#this entire thing started because of the fic i wrote where ART makes a note of MB's long legs
Text
Self indulgent drawing of Murderbot <3 It and ART are cruising through space, just the two of them, and Murderbot is relaxed and comfortable. ART has more than a few feelings about this and saves an image to its archive -- unfortunately Murderbot is aware of ART watching it and it flips off one of the drones.
(it doesn't dislike the attention ART is giving it... it just makes it a bit flustered!)
See some bonus images (including ones without text) below the cut, along with an explanation of some of the design choices!
I am 100% in the camp of Murderbot having a much more expressive face than it realizes, especially when it's alone and/or comfortable.
All text in the images with a color block behind it is essentially metadata that ART has attached to any tag it makes for Murderbot.
The blue inorganics are purely because @hazelek found a post with early 2000s vibrant, semi-transparent tech and we were joking around about MB getting aesthetic upgrades lmao.
About half the tags in the last image are courtesy of @scificrows alkdjfl;kj thank you dearly for those additions!
#⨀#fanart#murderbot diaries#the murderbot diaries#murderbot#tmd#secunit#mb+a#art (asshole research transport)#i've never been more proud of an expression in my life aldkfj;l#this entire thing started because of the fic i wrote where ART makes a note of MB's long legs#cause then i felt the need to draw MB with leggy legs... all comfortable and sprawling because MB deserves to be relaxed and comfortable#and then i got frustrated with drawing clothing and folds and said fuck it why does it need to be wearing clothes? its just it and ART!#plus i like its design and its fun to draw#anyway this was great fun to draw and i really like the end results
700 notes
·
View notes
Note
F - What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom?
N - Name three things you wish you saw more or in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice).
X - A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.
Z - Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go!
for theeeeeee ask meme! thank you for asking!
F - What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom?
probably Warrior Cats - I got on the ~official forums~ when I was 11 or 12 and got into RP, fanfic, fanart, and watching/making animations by the time I was 13. I RPed for a few years, wrote fic for a few years, and kept doing fanart and animation off and on through college.
when I was 17 or 18 there was a situation where Al Kat, the person who pretty much built the entire Warriors animation fanbase and multi animator projects from the ground up, was essentially run out of fandom by people harassing them for being "too old" for a fandom with "minors" (they got into the fandom as a teen and were like in their... early 20s when this happened). my disgust with this is what started me drifting away from the fandom and I just kept on drifting, especially after my disillusionment with the animation industry + wanting to get better at drawing people + not caring to keep up with the books anymore.
that being said I still feel pretty passionate about my old faves (especially Ivypool and Russetfur), I still keep up with new multi animator projects/AMVs, and I have a long playlist of my favorite animated fanworks that I like to watch all the time! if that counts as being in the fandom that would be around 15 years
N - Name three things you wish you saw more or in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice).
for tlt, and they're all art related,
more art of characters that aren't the big 6 (6th, 9th, tridentarii) - everyone and everything in this series is described as looking so INTERESTING and unique, by design, and I would like to see so much more of that
character designs that don't take tmuir's personal appearance/ethnicity headcanons as gospel (there are so many interesting visual possibilities based on the descriptions we have to work with in canon! she herself is out there telling people to draw babs as a lizard! is this just about me wanting to see desi 5th house (how I've always imagined them)? maybe!!!)
more environment art, set design, and full illustrations - again - this is such a fascinating series visually not just in terms of the characters but with the settings as well and it's always so fun when people explore that. I know this is tough in fanart because character focused stuff is easier and usually gets more notes but I love it whenever I see environment art or illustrations for TLT specifically.
oh and not art related but needs moar noncon
X - A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.
AUs if that's not too broad - whether that's setting AUs or plot AUs or the hard to define ones like rule 63 or daemon AUs. love that stuff!
usually for more specific tropes/kinks, it's not a one size fits all since my faves and OTPs can vary a lot between fandoms, but I usually like pretty much any tropes/kinks related to consent issues
Z - Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go!
I broadly agree with people who say the plot/pacing of Dungeon Meshi has issues, especially the first 20ish chapters of the manga, but I don't really care because I didn't get into it for the plot - I got into it because I kept seeing the most gorgeous concept art and character designs crossing my dash. As a vehicle for delivering Ryoko Kui's world and character concepts I think it's phenomenal and I love all the bonus content. Usually you have to find good, in character, prolific fanartists to get that kind and volume of content and it's absolutely magical to have so much of it coming from the creator herself. Also GOD I forgot how strongly I prefer canons that have no romance or sex at all between anyone. It's so easy to fumble, I usually don't really care about canon ships, just let fandom handle all of that... thank you Ryoko Kui...
4 notes
·
View notes
Text
20 Questions for Fic Writers
Tagged by @crackinglamb, tysm 💜
1. how many works do you have on ao3?
Currently 33
2. what’s your total ao3 word count?
110,421
3. what fandoms do you write for?
Currently writing for Final Fantasy XIV, but I have also written for Borderlands 2, Fallout 4, and Critical Role
4. what are your top five fics by kudos?
Only A Thought Away - Critical Role, Widomauk, Soulmates AU.
This Is Home - Critical Role, Widomauk/Fjorester/BeauYasha, Domestic slice of life.
I Will Endure - Critical Role, Widomauk, background Yashagard, Canon Divergence.
Forgiveness - Critical Role, Genfic, a bit of catharsis that still ended up happening in game just not the way i first envisioned it.
Boy, Oh Boy - Critical Role, Genfic, modern au.
All of these were done for a discord event several years ago.
5. do you respond to comments?
I do, I make an effort to respond to every one I get. Only exceptions being a couple "moar plz" "when's the next chapter?" type ones that I just deleted.
6. what’s the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?
Extinguishing the Last Light, my worst end Lightwarden AU where the Scions fail to defeat the final Lightwarden and the First continues to drown in Light.
7. what’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?
Walk to the Water, a 10k Borderlands Gaingel MerMay AU
8. do you get hate on fics?
Not yet, but if anyone tries it they've got another thing coming :)
9. do you write smut? if so, what kind?
I've written plenty, I've only posted the one E fic though. Mostly gay elf porn.
10. do you write crossovers? what’s the craziest one you’ve written?
No.
11. have you ever had a fic stolen?
Not that I know of.
12. have you ever had a fic translated?
Nope, though I'd be fine with it as long as I'm added as a co-author with a link to the original English.
13. have you ever co-written a fic before?
I have, I was doing a pretty large scale Critical Role rp fic with four other people. It disintegrated from some interpersonal tensions and one person leaving the fandom entirely but I still think very fondly on it. Before that, I was doing a Borderlands OC rp with a friend.
14. what’s your all-time favorite ship?
You ask me, a bisexual, to make a choice? Lol. Lmao, even. I do not have a One True Pairing, I have learned the mature art of multishipping like a goddamn adult.
15. what’s a WIP you want to finish, but doubt you ever will?
OOF well this is a tie between Sometimes Goodbye and A Thistle's Thorns, both being all but abandoned due to fandom drift and loss of motivation. I found the original outline I had (thankfully) written out for Sometimes Goodbye, and I have started another BL2 playthrough, but FFXIV has eaten my life at this point so idk if I'll ever come back to it properly.
16. what are your writing strengths?
Show don't tell, detail descriptions, I have been told my characterisation through dialogue has been consistently on point (which is a relief), worldbuilding
17. what are your writing weaknesses?
Finding a good place to end. if left to my own devices I will Just Keep Rambling. That was actually one of the reasons I kept my FFXIVWrite entries so short. I needed to get over the hump of just letting things end.
18. thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?
I haven't had this particular problem yet, but I will once I start writing stuff for Stormblood, because Kitali is multilingual.
When I'm reading it, though, I prefer to just have a dialogue tag indicating which language is being spoken and then either a bold, italics, or both to show what's being spoken in what language. It saves me the trouble of scrolling back and forth and back and forth from the notes at the end of the chapter or trying to remember what was said where exactly and in what context.
19. first fandom you wrote for?
Borderlands 2
20. favorite fic you’ve ever written?
That would be Dragoon Age: Origins, the telling of Kitali and Estinien's first clash which I definitely did not just spend the last hour or so rereading nope not me
Tagging: @captainsparklefingers @screamingvikings @ir0n-angel and anyone else who wants to take a shot, I have lost track of who writes and who doesn't lol
5 notes
·
View notes
Note
how did you get into typesetting? are there particular resources/guides you'd recommend?
i am so incredibly sorry, because the answer to your first question is almost certainly useless to you: when i was 9-12 years old i took a bunch of online math classes from the Art of Problem Solving. AoPS classes (at the time; i haven’t followed what they’re doing in years) were formatted as a chat room where the entire lecture was given in text format (vv accessible to me for both adhd and auditory processing reasons), occasionally the teacher would ask questions for you to type in a response to, and a few of the fastest correct answers would be shown to the rest of the class. especially if you used latex math typesetting to make it Look Nice (the chatroom had limited latex support).
i, a small child extremely interested in math and in Proving my Skills to the other faceless usernames in the chatroom, was super into this. with practice i eventually got really good at speed-typesetting math in latex; i also habitually wrote up all my homework in latex because my handwriting was fucking unreadable (probably because of the dyspraxia) and it was honestly simpler *and* faster than writing it on paper and scanning it.
so at that point i was just kind of in the habit of using latex whenever i wanted to make a vaguely technical document Look Nice. math camp qualifying tests. final papers for technical classes in college. personal notes and reference sheets (i’m much more likely to study things if my study materials are visually appealing, i’ve found). i discovered that with practice it *is* possible to take class notes, live, in latex, and that if you send your ~fancy~ latex notes to your friends in the class they will love you forever. plus the extra Challenge made it easier for me to pay attention in class (fuck you, adhd).
thus, when i got into ficbinding my basic approach was “download a random latex book template -> modify to my own tastes -> consult stackoverflow if anything goes wrong” and it works pretty well for me, because i’m an extremely bullheaded programmer with a decade of latex experience. would i necessarily “recommend” it to a beginner? …not really.
anyway i hear you can use ms word or another word processor to typeset fic/danmei? lots of people in the ficbinding discord seem to be pretty successful with it, and @armoredsuperheavy’s introductory ficbinding tutorial goes into some detail (all of which i fully skipped) about typesetting in word. i can’t really provide any help here, though, sorry :(
otoh if you DO want to take the plunge and go latex or go home, i’ve found that overleaf provides some pretty good basic guides to latex syntax; if you want, i can also send you some of my latex source files and talk you through what’s going on with them. you’ll almost certainly want to use the “memoir” documentclass (not “book”), so hit up ctan and download the memoir documentation while you’re at it. personally i don’t use overleaf because i am physically incapable of using any text editor without vim keybindings; you might want to start there because the live preview is super helpful for a beginner, but i have NO idea what font support is like. if you’re not using overleaf, i recommend installing xelatex on your local machine, and if you don’t already have a text editor of choice, sublime text is free* and has some nice latex extensions.
*it will occasionally nag you to buy a license but you can keep clicking “maybe later” indefinitely
(someone recommended ConTeXt to me a while back, but i can’t remember who it was. that might be a friendlier option?)
actually, would anyone be interested in me writing up a more detailed Guide to Typesetting Books in LaTeX for complete beginners/cleaning up and posting my book template? (i am bad at modeling what “a complete beginner” to latex typesetting knows, but i will beta test it on a long-suffering @combat-epistemologist.)
#the trashcan speaks#devil venerable also wants to exploit the memoir class for evil purposes#OH YEAH also if you have a html file or epub (e.g. from ao3) you can use pandoc to convert it to .tex#you can use pandoc on nearly ANYTHING actually. highly recommend pandoc#also the only reason i stopped taking aops classes was that i took ap calculus bc when i was 12 and that was the highest level they offered#so when i was 13 i had to start taking fuckin’ honors multivariable calculus or w/e cross-registered at a local college#and let me tell you. i missed the faceless online chatroom classes SO. MUCH.
15 notes
·
View notes
Note
hi 👋!!! I LOVE your Tmnt mm x 2012 crossover so far! Please continue it!! Your art is also so good! While I’m asking got any writing tips for fanfics?
Ahhh thank you! Actually posted the second chapter just now so I will be continuing. As for writing tips I’ve never been asked that, so this is gonna come out rambly and very much neurodivergent.
I’ll first establish I have aphantasia, meaning I don’t ‘picture’ things so much as I think in words(and in abstract concepts of movement). So when I write I don’t spend much time describing what things look like, I can’t picture it so why would I spend time explaining what it should look like? This means my writing is very dialogue heavy. It focuses on what character are saying and how they sound and what they do when they say it(because of how I think about movement)
So one of my best writing tips is when I get stuck or am slowing down with a scene I’ll start jotting down the dialogue. No actions in between, no they said this or that, no quotation marks they waste time, usually I won’t even note characters names and trust future me to know. Or trust I've written the charcters with strong enough individual voices that it's obvious at least to me. For example later in the fic is this scene:
We actually don't have a last name
Not until we had to go to school then we had to choose one
We didn’t really know what to pick so we settled on Stockman!
Stockman
Yep that’s our cousins last name and Baxter Stockman technically created us so that makes him our uncle-dad
I see, here Baxter Stockman is an associate of the shredder
… yeah we learnt that yesterday, but our Baxter stockman never did anything really bad!
Unless you count animal extermination as bad
Which we do
It’s still better than going with something like Smith
Writing it like this means the dialogue flows better. It also helps my brain out since I don’t have to constantly switch tracks meaning I can write faster. Also lets me move onto other scenes I have the itch to make. Often I won’t come back and fill in the gaps until I’m editing.
Another thing that helps me is using the fact fanfiction comes with prebuilt stories to work on top of. I like having an episode with premade plot points to build off of. My best example of this is another fic I wrote, The Bat Trap which was based on The Parent Trap(a movie I love). In it I had a bunch of one liners and situations from the movie that I wanted to include, so I would follow(and adapt) the plot to fit and follow. While in other places I could go off script so I wasn’t following it word by word. To this day it’s the only longform fic I’ve completed and that's entirely due to following a movie plot, so I had an endpoint I could work towards. Instead of an overeaching storyline I made myself with no end in sight.
And my best piece of advice! Give yourself a voice in your story. Especially if you’re doing something comedic. It’s all well and good to give your characters hilarious lines but ultimately only a fraction of your writing is going to be dialogue. Most of it is that connective tissue, what characters are thinking, where they are, what they’re doing. So think as the ‘narrator’ of these parts as a character equally capable of jokes. Such as my favourite technique the ‘smash cut’. My art for the first chapter is an example of that.
“They will be fine”
“Mikey was not fine”
It’s a fun way to open a new perspective and I will use it at nauseum because it entertains me. Ultimately it’s fun! Have fun writing, undercut your serious scenes. You want to add something but it doesn't fit the tone? Screw that, write it anyway. It doesn't matter if people don’t like it, because you’re gonna spend a hell of a lot more time writing than they will reading. Eventually that becomes your writing style and people ask you for tips:P
#asks#ask welcome#tmnt mutant mayhem#someone should ask me how write fight scenes I have an actual technique for that#wink wink nudge nudge#mutant mayhem
3 notes
·
View notes
Note
🛠️🦅⌛️!!
🛠️ What tools/programs/apps do you use to write?
mostly i use google docs, notes app, and discord to harass my writing partners :3 i also use canva to make cover art, playlist covers, mood boards, and stuff like that!
🦅 Do you outline fics or fly by the seat of your pants?
i usually outline at least a little bit. once i know generally where something is going i will free write starting with the idea that the fic is built around (for example in adieu adieu the first thing i wrote was light bursting into tears because that was the vision that started the idea in general). i sometimes write paragraphs out of order or just put action in brackets until i can come back to it and figure out how to narrate.
⌛ How long does it take you to write a fic, or a chapter?
wildly variable lmao!! i wrote amnesia haze in two days but kompromat took me the entire month of december!!
writer asks
9 notes
·
View notes
Note
I love Wind having master sword burns so so much, please give deets :D
*taps mic* I wrote that fic like, nearly a year ago, so I don't remember much, but I can provide a few details (most about the fic itself, as the whole "MS burns" thing is pretty simple
You can't wield the Master Sword if you do not have the hero's spirit. Zelda, however, as the descendant of Hylia, can wield it (which doesn't make sense to me but whatever)
This was actually before I hopped on the train of Four being Zelda’s cousin, I think, so really I was going for the descendant of someone with the hero's spirit also being able to hold it (to a lesser degree)
I've always visualized Wind's scars to cover his entire hand (hands?), like he laid it evenly on a sheet of hot metal, as opposed to like, just where the hilt touched him. No unblemished skin.
I started another fic about Wind without the hero's spirit (entitled as "ANGST HAMMER" in my docs, whereupon he used the Master Sword to kill Dark Link, and thus died himself) but never got more than a few lines (enclosed below, because I will probably never finish it unless a sudden bout of inspiration strikes. Be warned, it's quite old)
A detail only in that fic- Wind also has scars on his shoulder from where the hilt of the Master Sword rested
(Fun side note- those two are the only fics where my hc of "Blue becomes Edward Elric when his height is mentioned" is present)
This fic was intended to be a looooot angstier but somehow it ended up as a comedy. Writing Wind is just very fun and it's somewhat hard to take everything seriously from his pov
I looked up whether or not WW Link wore gloves to base the placement and extent of his scars on
The burns never got past, like, second degree. Most of the pain was like, a magical thing (the divine curse mentioned by Sun)
There's a running gag in my fics of a Link meeting another Link and calling them "Other Link", and here Sun does it as well (she and Sky are dumbass4dumbass)
This isnt relevant at all but someone made art of the scene where Groose picks up Wind and looking at it now, I just realized Sky is standing in the "you know I had to do it to em" (I think anyway) pose and I'd be upset but that's just so funny
Wind has always known he doesn't have long.
Ever since he pulled the Master Sword, he's held his lifespan in his hands, grains of sand spilling between burned fingers.
Was it not enough? To fight Ganondorf, blood from broken blisters slickening the Master Sword? To live every day in pain, sometimes not even able to do the most basic of tasks?
(He already knows the answer, has known it since the first day he drew the Goddess's blade.
It never will be.)
-
"Good thing the old man is here, right?" Wild says, nudging Wind's side and sending a jolt of pain through him.
Today has been a bad day; he'd woken up unable to curl his fingers in all the way, and his shoulder has been burning, only worsened by the hilt of his sword rubbing against the scars there.
"Yeah." He agrees, tuning back into the conversation. Sky had been demonstrating how his beetle worked, only to wedge it in between two branches out of arm's reach.
"Is it just a hero's spirit thing to be short?" Legend asks. "Time is the only tall one here."
"I don't know." Time says, ruffling Wind's hair. He tries not to wince at the jolt it sends through his already frayed nerves. "The sailor might still get taller than me."
Wind tries not to laugh at that; if Legend is right, then he really might be able to get taller than all of them, if the curse doesn't kill him first.
"I could still get taller." Four rolls their eyes.
"Yeah, right." Warriors scoffs. "You're even more of a shrimp than Wind."
"I'm not a shrimp! This is a perfectly normal height!"
"For a ten year old, maybe."
"I don't know." Legend says. "I think it's more like an eight year old."
-
-
-
He twists the blade into the Dark Link's chest, fire burning through him. It howls, clawing at him.
"Wind, no!" He hears Time yell.
He looks back, smiling. "It's what heroes do, right?"
#this ask took a little while to respond to because i forgot it existed lol#mb and nancy scream about hats#mb's writing
5 notes
·
View notes
Text
Revising A Tale of Star-Crossed Knights: Chapter 1
Link to Chapter 1: https://archiveofourown.org/works/39015690/chapters/97592907/
This is going to be a series of posts which is part Author's Notes, part retrospective. I've been wanting to revise my novel-length story for a while now, both to make it read better and to eventually reformat it into a good eBook format (AO3's ebook downloads unfortunately are not what I want). The first part of that was actually commissioning a lovely cover art by @racecarart; the second part is going through each chapter, revising it, and uploading the new parts to AO3.
Chapter 1 was the very first part of the story that I wrote. The first scene with the armory meeting was actually written in May 2021, over a year before the actual work on this fic began. I think my motivation for it came back in April 2022 which meant that it took about a month to produce 3000 words. This was back in a time when I had no idea what the finalized product was going to look like; I thought that I would only have eight chapters and it would be 15k-20k words (not too much longer than Divine Wind, Earth Lance). I did not have a handle on pacing and it shows.
I would estimate that the new Chapter 1 is about 35% original writing. The original plotline where Finn and Erinys go from 0 to 100 in the span of a chapter is meant to be contrived, firstly because the pairing is contrived in of itself (it's very hard to get in-game) and secondly because the plot relies on a sort of Kent/Fiora moment. But the original piece was contrived in a bad way. I especially didn't feel that there was much chemistry between the two prior to the dance. The solution to that was simple: expand on the first two scenes so they would actually show chemistry! They meet for the first time, they get to know each other and realize they're similar, and then they start becoming attracted to each other. On the other hand, I cut a short scene where Finn saves Erinys from an arrow because it didn't add much other than clichés.
The dance scene was my favorite part of the chapter so it was unchanged. I do like writing ballroom dances, perhaps to the point of leaning on it as a crutch, so I kept that. The very last scene at the end, however, did go some revision. The idea that Erinys tripped over a pebble and accidentally kissed Finn comes across as too contrived to the point of being immature. I changed it so that it's just that passion gets the better of them. I think this version of the scene also makes it more obvious that they did The Funny with each other outdoors - of course, I don't want to write anything explicit or even something that would make it rated M.
One last thing is that I'm cutting out a worldbuilding thing where real-world European languages like French filtered into the fic. That got dropped after around Chapter 9 and I don't want to leave a vestige of something that gets dropped out. A couple OCs will probably face a similar fate...Ah well, editing does mean you have to cut things you like.
---
For posterity's sake, here are the original author's notes:
Welcome to my Finn/Erinys longform fic. I'm finally getting around to doing this journey, charting the relationship from when they first meet to the end of the game when Finn is with his kids. I don't intend to novelize the entire thing but I want to try to get as much as I can think of on paper, from start to finish. I'm going to incorporate the four previous fics I've made so far as well. At the moment my outline has eight chapters, but I might add more if I feel a need to split up chapters or add more content. Targeting for one chapter a week but I'm not completely sure, depends on my motivation ebbing and flowing.
This chapter is basically an introduction; a fluff if you will. There's not really that much development because it's just Finn and Erinys falling in love. Probably rushed but that's okay because the idea is that they let their emotions take over eventually - they have a Kent/Fiora moment, if you will. At first they deny they're in love even though Lewyn and to a lesser extent Quan are egging them on, but later on they go from 0 to 100 because they're young. I refuse to write them doing the actual act but yes, they do the thing at the end of the chapter. We'll see that it has consequences in the next couple chapters, and it's not going to be completely clean. But I can promise that there will be a bit more fluff in the next chapter with a proper date or two.
Also if you're curious, the currencies are real life references. *Denier* is French for denarius and it was the currency used by the Franks in the early Middle Ages. *Marka* was an obscure currency used by Poland during the first years of the II Rzeczpospolita before it was replaced by the złoty. I didn't want to be too on the nose with those.
3 notes
·
View notes
Text
Chance and Choice BTS
Behind the scenes stuff! I have A LOT of notes about the making of Chance and Choice from unreleased Beta to the latest chapter! Please enjoy the notes that simply cannot keep to myself anymore.
Pre CC (Runner-up):
Originally originally, the very first almost beta version of CC was just going to be Jack's origin story lol. Like straight up in chronological order, a series of events spanning his entire life as a closer look into his fall from grace. Really heavy handed on the psychology aspects of how his mind works (because I love nothing more than psychoanalyzing people/characters)
I had a whole idea about if i ever dropped this fic that the accompanying art would just be Jack himself promoting the story as if it was his own autobiography. Celebrity biopic release vibes. Buy my book!
This rough beta version was called Runner-up. And I got all the outlining done when I realized that by the end of the story Jack still would’ve been a villain (and in banishment) and I ended up thinking that the aftermath of his banishment with Lucy would've been a more attention-grabbing story.
As much as I enjoy hurting this man, I also want to see him heal, so Runner-up was promptly scrapped (but somewhat currently still used as a rough guide for any of Jack’s inner machinations/past experiences)
In the tail end of planning Runner-up, when Killian was starting to come more into his own and not just a background character, apparently, I wrote it down that him and Jack were only supposed to have romantic tension and for their official relationship to start way later after he’s already reformed.
I think the idea was to have them just hate flirting with each-other while the whole story goes on around them? But you can also do that AND be bitter exes at the same time. Very glad I changed this little bit.
A concept that also did not survive the Runner-up days was the idea of Jack having some kind of Ice based healing powers! Most akin to the water bender healers from Avatar.
He would've had this whole thing about swearing off using the healing powers for whatever reason and ends up burying the lead that he ever had them in the first place. Until a situation comes up where he’s forced to use them in front of people, unearthing the secret. This idea was cool, but then I reworked the whole magic system so this idea had to go.
Chapter 4:
Fun Fact! This meeting where Jack and Mother Nature actually talk for the first time since banishment will be the last time they directly speak to one another until the very finale. They will be going another two weeks without talking before reconciling at New Years.
I've had the idea for the Bypass for a while, but the way it looks is closest to The Great Exhibition hall of 1851. Just way bigger and with portal arches and FIVE MORE FLOORS. This place is HUGE you guys it's like a whole town in of itself.
I wanted the teleporters to accommodate a full-sized dragon because as a species they would be very limited in available airspace without getting spotted by humans. So, to quick travel they mostly use the teleporters.
I am going to be very honest with you guys. I really did only give Jack a journal of sorts so that I could maybe spin that off into The Misadventures of Exile kinda thing. Because nothing really physically happens to him (besides the polar bear) but he goes through a lot of mental wear and tear, and I thought I should give myself a little window into his head for possible future use.
Chapter 5:
The flashback scene with MN and Jacks fight, these exchanges:
“When all the realms turned against me, what did you do? Nothing!”
“You were not meant to have a holiday that is not my fault!”
“Not your FAULT!?”
Is directly taken from Kung Fu Panda, the first movie where shifu and tai lung recount their falling out as they fight. Tai Lung (and his and shifu’s dynamic) is so interestingly complex and served as a HUGE inspiration for Jack’s character and his relationship with MN.
ANOTHER line that I kinda ripped off was this remark from Jack:
“How could you possibly bring me lower than this? What more can you take away from me?!”
That one I got from The Incredibles when Bob threatens Mirage when he thinks his family is dead :)
A line that I also really REALLY wanted to include but didn't was from Steven Universe. Where Amethyst and Pearl are fighting in the kindergarten and amethyst says:
“I never asked for it to be this way! I never asked to be made!”
I wanted to give that line to Jack as he was fighting MN SO BAD! But I just couldn't find anywhere to fit it.
Originally Jack’s visceral injury would have been a single very sharp root straight through the shoulder. Literally clean through him; just one major puncture wound. But I ultimately thought that was lacking something, so i ended up changing it to something way more violent.
That whole fight scene I’ve had in the chamber for A WHILE, before most of the plot of CC was ironed out. And like I’ve said before, legendary fisticuffs are COOL AS SHIT so I have a lot to say about that passage in particular.
Chapter 6:
I had three separate ideas for Jack’s beginning nightmare sequence for this chapter (mostly because i’ve really liked coming up with very metaphorical and emotionally poignant scenarios for Jack to be in (psychoanalyzing yet again) ).
The final one of the following voices was my personal favorite and was planned to be put somewhere far later in the story, but i ultimately decided to treat myself and write in prose about Jack’s internal struggle :)
The other two nightmares I think I will keep mostly a secret if I ever choose to use those for future sequences. But! The other two (in the vaguest of terms) are
Mother Nature Lapis Lazuli inspo
Playing very weird chess and loosing horribly.
The main note that I’ve had for this, and the next few following chapters is just: EMOTIONAL LABOR! And that’s literally it lol. Thats the only note I need for this next stretch of the story lol.
Fun Fact! The weight of Lucy’s staff is actually different depending on the personal harmony of the one who’s holding it! It always maintains a level of heaviness that Lucy doesn't experience, but depending on someone’s inner balance the staff will be lighter or heavier depending on who’s holding it. Charlie has little difficulty holding for its weight in Chapter 5, because he has little to no internal struggle. He’s very confident in who he is and where he’s going in life and all that jazz.
Whereas Jack in this Chapter, is nearly taken down by the thing because he is all kinds of out of whack internally. Banishment has been nothing but one big internal seven-year struggle and it shows in the weight of the staff. He’s way-out synch and therefore the staff is way heavier than it should be.
Chapter 7:
I had to rewrite the beginnings of this chapter a fair few times with how exactly Lucy finds out more about Frostmas as a thing.
One of the times she would've found herself in the hall of timelines to learn about Frostmas that way. It was a huge room of clouds and different clock faces representing all the major alternate universes. I had a whole convoluted way the books updated themselves by pulling straight from the clocks to double check the series of events that have technically never happened.
But this was WAY too complicated of an idea to execute without having it feel overly clunky. So, it must be scrapped.
AND I KNEW that THIS was the most opportune time to name drop everyone else’s amazing work! As mostly a treat to myself, but I had it penned down to AT LEAST mention CS here. Because I was dying to do that at some point and NOWS THE TIME! THERE YA GO BITCHES! Technically canon? But actually, not really.
Killian and Chimera’s intro was A BITCH AND A HALF to nail down. I went back and forth on the logistics of this scene a lot. Where it was gonna fit in the story and if I'm introducing this new character/element too early or too late. This one was a thinker.
BUT THEN I remembered that there's an actually seven-year-old at the north pole that he could scare! Keep it closer to the main cast and switch it to full nighttime hours at the end of the day and BOOM! He’s here! In the story! Jack and Luce are gonna run into him later for the confrontation OF A LIFETIME. Very hype about that
For Killian’s intro I had an idea for Chimera to call him on the crystal ball, but he accidently left the sound on so it flashes colors AND Toxic by Brittney Spears would start playing very loudly in the middle of the night. This was really funny to me, but ultimately undermined the whole buildup of him being scary and threatening so I had to scrap it.
Misc:
Whenever I get to the redlining stage in the editing process, I try and do it physically as often as I can. I literally print out all the pages, staple them together, get a red pen and go to town! Usually with a lined sticky note as well for when a passage really needs to be deconstructed. I do this because it gives my eyes a break from staring at a screen and helps me spot mistakes easier. I keep them all in a little accordion folder and save them as sweet little mementos :)
(I don't do this for any of the snowdrifts because those are relatively low stakes, but I did do it for Solstice just because it directly ties into CC in a somewhat more important way.)
A couple of key inspo’s for Jacks character in exile (as I imagine him anyway) were Tai Lung (as previously stated), Loki and a touch of Bojack Horseman. I rationalize any out of character things he does with “Oh but he’s in exile, he’s been banished for seven years now, I think he’s bound to act just a little different.”
Some of the names that were in the rotation between Runner-up and CC include:
Polar Opposites
Vice Versa
Hope and Heartless
Flip Side
2 notes
·
View notes
Note
hiii, how are you doing? 💌💛🔮🚦❤️🎨
Fatigue has been truly kicking my butt this week (covid long hauler 💔), but I’m trying to hang in there!! Thanks for asking! 💜
💌 Is there a favorite trope you like to write?
I’m a sucker for friends to lovers. And I don’t know why but I like miscommunication… I don’t like things to be easy lol …And slow burn romance, but I think everyone has a different opinion on what constitutes as slow. But as long as it isn’t love at first sight! I feel like most of the fun is writing the build-up.
💛 What is the most impactful lesson you’ve learned about writing?
Just have fun. And that life is too short to think you shouldn’t try.
🔮 Any advice for writers working through burnout or writer’s block?
Ha. Me and writers block are very familiar with each other. I once was so burnt out and put off of writing that it took me 10 whole years to write something again— well at least everything I wrote between that time was strictly business/not for fun so I hated it. It was all entirely for school and boy did that not help at all cause everything needed a citation in APA format. So yeah, it took 10 years for me to write something again that I wanted to write.
Sometimes you end up taking a step away from writing and it can last a lot longer than you think. Knowing I could end up in a block for years is kinda why I got so paranoid last month when I fell into a block again because I worried I wouldn’t get over it for a while, but it passed! I think it helps being in a better mental space when you want to create… and also looking to others for inspiration can also help!
🚦What sort of endings do you prefer to write: ambiguous, bad, happily ever after, etc.?
Happy! Or at least on a lighter note. I just can’t leave my characters worse off, especially if it’s angsty. I’m just not a fan of bad endings. Maybe that’s boring of me, but I’ve always enjoyed stories more if there was hope at the end of it. And where the characters would have learned from their experiences and be in a better place than where they started. I think that’s why I gravitate towards that.
❤️ What is your favorite line that you’ve written in a fic?
Of course I’ll answer this again because how the heck can you choose only one favorite line? lol
I really liked writing this one:
“Preposterous!” Dustin shouts, “You could murder someone in cold blood— you could murder me in cold blood and I’d still be your friend!”
🎨 If someone were to make fanart of your work, what fic or scene would you hope to see?
That’s such a dream. Honestly if anyone ever made fan art of any of my stories I could die happy.
If it’s a scene from my current multi-chapter work then probably Will reaching for Mike’s hand at the viewing to comfort him OR their silly banter in the morning in the kitchen before Mike ran off lol.
thanks! 💛
1 note
·
View note
Text
𝐏𝐒𝐄𝐔𝐌𝐈𝐍𝐎 | vento aureo; author's note.
✦ .⁺ from pace with love.
table of contents
geez.
can we get a round of applause up in here? not for me, but for the fic and all of you for making it here. it's been over a year of updates, 56 chapters and something like 100k words.
absolutely crazy.
of course, i must pay my respects to the esteemed araki and david productions for making this fever dream of a series. they not only brought me back into anime and manga, but also into creative writing. it was dry until they found me, not gonna lie.
thank you to the insanely talented fanfic writers on ao3 and wattpad who inspired me to write this fic. your imaginations are wild, and if anything, you made me fall more in love with the series. thank you as well to the wonderful fan artists. your modern au art of the gang gave me life and sustetenance.
thank you to all the luxury clothing brands out there. gucci, dior, louis vuitton. it's highly unlikely i'll ever own some of your pieces, but a good portion of the outfits in this book are straight from your runways, so thank you. if you're interested in checking out where i got my inspiration, poke around on the vogue site :DD
honestly? it's been such a long time that i'm hard-pressed to remember the initial inspiration for this fic. i was actually working on a few other fics before I started this one. none of them wanted to fly, though, so now they're sitting dustily in my drafts.
i think the start of pseumino was this other vento aureo fic i wrote. it was pretty cool, but way out of reach for my inexperienced ass. i might go back to it one day, but i was like, can I write something easier and less complciated than this? i think I might have been reading some college thing, who knows, but the idea stuck, and here we are.
for original concepts, i fumbled around with making y/n's stand ability the ability to flatten things (like zucchero, i guess). i got pretty far with it before i found the inspiration for white satin. (who was orginally going to be named paradise city for it's floaty, glimmery apperance).
some of you might remember when this fic was called "elaborate" and was a female reader insert. that was inspired by some song lyrics i found with the lyrics "elaborate lies". i thought it fit the vibe really well (at the time, anyway).
narancia, fugo, risotto and abbacchio were meant to be an opposing group to the sapiena elites. i remember planning some kind of power struggle and trying to get them to overthrow the elites somehow. eventually, it just became easier to lump them all together.
i don't think risotto was supposed to be in this fic, but he snuck in somehow.
i'm gonna be real. this fic isn't quite 100% in my mind. it sort of feels like I took 3 different fics and tried to mash them together. (like, the sapiena elites, narancia and fugo, and then abbacchio and risotto feel separate and don't quite mesh). the original concept i had changed drastically, and i still feel that y/n's motivations to become noticed are petty and childish. i tried to expand on them, but it still feels clumsy.
ironically, the sapiena elites were the hardest ones to write for. it was easy to come up with scenarios for everyone else, but the detatched glamour that i attatched to mista, bruno, trish and giorno made it hard to get into their heads and find interesting scenarios to put them in. if i could go back, i would've scrapped the elite idea completely and just made them regular students.
going back to edit the entire fic was pretty grueling as well. i surprised myself with just how much my writing style and abilities changed within a year. if i could rewrite this fic, i would've changed the entire beginning. elaborating more on that supposed bizarre activity that was happening, fleshing out the relationships with everyone, really clamping down on the reader's flighty personality because i had no idea what i wanted it to read like (and it shows, i think).
this fic was rocky, and i appreciate your patience with it. it helped me to ground my writing style, and plunged me into the world of competent writing, characters and plot. i still have a way to go, but i'm glad i started here.
hmmm, what else. oh! please let me know if you guys were wondering anything about the fic or had some thoughts to share! (your favourite moment maybe? something you didn't really like? something you expected/w ould've liked to see?) or feel free to share any questions for me about vento aureo or jjba in general. i don't get to talk jojo enough so i'm always up for it.
(personal favs of this fic for me happen to be: narancia and fugo, absolutely adore those two. abbacchio's got some of my best, prettiest writing. writing for bruno was probably the hardest. and my favourite chapter is one of those last ones where giorno left for milan. i think i'm a whump writer in disguise.)
thank you all of you for reading. whether you made it to the end or just popped by, i sincerely appreciate that you gave me a bit of your time. like there are people who are here from when I first posted this fic. y'all are troopers, for real. cookies for all of you :D your comments were the highlights of my day, and every update put me on cloud nine. thank you thank you thank you. you're all absolutely wonderful. i liked to write before, but it's a huge ego boost to know there are people who might like to read my stuff <3
but even if this is the only time we ever see each other, grazie again for reading. here's to more and more jjba.
4 notes
·
View notes
Text
into the wilderness | pjm
summary: alright, so last summer’s camp was... disastrous. from the murky green showers to the wasps nests, it was all-around a bad time. but none of those things could be quite as catastrophic as the end-of-camp counselor campfire, when you told park jimin that you were in love with him. and if telling him was terrible, then seeing him again this summer, one year after your fruitless confession, just might be the death of you.
{camp counselor!au, unrequited love!au, friends to lovers!au}
pairing: park jimin x female reader
genre: angst, fluff, comedy
word count: 27k
warnings: unrequited love, camp shenanigans, awkwardness, secondhand embarrassment/hurt, ot7 cameos
a/n: hello and welcome to the one thing that guyi has wanted to write for literal years now but never go around to! finally i can cross camp counselor au off my list. anyway, it’s been over a year since i wrote for jimin so i hope that this monster 27k fic can make up for that !!! i swear the ending is happy. i swear. i promise.
Something about last summer sucked.
Maybe it was the record six wasps’ nests you found around the cabin, leaving you with more bee stings than mosquito bites by the end of camp. Maybe it was that weird murky green color of the water in the showers and the sinks that didn’t go away until three weeks in, when you were already positive you had contracted some sort of pond disease from brushing your teeth. Maybe it was the lack of Namjoon, who had an internship and couldn’t come, therefore removing all sense of order and leaving you and the rest of the counselors in a state of chaos.
Or maybe it was the fact that, on the very last night, at the very last counselor campfire, you told Jimin that you loved him.
Truth be told, you weren’t sure how badly it would go. But telling him was so much easier than keeping it hidden, than letting it drag on and on, this boulder sitting on your chest for the rest of time. You had spent the whole eight weeks of camp rationalizing it to yourself, so much so that by the time the last counselor campfire rolled around, you were convinced that it wouldn’t be that disastrous.
There was no part of you that thought Jimin would reciprocate your feelings. No part of you that secretly hoped that maybe he felt the same, and that you could end the summer with more money in your bank account and a boyfriend on your arm. You knew he didn’t. Jimin was sweet, and thoughtful, and gentle, which is exactly why you fell in love with him, but he was like that to everyone. You didn’t think that telling him would suddenly make him fall in love with you.
You told him because people like Jimin deserve to know that somebody loves them.
You told him because you thought that nothing would change.
What you didn’t really expect to happen was this:
Your marshmallow is burnt beyond recognition, poking off of the edge of a stick like a sad piece of coal rather than a sweet treat. At this point, it’s even darker than the chocolate sitting on the graham cracker in your lap, waiting to be smushed together into the sugar-fest known as a s’more, so eloquently named because you will apparently always want some more.
“Uh, hello? Earth to Y/N?”
Taehyung’s hand waves furiously in front of your face as he leans forward to make eye contact with you.
“Huh?” You ask, shaking yourself out of your thoughts. Your mind has been awfully cloudy these days, overcast like the weather around here. It’s a wonder you’re able to make your way through.
“Are you alright?” He asks, an eyebrow raised. “Your marshmallow looks like what happens when I try to make scrambled eggs.”
“Your scrambled eggs look like that?” Seokjin interrupts, pointing accusingly at your charred marshmallow. You’ve seen Taehyung in the kitchen. It’s not that bad, is it? “Next year you should sign up for some of Yoongi’s cooking classes. The six-year-olds can cook better than you.”
“You’d have to pay me way more than the shit they’re giving us to get me to teach Taehyung how to cook,” grumbles Yoongi.
“I’m fine,” you promise Taehyung as Yoongi and Seokjin launch into a tirade about raising minimum wage. “I just—” You glance at your marshmallow. You don’t even think the fish monster at the bottom of the pond would eat it. And he apparently eats people whose hearts have turned to stone. Like Seokjin, who swears that it had eaten the tip of his pinky finger. “—like my marshmallows really cooked.”
Taehyung looks skeptical but drops the subject nonetheless, turning back around so he can find a different conversation to barge his way into. You’re willing to put money on him finding some way to annoy Jungkook.
Insecure about your apparent lack of marshmallow-roasting skills, you pull your stick away from the campfire, blowing on it until you decide that you’re willing to risk burning the tips of your fingers. You pluck the marshmallow from the skewer, hissing to yourself as you quickly plop it onto the graham cracker, squishing the whole thing together.
The marshmallow is so burnt that it barely gives underneath the press of your fingers, bouncing back up like rubber. You frown at your s’more, which clearly should be renamed to something else because nothing about the thing in your hands makes you want some more.
Next to you, Jimin laughs at your pitiful attempt at a classic campfire treat.
“You want mine?” He asks with a smile, holding out a flawless s’more, the kind that they make in movies to perpetuate the illusion of perfection. You look up at him and in the light of the fire he glows, like a spark from the flames had created him right then and there, like he had been born with light in his eyes, a halo surrounding his body.
You wonder if Jimin knows how beautiful he is. How beautiful he has always been, radiating kindness and joy and laughter. He must know, right? It must be impossible for him to notice how everyone falls in love with him. You certainly aren’t an exception.
He holds out the s’more in his hands, laughing as he looks at you because there must be something endearing about being a shitty s’more maker, and you think, what’s the worst that can happen?
“I’m in love with you.”
The s’more drops to the ground, hitting the grass with a thud.
Jimin’s eyes meet yours, and for once, they are unreadable. This tragic sort of confusion, like he can’t believe the words you’re saying to him. Like his mind refuses to accept them as true.
He opens his mouth, but you answer for him.
“It’s okay,” you assure quickly, reaching a hand out to rest on his own. The touch makes him look away, like your fingers are the flames of the campfire, burning him where they touch his skin. “I—I know you don’t feel the same.”
It’s not a secret. Not to him, and not to you. Jimin purses his lips because he feels guilty for not loving you back. Because he is so good, so kind, that he feels as though he has wronged you because he doesn’t love you the way you love him. Like it’s his fault.
“Y/N—” He starts, but he does not finish.
“You…” you interrupt, looking down at your feet. You can’t look at Jimin because looking at him hurts, and you can’t look anywhere else because Jimin is all you think about. All you ever think about. “You don’t have to say anything.”
He speaks, and it’s as if the words don’t belong to him. Don’t belong to anyone.
“What are we supposed to do?” He asks.
You shrug, resigning yourself to this. You knew that he wouldn’t feel the same. You didn’t know how terrible he would feel because of it. “Nothing,” you tell him. “I just thought you should know.
He nods, because he knows, and he nods, because he can’t do anything else.
The fire crackles beside you, s’mores forgotten on the ground as your friends laugh and cheer, distant sounds that echo in your head like white noise. Jimin is all you can think of and right now you’re thinking about what happens next.
“I’m sorry.”
Maybe telling him wasn’t such a good idea after all.
“Me too.”
Your busted-up sedan revs angrily as you rally up the mountain, shaking your head in an attempt to rid the memories of the campfire from your mind. Unfortunately, the nasty thing about memories is that the more you try to forget them, the more you seem to remember.
You sigh. Something about last summer sucked.
Nothing about this summer makes you feel like it’ll suck any less.
The good thing about being thirty minutes late is that you’re still thirty minutes earlier than Taehyung, who does not have a single punctual bone in his body. You can count on one hand the amount of instances where he’s actually been on time, all of which are because you and the other counselors conspire to tell him that events are an hour earlier than they actually are just to make sure he doesn’t stroll in an hour late and improperly dressed.
The bad thing about being thirty minutes late is that everyone besides Taehyung is already here, waiting for you.
Your sedan crawls to the clearing at the top of the mountain, fighting against gravity and itself as it chugs up the last few feet, coming to a rough stop in the dirt, sunken in from countless tires tracking across it.
Through your windshield, you can make out two figures with two clipboards, only one of which has something genuinely useful on it.
“Y/N!” Hoseok cries out excitedly, splaying his arms out as if to hug the entire front of your car only to reveal the near-blank clipboard in his hand. All that’s on it is a neon green Post-it note with a caricature drawing of who you assume to be Yoongi, if the grouchy expression and chef’s hat are anything to go by. There’s no signature or name, but Hoseok’s art skills are on par with those of the campers you work with and Jungkook has a fun and quirky habit of vandalizing all drawable surfaces with pencil sketches of the counselors, so you take a wild guess as to who the artist is.
You pop the door of your car open and step out into the sticky weather, warm and muggy despite the clouds above. It’s the same as when you step into your bathroom after your two roommates have showered, using up all the hot water and leaving a layer of fog on the mirrors for you to all play hangman on. Only, this steam never goes away.
“Hoseok!” You cheer, letting the man wrap you up in a sweltering hug, your hands gently patting the top of his back so as not to come in contact with the dampness soaking through his thin cotton t-shirt. You haven’t seen each other for nearly a year, though, so you give in more than you usually would and relax into his hold. “You look good, I like the hair,” you compliment, two fingers coming up to twirl at his bright red locks, deep and vibrant like the cherries you pick.
“Dyed it just so I could tell the kids I’m a superhero!” Hoseok grins. He’s already heading over to the back of your car to pop the trunk and pull out your duffel bags so that he can park your car in the garage at the other end of the campsite.
“Then who’s the villain?” You call, tossing him your keys.
“I guess that would be me.”
You whip around to find a platinum-blonde Namjoon standing happily before you, looking at least a little bit resigned as he grins at you. His hair is longer this year, like growing it out would somehow compensate for frying it with layer after layer of bleach. And with his silver-white hair and the fact that he is the only counselor any of the kids are genuinely afraid of disobeying, you suppose he would be the antagonist after all.
“Namjoon, nice to see you again.” You go in for a hug even though Namjoon clearly had no plans on instigating one himself, because someone as hardworking and patient as Namjoon deserves a little platonic affection every one in a while. What, with everyone else constantly conspiring with the campers to oust him every summer.
The truth is that all of you know that without Namjoon, this camp would be nothing but chaos in its purest form, with the counselors unable to wrangle the kids and the kids using that knowledge to their fullest advantage. Take last year, where everything seemed to go wrong because Namjoon had his stupid internship with a business firm and spent the entire summer drilling finances into his head instead of losing brain cells watching kids eat sand.
If you had any dignity left you’d blame your rotten confession to Jimin on Namjoon’s absence as well.
“Nice to see you, too, Y/N,” Namjoon says when you part, checking your name off of the list on his clipboard. “I feel like it’s been ages since I was here.” You can see red marks all over the page, blank only where the name Taehyung is written.
Some things never change, you suppose.
“Well, we definitely missed you last year,” You say with a chuckle, trying not to immediately associate your personal misjudgements with the lack of Namjoon, who you can hopefully keep from ever finding out what happened at last year’s end-of-camp counselor campfire. The problem is that Namjoon picks up on social cues and body language like a sociologist, so your only hope is pretending that the campfire never even happened. “Camp was pretty much a mess without you.” In more ways than one.
“Namjoon!” Someone calls. You and him both jerk around to the source of the sound when you see a figure barreling towards the both of you, face obscured in shadow.
You almost don’t recognize him, with his pitch black hair and thick voice, like he has somehow become a new person in the nine months you’ve gone without seeing him. But the moment he comes into view, you know, and you can’t even pretend to not know, not with the way your heart freezes in place, mid-beat, like the sight of him has turned you to stone. Not with the way that Namjoon is right beside you, and how you don’t think you can bear explaining to him why you and Jimin aren’t as close as you used to be. Not with the way that Jimin looks as beautiful as he always has and always will be, no matter how many summers pass, this timeless portrait, this piece of art that’s come to life.
There’s a part of you that’s shocked still at seeing him, like you had almost thought that after last summer at least one of you would bail on this shitty summer job, filled with mosquitoes and mud and wifi that only works in the room that doubles as the gymnasium and the mess hall. It’s the same part of you that wants to go back to pretending that nothing ever happened last summer.
But Jimin is here, in front of you, eyes wide and out of breath and gorgeous, and pretending that last summer never happened is the same as pretending that you never fell in love with him at all.
“The water in the boys’ cabins sinks is green,” he says with a tense smile, making Namjoon nearly smack his clipboard into his forehead.
“Ugh, seriously?” He asks, and you can’t tell if you’re thankful or hurt that Jimin’s failed to acknowledge you. “Fine,” he scribbles something down on the clipboard, this handwriting scrawl that only he can read, “I’ll figure out what to do with that later. In the meantime, just don’t drink it.”
“Seokjin’s already made lemonade with it, though—”
“Great,” Namjoon says, exasperated as he takes off towards the main cabin, where Seokjin is sitting on the balcony with his feet up on the railing with a glass of suspiciously murky lemonade in his hand, one that he’s offering up to Yoongi with a devilish grin on his face.
His disappearance leaves only you and Jimin left standing at the entrance, rocking back and forth on the balls of your feet in the hopes that one of you will either leave or spare the other the torture of a conversation.
“Hey,” Jimin says quietly, trying to meet your eyes.
You look away, pretending to smack an imaginary mosquito on your arm while an actual one bites your leg. “Hey, yourself.”
“It’s been a while.” The last time we saw each other you told me you loved me.
“Yeah, it has.” I know.
“How are you doing?” Do you still love me, or was the distance and time enough?
“I’m alright. Same old, same old.” I never stopped. “How are you?” What about you? Did you stop seeing us as just friends?
“Doing well, thanks.” No. You’ll always be just a friend to me. Jimin sighs, looking up at the overcast sky with his hands shoved into the pockets of his shorts, taking in the scenery before him. He exhales, long and heavy, before turning to you with a soft little smile, the kind of grin that almost makes you feel like forgetting might not be the best thing to do after all. “I just feel like this summer is a fresh start, you know? Like, I feel like there’s something different about being here this year.”
Maybe this summer, you can learn to move on from me, too. Because something’s gotta give.
“I hope you’re right about that,” you tell him, because being around him hurts and being away from him makes you replay that night over and over, wondering what would have happened if you had just kept your stupid mouth shut. You open your mouth to say something, anything else, anything to break the ice that didn’t used to be there before, cut between the tension that has settled between the two of you, but your tongue is dry and your heart is sore just looking at him.
Defeated, you walk over to where Hoseok’s left your duffel bags, hiking them onto your shoulders and heading towards the girls’ cabins, ready to end this conversation before it tears you in two.
Jimin seems to flounder, standing awkwardly for a few moments as he watches you walk towards the cabins, skirting around him a few feet away because brushing by his side seemed too close for comfort. But then he says, “Hey, Y/N?”
And it makes you stop dead in your tracks, unable to deny him an answer.
You turn around to look at him, and he offers you a grin.
“Are we good?”
Your love for me, will it affect our friendship?
You swallow.
It already has. It always has. From the very beginning, loving you was part of our friendship. I don’t know how to be friends with you without it. Even when you didn’t know it, I loved you. In a way, it was easier back then. Telling you was the one thing I shouldn’t have done.
“Yeah, Jimin,” you tell him. “We’re good.”
The trek to your cabin from the main buildings of the camp is nothing if not familiar. Familiar in the way that the ground curves beneath your feet, leading you up to the top of a small hill where the building sits, looking out over the rest of the clearing. Familiar in how the scent of the woods that surround you fills up your senses, this fresh, airy feeling, like the very oxygen is smothering you. Familiar in how this place reeks of the memories of summers gone by, summers spent beneath the stars and by the campfire.
Summer memories that make your heart burst with fondness and summer memories that… don’t.
The fact is that it has always started and ended here.
When you kick open the door to the cabin, there is only one other occupied bed. It belongs to Hazel, a counselor in her sophomore year in college who joined the crew last year and assumed that the Namjoon-less pandemonium that was camp last summer was just the norm. Hopefully she can take a much-needed break this year now that Namjoon’s back and she’s not the only one fruitlessly trying to cajole the campers into behaving.
You beeline towards the bunk bed that has been your summer home for the past three years, the one shoved right up against the back right corner, giving you a perfect view of the entire cabin. The downside is that it’s the same corner that spiders seem to prefer as their location of choice for their webs, but better you, a stone-cold college student, than a terrified six-year-old.
Plopping your duffel bags on top of the mattress, you let out another sigh. You wonder what it is about this summer that is so damn tiring, so exhausting that you can’t help but outwardly exhale every ten seconds, like merely being here is wearing you out, bit by bit.
You’re looking forward to when the campers arrive tomorrow. Sleeping alone (well, nearly alone) in a cabin feels uncomfortably empty. Plus, you’re hoping that they’ll provide you with some sort of distraction so you don’t have any free time left to spend dwelling on the what-ifs and the should-have-dones. When there’s only a dozen of you, it’s much easier to run into him.
The moment you collapse on your bed, a messy brown head of hair comes bounding out from the shared bathrooms in the center of the cabin.
“Y/N!” Hazel cries out, launching herself across the room and into your arms for the tightest hug you’ve had in a long while.
“Hey, Haze,” you greet in return, offering her a squeeze back. You didn’t often mix in your camp activities, with Hazel in charge of the nature walks and animal conservation activities while you hide in your air-conditioned arts and crafts room, but living together brought upon you a closeness you otherwise don’t share with anyone else. Plus, Hazel keeps a family-sized pack of Oreos and a gigantic jar of smooth peanut butter by her bunk at all times for emergencies.
“I feel like it’s been so long!” She laments when she finally releases you, looking positively thrilled to be here right now.
Not long enough, you think to yourself, though you don’t suppose any more time apart from Jimin would make seeing him again any easier. “Yeah, but the year goes by so quickly,” you agree half-heartedly. Too quickly.
“I’m so excited for this year.” Hazel grins, clapping her hands together. “I have so much planned for all the nature walks and everything. I spent all of last week reading up on edible plants and berries found in this part of the country. I’m gonna teach all of the kids what they can eat in case they get stranded in the forest!”
“Fun,” you say with a hesitant nod. It’s not that you don’t trust Hazel to have done her research, it’s more that, knowing the campers and knowing the counselors, someone’s going to try and get lost in the woods around the camp, eating everything they can. Not to mention the fact that Hazel’s so innocent she’d probably reveal to someone like Seokjin or Jungkook which plants were poisonous without even realizing it.
Camp last year was a mess, but at least nobody died.
“Hey, aren’t you excited, too?” She asks, a hand on your shoulder as she notices your reluctance. “Apparently Namjoon’s a great leader so this year isn’t going to be as bad as last year.”
“Last year wasn’t bad just because Namjoon wasn’t here,” you comment vaguely. Hazel doesn’t need to know about all of the drama that goes down between the counselors. Hopefully she can get out of here without being dragged into something by one of you.
“Well, this year is supposed to be better!” She cheers you on, determined to get you to feel as enthusiastic as she is. “No matter what did or did not happen last summer. Plus, you know that if anything bad happens I always have my secret stash, counselors only.” She winks.
“Thanks, Haze,” you say, sighing again like it’s your job to be worn out by life. “I think I just need a bit of time to get back into the swing of things.”
“That’s the spirit!” She rallies. “I’m gonna head back to the main camp and see if there’s anything good to drink. I’m thirsty.”
“Stick to soda,” you advise, eyes wide at the thought of her downing anything that Seokjin’s had a sneaky hand in making.
She doesn’t seem to notice your worry, already bounding towards the door, light on her feet. “I was feeling a Fanta anyway. See you at the camp counselor meeting if I don’t see you around beforehand!” She pulls open the heavy wooden door, half outside when she stops to turn back at you, wagging a finger in the air. “Remember, Y/N, leaves of three, let them be!”
The door slams shut behind her, creating a cloud of dust in its wake. You watch helplessly as the particles dissipate into the air, as the silence that was once so comforting begins to terrorize you once more.
You collapse back onto your bunk. If only last summer’s murky green water had poisoned you. Then maybe you’d finally have a good enough excuse for your utter lapse in judgement, and you wouldn’t be sighing so much.
There were no camp counselor meetings last year. There were only haphazard caucuses, irregular get-togethers where no one knew quite what was going on and there were no real announcements to be said, no real orders to be given. You had almost forgotten what it was like to have someone with genuine leadership skills working here.
The problem last year was not getting everyone into the same room for thirty minutes. It was keeping everyone focused in that same room for thirty minutes, which was essentially impossible because, at your age, submitting to someone of authority is the very last thing you want to do. Especially when the consequences pretty much only amount to having to drink Seokjin’s murky green lemonade.
But like with everything else, Namjoon has, somehow, made the impossible possible.
“Guys, guys, can we stop drawing on the board, please? I need that,” Namjoon begs as he walks into the room to find Jungkook and Taehyung with chalk in their hands and a chalkboard at their disposal. What they’ve accomplished so far is an expert drawing of Spongebob and Patrick with their faces missing, waiting to be filled in by one of the unlucky people in this room.
“Okay, so who’s Patrick?” Taehyung asks the audience.
“Hoseok!” shouts Seokjin.
“You!” shouts Hoseok.
“Seokjin!” shouts Hazel, too, just because she likes being involved in things.
Jungkook lets out a cackle at that. “Are you kidding?” He asks. “If anything…” He does a quick sketch on the board, hand flying across it so quickly you’re actually a little bit impressed, “Seokjin would be Plankton.”
He steps away from the board to reveal a scarily-realistic drawing of Seokjin’s angry face on Plankton’s tiny, antennaed body, making everyone—even Namjoon, who usually tries to keep the roasting between counselors to a minimum—laugh.
Seokjin scowls, and normally you would feel bad for him always being the butt of Jungkook’s endless jokes, but you can see a half-empty glass of green lemonade by Jungkook’s side, and you decide that he can hold his own just fine.
“I think you guys would be Spongebob and Patrick,” Jimin pipes up from the back. You freeze, turning your head slightly just to see him sitting on the table pushed up against the wall. You hadn’t even noticed him. Or maybe you had, and your brain just decided to pretend that you hadn’t.
Nevertheless, hearing his voice doesn’t make it hurt any less.
“Jimin’s right,” Jungkook agrees, already beginning to fill in the blank space where Spongebob’s face would normally go with a caricature of his own. “I’d be Spongebob because I have a wider face than you, Tae.”
Taehyung doesn’t object, instead moving his hand to an empty spot on the board. “Yeah. Oh, and Namjoon’s Mr. Krabs, obviously,” Taehyung says, adding his own drawing of Mr. Krabs with Namjoon’s camp get-up on—cargo shorts, a short-sleeved flannel shirt, a baseball cap, and high-tops.
“I would not be—hey, give me that!” Namjoon shouts, indignant, before ripping the chalk from Jungkook’s hands as he cackles wickedly, clearly pleased with himself. Namjoon shoos the both of them away from the board before wiping it with the eraser, which has very obviously not been cleaned since last year, leaving a trail of pale yellow dust in its wake wherever Namjoon drags it across the chalkboard. “Chalkboard for official matters only.” He glares at Jungkook and Taehyung, who high-five each other.
The chatter soon subsides as Namjoon writes down the meeting to-do list on the board in his same old scratchy handwriting. Namjoon’s one of those people that writes exclusively in capital letters, simply enlarging any letters that actually need to be capitalized. You’re almost one-hundred percent positive it’s to establish written dominance over the rest of the counselors.
“Okay, first order of business,” Namjoon begins after coughing to get everyone’s attention. “It’s come to my attention that the entire cabin water system is green.”
“Hasn’t it always been—?” Hazel asks, innocent eyes wide in confusion.
“I called the utilities people and they’re coming tomorrow to fix it, so in the meantime, do not drink the water. Showering and using the bathroom is fine. I would use water bottles for brushing your teeth, though,” Namjoon says, crossing off something on his clipboard as the rest of the counselors murmur in approval.
“See, this is what happens when Namjoon’s here,” deadpans Yoongi, motioning up to him where he stands at the front of the room. “Shit gets done.”
“Okay, secondly, no swearing in front of the kids,” Namjoon says, adding that onto the board as a final reminder. “The fact that I have to tell you guys this multiple times every year is ridiculous.”
“Fuck you, I can do what I want!” Taehyung shouts, earning a chorus of fuck yeah’s.
“You guys do know that I have the power to fire you, right?” Namjoon says pointedly, making Taehyung shut his trap. “Okay, moving on. Everyone’s been assigned to the same things that they were assigned to do last year, and if you weren’t here last year, then the year before that.” Namjoon receives some cheers and some groans in response to this, the former mostly from people who work indoors, and the latter mostly from people who don’t.
“Seriously?” Seokjin whines. “I don’t think Yoongi has stepped foot out of the kitchens in literal years.”
“And I would like to keep it that way, thank you very much!” Yoongi counters.
“Oh, shut up, at least you get to spend some time indoors teaching all of the kids how to play Hot Cross Buns on their guitars,” Taehyung counters. “I got more mosquito bites than freckles last summer.”
“My students have long advanced from Hot Cross Buns,” Seokjin says proudly and a little bit devilishly. “We’re working on something more technical now.”
“Like what?” Jungkook challenges.
“Okay, continuing…” Namjoon says loudly, eyeing Seokjin suspiciously. “If you’re new, you should have already received notification as to what activities you’re in charge of, but if you’re not sure, come and talk to me.”
“Oh, so Jimin’s still on first aid, then?” Taehyung asks, wiggling his eyebrows. “What do you think Y/N’s gonna do to get herself sent down to his tent? Glue her fingers together? Burn herself with a glue gun?”
“Shut up,” You mumble tensely, embarrassed that somehow you and Jimin’s relationship has turned into a counselor affair.
Last summer, you had accidentally given yourself a palm full of splinters from the birdhouses that you had the campers paint to bring home with them, and the first aid tent is the only place that has bandages. Jimin was there, as he always is, and the two of you spent the evening plucking out all of the pieces of wood from your hand and patching it up with Band-aids that had Spiderman and Moana on them. Contrary to apparently popular belief, it was not on purpose, even though the hour of hand-holding was rather nice.
“Or Jimin can just find some excuse to visit Y/N in the arts and crafts room,” Seokjin tacks on unhelpfully. “You know, last summer I don’t think I saw them eat lunch in the counselor room at all. They were always finding secret places in the woods.”
“Maybe we were just busy during lunch?” Jimin suggests, clearly equally uncomfortable.
“Busy fucking, probably,” Taehyung mutters.
“It’s none of your business,” you snap, because the last thing you want to be talking about right now is how wonderful your relationship with Jimin used to be, when all that’s left this summer are the burned remnants of it, the ashes of something that could have been. You don’t need a reminder of why you thought that you and Jimin would be alright, of why you thought that telling him wouldn’t be that bad. It was terrible, and now all you can do is pick up the pieces, patch together a friendship whose thread has come loose.
“Alright, let’s keep going,” Namjoon says, picking up the weirdly tense atmosphere and doing his best to bring the attention back to him and the meeting at hand. “You guys should know that this year, Hoseok is thinking of adding in a counselor dance to the end-of-camp show…”
You look over at Jimin, who immediately turns away when he spots your gaze, making to pick at the rips in his jeans, doing anything and everything he can to avoid eye contact with you, and your shoulders sink.
Jimin had asked you, “Are we good?”
And you had responded, “Yeah, Jimin, we are.”
And the two of you must have both known that was a lie.
You turn back to face the front, focusing on how Hazel is rubbing your forearm and not asking questions, and you try to feel a little bit better.
After the meeting, you and Hazel decide to spend the night holed up in your cabin eating from her Oreo stash instead of eating dinner with everyone else, half because it’s only the first day and already being around all of the other counselors is tiring, and half because you don’t think you can handle seeing Jimin any more today, but not before Namjoon stops you on the way out of the door.
“Y/N,” he says, making you pause in your tracks. “Can we talk?”
“What about?” You ask, hoping to God that it’s not about everyone thinking you purposely injure yourself just so you can see Jimin at the first aid tent.
“Just quickly, you and me,” Namjoon says casually, pulling you to the corner of the room, away from any windows so no one can see you two talking. “Did today’s meeting make you uncomfortable?”
“No,” you lie like a liar. “What are you talking about?”
Namjoon’s too observant for his own good, you decide, when he frowns at you, clearly not buying whatever it is you’re trying to sell him. “You don’t have to tell me everything,” he says quietly. “But I know that something happened between you and Jimin.”
You open your mouth to object and tell him that you and Jimin are fine, but Namjoon raises his eyebrows at you, like he’s challenging you to tell him another lie.
“Well…” you begin, resigning yourself to the truth. “Yeah. Last summer.”
Namjoon purses his lips, nodding in understanding. “Do you wanna talk about it?”
“You’re not my mom, Namjoon,” you say with a smile, even though maybe telling someone about it might not be a half-bad idea after all. Plus, Namjoon’s your friend and the only one around here who’s any good at keeping secrets, so getting the words off of your chest could be good.
“You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to,” he reminds you, because he’s wonderful like that.
“No, it’s alright…” you sigh. “I guess someone else has to know.” You close your eyes, willing the words to come up from your throat, willing them to not hurt you as they leave your lips. “Last summer at the campfire I told Jimin that I loved him.”
Namjoon doesn’t say a word.
“And he doesn’t love me back, which is not the problem because he shouldn’t change how he feels about me just to make me feel better. It’s not his fault, and I’m not angry at him or anything. I knew that he didn’t love me back when I told him,” the words come up like bile, slowly and carefully before spilling out in front of you. “But I was an idiot, and I thought telling him would make me feel better, or something. And it didn’t, because now Jimin and I don’t know how to act around each other anymore, and everything sucks.”
Namjoon offers you a careful, hesitant smile.
“So yeah. That’s what happened.”
“Sounds like you and Jimin should talk about it,” Namjoon suggests, and maybe he’s smart, and a good leader, and attends a prestigious college along the coast, and studies business and sociology, but that is the worst idea he has ever had.
“No,” you immediately say, shaking your head. “It’s no big deal. Jimin and I are still friends.”
“Are you, though?” Namjoon asks.
You sigh, reaching up to rub at your forehead. “Yeah, we are,” you insist, perhaps more to yourself than to Namjoon. He looks skeptical, but doesn’t ask any questions. “It doesn’t even matter. I made a mistake and now I’m gonna deal with the consequences.”
“I can try to get the rest of the boys to stop teasing you and Jimin. I know it must be weird for you both right now,” Namjoon offers, always wanting to help. You scoff. Weird would be the biggest understatement of the century.
“Jimin and I can handle it,” you say, not wanting to disrupt the rest of the counselor dynamic just because you and Jimin are dealing with things right now. Besides, the teasing has always been in good fun, and you know the boys well enough to know that they aren’t doing it out of malicious intent. “But I appreciate your concern.”
“Just doing my job,” Namjoon says proudly. You stand there in silence for a few more seconds until he coughs awkwardly to fill up the space. “You can go now, by the way, Y/N. I just wanted to make sure you were doing alright.”
“I’m fine,” you promise, silently hoping that one day, when you talk to Namjoon, you won’t have to lie to him anymore. “Thanks for checking in.”
“I’ll always be here for you,” he says in that comforting way, that warm way that wraps around you like a mug of hot cocoa on a cold winter night.
You crack open the door to find Jimin, Taehyung, and Jungkook tossing around a frisbee on the open lawn as Seokjin and Yoongi watch from a picnic bench, soda cans sitting next to them. Someone must have mentioned the green lemonade. Jungkook purposely tosses the frisbee too high for Jimin to reach, making him jump wildly in a fruitless attempt to grab it. He falls backwards onto the soft grass, laughing alongside Taehyung and Jungkook as Taehyung pulls him back up to his feet.
You smile to yourself, the longing and the pain and the love settling deep within your heart, finding a home amongst the wishes and the dreams. Seeing him there, the widest smile on his face as he tosses around a frisbee with some of his best friends, letting the rays from the setting sun fill him up with joy, it reminds you why you fell in love with him. It reminds you why you’re still in love with him.
Something seizes up at your heart, clenching it between its fingers. That used to be you, the thing whispers. You used to make him laugh like that.
You did. From the moment you met him, you let his laughter fill your senses, burned the sound of it into your brain. You used to be so close. You used to think that maybe, just maybe, Jimin might love you back.
You should have never told him, it murmurs, grip growing tighter. Look at where it got you.
If I could turn back time and redo that night, I would, you fight back.
But you can’t.
The wicked thing releases your heart, lets it drop to the floor. You don’t pick it up.
Every year, you and the other counselors keep a scorecard on the chalkboard in the meeting room to see how quickly someone gets sent to the first aid tent, whether it be from stumbling over a twig or contracting poison ivy or drinking the green water. Last year, it took two hours and thirteen minutes.
This summer, it happens barely an hour after all of the campers have arrived.
You make a mental note to write down the time on the scorecard as you run over to help the poor boy off of the ground after slamming into a spruce tree while playing an early game of tag with his friends. The side of his cheek is imprinted with the texture of the tree bark, and he has some scrapes on his hands and knees from the fall.
“Whoa, hey, you alright?” You ask, leaning down to help him up. “You gotta watch where you’re looking, okay? Don’t want you to get hurt.”
The beauty about young children is that very little actually causes them great pain. If it weren’t for all of the overprotective counselors, the kids would probably run themselves into the cabin walls and trees for the entire duration of camp.
“I’m not hurt,” the young boy says, standing up proudly. “I’m fine. My mom says I have thick skin.”
“What’s your name?”
“Eli,” the boy tells you matter-of-factly. “That’s my cabin.” He points to the one to the west of the camp that Taehyung and Jungkook are in charge of. Why Namjoon continuously assigns them to the same cabin year after year is beyond you. Once, they convinced everybody in their cabin that Seokjin and Yoongi’s cabin was haunted, and the only solution was to out-scare the ghosts by yelling and screaming right outside.
“Is this your first year at camp?”
“Yup,” Eli says, rocking back and forth on his feet. He is not at all fazed by the blood and broken skin on his hands and knees, nor the pieces of wood and bark sticking out of the side of his face.
“Alright, Eli, even though you have thick skin, I have to take you to the first aid tent. Really quickly, okay? Just to make sure you aren’t gonna get an infection. Then you can go and tell all of your friends how thick your skin,” you say, already beginning to usher Eli towards the first aid tent.
“I think I have the thickest skin out of everyone here,” Eli says, as if goading you on.
“You know what? I have to agree with you,” you say. “I get hurt really easily. My mom always says that I need to be extra careful here.”
“I’m sick of listening to my mom,” Eli pouts, stomping on the ground as you lead him towards the first-aid tent.
“Me too,” you agree. No point in telling him that he needs to yield to his parents when he probably won’t even remember this conversation by the time he wakes up tomorrow. Besides, it’s never too early to begin teaching kids about rebelling against authority figures. “But you won’t have to listen to everything I say, okay? We’re just gonna be really good friends.”
“Like with my babysitter,” Eli says.
“Exactly,” you say, stopping right outside of the first-aid tent. You’re not even positive that anyone’s inside, especially since it’s barely been an hour since camp officially started. Hopefully, Jimin’s somewhere else so you can just patch Eli up yourself.
The first aid tent is not so much a tent as it is a shed with a fabric entrance, two curtains attached to a rod above the entryway to provide some semblance of privacy since nobody in the camp is handy enough to actually install a working door. But calling it the first aid tent is better than calling it the first aid shack, which, in the wise words of Yoongi, makes it sound like “a hospital where people go to die.”
When you push open the curtain, the first thing you notice is Jungkook and Seokjin in the far left corner, each with ice packs and suspiciously identical markings on them. They’re both making desperate attempts to patch each other up, fighting with the gauze and bandages that are laid out on the table beside them, as if in a competition to see who can better take care of the other.
Besides that, Jimin is lounging along the wall, leaning back against it as he gazes into nothing, deeply lost in thought. His eyes trace the lines of the shed, foot tapping to an imaginary beat, brows furrowed. You wonder what the hell it is that Jimin could possibly be thinking about so intently, what it is that is making him not even pay attention to the two overgrown children in the corner of his tent, attacking each other with first-aid materials.
Watching him, you almost don’t want to disturb him. Almost want to grab one of the kits on the shelf by the doorway and pull Eli outside, partly because you don’t think Jimin absolutely needs to be present for you to clean Eli’s wounds and give him some Spiderman Band-aids, and partly because you don’t think you can bear having to say hello to him.
Eventually, and only because Eli would start thinking it was weird you weren’t talking to each other (and not because a part of you just wants to hear his voice again), you take another step forward, coughing.
“Wha— oh, hi,” Jimin says, the sound of your arrival breaking him out of his trance. He rubs at the nape of his neck, clearly trying to brush off any awkwardness. “How can I help you guys?” His voice is unrecognizable.
“Eli here crashed into a tree while playing tag,” you say tensely, doing your best to look around the room, anywhere else, literally anywhere else, just so you don’t have to look at him. “I just brought him here to make sure he’s alright.”
“I’m fine,” Eli insists.
“Well, Eli, we just have to double check that,” Jimin says comfortingly, reaching down to bring Eli over to one of the benches. He sits him down and kneels so that he can be at eye-level with him, and says, “Sometimes our bodies say that they’re alright even when they really aren’t.” Out of the corner of his eye, Jimin meets your gaze, looking at you like there’s nothing left that you can do, looking at you like there is so much that he wants to say but no way to tell you.
You open your mouth, willing for the words to come out, but your throat is dry and your heart is pounding in your ears, a painful thud with every breath that you take. He must have known that what you said was a lie. He must have known what you were going to say when he asked, but he asked anyway, not to get the truth but to see where your relationship stands.
As it seems, your relationship doesn’t seem to be standing at all.
It lies in front of you, shattered into a million pieces like a broken mirror, cursed but still doing its job, still showing you this fragmented reflection of yourself. Mixed together like this, you can’t see where your friendship ends and your love began. Mixed together like this, it is impossible to repair.
“Y/N—” Jimin begins.
“I should go,” you say at the same time, making the two of you stop in your tracks once again. “Thanks for, uh, patching Eli up. Just make sure he gets to the mess hall in time for dinner.”
“I will,” Jimin says with a nod. There is so much that he wants to say but you don’t think you can bear listening to another word come out of his mouth, to another apology for not loving you back when it wasn’t even his fault to begin with.
You ruined your friendship but Jimin seems to think that he is the one to blame.
“I’ll see you at dinner?” Jimin asks.
You look back at him, wanting so desperately to say yes, to pretend that everything is back to normal, to act like this is the beginning of last summer instead of this one, where you loved him and he didn’t know and everything was alright. But you can’t, because it’s not last summer. It’s this one, and you still love him but he knows now. He fucking knows and just thinking about it makes your heart shake in its cage, holding itself together but unable to stop itself from cracking from within.
Jimin must have known you wouldn’t have agreed. Why did he ask?
“Wait, Y/N, hold up!”
You’re already halfway out of the makeshift door when you turn around to see Jungkook barrelling after you, leaving Seokjin in the dust as he joins you outside, pulling you away from the entrance instinctively. No one has ever been particularly good at keeping secrets here.
“Can I help you, Jungkook?” You ask, blinking at him, trying to act as normal as possible.
“Are you alright?” He leans in close, looking into your eyes, concern washed over his features.
“Everybody seems to be asking me this,” you say, acting like you don’t know why. “I’m fine.”
Jungkook, for all of his wide-eyed innocence, for the way that he views the world as perfectly imperfect, doesn’t buy it. “You don’t have to tell me anything,” he says. “I don’t know what went down between you and Jimin.”
“Nothing happened,” you say, forcing a laugh just so you don’t sound miserable.
“Whatever it is, I just want you to know that it doesn’t always have to be like this,” he says, reaching out to take your hand in his own, his calloused thumb rubbing soothingly against your skin. “But you should be honest with your feelings, don’t you think?”
“You and Namjoon both think that I don’t have a handle on this, when I do.” You don’t. And being honest with your feelings is what got you into this mess in the first place.
“Come on, Y/N, you don’t think we haven’t noticed, have you?” He asks, soft and sad and desperate to get through to you.
“It’s no big deal,” you insist. “Jimin and I are alright. We’ve always been alright.”
“If you say so…” says Jungkook, no less skeptical than he was when he initiated this conversation.
“Are we done here?” You ask, already pulling your hand from his grasp so you can go back to your cabin and pretend that the rest of the world doesn’t exist.
“Yeah,” Jungkook says, resigned as he lets you go. “But you know I’ll always be here for you, right?”
“I know, Jungkook,” you promise, because he always has and he always will be. “Thanks for looking out for me.” You begin to scurry away from the first aid tent, praying that Jimin didn’t hear you and Jungkook and wishing that everything was the way that it used to be.
“Be honest!” Jungkook shouts when you’re a hundred feet away, rushing back towards your cabin.
Jungkook wants you to be honest?
Telling Jimin that you love him ruined your life. It ruined camp, it ruined your friendship, and it ruined your future. Seeing him now makes your heart ache and your brain dizzy. Every night you replay that conversation in your head, over and over, wondering if there was something that you could have done differently, something that you could have changed so you wouldn’t have ended up like this. Jimin wants to be friends again but you don’t know how to do that without him feeling guilty for not loving you back.
You want to be honest?
Jimin makes you feel like there is a fire beneath your skin that you can’t extinguish, the flames creeping towards your heart.
The only solution, it seems, is to smother them.
The worst part about being in love with Jimin is that he’s impossible to avoid.
You peer into the mess hall to see if lunch that day is any good and you see him laughing at a table surrounded by elementary schoolers munching on hot dogs and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. You go hunting in the storage shed for some extra packs of popsicle sticks and find him cleaning out the old flower pots to use in the greenhouse. You lead your group of campers from the arts room to the lake and see him and Taehyung setting up the net for some friendly water polo, laughing as they try to tie each other up in the rope.
It feels like you��re watching a movie unfold in real time, one where he is the star and you are nothing but a background character, the desperate loser who confessed to him in the beginning of the film just to develop his character arc, make him seem personable and relatable, then forgotten about until the end when you spot each other on the street and nod silently to each other, as if to say you’ve both inexplicably reached a peace between the two of you.
Is that what the future holds for you? A wordless camp, an empty conversation? Will you simply go the rest of the summer without speaking, then nod to each other right before you leave? Will this be the last time you ever see each other?
The worst part about being in love with Jimin is knowing that just because you want things to be different doesn’t mean they will be. Just because you want Jimin to love you back doesn’t mean he will. Just because you want everything to go back to normal doesn’t mean they will.
As it turns out, love confessions don’t always end in fireworks.
Park Jimin is impossible to avoid not only because he’s everywhere but also because he is everybody’s best friend, the campers’ favorite counselor and the counselors’ favorite companion. He is kind and thoughtful and electric. He is magnetic. He makes others laugh without even trying, he names the plants in the greenhouse after the people he loves, he stays behind after activities to clean up when no one else will.
Falling in love with Jimin wasn’t you picking out your favorite traits of his, wasn’t you seeing him do one selfless thing and deciding that he could do no wrong. It was submerging yourself in the lake, little by little before you dive in headfirst. It was catching glimpses of his goodness until you were consumed by it. It was knowing that you prefer yourself when you’re around him.
Falling in love with Jimin was like the heat in summer—endless.
If only falling out of love with him would be just as easy.
The weather has been unusually nice today. There isn’t a cloud in the sky as the sun beats down on you, rays peeking through the tall branches and leaves of the spruce and oak trees that surround you, casting hazy shadows on the grass beneath your feet. It isn’t too muggy, isn’t too sticky and sweaty, this perfect medium between warm and hot, between dry and humid. It’s the sort of day that you romanticize every day of summer being, only to realize that summer actually consists of sweating through three different t-shirts and needing to eat your ice cream in ten seconds before it melts into a puddle on the concrete.
Nonetheless, camp policy has always been that when it’s a beautiful day, the campers are going to spend every hour they’re awake outside, going on nature walks and playing capture the flag and eating watermelon on the splinter-y picnic benches. It’s nice, because it gives you a break from having to tell the kids not to touch the tips of the glue guns, but it also stinks, because it forces you to leave your sweet, air-conditioned paradise in favor of a mosquito-infested summer hell.
Luckily, the kids have been washing off the summer heat in the cool water of the lake with the counselors that actually prefer being outside, playing volleyball in the shallows or canoeing out where it’s deeper. Sometimes, you wonder why Namjoon will let so few counselors supervise so many campers, and sometimes, you decide that it’s better them than you.
You take a seat on the picnic bench by Yoongi, who is drinking notably clearer lemonade than in days past, so you assume that Namjoon got the water problem fixed like he promised. The two of you have never been outdoorsy people. Why you’ve been working at a summer camp for the last three years escapes you both. You and him lean back against the edge of the built-in table. From here, you have a perfect view of the lake, clear and blue and filled to the brim with rambunctious children, keeping at least somewhat of a watch over them so that Namjoon can’t shout at either of you for slacking off.
“You know that Seokjin gave you murky water lemonade earlier, right?” You ask, just to make conversation.
“I know,” Yoongi says, wholly unfazed. He takes another sip and sighs, feeling refreshed. Without batting an eyelash, he deadpans, “You know that you and Jimin aren’t going to get any better if you don’t talk to each other, right?”
“What are you talking about?” You scoff, playing dumb.
“Just because all of those other idiots didn’t hear what went down between you and Jimin last summer doesn’t mean I didn’t,” Yoongi mutters monotonously.
You jerk up, stick straight at his words, eyes wide as you glare at him. He heard you?
Yoongi laughs at your reaction, reclining back impossibly farther. “Relax, I haven’t told anyone. You know it’s none of my business.”
“Well,” you sputter out, “if it’s none of your business then why are you talking to me about it?”
Yoongi frowns. “Because you’re my friend, Y/N. And I hate seeing you like this,” he says, that soft lilt to his voice peeking through the rigid words spilling from his lips. “I feel like I don’t even know who you are anymore. A lot of the other counselors do.”
You purse your lips together, guilty.
“Especially Jimin.”
“I just need time,” you say, trying to be honest for once in your life. Loving Jimin was never going to go away without a fight.
“You need to talk to each other,” corrects Yoongi.
“Talking is what got us into this mess,” you huff out, dejected. Yoongi heard it himself—your confession sent you and Jimin’s relationship down the garbage chute.
“And talking is what’s going to get you out of it,” Yoongi tells you pointedly, truthfully, in that horrible way where you know that he’s right but refuse to accept it. “Promise me you’ll try?” He reaches out to place a hand atop yours, looking into your eyes with hopeful promise. “We want you back.”
“I’ll try,” you sigh out, because it’s never been worth fighting with Yoongi. Not when he cares so deeply.
“Try what?”
You and Yoongi whip your heads around to find Jimin standing on the opposite side of the picnic bench, helping himself to a piece of sliced watermelon.
“Try enjoying the outdoors more,” Yoongi covers for you instantly, making you breathe out a little sigh of relief. “We both hate when Namjoon makes it an outside day.”
“It’s not that bad,” Jimin says with a smile. The only reason Jimin doesn’t mind it is because he gets the best of both worlds—half the day spent inside the first-aid tent, the other spent inside the greenhouse by the woods. “There’s beauty in everything.”
Yoongi scrunches up his nose. “Like that?”
In the distance, you spot three things: Jungkook and Taehyung, laughing evilly as they run down along the rocky beach. The clothes clutched in their hands, crumpled up in their grasps while they hoot and holler. And Seokjin, hair sopping wet and half-naked, with nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist and ugly lime green water shoes on, chasing after them.
“I’m out,” Yoongi says without missing a beat, grabbing his lemonade and dashing off to safety. Yoongi’s exit leaves you and Jimin standing there, stranded, frozen in place, as Jungkook and Taehyung rush by you, each grabbing a piece of watermelon on their way. Something falls from Jungkook’s hold as they pass you, and Jimin reaches down to pick it up. It’s one of Seokjin’s socks.
“Give that back, Park Jimin!” Seokjin’s banshee screech rings in your ears.
“Run,” Jimin says, and you don’t get another say in the matter before Jimin is grabbing your wrist and pulling you along with him, Seokjin’s angry caws echoing throughout the clearing.
Even though Jimin didn’t even actually steal his clothes from the locker room by the lake, Seokjin has determined that anyone who runs from him is automatically guilty, thus lumping both you and him into a wild goose chase alongside Jungkook and Taehyung, who are almost always the guilty parties when it comes to practical jokes like this. For a few moments, it’s the four of you running across the open field with Seokjin hot on all of your heels, desperate to catch up to at least one of you despite being severely out-matched, both in athletic ability and footwear, and then suddenly Jimin is pulling you behind the shed as Jungkook and Taehyung make a sharp right, headed in the opposite direction.
Crouched behind the shed, you and Jimin stop for a minute to catch your breath, chests heaving after doing more exercise in the last thirty seconds than you have in the last week alone. You’re pressed up against the back siding, and only after your heart rates finally slow down do you become faintly aware of Jimin’s hand still gripping your wrist, like he’s simply forgotten to let go.
“You think we lost them?” He asks with a wicked grin, and it’s impossible to avoid his gaze when he’s so close like this, when there’s barely a foot of space between your bodies, when his fingertips still press against your skin.
“I think so,” you heave out in response.
“Better stay here for a bit longer just in case,” Jimin says, and it’s the flirty sort of thing that he would say if it were last year, the flirty sort of thing that he would say if you two were friends like you used to be, but you aren’t anymore, and now it feels like Jimin is trying too hard and you aren’t trying hard enough.
“I… I mean,” you say, pulling your wrist out of his grasp, rubbing at where your skin sizzles from his touch. “We’re probably fine.”
“Are we?” He asks, and this is exactly why you shouldn’t try to talk to him, exactly why talking won’t erase the tension that has settled between you two, repair the cracks in what you are. You’re not fine, because everything changed when you told Jimin that you loved him, and you’ve never been good at adjusting. You’re not fine, because for the first time in your years-long relationship, loving him is getting in the way.
“I hope we are,” you admit, more to yourself than anyone else. Oh, how you so desperately wish that things were back to normal. Oh, how it would be so easy if only things were just a little bit different.
“Me too,” Jimin says, and he smiles and, oh, how it makes you feel real and true and whole. He stands back up and reaches an arm out to help you do the same. For once, it doesn’t feel like a Band-aid on top of a stab wound. It feels like a lifeline.
You let Jimin help you back to your feet, and for some reason your heart feels just a little bit lighter.
“You think we’re alright?” Jimin asks.
“Yeah,” You respond with a nod. “I think we will be.”
One thing that Namjoon is big on is interdisciplinary recreation. This is half due to the fact that he attends a private liberal arts school on the east coast and half due to the fact that he doesn’t always trust some of the counselors when it comes to chaperoning a whole group of kids on their own. You aren’t going to name names, but they’re the same people that steal clothes for fun.
He’s got a list up on one of those massive sheets of lined paper filled with suggestions for all sorts of things that combine two or more of the basic activities the camp offers, ranging from making handmade bird seed treats in the kitchen to put out on nature walks to dodgeball in canoes. Some of Namjoon’s ideas are a lot more feasible than others.
Namjoon’s never been a pushy person. He’s repeatedly said that he purposely avoids telling people what to do within their activity sectors because he doesn’t want the counselors to think that he’s stepping all over them or doesn’t trust them to come up with their own entertainment. The list in the counselor meeting room is titled: ACTIVITY SUGGESTIONS, bolded and circled, just so everyone knows that he isn’t forcing you to do anything (if you’re being honest, the emphasis on suggestions somewhat works against his whole niche). But sometimes, especially for someone whose greatest fear is stripping away others’ creative freedom, he can be rather insistent.
Take, for example, the two stacks of plain flower pots left anonymously inside the arts and crafts room when you walk in to set up the activity for the day. You were originally going to have the younger kids color in their own guitars to hang up in the music room—an activity that was not on the activity suggestions list—and give the older ones some clay and let them go to town, but you suppose that decorating flower pots will be just as entertaining. At least you didn’t have to go hunting for the materials.
The only problem with decorating flower pots is that, once the campers have painted streaks and polka dots and glued charms all over them, the flower pots have a rather specific place to go. A place that is part of a notable Park Jimin’s domain.
A sneaky little feeling beneath your skin suspects that someone may have let it slip to Namjoon that you and Jimin could do with a bit of relationship repair. And Namjoon and Yoongi have been bunking in the same cabin for as long as you can remember.
Sighing to yourself as you begin to set up the flowerpots on old newspapers spread out on the wooden tables, you decide that spending an hour with Jimin in the greenhouse (maybe even less if you can find an excuse to get yourself out of there!) couldn’t be any worse than being crouched down behind that cobwebbed old shed with his hand on your wrist and his eyes gazing into yours. At least you’ll have thirty campers to maintain the distance between the two of you.
You suppose that you do have the easier of the two jobs. Arts and crafts is a rather simple activity to oversee, barring the occasional papercut or glue gun burn. Luckily, painting flower pots means that you will really only have to worry about the campers mod-podging their fingers together, and even then, the bathroom is just down the hall. Jimin, with his having to wrangle the kids to garden neatly and not hit each other with the trowels, is going to have it much harder.
There’s a part of you that knows you’ll stick around. Not just to lessen the load of campers for him, but just so you can spend a little more time in the same room, breathing the same air, pretending that things are the way that they used to be.
When you leave the arts and crafts room to hike the ten minutes to the greenhouse, followed by all of the campers dutifully carrying their brand new flowerpots in their hands, you feel like a young bird leaving the nest. Taught to fly little by little, but one day forced to face the real world and exist without the safety net you’ve called home for so long. The arts and crafts room hasn’t always been your favorite place in the camp, but this year it’s felt like you’ve been holding on particularly tight.
Jimin is already waiting happily in the greenhouse for your arrival, this stupid old gardening apron tied around his waist with a faded picture of a cartoon cactus on the front that says free hugs. He watches fondly as all of the kids shuffle into the greenhouse, the whole room just barely big enough to fit all of you, wide eyes peeking out from behind seed packets and green leaves.
You stay in the back corner as Jimin gets to work, having all of the campers place their pots on the tables in front of them, bright plastic buckets of soil at the ends of their tables, flower seeds waiting to be planted.
As much as Jimin is fantastic at patching kids up inside the first aid tent, the greenhouse is where he really belongs. The harsh rays of the sun are softened by the glass walls as they beam down on him, surrounding him with this warm yellow halo, painting him into the scenery behind him. Here, amongst the lush vegetables and flowers and ferns, Jimin doesn’t look like an underpaid camp counselor carrying the weight of thirty children on his back. He looks like this fairy in the woods, this forest sprite that has grown up amongst the trees and the moss and the wildflowers, who has learned to tend to the world’s greatest garden. He looks like someone whose mere presence makes the plants smile a little wider.
Jimin’s like that with everyone. It should come as no surprise to you that the plants feel better when they’re around him, too.
Jimin has always been so good with kids. More so than any of the other counselors, really, though they all try their best to be fun and friendly and gentle and stern all at once. But there’s something in Jimin’s nature that just makes him the best at it, something about the way he cares for them so deeply, something about the soft lines of his face that earns him their trust the fastest. He’s good with everything that camp throws at him, from frisbees to murky water to lake monsters, but nothing has ever seemed quite as right for him as his connection with the campers.
The children don’t know how lucky they are to know someone like Jimin. Someone who believes wholeheartedly in the goodness of others, someone who will stop at nothing to fix what has been broken.
You think about how lucky you are to love someone like Jimin every day of your life.
“Mr. Jimin?” A squeaky little voice pipes up. It’s a young girl named Zoe, whose flower pot is decorated with a painting of her entire family, a group of four stick figures with red shirts and purple dresses holding hands together, loopy smiles drawn onto their faces.
“Just Jimin, alright?” Jimin corrects.
“Are you sure these seeds are going to turn into flowers?” Zoe asks, looking skeptically at the packets in front of her.
Jimin laughs, and it is as warm as the rays of the sun that stream through the glass walls. “I can’t promise that they will, Zoe.”
“Then why are we doing this?” She pouts.
“Because,” Jimin says, pointing to the packets in front of the campers, “the only way that I can promise that these seeds will turn into flowers is if you guys can promise to love them. Because no matter how much sun they get, no matter how much you water them, they will only bloom if you really, really love them.”
“How do they know?” Another girl pipes up.
“Flowers are just like us,” Jimin tells her gently. “They can feel when they’re loved, and they love us back by blooming for us.” He shuffles around the back of the greenhouse where he stands, fishing through the shelves lining the walls until he emerges with a rather large pot in his hands, placing it down on the table beside him with a thud. “Take this hydrangea, for example.”
Your breath catches in your throat, the blue flowers flashing before your eyes.
You planted those together. Last summer. You and Jimin snuck out to the greenhouse while everyone else was eating potato salad for lunch and spent the hour listening to pop songs from the eighties and planting a baby hydrangea.
They will bloom every year, Jimin said.
So they’ll always remind us of us, you responded.
It’s the first time that you and Jimin have looked at each other since you entered the greenhouse. He catches you off-guard, eyes wide as you stare back at him, suddenly feeling this gut-wrenching ache from deep within your belly. And Jimin—
God, Jimin looks like he’s tried everything under the sun and moon to keep that damn hydrangea from wilting.
“They were planted early last summer. And they bloomed, right? But they look so sad,” Jimin explains, rallying himself and turning his gaze away from you. “And I gave them new soil and watered them regularly, but I’m still missing something.”
“Love!” Zoe shouts.
“Right,” Jimin says with a tense nod, eyes flickering to yours once more. Your shoulders slump. “But I have a lot of love to give, so hopefully they’ll be alright soon. You guys just have to remember that love is the most important thing that you can give to your flowers. Just like you and me, the flowers need to know that there is someone who loves them.”
But you do know, you want to shout out to him. You’ve known this whole summer and you knew back at the campfire and you probably knew even before that. You’ve known for so long and still the flowers that we planted together are fucking wilting. Like they can’t even bear that this is what we’ve come to. What do you mean, they need to know that there is someone who loves them? You do. And I love you. You must know that, don’t you?
You feel the vines of a thorny rose wrap around your heart, clenching it tight. It’s been in bloom for a year now, thick red petals filling up the empty spaces between your bones, nectar swimming within your veins. And when you picked it, cut it off at its stem to place in Jimin’s hand, it grew only stronger, bloomed only harder.
Oh, if only that hydrangea knew how much you loved him.
Afterwards, you stay back to help clean up. There’s soil all over the floor, buckets knocked over in the campers’ frenzy to go play games in the gym with Jungkook, discarded paper seed packets and trowels left littered across the tables.
Jimin doesn’t put on any eighties music. Instead, you stand there in silence, brushing the leftover soil into dust pans and buckets, placing the gardening tools on the rack by the entrance.
Even though you know flowers don’t wilt that fast, it feels like with every second that passes, the hydrangea is a moment closer to death. The color seems to fade every time you look at them, going from its vibrant pale blue to a sallow green, no longer able to tolerate being in the same room as the two of you.
Your love doesn’t seem like it’s going to fix it this time.
“I didn’t know that it was doing so badly,” you say, and the words don’t even feel like they belong to you when you hear them back, making Jimin stop dead where he stands.
“What?” He asks.
“The hydrangea.”
Jimin looks over at the pot on the table, and he sighs, helpless. “I’ve tried everything. It just doesn’t seem to be working with me this year.”
It’s no secret to the both of you why.
“Hopefully you can figure something out,” you offer alongside a half smile. “I would hate to see them die after only a year in bloom.”
“Me too,” Jimin sighs.
“How have you been?” You ask him, because you never really did get a real answer when you asked him that very first day. And because no matter what you do, you’ll always be curious about him.
“Alright,” Jimin says, and it’s not a lie. “I’m looking forward to graduating next year.”
“Yeah, me too,” you say, even though you’re only looking forward to the not-being-in-college part of graduating. Not so much the being-chucked-into-the-real-world part. “How’s the major coming along?”
“Well, physics never gets any easier,” Jimin jokes, and even though it’s a little bit forced it makes the two of you both laugh, desperate to get back to the way that things used to be, step by step. “What about you? Still going for English?”
“With a side of business so that I don’t end up a broke poet,” you remind him. “But yeah.”
“Maybe you can write me into one of your stories,” Jimin suggests.
Oh, but doesn’t he know already? He’s the main character in every single one. All of your poems are about him. He is your inspiration and your muse. He fills up each blank page all on his own. Doesn’t he know?
“Maybe,” you agree, even though there has never been a ‘maybe’ when it comes to him.
You nearly drop the plastic bucket of soil on your toe when you hear his next question.
“Have you, uh, been seeing anyone lately?” Jimin scratches at the nape of his neck, clearly nervous. Your heart sinks. Out of all of the possible questions he could ask you to keep this relatively casual conversation going, he chooses that one?
You look up at him, wondering why on earth he’s asking you this when your love has already been laid out bare in front of him, every corner unfolded so he can read across the lines like a map, memorize the splotches of color. You look up at him and you are helpless, desperate for him to realize that even with thousands of miles and hundreds of days between you, for you, it has always been him.
You wonder if the only reason he’s asking is to see if you were starting to move on.
“No,” you mutter lifelessly. “I haven’t.” And then, like a devilish whisper in your ear, “Have you?”
You almost expect him to say yes. You almost expect to hear him recount all of the fantastic dates he’s been on, all of the loving relationships he’s been in, but instead, he says, “Me neither.”
And that? That makes your heart stop dead in its tracks.
“I tried to, you know,” Jimin says, and each word is a puncture wound inside of you. “But I just couldn’t. Nothing really stuck.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” you tell him, because you are. Because Jimin deserves to love someone who will love him back. Someone that isn’t you, someone who hasn’t been hopelessly pining after him for a year.
“No, it’s alright.” Jimin shrugs. “I’m kind of glad that nothing stuck.”
And if hearing the words “me neither,” leave his lips made your heart freeze up, then hearing these words set it aflame. You don’t respond, instead choosing to let the words etch themselves into your memory, carve themselves into your heart, give you hope, if only a droplet of it. Any is enough to have your heart beating a little faster.
“I miss this,” Jimin breathes out, and if you closed your eyes and pretended that you were somewhere else it would almost sound like a confession. You glance up at him, and he is so empty, clinging hopelessly onto the remnants of things past just like you, and you realize that being honest is really the only option you have left. “I miss doing stuff like this.”
The with you goes unspoken, but it rings loud and clear in your ears anyway.
“I miss it too,” you say, because Jimin must know already, doesn’t he? How if you could choose to go on loving him without him ever knowing, then you would do it in an instant? How loving him silently was painful but loving him like this, unbearable. “I feel like it’s been a long time.”
A long time since you both really spoke to each other. A long time since you were friends the way you used to be. A long time since you first began to love him.
“Can’t we go back?” Jimin asks, a foolish question. He should know better than to ask for something he already knows he can’t get.
“You know we can’t,” you tell him. You’ve already tried.
“Then can we begin again?” He proposes, the two of you meeting in the middle of the greenhouse, right in front of the hydrangea. You hadn’t even realized you were barely three feet away from him until you were already there. “Please? I miss us, Y/N. Don’t you miss us, too?”
Gazing at Jimin, you feel your heart tremble. One thing that hasn’t changed is how weak you are to his touch, to his eyes, to the way that they make every part of you feel like jelly, feel like you’ll collapse without him to hold you up. You’ve never been able to say no to him. It’s one of the things you don’t think you’ll ever outgrow.
“We can try,” you say, because being honest may be hard, and talking even harder, but now you would rather try to piece yourselves back together than spend the rest of the summer wondering what to do with the shattered remains on the floor, stepping around them instead of cleaning them up, repairing what has been broken.
It’s like the words are music to Jimin’s ears, the way he lights up, grinning wide and real and true. He inhales and it feels like a breath of fresh air, like a brand new season has come to rest upon the two of you. It feels like relief. It feels like hope. It feels like new.
You hadn’t realized it before, but you’ve been dying to make him smile.
Next to you, the hydrangea seems just a little bit brighter.
It’s getting easier.
No longer are you turning in the opposite direction whenever you see him hanging around the center of camp, praying that he hasn’t spotted you from where you stand. Nor are you making excuses about having to go help Namjoon with something or run back to your cabin whenever he shows up to spend time with you and the other counselors.
And even though it’s still a little tense when you accidentally look up at the same time and meet eyes, even though it still feels like you two aren’t quite the same, it’s getting easier.
You’ve even begun to eat lunch together again.
It’s not exactly like it was before, not like when you would scurry off to the greenhouse or the shed or some other hidden place, spread out a picnic blanket and bask in each other’s company, laughing about anything and everything, but it’s better. It’s better than how it used to be, when you would always bring your lunch back to your cabin to eat in silence, drown yourself in your comforter and your thoughts, letting them pile on top of you, one by one. It’s better than how you used to pretend that you didn’t even know each other.
Slowly, step by step, things have almost started to feel normal again.
“You guys seem happier lately,” Taehyung commends mindlessly as he sits down across from you and Jimin, three pieces of meat lover’s pizza on the paper plate he sets on the tabletop.
You and Jimin smile at each other. You suppose that you have been.
“Three, Tae?” The moment gone too soon, Jimin’s focus is immediately redirected to the behemoth meal in front of Taehyung. “Seriously? Aren’t you lactose intolerant?”
“The meat balances it out,” Taehyung says matter-of-factly, even though it definitely doesn’t. He takes an enormous bite out of one of the slices, eating nearly half the pizza in a single chomp. “But seriously, I mean it. You guys look a lot happier. Yoongi!”
Yoongi freezes in his tracks from where he’s walking by your table, spilling his open soda can all over his plate of pizza at Taehyung’s shout of his name.
“Don’t you think that Jimin and Y/N seem happier?” Taehyung asks, motioning to the both of you.
“I don’t know,” Yoongi says with a shrug, aloof as always. You chuckle to yourself, knowing fully well that it was him who got Namjoon to leave two stacks of flower pots in the arts and crafts room to give you an extra push towards talking with Jimin. Taehyung huffs, disappointed but not surprised that Yoongi contributed so little to the conversation, but he doesn’t notice how Yoongi gives you a smile and a thumbs up as he heads over to where Namjoon and Hoseok are sitting.
“Well, I think you guys do,” Taehyung says pointedly.
“Did we seem… unhappy to you?” Jimin asks, an eyebrow raised.
“No,” says Taehyung. “I don’t know, you guys just seemed different. You know, I was talking with Jin and he and I were convinced that the two of you were dating last year and then broke up sometime before this summer because you guys were acting so weird earlier.”
“Really?” You ask, cracking an awkward smile just to keep the mood light because god, Taehyung really is a lot more observant than you give him credit for. “That’s so funny, honestly.” It’s not. “You know that we’re just friends, Tae.”
Next to you, Jimin is staring down his lunch like it’s insulted his family. Out of the corner of your eye, you watch as he opens his mouth to say something, anything, goddamnit, anything that will make you feel like you’re not the only one who wants you two to be friends again. Anything that will remind you that being friends is all you have left because he will never love you back.
“You could have fooled me,” Taehyung acknowledges. “Seokjin was pretty convinced, too. We even had a bet going to see which one of you would admit it first.”
“You guys bet on us?” Jimin asks, a little horrified and a lot of something else, something that you can’t quite place.
“Not with money!” Taehyung defends. “Marshmallows for the end-of-camp counselor campfire. But neither of you ever said anything so we ended up just dropping it and ate as many marshmallows as we wanted.”
Oh, if only Taehyung knew. Oh, if only he had heard you that night, heard you pour your heart out in front of that fire. Oh, if only he had noticed, noticed the warm yellow glow that made Jimin look like he had been bathed in candlelight, noticed those roasted marshmallows over the heat, noticed the words that replay in your head like a broken record.
There’s a part of you that wants to know who Taehyung was betting on. A part of you that is wondering why on earth would either of them ever assume that Jimin would be the one to confess first when he has only ever seen you as a friend and you have always seen him as something more. Seen him as this dream come to life, seen him as the answer to all of your prayers.
Jimin never would have confessed first. That hasn’t changed.
“Thinking back, it was kind of stupid of us to bet on you guys when you hadn’t even confirmed anything,” Taehyung says with a sigh, pursing his lips together tightly. “I don’t know. I guess that Seokjin and I both really, really wanted you guys to get together.” He chuckles, but it isn’t funny anymore.
Believe me, Tae, you think to yourself. You guys weren’t the only ones.
“Eh,” Taehyung hums, shrugging to himself. He clearly isn’t as caught up about it as you and Jimin, who wonder every day how different things would be if you had just kept your damn mouth shut that night, if you had never loved him in the first place. “I guess I’m just glad to see you both smiling again.”
“Thanks, Tae,” you say, because even if Taehyung doesn’t know the whole story he’s still hit the nail on the head, and even if he can’t pick up the way that Jimin’s body has tensed up beside you, even if he doesn’t notice how normal feels like the furthest thing to describe the two of you right now, he has always wanted the both of you to be content.
“Makes me kinda sad to know you guys are just friends, even though I’m obviously not going to force you into anything.” Taehyung takes another bite of his pizza, the words just conversational to him even if they clearly aren’t to either of you.
Slowly, Jimin looks back up from his lunch, like he’s finally made up his mind. You meet Jimin’s eyes when he does, and for once you don’t dare jump into the swirling sea of his irises, for once you can hardly tell if the waves are calm or rough. For once, it feels like Jimin is looking at you the way you look at him—helplessly.
Taehyung smiles, looking fondly at the both of you. “You guys would have been cute together,” he says it because he means it. “You make each other so happy.”
He means that part, too.
The end-of-camp show is a longstanding tradition where all of the kids, divided by age group, celebrate the best part about summer and going to a sleepaway camp: being away from their parents. There are dance performances choreographed by the counselors (namely Hoseok, who has the most free time because his other job mainly consists of making sure Namjoon doesn’t lose his head), a guitar performance organized by Seokjin (who has promised not to rickroll everyone this year), and an art show setup by you to display all of the treasures that the campers have created. But your favorite part of the show is how, no matter how much time time is spent practicing and rehearsing, the performance will always end in chaos. The only predictable thing about it is its unpredictability.
This year, as suggested by Hoseok and immediately implemented by Namjoon, the counselors are being roped into a performance of their own, one that is bound to be even more disastrous because even though you can all listen to directions, you are all also just as capable of purposely disobeying them.
Part of you suspects that the only reason Hoseok even recommended that you all do this is because he enjoys watching the camp counselor collective crash and burn. Like there’s something cathartic about watching you go up in flames.
Nevertheless, you do it, because if not for yourselves then for Hoseok, and if not for him then for Namjoon, both of whom tirelessly to make sure that camp is a place where you and the other counselors can do the dumbest things without repercussions. If it weren’t for the two of them, camp would be a lot less fun.
Hoseok also just absolutely relishes in being in charge of something, something that involves dancing and singing and performing, which are his favorite things to do, and it would be cruel of all of you to deny Hoseok this opportunity, if only for a silly little camp performance.
Hoseok manages to wrangle a time and space for rehearsal thanks to one of those magic scientists that perform cool things with chemicals, one that Namjoon has arranged to visit camp to give you and the other counselors a much-needed break from the endless excitement of children.
And so, you all trickle into the empty counselor meeting room at three in the afternoon exactly, waiting to see what the hell Hoseok has come up with now.
All of the tables, chairs, and other miscellaneous furniture has been pushed up against the walls, leaving just enough room for all of you to fit relatively comfortably, with Hoseok standing smack in the middle of the room, looking proud.
“I’m scared,” Hazel admits to you as you pass by Hoseok to stand where the rest of the counselors have gathered. You sneak a peek at the clipboard in Hoseok’s hand, which isn’t empty this time, and is instead filled with sheets of paper that look like they belong in the hands of a sports coach, X’s and O’s and arrows littering the pages.
“Don’t be,” you say, though the tremble of your voice is probably doing very little to calm her nerves. You end up grouped together with Jimin and Yoongi, who are both standing in silence, waiting for something to pull them out of their thoughts. “Hey,” you say softly, giving Jimin a nudge.
“Hey,” Jimin responds, face lifting a little when he sees you. From behind him, Yoongi is eyeing the both of you, but he doesn’t seem very worried. Jimin laughs tensely. “I’m nervous about what Hoseok has in mind for us.”
You glance over to Hoseok as he talks animatedly with Namjoon, who looks a little bit in over his head. Namjoon must have known that Hoseok would spare no expense when it came to a counselor performance.
“I’m sure it won’t be that bad,” you assure him with a squeeze to his wrist, making him smile weakly at you.
“First Namjoon makes us sit outside, and then he makes us do exercise?” Yoongi huffs. “When will it end?”
“High time he got you out of the damn kitchens,” Jungkook mutters to himself, making all of the other counselors within earshot laugh. Yoongi turns around to give Jungkook half of a noogie before Hoseok claps to get everyone’s attention.
“Alright, hi everyone!” Hoseok cheers. “Glad you all could make it.”
“Did we have a choice?” Seokjin asks.
“Nope!” Hoseok grins. “Anyway, as you know, this year Namjoon and I have been thinking of doing a counselor performance at the end-of-camp show to show unity and entertain the kids, since they’re the ones who have been doing all of the work thus far to make the camp show a reality. And I, as your assistant head counselor and dance choreographer, get to set it up!”
“Oh, God,” Taehyung says.
“It’s not going to be a super serious thing because this is camp and we’re literally performing for prepubescent children, so don’t worry!” He says, doing nothing to ease people’s worries. He turns around to face the chalkboard, and begins to magnet the pieces of paper from his clipboard onto it, page by page, as the rest of you stare on in horror. “But I have come up with a bit of a dance for us to perform…”
“Oh, God,” Seokjin repeats dramatically.
“Anyway,” Hoseok says, clapping his hands together once more to redirect everyone’s attention from the mess on the board back to him. “It’ll be a bit of a partner dance for the first half, and then everyone gets about five seconds worth of a solo in the middle where you can do whatever you want—” when Hoseok spots Jungkook, Taehyung, and Seokjin already beginning to scheme, wicked smiles widening, he quickly adds, “—within reason, and then a big old group thing to finish it up. Does that sound good?”
“Whoop,” Yoongi deadpans.
“Great!” Hoseok says, fumbling for another piece of paper in the stack that he still has left on his clipboard.
“God, a partner dance?” You ask awkwardly, feeling noticeably more worried than before. It’s not that you’re dreading having to dance, or even having to perform in front of a bunch of kids, it’s the idea of having to dance with someone else, a specific someone else in particular, that has your stomach doing flips. “Why did Hobi think that was a good idea?”
“It might be fun, don’t you think?” Jimin says, trying to keep the mood light. It’s clear he has no worries about the potential for being paired up with you, which might have been able to fly last year but this summer, you’re not so sure. You and Jimin just managed to start eating lunch together again without wanting to curl into a ball and hide. What’s going to happen if you have to dance with each other?
“I’m not a very good dancer,” you admit, a weak excuse for your real fear.
“Then I’ll teach you,” Jimin says, and the words are hopeful and filled with light as he works so desperately to remind you that not all has been lost. That you can begin again.
“Okay, partners,” Hoseok says, looking at his list. “Namjoon and Yoongi, Jungkook and Seokjin, Taehyung and Hazel, Maria and Ruby, Jia-yi and Quinn, and Jimin and Y/N.”
Shit.
Yoongi, noticing your alarm, immediately interrupts, “Uh, is it possible for us to switch partners?”
“Why?” Hoseok asks innocently.
And in that split second, that moment of pause, you look from the wide-eyed Yoongi to Jimin, who is gazing back at you like he’s finally got it right, like he’s finally been given an opportunity to fix what you had broken, to repair your relationship, brick by brick, if only for a stupid counselor performance. Jimin, who is smiling and smiling and smiling because you are finally eating lunch together and you are finally watering that damn hydrangea and you finally get to dance together, and everything in the world is slowly beginning to feel right, the dust is beginning to settle after a month’s worth of storms.
You inhale, then you exhale, and you say, “I’m fine with my partner. I don’t think we need to switch, do we?”
And you swear, your heart feels lighter already.
Jimin pops into the arts and crafts room more often these days. Sometimes he actually does it because he needs to drop something off, because a camper left something in the greenhouse or because Namjoon is making him, but most times, he does it just to say hi, just to charm all of the campers as they make collages out of old magazines or glue together fabric for no-sew pillows.
And every time he does it, every time there is that familiar knock on the door, you nearly tumble over yourself from excitement. The best part about it is how normal it’s all beginning to feel, how familiar it is. You are almost back to where you used to be.
Almost back to when you loved him, and he didn’t know, and everything was alright.
Today, the kids are making cards for you to mail back home before the summer is done, before camp comes to a close and they return to their lives and you return to yours. Normally, you’d automatically send the letters back to the parents, but this time, you offer up an alternative.
“These cards are going to be mailed back home to the people that you love,” you say, holding up your own as an example. It’s a basic one, yellow cardstock with daisies made out of construction paper glued onto it, but it serves as a good guideline for whatever the campers want to do with their own. “You just need to provide their address so that we can make sure it gets to the right person.”
“It doesn’t have to be our parents?” One boy asks.
“Nope,” you say with a smile, shaking your head. “You can send it to anyone you love. It’s just to let them know how you are, and that you miss them.”
“Who are you sending yours to?” A different girl, Rose, asks.
“I’m not sure yet,” you say, because you don’t really need to let your parents know how you are when you text each other constantly, and all of your friends from back home can see all of the shenanigans you get up to on your social media, but a letter is no fun if only one person ever gets to read it.
“You should send it to Jimin,” Rose suggests matter-of-factly, making you sputter out the water you were taking a sip of all over the table in front of you.
“Jimin?” You repeat, forcing a smile. “I see Jimin all the time.”
“But you really like him, don’t you?” She asks, even though she obviously already knows the answer. Goddamn, kids pick up on everything. “I can tell.”
“Is that so?” You return, eyebrows raised.
“Yeah, me too!” The boy chirps up. “You always look so nervous whenever he comes to say hello. Like you don’t know what to say. That’s what my mom looks like whenever she comes home from a new date with a boy she really likes.”
You do? That is news to you.
“It’s okay, though,” Rose interrupts. “I think that he really likes you too. Otherwise he wouldn’t just be popping in every other day to say hello!”
“Maybe he really likes seeing you guys, instead!” You offer, feeling your cheeks heating up at the thought that you and Jimin have laid yourselves out bare like a board book for everyone to read.
“I don’t think so. He looks too happy when he sees you.” The girl shakes her head. “You should send your card to him, so he knows that you love him.”
Oh, he knows, that’s for sure, you think to yourself. There’s no way that Jimin hasn’t already realized that you still love him. That you have always loved him. Even the campers have it figured out, and they’re still in elementary school. But you think that the worst part of this, the worst part of all of these freakishly observant children verbally beating you up with reminders of your relationship with Jimin, is how they seem to think that Jimin likes you back. That Jimin sees you as something more.
Because he didn’t, last year. And he didn’t, earlier this summer. And there is no way things have changed that much.
“You guys should keep working on your cards,” you say, desperate for the subject to drop, desperate to talk about anything, literally anything, besides Jimin. “We want to send them by the end of the week so that the people you love will get them before camp’s over.”
“So you do like him!” The boy exclaims.
“Cards, Oliver!” You reprimand him, earning a chorus of giggles, though there is no mistaking the way your body has tensed, the way your words are shaking. No mistaking how your heart trembles at the thought of Jimin, sweet, wonderful, beautiful Jimin, actually liking you back.
It can’t be.
You and Jimin have always just been friends. That’s all you’ll ever be. You swear.
You swear.
“The hydrangea looks better,” you comment as you enter the greenhouse, eyes immediately darting towards the pot on the table at the front. In it, the hydrangea has blossomed fully, its petals a vibrant sky blue, basking in the faint glow of the sun as it streams into the greenhouse, peeking between the misty gray clouds, painting everything with a hazy yellow warmth.
“It does, doesn’t it?” Jimin asks from where he’s wrestling with an enormous packet of soil, pausing his battle to turn and look at the blossom, smiling to himself. “I think we must have worked some sort of magic.”
“Or maybe it’s just your expert gardening skills,” you tease, hauling in some plants by the door that Jimin has been meaning to bring inside the greenhouse for days now. “I’m not in here enough to make any sort of noticeable difference.”
Jimin scoffs disbelievingly. “You’re in here almost as much as I am nowadays.”
“Just to help out,” you defend weakly, pouting to yourself. It’s not like you’ve completely abandoned your air-conditioned arts and crafts room to fool around in the balmy greenhouse, soil underneath your fingernails and seeds stuck to your clothes. You just prefer to spend your free time here. Nothing criminal about that.
Plus, Jimin sure doesn’t seem to mind.
“And for that, I thank you,” says Jimin with a grin, the bag of soil finally beginning to cooperate with him. He hauls it over his shoulder to bring into the back room, where he keeps all of the bigger tools and plants that are too advanced for the campers, and you pretend not to ogle the way his biceps bulge as he carries the soil away, the bag easily fifty pounds or more.
What? You didn’t fall in love with Jimin just because of his electric personality.
“Besides, you come into the arts room so often that all the kids are starting to think you work there instead of here,” you remind him pointedly. He laughs, and the sound bounces off of the glass walls, filling up the room.
Jimin comes out of the back room, a little bit of soil smudged onto his cheek from his gloves, and he’s smiling. “Maybe I just like seeing you.”
“Next time we do a craft I’ll make sure to prepare an extra one so you can do it with us,” you joke, ignoring the way his words warm you from the inside out, convincing yourself that this is what it was like last year, too, so Jimin doesn’t mean anything by it.
Convincing yourself that Jimin has never loved you the way that you love him.
“Am I going to be allowed to sit next to you?” He asks as he walks up to where you’re working, that same flirty lilt to his voice, that teasing tone that he always used to use on you, especially whenever it came down to spending time together.
“Only if you’re good,” you chide in response, leaning over to pick up a flower pot just so you don’t have to see his damn face, so you don’t have to see the way his eyes glint in the sun as he toys with you, as he presses all of your buttons with ease.
Obviously, you had seriously miscalculated how far away he was, because by the time you’re standing up straight he’s right behind you, playfully pinching at your waist, the sensation sending an electric jolt through your veins. You jump and gasp at the feeling, nearly dropping the goddamn flower pot, body suddenly turning to jelly. Behind you, Jimin is in stitches.
“I could have dropped this!” You scold him as he doubles over in laughter, giggling and giggling and giggling, so much so that you can’t even pretend to be angry at him, too endeared by his happiness, by his pure joy, to shout at him any more.
“You’ve always been so ticklish, Y/N,” Jimin says between puffs of air, trying to catch his breath.
“I am not! You just surprised me!” You defend, even though Jimin’s right and he knows it. Your outrage leaves him in hysterics still, amused by the way you so easily fall right into his trap.
“Whatever you say,” he singsongs, helping you haul in the last of the flowerpots. “I think that’s the last of them.”
“Next time I show up, a whole different part of the greenhouse will need work,” you say with a sigh, because no matter how much you do, no matter how much you clean and reorganize, there will always be something left.
“The work is never done,” Jimin says with a smile, having already resigned himself to this fate. “But I think it looks pretty good.”
And looking at the greenhouse, looking at the vibrant hues that fill the room, from the rich golden marigolds to the bright pink lilies, from the rich green leaves to the soft blue hydrangea, you have to agree. It’s no wonder why Jimin loves this place so much, spends so much time in it despite its severe lack of circulation and the absence of reliable shade. It’s because everything in here he has had a hand in making. Everything in here is here because of him.
This place will never not remind you of him.
“It’s getting late,” Jimin says, checking his watch. “You think they have dinner ready for us?”
“God, I hope so,” you say with a sigh. “I’m starving.”
“Then shall we feast?” He asks, holding his arm out for you to take.
You wrap your arm around his own, and you grin. “We shall.”
Then the thunder cracks, and the sky begins to sob.
You’re barely three feet out the door before you feel the wet splotches on your shoulders, cold drops on your skin, made thicker by the leaves above your head, forcing you to retreat back into the greenhouse. Thanks to the glass, the raindrops that hit the rooftop ring like mallets on a drum, booming and loud, echoing throughout the room.
“Damn,” Jimin says, staring out at the once sunny clearing, now shrouded in a grey haze. “It was sunny two minutes ago.”
“It’s just a summer storm,” you assure, arm still wrapped up tight in his own. “They never last long.”
“Think we should wait it out?” He asks.
“Whatever you want to do.”
Jimin grins, squeezing you tight. “How about this? Five minutes, and if it doesn’t stop, we make a run for it?”
You nod. “Five minutes.”
Five minutes pass and the rain has no intention of letting up, seemingly getting heavier as you count down the seconds, the light grey fog that has blanketed the clearing turning to an angry deep blue, thick and endless. The alarm on Jimin’s watch goes off, signifying your wait’s end, and you open your mouth to suggest that maybe you should wait here a little longer, but barely get the first letter out before Jimin is flinging open the door to the greenhouse and pulling you out into the rain.
You shriek as the drops hit you, little pellets of water striking you like beads, soaking your clothes and your skin everything in between. Jimin looks back from where he’s running in front of you, one hand still wrapped around your wrist, and his hair is in strands and his shirt is sticking to his torso, and you don’t think that, in your three years of knowing him, you’ve ever seen him happier. He pulls you out into the rain and he looks like a shot from a movie scene, looks like the hero in a coming-of-age film, letting the rain wash away his worries and his insecurities, letting himself be reborn beneath the crying sky.
And he stops, and you stop, and you stand there in the pouring rain just looking at each other, picturesque frames, moments in time, letting the water soak into your skin, letting it trickle down your cheeks, decorating your eyelashes. You feel his hand sink down to your own, feel your fingers intertwine. And he is smiling, God, he is smiling so fucking wide, smiling at you like there is no place he would rather be, smiling at you like you smile at him when you think he isn’t looking, like you are the reason he is filled with light. Jimin stands there in the rain with his hand on your wrist and droplets of rain dotting his skin, and he is brand new. And you watch him, watch the way it rains down upon him, and you wonder what the hell he is thinking.
You wonder what on earth he sees when he looks at you.
(Is it the same as what you see when you look at him?)
“Aren’t you cold?” You ask him, feeling like your voice is a distant melody, feeling like it’s coming from somewhere else.
He shakes his head, and you can see the rain spraying from the ends of his hair, soaked strands framing his face. “Isn’t this wonderful?” He asks up to the sky, tilting his head up to let it rain down upon him, let the droplets drizzle down his cheeks. “Don’t you love it?”
“It’s nice,” you admit, because there’s something refreshing about being here, about being caught in the midst of a summer storm, washing away the dirt and sweat and worries.
“It’s perfect,” Jimin corrects, voice trampled by the rain, thick and heavy. “I feel like this is just what I needed.”
“Needed for what?”
He looks back at you, looks at the way your bodies are still connected, at the way you’re standing barely a foot apart in the pouring rain, and he grins and says, “Just what I needed to know.”
You don’t have time to ask him what he needs to know, what he has been so desperate to learn, before he’s pulling you back into him and up onto the deck, wet footsteps on the wooden porch as you heave yourselves out of the rain and into the counselor meeting room, drenched from head to toe.
“Oh my God, what the hell happened to you guys?” Seokjin asks, shocked when he spots the two of you, still holding hands.
“Got caught in the rain,” you say sheepishly, still feeling out of breath.
“In the rain?” Taehyung asks. “For how long?”
“Long enough,” Jimin answers this time, finally letting you go to run towards the back of the room. You watch helplessly as he does, your hand clenching around nothing, missing his touch. When he returns, he’s got a dry windbreaker in his hand, crumpled up from being in his backpack for so long. “Here, use this,” he says, placing it over your shoulders, pulling the collar tight at your front.
“Thanks,” you say breathlessly, wondering what the hell Jimin is going to use to dry himself off, clothing so soaked not even a day in the sun could dry it.
“That was fun,” Jimin says, fixing the windbreaker over your shoulders to make sure it’s covering as much of you as possible. “Who knew, right?”
“Right,” your voice trails off, too focused on the way his brows are furrowed as he tries to dry you off with a jacket made of fabric meant to repel water rather than absorb it, mouth pressed into a pout as he shuffles it around, drying off whatever he can.
“Maybe we can do it again sometime,” he says when he’s satisfied, gazing into your eyes, trying to get you to gaze back into his own. When you falter, he chuckles, this little huff of air dispelled from his lungs. “I’m gonna go bother Hoseok for something dry. Don’t stay in those clothes too long, or you’ll catch something.”
With that, he disappears into the other room, soggy footsteps leaving prints in his wake. You’re so busy watching his back disappear from view that you don’t even notice Namjoon coming up to you, a sage expression written all over his face.
“What?” You challenge, not liking the way he looks so suspicious.
“Nothing,” he says with a laugh and a shake of his head. “I just… don’t know if you really do have anything to worry about when it comes to him.” He nods his head in the direction of Jimin before vanishing, called over by Seokjin and Jungkook to complain to him about something, leaving you floundering in the doorway to the counselor’s room.
Does Namjoon know something you don’t?
Are you missing something here?
Because as far as you’re concerned, you and Jimin are finally getting back to where you used to be. As far as you’re concerned, you and Jimin did these same things last year, worked in the greenhouse together, planted flowers together, ate lunch together (okay, maybe you didn’t stand in the pouring rain together), and you are positive Jimin didn’t love you back then. As far as you’re concerned, this isn’t different. This is normal.
Outside, the rain has stopped, a rainbow hidden behind the trees the only reminder that it was ever there in the first place.
Despite the fact that you will literally only be performing for a bunch of children, Jimin is insistent on teaching you how to dance.
At least, that’s it looks like, when he asks you to meet him in the counselor’s room one day half an hour before the mandated practice that Hoseok’s arranged for the whole group of you while the all the campers are off on a nature hike with some of the local rangers from the reserve nearby. You don’t know why this couldn’t wait until during practice, when Hoseok puts on some upbeat dance music and lets everybody do what they want, which usually ends up in someone getting twirled (usually Seokjin), but you don’t really mind. Your other option was to lie around in your cabin waiting for the next social event.
Jimin’s already inside by the time you arrive, this smooth, soft jazz playing from the little speaker that he brought with him, set up on a table at the front of the room. The furniture hasn’t been moved back to their original spots since the first practice, so anytime Namjoon calls a meeting everyone ends up sitting on the floor like a kindergarten class, but at least it makes dance practice easier.
Even though he’s not really dancing, his body is still moving, absorbed in the music as it echoes around the room, hips swaying and head bobbing. He loses himself in the melody so easily, letting each and every note pluck along to the strings of his heart, this deep, mellow sound that fills him up like a wine glass, dulcet and sweet.
“Hey,” you say softly from where you stand, watching him from the doorframe.
Jimin jumps a little bit at the sound of your voice, almost embarrassed that he hadn’t spotted you sooner. “Hey,” he says in return, coming to a halt. “I didn’t, uh, see you there.”
“That was kind of the point,” you joke, walking into the room and joining him where he stands in the center. “Why did you want me down here?”
“You mean I need a reason to see you now?” Jimin teases in return, a little smirk playing along his lips. You frown, narrowing your eyes at him, unimpressed. He gives. “Alright, you got me. I promised you a dance lesson, didn’t I?”
“This isn’t the kind of music that Hoseok puts on, though,” you point out, even as Jimin intertwines his hand in your own and pulls you in close to him, the two of you stepping in time to the beat, not too slow but not too fast, either, this even, steady swing, the sort of thing an old bar would play during the evening rush. Jimin doesn’t pay your comment any attention, instead focusing on his hand on your side, your fingers laced together between your bodies.
You have, admittedly, never been much of a musical person. You never go out to clubs because sweaty, drunk people just aren’t your style, you don’t ever dance, and you can barely keep a beat when you sing in the shower. Your body has always been stiff as stone despite your (and your friends’) best attempts to achieve otherwise, and as such, you had long resigned yourself to the fact that you do better with your mouth than with your feet.
But still, Jimin rallies on, because you’re here, goddamnit, and even if you never dance again after this, at least you can say that you have. He moves you around the room in time with the honeyed melody, even daring to pull some advanced tactics like spinning you beneath his touch, hand held above your head as you twirl in place. And you try to let loose, try to lose yourself in the music like he does, but it’s hard when you have always been more of a wordsmith than a dancer.
What’s also not helping is how every bone in your body always seems to freeze up at his touch.
“Relax, alright?” He says, guiding you across the old wooden floor, boards creaking beneath your feet. “It’s just me.”
That’s the problem, your brain supplies unhelpfully.
“I told you that I wasn’t a very good dancer,” you say bashfully, unable to look Jimin in the eye when he is so close, when his body is practically pressed up against yours, when his fingertips leave burn marks where they press against his skin, sparks flying.
It’s different than when it was raining, because when it was raining, even though you were close, there were other things for Jimin to look at besides you. He gazed up at the sky and thanked it for its tears, gazed around the clearing and surrounded himself in the navy blue haze, closed his eyes and felt the drops on his skin, felt them wash away his nightmares and replace them with dreams.
It’s different now, because there is nothing impressive about the counselor room. Because the janky old tables and dirty windows aren’t something to be gazed at. Because Jimin’s focus is on you and only you, and it makes you feel like he’s staring right through you, like he’s gawking at your heart where it sits in its cage, trembling beneath his eyes. Jimin makes you want to board yourself up, wall yourself in, and reveal yourself bare all at once, like there is so much that he already knows but so much more that he could, if only things were just a little bit different.
“You’re doing just fine,” Jimin promises, voice as soft as his steps, padding on the hardwood. You’ve lost track of the number of times you’ve circled the room, Jimin guiding you without reason or rhyme, just rhythm. He makes sure you’re always looking at him, reaches a hand out to tilt your chin back up if you dare glance away, keeping his steely gaze trained on you, determined to have you do the same. “Isn’t this nice?” He murmurs.
“It is,” you agree. You don’t even have to think about your response, letting the words fall off your tongue, because even if you do feel tense, even if your bones are stiff, there is something about this that sets you at ease.
And you stay like that, wrapped up in each other, swaying to the beat of this song, a beat that is strikingly similar to the drums of your hearts, and the moment feels as though it’s freezing. Feels as though the rest of the world is fading away, leaving only the two of you and the warm, rich tune that floats through the air, slowing down as time seems to come to a halt.
“Do you still miss us?” You breathe, and you can see the words as they leave your lips, see them written out in puffs of smoke between you before they fade into nothingness.
“No,” Jimin responds, equally as speechless. The word disappears quickly in front of you, replaced by his next ones, “because this is what I had been waiting for.”
The words stare down at you angrily, your eyes raking over them, line by line, letter by letter, hoping to imprint them into your skin and your brain and your heart, hoping to keep them locked up besides your love for you to replay, over and over, one of many memories that keep you up at night, that you flicker back to watch like an old film, reminiscing of who you used to be, what you used to do.
They disappear far too quickly, and suddenly time begins again, and you get dizzy just from how much the rest of the world needs to catch up, whizzing by you in fast forward. Or maybe you’re just dizzy because Jimin has always made you feel this way, always left you gasping for air, weak in the knees, heart pounding.
God, he makes your heart pound. He makes it drum in your ears like the Nutcracker, like thunder during a summer storm.
“Don’t you want…” he asks, trailing off, eyes hazy and deep, absolutely unreadable.
“Want what?” You respond, and you swear you aren’t doing it on purpose but you feel yourself leaning forward, closing the gap between you, inch by inch—
“Want to see me lift Seokjin up in the air?” Jungkook’s voice rings out into the room. “I can, you know, he weighs like two pou—whoa, alright.”
A hoard of people stop behind Jungkook as he stands in the doorway like a floundering fish, blinking at you and Jimin. His arrival does not give you enough time to part without things looking suspicious, without all of the damn counselors already making their assumptions, leaving the two of you separating awkwardly, smiling tensely.
“What were you guys doing?” Taehyung asks, breaking the silence that has blanketed the room.
“Practicing,” you say quickly, looking as far away from Jimin as possible. Not even you are buying into your excuse.
“Sure thing,” Taehyung responds, eyebrows raised in understanding, already having formulated his own, likely more realistic answer.
“Alright,” Hoseok says, appearing from behind the crowd with a clap of his hands. “I guess that means that Y/N and Jimin don’t need to be joining us today, off you guys go.” He gestures for the two of you to leave, but the only exit doubles as the entrance, which means the two of you are left to shuffle past a crowd of counselors, all of whom are staring at you as you pass them by. Jimin doesn’t reach out his hand, and you don’t make any attempts at changing that.
You nearly suffocate on the way out, overwhelmed by the tension that has filled the atmosphere, leaving everyone helpless to it.
Jimin goes in one direction and you go in the other, the both of you clearly too stupefied to say anything meaningful to each other, determined to spend the rest of the night apart in an effort to dispel the dozen rumors that you know have already begun to circle the camp.
On your way back to your cabin, alone and lost in thought, you finish your conversation.
“Do you want…” Jimin asks, voice trailing off.
“Yes,” you say. “I want it all. I want you.”
You wonder if Jimin feels the same.
There is something eerie about the camp late at night, when the only lights that shine are the dim yellow wall sconces outside of the cabin doors, when everyone is sound asleep in their bunks, when there is only the moon and its stars to keep you company, watch over you from their place in the universe. There’s something eerie about the quiet, not because you have a reason to feel unsettled but because you’re so used to camp being this lively, bustling place, filled with things to do and people to see.
When you see it like this, empty and silent, it almost makes you think you aren’t even in the same place anymore.
The one and only place that you go when you cannot sleep is the pier, extending out over the lake, the cool, clear lake, looking out into the midnight horizon, a perfect view of the stars and their reflections, cast over the water, twinkling endlessly. You take a seat on the edge, legs dangling over the water, and you stare out into the world, a cool breeze tickling your skin.
You wonder what it is that’s keeping you awake tonight. What it is that is holding sleep just out of your grasp, your dreams suspended above your head. Camp ends in three days and for once you finally feel satisfied, feel as though you have done what you wanted and accomplished what you had hoped. The last few days of this summer are a far cry from those of last summer, where you were wearing yourself thin thinking about your confession, thinking about what you would say and when you would say it, and what you would do based on the fifteen thousand different things that Jimin could say in response, so hung up on telling him that you barely focused on anything else.
But this summer, you and Jimin are finally starting to be alright again. And even though you don’t think you will ever move on from loving him, you have moved on from the fact that he will probably never love you back, moved on from your failed confession, and you are learning to be okay with what you have, even if it’s not what you want.
The truth is that you and Jimin have never felt closer. Driven by your mutual desperation to be friends again, to return to the way that things were when you were together, when you were inseparable, you have been pulled together like moths to each other’s flames, like the thunder and the lightning. You can’t think of anything from this summer that you have wanted more than to be by his side again. But things are different from last summer, different because you and Jimin are not only friends but friends who have had to reckon with love, with its disastrous effects.
So maybe that’s why you’re awake tonight. Because this summer feels inexplicably stranger than last summer, and you feel like you’re missing something.
“I thought I’d be the only one still awake.”
You whip your head around at the voice to find Jimin standing at the other end of the pier, ink black hair hanging over his eyes, stars swimming in his irises. You can barely make out his face this late at night, when there is nothing to cast upon him a glow besides the moon and its lonely companions, but you will never mistake his soft, honeyed voice, never mistake the way his eyes sparkle and shine. He is grinning at you, warm and kind, as he slowly makes his way towards you, footsteps tapping along the worn wooden planks, until he sits down next to you, feet hovering above the water.
“You and me both, I guess,” you feel yourself whisper, not daring to speak a decibel louder.
“Lots on your mind?” He asks, looking out into the horizon. You sigh, too tired to respond. He understands anyway, just like he always does. “Mine too.”
You let the silence wash over you like a wave that bathes the shoreline, gazing out into a world that carries on no matter the time of day, no matter who watches over it. Like this, you and Jimin don’t need to explain yourselves to each other. Don’t need to force a conversation just for the sake of filling up the quiet night. Like this, your presence is enough, the knowledge that he is here beside you, staring out into the same sky, into the same moon and stars, is all that you need.
Something has long gone unspoken between the two of you. Something that you can’t quite place. Jimin has had something to say for a long time but he lets his body do the talking, lets you fill in the gaps. But this time, it feels like the more you try to read between the lines the less you understand, and goddamnit you wish that he would just tell you, would just say it so you don’t have to keep wondering and wondering and wondering—
“I never did tell you,” Jimin says, breaking you out of your reverie.
“Tell me what?”
“Tell you what I was thinking, that night.”
He doesn’t need to elaborate any further for you to know what night he’s talking about. You stare down at the lake, at the way it seems to move into itself even though there is nothing to disturb it.
“I guess I was just so shocked that you, you know, liked me like that, that I didn’t really focus on anything else. Didn’t think about why, or how, or when, or what to do. It existed separately from all of that,” he admits, breaths heavy.
“You didn’t need to focus on that stuff,” you assure him softly. “It was my burden to hold. I was the one who chose to tell you. It wasn’t your fault.”
Does he know? Does he know that you never hated him for not loving you back? That you didn’t expect him to do anything about it?
“I just felt so bad,” he says, and you hear the way the words prick at his tongue, leave burn marks along his lips. “Because I didn’t know what to do after that. I wanted to love you back so badly but I just couldn’t.”
And even though you already knew this, even though you were already well aware that Jimin has always only seen you as a friend, for some reason hearing him say it aloud still hurts, still pierces your heart, wounds that your love for him alone cannot fix.
“It’s not your fault,” you promise him, because throughout all of this, no matter what, you have never, ever blamed him for not loving you back. “I didn’t expect anything. At all. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“Don’t I, though?” Jimin asks, and God, he sounds so helpless, sounds like he’s tried everything under the sun to figure things out and still, nothing has felt right. “We had always been so close. I wondered why I couldn’t fall in love with you and the things that we did together when you could. I thought that I was doing something wrong. You deserved someone who would love you back, and I so desperately wanted to be that person.”
“You owed me nothing,” you declare. “You still don’t owe me a damn thing. All I wanted was for you to know.” And look where that got you.
“Knowing didn’t feel like enough,” Jimin divulges. “I wanted to do more for you than just acknowledge it. I replayed that night in my head, over and over, wondering what more I could have said to you.” He sighs, deep and slow and filled with weight, filled with a year’s worth of thoughts he never told anyone else. “You told me you loved me and it was all I could think about. Then and now.”
“You still think about it?” You wonder aloud, sad because Jimin doesn’t deserve to have this weight on his conscience when you are the one at fault, and hopeful because maybe, just maybe, your confession meant just as much to him as it did to you.
“I can’t stop,” he confesses. And then he turns to you, turns to you in the glow of the moon, his eyes drowning in starlight, and he says, “Every time I look at you I think about how you love me.”
You don’t know what to say. You are too absorbed in the swirling sea of his irises, letting the warmth wash over you in waves, filling you up before emptying out again, shocks of cold before the heat races through you. Jimin is right there, right here, and he is gazing at you and you wonder.
You wonder, what if.
You wonder, what if he loved me back?
“Even when I was away from you I thought about it,” he chuckles to himself, amused at his own obsession. “I thought about you, that night, at the campfire. You were wearing this neon pink camp t-shirt and your marshmallow looked like coal and you had this warm orange glow on you, and I swear to God, that image is imprinted in my brain. I see it every time I close my eyes.”
You didn’t know that.
“When I went on dates, I saw you instead. I would be sitting in a booth with some girl and she would be trying to talk to me about the menu and all I would see is you.” Jimin exhales, filling the pauses that he leaves between his sentences, eyes raking you up and down as if he’s trying to commit this scene to memory, as if this night on the pier is something worth remembering. “They knew, too. All of them told me that I should get over my ex before going on a brand new date.”
Get over you? What about you was there to get over? Your love has always been one-sided. You have never known a world where it hasn’t.
“And I wouldn’t even try to explain to them that I didn’t have an ex to get over, and that you were the one who confessed to me, and that I didn’t love you like that,” he forces another laugh, like he doesn’t even believe the words he’s saying himself. “Then this summer rolled around, and I saw you arrive and I just can’t tell you in words how happy I was to see you. How looking at you just lifted my spirits.”
“I hardly recognized you at first,” you admit shyly.
“I dyed my hair,” Jimin reminds you. That’s right. He had brown hair last summer. “And I wanted to talk to you, but I didn’t know how to without bringing up all the shit that happened last year, and things were awkward between us, and I guess…” he trails off, thinking for a moment. “I guess I just really, really wanted us to get back to the way things were, but I didn’t know how to. And I didn’t know what had changed.”
“Nothing changed,” you say, even though everything did. But loving Jimin has always been a constant in your life, a truth, and this summer was no different. “I wanted to go back to being friends with you, too.”
“I thought I wanted that, too.”
This time, you are the one who turns to look at him. What could he possibly mean by that?
(Can it be?)
“At first, that’s all I wanted,” Jimin begins. “I wanted us to go back to being friends, I wanted us to eat lunch together and have it not be weird, I wanted us to spend time in the greenhouse and the arts and crafts room together, I wanted us to hang around the rest of the counselors without them noticing how different we were. But then I noticed that the hydrangea was wilting no matter what the fuck I did to keep it alive, and I realized that wanting our friendship back wasn’t enough for me anymore.”
You are frozen in place. You are locked into his gaze, body turning to stone, unable to even utter a single word. To breathe a single breath. And you look into his eyes, Jimin’s beautiful, ocean eyes, Jimin’s sparkling, ink eyes, and you pray.
“And then Hobi partnered us up for the stupid camp counselor performance, and we got caught in the rain, and then we danced in the counselor meeting room and I just—” His chest heaves, words flounder. As if he has so much to say, as if the words are practically spilling off of his tongue, and yet they are still not enough. He closes his eyes. Pauses. Catches his breath. And then he asks, “If I asked you if you still loved me, would you say yes?”
“Yes,” you breathe out.
“If I asked you if you wanted me to love you back, would you say yes?”
“Yes,” you whisper again.
Jimin blinks.
“If I asked you if you wanted me to kiss you, would you say yes?”
You barely get out the first letter before Jimin is pulling you into him and pressing his fiery lips upon yours. His hand cradles your cheek, the other one splayed out on the wooden pier to keep his balance, dragging you into a messy, desperate kiss, one that sends sparks ricocheting throughout your body, turning your blood into liquid flames, that fills you up from the inside out. The feeling of his lips pressed upon yours makes your heart shake so wildly in its cage that it frees itself, growing a thousand times wider. The rose inside of you vanishes, finds itself replaced by a blooming, bright blue hydrangea, one that settles deeply within your soul.
Your legs dangle off the pier as your arms wrap around Jimin’s body, curling around his torso in a futile effort to bring him closer than he already is, to feel the warmth of him press against you, sending jolts down your spine, into your bones. You feel yourself getting dizzy just at the feeling alone, kiss drunk, the rest of the world spinning like a goddamn teacup ride, but you cling onto him and you know that he will always be there to catch you if you fall. You know that he will always be there to steady you when you feel the world slipping out from beneath your feet.
You have him, you have him, you have him. You have him, and he is right here, and he loves you like the sun loves the moon, and you love him like the waves love the shore.
When you part, you almost lose your balance and fall right off the damn pier. Jimin reaches out to grab you just in time, saving you from a watery grave (or just major embarrassment), and the two of you laugh, letting your voices fill the moonlit air, heads light, bodies blissed out.
“Honestly, I was a little nervous you were going to say no,” he admits with a laugh.
“Impossible,” you chide. “You know I’ve always loved you.”
No matter what, that will never change.
“And now,” he says, pressing another kiss to your forehead, this one gentle and plush, “you know that I will always love you, too.”
It doesn’t feel like something long overdue. It doesn’t feel like something that you have been waiting and waiting and waiting for, something you have expected from the moment you told him.
No. This feels like something new.
This feels like your heart is in bloom.
The end-of-camp show, no matter how much time and effort Namjoon puts into making it go smoothly, is a train wreck. But it is a train wreck in that wonderful way, in that way where you would be suspicious if things actually went according to plan, in that way where chaos and disarray reign supreme. Quite frankly, when it comes to the end-of-camp show, you never expect anything less.
The truth is that the majority of the end-of-camp show performances are just for the counselor’s entertainment, an afternoon of fun to wrap up the end of camp, topped off by a fun meal (usually pizza) and a night around a bonfire, letting the heat warm your bodies from the inside out. Unless Jungkook and Taehyung pull some extremely ridiculous prank, the last official day of camp is usually everyone’s favorite, filled with snacks and music and laughter.
The performances by the campers go about as well as any performance by a bunch of elementary schoolers can go—that is to say, the kids remember the first five seconds of the choreography before they devolve into pandemonium, dancing as many weird, trendy dances as they can, and some you don’t even think have been invented yet. Nonetheless, Hoseok is proud, and beams at all of the campers as they scurry away from the center of the gymnasium once their dance is done, grabbing little snacks on the tables by the windows before settling in to watch the next stage. Hoseok does a good job of keeping the music current and upbeat so that nobody falls asleep, and gives the campers enough creative liberty so that it doesn’t feel too practiced.
Lightly rehearsed, Hoseok likes to say.
Absolute madness, Yoongi usually corrects.
After the dances, Seokjin and his hoard of campers with guitars the size of an overgrown ukelele make their way to center stage, and you and the other counselors bet on what stupid song he’s taught them all. He starts it off with everyone’s favorite and the most timeless of all tunes—Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star—before the musical highlight.
(“It’s gonna be Fireflies,” Taehyung insists, so confident in his choice that he even wagers two of the homemade Rice Krispie Treats that Yoongi got all of the campers to make for today’s celebration.
“It’s been too long since he rickrolled us,” Jungkook says, eyes narrowing suspiciously to Seokjin at the front of the room. “I’m just waiting for it.”
“Wonderwall, obviously,” Hoseok contributes, even though Seokjin got all of the campers from last year to play that.
You and Jimin are both almost positive Seokjin has chosen to perform Let it Go, a song that will never truly escape you, but you keep your comments to yourselves.
“I’m thinking Photograph,” Namjoon comments mindlessly, late to the conversation.
“The Nickelback song?” Yoongi says with a scoff. “Dude, we’re the only ones old enough to even know that song. No no, I think it’ll be Despacito.”
“If I have to hear Despacito one more time, I’m going to jump out of the f—” Taehyung stumbles on the syllable as Namjoon turns to glare at him, making Taehyung sputter for a replacement. “F… -reaking window. Watch me.”)
In the end, none of you guess correctly, because Seokjin has chosen to teach all of the campers how to play Country Road, Take Me Home, and honestly, none of you can even be mad about it because by the thirty second mark, you’re all singing along. There’s just something about that song that forces you to belt out the lyrics, something magical and irresistible.
Afterwards, it is finally time for the counselor’s performance, which, if the camper’s excited screams are anything to go by, is apparently the peak of the afternoon. Hoseok puts on the same upbeat dance music and all of you go to town, following his choreography without any hitches before jumping into the solo section. Namjoon and Yoongi both attempt a trendy Internet dance and fail miserably, Taehyung and Hazel do a little tango that involves no accidents, and then it’s you and Jimin’s turn.
The music isn’t really appropriate for the slow dance that Jimin taught you in the counselor meeting room, but he makes it work and you follow along, tracing his footsteps and laughing at the prickly sensation his hand on your waist sends shooting through you. You really have always been ticklish there. Hoseok only gives everyone thirty seconds before they’re booted off to the sideline, but thirty seconds is just enough time for Jimin to spin you once before pulling you into a kiss in front of dozens of campers and all of the counselors, whose hollers and hoots fill the gymnasium, bouncing off of the walls and ricocheting into your ears, when they watch you. It has your cheeks heating up something fierce, all embarrassed by Jimin’s big reveal, but the great big smile on his face makes it all worth it. He looks so happy to be here with you. He looks so goddamn happy to have you.
It makes you feel like you can do anything.
Ultimately, Jungkook and Seokjin get the greatest applause, because Jungkook lifts Seokjin into the air figure-skating style before Seokjin comes crashing down on him, and they land in a puddle on the gymnasium floor to the screams of all of the campers and counselors, who have never seen anything quite as artistically dramatic in their lives.
Afterwards, you and Jimin retire to the snack tables alongside the rest of the counselors as the campers are free to roam the building, check out the art on display and eat as many ants on a log and homemade Rice Krispie Treats as they can get their grubby hands on.
“Congrats, you guys,” Namjoon says, raising his dixie cup filled with lemonade. “It worked out after all.”
“I’m proud of you,” Yoongi murmurs to you, a soft smile gracing his features.
“Love always prevails,” Jungkook declares, sighing happily, always a hopeless romantic at heart. You sure hope that one day, Jungkook will fall in love with someone who loves him back unconditionally, because he deserves it.
“Which one of you confessed first?” Seokjin says, Taehyung nodding furiously behind you. You see that the bet is still on.
“Me,” you say.
“Me,” Jimin says.
You both look at each other, eyebrows furrowed, clearly on separate wavelengths.
Seokjin narrows his eyes. “Alright… which one of you said ‘I love you’ first?”
“That would be me,” you admit sheepishly, having a year’s headstart on Jimin when it comes to love confession.
“I fucking knew it,” Seokjin says, palm out. Taehyung begrudgingly smacks five dollars into Seokjin’s hand, muttering to himself about how he was convinced that Jimin would tell you first. It makes you wonder, just a little bit, how long Jimin had known.
You open your mouth to defend yourself and your weak, weak heart, when you feel a tap on your side. Behind you is the same girl from the day that you were making cards to send back home to people you love, the one who absolutely grilled you about your feelings for Jimin.
“Yes, Rose?” You ask happily.
“So did you send it to him?” She questions.
“Send what?”
“Your card. Did you send it to Mr. Jimin?” She elaborates, eyes wide in curiosity. You make a mental note to remind her to never stop being inquisitive. It will take her far.
“No, I didn’t,” you say with a laugh, shaking your head. You look back at Jimin, where he’s laughing with Seokjin and Taehyung about their stupid bet on you, and you grin. He is so beautiful. It’s still hard to believe he’s yours. “Jimin doesn’t need a card to know that I love him.”
Not when he’s right here, and not when you know he loves you back.
The counselor campfire is held on the day very last night that you spend together, after all of the campers have left the mountain, returning home, and you finally have the place to yourselves. Namjoon and Yoongi light it because everyone else has been banned from doing so after the Great Flame Incident two years ago, and then you all sit on the logs around the fire pit, reminiscing of the summer gone by, musing aloud about what the future holds.
You and Jimin snuggle up together, and this night faintly reminds you of the one from last year in the way that Jimin still glows, warm and yellow, in the light of the fire, in the way he seems to make perfect s’mores no matter what, in the way that he laughs at everything that you say. But even with all of the similarities, nothing, literally nothing, could top how you feel right now, dancing on cloud nine with Jimin by your side.
Never in your wildest dreams did you imagine you’d have him. Never in your wildest dreams did you think your confession would amount to anything more.
“You’re burning your marshmallow again,” Taehyung points out crudely, the side of your marshmallow already turning an ashy coal color.
“Ah, fuck,” you mutter to yourself, yanking it away from the fire as you blow on it.
“You’re never gonna learn, are you?” Jimin teases. He plucks his off of his stick, perfectly toasted, and holds it out for you. “Here, have mine.” You open wide and he pops it onto your tongue, the crisp, sweet flavor melting in your mouth as all of the other counselors groan, clearly wishing that they were somewhere other than here. Jimin’s fingers reach up to your chin, tilting your face towards him, before a thumb comes out to wipe away at the smudge on the side of your lip, a sticky white crumb that he pops into his mouth, earning another round of whines.
“Gross,” Seokjin says, nose scrunched up. “Just because you guys are in love now doesn’t mean you have to keep showing us. We get it.”
“Oh, just leave them alone,” Yoongi chides. “They’ve been pining after each other for so long, let them have this.”
“Thanks,” you murmur to Yoongi. You have a lot to thank him for. He has always been on your side, even when you weren’t.
“Anytime,” he promises.
“If they’re gonna be like this next year, then I don’t know how long I’m going to last,” Taehyung admits with a fond sigh, because no matter how much he pretends to be annoyed, you know that he’s happy for you.
Namjoon sucks in a breath. “Uh, yeah, about next year…” he says, wringing his hands together. “I’m not going to be coming back.” You fall into silence, the only sounds the crackle of the fire, the rustle of the wildlife in the woods. “I have another internship at a firm, and then I’m going to be going into the job market, so I don’t, uh, I don’t really see myself coming back here.”
“Me too,” Yoongi chirps up, earning a surprised look from everyone else. “I’ve just been given an offer to produce music for this small record company, but they’re located across the country, so I’ll be moving soon. I guess—well, I guess now’s as good a time as any to tell you all.”
“Congrats,” you tell him, sad to hear he won’t be back but thrilled to know he’ll be doing something he truly loves instead. “Seriously, Yoongi. That’s amazing.”
“Yeah, man, that’s sick,” Jungkook pipes up. “When you’ve won your Grammy you have to remember to mention us.”
Yoongi chuckles to himself, small and quiet, but even in this orange light you can see the way his cheeks are turning cherry red, relishing in the praise. “I’ll miss you all,” he says.
And slowly, one by one, you all begin to admit that even though you love it here, being a camp counselor had always been temporary, and it just wouldn’t be the same without everyone else here with you too. You and Jimin will be graduating this coming school year. So will Taehyung. Seokjin has a Master’s degree in acting that he wants to pursue. Even Jungkook, who is younger than all of you besides Hazel, has said that he plans to travel with his college lacrosse team next summer.
“Damn,” Taehyung says when everyone is finished, as you all begin to count how many of you there will be left for next summer. “Who’s gonna do Namjoon’s job?”
“I already asked,” Namjoon says with a proud grin, “and Hazel said she is happy to take on the responsibility.”
“Oh, fuck yeah!” Seokjin shouts, giving Hazel a massive hug, nearly crushing her in two. “Hell yeah, Haze! You are going to be kick ass at that. I’m proud of you!”
The rest of the counselors soon follow suit, congratulating Hazel and cheering for her future. It almost makes you want to come back, but you know that Hazel will be fine without you. As long as she still has her secret stash.
“Nice work, Haze,” you tell her, earning a shy smile from her in response. “You’ve always been a leader.”
“I’m just nervous I won’t be as good as Namjoon,” she admits timidly, clearly a little overwhelmed at such an enthusiastic response.
“You have nothing to worry about,” Namjoon assures her. “I know you’ll be fine. Plus, you won’t have all of these losers to worry about, so your workload will be much lighter.”
“Hey!” Seokjin, Taehyung, and Jungkook all shout at once.
“Don’t get me started on the two of you,” Namjoon chides, eyes narrowed. “You’ve caused me more stress than my senior thesis.”
“Out of love,” Seokjin swears, Jungkook and Taehyung nodding enthusiastically next to him. Namjoon rolls his eyes, even though you know that he secretly loves the extra work that they give him. It keeps him young, in that old-timey kind of way.
“Then I guess this is it, isn’t it?” Hazel asks, standing up and holding out a finished s’more, already taking on her newly-bestowed head counselor duties. “I suppose I’ll do the honors. Congrats to Y/N and Jimin for finally figuring their relationship out, congrats to Yoongi for getting into that record company, congrats to Namjoon for getting his internship, and congrats to everyone else for doing what they love, and for not letting their dreams be dreams. This summer feels sort of like the end of an era, in a way, don’t you think? I mean, lots of us are moving on to bigger and better things, celebrating the past and aspiring to become people that we hope will be admired in the future. And I guess that I just want you all to know that no matter who you become, no matter what you do, I’ll always be someone who admires you.”
If you were a little drunk or just a little more sentimental, Hazel’s words would almost bring tears to your eyes, but instead you just join everyone in cheers, standing up and clinking your s’mores together.
And in a way, it really does feel like the end of an era. No more summers on the mountain, no more late-night camp pranks, no more hydrangeas in the greenhouse. You’re moving on, not only from this part of your life but from your almost-fruitless quest for love, from the place that led you to fall so deeply for Jimin, the place that has housed every memory you have ever saved of him. You’re moving on to a world where Jimin is with you every step of the way, where you know that he will always be there for you, where you no longer have to fight yourself to keep from loving him, where you have to do everything you can to preserve an already-fragile friendship.
No. Now, you can take your first step forward with Jimin by your side.
“Cheers!” Everyone shouts.
“Cheers,” Jimin says to you, pulling you in for a quick little kiss, and no matter how hot the campfire burns Jimin’s lips upon yours will always be what warms you from within. “Cheers to us.”
You grin against his lips, pressing back because you can never get enough, and you murmur, “Cheers to us.”
“Hey! Jungkook!” Seokjin shouts right as Jungkook hops into his car. “When we text you in the group chat you better fucking respond!”
“I will, I will!” Jungkook screams back, voice so loud you can hear it despite the fact that all of his windows are rolled up.
“No, he won’t,” Yoongi deadpans as he passes you by, duffel bags hanging from his shoulders. “You know he won’t.”
“He never does,” you agree. Getting a text from him is almost as impossible as winning the lottery. “I’ll call you, alright? I know you don’t really like texting, either.”
“Talking is just easier,” he says with a nod. “I’m looking forward to it. Call me whenever you need me.”
“I will,” you promise, watching as Yoongi bids you one final goodbye before heading to his own ride. He plops his bags into the trunk of Namjoon’s car before getting into the passenger seat. Namjoon pushes his head out of the window to wave, smiling wildly at you as he starts the car. You grin, waving back, and watch him, Yoongi, and Jungkook, disappear down the mountain.
“You’re next, right?”
You whip around to find Jimin standing behind you, a frisbee in one hand and a suitcase in the other. He won’t be leaving for another couple of hours, when Taehyung’s finally ready to go. They live close to each other so they figured they’d save money by splitting an Uber, which will be waiting for them at the bottom of the mountain.
“Yeah, gotta get back before college starts,” you say, dropping your bags at your feet. “But we’ll see each other before then, right?”
Jimin and you attend universities on opposite sides of the country. Loving each other is the easy part. Staying in love is what will challenge you.
“Of course,” he promises. “I’ll visit whenever I can. And I’ll come see you on all my breaks during the semester, too. You and Jungkook.”
“Good, you better,” you say, and you pull him in for a bruising hug because you know that this will be the last time for a while. Not a long while, but a while, and even if you have committed every slope of his figure, every inch of his face to memory, you still have to remember how warm he is when you hold him, how soft his lips are when they touch yours. Those things… those are new. “I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll see you soon,” he assures you. “But I’ll miss you too.”
Several feet away, Hoseok honks the horn of your car to let you know that you’re all ready to go.
“I’ll call you when I’m home, okay?” You promise, pulling him in for another hug, one last time, feeling this strange desperation rush through you, like you won’t see him for weeks and this is all you’ll have left. “Isn’t it weird? You’re right here and I miss you already.”
“We’ll see each other again before you know it,” he says, pressing his lips to yours in a sweet, quick kiss. No matter how many times he does it still sends sparks shooting through your veins, but you suppose that that’s just another thing you’ll have to remember. When you part, he notices your worry, eyes softening at the sight. “Hey,” he says, lifting your chin up so you look at him. “I love you.”
You crack a smile. “I love you, too.”
It’s not a goodbye.
It’s an until I see you again.
You grab your duffel bags and hike them over your shoulder, footsteps heavy and weighted as you slowly make your way towards your car. Every four steps or so, you turn back just to make sure that Jimin’s still there, and sure enough, he’s watching you, this lopsided, love-drunk smile lacing his features.
You place your bags in the backseat of your car before heading to the driver’s side, hand on the handle as you look up one final time.
There Jimin stands in the middle of the clearing, the warm afternoon sun bathing him in a halo. There he stands, beautiful, and kind, and lovely, and in love. And you are so in love. You wave. He waves back.
And you know that you two will be alright.
You jump into your car and tug the door shut behind you, keys in the ignition, engine revving, and you sigh, content and feeling confident in life. You peer into the rearview mirror to see Taehyung running up to Jimin, wrapping an arm around his shoulder and waving goodbye to you. You lift your hand up in response, watch as they bid you farewell as you creep towards the slope down the mountain.
As you drive down the mountain, you take a deep breath, inhaling the fresh summer air, and you smile.
↳ links are broken, but don’t forget to message me with any thoughts or feedback!
#jimin angst#bts angst#jimin fluff#bts fluff#bts fic#jimin fic#jimin x reader#bts x reader#jimin au#bts au#w: into the wilderness#UHH THATS THE FUCK RIGHT THATS WHAT I SAID !!!!!!#okay but also i havent felt as emotionally redeemed abt a climax scene in a long time#anyway i hope you all enjoy !! this is my baby so you BETTA TREAT IT THAT WAY
4K notes
·
View notes
Text
Watching the Rise of the Titans movie and I'll be documenting all of my thoughts/reactions here. [Spoiler Warning]
So instead of reblogging every new update, I'm just going to have this post up on my phone as I watch and type my reactions in a bullet list format.
Nari's human disguise is so cute. As someone who does have a cottagecore aesthetic, I want to cosplay her so bad
Are Skrael and/or Belroc non-binary coded? Regardless, I'm also obsessed and I want to fuck Skrael and be Belroc.
STEVE CARING ABOUT JIM BEING HURT YESSSS!!! My god his redemption has probably been one of the greatest there is because he doesn't just suddenly go from being a bully to a completely good person. You can see the gradual shift in learning better throughout the shows which is awesome.
IN NEW YOOOOOOORRRRRRRK!!!!!! CONCRETE JUNGLE WHERE DREAMS ARE MADE OFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!
The mugshot montage reminded me of season 1 of trollhunters when toby and Jim were arrested at the museum.
STRICKLER PUT A RING ON IT??? HE'S THE ONLY DILF IVE EVER ACTUALLY AGREED WAS HOT WYM I CAN'T HAVE HIM??? well I'm still really happy about his arc over the series probably one of my favorite character growths.
Eli my guy got his growth spurt!!! As an 18 year old who is still 5'0", I'm happy but envious for him
So I went into this movie without watching any trailers or promo, but I doubt anything could have prepared me for the existence of mpreg. In fact, I wasn't going to document my reactions until I saw that.
NAMURA!!!!!!!!! MY BELOVED!!!!!! I CAN STILL THIRST FOR YOU WITHOUT GUILT
The coach teacher just called the kids zoomers so I have to dock one point from my final rating just because of that. Unforgivable
Those husky animation models suck lmao
Oh fuck the titans got power ranger zords!!
God why did they include the mpreg??? This movie would have been perfect without it.... After that plot point being revisited only one time I'm already beyond done with it
Like it's bringing me back to the v*ltron days where they're was a suspiciously high amount of klance omegaverse and mpreg fics and art created and it physically hurts because Steve and Keith's voice actor is the same person meaning this is especially cursed to me since I was unfortunately in the v*ltron fandom and remember all of that
But like on another note, how old are these characters again??? I haven't checked any wikis because of spoilers but is Steve an adult??? I know aja might be technically a lot older than 18 because alien but is whatever age she is equivalent to an adult as far as emotionally and physically in Akaridion development??? IS THIS A TEEN (M)PREGNANCY IN A KIDS SHOW????
Like bruh I saw a singular post on here before going into the movie that was like "rott spoilers without context" and there was a pregnant belly but I was absolutely not expecting the actual context of it. I'll find the post after I finish and edit this post to tag the creator right here: @makoden
This entire post is just gonna be me ranting about mpreg huh
Anyway I love the whole roundtable allusion to the legends of king arthur (not the toa version but the one he's based off)
THERE'S 3 TO 5 BABIES????? I need to take a break bruh this is just too much
Alright I've taken a 30 minute break got some food and did some things i love (decompressed by tactile stimming with some owl plushies and watched some videos on my favorite owl, Garu. He lives in Japan with his owner and is a domesticated eagle owl who basically just acts like a sky cat. If anyone else needs some eye bleach, here is their YouTube channel)
Blinky and ARRRGHHH!!! saying their "if one of us doesn't make it" talk my god one of them is going to die I can see it and I will be utterly crushed. Jim can't lose another father figure and Toby can't lose his wingman again I will riot if this happens
On a similar but unrelated to the movie note, can we just talk about how toa started with Jim having 0 dads and (if strickler and blinky live to the end) will end with 2 dads? Like I just really feel happy for him that he has two dads who actually figured out how to put the past behind them to not have any infighting between them so that both of them are healthy father figures. Jim has already been through literal hell and back losing his actual humanity in the process so if he loses one of them, I'm going to be really pissed because at this point, this is just Jim torture porn. Y'all know how as SpongeBob SquarePants went on, the show just became Squidward torture porn? It's starting to feel that way for toa and I really hope they cut the shit by the ending
Jlaire is such a good ship but like I feel like it's too perfect they never disagree with each other
YESSSSSSS Someone finally doesn't treat toby like a fat waste of space who messes stuff up!!! I think out of all the characters that would have been most deserving of a rewrite, it's Toby. Sometimes I just feel he's only comic relief and any heartfelt moments he's had in the series was also born of stupidity (ie his flour baby project being unharmed was seen by him as divine intervention from his parents but was actually just Eli and Steve behind the scenes).
Ohhhhh yesssssss Archie's father!!! I was hoping I'd see him again because we got so little of him last
Ooooooooooh Asian trollmarket!!!!!
Oh never mind slavery trollmarket
Bruh titanic camelot
I feel like we're not seeing enough of the villains because I completely forgot about the power ranger zord things
NAMORA NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MY LAST CRUSHHHH
STRICKLER NO NOT YOU TOO PLEASE
WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THE ONLY TWO CHARACTERS I SIMP FOR ON THIS SHOW DIED WITHIN FIVE MINUTES OF EACH OTHER
THAT WHOLE ASS RANT I WROTE IS COMING TRUE FUCK THIS MOVIE THIS SERIES IS JUST JIM TORTURE PORN
WAIT JIM'S SPERM DONOR INFO?
Oh thank God I don't want to know anything about that person
For the record, I call that man Jim's sperm donor because he has no business being called a father to him. All he did was donate some swimmers to the creation of him and give him abandonment issues
Oh another blind troll elder???? This fucker is just if vendel was a bad guy
Bruh I was grieving
PACIFIC RIM WITH GUN ROBOT VEX AND THE BELROCZORD? I've never seen that movie but I know the reference
Bruh Blinky doesn't read horoscopes? Does he realize conspiracy theories are just the manly version of horoscopes?
NO DON'T KILL VEX STOP KO-ING FOUND FAMILY MEMBERS
Oh thank God he's okay
NO NOT ARCHIE AND CHARLEMAGNE OH MY GOD
oh never mind they're just gonna coup de tat I believe in them :))
But I want to see him again
But I'm glad to see vex
Yay they're in arcadia!
But yeah I wondered why the trolls and Merlin didn't keep the whole "daylight doesn't hurt trolls" feature from the eternal night but now Guillermo del Toro I see you were playing the long con in that just to kill my girl Namora :(((
Oooooh I love the animation of the Narizord over Chihuahua!! It looks very good and realistic (if only they could have put some of that into those huskies from before smh)
Bruh the character designs of the arcane order are so good I want to be them
Nari making sure the Skraelzord doesn't crush the bus
DAMN DOUBLE HOMICIDE
Bruh I'm just glad we finally have an answer on why arcadia had everything going on as opposed to literally anywhere else!! I always found that as a weird coincidence for plot convince.
BRUH WERE BACK TO THE MPREG IM SO JEALOUS I FORGOT ABOUT THAT EVEN THOUGH IT WAS BECAUSE I WAS GRIEVING THE LOSS OF MY LOVELIES.
Oh that's real convenient that the ninth configuration meant all of them. Way to not decide which character gets more attention. Though it probably was a smart way to not have any infighting in the fandom between each character's stan group.
Bruh I just realized where is Barbera did they just ditch her on the Camelot ship???
And where are the other trolls that migrated at the end of trollhunters s3? They said something about new jersey but obviously Jim and the other main characters got on Camelot instead.... This feels like a plot hole
And we never learned the process of how changelings are made and bonded to humans and stuff. We just know it's super painful but I'm curious ffs!!!!
THE DONT THINK BECOME HERO SPEECH ALL SAID TOGETHER!!!
BRUH THEY REALLY HAD TO SHOW HIM GIVING BIRTH??????? WAS THAT AN ABSOLUTE MUST??????
Plus the main audience for this series is little children (the rating for the movie is literally TV-Y7) so even though my adult ass is not in the target audience, I STILL DONT UNDERSTAND WHY WOULD MPREG AND ANAL BIRTH WOULD BE AN IMPORTANT THING TO 7 YEAR OLDS???? THIS IS A LITERAL FETISH HIDDEN IN KIDS CONTENT ITS ELSAGATE ALL OVER AGAIN Y'ALL 😭😭😭😭😭
Though it's probably hypocritical of me to think fetishes don't belong in kids tv when I've openly admitted to thirsting for strickler and namora
HUZZAH
NEW AMULET WAZ GOOD????
STAB THAT BITCH JIM
WAIT NO I SAID STAB NOT GET STABBED
Alright good job just missed the directions at first but you fixed it
SEVEN KIDS?????????
T O B Y ????????????
W A I T NO
N O
IS HE ACTUALLY
OH MY GOD THERE'S HOPE
NO THERE ISN'T
F U C K THIS SHIT THEY REALLY JUST HAD HIM TO BE BULLIED THEN KILLED
Y'ALL IM ACTUALLY CRYING THIS NEVER HAPPENS
I NEVER ACTUALLY GET SO EMOTIONAL OVER MEDIA THAT I CRY IT ONLY HAPPENED ONCE AT THE END OF VOLTRON BUT AHHHHHHHH
W A I T
HE'S GONNA BE BROUGHT BACK?????
HOLD UP THEY'RE JUST GONNA BRING ALL THOSE DEAD PEOPLE BACK??????
WAIT IS HE
BLINKY CALLED HIM A SON
HOLD ON IS THIS GOING TO BE A CLIFFHANGER???????????
BRUH THEY REALLY JUST CAN'T END THE SERIES WITHOUT CLIFFHANGERS like there's always an open ending
TROLLHUNTER TOBY????? You know what forget the whole rants I had on how toby was written they just redeemed it all
And that's all! I'd rate it a 6.5/10 because it's definitely the weakest of all the sequels but still had amazing animation and some good plot points. It's just really hard to look over the bad stuff enough to rate it any higher.
#tales of arcadia#rise of the titans#trollhunters#rott#rise of the titans spoilers#rott spoilers#toa#3 below#athena's own original post!#jim lake jr#claire nuñez#toby domzalski
139 notes
·
View notes
Text
until dawn; pt. II - ljn
part I | part II
⤑ summary: basic number one rule of the museum is not to touch the art. but no one told jeno that falling for one of them isn’t allowed either.
⤑ pairing: jeno x female reader
⤑ word count: 12.2k
⤑ genre: ANGST, fluff, romance, smut (f receiving, dom!jeno waow, dirty talk, wrap it everyone) | broke architecture major!jeno, historical figure!reader, enemies to lovers!au, college!au, night at the museum-inspired!au
⤑ warnings: references to actual historical figures, explicit language, graphic details, major heartbreak caused by another party, expect time jumps too
⤑ author’s note: happy jeno day!! i’ve been so excited to post this part, and i’m happy we’re here!! perhaps, this is the last long fic i’ll write for a while so i can rest, but i’ll still be posting short stories within the weeks to come! i’m excited for may to say the least hehe
btw, for the smut scene (indicated with **), i highly recommend you listen to strange (feat. hillary smith) by kris bowers!! this song is from the bridgerton soundtrack, and oh man, the feels!!
with that, enjoy!
italicized text either means they are personal notes or flashbacks.
this was meant to be more angsty, but either way, i screamed every time i wrote something gut-wrenching.
⤑ taglist: @renjunniehome
⤑ ctto above!!
⤑ leave me some feedback, constructive criticism, or hellos!
“You ready to get your butt beaten by me, Lee?”
“Prepare your final words when I win instead, (Y/L/N).”
Mischievous banter exchanged between you two became a new norm. Almost every night, someone within the art pieces established a contest over anything and it released the competitive sides of you two. So far, Jeno has been winning. Not like it hurt your pride, but maybe just once, you could conquer one game to feel better. Not only that, there’s a mini penalty for the loser. So far, you’ve cleaned up the lobby yourself and acted cutely to everyone the entire evening (or aegyo as Jeno called it).
Tonight, a game of archery was held by the Greek gods. They pushed away any extra pieces away, leaving the whole room vacant with two boards right beside Zeus’ throne. Numerous arrows were produced and sharpened, Zeus in the center announced to everyone participating.
“It’ll be 1 on 1 games. First to go are Jeno vs (Y/N), followed by Athena vs. Hermes, Cleopatra vs. Freddie, and last would be Hades vs Aphrodite.”
Cutting the chase, you didn’t expect Jeno to be that good at archery. Sure, he told you that he took classes with his friends for fun when he was younger, though it showed that he’s a fast learner and even hit one bullseye in the middle of the game.
Not slightly threatened until the last rounds, you fixed your aim and lessened your overthinking when preparing to shoot. Thus, you scored 2 bullseyes shot. It was a close fight, having the audience on the edge on their feet again because it’s the two of you. Your dynamic with the night guard always elevated the mood, shifting their bets over and over again.
By 1 point, you received your first victory against Jeno. Unlike you, he showcased his sportsmanship sweetly without any comments of disbelief. He’s never bragged about anything big in his life, not unless it’s a high grade for his plate. Normally, he celebrated wins in a laid-back manner. But don’t be fooled: he loves giving penalties.
“This is why I don’t make bets with my friends because I really go for their weak spots.”
“You’re cynical, Lee Jeno.”
“Only if you’re close to me, (Y/N) (Y/L/N).”
“Aren’t we already past that stage?”
Almost halfway through his job, he sustained a meaningful friendship with you. Out of everyone, you were his default person to hang out within the nights he had a shift. If he wasn’t present, he made sure to give you small treats or gifts as much as possible. An innocent friendship, it was that the world would’ve never believed in.
Or was it?
“To celebrate your win, what do you want me to do?”
“You’re too kind for me to play around with, even if you’re the complete opposite of me.”
“I’ll make it simple and worthwhile since I don’t know when I’ll win a game again.” As your finger tapped your temple as you pondered deeply, a smart idea came through. “Grant me 3 wishes.”
He chuckled, lowering himself to view you better. “Am I like some genie now to you?”
“No room to complain, I won, didn’t I?” You grinned, raising one brow to show your dominance.
“You’re petty in your own way, aren’t you?”
“Perhaps. Now come on, I want to use my first wish.” You shrugged it off like no big deal, loving the high feeling of triumph. You lead him to the center of the lobby, where a beautiful grand piano only selected people get to play during exhibits. “Open the museum piano.”
Ever since you were brought to life, you never used it. Tempting but because people from the outside might here, maybe it’s time to try something new. A new challenge, and besides, you missed entertaining people through it. The last time you touched the delicate piano keys was to your family before you ran away.
It’s a good thing that in the shackle of keys Jeno held, the needed key was there. Unlocking the lustrous black instrument, you sat by the matching black bench. Crackling your fingers, you tested by pressing a few keys to get the hang of it again.
“What are you planning to play, (Y/N)?” Jeno leaned against the side, his arms crossed.
Humming the first notes of your piece, the nostalgia ran through your veins. “Nocturne No. 2 in E flat by Chopin.”
Your fingers took off and played each chord slowly and calmly. This piece reminded you the most of your mother, who sat by the couch in front of your old piano with your father while guests from the party they hosted crowded around you. Being the youngest, they often requested you to perform as entertainment so you always put your best foot forward. Or so you tried.
Nevertheless, no one else in your family was capable to play this piece as perfectly as you. By the way your eyes closed and your body swayed to the mellow tune, Jeno observed how you memorized this piece by heart. A passionate flame you were, outshining every pianist out there.
He wasn’t surprised at how multi-talented you were, though there’s a different kind of aura you present when you played the instrument. From your hard and tough front, you could be soft and sweet to the right people.
In a way, you showed your comfort toward the boy by serenading him with the piano. Sketching him with him in the past was one thing, but this was another. You’d sketch with people you’ve grown used to, but you play piano to people you want to cherish in your life. As dangerous as it seems, Jeno was someone special to you, only wanting to have good moments with him.
Junmyeon will always have a huge part in your museum life, but Jeno filled the emptiness that he left behind. This loneliness for a human friend vanquished thanks to Jeno, and you didn’t want to jeopardize it at all. Sure, whenever he acted like a gentleman around you, let you inside the Foreign Art Room, or brought you food sometimes, you couldn’t help feel honored.
Though lately, every time he showed off his strength when he defeated Zeus and Hades during an arm wrestle game the god held again. You seriously had to catch a breath at every flex his arms made, like the goddesses. Maybe how he pushed his black hair back when he’s drawing another plate, you’d give yourself a few extra seconds to see his long fingers skim through them. He’d bit his lower lip when he’s in too deep with his creativity, wondering if he’d bite the lower lip of the girl he’d ki-
All right, (Y/N), relax. Maybe you’re thinking this way because it’s been decades since your last relationship. You wouldn’t want to fall for another possible trap and hurt yourself again, right?
Ever since this job, Jeno’s university life drastically changed. Yes, he still hung out with his friends and performed extremely well in his classes, though he prioritized anything related to the museum wherever he was. If they were drinking out, he’d buy an extra bottle of soju for you on his way back to the dorm. Rarely does he get shitfaced anyways.
If he and Renjun visited the bookstore to purchase pens or any art-related materials, he always bought either an extra sketchpad or set of pens. Even if you were simply a figure to everyone else, he appreciated the bond you both developed.
Every night, he’d tell you about his day from the start. Normally, it consisted of a lot of schoolwork and coffee, some stories about his roommates too. Speaking of them, he’d insert a lot of humorous words about his entire group of friends, whom you learned their names too.
Mark, Jaemin, Renjun, Jisung, Chenle, and Donghyuck, each of them presented a different color in their group. Jeno, who’d admitted to being shy and quiet, grew out of his shell because of them. A friend of Jeno’s would automatically be a friend of yours, if only you were allowed to leave the museum or become a human.
Jeno learned more about your past explorations that never got documented because you no longer had an interest in jotting them down. They were adventures you’d kept to yourself, memories only close to you then would know. Except now, Jeno was another addition. You’re not the type to instantly open to people, though again, a sense of relief surrounded him every time you encounter each other. It grew gradually like a warm hug, softening your heart and breaking your walls.
The more he spent time with you, nothing feared Jeno the slightest. He’s always maintained himself intact, avoiding lines to be crossed and giving respect to those who deserve it. However, he began to question himself where exactly his feelings lie with you after Jaemin tried to set him up on a blind double date just so the best friend of his date wouldn’t feel left out.
He’s rarely one to get crushes on people, even when other girls in his college openly showed their affection towards him. Valentine’s Day or his birthday, several girls sent him chocolate or flowers. Jaemin and Renjun got sick of girls reaching out to them first so they could reach him. It’s not because he’s not the dating type, but because he’s so goal-oriented that unlike his roommates, he doesn’t have a slight clue about dating.
Though one-night stands while at a party and dating were completely different, he’d still say he had experience with girls. Plus having an older sister, he never took advantage of them. He’d rather tell them in person that the feelings weren’t mutual than ghosting them. He’s not like Jaemin anyways.
With that, he’s so lost when his heart beats twice as fast the second you’ve woken up from your posing slumber. He doesn’t comprehend how flustered he’d be when you highly insist to help him with his plate or how cute he finds it when you’re playing fetch with Mochi. On top of it, when you chose to sketch each other for one of your sketching sessions, he’d take a longer stare at your visage before he drew some strokes.
A lot of historical accounts mentioned how your beauty was the standard of the Victorian era, wherein you were the jewel of your neighborhood and numerous men wanted your hand. Women envied you, especially having high intelligence skills that were equivalent to a man. That time, that felt like a threat to most men. Though surprisingly, it turns out there were men who liked intelligent girls.
Jeno knew he liked you as a friend, though liking you past that he didn’t intend. Nor was it allowed because it’ll break one of the golden rules. Before he’d go beyond contemplating, he had to stop himself. This was so unlike him. The feelings will fleet away, he’d repeat to himself. Don’t waste a great friendship because of your silly emotions.
Individually, both of you swallowed these harboring feelings down your guts and simply kept your friendship status safe. Doing your typical activities or whatever else you could think of, none of you minded to change it whatsoever.
Unknown to you though, it was obvious to the other art pieces ones that you two practically passed off as young lovers. Although they know that pushing one towards the other went against the rules, Aphrodite begged to differ.
“Holding them back from expressing what they really feel just because of the law here is a tragedy. They should at least try, you know?”
On another typical night, Jeno invited you to the Theater Room for a movie marathon. After finding out that you’ve never seen any moving pictures, he wanted to be there to introduce it. Luck was on his side to not have plates or requirements due for the week and everyone was behaving themselves, so he started with rolling out short films from the 88mm projector. Having premade popcorn and drinks, the two of you shared roars of laughter and emotional tears.
Switching to the cd player for longer and clearer films, you’d opt to believe that you were born at the wrong time. With all these advancements, it came with a lot of new beliefs. One of them was allowing women to study and work. Then again, she was a pioneer according to historians. Without her, it wouldn’t help shape society as it is today.
Nonetheless, this movie Jeno played on the big screen was what he defined as “one of the classics”, 10 Things I Hate About You.
This outspoken character named Kat was presenting a poem to her class, trying to hold in her raw emotions towards Patrick, the boy who broke her heart. Too engaged, you didn’t notice how Jeno stretched his arms out so he could wrap one around your shoulder. Not that you were complaining, his warmth reassuring you safety.
“I hate the way you talk to me, and the way you cut your hair. I hate the way you drive my car. I hate it when you stare. I hate your big dumb combat boots and the way you read my mind. I hate you so much it makes me sick; it even makes me rhyme. I hate it, I hate the way you're always right. I hate it when you lie.” The way she attempted to keep her strong ground only reminded you of where you were weeks ago, especially once she excruciatingly broke down.
“I hate it when you make me laugh, even worse when you make me cry. I hate it when you're not around, and the fact that you didn't call. But mostly I hate the way I don't hate you. Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.” Only when you leaned back to the chair, you felt his arm. His thumb caressing your covered shoulder, you peeked him a little bit. His eyes fixated on the screen, absorbed in the acting and how Kat’s tears weren’t scripted as she stormed out of the classroom.
Not that you were her, but it sparked the past memory of how you merely disliked him because of his job. But as a person, not even close, not even once did you hate him. How blessed that he never judged you for it, staying patient all this time.
Right before he could look back at you, you moved your face back to resume your watching. Jeno definitely noticed what you did, though not sure as to why. Whatever it was, it wasn’t harmful.
Once the film ended, Jeno checked his watch for the time. 4 am, he wanted to do something else now instead of film viewing. You were on par with it, wanting to walk it out after being seated for hours. As you both cleaned up and bid the posters outside goodbye, the doors to the museum were locked unexpectedly. Impossible on Jeno’s half because he had the keys for every room, but he double-checked his bunch.
Alas, the keys for these doors specifically were missing. But there was no other way anyone could’ve gotten it, plus it’s not like the last person he talked to, which was Aphrodite, would need it.
Or did she?
Rather than putting any blame on each other, your only wish now was to return to your section before sunrise. You and he could just relax momentarily before yelling for help.
“Maybe we should watch another film first?”
“Alright, you choose while I return the rest.”
As Jeno inserted the cd of Cinema Paradiso inside, the background music of the opening played. He hummed the first notes, already feeling the love from this film. Another must-see classic as recommended by Renjun, he wanted to rewatch it with you.
Slowly returning each cd and film roll to their respective drawers, the melodious theme had you waltzing in the small space. Even beyond your life, classical music never gets old. Aging like fine wine, sounding spectacular as time passes because of people’s creativity.
Jeno gazed over your sudden movements, smiling uncontrollably at how immersed you were as you multi-tasked. However, you took a wrong turn by the desk and almost dropped a priceless film roll. But before you fully slipped and fell, a pair of strong arms caught you at the right time. Panting from the nerves, mostly when he was inches from your face. Never has he pressed his body this close to you to protect you, and never have you seen his captivating eyes this up close.
As enchanting as the background music of Ennio Morricone was, it only became noise once Jeno took ahold of the film roll on your hand and placing down on the desk. Taking another step closer, you were backed up by the edge. Not to mention how his height dignified his impact on you, your arms were still situated by your side with nowhere else to go.
That was until his finger elevated your chin so he could meet you on eye-to-eye level. His other hand gripping your waist, you became brave enough to place your hands by his broad shoulders. Licking your lips, you glanced at his lips quickly. But he noticed it, and as risky as this was, it was a leap of faith to take.
“May I kiss you?”
Always such a gentleman, even when he already knew how much you desired him through your returning affections. Calming your breath patterns by the speed of everything occurring, you came back to your senses. He’s the one who constantly told you not to forget your roots, so you were going to take this one.
You trust him, and he does too.
“Yes.”
Since the first film, some kind of tension increased the closer he moved or intimate his actions were towards you. You kept pushing it back in hopes not to ruin what you both have. But it only turned out to be mutual, especially how none of you held back as soon as his lips passionately clashed yours.
Tangling your arms around his neck, you stood on your tiptoes to press even closer to him. Feeling his lively heart pumping against your hollow chest, you bit his lower lip. Something you’ve secretly craved to do, he growled from the pleasure. He hoisted your waist to the desk, his impatient hands earnestly traveling all over your body. While your legs locked around his torso, your feisty nature leaned back so your entire body lied on the small desk.
Jeno was on top, placing one hand down to hold himself while the other squeezed your waist firmly. Even if you’re made of wax, you’re like an actual living woman at night. Everything about you becomes real until dawn. You emitted vulgar moans, giving him more access to your neck. Peppering a mix of soft to hard kisses, your hand teasingly snaked under his shirt. He really wasn’t joking when he bragged that he was quite ripped since he enjoyed sports and going to the gym, cupping a part of his toned abdomen.
“If you want something, all you have to do is ask.” He sluggishly sucked the area between your ear and neck, one of your weakest spots. “What’s on your mind, baby?”
The growing moistness in between your legs left a stain in your panties, trying to close your legs out of embarrassment. It’s been decades since you’ve been stimulated like this. However, Jeno beat you to it as he trailed the hand that was on your waist and lowering it right above your covered sex. He cupped it agonizingly slow, making you folding your leg from the pleasure. For a man who doesn’t date around, he knew exactly what he’s doing.
“I just kissed you, and you’re already this soaked. Can you handle me, baby?”
As the strong woman that you present yourself to be, it would selfishly take the right touch from the right man to weaken you. With his savage lips back on yours while your hands clutched on his shirt, he was simply waiting for a verbal answer, yet driving you completely mad. Everything was happening so fast, and here he was to please you in anywhere you seem fit.
You were deprived, and oh, you needed it more than ever.
However, seconds before you replied, there was loud rumbling from the main doors which stopped your devilish antics. As Jeno moved back from you to see the ruckus, you lifted yourself back up, pulling back your dress sleeves and flattening out the creases. The last thing you wanted was a trail of familiar red marks from the aggressive male, finding any reflective surfaces to check.
“I wouldn’t be that dumb to leave you hickies now, would I?” Jeno ended your worries as he placed his hands by your side again. His face leaned towards yours again, reliving the warmth in your cheeks. His lips were plumper, catching traces of your coral lipstick smudged there down to his jaw. He slotted himself again between your legs, grazing a hand on your waist and the other to your warm cheek. “The door’s unlocked now, and it’s 5 am. Do you want to clean up now?”
You playfully scoffed, aware that neither of you had plans to do that yet. Such a player while in the heat of the moment.
“Spare me 15 more minutes with you first.”
Hiding the romance you’ve both built failed without trying. Aphrodite spotted all the signs from your open physical affection and words of admiration, calling you two out in front of everyone without shame. She is the goddess of love, after all. You couldn’t fool her even if you tried.
Plus, she’s the one who locked the two of you up in the Theater Room that night. But neither of you know that.
“Sketch my ideal home?” Jeno bent down to the table, testing out his newly bought pens so they wouldn’t spill.
“Isn’t that why you decided to pursue Architecture in the first place? Come on now!” You pestered across him, opening your new sketchpad since your last one ran out of pages. As expected, Jeno bought you one when he went to the bookstore. As much as you insisted not to because he should use the money somewhere else, he did it anyway. He loved your works, encouraging you in any way he could.
When he was reminded of his humble beginnings of his passion for architecture by you, never had he envisioned exactly how his perfect home would be like. Settling down was so far beyond his mind, only focusing to graduate university then study for the licensure exams. However, he did miss drawing something for fun, not as a requirement. He also was the one who took charge of designing his dorm.
“Fine, only if you draw what your ideal home would’ve been if you never left London.”
Now as lovers, the only addition to your relationship were the public and private exchanges of affection. Deep conversations, film viewing, back and forth banter, you’re both still the same competitive duo everyone expected to be together. In public, the two of you held hands, hugged, kissed each other cheeks too when it felt right. Cleopatra’s face of fake nausea was priceless every time, while Princess Diana, Anne, and Katherine enjoyed it. It’s been years since they’ve seen this glow of adoration in you. Bit by bit, you’re going back to the old you. Except now, you’re a lot stronger.
Perhaps, this version of you proved wrong for the need for romance. Even if you made the choice not to settle down then, it would’ve been different if Jeno was in your universe then.
“Are you done there?” Jeno asked while you were finishing up your masterpiece. Life in London sounded fun when you were younger, having all these ideas on interior design and the like. An innocent time.
Instead of replying, you strode to his side and compared your pieces together. He pictured a two-story home, with a backyard and rooftop area. He definitely wanted to stay in the city as his whole life was based there. Although you preferred living in the countryside more for more freedom, you gave it a shot by pinpointing every detail of a wealthy typical Victorian-era home you liked. You desired a spacious lobby with a grand staircase in the middle, a crystal chandelier there too. The living room would have a small library and a grand piano, where wide doors leading to the grasslands were beside it.
Considering you two lived from different times, in a way your ideal homes were similar. Somewhere private, surrounded by nature and minimal furniture, you’re curious as to how it would look if the two of you fused them together. A mix of old and new, will it look pretty?
“What will look pretty?” Jeno questioned your random thought, looking back and forth at your sketches. “You know who’s pretty though?”
“If you say what I think you’re going to say, I’m lea-”
“You.”
Jeno has gotten flirtier since that night, always finding the right opportunity to flatter you. Although you denied them out of embarrassment, the butterflies in your stomach can’t lie to you.
You’re so smitten, and so was he.
Jeno’s always one to follow the rules, but so far, he’s been breaking some of them already.
Just last night, he gave Renjun access to the lively museum because he needed more research regarding you. Initially, he practically interviewed Jeno for every piece of information he gathered because he used to be so deep in the books to study everything about you. Now in the past, Renjun still couldn’t forget how Jeno drunkenly admitted how crazy he was going to be over you and your coldness whilst sobering up in the dorm.
He didn’t understand one bit by that, especially when you’re technically dead. But by the sight of the first piece Renjun saw alive, which was Zeus, he almost passed out. Piece by piece, he viewed these artworks come to life from his fresh eyes. Right before he could’ve screamed when Athena shot a lightbulb in their exhibit, you happily called out Jeno’s name.
Renjun froze on the spot upon seeing your wax figure come to life. He’s browsed through this museum numerously due to the new exhibits, but lately, he checked your section out to find any tiny details that were linked to your life. Aside from the sketchpad, compass, and hairpins, he wanted to know if there was more to your life as an explorer.
As human interactions except the night guard weren’t allowed, Renjun needed help for his project in Women Studies. Just like Jeno’s assignment, you aided him. Fruitfully answering every question he gave you, Athena popped out of nowhere to inspect Jeno.
“I see you’re breaking another rule.”
“I’m sorry, Athena. He was desperate, and it would be selfish of me to let him fail.”
“This is the last one I’ll let slide, alright?” Athena huffed, not impressed by the reckless behavior Jeno acquired over time. She saw this coming, but for a change, she couldn’t punish him. He was a young adult, still learning more about life. Only will she step in if things turn for the worst. “I can’t believe I’ve gained a soft spot for you.”
Jeno laughed, hugging the figure like his older sister. “You love me though!”
Glad to say, Renjun aced his project and kept his word of not telling anyone about the happenings in Jeno’s job. Jeno even made a makeshift non-disclosure contract so Renjun wouldn’t spill the slightest details.
Lately, so much has been happening in the museum that having alone time with each other was rare. And when you did, the two of you made sure to maximize it and make every intimate moment count. From each touch, each longing kiss, each moan, and groan, never were you left hanging whether you’re at the Theater Room, Jeno’s office, or the Foreign Art Room.
The only time the two of you went beyond the boundaries was at the indoor garden. Jeno managed to get the key to it, lighting up some candles before you invited you inside. Thanks to the magic of the Greek gods, the cameras were bewitched to display fake imageries when security checks in the morning after.
Upon your deep conversations, you’ve mentioned once or twice about the indoor garden. It was the latest addition of the museum, opening in the early 2000s. Because it was a sacred place, no art piece was ever allowed inside.
Yet again, Jeno challenged the rules again when he invited you inside. A few minutes before, he set up some lights along the hallway of the garden, where he placed a blanket, a picnic basket, and his laptop right at the end of it. The best place to view everything, he just knew you’d love it.
He was undoubtedly right once you gasped at such a pretty sight. Seeing the silhouettes of various flowers and plants together with the night sky with all the stars sparkling, it was like you’re attending another ball with your sisters, who were looking for suitors then.
Once Jeno leisurely led you until the end, he brought out all the delicacies from the basket. One of them was this Italian savory dish of dough with toppings such as cheese and pepperoni, or pizza as they named it. The next ones were fresh strawberries and melted chocolate, followed by grape juice.
“I’d drink actual alcohol with you again, only if I didn’t get shitfaced and do my job properly.”
“Point taken. Besides, this is close enough. So pour me a drink please.”
Perhaps this was the closest to a date Jeno could ever ask you out to. With the restrictions and being constrained with time, he brainstormed all sorts of ways to bring the outside world to you. From simply letting you wander around this fascinating room, he unleashed the inner romantic in him. None of his friends would’ve thought since they never asked him about it, so he kept it to himself only. Finally, he’s satisfied with what he prepared. After eating, the two of you would watch more films before the sun rose again.
You’re just the right person for him at the moment he can act that way.
After your quiet stroll and sitting back down, Jeno surprisingly handed you a tiny box.
“A gift?”
“Open it.” He sipped on his juice, paying attention to your actions. Gently untying the box, the amazement in your eyes couldn’t fathom such a lovely present. No words were required to verify that Jeno outdid himself again, just your facial expression alone is enough.
When Jeno said that he pays attention to the tiny details, he doesn’t bluff. Throughout your growing relationship, you’ve cited how you wanted another special flower in your life. Just because you couldn’t view lavender roses the same way ever again, it didn’t mean you wanted to kick them out of your life. Flowers were one of nature’s beautiful creations, so you’re wishing to find the love you once had for lavender roses in other ones.
Thus, you came across what you thought held the highest form of meaning: red roses. Despite its thorns, it’s still a marvelous flower. Innocently, you told him that just because of the memory of your father giving them to your mother on her birthday yearly.
Red roses represented true love and romance, a discreet message only those eager would know.
Jeno was one of them, which was why he reserved this gift for this very moment. It was a necklace he found through a college fair recently, a subtle red rose pendant in the center. Since he couldn’t give you huge gifts, he settled for something light. Something none of the guards or the director wouldn’t pinpoint out when they do their inspections.
“Do you like it?”
Not one utter from your mouth since you’re so hypnotized, your lips quirked up in a charming smile. “Is that even a question? This is astonishing, Jeno.”
After you attempted to put it around your neck, Jeno sighed and stepped in to help you out. “Turn around, (Y/N). Let me.”
The tension gradually heightened once you held your hair up so Jeno accessibly viewed your clean neck. Clasping the lock, it took all his might to hold himself back from you. Even from behind, your silhouette was attractive to him. The lights he set up weren’t helping the slightest of what he’s thinking to do with you.
“Done.” He breathily whispered in your ear.
**
If he thought he was the only one feeling something powerful, he’d be more than wrong. The lingering sensation of his slim fingers gracing your décolletage area unhinged another kind of want, the one you’ve only imagined in your mind when you were needy and alone. It shouldn’t be a sin unless you’re with the person you’ve fallen for, right?
Facing him again, the eye contact didn’t last long when you were the first one to strike a move. Jeno kissed back right away, his hands pulling you closer by your waist. Whatever sultry music Jeno played, it gave you the perfect momentum to grind on his lap. He groaned against kisses, adding his tongue. His thumbs sensually rubbed your hipbones, one of your hands toying around with his hair while the other one balled up his shirt by the chest. None of you cared if anyone caught you.
The last time you’ve been this aggressive was at the Theater Room, which eventually increased the hidden lust you’ve had towards each other. Taking things slowly at first, it’s about time to delve in for more. The mood was already set from the start, even if Jeno didn’t plan this to happen here. But being the prepared man he is, he did have a condom in his back pocket.
Your fingers trailed from his neck until his crotch. He was hard, sensing how suffocated he must be. But he kept himself in control. Locking eye contact, you sweetly spoke.
“Grant my second wish, Jeno.” That same hand of yours held one of his, planting it in your breast. “Make love to me.”
Giving the go-signal, he crashed his lips on yours while stripping you off your dress. Carefully, he turned you around to untie your tight corset. Once it fell, your neck leaned sideways as his lips attacked it madly. Your breaths were tremulous, placing both his hands on your freed breasts to knead with. His touch felt like fire on your skin, yet you couldn’t stop.
“Jeno,” Obscene moans from your lips choked out. You desired more, shifting back to face him again to attack his lips. Slowly feeling one of his hands laying you down, you spread your legs with ease just for him. He parted after your head landed on the cushion to unbutton himself. The way your mouth dropped to selfishly stare at his bare body, flexing them before getting back into position. He was fit and toned just as Cleopatra predicted.
As much as Jeno knew how wild your thoughts were getting, he was more taken aback by your perky chest.
“Fuck, you are divine.” He sucked one nipple as his fingers ventured to slip your panties down. So much was going on, you didn’t know which stimulated you more. You tried to close your legs around his hand, but he slapped your inner thigh to stop you.
The cool breeze shivered you, especially from your core. Jeno’s fingers adventurously grazed from your hip area to your lower lips. He teasingly rubbed it up and down in your essence, his index finger settling it right at your needy clit. Another moan escaped your lips, an opportunity for Jeno to slide his tongue in your mouth. Enjoying the moment, his fingers dipped inside you. A gasp broke your kiss, making him giggle in your ear.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
“Oh, angel. The things I want to do with you.”
Sliding them back and forth, curling it even, you squirmed for more. Dropping himself to meet your core, Jeno placed your legs on his shoulder. Pushing you closer, his steamy breath felt like friction. Your hips grinded against it, so he gripped on them so you stay put.
“Angel,” He chuckled darkly, his crotch tightening at how powerless you looked. “You’re so pretty.”
You were drenched from arousal. But to Jeno, you were glowing under the lights. He wanted to take his time to admire what he had done to you. His independent girl, only weak for him.
His fingers unfolded in your lower lips, diving in to your orbit. You could hardly speak from his skilled mouth, especially his tongue savagely lapping your clit in numerous paces. You’ve only daydreamed about what it could do aside from kissing, and it exceeded your expectations. By the heated sensation that had the heels of your feet digging his back deeply, you affirmed to have seen more stars than the night sky above you.
Your back arched uncontrollably while his hands grasped your hips to stay in place, the tears in your eyes formulating while tugging on his hair. Your thighs clenched around his face, but his broad shoulders widened it to taste more of you. No use of pulling away when his grip on you was tight, so you could only cry out from the pleasure.
“Fuck!”
The ringing sounds in your off were going off, your throat drying up from moaning once another orgasm was about to hit. Once the knot in you snapped, nothing could hold back your screams of pleasure whilst panting for air. Sensitive as he licked every remaining essence he caused, he smirked as he got up to unbuckle his jeans.
Oh, boy. He got quite a package behind his boxers.
Even while you were overly sensitive, you had to grasp it in your hands. He was yours, and you were his.
The way you clenched around his protected length, pausing to readjust yourself to the feeling. The foreplay deemed helpful, though the girth of him overwhelmed you. He stretched you out so good.
“Are you okay, (Y/N)?” The stunned face you made was expected, still feeling worried that it may be too much.
Biting your lip, you moaned once everything felt bearable. “You can move, Jeno.”
None of you could track exactly how many rounds you went through. Even in the semi-public area, it didn’t hinder either of you. There’s that thrill, and surprisingly enough, you both shared the liking of it. Always switching the positions, you decided to call it quits after another sloppy round in missionary. Something seeing Jeno on top, fully submitting yourself to him, made you feel calm to be vulnerable. It’s really the trust you’ve established from the start, making you rely on humans again once you’ve let the past be.
Jeno brought out another blanket, initially meant for cuddling. It was still applicable though, curling your body into a spoon towards his racing chest. Music was no longer noise, the intimacy creeping back instead of lust this time. The afterglow of Jeno, sweaty and knackered as his legs sprawled under the sheet, was a sight for sore eyes. He’s always been handsome while on duty, but post-sex gave him an extra boost.
Plus there’s pride from the red marks courtesy of you on his chest, grazing over it softly.
Jeno chuckled softly at your smooth fingers, lifting them up to kiss them tenderly before kissing your lips again. Only humans were capable of and to love, but you’re some kind of an exception. Regardless of the magic from the plate, you’d be able to love too if it weren’t for your background.
There’s so much love Jeno wanted to offer you, even if he hasn’t said it out loud yet.
Perhaps one reason was because time was beginning to tick. Finals were a few weeks away, then the one-month long semestral break until a new semester kicks off. Time really flew by, and his bank account and heart expanded too. Enjoying the now was all he could think of doing, but those uncertainties bothered him.
The biggest would be where you and he would stand when his job ended.
Jeno was too absorbed in his internal debate, as portrayed by his eyes staring off in space and running his hand in his hair repeatedly. Something was disturbing him, and you’re concerned as to what it was.
“Jeno,” Around his arm, you tapped his chest to get him out of it. “What’s going on in your head?”
Jeno approached every obstacle he faces straightforwardly, not wanting to let him hold back. Rarely did he keep secrets, especially from you. Instead of hiding away, he voiced it out.
“(Y/N), will we work out?”
“What do you mean, Jeno?”
You’re so occupied in the present that thinking of the future was never in your field. Like him, you’re just enjoying being in the moment. Though after tonight, it’s making you wonder if there’s a future.
“Well,” He placed his hand on top of yours, affectionately observing you. “Times flies faster when you’re having fun, and well, the semester is ending.”
His last words crushed a part of your heart, remembering his initial plan. None of you expected your friendship to bloom into what it is now, but life was just full of surprises without a schedule. At the same time, none of you wouldn’t have it any other way.
It may have been a few months since you two committed to each other, but the spark was still strong. It wasn’t like a summer romance kind of feeling. Time was not a determinant of love either, which you were certain of it with Jeno. A lot more than Junmyeon.
It should’ve frightened you when you realized your love for Jeno, but it didn’t. Even if you didn’t age physically, your mindset did. You’ve learned to forgive your younger self, and through Jeno, you let your guard down completely. From that, you let love in. Platonic to your fellow art pieces, and all of the above to Jeno.
Throughout your relationship, you regained all confidence in yourself and everything you set your mind to.
“I wouldn’t want to worry too much about it if I were you.” Your body flipped to lie on your stomach, resting your head on your palm.
“Why shouldn’t I, angel?”
Gazing back at him, you left a velvety kiss on his lips to rest his thoughts. His hand wrapped your neck, deepening it. But you pulled away with a giggle, all too knowing of his secret intentions as his cock began to harden again. His eyes narrowed down and his lower lip stuck out at your attempt of being a tease.
But enough about sex, you wanted to address a point.
Lee Jeno was going to be the biggest risk you wanted to take and fight for, and no one should try to stop you.
“I’ll ask Circe for a potion. For me, for you, for us.”
If it weren’t for insistent questioning towards every art piece, who kept their mouths shut, only Circe herself banished him from his suffering. Her series of potions varied, and the one you requested years ago which you threw out was capable of turning any art piece into a living human. No potion of Circe ever failed, so you entrusted your life for the day you do drink it.
“Are you sure, angel?”
Jeno knew about that one specifically, and as great to hear that you never threw it out, he never put pressure on you. He wanted you to do whatever felt right, even if deep down, he wished you’d use it. He was only worried about how the flow of the entire museum would be disrupted.
Typical Jeno always looking out for you, but you saw right through his concern. Here you were, caressing his check as reassurance. With an honest smile,
“I’ve never been more certain with anything in my life here until you came, Lee Jeno.”
Jeno opened up more to his life outside the museum, telling all sorts of experiences not just his days as a university student. From his childhood, his family, his travels, heck you even want to meet his friends at this point!
Newly, he shared with you how the sunrise and sunset looked like in Seoul with much vivacity. It’s a luxury as a human to witness as day breaks and ends, so you could imagine by yourself how it would look like. Sure, you had drawings and all, but that was from the real (Y/N) (Y/L/N).
This version of you wanted to live more; that’s your greed now.
“You’ve never touched snow too, right?” Jeno, who had his arm wrapped around you, silently watched the first batch of snow from inside.
“Yup, that’s the thing when you’re imprisoned in this place.” You sulked by his side, earning a chuckle from him who pulled you in closer.
“Don’t tell me now that you despise this place.”
“I don’t, but it hinders me to experience new things. The whole pattern of being awake at night by a plate gets tiring, Jeno.”
All Jeno would do when you’re frustrated was placing your head on his shoulder, listening as you talk.
“I know, angel. But it won’t be long until you leave this place with me, right?”
“You know it!” You interlocked your hands with him, eyes trained at every falling snowflake.
Sometimes, moments in silence with Jeno were all you needed for the night. Being within each other’s presence, focusing or admiring something from afar, it was all the peace you’ve needed from the bustling art pieces.
This week was the last of the semester, and Jeno’s off duty for tonight to focus on his exams. You’ll see him tomorrow night, which was his last shift ever, and also yours too.
Perhaps the biggest milestone you’re committing to without any regrets.
However, it took an unnecessary conversation you accidentally eavesdropped on to rock your decision.
You needed more ink after running out mid-way of sketching the sculptures as a secret parting gift. Before you could take a single step inside your exhibit room, a series of voices were full-on arguing. Booming back and forth, you peeped your ear out whilst hiding against the door.
“Athena, how dare you did to her?! She’s done so well from moving on from it, falling in love even! And now you’re telling me this?!” The distinct voice of Princess Diana, who spoke sweetly most of the time, boomed towards the Greek god. “You’re heartless.”
“I did what I had to do for the sake of this place, Diana!” Athena raised her voice, the lightning in her hands holding back from lashing out. She hated it when anyone argued with her, especially when she does things according to what she believed was necessary. Out of everyone, she had more leadership. “She had to know that her place is here as a wax figure, not outside. Talking Junmyeon out of it was for the best, plus it’s ideal when he drank the potion of memory loss from Circe.”
“But it tore her apart when he left her, and it’s going to tear her again if you do the same with Jeno.”
“How else are you going to approach the situation then, Diana? Those two have broken the highest golden rule, so they need to wake up.”
Right when she celebrated within herself for healing, hearing the unbearable revelation behind the past devastated you. This whole time, she internally blamed herself for being ageless and lashed out at others. The scary past barged back in, and you couldn’t handle it anymore.
Somewhere in the corner, you wept without a trace. You could care less about Athena’s opinions, but you found yourself agreeing to some of her words. You had a role to fulfill, and leaving that behind would be selfish and it could make the museum go topsy-turvy. As painful for Junmyeon to leave you, it was because the truth hurts. Nothing could change it, even if Circe could be your solution because it’ll leave a lot of questions. You didn’t want Jeno to be seen as a suspect.
Oh, Jeno.
There’s nothing wrong with falling in love either, you didn’t intend it to happen. But it becomes unfair when it compromises with your purpose, and that’s not how you are. You’ll always remember Jeno as your biggest risk, though it’s time to end things. Treacherous as it was to accept for you, risk-takers have boundaries too.
Fast forward, on the night of Jeno’s last shift, you’ve cherished every second with him. Playing around, chatting with other art pieces, kissing in private, you made it count. Before dawn broke, that’s where you chose to come clean by the garden, your sacred place. Not even your self-reassurance could prepare you to witness the hurt and confusion Jeno felt.
“You’re a mortal, and you still get to choose your path. Mine is already predetermined here as a wax copy of a historical figure.” You advised as you held both his hands, your voice shaking at the reality.
A few days ago, you were beaming with exhilaration at a new journey but now you’ve permanently backed out. Jeno couldn’t comprehend, and as much as he tried, he couldn’t. A life without you by his side would be empty and dull. “Even so, there are things about you that the original person didn’t have.”
Arguing with him wasn’t your favorite, and it’ll leave the two of you in a bad mood. But there is no way to negotiate this; you’ve already made up your mind. “We must end this, Jeno. You need someone who can grow old with you, and I can’t be that person for you.”
“But we can make it work!” His hands gripped on your slumped shoulders, whilst your face avoiding his to spare yourself from the heartache. “There’s still Circe.”
“I know, but recently, I found out that she’s an indirect cause of my misery.” Pulling away from his touch, you belted with frustration. “I cannot do this anymore, Jeno.”
You’ve always fought for whatever you wanted in life, and Jeno knew he was one of them if it weren’t for you telling him that. So he did the same, thinking of ways to make you feel whole. Now, he couldn’t tolerate the sudden crumbling of his heart from your outburst, and all he wanted to know was why you felt this way. How could he help you?
You don’t keep secrets from Jeno, but the truth behind your harsh actions cannot be revealed for the sake of the museum. Plus, you didn’t want him to despise this place he admired. Causing him pain wasn’t on your list, but keeping him safe was. It may be shown differently and he may not understand it now, but over time, he will.
“Jeno, you’ll find someone better out there. Someone with their whole life ahead of them, who’ll love you for everything that makes you who you are.” Repetitive punches in your guts urged you to barf at your half-lie, but you held it in.
“Why are you pushing me away? What happened to taking risks, (Y/N)?” Jeno interrogated, taking your hands in his hands again. They unconventionally quivered, like his lips. Jeno has never cried in front of anyone, not even when he was younger. Though for you, he just might. “Am I not worth it for you?”
Dear heavens, he was wrong. You internally screamed that, but you can’t let your selfishness seize the night. As Athena said, you had to wake up from your dream. “Committing to you was my biggest risk of them all, Jeno. Everything else that went along with it, I don’t regret it one bit. But time’s really up for us, and we must resume our normal duties.”
“I can’t lose you, (Y/N).”
“You never will, Jeno.”
He crouched lower to meet your height, his finger moving your head so you’d look at him back. Weakly enough, you did. “I want you to be a part of my normal life, angel.”
“I’ll always be here, you know. I’ll be standing in my usual spot upstairs, and you can drop by whenever you can.” You pressed your lips, lifting your head to avoid incoming tears. Meanwhile, he began shedding a few. You’ve hurt him big time, and you’ll never forgive yourself for this. “I still have one wish, right?”
Jeno’s sorrow was beyond his capacity, leaning his forehead against yours to kiss it. No matter what he could say or do, he already knew it won’t be effective. You’re affirmative in your choices, yet he still wanted to challenge it. All he wanted to know was why you’re doing this.
“Let me walk you one last time to your section.”
The black night sky had remnants of blue, motioning that dawn was approaching. Other figures gave their goodbyes to Jeno earlier, cleaning up their areas before they pose. Though none of them anticipated such a cold atmosphere between you two, they could only spy on what was bound to happen.
“My last wish is for you to let me go, Jeno.” You avowed, blinking your eyes with faux positivity. Your hands patted his blazer so it wouldn’t crease. “I already have a role to fulfill here, and you’re on the way to yours, future architect.”
“I love you, (Y/N) (Y/L/N).” Only tonight did he muster his courage to finally admit it to you after giving himself more time to analyze it. Timing was always crucial, and the badness of it showed.
Deep in your heart, you resonated the feeling. But it’ll make things more complicated, and it was the final thing you’ve wanted to occur. Someone had to be the strong one, and now, it should be you. With one more compassionate kiss on his lips, you stepped inside your section and readied your position.
“Goodbye, Lee Jeno.”
The sunshine brightened the room, and you’ve frozen to slumber again.
All Jeno could do was drop on his knees, sobbing over your rash actions. Unknown to him, a single tear left your eye as you posed.
Regardless of what status you were in, the pain of it all remained.
Jeno spent most of his semestral break with his friends to travel or whatnot, trying to forget it all. Even if he aced all his finals, his efforts felt like nothing if he never had you by his side to celebrate.
The sting over his short-lived romance with you never diminished the slightest, no one whom he could express his pain about it to especially when Renjun drank the memory wipe potion that Athena initially left for Jeno by his desk.
Forget it all, and live a peaceful life. You have so much potential, my mentee.
- Athena
Perhaps this was the same thing Junmyeon drank all those years ago, but unlike him, he didn’t have the guts to. He still wanted another chance.
So every day since the new semester began, he spent every afternoon break at your section. He’ll be seated by the bench, doing his assignments and talking about his day while sometimes stealing a glance of your figure. Some habits don’t change.
He never got sick of the same smile you exemplified, falling even more for you. He’ll often wonder what you’ve been up to.
What are your new sketches?
Are you taking care of Mochi well?
Have you apologized to Sanghoon yet?
Speaking of him, he surprisingly scooted over to Jeno’s side. This was the first time Jeno met the man, and politely enough greeted him. Sanghoon interviewed the boy, asking all sorts of questions that Jeno had every answer to. The biggest change that Sanghoon noticed since he left was your personality. You no longer bite, but treat everyone kindly without bias. You’re always active to help him out in cleaning the lobby, and you don’t go easily defensive.
Once he found out that Jeno was the reason for that, he was overjoyed at the start and wanted to meet him some way. You were a tough cookie, but now you relaxed. That was all that mattered to him, hoping to know more about him from you. That was until Diana stepped in and told him everything that happened. Mostly, the bad.
Playfulness eventually bore love. The last time you fell in love was in the 80s and Junmyeon pushed you away, he recalled. This time, you’re pushing Jeno away because you simply agreed with Athena’s points.
This wasn’t right, but it wasn’t his place to interfere.
But then again, he finally caught Jeno for the first time today and this time, he was open to hearing his side of the story. Lessen his misery too.
“No matter how stubborn she is, she loves you.” He advised him, bringing out one of your full sketchbooks. As Jeno opened it, the majority of the portraits were him. Sleeping, smiling, laughing, you drew him from every minor detail you could spot like the mole near his eye and his crescent eyes.
A handsome face I would never get sick until the end of time. Someone I want to wake up to every day in the morning if it weren’t for that plate.
- (Y/N)
Towards the end, a sketch of a house unfolded. The interior was a fusion of modernity and old royal design due to its white walls, wide space, and the placing of less furniture, plus an open backyard. There’s another tiny comment on the side from you.
I was right. Joining our varying designs together is pretty. Maybe Jeno and I could live in a house like this one day.
- (Y/N)
If you loved him so much, why did you let him go then when you had all these plans with him? Even if he tried to understand, he just didn’t.
“Don’t give up just yet when she told you to.”
“Are you just saying this or something?”
“Well, Princess Diana passed this message on but after everything, I believe that she’s right.” Sanghoon gave his opinion, but Jeno was reluctant to accept it.
“I never got a proper explanation why she suddenly changed her mind, Sanghoon.” He ranted, raking his hand through his hair from puzzlement. “Did I do something wrong?”
Sanghoon pitied him, having the upper hand and questioning himself whether to reveal the truth. However, since this boy took the job, he’s succumbed to secrecy. Without any transparency, it could drive someone mad. He’s too young for that, so Sanghoon breathed in defeat and placed his hand on Jeno’s shoulder.
“Promise me you won’t be mad when I tell you because I was when I found out; almost screamed even.”
Jeno nodded, listening to whatever Sanghoon had to say.
Of all people, he never would’ve expected Athena to do such a brash thing. Someone he respected and trusted, only to betray him by doing something she believed was good for all. Except it wasn’t, and it ended up hurting you all these years. The woman he loved, now he’s a clearer understanding of why you did what you did. Yet, it can’t fix his excruciation.
Heartbroken was an understatement; he had no one to rely on. With Sanghoon, he finally had a proper breakdown. The older man could only comfort his quietly, picturing him like one of his sons going through a hard time in school. But if it involves the heart, it’ll take more time to recover.
“You’re always the one adjusting, Jeno. But I think this time, you’re the one who needs space.”
A Year and a Half Later
“Jeno Lee!!!” Jaemin roughly wallowed his best friend in a hug when he arrived in their dorm room for the first time in a long time. “You dyed your hair blonde again!”
Renjun, who was behind the two of them, only rolled his eyes as he helped carry Jeno’s bags. “God damn it, Jaemin! You’re supposed to be helping me first!”
“I know, but give me a few seconds! I’m just happy our group is back together!”
Jeno laughed at his friends’ annoying yet silly dynamics, giddy to be back home. For a year, Jeno spent his 3rd year of university in Rome, Italy after one of his professors brought up to him about a scholarship program there for his course. At the time where he needed a change of scenery, he sent his application form and got interviewed.
Acing it, he had the opportunity to fly across the world to study and travel. His English skills surely improved, even picking up Italian words along the way due to a required class for it. He studied the history of different locations and how they were built.
He also went on field trips almost every day if it weren’t for the Italian students assigned to tour him around, academic and non-academic. Nights he spent on drinking wine on the rooftop of his dorm with them, screaming his complaints in the world with them.
It didn’t hit him that his stay was reaching its end until he submitted his final plate. His goodbye party didn’t even feel like one, but a see you later in the next few years after he becomes a licensed architect with money. His goal of it felt more realistic, motivating him to excel in his remaining years in university.
After unpacking half of his things, he was reminded of an email from one of the head professors, who requested another copy of his confidential documents from the Italian university he went to as soon as he’s back on campus.
He raced to the department with a folder of them and luckily encountered the said professor. Handing it to him, this professor questioned how he was and what experiences he gained from the trip. With excitement, Jeno spoke all sorts of tales from his adventures, highlighting how determined he was now to be an architect.
“That’s great to hear, Jeno!” He celebrated, checking on his watch, and widened his eyes. Frantic at his colliding schedules, he asked Jeno for a favor. It turned out that at the same time as his emergency meeting, he’s supposed to tour the new transferee student around campus.
“Only if you have time, Jeno! I could always ask another student, plus you just came back and need rest.”
“It’s not like I left for a decade, sir. No worries, I’ll do it.”
“Oh, bless your soul.” He put his hands together in prayer position, bowing back and forth with gratitude. “Wait, she’s right outside! Go ahead and introduce yourself.”
Jeno nodded, exiting right through the department doors. This girl had her back turned, inspecting her surroundings. She wore a black and white tweed blazer that matched with her skirt, black high heeled boots, and a black handbag. She must be a foreigner, Jeno thought.
“Excuse me, are you the transferee in the department of Architecture?”
Jeno didn’t brace himself for the surprise he’d face once this girl reacted to him calling her out. Her face was one he could never forget, no matter how many times he told himself to. The same face he convinced his heart to stop beating for, yet it lied.
This radiant face was none other than yours.
Jeno almost dropped his phone. He tried his best to hold on to your promise, but he failed. It was the main reason he studied abroad; to forget and focus on his career path. So the least thing he could’ve done was to study hard for his dream career.
Just a glimpse of you projected back every single memory you’ve had together. Beautiful yet heart-wrenching, he kept his emotions to himself.
You even wore the rose necklace he got you. Could it be?
“It’s been a while, Lee Jeno.” You took the metaphorical scissors to cut the tension, trying to contain the crushing feelings. The faculty center was a public place, yet it’s like the two of you were on the main stage.
“Do you remember me?” Astounded, you nodded. Every single detail.
Jeno could’ve ran away, but didn’t. He could’ve left you hanging, but didn’t. He can no longer count how many times you’ve appeared in his dreams, only to be disappointed when morning comes to not have you in his arms. He took one step closer, taking his time.
“How do you know me?”
“You’re the boy whom I helped with his assignment, argued with me over Romeo and Juliet,” You mimicked his move, making you one step nearer to him. “And most of all, the boy I once gave my entire heart to.”
Another step, leaving a few inches between the two of you. His heart palpitated without caffeine. What if he was napping in his dorm again? It was all surreal. “Is it really you, (Y/N)?”
Hearing your name from his lips lowered your guard, you pleased him with a hopeful grin. “I’d be dust by now if I didn’t drink Circe’s potion, right?”
That’s where Jeno unchained himself from his emotions. He engulfed in a warm hug, one that has no plans to let go when his chin planted on your shoulder. You returned the gesture, dropping all your worries away along with your bag and papers as your arms snaked through his neck.
You knew you had to part ways for a while after everything, though you were unsure how he’d feel about it. You recalled every time he visited you after his job ended up until his intense chat with Sanghoon, where he bawled his heart out. You couldn’t take it anymore after trying to stay strong, crying as soon as you woke up that night.
All your fellow figures could do was soothe you down like before to the best of their abilities, yet this time, it was unsuccessful. You’re filled with misery, realizing later how much of a big mistake you’ve made.
You’ve isolated yourself again for a while, but less rudeness and more silence. It was until Circe visited you. She doesn’t like getting involved with drama, though now was different. She, alongside Hera and Aphrodite, couldn’t withstand you tolerating the heartbreak again. So they went behind Athena’s back on this one time and created a potion together just for you. But with a compromise.
“This potion can turn you into a human. However, there’s only a 10% chance you’ll regain all your memories from this place.”
“So I’ll forget everyone and him?”
“Yes, unfortunately.” You’re about to shoo her away, not in the mood to do something drastic as that. But Circe grabbed your arm again. “I strongly believe that if you and he meant to be, then there will come a time these past memories will suddenly surge at you.”
“Must I need to forget to live properly?”
You’re stubborn, and Circe expected it. “You’ve broken so many golden rules, (Y/N), so it must be done. I’ve gone against Athena for this potion, and rarely have I done that. So rather than wallowing up in misery, you should focus on yourself. Do what makes you happy because this place is trapping you from every great thing out there.”
Those were the word that the actual (Y/N) (Y/L/N) lived by, nevertheless, you’re unique from her. You built a separate identity from her. “But Jeno-”
“At the right time, (Y/N). Pull yourself together and do all the things you’ve dreamt of before he came into the picture. I just know he loves you that much, and that he will wait for you.”
That same night, you gathered all your senses and drank it. The transition was fast as lightning speed, and behold, you were like a new person. You’re back in London, with a family that closely resembled your former one; only 3 older siblings, making you the youngest. You also had a new set of memories, from childhood until your adult years.
From (Y/N) (Y/L/N), you became (Y/N) Edwards.
It took one drunken night out with your university friends for the unlikely surge of old memories to speedily hit through your intoxicated state. Way beyond a dream, you’ve dropped your shot glass and broke down in the bathroom of your dorm room. You left something unaccomplished, and you had to do something before it’s too late.
Thus, you rushed to Seoul thanks to your parents’ support as they agreed that exploring outside your home country was a great experience. The only excuse you gave to your friends for the sudden transfer was you finding a new calling.
Sure, studying abroad was an exciting thing but you’re more determined to reunite with him. Even if this encounter was unforeseen, it was bound to happen one day. It so turned out that you had the same major in your former university and this new one.
Head to toe, you remembered everything.
“I’m so sorry I took so long.” You cradled your head on his chest, unaware of how your new life left Jeno so troubled.
“That doesn’t matter anymore.” Jeno tightened his grip, scared of releasing you again. Those two years felt like a breath of fresh air and a punch in the gut. “I tried to live up to your last wish, but I really can’t.”
“I want to take that wish back, Jeno. I wasn’t thinking right and only ended putting you through so much.”
“Oh, angel. I slowly understood why you did it.” Before he got too fragile, he softened his grip on you and showed his face again to you. He wanted a better look at his pretty girl, his fingers brushing strands of your hair behind your ear. Heart-fluttering, you bit your bottom lip. “What would you want to wish for instead?”
“Instead of you letting me go, I wish you could take me back and love me again. I can’t undo the past, but I’d still like to think I’ve tried my best.” That was the only wish you could ever think of. As huge as it was, it was something he may not accept. Yet you gave it a go, risking it all. “I don’t deserve you at all, Jeno.”
“Don’t say that, (Y/N).” One of his hands grabbed yours, putting it on his cheek. Cupping it, “I’ve never stopped loving you, you know.”
Oh, love. An all-too familiar emotion that either makes or breaks you. Of all the times you could’ve said those words, you held back, especially that wretched night you two broke it off. Although you showed it, being able to say it to someone felt more empowering.
This was finally the chance you’ve unconsciously waited for.
“I’m stupid for not saying this sooner.”
“What is it?”
With intimate eye contact, you drowned in the comfort of his brown orbs. You trusted him then, and you trusted him now. “I love you, Lee Jeno.”
Secretly, Jeno anticipated for the day you’d say those meaningful 3 words. Just like you, he showed more affection through actions than words. He only admitted when he lost you, and never would he do the same mistake again. If he felt that the love was strongly present, he will say it aloud.
“I love you still, (Y/N).” His arm around your waist tugged you in further. “I loved you as (Y/N) (Y/L/N) and I will continue to love you as (Y/N) Edwards.”
He peeked on your ID earlier, but regardless, he stood by his truth. You’re still the same (Y/N).
Finally, he closed the limited space between your lips. The memories of your past romance replayed in sync of every touching kiss, popping one leg up like in the movies. The Princess Diaries, specifically. Like in the museum from your unbearable parting, one warm tear freed itself down your cheek.
The sweetness of being reunited with you again beat the torturous wait of Jeno. Time really made your hearts grow fonder. As everyone said, if the love between two people is real, then it’ll find its way back to each other.
The world must be on your side too because no professor called you two out on your public display of affection. Jeno pecked your lips one time before stepping away, picking up the things you dropped.
“Now come on, I have to tour you around as instructed.”
You stomped on your feet, rolling your eyes from being left hanging. He’s still the same tease from before. “After that kiss though, I would’ve thought we could reschedule it.”
“No can do, Edwards.” Passing over your things, he wrapped one arm around you as he escorted you out of the building. The university was huge, with more buildings and green fields surrounded everywhere. “Left or right? There are a lot of places you missed out on all those years.”
“Point taken. Then you lead the way, my love.”
#nct#nct au#nct scenarios#nct x reader#nct fluff#nct angst#nct smut#nct imagines#nct dream#nct dream au#nct dream scenarios#nct dream x reader#nct dream fluff#nct dream angst#nct dream smut#nct dream imagines#lee jeno#lee jeno x reader#lee jeno au#lee jeno scenarios#lee jeno angst#lee jeno imagines#lee jeno fluff#lee jeno smut#jeno#jeno x reader#jeno au#jeno scenarios#jeno imagines#jeno fluff
343 notes
·
View notes
Text
Disconnect
Yandere!Shinsou x reader
Warnings: yandere, adult themes, bordering Stockholm syndrome, hints of dubious consent
A/N: here’s another fic I posted and deleted a bit ago, but I edited it and revamped it a bit. I was in a weird place when I wrote this, but it’s content! Gonna stop impulsively deleting shit😂
“Are you in love with me?”
What a pathetic question. You know it is, but it’s been on your mind all damn day. That, amongst other things. Insecurities have been bombarding your brain and consuming your thoughts. They’re the kind that you’ve managed to repress for years, but today, while bored of all the nothing you had to do while Shinsou was away, they came at you full force, as if they were paying you back for forgetting about them.
Before Shinsou took you, happiness had been perpetually evasive. Some days you could pretend like it had been there, but that had just been a trick of the mind—a phantom emotion that muzzled how you’d actually been feeling.
The truth is, your friends—your family—everyone you know has always simply tolerated you. You could go to them when you were feeling down, but they never really wanted to hear your qualms. They’d always tell you anything you needed to hear to get you to stop whining. There’d been an art to ignoring how they grimaced at your attempted humor and hope for you to stop trying. They never wanted to hear about your interests or aspirations, either—most of them were too big for you anyways—but they would smile and wait for you to finish prattling on, then exhale with relief when it was over.
So, it hadn’t been like you could tell them how you felt, lest you wanted to risk being a ceaseless nuisance.
Some days you’d wondered if they wouldn’t mind if you just disappeared. Now you find yourself wondering what they think now that you have.
It’s fine. Rather, it had been fine when you were around them. However, the more time you’re forced to spend with Shinsou, the more you realize how unhappy you used to be.
You can’t say you’re happy now, either. With the reality of your situation, you’d actually have to be insane to say that you’re happy. A caged bird could never thrive if he couldn't fly. But Shinsou has been the first person that wanted to hear you talk about anything and everything. He wants to know you—to be there for you. He actually asks about your likes and dislikes, how you’re feeling, what he can do to make things better, while you’ve always been reluctant to answer him.
Still, you want to know. You want to be sure. You can assume that he does love you. Afterall, he’s taking care of you right now.
Earlier, he sensed that you were stressed and offered to give you a massage. Normally you would slink away from his touch, but you were feeling weak, so you said yes. You have to admit that having him touch you is... nice.
A deep groan escapes your chest when he presses on a particularly tense spot in your back, so he rubs the area more, making sure to massage all of your anxieties away. He leans down low to press his lips against the shell of your ear. You can feel the curl of his mouth when he says, “that’s a stupid question.”
I know. You want to tell him that, but you won’t. You won’t open up to him. You know he’d like that too much. It’s ironic, really. The one person who wants you to open up to them and it’s the last person on earth you’d want to tell anything too personal to.
“I wouldn’t have asked it if I didn’t need to hear the answer.”
“You wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t in love with you,” he counters.
Touché, asshole.
“So the moment you fall out of love with me, you’re going to let me go.”
You very nearly say ‘you’re going to kick me out,’ but it’s not like you’re simply visiting with him. You’re there against your will. He's your captor, you’re his prisoner.
“That’s not going to happen.”
“But if it does-“
“It won’t.” Shinsou begins kissing down your spine. “Getting you here was a drag, but I won’t be letting you go under any circumstances.”
“Why?”
Darks skepticism envelopes his timbre when he asks, “why, what?”
You can't blame him. There’s been plenty of one-sided conversation where you’ve practically begged to be released, only to have Shinsou give you the cold shoulder. This won’t be another one of those discussions. You couldn’t bear it.
“Why do you like me?”
“Why do I like you, or why am I in love with you?”
You think about it for a second and decide to hell with it. You threw your dignity out the window the second you asked your first question. You hide your face in the pillow and mutter, “both.”
Shinsou hums against your back, pretending to consider the question while he squeezes your hips, pressing his thumbs into either side of your tailbone.
“Oh, god,” you sigh, pushing your ass up so he presses deeper on you, “that feels so good.”
“Reason one as to why I like you-“ Shinsou moves his hands down to your ass. He kneads your muscles, partly because he knows you want it, but mostly because he loves handling your ass- “you sound like that when you moan.”
“Be serious!” You bark back half-heartedly, because he seriously knows how to give a good massage, and you can’t stay annoyed when he’s touching you like that.
“I’m being plenty serious. It’s hot.” He squeezes your bottom, adding just the right amount of pressure to get you to moan again. He chuckles and thumbs the side of your underwear, letting it snap back to your skin pap! “So hot.”
“So, you like me because I’m hot?” You exhale when he squeezes more lotion onto your back, the cool sensation making goosebumps rise on your skin.
“Well-“ there’s a shrug in his voice when he makes his way back up to your spine-“it’s one of the reasons.”
Shinsou begins listing things he likes about you: the curl of your hair, the dip in your hips, the curve of your ass, the way your nose scrunches up when you smell something you think is going to be nice, but is actually unappealing, and that “cute little mole in that one place,” he suggests, “you know, the one I like to kiss…”
It’s all almost nice to hear, except they all have one thing in common: they’re all physical. You won’t always look like what you do now. You don’t think that Shinsou is so superficial that he only judges you on your appearance, but you can’t stop the swelling in your chest.
“And I especially like your neck,” he whispers at the column of your throat, right before licking a stripe up to your earlobe. You shudder when he smiles against you. “So sensitive…”
“So that’s it?”
You’re being negative, demanding even, and you shouldn’t feel bad about it because it’s with Shinsou, but you do. You need to hear more. You need to feel like you matter.
“There’s loads more, but this is what I’m focusing on right now. My partner’s half naked in front of me and I’m only human.”
You turn to face him, maneuvering the pillow your head was on to the front of you, hiding Shinsou’s eyes both from your chest, and from the tears you’ve left behind.
“What about when I change?” You ask, squeezing your fluffy shield against your stomach.
“What do you mean?”
“Like-“ you bow your head, fiddling with the fringes on the pillow- “I don’t know. If I’m gonna be stuck here forever, then obviously I’m gonna age.”
Shinsou frowns. “So?”
“So...I won’t always be-“ you make a flippant gesture at him-“your version of hot!”
He snorts. “My version of hot? What’s that?”
“You tell me!”
He shakes his head, laughing as he brings his hand to the back of his neck, looking sheepish. “You’re my version of hot...it won’t matter if your hair turns silver, your skin wrinkles, you get all saggy and crinkly-“ he chuckles- “same thing’s gonna happen to me, only with my job, I might end up losing an arm or—heaven forbid—I get a scar over an eye.”
You dismiss that. “Scars can be hot.”
“Duly noted.” He smirks. “I might have to be extra reckless on my next mission. See how you react to my battle wounds.”
“Please don’t,” you say immediately. You gaze up at him to see that his usual sleep-ridden eyes have softened. Geez, he’s acting as if you said something nice to him.
“What’s going on with you?” Shinsou asks as his hand falls over your pillow shield. He tugs on it to move, but you keep it clawed to your chest. “C’mon...let me in.”
It’s hard because you want to. You want to let him in, and you’re stupid for it. At least you have the mind to shake your head at him.
“Alright then,” he says, “what do you like about me? Or should I say, do you like me?”
“No.” That part is easy enough to say. Even if it's a lie, which you aren’t sure if it is or not, you know it’s what you should say every time. Regardless of what he makes you feel, what he does for you, how he takes care of you, you’re still there against your will.
You don’t get a moment to feel guilty about saying it either, because as soon as the answer rolls off of your tongue, you freeze, unable to move or speak. Immediately you want to rebuke, tell him off, scream at him, but your body disobeys every single one of your furious demands. Shinsou hasn’t used his mind control on you too much lately, and you let yourself forget that he has it. You’re absolutely seething.
Bastard.
“I’m sorry, darlin’. I’m a slave to my own whims.” Shinsou takes the pillow away from your body. His eyes scan over your torso appreciatively before finding the dark dots stained from your tears on the fabric of your pillow. He flexes his jaw, then places the pillow back behind you.
“Lay back,” he commands, and you’re helpless to oblige.
For a moment, the two of you are still. Shinsou’s staring at you, but not in a way that’s weird...er than normal. He’s seen you naked plenty of times, so he’s not being entirely a pervert. It’s only when he rolls down to level his face with yours, you see that there’s mist in his eyes.
“You’re intelligent,” he says, placing a hand over your navel, “and not in a way that’s annoying. You can hold stimulating conversations, and you think...differently, but you’re also interested in listening to divergent viewpoints.”
Shinsou starts moving his hand in circles, using his fingertips to draw intricate designs across your skin.
“You don’t know how to make a proper playlist, so when you listen to music, the weirdest shit comes on, and you sing along to all of it. And you’re so bad at singing, but you belt that shit out like you don’t even care.”
You kinda wanna hit him. You kinda wanna laugh. You kinda don’t wanna accept that you've gotten comfortable enough around Shinsou to actually sing around him, even if it’s in the goofy voice that you use.
“You’re kind to animals, you laugh in your sleep, you yell at inanimate objects, and you always read the last page of a novel once you’re halfway through it, which is infuriating, but it’s because you get so excited that you can’t stand not knowing what’s going to happen.”
Shinsou brings his hand up to cup your face. “You piss me off. You challenge me. You’re stubborn and defiant and abrasive and I-“ he pauses, sighing- “and I love it. I love every part of you—vexing vices and valorous virtues.”
He leans down so that his lips are a hair away from yours. His voice is tight, raspy from something he’s holding back, but still, he speaks. “I know I’m fucked up for this. I know you hate it here, but there’s no way in hell I’d ever let anyone else have you. You’re so fucking weird, and beautiful, and angry. You’re precious to me, and I know without a shadow of a doubt that I’ll always be in love with you. And that means damning you to me. I would say that I’m sorry, but I’m not. At least, not for keeping you. You’re the only thing I've ever wanted—the only sin I don’t regret.”
Your brain is ocean fog when his lips meet yours. He kisses you softly, because he doesn’t want to bring you out of your stupor just yet. His fingers travel down your sides, resting at the waistband of your panties. He pulls back and eyes you deviously.
“And if you don’t like me yet, I guess I’ll have to deal, but that doesn’t mean I’m not gonna keep gunning for your affection.” He smirks, hooking his thumbs around the sides of your briefs. Your entire body flushes in direct reaction to him, anticipating what comes next. It doesn’t go unnoticed.
With a devilish glint in his indigo eyes, he smirks up at you and says, “at least I know some things you love about me”
#yandere!shinsou x reader#yandere!shinsou#yandere x reader#reader insert#bnha reader insert#bnha x reader#bnha imagines#hitoshi shinsou x reader#shinsou x reader#yandere bnha#bnha yandere#tw yandere
556 notes
·
View notes
Text
First of many
Summary: This is your first anniversary with Spencer. And it’s nerve racking.
Pairing: Spencer Reid X GN!Reader
Content/Warning: Just fluff cause I’m a softie. But a few curse words and mention of anxiety.
Word Count: 2,021
Author’s note: I wrote this for @homoose ‘s creator challenge because I love her Spencer fics. I am so happy that you reached 2k, you deserve it and more.
Spencer was, scrolling through Netflix, while you were getting some snacks. He came across Pan’s Labyrinth, which was the first movie the two of you had ever watched.
Very early on you had realized that Spencer hasn’t watched a lot of pop culture-relevant movies and that’s when you decided that they would have mini movie marathons to get him caught up. Spencer smiled at the memory that was in the first months of your relationship. And then it hit him, like a bag of bricks.
Their first anniversary was coming up. Real soon. Like in two weeks soon. How could Spencer forget? He had an eidetic memory. It’s just that everything was just so fast and nice, that it seems like time passed him by and he didn’t even notice. He didn’t have to stress about anything, everything came naturally between you two.
Yes, there were ups and downs. Spencer is a stubborn man and you can be even more stubborn. He would try to protect you by closing off, you would call him out on it. He had his bad days and you had her bad days too, but would always talk it out and resolve it.
He loved you with all his might and you had made this year incredible. He felt at home when he was with you. He never imagined being able to feel this love for a singular person. And he was excited to show you.
One problem though; this was the first time one of his relationships has lasted more than a few months. He didn’t know how to start. He didn’t know the proper etiquette for anniversaries. Hell, he had never read any literature about how to celebrate an anniversary. Fuck, what was he going to do?
Meanwhile, in the kitchen, while waiting for the popcorn to be done to get back to cuddling with your boyfriend, You had an inkling that you were missing something. It was like an itch you couldn’t scratch. You grabbed your phone to see if there was anything that would help you remember. But nothing. You still felt something wasn’t right. That’s when you saw it.
You knew you weren’t going to remember, you didn’t have Spencer’s memory. You wrote it on your calendar that was on the fridge. It was right there, with a red heart around the day and everything. Fuck.
Your anniversary was coming up. And you had no idea what to do. But that wasn’t the most stressful thing about the entire thing. It was that it was a reminder that you were Spencer’s longest relationship and this was the first time he has ever lasted a year with someone.
Spencer told you in the beginning about his woes and struggles with dating and being in a relationship. You found it adorable how nervous he was trying to figure out how to manage these relationship things. You even heard him talking to Derek and Luke one night to get advice.
Thankfully, he was much more comfortable now and realized that he just had to be himself. But those first months were filled with you reassuring Spencer that he didn’t have to change or anything. That you loved him just the way he was.
That’s why you wanted to make this day special for Spencer. To celebrate that you have overcome multiple obstacles and are still together, one year later. To show him that he was the best boyfriend you could ever wish for. But, how can you do that? How can you make this the perfect day for the certified genius that was sitting in the living room?
Out of all his friends, he knew only one of them could help him. Someone with the creativity, the passion for love, and the knowledge of you and that was Miss Penelope Garcia. Before he could even finish his sentence, she already knew what to do.
She grabbed a piece of paper off her desk and started to scribble some words down.
“Okay, boy wonder, you will meet me here after your last class. I will not accept any excuses. ” She gave Spencer a piece of paper. He smiled at his friend.
“Oh, I’m not done yet, mighty professor. How do you feel about shopping?” Spencer’s eyes widened. Shopping with Garcia wasn’t an easy thing, or so he heard from JJ.
“Hey, Reid! What are you doing here?” Luke said, poking his head from the door.
“I- uhm. My classes are later in the day and I wanted to ask Garcia something.” Spencer told his friend, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. Luke smiled at the brunet and turned his attention to Garcia.
“It’s Spencer and Y/N anniversary in a couple of weeks and we are gonna help our beautiful genius.” She said with the biggest smile. Luke laughed at Spencer’s confusion.
“Oh, this gonna be so much fun.” Garcia clapped.
You, on the other hand, were on a phone call with Emily ranting about it. You had no idea how to start. You knew what you were going to get him, sorta. Okay, you thought about one thing. But it wasn’t enough. It didn’t feel like enough.
“Y/N, calm down.” Emily laughed.
“Emily! Please, I need your help.” You groaned while Emily let another laugh.
“How about a picnic?” She suggested.
“I don’t know. He probably won’t like the grass being close to the food. And then there’s all the people at the park. I don’t think Spencer would enjoy all the germs there must be. ” You rubbed your eyes, stressing out.
“Well, picnics don’t have to be in parks.” And that, folks, is why in Emily Prentiss we trust. You both started scheming to make this the best anniversary ever.
It wasn’t a competition but not even an unbiased jury of profilers and behavior specialists can decipher which one of you two was more nervous.
On one hand, we had Spencer checking his gift that he put in the backseat so you wouldn’t be able to peak. His head wasn’t even in the conversation you were trying to form, keyword trying. He just felt his hands getting clammy. His heart was in his throat, not literally but he felt it. He had never done something like this.
Then, on the other hand, we had you. Gripping the steering wheel as if someone was going to rip it from you. You were trying to calm yourself down by talking with Spencer but he kept looking over his shoulder, staring at the gift he got you. He said he wasn’t gonna show it to you till you reached your destination. The minute you saw a big purple gift bag, you felt your heart stop. But also your brain starts to run. What if he didn’t like your gifts?
You parked in front of the location and turned off the car. Spencer gave you a soft smile and grabbed your hand. He kissed it and rubbed the place where he planted the kiss.
“What was that for?” You giggled.
“No reason. Just because I love you.” He gave you a wink. You grabbed his face and pulled him in for a soft kiss.
“C’mon, sweetie. Let’s go.” You opened your car door and headed out. You entered the place, trying to set out everything.
“You can do this, Reid.” Spencer took a deep breath, grabbed the gift, and headed to where you were.
Spencer knocked on the door and quickly you opened it. You gave him a smile and let him in. Spencer gasped.
“Ta-da!” It was an art gallery, filled with brand new paintings and unknown artists. But in the middle of the room, there was a blanket, a light candle, and a picnic basket.
“What? I- How did you do this?" Spencer couldn't believe what he was seeing. It was just too overwhelming.
"Well, Emily Prentiss has friends in high places. And one of them just so happened to own this gallery." You explained, grabbing his hands leading him to the blanket. "So what do you think?"
"I love it so much! It's- Woah." Spencer was speechless. His eyes were sparkling with love. He couldn't believe it.
"Did I just render doctor Spencer Reid speechless?" You joked, Spencer rolled his eyes.
"You know it's not that difficult for you." You smiled at his words. Spencer remembered his gift and started to scratch his neck nervously. How could he top this? What he didn’t realize is that you are still nervous.
"Do you- uhm- want to have your gift right now?" He grabbed the purple gift bag, clenching it close to his heart.
“Well if you want to.” You said, trying to ease his discomfort.
“I mean you already gave me my present and it was spectacular. It’s only fair and just that I give you yours. Obviously, if you want to wait it’s fine by me. Or if you don’t want it till we get home, I understand. I-” Spencer rambled, before being cut off by you.
“Spence, hey, calm down. First of all, this isn’t your only gift.” You stated. Spencer looked at you strangely.
“Woah, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the thought, but this is enough. I mean look at this. This is incredible. I can’t believe you did this. I love everything about it. It’s the best way to have a picnic. ” He exclaimed. You chuckled at your boyfriend’s excitement.
“It’s just a small thing. Don’t worry about it. Now.” You made grabby hands at him, and he laughed while giving you the gift. You opened the bag to see a familiar color purple ball of yarn, a box, and a little book.
“I know you like my purple scarf and since I take it to cases sometimes, so I made you one.” You pulled the scarf out of the bag.
“How?” You gasped.
“Garcia took me to this recreational center she volunteers at and they had a knitting class. I don’t know, it just made sense.” Spence explained.
“It’s even warmer than yours.” You said putting it around your neck. Spencer’s heart clenched. “Wait, there’s more. Right.” You pulled the box out of the bag and opened it. It was a simple gold necklace with an S on it. You gasped at the gift.
“Spencer, I-” “That’s not all. Look at the book.” It was a simple leather small letter notebook. You gave Spencer a look, to which he responded by giving you a reassuring smile.
You opened it to see Spencer’s writing on the first page.
Whenever you are feeling sad, lonely, or need a pick me up, read a page from this book.
With love, Spencer
“They are a collection of love letters. Or messages meant to be in love letters, to you.” He said softly.
“Oh, Spencer!.” You pulled into a hug. He gripped you tightly. You pulled away and started peppering kisses all over his face.
“I love you so much.” You said, grabbing his face. He smiled. Something Spencer loved was when you hold his face in your hands. It made him feel safe and loved.
“And I love you.” He leaned in and kissed you. You pulled away first and gave him a smile.
“‘Now time for your present.” You opened the basket to pull out a box. Spencer grabbed the box out of your hands and started to take off the gift wrap. Spencer gasped, his eyes almost bulging out of his skull.
“You didn’t.” He said his eyes never leaving the book in his hands. You chuckled. Spencer had recently been going through all of his mom’s scrapbooks. And you would sit in his lap while he explained every picture and every article. It was like a therapeutic thing. So you decided you wanted to make one for you guys.
“Oh but I did.” You winked at him. He went through the pictures with tears in his eyes. A year’s worth of memories, right there. He noticed there were a couple of blank pages.
“For the years to come.” You said softly.
“For the years to come.” Spencer repeated.
201 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
redwineand12gaugeshells
I got drunk and got a tumblr
mythrilhusk
#HuskWrites
spectorgram
the winter knows me
b0r3dtod3ath
sophie
kimdirbiyografi
Biyografi