#or when he’s painted his nails in recent years
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One thing I love about Pete’s gender non-conforming-ness is that like. I feel like a lot of guys/celeb guys are so like. Performative with it?
They’re all so “ yeah I…. Painted my left toenail pastel beige so yeah…… I’m queer and a queer ally✊ I hope this Statment I’m making has real world effects….. I hope me wearing a pearl necklace ( that I take off when I see my grandma ) will really make a change in this world I’m like a great guy I’m making such movements such changes such-“
And then like in a recent interview a guy was like “ Pete why did you grow out you hair what was the significance what was the meaning ???“
and he was like “ well yknow I like kinda like think about cutting it but like then I’m like no cus like I like how it falls yknow ?”
Like Pete’s gender non-conformity feels so genuine to me. It doesn’t feel like he’s thinking “ oh yeah this is such a huge statement twitter is gonna LOVE me and praise me for my allyship “ it just seems like “ hmm I wanna put my hair into little buns today “
#or when he’s painted his nails in recent years#we only found out cus of like random posts#I feel like there is No thought behind when he does these things#and I mean that in the best way possible#idk I don’t really like doing ramble posts#but whatever y’all have to deal with me
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it isn't really complicated, but i still can't tell my grandma about it. my girlfriend is also my boyfriend and i'm her girlboyfriend and there are a lot of days this feels like smoothing sheets over a good mattress. it feels like getting a cup of good hot chocolate. we paint our nails lesbian flag pink, and i watch her eyelashes make shadows on her cheeks. she wants to kiss me because i am really good at baking, and i want to kiss her because when i am freaked out about how i spilled coffee, she just hands me extra napkins and helps me clean. he is so handsome i want to eat my fist. they once just winked at me and i couldn't talk for like the next fifteen minutes.
i haven't seen the L word and i was raised catholic. my earliest experiences with queer relationships were through harrowing conversations and hushed questions and blood on the ground. i didn't like boys soon enough. what, are you gay? asked to a 6th grader, almost like a demand.
when she is asleep next to me and i can feel the dreams run up and down her body, i pretend we are both somewhere in the stars. i like to picture a future full of fruit trees, and writing him poetry. sometimes she wakes up, has a whole conversation with me, goes back to sleep, and utterly forgets that we ever even spoke. she is always kind to me, even in that liminal half-there ghost. i like the croaked, raw way her voice sounds in the very-early morning, the way she always seems surprised i'm still here, and home.
on the internet, there are a lot of people who would be annoyed by both of us, and how labels must be pruned into orchids. a box has to hold and define the insides. people must be organized.
we went on a date last night, and the host said, oh, table for 2 nice ladies? neither of us are ladies, but also we are very much 2 nice ladies. i have been wearing her sweater nonstop. he has frequently been forced into wearing my taylor swift official merch quarter-zip because i was worried about him catching a chill, and you simply cannot be cool in an official taylor swift quarter-zip. do not worry: they listen to better music than i do, and their voice sounds like leaves falling.
i wear the skirts and makeup and i am better with spackle and know how to drive stick. recently someone commented on my work - you're just a man trying to reappropriate lesbian spaces. sometimes i feel like she is a clementine to me, and sometimes i feel like he is a german shepherd and sometimes i feel they are a bird. i like watching his hands over a guitar. can i write this poem, even? how can you be a lesbian if you're sometimes with a man? or you are the man?
how can i, huh. you know, our first date lasted 3 days. we'd been flirting for over a year before i finally asked her out. i'd already written her into poetry. she'd already written me into songs.
last night, in the late night, when they woke up again, confused about where they were, they said - oh, thank god. this is your arm. there's just something so precious to me about the specifics, the denotation that the arm was (thank god!) mine. i really liked that definition. i liked the obvious relief because i understand it.
i say yeah, i have a partner. i mean - oh. thank god. it's your arm.
#writeblr#warm up#on gender politics lol#inkskinned try not to have feelings for someone challenge#time of death: they put my earring in their ear. they were wearing an unbuttoned black buttondown and a necklace with my name on it#you can just send me the coffin i was ready to crawl in
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wedding crashers | jack hughes
warnings: semi public sex, pining on jack's side, older!reader (jack is 22, she is 26), unprotected p in v (always... do as i do not as i say, wrap it when you tap it), fingering, dirty talk, insinuation of oral (m & f receiving)
pairing: jack hughes x fem!reader
request: "jack hughes and a slightly older reader (like idk 3 years older maybe), i feel like he’s so sassy and cocky that he would go nuts if he was able to get an older girl hahaha, maybe it could be like a challenge type situation where they were bantering over whether he’d be any good in bed bc he’s “just a baby” or something so he has something to prove.. 🫣"
wc: 4167
You’d first met Jack Hughes in 2015. You were at one of the USA Developmental games with Matthew, your best friend at the time, watching his brother play for the last time that year. Since it was Christmas just recently, this was the only time you’d get to see Matthew until who knew when. Even though it involved hockey, which always stole Matthew’s attention from you, you decided to join him anyway. It was Matthew that introduced you to the Hughes family, after you had commented on Quinn’s performance.
Jack was a goof from the get-go. He was fourteen when you met, so all of his attempts to flirt with you went nowhere. Well, they made it to the front seat of Matthew’s car, where you laughed about the younger boy’s boldness. He was a sweet boy, and cute in a way that made you want to pinch his cheeks, and you were able to watch him grow up and come into himself.
Your friendship with Matthew had dwindled since he was drafted in 2016, but you were still close enough with his family to be invited to Brady’s wedding. It was there that Jack cornered you, hitting on you for the umpteenth time. Now, he was 22 years old, overconfident and cocky due to years of praise from not only his coaches and peers, but from every pretty girl that fell into his company. You were 26, mature and happy with the life you had made for yourself.
Jack had never stopped chasing you, though it wasn’t an overbearing and constant chase. He was sure that he would conquer you someday, having never forgotten the way he rubbed himself raw after he had first met you and you had smiled in his direction. What can he say– he was fourteen and a pretty girl, an older girl had smiled at him.
And, pleasantly tipsy, Jack had decided that today was that day.
He tore himself away from Luke, having delivered a new drink to his underage brother, and made his way to you. You were sitting with one of Brady and Matthew’s relatives, making small talk over a glass of white wine. Your legs were crossed in a way that Jack could only describe as dainty, your nails painted a pretty blush color that matched your dress. Jack licked his bottom lip when an image of your hand around his cock, with those painted nails contrasting the color of his member, flashed through his mind.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Jack said, not really feeling sorry at all. He turned to you. “I was wondering if you’d join me for a dance.”
You smiled and shook your head slightly, a small laugh falling from your lips. “Sure, Jack.” To the Tkachuk relative, you excused yourself, standing to take Jack’s extended hand. You took a sip from your wine glass, polishing off the drink.
Jack truly couldn’t have chosen a better moment to ask you to dance, as a new song began and decided for you, due to its pace, that the two of you would engage in a waltz of sorts. Jack wasn’t much of a dancer, but he was able to box step in time with the music and lead you through the dance.
You had given Jack a knowing look when his hand found its way to the small of your back, threatening to dip dangerously onto the curve of your ass. Your hand rested on his shoulder, the other in his hand, held close to your bodies.
Jack pulled you close to him, mere inches between your bodies. You laughed again, your head dipping to fall on his shoulder for a split second.
“What?” Jack asked as you flicked your hair from your eyes with a slight tilt of your head. “You’re supposed to be close when you dance.”
You rolled your eyes. “Whatever you say, Jack.” Your voice was light, almost sing-songy. “Your intentions are nothing if not innocent, isn’t that right?”
“I just want to dance,” Jack deflected, but the smile on his face told you everything you needed to know. His eyes were shining, both from the drinks he had consumed and the charged energy between your bodies.
You raised your eyebrows and pursed your lips, trying to suppress a smile as you and Jack continued to stare at each other. You broke first, looking away and shaking your head.
“What?” Jack said. “You don’t believe me?”
“No, I don’t believe you.”
“Oh, I’m hurt by that.” Jack pouted, his bottom lip jutting out in a way that caught your attention. It was plush and pink and just a little cracked from sun exposure. You knew Jack had spent the beginning of the summer out on the lake, and his skin reflected that– both tan and sunkissed at once.
Though you hated to admit it, Jack had grown up to be very attractive. He glowed, especially in the summer, especially when he had a few drinks in his system and he had grown a little more brash and a little more bold.
“Poor Jacky,” You teased. You tilted your head down and blinked up at him through your lashes, saying in a baby-voice: “I hurt the little baby’s feelings?”
“You did,” Jack agreed, his pout just becoming more exaggerated. “How are you going to make it up to me?”
Your whole body moved with your laugh this time. “I suppose you’re about to ask me to kiss it better.”
“Well, I was hoping for more than just a kiss,” Jack said, chuckling at your laughter. He licked his bottom lip before biting it in a cheeky smile, the apples of his cheeks prominent and pink. His teeth were a sharp white contrast to the red dusting across his cheeks, but you found yourself growing fond of that shameless smile the more you saw it.
“Jack, you’re a baby,” You laughed. “In the real world, you’d have just graduated college. I know things are different because you’re a big, famous hockey player and you’ve been doing this job for years, but the fact of the matter is that you’re just too young for me.”
Jack was unscathed by your rejection, just like he always was. He didn’t even mind that your tone was borderline condescending, like you were talking to a five year old instead of a grown adult.
“Plus, Jacky–” You smiled, itching to hammer the final nail in this coffin. “You can’t handle a grown woman.”
His eyes grew dark at that. “I can handle a grown woman,” He stated, voice definite.
You threw your head back, not quite laughing, but not quite rolling your eyes in exasperation either.
Jack’s hand left yours and found your jaw in a flash, bringing your face back to his. “I can handle a grown woman,” He repeated. His gaze flickered down to your lips. “Let me prove it.”
Your breath caught in your throat, eyes flickering down to his lips to match his motions. “In your dreams,” You denied, bringing your hand to his chest to put some distance between you.
Jack didn’t allow it. If anything, he pulled you closer. He pressed his hips into yours, took your hand off his chest and resumed its original dancing position. He tugged you tight to him, tight enough that you were looking over his shoulder and his mouth hovered right next to your ear.
“I’d be so good to you,” Jack whispered. Your eyes flickered around the room, but no one seemed perturbed by yours and Jack’s positioning. “I’ve had a long time to think about this, Y/N. Let me tell you what I’d do, what I have done in my dreams.”
You didn’t say anything, but the fingertips of the hand on his shoulder found the hair at the nape of Jack’s neck and stayed there.
“I always start by kissing you. Always. I’d start slow– just feeling how these pretty pink lips feel against mine. I’d wait for you to loosen up, to open your mouth and invite me in for more. I’m going to keep going slow, but I’m going to slide my tongue into your mouth and kiss you until I’ve figured out just what you taste like. Today, you’ll taste like your white wine at first, but I’m going to kiss you until I’ve deciphered your taste, Y/N.”
Jack moved his hand to your waist and squeezed gently.
“I’d start with my hands here, but I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I’ll start moving, feeling every inch of you. There’s not a part of your body where my fingerprints won’t be found. You won’t know what to focus on– when one of my hands is tangled up in your hair, the other one is going to squeeze your ass and really feel it out because I’ve been thinking about it for so long. And all the while, darling, I’ll be kissing you and stealing the breath from your lungs.”
You gasped at that, shifting closer to Jack. He smiled, knowing that he was closing in on the moment that he’d been wanting for the past eight years. His hand moved to the curve of your ass and you’re nearly helpless with it, or just unwilling to chide him for venturing that far. Jack made eye contact with Quinn over your shoulder and smirked, showing his teeth in a cheshire way.
He spoke again. “But then I’d bring my fingers down, won’t I? I’ve made you breathless, I’ve made you moan, I’ve got you begging for more– something you thought you’d never do. Yet here we are, and you’re always dripping for me.”
By the end of his sentence, Jack’s voice was barely audible. You were straining to hear him, and his mouth was right next to your ear. You felt a bit breathless already, strung together by terrible stitching. Your resolve snapped when you felt his lips close around your earlobe, his teeth tugging at your skin gently.
You jumped away from him like you’d been electrocuted by his touch. You’re breathing heavily, chest heaving.
Jack fared no better, standing in the same spot. You watch his chest rise and fall, the little bit of his skin you can see between his unbuttoned white shirt glistening. His mouth was slightly open, ready to whisper something else dirty in your ear.
You looked him up and down like you couldn’t decide where to focus, like you were fulfilling a prophecy where Jack made you fumble where you once stood so sure.
In a second, you made your decision. You needed to see how this would end, needed to feel it for yourself.
You grabbed Jack’s hand and dragged him out of the reception hall, down the winding hallways until you’ve deemed that you’re far enough away from the party that no one would be able to find you if they came looking.
You shoved Jack into a closet– a closet, you thought to yourself, wanting to laugh at the absurdity. When you closed the door behind you and turned to find Jack’s eyes, he was waiting with a stoney face, not letting any of his emotions show. You’d have killed to know what he was thinking.
All you could do was nod, mouth opening and closing a few times, but never finding words.
Jack tilted his head, his eyes flashing in the darkness.
“Please,” is the single word that ended up breaking the silence between you.
Jack’s lips were on yours in the blink of an eye. His hands cradled your face and his kiss was insistent, bruising. He was slow, sure, but he was emphatic, unyielding. The kiss reflected the eight years of waiting that had passed before he got this chance.
His hand pulled one of your legs up onto his hip before it circled around you to knead the skin of your ass. Your dress, already short because Brady and Emma had planned for a wedding in the dead of summer, rode up until your behind was barely covered.
All the more for Jack to hold onto as his tongue made its way into your mouth.
You continued to kiss, breaking apart only to take a breath and recover, unbuttoning the rest of Jack’s shirt and pushing it down his arms. Your hands roamed his torso, feeling every muscle that Jack had worked so hard to build.
Jack’s mouth traveled south, sucking along the skin of your neck. He bent down, both of his hands finding your thighs and lifting you. You wrapped your legs around him and ground down against him, finally getting some relieving friction from the sizable bulge that was pressing against his zipper. Jack moaned out loud, gasping at your movements.
“What next?” You asked, grinding down again.
“What?” Jack replied, lost in the moment. His eyes met yours and they seemed cloudy, swirling with lust.
“After you, shit, after you touch me–” Your head tipped back as he pressed a kiss to your collarbone. “What do you do next, in your dreams?”
It took a minute to register for Jack, too caught up in the feeling of your pussy against his cock, even if there were multiple layers separating you.
“I touch you,” Jack said, the obvious next action. “I don’t do anything, I just touch you. I use two fingers and I find every spot that makes you react. Once I’ve got you figured out, I–”
You cut him off. “Do it,” You told him. Your head felt light, almost dizzy, and you nodded like a bobblehead. “Do it.”
Jack let out a pathetic, wanton whimper at your command and walked forward until you were pressed against the wall. He shifted you over to that you were held up by his thigh and he brought one hand down to your panties.
He felt over the skimpy fabric, which was barely doing anything anymore. It was soaked, darkened with your slick, and briefly, Jack thought to take it off of you and pocket it to bring home as a souvenir. How dirty you would feel going back out to the reception… the thought of it nearly made Jack’s knees buckle. It would be a constant reminder that he’d won, that he’d managed to fuck you and satisfy you after thinking about it for so long.
He allowed his fingers to wander up and down the expanse of your pussy, cataloging how you whined when he rubbed over your swollen clit and how you clenched down when he pushed at your entrance through the fabric covering it. He noticed how your stomach tensed as he teased his way across your lips, running his finger over each curve and ridge.
As if inspired by something divine, Jack pulled your panties taut, making them ride up into your cunt and provide some gratifying friction when you next ground down on his hand. Jack watched, eyes wide, as you chased your own pleasure. His hand was the catalyst and you were moving mindlessly, like he had already plucked every thought from your head and replaced it with desire for him.
“Fuck,” Jack choked out, feeling a spark zip up his spine. “Y/N.”
He said your name with such reverence, and flexed his hand against you like an offering.
“Fuck me,” You said. Your hands found Jack’s hair and you pressed your lips to his. “Jack. I need you to fuck me. I need you inside me, I can’t– oh, need you to make me come. Baby, I’m so close already, I need you.”
Jack’s cock was throbbing like he might burst from the slightest breeze. There it was again– “Baby.” It didn’t mean the same thing now, Jack knew it was more of a term of endearment than an insult, but it lit a fire under him nonetheless. He was going to prove to you that he wasn’t a baby, that he was a man and in this moment, you were his. He was going to fuck you hard, like you’d never imagined he was able to do. He was going to make your legs shake, make it so you couldn’t walk or do anything but sit prettily at your table and sip on another glass of wine to cool you off.
He was going to make it so that the next time he saw you, you’d be begging him to make you come again.
Jack let your feet find the floor again, stepping back just far enough to get his hands on his belt. “Strip,” Jack commanded. “I want to see you.” At the same time, he unbuckled his belt and worked to remove his dress pants. He kicked them away, in a crumpled little pile near his dress shirt. His underwear joined shortly after.
You hurried to remove your dress, eyes locked in on Jack’s cock. It was a burning red at the tip, wet and straining. It stood away from his body, solid and you swore you might’ve just felt some drool pool at the corner of your mouth.
His hand fisted his cock, eyes lasered in on your protruding nipples when you dropped your dress to reveal your body.
Jack sighed, stroking himself slowly to keep himself at bay. “You’re better than I dreamed,” He said, causing you to blush.
“Jack,” You whined, aching for him to come closer, to slide inside you.
“Let me.” Jack stepped forward and got to his knees, gently bringing your panties down and helping you out of them. He dropped a kiss on your clit before standing again.
You brought an arm around his neck, your other hand placed solidly on his chest. You could feel his pulse racing wildly beneath your palm and you suddenly remembered that he’d been waiting to do this for years.
“Come on, Jacky,” You voiced. “Prove yourself.”
It was a weak command, a weak insistence, barely any indicator of sureness in your voice now. Jack had turned you inside-out, made you question everything because you never imagined you’d need him the way you do now.
He practically growled and you could feel it rumble in his chest. He captured your lips with his, nibbling on your bottom lip before filling your mouth with his tongue. It was slippery and wet and it felt like magic.
Jack pressed the tip of his cock against your entrance, feeling the head slide in. He stopped there for a minute, breathing deeply into your mouth to ground himself. He couldn’t disappoint you, wouldn’t dare shoot off early and cut short the night that he’d been fantasizing about since he was a teenager.
“So good,” You breathed out, feeding the words to Jack. He dipped his head and inched further into you, moving slowly until your pelvis connected with his.
“Fuck,” Jack whimpered out.
His thrusts started shallow. Jack felt like you were constricting him, squeezing him like a snake in a cartoon. His voice was caught in his throat like an ugly lump and the only noises that could force their way past it were groans and “uh”s that borderline on squeaky. He didn’t care about the noises, he didn’t care that he could be embarrassing himself in front of the girl he’s wanted for so long.
It didn’t matter to you, either– you were too caught up in the feeling of Jack’s cock sheathed inside of you. He was pressing against your most intimate spots and you could feel him throbbing inside of you, dragging delectably along your walls.
His thrusts grew deeper, became longer, harder. Jack’s hair fell into his eyes and you brushed it away. His eyes met yours and the air between you felt thick and charged. You brought your hand to Jack’s jaw and leaned forward, connecting your lips.
This kiss was different. It was soft, intimate. Your tongues slid against each other, licking into each others’ mouths and swallowing each others’ groans and whimpers. You forgot for a few minutes that you were in a closet at the wedding of a man you’d known since you were children, fucking a man that you swore you’d never touch because he’s too young.
That man was quickly proving that he’s one of the best fucks in your whole life.
Here he was, mouthing against your neck after moving away from your lips. He was making these desperate noises, thrusting into you like he’s taking a chance at something he’ll never have again. At the beginning of this night, you might have agreed that he’d never get another chance. Now, you can’t help but look forward to the next time you see him, when you’ll get your mouth on his thick, skillful cock.
You told him such, and Jack fucked you harder as a result. His hands clutched at your waist, fingertips destined to leave bruises.
His cock entering and leaving you caused the closet to fill with wet noises and the sound of the slapping of skin. That, paired with Jack’s pants and whines, pushed you further to the edge. Your climax wound up inside you, tense and heavy in your gut.
“Jack,” You said, voice pleading. “I’m close.”
A moan was ripped from Jack’s chest, sweat beading at his hairline. The look in his eyes was almost animalistic, capturing you in his gaze like you’re the only being that exists in the world.
“Please,” Jack panted out. “Come on my cock.”
The winding coil of your climax unravels as Jack continues to thrust his length into you, drawing himself almost completely out of you and then forcing his cock back into your cunt. Your release leaked down his shaft, coating him completely.
The vice grip of your pussy on his cock made Jack hesitate, made him stutter. He still didn’t want to shoot off, he didn’t want to fill you up with his come, because that meant that this would be over. His dream, journey, his conquest would be complete, and he’d have to find something else to lust after.
He knew in his heart that he was still just Jack, just a younger hockey guy who you’d known when he was pimply and stick-like, one who could never fit into your life the way he wished he could.
He’d almost rather torture himself, deny himself from his release, than have this end.
But end it must, and it ended with a breathy whisper of his name.
“Jack,” You mewled, twitching in oversensitivity.
“Oh,” He groaned as his cock jumped inside you, your walls milking him for everything he has. His eyelashes fluttered as you seemed suddenly re-energized, fucking yourself on his cock as he came inside you. It was like his come brought you to life, something too powerful and symbolic for him, and Jack closed his eyes at the thought.
You came down together, eyes finding each other intermittently in the darkness, only when the other wasn’t looking. Your breaths synched, unknowingly, as you dressed yourselves. You were close enough that your elbows could bump as you pulled your clothes on, but both of you were too conscious of the tension to let it happen.
You finished dressing yourself first and you looked over to Jack, feeling something close to awe as he buttoned his shirt and left some skin exposed. You were drawn to it, wanting to reach out and reveal the curve of his shoulder, the dip of his collarbone, the ridge of his waist again and get your mouth on him, but you couldn’t move.
The tension felt like molasses, thick and heavy. Jack’s eyes met yours and you knew that the emotion in his eyes reflected your own: that you knew everything had changed and you didn’t know if it was for the better or for the worse.
Jack opened his mouth to say something, but you shook your head. You made your way into his space, tilting your head up to meet his lips in a sweet, short kiss. You pressed something soft into his hands, then turned and left the closet, leaving Jack alone in the dark.
He didn’t know how you knew, but you had handed him your ruined panties. He slipped them into the pocket of his pants, mentally noting to find his suit jacket and move the panties to the inside pocket of that garment.
When he saw you again at the reception, almost a half an hour later, you were sipping a new glass of wine. Jack made eye contact with you over the glass and patted his pocket, the small lump of your panties still visible to those who looked closely, and he grinned to himself when he saw you blush.
He’d text you later that night, having bummed your number off of Brady years ago but never used it until now. It was a simple message, teasing and confident, bold like you had come to expect from Jack:
“lmk when u want to see what i can do w my tongue ;)”
note: this might just be my magnum opus. this is my favorite thing that i've written in ages. i had toooo much fun with this. ...will write a part 2 when jack DOES show her what he can do with his tongue... maybe paired with another recent request i got about jack's current injury and what he is or is not able to do with his shoulder.
P.S. I'm not married to the title of this. It was kind of just something I threw out there. They do not crash a wedding. Although their behavior is certainly dramatic & would disrupt the wedding.
#puck luck's fics#jack hughes#jack hughes smut#jack hughes x reader#jack hughes x y/n#jh86#nhl smut#nhl x reader#nhl fanfiction#nhl x y/n#nhl fic#andy writes anything🍄
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papaya nails and everything nice | op81
hi! i dont really know how to comment on that one, i just get this idea from few videos where oscar actually admitted that he has very interesting relationship with his nails
anyway, is this original? i think it is. is this wholesome? hell yes, we do be supportin in this household. enjoy!
summary: oscar is having an unusual problem but it's nothing a manicure cant fix
warnings: none, i hope that painted nails on a boy arent a trigger
pairing: oscar piastri x fem!mclarendriver (ft. lando)
Oscar had been struggling to get himself together for some time now. As far back as he could remember, he considered himself as organized and put-together person who kept everything in check. However, for the past few weeks he had been the complete opposite—nothing seemed to go his way, he was incredibly scattered, sleeping poorly and was always last-minute everywhere.
This day was no exception to the rule that had persistently dominated Piastri's life for the past few weeks. Hurrying, he entered the garage running late and quickly started changing, not wanting to delay the start of training. His hair was messy, clearly having just detached from the pillow a few moments ago. Y/N observed her friend from the corner of her eye, seeing him struggle with unzipping his jumpsuit. Without hesitation, she approached him and eased his suffering, helping him with the zipper.
"Thanks," he mumbled, throwing a fleeting glance at his friend. Only then did Y/N noticed that Oscar's face was marked by several red streaks.
"Something happened?" she asked, clearly concerned. The recent strange behavior of Oscar had not escaped anyone on the team and she was no exception.
"I overslept, nothing new lately," Piastri casually replied, putting on the jumpsuit and fastening it around his neck. He brushed his hair off his face and only now did Y/N have a full view of his face, where red stripes were visible on his even paler-than-usual skin.
"Yes, that too, but that's not what I meant," she said.
Y/N took her phone and showed him his reflection. He furrowed his brows in surprise but took the phone from her and looked at his face. It was a fact, there were strange red marks on it. After a moment, he figured out why he looked like so this morning.
"They're probably scratches; I must have done them in my sleep."
"Scratches?" she scrunched her eyebrows and involuntarily glanced at his nails when he handed her the phone. Indeed, Oscar's nails could make many girls envious.
Y/N still had something to ask, but she was called to take her place in the car. She didn't have the chance to exchange a single word with Oscar until lunchtime. The couple sat in the cafeteria and as Y/N was familiar with both the old Oscar, whom she had known for several years and the slowly emerging new Oscar, she had never paid much attention to his hands or, more importantly, his nails.
"Has this happened to you before?" Y/N asked when they were both eating lunch and Oscar focused all his attention on what she assumed was his first eagerly awaited meal of the day.
"That I took two portions of rice with vegetables for lunch?" he asked with his mouth full, glancing at her in the meantime "No, honestly, this is my debut."
She rolled her eyes. "No, I'm not asking about that. I mean, have you ever looked like you've just met Wolverine?"
"Still have those marks?"
Y/N nodded in response as she continued eating.
Oscar sighed, swallowing what was in his mouth and wondering whether to tell her about the embarrassing nonsense that had haunted him for as long as he could remember. Seeing her curious gaze he decided to confess to her an unusual fact about himself.
"I can't cut my nails."
Oscar threw this statement into the air without much ado. Honestly, at this point in his life where he was and with all the things happening, most of which didn't go the way they should, thinking about things like his unfortunate nails would be total foolishness.
"Oh, really?" she was surprised, but it was the kind of surprise when you hear some fun fact you didn't know before.
"You reacted like I just told you that there are twice as many kangaroos as people in Australia."
"It's quite an unusual thing, you're probably the first person I know who can't do it."
"I don't know if it's something to feel special about, although probably yes since for the rest of the day, I look like I do."
Oscar replied, pointing to his scratched face.
"What's worse," he continued, not interrupting his eating, "Even when I manage to deal with them, it takes a moment and they look the same again. They grow terribly fast."
"If you want, I can help you with them," she offered, glancing at him.
Oscar hesitated for a moment and after that he looked at her uncertainly.
"Could you?"
"Of course!"
Shortly afterward, Y/N's hotel room turned into improvised nail salon. She took her task very seriously, pleased that Oscar allowed her to do anything extra such as cutting his cuticles or giving his hands a massage with a cookie-scented cream.
"You have nice nails," he said when she massaged his hands. Her nails had short square shapes with a matte finish. The color was no surprise; it was papaya orange. "Do PR people dip their fingers in this too?"
Y/N laughed and shook her head.
"No, I just noticed this nail polish in the drugstore and I thought I'd take it. It amused me that this color haunts me everywhere."
"Do you do your nails yourself?" Oscar looked at her with a slight shock. "It must be terribly hard and time-consuming."
"I've been doing them for a few years now and as you can see they are pretty simple, so with each time I get better at it."
She replied, taking a bit more cream. She noticed that he was silently looking at her hands; it seemed that he was particularly paying attention to her nails.
"I can paint yours too if you want."
"Mine?"
Y/N nodded and Oscar looked at her, shocked by how effortlessly she seemed to read his thoughts.
"Painted nails aren't for boys. "
Y/N rolled her eyes.
"Anyone can have painted nails, Oscar."
"Zac would be pissed at me. PR people probably too."
"Fuck Zac, fuck PR people," she looked him in the eyes. "Everyone has the right to look how they want, so if Lewis can have earrings and tattoos, Alex could have red hair, then you or any other guy can have painted nails."
Oscar hesitated for a while, looking at her uncertainly. He was silent for a moment, thinking hard. However, he decided that it was time to finally do something contrary to the norm. He has stuck to the rules and regulations all his life, so it's time to make a small concession that won't harm anyone.
"Can you make them for me with a shiny finish?"
Y/N smiled and nodded, hurriedly getting off the bed and grabbing her bag with all the supplies. The smile on Oscar's face appeared with each painted nail, pushing away his fears and insecurities.
When the girl started finishing his other hand after more than an hour, Lando came into the bedroom without any warning, complaining about his friends and the fact that none of them had replied to any of his messages for over forty minutes.
When Norris noticed what he was witnessing, he opened his mouth in shock and his eyes almost fell out of his sockets. Both Oscar and Y/N knew their friend's unfiltered chatter, so they mentally prepared themselves for some comment from him. But beside that, he hurriedly took off his shoes and all excited sat on the bed, rolling up his sleeves.
"Oh my God! Will you do mine too?"
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idk if you write smut so if you’re uncomfortable totally ignore this!!! but!!! imagine y/n and recently fiance!harry and him fingering you with his ring finger talking abt marriage and shit 🫣🫣
future husband
Harry styles x reader (masterlist)
summary: Harry proposes and it leads to sex
warnings: smut
a/n: IM SORRY THIS TOOK TOO LONG I JUST NEEDED TO BE IN THE RIGHT MOOD TO WRITE SMUT AND THEN TUMBLR DIDNT PUT IT IN THE TAGS AHHH
Harry's ring obsession started when he was in his early twenties.
He rarely wore any type of a jewelry or anything flamboyant when he was younger. He painted his nails on occasion, something to relax himself with or whenever Y/n was doing hers, but nothing too grand.
But a simple silver chain given by his one and only changed that.
He started getting a little more into jewelry, necklaces, earrings, and his favorite, rings. He liked the intricate designs that rings ment; they could be loud and a stable piece, or they could be a subtle addition to the outfit.
They could also symbolize love.
After dating Y/n for three months, he knew he was certain that he wanted to stay forever with her, he just didn't allow himself to think of marriage this early into a relationship--at least not until his mother asked when he was going to propose after meeting her around their six-moth anniversary.
Finally though, after just under two years, he popped the question. He got a beautiful engagement ring, a band with beautiful engravings throughout, and of course, a huge fucking rock.
"Harry." Y/n sniffled, seeing Harry on his knee, ring in hand. "Of course, yes!"
A lovely proposal in a quiet and quant cottage away from civilization was perfect and exactly what they needed, not only for their privacy but for the ability to have sex in the middle of the woods. Harry bought this property not too long ago and waited for the right moment to take Y/n there, a proposal seemed like the best time.
The kissing of course led to more, how could it not? Harry was always a passionate lover, always eager to please, so it was honestly no surprise when the soft kiss turned more sensual.
"Fuck, I'm so glad you finally asked." Y/n mumbled softly as their lips kept touching, coming back for more. "Can't wait to spend the rest of my life with you as my husband."
Harry moved onto her neck, biting softly as he went down. "It's all I've ever wanted." He groaned as Y/n's hand trailed down to his pants, she teased him slightly, earning a moan from him. "And to please you again. Lay down."
Y/n made herself comfortable on the blue and white picnic blanket. Harry moved the basket and wine bottles out of the way. He pulled flipped her dress up, revealing her lacy set on panties.
"Planning to seduce me today?" He asked with a raised brow.
"I had a hunch you might be asking me to marry you." She shrugged her shoulders, biting her lip to hide, poorly, a cheeky smile.
"How?" Harry gasped, his fingers tracing the band of her underwear. "It was top secret!"
"Oh come on, H." She giggled, her hand coming up to stroke his cheek. "You take me on a surprise getaway, no one around, to a cottage that is darling... It's the most romantic thing you have ever done."
Harry blushed. The midday sun gleaming perfectly on his skin, twinkling his green eyes and highlighting the freckles that scattered his slightly tanned skin. Y/n couldn't help but feel so lucky. This beautiful man, inside and out, is now her fiancé; she started to tear up, which, of course, caused Harry to tear up as well.
"No don't start baby." She told him. "We need to focus so we can have sex. No tears now."
She wiped her tears then Harry's. "You started it." He mumbled, smiling as he finally pulled her panties down. "We just love each other too much."
"I guess so-" Y/n gasped as Harry entered a figure into her. The familiar feeling was welcomed as the subtle feeling of pleasure began to buble up inside of her. "Fuck that feels so good."
Harry was leaning half on and half off of her, his right hand fingering. her while his other held him up so he could kiss by her ear.
"Don't get one of your rings stuck in me." She warned, looking sternly at her love. Harry shook his head and kissed her softly.
"I would never."
Harry had on a simple band, one similar to the new one adorned on Y/n's finger. He figured while he was buying the engagement ring he could buy a matching one for himself.
"I can't wait to marry you." He spoke softly, creating a new hickey just under her ear lobe. "Gonna wanna fuck you again when I see you in that dress, don't know if I could wait till the honeymoon."
He added a finger, adding to the pleasure.
"And seeing you with that ring...It's going to be as sexy as your lingerie. Just knowing you're mine and I'm the only one that can ever see you like this."
"Fuck, H. Gonna come."
"I'm the only one who will get to see my wife like this. And everyone will know I can only to this do you...I'm the only one capable." Harry's words were possessive yet reassuring, the constant validation that he was the only one for her pushed her over the edge, leaving a gasp from her mouth.
"Har I need you inside." She yanked him fully on-top of her, unbuttoning his pants and pulling them down after Harry quickly pulled his fingers out of her, but not before a little taste.
He helped her strip himself, knowing she is just as possessive as him but just doesn't always vocalize it, but her actions speak louder than her lack of words.
Harry entered Y/n, the euphoric feeling washing over him as he let out a loud moan, mentally thanking himself for buying the isolated land. "Feel so good."
"You stretch me out so much." She gasped. "My future husband."
Harry thrusted, a reflex from her words in her sexy, faint, voice. "Don't say that or else I'm going to come in less then a minute." He paused, staring into his loves eyes. "Want to impress my future wife."
"You impress me every day. Every time I see you I have something new I love about you." Y/n leaned in a kissed him, it was mainly teeth, but still perfect nonetheless. "Today it's your cock."
Harry stopped thrusting briefly. "You mean it hasn't impressed your before today?"
"It's the first time I've been impress by my fiancé's cock, I was already impressed when he was my boyfriend." She assured. Harry rolled his eyes and got back to thrusting, moving his ring finger down to her core and rubbing soft circles on her clit, making her jolt slightly.
"I'm gonna cum again, H."
"Me too."
They both moaned as they climaxed at the same time. Harry collapsed onto Y/n's chest, arms exhausted from keeping himself up. They stayed like that for no more then five minutes, Harry's cock softening inside of her as they relaxed.
"I can't believe you're going to be my wife." Harry thought out loud. "Never thought I'd work up the courage."
"Why? You knew I'd say yes."
"I dunno, just all the what-if's got inside my head. You know how that is." Harry mumbled, nuzzling his face into the side of her neck. He kissed over her blooming hickeys too, soft contrast between his sexual and romantic desire for her.
"Well your next biggest concern is finding were to go for our honeymoon." Y/n said. "Might have to go all over."
"I'll pay for every penny of it."
"Most defiantly. You know I have expensive taste." Y/n joked. "The wedding is going to cost half a fortune on its own."
Harry smiled, kissing her cheek then her lips. "I'd spend all the money in the world to make you happy. I'd go broke to see you smile."
"Stop, you're going to make me cry again." She whispered, tears starting to form.
"I'll just kiss them away, my love." He sighed. "It's my job as your future husband."
#harry styles x reader#harry styles#harry styles fluff#harry styles x y/n#harry styles smut#harry styles x you#harry styles imagine#harry styles fanfiction#harry styles blurb#harry styles fanfic#harry styles one direction#bf!harry styles#husband!harry#husband!harry styles#harry styles fic#fiance!harry#fiance!harry styles#harry edward styles#harry styles x fem!reader
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The 141 + Nik letting you paint their nails
Soap loves when you paint his nails. Admittedly they won't last long because he'll pick the polish off but he really likes watching you hold his hands so delicately, all your attention focused on his nails as you try to get the perfect stoke. He likes them done in black, no top coat because it won't last and he doesn't want you wasting polish on him like that, he talks animatedly the whole time, you have to keep grabbing his hands to get them back where you can work on them, laughing the whole time. He tends to smudge them quickly too, what can he say? He just wants to grab you and kiss you as soon as they're done.
Gaz really likes when you paint his nails. You tend to couple the painting with a hand massage and fuck if that doesn't feel good on his tense hands. You both put on your pajamas and he tells you all about his most recent job, you don't answer much, you need to focus on not getting any polish on his pretty hands, but you love listening to him and he likes to complain about work so this is really nice for both of you. When you're done Gaz is good and waits until they are all dry, top coat and all, before he grabs you to give you a proper thank you.
Ghost would rather eat glass than admit to anyone but you he loves when you do nail art on him. He wears gloves all the time anyway, who is going to know if he has bright pink nails with flowers carefully drawn on them, plus they look really nice and he knows you want to practice. You work with a playlist going of a mix of your songs and his, humming along to all the songs you know so well by now as you add the miniature details and Ghost watches you with the kind of tenderness he can only show when you're so focused you can't look up.
Price isn't much for painted nails but he lets you when you ask. You tend to just give him a clear coat, more than anything you just like this weird little intimate thing you can do for your partner, massaging his hands, moisturizing them, then carefully painting on a coat of shine to keep his nails nice and healthy. Price likes that, closeness that isn't complicated and doesn't demand anything from him but time, something he gladly gives you as often as he is able.
Nik actually asked you to do his nails when you two first got together. That really shouldn't surprise you, you've seen the old pictures tucked in the heli of a much younger Nik in mosh pits with safety pins shoved through his ear lobe, it's sweet, this little bit of his past he wants you to be a part of, refreshing his nails after so many years of not painting them. He likes dual colors, black on one hand, dark red on the other. He plays old metal music, it's bad in a way that's good, and he tells one story for every five songs and you hang on his every word as you blow on his nails to dry them.
#soap#gaz#price#ghost#nikolai#john soap mctavish#kyle gaz garrick#simon ghost riley#john price#nikolai cod#141#141 headcanons#141 imagines#141 x reader#141 x you#john soap mctavish x reader#kyle gaz garrick x reader#simon ghost riley x reader#john price x reader#nikolai x reader#i have actually decided i don't want to keep tagging this#go be free#i trust this post to find the right audience
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++ 𝐍𝐀𝐍𝐀𝐌𝐈
[summary] nanami comes to the school per gojo’s request, but finds you instead.
[cws] fem reader -> reader is a student. unedited.
Nanami wasn’t a teacher, but he wasn’t ignorant to the fact that a lot of the younger sorcerers saw him as one, and even admired him to some degree.
It was… troublesome.
He knew what becoming overly attached to people in this world meant and it wasn’t worth it. It would only make their death that much more painful when the time came, and Nanami had already experienced enough pain to last him in the next lifetime. So he kept everyone at a distance, even Ino, and especially you, but you had always been good at closing that distance time and time again and finding a way to burrow yourself into his thoughts and under his skin.
This is just another one of those times - except this time, his usual resistance had been nowhere to be found. You had managed to chip it away bit by bit with your salacious ways - a brush of your painted nails along the back of his neck whenever you passed him by, a sly bite of your lip whenever you caught his stare, a brazen spread of your legs whenever you wore a skirt in his presence, a brush of your breasts against his arm whenever you solicited him for his help, voice set in a low tone as you invaded his personal space.
You had employed those same tactics today; a low cut shirt coupled with a skirt that was completely out of regulations, and freshly painted nails that housed the same design as the tie looped around his neck.
He had come to the school on rare business with Gojo, and you had somehow managed to corner him in an empty class instead, eyes practically shining as you ensnared him in your trap.
“How nice of you to stop by to see me, Kento.”
“I’m here to see Gojo, not you.” He stepped around you, fully intent on leaving the room and you with it, but your hand snagged hold of his jacket. He looked down to your hand, then followed your wrist up to your arm and so forth, tired eyes clashing with your playful ones. “I don’t have time for your games today.”
“Luckily for you, this isn’t a game. I genuinely need your help.” You smiled, and he should have shaken you off and left right then instead of letting you step closer. “I’ve been having a bit of trouble with something, and Gojo-sensei is always too busy for anything one-on-one.”
“We’re both aware that I’m not a teacher here. I can’t help you.” There’s only an inch of space between the two of you now, and the faint scent of your perfume wafts up from your neck, and Nanami feels a strong urge to duck his head down to get a better smell.
“Oh, I think you can..” You look up at him through your lashes, teeth softly biting down into the plumpness of your glossy, bottom lip before you’re releasing it. “It won’t take up much of your time - pinky promise.” You cheekily offer your pinky to him, and to keep the smile on your face he lets you hook it around his larger one.
You lead him to one of the desks of his youth, and he settles down into the wooden chair, briefly wondering if they were always this small and uncomfortable or if he had really gotten that much bulkier in his older years.
“Like I said earlier, something’s been giving me a lot of trouble recently. I just can’t seem to get it right.” You plop yourself on top of the desk he’s sitting in front of, and his eyebrows raise just a bit as your hands move to clench the ends of your skirt. “It’s a bit embarrassing, so promise not to laugh, ‘kay?”
Your shoes hit the floor, leaving you in a black socks, and Nanami breathes through his nose when you settle your feet on his shoulders.
He swallows.
“What are you doing?” His voice is a low rumble, something churning deep in his gut, and he sucks in a sharp breath when you spread your knees and lift your skirt, revealing your lack of panties. Your lips take a moment to spread, the stickiness of your slick to blame, and his mouth runs dry at the sight of your clit just barely peeking out.
“I haven’t been able to come the last few days, and I’ve been trying so hard, Kento. I even think about you while I touch myself, because you’re so handsome and I like you, y’know? But I still can’t do it…so, can you watch and tell me what I’m doing wrong?”
And that’s how Nanami found himself frozen in his seat, eyes zeroed in on the way you rub fast, tight circles around your clit, hole clenching around nothing as it drools.
Your chest heaves as you work, and he thinks he might croak in his seat when your other hand dips down to push two fingers inside your pussy, a loud, dirty squelch sounding as your slick bubbles up around your digits.
“Ah, Kento,” you gasp, and a bead of sweat trails down the side of his face, over sharp cheeks and an even sharper jaw before disappearing into the neckline of his shirt. “You see…‘s just not working.” Your calves tense, fingers slipping out of your hole to spread your juices around, and Gods is he thirsty. “I need your help, Sir. You’ll help me, won’t you?” Your fingers, still wet and glistening, curl around his tie, and Nanami doesn’t resist as you tug him closer and closer to your heat, your overwhelming scent muddling his thoughts until you’re all he can think about.
Once again.
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boyfriend drabbles (pt.1)
pairing: Jungkook x reader
summary: fluff omg, jk being a cute bf, painting each others nails and its just basically cute stuff HAHA
word count: 600+
boyfriend drabbles masterlist!
Ever since you and Jungkook had started dating three years ago, he became a major part of your daily life, and even on days where he would not be able to see you in person, your boyfriend would always make the effort to give you a call and whisper sweet nothings into the phone.
One of your adopted habits was to include your boyfriend in every aspect of your life. Whether it was a casual get-together with your own circle of friends or any other social event, you had an inclination to bring Jungkook along with you, a gesture that he wholeheartedly embraced, never once expressing reluctance or complaint.
In this case, Jungkook finds himself trailing behind you and your best friend, Sohee, as the both of you enter the familiar shop. A subtle wince crosses his face as he observes the two of you quickening your pace, your excited squeals filling the air upon reaching closer to the rows of products displayed before you.
Jungkook watches as the both of you light up upon noticing a small booth, remembering you had mentioned once about that particular brand. A quiet hum leaves his mouth as he watches the both of you excitedly swatch the different shades of eyeshadow, but to him, they look exactly the same shade.
—
“___, I’m gonna go to the toilet, wait for me here okay? Don’t you dare to try other stuff without me,” Sohee raises a finger at you playfully as she walks off. Now it’s only you and Jungkook, and your boyfriend is more than content to finally get some of your attention.
“Jagi,” Jungkook whines as he leans down to peck you on the lips, you chuckle as you reach up to ruffle his hair in sympathy. Poor boy, you thought.
“If we stay here any longer I’m literally going to go insane,” He whines, eyes adverting to your hand filled with various makeup products smeared onto your skin.
“I promise we’ll be quick,” A laugh sounds out from your mouth at his exasperated state, as Jungkook sighs, mentally cursing at himself for not charging his phone the night before, now that it’s battery had gone flat.
You begin to test out more shades where you and Sohee had left off, not leaving anywhere else, but it seems as though your boyfriend had other plans.
“Hey!” You gasp as Jungkook gently tugs on your arm, forcing you to follow along behind him as he trudges towards another aisle.
“Baby, what are you doing?” You question his sudden actions when your boyfriend reaches for the nail polish tester and raises your hand to paint your index finger oh-so-gently, his brows furrowed as he tries his best to paint within the nail. You begin to laugh at Jungkook’s sudden actions, but he cuts you off, “Jagi, stop moving, you’re gonna make me mess up,”
After he’s done painting your fingernail, Jungkook looks contented at his little artwork on your nail, and then he proceeds to attempt to paint his own finger too, but it’s harder for him when he attempts to use his non-dominant hand to paint. A disgruntled sound emits from his mouth, eyebrows furrowing as you grab the nail polish from his hand to do it yourself.
“I should have known you would betray me for you man,” You hear Sohee dramatically sigh as she approaches the both of you, Jungkook sticking his tongue out at her as she rolls her eyes.
Even though you and Sohee had spent at least another good twenty minutes in that store, your boyfriend didn’t mind as he held your hand the whole time, sometimes hugging you from behind and leaning his head on your shoulder as your best friend clearly annoyed from the third-wheeling.
a/n: hello!! i kinda wrote this in a rush without really planning so it might not be the best but its really short anyways haha, i realised i havent been putting a note at the end of my fics recently 😭 and i want to talk with you guys more! i also def need more inspo to write more scenarios so if you guys have any pleasee send an ask to me ❤️
#jungkook fluff#jungkook#jungkook au#jungkook ff#jungkook smut#jungkook x oc#jungkook x reader#bts#bts ff#bts fic#jungkook comfort#boyfriend jungkook
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literally anything with donnie is fine! just wanted to tell you how much i love your writing too!! :)
Awe thank you sm qt!! I whole heartedly appreciate that, it means so much to me💘 This is a little rushed <3
Baby, Sit.
(Not my image!!). 18+
Warnings!!- Enemies to Lovers, Jealousy, dom x sub, smut, oral (m receiving), fingering, slight chocking, possession and teasing.
Dom Donnie x f/reader
(Donnie and reader are both 18!) Disclaimer/ this is purely fantasy, if somebody is cruel to you irl it does not mean they like you, they’re scum :)
Summary: You were hired by Rose and Eddie Darko to baby sit for their youngest child Samantha, little did you know you would be sitting for some else.
Being an eighteen year old student, you were painfully broke, so when your mother had referred you to her friend to baby sit, you immediately accepted.
When your mother had told you the name of the woman who’s child you would be looking after you felt a wave of anxiety rush through you.
Rose Darko. As in the parent of Donnie Darko.
You and Donnie had been in the same school, you were the same age. And unfortunately you couldn’t stand him and vice versa. There was something about the pair of you that didn’t work. He was always so uptight and had to be right about everything, it was infuriating. There was one main factor that contributed to the continuous clash between the two of you, which was the fact you dated his best friend up until pretty recently. You hadn’t seen Donnie since then considering you had no reason to be around each other anymore but the thought of seeing him again made you want to scream into a pillow.
Whenever you two would be in the same vicinity he would just straight up ignore your presence or when he did acknowledge you he would be blunt and snappy. You had no idea why but this lead to a lot of animosity between the two of you.
So when your mother had told you you would be babysitting for Samantha Darko you immediately wanted to call up Rose and tell her you wouldn’t be able to do it. However you were pretty broke and you assured yourself you probably wouldn’t see Donnie, not if there was no one to baby sit his younger sister. Plus what was you supposed to tell her? Sorry I can’t watch your child that I’ve already agreed to watch because your son hates me? Yeah no.
———————————————————-
“Hey (y,n) yeah we’ll be gone for a couple hours but we left some money for pizza.” Mrs Darko told you as you stood in their kitchen.
You already knew Samantha from when she would bug Donnie at school and run up to the friend group. She was a sweet kid and she liked you well enough so that definitely eased your nerves.
“Okay great, does Samantha need to be in bed by a specific time.” You asked sweetly, knowing full well you’d probably let her stay up regardless.
“Um nope just not too late and by the time we get home. Oh and she has homework to do.”
Rose sterling looked at Samatha as a warning.
“Boringgg.” Samantha protested whilst stood directly by your side.
“Okay well we’ll see you later, have fun” Eddie spoke as they made their way out of the door.
Rose returned and popped her head into the door before leaving .
“Oh (y,n) I’m sure Donnie will be glad to see you again.” She smiled and quickly left before you could even form a response.
Your mind paced. Was Donnie supposed to be here? Why did they need a babysitter then? Did they know you two used to be in the same friendship group? Had he mentioned you? Was it negative? Did he express how much he hated you? Would you actually see him again?
“Can you paint my nails?” Samantha snapped you from your spiral of anxious thoughts.
You turned to her and smiled. “Of course”
You had painted her nails, watched her dance rehearsals and told her how good she was, ordered pizza and now you were helping her with her homework.
She had to write about the character of Pony boy Curtis from ‘The Outsider’ by S.E Hinton.
You had loved studying this book when you was her age and literature in general. So it was absolutely no bother helping her complete her assignment.
“Well, he’s obviously very different and unique to the other characters which can be inferred through-“
You were cut off by the sound of the doorbell ringing.
“Pizza, thank God!” Samantha cried out holding her hands together.
Laughing at her childhood silliness you walked over and opened the front door with cash in your hand, your stomach very exited to finally eat.
However, you were not laughing when you opened the door to someone that was not the pizza delivery man. In fact you no longer felt hunger but complete nausea. Instead a tallish guy with dark hair and piercing blue eyes stood on the other side. Donnie.
You didn’t say anything, just moved to the side to let him through. He didn’t say anything either. Simply walked past as if you weren’t there, the smell of cigarettes trailing behind him.
“Ugh it’s just my stupid brother, not pizza” Samantha whined.
Donnie pulled a face at her as he made his way through the house.
“Hey Sam, when she goes home tonight, Freddie Kruger is gonna craw out from under your bed.” He teased through a creeping voice, obviously trying to upset her.
Samantha in her upset state, Freddie Kruger clearly being a touchy subject, yelled out whist nearly in tears
“SHUT UP DONNIE, NO HE WONT!”
He then made his way over to her homework and scoffed, picking up her copy of The Outsiders and mumbled “mediocre.”
He then proceeded upstairs, leaving the minute he’d managed to make someone else feel bad. Typical.
You rolled your eyes at his cruelty. Of course she wouldn’t be reading fucking Dostoevsky at her age.
Remembered what it was like being in an English class with Donnie gave you a headache. He had great ideas but god forbidden you had an opposing idea. He would scoff and roll his eyes. It drove you crazy. He wasn’t always like that thought, at one point he used to encourage your ideas and even swap notes with you.
You were cut from your thoughts once again when the door bell went again, fortunately this time the pizza man was the one on the other side.
Sam ate some pizza, you no longer felt hungry but you did eventually managed to calm Sam down. The pair of you just chatted about whatever she wanted. She was telling you about some childish drama in her friendship group and you nodded your head pretending like it wasn’t the funniest shit you’d ever heard. Childhood drama is always hilarious when you���re no longer a child.
Despite being distracted by Sam, you kept thinking about the boy upstairs. “Do you think your brothers eaten?”
Sam shrugged her shoulders “who cares?” annoyance laced in her voice at the mention of her older brother.
You said nothing and proceeded with her homework.
Once she had finally finished she was ready to sleep. Her expression exhausted and she yawned after almost every word of her sentence.
“I’m- not even like- that- tired.”
You giggled at her before telling her she should probably head up to bed but you did promise to braid her hair first.
“Thanks for keeping me company (y,n), you were always my favourite out of Donnie’s friends” she smiled and hugged you at the bottom of the staircase.
The word ‘friend’ lingered for a while in your head. It was true, you were friendly at a time. It sucked because he felt good to be around for a time.
You stayed downstairs as she marched off to bed, whispered a sweet “goodnight” as she made her way to bed.
There was still around an hour and a half until Eddie and Rose were supposed to be home and you hadn’t seen anything of Donnie since he had come home. It was weird, you felt like you hated him but you also wanted to be around him. You especially wanted to know why he hated you. A part of you hoped that maybe he’d go back to his old self but instead you pushed him into the back of your mind and stared to clean up a little.
Once you had cleared up you sat onto the couch and grabbed a book from your bag and stared to read. You only had a few chapters left so decided to try and finish them tonight.
You were so drawn into the book that you didn’t realise a familiar figure loomed behind you. Donnie stood behind the couch reading over your shoulder. After a couple second of you not noticing his presence, he leaned down to your ear.
“Good choice.”
You jumped and your head snapped round to Donnie, almost slapping him out of instinct as a small yelp slipped past your lips.
“What the fuck Donnie. I could have woken up your sister. What’s wrong with you?”
His face was close to yours, and a small smile crept onto his face as he watched your second of distress. “Hello to you too (y,n)”
“Why are you being so friendly? Thought you couldn’t stand me?” You asked with your brows furrowed and your tone daring. You weren’t even with his stupid friend anymore so you had no clue why he was still such a dick.
“I’ve never said that.”
His answer was short and blunt but he had that smug grin on his face. Not one that radiated happiness or flirtation but something else. Power maybe? Like a wolf who had corned a bunny and laughed hysterically as it tried to escape.
You didn’t try to escape from him though. You kept your eyes locked onto his, not daring to dart your eyes away as a sign of weakness.
“You didn’t have to.”
He however did not have any snarky remarks in response. Instead he made his way round to the spot on the couch next to you and snatched the book from your hands.
“Ah 1984. George Orwell. You know when I tried to explain to your small minded boyfriend. Oh no. Ex-boyfriend, the concept of this book it was exhausting.” He rolled his eyes dramatically with that mean playful look on his face.
Why on earth was he doing this? Mentioning your ex boyfriend, calling his own friend small minded, even speaking to you. You racked your brain on why he was doing this. Sure you had known he hated you but that usually manifested itself through his lack of interest in engaging with you or his need to argue with everything you ever said. Now it was like he was taunting you by giving you this almost flirtatious, slightly sadistic attention. It was so odd but so hypnotising.
“But then again, I never did understand why he was with someone like you.”
You couldn’t tell if that was a compliment or an insult. Someone like you? What exactly did that entail.
“What are doing Donnie?”
Your brows were furrowed slightly and your eyes a little sad, completely fed up of trying to work out his cruel ways, or even justify them to yourself.
You and Donnie had been somewhat friends before you started dating his best friend, but as soon as you did he became a new person. When you’d occasionally chat in the library about whatever book you were studying he’d always smile or when you’d catch each other on the way home and he’d be a little awkward but totally engaged with whatever you were saying, it was nice. That all came to a stop when his friend had started to pay you attention. You thought maybe Donnie felt as though you’d stolen his best friend and for that you did truly feel sorry.
You were now face to face in the dimly light room. Just a lamp illuminated the two faces.
“What were you doing (y,n)?”
He was no longer smug but he had caught and attitude with you. There something underlying in this anger in his voice. A deep irritation sat on his tongue.
“What do you want me to say Donnie? Sorry I didn’t live up to the expectation of being your friends dream girl, or sorry that you felt abandoned by him?
He shook his head and let out a hysterical laugh. As if your words were a pathetic joke.
“Ugh (y,n) I honestly thought you were smarter than this. I didn’t give a fuck about losing ‘crucial friend time’” He mocked.
“It frustrated me that someone as smart as you would even consider giving someone like that your time of day. Someone who you couldn’t converse with about anything slightly philosophical or opinions on a new book or poetry, because ‘books are useless, or ‘metaphors are stupid’. Mimicking his best friends voice as he spoke.
You said nothing. You were speechless and your brain hurt from trying to work him out. You just thought to yourself after his little outburst. Then it hit you. Was this jealousy?
“Why do you care so much Donnie? It’s not like I could talk about poetry or a new fucking book with you. You wouldn’t even talk to me.”
You snapped back, testing him. Was he truly jealous of not you, but your ex?
You were both still face to face. Inches away from each other.
“Only after you climbed into bed with someone who didn’t deserve you.” His voice was assertive and filled with envy yet his voice was low.
The realisation on how close you two had gotten finally hit the both of you. You were staring at him with your lips slightly parted and a slight confusion brushed your features. Why did you find this hot? God, you told yourself this was wrong but the sound of jealousy in his voice made your chest heave with excitement.
The sound of your heart beat was loud, it felt as though your heart had been placed to your ear. His lips were so close to yours. But you were upset, with another overwhelming feeling aching in your chest. Lust?
His eyes were still fixed on yours. “It should have been my bed you were climbing in.”
He brought his fingers up to your jaw possessively.
The two big black holes that had replaced his usual pupils drew you in. His eyes trailed down to your slightly parted lips. There was a part of you that wanted to cry and shout at him for being such a dick, but you couldn’t. It was like you had been hypnotised. Or maybe you’d just awoken from the trance you’d been under. This complete and utter blindness towards Donnie’s feeling towards you, or yours for him.
Amongst your silence he crashed his lips to yours. The kiss was hard and desperate. He pushed his tongue past your lips and you let a small moan slip. His hands cupped either side of your jaw as his teeth sank into your bottom lip.
A small hiss left your lips at the sharp pain that send a shock through your body. Donnie’s hand trailed down from your jaw to neck and his hand slowly snaked it’s way around to your throat. He added a little pressure, not enough to hurt you but just enough to make you feel everything more intensely whilst his other hand brought some hair behind your ear.
He pulled away from the kiss, keeping his hand exactly as they were and just admired the mess of emotions plastered along your face. Anger, confusion, fear and lust. To him you looked like a beautiful oil painting, so many different things happening at once and he got to be the observer. The artist even, controlling what you felt next.
“Donnie” You whispered.
“Shh baby. I’ve got you now.” There was an element of comfort in his voice but mainly possession. A wider grin played on his face as he said those words, violently bringing his lips to yours once again.
The feeling of his long fingers inching closer up skirt and thighs made you want to cry out and tell him exactly where to touch you. But you didn’t.
The slight pressure from his veiny hand wrapped around your neck and the near brushes to your clit through your underwear, were getting you so worked up.
“Donnie, please.” you whispered against his lips, your voice quiet and needy.
He practically growled in response “Oh now you want me? Such a slut.”
As you whimpered underneath his tough he chucked into your ear. “Bet he couldn’t make you feel this good.”
You came quickly under his palm, your head was a mess. There was so many emotions running through, it was like ecstasy. He was a drug.
“Mhm, good girl. If only you hadn’t been so stupid, could have had this ages ago.”
He pulled his fingers out of you and brought them to your lips.
Taking them into your mouth and swirling your tongue around his fingers while he starred at you intently, made him throb hard.
Snatching his fingers from your lips he grabbed your jaw harshly.
“Now be a good girl and sit.” He motioned to the spot on the floor between his legs. “Cmon baby, sit.”
You obligated, desperate to hear him feel good. Desperate to win his approval by being the cause of his pleasure.
Sat on your knees in between his thighs, he sat on the couch and wiped the mess from the corners of your mouth with his hand. The same hand in which his fingers had been inside you.
Reaching for his zipper, his hand caught your wrist tightly as he peered down at you.
“Did I say you can touch me?” From your angle he looked so much bigger than he was.
You huffed out a small whine, “Please can I touch you Donnie. Please?” You looked up at him with doe eyes, it used to work on him when you wanted him to do something for you. Usually homework. And it did.
He now brought his lips in between his teeth, admiring how pretty you looked on your knees.
He nodded his head and you quickly undid his zipper and brought his jeans down to his ankles.
The hard erection confined to his underwear made your mouth melt. You kissed him over his tight underwear and he groaned quietly.
Staring up at him innocently, he nodded his head, giving you permission to take off his underwear. Immediately you pulled down his underwear and grab him by his base.
You licked him from his hard base to his red tip and started to kitten lick around the top of his cock.
Donnie breathed heavily and grabbed your hair into a make shift pony tail roughly.
“Stop teasing (y,n) or I swear-“
The warning was enough for you to cut him off by taking him into your mouth suddenly. You bobbed your head and licked his veins as his grip on your hair got tighter.
“Fuck. Gonna cum soon. Look at me.”
He pushed you onto his dick deeper, it violently hitting the back of your throat as your eyes watered.
The sight sent him over the edge, shooting his cum down your throat as you swallowed submissively.
He let go of your hair and offered his hands to help you up, once again wiping away the mess he’d made from your lips with his finger.
“It was nice to see you again (y,n).”
(Not proof read) 🙏
#jake gyllenhaal#jake gyllenhaal fanfic#jake gyllenhaal smut#donnie darko#donnie darko smut#slight enemies to lovers#babysitting
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soulmate trope | dabi
Dabi’s route of soulmate trope.
"post-canon dabi? canon isn't even finished as of when this was posted on 30 july 2023!"
to you. i know he's doing just fine. and obviously i will be wrong about some things.
warnings: female reader. manga spoilers up to chapter 390: specifically about touya's body but vaguely about ~all of that~. sexual content. food mention/discussion. injury descriptions (burns) that aren't reader's. weeb slander.
a note: part of the plot revolves around...analysing anime. i use hunter x hunter here, and if you are not into that, i have, to the best of my knowledge, included neither spoilers (aside from early story arc names) nor information that cannot be understood via context clues. additionally, there is a brief pokemon metaphor that also can hopefully be understood with context clues as well.
~27.7k
You’re being watched.
Or rather, you had the eerily intense inkling that you were being watched, or as if you were some sort of recently awakened sleeper agent—as if you were somehow the key to someone’s spying into U.A., even though the most secretive thing going on right now in 3-A’s common area was that Hagakure’s facial features were somewhat revealed by the drying face mask.
“Jirou,” you said, bookmarking your place, “Would you mind checking for—I don’t know, any kind of outside surveillance devices in here?”
Jirou bit the stem of the carnation she’d been about to weave into Yaoyorozu’s hair and shifted all the strands of the braid into one hand, and she tilted her head to jab the arm of the couch with her earjack. After a few moments, she unsheathed it, the hole in the couch sealing itself, and shook her head. “Nothing out of the ordinary. What’s up?”
Furrowing your brow, you shoved your book between the cushion and arm of your chair. “I’m not sure. It’s—I have this weird feeling that someone’s looking at me. Or through me, really. Both? I don’t know how to describe it, but it feels like someone else is seeing what I’m seeing.”
“Do your eyes hurt, ribbit?” Asui asked from her spot on the floor, where she was sorting her m&ms by colour.
“No. More like I’m hyperaware of them,” you said, “But I can’t shake the feeling that someone’s watching all of this because of me.”
“What’s there to watch? It’s nothing but a Girls and Todoroki Night. There’s nothing worth seeing and or any big secrets being spilled. Well, spoilers for the New Year’s episode of Kamisama Kiss, but it’s been out for years already,” said Mina, gesturing towards the television, and Uraraka snatched Mina’s hand out of the air and laid it flat on the coffee table again, because she’s not done painting her nails, damn it. Mina sighed dreamily at the sheep whose wool fluffed enough to take up the entire screen. “What I wouldn’t give for my hair to have that much volume.”
“I guess you’re right,” you said, settling down into your chair, pulling Shinsou’s blue-pineappled blanket up to your neck (he was out on his bike, so he wasn’t attending this Girls and Todoroki Night [Shinsou and Todoroki were the only boys allowed, since their presence wasn’t obtrusive or contrary to the vibe. Additionally, Shinsou thought it was funnier if his name weren’t included in the title of these events]). “Y’know, in the manga, the New Year avatar isn’t a sheep. It’s a dragon.”
Mina blew on her hands as Uraraka rebottled the nail polish brush. “Whaaaaat?
“It was changed to a sheep to align with the year the episode was released,” said Todoroki, his thumb and index finger pinching his lower lip with his eyes glued to the screen, “I understand the change on a narrative scale, but I believe the dragon had more of a character arc than the sheep. The dragon didn’t think it was as appealing as other years’ avatars, and it had to learn to accept itself and accept others’ love for it. It was rooted in misunderstanding.”
For some reason, when you looked at Todoroki, you were doused with regret. Sharp and cold, followed by a splash of something more muddled: envy, maybe? Gratitude?
These…these feelings weren’t yours.
***
“I can’t believe I missed a Girls and Todoroki Night,” said Shinsou, grinning, his legs dangling off the dorm’s kitchen counter, “but alas! The night was calling, and I had to go out in it.”
“We will not spoil Kamisama Kiss for you,” said Todoroki. He was crouched in front of the oven, hands clasped as he stared through the tinted window at the browning potato wedges. “You will have to watch that episode on your own.”
“You should really read the manga,” you were saying as you scanned the inside of the refrigerator, looking for anything that might go well with the potatoes—ah, Aoyama’s got some bougie-looking sauce. Savoury, by the looks of it. “It goes farther than the anime covers, and it’s so sweet. The worldbuilding gets better, too.” You took out the bottle and gave it an experimental shake.
“Really?” Shinsou wrinkled his nose. “I don’t know; that villain guy isn’t very fun. Feels like too much time is wasted on him.”
Todoroki’s head snapped towards Shinsou at the same time you slammed the refrigerator shut. “No,” the both of you said at the same time, and you continued. “The anime hasn’t been quite as accurate in tone regarding that character, but he’s really wonderful, eventually. You really feel for what happened to him and for his past relationship to the main characters. Simple but effective job of deconstructing his villainy and granting him humanity.”
“Huh.” Shinsou propped his cheek on his fist, his ankle resting on his opposite knee. “I wonder how much nuance I’m missing because I’m only watching the anime.”
For a second, you felt as groggy as if you’d just woken up, your eyes focusing a bit more precisely, blurring the kitchen tiles for a moment before re-focusing, and it crept in again: the feeling that someone was watching you, that someone else was here.
“Hey, Shinsou, Todoroki,” you said, blinking several times, Aoyama’s brown sauce clutched in both hands, “Do my eyes look any different?”
Both of them looked you over. Shinsou shook his head. “Are you hurt?”
“No, I’ve got—” You nodded towards Todoroki. “I have that same feeling from last night. Like someone’s watching. But Jirou said nothing was wrong.” Shrugging, you tossed the sauce to Shinsou and sat in front of the oven with Todoroki. “I guess Kamisama Kiss must bring out the voyeur in me. Or being voyeur-ed. Watched.” You crossed your legs at the same time Todoroki jolted because of a crushed peppercorn popping in the oven. “Maybe we should start reading manga alongside the anime so that we can judge how accurate they are. See how much character nuance is lost or preserved.”
Todoroki’s eyes bulged. “You have no idea how much that appeals to me. I desperately need to discuss the differences between the Hunter x Hunter 1999 anime, the 2011 anime, and the manga. Sero refuses to watch the 1999 version.”
Amusement. Condescension. Bubbling to the top of your consciousness.
Distinctly not yours.
Why would you be feeling these things in the face of something that sounded so wonderfully, uselessly pedantic? A project like Todoroki’s just proposed sounded like an absolutely ideal waste of time that would allow you to be more accurate than the vast majority of people when it came to plot, lore, and characterisation. Why would emotions you’d associate with making fun of someone pop up now? You didn’t want to make fun of Todoroki; you were enthusiastic about joining him in this pointless endeavour.
The timer on Shinsou’s phone blared, and he tapped it off, patting his pockets (?) for the oven mitt, which he spotted on the counter next to him. “Why would Sero refuse to watch the older version?”
Todoroki helped you stand and guided the both of you away from the oven. “To be fair, in the 1999 anime, the animators did take liberties with panel composition and brought in new angles and lines sporadically. Colours are also odd and inaccurate, and those are corrected, for the most part, in the 2011 version. More of the manga is covered, and the animation is smoother in the 2011 version as well.”
Why did you feel the distant sensation of laughing? Nothing about this has been funny, per se, but the…what was going on?
“Okay, I’ll bite,” you said, strangely heavy and hyperaware and surveying the tray of steaming potato wedges as Shinsou shuffled it to the stove, “I’ll do it with you, all this manga accuracy checking.”
“Me, too,” said Shinsou, shaking the over mitt off, “My suggestion is that we keep it to just the three of us, to prevent exhausting arguments, like we’d have in a big group the size of Girls and Todoroki Nights.”
“I can lend you the first few volumes,” said Todoroki, opening a cabinet to search for Aoyama’s sauce bowls, “After that, I have a link to high-quality scans I can send you.”
“Sounds perfect,” you said, reaching for a potato wedge that did not sizzle and screech as much as the others, “Should we watch the first episode tomorrow night?” When you retracted your hand at the burn, you felt your own pain and someone else’s sense of nostalgia.
***
You’d already been on the precipice of falling asleep during Present Mic’s lesson, but when a concentrated shot of fatigue pierced you, you set down your pen and reluctantly resolved to get the subsequent notes from Iida. God, couldn’t this wait until you were out of class? No one needed to see how terrible your own notes were. No one needed to see your drawings in the margins.
Burying your face in your hands, you dug the heels of your palms into your eyes, rubbing them as the lethargy kicked in, and you braced yourself for the uncanny sensation of being your own worst voyeur.
When you opened them, after the lightheaded dots blinked away, you weren’t in the classroom, instead entrenched in darkness. Well, wait—you groped around on your desk: physically, you still were upright in your desk at U.A., able to grasp your pen, set it down, able to faintly hear Present Mic, as if he’s in the next room over.
Blindly, you tapped Mina’s desk behind you, turning your head over your shoulder. “Do my eyes look weird to you?”
“No. Should they?” she whispered back—or maybe she said it at a normal volume, and the classroom had been so far removed the distance silenced her.
Biting the inside of your cheek, you faced the front again. Looks like you have to figure this out yourself, or else you’ll be sitting in pitch black for who knows how long.
A minute passed. Your eyes adjusted to the darkness, shapes appearing—you’re inside. In a room with the lights off. Sideways, for some reason. One of the shapes was so rigidly rectangular that it had to be a shoji divider, and you were just trying to estimate its size when all of your mental facilities halted at a loud, rumbling groan.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” a scratchy, masculine voice said, “Must be my turn, huh?”
He flipped over, and barely cracked venetian blinds behind dark curtains just barely illuminated part of the scene: you were seeing this sideways because he was lying in bed, an out-of-place, opulent, Western-style bed in what you assumed was an Eastern-style room, judging what you could make out of traditional wallpaper and tatami flooring.
“Well, you’re not getting anything out of me,” he said, reaching for one of the many strewn pillows and hugging it—you lost half of your sight when his face sank into it (too dark for you to get a good look at his hands or arms), “Sucks for you, but I’m going back to sleep. Don’t care how curious you are. Not sharin’ anything with someone who can’t cook potato wedges right.”
No, get up. Get up. Say more right now. Who was he? It’s—it’s the middle of the day, anyhow; what is he doing asleep?
“Hah. You’re angry with me.” His laugh sounded more like a hiss, somehow. “Get used to it.”
He shut his eyes. After about a minute, the darkness faded, and Present Mic���s voice hit you at full volume, and you winced, clamping a hand down on your notes when the classroom came into view.
***
“You are not dropping out of school the semester you’re supposed to graduate,” said Aizawa, pinching the bridge of his nose, elbow digging into the puffy leather chair by Nezu’s desk.
“From my perspective, it does not appear you are a liability to U.A.’s security.” Nezu steepled his paws together, his pink toe beans preventing him from pressing them completely flat. “Simply seeing through each other’s eyes and feeling some of his emotions are no cause for the drastic security measures you are proposing. I believe that so long as you have some sort of indicator that either situation is happening, faculty can prepare for your temporary debility.”
“Don’t even think about abusing it to get out of class,” said Aizawa, propping his chin on his fist.
“You think I would? Shocked! Shocked and offended,” you said, “I’m gonna be in class; I don’t trust anyone else’s notes. I want my own interpretations of lectures.” You slumped down in your seat, tilting your head back to stare at the ceiling. “Principal Nezu, do you have an idea of why this is happening to me?”
“I do.” Nezu opened the top drawer in his desk to retrieve a stack of yellow-green papers, torn from a legal pad and crimped because of whatever was spilled on it. “Recovery Girl and Midnight have been analysing the results of Tainted Love’s quirk for some time now. The female rehabilitation centre with which Midnight works, Sakura Grove, has uncovered evidence of two other incidents that caused a soulmate bond with similar qualities to form.”
“What? No,” you said, letting a whine creep into your voice, “That means my soulmate’s a jerk. He was rude to me. He insulted my potato wedge recipe.”
Aizawa raised an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth twitching upward as he crossed his arms. “You can’t expect there to be love at first sight, can you? Love is a choice. You work at it every day. You have to keep choosing it.”
“Yaoyorozu and Jirou were already dating when they got assigned soulmates,” you said, listing on your fingers, “Midoriya and Uraraka had been pining after each other for years—”
Aizawa scowled. “Stop that.”
“So, do you want me to report anything? Do you want me to duck out of class when he—checks in?”
“If you feel unsafe, let us know. Otherwise, it is of my opinion that you will be just fine,” said Nezu, and he reached for his paw-sized coffee cup to remove the melting stroopwaffle cookie off the top. “Report what you perceive as dangerous, but you deserve privacy. When you decide on your signal that the bond is active, please send an email to faculty members. Whether or not you inform your peers is at your discretion.”
***
So, of course, you told everyone.
Meaning no one batted an eye the next time the soulmate bond activated, which was in class. Feeling the exhaustion and the slight buzz from your soulmate popping in to watch through you, you made the phone call symbol, grabbed a marker from the whiteboard, and headed out into the hall, no questions asked.
“Hey,” you were saying, shoving your forearm against the concrete-block wall and popping the marker cap off with your mouth, “Good to hear from you. Didn’t know I could see through you, too. Excited to see how we’ll deal with that. This is my phone number.” You scrawled it across your arm, along with your given name above it. “If you can’t memorise it now, that’s fine. I’ll write it down next time, too, so you could prepare to have something nearby to record it with. I look forward to getting to know you.”
No strong emotions on his part. But he was there.
“Okay,” you said, and you turned to sink down against the wall to sit in the deserted hallway. “Some basic stuff: I’m a student at U.A., in my last year. I’m in that—uh, I’m in the class that’s gotten into a bit of trouble over the past few years. Midoriya, Bakugou, and all of them, if you watch the news. I’ve just ducked out of class with everyone.” You kept looking at your arm so that he could memorise it. “I don’t really wanna talk about my quirk, since that seems like such a boring, capital-A adult question, but I can tell you about it later, if you really want to know. Oh! I do not suck at making potato wedges. It was just a recipe that none of us had made before, and they were fine. They were good. I—”
And he’s gone, link severed.
Crossing your arms, you slumped against the wall. Did he choose to end it? Could he? He didn’t seem very receptive, so you wouldn’t put it past him.
***
You woke up from a nap watching through him play a video game, some non-discernible, first-person shooter. Again in the dark, but perhaps not in the same room. The windows weren’t open enough to let in enough light to tell.
Your soulmate never acknowledged you were there by gesture or word. Just played his stupid fucking game. You were trying to send him foul vibes of frustration and indignation, but he ignored you.
After a mere six minutes of the world’s worst Let’s Play, you decided you could be a little bitch as well.
***
“Oh! He’s here. Excuse me,” you said to Shinsou and Jirou, making the phone call gesture as you pushed yourself up from the lunch table, “I’ll be back in a moment. Please guard my gummies from Monoma.”
A flash of curiosity, finally, from your soulmate as he got the image of Shinsou and Jirou smirking to themselves and waving you off.
Once you were alone outside in the courtyard, you pulled out and unfolded the piece of pink construction paper, at this point every inch covered by doodles of flowers and increasingly shitty bulbasaurs. You tapped at the writing in the centre. “This is called a telephone number,” you said, “This one belongs to me. If you dial this number into a phone to call it, you will reach me. Then, we could have a conversation and arrange to meet up, instead of this unreliable, one-sided bond.”
You flattened your hand to smooth out the creases, halting midway when it struck you. “I’ve just realised you may be confused by this situation. Don’t worry; I am as well. But be assured, due to a quirk incident, we’ve been assigned soulmates. Yeah, I know they’re fake, but with this villain Tainted Love’s quirk, soulmates are real.”
He evidently was feeling like he wanted to walk straight into the ocean.
“I’m assuming you’re not a U.A. student, so—do you remember breathing in some sort of pink dust? Within about the past—I don’t know, two and a half years? That’s how long Tainted Love was active. She only got arrested about a month or so ago.” You couldn’t garner anything from him except for exasperation, so you continued. “And not, like, snorting a line of pink dust. It would’ve been in a dust cloud. A bit like fog. You would’ve noticed it.”
Staring at your phone number the whole time, you allowed him silence to think. Whatever he was feeling was very subdued, so you couldn’t really surmise what it was, but ten seconds before the bond broke, a livid, fiery ire consumed your whole body in the heat of recognition.
***
Shinsou, Todoroki, and you were all crowded around a laptop in Shinsou’s dorm to watch the beginning episodes of Hunter x Hunter the next time your soulmate spoke to you. He’d gone a couple of times ignoring you in silence, once outside on a walk during the day on a path uptown you didn’t recognise, and the other on some rooftop while playing on his phone and watching a meteor shower. Completely disregarding your attempts to give him your number or talk to him in real time.
It just figured that he bothered to spare you any information when you were trying to see what the next phase of the Hunter Exam was, so Todoroki and Shinsou paused the show for you and waited. With a stab of affection for your friends, you moved to the corner, waiting for your soulmate to say something.
And he was. Your soulmate knew more combinations of swear words and general filth than you’ve ever cared to consider, and you were almost impressed with the creativity of his vulgarity. Outside under the night sky, he was furiously ripping open some medium-sized, cardboard box as he stomped towards a carefully cultivated, lilypad-covered, manmade pond towards the back of a highly organised, traditional garden.
Eventually, non-profanity was added. “Goddamn fucking shit-ass fish and goddamn fucking shit-ass crusty motherfucking doctor can’t take care of his own goddamn fucking pet project.” Tips of his house slippers stopping at the pond only by way of running into the stone wall, he stumbled, growling in frustration, before regaining his balance and yanking out the plastic bag inside the remnants of the box. “Wants a goddamn gift for fucking Mom but can’t be arsed to do it him-fucking-self. Deserves every fish fucked into his respiratory system, clogging up his arteries to give himself a goddamn heart attack. And then I can’t be blamed for—” The plastic stretched, and he ended up tearing it in half above the water, pieces falling atop waterlilies. “Shit on a cuntbag. What the fuck. I don’t deserve this.”
He stretched to reach the waterlilies, cupping his hands to sweep the fish food off and into the water. And—the moonlight struck the gently rippling water, enough for you to see a flash of an orange koi tail break the surface tension, but not enough to see whatever was going on with his hands—not that he was doing anything strange with them (just picking shreds of plastic out of the water), but they somehow were strange. They moved stiffly and had some sort of bumps on them, but—does this guy live in darkness? You couldn’t tell anything about what his hands looked like aside from the shadowed bumps, which could be anything.
“I deserve a lot, but I sure as hell don’t deserve this.” He rounded the pond and punched a few buttons on a small, hidden, monitor, checking the pH of the pool and water levels. “Not my fucking job. Not my fucking job. Why do they think—why am I the one to do this shit. How come I can get in trouble with my fucking brother for him not taking care of his project.” He swatted at his wet bathrobe sleeve, pissed, and shook out some of the water. “Hey, you. I know you’re there.”
Back in the dorm, you jolted in your seat. In the distance, you could hear Shinsou ask what was wrong. “Nothing,” you said, sounding distant yourself, “He acknowledged me is all. Hasn’t done that for a while, so it felt like a fourth wall break.”
Your soulmate sat down on the edge of the pond, glaring out at the rest of the garden (wisteria heavy, vines swaying in the night wind). “Are you hot?”
You’d never wanted to be able to transfer direct words or actions to him so much, because he needed to be strangled.
“I’m not kidding.” He crossed his arms, covered by a dark bathrobe, sticking his hands in his armpits. “Are you hot? I don’t like the idea of being connected to some hideous fuckwad.”
Never mind. Now you have never wanted to be—
“This quirk shit isn’t gonna last long, but if you’re hot, you need to get on my dick before it goes away. I wanna see how it looks giving me a blowjob from your perspective.”
Kill. Destroy. Maim. Eviscerate, even.
“Ooh, watch out. We’ve got an uptight, prudish bitch over here,” he said, and he laughed—again, sounding more like a hiss than anything else. “Well, then. If you’re not gonna put out, then I’ve got no use for you. Don’t need anyone, especially not some goddamn lunatic who claims to be my soulmate. Too many people are interfering in my life, anyway. And to be honest, it seems like you’re dumb and irritating. I don’t like people like you.”
Maybe you’re soulmates because you’re destined to kill him on sight. Your soul, calling out for his to suffer extreme violence. He’d deserve it.
May all his potato wedges burn.
***
Monoma was at the next Hunter x Hunter anime viewing, because he’d been dying to know why you were wearing an actual and literal clown costume, wig and enormous foam nose included.
“I’m liking the new hero outfit,” Monoma said, flipping his hair back with a flourish, “but why are you wearing it during our off-hours?”
“Shove off,” you said, grinning as Shinsou tossed you a pillow to hold, “Did you bring your peach gummies?”
“I did,” said Monoma, sitting next to you on Todoroki’s tatami mats, and he pulled a massive bag of white peach gummies from inside his jacket, handing it to you to open. “May I ask if it’s seriously part of your new uniform, or—”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Monoma,” you said, ripping open the bag at the notch, “I’m making a point.”
“Her soulmate,” Shinsou supplied, pulling up the next episode, “He wants to know what she looks like. So, she’s been dressing up in horrible, gawdy shit so that he can never really tell, even around mirrors.”
“He’s pissed,” you said, beaming, digging into the bag and popping a gummy into your mouth, “He wants me to stop playing around, but he was mean to me. Mean to me, unprovoked, and in a way that wasn’t hot. Tomorrow, I’m wearing a sheet and running around like a ghost. I will say nothing to him but boo.”
“I suppose that explains the influx of regular face masks you’ve taken to wearing during class.” Monoma scoffed, his incredulous, open mouth stretching into a grin. “You are impossible. If your humourless soulmate is worth his salt, then he should at least value the effort you’re putting into it.”
“Sero has sent me a message,” interrupted Todoroki, thumb swiping his phone screen, “He says that he has changed his mind and would like to join us. He’s started rereading the series and likes it more this time around.” Todoroki looked up and around his room, lips pursed. “There is not much space for five people. It is getter harder to see the laptop.”
***
The five of you started the Heaven’s Arena arc of Hunter x Hunter in Aizawa’s dorm apartment, seeing as he had the best television setup: for one, having an actual television instead of simply relying on his computer. His sound system held up, too, though you suspected Present Mic had something to do with that, instead of Aizawa’s own preferences.
You, Shinsou, Todoroki, Monoma, and Sero were scattered across Aizawa’s living room, all cosied under blankets and pillows and pointed towards his wall-mounted television, sitting on his cat-hair covered couch and armchairs, mugs and snacks on his coffee table, socked feet loose, and house slippers at the edge of the shag rug. The cats, Dango and Konpeito, chose to snuggle up towards Todoroki and you (beat that, Shinsou!), so you were careful not to disturb them from their slumber on your lap. No sudden movements, even when the tired dizziness of your bitch soulmate faded in.
“Spoilers for Hunter x Hunter, I suppose, even though it’s been out for decades,” you said under your breath, raising your hand to signal to the others that your soulmate was looking in. At your movement, Dango raised her head from her cocoon in your lap to yawn, her face nearly turning inside out, and she flinched, her pupils dilating, at the creak of the door.
Laden with groceries, Aizawa stepped into his own apartment, his brow furrowing at the sight of his students in his living room. “You have ten seconds to tell me what you’re doing here.”
“The fuck?” Sero whipped his head towards Shinsou and back at Aizawa. “Shinsou told us you were okay with it.”
“I said that he wouldn’t mind, which he can’t if he doesn’t catch us,” said Shinsou, bracing himself when Aizawa tugged at his capture weapon around his neck, “It’s my fault, Aizawa-sensei. Please don’t get angry at anyone else.”
Your soulmate seemed pleased that you were getting in trouble. Bastard.
Aizawa set his cloth bags on his kitchen counter, the insides shifting with the weight of the groceries. “Is this appropriate for Eri to watch?”
“Well, in general—”
A character onscreen chose that moment to seductively moan another character’s name, over and over again.
Aizawa winced, scrunching his eyes shut tightly. “Turn that shit off. Find another place to watch it.” Shaking his head, he unbagged the first of his groceries. “Shinsou, never bring anyone, including yourself, into my personal space again with express permission.”
“Damn it,” you said, reaching for the remote. You pressed the power button, watching the screen fade from the vibrant colours of Heaven’s Arena to black, with Aizawa’s living room reflecting back at you. Forlornly, you scratched the back of Dango’s neck, watching her mirrored reaction, before you realised what you were doing: giving your bitch-ass soulmate a clear view of your bare face. Eyes bulging, you gasped and bent over to hide your face, with Dango scurrying away at being disturbed.
The connection cut at the faint suggestion of intrigue.
***
YOU
hey i know we said we’d keep it small but. i think midoriya would really enjoy the battle analysis that the hxh characters are doing
YOU
bc they be doing some QUICK analytic work based on their opponents’ personalities
TODOROKI 💅🎏
Midoriya has been asking more questions than usual during our sparring sessions.
SERO 🧃🍊
ffs why isn’t he already in the group? should’ve thought of him
SHINSOU 💜🍡
want me to add him?
YOU
would that be okay, todoroki?
TODOROKI 💅🎏
There’s more than enough room at our new venue. We should invite him.
SHINSOU 💜🍡
why don’t you text him then? it’s at your place
MONOMA 🔇🎭
Midoriya CANNOT sit next to me
MONOMA 🔇🎭
I’d like to hear the onscreen dialogue instead of whatever he’s saying under his breath
MONOMA 🔇🎭
He CANNOT shut up
YOU
WHOMST won’t shut up??????
SERO 🧃🍊
don’t worry no one will sit next to you
MONOMA 🔇🎭
Good
MONOMA 🔇🎭
Wait
TODOROKI 💅🎏
Midoriya can attend! He’ll be a little late today, but I think we should wait for him, since it’s his first time joining us.
Startled by the waiter, you put your phone down on your notebook and accepted your coffee graciously. You shifted your laptop and notebook over so that you could cup the mug in front of you, its warmth seeping through the sides, and you took a tentative slurp. Interesting. You’ll finish it, but you won’t order this again.
You were killing time that Saturday by getting ahead on your work for Put Your Hands Up Radio: editing and fact-checking news segments that Yamada would read between songs towards the evening. Electing to get some sunshine on your skin before hunkering down with the group again to analyse some anime, you’d chosen to edit the articles outside at a café you’d discovered recently, one at which you hadn’t decided on a regular order yet and were shopping around the menu each time you came. Plus, if you’d stayed on campus, no doubt Shinsou or Monoma would’ve found you to distract you.
The café’s patio with scorching, cast-iron furniture and haphazard parasol installation led to most of its customers sitting inside, but that meant you had space to think, even with the hot groves of your seat imprinting patterns into your skin.
Your soulmate was probably being rude because he was scared, or perhaps he didn’t believe that Tainted Love’s quirk was legitimate. You’d have to assure him that it was, as you’d run through Nezu’s report with Midnight and Recovery Girl, fact-checking that. Either way. Some frustrated guy—living at home, apparently, and pissed about it—was paired out of the blue with some student at U.A. He might be scared that you were a creep.
Tainted Love’s team’s notes on her quirk that Midnight had confiscated explained that each soulmate bond, somehow, was moulded around the pair’s personalities and would fulfil a lifelong need. A lot of responsibility, it seemed, but if it were true—and other pairs proved it true—you would fulfil it naturally, and so would he.
So, even though your soulmate had been rude, you’d give him a chance. The soulmate bond existed for a reason. Plus, he might be a real-life tsundere, and wouldn’t that be fun to crack? To be the only one a rude, evil person was soft for was the ideal, wasn’t it? Someone so naturally cruel and heartless but learning to be kind for you—
Get a hold of yourself. He’s a real guy who will be in your life forever, not just someone you can throw away, like a celebrity/pro-hero crush. Treat him seriously.
“I’m…being serious,” you said to yourself, pouting into your coffee. You hunched in your seat to drink from the mug without lifting it, and you slorped away the neck of the latte art swan the barista had so carefully poured. “He’s probably not even be a sexy sort of cold-hearted. He’s just a type of bitchiness I haven’t learnt how to handle yet.”
Those boys in the anime analysis group? You could play their types of bitchiness like the world’s smallest fiddle. They were all so easy to handle (especially Monoma because of his predictability; Todoroki gave you the most trouble due to his complete non sequiturs), and it was fun bouncing off the petty parts of their personalities. Your soulmate spun things differently, but you’d learn his inclinations in time. If not, it’s not worth your time trying to “fix” someone who has no redeeming vulnerability.
You sighed. Now that you’ve lost your editing groove, you might as well do some last-minute reading before watching the next few episodes tonight. Closing your laptop, you reached down into your bag to get the next volume of Todoroki’s manga, and your vision blurred over, dizziness incoming. Well, at least you’re sitting down.
You held the manga volume in your lap and waited for your soulmate’s line of sight to appear. If he were in a darkened room yet again, you could buy yourself a little treat. The café’s display case had some sort of new chess square that you’d been eyeing. And—shit, sunlight was coming through. No little treat for you.
Well, maybe you’ll get one, anyway. You slumped farther down in your seat, blinking as dappled, sunlight-covered pavement and an empty terrace outside a business across a busy street came into view—your soulmate jumped back off the road when a car whooshed by, and after that, he jaywalked, horns blaring in his wake.
He did a little hop to get on the opposite sidewalk, hands in his pockets, and peered past the iron fence into the window of the shop—a packed coffee shop; maybe you could at least learn his coffee order, because then you’d have some shred of information about him. But no, he unlatched the iron gate and wove his way through the cast-iron patio chairs and tables, and—
You’re staring right at you: sitting, legs crossed, not taking up space, stuff spread out over your table, and he’s gaining on you. You flinched, watched yourself flinch, and your gaze darted around until you were able to meet his (your) eyes (your head making minor, nervous movements you wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t seen them), expression cautious, curling in on yourself on impulse. When you saw how, through an outsider, that made you look small, you made the effort to sit up and roll your shoulders back, elbows on the table. You watched yourself recoil at the heat of the iron, and you had to use his perspective to know where your notebook was so that you could rest your arms on it.
He brushed past your table’s open chair, instead yanking the table by the edge away from your lap so that he could stand closer to you and grabbing your face. He first cupped your jaw with his whole hand, pale skin and leather of a fingerless glove cold to the touch, and then, when he seemed sure you weren’t going to protest (his vision turned slightly to the left—he must have tilted his head), he narrowed his grip in little jerks of his hand, sliding erratically from gripping your jaw to just tilting your chin upwards towards him. He turned your head to the left and to the right before returning to centre to stare you down (you’d been pliant under his control, because the doubling of you watching you do things was throwing off your senses of balance and direction).
“Not as hard as you fucking made it out to be, huh?” His thumb rubbed over your chin. His nail was cracked. “Now, are you gonna stop acting like a little bitch, or are we gonna keep playing your stupid game?”
“First of all,” you said, fascinated by the way your lips curled in under your teeth to shape the consonants, and judging by where your soulmate was looking, he was, too. “It’s not an act. I am a little bitch.”
“No more of that hiding shit.” He tapped your cheek a little harder than he needed to with his middle two fingers. “Don’t know why you’d wanna hide this, anyway.”
You wouldn’t’ve said you winced at his rough touch, but you noticed enough of an aggravated microexpression around your eyes that you could tell you didn’t like it. “You’re doing the same. Hiding what you look like from me.”
“And I’m gonna keep doing it. You get nothing. There is no us. Soulmates don’t exist, and even if some hack fraud’s quirk has paired us off, I don’t need anybody, least of all you.”
“Well, maybe you don’t need anyone,” you said, your eyes dipping to see more of his hand (hot damn, we forgot we can’t see through our own eyes that quickly?) and then raising them to look directly into your soulmate’s—hyperaware of the way your eyelashes fluttered against your skin, of the slight pinch of your eyebrows, of the way the sun struck your cheeks, “but you could want someone.”
A sliver of a cool breeze wove its way through the patio, some of your hair swaying with it.
“I won’t pressure you to do anything you don’t want,” you said, lying, “but at the very least, we could communicate enough for this to be easy for us. Please let me give you my phone number, and please save it this time.”
His thumb inched up to press into your lower lip.
“Please,” you said, eyes dark but slightly glassy, letting your tongue tap the tip of his thumb, so lightly wetting it that it was as if you hadn’t touched it at all.
Your soulmate tilted his head again, lurching to the side as he shifted his weight to lean on the table. He knocked your pen onto the ground, and when you made the slightest movement to grab it, he pressed his thumb harder against you to still you, and he shook his head.
Your throat ran dry. Your (his) eyes honed in on the bead of sweat dripping down it and into your blouse. “Give me your name, then. A name, if you hate me that much.”
“It’s Touya,” he grumbled, and he closed his eyes in the moment before he kissed you, cold lips open before even touching yours (both rough, but his lower lip was much rougher for some reason). Blind, you startled back at the initial touch, but he held your chin firmly near his, sliding his gloved hand to your cheek as his tongue did into your mouth, pressing against the roof of your mouth and along your gums, alternating pressure where he pleased, not seeming to care what you did with your tongue—not that you were doing much at all due to surprise, but you at least had the mind to press your lips back, because while yes, his style was unorthodox, it still felt good. He laughed through his nose, once, when you slid your tongue against his, but when you raised a hand to cup his cheek, he pulled away before you could do more than graze him.
“Touya,” you said, and now that he was looking at you again, you—well, you looked kissed out, leaning towards him to chase that feeling, to encourage him to touch you again, and you looked fucking hot (the hell? It took a lot for you to think of yourself that way, and today hadn’t even been a good day for you, but now, freshly kissed, saying your soulmate’s name, you found yourself thinking you were pretty. Uh. Could this be what he was thinking instead of you? You couldn’t tell; it felt like it was coming from somewhere deep in your gut). “Touya. Let me write—”
You watched yourself grapple for your pen for a while. He huffed, crossed his arms, and bothered to look down where your pen was for you, and when he did, you finally grabbed it.
“Touya,” you said, uncapping the pen and hovering over your notebook, and you paused after the first stroke. “Touya spelled like that Todoroki Touya who released that Endeavor video during the war?”
The ink bled through the sheet of paper from being pressed in one spot for too long.
“Yeah,” he said eventually, voice rasping, “Spelled just like his.”
“Okay,” you said, bending over your paper and writing based on muscle memory, and under his name, you wrote your phone number for him again, with your name written beneath it, just to hammer it in. You ripped the page out of your notebook with some difficulty before passing it to him.
Touya scanned it and rubbed his thumb over your name, the leather of his fingerless glove catching on the uneven tear.
Cute. Nerd. “Do the gloves have something to do with your quirk?”
“What? No,” he said, crumpling the paper and stowing it in his pocket, and he kept his hands there, hiding them, “I don’t have a quirk.”
Okay, so Touya spoke in a rush and concealed evidence. Sounds like a lie. Monoma took that route on occasion, so the obvious thing for you to say was “Oh, so you wear them because of Naruto? Do you run like him, too?”
“Fuck off,” he spat, and you watched yourself grin: you’ve got him. “As if I had time to be a fuckin’ otaku.”
“Good to know,” you said, “So, all the manga re-analysis I’ve been doing with my friends is new to you? I hope you’re not planning on reading or watching any of the works that we’re covering, then. Unless you wanted to read along with us?”
“I don’t need that shit to scorch my brain.” For some reason, he winced, scrunching his eyes shut for a moment, and you waited in the dark for him.
“You have enough going on?”
He pried his eyes open, blinking blearily at you, still grinning, still smug. “Yeah,” he said, and he dug his left hand out to stare at the back of it, leather shining in the sunlight while he wiggled his fingers. He bent across the table to grab your coffee, fingers spidering over the rim to grip it, and he brought it to his mouth. “This is fucking awful; what’s wrong with you?” he asked after an audible swallow.
“It’s not my usual order.” Closing your notebook, you crossed your arms, staring down at you and feeling more and more like you’re in a dream. “You can either tell me what your quirk is, because I know you’re lying, or you could stay? For coffee? I’ll buy you something better.”
(You would have asked what’s up with his appearance that he didn’t want you to see or feel, but considering how early in your first official meeting it was, the question may be too insensitive, especially if he were born with it.)
Touya glanced over his shoulder, saw something you couldn’t, and set your mug on the iron table with a quiet clink. “I’ve got to go,” he said, and he spun around, taking the first step away.
You slammed a hand on the table purely on guesswork based on where he left your mug, and the sound of shaking iron and tinkling porcelain resounded, distant when you heard it through his ears, yet feeling the vibrations travel through your own arms. “Tell me your goddamn quirk, you daft fucker.”
Touya paused, and he turned back to you. “That’s more like it.” He sat on your table, at the place over your lap, and he reached out towards your face. You saw yourself lean back, eyes wide, but he simply dug his fingers into your hair at your hairline, scratching your scalp and digging his nails in enough to hear the movement.
(You saw yourself frown the moment you noticed his skin was colder than the glove.)
“Barking at me like that is how information is usually torn out of me. Makes me feel at home,” he said, a bit too cheerfully for your liking, “You can be trained to be a bitch towards me yet.”
“Touya,” you said, raising your head to embolden more of his touch, “Who’s—who’s been treating you like that? You don’t deserve it.”
“Shut up.” Touya laid his hand flat atop your head, the weight of it pushing down on you. “Sure, I lied. Said I didn’t have a quirk. Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters.” Your tongue swiped over your lower lip, and Touya’s gaze darted to it. “I want any scrap of you I can get. Everything I’ve already learnt I’ve filed away in my heart: your name, the way you speak, your hatred of your brother’s fish and living at home—”
The hand on your hand slipped to slap over your mouth. “Jesus Christ, stop noticing things about me. Freak. Goddamn.” Touya lifted his hand off of you, and based on his perspective, he ran it through his own hair. “So that you don’t go making your own intrusive observations, I’ll tell you about my quirk: I effectively don’t have one anymore. I used it a lot, and it fucked me up. So, for my own self-preservation, which I’ve been told I should value, I can’t use it anymore. Good enough for you?”
“Great enough for me,” you said, “I’ll take care not to talk about my quirk or hero course stuff too much. I don’t want you to feel left out.”
“Holy shit,” said Touya, and he broke eye contact with you to stare at his boots (scuffed, black, but new, so the scuffing must be intentional), blinking rapidly before pressing—probably—his thumb and forefinger against his eyelids.
Something was deeply wrong with this man. You needed him to kiss you again. You opened your mouth to ask him to, but wooziness and your dry throat called; the ripped page of your notebook you’d been staring at dripped back into your own perspective at a glacial pace. You heard the scuffle of his shuffling off the iron table and the grit of his boot against the concrete, and when you grappled for him in the dark, your hand clenched around nothing.
You rubbed your eyes until the vertigo passed, and when you opened them, Touya was gone.
***
Later that afternoon, you were scrolling through your phone on the end cushion of one of Todoroki’s couches in the living room in a poor effort not to gawk at everything. You expected some of it could be excused, since it’s your first time at his house, but good God, rich people were insane. This was the biggest, traditionally-styled building (estate?) you’ve been in since you toured a castle preserved from the Edo period—but it was apt, you supposed, since Endeavor had been acting as a sort of daimyo of his own.
Dormer gables. Hip-and-gable roofs, with golden shachihoko shibi cupping the corners—though instead of the customary sea monsters, if your eyes weren’t deceiving you, they appeared to be made for flame-swimming instead of in water. A recessed entryway, its wooden flooring tiles hand-cut in tiny designs to make you aware of the space, with brand-new guest slippers already provided before you could ask. Todoroki’s house (estate?) screamed business, or at the very least, don’t touch anything.
At least the living room in which you sat stiffly had a touch of clear modernity—and so it seemed that the inner rooms actually revealed that they were living in the modern age, but the barrier of traditional architecture to get to actual living space heaved a hyperawareness of outsider onto your shoulders.
Todoroki himself, bless him, moved around like the elegant austerity didn’t even occur to him. Waiting for Midoriya with the rest of you, he’d helped everyone spread out their notes and manga over the short table and floor, gathering blankets for everyone when it occurred to him that not everyone’s body tolerated temperature like he did (since the house was kept oddly cold), and, instead of offering tea, like he’d said his sister would expect him to do, he provided a peculiar but pleasant combination of snacks: cheap-ass cup noodles, strawberry chardonnay-flavoured cheese on soup crackers, old mooncakes that had been in the fridge for a month but he declared were still good, and gummy worms for Monoma.
The bitch even bought everyone a fancy little drink according to personal preferences—and no one had even requested them or informed him what to get, but he’d gotten everything right, regardless (you suspected he’d asked Shinsou for help).
“Thank you,” you said, turning over in your hands the poshest bottle of pink lemonade you’ve ever seen, “You’re a very gracious host, Todoroki.”
He slurped his own caramel frappe. “I’m very excited to have so many friends over at once.”
“Of course,” you said, your weight jostling on the couch cushion as Todoroki sat next to you, “I can’t believe we didn’t think of going off-campus to watch this shit earlier. There’s way more privacy here.”
“Our doors are always open nowadays,” he said, and when Sero tapped Todoroki on his shoulder to help open another package of cheese, he held up a finger to pause your conversation.
Smiling softly, you twisted off the bottlecap of your lemonade, holding it up to your nose to inhale that pressurised burst of lemon scent, and—oh, hey, you felt a little lightheaded as you did so. Two times in one day? That’s new. At least it was from your perspective this time, so you didn’t have to worry about knocking anyone’s drink over.
“Hey,” you said, snuggling down into the couch, your palm atop the opening of your drink (when Monoma shot you a questioning look with the phone call hand signal, you nodded, and he relaxed and leaned towards you, his teeth cutting into his lower lip as he grinned). “Funny how we keep meeting like this, yeah?” you asked, feeling soft and full of love for this fucker, and you reached towards the coffee table to set down your drink and grab a flower-shaped mooncake. “I guess I can stop hiding from my reflection now, sweet boy.” You made eye contact with yourself in the reflection of the Torodokis’ enormous flatscreen, and you held your mooncake up in a toast before biting into it. “Hope you’re well. You seemed stressed earlier. I’m currently—”
Your phone rang in your lap, and you narrowed your eyes at the unknown number before answering it. “Hello?”
“Where the hell are you right now?”
“Wow,” you said, chewing, “No greeting, even? No mention of how much that you miss my voice or my lips now that you’ve—”
“Just tell me where the fuck you are,” said Touya, at the same time that Monoma’s eyebrows shot to his hairline at the kissing implication, and he thumped Shinsou in the chest for him to look up from his phone.
“Does it matter?”
“I told you my quirk shit when I didn’t want to, so fucking tell me,” said Touya, sounding muffled and, again, like he stood near traffic.
Swallowing mooncake in a rush and choking a bit, you cleared your throat and said, “Fine. I don’t know why it matters that much to you, but I’m at a friend’s house. Our anime analysis group has gotten too big for the dorms, so we’re trying out his place.”
You had to ensure the call hadn’t dropped due to his long response time. “What friend?” he asked.
You raised a brow, though he couldn’t see you. “I doubt you would know—shit!”
Struggling to tear the plastic covering the cheese, Todoroki had accidentally slammed his elbow into your collarbone.
“Geez.” You winced at Todoroki and rubbed the spot. “No, no, I’m fine,” you said when he reached towards your collarbone, his fingertips already icing over, “You may want to go get a knife to open that, though.”
Nodding soberly, Todoroki lowered his thawing hand and rose from the couch, tossing the cheese to himself. “I’ll do that. Anyone need anything from the kitchen while I’m up?”
While the others answered, you spoke into your phone again, hand on your chest. “Sorry about that. I guess if you paid attention to the news last year, you’d know him: one of Endeavor’s kids, Todoroki Shouto.”
The soulmate connection started to trickle away, but Touya stayed on the phone. “Do you not have any other friends who have a place?” Plastic crinkled on his end, along with a car horn in the background. “Hell, the library downtown rents out portable TVs—”
“Why should I be at another friend’s house?” Touya wouldn’t be able to see the reflection of your self-satisfied smirk now, but surely he could hear it in your voice. “Jealous that I’m at the house of another man?”
Touya gagged into the speaker. “Someone’s full of herself. Don’t wait up for me,” he said, and he hung up.
You pulled your phone away from your ear, pouting at the call screen before creating a new contact.
“You didn’t tell us you’d met your soulmate,” said Shinsou.
“It only happened this afternoon,” you said, saving his number under Touya 🐠🚷 (the fish for the koi pond he hated, and the no pedestrians sign for his apparent propensity to jaywalk), “and I’m not sure what to make of him. I was hoping to form my own opinion before telling all of you.”
Todoroki perked up and tilted his ear skyward at the sound of the front door opening. “I’ll get it,” he said, standing, “I bet that’s my brother. He’s back four hours late from physical therapy; I hope everything’s okay.”
Your eye twitched.
(Todoroki had warned everyone before coming over that his family would probably be in and out. Less so Fuyumi and Natsuo, because Fuyumi had recently moved in with her significant other and Natsuo had his own place near campus, but more of his parents and Dabi. Well. Touya, now, but you had your own Touya to worry about.
You’d met Dabi. Twice, during freshman year. When he’d been a villain, instead of whatever was happening with him in recovery. Rather formulative experiences for you, ones you only permitted yourself to think about in the hollowness of lonely nights—but you didn’t need those memories anymore, because you had your Touya now.
Remember? You have your own Touya. You don’t need another.)
“Do you want me to carry that for you?”
Todoroki’s voice trailed behind boot scuffing and a sliding door, and in Dabi/Touya shuffled—hoodie yanked up (layered over a longer coat?), strings pulled firmly around his face, plastic bags from the convenience store down the street on his wrist, very determinedly staring at the floor as he strode past behind the couch instead of at the four of you strewn across his living room, ducking into the kitchen as soon as possible.
You’d barely seen him for five seconds, and your heart was going to beat out of your chest. Or maybe that was just the bruise forming on your collarbone.
Todoroki nodded after his brother, standing behind your place at the couch. “There’s no ceremonial introduction, I assume. That’s my brother, Touya. You’ve all,” said Todoroki, scratching the back of his neck, “met him before. But! If you’re nervous, we will not be seeing much of him. He doesn’t spend much time in the main house; he lives in the old-fashioned teahouse towards the back of the garden. Privacy, you know, even though we’ve got to keep him close.” Todoroki wetted his lips as he looked towards the emptied shrine on the far wall. “He shouldn’t be any trouble, but I may have to zip out on occasion to help him. Not all of his skin grafts are taking.”
The doorbell rang, and Todoroki started towards it. “That must be Midoriya. Sero, would you please pull up the next episode?”
When Todoroki stepped into the entryway to greet him, you couldn’t suppress your curiosity. “I’m gonna go pour this over ice,” you said, gesturing with your pink lemonade bottle, “I’ll be back in a minute.”
Shinsou—the only one whom you’ve told about what happened with Dabi back then—shot you a crooked grin, but he distracted Monoma from noticing exactly what you were doing while you sneaked away down the hall.
His back was to you. Water flowed out of the kitchen faucet while he yanked his hoodie over his head and tossed it over the back of a chair, and he did the same with a longer, black coat—similar in shape to the coat he’d worn as a villain but not the same one. Maybe he’d grown accustomed to having the weight of it on his body, so what he wore now was a type of security blanket. While he ran a spoon under the faucet, he fumbled behind himself for his plastic, convenience store bag and fished out a pudding cup.
Backtracking a little, you purposely made your footsteps audible so that you wouldn’t startle him, and you entered the kitchen, shaking your lemonade for more noise to alert him of your presence.
His white brows pinched when he saw you, and he hastily shut the water off and scooted off to the edge of the counter while he put his stuff away, his movements rigid and close to his chest.
“Hi,” you said (oh, my God, you were talking to Dabi; holy shit), “Where do the cups live?”
Dabi blinked slowly, unable to look at you, and he peeled the lid off of his pudding cup. He glanced towards the door and back towards his stuff on the table, and he pointed towards a cabinet, his finger returning to his fist in a rush to get back what he was doing.
“Thank you,” you said, opening the one he’d pointed to. Oh. Fancy. Lots of choices. “I hope we’re not bothering you. We can—we can always leave, if you need us to. Or you could join us, if you like.” You turned around in time to see the flat of his tongue lick pudding off of the lid, stitches showing at the back of his tongue, and in the moment where he ducked his head, the tiny, unblemished part of his skin near the corners of his eyes blazing pink, your brain short-circuited.
(Dabi had been your first kiss.
During freshman year, in the week of that first round of internships, you’d been planted in Hosu City, around the time Stain closed his fist around the public consciousness. On a night patrol, your mentor had slipped into a restaurant that the yakuza frequented and stationed you in a nearby alley to watch for other yakuza incoming from the employees’ entrance.
An official sidekick had caught up with you—late forties, spandex, unrecognisable. You’d been terse in your replies, since he’d been essentially blowing your cover, but he couldn’t take a hint.
It’d only occurred to you that he’d been hitting on you when he’d propped an arm on the brick wall above your head to dominate your personal space, and an all-consuming dread had erupted in your stomach when he’d said, moving to take your chin in hand, “You know, you remind me a lot of my daughter.”
Before he’d been able to touch you, something rabid and ravenous about the size of a labrador had tackled him to the ground, the force knocking him almost two whole meters away, and the thing ripped into the sidekick’s chest, blood spewing—and somehow having the sense to cover his mouth to stifle the shouts.
In the moment you’d moved to get a better look at what was, in retrospect, a nomu, another figure had stepped between you and the sidekick, his own arm resting on the wall to keep you from getting closer.
“Hey,” Dabi had said, an easy grin stretching across his face, “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about anything. Just testing some shit out for someone. So long as you don’t go making any noise, I’ll let you walk away.”
Dabi hadn’t made his villain debut back then, but even so, it hadn’t seemed like it was just testing something out for someone; this guy had seemed his own brand of dangerous. Your gaze had started to creep towards the source of crunching, but he’d tapped your cheek, making you look at him. “Nuh-uh. Keep your eyes on me. If you don’t know anything, I don’t have to kill you, do I?”
“I, I’m—” You’d steeled yourself somewhat, your hands clenching into fists at your sides. “I’m not just gonna let you kill a hero while I stand here.”
Again, Dabi had stopped you before you could take a full step, this time by gripping your jaw, letting it rest in his palm while his fingers dug into your cheeks. “Can’t call him a hero. Was comparing you to his daughter—didn’t you hear? And it looked like he was gonna assault you. Some guys aren’t meant to be fathers.” His syrupy gaze had fallen to your neck, and he’d squeezed your face. “Jesus, your heart is beating like crazy.”
“I don’t normally calm myself down to the sounds of someone getting maimed,” you’d said, blood splattering in the air behind him, “Oh! Fuck.” You’d scrunched your eyes shut and curled in on yourself, trying to block out the sound of bones snapping.
“Some hero you are.”
“Yeah, yeah,” you’d said, “You’re more of one than I am, tonight. Thanks—?”
“Dabi,” he’d said, and at the time, it had just been a name. When you’d pried open your eyes, he’d been smiling, mouth closed, head tilted at being called a hero. You’d smiled back, but at an enormously strident crack from behind him, you’d had a full-body jolt. “Fucking hell, calm down,” he’d said, his arm sliding from the wall to your upper arm, “For once, you’re safe with me.” Seeing you try to look over his shoulder again, Dabi had dragged you forward by the jaw to kiss you, closed-mouthed but hot, leaning into you, his mouth overwhelming you with hardly any effort on his end, and he’d kept kissing you, stroking your cheek with the back of his hand, until the nomu slinked into silence.
Dabi had broken off when the nomu scuttled farther down the alley. “Right.” He’d taken a deep breath. “You gonna tell anyone about me?”
You’d shaken your head, confused as to why he seemed more concerned about descriptions of him rather than descriptions of the murder. But he’d been nice to you. Had given you a hell of a first kiss. “I can say someone in the yakuza killed him.”
He’d roughly patted your cheek and dropped away from you, stowing his hands in the deep pockets of his coat. “His death isn’t worth reporting, but I’ll take it.” He’d spun on his heel, raising a lazy hand in a wave as he disappeared into the night. “You’d better hope you never see me again.”)
And now, here he was, hunched over shitty gas station snacks in his family kitchen, a spoon hanging out of his mouth while he stowed things away. His naturally white hair showed now, and…he seemed terribly shy. Dabi, shy. Fucking ridiculous. But, you supposed, there’s guilt and shame around, uh, doing what he did. And—and his body was horribly, horribly mangled and mottled. He might not think anyone should look at him.
Todoroki (Shouto, you supposed you should think of him as, since Dabi was a Todoroki, too) had mentioned not all of Dabi’s skin grafts were taking. It was obvious. He’d burnt up during the war, and while you’d heard Recovery Girl and Eri had worked on him, despite outside protests that he wasn’t worth it, he still was very clearly cobbled together.
He still had a lot of staples, though faded stitches filled in new gaps, and those that remained had been replaced with medical-grade staples that wouldn’t get infected. Patches of successful grafts left a waning diamond pattern, particularly around his neck. Very little purple, overall, but going by the scars, you could still tell where it had been. Based on his appearance, he shouldn’t be alive, let alone able to walk around.
But he scooted with such speed out of your way when you got ice out of the freezer. “But really, you could stick around with us, if you wanted to. No pressure, though, if you want to be alone.” Calmly. You were calmly popping ice out of a tray and letting them clatter into your glass. “We’re watching Hunter x Hunter right now, if you’re interested. Have you read or watched it before, either the 1999 or 2011 version? Do you have a favourite character?”
Dabi clutched his snacks and discarded clothes to his chest, almost at the door, with his eyes darting all around the kitchen except on you.
Yeah. Must be shy. You were one of the U.A. students who fought in the war, after all, even though you didn’t personally fight him in the end. Probably feels guilty about the whole thing. Shy could be refreshing, after those bitches in the living room and your cunning soulmate.
Finally, tentatively, Dabi shifted his belongings to his right arm, and he raised his left to pat his throat, swallowing so that his Adam’s apple bobbed.
“Oh,” you said, ice melting in your hand, “I’m sorry. Are you on vocal rest? Vocal cords messed up somehow?”
After a moment, Dabi nodded. He edged towards the hallway.
“Okay. I hope you feel better soon,” you said, and you poured your lemonade over the ice. “I’ve kept you long enough. Please go rest; I hope we don’t disturb you further.”
Before you finished, he’d already skibbled off, his house shoes slipping on the wood.
***
(The second time you’d met Dabi hadn’t been as hands-on, but it’d still left an odd impression.
It’d been in an urban jungle-type battle, after knowing his involvement the League but before his backstory reveal, and you and some classmates had been fighting a handful of PLF-aligned villains.
You’d slithered underneath a lean-to created by a partially collapsed building to catch your breath, along with shielding yourself from an explosion Bakugou had been building up. You hadn’t even known Dabi was in the group you were chasing, but he’d slinked underneath the same, protective ruins as you had, barely slipping underneath the cover before Bakugou’s explosion had shaken it.
Dabi had braced himself on the crumbling entrance, scrunching his face away from the explosion, and once it’d stopped, he’d noticed you were barely two paces away from him, sweat dribbling down your face the same as it’d been down his.
You still didn’t know if his startled, constipated expression had been of recognition or simple surprise to see someone else taking cover under something that could collapse and kill them. He’d taken in your U.A. gym uniform—your personal hero costume had been in repairs that week—and there’d been a couple of heavy seconds where neither of you had done anything besides pant and let sweat drip onto the rubble.
He'd slipped out first, since he’d been blocking the entrance, and you’d left soon after. You hadn’t been five steps out of the lean-to before someone on the PLF side had destroyed it, and in the privacy of your heart, you liked to think that Dabi had waited until you were out to raze it.)
***
You made it a habit to call Touya whenever the soulmate bond activated. Though he never initiated a call, he answered most of yours. What else was he going to do, if it were on your side, besides sit there in the dark? He continued to be hold information about himself like a miser clutching coins, but you found it refreshing to have a charismatic grouch of a pseudo-pen pal.
You’d closed the door of a library study room behind you as you called him this time, setting your stack of books on the table.
“You’re finally reading something besides manga? I thought your brain was gonna rot,” he said upon picking up.
You slung the strap of your purse over a chair. “No greeting? No admittance of missing the melodious sound of my voice?”
“Why in the hell would I do that,” he said over the screech of pulling out your chair.
“Because you missed the melodious sound of my voice?” You pulled out your notebook, flipped it to a new page, and fossicked around for a pen. Clicking the one you found, you reached for the first book in your stack, a rudimentary sign language dictionary, and you jotted down a list of common words as they came to you, such as thank you, help, and, of course, the all-important cat.
Touya clicked his tongue. “Are you seriously gonna make me study with you?”
You made the final stroke in the word pudding. “I don’t expect you to absorb the information. If you rather I read manga, I can go to that section for a while. Pick out a shoujo.”
“Get fucked with that otaku shit,” said Touya, and—he must have had his phone on speaker, because a couple of people were speaking to each other nearby about what must be the latest Assassins’ Creed, and the sound changed after some scrapes, with Touya sounding closer. “Why study sign language?”
“There’s someone in my life who recently became unable to talk all of the time,” you said, “and I’d like to help give him some way to communicate.”
“Just text him,” said Touya, “Well—never mind. Who’d wanna text you, anyway?”
“Sometimes, people put away their phones, Touya. Have you heard of it?” You drew a line down the half of your paper to make a new column, one sorting the words in groups—places, family members, requests, and the like.
“What are you getting out of it?” Touya must have scratched somewhere on his face, the sound coming over the phone. “You makin’ fun of him? Making him feel bad? If he wants to talk to you, he can just write shit down.”
“I think he might hate it because of how slow it is. And what if I luck out, and he knows sign already? Then half of my work is done for me,” you said, listing off all of the terms for family members, “Text-to-speech may be okay, but I don’t know. Still slow.”
“He probably doesn’t even want to talk to you,” said Touya, “let alone learn something for you. That’s a lot to ask for someone you ain’t fuckin’.”
You hummed and ignored him. You titled a new column Body, and the first word under it was burns. Followed by healing, surgery, hands, skin, hurt, and rest. For the first time in a while, Touya’s emotions were strong enough for you to feel, but you couldn’t name them. More like some pitiful, fearful soup, if anything, and other stuff you couldn’t put your finger on.
His voice still came in confidently derisive, though. “What kind of fucked up guy are you spreading your legs for, since those are what you’re writing down for his body? Seems like you’d be better off as a cocksleeve for someone else actually capable of fucking you.”
“Oh, rude! Rude!” Scowling, you set down your pen. “That’s rude to both me and him. I’m not talking to you anymore. Enjoy studying, asshole.” You flipped to a random page in the dictionary and started memorising, a bit too pissed to be productive for real, and you kept it up—if Touya were going to be here, then he’s not learning productive sign language, either. Try using marble and mare in everyday conversation, jackass.
Later, you caught yourself zoning out while staring at an entry, only shaking yourself out of it when Touya grumbled under his breath for you to turn the page already.
***
Todoroki paused the episode when the pizza arrived.
Moaning way too sensually, Kaminari stretched his arms above his head and arched his back. “My electricity is cooler than Killua’s, right? I have more swag than him?”
“No.”
“In your dreams.”
“Yikes.”
“Wrong,” said Shinsou, pelting him in the face with a popcorn kernel.
Kaminari picked it up off the floor and ate it mournfully. “I’m getting beaten by a fictional twelve year old.”
“I’m going to the bathroom,” you announced, pushing yourself up from your seat between Shinsou and Monoma (which was just as well, since they were comparing scans of the current manga chapter over your lap), and you set off with the intention going to the farthest bathroom to increase your chances of bumping into Dabi.
No such luck, even though you deliberately stomped your slippers as loudly as you could to try to draw him out. Sighing, you backtracked to a tiny bathroom you’ve used before, one that wasn’t as intimidatingly wealthy as the rest of the house and therefore actually felt like it was meant to be used, and you opened the creaking door onto an exhausted, shirtless Dabi trying to rub some sort of cream on the back of his neck, a massive jar open on the sink, blood seeping down his biceps at the strain around his staples.
Both of you froze. He took a quick glance to the gobs of cream on his hands and managed to kick the door shut from his seat on the closed toilet, but your foot caught in the door, which struck your nose and cheekbone, with you yelping and clutching the area.
“Sorry! I’m sorry,” you said through the crack in the door, shakily dragging your bruised foot out of it, “I didn’t know anyone was even in this side of the house. Are you okay? No, wait, sorry again—you’re bleeding; of course you’re not okay. I’m sorry.” You checked your nose for bleeding of your own, but nothing leaked out of your nose. “Can I—may I help with whatever you’re doing?”
No answer. But he hadn’t shut the door.
“Fine,” you said, and you spoke into the crack, only able to make out the granite on the near side of the sink. “I don’t know what’s going on with you nowadays, but I hope you’re doing okay. Or that you’ll be okay soon, at least. I can’t begin to imagine what you’ve been through, and I’m sorry you had to go through it. But I can grasp, I think, that having a bunch of your brother’s friends over can be intimidating and isolating. If nothing else, I’d like to get to know you better—or you could just get to know me better, if you don’t feel like sharing—so that having all of us over isn’t as terrible. I’m sorry we’re bursting into your life when you’re working out a lot of stuff in recovery—”
Dabi yanked open the door, brow furrowed, and instead of looking at you, he clamped his slimy hands on the sink and stood on his toes to arch towards the mirror, opening his mouth wide to breathe hot air onto it, teeth bared, as if he were roaring. In its fleeting fog, he traced out kanji, streaked with lotion and hidden by his left hand as he wrote, and he blew over it a final time before stepping back and jabbing at the message.
Stop apologising.
“Ah—oh,” you said, while Dabi squatted and rooted through the cabinet under the sink, “Okay. I’ll try. Thank you for saying so.” How do you talk to someone who was formerly 1) an S-tier villain and, more importantly, 2) your longest-running crush?
Dabi plopped a meagre first-aid kit on the counter and pointed to the source of bleeding on one of his arms, the inside bicep where two staples had come loose.
“I don’t know shit about first-aid,” you said, reaching for the kit anyway, “I know you have to keep pressure on it, and stuff, but—”
And so the first time Dabi looked you in the eyes was to shoot you an incredulous, suspicious glare that accompanied his snatching the kit back from you, clutching it out of your reach. Relaxing once it was in his hands, he hesitated a moment, shifting his jaw, before nudging the open jar of lotion with his knuckle, reverting to his fixed gaze on his feet.
“I can do that,” you said, heart racing, “You wanna—why don’t you sit back down?”
Not lotion, you noted, as Dabi pulled out disinfectant wipes and a roll of gauze near its end, burn cream. Aw. You dipped your first three fingers into it (heavy, roll-around slimy, like holding a frog) and hoped to God that your soulmate didn’t tune in during this. Touya didn’t like a lot of things you did, but he’d probably loathe your gawking over the scarred back of someone who wasn’t him.
Yeah, Touya would probably hate how you would hone in, laser-sharp, each time Dabi’s muscles flexed as he wrapped his wound, how the space between his shoulder blades with the tiny dent along his spine (well, his spine indented at the top of his back, where he was broader and still held muscle, and poked out towards his lower back as he bent over) held your focus far too long to be impersonal—and you got to touch it. You kept the contact to your fingertips, because as much as you wanted to flatten your hands to feel every moving tendon, you didn’t want to scare him. He’s probably not used to outside touch, and you shouldn’t come on too strongly, especially when someone else’s soul was fucking bound to yours.
But as your fingers smoothed over the marks around his shoulders where burns used to be, skin cold to the touch, as Dabi turned his head to the side just barely so that he could watch you out of his periphery, you found it hard to remind yourself that you already had a Touya. Can’t have two.
“I know it’s none of my business, but, uh, if you’re on vocal rest this often, I could—I could help you learn some sign language?” You scratched underneath your eye in a nervous gesture and smeared some of the burn cream on your cheek. “Nothing intensive. Only simple, everyday stuff, like—well. I don’t know what frequents your vocabulary. You don’t have to, but I’m offering. Just in case.”
In the mirror, Dabi halted in tying the gauze to glare up at you, his lip curling up in flash of a sneer.
“Okay, that’s cool. That’s fine. I can—I can leave a sign language book with your brother, if you—if you ever change your mind.” You nodded, just to have some sort of reaction he could see, and he tucked away the disinfectant wipes and tossed the empty roll of gauze into the trash bin. “Hey,” you said, noting how he’d only bled at his left arm, which was covered with mottled patches of skin, staples, and stitches, along with the faint diamond-pattern of skin grafts, while his right arm needed no medical attention, pale and unblemished without any sign of damage, “What’s up with—if you’re comfortable with sharing, why doesn’t your right arm have any scars? Was Recovery Girl able to heal that more effectively, or something?”
Holding your gaze in the mirror, Dabi raised his eyebrows, nearly vanishing under the drooping, white spikes of his hair, and he reached over with his left hand to rub his thumb over his right shoulder and curving down into his armpit.
He actually laughed (a laugh through his nose, yes, and one without the humming sort of vocalisation usually accompanying a laugh through a nose, but a laugh nevertheless) at how hard you jumped when he popped off what was apparently a prosthetic.
***
“If you hate gardening this much, why keep doing it?” you asked, once again trapped in Touya’s perspective late at night while he tended to a traditional, Japanese garden. You lay flat on your back in bed, hands and phone resting on your chest (laptop closed to the side. Your essay was due at eight o’clock in the morning. Would Present Mic accept late work due to soulmate interference?).
“Lots of dumb fucking reasons that all fold in together,” said Touya, shovelling gravel out of a wheelbarrow and into the man-made brook he was trying to shape, “One: my stupid fucking family has decided that doing this earthy shit would calm me down. Zen gardening, or whatever.”
“Oh, do you have issues controlling your anger, Touya?”
“Stop that. Two.” Gravel pittered off the shovel blade, falling into the trickling water with a series of tiny plops. “One of my brothers brought up how Mom always liked the garden but was stopped from taking care of it herself, and since I did some shit to—it’s not like I could’ve helped it; they were keeping stuff from her, too. Anyway, Mom’s fucking sad nowadays. Better, but sad.” Touya sank the shovel into the gravel to lean on it, tracking the flow of the water for a moment, twisting through the previous path currently being overtaken by moss and fallen stone. “And my brother thinks the garden being fancy again will make our mom happy, especially if I’m the one to do it. Dick. Saying if we hired people to do it, it wouldn’t be the same. Started with just the damn fish, but now the whole fucking thing’s my job. It’s fucking shit. It’s blackmail and family obligation and rent all at once. It’s a fuckin’ nasty trick.”
Touya dug into the wheelbarrow again. “And my fa—that guy had the nerve to suggest that I needed something to do during the day. As if I’m not busy enough.”
“During the day? Touya, I’ve only seen you garden at night.”
“Because it’s too damn hot outside all the time. And I don’t want anyone watching me. I’m no one’s business. But I bet they’d like staring out of a window at me, while I break my fucking body again moving all of these shitty rocks and shaping Mom’s fucking evergreens.” He shovelled with deep malice. “Did you fucking know that there’s goddamn symbolism in these shitty gardens? That you can’t just put things anywhere without it meaning something? Somehow ponds are supposed to be oceans. Rocks are supposed to be mountains. Forced perspective shit, paired with tenets of Zen and Shinto, and it’s the pettiest, most unnecessary bullshit I’ve ever had to deal with, and I dealt with a friend’s abominable driving for years. Never got any better at it, even though I got fucking motion sick.”
He knelt, and when two, fat glops of Touya’s sweat dripped onto the stone at the impact, you rather enjoyed the gentle wafting about your dorm room at the blades of your ceiling fan.
He must have felt your appreciation. “Stop that. I’m making a point. Look at this shit,” he said, gesturing to the brook and then up at the three-quarter moon, “I’ve gotta change the course of the water, because it’s better to face towards the moon to capture its reflection, and I’ve gotta make it somehow cascade or waterfall at some point over there.” He pointed far across the garden towards a flickering pair of stone lanterns. “How am I supposed to do that? I can’t even make it flow through gravel right. I might have to move some of the stepping stones again. I fucking hate those things. They’re too heavy for one person, and I’ve already had to rearrange them because some of them weren’t fucking weathered or natural-looking enough.”
“Sure. Death to aesthetics,” you said, blindly feeling around for a pack of gum you kept in your bedside table, “I’d come help you if I could, but somebody—”
“You’re not getting a location out of me, princess.”
You paused, hand on the knob of the first drawer, and a wide, smug smile broke across your face (Princess, Touya? You’re gonna call me princess? You sure you don’t care about me?).
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“I could feel it,” said Touya, flexing his fingers on his knees, “so shut up.”
Gloved hands clenched into fists, he glared at the brook, the gravel, up at the moon, and back into the water.
“You know, it looks like if you moved most of the gravel to one side, the water might flow the direction you need it to.”
“Who’s the one busting their ass here, me or you?” But he plunged his hands into the water, grabbed heaping fistfuls of rocks, and patted them onto the far side of the stone bed.
“Touya,” you said, feeling around in your drawer for the pack of gum, “Take your gloves off! You’re gonna ruin the leather.”
“Like I care.” He dragged more gravel underwater. “If I took ’em off, you’d see my hands.”
“Come off of it, Touya. I bet they’re perfectly fine,” you said, successfully grabbing gum and sliding your drawer shut, “Hands are often the most attractive part of a man.”
He paused, water flowing around his arms up to his elbows (he wouldn’t roll up his sleeves, either. Stubborn boy. He must hate whatever’s going on with him). “Not the dick?” He sounded like he was grinning.
“Not always. Some of them look like sad, sea creatures,” you said, unwrapping your gum into your phone’s speaker to annoy him, “It takes talent to have a pretty cock. Hands, however, can easily be lusted over because of what they’re capable of. Or what you know they’ve done.”
(Hee hoo hah, like burn down a city. You’re so normal about it.)
“Not how they look?”
“Appearance can help, but it’s not the whole cow,” you said, chewing while the flavour faded fast.
Touya scoffed, his fingers sinking into gravel. “You makin’ fun of me?”
What? “Of course not. Why?”
“Don’t say shit like that to get on my good side. I’m more than aware I ain’t got anything besides my shitty personality goin’ for me.” He cleared his throat. “That sign language guy got anything I don’t?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You sure seem obsessed with him,” said Touya, leaning more deeply into the water, soaking his hoodie even more, “even though he sounds pathetic. You tryin’ to fix him to make yourself look good?”
“Of course not. I know no one can fix anyone else. He has to choose to do that himself,” you said, “Not that there’s anything about him that merits fixing.”
Laughing (oh? hot), Touya scooped a handful of gravel out of the wheelbarrow to add it to the far side. “Yeah, you’re fucking obsessed with him. Am I not your soulmate?”
You rolled your eyes, even though he couldn’t see it (and…you…couldn’t see it). “You haven’t given me anything to obsess over, unless you want me to research gardening tips or how to breed carp.”
“I would love for you to be obsessed with breeding, sweet—”
“Oh, my God, you have to ease into that sort of thing, Touya.”
He pulled his hands out of the brook, drenched sleeves gushing water back into it. “D’you want me to start with how much I wanna suck on your perfect tits?”
“Touya,” you said carefully, shoving the gum to one cheek, “Is everything okay? You’re acting—strange.”
“What do you—”
“Where’s the blind hatred for me? Where’s the disdain?”
Sitting back on his knees, Touya shoved his leather-wet-dripping hands into the damp, double pocket of his hoodie with a muted slosh. “You think I hate you?”
“You’re that rude to people you don’t hate?”
Water seeped through the pocket and through his jeans, visibly darker in the moonlight and soaking his thighs. “Fuck off. I mean—what I mean is that I’m not used to people like you. Who don’t talk like me. Who aren’t mean to me back. Or who don’t seem to want anything from me. Didn’t know you really thought I was rude.”
You screwed up your face. “Who have you been hanging out with? What the hell is wrong with you? Spend time with people who like you, please?”
“No one likes me—”
“Get your head out of your ass, edgelord,” you said, sitting up in bed and holding the phone up to your mouth, “Newsflash, dipshit, it sounds like lots of people like you. Your brother, who wants to help you make your mom happy, in an easy, physical way that you’re more than capable of. Your mom, who sounds like she’s happier now that you’re back in her life. The rest of your goddamn family, who want you close by so that they can help you if you ever fucking accepted it. Your stupid friends who are into Assassins’ Creed.”
“Stop fucking noticing things about—”
“And me. I like you, dipshit. Get over yourself. You’re digging yourself your own lonely, self-deprecating hole, where I guess you’re at your most comfortable. But tonight alone you’ve shown in your garden that you fucking hate digging holes. They mean unnecessary work.”
Inhaling sharply, you threw your phone into the bedspread, but all that came through was a distant deer scare, bamboo hitting rock.
“Since when do you like me?” he asked, pushing on his knees to stand.
The artificial-yellow light from your lamp starting creeping in around the rim of your vision, blotting out parts of Touya’s silhouette in the moonlight. “I talk to you, don’t I? I wouldn’t even acknowledge the bond if I weren’t open to—we’ve been hanging out. You didn’t know?”
“Like I would know what that looks like,” said Touya, the walls of your room coming into view while Touya pulled his own phone out of his inner pocket, tapping the screen to see how long the call has lasted, “Like I would know how someone like you would behave when they like me.”
“Stay on the goddamn phone,” you said in the moment his thumb hovered over the end call button, the last thing you made out before fully sinking back into your dorm room, “If you don’t know what I—well, what does your love look like, Touya? What do you do when you like someone?”
“Sexually? Romantically?”
“Not necessarily,” you said, pissed to have the connection severed and sliding off of the bed to turn off the lights, “Just when you care for someone at all.”
“Gimme a minute,” came Touya’s voice, and after you flipped the lights and the ceiling fan off, you wandered over to your window, switched your phone off speaker, and held it to your ear as you stared up at the same moon Touya was under, and you waited.
“Right, I don’t know for sure,” he said after a while (but it sounded like he’d stopped dealing with the gravel to think about it), “but this is the only thing that’s coming to mind. Before I was living at home again, me and some friends didn’t have consistent sources of food. Don’t interrupt to say you’re sorry. But. So, whenever I’d, uh, buy stuff. From a store. I’d make sure I got some sort of snack for whoever I was with, even though we were all too proud to ask for shit. Didn’t really think about doing it on purpose. But I guess I did.”
“You are deliciously, delightfully, tender as fuck,” you said, clenching a fist over your heart, your boob jostling with the fervent impact (and it pleased you knowing that Touya would’ve laughed if he’d seen), and you kept talking over his sounds of disapproval. “And I am gonna cook for you. I am going to set you a table so vast that you’re gonna be eating off it for a long, long time. You’re never gonna be fucking hungry ever again, Touya.”
When he didn’t answer, you worried you said the wrong thing, but you stayed on the line, listening. Two minutes later, he hung up, and you could have sworn he cut off in the middle of a wet sniffle.
***
What can you cook? What were you good at cooking that actually constituted a filling meal?
Start small, you supposed.
Fuyumi kept the Todoroki kitchen much more well-stocked than the kitchen to which you had access, and so, with welcome permission, you headed over to the estate earlier than the scheduled viewing time to prepare, with Shinsou and Todoroki hanging out in the kitchen with you.
“Jirou says she can attend,” said Todoroki, thumb swiping across his phone screen, “Turns out her tipping point was stating the merits of studying Melody’s music powers. She’s asking if Yaoyorozu may attend as well?”
“It’s your house.” Shinsou was folding his napkin into an origami frog. “If there’s a need for excuses, you can always say Yao might like—I forget his name, but he’s that character in the Phantom Troupe whose hair looks like a mop? She might like analysing how his power lets him copy anything, even though it doesn’t have the same limitations like her quirk.”
“I will mention that,” said Todoroki, nodding sagely.
The plan was simple: with a captive audience of anime nerds, you could get feedback on your cooking until it was good enough for Touya (a small part of you still cringed thinking about how he reacted to your potato wedges). You would lure your friends into a state of complacency with your smaller dishes—baked goods, and the like—until there was no escape when you served them something more filling, like soups.
Today, you were making teeny little lemon ricotta pancakes (the recipe called for them to be regular-sized, but if you made them around the size of a potato chip, it would be more accessible to eat with fingers in the living room) that gave you the air of being fancy but were actually mindless to make, it turned out, and right now, you were stirring the stewing blueberry syrup that you’d decided would be a dipping sauce rather than drizzled over—the Todorokis had an excess of white furniture, and you would like to be invited to use their kitchen again.
“I think,” you said, once the syrup was behaving like syrup when you let it dribble out of the ladle back into the pot, “I’m gonna take some to your brother. I don’t want him feeling left out, if he comes through. He’s home right now, yeah?”
“He’s in his teahouse. It’s towards the back of the garden.” Todoroki got up from the table. “Do you want me to show you?”
“I’m sure I can find it, since it’s the only building not connected to the main one,” you said, but you did accept his help finding a tray and sauce cup for the syrup, and once it was set, you picked up the tray and strode with purpose towards the garden.
Walking through its seemingly-natural landscape while balancing food and liquids proved to be miraculously easy. Their hired gardeners must be doing insane upkeep to ensure its deliberate, natural-but-not cosiness. You made a mental note to ask Touya what some of the structures symbolised, like the recurring patterns of three rocks of different heights close together. He’d know, reluctantly, since he did stuff like this, and you considered his work to be superior to this, anyway.
In the blistering sun, you had to narrow your eyes to slits, regretting that both of your hands were full so that you couldn’t shield them from the light, and you found a gated, stone path to the teahouse. Clearly, it had once been slightly dilapidated but had since been worked on; another room had been latched on to the side to double its size, judging by the change in architecture styles, and the roof reflected sunlight a little too well for its polished, stone tiles to be less than a year old.
Bracing the tray, you took the steep step onto the neatly swept, bamboo engawa running around the edge of the teahouse, and you—was the door around to the side? Around the left side of the original part of the tearoom, two shoji panels had been spread to let in sunlight upon an empty room with an actual fucking sunken hearth, unlit, with one of the same fire-fish as on the estate’s roofs for the crank’s lever. Behind what would have been the seat of honour stood a dishevelled tokonoma, devoid of scrolls or incense burners but instead housing an unzipped backpack atop a long coat, its sleeves trailing onto the floor outside the tokonoma, with sticky notes taped to its inner wall. A red-tinted wood dresser had been pushed into the corner, tissues and hand sanitiser atop it and a single stack of books propped next to it.
A pair of boots was tucked inside the open shoji. Maybe he’s asleep.
At your first step inside, you jolted so hard you had to struggle to hold onto the tray—the floor had chirped at you. Dead ringer for a bird call. Tentatively, you took another step, and it chirped again, this time with a bit of a wheeze, more artificial-sounding.
You jumped and stumbled again at another wall sliding open, giving the impression that a flock of birds had flown inside, and Dabi poked his head through the gap (you could make out the gleaming pause screen of a gaming system in the newer room behind him). His face had relaxed when he’d seen it was you, but it pinched into a strange, unnameable expression when he saw what you were carrying.
“Hi,” you said, holding out the tray, “I’ve made too many snacks for the anime group today, so I thought you might like some? I can take it away, if you don’t want any.”
Since he probably didn’t know the amount of people attending nowadays, he probably didn’t recognise your lie. Dabi held up a finger for you to wait while he exhumed a short table and two floor seats from storage in the walls, and he waited for you to sit before he did, slowly, crossing his legs on the cushion, his joints creaking.
“They’re little lemon ricotta pancakes. Todo—Shouto told me you didn’t have any food allergies, so it should be fine. That’s blueberry syrup,” you said when he pointed at it. “I’m—I guess you could say I’m practising recipes for cooking for someone else. If you don’t like it, please let me know. I’ll make it better next time.”
Dabi fiddled with two of the tiny pancakes before selecting one, inspecting it in the sunlight, and dipping it into the syrup (you went a little crazy when it dripped onto his tongue stitches, but you managed to suppress it). As he chewed and swallowed loudly, Dabi’s eyes bulged, brow furrowed, and he, panicked, fumbled around for probably his phone, patting the pockets on his jeans. Hands pausing after slapping the empty pockets on his ass, he sprung up, grabbed a pen off of the dresser, and snatched a sticky note off of the inner wall of the tokonoma. He returned to the table and knelt half on the seat, scribbling furiously, and when he pushed the sticky note to you, under a crossed-out potting soil, sledgehammer, he’d written fuck you marry me NOW.
There’s a moment in which you forgot, a moment in which you laugh, head tilted back, flooded with endorphins at your long-time, pseudo-celebrity crush liking something you made to even joke about being in a relationship with you. You opened your mouth to make some joke about how you’d like to go on a few dates first, to have some sort of courtship, but you stopped at the first word: “Touya.” You cut yourself off, brow pinched. You can’t have two.
Not that…not that Dabi/Touya could ever genuinely like you, who fought against him and now witnessed his debasement, but in the far-flung chance that he could, you should clarify about your Touya.
“Touya,” you said again, this time sober and grim, hands folded on your lap, “I know you were only joking, but I was in a quirk-related incident a while ago, and it assigned me a soulmate. So, even if you could like me, I’ve got someone waiting. Presumptuous of me to say, I know, but. I want to treat you with kindness and not make you wonder, in the case it arises. Funnily enough, his name is Touya, too—”
Your phone rang loudly in your back pocket (you kept it on loud nowadays so you could easily feel around for Touya’s call, but it’d led you to awkward moments like this, too). Dabi scowled when you brought it out to silence it and dipped another pancake in the syrup, letting it absorb what it could to tinge it purple.
“It’s him, actually. Odd timing.” Lying flat in your palm, your phone flashed an incoming call from Touya. Leaning across the table, Dabi grabbed it out of your hands to answer it, put it on speaker, and lay it in the centre of the table while he ate his soggy pancake, shaking his head when you moved to undo all of that.
“Hey,” came a tinny, raspy voice that was very much not your Touya’s, “You’re the soulmate, right?”
Dabi shouldn’t have to hear this. Before you could tap the speaker button again, Dabi swatted your hand out of the way, gesturing for you to answer.
“Uh, yeah,” you said, shifting in your seat, “Who are you? Where’s—”
“Tell Touya he left his phone at my place the next time you see through him.” A repetitive, techno instrumental played in the background (video game music?). “At Shiiiiiiiimura’s place. Yeah.”
“I can do that, Shimura,” you said, unsure if you should hold out the vowel as long as he did, and perhaps you can take advantage of the situation for a brief moment, because Dabi was staring at your phone with a constipated sort of expression as he listened. “I can’t control when the bond activates, but I’ll let him know. Do you know what sort of food he likes?”
Shimura barked out a laugh, filling the room in a wide, cleansing way you wouldn’t expect from someone with his scratchy voice. “I heard your potato wedges are shit.”
You sputtered, “He didn’t even have any—”
Dabi ended the call, frowning, shaking his head, and tipping your phone off the table to gently bounce twice when it hit the tatami. He held up a tiny pancake and made a show of looking at it, at you, and back at it, and he shot you an aggressive thumbs-up.
***
Uraraka spent an entire patrol gushing about how she would fuck the author of Hunter x Hunter if she could, so she showed up to the next get-together, along with Asui, whom everyone already thought would be friends with the story’s protagonist if he were real. When you Aoyama caught you in the act of stealing one of his posh cookbooks, you explained the situation to him, and so he tagged along to taste what you were cooking, along with supplying some of the fancier ingredients you wouldn’t’ve known how to obtain. Then you’d asked Sato for advice on how to make the swirl in a strawberry swirl loaf not go to shit, and then the group had spent a few hours discussing the good relationships with animals that Hunters are inherently supposed to have, so Kouda was summoned for his opinions.
The long of short of it was that there were many more spectators than necessary to when Dabi strode into the viewing room, drenched in sweat from his walk back home, to pelt the back of your head with a two-pack of Sakeru cheese. As you rubbed the back of your head, pulling the cold plastic from between your shirt collar and skin, he at least had the decency to drop the single-wrapped fish bread into your lap.
“Hey, Touya,” you said, grabbing his hand before he could skitter away as usual (his wide eyes couldn’t decide to look at both of your hands or at your face), “I’ve set aside slices of both strawberry swirl bread and garlic bread for you in the kitchen. I recommend heating the garlic bread up so the cheese gets all melty again, but it’s good at room temperature, too. Thank you, by the way. For these.”
Nodding hastily, Dabi tore his hand away from your in two, spasming jerks, and he slithered into the kitchen.
Though the rest were watching the show, Shinsou was turned towards you, his head tilted with an incredulous sort of smile. You stuck your tongue out at him and crinkled open the cheese.
Dabi returned with both slices on a paper towel and stood behind you at the couch for a minute, watching the episode. Shifting his weight, he pulled out his phone. “This is garbage,” came a droning, text-to-speech voice from behind.
He stood behind the couch for three more episodes.
***
Through another moonlit, soulmate connection, Touya was failing to prod stray ducks out of the koi pond with the skimmer.
“They’re tenacious little bastards,” you said, sitting on the counter of the dorm kitchen and praying to God that the oven timer wouldn’t go off while you couldn’t see.
“Why. Won’t they. Move.” Touya nudged a duck with the flat of the skimmer, its width as long as the entire duck, and the duck kept gabbing to its friends. “I have no idea if ducks upset the chemical balance of the water enough to kill koi; I’ve never seen them in here before ten minutes ago. Goddamn.” He waved the skimmer over the water’s surface, filtering some debris, and he flipped it onto a duck, who remained vexingly apathetic at the new source of wet. “Tonight was gonna be easy; I was only gonna put up windchimes; I was gonna get to go to bed early. Now I—no, no, no, don’t—!”
One duck bit at the skimmer net, and having pierced it, the duck led the rest of them to the centre of the pond, where the skimmer couldn’t reach, no matter how Touya strained.
“I fucking hate birds,” said Touya, slamming the skimmer on the ground, “and I fucking hate fish. They’re not even good when they’re alive.” Seeming to have a change of heart, Touya picked the skimmer up and took care to lean it against the stone wall of the pond. “Tell me something good, won’t you?”
Does that imply you don’t have to work on any fish dishes? “You’ll be thrilled to hear that my little anime analysis group is almost through the Hunter x Hunter anime, probably. We got to the end of the 1999 version last night.”
Touya sat and splayed his legs on the koi pond stone, watching the moon’s reflection ripple as koi tails broke surface tension. “That’ll only make your process more streamlined, since you’re not watching two episodes covering the same chapters in conjunction anymore. The Chimera Ant arc takes forever, though. You’re not almost done.”
Groping around for your oven mitts, you smiled. “How do you know that, Touya? Thought you hated—”
“What are you going to watch next?”
Stupid boy. Shy boy. “Well, Sero is pushing for Pokémon since there’s so much of it.”
“God, no,” said Touya, leaning back on his hands, “Iconic, yeah. Fun, not really, because in the games, you’re the one getting to battle and bond with the things. It’s not fun to watch someone else get to do it.”
“I can rely on you for negative reviews of everything.” Oven mitt? Oven mitt. Now, where’s its pair? “You want a pokémon, Touya? Which ones?”
“You are such a fucking child—”
“You want a pikachu, don’t you?”
“Hell, no,” Touya spat, “None of that cliché shit. Pikachu isn’t even that good. I—” Cutting himself off, he hunched forward, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his gloved hands together. “You’ll shit on me for it. Forget I said anything.”
“Should I let you make fun of me first?” You slipped on the other mitt. “I’m cliché as hell. My top choice is either a certain starter or an eevolution.”
“No, I—”
“All right. How about you tell me your favourite as a kid and the one you would choose now?”
“You’re pushy as hell. When I was a kid, I wanted a Ninetales. I was—my mom had read enough for me to know about traditional kitsune,” said Touya, and he ducked his head to stare between his legs (crotch unfortunately hidden in shadow), “and Ninetales is immune to fire. It can use it and not burn up, and it’s not affected by outside fire attacks.”
The memory of rubbing burn cream across Dabi’s shoulders and how delicate his skin looked surfaced. You wouldn’t wish that on anyone. “You scared of being burned, Touya?”
Touya kicked the stone beneath his boot, scuffing it. “Just seems like it’d be neat.”
“Perfectly reasonable,” you said, wrapping your muppet-y, mitted hands around the oven handle in preparation for whenever it would go off, “and a perfectly logical pokémon to latch onto. It’s fairly popular. I don’t see how I’m supposed to make fun of you for that.”
“Sure.” Touya bent farther to re-tie his bootlaces. “I like my current choice for a dumb as hell reason, though. Shiiiiiiiimura,” said Touya, yanking the laces tightly (and he dragged out Shimura’s name, too. Was that the proper pronunciation?), “was trying to hype us up for something stupid we had to do that some of our friends were scared of. Shimura’s teacher—’scuse me, abusive fucking manipulative shithead of an adoptive father—wanted him to make a speech to show leadership, or some bullshit. Instead, Shimura pulled out his phone and showed us someone’s video of playing one of the early Pokémon games, for the battle at the end to win the game. And to defeat the last boss’s toughest Dragonite, the player used this…this fuckin’ weak-ass, all-around insignificant pokémon picked up from the beginning of the game, and it fuckin’ won. It won against the toughest opponent, and—and Shimura was saying, oh, the Venomoth is us, and we can win against our big-ass enemy, oh, ho, ho—”
“Excuse me. A Venomoth? You only use them temporarily at the beginning of the game, when you don’t have anything cool yet. They fucking suck.”
“See, you’re making fun of me. I’m not going to say anything else.” Touya leant back on his hands again, this time crossing his legs to prop his ankle on his opposite knee.
“No, I’m—I’m sorry. Sorry. First impressions. But you’re convincing me. Go on. I’m listening.”
Touya flicked water towards the ducks. “Are you gonna keep insulting—”
“I won’t! I won’t,” you said, sliding off the kitchen counter to stand directly in front of the oven, “So, Venomoths. I hear they’re fantastic.”
Touya rolled his eyes, and it was cute, you thought, how you had to follow the motion, seeing the moon at the upwards roll and back at its reflection in the pond. “Yeah. I bet Shimura’s forgotten all about it, but it stuck with me. Not immediately—at the time it was stupid, and to be fair, it’s still stupid. But now that I’m back here, living at home, it’s—it’s stupid. It’s, like, if that stupid fucking bug can defeat a goddamn dragon, then I can tend the garden. I can keep that stupid tsukubai clean. I can hang out with my brother. I can fucking—” He cut himself off again, this time striking the water hard enough to splash one of the ducks (it quacked at him with disdain and simply swam a couple of centimetres away).
“Do what, Touya?” The oven timer started beeping, and you tensed. “Hold on; don’t say anything. Don’t say—I have to concentrate; I’m getting stuff out of an oven.”
Touya stirred the pondwater with his ring and middle fingers while you blindly approximated the logistics of getting the tray out of the oven, and by standing at the oven’s side inside of reaching into it from the front, you were eventually able to remove the tray and rest it on the counter above it—you’re not going to bother feeling around for the pot holders.
When you sighed in relief once you’d closed the oven again, Touya asked, “What are you cooking?”
“Strawberry cheesecake muffins,” you said, frowning in the tray’s general direction, “They’re supposed to have a marbling effect, and I’m supposed to be putting on some sort of streusel-type sugar on top right now, but I’m not gonna risk it. I hope they’re done. You have to trust the recipe’s bake time with cheesecakes exactly, so I’m hoping it’s the same for—”
“I am gonna make you come so hard,” Touya was saying in a strained sort of way as he ran his hands down his face, “I am gonna fuck you so hard that you leave in a permanent dent in my mattress. I am gonna hold you and kiss the back of your neck and make you cry out as you gush around my fingers. You’re—you’re so fucking per—I am gonna take care of you back.”
“Cool.” Right, so bake the muffins again at some point. “Do you have any food allergies?”
“I’m allergic to you not saying anything hot in response to what I just said.”
Sure, Touya. “I’m also gonna make you this really sexy tomato soup with what the recipe calls a grilled cheese top. It’s got cheesy bread cut into chunks that coat the surface so that you can’t even see the red, and it melts into the soup—”
“Stop, I can only get so hard—”
“Show me your cock, then.”
“No,” said Touya, deliberately looking at a trio of fish convening near the pond’s surface, their o-shaped mouths blorbing and blobbing underneath the water towards Touya’s waving fingers, “I meant—well, first, you are gonna make that soup, pl—please—but I meant that—I mean.” He twirled his finger under the water, and the koi were fascinated. One of them kissed his finger. You were feeling a similar impulse—and perhaps that’s what prompted Touya to continue. “I came the first time someone stuck their tongue in my mouth.”
It occurred to you that anyone could be walking by the dorm kitchen to overhear. Now that the muffins were out of the oven, you elected to turn off the speaker setting to hold you phone to your ear. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I was sixteen and insane with hormones, and it hadn’t been long since I’d woken up from—well. When someone kissed me with tongue for the first time, I came in my pants. Taken completely by surprise that someone was even kissing me, that someone could even want me when I look like—and then that. We were outside, on a public bridge, during the day. I haven’t seen that fucker since.”
You had been contemplating whether it’d be worth fumbling around for a knife to ease the muffins out of the tray, but all cogs stopped at Touya’s story. “Why are you telling me this?”
“So you’ll tell me something back. I already told you some embarrassing shit about pokémon and shit, so you have to embarrass yourself back. You’re the one who brought up cocks, anyway. So—so you have to share something back,” said Touya, allowing a fish to rub up against his hand in a pseudo-sort of petting it, “Something about when you were young and stupid.”
“And preferably sexual, right? I know what you’re about, you shy, baby boy.”
“Ffffffuck that.I ain’t shy—”
“You won’t show me your face, Touya. You’re scared for me to see it. Shy boy.”
Touya scratched along the side of the koi like it wanted, and another nudged the back of his hand to be scratched, too. “Fuck off.”
“I’ve only told one other person about my first kiss,” you said, moving to sit on the counter again, “Wanna hear that story?”
“Fine,” said Touya, and he pulled his hand out of the pond, flicking water off his fingers and into the open, mournful mouths of the koi he’d been petting. “You had better be about to tell me about seeing through me at that coffee shop.”
“Come off of it, Touya; isn’t it better for me to have outside experience and still choose you regardless? My first kiss was way before that,” you said, hoping how pleased you were at his mild possessiveness was being transferred to his side of the bond, “and I didn’t even know the guy’s name at the time. And it was—it could’ve turned really bad, really quickly. Because my first kiss was with Dabi, before he made his villain debut.”
“Do—huh?” Touya shook his head, causing you to wince and steady yourself at the dizziness. “Beg pardon? Beg your fucking pardon? I didn’t—know that that Dabi guy went around kissing people.”
“He did at least once. It was back in freshman year, and I was out at night during my hero internship.” Getting comfortable on the kitchen counter, you crossed your legs and leant against the cabinets to support your back, exhaustion kicking in. “Some older sidekick hit on me in what was an exceedingly creepy way—he made it pseudo-incestuous by saying I reminded him of his daughter. In retrospect, the interaction could have gone much, much worse, if Dabi hadn’t inadvertently rescued me—scratch that, it may have been intentional, looking back, because he’d said stuff about the sidekick being a shitty father, and now he’s, uh, let us know about his own dad.”
It took Touya a moment. At least he wasn’t shaking his head anymore. “Are you saying Dabi burnt some guy to death in front of you, and you still kissed him?”
You sucked in through your teeth. “Not exactly. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was testing out a nomu, and that ripped the other guy to pieces. And—this is gonna sound wild—I think Dabi may have kissed me to comfort me? I know it was a distraction from the gore and from getting a good look at the nomu, but I think he may have also done it to calm me down. It was—oddly sweet.”
Touya gripped the edge of the stone wall, his fingers dipping into water (but not deep enough to remoisten his leather gloves) and koi swarming. “What did the nomu look like?”
Even though you couldn’t see it, you held your phone away from your ear for a second to shoot it an incredulous look. “Wha—Touya, weren’t you going to ask if he were a good kisser, or something?”
His knuckles popped when he clenched his fingers and asked flatly, “Was he a good—”
“You’re better.”
“Thanks,” he said, not sounding like he cared about that at all, letting a koi drag his hand into the water by biting his finger, “What did the nomu look like?”
“God, I don’t fucking know. That wasn’t important to me. I, uh—it was around the size of a good-sized dog, like a golden retriever or a lab. I don’t—I guess it walked on all fours,” you said, wondering why the fuck—oh, the dizziness must not have come only from Touya shaking his head, because it’s sweeping over you again, waves emanating from the bond. “Now that I’ve seen other nomu, I can recognise that its head looked whacky because its brain was exposed, and I think its skin was more green-tinged than the others who had that navy-black colour going on. Honestly, Touya, I wasn’t—”
Through the phone came such a strident, alarming crack that you halted mid-sentence to listen for it again. It’d come from Touya’s side, clearly, but nothing in his line of vision betrayed its source, although—and you would not have noticed this if you hadn’t been scanning his environment for any hint—something that looked like split glass frosted the inside of Touya’s fist before he unclenched his hand a second later, any illusion of something there melting into the water.
But something was wrong. “Touya?”
“You still see that Dabi guy when you watch anime at Shouto’s house, yeah? Stay on the line,” he said, darkness of the bond fading drabbling at the edges of his vision from your perspective.
“I am,” you said, uncrossing your legs, “I do.”
“What do you think of him? Ugly fucker, isn’t he?” Touya fell still as a duck approached him as it navigated through the water lilies, and Touya’s outstretching his hand to its head was the last thing you saw before the bond gave out. “Still as pathetic as he was in the war? Think he should be in prison?”
“Negative reviews of people, negative reviews of television, negative reviews of potato wedges—so cool, bro. Now say something true and beautiful.”
“Answer me, damn it.” A disgruntled quack.
“You’d better not be strangling that duck.”
“You think so little of me? Do you want me to put the duck on the phone?”
“I don’t think it could sit comfortably,” you said, pushing yourself off the counter and walking to the knife drawer now that you could see, “I see Dabi every once in a while when I’m at Todoroki’s house. He’s shy. I don’t mind. It’s not my place to assume anything, but. I don’t think he’s doing okay, since it seems like he’s spent a good part of his life wanting someone to look at him, to pay attention, and now he’s getting that in a way he probably didn’t anticipate, and I want him to be okay. I think I’d like to help him get there, if he’d let me. But I know I’m nobody important to him, and that’s fine.”
“Sounds a lot like pity,” said Touya, and when you made a noise of protest, he kept going. “Or maybe you’re fucked up enough that you like him? From when he kissed you?”
You couldn’t exactly tell your soulmate that you’ve been suppressing naïve, celebrity-crush-type feelings for someone else. “Well,” you said, grimacing as you slid knife edge between a muffin and the tray and started to remove it, “He’s very babygirl-coded.”
***
TOUYA 🐠🚷
looked it up. definition of babygirl does NOT help
TOUYA 🐠🚷
incidentally
TOUYA 🐠🚷
what should a guy wear to impress someone
YOU
a guy? or you specifically?
YOU
because i am, of course about to suggest the golden standard of rolling up thy sleeves to thy elbows, but you won’t even showing your fucken hands asldkjfa;
TOUYA 🐠🚷
gloves necessary.
TOUYA 🐠🚷
but think formal. formal setting.
YOU
why are YOU going to a formal event?
TOUYA 🐠🚷
have to. blackmail/family obligation/rent.
TOUYA 🐠🚷
open to suggestions. about style more than brand, because if I go too expensive, my dad will think I’m making him pay a lot as sabotage.
YOU
and here i was about to recommend that you go skinny-dipping in a vat of liquid gold
TOUYA 🐠🚷
you just wanna see my cock, don’t cha
YOU
what makes you think I’D be invited to some shitty formal event
TOUYA 🐠🚷
I’m betting you’d hear about it on the news
YOU
i think i’d be more interested in what food is provided
TOUYA 🐠🚷
…
TOUYA 🐠🚷
no, I shan’t say
YOU
is this a cum joke
TOUYA 🐠🚷
but seriously. what should I wear. assume I will do something awful and evil and that you will see the outfit on the news when I get arrested.
YOU
touya, how would i recognise you. idk what YOU even look like. not that it matters, i guess. all that matters is that you wear something that fits you well. you don’t need to impress me; you’ve already won me over
TOUYA 🐠🚷
i what
TOUYA 🐠🚷
wait what do you MEAN it doesn’t matter
YOU
does it help get it through your thick head if i tell you that you are also babygirl-coded? perhaps not even coded but genuinely babygirl??
TOUYA 🐠🚷
it does not.
***
Adjusting your lace shawl, you gripped Shouto’s arm as the both of you furtively sneaked away from the hordes of pro-heroes, industry workers, and flashing press to slink back to the enormous table of hors d'oeuvres to see how many of them you could pack into your purse and his strategically planned inner coat pocket, sewn into the inside of his lapel for the occasion.
When Shouto had invited you to this ghastly awards ceremony for Endeavor, he’d claimed his motivation was that so he could talk to you about how the 2011 Hunter x Hunter anime was wrapping up, since he (flatterer!) said you had the best interpretations of certain characters, unlike some of your classmates, and Shouto tempted you with how you could stake out whatever posh food they had for you to try to recreate later. So, you’d dug out the dress you’d only worn to All Might’s official retirement party and agreed to attend.
Those present were a strange conglomeration of people, since the public opinion of Endeavor has been odd and tenuous lately. Essentially, the handful of attendees you knew were busy ingratiating themselves to people you’ve never seen before but they evidently were acquainted with, so those with whom you could hold an actual conversation with were scattered and few.
However, you didn’t even need to bring a book, because once you and Shouto had settled at a back table with both of your plates stacked with the most variety you could fit on them, he deadass pulled out his anime analysis notebook, which was starting to resemble Midoriya’s quirk analysis notebooks in terms of extensiveness and insanity, with lines crossing several pages to connect ideas. As you discussed where the two of you thought the characters were going, you had your own notebook—a new one, this one for recipes, and whenever either of you thought one of the appetizers was interesting, you wrote it down.
You were chewing on what Shouto had informed you was a water chestnut when the chair on your other side was pulled out with a screech against the tile, and Todoroki Touya plopped into it, his legs hardly having the time to spread before swiping a piece of candied salmon from your plate. The instant he bit down into it, his nose scrunched up.
“It’s fish, Touya,” said Shouto, dipping his own crudité in a tiny bowl of raspberry vinaigrette, and he passed his napkin to him. Touya spat the salmon into it, bunched it up, and edged it underneath the edge of your plate.
On your list, you wrote no fish! at the top, but before you even lifted your pen from the paper, you froze. The list wasn’t for this Touya; it was for your Touya. You crosshatched it out, trying to remember if your Touya had ever said anything about liking fish. He’d said he hadn’t, right? He didn’t like them alive, at the very least.
Shouto chomped down harshly, the crunch of raw celery distinct even through his closed mouth. “What brings you over here, Touya?”
He already had the text-to-speech function pulled up on his phone, and he held a parmesan palmier between his teeth as he typed. “People were asking Natsuo and Fuyumi about what they’re doing with their lives. It was only a matter of time before they got to me. Don’t wanna hear anyone else describe the nothing I’m doing. At least I know you guys are too busy talking about nerd crap to shit on me.”
“Oh, sweet boy,” you said, pursing your lips, “You’re in recovery. That’s enough. You don’t have to do anything to be worthwhile.” Wait. Fuck. You don’t talk to this Touya this way. Reel it back.
Crumbs fell from his mouth to the tablecloth. “The hell is wrong with you?” he typed.
Yeah, reel it way back. You elected not to respond, instead biting with difficulty into a brie/fig/prosciutto crostini and not being able to taste any of it.
“Would you like to discuss some so-called nerd crap with us?” Shouto arranged his notebook father across the table to be more in the middle of the three of you. “I know it’s been a while since you read Hunter x Hunter, but it’s been on hiatus so long that there’s not much new information that you need to know.”
“Hey,” you said, rushing to swallow, “You’ve read this before? How come you haven’t been sitting in to watch stuff with us?”
Touya shot Shouto a dark look, tongued a chunk of palmier into his cheek, and furiously typed on his phone. “I’m not interested in that shit anymore. It’s for kids.”
Shouto looked taken aback. “This is news to me. Do I have permission to take your manga volumes out of the house, then?”
“Fuck you,” Touya had already typed while Shouto was talking.
You bit back a smile. You’ve been borrowing a former, major villain’s manga? Cute. “But if you read it a while back, that means you’ve had more time to think about the characters,” you said, resting your elbow on the back of your chair as you shifted to face him, “Most of us are absorbing the story for the first time. It’d be cool to hear what you think.”
That parmesan palmier had looked good. Trusting this Touya on his taste, you wrote it on your list to investigate later, while he typed his response.
His expression fell flat enough to match the robotic tone. “Do you just want to hear me project my daddy and mommy issues onto the characters in the Zoldyck family?”
“No, Touya,” you said, laughing, “You have valuable things to say across the board, and I want to listen.” You almost nudged his knee with yours, but you had to stop yourself, something dark swirling in your chest. This wasn’t your Touya. You’re not allowed to.
His eyes flicked down towards the movement, but he didn’t comment. Shifting his jaw, he slipped off his white tuxedo jacket to drape it over the back of his chair, and for some reason, his gaze kept darting to you while he rolled the sleeves of his button-down up to his elbows, but he tried to give the appearance of being very focused on whatever skewered meat and pineapple was on the rim of your plate.
You were frowning. Fuck this. Fuck him. Touya was probably one of those guys who knew their effect on women, so he would know about the rolling-sleeves-to-elbows move. And fucking hell, was it effective for him, because the way he’s lost a lot of weight but was currently gaining it back made the tendons in his forearms much more noticeable when they tensed and strained, and the asymmetry of the burns and scars up his left arm in comparison to the smoothness of his prosthetic right only made him even more horribly, horribly attractive, and you were pissed about it, only getting more furious as he wrapped his tongue around the base of the first pineapple chunk and used his teeth to maneuver it off of the stolen skewer, hooded eyes staring you down. This Touya can act like a fucking slut, sure, but your Touya won’t even show you his goddamn hands.
“Hey, watch out.” You scratched your forehead in an attempt to conceal how enraged you were. “I’ve already had one of those. That lump at the end is an overly-breaded coconut shrimp. So—fish—be careful,” you finished lamely.
Touya’s hands and mouth were full with the skewer. Unable to type on his phone, he shifted the skewer to his left hand, flattened his right, and tapped his left wrist with it—the JSL sign for thank you.
You nodded and didn’t think anything of it for a moment, but when it hit you, you seized up and stared at him, chest swelling, proud and confused and frozen. Getting a little lightheaded, actually, but oh, God, who wouldn’t at the sight of Todoroki Touya, quiet and subdued but still suave as fuck, sitting so close to you in a freshly dishevelled white tuxedo that fit like it was custom-made for him, smelling so, so good and smiling with his perfect teeth (how are they that good when he was with the League for so long?), leaning towards you to steal your food and showing that he’d been paying attention to you, that he’d taken the JSL book you’d left with Shouto, that he’d thought about you when you’ve been apart and cared enough to try to learn something new with you, and you were going to kiss him; he deserved it; you were going to grab that stupidly adorable face and—no, that lightheadedness was also stemming from the soulmate bond activating.
Nausea swept through you for more than one reason. If your Touya discovered you were fighting the urge to kiss someone else, let alone the other Touya, then—you didn’t know. You didn’t know how you’d ever recover. Please let this be from your perspective, so he can’t feel your feelings, please.
“I have to go,” you said, pushing up on the table to stand, not even bothering to flash Shouto the soulmate hand signal. You had to get away. No matter if it were from your perspective or his, distance would help you suppress your fucking shameful crush on your friend’s older brother.
Good God, you were crossing the streams, you noted and fumed as you escaped onto a vacant alcove. Because they have the same goddamn name, your brain has been conflating the two of them. Shut up. You’re only allowed to have one Touya. Two would be greedy and dismissive of the soulmate bond in the first place.
Vertigo struck you so severely that you had to brace yourself against the nearest column, but you swopped to the balcony railing because you could grasp it and put most of your weight on it, and because your brain was swimming, you hand to get on your knees to wait for it to pass. “No, you can’t,” you said, trying your hardest to push thought of that Touya out of your head in case your Touya could feel them, “You can’t—that one doesn’t need to be in a romantic relationship right now. He’s working on himself. It’d fuck him up.” And ohhhh, you left your phone at the table, so you couldn’t call your Touya, and fuck, you didn’t want him to feel confused or betrayed because you weren’t calling him—
“Whose future are you deciding, here?”
Your Touya. He was here?
You opened your eyes to the sight of the balcony and the garden below, thank fuck. Okay, you could work with this. You could work with this; he’s not supposed to be able to feel—
His voice came from close behind you, as if he were leaning on another side of the column. “What’s got you feeling this guilty?”
Holy shit holy shit, has the bond evolved? Can feelings be felt from both sides regardless of perspective? “Hey, Touya.”
“Don’t turn around,” he said, even though you’d made no movement to.
“Can you see?”
“Only through you, angel. Otherwise, I’m in the dark.” With the sounds of clothes shifting, Touya must have crouched behind you, joints cracking. A fingerless-gloved hand brushed down your arm, and he moved your lace shawl out of the way to stroke your bare skin. Your mind was already going haywire at your betrayal, and his cold, gentle touch was not helping. “What’s wrong, hm?” He adjusted himself again behind you so that he could wrap his other arm around your waist, pulling you back into him, and his cool, rough lips pressed against the curve of your neck as he rested his head there.
You were going to cry. You’ll do it. For real, this time.
“Did that Todoroki Touya guy bother you? I saw him sitting at your table.”
God, no, he brought up whom you were trying to avoid, and you cringed, hating yourself as Touya’s hand sank down your arms to entwine his fingers with yours, rumpled shirtsleeves grazing your bare skin and leather gloves curbing the maximal skin-to-skin contact.
“He’s so fucked up that I wouldn’t be surprised if you hated him,” Touya was saying into your ear, “I could grind him into a pulp for you. He’d deserve it, wouldn’t he, for what he did to everyone? And I was burning up with jealousy from across the room; someone as pretty as you shouldn’t have such a hideous thing by your side.”
You made a noise from the back of your throat. You didn’t know, and you especially didn’t need the one person you were trying to hide your internal conflict from while you were actively trying to work out the internal conflict. First things first, you supposed. “Touya’s not fucking ugly.”
Your Touya snorted against your neck, hot air washing down the hollow of your throat. “I forgot how twisted you are. But there’s no way you could actually like him, right?”
“I can’t,” you said, releasing the balcony to clench your fists on your knees, “I can’t like him. He needs to discover who he is as an individual before he finds out how he functions in a relationship. He doesn’t need romance—or me, at this point in his life.”
“Interesting,” he said, more clearly now that his mouth wasn’t muffled against your skin, “Sounds like you think something’s wrong with him. Like he’s not whole. And isn’t he broken? You’d have to be, if you pulled the shit he did, burning cities to the ground and murdering—”
“Shut up,” you said, hunching in on yourself, “You’re don’t know. You’re believing what other people have told you about him. You’re just—you’re just like people who talk about that nerd shit you hate without checking the source material. They’ll talk about certain characters in terms of false narratives they’ve crafted, and they’ll talk about them for so long that the false information becomes conflated with the characters, with everyone thinking the wrong stuff is real. I—fuck.” You winced, but he was listening, his free hand winding around your neck to adjust the migrant clasp on your necklace to the back of your throat. “I know my ideas of Touya stem from propaganda, but I want to learn about him from him. Just based on what I’ve seen, there’s so much out there that’s wrong—it’s even subconsciously perpetuated in his own home, since the shrine where his family mourned him is still there. And I hate it. I hate it, because he seems so lovable, but so are you, and I hate myself because I want to love only you, because you’re my soulmate, and I’m so, so, so goddamn terrified that you’re gonna reject me and leave me alone forever now that I’ve betrayed you. By feeling stuff for someone else.”
You were crying. You were crying, nose stopping up, and Touya kissed your throat, over the clasp of your necklace. “Rejection’s a bitch. I know that,” he said under his breath, “So, I’m not gonna do that to you, even if…” He trailed off, instead latching his mouth to your neck again, letting his tongue flick over your skin once, as if it were an afterthought. “You really like him?”
“I’m scared that I do,” you said, taking a corner of your shawl to daub at your tears.
“The only thing to do is feel it out, I guess.” Touya settled at last, shifting weight and moving his legs so that they’d be on either side of you, and his left arm joined the other around your waist to hold you close. “Or let it die, if you want. The soulmate bond doesn’t matter in the end. You don’t have to love him or me.”
“But Touya,” you said, sniffing, dying to look back at him but restraining yourself, “I do.”
***
Later that night, you were researching how to make little cheese balls that were shaped like pumpkins like they’d had at the awards ceremony when you felt the familiar wooziness. Funny. It’s not often that the bond activates twice in one day. You closed your laptop and set your notebook aside, waiting for the slow, drowsy fade into Touya’s eyes.
Tonight, it’s a jarring, instantaneous slam into his perspective, and you felt like you’d been knocked about in the baggage rack of a train. You threw out your hands to balance yourself, even though you hadn’t been physically moved, and the queasiness made it hard to concentrate, blackness blotting at the edges of your periphery.
But the darkness of Touya’s bedroom wasn’t helping, with only partially drawn curtains letting in moonlight, and—and oh, my God, he’s flat on his back in bed, tousled bedsheets, cock out, and it’s so pretty, unfairly pretty, thick as hell but thicker at the head than the base, blushing deep pink, leaking onto the faint lines of re-developing abs and a vaguely red trail of hair, and—
The hand touching it has skin grafts.
“—ugh, darlin’, fuck, you know what I’m gonna—gonna do to you, angel?” Touya was muttering to himself, too caught up to realise you were there. “You don’t—you don’t know what you do to me.”
You’d registered his pubic hair as vaguely red because, now that you were staring, only the very tips of the untouched hair trailing down his stomach were red, with what he’d probably shaved at some point lower on his body snowy against whatever unburnt skin could still grow hair. He’s gripping himself at an angle that doesn’t make him rub against a strand of load-bearing staples on his upper thigh (did someone say load?), connecting a stretch of familiarly burned skin to a healing graft, diamond-speckled and twitching with his cock the closer he drew to orgasm (from the back of your mind surfaced a questioning thought of if he’d advocated for healing his hands first, since staples would hinder smooth masturbation). His prosthetic arm lay unattached at his side.
“Hahh, I wanna,” said Touya, drawing in a ragged breath, “wanna make a mess outta you, y’always too put together, too fuckin’ pretty for y’own damn good, fuck.” He rubbed his thumb over his tip, the skin there giving everso slightly at the pressure, with another bead of precum swelling before it dripped onto his stomach. “Gonna find wha—whatever I can do to make you fuckin’ whine, and I’m gonna, hah, follow that sound for the rest of my goddamn life, and, oh—fuck, fuck, how, how sweet you’d feel wrapped around me, how much I don’t fuckin’ deserve—”
He cut himself off to take a deep, stuttering breath, and you saw the gates of heaven in the way his chest surged forward when he arched his back, lines of burns and scars carved into his skin like a roadmap. And Touya moaned for you, and you didn’t know how much you’d needed to hear both Touyas do that until now, but before he could finish the first syllable of your name, you were lurched out of the bond and back into your room, just as abruptly as it had begun.
Your hands were shaking as you tied your shoelaces, aware of the leak into your underwear when you bent over, and you dashed to the nearest train depot, navigating in fervent, distant buzz all the way to the Todoroki estate. You must have appeared sufficiently crazy, because the only vacant seats on the train were next to you.
(In your heart of hearts, you had known.
If you’d put it into words, consciously, where both Touyas overlapped, it would’ve been too hard to bear if they’d been different people, which was, regardless, the most logical situation. Getting excited for your soulmate to be your former crush and then being disappointed when it wasn’t him felt like a betrayal to your soulmate. You hadn’t wanted to set yourself up for disappointment or betrayal, because you shouldn’t feel guilt when you look at your soulmate. Someone who holds your heart in his hand should never be second best to you. Touya’s had enough of not being enough in his life.
Surely the random chance of a stranger’s quirk wouldn’t be so kind to give you whom you’ve been wanting. You haven’t allowed yourself to hope.)
You didn’t even go in the front door. You clambered over the garden wall and berated yourself for not recognising Touya’s garden earlier, even though you’ve usually been around the kitchen and living room when you’re here. It took you longer than it could’ve to get to his teahouse, because you were deliberately staying on the garden path instead of walking on his hard work, but you didn’t even take off your shoes at the entrance, the nightingale floors chirping out in the night as you surged towards his bedroom door.
Touya lay facing the window in his very Western bed that took up most of the room—and much of his bedroom was like that, with his modern belongings scattered across other outdated furnishings, clean but cluttered, thought it startled you to open the door onto a Naruto poster taped in the space designated for a hanging scroll.
You only had time to absorb poster and lived-in before you saw the face of God in how Touya stretched and groaned in bed, arching his back and holding it until his back popped (a little too fixated on his moonlit nipples, like seeing them would fix you, flip you back to your factory settings). “Natsuo,” he said, coming out of his groan, eyes scrunched shut, “Don’t say you’re here to make me re-hang the windchimes. I spent all day tracking how air flows through the garden.”
You sat at the foot of his bed, mattress dipping slightly, still in your coat and shoes and hesitant to spread dirt, but the need to be near Touya, even if it were through blankets, consumed you. Hands folded behind his head, Touya cracked open an eye at the weight, and he froze.
You hadn’t prepared any confession on the train. You’d been too focused on the memory of his thighs. So, what garbled nonsense that came out of your mouth was “I figured your dick would be pierced.”
Touya appeared to snap back into reality, and he sat up in bed, pulling the blankets up to cover more of his bare chest (mourning for his nipples. Inconsolable about it, even) and quite obviously tried so hard to be chill (the way his leg started jiggling underneath the covers and how he wouldn’t look you in the eyes for more than a couple of seconds gave him away, though). “Is that what they say about me?”
You folded your hands in your lap, bent over for a swift escape in case he wanted you to leave “Jirou conjectures that you have a Jacob’s ladder.”
“Just what I need. More holes in my body.” He ran his tongue over his lower lip—much more scarred than the upper one, clarifying some things about kissing him. “Don’t know how to take that a bunch of kids who resent me talk about the state of my dick. You a part of that crowd?”
“I was shown a picture of what was advertised to be a very realistic dildo,” you said, scooting your ass farther back onto the bed now that he wasn’t going to send you away, “It had many, many piercings. It wasn’t as thick, if that makes you feel better.”
“It does not,” said Touya, brow pinched. He brought his legs up to hug them to his chest, but he must have changed his mind, instead just letting them block your view of him, hiding behind the cover of the lumpy comforter.
You waited for him to elaborate. His tuxedo was thrown over a wicker trunk, bowtie tossed onto a kotatsu, even though it wasn’t cold enough outside, with his gaming controller next to it and an open can of black tea. Two floor seats were haphazardly tucked underneath the kotatsu’s blanket, the one facing the TV flatter and duller than the one nearer the door. His only bookshelf had the illusion that it was constantly being added to, with the first shelf arranged neatly and the rest completely shoved together, the lowest one still mostly empty—your sign language book lay horizontally on it.
He should’ve said something by now, right? Antsy, you shifted your weight, staring down at your shoes. To have something to do, you slowly took them off, lining them up with Touya’s house slippers (with seahorses on them?) next to the bed, and you swallowed your pride to break the ice. “I’m glad it’s you, by the way. Very glad.”
Touya grunted and draped an arm over his knees. “Did you know?”
“I will be generous and say not really,” you said, shuffling off your coat to hang on the bedpost, “I didn’t permit myself to make the connections.”
“Eh.” He shrugged with one shoulder—the left one, the natural one. He’d reattached his prosthetic in the meantime. “There are around one hundred Touyas in Japan, according to the last census.”
“Sounds like a prepared statistic,” you said, holding back that the name frequency has probably plummeted in the last few years, “I’m serious, though. I wanted my Touya—soulmate, you, Touya—to be Todoroki Touya. So badly.”
He covered his mouth, thumbing at his lower lip and simply staring at you. In the moonlight, his eyes were as fucking bright blue as—well. As his flames. More things were clicking into place.
“Really, Touya,” you said, desperate for him to believe you, “I liked you as the stranger in the alley, and I liked you as Dabi, and when my soulmate seemed to share some traits with the other Touya in my life, I didn’t give myself permission to think about it. Because I was growing fond of the you that spoke to me, that I was getting to know, and while my feelings for the other you were being rekindled, too, I wanted to love the soulmate you more, because it's become fucking evident to me that I was made to love you, even without this soulmate stuff. You’ve been scattered throughout my life, anyway. It just happened to speed things up, since it forced you to talk to me. Otherwise, you’d probably still be at the point where you’re the brooding-older-brother figure who isolates himself in his room when his brother’s friends are over.”
Touya was frowning, but you waited it out entirely this time. “You saw…all that,” he eventually said, gesturing down himself, “and you still want me?”
Biting back a smile, you lifted your knees to the bed, moving slowly to gauge his reaction before getting closer to him. “I saw you decapitate someone, and I still want you.”
“You’re insane,” said Touya, tensing up as you neared him but twitching into a nervous grin, eyes falling to your boobs, away to the window, and back to your face.
“Correct,” you said, and you knelt next to him, taking all of your restraint to keep from reaching out the final few centimetres to run your hands down his chest. “Don’t you need someone a little insane, though?”
The comforter fell a few inches down his chest, and you throat ran dry at the long line of fading stitches and staples.
You raised a quivering hand to his face, and it’s strange: both of you flinched in the moment your fingertips felt the tiniest bit of body heat emanating from his cheek, and it’s strange: it’s the first time you’ve felt any heat come from Touya at all, and it’s strange: you could see yourself so clearly waking up next to him every day, putting your chin on his shoulder while he picked out fruits at the grocery store, feeding the koi late at night together while you lured the ducks away, watching his eyes soften in the same way both when he sinks his teeth into something you’ve baked and his cock deep into you while he cradled you closely to his chest, but at the moment, it might be too much for you—and perhaps Touya as well, judging by the nearly incomprehensible, jumbled sort of expression—if you even touched his face.
Perhaps the prospect of romance was too much for him at this point in his life. The last thing Touya should be feeling about that was guilt.
“I don’t mind being on the backburner while you figure things out,” you said, returning your hand to your lap and trying very hard not to look at his nipples, “I’ll wait for whatever you need to do. I’ll—”
“No,” said Touya, shaking himself out of whatever spiralling dive he’d been leaning into, “Hell, no. No fucking—” He snatched the hand you’d almost touched him with and clenched it hard, smushing your fingers together (startled by the physical contact, even though he’d initiated it), and after a flash of frustration at his prosthetic arm, he passed your hand to his left. “You’re fucking sticking around. You—you don’t just look at me; you see me, in such a different fucking way than anyone else, and you did it immedia—it took my family so long to look, and you—you’ve been watching. Been paying attention. It’s all I’ve ever—” He frowned, rolling his tongue along the inside of his cheek. “It’s good to have you around while I dig myself out of this hole,” he said, squeezing your hand harder but glaring outside through the window, “I wish I had known you sooner.”
“I’m here now, and I want to get to know you better. I want to hear more about you, things that are true,” you said, “and don’t start with anything self-deprecating, Touya. The next time the bond lets you see through me, I’m gonna show you what you look like through my eyes. And I’m not lying to you when I say you are so very, very pretty.”
Grunting, Touya fidgeted in bed, the covers slipping down to his stomach, drawing your hand closer to him, with your body leaning in to follow his pull. “Shit,” he said, “Don’t say shit like that right now.”
“Touya, I am gonna tell you how gorgeous you are until you believe it, and that starts now.”
“Not tha—well, yes, that, but I—” He sucked in through his teeth (also sucking in through a tiny hollow in his cheek caused by a loose staple, with a faint, wheezing whistle) and threaded his fingers through yours, pulling your hands towards his shoulder so that you loomed over his chest, “I have a hell of a refractory period now. It’s fuckin’ hard for me to get hard a lot, and you saw me; I just—” Inhaling sharply, he jerked his hand away from yours and frantically started wiping it on the blankets. The new skin around the tips of his ears bloomed pink. “I haven’t washed my hands.”
“Touya,” you said, “Like I care.” You took the hand he was trying to hide in the folds of the blanket and licked up his palm, holding eye contact and relishing the way the blush spread to the untouched skin around the corners of his eyes. “I want all of you. Both sides you’ve shown me, and more. So long as it’s real. So long as it’s you.”
“All right. First step is getting on top of me,” said Touya, and, palm wet, he took your hand again, and he tugged on it, guiding you into his lap, other hand sliding down the thigh you swung over him. “Makes it easier to talk, y’know. To look at you.”
“Oh? Are we starting with your tragic backstory? If you’re taking requests,” you said, sliding your hand up and over his shoulder to run your fingers over his collarbone (jutting out from under both burnt and new skin), “then I’d like to hear your perspective of when you first kissed me.”
Touya lift his prosthetic hand to your cheek, just as cold and strong as his real one, and he placed his thumb at the corner of your lower lip, tip breaking the seal of your lips to press in just barely. “Actually, I think we’ll start with this pretty mouth of yours.”
***
Iida was shouting and gesturing from the living room that you only had fifteen minutes before the episode viewing was scheduled to start, and Shinsou shut him up by reminding him that Tokoyami had to pick up Ojiro and Hagakure from the floristry across town and that they’d start watching whenever they started watching, so chill out, Iida. Go help Mina pick the bugles out of her hair, or something.
You and Touya crouched together in front of the oven, staring through the glass at the rows of potato wedges—the recipe he claims his mother made when he was five, but surely a woman as sensible as Todoroki Rei wouldn’t put that much fucking cayenne pepper or paprika or chili sauce or—listen, it was a lot.
“C’mon, pretty boy, tell me something else true about you,” you said, nudging his shoulder with yours while you made eye contact with him in the oven’s reflection.
“Hm,” he said, scratching the underside of his chin with a bare hand (the gloves lay folded back on the teahouse dresser), “I hate fish.”
(Here you sighed dramatically, because you obviously already knew this. His loathing was intensified at the moment, though, because he’d had to get up and leave you in the middle of the night last night because the koi pond monitor was blaring at a stupid clog in the filter.)
“Tastes fuckin’ gross dead. Bitch to take care of livin’.”
You pushed on your knees to stand, and you held out a hand to help him up. “Enough with the negativity, dickhead. Tell me more about what you like.”
“Besides you?” He took your hand and grinned, putting all his weight into it as you strained to lift him, and when the oven timer beeped and you’d shot a few choice words his way, he had mercy and stood up by himself. He grabbed the oven mitts and tossed them to you, and while you removed the tray from the oven, he ran his hand through the sharp, white spikes of his hair, inadvertently wiping specks of paprika into it.
You set the tray on a cooling rack. “C’mon, Touya. No need to be so cheesy.”
“I can be worse,” he said, winding his arms around your waist before you could even take off the oven mitts, cradling you close to him, no room in between, and he propped his chin on your shoulder. “I can even incorporate—you call me cheesy; you’re the one who called me pretty boy not a minute ago.”
Blindly, you raised a hand to run it back through Touya’s soft, soft hair, and you gently bumped your cheek against his. “I am not being cheesy by simply stating the truth. You’re gorgeous, Touya.”
“Bet I’d look even better throbbing inside you.”
“Please follow a logical flow in conversation like the rest of us,” you said, and when you couldn’t grasp the spatula you were reaching for, Touya grabbed it for you, scraping up some of the first row, having to release you during the process.
Leaning on the counter to face him, you flinched at the heat before pinching a potato wedge between the tips of your fingers, but Touya held one like it was completely cool. It had almost touched his tongue before he paused and waited for your reaction to his recipe.
His potato wedges were bad. Too crunchy on top because of the odd broil time and not-fully-ground peppercorns and too soggy and soft underneath, especially in the part where it’d stuck to the tin foil and peeled off, and the combination of spices didn’t quite mesh together well. With a sliver of quiet triumph, you swallowed a bite of potato wedge decidedly worse than the ones you made.
But Touya was looking at you, eyes brimming with hope despite his otherwise carefully cultivated cool exterior, watching, waiting for you—and it was Touya, after all; Touya was the one who cooked these—made them for you, deliberately, on purpose—and so that made what words were about to come out of your mouth true and beautiful.
soulmate trope taglist: @bakugouspsycho, @pansexualproblemchild, @doonaandpjs, @sunsetevergreen, @the-coffee-is-on-fire, @liberace2, @ladymidnight77, @nonomesupposedto, @gooooomz, @kissmebakugou, @pachiibatt, @celestair, @tiredkittykat, @cheshireshiya, @90s-belladonna, @infjsnightmare
#bnha#dabi#dabi x reader#dabi/reader#dabi imagine#dabi fic#mha#dabi headcanons#dabi fanfiction#dabi fanfic#soulmates#soulmate au#soulmate#dash it all
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𝐀𝐭𝐭𝐚 𝐆𝐢𝐫𝐥 || 𝐉𝐨𝐞𝐥 𝐌𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐫 𝐱 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫
Previous Joel Fics: Mule [5.1K Words]
Summary: Marlene thinks Joel can save the fireflies. You’re not so sure.
Word Count: 10.2k!!!!
CW: LONG FIC. You have been warned! Slow burn Enemies to Fuck Buddies. Joel is 40 here, 10 years before the events of the game! Military and political themes because, say it with me now, “Jas loves plot”. Moody Joel, before Tess. Aggression. Slight gore. Power play. Hair pulling, f masturbation. Angst. Based off Game!Joel
Tease: “Look at you,” Joel growls. “Totally shameless.”
‘When you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light.’
The white graffiti paint drips down the chipped terracotta walls of the hallway you were designated to patrol. Your feet ache in the brand-new leather boots gifted to you in the last donation drop-off, and you want nothing more than to crawl back to bed and ignore the arrival of this smuggler that had Marlene promising that she could take control of Boston in a fortnight.
“What a bunch of bullshit,” you scoff bitterly, picking at your cuticles. The skin is red raw under the fluorescent lighting, crimson blood pooling around your nails. It's a nervous habit you picked up since joining the Fireflies, marginally healthier than staying up all night but still torturing your body somehow.
There was no light to this way of life, no promise that the darkness would ever subside. It was a brutal cycle of killing a handful of soldiers only for them to execute swathes of Fireflies. You saw it in your dreams, your colleague's brains splattered across the streets in the exclusion zone, a carmine reminder that the military would not tolerate any form of mutiny within their controlled zones. Too many had devoted themselves to suicide missions, but still, you had nothing to show for it. How much longer could Marlene continue to hurl young lives at a promise she couldn't fulfil? The likelihood of finding an immune individual grew smaller and smaller each time squadrons of Fireflies failed to return home, and even the most faithful of individuals were beginning to lose hope that this martyr would ever arrive. That was despite your dogged leader insisting that there must be someone out there that could help provide the vaccine that would eradicate the Cordyceps virus.
You hiss sharply as you subconsciously pull a hang nail down your first knuckle, resulting in a stinging sensation that rips you from your pessimistic thoughts. It's light outside now, and you wonder how long you will have to wait to meet this smuggler that Marlene speaks of so highly. She had claimed that she knew the man's brother, stating that Tommy had fought valiantly for the cause until he found himself unable to justify putting his life on the line for someone that they weren't sure even existed.
As Firefly numbers dwindled, so too did the morale that held the frayed edges of the organisation together. Everyone had sacrificed something and lost someone dear for seemingly no reward. Marlene's fantastical idea that one lone smuggler could change the course of the firefly's suffering left you feeling that options were running out.
As you begin to resign bitterly to your seemingly inevitable end, a pair of footsteps sound down the corridor in an indication of your saviour’s arrival, broken bottles crunching beneath his boots. When you look up from your throbbing finger, now stripped to ribbons, you are caught off guard by the view.
Marlene's expression is grave; eyebrows pulled together in a stark and silent warning. Soldiers aren't coming home today. You had seen that gaunt visage before. Hell, you'd seen it almost every week recently. However, the most shocking sight was the person who accompanied her.
The man is old, much older than you had been expecting. His mousy brown hair, trimmed short, is greying to match the thick, peppery beard that coats his jaw. The edges of his eyes are creased, no doubt carved with the years he spent fighting to survive. His thin lips turn downwards, and his eyes are cold and hardy, indicating his desire to get the job done and escape Marlene’s control.
"Soldier," Marlene addresses you with an air of authority that can only indicate she is attempting to impress her guest, "You will be coming with me."
"Yes, ma'am," you stand at attention and cast your eyes over the guest of honour, who is yet to introduce himself. He doesn't look as though he intends to. He watches you with an air of caution as though he doesn't trust you. It doesn’t surprise you. Everyone in this new world order is a threat. Perhaps this wariness is how he survived so long.
Falling in line, you follow behind your superior. There is an uneasy silence settling amongst you. The Commander and The Smuggler don't seem comfortable in each other's presence.
"So, say you take back Boston. What then?" The man's gruff Texan accent cuts through the silence like a dull blade. It's agonising, an unwanted intrusion to the apparent mutual decision to remain quiet.
"I think you know," Marlene speaks with frustration, "Restore democratically elected government control.”
"Didn’t you say that at the beginning? It ain’t as though you are any closer than 10 years ago." The smuggler points out, his assessment lacking any form of amusement. He doesn't seem to revel in the Fireflies' losses, yet he has the confidence to call Marlene out on her ridiculous ambition.
Marlene shoots the stranger a look of indignation, clearly not appreciating his accurate assessment of the Fireflies’ track record. She doesn't attempt to argue, instead leading him into a room and ushering you inside.
“Joel,” she begins, naming the enigma that had walked in and undermined the entire principal of the organisation he had joined momentarily. Marlene closes the door and locks it for good measure before turning to face her ‘last hope’. “I need you to tell me the plan. I can’t just let you blindly lead the last of my men into a war zone-“
“Didn’t expect you to,” he answers lazily, crossing his arms over his chest. The sleeves of his flannel stretch across his broad biceps, buttons straining slightly against his frame. You assume that his physique is thanks to lugging around the oversized backpack that rests over his shoulders, the worn nylon fabric practically bursting at the seams.
Marlene offers Joel a look, the kind that indicates she doesn't feel like joking around. He inhales slowly through his nose, then exhales as if preparing to begin a presentation at a job interview. In a way, that is exactly what this meeting was.
"Y’all can only gather the number of weapons you need from one place. You won't find this shit just lyin’ around. We'll have to take it from the military themselves."
You nearly choke on the oxygen in your lungs, rocked back by Joel’s confidence in his ability to steal directly from under the noses of the US Military. You knew that Marlene had faith in him, but this was lunacy.
"And just how do you suppose we do that?" Even Marlene, ever the optimist, looks at Joel as if he is crazy. There was no way to infiltrate the military bases that the Federal Disaster Response Agency sanctioned. They had the place secure, triple-locked to keep out humans and infected alike.
"We'll catch them on one of their supply runs," Joe answers her question simply, as though he thought of this already, “If we ambush during the night in the Outskirts, they’ll lack the defences to hold us off. At most, there'll be four of ‘em in the delivery vehicle.”
It's an insane plan. The soldier’s on the border of the quarantine zones are armed to the teeth to defend against the infected. The team would need to be stealthy, catching them off guard and dispatching them before they had a chance to call for backup.
Perhaps it's the kamikaze-like nature of Joel's plan, or maybe the lack of detail he’s sharing, but understandably Marlene seems unsure. "Do you think it'll be worth it, all that risk?"
"What, armin’ yourself and strippin’ them of their next lot of ammunition? Seems beneficial to me."
You can't help but wonder what Marlene is trading for Joel to run headfirst into a death trap like this. Likewise, is it wise for her to place all her bets on one man who seems intent on being captured and sentenced to execution?
The heavy sigh that rattles through Marlene's lungs indicates to you that she has nowhere else to turn. In exchange for Joel's basic scheme, she extends a nod of approval.
"You will be escorting Joel." It takes a second for you to realise that Marlene is talking to you, still caught up in shock. When you do, Joel looks less than pleased at the concept of having a babysitter. He drags his eyes over to you, expression flat. You can't say that you're precisely thrilled, either.
"Yes, ma'am," you offer confidently despite wanting to beg for mercy. She doesn't offer you the chance.
"Joel, gather all the men and firepower you’ll need." With that final comment, Marlene turns toward the exit, leaving the two of you alone in the unfurnished room. She seems animated and enthusiastic about getting this plot up and running.
Joel makes no move to leave, instead leaning against the wall and peering at the Firefly pendant that rests on your collarbone. You know what he's thinking, but he himself fails to speak the ‘why’ out loud. There’s an awkward edge to him, indicating a man who had grown too accustomed to surviving as a lone wolf.
"I heard your brother was a Firefly," you beat Joel to it, asking the question before he has the opportunity to interrogate you. This area of the conversation appears to irritate Joel, his eyes turning to the ceiling.
"Yeah, he wasn't happy with the way I did things. Said it was too violent. Instead, he joined you and continued his brutal crusade here despite criticisin’ mine." Joel scoffs, picking at the thread-worn sleeves of the flannel he wore. His words are bitter, leading you to believe that the brothers don't talk anymore.
"It's less of a crusade than an attempt to set things right," you justify.
"You're killin’ people," Joel accuses bluntly. It's as though he's tarring you with the same pitch-black brush as those who killed for their own benefit. It sparks a rage in you, the words spilling from your lips before you can stop them.
"You kill people to survive this world. I’m trying my best to revert it to the old one. If I have to kill soldiers to do it, who, by the way, act worse than the infected most of the time, then so be it.”
Joel appears to let your argument settle before he nods, pushing himself from the wall and making his way to the door. His boots scuff the flooring, the grating sound punctuating the silence as you await his response, which he delivers with an air of finality.
"Yeah, you just keep tellin’ yourself that bullshit."
—————————————————
Joel has a wealth of knowledge that can only result from his smuggling adventures and the network of insiders he worked with. He is somehow aware of the military's next supply drop-off date, which just so happens to coincide nicely with his arrival. It gave the team two days to plan their attack. It was almost too good to be true.
Your suspicions against the smuggler grow with your inability to discern his reason for aiding Marlene. There was no question that he was no longer involved with his brother Tommy, the two seemingly ending their relationship on less than amicable terms, and there also appeared to be no love lost between your sergeant and Joel.
Yet despite his apparent limited reward, Joel was focusing all of his efforts on ensuring that this mission was successful. His rucksack, which he had held close to him since entering the Fireflies’ hideout, was filled to the brim with rudimentary grenades and modified firearms. He admitted his knowledge of creating these weapons had come from manuals scavenged throughout his time as a smuggler. Reluctantly, Joel shares the blueprints, and the mission squad are armed with Molotov cocktails and nail bombs by the end of the evening.
You wish you could say that Joel's helpfulness had warmed you to his presence; however, you find yourself increasingly irritated by his constant attendance. You see him arrogant and consistently standoffish despite your fellow member's attempts to appease him with light conversation.
Following the half-a-day-long effort to sufficiently arm the team, Marlene had pulled all on-site members of the Fireflies into a meeting room. She stands at a table, an aged, worn map of the Boston quarantine zone spread across the surface. From where you're standing, you can see circles marked in red ink along the border.
Something akin to optimism clings to the air of the dusty meeting room. You feel it when the group goes silent as Marlene raises her hand for attention. Joel stands by her side, eyes assessing the map as he awaits the beginning of the briefing.
"Everyone listen in," Marlene orders, authority drenching her tone as she commands her army, "I want everyone confident in their role on this mission. We only have one chance to get this right."
You swallow thickly, readying yourself to hear how Marlene had taken Joel's absurd mission plan and cultivated it into a scheme for which her troops would feel comfortable risking their lives.
"We have information that the military is due a supply drop from FEDRA in two days. We are almost certain that this restock will contain firearms and ammo that could help us take down the military presence in Boston." A series of murmurs sound, those in the room comforted by the prospect that they may no longer need to ration their supplies.
"It is crucial that we obtain these weapons to take control of the Boston quarantine zone. With civilian support, we could increase our numbers and once again focus our efforts on obtaining a vaccine for the Cordyceps virus."
It was an unspoken truth that the Fireflies' efforts to acquire a vaccine had ultimately fallen by the wayside, the lack of soldiers, weapons and equipment making it increasingly difficult to travel across the country to the medical facility at Salt Lake City where the trials were taking place. The Fireflies focused most of their resources towards protecting the medical officials integral to finding a cure. Taking control of the militarised zone would provide more than enough manpower, vehicles, and firearms to travel safely and restart the process of searching for an immune individual who could help turn the tide of the war against the virus.
"I can confirm that most supply drops are handed over on the east side of the quarantine zone. Our best option is catching the vehicle containing the cache in the Outskirts before it reaches the wall.”
The Outskirts are notoriously dangerous, their desolate plains unlit and infested with runners that try their luck getting past the military blockade. If you somehow managed to survive the creatures, you then had to contend with the snipers on the wall. Many Fireflies had lost their lives crossing these lands to supply the medical facility in Salt Lake City at the peak of testing.
"I will be handing the mission over to Joel to ensure we have the best chance of obtaining these critical supplies,” Marlene finishes, stepping back and letting Joel take control of the meeting.
Wasting no time, Joel points towards the circled area on the east side of the quarantine wall. "They plan to hand over the cache at the gate on the East wall. If we can intercept ‘em before they reach the lit areas surroundin’ the zone, we should be able to take out the soldiers and grab the weapons before they can call for backup."
You're unsure where your frustrations come from. Perhaps it's the simplicity with which Joel delivers his plans, but you find yourself questioning whether or not it was possible to succeed without losing enough men to bring the Fireflies to their knees.
"I assume you expect us to travel through the underground tunnels beneath the apartment buildings. Who's to say we won't run into Clickers and Runners that drain our resources or leave us late and unable to complete the mission?" You question Joel with sincerity, but he looks at you as though you’ve queried his authority.
Marlene opens her mouth to interject and scold you for insubordination, but Joel raises his hand.
"I am gonna do a run of the smugglin’ tunnels myself and sweep for any infected so that the path is clear for tomorrow evenin’," Joel answered smoothly, despite the obvious irritation laced between his words, "Shipment is due at 9 p.m. tomorrow. We're gonna move out at 5 to make sure that we have enough time to get to the Outskirts and set up for engagement."
Still, you find yourself concerned with Joel’s leadership. None of you knew him. He hadn’t developed trust between the team and himself; instead, he kept you all at arm's length and maintained distance.
“How do we know you won’t hand us all in and take the weapons yourself? You’re a smuggler; you’d earn a lot from them,” you accuse, not unlike the tone Joel had taken with you hours before.
“Soldier-!” Marlene speaks up, running out of patience with your disregard for her ‘smuggling saviour’. Once again, Joel keeps his hand aloft to quieten her and fight his own corner.
“This is a job,” he states with a gravelly tone that betrays his relaxed posture, “I ain’t for your little militia group, and I’m not against it. I will lead this mission, hand the weapons over, take my ration cards and my cut of the firearms and leave. You wanna distrust me and end up dead? Be my guest.”
You can’t help but scoff, taken aback by his inability to choose his side of the moral compass. To fight for good with the Fireflies or battle to maintain the new world order with FEDRA. Instead, he doesn’t even sit on the fence. He’s situated in the shadows, benefitting from either side only for himself.
Joel’s expression serves as a warning to interrupt him again, pointing to the map as he begins to detail the step-by-step of his mission.
“Plan’ll go like this….”
—————————————————
You can’t exactly claim to be surprised that you had been left out of the mission squad and ordered to remain at the hideout after questioning Joel’s leadership. ‘One loose link’ and all that. However, you find yourself wracked with nerves as you return to your room for the night. What if they needed you? What if everything went south, and you were the one pair of hands required to maintain a grip on the delicate situation?
That wasn't to say that you didn't have faith in your fellow soldiers to carry out the mission successfully. Joel had picked the brightest and most skilled of Marlene's troops to carry out this night raid, and you knew they had enough experience to achieve this critical assignment. But what if…?
Marlene had delivered her scathing reprimand following the meeting when she had dragged you down a corridor and insisted you get your act together. You hadn’t been able to look her in the eye, believing her reckless for putting the lives of her troops, your friends, in the hands of a man who couldn’t care less what happened to them as long as he got his payout.
Were you being naive? Was it foolish to believe that every surviving person not aligned with FEDRA should stand opposed to the regime and attempt to restore some level of order? Or had humanity evolved beyond the return to everyday life, much preferring to fight for themselves, to remain in the dog-eat-dog system this virus had granted them?
You find yourself fearing the answer.
As you enter the doorway to the barracks, you hear the rapid pacing of footsteps down the hallway approaching you. The sound drags you from your thoughts, but not before a hand firmly grips your collar and pushes your back to the wall so hard that you hit your head off the jagged brickwork.
Pushing his forearm across your chest, Joel stares back at you with rage burning in his pupils. The metal of a watch strapped around his wrist digs into your collarbone painfully, but you grit your teeth in response, standing firm against Joel's display of intimidation.
His chest is heaving with heavy breaths, seemingly infuriated by your display in the meeting room. Despite his fury, his voice is relatively even. "You gotta problem with me?"
"Ha," you scoff, "That's funny. What was it you said? ‘Be my guest’?”
Joel answers first by applying pressure to your chest, his forearm balancing his weight and crushing your bones beneath it in a painful warning. You grab at the skin exposed by his rolled-up sleeves and dig your nails in, though it does little to de-escalate the tension.
"Look,” he sneers, brows creased together, “You don’t gotta like me. Ain’t even gotta respect me. But what you’re not gonna do is put doubt into your fellow soldier's heads. That shit’ll get them killed. You want that?”
"What's it matter to you? You don't care how many die as long as you get your payout," you dig in, not allowing Joel to think he could muscle you into submission.
He inhales shakily in anger, glaring at you as you attempt to pry his arms off. "The role Marlene gave me ain't to ensure the survival of your friends. My only goal is to guarantee y’all get your hands on those weapons, no matter the cost. So I suggest you assure their best chance of survival by keeping your mouth shut and your opinions of me to yourself."
"Aye, Aye, Captain,” you sneer.
"Atta girl."
The sarcasm dripping from those three syllables sets you off again. You grit your teeth while pushing hard on the limb that has you firmly pinned down, but your limited strength has little effect until Joel pulls away completely. Almost instantly, a bruising ache settles across your skin, and you suppose it's Joel's version of a parting gift.
There is a pause between the two of you as you take in Joel's command. He appears to be watching your expression for any sign of acknowledgement towards his order. You both breathe heavily, on the comedown from your respective anger aimed at each other. It's intense, the crackling tension in the air shared by both of you.
You're unsure how or why the mood shifts so violently in the room, but you can feel your heart racing as you watch Joel settle his hands on his hips. His tongue darts out to lick his lower lip as he exhales what must be the last of his anger. In this quiet moment, you note how handsome he is despite his weathered appearance. His usually aggressive, guarded expression is momentarily brought down and exposes the warm, earthy brown tone of his irises.
"Just…" Joel hesitates, searching for the correct words as he looks you in the eye. He's quiet for a long, drawn-out second as if processing you. "You ain't gonna like the guilty conscience of believin’ somethin’ you said is the reason your friends died. Trust me."
The gentle tone Joel offers indicates he has experience in what he's warning you against. When he offers this advice so calmly, who are you to deny this slither of kindness? So you just nod in acknowledgement, refusing to extend him any more appreciation.
Joel steps away whilst clearing his throat, appearing satisfied with your non-answer. He, too, provides little recognition, instead turning around and exiting your room in the direction he came.
You watch as he paces down the corridor, his broad back disappearing around the corner and leaving you alone to dissect what the fuck just happened.
—————————————————
On the morning of the mission, you see very little of Joel. It's all hands on deck, the mission team working hard to ensure they had the supplies needed for the hijacking. Every so often, you would catch glimpses of Joel's red tartan flannel or hear the rough intonation of his Texan accent. It was silly, but you began to think he was purposely avoiding you.
Yes, he had acted carelessly last night by cornering you the way that he did, though you're not sure that is entirely out of character for him. Instead, you believe that whatever happened that caused your heart to race when he pulled away was a shared experience.
Rather than concerning yourself with why he was skirting around you, intentional or not, you focus on enacting your promise from last night. You work hard to ready the troops for the deadline, a subtle nod that you approve of Joel's leadership to urge their confidence in him.
It is painful, but you take your time with each of them. There is almost a certainty that some may not return home, and so you commit them to your memory. It's something you did every time someone left to enter the field, but it felt especially pertinent considering how close the Fireflies were to shifting their luck. Those who died tonight wouldn't get to appreciate the spoils of their sacrifice.
By mid-afternoon, Marlene considered her soldiers ready for battle and ordered them at ease to relax and rest up before heading out. Some opted to share their last meal; others played card games while recounting the time they had spent together with fondness despite the difficulties shared.
Quietly, you had slipped away from the main halls and left them to their final goodbyes. You weren't going out there, so it felt disrespectful to sit amongst those waiting for the call to arms. Alternatively, you made your way to one of the medical bays to ensure that someone set up enough equipment for those who may come back wounded.
By now, you had set out multiple antibiotic syringes, readied bandages and sutures and prepped gurneys so that everything was ready should there be an emergency. You felt better this way, as though you had aided in the effort.
So caught up in the process, you failed to notice Joel leaning his shoulder against the doorway until he cleared his throat to alert you to his presence. When you look up, the sound having startled you, you find him watching you with his arms crossed over his chest.
"Do you… Uh-do you need something?" You offer awkwardly, unsure of what else to say. Joel shakes his head, eyes flitting down to where you had laid out the medical equipment.
"No. Everythin’ is ready, and the tunnels are clear of infected. Just comin’ to tell you I'm headed out." He walks across the room towards the desk you are sitting at, stopping at the foot of the wooden table and laying his palms flat along the surface. You can see the veins raised through his skin.
You look at him through your lashes, swallowing back the nervous energy you feel creeping to the surface as he leans over the table.
"Why should I care?" You ask. You intend for it to appear nonchalant, but it just sounds breathy even to your ears. Joel raises an eyebrow in question.
"Woah Woah, easy. Still bratty then, I see," Joel points out, his tone flat. You cringe inwardly, knowing that that must have been his attempt to extend an olive branch. "Thought we could put this little disagreement behind us before heading out."
"There isn't one."
"Could’a fooled me," Joel chuckles, but it lacks humour. His gaze slips over your body and appears to take note of all the tiny details. You hope it's all in your mind, but you can feel your face heat up and your heart thrum in your chest again.
"You know, you really remind me of Marlene."
Of all the things you expected Joel to say, that certainly wasn't one of them. You look back at him slack-jawed as you feel the warmth of what you assume was a compliment wash over you.
"Huh?”
"She doesn't put up with none of my bullshit neither. Always tellin’ me to take a hike when I'm outta line and put me back in my place," there's a hint of a smile and Joel's face as he recounts their strange dynamic. A fondness touches his eyes, a fraction of warmth you hadn't yet seen in the hardened smuggler. "Thinkin’ that's maybe how she managed to keep Tommy in check for as long as she did."
You hesitate in your response, unsure how to approach this conversation due to the awkwardness from this morning. Turns out you don't have to because Joel continues.
"Only difference between y’all is that you have the balls to question things you feel ain't right. That's a high-value quality in a leader."
You feel as though you've been bowled over. Yet another compliment from the man who had attempted to strangle the life out of you nearly 12 hours ago. They were starting to make you think that maybe he'd succeeded and that you had entered a strange alternate dimension.
Laughing awkwardly, you shift the syringes around the tabletop in an attempt to keep your nervous hands busy. "Don't let Marlene hear that, shall consider it mutiny."
That earns you another elusive chuckle, the Texan shaking his head in amusement.
"Yeah, well, it ain't mutiny if I ain't part of her little militia army. Don't think I got much to worry about." This dynamic isn't friendship, you figure, though it's undoubtedly more amicable than tussling in your bedroom. It may be the closest Joel ever got to anything akin to amity.
It's not hard to assume that almost 20 years of solitary survival might make it challenging to establish emotional ties. Plus, you know nothing of Joel's ordeals getting to this point. Still didn't excuse his arrogance, though.
Again, silence creeps between you and you feel your stomach somersault while Joel maintains his close proximity. You dread to think what you look like, horrified that your expression could give away your internal panic. Even if it did, it wasn't Joel causing it. It wasn't.
"I'm off," Joel grumbles, standing up and pulling away from the desk and allowing you to breathe a silent sigh of relief. You watch him stroll leisurely towards the door, his hands on his hips. "I'll see you in the mornin’."
Most people in the Fireflies were surprisingly superstitious. It wasn't often you heard someone announce with such certainty that they would return from a mission. Regardless of its abnormality, it manages to ease your nerves – not that you were concerned about what happened to Joel.
"Good luck."
The flippant comment causes Joel to stop in his tracks, pausing in the doorway. He peers over his shoulder at you as if to make certain that you said it. He appears surprised.
"Yeah. Thanks."
—————————————————
Pacing.
You're pacing uncontrollably, circling the room in a failed attempt to ease the nervous energy pent up in your system. No matter how hard you attempt to block out the repetitive dialogue in your mind, it rushes back to the surface of your brain. What if, what if, what if –
Joel and his squad had moved out the minute the clock struck five, just as he had promised. Although Marlene had provided Joel with a walkie-talkie, the mission's reliance on stealth meant that no one intended to use it. You were completely cut off, uncertain of Mission status or if the squad was even alive.
Hoping it would make your wait more bearable, you turned your ticking clock to face the wall and put your watch inside your bedside drawer. It had helped initially, but now the sun had set, and you were expecting their imminent arrival. Every second your colleagues don't step back into the compound, your faith dwindles.
Though she maintained a stony expression, you knew Marlene was equally anxious. The most wanted woman in America, though able to defend herself, still depended heavily on her armed personnel. Reliant on this mission being a success, she had offered them up to Joel in the hope that their experience would assure victory. You can't help but wonder if she feels exposed without them.
What if they didn't come back? Could she survive without them?
It’s bordering on the edge of midnight when Marlene informs you she’s turning in for the night. You can’t say you blame her, needing to sleep on the off chance the team didn't return. She had informed you upon the group's exit that if the mission failed, the two of you would be heading to Salt Lake City at dawn.
You opt to stay awake, knowing well enough that you won't sleep until you are confident there will be no return.
Continuing your anxious circling of the room, you pick at your wounded cuticles. They are weeping blood down their knuckles thanks to hours of torture, yet you can't bring yourself to stop the self-destructive behaviour. Not while you wait for news.
Your heart practically leaps out of your chest at the sound of the main doors creaking open. It's so quiet you almost miss it in the silence, the sound of your blood rushing through the shell of your ear nearly drowning out the barely audible noise.
Grappling for your pistol, you release the safety and suck in a shaky breath. No one had announced themselves, and without guards on the door, there was no way to discern that those who had entered the building were Fireflies.
You shake with nervous energy, carefully stepping across the rickety wooden floor to conceal the sound of your movements. Had the US military found your hideaway? Surely not; they would have moved in before any threat to their organisation could be enacted
Leaning your back flush to the door frame in an attempt to conceal yourself, you listen out for any advancing danger. It's quiet at first, but you hear the scuff of a boot against the uneven floor cut through the silence. Inhaling swiftly, you ready yourself before lurching out from behind the door frame with your pistol aloft.
Shock wracks your body upon setting your eyes on the intruder that stands before you. Joel. Covered in blood from head to toe, his hands drip the viscous liquid onto the floor. The shoulder of his flannel is ripped open, loose threads sticking to his sweat-soaked skin.
"Oh-oh shit-“ you gasp out, horrified by the state you find him in. Given the state of his clothes and the sheer amount of blood that continues to run from his hair down his temples, your immediate thought is to check for wounds-but you can't see any. Sure, there is a scrape on his shoulder where the fabric of his flannel has ripped open and a cut that spans the length of his whole knuckle that you can see when he wipes the sweat from his brow, but other than that, you can't see any wound that would cause that much blood loss.
Joel, however, appears relatively unfazed as he points over his shoulder.
"Most came out with minor wounds," he states calmly, his gruff voice laced with exhaustion, "Lettin’ Marlene know we are back and that I have her guns."
It's as though Joel had just completed a simple sweep of the hideout parameters rather than one of the most dangerous and vital missions since the fireflies began their fight for humility, all without having received a single major wound.
As he walks away and leaves you gawping after him, frozen in place, you hear your team filtering in through the main doors behind you one by one. They are shouting your name and proclaiming their victory as they surround you, holding their hard-won weapons aloft. Despite their hollering, you can barely hear them over the frantic thoughts buzzing through your mind.
How?
It takes hours to ease the excitement and adrenaline buzzing through each of Joel's soldiers. You stitch up the wounded and listen to their battle stories in awe. They are enthusiastic about informing you of Joel's brilliance, frequently admitting that they could not understate how much of this victory they owed to him.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” one laughs incredulously. "There were more than we had expected, but it didn't phase him. He took out two of them on his own, and when his gun jammed, he knocked them out with his fists!”
Turns out that the four soldiers the fireflies had expected were accompanied by another five unaccounted for. Joel hadn't let it affect the team, pushing them ahead with the mission. By blinding them with smoke grenades, the team had been able to ambush successfully, and despite the physical tussle that resulted in Joel's bloodbath, the mission had otherwise gone just as planned, the fighting all wrapped up within moments.
According to the many recounts told as you patched up your friends, the only reason it took so long was that the weapons boxes were heavy and made for a tight squeeze in the tunnels. You could have cried at the stupidity of it all.
Eventually, Marlene joined in with the festivities, having been woken by Joel to confirm "Mission accomplished." Leftover Molotov cocktails from the mission we used as celebratory drinks that had the majority of your colleagues wasted within the hour - including your commander.
As fresh, golden beams of sunlight peered through the windows, you excused yourself to bed despite the drunken protests of your colleagues. After explaining your exhaustion, thanks to your immense concern, they reluctantly allowed you to leave on the condition you would celebrate with them later. You imagined their hangovers would be too severe for further partying.
Practically clawing your way to your barracks, you breathe a sigh of relief as you walk through the open door. You can still hear the shouts of jubilation downstairs, noting that you’d probably have to drown out the sounds by covering your head with a pillow. The mattress calls to you like a siren, promising rest. You plan to skip removing your clothes and fall into bed as you are-
"Didn't expect to be greeted with a gun to my head."
The heavy, Southern drawl that sounds from your doorway behind you makes the hairs on your arms stand on end. You wish you could say it was a fear response or disgust, but your heart leaps in your chest with excitement.
Swallowing thickly, you close your eyes to collect yourself before you turn to face him. Your inhale is so deep you feel the edges of your lungs ache at the strain before you turn around to face the Walking Headache.
Joel is leaning against the door frame as he had in the medical room before he left. He has bathed since you saw him an hour ago, scrubbing the gore from his body and dressing in fresh clothes. His hair is still damp, and you assume he’s been forced to borrow the outfit from one of his new-found friends, the seams a little too tight on his broad body.
"Yeah, well, I didn't expect to find a serial killer walking the halls either," you dig at the state he had returned in. It earns you a deep chuckle that resonates in his chest, and you can't help but note the way you hold your breath to hear the pleasant sound better.
"That how you treat all your commanders?" Joel questions, his voice lilting with a hint of humour that you find dangerous, your heart stuttering at the drastic change in him since the last time you were in this room together.
You let out a scoff that doesn't quite match the indifference you were attempting to convey. "Don't flatter yourself. You were consulted to lead one mission; that doesn't make you a commander."
He doesn’t like that.
Standing gormlessly in the middle of the room, you immediately regret the words as soon as they leave your lips. Joel is gazing at you with an intensity in his earthy irises, taking in your feigned lack of respect with a slight arch of his brow. It's less of a look of surprise than it is an unspoken challenge. It makes your body flush with heat.
The sense of security you feel with him on the other side of the threshold to your door bursts the moment he effortlessly steps inside. He has no issue with invading your personal space, finding it even easier when you fail to find the words to protest his intrusion.
Joel doesn't hesitate, but he also lacks urgency, taking his time to leisurely bridge the space between the two of you. Again, he is close enough that you can see the intricacies of his face. There is a myriad of delicate freckles and a small, ruddy scar that kisses the bridge of his nose.
You're so wrapped up in the tiny details that you almost miss the flicker of consideration in his eyes. Despite his steady, authoritative body language, he’s questioning whether or not he can say what he has in mind as he studies your expression carefully.
He leaps.
"Insubordination results in punishment, don’t it, soldier?" His volume pitches right down, each syllable buzzing through your veins as he maintains heavy eye contact that has your knees melting beneath you.
It's only when he speaks that you realise you have stopped breathing, your lungs burning in a desperate attempt to shake you from the trance he’s put you in.
You have no explanation for your response. You don’t have the chance to argue, to insult him for playing this ridiculous role. Instead, each word forces itself from your mouth upon your shaky exhale, coming out in a broken whisper.
“Yes, Sir." Your answer is spoken embarrassingly quickly. There’s a flash of something powerful in his eyes, like he’s still buzzing on residual adrenaline left over from the mission. It surges forward at your answer, and he clings to it, taking control of the room- of you.
“Atta Girl.”
It drips through you like honey, coating your insides and warming them. Your body tingles and pleads for Joel’s attention despite your best efforts to fight the need he draws from it as he drags his eyes across its length.
A tiny voice in your mind rears its ugly head. He’s probably pent up from fighting, and you’re still stressed from waiting up all night. You could give in to what you want. Doesn’t mean you like him.
Joel seems to hear it too, his eyes searching for a hint of approval. You can see he’s itching to touch you, to release the anger that you’ve built in him back onto you with tongues and teeth.
Doesn’t mean you like him.
“On your knees, soldier.” He commands, and it’s like his voice strokes something hedonistic inside of you because your body surges with arousal at the implication of his order.
Doesn’t mean you like him.
Against your better judgement, you slowly sink to your knees in front of Joel, eyes pin-set on the toes of his dirtied boots. The wooden floor smarts your knees, but you maintain your position in an effort to appease him.
Joel doesn’t move, feet firm in their place on the floor as you bow before him. He’s making you wait, arms loose at his sides. You don’t dare to lift your head to look at him, to urge him forward, instead straining your eyes upwards to watch the steady rise and fall of his chest.
Prickling heat teases at your skin, your arousal triggered, knowing he was watching you submit to him so easily. The tension grips you, finding it ironic that Joel entered every situation all-guns-blazing yet had utmost patience when it came to prolonging your suffering.
Your need condenses, acutely aware of Joel’s entire being. It’s as though you can feel his eyes trail over your body like a feather-light touch, and you swear that you can smell the dampness of his hair. Most of all, you focus on Joel’s even, quiet breathing, the expansion and deflation of his lungs acting like a metronome in the silence.
Then- God, then he’s moving his hand forward achingly slowly, fingertips pressing delicately against your left temple. The brush of his fingerprint over your skin ignites a humming arousal between your thighs, and you subconsciously press them together when he pushes his digits into your hairline.
Your jaw drops, slack as you exhale shakily. So starved for Joel’s touch, you’re more than grateful for the innocuous brush of his fingers along your scalp. It’s probably so obvious to him, your desperation, but he doesn’t mention it. Instead, he takes a step forward, his boot settling into the wooden planks you’re kneeling on, his feet on either side of your thighs.
Joel is so close you can feel the fabric of his jeans brush against your forehead. So frequently worn, the denim has lost that rough texture and could almost pass for cotton. You don’t dare to move, knowing if you so much as twitched, your nose would graze over his crotch through the material.
“Atta girl,” Joel murmurs, unironically this time, his voice rumbling in his chest. It cuts through the quiet so suddenly that it makes you jump, almost loud to your ears. He sounds pleased with your reception of his proximity, rewarding you by taking a firm but painless grip on the roots of your hair.
It’s as though you can read his mind. His pulse thrums in his palm against the soft flesh of your scalp, matching the thumping pace of your own. Joel doesn’t speak his thoughts out loud, yet it’s like he whispers into your ear. ‘Good soldiers get rewarded.’
The pressure he applies to the crown of your skull is minute, but it’s enough to push your face into his crotch. Your gasp of surprise is so loud that it almost drowns out the resonant hum that he releases, gripping tighter to your hair as you nuzzle into him.
Rock hard beneath your cheek; you can feel Joel’s cock twitch at the delicate friction you gift him. Having plunged so deep now, you no longer have to reason with yourself to take what you want, kissing the shaft of his dick through the fabric he wears. Again, your reward is to be pushed closer to him, the adrenaline pulsing through Joel’s veins causing a heavy-handedness that makes the walls of your pussy flutter.
“Look at you,” Joel growls as your tongue drags across the fabric his cock strains against, as if resorting to desperate measures to taste him, “Totally shameless.”
You can’t contain it, the whimper that bubbles in your throat. It sounds around Joel’s twitching cock, and it seems to rile him up, momentarily cracking his composure when he thrusts his hips forward slightly.
Fuck, it’s like he’s hypnotising you with his grunts and groans, your body liquidating as they heat you from the inside out. Heaving breaths indicate the magnitude of your desire, and you’re kneeling up before you can even think of the consequences of taking matters into your own hands.
Pushing your nose into the seam of the crotch in his jeans, you use the tip of your tongue to search for the zipper. The brass is warm when it brushes your tastebuds, a metallic tang coating them as you slide your tongue beneath it.
Carefully, you take the fastening between your teeth, lowering your head to drag the zipper down. You probably only manage four links of the chain before Joel’s hand shoves itself between you and the fabric, bumping your nose as he tears the button of his jeans open with a stuttery exhale.
He releases his cock from the confines of his pants, and God, you’re so thankful he does. A thatch of thick curls frames the base of his cock, a subtle curve to the veiny shaft that stands at attention beneath your gaze. The tip gleams in the low light seeping through your thin curtains, coated with precum that weeps from the head that’s flushed a dusty purple. He’s not too big, with a perfect girth and length to him that has you convinced he’d fit inside you just right-
Joel doesn’t allow himself to examine how you practically melt at the sight of him, wrapping his fingers around his shaft and steadying it with his thumb. In any other situation, the gentle slap of his cock against your cheek would have you leaping from the floor and throttling him, but you’re both so needy that you open your mouth greedily without prompt. It drives Joel insane.
“Hah,” he heaves, pressing the tip of his dick to your flat tongue, “Shit- oh shitshitsh-“
Joel sheathes himself inside your mouth with one long stroke of his hips, and you’re almost sure your throat stretches beyond its limits to accommodate him.
“Fuckin’ shit,” Joel curses heavily, watching your eyes brim with tears at the intrusion as you fight your gag reflex. When you glance up at him through your watery lashes, you catch the way his upper lip arches at the sensation of your tongue tracing the underside of his cock. He’s sweating, brow glistening with evident arousal on his brow, and your stomach flips at the concept that you were the one making him feel this way- breaking his almost impenetrable composure.
Carefully, you inch him further down your throat until the tip of your nose buries into the curls framing his pubic bone. A musky smell that is uniquely Joel coats your senses, and you find yourself almost dizzy at the concept of being totally surrounded by him, filled by him. Just hours ago, you couldn't stand him, couldn't bear to be around him, and yet now you think you'd cry if you pulled away.
Joel groans above you as you swallow around his length, his fingers grappling with your hair for purchase and gripping tightly to the strands at the crown of your head. You use Joel’s distraction to begin bobbing your head, slowly pulling off him and feeling him drag against the walls of your throat until the tip of his cock rests over the flat of your tongue. Before he can complain, you sink back down and take all of him back into your mouth, and you swear that you can see Joel’s eyes roll back into his school in your periphery.
"Ah- fu-“ Joel appears entirely enraptured by the sensation of the head of his cock catching on each little ridge of your throat, and you can see him watching you work him in and out of your mouth at a lazy pace. "Look at you- Hnng- So fuckin’ good."
As you get used to the sensation of the velvety skin bumping against your throat, you begin to experiment a little more. You use the slow, steady pace to drag your tongue over the length of his fraenulum and swirl it around the head. The salty taste of the precum beading at the slit pushes you further, feeling him twitch with your ministrations.
Throbbing aches begin to settle in your knees, complaining about kneeling against the wooden floor but are drowned out by Joel's heady groans and the tight coil of arousal between your thighs. It's as though you can feel your pulse throughout your body, complaining about the lack of attention, but also invested in the way Joel appears to be losing his composure that you can't find it in yourself to protest.
“Christ-“ Joel groans out above you, suddenly taking a firm grip of your hair and pulling you up and off of him. The burn in your lungs has you gasping for air as you look up at him in concern. Had you messed up?
Opening your mouth to ask him what you’d done wrong, you find the words die in your throat when Joel pushes the tip of his weeping cockhead against your lips again. He’s staring down at you with this look in his eyes, something dark and potent swirling in his pupils. You taste him on your tongue again, and Joel pushes your head down onto him again.
He's unable to control himself, driven by the sensation of your mouth around him. The comprehension makes your mind spin with pride, and again you submit to Joel.
It’s rough, your hair wrapped around his fingers to better his grip as he forces you to still. Your eyes tear up, leaking tears down your cheeks as he begins to fuck your mouth at a brutally satisfying pace. Despite the bruising sensation of his cock hitting your throat, you’re practically dripping in your underwear when seeing the way Joel snarls at the overwhelming bliss.
Grasping desperately onto his hips to brace yourself, you cling on as Joel fucks deep into your throat. The hinges of your jaw ache at the effort of holding your mouth open for him, but Joel doesn’t let your efforts go unnoticed.
His free hand brushes his rough knuckles across your cheekbone, sliding down your face so his palm can cup your throat. Joel lets out the most wicked groan, applying pressure to your neck to feel himself slide in and out of you.
“God- You feel that?” He laughs out incredulously, his cock twitching, “You’re takin’ me so fuckin’ good.” He’s mouthing off, a lot more talkative than usual. You put it down to the blood having rushed from his head to his co-
“Touch yourself,” he orders, and it’s like the oxygen he’s starving you of begins to make you think you’ve imagined it. Your eyes flutter and blink back tears, your brain working to figure out if he honestly said it. It’s only when he yanks your hair in an attempt to wordlessly urge you to do as told that your hands snap down to your waistband.
Blindly, you push your fingers beneath the waistband of your trousers, practically sobbing with relief as your fingertips clumsily brush your clit. It sparks white hot, the muscles in your thighs trembling as they brace your weight on your knees.
“Mhmmm fuck,” Joel rumbles, watching your face as he fucks into it, noting how your brows pull up at the pleasure you draw for yourself between your thighs.
It drives him insane. You can feel it. His dick twitches against your tastebuds, and you can feel his pulse in the thick vein that runs down the underside of his cock. Joel’s fingers paw at the back of your head, pushing you down onto his length and making you take him impossibly deeper. You’re choking on him, gagging around his girth. It makes your eyes stream, yet it just makes your fingertip swirl around your clit quicker, seeking that high you craved.
“Nuh-uh,” you hear Joel’s gruff voice, his palm patting you harshly on the cheek. Just enough to sting. “Focus right here, right here.”
Blinking through the teary haze and the surging arousal that grips your muscles, you only notice with a particularly sharp slap to your cheekbone that you had closed your eyes. Joel’s urging has you looking up through your wet eyelashes as he continues with his harsh thrusts.
Sinking your digits into your heat, you melt against the intrusion in your throat as the walls of your cunt flutter around your fingerprints. Severely neglected, your pussy aches and arches towards orgasm at breakneck speed. Under the weight of your body, your thighs tremble at your ministrations, and your brows pull together as if to brace against the impending crest of ecstasy.
“Oh fuck, yeah, just like that,” Joel rumbles under his breath, eyes set on your twisted expression as his hips begin to stutter. You feel his pulse on your tongue and draw clumsy, sloppy circles over your clit to match.
The groan that tears its way through Joel’s throat when he cums almost startles you, and you’re almost sure it does the same to him. His fingers are white-knuckling your hair in an attempt to brace for the surge of pleasure, his cum streaking down the back of your throat.
He watches as you desperately stroke over your throbbing clit and swallow his load without prompt. Even through your blurred vision, you can see his awed visage as he watches you take everything he gives.
Perhaps it’s the apparent appreciation he shows you when you hear him mumble a muffled ‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ’, or it’s finally rendering the argumentative Joel Miller borderline speechless. Still, you hurtle off the edge with barely any warning other than a split second of a hot white crackle up your spine.
Your body contracts inwards as you rub yourself through the crescendo, grateful Joel was with it enough to remove himself from your mouth just before. The ragged gasp you exhale sounds strangled, your orgasm blinding you in its onslaught. Your vision spots and slides out of focus, seeing double as the warmth ebbs away.
Soon, the only thing your hearing focuses on is the inhale and exhale of your lungs, sharp and clawing at the oxygen that keeps you from blacking out. Had you stopped breathing?
Joel turns away for a moment to right himself, pulling his jeans back up and buckling his belt again. The afterglow of such an earth-shattering orgasm makes everything slow, and you can’t help but smile almost dopily to yourself as you watch him ruffle his salt-and-peppered brown locks.
A sharp inhale drags you from your brain-melting comedown, settling back on your haunches and stretching out your aching legs as you watch Joel struggle for words. He looks conflicted, opening his mouth to speak and then firmly pressing his lips together in frustration.
Cotton sticks to your back thanks to the perspiration beading there, patches of the khaki shirt you wear stained with darker sweat patches. The birds are singing to fill his silence, allowing him a moment to approach his thoughts without awkwardness. You don’t push him.
“You wanna help me?” He tests the waters, mahogany eyes flicking to your face to gauge your reaction, “You know… Takin’ some time to smuggle instead’a doin’ this militia suicide task?”
It’s like he douses your sticky sweet, pleased muscles in ice-cold water in your shock. You certainly hadn’t expected him to like you, let alone ask you to work for him. It’s your turn to be speechless, the oxygen you had fought so hard to breathe catching in your throat and choking you.
“I-“ You swallow thickly, wanting to approach this carefully, “Joel, I made a promise.”
He nods slowly, eyes shifting to the wooden floor and seemingly tracing the rough surface of each plank as though it were the most exciting art installation he had ever had the time to take in. Perhaps it was. Joel didn’t seem the type to stop and smell the roses.
“I have to fulfil my promise to help find a cure,” you tread delicately, but it’s almost pointless because Joel agrees with a nod of his head, neither forceful nor resentful. He appears to take your word, wordlessly encouraging you to chase that ‘pipe dream’, as he had once called it.
“You got it,” he clears his throat roughly, clasping his hips with both hands as he exhales slowly, letting the implications of your decision sink into his bones. Certain death. There wasn’t much else out there for a Firefly, and you weren’t naive enough to think any different.
‘When you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light.’
You couldn’t turn away now. Not when these guns he’d hand-delivered made that light almost close enough to touch.
Chewing on the inside of your cheek, you watch him slowly pace to the door, wood creaking beneath his weight. He leans his palm against the frame, glancing back at you momentarily.
“There’s a spot for you, y’know? If you change your mind.”
A melancholy smile plays at the corner of your lips. The likelihood that you’d survive long enough to begin sufficiently regretting your decision and change your mind was slim, but the thought that Joel was willing to set a place aside for you…
“Thank you, Joel,” you whisper, shocked to hear your voice crack with emotion with the gratitude you show him.
Doesn’t mean you like him.
“Mhm,” he nods awkwardly, thumb brushing against the circumference of the watch that had dug into your collarbone 48 hours ago. There’s a tenderness in that touch, something that your cheekbones ache to experience. Instead, you ignore the infuriating pining of your body for the man who had irritated you only moments before, watching as he steps out into the hallway and out of sight, no doubt to grab his stupidly oversized backpack and slink away into the darkness of the underground tunnels and return to his regular trade.
Your heart strains in your chest, but it doesn’t mean you like him.
It doesn’t.
END
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Given all the really excellent and interesting talk about this recently, I wanted to write up a quick list of ways we see Izzy being consistently abusive to Ed in season 1, just so I have a handy post to link to the next time someone asks me "wait, how is Izzy abusive?"
(Again, I genuinely like Izzy. I think he's a great character, but dismissing how he behaves in s1 defangs him as a character, cheapens his s2 arc, and decontextualizes a lot of Ed's behavior.)
Izzy is shown as being emotionally abusive to Ed throughout season 1, because he:
Controls the information Ed has access to. In s1e3, we see Izzy tell Ed his own version of events, twisting them to suit his purposes. He does this so easily and cleanly it's clear he's probably been lying to Ed to manipulate his perception of events for a long time.
Isolates Ed from others. We do not see Ed talk to any crew members before s1e4, and even then, Izzy cuts the conversation short. He also prevents anyone from seeing Ed in s1e10 until Ed makes him ask for Lucius. In s2 Ed tells us that he knew very little about Fang despite having worked with him for 20 years - Izzy seems to make a habit of making Ed unapproachable.
On that note, Izzy insults and demeans Ed to other crew members, creating his own narrative around Ed's actions. He says he "massages" the crew when they're worried about Ed's judgment, but what he actually does is tell them Ed's "half-insane." He is creating a situation where Ed is reliant on Izzy for information and the crew feel like they need Izzy to interpret what he presents as the irrational demands of an insane man, even though we as the audience know Ed's behavior is never as erratic or irrational as Izzy makes it out to be.
Insults and demeans Ed to his face. Izzy is not shy about calling Ed insane and unpleasant to his face, and Ed doesn't seem surprised to hear it. I don't think it's a coincidence that Ed admits while he's in the gravy basket in s2 that he's scared he's insane - that's one of Izzy's favorite insults to apply to him and he's clearly internalized it.
Ignores Ed's feelings and wants when he's not acting the way Izzy believes is appropriate. We see Ed constantly reaching out to Izzy in s1e4 to share his thoughts and excitement, and Izzy shuts him down every time. Izzy's created a situation where Ed can only really talk to Izzy, and Ed is clearly desperate for human connection.
Pushes Ed to harm someone Ed loves, even when Izzy knows that Ed "adores" Stede and Stede makes him genuinely happy. Izzy is very insistant about getting Ed to kill Stede, even once it's obvious Ed has already deeply bonded with Stede.
Literally "buys" Ed in return for selling Stede out. This is just gross and unacceptable, not to mention wildly racist. Frankly I think Ed showed remarkable restraint for only punching him once.
Tries to get Stede killed in front of Ed, multiple times.
Obviously, threatens and mocks Ed when Ed isn't behaving "appropriately." When Ed is starting to feel better in s1e10, and is reaching out to the crew and connecting with them, and is painting his nails and singing and generally behaving in a much more feminine and emotionally available way than Izzy would prefer, Izzy threatens him to force him back into the hyper-masculine Blackbeard persona he knows Ed hates and Ed has said he wants to move past.
Goads Ed into violent behavior and is delighted when Ed is visibly upset. When Ed chokes Izzy, Izzy is laughing and grinning and generally having a very nice time while Ed's standing there with tears in his eyes and visibly terrified. He's very happy to have gotten the reaction he was trying to provoke and doesn't care about Ed's feelings.
So, take it all together, and we can see that Izzy has created an atmosphere where he has put himself in control of Ed and has further manipulated the crew so they look to Izzy as a filter for Ed's behavior so Izzy can completely control the narrative. When he thinks he's losing control of Ed, that's when Izzy tries to get Stede killed, without regard for Ed's emotions. Izzy consistently insults Ed, ignores his desires and feelings, and prioritizes his control over Ed's feelings.
Have I missed anything?
#ofmd#our flag means death#izzy critical#i don't really think this is izzy critical at all because i'm just talking about the character's canon actions in the text of the show#but tagging it anyway. just in case. sigh
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okay, so, adding onto your, as of this moment, most recent post, just picture it: you catch onto the fact that jason gets all smug seeing his handiwork on your nails when you jerk him off, and decide to surprise him by going out and testing literally every possible red nail polish available until you find the exact perfect shade that matches his helmet, and giving it to him as part of his gift for some occasion or another (personally I'm thinking either his birthday or Christmas, anniversary could work also)
but like, just imagine how thrilled he would be and how eager he would be to get that colour on your nails, and how impatient he would be for them to dry so he could see them in action, yknow? 👀👀
-🦊 (also omg i have my own tag now?🥹)
allow me to tell you that since you're the first "formal" anon with an emoji you are indeed my favorite, plus i'm always happy to see you around here bc you feed my delusions so thanks 🦊 ily, so yes you have your own tag
jason had to get used to his birthday being a little different since he started dating you, he had a reason to celebrate now and it was lovely, since he woke up you would shower him in details and little gifts and he loved to feel like a spoiled child because he felt all the love you had for him.
this year it wasn't different and his day was filled with things he liked a lot until he had to leave on patrol for a while so it was the perfect opportunity for you to prepare his last gift. it had been a while since he found out he liked painting your nails just to see artwork when you wrapped your hands around his dick, it simply made him grin proudly because it was his girl pleasing him and showing off her pretty nails, done by him so you decided to feed that little monster in jason's head. a whole week going into every store you saw to get the perfect shade of red that could match his helmet, carrying a pic on your phone just of the color to compare it until you found the one.
as soon as he slid into your apartment through the window he noticed the lights of the living room on which meant that you were there waiting for him so he made his way there. as soon as he saw you he took off the helmet, holding it under his arm and giving you a wide grin "isn't it past your bed time, princess?" jason asks teasingly as he walks towards the couch to sit next to you.
"no, it isn't because i have two last things for the birthday boy" you reply with a mischievous smile, handing him a small white box tied with a pretty red bow that he didn't wait to undo just to open the little box.
the smile that crept to his face was enough to know he was thinking about the reason behind the red nail polish bottle he was holding between his fingers, his eyes fixed on yours before he leaned in to kiss you but he stopped as soon as you tilted your head "are you gonna give me your pretty hands or do i have to ask?" jason's voice drops low and it makes a shiver run down your spine and even lower between your legs because you know what he wants.
"isn't it past my bed time? maybe we should wait until tomorrow morning so we can sleep" you reply, pushing jason a little just to build a little more of that pretty glint of need and desperation on his eyes and you let out a chuckle when he shakes his head, hair going messy and his white strand mixing a little with his jet black hair.
"you don't expect me to wait, right? give me your hands and let me see how they look when you use them on my cock, baby" jason's words make you swallow hard before you lay your hands on his thigh so he can start painting your nails and he's quick without messing it not even a little bit and you can't help but smiling when he's blowing on them to dry the nail polish.
"someone is getting a little impatient" you tease him which only earns you a low growl from his lips, he's impatient and needy because you can already see the outline of his half hard dick under his tactical pants and how his chest heaves under the chest plate so you blow a little too on your nails. jason stares at you, he even counts into his head how many minutes he has to wait until his trained eye sees the paint is dry.
"down on your knees. now" he almost barks the order as he spreads his legs to let you sit between them on the floor just to be met by his helmet placed between his thighs "put your pretty hands on the helmet, baby" jason says and you do so, his blood is boiling at the sight because the shade is exactly the same and his hands go a little clumsy when he decides to undo his belt and the buttons of his pants, taking away the helmet just so your hands can start to stroke him over his boxers.
there's soft grunts escaping his lips even if you're not touching him completely yet but he's so turned on by the color on your nails he can't really help it. leaning in he grabs your hips to move your body until you're sitting over his heavy boot, the rough material making you tremble ever so slightly "be a good girl and sit pretty there for me, yeah, love?" his voice is low and he smirks when you are the one sliding your hand under his boxers to wrap your fingers around his hard dick, nodding at his words.
for jason there's nothing hotter than his girl but seeing you like this, getting him you know he likes to use with you makes him feel so good, the way you always seem to guess what he would enjoy a lot is like touching heaven and having you know, kneeling in front of him while you jerk him off sitting on his boot feels like the perfect birthday gift. your hand going up and down his length with the right amount of pressure before your thumb slides up to play with his tip drives him crazy, he thrust his hips a little just to urge you to keep going at the same time his hand holds your chin slowly guiding two digits into your mouth "don't you have anything to say to me, baby?" he asks with a smirk as his thumb presses your tongue to mess up with your words.
"happy birthday, jay..."
#⭒ 📬 ⭒#🦊 anon#I NEED TO I NEED TO UHHHHHH#jason todd i need you so BAD#jason todd x fem!reader#jason todd x reader#jason todd x you#jason todd blurb#jason todd x y/n#jason todd imagine#jason todd smut#red hood imagine#red hood smut#red hood#jason todd#reader insert
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found colors for unspoken feelings
childe x gn!artist!reader
warnings: fights, scars, small mentions of blood
summary: childe got into a fight with you over something you loved doing. he immediately regret the words he said, but even worse than that, he brought back an old habit of yours which he fought so hard to get rid off
a/n: eurgh this took me so long for no reason...
wc: 2.9k
you had these scars on your hands, and you hated them. no one knew where they came from except for your boyfriend, childe. he has caressed your hands so many times, and told you before, that he doesn't mind the crescent shaped marks on your hand.
he knew you used to press your nails into your palm so hard, that they started to bleed. you’re an artist, and always wanted to do something with your talent, yet your parents were more than just unsupportive of your dreams. they started suggesting that you put your free time in something other than your ‘little doodles’.
yet their words grew harsher and harsher over the years you lived.
whenever you were once again told that you're useless, and that your paintings don't look any different from those compared to a five year old, your hands would start bleeding again.
maybe you would've given it all up, if it wasn't for your, at that time, friend childe. he was your rock, your support in all of this.
how many times had you texted him late in the evening and asked him if you could stay over at his place? how many times had he cleaned out the wounds on your palms?
He helped you move out of your parents house, into your current shared apartment, and helped you be comfortable drawing again.
yet even with all of his support, you grew protective of your work. you barely told anyone about what you did, and was afraid of taking criticism.
one person you were not afraid of though. you were never too afraid to ask childe for his opinion on your recent piece. you were never too afraid to turn around the canvas, and show him what you had done with your time.
and everytime again, he was proud of you. he peppered your face with kisses, and told you what he especially liked.
and over the years, even your so much hated scars started to fade.
apparently his job has started to take a lot more from his energy though.
he never said that, but you just assume that that is the reason for his lack of response to your proudly painted canvas.
nowadays you never got more from him, other than a simple ‘i like it’, or even just a hum of approval.
and it got you thinking, if you would stop showing him what you had done, would he care enough to ask?
so that's what you did.
the next day when he came home from work, you didn't ask if you could show him what you had painted. you simply greeted him with a warm dinner, and a kiss on the lips. you hadn't mentioned your art for the whole day.
but still, while lying in bed, your thoughts told you that he was probably just exhausted, and that he might have forgotten, but tomorrow he will surely ask you about it!
he never asked you about anything.
was he really that forgetful? a week had passed, and you just wanted to show him one piece, that took you significantly long.
“babe, i have something to show you!”, the excitement not fading even though childe had forgotten what you spent the majority of your time with.
“sure what is it?”, your boyfriend didn't even look up from his dinner, but that was okay! he was probably just really hungry.
“i’ll get it!”
you quickly ran to your room, and grabbed the beautifully painted canvas.
yet childes reaction was as little as the hope you had left for any sign that you two were not drifting apart.
“oh, that's cool babe”
thats cool?
you felt your heart clench, when you realized that's all he had to say. still, you weren't ready to give up yet.
“what do you like about it?”, what were you even trying.
childe took another look at the painting, and then at you.
“i don't know, it looks pretty though”, you quietly looked away.
“okay, thanks for your feedback, I’ll be heading to sleep now”, you smiled, but the hole in your heart was growing by the second.
“alright good night babe”
the bed felt cold. you hugged your own body, trying to keep yourself warm, yet the cold sheets you were lying between made you shiver.
you could no longer blame childes dismissive act on his work, and him being so exhausted. what could have changed your boyfriend so much, that he was no longer the person that made you feel so safe? a tear rolled down your cheek, onto your pillow.
when you woke up that morning, childe was not there. you assumed he must have headed to work earlier than usually.
you forced yourself out of bed, ignoring how heavy your body felt on your legs. that was when a specific thought came to mind. maybe you should start showing your boyfriend your drawings without him having to ask. and maybe, just maybe, he would start being excited to see them again.
you don't remember what made you come to this conclusion. maybe desperation for the love you used to feel everyday, which had now left your life as quick as it had appeared.
so that's what you did. everyday you had proudly presented your boyfriend your drawings which you had put minute after minute and hour after hour of your days into. longing for his love and attention back you were ready to do anything.
probably if you had told anyone how you felt, and what you were doing, they would have called you desperate.
but no one could expect from you to give up the love that had saved you over and over again. no one could expect that you would give up the only person who was there for you in your hardest and happiest times.
so youre not giving up yet.
even though childes lack of enthusiasm remained the same, you were glad he was at least not shaming you for your hobby like your parents used to. you don't know how you would react if he were to act that way, but it was childe you were talking about.
you were convinced he could never even act that way.
but how long could you still continue this? everyday where you presented your work to him, and he would just react with a disinterested ‘nice’, felt like a weakening punch in the gut.
this wasn’t working. maybe you should just talk to him about his lack of a reaction to your hobby and your work. the work which he used to love so much.
so maybe that was the right thing to do.
when he came home from that specific day at work, you had shown him a drawing which was especially big. you had put so much work into it, you barely took a break the whole day to make sure it was finished before he came home.
maybe you were going to get a bigger reaction out of him this time.
“looks great babe”
he didn’t even look at it.
what were you doing wrong?
“childe, you didn’t even look at it”, maybe you really needed to talk to him.
“huh?”, seriously? did he even care? has he never even listened to you?
“childe you don’t even care about my drawings like you used to, do you?”, suddenly he got up from his chair. and you put down your drawing, leaning it against the wall.
childe rubbed his face.
“you know [name], I’m really tired, can we discuss this some other time?”, you had told yourself for so long that he was just tired, but was that even true?
“childe you’ve been tired for months now. don’t get me wrong, i cant even begin to imagine how exhausting your job must be, but I don’t even really feel like you acknowledge me, other than eating the food i cook for you”
you had to try really hard for this to not turn into an argument. emphasis on tried, because childe was not willing to listen to you. it felt like he was never going to be listening to you, and you needed to get that out of your system. maybe this wouldn't be the best time to tell him, but was it ever going to be the best time?
“i understand that you might be tired, but just tell me what happened? why are you being like this?”, your tone remained calm, yet your muscles tensed up.
“all i am asking of you is the attention that you used to give me. i understand that you can be tired when coming home from work, that's not something i'm denying, but-”
“look, [name], do you really want to know?”, his tone was a lot harsher than yours, and it made a shiver travel up your spine.
you took a second, but nodded and gave him a hum.
“you know that while i am going out to work, and let you stay here all day, all you do is paint and draw. you know that there are so many things that you could spend your time with, but instead you waste your day just holding a paintbrush all day”, childe words were absolutely taking you apart. wether that was his intention or not, that's what he had achieved.
when you two first moved into the apartment, you had told him that you would go find a job, but he insisted that you should stay home. if he had anything to say, or if he had wished for you to get a job, he could have said so, couldn't he?
“childe if you had wanted me to get a job, you could have said so. i would have started looking for someth-”
“you're missing the point! i am saying that you keep wasting all your time, and then expect me to praise you for it! your stupid drawings are just a huge waste of your days! every single day i come home and you remind me of how much you waste your time! do you seriously think that i could be proud of you for that?!”
maybe trying to confront him today wasn't such a good idea, yet this felt like it was a really long time coming.
when you blinked, you found little tears collected in the corners of your eyes. yet even when they fell childe didn't notice. he kept ranting on and on about things he had already said.
while he kept talking and talking, your nails had found your palms once again. an old habit you had wished to finally be rid off.
the memories came flooding back of your parents shouting at you for the same thing, your boyfriend was shouting at you right now. the same boyfriend that first safed you of the mental torture your parents put you through. the same boyfriend who would cut your nails for you, so the wounds wouldn't be so bad. the same boyfriend who had praised you for your talent.
the stupid thing about this was that childe isn't actually mad about you wasting your day. he wasn't even able to put an exact finger on it. you could blame it on him being exhausted from work, and needing to take out his exhaustion somewhere, or maybe he was mad about not spending enough time with you. maybe he was mad at himself for not giving you enough attention, but the hurtful things have been said, and there was nothing he could do to take them back.
when childe finally looked at you after ranting for a good minute, his heart dropped to his stomach and maybe even further.
there you were standing, sniffling, looking down at your feet while your nails were digging into the soft flesh of your palms. your face was wet from your tears, and your hand only reached up to wipe them away, and then to return into a tight fist.
“i understand, I hic i will draw less, and find better things to do”
childe often found himself wishing to be able to turn back the time, but never had he prayed so hard for being able to take back his words.
“w-wait, [name] i-”, childe felt like all the words and apologies he could have given you were knocked out of his brain in an instant, and he panicked when you wanted to walk past him to leave the room.
although the worst thing was that you were pressing your nails so hard into your palms again, to a point where you were bleeding from the amount of pressure you were releasing. childe felt as if he had been punched into the stomach. the habit of yours that he was fighting so hard to get rid off, had returned. it had returned because of him.
“[name] please i don't know why i said that, i was just- maybe i was just tired from work, although i cant blame it on that-”, childe frantically took your hands into his, yet your nails already had your blood on them.
childe felt like a world in front of his eyes fell apart. the bad habit of yours that he tried fighting for so long, was close to returning. he was the one who tore your scars back open, and there was nothing he could do about it.
“[name], [name] please- I didnt mean to say these things, please”, all childe could do was beg and repeat your name over and over as he felt his eyes water.
he frantically held your hands, and let you to a chair, to sit down. tears were still repeatedly staining your face, and childe had rushed off to get some bandages for your hands.
childe rushed back and almost fell down onto his knees in front of you.
“please just let me-”, childe proceeded to clean your wounds a little, and then bandage up your hand. while he was handling your hand, you didnt move or talk one bit. other than quiet sniffles, you just let childe do what he needed to do. in the mean time, your head hung low and your eyes havent stopped staring at that one spot on your leg.
you didnt know how to feel. how could you? the one person you believed you could turn to, whenever your parents were rude to you, has done the same thing you were so afraid of happening again. and why? because of stress at work? because he had a bad day?
“[name] i know youre mad, just please- please say anything”, childe pleaded with you.
“I’m not mad”, you replied and your voice broke. you werent even sure if that was true. you were more hurt than angry, but then again you were also just confused.
“its late… can i go to bed?”, why were you asking him?
“of course- anything you want, I’ll sleep on the couch for tonight”, you were both crying and overwhelmed by emotions.
you nodded and headed up the stairs to the room you and childe usually shared. a million thoughts flooded your mind, but for some reason your chest felt so empty.
the person you usually relied on when you felt this way, was now the cause of your feelings. who were you supposed to turn to?
then another thought filled your head. what if your parents were right all along? maybe you should have done anything else but waste your life painting stupid pictures.
you cried yourself to sleep that night.
and even after you woke up, you could feel the daggers that were sent through your heart.
you opened the door to your room. “childe?”, you called out, your voice being utterly shaky.
was he at work?
when you opened the door to your art room, you didnt expect childe to be sitting in the middle of your paintings. you couldnt read the expression which was resting on hsi face.
what childe hadnt realized was that these paintings were small pieces of your soul. every single one of the paintings were thoughts and feelings that you couldnt find the words for, so instead you found the colors for your unspoken feelings. childe has never wished for anything as much as he has wished that he paid more attention to you.
“childe…?”, your voice pulled him out of his thoughts, and his head shot towards the door.
“oh- sorry i was just… well uh, do you need anything?”, childe stammered, getting up from his sitting position.
“i was just looking for you… why are you here?”, your voice remained quiet and shaky.
“i was just… looking at all your work that i had missed… and all the time… well uh- if you want me to leave ill go-”
“its… its okay i just wanted to see where you were” with those words you turned around, about to leave the room.
“wait-! [name] I… I’m sorry, I dont know what to say to let you know how bad i feel-”
“childe i know”, his face was met with the sight of a sad smile on your face.
“w-what can i do to make you feel better? I’ll do anything- please”
“I dont know, honestly…”, a shaky sigh escaped your lungs.
“please… know that i love you [name], more than anything”
“i… love you too”
part 2?
reblogs are appreciated!
#rainstops#genshin impact x reader#genshin x reader#genshin impact#genshin#childe x reader#genshin childe#tartaglia#childe tartagalia#tartaglia x reader
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heyy, i saw you asking for gojo requests 👉🏼👈🏼
can i request a very fluffy domestic husband gojo i don’t really have anything else in mind so please feel free for the rest 🫶🏼
Pairings: Gojo Satoru x Reader.
Tags: FLUFF
Synopsis: He's a silly babie having sillier thoughts
A/N: HUSBAND SATORU WOULD BE SO CHEESY ME THINKS. ALSO I HOPE U LIKE THIS!!!
You were fast asleep, for the most part at least but you were way too tired to get out of bed and see what Satoru has been doing for the past two hours.
For the past two hours, you've been hearing the clicking and clacking of things, doors being opened and closed every short interval. You were just so thankful you've gained the ability to sleep through whatever chaos satoru causes- he can even ask you nonsensical questions and you're capable of answering him through your slumber.
You wake up an hour later and find the house to be so silent. Eerily silent. You know he's safe or at least alive by sensing his cursed energy. Thinking it's always better to get ready for the day before even thinking of facing your dear husband. Especially now, you know something is up.
"Sato-" Your eyes widen when you see him, your husband, one of the strongest sorcerers of the era on his knees, looking sorry. You expected a prank, a joke, something random but not whatever this is.
Before you could recover from your shock he gets on his one knee, grabbing your hands "I'm so sorry for always annoying you and creating troubles but please don't leave me" he pleads.
"WHAT??? Wait wait- who's leaving you? What is happening?" You question him, bewildered by his strange yet worrisome actions, nose scrunched with your head tilted.
"...you?" he feared.
"why would i leave- wait did you.... did you cheat on me?" you ponder, you know he wouldnt but the heart aches even at the thought of it.
"WHAT?! NO I WOULD NEVER. WHY DID YOU EVEN THINK OF THAT??????" he was dumbfounded and quite hurt as well.
"then why would I leave you??"
"because you told me you'll leave me"
"I NEVER SAID THAT and i love you too much for that Satoru" You confessed cupping his cheeks, eliciting a shy giggle from him.
But he returns to the main topic pretty quickly and now you're both stuck in a weird questionable situation. Finally, he decides to explain how he interrogated the sleepy you and asked you all the wrong questions. Of course you said yes when he asked "would you leave me tomorrow when you wake up for always annoying you?" leading to the current scenario.
Though you had the magical ability to sleep through things but there was a major drawback- you would say yes to everything when being questioned.
You sigh as you pull him into your arms "My love, my dear husband of three years please do not worry about my unfortunate habit of saying yes to everything in sleep and me going anywhere." you pause, taking his hand in yours before placing a gentle kiss on the wedding ring while looking at him "i fear I love you too much to even leave you after death" you chuckle.
He pulls you in his arms tightly, causing the both of you to fall on the ground as his laughter echoes through the rooms "sigh, see at you making me worry for absolutely no reason! That is very bitter to do so, my kikufuku!!" he complains contradictory to the grin on his face.
"But nonetheless, let me treat my sweet wife like she deserves to be." He announces, making the rest of your time, his.
The rest of your day goes pretty well with him having breakfast with you where he insisted you both feed each other, as according to him, it helps make the couple love each other more. Him cleaning the dishes before settling on the couch which was surrounded by your favorite flowers where you both went through the special, as he called it, the special married couple skincare routine before the both of you painted each other's nails. Ordering the food through online services as you both binged your recent favorite series, intensely discussing the plot.
It was a perfect stay-in date, the one you both desperately needed to recharge from the exhausting lifestyle you both lead.
"soooo.... tomorrow even if you say yes to your most hated food, I shouldn't make it right?" Satoru questioned, his voice laced with mischief.
"Yes thank you. I mean yeah please don't make it" you doubly clarify so you prove that you're awake, causing the both of you to laugh.
[REQUESTS ARE OPEN]
[MASTERLIST]
#gojo x reader#gojo satoru x you#gojo imagine#gojo satoru x reader#satoru x reader#gojo x you#gojo x y/n#gojou satoru x reader#gojo fluff#jjk x reader#jjk x you#jjk fluff#jjk x y/n#jjk satoru#satoru gojo x reader
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my love mine all mine , aaron hotchner
this is incredibly self indulgent. i wrote this for myself, because my cat passed away today && i have no idea how to grieve correctly. but i've always been able to express myself the best through writing, so here i am trying to do so.
basically reader loses her kitten && hotch is there to comfort her while she grieves. reader is a doctor && gets her nails painted. mentions of sleeping in a scarf and braids (but this can apply to any race <3) hotch is pretty flirty. he also had a dog that died when he was younger (idk) ... i'm still getting used to writing him (but he's been rotting my brain) so hotch girlies please be sweet to me, i'm trying.
"Have you decided what you want me to grab on the way?" You feel giddy, eyes beaming vibrantly as you unlock your front door. Aaron was on the other line, he'd been looking forward to spending the evening with you for the past two weeks. Your jobs often sent you in separate directions, with him following cases cross country, and you spending nearly twenty hours a day working at Inova Fairfax Medical Campus. The commute was nearly an hour from Quantico, which made it difficult for your schedules to coincide the way you hoped.
Today though was an exception. He'd just gotten back from a case, a successful one, and you'd been lucky enough to finally get two days off. You couldn't contain your excitement when you'd finally managed to get Aaron on the phone, and with Jack staying at Jessica's for another night, it seemed everything was working out in your favor. You still had no idea what you were in the mood to eat, despite having ample time to figure it out. "I dunno." you mutter, and you drop your keys into the basket just to the left of the front door.
"Well honey, you've gotta give me something." Aaron chuckles, and his voices makes you feel warm and fuzzy on the inside. "I'm sure you haven't anything at all today." and it doesn't take a rocket science to know he's absolutely correct. Your stomach grumbles audibly, and you cringe, the sound a dead giveaway of your poor eating habits. "Do you need a bit more time to think about it?" he asks, and you're nodding your head, despite the fact that he can't see you. Your focus is split, eyes darting around your place in search of Piper.
Piper was your five year old tabby, the most special companion that you'd cared for since she was a newborn. Usually she'd be making her way to your front door, nudging her head against your shins, meowing her head off as some form of reprimand for being gone too long. Her absence was unusual, but you'd noticed she'd been sleeping a touch longer in the recent months. You'd taken her to the vet and they'd written off any life threatening illnesses. Perhaps she was jus becoming a lazy cat they had said.
"What'd you eat yesterday?" you ask, and you shrug off your coat next, hanging it in the closet as you slip off your cork-leather clogs. You admire your pedicure, French-tips gleaming back at you as your feet hit the cherry laminate flooring. You imagined that he'd hardly been able to eat well while out on a case, Aaron (and his team) had a horrible habit of neglecting their own health and wellness for the sake of cracking the case. You'd call him out on it, but it'd feel to hypocritical with the way you gave most of your life to the hospital.
"Four cups of coffee." and he sounds sheepish as he replies, he'd been running himself ragged with this last particular case. He couldn't leave the precinct until he was convinced he'd made a dent in the investigation. He could imagine your disappointed pout, but he was doing his best, or at least trying his best. "But, Dave made sure that I got something this morning before we got on the jet." and it's not like he has to explain himself to you, you'd never berate him. He believed it was just a side effect of falling for you.
"Four cups?" you gasp, head already shaking. "You're going to turn into a cup of coffee if you keep up with habits like those." you scold. "You'll have to double your water intake, you could seriously dehydrate yourself that way." you say with a quiet huff. You round the corner of the foyer, heading for the kitchen. "Are you feeling alright?" your tone grows a bit softer, "Four cups means you were really absorbed in the case. Everything okay?" you tread lightly. You weren't quite sure how he felt about you asking about his job.
"As far as endings go, I'd say it was better than most." he replies thoughtfully, clearly unfazed by your desire to probe. That makes you smile a bit, the obviousness of his trust for you. "We minimized the amount of deaths, the unsub was taken into custody... the team worked really hard." he proceeds, and you find yourself grinning. "But, I will do a better job of taking care of myself. You'd be a good nurse, but I can imagine a few better scenarios for you to take care of me."
You smile despite the fact it makes your heart stutter step. You were still getting used to him growing more confident in this way, but you weren't complaining in the slightest. "I'd be a great nurse." you correct him delicately, "I'd enjoy taking care of you in any way though." and you bet he can hear your shyness through the phone. Your relationship with Aaron still felt fairly new, you'd been seeing one another for going on seven months, but you knew you loved him.
Even if you hadn't managed to say it just yet.
"Look at that, another thing we have in common." he exhales, and you want him to hurry up and get to you. You hadn't seen him in so long, and despite the fact you were willing to mount him on sight, you just wanted to enjoy being in the same place for once. "How are you? Did you have a good day?" and you like the way he's so attentive, how he seems to genuinely care about what you had to say.
"It was great." you insist, and you've poured yourself a glass of water, ice tinkling as you scanned the dining room for any sign of Piper. Still nothing, weird. "I went to the bookstore a bit earlier, got a few novels for my book shelf." you list. "I got my nails done, and I got a facial. It was so relaxing I wound up falling asleep on the table." and you chuckle a bit at the memory. "Piper and I went on a drive before lunch, she's so spoiled." you add, but you're still scouring the space.
"Drafted up my budget for the month, my new schedule came in," you exhale tiredly at the thought. "Picked up my scrubs from the dry cleaners, I did a grocery run, and went to see the flower exhibit near the Farmer's Market. I got this really incredible soft-pretzel croissant." you sigh dreamily at the memory. "And now I'm home, and waiting for you." you complete, and you lean forward, arms resting against the countertop. "It was a really nice day. I thought I wouldn't know what to do without work, but I'd nearly forgotten what it feels like to be off."
Aaron's silent, but not because he's disinterested in your ramblings. He finds them endearing, and oftentimes had to remind himself that you, much like Jack, needed verbal response in order to feel heard. "I missed you." and it's not quite what he was aiming to say, but it's what comes out. It's true, it had been a while since he'd seen you in person, and with the way your schedules overlapped, he'd hardly been able to get much conversation out of you apart from quick check-ins in between patients and breaks in BAU cases.
You let out a quiet puff of air, it's not quite a sigh nor an exhale. Your lips curve upwards, and you wonder if there's a record out there for most smiles achieved in a single phone call. "You've got no idea how happy that makes me." you reply, and you inhale deep. "I missed you too, hurry up and get over here." you press, and you replay the sound of his responding laugh over in your mind. You don't think you could be more lovesick, but it's a more than welcomed feeling. "As far as dinner, why don't I just cook something?" you offer with a shrug.
"Do you want to?" and Aaron's got this weird thing about him where he's still getting used to the fact that you want to do certain things for him. You go over it a lot, reminding him that you'd love nothing more than to spoil him as much as he spoils you. He's still a bit hesitant, but you don't mind fighting the good fight until he relented. His hands tighten just slightly on the steering wheel, and his leg jumps as he awaits your response. He knows, or better put, he has an idea of what you'll say. He still wants to hear it either way.
"We take care of each other, mon amour." You coo, and he feels that familiar rush of affection towards you. "It'll be fun." you add, and then you're sighing audibly. "I just really can't wait to see you. I don't want to wait any longer than I need to." you express, and Aaron understands. He'd been restless on the jet, Dave and Emily seemed to zero in on his jitters, he was thankful they had enough couth to keep it to themselves. All he received was a knowing smirk from Rossi as he made a beeline for the tarmac the second the jet landed.
"I'll be there soon." he promises, and you grow giddier. "I-" and he wants to cross the line, mutter three worded phrase that would change everything. He'd been learning to be more bold, to focus on the things he could control, and appreciate those things. "I love you." he doesn't have time to think about the repercussions, because it's out, and there's a strong sense of relief that washes over him. You are surprised, but elated. The excitement his words bring you is hard to diminish.
"I love you too." and it comes out as easy as breathing. Probably because you mean it with all of your heart. "I'll see you soon, Mr. Hotchner." you promise, and he's chuckling at your sudden formality, likely a side effect of your newfound nerves at the huge step you'd both taken in your relationship.
"See you soon." you don't bring the phone from your ear until you hear the faint click of the call ending. You exhale shakily, mind running at a mile a minute as your heart seems to double in size. Still, you find this moment is short lived- mind once again on the eerie silence in your apartment. You place your glass down on the counter, coaster be damned as you make your way past the dining room and towards the living room. Sometimes you'd find Piper curled up on the couch, quiet purrs escaping her as she slept contently.
"Piper!" you coo, surprised when you note that she's nowhere to be found. You know that she wasn't outside, you'd made sure before leaving back out that she was comfortable in the house. You follow the layout of your place, the archway that led from the living room back to the foyer is the route you take, heading towards your bedroom as you continuously call for the cat. "Piper, where are you, pretty girl?" you enter your room, hopeful that you'll find her there.
You spot her little paw peeking out of her hideaway and instantly relax. "Oh Piper, you scared me." you let out a shaky sort of giggle as you fully enter your bedroom, feet brushing over the comforting carpet. You kneel just in front of the hideaway, reaching out to pet her. It takes you a few moments to make peace with the fact that she's not rousing. You swallow thickly, a lump growing in your throat as you wiggle her paw. She doesn't move, just as limp as before.
"Piper?" you feel the way your throat constricts, eyes immediately wanting to brim with tears, as you grow frantic. "Oh, please no-" you exclaim, head shaking as you feel a shudder rack through you. You're gentle as you maneuver around the hideaway, hands looping around her small body as you move to pull her out. She's limp, not even the act of you lifting her up enough to make her move. Your glow feels like it's diminished almost instantly, a dark cloud setting in over your head. It seemed a bit silly, panicked over the loss of a cat.
But she was yours, like a daughter to you in the way you cared for her, and made her apart of your routine. She was special, and despite the reputation cats gained for being standoffish and unable to understand human love, you knew that to be wrong. Piper was sweet, a loving cat that curled up beside you every night and followed you like a second shadow. She'd play games of tag with you, chasing you around your apartment as you squealed and screamed for your life.
"Please, please, no-" you're shedding real tears now, they're slipping down your cheeks in a constant succession. "Piper, please wake up!" it's silly, probably. Rocking back and forth with a dead cat in your hand hoping that sheer adoration will be enough to turn back the hands of time. It's certainly not, and the reality crushes you. The first sob is choked, almost like you're holding yourself back, not letting your feelings take full affect. You hadn't prepared yourself at all.
You didn't know what to do.
You think that's when the first swell of sobs begins. They're more ugly wails than anything else, the loud sound echoing through the space in front of you as your arms lower, Piper's body leaning against you as you continued to let your tears flow freely. Your chest tightens, constricting every couple of seconds like you'd suddenly developed chronic heartburn. The pain is a violent assassin, the air around you feeling tight. You think you may be choking on all that you're feeling.
You hate the part of your brain that was constantly in 'Doctor Mode', the side that reminded you that despite your grief, handling a deceased animal like this was a surefire way to get sick. Her body wouldn't start to decompose for at least another day, but you had no real way of knowing just how long she'd actually been dead. You don't move though, until at least your sobs have waned, you know it's not the end of them, but it's a reprieve just for a moment.
You slowly climb to your feet, still clutching Piper as your eyes whip around your bedroom. Your eyes land on her carrier, and the image makes you want to cry all over again. You shut your eyes, allowing yourself to take in a deep breath. It doesn't help. Still, your feet lead you over to the carrier, where you're gently placing Piper. Her vet was only eight minutes up the street, and maybe your ability to dispose of her so quickly was precisely why this was happening to you.
Guilt was loud, too loud. It almost knocked you to your knees as you imagined Piper's fear whilst you were gone. Was she sick? How long had she been? Why hadn't you noticed? Why did you leave her alone? Why weren't you there? You let her down. You had let her down.
You want to curl into a ball, hide under the blankets and cry until you passed out. But, she deserved better. She deserved to not be lugged around like she was some prop, she needed a proper place to rest. Once her carrier is zipped up, you're picking it up by the handles, using your other hand to swipe at the tears still trying to fall. You take the route you'd walked not ten minutes prior, slipping your shoes back on, and grabbing hold of your keys. Aaron still had another forty minutes or so in his drive, you hoped it went by quickly.
You don't think you ever needed him more than now.
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The sobs returned the second you'd walked past the threshold of your house. You sluggishly made your way back to your bedroom. It felt much lonelier now, the house feeling much too big for just you. You think that makes you cry even harder. You're covering your mouth with your hand, hoping that it would be enough to mask the sound of your bawling. You doubt that it does, but you can't do much else. You don't want to go to sleep, you don't want to do anything.
You begin berating your behavior once more in your head, replaying all the ways you'd been a shitty caretaker even though you know it's a bad idea. Your leg shakes under your comforter, the blanket squished underneath your body as you hid your face beneath the blazing heat of your huge blanket. You don't even realize how long you've spent in this space of self-loathing and bitter tears, until you hear the front door's lock shifting out of place. Aaron was here.
"Y/N, sweetheart?" and you want to run to him more than anything. You can't though, because you don't want him to think you're a failure. So you stay put, and you cry a bit more, sniffles growing more audible as you're forced to choke back angry sobs. It doesn't take long for him to make his way towards where you are, and you don't know what he'll say when he finds you looking a mess. You know your mascara has given you racoon eyes, and in your grief, you'd failed to tie a scarf around your head. Your braids would look messy soon.
"Y/N?" and his voice is so soft, soothing, everything you don't deserve now. Your hand clutches a fistful of your shirt, right where your heart rests. "Are you in here, honey?" and you sniffle, an answer all on its own. You barely hear his footsteps, but you feel it when the bed dips just slightly, and you feel it when he gently pulls at your blanket. When he's pulled it back, he's met with the sight of your tear-streaked cheeks. Your nose was runny and raw, and your lip was quivering. It didn't take a profiler to know that you'd been crying, and he frowns.
"Are you alright?" he questions, and his hand reaches out to brush against your cheek and neck, almost like he was checking your temperature. "You've been crying?" and he examines you subtly for any signs of assault or struggle. "Did something happen?" and he knows he keeps asking questions, but he's getting worried.
"P-" and a sob racks through you, your entire body curling in on itself. Your hand is pressing against your mouth again, and your shoulders shake as you began to cry once more. "Piper she-" and your head shakes, hand clenching and unclenching against your shirt. Aaron's eyes dance around your room, and his eyebrows push inwards. He was worried, but determined to be extremely delicate with you, namely by being patient as you got out what you needed to tell him. "Piper's dead." you finally say, shoulders sagging as you weep.
Aaron's examining your face, which gives you a front row seat of the way his face is eclipsed with compassion. "Oh, honey..." his lips pull downwards into a frown, and you know, of course you know it's awkward. What do you realistically say to a person that loses their cat? It's not like any amount of conversation would bring her back. "I'm so sorry...." and usually it sounds empty when anyone offers condolences, but like with most things, Aaron is an exception. "Are you okay? Can you tell me what happened?" he pleads.
And you know that he knows that you're not okay. It's meant to be a stupid question, the obvious one. But you also know that he's giving you the chance to vent, to articulate everything you feel with no judgement. It makes you want to curl into him, and stay wrapped up in his arms until neither of you had any idea where one ended and the other began. "I just-" you have to take a moment to gather yourself, hiccupping blubbers escaping you. "I came home, and I-" your voice cracks harshly. "She was just gone. I don't-" you shake your head.
"I don't know what happened." you express, and Aaron's sympathetic, and he hates seeing you like this. Every time you cry it makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand upright. He supposed that came with loving you, an innate desire to protect you, and keep the bad things out. He'd only ever seen you in this state a handful of times, mostly when things went wrong at the hospital and you lost a patient. He had to get to you before you started blaming yourself for something that completely out of your control.
He didn't know much, but he did know your love for Piper, and how deep it ran. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that you'd never do something to put her in harm's way, you'd never do anything to hurt her. And he wants to pull you into his arms and tell you everything will be alright, he wants to be there to anchor you down. To ground you in the midst of all these swimming and overwhelming emotions trying to fight for the upper hand. He wanted to be there for you.
"Is there anything that you need from me?" he asks gently, grief was harsh, it came in ripples and waves. It was gut-punching, it could be loud and then silent. Sneaky and then outright. It was a process, and whether anyone else thought so, if you needed to grieve the life of your pet, you should. Who was he to ever get in the way? He's gently rubbing his thumb over your cheek, your tears splattering as you kept the duvet pulled up to your chin, as you stared him down. He figured you must have been deep in thought.
It takes a moment for you to reply, and he's fine with the silence. You're tears haven't stopped, but they've grown more quiet. Silent tears that pool and trickle down his wrist and onto the blanket. You soon take in a shaky puff of air as you sit up. Aaron's patient as ever, watching as you pull your legs from underneath the blanket, crawling until you were sitting on his lap. There's no sexual undertone to your movements, you don't want to fool around, you just want to be close.
Your head rests against him, eyes closing as his arms envelop you. "Can you just stay with me?" you ask, and he's already nodding his head. You both knew it was an impossible request. At any moment you could get paged, or he could get a call about a new case. The world didn't stop all because you were grieving, but for one second you both could pretend. He could stay right here with you, and you could love him, and not feel so overwhelmed by all your sadness.
"I'm not going anywhere." he mutters, and he's reaching for your hand. His easily dwarfs your own, but it's still just as comfortable, letting your palms press against his own. "I have never lost a cat before-" and he's treading lightly, wanting more than anything to help you and not harm you. "But I did lose a pet when I was younger." he expresses, and your interest is peaked, just slightly.
"What type of pet?" you ask faintly, and you're squeezing his hand in your own. He knows that it's comforting you so he says nothing about the tight pinch of his fingers pressing together.
"He was a golden retriever actually." Aaron replies, "Nothing was particularly wrong with him. He was fed well, taken care of, treated like one of the family..." he proceeds, and you involuntarily hold your breath as you listen. "But one day he just... he just went." Hotch proceeds, "And when you're a little kid that's not in the best environment, a staple like a pet dog is important. Losing him was like losing the only bit of sanity I could cling to. Does that make sense?"
Your head nods, and you squeeze his hand again to show him you care. "And surprisingly enough, I found myself crying over it. Mourning this dog, an animal that was part of the family, but of course, was not my family member." he continues, and his chin rests on the top of your head. "The point is, him being a dog didn't make it hurt any less when he left. It's okay to be upset about Piper, she was important to you, special even." he whispers. "And you did a great job giving her all the love you possibly could." his eyes close then.
"I need you to know that it wasn't your fault. And keeping yourself up with thoughts of 'what ifs'." it's his turn to squeeze your hand this time. "And those moments where you... didn't want to play, or wanted to be left alone are not what she remembered when she passed on." he insists, and he won't take any arguments on the matter. "You gave her five amazing years, and whether science backs it up or not, she knew how much you loved her." he insists. "You might not believe it today, but I hope that you do in time." and he kisses your forehead.
It's butterfly inducing, and makes you cling all the more to him. "You're not by yourself." he adds, and you're glad to know it. You peel back, eyes locking with his, and they're glassy. You hate seeing such a grief-stricken look on his face, at your sake no less. It makes you lean forward and kiss him, in the hopes you'd manage to kiss it away. He kisses back instantly, and you're still sad, you probably will be for a long while, but you don't feel as lonely as you did an hour ago.
"I love you." you mumble the second you've pulled back, and this time there's no phone. His eyes are swirling with so many thoughts and feelings of his own, but you need him to know you mean it, and likely always will. You couldn't imagine anyone else being here with you like this now, nobody else that would care enough to grieve with you. He gives you a half smile, and kisses you once more, a much deeper kiss that makes you lightheaded and dizzy. Of course he had that effect.
"I love you too." and you're happy that he hasn't left you hanging. Your fingers trace his collarbones and cheeks, moving to cup his face with your right hand. You kiss him again, this time just long enough to get the message across. When you pull back, your head is finding it's place back on his chest, and his arms move up and down, rubbing gentle circles against your back, as he cranes his neck to kiss your head. It makes your stomach flutter, but it makes you want to cry too.
He leaves three gentle pecks on the top of your head, moving to kiss your cheek, before he's looping his arms around your waist with a palpable amount of admiration. He plants a sweet kiss on your shoulder, and mimic this action by offering him a kiss of your own. "Thank you." you exhale, and you mean it so wholeheartedly.
"You don't need to thank me, Y/N. We take care of each other, mon amour, remember?" and he recites your earlier words back to you. It makes you cling to him much tighter, tears returning to your lashline as Aaron pulls you even closer to him. "If you need to cry a little bit more, go right ahead. I'm right here." so you do.
Grief was a lot, it could be paralyzing, debilitating, and outright traumatic, but you knew even if it didn't feel that way now, in time you'd be okay. Part of you felt like you had Aaron to thank for that.
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