. He had been well enough to hunt on his own for some time now so it was all you brought unless he wanted something from deep waters, too far away to catch and return within a day.

“I think I found it.”

Five weeks has been long enough to realize that there were things you were going to miss about the land too. Besides Mei. You pinched a corner off the roll and let it melt - butter and yeast - on your tongue.

Sasuke stilled. Or the majority of his body did, the rest of him still drifted and moved like seaweed or the wide fans of coral. “You think?”

“It will be difficult.” Of course it would. This was asking much, and there was always a price for magic. “You’re right. We can’t do it.”

The fins of the left side of his tail dragged, listing deeper into the water before he righted them, showing his otherwise silent dismay. It was still fascinating that his body language – which should be alien and strange – has become easier to read, and so quickly.

“But my sister is the queen of this nation. She has enough magic.”

“Would she do it?” For you, for the both of you, would she change you from a creature of the land to the sea?

You didn’t know. She had said “almost anything”. Would she let you go down to the unknown, into the depths of the sea with only a companion and no promises to bring you home?

Sasuke had edged closer, letting the gentle waves push him to the rocky shore where you leaned down. Your fingers dangled in the water.

He called your name. His voice shook.

“Are you going to break your promise?”

It was at that moment that you realized how much your words had meant to Sasuke. You had been thinking of this as a gamble. Sasuke could get tired of you, he could leave you, he could decide that without any titles or family in the ocean, you were worthless to him. You had slowly made peace with all of this.

As his voice broke on the word break, your resolve became honed to a blade.

“No.” You reached for his face. Your hands cupped his cheeks. You pressed your forehead to his.

“Even my brother–” he choked, on the grief, on the anger, on the long years of being left alone of being told no, Sasuke. I need to do this alone.

Something small, lighter than a pebble but heavier than a drop of water rolled over your fingers and knuckles.

The realization that, yet again, he didn’t have to be alone for most of his life had broken something open inside of him at the threat of abandonment. Again. Sasuke clutched your wrists, not to pull away, but to keep you close. His claws faintly indented against your skin.

You nuzzled against him, closer than you had ever been. He smelled of salt and the sea, and something almost electric, like the air under a thunderstorm.

His tears slowed but did not stop.

You hadn’t found the entirety of the spell, but you knew how to hunt it down, to solve the puzzle of hints and documents until you had the whole picture. One piece of information from the multitudes you had consumed came to you:

The tears of a mer are pearls, used in the magic of transformation, from land to sea.

You cupped his cheek, and caught the fall of his sorrows. You understood what it was to have an elder sibling who could not love you more than her duty but who would try to give you everything regardless, and for it still not to be enough. You knew what it was to be profoundly lonely, to have lost everything and still have that place like a hole through your lungs.

“Wait for me,” you begged. “Wait here and when I have convinced her highness the queen, when I have convinced my sister, I will come to you. And if I cannot, I will go with you anyways and find a way out to sea. As a pirate or a humble sailor, I will find you. For your love I would drown.”

“I do not want you to drown,” Sasuke said, dark eyes fierce and wild and afraid, shimmering in mother of pearl colors with a thin film of tears, but did not otherwise deny you.

You swiped the last few pearls from the corners of his eyes and his cheeks, the water of his tears crystallized to salt and carbonate the moment they hit air. “Three days or five or seven,” you said, “no more, no less.”

He pressed his cheek into your palm. You cupped the pearls in your hands like water until you reached the base of the secret path to the lagoon. Then you folded them into a square of fabric and tucked them into a pouch at your hip.

You clambered up the walls of his sanctuary, elegant as a climbing vine, and were gone.

Mei was sitting upon her throne when you threw yourself at her feet. The stone and wood pattern of the floor was alternating warm and cool beneath your knees and palms. After all of your research, it finally occurred to you to wonder whether that was another subtle nod to the history of the relationship between the beings of the land and the water, between your family and others on the mainland and the clans beneath the waves.

The queen looked down from her seat for a few long, heartstopping moments. You kept your face turned to the floor.

“Go.” She made the soft command and everyone she gave it to sprang to obey. The room rustled with the sounds of their retreat.

“Approach.”

You rose and came closer, tilting your head up slowly, afraid to see her expression.

It was kind, which was as much as you could have hoped for.

You looked around briefly, moving only your eyes while your head was tipped to the floor. The only people left in the throne room besides the two of you were a single minister who seemed to be taking the minutes of the day.

“What is it you have to ask me?” she asked gently.

Suddenly, the enormity of your request stole the air from your lungs.

Your sister gave you several long moments that did not return your ability to form words appropriate to a petition from the court.

“Or –” her voice was harder, more of the queen in it, “– would you like to explain what you’ve been up to for the last six months.”

That was easier, and harder. It was likely the mer lived beyond humans, concealing themselves and their own internal conflicts with relative ease, but you worried about exposing them nonetheless.

Mei called your name with a near sigh, only concealed because this was an official meeting and her irritations with you didn’t need to go on record. “You have to start somewhere.”

“It’s not my right,” you finally got out, thinking of the whole unknown world you were ready to dive into.

“Then tell me what is.”

You struggled for words and then eventually said, “Has anyone in our family ever encountered something from the ocean? Something difficult to explain.”

Mei leaned back against the carved scenery of the throne. Birds and fish and the long-tailed lemurs from the mountains soared and wound and climbed their way through the wood.

After a pause she offered, “Did you find something near-human, perhaps, in the genealogies?”

A heavy weight fell from your chest, and a wonder took its place.

“You know?”

She did not shrug but the emotion was there as she said, “I am the queen. It is my job to know. Many of the newer family registries were burned during the coup. It was easier when we returned to access some very old ones, which had not been touched in some time.”

“So we did once mix blood with the sea,” you said, half to yourself.

Mei looked at you, and something heavy and sad entered her eyes. You met that gaze, heart in your throat. Then she shook herself, and that emotion passed.

“Ask your question,” she said once again.

“Would you let our line join blood to blood with the water again?”

Mei’s green eyes were fathomless as the sea.

Sasuke waited, three days and then five and then seven and on the first dawn hour of the seventh day, a slow entourage of elegantly dressed people made their way carefully down to the lagoon.

First came a tall woman in a blue gown and red herringboned hair with a look about her that said she had survived much. With her was a dark robed man with heavy beads around his neck, a woman carefully juggling a portfolio of papers, and another man with a broad, heavy sword in his hands. And amidst them all was you, dressed as simply as a sailor in a billowing cotton shirt and loose, tied breaches.

A wreath of silver kelp blades was woven in the red haired woman’s hair so Sasuke assumed she must be the queen you spoke of, your sister.

She knelt down by the water and arranged her skirts as carefully as any selkie. Over her legs, between the slits in the fabric, glimmered a network of silver armor.

“It has been a long time since one of our people returned to the sea,” she said. “And now you wish to take the most beloved of my few remaining companions away.”

Sasuke lifted his chin. “I take nothing, as the sea takes nothing.”

“No,” the queen murmured, “things are seldom so deliberate, but you are a living, thinking creature, the same as I.”

She held out a hand and drew you down beside her when you placed your hand in hers. She drew you forward until your fingertips touched the water and then let you go.

She beckoned forward the woman with her folio of papers and they were laid out, weighted with polished stones and the leftover parts of dead things from the water, their spines and smooth curved outlines as familiar to Sasuke as their names.

The queen drew her fingers across words which Sasuke was faintly surprised to recognize. The queen noticed because a queen must notice everything.

“Our kingdoms share blood,” she explained slowly, every word precisely dictated. The woman who had spread out the papers slid a brush across a blank sheet, marking the conversation.

“We share language and words and music, although they have grown different from one another over generations.

“I will give you the last golden piece of my heart,” she continued. “But each year you must return, and show to me all is well, with both of you.” Her clever green eyes darted between you and Sasuke. “That is the price of my magic.”

He nodded, once, tight and sharp, and the queen seemed to relax, settling back on the rocks as easy as if they were her own great chair up in the castle with its wing-shaped roofs.

The queen turned to you and called your name so softly, like waking a child from sleep. “This is the first such alliance in more than a century. It will be your responsibility to learn the ways of the water. You will return each year so you do not forget the ways of the land.”

“I understand,” you said.

The queen cupped your cheek and pressed her brow to yours.

She pricked her thumb, scarred from pricking, against one tooth and pressed a bloody thumbprint to the laid out papers with their tiny, perfect letters, and the one still glistening with fresh ink. Sasuke followed her mark, and you after, and then you pulled away from her and lifted the loose shirt over your head.

The loose pants fell in a dark puddle around your feet, and bare, you eased yourself into the water, hands holding the rocks while your feet turned little eddies that hummed against the sensitive scales of his tail.

The man in dark robes pulled an empty wooden bowl from his sleeve. The queen pulled a black lacquered container from hers. The lid came off with a subtle click and inside was barely an inch of shimmering white powder. With a start, Sasuke realized that these were what remained of the tears you had taken with you.

A pinch of the gleaming powder fell from the queen’s fine fingers. She dipped her head and caught her own tear, her own whisper of loneliness into the wooden bowl. She held it out for you and you pressed your thumb and forefinger together until one perfectly mixed drop of blood and salt water fell in the mixture.

The man in dark robes dipped a stick of something that looked like dark polished wood into the bowl and stirred three tines and passed the bowl back to the queen.

She dipped a finger inside and smeared your lips red and the drops fell between your lips like rubies.

Then she moved back on the rocks, eyes both excited and sad, like all those who knew true magic.

Sasuke looked at you, lips red with your own blood and the sheen of his fallen tears and whetted with a queen’s permission.

Between one breath and the next, your eyes went wide and silently, you fell beneath the waves like a spear thrown into the water.

Sasuke dove down immediately, but even with his eyes, you were lost to him in the dark. It should have been impossible. The sandy bottom of the lagoon, though deep and cool and still let in a little bit of light.

With the dawn, even the water shone like it was filling with blood.

You fell alone through streaks of red light, diluting slowly with gold. It was like drowning, like suffocating. The blood on your lips and the tears in your mouth put the savor of grief, the tang of loneliness, the suggestion of life that comes from leaving one place for another on your tongue.

Your ribs ached and your throat ached, like being strangled with a great hand. That hand squeezed and now your legs could only thrash together as one, no more kicking toward an imaginary surface.

The thrum of water - how vast the sea was, how easy to pour yourself into it and let it take you - but no! you must keep your own form, even caught in a fist - it pressed against you like a hundred holy mantras, like the prayers that rose on the day your sister the queen was crowned.

You fought against the weight, struggling against the instinct to hold all air in your lungs. It went quickly stale as your body shifted and twisted, becoming one with the water, the stab of bones realigning. Silvery bubbles escaped your mouth as you writhed, looking for Sasuke, looking for Mei, looking for the surface.

You were sinking slowly, drowning. But as the oxygen seeped from the little air left in your lungs, panic left with it. One could not fight the might of the sea.The salt taste of blood and tears lingered on your tongue. A rippling sensation passed over your skin. You could let it take you, to pull all of you through the endless tide and currents. There would be no leaving, no loneliness, no goodbyes. You would be with Sasuke always, as constant as the sea itself.

Sasuke. Mei.

It was their tears on your tongue. It was they who would have only the formless ocean left to whisper its fathomless stories in their ears.

There was no way to swim far and fast enough to taste air again, but if you did not try, their grief would be wasted.

You fought, trails of bubbles like tiny jellyfish trailing from your nose and the corner of your blood painted mouth. Your ribs ached, but you reached upward towards the slanting sunlight. If you were crying too, you would not know, for your cheeks were wet already, but you felt heat behind your eyes. You thrashed with legs held tight together, felt the catch of the ocean over your skin.

This was it, barely any change to the light and you were out of air but still you struggled. And still you lost as your mouth opened and the last of the bubbles pushing water out of your nose drifted further and faster in the direction you wanted to go, and you breathed in.

It burned like drowning. It is said that the ocean was alike to the blood of living things. It burned like you had swallowed flame, but you still thrashed, kicking your aching, unfamiliar bones together, toward the surface

The ocean tried to swallow you whole because it was a great thing and you were so very small and it had no care for your sorrows or anyone else's. But you did. You cared. You took another gulp of saltwater, pulling toward the surface. Maybe it was growing closer, maybe the water was growing less red.

You clawed and reached and swam, and at some point you realized that you were not drowning, that although your lungs were filled with the heaviness of water, your vision stayed clear to the edges, too clear for underwater, and your kicks were no longer kicks but the thrusts of a mighty tail, and you were indeed seeing the approaching refraction of the sun.

You breached with a leap, your momentum nearly carrying you up and out of the water until you managed to curve back downward in an arc. You sensed rather than saw his surprised backstroke, the way he was swimming near the bottom of the lagoon and surged up to meet you.

He stopped, perfect, with long lashes like a deer’s, dark eyes almost liquid themselves, skin milky as jade. You’d never noticed before the ever so faint patterning of scales, palest purple, that ran along his arms and ribs, even though you’d felt them. He flicked his tail in restless back and forth motion, holding in front of you, not touching.

The magnificent blue and violet of his fins was tucked close to his body, which you knew meant he was unsure.

You looked down at yourself. You had your own tail now, strongly muscled, stronger than human legs to cut through the water to the depths of the sea. It had spines and fins, fluttered like the voluminous silk of a dress, drifted with each adjustment and motion you made.

“I am with you,” you said to Sasuke, breathed, your words new and different, but shaped by the instinct of a creature of the sea.

You felt like you were drowning, still. The weight of water in your newly changed lungs reminded you that you were no longer above the water.

But oh. It slid into place as you looked into Sasuke’s eyes. There was a faint ring of black patterning in them that had been invisible to your fully human eyes. The dawn-red flash was more obvious now with every turn of his head. He swam around you slowly, taking in the fullness of your new form.

There were so many new senses it was almost blinding. You could feel the movement of water, the currents brushing against your skin and scales, the electric vibration of Sasuke circling around. Mei was a spot of warmth stronger than Sasuke somewhere above. Was that her magic? You did not know.

But Sasuke, he sang to you, his very presence hummed in your new bones. He felt tethered to you with the warmth of a sun warmed current. You knew instinctually that his inspection was nothing predatory, not curiosity exactly, but more like interest, more like … your instincts spoke to you of the slow movements of a courting display. Experimentally, you fanned the wide train of your tail, flexing muscles you hadn’t had minutes before, moving slowly so it rippled and showed off the tracery of vein-like patterns drawn by your scales. It pleased you that it was reminiscent of leaves, a reminder of the land you came from.

If this focus, this sense of belonging was half of what Sasuke had felt while you were only human, you understood even better the strength of emotion that had led him to shed tears.

Sasuke spiraled closer, the slow humming sounds in his throat translating into comprehensible description, concepts rather than words. Warm sand between skin and scales, the change from shallow to deep water, colored stones that guide in different sequences. It was both what he saw, and the feeling those things evoked in him – a comfort that never faded, the impression of moving from one place to somewhere very different, the bracelet you had given him. He wanted to go, to swim with you.

You wanted to go with him. You found yourself stirring your tail, clumsily and Sasuke’s affectionate consternation, almost a laugh, vibrating through the water. Something stopped you. There was something important. Another warm tether. You blinked. Mei. You had forgotten her so quickly. Or not forgotten, rather that she had drifted to another corner of your mind. Sasuke’s presence had been so strong and immediate, pulled your focus like a magnet.

The sound you made was unpracticed and in frustration you had to switch to gestures. Sasuke blinked and made a soothing sound almost like a very low echo that vibrated in your chest. He looked up to where a rippling image in red and blue sat by the water.

You breached the surface for the first time since the changes to your flesh. Air burned through your throat and nose, so light you felt like you might drift away. It was disorienting.

Mei’s eyes met yours, wide as though surprised. Maybe because the spell had worked so well, or because you had come back at all. She looked at you. You looked the same but so profoundly and obviously different.

Slowly, feeling the strength and speed in your limbs, you reached up and wiped away the tear that fell from her eye – clear and warm against your fingers.

“Go.” She whispered. That warm thread thrummed strong and malleable in your new senses.

You lifted yourself from the water to press your lips to her brow. She smelled like anemone flowers, which is something you had never realized before. It would be something to remember her by. Even though they weren’t the same, each time you saw one underwater, you would think of her.

“I love you Mei-oneesan.”

You could sense that Sasuke had popped his head above water, eager for the goodbye, to show you the open sea. A low, slow vibration found you, tingled up the new spines lining your tail like an overt extension of your spine, a reminder that he was here - comfort, but also excitement.

“I’m not going away,” you said to Mei. You slipped back so that the fishlike half of your body was submerged, looked back at the mer looking with expectant dark eyes at you. “I’m just going to love him.”

Mei’s hand found your cheek. Her fingers traced across the faint flash of new scale so fine and soft it blended with your skin. “Love him well,” she said. Whatever that meant for his people, she did not know, but she knew you would do your best to figure it out, she had every confidence in your abilities to adapt, and more importantly, to build a new life.

“I will,” you whispered, suddenly elated.

You spared a glance back, but you would return. Sasuke gave an adorably impatient little jerk of his head. Ready?

A sharp sound came readily from your throat, although from a place lower than the human voice box. You knew it to be some kind of affirmative, but that was going to take some getting used to. Everything would be new. A thrilled shiver went through your body as Sasuke dived below the waves. You followed close behind through the tunnels carved from the protective rocky wall, stones red and then black and then green marking your way.

The ocean opened up ahead. The water you drew over your new gills was like a breath of fresh air despite its aching heaviness. Sasuke waited, watching as you took it all in with eyes that saw much better in the depths, but there was still a point in every direction where you could no longer discern more than color. You focussed back on him, eyes wide. You beat your tail a few times to catch up, stopping just within reach for your more decorative fins to brush against Sasuke’s.

He reached out with seeking fingers and you reached back. Then he opened his mouth as though to taste the water. You imitated him, which seemed to amuse him. There was a burst of something taken in like flavor, but more like scent over your palate. Sasuke turned towards whatever sign he had found pointing him to what he was looking for. You followed into the blue expanse.

#mermay 2023 #mermay fic #uchiha sasuke #uchiha sasuke x reader #sasuke x reader #mermaid!sasuke #little mermaid au #but it's in reverse #long post #i think i'll cross post this one to ao3 as well #link will be up eventually for anyone who prefers reading there

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getosprettyboy · 1 month

Text

Thornes Without Roses

Pairing : Loki x Reader

Tags : sh, angst, hurt/comfort, just be warned

Summary : Loki reacts to your sh.

A/N : Hope you like it?

You know you shouldn’t do this. You know how wrong this is. You know that this is the least helpful thing to do to yourself. But it’s not that you’re doing this for attention.

No.

You just feel like you deserve this. You deserve the pain, you deserve to bleed, that’s what you tell yourself.

The last couple of days has been really hard on you. A failed mission with two casualties led you to get yelled at by the relatives of the victims which led you into self-loathing which then led to you thinking how big of a disappointment you are and such a heavy burden to carry. Before this, you were already feeling low due to your depression coming back with all these negative thoughts to make you want to jump off a building.

This isn’t something new as you have been dealing with these feelings as a kid and you are used to it now. The thing you shouldn’t be used to is how you deal with these emotions. You know these aren't the best coping mechanisms but it is all you have.

You go towards your desk and grab a sharpener, you also grab a screwdriver to take out the blade. You haven’t done this in a year because you promised yourself to never go down this path ever again but here you are.

You go to the bathroom towards the sink and look at yourself in the mirror. You wondered, when did things get so bad?

You held your am in front of you and dug the blade in your skin and drew a line. You watched as the skin then started to bleed. You choked on a sob and then drew more lines with the blade until you started sobbing.

Why were you like this?

Why did you have to be such a burden on your friends?

Why couldn’t you just stay happy?

What is wrong with you?

These thoughts swarmed your head as you sat on the toilet and put your head on your hands and sobbed. You sobbed about how you were incapable of love and how you were probably better off dead.

You kept on doing this for a month. Cutting yourself almost every day and hiding those wounds by wearing sweaters, jackets, or anything to hide the cuts made by you. Maybe your sadness was reflecting on your face and how you behaved because you started eating less, and got more reckless during missions which would lead you to be yelled at by one of your friends. You knew they meant well but you couldn’t bother yourself to listen to them. They even started asking questions.

“Are you alright [Y/N]?”

“Do you want to talk?”

“You know we are always there for you.”

“You know we love you right?”

Your least favourite was when you were asked - “Why are you wearing full sleeves in the middle of June?”

You hated these questions in general.

One day you were feeling extremely low and overwhelmed and thought of cutting yourself. You went to your room and took your sharpener and went to the bathroom and took off your sweatshirt and began to cut yourself.

As soon as you started to cut yourself there was a knock on your bathroom door.

“[Y/N], are you there?”

It was Loki. Shit! Why did he have to come at a time like this?!

“Fuck!”

“[Y/N]?” Loki asked cautiously.

“One minute!!!” You said in a panic.

You tried to hide everything. You put a band-aid on your wound and hid the sharpener in the medicine box. You flushed the toilet to seem you were busy and came out of the bathroom with a smile on your face.

“Hey! Loki, what brings you here?” You asked.

“Well I just wanted to talk about something.” He said.

“What is this something?” You asked.

“It’s about you [Y/N], you seem very down lately. Are you alright?”

“Pfft! I’m totally fine. I don’t know why everyone is asking me that.”

“If you say so.” He looked down and his eye caught your bare arm.

Shit! Shit! Shit! You forgot to wear your sweatshirt.

You tried hiding your non-dominant hand but Loki already saw it.

“Show me your arm.” He demanded, you looked into his eyes and there was a half-hearted glare.

“It’s nothing. I promise.” You said but your voice reached deaf ears. You were panicking, your heart rate increasing. Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Why was this happening? Why today of all days? Your vision was beginning to blur from your tears.

“[Y/N] I’m going to ask you this one last time. What happened? To. Your. Arm?” He asked firmly.

You couldn’t take it anymore, the dam broke and you were now crying. Holding your head in your hands in shame. You felt shame, guilt, and sadness. You broke down into your arms.

“I’m sorry. I’m so so so sorry Loki. Please don’t be angry at me. I'm so sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen. Loki I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry Loki. Please, please don’t be mad.” You cried. You cried and cried and cried in your hands not wanting to look at Loki because he might be looking at you with fury in his eyes or disgusted with you or something worse that you don’t want to imagine.

The last thing you expected was a hug from him. You stood there shocked at his reaction, you silently just stood there confused until you started crying again.

This felt so much better. His embrace was so warm. You felt a ray of sunshine finally blooming in you as he held you tight as you sobbed in his arms.

He guided you towards the bed and made you sit beside him while he comforted you.

“Shhh, it’s ok. Let it all out. I’m here, it’s ok [Y/N] I’m here, I’m here, it’s alright.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry Loki. I don’t mean to be such a burden. I’m sorry” You said while violently sobbing.

“[Y/N] stop apologising. I am not angry” He said calmly.

“What I am is concerned about your well-being. I know the last few weeks have been harsh on you, but that doesn’t mean you would do this to yourself. You are better than this and you are not a burden to me in my life nor in anyone else’s life but what you are is a blessing in human form and especially to me, You are like the sun shining brightly in my darkest of days, you mean the whole world to me [Y/N] and I mean it whole-heartedly. Do you understand what I am saying [Y/N]?”

You nodded weakly.

There was a pause, and then Loki continued. “I’m sorry if I ever made you feel that you can’t open up to me but I promise that I won’t judge you and promise to make you feel safe and comfortable with me.”

Your heart warmed up at his words. Maybe you should’ve gone to Loki or a therapist for help instead of doing this. But you couldn’t do anything else because you felt that you would be burdening your friends by doing so but after hearing Loki maybe that isn’t the case.

You could feel more tears in your eyes. You couldn’t help it. Nobody has said something like that to you. You’ve been doing this since you were fourteen and you sure as hell weren’t going to stop but maybe you’re going to try to stop doing this.

Your cries had subdued to hiccups and you were just processing what he said.

“Thank you… Loki. I really appreciate you saying that.”

“You’re welcome, and I meant all of that so whenever you feel like doing that to yourself just call for me and I will distract you from it,” Loki said sincerely.

“Thank you.” That’s all that you could say. Those were just two words but he knew how sincere you were about it.

You both stayed like that. Loki held you tight in his embrace and you rested your head on his chest as you both lay down on the bed. His heartbeat slowly lulls you to sleep and after so many sleepless nights you had the best sleep.

#loki x reader #loki laufeyson #loki angst #loki drabble #loki fanfic #loki fanfiction #loki fic #loki x you #loki x y/n

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chcrryade · 2 months

Text

when you think you know what i know.

Hasun, and all of the people he has to learn how to understand.

INCLUDES ⁺⠀lee hasun, cherryade ensemble. TIMESTAMP ⁺⠀JULY—NOVEMBER 2021. WARNINGS ⁺⠀profanity, injury, smoking, arguing. the piece as a whole is kind of a mish-mash of scenes!! WORD COUNT ⁺⠀7.8K. NOTE ⁺⠀i guess this is.. a chapter? or at least a little insight into these weirdo freaks idk.. but i hope u like it anw!!! if u hv any thoughts please tell me or i’ll blow up!!! and finally thanku to my fave isa for making the decision for me for this to be through hasun’s eyes (bc it was originally gonna b doyeon LOL). love u 🫂

ఇ⠀PRACTICE ROOM⠀3RD JUNE, 2021

Doyeon looked like he was an untied shoelace away from snapping.

It was just them in the practice room, the others having left not long after the choreographer did to spend the rest of their evenings however they so desired. Hasun stayed because of the creeping worry he was falling behind, an uncomfortable feeling hanging over his head that if he didn’t get up to standard soon he would simply be cut. Easily, thoughtlessly, as he had seen the company do before and feared they would do again.

Why Doyeon was still there, though, he had no clue. The older seemed miles ahead of him in terms of talent, every move he made flowing perfectly into the next. Doyeon was like honey, slow and sure and golden, and Hasun supposed that made him something of an irritating bee trying to replicate it for himself. He had first tried to just shut him out, focus on his own steps and twists and turns, but soon the force of Doyeon’s trainers against the wooden floor were starting to drown out the music from the speakers, and Hasun had been watching him ever since, barely attempting to keep up the pretence of following the routine anymore. His movements were ghosts of what they had been earlier, eyes fixed on the figure next to him in the mirror.

The older boy seemed.. Off. What was once honey-smooth now looked more jerky, forceful. Like it was being pulled out of him, every movement too big for his body. His face was blank, eyes far away, and his hands were curled into fists at his side. Hasun’s brows drew together, mouth opening to call out, to try and snap Doyeon out of whatever trance he looked to have fallen into, but he faltered in the face of the rhythmic beat of trainers against floorboards and the melodic vocals of their mock-up debut track playing on repeat.

Everything seemed to grow in volume. Feet on the floor. His breathing in his ears. Music from the speaker, lyrics from the song. It was a climbing crescendo, and the chilling feeling was back—running along the nape of his neck, a feather-light touch across his skin that left it crawling. Something felt wrong.

The music only felt like it got louder, after that. As if protesting against the sense of dread that was slowly seeping into his train of thinking. His hands were cold, his feet ached, his eyes widened. Everything was slowing down, and Doyeon was stopping in place, and his eyes seemed to snap open in realisation, finally awake, and then—then he was crumbling to the floor, a pained yell ringing out around the room that echoed horribly in Hasun’s ears. The demo track carried on.

He was by his side in a second, hands cautious as they hovered for a moment before he finally settled them first on his back, then moved to his shoulder. He didn’t know what to do. Doyeon pushed to sit upright, the clouded-over look in his eyes replaced with something that Hasun couldn’t name, and didn't know how to describe.

“Hyung. Are—are you alright? Should I go get someone?”

The way the older one reacted made it seem like nothing sounded worse. He jerked further upright, shifting out of Hasun’s hesitant grip, and his hand made to grab at his arm, eyes suddenly frantic. “No, fuck. I’m.. I’m alright, Hasun-ah. See?”

To demonstrate, he pushed himself to stand and presented his hands in a flourish. It was almost believable, until he moved to take a step and one of his knees nearly buckled all over again. Doyeon slumped back to the floor before his legs could do it for him, face pale and all excuses shocked silent.

Hasun was starting to panic. His hands rose to try and reach for the dancer again, but he shoved them back by his sides when he saw how they were shaking. Idiot, he berated himself, glaring hard at the floor so Doyeon didn’t see the unsurety in his face. You’re supposed to be helping.

“Are you sure, hyung? Please don’t lie, I don’t.. I don’t know what to do.”

To Hasun’s horror, he felt the hot prickle of tears threatening to fall, a broken half-sob clogging up his throat before he choked it down and clamped a hand over his mouth. Shame came not long afterwards, the tips of his ears burning red-hot. He couldn’t be breaking down, not now, not here—not when, if anything, it should’ve been Doyeon brought to tears. Doyeon who seemed to be the picture of calm in that moment, teeth coming to gnaw at his bottom lip as he yanked up the leg of his sweatpants to inspect his ankle, brow furrowing slightly at what he saw. He lifted his gaze from his leg to try and reassure the youngest one more time, but stopped still when he saw the tears shining in his eyes, resolutely avoiding eye contact. His words faltered, coming out stilted, awkward. The positions had flipped, and now Doyeon was the one with no clue of what move to make.

“Hasun-ah, I’m fine. Hyung’s fine. There’s no need to—just. Don’t cry, Hasun-ah. Please.”

His attempts at consolement were flimsy, crumbling at the foundations, and so he gently set a hand on the maknae’s shoulder instead. That seemed to be all Hasun needed for him to collapse into Doyeon’s shoulder, head down and cries muffled in the thin fabric of his sweater. The demo track was still playing from the speakers, lyrics looping over and over. Hasun wished he was back in the dorms. In bed, underneath a duvet in a room that at thirteen had seemed so like a stranger but he now knew like the back of his hand. He wanted his tears to dry, the music to stop, a warm meal that evening, and for Doyeon to be alright. For everyone to be alright. He wanted to make it, and he wanted everyone to be fine when they did.

Doyeon appeared to understand without him saying a word. He simply pulled him in closer, a hand making its way to stroke over his hair softly, tangling and untangling the strands between his fingers. There they sat; in the practice room long after everyone else had left, long after the sun had set. Bruises were starting to form around Doyeon’s ankle, sickening shades of purple and blue. Hasun’s hands were still cold, his head starting to hurt from the soft sobs that wracked through his frame. Neither of them paid any mind, for now.

“We’ll be alright, Hasunnie. We’ll get through this.”

Maybe it was an empty promise, but Hasun didn’t care. It was good enough for him.

ఇ⠀CLUB (?)⠀5TH JULY, 2021

“Why are we here, Jalen-hyung?”

The strobe lights were hurting his eyes, painting him pink and purple and blue and a whole other range of colours he was too overwhelmed to remember the name of, the bass of whatever EDM remix they were bumping was matching how fast his heart was beating, and his hands were sweaty from where they were holding onto the back of Jalen’s shirt in a vice grip as the older led them through the back-alley club he’d dragged him to—for what reason, he could do nothing but guess.

Jalen turned back to him, the white of his teeth when he grinned gleaming at him even through the pseudo-darkness. “Inspiration. Why else? You said you wanted to write a song, didn’t you?”

Hasun shifted, straightening up when somebody knocked into him from behind and then carried on pushing their way through the crowd without so much as an apology. “Not about anything like this. I’m not—I’m not even allowed to be in here yet.”

All he got in response was an eyeroll, and then suddenly Jalen was off again, finally coming to a stop at a rare empty booth that he shoved Hasun into before cramming up next to him. Sweat was starting to bead across his forehead from the stuffiness of the room, and the older one’s voice was too loud in his ear when he leaned in close to yell in it.

“So just don’t tell anyone! It's not like I’m making you do shots, I’m just trying to get you inspired. What is it you even want to write, anyway?”

That was where Hasun stopped in his tracks, suddenly far too interested in the rings on his fingers than meeting Jalen’s eyes. The thing was.. He himself didn’t really know. Hasun just knew he wanted to do something, contribute something other than his vocals on the tracks and dancing for the stages. Every single one of the other members already had things to show, traits they were known for, both personalities and reputations already established (for better or, in some cases, for much worse), and Hasun had nothing. He was the nobody, the new boy. So he figured a good way to show people he wasn’t going to just stand around without pulling his weight would be to get his name in the credits for one song, at the very least.

But he couldn’t relay all that to Jalen. He’d probably just laugh, leer, pat him on the head and tell him that his voice would be more than enough, because he didn’t get it. Because it wouldn’t, it wasn’t, and it never would be. That was one of the first things he’d learned as a trainee, standing in the cold one November evening while his cousin stubbed out cigarettes under her stilettos and ingrained into him things that he’d never learn in any practice room.

They never just want your voice. Or your talent as a dancer, or your pretty white smile. It’s not that easy. You have to be someone, you know. You have to be the one who tells the best jokes, or gets the most girls, or the one who looks like they just don’t give a fuck about anything—about anyone. You have to write the songs, or get yourself onto billboards, or say the most in all the interviews. You’re not enough. She never said it, but it was written in the fine lines, the footnotes. Hasun was desperate to please and to prove, so with knuckling down and shoving some lyrics in front of their producer’s face with a hopeful smile he hoped to kill both of those birds with one stone.

But he couldn’t relay all that to Jalen. So instead he just shrugged, raising his head and trying not to mumble so he’d be heard over the music.

“I don’t know. Just.. Something. Something fun.” Something worthy. Something that’s enough.

The older one again gestured at the atmosphere around them, with a force that sent one of his dangling earrings swinging and an eyebrow raised in expectation. “Fun? We’re at just the place for it.”

For him, maybe. Hasun had overheard all the stories Haeil had playfully forced him to tell the rest about his life back home, everything he’d seen and done so far. Scenes like this probably felt like a place where he could slip into a second skin, into a nature he’d grown up inhabiting. For Hasun it felt like being thrown into the deep end, locked in a cage with his oxygen cut off. Everywhere he looked was another flash of glittering fabric, sparkling jewellery, and on occasion an LED-endowed vape clutched in the hand of a drunk partygoer—which Hasun was half-sure was allowed just as much as him even being in this place at all, but from how run-down the entire establishment looked (from both the outside and in) he wouldn’t be surprised if the smoke alarm’s wires had been cut long before anyone started flicking lighters or hitting blinkers.

The air felt as if it was weighed down, so laden with the force of sweat and perfume and powder that Hasun felt that if he stuck his tongue out he would be able to taste it. He laughed weakly in response to Jalen’s question and shimmied down further into his side, trying his best to melt into the cheap leather even if the stench of the alcohol that had seeped through it made him want to retch.

Unfortunately, Jalen wouldn’t let him off that easily. His grip around his arm wasn’t a rough one, but it was firm enough that he tugged him back into sitting upwards with ease. His gaze when he turned to stare into Hasun’s eyes was unflinching and uncomfortable, and the youngest wished he’d said yes when Jalen had asked if he was doing anything that night.

“Stop moping, just humour me for a minute. Ignore this shitty music, ignore everyone else—just stay in your head and think. Lyrics can be anything, you know, no one’s expecting us to bring anything deep to the table. Fuck it, you can write about the awful shade of purple they’ve painted the walls if it means you’ve got a song on your hands. Just.. You know. Try.”

Try. Try and write something fun. Something enough. He tossed Jalen a wary look in the face of his gentle encouragement, but broke the eye contact and tried to push out the overbearing noise thumping into his skull anyway. Stay in your head. His mind was quiet, a place of solace, and he slowly lowered his head into the comfort of his folded arms atop the table, tugging his beanie down over his ears in an attempt to muffle the bass even further, and thought. Felt.

It took a while for anything to form, while he sat there and stared into the ocean of neon lights and young recklessness, and when it did it didn’t even come all at once. It didn’t come in a perfect flow of intro-verse-chorus-verse, but instead in broken lines. Or rather, just one. But he shot upright all the same, and Jalen next to him jerked in surprise, eyes wide as Hasun tugged harshly on the sleeve of his jacket.

“Hyung. We need to go. I need to write this down.”

Jalen’s grin was just as wide as it had been earlier, and looked to gleam even brighter as he got to his feet and gave the youngest a hand, arm around his shoulders as he tugged him out the same entrance they’d come in from. Hasun’s eyes were trained on his feet, at the floor, desperately trying to keep what he’d thought of in mind, trying not to lose it to the tug of the crowd and the rhythm of the music. It wasn’t whole, wasn’t any sort of final product or finished piece, but when it was..

When it was, then maybe it would be enough. But only then.

ఇ⠀CHERRYADE DORM⠀21ST JULY, 2021

The voices in the kitchen were far too loud for Hasun’s liking. He almost hadn’t heard them at all, because debut was around the corner and they were being worked to the bone, but the combination of the walls being so thin, his room being the closest to the kitchen, and the slamming of the front door with the harsh back-and-forth between whoever was out there that followed not long afterwards was enough to rouse him. He shifted upwards in his bed, bleary eyes struggling to make out one foot from the other as he shoved back the thin duvet and reached for a hoodie tossed over the chair shoved against his tiny desk. He was gentle as he pushed open the door, quiet as he pushed it closed behind him. The only light was coming from the warm yellow bulb under the stove hood, and bathed in it he could just barely make out Haeil sitting on the counter, face half obscured by the figure in front of him.

Hasun made to step closer, to ask what was going on, until he snapped to full attention at the sound of Jalen’s voice, the coldness of his tone cutting straight through the otherwise warm atmosphere.

“What the fuck were you thinking? Are you drunk? Is that it? How could you do something so stupid?”

Haeil’s face twisted into something ugly, and he shifted away from the older man in front of him, hand reaching up to rub at one of his eyes. His reply was just as harsh, his usual apathetic state turned cruel by whatever argument he was in the middle of.

“I’m not drunk, and I’m not stupid, either. God, you make it sound like I asked for this to happen. If you’re just going to give me a lecture, you can fuck off. I can take care of this by myself.”

Jalen’s returning scoff hurt Hasun’s ears. He only pressed closer, bringing his hands up to hold Haeil’s face in a way that was far too soft for how he was berating him only moments earlier. Hasun felt slightly sick, skin burning too hot for the thick fabric of his hoodie. He didn’t think he was supposed to be seeing this or hearing this at all. But he couldn’t turn away, rooted to the spot out of the morbid curiosity that was eating through him.

“Can’t you just let me help, for once? It’s late. Knowing you, you’ll knock everything over and wake everyone up. I don’t want to deal with a pissy Yijun at two in the morning, thanks.”

Despite how Jalen’s tone had lightened, lifting at the end in a half-attempt at a joke, a hand reaching out for Haeil to take, a silent plea for them to agree on a truce, the rapper was resistant. He squirmed out of the vocalist’s hold once again, and turned his eyes towards his feet, words only just above a mumble—so quiet that Hasun strained forward in order to hear, and hated himself a bit for it.

“You’re not my mother.”

The play at being civil dropped, then. So abruptly that Hasun could feel it in the air—like there was a drop in temperature, a shift in the mood. It was a step too far. The three steps back that came as the fallout to Jalen’s weak excuse of moving forward. Jalen straightened up, all previous notions of helping Haeil discarded, forgotten. His next words sounded mean in a way Hasun hadn’t known Jalen to be, the sardonic smile visible even if his back was turned.

“That’s a bit rich coming from you, isn’t it? Has she called?”

Silence rang out in the kitchen. If Haeil had taken it a step too far, then Jalen had just ripped it apart with his bare hands. All was quiet for a few moments longer, before the oldest moved to speak up again, hand slowly raising to Haeil—who was just.. Staring at him, eyes saying far more than either of them could ever out loud and body stunned still—again, before he dropped it with a sigh and turned on his heel. Hasun froze on the spot, unsure of whether he should return to the safety of his own room or press himself as close to the wall as possible and hope Jalen would brush right past him in the dark.

But before he could come to a decision Jalen had solved the issue for him, simply brushing straight past him without a mere glance in his direction and wrenching open the door to his own room, letting it slam carelessly shut behind him and leaving Haeil behind on the counter watching in silence, mouth having opened as if to call out after him but then thinking better of it, and Hasun with his heart thumping hard in his chest, socked feet unmoving from where he’d been stood throughout the whole ordeal.

And then there were two. Haeil looked to have curled in on himself, head hanging and arms loosely wrapped around his sides, and Hasun felt he had to do something—because if he’d gleaned anything from the conversation he’d just overheard, it was that something had gone wrong. So he steeled himself, pulled his hood down from where he’d had it covering his messy head of hair, and stepped forward into the low kitchen light.

“Hyung? Are you—is everything alright? I just heard some noise, so..” The lie settled uncomfortably in the pit of his stomach, but it was better than admitting what he’d just overheard. Haeil startled at his voice, head snapping up to face him, and what looked back at Hasun was a face that held something far worse than any of the scenarios the youngest had been thinking of. Haeil’s face was bruised, beaten, the beginnings of a black eye already starting to form. His arms looked to have fared a little better, but there was blood still sluggishly oozing from one of his scraped knees. The laugh he let out in response to Hasun’s question echoed around the empty room, sounding almost hollow.

“Does it look alright? Think some concealer would cover it up fine? Some drunk fuck jumped me while I was out for a—just. While I was out.”

His skin was burning hot to the touch, and Hasun’s hands were shaking as he tried to figure out what to do. He felt like he was back under the stark white lights of the practice room with a fallen Doyeon before him, a fawn on unstable legs. Haeil was a lot less receptive to his panic, though, simply pushing himself off of the counter (biting back a curse when he did so, the leg he’d injured shaking a bit when he landed on it too hard on his bare feet) and opening up the cupboard they’d unspokenly agreed was meant for the more miscellaneous things, fishing around for the unopened box of plasters and throwing Hasun a half-hearted thumbs-up when he found them.

“I’ll be fine, Hasun-ah. It’s nothing water won’t fix. Why don’t you go back to bed, hm? Hyung’s sorry for waking you up.”

The bathroom was all the way at the other end of the hall, and Hasun watched on in silence as Haeil hobbled his way down, melting further and further away from the warm kitchen light and disappearing into the darkness, the only sound being his bare footsteps padding across the wooden floor. Bright white illuminated his silhouette when he switched on the bathroom light, the blooming bruises on his pale skin almost unearthly in the unnatural glow. He turned and met Hasun’s waiting gaze over his shoulder, and the look he gave him felt inconceivable. The moment stretched on for a beat, another.

Haeil turned back and slammed the door shut behind him, taking the light as he went. Hasun, now standing alone in the kitchen, clad in his socks and sleep shorts and threadbare hoodie, felt like there was something he wasn’t getting—that there were lines he couldn’t see, and so was unable to read between.

But he supposed he’d never find out now. The only thing left to do was flick the stove light off and trudge back to his bedroom, falling back onto his bed and being unable to do anything but close his eyes and try to dream.

Haeil’s eyes stared back at him when he did; asking a question Hasun didn’t know how to answer, wanting to hear things Hasun didn’t know how to say.

ఇ⠀CAFÉ⠀30TH AUGUST, 2021

It wasn’t the first time he’d seen Yijun smile, but it was certainly one of the only. Hasun had no clue who he was talking to on the other end of the phone, but whoever they were had the main rapper grinning like a fool, all while Jaehee and himself were left to sit opposite and make small talk—which wasn’t going all that well either, seeing as Jaehee was far too busy trying to eavesdrop into the other’s phone call to make any sort of conversation with the youngest. So the only real source of entertainment he had was to play with the straw poking out of the top of his smoothie (that Yijun had earlier commandeered one sip of, and then proceeded to fake-retch at the taste of) or people-watch from their convenient window seat, watching as couples and friends and lone individuals wandered by.

“Do you have to? Fine, if whatever you’re doing is more important than me, then go ahead, but just know I’m getting you back next time I see you. Mm. Alright. Love you, bye.”

His conversation apparently having ended, Yijun carelessly let his phone clatter back onto the table and sat back in his chair, taking his coffee with him as he did so. Jaehee leaned forward eagerly, grin on his face as he started his interrogation.

“Who was that?” The leering grin on his face made Hasun feel like Jaehee knew perfectly well who it was, and was only asking to piss Yijun off.

The question served its purpose to a T. Yijun turned his nose up and released the bitten straw from his lips to snap back at him almost immediately. “None of your business. Nosy fuck.”

The fellow rapper pulled a face, slumping back into his own seat but not staying deterred for long, piping back up after only a few seconds of sulking. “I was just asking, God.”

Hasun wanted to finish his drink as fast as possible and leave the two to their oncoming argument, but at the same time he felt he needed to attempt to mediate. Surely they wouldn’t start yelling like they did on occasion back at the dorms—seeing as the café they were all sitting in was a very public place, and with Yijun’s first group scandal already under his belt after his run-in with a senior at Inkigayo they were already walking on thin ice.

“Well, don’t.” Came Yijun’s snappy reply, taking another pointed sip of his drink that drained the rest of it and setting it back down on the table with the force that made his phone jump in its place face-down on the smooth surface. “Why are you even here? I don’t want you to be.”

The pout on Jaehee’s face was starting to morph into something that looked more like a scowl. “Who died and made you leader? I’ll go where I want, I don’t care if you want me there or not.” It seemed like a final statement, but then the rapper was turning towards Hasun with a sudden grin that made him look like something of a cartoon shark, wide and pointy. “Hasunnie does, doesn’t he?”

Shifting awkwardly in his seat, now with the force of two unblinking pairs of eyes on him, the youngest gave a nondescript gesture that was an amalgamated mix of a shrug and a nod and wished the ground would swallow him whole. Jaehee huffed, seemingly unsatisfied with his answer, and Yijun burst into laughter.

“Doesn’t look much like it to me. You’re really running out of allies if even our maknae can’t bear to spend time with you.”

And with that, Jaehee reached his breaking point for the day. It always went like this, as Hasun had come to learn over the years they’d spent together. Jaehee prodded, and then Yijun shoved and broke and snapped in retaliation. The scraping sound of his chair legs against the floor was ugly, grated against Hasun’s ears, but where he winced, Yijun simply picked his phone back up and went back to scrolling mindlessly at something or other, not sparing the rapper a singular glance.

“I’m calling Jaeyoung-hyung. I’ll just—I’ll see you back at the dorms.”

He was gone without another word, one hand clutching the remnants of his drink and the other bringing his phone up to his ear, turning back for a moment to meet the eyes of Hasun watching him go and throwing him a final thin smile that looked too fake on his lips before he pushed the door open with a shoulder and was disappearing off down the street, only pausing for half a second to pull his hood up over his head despite the late-afternoon sun still being high in the sky.

“Well,” Yijun began, shoving his phone in his pocket for the time being as soon as Jaehee was out of sight and turning to face Hasun properly. “That was quicker than usual. Maybe it’s because my friend on the phone is a touchy subject for our Jaehee.”

It had sounded more like a sore spot for Yijun himself, but Hasun wasn’t too keen on meeting the same fate as Jaehee, and so kept his mouth shut. The silence that then fell over them wasn’t awkward, by any means, but it wasn’t the most comfortable either. Hasun just focused on finishing his drink, wondering if he should tell the older man to go ahead and not bother to wait up. The words were on the tip of his tongue, shifting to sit further upright so they’d come out coherent and not a jumbled mess of syllables, but before he could say them Yijun slumped down in his chair, a hand coming up to rake through his hair before the other joined it to dig the heels of his palms into his eyes for a brief moment.

He looked tired, all of a sudden, all the fight from earlier having left him. He reached into his pocket for his phone again, but swore under his breath when the screen stayed dark, battery dead. The youngest watched as his hands squeezed together tight before just barely relaxing, fingers coming to pick at hangnails and teeth gnawing at his bottom lip. Hasun took a breath, another, and then slowly brought his own phone out of his pocket, unlocked it, and held it out to the rapper. He didn’t know what Yijun wanted it for, but he was going to offer it all the same. Watching the older all twitchy and uncomfortable felt odd, unnatural, and he wanted to see him back to his normal self (even if that didn’t mean someone particularly kind, or caring, or all that nice at all) as soon as possible. Yijun stopped his picking and looked at the home screen of Hasun and Eunhee arm-in-arm to the face of the youngest and back again, hesitating.

“Take it, hyung, it’s fine. Just don’t.. I don’t know, drain my bank account.”

Yijun scoffed and rolled his eyes, quickly back to his usual brash act even if his hands were wary when they took the device from Hasun’s hands. “As if. I’d only do that to Jaehee, Hasun-ah. You’re my favourite.”

Hasun grinned, happy to see him back to normal even if it was just for show, just to save face. He then finally finished off his own drink and set it on the table, getting the feeling he wasn’t really supposed to stick around any longer to listen in on any more conversations Yijun was probably going to have. He started to get his things together, yanking the zipper of his hoodie up and shooting the rapper a smile.

“I’ll go first, Hyung. Call a cab when you go if it gets late, don’t walk home on your own.”

Yijun made to protest, but Hasun stopped him before he could say a word and stood from his seat, granting the older a wave as he gently pushed open the door and stepped out into what was gradually turning into the early evening. He’d get back before dark if he walked quickly, and so only turned back for a moment to grin one last time at the rapper before he turned and was on his way, wondering absently what was waiting (or rather, what was left) for him in the fridge back at the dorms.

Later that night, when Yijun slipped into his room after only a quiet knock, he gently placed his phone back onto the bedside table and gave Hasun another one of his rare smiles, small but genuine. There were no words that needed to be shared between them, nothing more that needed to be said.

It was only a small moment of understanding, one that passed as quickly as it had arrived, but it left Hasun feeling warm all the same. Left him feeling like he was getting somewhere, finally.

ఇ⠀DOWNTOWN GANGNAM⠀16TH SEPTEMBER, 2021

This was supposed to be a coffee run. They had practice in ten minutes, and instead of doing what he said he was going to do, Minhui had hopped out of the car, blew a kiss goodbye to Jaeyoung (and got a middle finger in return), took Hasun by the arm, and dragged him along to the closest shopping centre. He’d counted three coffee shops, and the dancer hadn’t spared a glance at any of them. Minhui seemed more interested in the rack of fur coats—made from animals that Hasun could only guess, in so many outlandish patterns and thicknesses and the rest that it almost looked like a scene from a movie.

“Hyung,” he hesitantly began, looking over his shoulder before drawing closer to the still-browsing older boy. Minhui only hummed in response, half-listening. “I really don’t think we should be..”

“Shut up. Go try this on.”

A coat twice the size of him was suddenly being flung in his direction, and he only just barely caught it, before looking back up at the dancer, wide-eyed. At the sound of their commotion a few other browsers had turned to see what all the fuss was about, and it made Hasun want to melt into the floor. At the maknae’s pleading gaze, Minhui simply rolled his eyes.

“Stop panicking, won’t you? I doubt we were actually going to practise today anyway—Yijunnie fucked off to go see some of his ex-members, and Haeil-hyung was out again last night. But if we get in trouble, then don’t worry,” he threw Hasun an overexaggerated wink, his smirk cat-like and vaguely unsettling. “Hyung will take the fall for you, aegi.”

He shuddered at the term of endearment, and Minhui clearly revelled in his displeased reaction if his responding cackle was anything to go by. Still, Hasun turned the coat around and slowly slid it off its hanger, before tugging it over his shoulders. It felt odd on his bare arms, the interior lining not so much a wild and fluffy affair as it was a silkier and smoother fabric. Minhui cooed again far too loudly when he gave him an indulgent flourish of his arms, tugging his phone out of his back pocket and aiming it straight at him.

“Yah, hyung. I never said you could take pictures.” His complaints were rather unfounded when he wasn’t doing anything to stop him, but he felt he needed to get the message across anyway. Minhui, of course, ignored it.

“You never said I couldn't, either! Do a twirl for us, Hasun-ah.”

Muttering under his breath the whole while, Hasun did as told while the dancer snickered and snapped picture after picture every second of the process. He found he felt less worried about the potential prospect of missing practice the longer he was away from the company building, everything being much easier to forget when it felt like it was just him and Minhui—no managers, no staff, no-one. Just them, the generic pop songs they were playing on the in-store speakers, and a rack of fur coats.

Minhui got bored eventually, after he’d made Hasun try on everything he could find that piqued his interest, and he left the maknae struggling to catch up when he abruptly walked straight back out the entrance to the store in the same manner he’d entered: rushed, in a way, every step almost too quick to catch, but also with purpose, confidence. Like he was the owner of every location the chain belonged to, dropping in for a surprise visit and putting everyone on edge before leaving again.

He hadn’t seemed to have figured out their next stop, as when they were out in the busy Gangnam street again he stopped and turned aimlessly a few times, taking in the abundance of billboards and flashing lights and people everywhere he looked. Hasun took a small step away from him, not exactly wanting to be associated with the pink-haired dancer twirling around on the spot while innocent onlookers were made to be his witnesses, but similarly took a moment to simply stand and stare at the bustling city around him.

It felt like too much—car horns beeping at one another, ten different conversations between twice the amount of people floating into one ear and out the other, glaring LEDs hitting him in the eyes on every building he dared to glance at, and about three different idols staring back at him from their places in bus stop windows or billboard advertisements, holding whatever product they were being sponsored by close to their porcelain faces—but at the same time, it felt just like home. A part of him as much as everything else was, as much as the company was, as much as the group was.

It’d been hard to truly get a grasp on at first, what with the training and the debuting and everything in between that had made his life far too hectic for him to take a minute and really accept where he was and where he wanted to go, but now in the stolen moment of peace—by himself, with Minhui at his side, on what was supposed to be a coffee run, when they had certainly missed whatever practice there may or may not have been by now—he felt he could finally process it all properly. This is where I am. This is where I want to be. I don’t know where to go next, but that doesn’t really matter, because I don’t need to know that right now. Right now, he could just be. He could just sing the lines they gave him, dance the choreography they taught him, and just hope he was doing alright instead of worrying if he was going to be replaced.

A smile grew on his face, quiet but wide. Hasun enjoyed the moment for a second more, another, but it was ripped away from him by a complaining Minhui tugging at his arm, apparently bored with (or had gotten dizzy from) his spinning-around-in-circles gimmick.

“Hasunnie-yah. Let’s go get lunch, hm? I’m starving. It’s all on me, but if you want dessert then it’s gonna have to come out of your own pockets.”

Hasun rolled his eyes, but didn’t complain any further, letting himself be dragged along to whatever eating place Minhui could find and listening to all his tangents and rambles on the way. He didn’t feel all that annoyed at his moment being ruined—in fact, he felt it only would’ve been ruined if Minhui had let him overthink any further. He felt that his acceptance of his place was something that should be processed simply and left at that. This is where I am.

And, as he was taken down winding alleyways and wide open stretches of the high street, surrounded by conversation and lights and life, he didn’t think it was an all-too-terrible place to be.

ఇ⠀JAGUAR BUILDING⠀25TH NOVEMBER, 2021

As soon as Hasun entered the recording room, all eyes swivelled to him. Yijun, Daejin, and Doyeon were the only ones there, but even their three gazes combined made him feel uncomfortable, the back of his neck burning as they just continued to stare. It was only when he was just about to pipe up and ask what was wrong that Daejin sent him a sympathetic smile and turned fully in his chair in front of all the production equipment, pushing his headphones down to rest around his neck.

“Hi, Hasun-ah. I don’t want to be too much of a bother, but.. Do you think you could go find Jaehee?”

The immediate question on the tip of his tongue was why, and Yijun spoke up to answer it without him even needing to say a word. “He threw another tantrum and stormed off. Daejin-hyung wants his part done by tonight, so we don’t have to listen to his shitty vocals any longer than we need to.”

Doyeon clicked his tongue in disapproval at Yijun’s choice of words, but didn’t move to say anything to disprove them. Daejin visibly bit back a smile but shook his head anyway, quashing the grin completely as he looked back to Hasun to hear his answer. The maknae nodded easily enough, and turned to leave—but then stopped abruptly and swung right back around on his heels when he realised he had no idea where the rapper was.

“Where would I find him, hyung?”

That seemed to draw a blank out of them, both the producer and leader doing nothing but shrugging helplessly. It was Yijun that spoke up again, not looking particularly happy about the answer he had to give.

“Outside. Round the back, near the main road. Tell him to go home if he’s crying though, that sniffling would drive me crazy.”

Doyeon did speak up at that, reaching over from his place settled on Daejin’s tiny leather sofa to whack him lightly on the thigh. “Leave off, Yijun-ah. The only reason he stormed out in the first place was you. As usual.”

The vague directions had only been a half-help, but Hasun was sure he’d find Jaehee if he wandered outside long enough and turned back around, letting the door swing to a close behind him as he navigated back to the elevator. Evening had long since fallen, and he stared out at the city skylights in silence on the way down.

The November air was biting through his thin hoodie, and he hoped he wouldn’t have to be looking for too long as he took the first step outside the company building. Near the main road wasn’t very helpful, seeing as they were near about three, but he diligently fished his phone out of his pocket and fiddled with the flashlight until he had a more reliable source of light that wasn’t the fleeting car headlights passing by every few moments and began his walk, straining to hear anything that wasn’t the skid of wheels on tarmac or distant conversation from the nearby shops and bars and restaurants.

“Jaehee-hyung? Hyung!”

Another harsh gust of wind hit him right in the face, and Hasun was starting to get tired of looking for the rapper already. Maybe he could just say he couldn’t find him, and go back up to Daejin’s nice, warm, recording room. Yijun definitely wouldn’t mind—would probably celebrate, even. Doyeon would just sigh and accept it, and Daejin would wave it off and say it could always be recorded another day. The more he thought about it, the more pleasing of an idea it seemed to become.

“Hasunnie?”

Nevermind. He whipped around, curious as to where the voice had come from. It was definitely Jaehee, but he just couldn’t see him. That was, not until he looked down. Then he found the very person he was looking for crouched down on the gravel with his back against the wall and his phone in hand, open on a contact whose name he couldn’t read that well upside down. Jaehee was quick to shut it off and shove it back in his pocket as soon as he recognised Hasun anyway, standing back up and smiling the same thin smile he always did when everyone else knew that, really, he didn’t feel like smiling at all—the one that was stretched too wide, far too obviously fake for someone who used to be an actor.

“What’s up? Did you want something?”

Hasun shifted on his feet, pulling his hoodie tighter around himself. “Daejin-hyung wants you back up at the recording room. Says he wants your parts done by tonight.”

The smile almost immediately melted into a scowl, his figure slumping over and head lolling back as he groaned aloud, breath coming out in a visible cloud in the cold air. “No, God no. Not until Yijun-hyung’s gone. If he’s still there I’ll just do it tomorrow.”

The maknae’s brow furrowed, not really wanting to stand out in the cold and listen to the inevitable explanation of their latest fight but hearing the unspoken prod for him to ask about it and doing so anyway.

“What happened now?”

Jaehee slid back down against the wall, phone back in his hands as he passed it from palm to palm like it was a stress toy of sorts, absentmindedly chucking it up into the air and just barely catching it when it fell back down. “He was just—talking shit. As he normally does. I don’t know why it got to me so bad tonight, though, but it just.. Did. I needed a break.”

Hasun nodded empathetically, still hopping from foot to foot. The rapper’s head tilted back to lean against the surface behind him, his face scrunching up, and for a moment Hasun had the panicked thought he was going to cry. He felt out-of-touch and awkward with Jaehee on a normal day, but if he was crying then it would no doubt be thousands of times worse. Thankfully, the rapper only relaxed his face again and sighed, his phone having dropped to the concrete beneath his feet but making no move to pick it up. His next words were quiet, strained, and Hasun had to lean closer for him to be able to hear them at all over all the other noises assaulting his ears.

“I—I don’t really know what we’re all doing this for, to be honest. I don’t even know if we’ll even make it that big in the end.”

His words blew away with the force of the winter wind, but Hasun felt frozen still. He felt like he needed to say something, to attempt to comfort him even if he had the feeling anything he came up with would sound hollow, empty. He thought it over for a few long seconds before clearing his throat, forcing the words out when they felt like they were choking him up.

“It’ll be alright, hyung. We’ll—we’ll get through this.”

Hasun felt cheap, using Doyeon's words to him from four months ago on Jaehee now, but from the way it got his face to finally lighten up again after he let the words sink in for a few moments, got him to pick his phone up from the floor and slowly stand back up to join him in walking back into the company building, he figured they were as much of a comfort to Jaehee as they had been to him. Even if they both knew it was unfounded, standing on shaky legs and likely to crumble with the next disagreement, the next fight, it was good enough for now.

And that, in the moment, was all that mattered.

#⠀⬦ ⠀˚⠀⠀ALL ABOUT ME⠀⠀⸻⠀⠀writing.#⠀✸ ⠀˚⠀⠀너도 이미 STAR⠀⠀⸻⠀⠀development.#fake kpop oc #fake kpop group #fake kpop bg #fictional kpop group #fictional idol group #fictional idol community

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stinger-shot · 2 months

Text

Yey! Silly vent because I feel like shit!

Read under the cut if you want the juicy ass details

So basically, I gotta let this shit out.. its fucking me up a bit rn.

I met this dude around the start of 2021 on tiktok AND HE WAS SO TALENTED AND FUNNY but he always said he wasn't. Anyway time skip a lil..

We started getting into a few arguments near the middle of 2022. And they where just small disagreements then they gradually got worse and worse every time it happend. And it especially got bad when I made another friend on tiktok who loved doing art related things and drew my old persona back then.

And HE WAS NOT HAVING IT and he said quite alot of bad things to me. Did I stay friends with him? Yes I did. Did I also block the nice guy just trying to be my friend? Yes. I blocked them out of fear of loosing my best friend.

And near the end of 2022 we started dating because things had gotten a better.

Oh how I was so wrong. Everything just went downhill when he left high-school. He always needed attention. He got mad at me because I couldn't set an alarm BECAUSE he was up at 10am and I was up near 1pm. So I forced myself to do so mutch bullshit for him. Like draw him art as an apology and it drained me do badly I could hardly do my own personal art.

I didn't even have personal art at this point. Every time I fixated on something it was what he was fixating on because he'd get mad at me and argue with me if I wasn't.

But everything was calm when it was around April in 2023 and we where finally getting along like an actul couple because of a game called final fantasy. We where obsessed with it for months! And then around June or July I re discovered transformers.

I have never felt as happy in a fandom since 2019! Like holy shit the fandom is so sweet.

But I kept it a secret from him he still doesn't know. Then at some point I made this tumblr to get my stupid little urges out and now look at where I'm at. I haven't been this happy in a LONG while.

And just st the start of 2024 my ex got into an argument with one of his friends and I offered to talk to them. so he agreed and I spoke to them.

Im so fucking glad I did.

Because without their help I'd still be fucking miserable. They gave me the confidence to dump that bitches ass and I honestly feel like a weight has been taken off. Because it honestly felt like a chore every day of my life just talking to him.

And my other friend on discord had helped me out to. Including you silly fuckers on discord/tumblr. If your even reading this... if you are why are you still reading this?

But anyway. I just needed this off my chest. Because it does hurt a little spite how good i feel but I just have an off feeling. I haven't put down everything that happend while I was with my ex and some things might be in the wrong order or time but at least I'm forgetting it?

Just. I love the transformers fandom so mutch mutch really helped me pull through...

Fuck I'm ranting. Uh. Bye!

Also a big thank you to Avery and rex for helping me feel better (rex I've only known you for a little bit but jesus christ I fucking laugh my ass off because of you) jesus I'm sappy as fuck. (and avery your so fucking cool. You helped me alot.) And belyyvolks (I've had alot of fun messing around about ironhide XD) I'm not tagging because I don't want alot of attention on this post.

#Vent #Fuck me I ranted alot #transformers #Transformers is the best fandom ever #maccadam

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emilou-keen-gear · 1 year

Note

can you draw Della & Daisy Duck together like future sister in law?

Interesting request. I drew a sketch, but I thought a little story should go with it.

“Donald.”

Daisy said his name with such sweetness that Donald felt something inside of him melt.

“Daisy,” he said back, loving how her name felt on his tongue.

“Donald, we’ve been dating for quite a while, haven’t we?” Daisy said, playing with the salad on her plate.

“Yes, we have,” Donald said. Although he had dated some and had a few girlfriends, Daisy had stayed with him the longest. In fact, Donald hoped that she was the one. He hoped that he would have no other dates but with her.

“I was just thinking that perhaps I should get to know your family a bit better since we’re so close,” Daisy said. “We’ve had dinner with my parents several times, and you get along great with them. But I hardly have spent time with your family.”

Donald knew that Daisy wasn’t talking about his mother. They already had that discussion. Did she mean Uncle Scrooge and the boys? How much more did she want to spend with them? Daisy had already helped them fight a monster and settled a dispute with the Olympic gods. She helped him out with May and June all the time, clones of a clone of his Uncle Scrooge. Webby was constantly on his houseboat so to get to know her “sisters” better, meaning that Huey, Dewey and Louie weren’t far behind. She spoke frequently with Mrs. Beakley since she had been to London several times because of work, and they had a lot in common. Even Uncle Scrooge had several conversations with Daisy, mostly about starting a new business and the troubles that one has with marketing and spending.

What more did she want?

“Well…they’re always off adventuring, and I didn’t think you liked that kind of stuff,” Donald said. He hoped she didn’t. He had sworn off adventures. Of course, he said that after each new adventure, and somehow, Uncle Scrooge and the boys always roped him back in.

“No, of course not,” Daisy said, shaking her head. She gave a tentative smile. “I guess what I'm getting at is that there are…certain members of your family I’d like to get to know more.”

“Who?” Donald asked, ready to give her everything she wanted. If she wanted to strike up a better relationship with his family, he would do whatever she wanted. His family all loved Daisy, and he was sure they would be willing to spend time with her.

“Della.”

“Oh,” Donald said, his resolve dropping. It wasn’t that Della disliked Daisy, but his twin couldn’t have been more different than his fashion-savvy girlfriend.

“She’s your twin sister,” Daisy said, her voice getting stronger. “I want us to get along, but I feel as if she’s avoiding me. Maybe I’m wrong. It think that once I get to know her, she won’t feel so standoffish to me.”

Donald smiled. He knew Della had been avoiding Daisy, but he wasn’t going to tell her that.

“Do you think you could get Della to agree to a girl’s night out with me?” Daisy asked, taking Donald’s hand. “It would mean so much to me.”

Donald couldn’t say no as his face heat up. “Sure. Della would love to have a girl’s night out,” he lied.

***

“No!”

“Oh, come on, Della,” Donald protested. “It’s just one night.”

“No. Absolutely not. No way!” Della protested, shaking her fist at her brother.

“It’s not going to hurt you to do something with her,” Donald said. He almost used her full name to goad her like he used to when they were small, but goading Della would almost certainly make her grind her heels in even more.

“I won’t and you can’t make me,” Della said childishly.

“I’m just asking for this one thing. You owe me,” Donald said, raising his voice.

“Owe you?” Della shouted, her voice rising as well. “I don’t owe you anything. You’ve got nothin’ on me.”

“Oh yeah,” Donald said, feeling as if he had trapped his twin. “I raised the boys for ten years.”

“I was stuck on the moon,” Della protested.

“But I still raised them,” Donald said. “I did it because they are family, because I love you and I love them. I could have went off and started a band and become famous…”

Della rolled her eyes.

“…but I didn’t because the boys needed me. So I think that makes it so you owe me this one favor,” Donald reasoned.

Della folded her arms. “That’s not fair that you’re using the boys against me.”

“It’s not fair that you won’t spend time with Daisy,” Donald said. “I really like her, and I want you to get to know her.”

Della made a face. “But she’s all girly and into clothes and shoes and junk. She’s going to make me go to the spa and get my nails done and everything that I hate.” She stuck out her tongue, but then took in a deep breath. “But if you really like this girl, then fine, I’ll go out with her for one night. But then we’re square?”

“Then we’re square,” Donald affirmed.

They both spat in their hands and shook, just as they had when they were young.

***

“Penny, you have to help me,” Della shouted into her phone.

“What is it, Della?” Penumbra asked, her muscles tensing. “Are you being attacked? Is it another super villain? Did someone capture any of the little Dellas?”

“No, no,” Della said in a calming tone. “Nothing like that. I just need you to come with me while I spend time with my brother’s girlfriend.”

Penumbra paused. “Say what?”

Della sighed. “You don’t understand, Penny. Donald’s dating this girl and she’s totally different than me. She wants to spend time with me for some reason, but she’s into all these fru-fru, girly things. It’s going to be torture.”

“Your brother’s girlfriend is going to torture you?” Penumbra asked, reaching for her ray gun.

“No. Penny, put down the weapon. It’s just an expression,” Della said, knowing her friend all-too well. “It’s complicated. We just like different things and she’s going to want me to do things I don’t like.”

“Kind of like what Webby and Dewey did to me?” Penumbra asked.

“Yes…No, nothing like that because you actually learned to like some of those things,” Della said, doing a terrible job of explaining things to Penumbra. “Look, just come with me. You can be my buffer. Like, if Daisy is talking about shoes and makeup and junk, you can—“

“Put her in a headlock,” Penumbra quickly guessed.

“No…I mean, maybe. We’ll leave that as a second option,” Della said. “But try changing the subject first. Mention something that isn’t boring.”

Penumbra thought about Della’s dilemma. She recalled Della’s brother from the moon. He was a bit high-strung, but he could certainly take a punch. She liked him. And if Donald liked this Daisy-girl, it was hard for Penumbra to believe that she was as terrible of a person as Della was making her out to be.

“Please, Penny,” Della pleaded. “I know I’m asking a lot from you, which will probably mean going to a spa, getting mani-pedis, makeovers and a hair blowout, but I promise you that I will owe you bigtime if you do this for me.”

Penumbra’s eyes widened. Della had said it wasn’t literally torture, but those words made her believe otherwise. Hair blow out? Makeovers? Whatever this “spa” is, must be the worst place on earth.

“I’ll be there,” Penumbra said in a dark voice and hung up.

***

Daisy waited patiently on the bench just outside the Duckburg Downtown park, waiting for Della to show up. It was only a few minutes before their meeting time, and she checked her messages on her phone while every once in a while looking up and watching the traffic go by.

A few minutes later, a stretch limo careened through traffic, drove up on the sidewalk, and hit a cement garbage can, denting the bumper. Della jumped out, along with a female moonlander that Daisy had seen around the McDuck Mansion every now and then.

“Thanks Launchpad,” Della said, wincing at the damage to the car. “I’ll call you if we need a ride home.”

“Have fun,” Launchpad shouted before backing up, causing several cars to honk their horn, then driving off.

Daisy didn’t even say anything about Launchpad’s driving or his purpose as a chauffeur in the McDuck family. She had been around enough eccentric rich people to know they had their quirks—and surrounded themselves with even quirkier people—and there wasn’t anything to do about it.

“You look nice, Della,” Daisy complimented.

She didn’t think she had ever seen Donald’s twin in anything other than her aviator clothes. But Della was in a form-fitting t-shirt that set off her eyes and a pair of flattering slacks. It was the most feminine she had ever seen the pilot.

“This is my only nice outfit, and I’m not apologizing if it’s not good enough for where we’re going,” Della said in an almost rude tone.

Daisy ignored Della’s prickly nature, thinking that was just how she seemed to everyone. Perhaps when they had spent some time together, Della would lighten up. She then turned to the moonlander.

“No, what you’re wearing is great,” Daisy said, trying to be friendly. In fact, she was dressed similar with a simple V-neck shirt and designer jeans. It was a step down from her usual style, and she had hoped it would put Della at ease. “And who is your friend?” Daisy asked, not mentioning that this was supposed to be an evening for just the two of them.

“Oh, this is my friend, Penny,” Della said. “She helped me rebuild my rocket on the moon.”

“Nice to meet you,” Daisy said, offering her hand.

“Likewise,” Penny said in a dark tone, narrowing her eyes.

Daisy took a step back. Okay, so maybe Della just like overbearing friends.

“You said this was a girl’s night out, and Penny is a girl,” Della said. “You don’t mind that I invited her, do you?”

Daisy was a bit irritated, but she was used to surprises being sprung on her. She could roll with it. “No, that’s fine. Maybe next time, you could call me if you want to bring a friend. Let’s exchange numbers.”

“Next time?” Della muttered, putting her hands on her hips. “Sorry, but I didn’t bring my phone.”

“But you should still know you’re number,” Daisy said, confused.

“Oh…uh…Penny, how are you liking your phone? Pretty cool, huh? I bet you didn’t have this kind of technology on the moon,” Della said, changing the subject and using Penny as a buffer.

“Yes, this technology is quite interesting,” Penumbra said in her matter-of-fact way. “We would never have thought to use communication devises in such a lackadaisical way to play mind-numbing games and view videos of cats.”

“Ha ha. Good ol’ Penny,” Della said, patting her friend’s arm.

“I also find it interesting that you earthlings use your phone to collect the numbers of other phones,” Penny said. “My collection is not so impressive, and this seems to make me of a lower rank because of it. May I collect your phone’s number?”

Daisy was a bit confused by the way Penny spoke as well as how someone she just met had asked for her number, but she was too polite to say no. They exchanged numbers.

Penny had a small smile when she was able to type in Daisy’s number.

“Shall we go?” Daisy asked, gesturing down the sidewalk.

“Ugh,” Della said before remembering she should be on her best behavior for Donald. “I mean, sure. Let’s go have fun!”

The three walked side-by-side, Daisy a little ways in front leading the way.

Penny tilted her head to better to ask a question. “If I may ask, when we get to this… “spa,” how much of my hair am I to expect to be removed in the explosion?”

“What?” Daisy said far too loudly.

“I don’t mind losing all of it, but I just want to know what to expect,” Penny said. “And for the make-over, is the body alterations going to be permanent and will I receive a gold medal if I can make it through the entire thing without screaming?”

At that point, Della slapped a hand over her friend’s mouth. “Oh, ha ha ha. Oh, Penny, you joker. Wasn’t that a barrel of laughs?”

Daisy’s eyes had widened before her mind realized what was going on. Having dealt with her share of moonlanders—you’d be surprised with how many became successful quickly in the fashion industry—she knew how some of them could be.

“Penny, this is not how a buffer should act,” Della hissed at Penny.

“Della, did you think we’re going to a spa?” Daisy asked, stopping and putting her hands on her hips.

“Uh…isn’t that what…Aren’t we?” Della asked, looking uncertain.

“Della, I’ve seen your nails,” Daisy said with a shake of her head. “It’s clear to me that you haven’t set foot within a mile of a nail salon. Nor do you seem to be the type who would enjoy being pampered or dolled up.”

Della frowned. “You’ve been making a lot of assumptions. I might like…all that stuff.”

Daisy didn’t take Della’s comment as belligerent. She had known people like Della, who used sarcasm and humor when she felt uncomfortable with a situation.

“Well, we can go do that next time if you want, but I chose spending the evening here,” Daisy said and raised her arms at the establishment they were approaching.

Della’s jaw dropped. It was a bar. And not just any bar. But one of those themed one that specialized in a unique type of entertainment.

“No way,” Della said when they went inside, seeing a row of cages set up where anyone could pay for throwing knives, Chinese stars, hatchets and a variety of other throwing weapons to attack a wooden target. “Sweet!” she shouted as a burly man threw a full-sized axe at his wooden target.

“First round’s on me, both on the drinks and the game,” Daisy said. “Next round, loser pays.”

“Heh,” Della smirked, putting her hands in her pocket. “Get ready to pay for a lot of rounds then, Daisy.”

“We’ll see,” Daisy said, raising her hand to the bartender to indicate that they wanted three beers. He filled them up and slid them down the wooden bar.

Della caught Penny’s just before it slid off the bar.

“I don’t get this,” Penny whispered. “This doesn’t look like the spa that you described.”

“This isn’t a spa,” Della whispered back.

“Then what is it?” Penny asked, looking down into her drink and sniffing it. “Della, I have to warn you, Donald’s girlfriend has bought us drinks with an inebriating poison inside it. Do you think she intended to drug you?”

“Oh yeah,” Della said, taking a big drink. “And it’s not poison. It’s alcohol.”

“Alcohol is a poison,” Daisy said. “And you two are whispering way too loud.”

Della grinned sheepishly, looking very much like her twin brother.

Another of the bar’s employees came by and showed them which cage they would get to use for the weapons throwing.

“Don’t drink too quickly. If you get too drunk, they’ll take away your toys,” Daisy said with a grin. She set her drink down at a table, picked up one of the throwing stars and threw it at the target. It sunk in deep in the white ring just short of a bull’s-eye.

“Whoa,” Della said, her eyes wide. “Why do I get the feeling you’ve done this before?”

“After working for Emma Glamour for years, a girl has got to find a way to take out her frustrations and burn off some stress,” Daisy said. “I tried yoga, but it wasn’t my thing.”

Della gave her a big smile. “Maybe I will have to buy a few rounds. Now move over. It’s my turn.”

“Do you have something heavier?” Penny asked the bar’s employee, hefting the largest axe they had.

***

Donald lay in his hammock with his phone against his ear, listening to Daisy talk of her evening. He was falling asleep to the sound of her voice, which would most likely give him sweet dreams, but it might also irritate Daisy. He had to pay attention.

“I’m glad you and Della had a good time together,” Donald said, which had surprised him. Who knew that those two had something in common? “I’m sorry, Daisy, but I’m so tired. How about I take you out to the movies tomorrow?”

“Can’t,” Daisy said. “I’m going out with Della again. She still owes me a few rounds.”

***

It was a really fun story to write, although I'm not a fan of the picture. Daisy, Della and Penumbra aren't characters I've drawn a lot of (or at all.) Thanks for the request.

#ducktales 2017 #ducktales #fanfiction #della duck #daisy duck #donald duck #penumbra #donald X daisy #ask response

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