#last one was heaven is a spectrum maybe?
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You fold the last and I'll cut the line
But tell all the crowds that there's plenty of time
You've got a ghastly look in your...
So I'll make my own way through this everlasting night
We've all got to see this through
We've got years left to pull it on to
Sailing an ocean of upturned hands
I feel like an anchor embedded in sand
Screaming it out across all of the land
If you want to escape then you'd better make plans
And we've all got to see this through
We've got days left to pull it on to
Darling, darling I'm telling you now
We're cornered and desperate, we've got to get out
Wait here for every moment you doubt
Is getting you closer to the death you found
And we've all got to see this through
We've got seconds left to hold on to each other
It's the end of a simple world
(We can't always trust each other)
It's the end of a simple earth
(We can't always trust each other)
It's the end of a simple world
(We can't always trust each other)
It's the end of a simple world we believe in
The 349 views and 7 likes breaks my heart, man. This guy is so freaking talented 😭😭 He deserved so much more attention, and I'm glad he's finally getting it now.
#lost media#circa 2011#song civilian apocalypse#lyrics were all in his description#but even then i'm not sure if they're 100% accurate lol#been a while since i had to post some lost media with lyrics#last one was heaven is a spectrum maybe?#its all been covers since then lol#oops someone isn't good at diversifying what they post#(it's me i'm someone)
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Tropes? Tropes but make it good
Characters- Diluc, Kaeya, Bennett, Albedo, Razor, Venti, Zhongli, Xiao, Baizhu, Xingqui, Chongyun, Tartaglia, Heizou, Ayato, Gorou, Thoma, Itto, Scaramouce, Alhaitham, Kaveh, Cyno, Tighnari, Neuvillette, Lyney, Wriothesley, Freminet,
Warning- suggestive in chongyun's (dw he's aged up here bubs)
Note- All characters are aged, a dot '.' Meaning scene change , font meaning past memory.
A/n- hope you enjoy!
Baizhu
Doctor patient dynamic
Gentle hands rubbing your back constantly as your coughing fit seemed endless once again. "I-I don't think I'll be able to watch the next lantern right with you like I promised doctor Baizhu." You smiled through the pain, the said man sighing, "Stop doubting my abilities as a Doctor (Y/n). You'll get better." Running his hand through your hair as you layed down, exhaustion making your eyes droop close. "I'll make sure of it, my Little Violet."
Kaveh
Childhood friends to lovers
"Look what I made!" He looked up as you placed something on his head, one hand coming up to touch it, " A flower crown?" "Mhm. Just for you!" He blushed.
.
"I got you something Kaveh~" He turned to you from where he was writing his thesis, "(Y/n) how many times do I have to say you don't have to buy me art supplies. Um let me buy you lunch as repayment." He looked into your eyes with a gentle gaze as you hopped on the desk beside his papers, placing a box. "Too bad. I already made some for the both of us." "(Y/-" his words got cut short as you gently placed your finger on his lips, "shush Kaveh."
Al haitham
Academic rivals to lovers
"Ugh not again." You muttered under your breath as you looked at the list of top scorers. "Try harder. Maybe you'll be able to get a little better if you work on your gold fish attention span." A voice came as someone passed by, knowing very well who this person was as you sighed in irritation.
.
Soft clicks of shoes were the only echos in the house of daena as Al haitham made his way towards a bookshelf, his eyes falling onto a figure. He placed his book on the table gently, rounding the table, he placed the pen down from your hand as he placed his cloak on your shoulders, covering you to keep you warm as he pushed the hair away from your face. "Stop pushing yourself so hard."
Wanderer
Grumpy x Sunshine
"Oh c'mon would it kill you to come with me?" You pleaded as your partner kept ignoring your request, "There's no point in me going with you-" "I think you should go with them. It'll broaden your spectrum and give you a new way of looking at things." A gentle voice came as your eyes sparkled at the person. "See?! Even Lesser Lord Kusunali agrees with me!" "NOT YOU TOO " He yelled, grumbling. You pout, crossing your arms over your chest as you stood up, "I'll be leaving Lord Kusunali, since he doesn't want to go, I'll go and ask Cyno. I heard there's a new card back released there too, he'll be happy to come with me." Nahida blinked up at you as you started walking, observing how your frown turned into a sly smirk as soon as a hand gripped your wrist. "Not happening. I'm coming with you."
Cyno
Co workers to lovers
"Hmm how long do you think this water will last us here Cyno?" You eyed the big bag of water in your hand as you kept walking on the flaming sand in the middle of the desert, "It should last us till tonight. Don't worry, there's a village nearby, we can restock our supplies and get some well desserved rest." You looked at Cyno, unamused "Get it? It's because we're in a dese-" For the first time he cut himself from his explanation, you sighing as if the heavens saved you as he told you to stay put, going to converse with a group of eremites that were closeby. You took a seat in the shade of a giant rock. 'Wait, why is he coming back with a-' "Get on it. Your feet aren't used to the hot sand of the desert, they're already red from the external temperature, it'd be bad if they get blisters. I borrowed us this Sumpter Beast, we'll return this on our way back." Your face started getting warmer, whether it was because of the temperature of desert or your general Mahamatra, you didn't know.
Tighnari
Student teacher dynamic
"Ow!" A book came in contact with your head as you sat on the chair listening to your master's unending lecture. "So the next time I see you head into a withering zone all on your own, I'll be cutting down your sweets that you love so much." Your eyes widened at that, not your sweets! "What did my sweets ever do to you! Plus, I had it covered in the whithering zone!" Smack "Ouch! Stop hitting me-!" Your breath got caught in your throat as Tighnari placed his book under your chin, tilting it upwards as he brought his face close to yours, looking into your eyes, "Next time you won't be doing something so reckless. Okay my Lotus?"
Heizou
Undercover agent(you) to lovers
[ (C/n) -> cover name]
"I'm so sorry I wasn't looking where I was going!" You apologised to the young looking male. "Oh it's totally fine. Don't worry about it" He smiled, asking what your name was. "(C/n)" You replied, your smile widening when he asked if you'd like to go get a cup of coffee with him.
.
"Can you actually be serious for once Heizou?" You rolled your eyes as you kept walking through Chinju forest, sighing at your companion's carefree nature. He chuckled, " You want me to be serious huh?" You nodded," yes! It'd be- wa-!" Your sentence was cut off as your back hit a tree bark, your eyes leveling with none other than Heizou's himself. You shifted as he gazed at you in silence, noticing how he got much closer as each moment passed. His lips barely apart from your ear, he whispered, "Is this serious enough for you?.....(Y/n)."
Xiao
Eternal acquaintances to lovers
"You guys just loveee drawing on his face while he's sleeping don't you" you chuckled, feeling the cool breeze as other 4 yakshas drew little shapes on the face of the one sleeping. "Oh you know his expression is priceless whenever he finds out what we did!" Bosacius laughed.
.
"Do you ever know when to take a break?!" You were used to scolding him, and he was used to hearing it. A little too used to it. "Don't you smile when I'm here telling you to take care of yourself!"
.
Your eyes opened slowly, sounds of fireworks and a hand stroking your hair waking you up. You rubbed the haze out of your eyes, "Did they already start?" You pushed yourself up from what you thought to be ground, but lifting your head up you realised it was, "I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to-" He shushed you, gazing down at you gently as his thumb stroked your cheek. Your face grew warm as you sat up to avoid his stare, only to be turned around, feeling his head on your shoulder, his breath on your neck sending shivers down your spine. "S-Shouldn't you watch the fireworks as well?" You stuttered out, not able to focus on the display yourself. He just sighed, tightening his grip around you.
Zhongli
Newly shifted neighbours to lovers
He was in the middle of pouring himself some freshly brewed tea when a knock landed on his door. Your head tilted upwards to look at the tall male. You didn't know what you expected your neighbour to look like but you certainly didn't think of this. He looked... ethereal. "Umm I just shifted here and please take this." You handed him a paper bag. He looked at it and then at you, smiling, "Grace me with your company over some tea?"
.
"You really don't have to stay up this late for me." You said apologetically to the man sitting beside you, helping you with your thesis you had to write last minute. "It's totally okay. So as I was saying, this part of Liyue------" this went on for hours until he saw you rubbing your eyes. He chuckled," Is Liyue's history that boring?" "Wha- no of course not! It's interesting. I've never thought Liyue had so much to it." You smiled. A large hand came up to cup your cheek, making you look at him, and suddenly you realised how close you two were sitting for all this time. "Sleep's evident in your eyes" he noted as your eyes became hazy with sleep, "I'll take you to bed. My little dove."
Albedo
Klee's babysitter to lovers
"Klee no bombing the fishes again!!" You said to the little girl, so done with her shenanigans for this week. The little girl pouted, looking down until an idea popped into her head, "Lets go see Albedo then!" She smiled.
.
The little ball of sunshine was sleeping peacefully in the corner of Albedo's lab wrapped in two blankets while you laid beside her, trying to fall asleep as well because you had nothing to do and there was nothing Albedo needed help with, but the cold was making it too difficult. Were you actually jealous of a little girl's pyro vision? Absolutely not. You don't know when you fell asleep, or rather, passed out.
'Oh. They're both sleeping peacefully.' He walked up to the two of you, quickly noting how your face looked a little pale. His fingertips touched your skin 'Cold' he thought.
The little girl was the first one awake," Albedo! I had this dre-" she cut herself short when she noticed her brother sleeping too...while holding you close to his chest. "Maybe Klee should sleep some more~!"
Razor
Pack members to lovers
The chase of two little pups continued in wolvendom until they reached Andreas, where they started their chase back to their destination, their minds on the piece of juicy meat the winner will get.
.
Some things never really change, like you and Razor having a game of chase. The difference is, however, he's chasing you this time and you two's size differences now that you've all grown up. You landed on the ground with a soft thud, your back hitting the soft grass as you saw Razor on top of you, his skin glistening in sweat as he gave you a cheery smile, "I won again (n/n)!" You playfully rolled your eyes, "Yeah yeah I get you're faster than m- eep-! Razor-!" You giggled, trying to move away as he started licking your face and neck. His hands tightened around your wrists," No running far anymore" He whined.
Chongyun
Strangers to lovers
"But I asked for that popsicle first!"
"And I saw it first!"
"I'm their regular customer!"
"Not like I have them once a year!"
.
You bit off a little chunk of Chongun's icy popsicle," Hey what did I say about no having my popsicle!" You laughed, getting closer to him all of a sudden," Well if you don't want to share this popsicle, I can always make do with the other one you have~" thump
Yes he fainted.
Diluc
[Childhood known] Bartender-owner relationship to lovers
"If you'd like, you can work at my tavern. I can use the help and you can use the money." A kind offer he made to his childhood neighbour when you came back from sumeru and needed a job, not wanting to stay away from your homeland.
.
A soft cry left your lips when a broken glass shard pricked your hand, you continued picking up the glass pieces the customer accidentally broke, ignoring the bleeding hand 'I'd have to mop the floor anyway.' A strong yet gentle grip pulled you up and towards the sink to wash and dress your wound, "Why'd you ignore it?" You bit your lip, not knowing how to answer. "Be careful next time." He sighed.
.
The number of people were relatively less today, maybe because of the windbloom festival, giving you an opportunity to relax and unwind with a drink yourself. The door opened as you turned your head to see who it was. "Ah master Diluc! Let me go get you some grape juice-" You were about to stand up when two arms caged you against the counter, leaning towards you," Stop calling me that. It's Diluc for you. Just Diluc."
Ajax
Contract marriage
'To stay with party A's family and take care of party A's siblings, treat A like a husband in front of A's family. The contract shall last for three years.'
Signed, (Y/n)
.
It's been 2 years since you signed that contract, staying with Childe's family wasn't bad, they all treated you very nicely and that a corner of your heart knew that your family was now out of bankruptcy because of this, you were content....for the most part anyway.
"Look who's home~!" A very excited Childe emerged through the main door, his servants taking away the bags he was carrying as he picked up Teucer. "I brought you Mr. Cyclopes figurine Teucer!" You smiled to yourself as you watched each of his sibling hug their older brother, used to watching the scene from afar at this point. What you didn't expect was him making his way up to you, his height towering over yours as you looked up at him confused, your face flushing as he pulled you closer to him by your waist, kissing your forehead, "How have you been my love?"
"G-Good." You stuttered out. All his siblings left the living room to give you two some privacy, happy to see the sight. He brushed the strands away from your face, looking into your eyes," Sorry about that. But I missed you. I don't know why, maybe because I look forward to seeing you now." Your eyes widened, "And... I want to take you with me the next time I leave. If you'll join me."
'Because It's not just a contract to me anymore (Y/n).' He thought.
Xingqui
Library crushes to lovers
Your eyes peeked over the book to look at the blue haired male, quickly hiding behind it again as his eyes fell on you. "Oh god please tell me he didn't see me." You muttered to yourself.
.
"The realm of humans was known as the Zhongzhou, while the gods reside in Shenxiao. At the end of-------" he kept explaining the plot of his favourite book, not like you weren't listening, but half your focus was on looking at him.
.
"Umm (Y/n). There's this new book shop that opened in north Liyue. Will you join me tomorrow?" Both your faces were warm when he said the words as you nodded shyly.
Itto
Oni dynamic
"Haha I won again! Take that (Y/n)!" The little oni jumped up as he came out victorious again. "Alright alright no need to rub it in the face Mr. Onikabuto."
.
"Do you really have to leave (Y/n)?" You nodded as tears pricked your eyes, hearing the sad tone from your oni friend who you've always heard cheery no matter the situation.
.
"As my great partner (Y/n) came back after years of staying in Natlan, they'll be joining the one and oni Arataki gang! Isn't that great!?" The said oni swung an arm around your shoulder as you ducked, "Your arm's heavy Itto!" "Of course it is I'm an Oni you know! You don't expect me to weigh like a twing do you?" He wiggled his eyebrows. "But boss should we trust them? I mean-" "Well of course! I know (Y/n) for agesss do you think I'll take just anyone into the great Arataki gang huh!?" He pointed smugly to himself as you sighed. Yup, he'll never change, and you won't have him any other way.
Kamisato ayato
Arrange marriage
Your eyes faced the floor of komore teahouse during the whole conversation of your father and the head of Kamisato Clan, accompanied with his sister and their most trusted servant. You saw the two Clan heads shaking hands from the corner of your eyes, knowing everything is sealed. You never even saw what your to-be husband looked like.
.
"Wouldn't you look at me even now (Y/n)?" Gentle voice of your soon to-be husband spoke as he held both your hands in his significantly bigger ones as the priest made preparations to start the wedding rituals. You swallowed nervously as you slowly looked up, your eyes falling on the mesmerizing lilac ones.
.
An arm wrapped around your waist from behind while the other one took away the hairbrush in your hand, placing it on the dresser as kisses were placed on your neck," My gorgeous wife." You closed your eyes, leaning your head back against his shoulder," Says the man who gave that word a meaning."
Bennett
Adventurer-medic to lovers
"Yup, bad luck again." You sighed as you bandaged his knee again. "I'm sorry (Y/n), for troubling you so much. I try to be careful but..." he rubbed the back of his head. "I know Benny, not your fault, just your luck." He nodded, giving you a thumbs up and a cheery smile as you finished bandaging his wound. "Butttt" you intergected when he was about to say something, "Nothing some tasty Chicken-Mushroom Skewers can't solve!" His eyes started sparkling the moment you said those words, making you giggle. "Yay let's go!"
Kazuha
Crew mates to lovers
"Wait up please!" You yelled to the ship that was about to leave the docks of Inazuma. You ran as fast as you could against the wooden planks 'Bad day to be wearing a Kimono damn it.' Apparently your voice wasn't loud enough for the Captain of The Crux to hear and your heart already started grimacing the loss of boarding the ship just a foot away as it started leaving. A sudden gust of wind lifted you up as your eyes closed shut in terror, the next time you opened them, you were on the ship, with nothing but a maple leaf in your hand.
.
You were leaning against the railing of the ship, looking at the vast ocean in fasination until a strong gust of wind passed, swaying your footing, almost tumbling you over but a hand to your wrist pulled you back just in time before it could happen. Your breath was caught in the throat due to the event, and because of the stranger with platinum hair and ruby eyes that saved your life. He was.... breathtaking. "Careful, the wind can be flickering unexpectedly once in a while. It's a vast ocean after all." He smiled.
Venti
Troublemaker and muse
You raised an eyebrow as your beer fell off the table, a person climbing on it instead. You looked up to see who it was, silently grimacing over your spilled beer. "Are you gonna pay for my beer or not" you said looking up at him while he ran his fingers along the lyre, "I'll pay you back with my wonderful performance~!" You sighed in irritation.
.
Your form busted through the tavern's door in the middle of the night, scanning over your surroundings before your eyes landed on the mop of green you were looking for. You swiftly made your way over, carrying the windy bard over your shoulder like a potato sack as you slid a pouch of mora in master Diluc's direction with an apologetic smile. "Put me downnnn I wanna kiss you!!" He whined on your shoulder as your face matched Master Diluc's hair.
Thoma
Ayaka's best friend
"Here let me help you with that." He took the heavy looking bags from your hand just as you entered the Kamisato estate. "Ah thank you Thoma." You smiled at him.
.
"I'm also inviting (Y/n)." Ayaka spoke to her brother over supper and Thoma couldn't help but chime in," If they're coming, It'd be great if I can make their favourite dish." Ayaka and Ayato gave each other knowing looks as Thoma looked between them, confused, "Did I say something wrong?"
.
"I'm sure (Y/n) could use some help for this event. I hand this task to you Thoma." Said Ayaka as she gently pushed him into a room and slid the door closed so he couldn't escape. "Thoma it's you-!" You squeaked, surprised by the sudden entrance. "Y-Yes Lady (Y/n). Lady Ayaka said I should help you if you were to face any difficulties. So do you need any assistance?" He scratched the back of his head. Your eyes fell onto the kimono belt in your head and then at him, your cheeks warming, "N-No it's fine." He wordlessly came towards you, taking the fabric from your hand, silently waiting for you to turn around as permission. You did, your breath getting caught in your throat as you felt his hands do their work, his hot breath hitting the back of your neck. A few moments passed, your head becoming lightheaded with each second until he did the final knot, whispering in your ear, "It's done, my princess."
Gorou
Subordinates to lovers
"Bear with it" you said as you poured the disinfectant over your commander's bleeding gash. He suppressed a hiss as you blowed on the wound in hopes to make it feel less burning. "Can you be more careful Gorou? There was no reason for you to come in front of me to stop that arrow!" You glared at him. "Your mother entrusted you to me (Y/n)" he tried reasoning. "As if Lady Kokomi didn't tell me to bring you back safe and sound!" He just chuckled at that.
.
You were laying down on the make shift infirmary's bed when a very happy Gorou emerged through the door, out of breath as if he ran all this way (yes he did) "(Y/n)! We did it! The war's over!" He ran over to you and hugged you tightly, you noticing how his tail was swaying back and forth. You chuckled. "I'm so happy (Y/n)! I can finally ask your mother for your hand in marri-" Your eyes widened.
"Oh god i shouldn't have said it like that- (Y/n)? (Y/n)?! Oh god don't faint-!"
Mhm, franatic Gorou is pretty cutee~
Kaeya
Fake dating
"Oh~, who is this pretty person beside you Kaeya?" Lisa ask, intrigued. "My partner." Kaeya smiled.
That was five months ago.
.
You two sawyed from side to side to the silent beat of the music as you looked at him, "So when is your 'target' arriving Kaeya? It's been 4 hours." "Oh don't worry. He'll be here soon enough. My brother can be a little late. He is returning to Mondstadt after months after all." He replied, looking into your eyes just as the venue's door opened to reveal the said man. In the blink of an eye, Kaeya's face was buried in the crook of your neck, " The hell are you doing?!" You whisper yelled at the man, not knowing what he was up to now. If you knew something about Kaeya, it was his unpredictable mind. "Just making sure my brother believes this of course. He has very keen eyes for lies you see. I want to prove to him that I can infact find an adequate partner for myself." "You sure it's not because of that 5 dozen wine bottles he put at stake." "That's just an added bonus!" He smirked as he rose up to his full height, taking your chin in between his finger and thumb, bringing your face closer to his, " Plus, Who knows? I might actually persue it to make it real."
Neuvillette
Second chance [mates][immortal reader- non specified species]
"I'll wait for you" said the man you loved so dearly with a solemn look in his eyes. "Don't" was all you said before you departed to the underworld, having not done anything wrong yet having no choice.
.
A hundred years passed since your own lover sealed your verdict, your heart wrenching with pain each time you think of it. 'He had his reasons. It's for the sake of fontaine.' Your heart longed for the hydro dragon, but you've made your heart think that 'He must have wanted this.'
.
The day finally came when you reached the surface again, and what you didn't expect was to see him waiting at the entrance. "Neuvillette...." You whispered, your eyes trying to drink back the tears they started producing on their own. The said man walked towards you in slow strides, his mind detached from his surroundings except you. Strong arms engulfed you in a delicate embrace, cradling you against his chest as if you were made of porcelain. And as much as your mind told you to pull away, your hands only gripped him tighter, crying against him. A few moments passed when you looked up at him, " Where's your partner?" Your heart broke as you asked that question, but you needed to know. "Right in front of me." He whispered. It was hard for you to believe him, you expected him to move on. "Did you forget.." he started, his lips placing a delicate kiss on the corner of your lips," That dragons mate for life?"
Wriothesley
Classic Husband x Wife
As soon as you stepped foot into your husband's office, the door being shut behind you, you heard fumbling noise. You made your way up the rounded stairs, crossing your arms over your chest as you made your way over to him, "Don't tell me you're drinking tea again Wriothesley." You narrowed your eyes at him. "No of course not. Why would I drink more when you set a boundary of 7 per day" he chuckled. "Oh?" You raised an eyebrow, leaning against his desk as you wiped the corner of his lips," What's this then?" You showed him the sugar powder on your fingertip. He chuckled nervously, "You see-"
.
Gentle kisses across your face is what woke you up, your hand tightening against the fabric....wait. You looked up and around you, realising you're in Wriothesley's office and in his lap, clutching onto his shirt. He softly kissed your forehead," Morning sunshine. Ready to go to the surface today?"
Lyney
Opposites attract
"Well someone looks a little out of it on a fine day like this." Your footsteps came to a halt as a guy stopped in front of you. His hand came up and passed by the side of your hair," Let me make it a little better" he chuckled as he pulled a rose 'out of your hair.' It was pretty, you thought taking it from him and giving him a small smile,"Thank you."
.
You pulled him along with you by his ear gently while he tried keeping up with your pace," I was just entertaining them!" He reasoned as you continued walking," You were clearly still there when they told you they didn't wanna see your tricks." "But it looked like they could use some help!" He whined. "Not everyone deserves you lifting up their spirits Lyney." You sighed. "Well, I can always lift your spirits up. If you know what I mean." Bonk
Freminet
Fated divers
Your hands splashed the water around you as oxygen depleted at a fast rate from your body, you tried tugging on the vines tightly wrapped around your foot in hopes to break them but they won't let up. You extended your arms up in an attempt to swim back to the surface but it was becoming harder by the second. It wasn't long before black dots started covering your vision and you started sinking further down.
Your eyes open with a start, the endless water still surrounding you but there was a stranger, with his lips on yours.
.
"Hey there Freminet~!"
"Oh hi (Y/n)" he gave you a small smile, looking up from where he was tinkering with clockwork. "I got you Seabird Sojourn!" You smiled as you sat beside him, looking closely at the details of his doing. You took his hand into yours, making his freckled cheeks blush a pink hue," Let's eat first before it gets cold."
Written by Yours truly
Masterlist
#al haitham x reader#cyno x reader#tighnari x reader#xiao x reader#zhongli x reader#diluc x reader#childe x reader#tartagalia x reader#ayato x reader#bennett x reader#kazuha x reader#neuvillette x reader#wriothesley x reader#lyney x reader#genshin x reader#genshin fluff#scaramouche x reader#kamisato ayato#kaedehara kazuha#genshin impact#genshin scenarios#venti x reader#kaeya x reader#neuvillette#wriothesley#venti#lyney#childe#zhongli#xiao
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ready for love
PAIRING ▸ lee jeno x fem!reader (ft. tbz's juyeon)
GENRES ▸ fluff, non!idol au, college au, slice of life, friends to lovers but also...it’s complicated?
WARNINGS ▸ uhh swearing, drinking (but legally), mentions of infidelity, there was supposed to be so much more but it just turned into a fluff piece sooo..., y/n is indecisive and jeno is stupid, they're a match made in heaven 🫶🏽, jeno is the loverboy of the century towards the end, they make out and a few allusions to sex but no graphics, is it just me or is that header really blurry
SUMMARY ▸ a boy who has never taken a relationship seriously. a girl who is seriously over relationships. when they end up finding each other, will they let their ideas of what a relationship should be like ruin their relationship before it even starts?
PLAYLIST ▸ ready for love - blackpink, lovin’ me - fifty fifty, siren - taeyeon, island - youha, hate that - key & taeyeon
WORD COUNT ▸ 19.5k words
AUTHOR’S NOTE ▸ oh hey it's that one fic i've been writing since july! which reminds me - if that ending looks familiar, it's because technically, this was supposed to come out right after that timestamp did oops.
as always, feedback, comments, etc. GREATLY encourage writers! if you felt any sort of way (in a good or bad way!) about this fic, pls leave feedback!
far too easy. a couple of lingering stares. a coincidental request on social media. a few well-placed messages. one date later and...done. he was in. hook, line, and sinker.
it was almost getting predictable. at first, lee jeno just wanted to have a little fun. it was never anything serious - and it definitely wasn't always about sex. truly. as distrustful as men had made themselves out to be within the past few thousands of years, jeno truly wasn't thinking with his dick when he got into relationships.
it was just about having fun. he just wanted to get to know people, do sohing romantic just for the experience, and maybe, get to know their body if the relationship felt so inclined.
there was never any delusion about what a relationship with jeno was like. it was two months, if you lasted that long, and every second of it made you feel alive like you never had before. but the honeymoon stage would pass and jeno would lose interest and soon, there would be a heartbroken girl left behind, even though she knew exactly what she was getting herself into.
and it wasn't as though they could really get mad at him. he was a sweetheart through and through and he would continue to say hi if they ever saw each other around and he had definitely saved a couple exes from some ugly encounters. jeno never meant to hurt anyone; it just happened soimes because he was such a good guy.
at least, that’s what you understood of your best friend. from his nights of drunken confessions and the few encounters you’d had with his ‘girlfriends’, you had surmised that jeno lee was just meant to be a serial casual dater.
you, quite frankly, were on the opposite end of the spectrum. after a few too many boyfriends who had turned out to be grade a douchebags, you had effectively sworn off men.
dating was just far too hard. the 'did he notice me?' stage where you dress up a little prettier than normal. and then the internal panic when they request you on instagram. the casual talking stage where you've already accidentally planned out the wedding. the date where you choose to move past all of the blatant red flags you see. and then the relationship, when the red flags become red banners the size of antarctica because goddamnit, how did you miss the fact that this man was a literal freudian case study.
so whenever jeno would introduce his newest girlfriend or go on about his many adventures (including the details about the not-so-family-friendly aspects), you couldn't help but feel a little pang of jealousy because where the hell was jeno finding such amazing relationships? and why the hell isn't he taking them seriously?
you're sure you couldn't even count the number of sweet girls you knew would've been perfect to take home to his mother you had been introduced to before they were gone the next week.
"and that's why i think you're an insufferable brat," you grumble, pointing a stick of celery at him threateningly. jeno snorts slightly, redirecting your celery to the hummus sitting next to where you were perched on his kitchen counter.
"you've been saying that for as long as we've been friends," he says, pouring a spoonful of soy sauce into the rice for the fried rice he was preparing for dinner.
"three years too many," you say, squinting your eyes at him suspiciously. "how have we actually stayed friends for three years when you're so...wishy-washy?"
jeno's roommate, na jaemin, rubs his eyes as he stumbles into the kitchen, saluting you sarcastically as he reaches into the fridge to grab an entire bowl of strawberries.
"what a burn, y/n. wishy-washy. yeah, i'll bet that really did a number on him, didn't it, jeno my boy?" jaemin snorts, pouting when he quite nearly drops the bowl of strawberries on his foot.
he also very nearly escapes decapitation by celery stick, ducking from your brutal aim.
"at least i don't have a mommy kink," you snide, salvaging what was left of your celery snack.
jaemin jabs a strawberry in your general direction with a look of indignant betrayal on his face.
"i thought we agreed to never speak of what was revealed during balkan night," jaemin hissed. "you promised, y/n!"
"i was crossing my fingers," you shrug, placating your best friend with an olive branch of a silly smile when he swears vengence by strawberry assault a second time.
"whatever," jaemin grumbles as he slinks back to the darkness of his room. jeno just shakes his head fondly, tossing in the vegetables the two of you had just chopped up into the fried rice.
"why do you always feel the need to rag on him like that?" jeno says, mixing the vegetables into the rice.
"why do you always feel the need to avoid taking a relationship seriously?" you counter, hopping down from your perch to throw out the now empty hummus container.
"you know, anyone hearing this conversation right now would think that you were the one not taking relationships not seriously instead of me," he says calmly, taking a spoonful of rice. he blows on it before reaching out to you, letting you taste-test the fried rice. you hum, sifting through the ingredients in the fridge as you analyze what the missing ingredient was. your eyes land on a small plastic container with finely chopped garlic inside, the realization clicking in your head.
"just because i'm a little youthful and you have the personality of a grandpa doesn't mean that you have to be the one who takes relationships too seriously," you say, sprinkling the garlic into the fried rice. jeno hands you the wooden spatula and lets you take over the cooking process as he finds three bowls for the three of you.
"whatever helps you sleep at night," jeno says with a soft chuckle.
"speaking of relationships though, i'm not going to be leeching off of you for dinner tonight," you say casually, offering a spoonful to jeno this time to let him taste your shared creation.
he flashes you a happy eye smile, retreating into the hallway to call jaemin out of his room for lunch.
"date?" jeno says, a strange look in his eye as he hands you your spoon (you had a preference for only eating with the singular small spoon in the entire apartment for some reason) with a knowing smile.
"somewhat? it's a double date but i'm only going for jimin because she really really likes the guy and she's afraid she's going to fuck it up if it's just the two of them," you explain, giving him a thumbs up for the successful food collaboration.
"do you know who it's with?" jaemin pipes up, seemingly refreshed after consuming an inhumane amount of strawberries.
you furrow your eyebrows, trying to recollect the name of the guy jimin mentioned that jaehyun was bringing before shaking your head.
"i think his name was jayeon? yeonju? juyeon? i don't know, i don't really remember. all i know is that jaehyun better be head over fucking heels for jimin by the end of the night," you say in between bites.
"juyeon? lee juyeon?" jaemin says suddenly, his spoon clattering as he drops it in his bowl. jeno and jaemin exchange a look that you don't miss and you definitely don't like.
"am i missing sohing here? do you guys know him?" you ask, the worry lines on your forehead having become near permanent. jeno shrugs, pushing his food around in an uncharacteristically hesitant manner.
"i mean i just heard that he was a bit of a heartbreaker when he was in college but i don't really think that it was that big of a deal," jaemin says finally. you roll your eyes, puffing out your chest sarcastically.
"i'm a big girl guys, don't worry. i can handle myself," you say, patting jeno's shoulder comfortingly as you move to wash your bowl. "and besides, i'm not actually going there to find the love of my life; i'm just going there to support jimin."
"just be careful, y/n." jeno gives you a quick little side-hug before disappearing into the living room to turn on some tv. you turn to jaemin but your question dies on your tongue when you see that jaemin is already staring at you with an unreadable expression.
"what's up with him?" you ask, when jaemin sighs, getting up to wash his dishes.
"jeno's worried for you," he says. you huff, watching jaemin put his washed bowl into the dishwasher.
"i get that, dipshit. what i don't get is why!" you exclaim, wincing when you realize that you're much louder than you had intended.
"because juyeon's just like jeno."
it's all jaemin says but it's all he needs to say because now, you finally understand.
+++
"now remember, i'm only coming with you for you, okay? if you ever want to just be with jaehyun by yourself, let me know and i'll be more than happy to head on my way out," you whisper to jimin as you flash a bright smile at jaehyun, who approaches the both of you with a dimpled smile as he tucks his car keys into his pocket.
"y/n! it's so good to see you after so long," jaehyun says, pulling you in for a friendly side hug.
"i know," you say, squeezing quickly before letting go. "can you believe it's already been a month since renjun's party?"
jaehyun furrows his eyebrows, shuffling so that he was standing next to jimin. "no, really? has it already been a month?"
he doesn't wait for you to answer, turning to jimin almost immediately. "it's been a month since i met you? why does it feel like i've known you my entire life?"
it takes all you have to turn to the side before fake gagging, unable to help the cringe that runs through your body from the cheesiness, jimin fighting back a giggle, but you can see that her cheeks are bright red.
"jae, for your sake and the beautiful ladies', i'm gonna have to pretend like you never said that," a deep voice says from behind you. the man steps into the light and you're sure that your eyes are about to fall out of their socket.
juyeon is one of the most attractive men you've ever seen. long, long legs that lead up to broad shoulders, beautiful eyes and lips that would make kylie jenner jealous. his dark hair is slicked back and he holds himself with a humble, quiet confidence that makes you ready to fall to your knees instantly. he turns to you and his cool demeanor is instantly broken when he smiles, his face glowing in the faint lights of the restaurant.
"hi, i'm juyeon," he says, sticking his hand out for you to shake. you stare at it for a moment before taking it.
"y/n. it's nice to meet you," you say dreamily, before coming to your senses and retracting your hand. you were here for jimin and jimin only. juyeon and his beautiful face would have to stay in the friend zone - especially if what jaemin had warned you about was true.
but just because you couldn't purchase doesn't mean you couldn't window shop.
"y/n," juyeon drawls, letting your name roll off of his tongue. "a pretty name for a pretty girl."
jimin can barely stifle a giggle at your dazed expression, elbowing you in the rib cage. you shake your head slightly, composing yourself once more. how in hell were you supposed to confine this man to the friend zone if everything he said threatened your very sanity?
"well, they say that you should never keep a pretty woman waiting," you say with coy smile, gesturing towards the restaurant. "shall we head inside?"
juyeon mock-bows while jaehyun opens the door and says, "ladies first."
you blow juyeon a kiss with a teasing smile, linking arms with jimin and sauntering into the restaurant. juvenile? perhaps. but where was the fun in being adult all the time?
the four of you make your way to where there's a receptionist standing behind a booth, jaehyun stating his name for the reservation.
"right this way, ladies and gentlemen," the receptionist says, gathering a handful of menus and leading you to your table.
"so jaehyun tells me you are a business major," juyeon says, falling in step beside you. you hum, shaking your head slightly.
"i was a business major; i double majored in finance and economics, but i graduated two months ago," you explain, thanking the waiter as you take your seat at the table. juyeon takes the seat next to you and jimin takes the seat on the other side so that you were sat directly across from jaehyun.
you're about to turn to jimin and say something only to find her enraptured by some fascinating conversation that her and jaehyun seemed to be having, turning back with a knowing smile.
"i'm sorry, i was under the impression that you were still in school since it's only march," juyeon says, handing you one of the menus the waiter had left on the table.
"i graduated early because of the overlap between my majors. i was required to keep up my grades for my scholarship anyway so i was able to build up credits fairly quickly," you explain, trying to ignore the spark of electricity that you feel when juyeon's fingers linger on yours.
"oh, so you were quite the academic," he says, running a hand through his hair. you determinedly stare at the menu, forcing down the hot flash that runs through your body when juyeon catches you watching.
"you could say so," you nod, scanning the menu. "how about you? what did you major in when you were in school?"
"i was your direct senior," juyeon begins, smiling when he sees the confusion on your face. "i was a finance major in college."
"no way! that's so interesting. where do you work now?" you ask once you put down the menu to meet his eyes. maybe jaemin and jeno were just being overprotective? it wouldn't be the first time they steered you away from heartbreak but juyeon seemed like such a sweet and genuine guy.
because juyeon's just like jeno.
that statement is enough to bring you back to your senses as you focus on what juyeon is saying, jimin and jaehyun still debating the difference between computer engineering and computer science (their respective majors) and which one was better.
nerds.
"i was at amazon up until last summer but i recently switched to a new company. it's a pretty small company but they specialize in cleaning the ocean of plastic and recycling the plastic for 3D printing. it's very niche but i didn't want to just be another finance bro that just worked for the sake of money, you know? i wanted to work with a good consciousness."
maybe curving juyeon from claiming a place in your already fragile heart would be a little more difficult than you expected. kind, environmentally aware and a chose ethical work? juyeon was already better than approximately 90% of your exes.
"how about you? have you started working yet? the market is pretty brutal for freshly graduated f&e people, from what my friends tell me." you nod, internally composing yourself and steeling yourself a little bit more to keep from falling into juyeon's charms.
just like jeno. the reminder is harsh, but it works like magic as you feel the butterflies in your stomach beginning to dissapate.
"it certainly is a lot more competitive than i think a lot of people anticipated. thankfully, i was able to connect to a sponsor during one of the scholarship banquets and was offered a position for right after school," you explained and juyeon's eyes turn from mild and observing to full of respect as he nods, almost approvingly.
"which company?" he asks, taking a sip of his water.
"i actually am working in the finance department at patagonia..."
+++
the night progresses almost too smoothly. once the food had come out, jaehyun and jimin finally seemed to come out of the bubble they were in and the conversation flowed so well, it was almost as though the four of you had known each other for years.
it was clear that jaehyun and juyeon were close, having met each other at work and instantly clicking. the easy back and forth between them allowed you and jimin relax a little more, allowing the conversation to turn to less formal subjects.
you find out that juyeon has a dog, much to your dismay.
"y/n loves dogs!" jimin exclaims, and you can feel your heart's walls crack a little further. there were many things you could handle - a cute boy with a dog? that was a little out of the realm of control.
"really? oh you'd love ray then - he's a big dog but he's got a lot of love. sort of a gentle giant," juyeon says, his eyes twinkling as he pulls out his phone to show you his wallpaper. it's a picture of him and ray curled up next to each other, sleeping in bed, both of them in the same exact position as they snored away.
"i swear, him and ray are the same soul in two different bodies. i've seen this guy have full on conversations with his dog. which would be weird but it kinda just works for them somehow. i kinda think that ray genuinely does understand juyeon," jaehyun snorts, nodding at juyeon's wallpaper. "that was when ray was still a puppy and he would copy every single thing that juyeon did."
juyeon shrugs, smiling as he tucks his phone back into his pocket. "not much has changed there, if i'm being honest."
you're about to say something about meeting ray when your phone rings abruptly, rudely interrupting the conversation. you frown as you flip your phone open, looking at the contact profile on the screen. jeno?
"hello?" you say as you answer the phone, pointing to the restroom as you excuse yourself from the table. from the corner of your eye, you can see the waiter coming with the bill for your table and you vaguely register the fact that only two cards are being put on the table (jaehyun's and juyeon's) as you make your way somewhere a little more private.
"hellooo? y/nnnn-ie? you stilllll at your, huh, date?" jeno slurs into your phone and you hear someone in the background, presumably jaemin, trying to convince jeno to stop himself from saying or doing something stupid.
"yes, jeno, i'm still at my date. that you interrupted, by the way," you say with a frustrated sigh. you check your watch and realize that it's only 9:30 PM and jeno does not sound like he's been taking it easy on the alcohol. "why are you drinking jen?"
"whattttt, so now i'm a shitty lover and i can't, heh, drink?" jeno grumbles into the phone and it's clear from the sudden silence in the background that jaemin has completely giving up on wrestling jeno's phone out of his hand. you had firsthand experience with drunk jeno - he turned into the hulk.
"jen, if you called me in the middle of my date to go off the rails about how you're a lonely fucker, i'm going to kill you," you hiss, smiling at the lady who comes into the restroom as you weren't threatening your best friend with murder.
"I'M NOT A LONELY FUCKER!"
oh, so this part jeno could say without hiccuping or slurring his words. fantastic. you sigh, switching your phone to the other ear as you wash your hands, getting ready to leave the restroom. there's a pregnant pause where no one says anything but you can hear the top gun theme song in the background so you know jeno's on the line.
"if - if i change, will you not go out with juyeon?" jeno mutters finally, just as you're leaving the restroom. "if i finally start getting serious about relationships, will you not go out with him? will you come home?"
you pause at that. jeno's always been the protective type. for all of his own playboy (even if technically he wasn't trying to be a playboy) charm, jeno genuinely wasn't very happy when you dated people. he wouldn't be rude to them and he certainly would never force you to break up with them but every time he would run into them, regardless of how long you had dated them, he always had something to say.
he looks like he jerks off to weird porn. definitely something about shampoo, a hot girl, and way too much viagra.
he has a small dick.
he makes his girlfriends lose weight even though he has a beer belly.
i'm not even gonna lie to you - i just hate the fact that he's balding.
most of the reasons that jeno gave you were kinda stupid. but ultimately, he was usually right about which people to avoid and even if he said it was because they were ugly and balding, it was usually because he knew that they weren't kind people on the inside.
it was because you just didn't have a great self-image, jeno used to say. if you saw yourself the way the rest of us - the way i see you, you'd never even give some of these assholes a chance, y/n. think of it as playboy experience about how to find the people actually worth your time.
but he had never said anything like this before. for all of the hazy comments and strange strength jeno developed when he was drunk, he had never said anything like this to you before. mostly because jaemin was really good at protecting his roommate from making stupid decisions but it was clear that even jaemin couldn't stop this.
"jen, you sound crazy right now," you say, rubbing your forehead. you step out of the restroom to see juyeon waiting at the table alone, as jimin and jaehyun seemingly already left together. "i don't really know what you're trying to say and quite frankly, i have no clue why you're acting like this. ask jaemin to make sure you're drinking a lot more water and we'll talk about this in the morning, alright?"
jeno doesn't say anything but from the shuffling in the background, you realize that jaemin has finally rose from his slump and was signaling something to jeno. good. maybe jaemin would be able to understand why the fuck jeno was acting like this.
there's an exchange of words, mostly jaemin berating jeno to hand over the phone as you hear a loud thump in the background before jaemin is speaking.
"hey, y/n it's me," jaemin says. it's clear that he's been drinking too but jaemin isn't too much of a drinker so he still sounds pretty levelheaded as he speaks.
"what's up with jeno, jaemin? why is he acting like that?" you ask, making your way over to the table slowly. you realize that juyeon is holding onto your coat and suddenly, you're not really sure about what to do. you don't know what it is about the simple fact that juyeon is holding your coat but the entire thing seems a little domestic. like the two of you actually were on a date.
"y/n, i'm gonna be so honest with you, i think it's best if you have some distance from jeno for a while. i think he's just getting in his head about stuff he shouldn't be and really, i think the only way he's gonna get over it or figure out how to talk to you about it if he has some distance."
how perfect. you sigh, running your hand through your hair as you smile at juyeon, who helps you put your coat over your shoulders, the scent of his cologne filling up your lungs. you decide that if it was distance that jeno wanted, it was distance jeno was going to get. quite frankly, this wasn't the first time jeno had randomly pulled away from you, even if it was the first time he had finally come close to clueing you into why.
it was clear that jeno didn't like you dating people - especially not juyeon. maybe even to the extent of jeno changing his own playboy ways to convince you otherwise of interacting with juyeon.
you had considered the fact that jeno might be interested in you romantically or that maybe he was jealous for your affections. but every time you thought that, jeno would come back from his faraway space with a new girl and a genuine twinkle in his eye and suddenly, everything was back to normal.
jeno simply was an overprotective person, you decided. and he would do whatever he thought was right to make sure that the people around him didn't get hurt.
it really did check out, honestly.
jeno was equally overprotective of everyone in his life because getting that close to him in the first place was a feat within itself. once you made it past that original barrier, however, he would be willing to give his life if he thought it would help even the slightest.
but...even so. this was weird.
either way, juyeon was opening the passenger door to his car and you were aimlessly climbing into it so any and all thoughts about jeno would have to wait until you made it down this slippery slope first. the last thing you needed in the morning was the honest to god gripping panic of doing the walk of shame.
juyeon doesn't seem like the type to expect a lady to put out because he bought her dinner but you can never be too careful. he seems to notice your apprehension because he asks you for your address upfront, raising three fingers in an oath.
"i promise to conduct no funny business and i will take you home safe and sound, y/n," he says solemnly, and the way his eyes sparkle in the light of the moon is enough to make your resolve melt a little bit as you laugh softly.
"alright juyeon. since you promised no funny business," you quip lightly, entering your address on the navigation screen next to the steering wheel.
juyeon squints at your address, which is fifteen minutes away, before looking at you strangely. "are you sure this is the right address? my building is right next door! i would've seen you at some point, and trust me, i'd never forget a face like yours."
"uh, yeah, this is my address. i'm usually never home though, since i'm always either with jimin or my friends jaemin and jeno," you say, watching as juyeon sets the car in reverse to pull out of the parking spot. his arm lifts, as though he were going to put it behind the headrest of your seat to do the classic flirting move to reverse. he sets it back down when he sees you staring at the screen (which had a rearview camera feed on it), realizing that it would be dumb to try and make a move in such a cliché way.
"jeno? jeno lee?" juyeon asks as you guys pull out of the parking spot. you glance at him sideways, wondering if he were going to offer the same cautionary tale that jaemin and jeno had presented to you.
"yeah. he's one of my best friends. do you know him?" you ask, already presuming the answer.
juyeon is silent, as though he's weighing options in his mind. should he be honest with you? should he preserve your feelings?
"i know of him. i don't know him all that well," juyeon says finally, and you know that juyeon has decided to take the third option. neutrality. and while you're tempted on asking him to expand, you really don't know him well enough to do that.
so you just leave the topic aside and wait for him to start a different conversation.
he does soon enough, but you know that his heart isn't in it anymore. you engage in polite smalltalk until he pulls up to your apartment complex. you thank him for driving you and are about to step out of the car when juyeon suddenly touches your wrist gently, afraid to make rude or rough gestures.
you pause, half out of the car as you turn to him with a quizzical smile.
"i had a good time getting to know you today, y/n. and i know that it was just an excuse for those two to go on a date without making it weird but i really did have a good time getting to know you. i hope that i didn't make a bad impression at the end." his eyes are shining under the dim lighting of the few rooms that are still lit up in your apartment complex.
you smile at him gently, shaking your head to assure him. "you didn't make a bad impression. i had a good time getting to know you too."
you're ready to step out of the car once more when juyeon's fingers on your wrist wrap around them, this time a little bit more firm on claiming your attention.
"i - i want to see you again. i've honestly never connected this well with someone before. would you be open to that?" juyeon asks. you pause for a moment before giving in. how could you say no to him when he was looking at you with such big, brown eyes with so much hope hidden in them?
but even as you give juyeon your number, you can practically hear the bright red warning signs in your mind - and for some reason, jeno was the one screaming every single one of those signs.
"good night y/n," juyeon says, his smile every inch as heartbreakingly charming as the moment you knew he'd be bad for you.
you offer a tight, cautious smile in return. "good night juyeon."
+++
for someone who was fiercely overprotective of his friends, jeno had a strange tendency of self-sabotaging his relationships with them. not all of them - mostly just you. he didn't know what it was about you but somehow, he always just seemed to be saying the wrong things at the wrong time.
jaemin seems to think that it's because jeno has feelings for you (which he most definitely does not) (at all) (for real).
it wasn't as though jeno didn't like when you went on dates. in fact, he liked to think that he was rather supportive. it was just that you had a tendency to pick out all of the shittiest men in seoul to date and quite frankly, jeno hated it.
and you knew that. you'd been dealing with jeno's strange tendencies for three years now. he knew that you knew that he'd call you by next week and everything would be back to normal. that's usually how it went when you went on a particularly serious date on any level. strange set of coincidences that jeno only seemed to fuck up the worst right before or after a date you were raving about.
huh.
"i'm telling you jeno, you have got to tell her the way you feel about her," jaemin says, tossing a water bottle at jeno. they're sitting on the floor in front of the tv, watching money heist halfheartedly. terrible show to be their 'let's talk about our feelings' show but jaemin and jeno never could have a conversation like that without some level of violent scheming occurring in the background.
"i don't feel any way about y/n, jaemin. honestly, it's getting really fucking annoying that you keep saying that i do," jeno says, digging his chopsticks into his chinese takeout food. jaemin rolls his eyes, sitting down next to jeno with his own box of takeout.
"i swear to god. why did you call her then? why did you call her on her date last night?" jaemin asks. jeno shrugs, setting his food down before sighing.
"i don't know, okay? i just...you know what happened with juyeon. i just can't imagine her going through something like that," jeno says softly. jaemin looks at him before clearing his throat, forcing jeno to look at him square in the eyes.
"look, i know that you and juyeon don't have the greatest past but you have got to let her find her person. who knows! maybe juyeon's changed in the last three years. you literally don't know him anymore. and besides, this isn't about juyeon and you know it. you did this when she got with daniel, and then sunghoon, and then even doyoung." jaemin shakes his head, trying to get jeno to understand his own feelings. "you're blind to it but every time she actually feels good about someone, you somehow need to take a break from her. why?"
jeno doesn't actually have the answer to that question. why, indeed, is the question of the night.
later that night, when jaemin has turned in (or rather, announced that he was going to sleep, only to sit in bed and occupy their shared netflix account for hours), jeno pulls out his phone and searches up three words.
we need space.
he searches in his messages and cringes when he sees the number of outgoing texts that have space (as in the number of times he's broken up with someone over text) in them. he filters all of the other people out except for you and it pisses him off that jaemin is right.
may 2020. the first time jeno had asked you for some space, when you'd asked daniel to be your boyfriend.
august 2021. the second time you guys had taken some space, when you'd gone on your first date with sunghoon.
september 2022. the third time that you had had to take a break from each other. when jeno had introduced you to doyoung with his own hands.
realistically, jeno knew that jaemin was right. and with the evidence staring at him so incriminatingly, there was no way to refute the accusations.
but as much as jeno had dated around, he still didn't know what or who he was looking for. sure he was attracted to you as a person and your, uh, physicality - but that didn't mean that you were the one for him. and if jeno were to pursue something with you that made him realize that you truly weren't what he was looking for after all, not only would he be losing you as a partner but he'd be losing you as a best friend too.
so he continues in the toxic cycle of taking a break from you every time he feels as though his feelings are getting too high in his chest for him to contain them and never giving you or jaemin an explanation of why.
jeno knew it was wrong. he knew that his life would be so much easier if he just came clean and you fell one way or another on the scale of 'already dated' and 'haven't dated yet' like most of the girls on campus. but it was different with you.
it'd always been different with you.
so jeno rolls over, and goes to bed, dreaming of you and juyeon holding hands on your first date alone. he's never had such a restless night of sleep in his life.
+++
you know that you're being a bad friend to jimin when she's pouting at you swirling your straw in your macchiato instead of listening to her rambles.
"come on, y/n. it's been three days. you know that jeno gets like this - it's not like this is new right?" jimin says, covering your hand with both of hers, blinking at you curiously.
you smile and shake your head. "yeah. i'm sorry. this is supposed to be about you and i'm just getting in my head about this shit."
jimin tuts, eyebrows furrowing in mock anger. "that's not what i mean and you know it. i'll talk about jaehyun whether you're listening or not and you and i both know that. i just - i guess i'm not sure why you're always so hung up over jeno doing this when you know that he's gonna do it."
"you're right. it's not new. and i'm sorry that it keeps coming up when i really hate that he does this but i just wish he would talk to me instead of shutting me out every time that something like this happens. it's just him and jaemin cooped up and talking to each other for a week before they go back to being normal. and i get it. they're guys. they need a break and they need to do guy things and take a break from girls or whatever the fuck straight boys do. but this is getting out of hand and ridiculous."
but you catch yourself, shaking your head once more as you focus on jimin. "thank you for letting me get that out of my system. now tell me what you were saying about jaehyun. i feel like i've lost my best friend to some random guy for the past three days!"
jimin eyes you for a moment longer (and you know that she's not going to let this go) but decides to take mercy on you.
"well, jaehyun and i have been doing really well, honestly! we've seen each other every single day for the last three days - which isn't that hard considering that we've been having sex all day in every square inch of his apartment." jimin sees the scandalized look on your face before laughing. "don't worry, he lives alone and we've actually been going on non-sexual dates too. we connect in more ways than one if you get what i mean."
you slap jimin's arm incredulously, looking around the cute little café that you were sitting in to make sure that no one was listening. no one was, of course, given that it was 11:30 am on a monday but that was besides the point.
"oh my god. so are you guys going to make it official or what?" you ask, leaning forward on your steepled fingers. jimin shrugs, leaning back in her chair languidly.
"i don't know. i mean, i really like our chemistry and i like where this is going but i'm not going to label it. i'm definitely not going to be the one to pop the 'what are we' question - that's gotta be him," jimin says. "even though i am so incredibly head over heels for him. so i would like to be his girlfriend. for realsies."
she adds on the last part almost as an afterthought when she sees your unbelieving face.
"i mean it! i really want to be more than just a situationship but i really can't be the one to initiate that. i'm tired of always having to express interest in others. i attract; i don't chase," jimin says with a catty smile and you can't help but grin at that.
maybe jeno was really onto something. girl time was amazing. maybe that's why jeno needed some space from you.
"i agree. and you know what, i don't want to knock it but that honestly doesn't seem all that strange, considering that your location has consistently been showing that you're at jaehyun's place for the past 72 hours," you say, laughing at her mischievously when she returns the favor with a slap to your arm.
"i don't know. yeah. anyway. speaking of jaehyun, or not really him, but his friend - not the point! jaehyun mentioned that you gave juyeon your number? and that you've been kinda talking?" jimin says, and now it's your turn to blush.
"no - i mean, yes. i did give him my number but it's honestly not like that. he seems great and all but jeno and jaemin seemed really spooked when i mentioned him. i trust them when it comes to boys. especially with my shitty taste in them," you say thoughtfully and jimin can't help but agree with that.
she checks her phone and groans, starting to shuffle her things together as she prepares to leave. "this has been so good but i have to get to class and you know how much of a pain in the ass professor joo is."
you also start to gather your belongings, slurping down the leftovers of your macchiato. "yeah. i think that my early lunch break is coming to an end anyway. i've got a meeting at 6 pm but we're still on for dinner and drinks this friday, right?"
jimin nods distractedly as she checks her phone to see if jaehyun had texted her. he hadn't. in the past four hours. she clicks her phone shut and looks at you with a determined look in her eyes.
"yes. for sure. you and i have a date this friday and i don't want you to cancel, you hear me? and do not let those investors keep my baby from me like they did last time," jimin says, wagging her pointer finger at you threateningly. you roll your eyes, pressing a kiss to her cheek as the two of you make your way out of the café.
"i hear you. no more investors past 7 pm on a friday," you say, raising your hands in surrender when jimin squints her eyes at you. she side hugs you before checking the time once more (therefore realizing that professor joo wasn't above calling her out in the middle of class) and scurrying off to snu, a block down from the café you were previously in.
you sigh, shaking your head fondly as you turn in the opposite direction to head to work.
+++
turns out, friday seems to be a very popular night. not only do you have back to back meetings from 4 pm to 7 pm, but juyeon and jimin have texted you multiple times to confirm or (try) to make plans for friday night.
and honestly you didn't really want to go out. in between the radio silence between you, jeno, jaemin (who only really communicated in really stupid tiktoks back and forth), juyeon's suave maneuvering you into agreeing to a raincheck to saturday for the date, and jimin lamenting the fact that jaehyun hadn't brought up the 'what are we' conversation, there was so much going on.
all you needed were your friends, chinese takeout, and a little bit of jane the virgin. or other soapy dramas to take your mind off of everything.
but you had promised jimin and you'd be damned if you were going to bail on your friend when she was already not feeling well.
and besides, you refused to be a corporate slave who canceled on her friends because she was married to her job. that's not why you had chosen this job. and that's definitely why you had decided to reject pre-med as a sophomore in college.
so you find yourself taking shots with jimin in her kitchen and...jaehyun and juyeon.
when you had walked into jimin's apartment with nachos and shooters of pink whitney to pregame, you really weren't expecting to be face to face with juyeon - or jaehyun, honestly, given that jimin had been so heartbroken over the fact that jaehyun hadn't initiated the conversation yet.
not to mention the fact that she had made sure that the two of you were going out in the first place because of the whole jaehyun fiasco. so when you come face to face with the last person on the planet who should be in jimin's apartment, you're more than a little confused.
"oh, hey y/n. long time no see," jaehyun says with an easy smile, dimples showing that he had no clue that you knew that your best friend was waiting on a kind of serious conversation with him. you manage a tight smile before pulling shooters out of your purse, putting all four of them down on the counter in front of you.
"yeah. i thought it'd be a little longer though. jimin, i thought we were having a girls night?" you ask, eyes flashing at her when you turn out of view from jaehyun and juyeon. jimin just shrugs helplessly as juyeon steps in.
"don't blame her. i was the one who asked if we could tag along for the night. i promise we won't cause any trouble," juyeon says, and you turn to look at him, only to see him looking straight at jaehyun. his eyes dart between jaehyun and jimin before finally landing on you and you take the hint.
"oh. no worries. yeah, no worries at all, actually. hey, you know what i actually wanted to confirm something about tomorrow's plans with you if i could steal you for a couple seconds?" you say, leaving no room for denial as you wrap your arm in his and walk the both of you to the balcony, closing the door behind you.
"thank you for understanding - jaehyun wants to talk to jimin today about making things official but he's been so nervous about it that he's been putting it off. i figured that it would be better for me to come with him to make sure he doesn't chicken out. and catch you guys before you leave so that he doesn't sit and ferment in his feelings any longer," juyeon explains slowly, sure to refrain from turning around to see how things were going inside.
you lean over the metal bars of the balcony, the cold sinking into your skin in a refreshing way, the april air finally warming up enough to go out without needing a literal winter jacket.
"ahh. good idea. don't tell her i told you this but she was worried that he really wasn't into her," you say. juyeon snorts, a sound that's almost unbecoming from a man so handsome.
"isn't into her? he's head over heels for her. i don't think it's taken him more than thirty minutes to get into a relationship with someone if he wanted to. the fact that he took over a week to figure out his feelings means that he's serious. more serious than i've ever seen him." juyeon seems thoughtful as he trails off, letting his words sit on his tongue in a way that almost feels like he can truly feel the weight of the words.
"hm. or is just unsure of how he feels," you say, and juyeon looks at you strangely, turning so that he was leaning on the railing, his gaze fixated on you.
"are you really that cynical about men?" he asks chidingly, and you shrug.
"yeah. i mean. i don't know. i'm best friends with two of them so i know first hand how fucked up men can be. trust me, i pray to god every day for more patience before i fuck jeno or jaemin up for good," you say, and you can feel juyeon's presence grow cold at the mention of your best friends.
when you look at him though, he has nothing but warmth in his eyes and he smiles at you. "i will admit that there are a lot of messed up things that guys have done but it's not fair to categorize all men due to the faults of a few."
"uh-huh. and when men turn into heartbreakers after getting fucked over by one girl...it's okay?" you say, raising an eyebrow and you can feel juyeon trying to physically retract his statement.
"no. no. it's definitely not okay to hurt other people because you've been hurt. but give us some credit, okay? some of us are trying our best," juyeon says, and you watch as his eyes fall to your lips before dragging them upwards again.
"some of us are just trying to find our other half."
you're silent for a moment, and the moment is all you need to push off of the railings and turn to juyeon with a sad smile. "look juyeon, you're a great guy and i hate to nip things in the bud - especially with someone i get along so well with. but my friends are the most important people in my life. so i don't know what happened between you, jeno, or jaemin but i know that if it really came down to it, they take precedence."
juyeon nods, like he'd been expecting you to say as much. how, you don't understand, given that your reasoning had come out of pretty much left field. and for no real reason too. but men are predictable, easy to read, and all it takes is one moment to understand their intentions.
"yeah. i know. i figured you'd pick them. not that i'm trying to guilt you for that or that i expect you to pick me or anything but i still tried my best, you know," juyeon says casually, giving you a thinly suppressed heartbroken smile. you melt slightly as you turn to him, giving him a half shrug.
"i'm sorry. i'm sure your other half would be so lucky to have you," you say gently. you look at your phone, where jimin has texted you saying that she's going to have to bail on girls night as her and jaehyun had decided to stay in for the night. juyeon seemingly gets a similar text because when you look back inside to the apartment, jaehyun is holding hands with jimin, who uses her free hand to wave sheepishly at you as they recede backwards where the bedroom was.
"i guess we've overstayed our welcome," juyeon says with a laugh, opening the balcony door as the two of you make your way back inside to grab any personal belongings and leave before you witnessed something that would end up scarring you forever.
you eye the shooters and then exchange a look with juyeon.
“i know we’re not - whatever but honestly, i think that you’re good company and this kind of night doesn’t deserve go wasted,” you say, grabbing the shooters and juyeon’s hand and dragging him out of jimin’s apartment when you hear the very telltale sign of a bedroom door shutting down the hall.
juyeon takes one look at the shooters in your hand and the glint in your eyes before taking the two of the little bottles you offer to him.
“i can’t believe i’m doing this right now,” juyeon mutters under his breath, but his smile is lighthearted.
“what, grown men can’t drink pink whitney?” you ask, throwing a shooter back and immediately regretting the fact that you don’t have chasers with you. you may not be an amateur on the night scene but alcohol still always needed a chaser.
“no,” juyeon says, knocking back both of them a little too smoothly. “i meant taking shots with the girl who rejected me in front of her best friend’s apartment where her best friend and my best friend are fucking.”
you look at him, searching for any sense of genuine discontentedness but the way that juyeon’s eyes curve into teasing crescents convince you otherwise.
it would be so easy to choose him. so incredibly easy. but jeno’s face flashes through your mind and you find yourself taking a step back, shaking your head when juyeon looks at you questioningly.
“to the club!”
+++
there are two things that you learn about juyeon by the time you’re another two shots deep: a) he is an absolute gentleman - not just to you, but to the other people around the two of you as well. b) he is a very flirtatious drunk.
in fact, he manages the very big, very linebacker looking bouncer to let him into the club even though his name wasn’t on the list with nothing but a charming smile and an absolute inability to keep from flirting with everything and anything in sight.
which is funny to watch, especially from the other side of the bouncer, because every time juyeon says something particularly risqué, you can see the bouncer’s ears go bright red before he finally relents and lets juyeon in.
but it’s somehow less funny when he’s using those lines on you. it somehow makes your head dizzy and it makes you forget why you turned him down in the first place. you’re half-convinced that this had been juyeon’s plan all along. to turn on the charm to the max so that when you’re under the lights (that honestly might invoke epilepsy; why the fuck were they flying around the place like that), you forget all about jeno.
it’s a bad decision, you repeat to yourself as you watch juyeon make his way through the crowd to where you’re standing in an isolated, somewhat calmer corner. jeno and jaemin warned you against him for a reason. protect your peace, y/n.
and even while you repeat that to yourself over and over again, when juyeon’s hand holds yours precariously as he pulls you into the growing mess of bodies, you find it harder and harder to convince yourself that that was the truth. god, he looks good.
his hair has fallen messily across his forehead, contrasting the way it had been carefully gelled back before. he’s rolled up the sleeves of his button up to reveal his forearms, and you feel no matter than a man as your eyes trail the depths that planes of his chest promise from where they peek out of his half unbuttoned shirt.
you’re vaguely aware that there are various people waiting for you to either make a move or to push him away once and for all. it felt like every single person in the club was fixated upon the two of you - do you want him or not? because you’re holding up the fucking line. for you and your friend.
and so you take the plunge.
you move his hand from where it was innocently resting on your wrist and place it on the small of your back, smiling when juyeon takes the hint and draws you closer to him so that your chest is pressed against his.
“hey beautiful,” juyeon breathes as he looks down at you, almost in disbelief. “what are you doing here?”
you know, even tipsy, that he’s looking for a real answer. and you don’t want to play him - you don’t want to add to the list of heartbreak.
“i’m looking for someone to keep me company tonight,” you say and look up at him through your lashes, a coy smile playing on your lips when juyeon’s breath falters as you do so. “just for the night though. you know anyone who might interested?”
juyeon pulls you impossibly closer and you register the copious amounts of men (for you) and women (for him) that are turning away from the two of you, more than a little disappointed.
“yeah, i might know someone.”
and with that, he spins you so that your back is pressed against his front, his arms caging you in protectively when he sees that a man is looking at you like he genuinely wants to eat you up.
you can feel your self-control slipping further and further away from you as the two of you just let the music fill you up, forgetting about your inhibitions as long as you had this music and him.
it’s too perfect though, and you realize as much when you make eye contact with jeno fucking lee across the club. right before he dips his head to whisper in some girl’s ear.
jaemin is right next to him, his arm laying casually on another girl and you can see the sheer panic in his eyes when he sees you, and then the confusion when he realizes just who you’re pressed up against. you watch as he leans over to whisper (yell; you’re sure that no one can whisper in an establishment threatening to break the sound barrier) something in jeno’s ear but he’s firmly shut down when jeno waves him off.
you scoff at that, turning around the pair of you around so that juyeon’s back was to the two idiots that you call your friends, now facing the dj booth.
the song switches to a much more upbeat song that you don’t recognize and you take it as your cue to push any and all thoughts of your friends out of your mind. you choose to give no apologies for the way that you spend your time - especially if your friends chose to give you no explanation for their behavior.
if they didn’t need to explain themselves, neither do you.
and it works for a while. for a while, all you can think of is the warmth that fills your body. from the alcohol, the heat of juyeon’s body pressed against yours, or even the excitement of the atmosphere; all if it is just so intoxicating.
you forget all about the fact act jeno and jaemin are just a few feet away, actively avoiding you (and doing a poor job of doing so) until juyeon spins you around, looking deep into your eyes in a way that makes you feel, heat rising to your cheeks as you watch his lips move.
“i know that you don’t want - honestly, whatever it is that you don’t want - but jeno and jaemin are here and you haven’t pushed me off of you. so i’m going to shoot my shot for one last time, y/n. and if you reject me this time, i think that we should go our separate ways,” juyeon says, his voice soft and gentle and yet somehow, you can hear every word he says with perfect clarity.
you honestly don’t know what to say. juyeon had caught you in a bad moment with jeno and jaemin. more specifically, jeno. you didn’t want that to cloud your judgement though. you had known juyeon for a total of maybe a week. you had known jeno and jaemin for years and for those years, their opinions on the men in your life had very rarely been wrong.
and yet, the boy that they had warned you against was pressed up against you and those two were on the other side of the club, arms wrapped around girls you knew they would forget about by the morning.
you sigh, stepping back from juyeon, the sheer ridiculousness of the situation making you sober up more than you want to. you hear the beat drop to ‘kiss me better’ by rihanna in the background building up and it seems like everything in the universe is just pushing you to give juyeon a chance.
but juyeon understand what you mean when you step away from him and he gives you one last, longing look before smiling, gently tugging you forward so that the two of you can make your way to a less crowded area.
“you wanna go home?” juyeon asks. you know that he’s asking for his own sake, almost as though he was asking for permission to get with someone else to nurse him through his rejection if you wouldn’t. but he’s a gentleman and he wouldn’t leave you for the wolves and so he asks you if you want to go home instead.
“yeah. i want to go home.”
juyeon nods, already pulling out his phone. “let me call you an uber. and y/n? i’m not upset. i’m just glad that i know i did everything i could. jeno’s a lucky guy for you to care this much about what he says and thinks.”
you want to disagree with him. he’s my friend. of course his opinions matter. sorry. it’s not personal. i actually liked spending time with you.
but even as these thoughts battle in your mind, you find yourself unable to say any of the words out loud.
jimin was your friend but that stopped you very rarely from doing whatever you wanted to do in the end. jaemin would often yell at you for your terrible affinity for working yourself to the bone and you brushed his concern to the side every time. but it was different with jeno. it had always been different with jeno.
you’re too drunk to think about the implications of any of that though so you just smile once again, leaning up to press a chaste kiss to juyeon’s cheek.
“you’re so good, juyeon. regardless of what anyone says.”
and with that, you step into the uber that has reached the club in record time and head home.
+++
you’re not surprised by the text you get from jimin in the morning. or the one from jaemin. in fact, there are only two texts that surprise you when you manage to finally look at your phone with clear enough eyes.
jiminy cricket: OMG i’m so sorry abt last night love!! heard you went out w juyeon tho ;) we need to debrief fr
jaejaeminna: sorry i didn’t get a chance to say hi before you left
juyeon lee: did you get home safe?
ur mom (jeno): can we talk?
you respond to jimin with a quick for sure, girlie! before stepping into the shower, electing to ignore the rest of the messages in your phone. your roommate, jessica, a girl that you barely interacted with, given that she was usually at her boyfriend’s place or you were at jeno’s or jimin’s had kindly left extra pancakes that she had clearly made before she dashed out of the house.
you munch on them slowly, sending her a message of profound gratitude as you try to digest the events of last night (as well as the delicious pancakes), making sure to tousle your hair every so often to get it to dry faster.
first, jimin and jaehyun had clearly made things somewhat official (or at least were on the same page) which meant that you probably wouldn’t have to try and help jimin decipher what that entire situation was. a win, really. second, you and juyeon had gone clubbing together and had shared more than one or two intimate moments. third, you shot him down once and for all. fourth, he still called you an uber and made sure you made it home safe. fifth, you saw jeno and jaemin at the club and neither of them said anything to you.
this was officially the longest that you had gone without speaking to jeno - or even jaemin.
even the stupid tiktok’s had faded away to nothingness by the end of last week from jaemin, which meant that something was so incredibly wrong, it wasn’t even funny.
also, jeno never said can we talk.
it was usually a much more casual wanna get chinese? or even a bring your stupid ass over here cause jaemin misses you. that was more his speed in his form of apology or trying to make it clear to you that the two of you were back to normal now. he’d never acknowledge the two or three days of radio silence, electing to just pretend that they never happened in the first place.
so going from not talking at all to suddenly such a loaded question was new and kind of surreal for you. not to mention that jaemin’s last text to you was also indicative that something was seriously off between the three of you. the text before that had been a tiktok of a man sitting in a car yelling, “it’s the way you act!” and now it was that he didn’t say hi at the club.
you sigh, debating all of your options carefully.
you were obviously going to have to talk to jeno about the situation at some point. and honestly, you were going to have to have a serious conversation about the fact that he would do this every so often because it’s getting way too much for you to handle. it wasn’t as though you were doing something wrong - jaemin would call you out on your behavior, even if jeno didn’t.
you were left to decipher what exactly it was that had jeno in such a pissy mood and you would have to try and figure out what it is on your own because he’s a grown man that doesn’t know what communication meant. for someone who always warned you against the toxicity of men, he was doing a pretty great job of showing you exactly why to avoid them.
pushing all thoughts of jeno and everything else to the side, you decide to take the day as a self-care day for yourself. lord knows that with everything you had going on, self-care was the one thing you desperately needed. of many things, really, but taking a walk and soul food was going to have to do.
you’re just putting on a face mask (one of the korean ones that you had had to sell your left foot to pay the shipping for) when your doorbell rings and you hate the way that you already know who’s at the door even before you step to the entryway, where the monitor is to see who is buzzing for you.
you’re greeted by jeno’s face, alone, looking worse for the wear as he ruffles his hair, shifting from foot to foot as he waits for you to either let him in or at least press the intercom to speak with him. you’re trying to make a decision and you know that decision, as trivial as it seems, would be what would set up your friendship with him in the future.
were you really going to give him another chance? even as he continued to mess up this hard?
you don’t say anything in the intercom but the faint buzzing noise that echoes in the monitor is response enough as jeno opens the door that has opened once you pressed the button, effectively solidifying your decision.
he was jeno. your jeno. you couldn’t just not listen to what he had to say.
the time that jeno takes to make it to the fourth floor where your apartment was seemed to have stretched on for eternity. you weren’t sure the last time that jeno had been in here (last weekend) but suddenly everything in the apartment was just too messy.
you panic and rush to clean everything in sight before you pause awkwardly. this is just jeno. the same boy who had come over and thrown up on your birthday after drinking too much at your party. the same boy who would be sitting in his room screaming into his headset as he played video games, having no regard for you and jaemin spending quality quiet time together.
and he was also the boy who asked for space when you needed him the most.
so you put down your weapon of choice (a swiffer mop) and wait for the eventual knock at the door that finally comes about a half second later. you take a deep breath before opening the door, coming face to face with your ‘best friend’ of the past three years.
the little monitor had done the damage little justice. the eyeballs under jeno’s eyes were deep and purple, with his cheekbones protruding a little more than you remember them to, and his gaze deep and sorrowful.
but somehow, you could look past all of that because your gaze is caught by something else - the purple and very telling hickey on his neck. he’s clearly made an attempt to cover it up with what you assume is whatever foundation you might have left at their place on the nights that you’re too lazy to come home before work. the attempt isn’t all that successful, given that your foundation is about three hundred shades too dark for his skin (which is as pale as a ghost around this time of year) but you appreciate the effort.
not really.
jeno looks uncharacteristically shy as he stands in the living room, having switched out his shoes for his slippers that he bought specifically for your apartment once him and jaemin started coming over more often. they usually fought over ‘jeno’s’ slippers (they had peaches on them while ‘jaemin’s’ had ducks) but jaemin usually conceded to jeno.
usually, he’d be sprawled out on the sofa with little more than a half-hearted ‘hey’ and bags of chinese takeout on the kitchen counter but you see none of that now. now, he looked like a lost puppy, shuffling awkwardly to stand next to the couch.
it would almost be funny if it weren’t for the fact that the two of you haven’t spoken in a week. or the hickey.
“has it ever occurred to you that we might act like more than friends?”
the question is sudden, breaking your nostalgia and bringing your train of thought to a screeching halt.
“excuse me?” your voice is calmer than you thought it would be in your head as you spin on your heel to look at jeno in the eye. he licks his lips, a nervous habit that he’d picked up from you, but his eyes don’t shift from yours, decidedly steady. he’s thought this for a while, you realize belatedly. it was just a question of how long and what that really meant.
“i mean you leave your foundation at my place and i buy slippers for yours. i can’t stand olives but when we get pizza, i get olives anyway so that you can pick them off of my slices and eat them. you don’t know your left from right but you still drive forty-five minutes down and back to the bakery to get iced lemon poundcake every time i’m upset.
“i can’t stand it when you meet a decent guy for once in your life and i go off the radar but we - i can’t spend more than a few days away from you. so, i’m always showing up at your apartment with chinese food when the last thing i want to do is hear about you raving about your new date who has a job at amazon and wears real rolex watches while i’m still eating instant ramen and trying to get a grip on life.
“the worst part is that i think i’ve always known. even last night, i was falling into my old pattern of using people to get over you, y/n. in between trying to figure out why i couldn’t click with anyone else besides you and trying to figure out why i feel so empty every time i feel like you’re slipping away from me, i think i figured it out. sure, i hate juyeon because of who he is and what he’s done in the past but i hate him even more because he used to be just like me. and now he’s changed so much and become such a good person. the fact that he’s the bigger, better, older, stronger version of me with his life together freaks me out so much because what if you replace me with him? and then i lose the one person i think i’ve ever properly fallen for and one of my best friends all in one go? and it’s all so selfish but when i have ever tried to hide myself from you, y/n?”
your mind is spinning. jeno is heaving by the end of his rambling. you can’t seem to find your grip on reality. everything is just wrong. it’s all wrong. everything is wrong. what?
jeno lee. playboy extraordinaire. mr. couldn’t be tied down. the boy who came home with a new broken heart in his jar of hearts that he hid deep inside his mind so he wouldn’t have to think of the unintentional consequences of having an unavailable pool of love.
and here he was, standing next to the couch in the living room, looking at you with so much anger, confusion, and sheer love in his eyes that you’re almost upset with yourself that you hadn’t seen it sooner. had he always looked at you like that?
you don’t know what to say though. you can’t even tell if he’s still talking, by the way that the blood is rushing in your head like an unforgiving tsunami has broken loose. you can’t hear anything, much too preoccupied with your own thoughts to even think of listening to his.
you vaguely register the fact that you and jeno are somehow sitting on opposite ends of the couch, a good entire seat away from each other. that was good, at least. you’re sure that your legs would’ve given out on you at some point if you had remained standing.
“why do you hate juyeon so much?”
the question doesn’t seem to faze him as much as you wished it would. what was it with men and not being stunned by the most random questions or thoughts you can come up with? it somewhat frustrated you that you couldn’t stun them with the same shock factor that they seemed to utilize on you.
jeno sighs, raking a hand through his messy hair as he struggles to come up with the right words to say. or honestly, any non-stupid words.
“juyeon was actually one of the reasons why i came to snu in the first place. he was kind of like my mentor - a guy that i looked up to a lot in high school. he was one of my older friend’s roommate so when i came to check out snu, he toured me around and showed me his entire lifestyle. i was a senior in high school back then and he was just a sophomore but i swear, i’d never clicked with someone that fast before.
“he’s always been super smart and incredibly charming. and back when i met him, as a stupid senior in high school, i thought that everything that he had was what i wanted. he had a new girl at his apartment any time he wanted and always seemed like he had the entire college wrapped around his finger.” jeno gets up, looking frustrated as he starts pacing back and forth between the walls of the living room of the apartment.
“long story short, i caught him making out with my girlfriend at the time over the summer between high school and college. and it all came crashing down. in hindsight, maybe i shouldn’t have hated him nearly as much as i did but the fact that i couldn’t see that he had no qualms of getting with anyone who wanted to get with him hurt me. everything i had idolized came crashing down when i saw the two of them.”
jeno stops pacing, looking down at his hands, rough and raw from the biting winds outside. “it just - it just hurt y/n. and it made it so incredibly easy to just not believe in love anymore. and then i met you and you came into college looking for the one and it was just so hard not to believe in love. when you said you were going out with juyeon, it took me back to the darkest parts of my past mentally. ridiculous? weak? yeah. i know. but i couldn’t help it.”
“it’s not weak or ridiculous, jeno,” you say gently, finding your voice once more. “i’m just hurt that you didn’t tell me before. i mean, i thought i was your best friend!”
jeno laughs drily, a grating sound that tugs at your heart strings. “but he’s gone clean, y/n. he’s everything that i couldn’t be and so much more. he’s near perfect. i couldn’t stop you from finding ‘the one’ that you’ve been dreaming about since i’ve known you. even if that meant that i finally had to let the past go. even if it meant that i had to give up on being able to love you.”
you can’t help the tears that spring to your eyes. “jeno…”
jeno shakes his head, looking at you with watery eyes, dragging his red hands across them roughly. “stop. i don’t need pity. i just…i just wanted clarity. have you always thought of me as a friend? was i making up everything in my head? did - did i imagine that we could’ve had something this whole time?”
you’re at a loss for words. jeno wasn’t wrong. you’d gone to the ends of the earth to make jeno happy. any time he was upset, you’d drop everything to go get that goddamn lemon cake. you couldn’t go more than a week without him. even if the entire world went to shit, you’d always thought that you and jeno would go down together, fighting side by side. if it really came down to choosing between your friends, some part of you knew that you’d always choose jeno before jaemin or jimin.
and some part of you wonders if you’d always had that much affection for him.
“i don’t know,” you say honestly. jeno’s face falls, and an awkward silence falls between the two of you, with his feet pointed to the door and muscles tensed to move. you know that if you don’t come up with the words to say something that’ll convince him to stay, you’ll have given him no reason to. you know he’s going to leave.
no matter what, you cannot lose jeno, you realize. he’s the one part of your life that cannot leave. he’s the person that buys slippers for your house. he’s the boy who can’t stand when he has to compete for your attention. he’s the man who’s shoulder you cry on when your heart suffers even the smallest scratch.
he’s your jeno.
“i don’t know,” you begin, rushing to continue when you see jeno’s crestfallen expression. “but it’s all so sudden, jeno. you’ve been thinking about your feelings for a long while. i’ve honestly never considered the possibility of - of us being more than friends. of being together. maybe i’ve had feelings for you this whole time without knowing. maybe my ‘one’ has been you this whole time. maybe we’re better off as friends! i don’t know anything.”
jeno’s breath catches as he realizes what the hidden implication in your words is.
“but i’m willing to find out if you are.”
+++
after the enlightening conversation that you’d had with jeno that morning, you’d made plans with him to go on a proper date on wednesday, a day that you had nothing but boring meetings and jeno only had two classes. the two of you had decided to first go on the date and then try to figure out how you felt about each other from there.
you’d also taken it upon yourself to curve juyeon once and for all. he was a great guy and you were sure that he’d be a great person to whoever he’s meant to be with but after reminding him that you were distinctly uninterested (and apologizing if you’d insinuated that you wanted to see him as an anything after that night), you’d deleted his number and all thoughts of him from your mind.
jaemin had been equally easy to make up with. you understood - after all, jaemin was jeno’s friend first and foremost. even if he didn’t necessarily agree with jeno and his tendencies, being his friend first meant that he had to prioritize jeno and his feelings. he was relieved to hear that jeno had finally grown the balls (verbatim) to confess the painstaking secret that he had been holding onto for the past three years.
“three years? he’s liked me since he met me? and you never said anything, jaemin?” you say incredulously, thanking the barista with a quick smile before grabbing your coffee, rushing to beat the morning sidewalk traffic as you walk to office.
jaemin’s face on your screen is mostly covered by his covers - a sign that he’s either skipping a class (ancient world history) or avoiding some work that he has to do. it was both, but he would concede neither to you.
“it wasn’t my place to say anything,” jaemin says finally, and you finally look at him properly through the little facetime box, watching him drag his hand over his face. he looks as though he’s aged about ten years in the time that you haven’t seen him - which was only a few days ago, technically.
“and besides, you saw us at the club. did it look like jeno was exercising any type of common sense? clearly not. he wasn’t ready to listen to the truth, no matter who was delivering it. so there was no point in trying to make him to his senses,” jaemin continues, wrapping his blanket around himself a little tighter. “it didn’t help that his coping mechanism thus far has been to just run away from his issues, forget they exist, and then use a distraction to pretend that he was never affected by it in the first place.”
you sigh. this much was obvious to you as well. the day that jeno had come over, that had been one of the first things that you had confronted him about. he had presented a similar explanation then as jaemin was now but even if he didn’t say anything, you knew that was the truth.
“that reminds me - jimin texted me this morning asking if you were okay. have you talked to her since friday night?” jaemin asks and you groan. in all of this mess, you had completely neglected to debrief jimin and fill her in on everything that was happening.
“oh shit, i completely forgot to call her,” you say, swiping into the company building, smiling as you pass a familiar face. “i’ll talk to her tonight.”
“yeah. she seemed kinda worried. apparently juyeon told jaehyun that you two had cut it off for good and told him about you seeing jeno and i at the club. i guess jaehyun went and told jimin,” he says sullenly. you roll your eyes at his dramatics.
“just because you’re the only one getting no action doesn’t mean that you have to be jealous of jimin,” you say.
“no - what? no! it’s not that. i’m single by choice, thank you very much. i could have a hundred girls lining up for me if i wanted,” he says, clearly miffed. you stifle a laugh; it was so easy to rile men up. “but it’s like a violation of bro code. jaehyun knows that jeno doesn’t fuck with juyeon and he also knows that jimin is one of your best friends. like what did he think? that jimin wouldn’t tell jeno and i or that she wouldn’t talk to you about it?”
you blink, completely lost. “i swear to god, i think guys have more complex interpersonal links than girls do. i followed like maybe 20% of what you said.”
jaemin sticks his tongue out at you childishly. “whatever. don’t you have a job to do?”
“don’t you have a class that you’re paying thousands of dollars to take to go to?”
“touché.”
with that, jaemin ends the call but even as you finally sit down in your little glass office, you know that he’s absolutely not going to go to that class. it didn’t help that you’d taken the class last semester and had handed him your notes. at this point, he basically only went to take the tests - after studying your notes for maybe 10 minutes right before.
you’re about to call jaemin again to make sure that he actually gets up to go to class when there’s a knock on the glass of your office.
“y/n? someone’s ordered breakfast for you,” haerin, an underpaid and quite frankly undervalued intern at your office, says. she’s holding a little pastry box and a straw without any coffee. “the person who dropped it off said that he figured you’d already have coffee but you probably forgot the straw.”
you don’t even need to hear the name of your mystery courier boy because you already know who it is.
jeno.
+++
“he brought you breakfast? to your office?” jimin asks incredulously. you had called her soon after haerin had handed you the breakfast (with your favorite pastry inside the box). you seriously needed to hear a girl’s perspective on all of this, even if it was coming from the most romantic person you knew.
“yeah. i mean he’s done it before - like during my first couple of weeks of working, remember how stressed i was? he bought me lunch and dropped it off at the office, back when i was just an intern running around and didn’t have time to go and get it myself.” you blink, looking at jimin worriedly. “that’s not weird, is it?”
jimin ponders for a moment before shaking her head. “i mean you guys were best friends. i’d do it for you. but i don’t know. i feel like guys and girls who are just friends are more like siblings and i feel like girls who are really close are basically like a married couple.”
“why do you and jaemin always say weird shit that confuses me?”
“no - it’s like…like with a truly platonic set of girl and guy friends, they’re always doing sibling-like things. for example, i think i’ve seen you nearly give jaemin a black eye for taking a bite out of your pizza. but if i wanted a bite of your pizza, you’d probably honestly give me the whole slice. i don’t know, but it’s a dynamic that i’ve seen with all of my female friends compared to my guy friends. but you and jeno have never been like that.”
“i have most definitely tried to fight jeno over pizza. i’m sure i’ve fought him over much less, to be honest,” you say and jimin shrugs.
“i’m not here to make you feel one way or another about him. your feelings are yours to figure out. but as an outsider looking in, even if you were to fight him about something stupid like that, it was because that’s how you guys talked to each other. it’s not like you’re actually going to rip that pizza away from him. in the end, if he really wanted it, you’d concede to him. you don’t really do that for siblings. it’s charged in a different way.
“i’d give up my life for my older sister. but if she even looks at me the wrong way, i’m ready to pull out her hair. or my younger brother? he genuinely gets pleasure out of making me have to redo my entire skincare routine because he switched around all of the labels. would he send me breakfast to my office just because? fuck no. would he give me his kidney in a heartbeat? hell yeah.”
jimin looks down before looking up at you once more. “and even if none of that was true, you don’t look at jeno like you look at jaemin.”
this startles you out of your own attempts of running parallels between what jimin was describing and how you and jaemin were or how you and jeno were.
“what do you mean? how do i look at jeno?” you say, your voice coming out shockingly soft and confused.
“you know how you were kicking yourself about not realizing how jeno looks at you? yeah. that’s how i feel looking at you looking at jeno. i didn’t want to say anything to you about it. honestly, mostly because i hated seeing you get down every time he would just disappear from your life. i don’t know that as your friend, i should be encouraging you at all. but he makes you more happy than i’ve seen anyone else make you,” jimin says. “and that’s reason enough for me to be happy for you. to tell you what you don’t realize yourself. even when you dated other people, you always looked at them differently than you looked at jeno.”
“how do i look at jeno, jimin.” it’s not a question and both you and jimin know that you know the answer to what you’re truly asking.
“you look at him like you’re finally ready to love. like you’re realizing again that maybe jeno was the one you’d been waiting for every time.”
+++
your first date with jeno had been a full course of a dumpster fire with a side of natural disaster.
after your (jimin induced) realization that maybe you’d actually had feelings for jeno longer you’d thought, you find yourself going through the day as if you were on autopilot. jeno sends you breakfast on tuesday and wednesday morning as well, although he doesn’t mention a word of it when the two of you are texting.
at least nothing had changed there, thus far. he still sent you those stupid reaction memes that he found on pinterest and never failed to make fun of your typos in the group chat with you, jaemin, jeno, and now jimin.
you hadn’t seen him since friday night but by the time wednesday rolls around, you wish that you had a little bit more time. you’re still reeling from your newfound enlightenment and some childish, hidden romantic side of you wants to bask in the uncertainty and the almost juvenile way that your heart beats a little faster whenever you think of the date tonight.
the two of you had decided that you were going to try and approach it as a truly romantic date, rather than the quick food runs that you were used to with him. which meant you were going to have to clean up and put on a dress - a sight that you’re sure jeno was truly not used to seeing after so long of you lounging around his apartment in sweats all day.
since this was the first proper date you were going on (you insisted that the date with juyeon didn’t count, since you had only gone with the intention of being a good friend to jimin.) in a good while, you’d called in the big guns for reinforcement. the only reinforcements you had, but that was besides the point.
“i still don’t get why you’re curling your hair. it looks so pretty naturally,” jimin laments, setting down the section of hair that she was working as she moves onto the next.
“i know. it’s kinda silly but i wanna feel cute - like i wanna look feminine and feel cute when i see jeno. it’s stupid and i swear it goes against everything feminism has taught me but i just want to feel and look like my inner girly-girl has been begging me to,” you explain, pouting when you catch jimin laughing through the reflection of the vanity mirror where you were sitting.
“baby, that’s not silly at all. and it doesn’t go against feminism to want to dress up and look cute! reminder: feminism is about empowering other women and helping everyone have the freedom to choose what they want for themselves. whether that’s dressing up cute or being a stay-at-home mom or being a working woman or some combination of all of the above and then some,” jimin says and then there’s a wicked glint in her eyes. “it’s also very feminist to get men to do your bidding, i think. and hey, if you have to put on a little black dress to do that, then i’m all for it.”
“you sound absolutely ridiculous,” you scoff, but a little smile tugs at the corner of your lips anyway.
“speaking of little black dresses, you’re wearing a matching set underneath, right?” jimin teases. you swat at her with your free hand that wasn’t applying glitter to your inner eye. “i’m holding a hot iron, you psycho!”
“jimin! i’m not going to have sex on the first date. not that i’m above it but jeno is different,” you say and jimin unfortunately catches the underlying longing tone in your words.
“oh he’s different, is he? girl, where having you been hiding all these feelings for so long?” she says and you find yourself not being able to come up with a rebuttal. honestly, you didn’t know how either of you had been so blind to your feelings for each other. and suddenly, a cold rush of fear runs down your spine.
you twist in your chair, ignoring jimin’s protest that she was almost done with your hair. “wait. you don’t think that this is a mistake, right? like what if he thinks that he has feelings for me but it’s been the chase this whole time. or what if we just don’t click like we think we will? what if i lose my friend and the person that i think i’ve liked for longer than i’d like to admit in one go.”
jimin’s expression turns serious at that. “y/n, you’ve only had a week to figure out your feelings. it’s okay if you want to raincheck and then go on the date when you’re more sure of how you feel, if that’s what you want.”
“that’s not what i want. i think that i actually have liked him for longer than i think. it’s just been so hard to realize that because he’s always been with someone and i’ve always been waiting for the one. it just scares me to think that maybe the one that i’ve been looking for is someone who actually doesn’t think that i’m the one, you know? i don’t know if i could live with losing him.” you blink furiously, willing yourself to not let a single tear fall and ruin all of your hard work for the past couple of hours.
“trust me, y/n, if you’re sure about your feelings and if he really is the one, then everything will work out. have a little faith in the universe.” no sooner does jimin say this, the buzzer rings and you and jimin look at each other in panic.
“it’s still 5:50! he said he was coming at 6:00!” you exclaim and jimin rushes to finish your hair. “you have to distract him! i still have to put my dress on!”
“oh my good lord, i forgot about that. okay, you focus on getting ready, i’m running!” jimin says, cursing when she trips over the cord to the curling iron as she’s running to open the door for jeno.
you shimmy out of your pajamas in hurried movements as you hear jimin say that jeno could come up but that the elevator was broken so he’d have to come up by stairs.
“there’s no sign that says the elevator is broken though,” you hear jeno say as you’re caught in one of the legs of your pajamas, shaking it off wildly as jimin tries to come up with a random explanation on why exactly the elevator had no sign.
“yeah, it actually just broke. like right now. like it was so recent that they didn’t have a chance to put a sign up yet. in fact, i bet that we’re in a space-time pocket and time just moves faster for you and slower for people inside. maybe this building is narnia or something,” jimin says. the room is silent for a moment before you hear the sound of the elevator dinging and you wince, your movements no doubt mirrored by jimin.
you can already see jeno’s amused smirk as jimin says that the elevators must’ve been repaired by the aliens in the space-time pocket. but they were living in a speed that was faster than human senses.
you’d seriously have to buy her a drink when this date was over, you think to yourself as you struggle to zip up the back of the dress. you don’t think that you’ve heard jimin pull out that much utter bullshit in one breath before.
you have heard jaemin say something similar before though, so it made sense that jeno was neither fazed nor taking her seriously. not that anyone could take that seriously, anyway.
you’ve finally managed to contort your body in the right position to zip up the dress when you hear the door open and jeno saying something to jimin.
“i know i’m early. and i know she’s definitely not ready. but i found these earrings in my apartment and i figured that she’d want to wear these. if i know her at all, she’s wearing black and she always says that she loves to wear these earrings with her black outfits.”
you open the door just slightly for jimin to slip into your bedroom and deposit the earrings in your hands.
“how do i look?” you whisper, waiting for jimin’s reaction with bated breath.
jimin smiles at you and wraps you up in a tight hug, careful not to wrinkle the silky fabric of your dress.
“like a dream.”
that works for you and you take a deep breath before opening to door to see jeno. it’s just jeno, you remind yourself. and although it’s not just jeno because you don’t know if he’s ever been just jeno to you, the words serve as a good reminder.
he’s jeno. your jeno. not someone to be afraid of. someone who’s seen every side of you and still wants to see more sides.
you walk into the living room, where jeno is sitting on the couch, scrolling through his phone (tiktok, as you can tell by sounds of football highlights). there’s a bouquet of flowers, gardenias, laying across his lap and he’s clearly cleaned himself well. he’s wearing a black button down and rolled up the sleeves to reveal the tattoo that he’d gotten halfway through freshman year.
it’s a tattoo of jeno’s favorite quote from his favorite movie, chappie. you are made for good.
he introduced you to the movie early into your friendship, and had been thrilled when he realized that you liked as much as he did. in fact, the same quote that he had gotten tattooed on his forearm was the one that you had custom-made for your phone case. huh.
how long had you and jeno been doing things like this? since the very beginning, you balk.
“you look beautiful.” jeno’s voice is low, softer than you remember and your instinct is to counter him and say that you always look beautiful but he looks a little too sweet under the light of skylights for you to find it in yourself to do so.
“thank you.” you lean closer, eyes crinkling into a smile when you recognize the cologne that jeno was wearing. “is that the cologne i got you in sophomore year?”
jeno nods and smiles with you. “jaemin said that my normal one was too…fuckboy.”
“the sauvage one? hell yeah, it is. i think that most girls have a trauma response to that cologne at this point,” you say, and suddenly everything is so simple again. it’s your jeno, after all.
“it’s a good thing i listened to jaemin, then.”
you cock your head and you’re vaguely sure that he means more than just his cologne choices.
“yeah, i guess it was.”
+++
pretty much everything from there went completely wrong. for one, jeno’s car (which was infamous for coming up with the most random issues at the worst times) had decided to blare with just about every warning known to man almost as soon as the two of you sit in the car.
by the time that jaemin arrives to where the two of you had pulled over to take the car to the car dealership, jimin offering her car instead, the two of you were already about thirty minutes late to your reservation.
it had taken a lot of persuasion on jeno’s end to convince the restaurant to let the two of you sit and eat anyway, although you were past half an hour late for your reservation. as if that weren’t enough, the restaurant refused to accommodate for your dietary restrictions (even though they promised that they did on their website!), causing you to only be able to order an overpriced caesar salad with maybe three vegetables and too much vinegar.
then, as you were leaving, you found out that the valet had parked pretty much on the other side of the country. and it was pouring rain. to the extent that your phone had gone off about three times with warnings that there was a flood watch in seoul.
which meant that jeno had had to book it to run to get the car and pull it up to the front of the restaurant, where you were waiting, shivering even with jeno’s jacket around your shoulders. and due to the layout of the restaurant’s front, you were forced to run in the run in the rain anyway to dive into the passenger seat of jimin’s car.
and yet, even with all of this, you couldn’t help but laugh. the date was perfect. every time something occurred, jeno handled it with ease, allowing you to just turn off your brain and let him take care of everything for you. he would always turn to you with a silly smile and another story of how the two of you always seemed to find yourselves in the most unbelievable situations.
through all of this, you finally understand what you had been thinking that you wanted this whole time in your wait for the one. not someone who made sure that everything was perfect and that the date was always planned out to the t.
no, it was someone who made you feel like you were having a good time, even when everything was going to shit.
you look at jeno, recounting some story about how jaemin and him had snuck into a wedding once to eat food after days of cooking instant ramen in their dorm in freshman year, laughing so hard that you could barely hear the pelting rain outside. and seeing him smile like that, feeling yourself smile like that, just because you knew that he was smiling, your heart finally felt at ease.
definitely not a platonic type of love, you decide.
“hey, you okay?” jeno asks, eyes trained on the road in front of him as he navigates to your apartment. “you seem kind of checked out.”
you smile, shaking your head. “yeah. i’m all good. i was…i was just thinking about how stupid i’d been to think that i’d been looking everywhere but right in front of me for ‘the one’ when i didn’t even know what i wanted.”
“yeah? what do you want?” jeno says, his grip on the steering wheel growing tighter as he waits nervously for your answer. you look at him and jeno has to fight himself to keep looking at the road when he wants nothing but to look at you and commit this vision of you to memory.
your glinting earrings and your twinkling eyes under the seoul night sky. your drenched dress and jeno’s jacket across your lap. your wet hair that still somehow looked sexy as you flipped it over your shoulder. your soft smile and seeing you finally look at him the way that he’d been looking at you this whole time. he wants to capture it all within his mind and never forget the way you were looking at him now.
“i want someone to make me feel like that even the stupidest situations were easy to overcome when i’m with them,” you say softly.
jeno pauses at that, heart beating a little too fast to be good for him. a smile tugs at his lips, no matter how stoic he tries to look. “oh? does this mean you think this date was a success?”
“i think this date was an utter flop,” you say drily and jeno rolls his eyes at that. “but i think my date was pretty great. i’m not going to lie, i’m still a little hungry though.”
“i still can’t believe that they gave you a bowl of lettuce and charged like $30 for that,” jeno says, shaking his fist dramatically. “i’m going to write a scathing yelp review.”
“i mean i didn’t have to pay so that yelp review’s all yours,” you say before turning to him with a sly smirk. “aren’t you going to ask what i’m hungry for though?”
“what do you mean? what are you hungry for?” he asks, turning onto your street.
“ramen. wanna eat ramen and go?”
jeno has to use all of his self-will to keep from hydroplaning as he pulls into your apartment complex. “y/n. you want me to eat ramen and go?”
“yeah. i meant that literally though. you wanna eat ramen and then maybe ramen?” you ask, batting your eyelashes innocently at him as he parks jimin’s car in your designated parking spot.
“uh, isn’t jimin at your place?” jeno asks, feeling his heart skip a beat when you shake your head no.
“jaehyun’s apartment is like two complexes down so she just walked over. why? you don’t want to eat ramen with me?” you say, faking a sullen pout. jeno rushes to correct himself, resting his hand on your thigh gently.
“look, y/n, i think that you’re incredibly attractive and i really like you. but that’s - that’s my issue. i like you so much that i don’t want to make you feel like i was trying to get in your pants and then do something that you or i regret. and i know that you’re probably just saying that to get a rise out of me but hear me when i say that i want to take things slow. for your sake, not mine.
“i’ve been thinking about my feelings for so long and i’ve been thinking about how in love with you i am for longer than you might think. to me, sex would kinda just be the next step in taking our relationship to the next level. but i know you. you’ve really only been thinking about this about us for the past week or so. i don’t want to make you feel like you’re obligated to like me if we sleep together. i know that sex isn’t just sex for girls; or maybe it is but isn’t for you, no matter how much you tell me otherwise. and i honestly don’t know where i’m going with any of this but y/n, my feelings for you are true.
“i want to take things slow because if we take that next step, i want it to be when you’re sure. when you’re sure of how you feel for me. maybe i’m not the one for you, y/n. and as much it kills me to say that, it’s a very real possibility. you deserve someone who’d bring down the moon and gift it to you if that’s what you wanted. and i know that i would do that for you. but i need you to believe that too. wholeheartedly. i’ll wait for you for as long as you need. you’re my person, y/n. i’ve waited three years - granted, three very controversial years - for you. i’ll wait three more if that’s what you need.”
you’d said the ramen thing very jokingly, only half-serious about your proposition. but hearing jeno now, you’re happy that you had. you’re not sure that jeno would’ve told you how felt about you and just how deep his feelings ran for you if you hadn’t. he was right, of course. he knew you better than anyone else, after all.
so you kiss him on the cheek good night and open the passenger side door.
you’re about to close the door behind you, ready to bid him goodbye for the night when you lean down to say something to him.
“thank you for waiting for me, jeno.”
+++
turns out, romantic jeno is just like just friends jeno. mostly because you don’t think that you’ve ever truly been just friends. he’s quiet, teases you at any given moment, and listens to you recount even the most boring stories about work.
you went on a couple more dates with all of the formalities before slowly growing more casual with each other once more. neither of you had brought up the topic of physical touch after that night but lately, it was getting harder and harder to find places on jeno’s face to kiss besides his lips.
not to mention that you’d caught jeno’s lingering gaze on your lips (among other things) more and more often. so, just like everything else in your relationship, your first kiss was completely unexpected.
jeno had come over with chinese takeout, since the two of you (honestly, you had made the decision and jeno was just along for the ride) had decided to start the indiana jones franchise together.
you didn’t know what it was. the tousled hair? the way his arm was casually tugging you into to his side, covering your entire side as you cuddled closer into him? the way he was only a breath away from you? the look in eyes when he tears his eyes away from to look at you with the sweetest gaze?
everything. all of the above. you lean up to peck him swiftly on the lips.
jeno freezes, eyes going round as his entire face turns bright red. it was hard to think that just two months ago, jeno had been walking around with a girl on either side of him at a frat party, the promise of a good night hidden in his smile when he looks like a deer caught in headlights at the slightest sign of physical touch.
“did - did you just kiss me?” he stutters, and you shrug playfully, looking back the movie in front of you. he shifts you so that you’re facing him, unable to look away as he turns to face you.
“i thought we’re taking it slow?” he asks and you smile coyly.
“a month and a half of dating wasn’t enough to convince you that i actually like you the way that you like me, jeno?”
that’s all jeno needs to hear because no sooner do you say this does jeno dip his head to press his lips to yours, gentle and undemanding. he’s soft and careful, almost as if he were afraid that you were going to disappear if he chased after you too hard.
but you’d been waiting long enough and this was jeno so you pull away from him, a horde of butterflies settling in your stomach when he chases after your lips, eyes still closed, as if he couldn’t bear to part from them.
“jeno, i’m going to do something and you have got to tell me if you want me to stop, okay?” you whisper against his lips softly and jeno nods, opening his eyes so that you can see the look of absolute love and trust in them.
you get up and hook your leg over both of his so that you were effectively sitting on his lap, poised dangerously so that you could part from him at the slightest sign of discomfort. it never comes, though because as soon as you do this, jeno pulls you in closer so that his chest was pressed flush against yours.
“are you sure?” he says, confirming for the last time as you see the last strings of his resolve snap.
“god, jeno, i love you. now please just kiss me.”
his lips are pressed against yours the second the words leave your mouth, a little rougher and more insistent than last time. his arms are wrapped around your back and waist, eyes closed and you lose yourself in the feeling of being so close to him.
needless to say, that night had been a long night.
+++
“i look like an idiot,” your boyfriend complains, checking himself out in the mirror of your vanity anyway. you giggle, pressing a kiss to his temple so that you don’t mess up his make-up, carefully dodging the stray glare that he offers you.
“you look beautiful, jeno. and besides, this is for a good cause, remember?” you remind him as you make sure that your costume looks good as well.
“i don’t remember what me dressing up as a spandex wearing animated character has to do with changing the world, but alright,” jeno grumbles, shifting uncomfortably as his ‘uniform’ seems to cling to all the wrong places.
“you say that now but you and i both know that the moment you see those kids at the hospital, you’re a sucker. tell me you aren’t going to practice your mr. incredible in the car,” you say cheekily, and jeno is unable to refute that. ever since you and him have been dating, you have often dragged him to events such as these.
at first, they were rather simple things, almost as if you were testing the waters with jeno. for example, when the two of you went on a date to a zoo in the beginning of your relationship, you casually mentioned that many zoos that didn’t treat their animals with love and respect.
then, soon after, you asked him to sign a ‘take down unethical zoo practices!’ petition. and then from there, jeno found himself at a protest to rally for the rights of beluga whales.
not that jeno had anything against whales (he actually came to be quite passionate about the mistreatment of them the more he went to these events), but the fact that you took the world’s issues to be your issues was simultaneously your biggest character flaw and strength.
and he loved you all the more for it.
“you know who you are?” jeno says, swiveling around in the chair to mean mug you. “you’re woo young woo from that one kdrama. and i’m that poor unsuspecting boyfriend who wants to spend time with his girlfriend but ends up at a whale protest anyway. that’s what cute girls like you and her do; you get our attention, make us fall in love, and then ba-bam! you use us as a bodyguard and backpack carrier at protests and rallies!”
you roll your eyes, leaning down so that you were now eye level with jeno, the both of you lovingly aware that the banter between the two of you was not a symbol of actual annoyance but rather, mutual appreciation. you, for having so much empathy. jeno, for being so patient.
your heart swells when jeno looks at you with such loving eyes, trust and admiration swimming behind his façade of annoyance. you lean forward, pressing your lips to his, involuntarily smiling when you feel jeno’s lips curve upwards as well.
he hums softly, pulling you close so that you’re practically sitting on his lap. gentle and strong. a little callous, but only so that the butterflies in your stomach seem to be rebelling against the confines of your stomach, as if they too want to be showered in the love of your kindhearted and wonderful boyfriend.
you want to melt into his embrace, as you usually do whenever you’re near jeno, but your phone buzzes and you sigh, pulling away from your boyfriend reluctantly.
“that’s jaemin. he’s asking, and i quote, ‘what the fuck are you guys doing i’ll whoop your ass if you don’t come soon i hate this fucking gru costume and the kids keep asking where you are’. you think we should get going maybe?” you say, raising your eyebrows at the series (of rather graphic) of emojis that depict you and jeno conveniently being pushed off a cliff.
jeno snorts at his best friend’s antics, his touch lingering on your waist as he leaves to go start the car. he waits for you to finish responding (with a threatening message of your own) before extending his arm without even looking, waiting for the comforting weight of you clinging to his arm as the two of you leave your shared home, walking into the buttery evening.
it truly couldn’t get much better than this.
#jnnul#nct fic#jeno x reader#nct dream fic#nct dream#jeno imagines#nct dream fluff#nct fluff#jeno fluff#nct dream imagines#nct imagines#nct x reader#nct dream x reader
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Off Duty drabble request 😄 I love reading them having fun together away from work, so maybe on OCs Birthday and Jungkook giving her presents with her getting super excited and her puppy side coming out more? They're my fav :)
It's not often that you can just be you, off duty, nothing holding you back, not even himself.
But your birthday is a special day, one he always has you both take a day off to just do whatever you personally want. Last year for example, you had a full on spa-day; from facial treatment to massages and skincare at home, you'd been pampered to high heavens as a birthday present, and you loved every second of it.
This year, you've stayed home and had some visitors over, before you ate the cake and opened the presents you got- one of them yet another squeaking toy Seokjin had bought despite Jungkook's eager words not to.
But he can tolerate it.
Well, it's not really about tolerating it. But more so about what he gets to see whenever you get stuff like this- your carefree self, laughing, smiling, running after the toy Seokjin had been throwing for you while Yoongi watches fondly.
Jungkook's heart aches at the sight. You should get to live like this all the time.
"Are you okay?" Taehyung asks from the side, having noticed him go quiet. "You seem a bit.. in your head."
"Yeah no- I'm fine." Jungkook waves off, though he knows his friend doesn't believe him at all. The younger officer instead watches you just to make sure you're alright- always a little on edge, unsure why. He just can't shed it off.
"Jin said you two had some trouble connecting at first." Taehyung says, sitting next to him. "That you wanted to switch even. Is that.. still an issue?" He wonders, but Jungkook shakes his head.
"God no.." he chuckles a bit dryly. Absolutely no way in hell will he switch- the problem nowadays is exactly on the opposite end of the spectrum. He likes you too much- making it hard to stay professional and detached at all times.
"Hm. Well, she clearly likes you a lot." Taehyung chuckles, especially when you now visibly get too exhausted to continue playing, instead bringing the squeaking bear to the table Jungkook sits at so he can put it away later.
"Done?" Jungkook asks, and you nod, breathing heavily as he automatically offers you some water, a bottle you eagerly take after he unscrews the cap for you.
He's glad that no one questions him any further for the rest of the day, because he already knows how deep in he is. Especially when you fall asleep over his lap later that night after watching your favorite movie together, his heart breaking a little when he has to wake you up so you can get ready for bed by yourself.
But this is for the best.
The stronger the line between you two, the less it'll hurt when it'll be over.
#bts imagine#bts fanfic#bts fic#jungkook imagine#jeon jungkook x reader#jeon jungkook imagine#hybrid imagine#bts jungkook imagine#bts jungkook fanfic
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The same way that Season 2 redefined our entire understanding of Aziraphale and Crowley’s relationship? The way S2 took us from “A & C met for the first time on the wall of the Garden of Eden” to “A & C met for the first time as angels before Time began, they spent countless ages ‘talking and talking’ together, their meeting in Eden was only the first time they spoke post-Fall”…
A shift of this magnitude is what I’m expecting from S3. Something that will once again change the way we see A & C’s relationship. What was their friendship like in Heaven? How different was Crowley as an angel who started questioning God’s wisdom almost the moment he first met Aziraphale? What happened during the Great War? How exactly did Crowley Fall? What part did Aziraphale play - did he keep trying to warn Crowley about asking questions? What was their last interaction/final words to each other as angels?
I feel like Neil Gaiman MUST give us this information. Crowley’s time in, and fall from, Heaven is a huge gap in the story. With Aziraphale returning as Supreme Archangel and presumably spending more continuous time in Heaven than he has since Eden, I think this will trigger memories and we’ll get extensive flashbacks of A & C’s angel times - maybe an entire episode.
Theories? Ideas? Let’s hear ‘em. I’ll start:
I think Aziraphale came very, VERY close to Falling along with Crowley. I think, in the spectrum of:
Fall to Hell——-|——-Remain in Heaven
Crowley was barely on the left side of the line, and Aziraphale was barely on the right. I think that’s why Aziraphale is so understandably cautious and paranoid about Heaven. Contrast his behavior to Gabriel’s - we never see Gabriel doubt or worry that his feelings for Beelzebub and his cancelling of Armageddon 2 will cause him to Fall. Meanwhile Aziraphale thought that lying to the angels to save Job’s children would be enough to turn him into a demon. Even if my theory turns out to be totally wrong, I at least think we’re going to see that the Fall from Heaven was much more traumatic to both A & C then either one ever lets on.
#good omens#aziraphale#crowley#ineffable husbands#whatever happened in Heaven is going to be as shocking to the fandom#as finding out A & C have known each other for ‘millions’ of years and not just 6000
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top 5 colors, top 5 song lyrics, OR top 5 cooking utensils. or all of the above if you dare >:3
💪😤💪
Favourite colours:
1. Green. Green is my absolute favourite colour spectrum, and I especially lean into shades of jade, olive and moss.
2. Purple. Another strong contender! I like somewhat muted jewel tones of purple - aubergine, lavender, amethyst
3. Teal and turquoise, especially the deeper tones.
4. Graphite greys and blacks. Shades that are both objectively pretty and that I like to wear.
5. Hnnngh, how can I choose... I like muted chocolate browns, like dark stained wood. Rust is pretty, as are gold and silver as contrast colours... but if I can only pick one, I think I'll go with blue, especially smokey, muted mid-range blues.
Colours is one of those things my autistic brain is very attuned to. I am very aware of all colours around me, and colour is always a very important variable in choosing one thing over another.
Favourite song lyrics:
1. Hurts, Emili Sande
It hurts the way that you pretend you don't remember
It hurts the way that you forget our times together
Like the time laid in bed when you said it's forever, baby
I can't, I can't explain no more
Baby, I'm not made of stone, it hurts
Loving you the way I do, it hurts
When all that's left to do is watch it burn
Oh baby, I'm not made of stone, it hurts
(Straight up the lyrics that inspired those scenes in Heaven)
2. A Beautiful Lie, Thirty Seconds To Mars
It's time to forget about the past
To wash away what happened last
Hide behind an empty face
Don't ask too much just say
Cause this is just a game
It's a beautiful lie
It's a perfect denial
Such a beautiful lie to believe in
So beautiful, beautiful, it makes me
(A very Xue Yang in Yi City song to me)
3. Damaged People, Depeche Mode
We're damaged people, drawn together
By subtleties that we are not aware of
Disturbed souls, playing out forever
These games that we once thought we would be scared of
When you're in my arms
The world makes sense
There is no pretense
And you're crying
When you're by my side
There is no defense
I forget to sense
I'm dying
(This has been on so many character/ship playlists...)
4. Illusion, VNV Nation
A part of your soul ties you to the next world
Or maybe to the last, but I'm still not sure
But what I do know, is to us the world is different
As we are to the world but I guess you would know that
Please don't go, I want you to stay
I'm begging you please, please don't leave here
I don't want you to hate for all the hurt that you feel
The world is just illusion trying to change you
(Love this both for characters and myself)
5. Dawn, Poets Of The Fall
When darkness is no less than everything you've built become undone
There's no fight and no flight, disaster leaves your passion overrun
It's time to let go, it's time to carry on with the show
Don't mourn what is gone, greet the dawn
And I will be standing by your side
Together we'll face the turning tide
Remembrance, can be a sentence, but it comes to you with a second chance in tow
Don't lose it, don't refuse it, 'cause you cannot learn a thing you think you know
A new light is warm, shining down on you after the storm
Don't mourn what is gone, greet the dawn
(One of my absolute favourite songs. Another I love both for myself and so many characters)
Music more for the blorbos than me, maybe? But these are songs that I like a lot. Though actually, the vast majority of the music on my playlists is actually either instrumental or in languages I don't speak? Sometimes, especially when writing, lyrics can be too distracting. But I do have some workhorses that have been on many a blorbo playlist, and many of the above songs certainly qualify. 😂
Top Cooking utensils:
1. Tea ball thingies. Most of our tea is loose leaf, so you need a tea strainer to steep the tea. We have a bouquet of a dozen or so in a little vase over the kettle, and I use them daily.
2. Cooking pliers? I guess? I use those just about every time I need to fry something, to be able to both poke and flip even small bits and pieces. (they're plastic, they don't scratch the pan!)
3. Pasta ladle. We have a very pretty one shaped like a green leaf! (Remember how I said green's my favourite colour? Luckily it's wife's, too, so a lot of our china and kitchen utensils are green! In fact, the pliers above are green, too!)
4. Wooden fork spatula. The other go-to for frying things, when you need to stir stuff about.
5. Wait, does the electric kettle count? Because I absolutely use that daily too! Heating water both for tea and for ramen and similar.
Hah, did them all! Thank you for playing! 😂
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Kim Hongjoong : Angels And Demons
Pairing : Kim Hongjoong (Ateez) and named character (Helena Ford)
______________
A/n : suddenly got some inspiration??
_______________
Helena looked down at the families that were laughing at each other's jokes and eating food from their picnic baskets, clearly in their own worlds. They were all supernatural creatures, warriors, who hunt down demons and killed them, protecting the humans who knew nothing about demons and other supernatural beings. But even they had families, even they had people who loved them. People of their own kind.
While helena didn't. but that, she supposed, she could give to the fact that she was Lucifer's daughter. The fallen archangel people were usually afraid of. She wasn't supposed to be walking on Earth, let alone stare at a bunch of familes that were comprised of people who were born to kill people like her. Maybe not her, but demons that usually worked under the commands of other higher demons like helena, and her father.
Helena's ears perked up as she realized someone was climbing up the hill she was standing on right now, a someone she needed to avoid. But before she could so much as turn around, the someone was already standing right in front of her, his brown curious eyes staring into her violet ones.
??? : you have purple eyes.
Helena : violet.
??? : isn't that exactly what I said?
Helena : violet is a true color, part of the natural spectrum of light. Purple isn't.
??? : so, what, you're a light-enthusiast who can see people you aren't really supposed to even know about?
Oh, right. The Families, bore marks on their bodies that differentiated them from other humans, so these warriors were usually unseen by normal humans. And helena bore none of those Marks. Once again, because she was Lucifer's daughter and descended straight from Hell. So of course, the someone would certainly assume she wasn't one of the supernatural.
Helena : I'm not a normal human.
??? : you mean you're not a mundane.
Helena : yes. So scurry about and just have fun with your little picnics, warrior.
??? : you make me sound less like a warrior and more like a little rat, miss. What is your name, by the way?
Helena : you need not know.
??? : let's strike a deal then. You tell me your name, and I tell you mine.
Helena : I never wanted to know your-
??? : Kim Hongjoong. Now tell me yours.
Helena : oh. So you're the son of the infamous Kim Family, then.
Hongjoong : infamous? We're famous for good reasons, just as I am.
Except in hell they weren't. If they were known for good reasons on Earth and among angels, then they would definitely be considered infamous in hell. Except hongjoong wasn't supposed to know that.
Hongjoong : I thought you'd recognize me just by seeing me, but apparently not. Are you not from here?
Of course he would expect helena to know him. He was hongjoong, he was known to have slain a demon ranked just right below the higher ones at the mere age of 20, which had been 4 years ago. Everyone in hell and heaven knew him.
Helena : my name is Helena.
The Families knew lucifer's daughter, they knew lucifer had had a half-demon, half-warrior, half-faerie daughter with a lady residing on Earth. Except the families knew her as Normani, the one who bore the Necrosword, not Helena.
Hongjoong : helena what?
Oh, shit. She had to make up a last name. not hard.
Helena : ford. Helena Ford.
Hongjoong blinked his eyes in confusion, one that helena had expected.
Hongjoong : you're a descendant of…Maria Ford?
No, she was her daughter.
Helena : Maria was only one of the 5 other children of Henry Ford. And we do not accept her as family anymore. She is long dead.
Hongjoong : aren't you supposed to be in Italy, then? What are you doing in Korea?
Helena : I escaped from my family.
Helena supposed that was half-true.
Hongjoong : and crossed an entire continent by yourself?
She portal-ed herself here.
Helena : always this curious?
Hongjoong : yes, if you noticed.
??? : KIM HONGJOONG!
Hongjoong's eyes widened as he realized his bestfriend was screaming for him, a bestfriend who would probably tell the entire world about this strange lady in front of him. And so he turned to helena, saying quickly
Hongjoong : stay…right here or hide behind that tree. I'll be back within a few minutes.
Hongjoong didn't wait to hear what helena had to say and ran down the hill, rushing towards his bestfriend with a convincing smile on his face.
Hongjoong : Hi! So…where was I? ah yes, the girls being all over me the other day-
Seonghwa : joong, where the hell were you?
Hongjoong : what, can a man not do his things in private?
Seonghwa : ugh, joong-ah! There's…bathrooms.
Hongjoong : it's 1910, the bathrooms are not yet developed to handle me yet.
Seonghwa made a disgusted face and was about to say something when hongjoong chuckled and led him forward hastily, hoping he wouldn't notice hongjoong's lies. Because he needed to go back to the lady up the hill.
Except when he did go back to find her, she was nowhere to be found. But hongjoong had not seen anyone creep down the hill at any time within the hour. So if not by climbing down the hill, how the hell did she get out of there?
________________________
A week later :
Hongjoong had just stepped out of his room for a midnight snack when seonghwa rushed right into him. Something was wrong.
Hongjoong : okay hwa, what the hell.
Seonghwa : oh god, you're awake. There's been a demon attack.
Hongjoong wasn't on night duty today. And so he yawned, rubbing his eye as he said
Hongjoong : there's demon attacks every day, what's so special today?
Seonghwa : this one's happening at the graveyard.
Hongjoong's eyes slightly widened as he looked at seonghwa in confusion
Hongjoong : wait, our graveyard? The one where-
Seonghwa : our ancestors are buried yes, hongjoong please. Come along with me, right now.
Hongjoong nodded as the both of them walked towards the meeting room in the Institute, which was where hongjoong and his parents lived. It was the center for all the Families living in Korea. And the Kim's were it's heads, which was why they ran and resided in the Institute.
Seonghwa opened the door to the meeting room as the both of them entered, the discussions that were going on between the other people in the room immediately ceasing at the sight of seonghwa and hongjoong.
San : finally, you're here. Couldn't you get up a bit earlier when the emergency alarm rang, hongjoong?
Hongjoong : I needed my beauty sleep-
Seonghwa : can we not joke and get into the matter?
San sighed and nodded, walking over to the table as seonghwa gave hongjoong the look that he already knew well by now. Hongjoong and seonghwa were warrior partners, they were two people who balanced each other out completely. Both in battle, and in real life. Hongjoong was the sarcastic one, always getting himself in trouble. And seonghwa was the more serious one, who bailed hongjoong out of trouble. The classic.
San : this demon attack, we do not know why it's happening right now, like this. Especially in the graveyard, because it's supposed to be protected from demons. Warded against it.
Yeosang : there have been no casualties as of now, as the mundanes haven't really woken up yet-
Hongjoong : yes it's only 3am, give them a break, yeosang-ah.
Seonghwa : hongjoong.
Hongjoong threw his hands up in the air, letting out a breath before sitting back on a chair.
Seonghwa : we need to understand why this is happening. Hongjoong and I will go.
Hongjoong : and what ever of my consent?
Seonghwa : you're my partner, if I agree, you do too. Do we have a warrant, then?
Seonghwa looked at the others in the room, waiting for approval. The people in the room nodded, making san sigh as he stamped the seal of consent onto a piece of paper before handing it to seonghwa. Hongjoong sighed, getting up from his seat as he said, sarcasm lacing his tone
Hongjoong : well then, partner, shall we slay some demons to start the day off on a bright note?
________________________
Hongjoong : seonghwa! Throw me my axe, will you?
Seonghwa slashed his blade across a demon and threw the axe that had been earlier stuck on a tree trunk back to hongjoong, making him catch it as he buried it right onto another demon's chest. It stepped away from hongjoong, spasming before vanishing into plain air.
Hongjoong : did those bastards send us on a death mission?
Seonghwa chuckled before kicking a demon away from him, turning to face another one as he said
Seonghwa : don't flatter them like that, joong. We both know they all want you dead so they could acquire the power you would get from your parents once of age.
Hongjoong : you're the one who proposed this bullshit of an idea, hwa!
Hongjoong threw his axe at a demon that was right behind seonghwa before sliding up to it, taking a hold of his axe before pulling it away from the dead demon's body.
Seonghwa : I want them to know you're not going to die so easily.
Hongjoong : well! Now I think you're going to prove them just right. We're bloody outnumbered.
Seonghwa : you're literally the slayer of Basilius. Stop talking nonsense.
Hongjoong : Basilius was killed one-on-one! I didn't have to kill an entire graveyard of demons while fighting him.
Seonghwa : you did have to kill a graveyard of them before fighting Basilius anyway.
Hongjoong groaned as he killed yet another demon, it's ichor falling right onto his gear.
Hongjoong : it was a garden.
Seonghwa chuckled, using his mini blade to slash through the neck of a demon. But what he didn't realize was that hongjoong was stepping farther away from him after each kill of his, unknowingly. There were too many demons for either of them to notice.
And when hongjoong finally had noticed, seonghwa was nowhere to be seen. Instead hongjoong was now fighting a few other demons in the forest right next to the graveyard, the Mark that allowed him to see clearly in the dark coming to his advantage. But it wasn't for long, because soon enough hongjoong had tripped over a stone on the floor, falling on the floor as his axe fell away from him. Hongjoong reached for his weapons belt, hoping to take out a blade. But there were too many demons near to him, there was no way he could do any of that in time.
Before he could process things, three arrows flew straight past him, each arrow thrusting into the chest of three demons that were right in front of hongjoong. Hongjoong looked behind him with widened eyes as it landed on a figure of lady that was now running at a fast pace towards hongjoong, all while shooting arrows straight at the demons. Damn, she had good aim.
She threw her bow away as she had exhausted her arrows, leaning down and picking up hongjoong's axe before starting to fight the nearby demons with it. And she was swift in her moves, faster than any other warrior hongjoong had seen, and killed all the demons near to him within seconds.
The lady turned around as she threw the axe back at hongjoong, her face finally coming into hongjoong's sight.
Hongjoong : helena.
Hongjoong caught his axe from the air, flipping himself over as he slashed a demon right across it's waist, making it vanish. And soon they were both fighting together, killing demons quicker than ever. At least, helena was. Hongjoong was half killing the demons, half awing at how good helena was at fighting. She was definitely a Ford, it was evident in her moves.
But soon enough, hongjoong noticed in shock, the demons were retreating away from them, away from helena.
Hongjoong : what-
Hongjoong cut himself off as a mini blade flew right through his side, crashing into the arm of a demon right behind him as it died with the blade. The ichor splashed against hongjoong's cheek, making him stare at helena as she said
Helena : focus, warrior.
Hongjoong let out a breath and pulled a demon away from helena, kicking it away before stabbing his axe right into his chest. And that was the last of them, the rest of the demons had just vanished, back to where it came from.
Hongjoong breathed heavily as he stared at helena, who was now wiping the ichor away from her blade nonchalantly.
Hongjoong : who are you.
Helena : do you people have short-term memory loss? I told you-
Helena cut herself off as hongjoong walked up to her, taking his axe before slicing through helena's arm. Helena frowned, looking at hongjoong with furious eyes.
Helena : how dare you-
Hongjoong : I thought so.
Helena stared at hongjoong who was watching the earlier cut on her arm fade away in amusement, the skin repairing itself.
Helena : what are you doing?
Hongjoong : you're not from here at all, are you-
Helena : I am a Ford, I told you. We have special powers.
Hongjoong : what, Lucifer gave all members of your blood the power to heal from any cut almost instantly?
Again, helena supposed that was half true. Lucifer did give helena the power to heal from her cuts almost instantly. The Fords did not really have it. But how would hongjoong know?
Helena : yes, after he took Maria Ford as his wife.
Hongjoong stared at helena in half-scrutiny, contemplating on whether to trust this lady. But she had saved his life after all, hadn't she?
Hongjoong : fine, then so be it. But that does not excuse the fact that you ran away from me. From the hill, that day-
Seonghwa : yah! You betrayer!
Hongjoong shut his eyes tightly as he turned to face seonghwa who was now walking towards hongjoong, a cut on his arm and another on his temple.
Seonghwa : those creatures literally vanishe-
Seonghwa cut himself off as his eyes landed on helena, who just stared at seonghwa. Hongjoong walked towards seonghwa, inspecting his best friend's cuts with worried eyes. The warriors did have something like what helena had, they healed from their cuts too. Although not instantly, it took them a day at maximum. A few minutes being the minimum.
Hongjoong : these will heal soon. Thank god.
Seonghwa : joong, who is she?
Hongjoong : oh! Meet Helena Ford, from the family who holds powers that allow them to heal their cuts almost instantly.
Seonghwa eyed helena with suspicion as he asked
Seonghwa : the Fords can heal their own cuts like that?
Helena : have you met any Ford?
Seonghwa : no.
Helena : then don't ask stupid questions.
Seonghwa : I don't like you.
Helena : lucky for us, I don't like you either.
Seonghwa : I-
Hongjoong : okay! Don't be toddlers now.
Helena : I am not a toddler.
Hongjoong : then don't act like one, simple enough.
Helena opened her mouth to say something but was cut off as hongjoong tapped seonghwa's arm and said
Hongjoong : let's go back to the institute.
Seonghwa : but hongjoong, those demons, they retreated-
Hongjoong : we'll talk about those once we reach the institute, alright? It's dark outside and there can be other dangers. Let's go back.
Seonghwa sighed and nodded, giving helena one last look before turning back to go to their carriage. Hongjoong turned to face helena, her purple…violet eyes almost glowing in the dark. She wasn't normal, hongjoong knew that.
Hongjoong : come with us?
Helena : you literally cut through my arm, you expect me to trust you now?
Hongjoong looked away and walked towards helena, lifting the blade that was still held tight in her hand before slicing his own arm with it, making helena stare as blood dripped down his arm.
Hongjoong : equal now?
Helena : so you're sick in the brain.
Hongjoong : I'm a warrior, an eye for an eye, is how it works for us.
Hongjoong turned around and walked towards the same direction seonghwa had walked through, his axe dangling loosely in his hand as he said in a sing-song manner
Hongjoong : come with me, little demon. I hear the Fords love a good tea.
____________________
#kim hongjoong#hongjoong#ateez hongjoong#hongjoong ff#hongjoong angst#hongjoong fluff#ateez ff#ateez angst#ateez fluff#kpop ff#kpop angst#kpop fluff#angst#hongjoong x reader#hongjoong imagines
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the only thing to say when
somebody tells you that
you’ve changed is:
“Thank you.”
over the past couple years
people have told me that they
miss the old me
~ the funny me
the less-serious poet me
~ the safe me
the ambitious me
~ the life-of-the-party me
the “easy to be around” me
I try to explain to them
that lately my favorite places
have become thresholds
I have about four new beginnings a week
I’ll try doing this and then
~ I’ll try being that and then
I’ll try this on and then
~ I’ll try a taste of that
I may write a poem today
I’ll take some photos tomorrow
and maybe I’ll tell some
jokes on stage next week
and a decade from
now I’ll be a painting sunflowers
and each thing will be the most
important thing I’ve ever done
I’m in perpetual state of transition
I keep leaving home
as who I was and
returning as who I
need to be next
~ it’s all such a skin-shedding
adventure of fresh starts and
unlimited resurrections
I don’t want to be the exact same
person that I was when you
last saw me yesterday
too much has happened since then;
I’ve seen too much beauty
I’ve cried too many tears
I’ve sat with too many ghosts
I’ve put my toes in too many rivers
I’ve had my heart broken too many times
I’ve felt too many kisses
I’ve heard the divine singing to me from too many treetops to not be transformed
I once met angel that was sunbathing
naked in a garden who told me that
heaven looks exactly like a thick thunderhead draping itself over a Rocky Mountain valley
heaven is always billowing
heaven is ever rolling
heaven is constantly churning
heaven is relentlessly changing forms
heaven is a endless rumble
heaven never looks the same
from one day to the next
heaven is constantly being reshaped by the hands of the great potter
because
it turns out that grace is a
whirling spectrum of colors
and heaven has to keep
changing its form in
order to keep up with it
heaven transforms
its camouflage of miracles
and magic every morning
and if that’s good
enough for heaven
then it’s good enough for me
there is so much creation
taking place around us
for us not too join in
on the fun
so many new opportunities
so many new people
so many galaxies being formed
so much ancient beauty being rediscovered
with all of that going on
how can we have a new
beginning every single
time we breathe?
I believe epiphanies aren’t
meant to randomly drip
like a broken faucet
they’re meant to flood
like a creating river
when somebody
accuses you of changing
take it as a compliment
and wonder
why they haven’t
if a nebula can be given
permission to change forms
so can you
besides ~ and
this is VERY important:
maybe we aren’t
changing anyway
maybe we are just becoming
who we were born to be
in the first place?
maybe we were born
to keep unfolding
like an endless map
and one last thing, my love,
don’t let any your seasons
become permanent
let them all pass through you
bloom red
change
bloom green
change
bloom rainbows
embrace each
one as the wonder
that they are
our souls are
made of moving
holy water
with bits of sunlight in it
we are all glowing ripples
passing through time
reflecting light off the surface
don’t fret, my love,
heaven is required to
reinvent itself daily
as are we
as are we
as are we
and I can’t wait to
see how beautiful
you look the next
time I see you
radiating like
cathedral stained glass
under the glow of your
raw ever-changing
and unashamed
authenticity
~ john roedel
(wondrous art by the incredible Kat Shaw Artist )
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January 2023 Angel Fish Awards
(Angel Fish design by @slytherkins!!)
WELCOME TO THIS MONTH’S ANGEL FISH AWARDS!
Every month all of you fantastic writers work your asses off to post some truly incredible stories. Our Angel Fish Awards are the way for all of us, as a community of writers and readers, to lift each other up and give praise to those who have captured our attention and deserve a few kind words.
The monthly Angel Fish Awards are peer-nominated, meaning ANYONE (you don’t have to be a member) CAN NOMINATE ANY POND MEMBER’S FIC. Everyone in this community deserves to be showered with love and feedback, and we hope that this fun, thoughtful award will do just that.
Be sure to read through this whole post as people who were nominated more than once only had one tag activated for Tumblr tagging purposes!
WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, HERE ARE THIS MONTH’S ANGEL FISH AWARDS!
Nominated by @rauko-is-a-free-elf
To Love And To Hold by @glygriffe
This whole thing is just so cute. I think my favorite part is how ye great and powerful eldritch angel of the lord Cas is so cute and adorable that both brothers are hopeless against it. Sam moves quickly from "we can't keep it" to "well maybe if we can't find an owner," and Dean goes almost immediately from "hell no I'm allergic" to "dammit Sam pick up some Allegra I guess." 😆💚
~*~*~
Nominated by @glygriffe
Hate or Love by @rauko-creates
I love the poetry of this piece. It's poignant and have a depth that I can't quite grasp, but it's beautiful none the less.
Not Alone by @mrswhozeewhatsis
A sweet little fic set during the COVID-19 pandemic, featuring Sam x Reader. It's full of fluff and I like the type of narration, the author's voice in this fic. It makes me feel... grounded in the story, immerse in the universe.
~*~*~
Nominated by @mariekoukie6661
Under The Mistletoe by @katbratsupernaturalwhore
This was very cute!!!
~*~*~
Nominated by @mrswhozeewhatsis
...And Then There Were Three (series) by @thoughtslikeaminefield
It's been a heck of a long time since I've really read smut without just skimming through it for the vital details. This series? I read every word. So freaking hot!! Both brothers? YES, PLEASE!!!!
Just Like Heaven by @redmyeyes
On the Destiel to Wincest spectrum, I definitely lean towards Destiel, but I do love an occasional Wincest fic, if it's got the right feel to it. This fic right here? It's got it. The angst. The brotherly way of communicating without talking. The brotherly way of doing something gross as a way of saying, "I love you." (It's so gross. But so brotherly.) This right here is the Goldilocks of Wincest fics for me!
Smoking Spirits on the Roof by @stusbunker
And now I'm off to the other end of the spectrum with a Destiel rec! This is a sweet (and smutty) college AU that explores a little bit of the paradox of being queer and having religious faith and an uber-religious family. It doesn't go too deep, so it's not a slog, it's just right for some light reading!
~*~*~
Nominated by @princessmisery666
Rainy Days and Mondays by @kellyn1604
OMG 😱 those last three sentence’s literally made me teary eyed 😢 a smidge of angst but all the fluffiness and it was beautiful 🤩
THANK YOU ALL FOR THE AWESOME WORK AND GREAT FEEDBACK!
These are not actual awards, as in, there is no competition! This system is set up so everyone has a chance to share the love and promote a fic/author in the Pond that has grabbed your attention. The more people that participate, the better this will be :D
THANK YOU ALL AGAIN, KEEP UP THE AMAZING WORK, AND AS ALWAYS, HAPPY WRITING!
#angel fish awards#angel fish awards masterlist#spnfanficpond#fan fiction#fanfiction#fan fic#fanfic#spn fan fiction#spn fanfiction#spn fan fic#spn fanfic#supernatural fan fiction#supernatural fan fic#supernatural fanfiction#supernatural fanfic#fic rec#spn fic rec#supernatural fic rec
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How do you think a deeply religious people that knew their religion was 100% true, would react to living in a world post their equivelant of ragnarok? Where they saw with their own eyes their gods die, and it was common knowledge that heaven literarily burnt, hell no longer exist, and seemingly there is no divine forces left in existence, and there are no answers to where people go after they die anymore?
Of course im asking this from a writing perspective, as im planning on having one half of a cultural union having gone through this exact scenario.
As someone with several religion fanatics in the extended family, those people would be completely unfazed. Clearly, this was a trick by the devil to convince you that he doesn't exist anymore. There is nothing you could do to convince them, even if you produce the bodies. They've grown up with quotes from their own Savior about how they're supposed to live their lives, but they do the opposite, and when called out on it, they'll say that you're misinterpreting it. Being handed a dead angel won't even make them blink. If anything, they'll simply be empowered by proof of the supernatural.
Of course, that's the fanatics, but I think that establishes a helpful extreme point in what's going to be a spectrum. Some people will lose their faith and figure they have nothing left, lashing out in destructive (including self-destructive) ways. Others will choose to carry on, feeling that the principles were what mattered, not the divine reward/punishment. Many will probably organize around a post-Ragnarok religion, maybe going with one of those death/rebirth cycles that are so popular, dashed with a touch of some prophecy. After all, I'm sure someone somewhere said something that could be interpreted as a prophecy about what comes after the end times. In fact, I'd be surprised if there wasn't something blatant and they had to retcon someone's words about something else.
Religion is like comic books. It just rebooots, relaunches, puts your favorite in a new costume, and repeats the most popular story beats from the last iteration. The worst that can happen to it is that the audience migrates to cooler stuff from a different country, and the cycle starts all over again, praise be to Wotan and Goku.
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Sorry, I didn't intend for the use of MLM to be confusing.
Think I'm almost out of questions though so uuuuh this may be the last time I'm in here for a minute 😔
So, how old are demons/how long have demons been around? Older than humankind? Older than the Earth? Older than the Universe?
Do they have a separate world they chill in or is it just Earth? Does demons imply a Hell of some sort and would that also have to imply a sort of Heaven?? ( I don't think so necessarily, but you never know...)
Are demons the only umbrella type of monster or are there others? Or is any other supernatural-ish creature would just be under the 'monster/demon' spectrum?
Oh dude you definitely didn't make that confusing at all, I was kinda being facetious about how funny it is to read "multilevel marketing" as "men loving men". You're totally good lol!
We're getting into Deep Lore here and things are a lot foggier but I'll do my best to answer!
Demon age as a group/society is totally up in the air, they're probably older than humankind but specifics are unknown, at least at this stage.
in my head, there's like the Normal World where humans do human stuff and there's the Supernatural World where everything else hangs out. I guess ostensibly it would be like a whole separate dimension kinda but I also like the idea of both areas being tied together in certain ways. Maybe they share a lot of physical features, maybe populations kinda congregate in the same patterns. That kinda stuff. Like a reflection of each other. Different but in some ways one and the same? So no real separate heaven or hell, just mundane and not.
I think for now I'm gonna say that 'demon' sort of covers any real supernatural-ish kind of creature, though there's nothing stopping someone from seeing some big winged creature and calling it an angel, if you know what I mean. But just as a world building/organizational rule 'demon' would just be the most common word used for supernaturalish things though if the story breaks into a more demon-focused perspective somewhere down the line, we might discover that they have other ways to organize things.
Thanks for sending all these asks, some of them have been a challenge to answer but it's been fun trying to organize some of the far reaching worldlore that hasn't had a chance to show up in narrative for tcm. Please come back with more if you have them!
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Ice Pond Thou Art, to Ice Pond Returneth: Let's Finish(?) Tears of the Kingdom
We're finishing the plot, anyway. All of the spoilers!
Sidequest clean-up time! I am getting up to such antics
Monster decorations: check
Freezing my tits off in the desert while holding up a giant mirror: check
House? check!
I'm sorry but I am literally 12 years old right now:
I wasn't going to chase after dragon!Zelda just yet but she appeared literally right in front of me so I figured I might as well hitch a ride on her and make Link sad.
Da-da-da-daaaa in a minor key:
For some reason I'd been assuming I couldn't dye my sexy thunder shawl but nope! What lovely news for me and fashion aficionados everywhere!
Puzzling with the Boner Squad
I'M STILL 12
A lot of people just come out around me! It's a gift.
Sure do!
Truly, no one can resist my charms.
Bitch I DELVED:
I know I said collecting all the bubbul gems would be my Cruella de Vil origin story, so call me Emma Stone because I have lost my entire goddamn mind. Fewer than 20 remain and Koltin is no longer offering me hints for some reason? Whatever, I'm not doing it for him anymore. I'm doing it for ME.
I have looked up a map of caves and I WILL spelunk each one, mark my words
Oh right we got some caves in the GODDAMN SKY, WHERE CAVES DON'T BELONG
I'm fine I'm fine
One more and the eye strain ends. Squinting from the map on my laptop to the in-game map on my TV. Oho, Death Mountain, I see you now!
FUCKEN GOT EM
Shine on, you crazy diamond bubbul gem. Maybe someday I'll smack you around for rupees. Until then, I will think of you and your completionist nightmare sidequest every time I glide through the air with my fancy new paraglider pattern.
Okay I can finish the plot now
I am doing this final stretch of mini-dungeon the way the goddess intended: by throwing down my traveler's medallion and popping back for more sundelion dishes before getting back to it.
At long last I have killed a lionel, and I started with a gloom lionel because why not. Bitch was in my way.
Me when the sun rises before 7:00am:
Let's see how many Ganon phases we get! Dueling Ganon. Big Hair Boner Squad Ganon. Big Hair One-on-One Ganon. Ganon Become Dragon.
Why does everyone but Link get to scarf down a tasty magatama treat? UNFAIR
At least I look good thrashing around between Ganon's giant dragon teeth:
Took me a second to realize what I was meant to be doing but this was a pleasantly cinematic fight phase with lots of catching little rides on Zelda's big fuzzy dragon head.
Game removed my good hat >:( but also removed my shirt :) so I feel like we're half on the same page.
Guess we're not getting an ending where Link joins Zelda on an eternal draconic frolic, which on the one hand, yes, my girl deserves a happy ending, but on the other, "dragon" is a whole new gender spectrum Link should get to explore.
Game ALSO removed my cool arm. :< Now how am I gonna remodel my house?
Grabbing Zelda as she falls would be a lot easier with Ultrahand, just sayin
At this point, is Zelda, like Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide, older than the universe itself? My girl's been through it
My robot girlfriend is moving on to robot girlfriend heaven. This too is yuri.
And I am moving on to fucking around endlessly, but first, there's only one way I can end this, right?
Back to the ice pond, baby. I made myself a little blue cultist outfit and everything:
That's all, folks!
#stealthnoodle plays loz: tears of the kingdom#tears of the kingdom#totk spoilers#video#apologies to florence + that machine of hers#what a good game#my dreams will be haunted indefinitely by bubbul gems in hard to reach places#no i have still not figured out the actual purpose of the ice pond#no i will not look it up#yes i will probably throw myself into it again
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@bcbliophile
The glitter in the sky looks as if someone could scoop it all up in their hands and let the stars swirl and touch one another but they are so distant so very far apart that they cannot feel the warmth of each other even though they are made of burning. Maybe the secret of the stars has nothing to do with being alone.True love is usually the most inconvenient kind. Alicent was not the world, but she was everything that makes the world good. Without her, Rhaenyra’s life would still exist, but that's all it would manage to do.Hard as she tries, the melody of their meeting runs through her mind on an endless loop, each time as surprisingly sweet as the last, like a lullaby, like a hymn, and she doesn't think she could ever get tired of hearing it.One day the girl would fall asleep in her arms every night. And wake up to her kisses every morning. Sometimes she felt like they were a knot, too tangled to be taken apart.Love without choice isn't love at all. What is in our hearts is real whether we name it or let it exist only in darkness or silence. There are so many worse things than death. Not to be loved or not to be able to love: that is worse. She the only stable thing in the swirling chaos. There is only him and me and this thing between us that I cannot name, not out loud, but that my heart knows is love. Survival isn't wrong. You can sell your honor in small ways, so long as you guard yourself. you can pour a glass of wine like it's meant to be poured, and watch a man drink, and plot your revenge. it felt as if he’d been dreaming. As if dreams and memories and lies were the same thing. Waiting. Not waiting. One lover. A hundred lovers. There should be no judgement either way. A woman is not defined by what she does or doesn‘t do in the bedroom. The Targaryen heir live on the cusp of two worlds, trying desperately to fit into one. The rebel in her loves to throw dirt in the face of decorum. She loved the feeling of doing something bold enough to make her future hold its breath while she closed her eyes and reveled in the sensation that she’d made a choice with the power to alter the course of her life.Aren't we all drawn to friends in the beginning by trifling things? True bonds develop afterward, when character is revealed. A woman should not be defined about what she does or does not do in the bedroom. The soft brush of Alicent’s auburn locks felt like butterfly kisses against her skin. A late night giggling under candlelight as the shadow of safe darkness sounded like heaven to her. Two fathers on opposite spectrums creating problems for their lovesick daughters by proxy. A contentedly dramatic sigh left her lips as the other woman continued with her book like the minx she was. The princess wasn’t completely certain that she could fully see the pages. Ivory fingers drew gentle circles along the lines of her lover’s calf. Languid and reverent. There are some things you don't learn about yourself until you let someone else into the most intimate places of your heart. “I love you beyond paint, beyond melodies, beyond words. And I hope you will always feel that, even when I'm not around to tell you so. Though you do have a strange way of telling me that you are attracted to me.”
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Soul anon back. Next question: "If souls represent free will, why are soulless people generally more impulsive? Does impulsivity represent God’s will on humanity?"
I actually don't know the answer to this! I tend to struggle with free will questions, as they become more philosophical whereas I'm more into psychology and spirituality. Your last question is extremely interesting!
I would propose that without the ethical side, the soul, the impulsive side of the person is free to do whatever they want without being held back by ethics or sentimentality (Castiel called it a "dangerous empathetic response" which it very much can be).
In a human being, this is called the "id" in psychology, - I think it's a part of both our souls and minds. In Angels, it's ruthlessness but not cruelty- Jack sending the snake to Heaven, Castiel grabbing that child's soul or destroying a town for the greater good. It's logic. In real Castiel lore, he's impulsive, killing a spirit or soul before they even finished talking, because they had confused him a bit and he wanted to keep God safe from them.
The “dangerous empathetic response” bit is particularly interesting here as souls are generally classified as decreasing empathy rather than relying on it…I guess it would depend on if impulsivity and empathy are on separate ends of the spectrum or not.
With the Jack point, he’s also half human, so I wonder which approach would work better for him in terms of how his soul works( human side or angel side). He clearly has one (as he loses it) but maybe all it does it make him act like the angels version of himself. Maybe the soul IS his human side.
With Cas, it’s also interesting that the whole Godstiel thing was actually the exact opposite of soullessness: he took in too many souls, which affected him in the same way taking out a singular soul affects humanity. Idk if there’s a point there, it was just something i noticed
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Scrimblo AU plot summary under the cut bc I haven't actually shared much of what it's abt.
To start off;
Alternates are called 'Spoopy/Spooky Ghosts' by humans and they don't care whether they're called that or alternates.
Mork=Mark, Chaser=Cesar, Juice=Jonah, Apple=Adam, K=N, Imposter=Intruder, Six-nine=Six/TV Intruder, Dab-riel=Gabriel.
Last names do not exist solely bc I do not want them to, if people are called the same thing too bad.
Imposter and Six-nine are two different characters.
Most humans switch between "tolk liek dis" and "talk like this" just because. Alternates only "talk like this" however.
Now more into the lore;
Alternates have two forms, human and "real"(the scary things). Being in a human form takes energy(they have limited), so alternates usually can only hold one for so long. They also can't sleep (they more energize through just not doing too much) and eat (they have no need since they automatically regain energy).
Almost everybody except Imposter is short, adults+most alternates(including Dab-riel) are at 3', children are 1-2', Imposter is 6'. Sometimes alternates can shift their form to be taller though.
Dab-riel is basically the Devil instead of Antichrist, in his own way. Basically, Dab-riel was an angel who was disgraced after getting greedy and starting to visit Earth without permission and do things like kill whole species just to see what would happen to God's kingdom. After God found out, Dab-riel was cast out, retaining his wings, however they didn't work since he could no longer go back to Heaven. So, out of vengence, he decided to try to become the new God, messing with his plans for Mary and Noah.
Through Noah, he tried to create something, his first alternate, it was a mess but Dab-riel loved it anyways, letting it go rabid like a dog on Noah, watching lovingly as it did. Through that, it tried to create more and more, getting better and better at creating these things, now making them almost identical to humans.
One of these was Imposter, being one of the first steps to making successful doppelgangers, another was Six-nine who could only really be seen on certain wavelengths/spectrums but was so close to being a doppelganger, and then there's K, the first successful doppelganger who could change its form to fit any human's.
Dab-riel, wanting to become the new God, decided the first step was to turn God's followers against him, making alternates for this reason and this reason alone: Find humans, scare them into acceptance of him, if not, kill them off. All were assigned specifically to their own human(s), some got to have exactly one person, others multiple, and a select few got to have an specific large amount/group.
Imposter was assigned to multiple people, mostly young children like Mork. Sex-nine was assigned a large group, children who watched the TV.
K was one of the ones assigned to a specific person, this person being Chaser himself. After getting into his home, he scared Chaser in his kitchen late at night while he had a knife, and while trying to run, Chaser tripped and stabbed himself in the eye and the brain, killing him.
Chaser was visiting his moms' house during that time, and hearing the noise, she tried to investigate the noise, K panicking because he wasn't supposed to try to scare Chaser's mom or any other person, only Chaser, so it's not like he could kill her or anything without maybe some consequences. So, K morphed quickly into Chaser with a suit, the fastest to copy, and hid Chaser's body as his mom came in, disguising its voice as Chaser's.
After that, K buried Chaser in his mom home's backyard, and tried to pass off as Chaser for the time being, kinda getting comfortable with the form and also how Chaser's mom treated him better than Dab-riel might. During the day he was Chaser, and the night he was K, and Chaser's mom might've accidentally walked in on him once at night and got too scared and. Possibly died, but he can't tell.
So, he calls up Mork, remembering Chaser and him were roommates and finding his phone number through a contact list Chaser's mom had right by the phone and asked him if maybe he could turn on the cameras so Chaser's mom doesn't get robbed while he tried to "drive"(truth is he can turn into a car, I think all alternates can do this bc of scrimblo, fuck you) "his" mom to the hospital. Mork agreed.
Mork did so, but then whoops, his car got switched put by an alternate sent specifically to scare him, let's just call it "M", and it crashed his car, thinking it had killed him and escaping back to Dab-riel, but unfortunately he was still alive and had to go the hospital himself.
Luckily, both Mork and Chaser's mom are a-ok, and now K has to deal with his new found affection(platonic don't worry) towards his victim's familiars, mostly towards Chaser's mom, and how maybe he wants to BE Chaser instead of just going back to Dab-riel, so he does become a replacement of Chaser, telling that he just likes wearing suits all the time(the real reason is K can't shift very well into any different outfit) and an alternate attacked him and that's why his right eye is messed up.
For two whole years after that, he lives with Mork, both of them living normally before K accidentally reveals he's an alternate by not being able to hold his form and scaring Mork in his room for like a day until he couldn't take being cramped in there anymore and confronted K about what happened to the real Chaser and was going to happen now.
K told Mork what happened (to Mork's dismay at hearing his bff being replaced so easily) but Mork decides to forgive him because what's done is done but tells him to stop pretending to be Chaser. Eventually K also tells Chaser's mom he's dead(but doesn't explain him being replaced) and never tries contacting her again.
For 17 years, Mork and K lived comfortably though, K getting so used to his human form it started to become apart of his "real"(y'know the whole alternate look) form, and Mork became comfortable with his scars and stuff (the reason why he mostly wore long sleeved hoodies was bc he was conscious about his scars), and K also learns how to shift a bit better(he can do other outfits than just the suit) and how to maintain his human form longer. Also Mork is now like 35 instead of 18 in 1992 (where the car crash took place, 1994 was when it was revealed Chaser was an alternate).
During those 17 years, Apple was born and taken away from his mom by his dad and he never saw her again, just assuming she was dead. In his elementary years, he met Juice and they became BFFs. In high school, after spending years watching ghost-hunter shows and things of the like, they decided to run away and start their own spiritual business when both were 16 in 2009.
They stole a bunch and now they're wanted by the government. One time they got called by a cat, but Apple somehow understood what it was saying, and met at the house we see in vol. 2, THAT IS NOT CHASER'S/MORK'S OLD HOUSE THIS IS A DIFFERENT ONE, and Apple gets trapped with an alternate(Six-nine) in the basement while Juice just sits in a car not knowing.
Six-nine knows he hates birthday parties, so he tries throwing him one (even if its not his birthday) and tries to slowly tell him the only way out of this is to either die or accept Dab-riel as his new God. Apple begrudgingly accepts Dab-riel as his new god and gets to run out of there back to Juice and tells him to floor it outta there !!!!!!!
So they survive all well, and at some point Mork hears abt their service and as a joke asks them to get rid of his alternate-replaced roommate (Chaser), kinda wanting to see what exactly they would try.
They arrive and get scared at Chaser's appearance (he didn't know ppl were coming over and was in a bit of a fucked up version of Chaser bc it's easier to maintain) and they try to ward him off with things they learned abt on the internet (mostly just chanting) and get to find Mork laughing at them once walking in, Chaser and the boys confused.
Mork thanks them and pays them, telling Chaser abt how he called them up to see if whatever they did worked (thankful it didn't). But, the boys are too intrigued by this human and alternate being... FRIENDS!?!?
So they basically try to ask questions before Mork and Chaser get uncomfortable with hiow much they're asking and kick them out, but unfortunately Apple and Juice are too curious and end up staying in their car watching over their house before being found out by Mork.
He scolds them, telling them they need to go home and leave them alone, and they proudly told him they have no home, they ran away and this car was BASICALLY their home, so TECHNICALLY they were already home. Mork gets concerned at that, asking if maybe they could run back home, but they told him they couldn't.
So, he answers some questions they have before forcing them inside Chaser's and his house, Chaser saying an awkward hello and shifting to his human form (not in front of them, it's scary to watch that).
Mork tries to ask if they have anybody to live with, the answer is no and they're also wanted by the government so that means if they try asking for a new home, they'll most likely be arrested. Mork, out of the kindness of his heart, decides that well fine, if nobody else will look after you, I will, and they allow him to do that, mostly just wanting to get close to Chaser through this.
But, eventually, they do just start to like living there instead of only living there to get close to Chaser and they all get close together and live happily ^_^.
And that'sss really it, Mork+Chaser help with Apple and Juice's whole ghost business and alternates are still trying to convince ppl Dab-riel is their one God now and yah.
#This. Was long.#Also this is a mix of dark and stupid stuff bc I love mixes like that.#Mandela posts#Scrimblo AU#Crash write#Eye contact tw#Ask 2 tag
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Webb SMACS 0723
Webb Telescope Reveals a Spectacular Universe ~ 14 Jul 2022, Philip Sedgwick
Monday last, President Joe Biden held a press conference in which NASA afforded him the opportunity to release the first official photograph of an image captured by the powerful Webb telescope, previewing Tuesday’s official release of a handful of pictures. The image he revealed was of SMACS 0723, an image of grand galactic goulash with clarity and conciseness never before seen by human eyes.
Known as SMACS J0723.3-7327 by its more official, coordinate-infused name, one might expect this object revealed by the President to have connections with his natal chart. Well, this galactic grouping appears on the zodiac at 23 Scorpio 35 - a degree which virtually bisects the Sun and Venus in Biden’s natal chart and trines his Jupiter in Cancer. There’s an astrological eyebrow raiser for you!
This galactic cluster image reveals the effects of gravitational lensing such as is organically conducted by gigantic galactic goodies like the Great Attractor and the Shapley Attractor. This is the property of being so gravitationally significant the object bends light such that what lies behind the object can be seen.
Webb First Public Image, SMACS 0723
These images come from an infrared camera developed by a team at the University of Arizona. Why infrared? It is easier for this spectrum of “light,” albeit invisible to see through the dust clouds of space.
While taking in these images, the question that seemed to echo through the galactic dust clouds was: “Cool. Where are they?” So, with a few notes provided by NASA, following are the zodiacal degrees for the initial collection of objects. These coordinates are for epoch 2000.0. To factor in the precession that occurred in the past twenty-two years and get you halfway through 2022, add approximately 19 minutes of zodiacal arc.
Here are a few thoughts and the coordinates for the other images:**
Stephan's Quintet, NGC 7318B, at 26 Pisces 16
Look familiar? In a far more primitive image this collection of five galaxies was once used in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life.
Stephan's Quintet: Ready for its close-up, Mr. DeMille
The Carina Nebula, NGC 3324 at 19 Libra 20
The illusion of a landscape created by viewing the edge of an immense gaseous cavity within the nebula.
Carina Nebula
For the remaining two images of the initial handful, visit: The Webb Telescope
Southern Ring Nebula, NGC 3132 at 23 Virgo 50
Wasp 96-b at 7 Pisces 27
The corresponding image is actually a diagram of the light wavelength of a hot, giant, gaseous exoplanet. An exoplanet is a planet orbiting a star that is not our Sun. According to _The Exosolar Planets Encyclopedi_a there are 5,113 suspected planets around other stars. As well there are 2,638 planet candidates yet to be confirmed and within this combing of planets more than 820 multiple planets systems - as in more than one planet orbiting a star system outside of our own.
Here’s to these images stirring you to maintain a “keep looking up” to arouse awe, inspire creativity and seek solace in the Heavens.
With these images ping ponging between the retina and the brain, no doubt this would be a great time for ordering up a Galactic Report if you don’t yet have one. Maybe it’s time to check out the Galactic Trilogy and include more of the whole sky in your astrological perspectives... maybe it’s time to have a consultation or consultations that include elements from beyond the confines of our solar system. The links below assist in navigating through the obscuring dust clouds of the mundane and right to the ordering page.
And don't forget the few remaining days of the Inflation Busters where you can order a Galactic Report at a reduced price!
In film world news, I am recently aware of my film ZAP!’s scheduled screening in the “The Future Awaits” block at the San Antonio Film Festival on 5 August 2022, 3 PM to 5 PM, Screen 2, in the Radius Center in San Antonio, TX. This is the last festival screening. More details on where the film can be streamed coming soon!
METEORIC, another film with the message of keep an eye on the sky, awaits its first festival selection. Next month a series of fests announce Official Selections! Fingers crossed. However, I have received one tip-off and a wink and a nod from another festival director that favorable outcomes are on the next event horizon for the film. Stay tuned!
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