#your health cannot be bargained
Text
Not sure who needs to hear this but don't ever let shitty parents shame you out of using the health and wellness resources that are available to you and that you need! Fuck parents who medically neglect their children! Don't wait until you're 26 and then try to solve all your health problems on your own. Take care of it while you're younger, if you can! The necessary care isn't something to be denied of. Do it now so that by the time you're 26 preventative issues aren't as terrible
#you don't need permission to get checked out#if you can't drive and need a ride then don't let don't be afraid to ask a trusted friend to let you carpool with them#helping each other is mutually beneficial#maybe you get a ride and maybe your friend who cares about you gets to be relieved that you're okay- it's a symbiotic dynamic#you're worthy of the help and the care#also fuck your parents if they try to pull this 'it's expensive' CRAP#what did they think taking care of a whole ass human being would be???? a total bargain?#your health cannot be bargained#it is non negotiable#you deserve support and you deserve wellness 🫂💗#recovery#healing
74 notes
·
View notes
Text
this night together - chapter one (j.yh + s.mg)
chapter one: a safe place to land
summary: you're finally getting your dream job, working with some of the best dancers in the business, but a job change means a break in your healthcare coverage and suppressants these days are expensive. going into heat at the studio pretty much seems like the worst case scenario, but you find yourself in the care of two alphas who won't let you go through it alone.
note: reader and the boys are not idols in this fic, but instead are part of the bb trippin dance crew. the idol group mentioned in the fic's name is 'new world' which was one of the early options for ateez's name, and i just thought that was cute. overall though, i know very little about dancing and choreography. i did my best to research what that field might be like, but please know there are likely inaccuracies. also.... i have no idea how healthcare coverage with jobs work in korea and my research wasn't too helpful. we're going with what i know which is often a ninety day waiting period before you get health coverage at a new job, which means reader here cannot afford her medication out of pocket. go with it, for me ♡
warnings: just.... so much smut including: heat, nesting, knotting, fingering, oral sex (f receiving), rough sex, big dick yunho, implied breeding kink (it's omegaverse so ya know), gratuitous praise to make reader feel better, lots of pet names, lots of heat symptoms like cramps, slick, and insatiable horniness.
pairings: alpha!yunho x alpha!mingi x omega!reader
genre: smut, abo/omegaverse, angst, fluff, romance, polyamory
word count: 13.6K
next chapter | AO3
The first sign is the headache, a low, dull throb at the back of your skull. It’s not a full-blown migraine yet, but it might become one and that’s your first indication that your heat is close. You’ve done your suppressant rationing and your bargaining and your plotting and planning, but in the end it’s going to come down to luck if you can make it through the recording.
You had asked the company about their heat leave policy in the most casual way that you could, still new enough to KQ that it seemed natural for an omega to be asking. You don’t know why you were surprised, but as always the policy is disappointing. Full health coverage only after ninety days of employment, and until then not only are your suppressants not covered any heat leave is fully unpaid.
You had studied your cycle calendar in detail and tried to map out the dates, but no matter how you drew it or cut up the last of your suppressants to try and extend the effects, your heat was going to fall on or around your first real performance. And it’s not like you’re an idol, it’s not like the camera will be focused on you, but the idea of letting your new crew down two months into being here is too fucked a thought to entertain.
Your throat feels dry after the first run through of the routine, unnaturally so, a tight cough building in the back of your throat as you try to hold it together. The minute the music fades you’re falling out of formation before anyone else and covering your mouth with your elbow, coughing dryly into your sleeve.
“You good?” San asks from his place next to you.
“Mhm,” You nod tightly, but the cough is lodged in your throat, “I just need to,”
A bottle of water is pushed into your hand and you nod in thanks, unscrewing the cap fast and knocking it back, letting the cold water soothe your throat.
“Are you sick, y/n?” San crosses his arms to appraise you better, ducking his head and getting a good look at you.
“No, no,” You take a deep breath now that you can and shake your head, “just dry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to slow us down.”
“Let’s take five,” Yunho announces from the front.
You take another sip of water and the group starts to break apart. The cool bottle keeps you grounded and as far from anxiety as you can possibly get with the knowledge of this hanging over you.
“You good?” Yujin, one of the few other female BB Trippin dancers, asks, her chest heaving as she jogs up to you.
“Yeah, yeah,” You assure her, “I just need a minute,”
She squeezes your shoulder before moving past you, and you lean back against the wall nearby before taking a deep breath. Your eyes go unfocused towards the mirror as you collect yourself, drinking more water and hoping that no one’s upset with the delay. You’re still new here, but so far you’ve been accepted into the fold well, only a few of the dancers more aloof, so focused on the work you haven’t had a chance to try and make friends. You hope they aren’t upset at your sudden need for a break right on the first run through on the big day. You feel hot eyes on you, and you focus, catching Minseok in the mirror. He’s always pleasant and polite, but never overly friendly, and when you catch his gaze momentarily you see that his jaw is tight and his throat jumps like a spasm as he swallows and averts his eyes from yours.
Your brow knits in confusion, but Yunho appearing next to you breaks the brief moment of concentration and you turn towards him.
His eyes are soft, but his face is still serious and wired into work, “You sure you’re good?”
“Definitely,” You protest, “really,”
He chews the inside of his lip for a moment before adjusting the cap on his head and holding out a little bottle of pills, “Your head?”
“How did you know?” You thought you were good at concealing it.
“You keep wincing when I put the high lights on,” He nods up towards the fluorescents, “migraine?”
“A little one,” You assure him, you know he’s got to be worried about you dropping out of formation right before recording, “but I got this,”
As the lead choreographer and director of today’s stage performance, he’s been on edge this week. He’s so incredibly focused on the finer details down to every precise placement, finger extension, facial expression. You’ve been a dancer for a long time, and you’ve worked behind idol groups before, but not like this. The atmosphere here is different, and working with New World doesn’t feel like backup dancing at all. And for Yunho, it’s become clear to you over the past couple of months that while he isn’t the boss, he is the leader here and he takes that responsibility incredibly personally.
But despite all that pressure and responsibility, he surprises you when he smiles at your admission, “I get them sometimes. Do you get auras?”
You shake your head.
“I do,” He offers you the bottle again, “it sucks, but you know, the light sensitivity is always the worst thing,”
You take the bottle and tip the migraine medication out into your palm, “Yeah,”
“Are you sure you don’t need to tap out?” He offers, voice a little softer so that it’s a conversation just between you, “I know you don’t want to, but I can’t have you falling on stage,”
“No, honestly, I wouldn’t put the team in that position,” You look up, trying your best to convey with your eyes that you can make it, even though the low throb in your skull says otherwise.
“Okay,” He nods once, “I just had to ask. Are you ready?”
“Ready,”
“Alright,” He takes a step away and moves back towards the main part of the room. This time he doesn’t adjust the lights, he keeps the room low lit and calm and he claps as he turns back to the room at large, “Let’s run it again. We have an hour before the van gets here, and then from there it’s go time. We ready?”
A chorus of yes echoes back, and you lend your voice to the mix, shaking off the pounding in your brain. You can do this. You can. Wooyoung punches your arm softly as he walks by you to get to his starting position, flashing you a smile and an encouraging nod. With a deep exhale you let it go, and you get to work.
By the time you finish the third run through, your muscles are screaming, but you’ve managed to hold the rest tightly in. The migration medication seems to be helping, and though you can sense Yunho continuing to glance at you in the mirror he seems pleased that you’re keeping up. You just need to make it through this day, and then you can let it all fall apart.
With a glance at your watch, the hour now up, you realize just how much more time there is to get through. It’s only six in the morning, the earliest you’ve had to get up and be ready for this job yet. You’ve been told that if you’re ever a supporting dancer for a comeback stage it will be even earlier, two or three to accommodate pre-recording time. For this though, you’re not filming a comeback stage. You’ll get to the studios alongside New World at around seven-thirty, spend at least an hour or two getting ready in the green room, and then from there it will be a waiting game, and you don’t really know how a show like this will go. Music shows are a well oiled machine of time management, but this type of larger long program for their survival show stage is something you just aren’t used to.
You just have to, without question, make it back home, but that might be eight hours from now or twelve, and that level of uncertainty makes your stomach churn.
On the bus you take stock. Sore muscles, dry throat, ever so slight cramping in your back, bubbling migraine, fatigue. You’re not yet feeling the waves of hot flashing blush or deep, burgeoning cramps, but it’s not too far off. It feels like at the very least the quarter suppressant you choked down this morning might be doing just enough to mask the scent of your pre-heat, and that’s the best you can do. At least for now, no one’s noticed how close you are to the edge. No one, except possibly Wooyoung.
“Here,” He says from his seat next to you, offering you a lozenge from a bag, “for your throat,”
You stare for a second at the offering before your brain fires and you accept one with quiet thanks. Omegas often keep cooling lozenges around for their heat and pre-heat, something to take the edge off the soreness and dryness and it doesn’t surprise you that the only one attuned to your slight discomfort is another omega.
“You can keep the bag,” He places it on your lap, “if you need it,”
“I’m good,” You pass it back, not wanting to admit how close you really are, “like I said, just dry,”
“Okay,” He nods, and then he lets the subject lie, “are you ready for today?”
“Yeah,” You swallow tightly, “nervous, but yeah,”
“Mm,” He grins, relaxing back into his seat, “it’s fun, I promise,”
“Yeah?”
“When you see it all come together on the monitors,” He nods, “it just makes it all worth it,”
“All the work, you mean?” You can’t help but glance up the length of the bus, to where Yunho sits alongside San and Mingi, all talking quietly and seriously amongst themselves.
“Yeah,” He nods, “you’ve been working a lot of nights too, catching up,”
“I just don’t want me being new to be the reason it’s not perfect,” You reply with ease.
“That’s good,” Wooyoung says, “and I promise if you weren’t nailing it, you’d know by now.”
“Would I?”
“You wouldn’t be sitting here,” Wooyoung nods towards the front, “Mingi would have cut you ages ago,”
“Mingi?” He’s been nothing but nice, flirty, and funny. He’d been helping you out at night to get better, you thought so that Yunho and San didn’t have an inkling that you’re behind.
“His opinion is the one that matters,” Wooyoung laughs, whispering to you so the rest of the bus can’t hear, “have you not picked up on that yet?”
You shake your head slowly.
“y/n,” Wooyoung smiles as he realizes just how clueless you are, “Yunho would recommend we all stop drinking water if Mingi said it was a good idea. Mingi trusts his gut, and Yunho trusts Mingi,”
“Oh,” You breathe.
“Yep,”
“What about Jaemin?” You ask softly. You’ve only met the actual crew leader a few times here and there, but most of the time he’s not at the studio itself.
“He keeps the work coming and the doors open,” Wooyoung says, “but they keep us moving.”
You let his words sink in, the reality that for weeks you’ve been working side by side with Mingi and confessing all your fears of inadequacy, that he was the person who had to approve of you all along and you never knew it. You sigh, “Are you just trying to hype me up, or are you being serious?”
“I don’t lie.” He says, full stop, no room for misinterpretation.
The menthol lozenge burns a little on your tongue, but soothes the cut feeling in the back of your throat when you swallow and you find that finally for the first time all night you’re able to really exhale. With a soft nod you turn to him, “Okay,”
“Okay?”
“Let’s fucking do this,”
He grins, “After this stage you’re officially one of us, you know,”
Your eyes narrow, “You said that after my first week,”
He rolls his eyes, “Okay, maybe I lie a little,”
For the afternoon, with the lightness of Wooyoung by your side, you forget about your headache. The day happens fast, even with all the sitting and waiting in green rooms. There’s so much to remember, from camera positions to where the light is coming from, to how to adapt to the stage floor being just a little smaller than what you were working with back at KQ. The members seem suddenly focused in a way you’ve never experienced, you know what this means to them. To all of you. By the time it’s filming, you’ve had at least six lozenges and taken two more painkillers for your migraine to keep it at bay, and you're starting to feel exhausted. You film it twice, from two angles. Wide for choreography and tighter close ups on the members for cinematic facial expressions and intricacies of movement.
When it’s all over and you pile back into the van, your legs feel heavy and disconnected. If you can just make it back to the studio, you can change and call an Uber and get inside before it knocks you sideways.
Someone suggests drinks, someone else suggests a celebratory meal.
You want nothing more than for the van to speed up.
You grip your hand tight and breathe through the tight sensations in your body and no one ever notices a thing, not even Wooyoung who seems caught in the euphoria of the performance, your quietness blissfully overlooked for the moment.
At the studio, it takes time for the locker room to clear out after the show, everyone else riding on the high of the performance too and slow to pack up for the night. It had gone so well, despite the way you had to push through the pain. As the pain worsens, you’re not sure how you’re going to get home, but you know you need to figure it out soon. You can maybe call one of your roommates, but on a Friday night it feels unlikely that they’ll be available or sober enough to get you.
A cramp ripples through you, and you grip down on the wooden bench, your leg bouncing to try and distract you from the waves of sensation washing over you. It’s been years since your last heat, and you can already tell this is going to be hard and heady. Sweat is collecting on your brow, waves of uncomfortable warmth passing through your body, and you can feel the way your breath is tightening. You really don’t have long, a matter of hours maybe, but it’s obvious to anyone who looks at you what’s going on.
You fish your phone out of your bag and scan through your contacts, blinking hard to try and clear your blurring vision. The phone keeps ringing, first one of your roommates, then another, and when you hit their voicemail boxes for the second time, your phone slips from your fingers in frustration. Tears prick the back of your eyes, your hands shaking. You really thought you had more time.
A noise across the locker room startles you, the heavy metal clang of a locker closing and you realize someone’s still in here with you. You’re trembling, a mix of abject panic and pain, your omega surfacing inside you in a way that you can’t control. Footsteps come closer, and though you’re still shielded by a row of lockers and can’t see him, you can smell him. Rich, cocoa and cinnamon.
Mingi walks past your section of lockers, and you hope he won’t notice, but you’re never, ever that lucky.
“Hey,” He says when he catches sight of you, “you did good tonight,”
You keep your eyes away from his, curling down further to tug at the laces of your shoes and hope that he doesn’t notice the way you’re clenching your jaw to keep from crying, “Thanks,”
“Yeah,” He says, and you hear his steps shift and then pause.
Your eyes press closed as you hide behind the curtain of your hair.
“y/n,” Mingi asks, “are you okay?”
“Mhm,” You pull your laces tight, your insides cramping painfully as your body registers the presence of an alpha.
“Are you sure?” He asks.
Biting down on the inside of your cheek you steady your voice, “Yeah, I’m good, just tired.”
Mingi doesn’t answer, doesn’t move, and there’s really only so long you can pretend to tie your shoes. You tug your other laces taut and then do your best, leaning back up into a normal sitting position despite the pained pressure inside you. You grip down on the bench again and breathe slowly through your nose.
“Are you hurt?” Mingi asks, concern evident in his voice, “Did you pull something?”
You shake your head, you can’t trust your words.
“Something’s wrong,” Mingi takes a step forward and you jolt back, sliding off the edge of the bench with a tight sound, your back connecting hard with the lockers behind you. His eyes widen at your sudden movement and you hold a hand out to keep him right where is.
“Stop,” You plead, body shaking, “don’t,”
“You are hurt,” He can feel your fear, and his eyes are panicked as he scans your body, “what happened?”
“It’s not,” You sigh, shaking your head, another hot flash making your cheeks light up with blush and cutting your words.
When he takes another step forwards you watch his face change, the way his breathing settles low into his chest as he regards you and comprehension starts to relax his face. Your eyes press closed as another cramp ripples through your abdomen, and suddenly you feel the first rush of slick.
“Fuck,” Mingi says, “what are you doing here?”
“Working,” You groan, opening your eyes again.
“You should be on heat leave,” He shakes his head, “you should be home,”
“I know,” You nod, your throat growing tight and tears bubbling back up, “I-I asked, but it would have been unpaid, and with the performance… I couldn’t afford to not be here. I thought I had a little more time,”
“Okay,” He steps a little closer and you shake your head, pressing your body back further against the lockers as if that will do anything, “it’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you.”
“I know that,” You laugh humorlessly, “but right now your scent is making this harder,”
“Oh,” He swallows hard, “I didn’t mean to,”
“Mingi,” You meet his gaze and his eyes soften, “I need help,” You wish you didn’t have to ask. You wish you had just stayed home, not rationed your suppressants, and just handled this on your own.
He nods, straightening up and swallowing hard, “Okay, let’s go,”
“Go?” You watch as he picks up your bag and slings it over his shoulder with his own.
“Can you walk?” He holds a hand out to you, an offering and nothing more if you want it.
“Yeah,” You stammer, pushing yourself off the lockers, but one step already has you shaky and you grip his hand and let him hold your weight to keep you standing.
“Alright,” He shakes his head, “I’m sorry, just hold your breath or something,”
His arm wraps around your back, pulling you up and supporting your weight with a sure hand on your forearm and with his help, you take a step. His scent is dizzying, equal parts calming and arousing, and tears roll down your cheeks as you try to keep quiet and hold it together. Slick pools between your thighs and you’re sure he can smell it, but he’s doing a good job of saying nothing about it to you.
“W-where are we going?” You manage as he pushes the door to the locker room open and steers you out into the dimly lit hallway of the dance studio.
“We need to get Yunho,” He says with ease, like it’s obvious and poses absolutely no problem.
At the thought of him, your body clenches and you bite down to keep a tight, pained sound inside. “No, Mingi, he can’t,”
“We’re past that point,” Mingi is all but dragging you now, “I need his help, I can’t get you home by myself.”
Yunho’s the only one with a car between them, not the mention a driver’s license. Mingi typically hitches a ride with him or using the subway, and at this stage in your heat, it’s not safe to take public transportation or put you in a taxi. There are too many variables, too many people you don’t know, and you need someone you trust to get you to a safe location to ride this out. The idea of Yunho tears your body in two, caught between the feeling of wanting him and never wanting him to know about this, but you know he’s safe, that safe place.
There’s a light still on in the office at the end of the hall where you know Yunho is going through footage from the day and making notes while things are still fresh in his mind. When you’re close enough to the door but still safely in the hall, Mingi calls out, “Yunho!”
“Yeah?” He shouts back, and you can hear the distraction in his voice, a clear picture of him writing something down as he calls over his shoulder.
“I need your help,” Mingi adjusts his grip on you, holding you close as your body trembles in his arms, “like right now,”
“Uh,” Yunho trails off, “yeah, okay, yeah, I’m coming.” You hear Yunho jump up from the chair in the office, his quick footsteps, and another wave of fear flutters through you.
“Mingi,” You grip down on his hand.
“Right, fuck,” He remembers himself, tucking you closer to his chest, “slowly,”
“What?” Yunho’s voice comes from the office but you can see his shadow on the floor in the hall as he gets closer to the door.
“Yunho!” Mingi’s voice is deep, clear and firm and you let your head rock back on his shoulder, “Slowly, seriously,”
He’s not distracted anymore, he’s incredibly alert. Yunho steps into the hallway slowly, just as directed when he hears the tenor of his best friend’s voice, and it takes him seconds to size up what’s going on.
“y/n,” He takes a half step forward and stops himself, arm outstretched, “oh no,”
His soft tone soothes you instantly but it doesn't help the emotional live wire you feel like you’re walking, and a little sob bubbles out of you, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,”
“You’re in heat,” He says, shaking his head, “it’s not safe for you to be here, why are you here?”
Your omega shrinks and more tears spill over, the wave uncontrollable now, “I’m sorry, please,”
Yunho’s eyes flick to Mingi’s before he comes closer, reaching out for you, “I’m not upset,”
Relief washes through you, “You’re not?”
“No,” He assures you, his voice dropping to a warm and even tone, “I’m just worried about you, I want you safe. Come here,”
You comply instantly, stepping out of Mingi’s hold and straight into Yunho’s arms, letting him tuck you close into his chest before he adjusts his stance and brings your face up to the crook of his neck. His scent washes over you like a salve, nothing but warm rain and fresh cut cedar.
“Shh,” He soothes you, running a hand down your back, “there we go, take a deep breath,”
For a minute, it feels like your cramps have passed, your head clearing. He grounds you and brings you back into your body with his touch and you breathe low and slow, your hands gripping his shirt.
“Okay,” Yunho murmurs, “what’s your heat plan? We can take you and get you there safe,”
You shake your head into his neck, nuzzling closer to his skin, “I don’t really have one,”
“What do you mean?” He asks, clearly not understanding.
“You can take me home,” You tell him, eyes drifting closed, “I usually can take care of things myself,”
“That’s insane,” Mingi says from behind you both, and you feel Yunho’s hands tighten on your back.
“Who’s there with you?” Yunho asks, “Don’t you have roommates?”
You nod, resting on his shoulder, “Mhm,”
“y/n,” He prompts you, “what are their designations?”
“Mm,” You’re feeling so warm wrapped in his scent, “Ari and Hyejin are betas, Hyunwoo is an alpha but he’s probably out tonight,”
“Tonight,” Yunho shakes his head, “you go through heats like this with an alpha home?”
“Not like this,” You mumble into his chest and he shifts you in his arms.
“What did you say?”
“Not a heat like this,” You manage, “I’m normally on pretty heavy suppressants,”
“She can’t go home like this,” Mingi says, “this is still just pre-heat,”
“I think so,” Yunho’s voice sounds far away, and you sink into the steady sound of his heart and the feeling of his hand smoothing a comforting line up and down your back. When he finally speaks again, his voice is so tender you almost don’t recognize it, “Can we bring you home? Let me help, you can’t go through a heat this hard by yourself,”
“Yunho,” You shudder against him, “we can’t,”
The thought of his cock inside you flashes through your brain, and you imagine the feeling of his swollen knot locking in, your body full and sated and the cramps dissipating. Your core throbs at the idea and you feel another rush of slick rush through you.
“You’re in pain,” He murmurs, dropping his head a little lower, “you need an alpha. Let me take care of you, let me take you home,”
You should say no, you should take your chances in your apartment with your box of toys and a bottle of lube, but you keep breathing in his steady scent and all you can do is say yes. Yunho’s been kind to you since the beginning, taking care of you for weeks even if he didn’t really know it, and he can take care of you now too if you just let him.
“We’ll take care of you,” Mingi cuts in, offering his help softly, “and make sure you’re safe until it’s over,”
“Are you sure?” You pull back from Yunho’s neck, leaning heavily on his chest still.
He cups your cheek in his broad hand, bringing your eyes up to his, and nods, “Positive, and if you don’t,” he swallows hard tries to find the right words, “if you don’t want to have sex we can figure something out, but you need a place that’s private, and you need to be with more experienced alphas who know how to keep their hands to themselves.”
They’re not wrong. You just have to trust them. You just have to let go.
Your body makes the decision for you, the way your aching and throbbing is soothed just being between them, and you let your mind follow.
“Okay,” You sigh, leaning into his hand, “yes,”
“Alright,” He sighs, “don’t worry about a thing, okay? We’ll get you home.” Yunho’s thumb rubs a soothing pattern into the soft gland at your wrist and it relaxes you further. He looks over you for a moment, “Mingi, I need you to take her for a minute, I’ll get the car.”
When Yunho steps away, just to try and pass you back to Mingi, the lack of contact strikes panic through you and you shake your head, “No, no, don’t go,”
“It’s not for long,” He assures you, his hands sliding down your arms as he separates from you slowly, “I’ll be back in 5 minutes,”
A panicked whine leaves your throat and your mind spins, “Don’t leave me!”
“Hey,” He soothes you but you don’t respond, all you know is he’s leaving and you’ll be without him and the thought makes your body clench. “y/n, hey, y/n,” He tries again but you’re shaking your head. “Omega.” His voice roots you to the spot.
Mingi’s hands close over you gingerly from behind, and Yunho nods as your panicked noises stop, “Okay, see?” He says, “Listen to me, omega, I’m not going far. You won’t be alone, Mingi’s right here. I’ll be back in five minutes, and then I won’t leave you again, okay?”
“Okay,” You lean back into Mingi, and let his touch keep you warm.
Yunho nods and then keeps his eyes on you as he moves back to the office, darting out of your eye line for a moment. You can hear him grabbing his things; the zip of his bag, the jingle of his keys, and the lights flick off before he jogs back out.
“Here,” He says, holding out his jacket, “put this on,”
Mingi takes it from his hands, and eases it onto you. When you pull the jacket up, his scent washes over you again and you sigh.
“Better?” Yunho asks.
“Mhm,” You murmur, and tucked into the warmth of Mingi’s chest with their combined scents easing you, you can breathe. You keep your eyes closed, but you hear when Yunho walks out the front door and your body clenches a little, but you take a deep breath in.
“Mingi,” You finally say, looking up at him, “thank you for not leaving me,”
“Hey,” He shakes his head, “I was never going to leave you there,”
You nod, twisting in his arms so you can tuck your face into his chest and let his arms wrap fully around you, “I’m sorry,” you sigh, “I’m not usually such a touchy person,”
He chuckles, smoothing your hair with his hand, “It’s okay, I like it,”
“And Yunho?”
“Oh,” Mingi laughs, “he’s a cuddler, don’t worry.”
Your stomach cramps and you groan into his chest, “God,” you grip him, “I forgot how much this hurts,”
“How long has it been?” Mingi shifts his grip so that more of your weight is supported, “You know, since your last real heat?”
“Years,” You tell him honestly, “they’ve been so much easier on suppressants,”
“Mm,” Mingi nods above you, “when this hits it’s going to be intense,”
“Have you helped a partner through heat before?”
“I have,” Mingi says, “but Yunho hasn’t,”
“Oh,” You have no idea why Yunho offered himself up immediately like he had done it a thousand times before if he’s never shared a heat with someone. The sure, practiced tenor of his voice when he called you omega rings in your ears.
“Don’t worry,” Mingi assures you, “I know what I’m doing, and Yunho’s got a handle on himself. He won’t touch you if you don’t want him to,”
“I’m really, really not worried about that,” You sigh.
“Good,” Mingi’s phone starts to vibrate in his pocket, and he adjusts his arms around you so he can find it, “We’ll take care of you - Hey? Are you out front?”
You can’t hear Yunho’s side of the conversation but you just wait, held against him.
“Okay, I got her,” Mingi says, and you smile.
You forgot the way that heat takes over every physical sensation, every little thing heightened until you feel like you’re on a razor’s edge. In a matter of hours you’re going to be a writhing mess, in so much pain you might be delirious - you might ask anything of them, beg for anything. You have to reconcile with your shame now, and let them help. After weeks of dancing around Yunho, what you really want is to ask him out for coffee, not this. Mingi is no stranger to being flirtatious, those sparks between you already evident, but it always felt like a little inside joke between friends, not a step towards anything more.
“Alright, just a little further,” Mingi urges you as he slips his arm under yours.
It takes time to get to the car, but when you get there, Mingi slides into the backseat with you instead of taking the front with Yunho like he normally would. Enclosed in the warmth of the car, you relax into Mingi’s arms and find Yunho’s eyes studying you in the rearview mirror. Their scents settle you a bit, more than any other alpha’s ever has.
“I’m okay,” You assure them, “it’s coming and going,”
“We don’t live too far,” Yunho smiles, “so just try to relax and we’ll be inside soon, okay?”
“Yeah,”
Mingi eases you against him, feeling your exhaustion, until you’re nestled in his lap with his fingers softly carding through your hair. Yunho’s eyes flick back to you again and again as he drives, but for the first time since the locker room, you’re not in too much pain.
“Yunho,” Mingi murmurs and his friend hums a noise of acknowledgement, “we need to pick up a few things for her,”
“What do you mean?”
“She needs to eat before this really starts,” Mingi says quietly, “I think we have water bottles at home and ice packs?”
“Yeah we do, I went to the store a couple days ago,” Yunho glances back at you again.
“Okay,” Mingi’s fingers keep up their soothing brushes on your scalp, “and we need condoms, in case.”
“Oh,” Yunho blinks and opens his mouth to say something but you get there more quickly.
“We don’t need them,” You twitch as a cramp ripples through you, “I’m on birth control,”
“If it would make you feel more comfortable though,” Mingi offers.
“No,” You groan a little and shift on the uncomfortable back seat, “really, I’m good.”
The car is quiet for a minute, the reality sinking in that they won’t just be keeping you safe tucked away in a room in their apartment, but they will be helping you. Yunho clears his throat, “Then we’re good, let’s get you home and in bed, and then we can order food? Do we have time?”
“Mhm,” You assure him, “I’m okay now that i’m with you both,”
“Exactly,” Mingi soothes you as your fists tighten, eyes closing as you breathe through another small cramp, “your alphas will take good care of you,”
You release a shuddering breath, the word sinking into your chest and keeping you whole.
“Almost there,” He murmurs, “just breathe, omega,”
Getting you upstairs to their apartment proves a little challenging, moving through the lobby of the apartment building and ferrying you into an elevator. They stay close to you, keeping you firmly tucked between them as they walk you in, and you do your very best to seem in control and not draw any unnecessary attention.
The minute their apartment door closes though, your legs give out and Mingi scoops you up, “You did so well,” he assures you, and it’s evident now that he is the one with the experience here, knowing exactly what the primal part of your brain needs to hear.
“I’ll order food,” Yunho says, giving you a small smile.
“Get her some meat,” Mingi directs him, “broth too, and lots of rice,”
“You are good at this,” You sigh.
“We got you,” Mingi grins, acting like this is second nature, “now… I can put you to bed, or would you like a cool shower before you lay down? I know that helps,”
“Mm, yes please,” You nod.
“Alright,” Mingi nods and looks up, “get the food going, and then meet me in my room with some water and the ice packs.”
“Right,” Yunho looks at you, “are you okay with just Mingi?”
“Yeah,” You smile, “I’m feeling okay,”
“Good,” Yunho smiles back and pulls out his phone to order the food, “then I’ll meet you there.”
Mingi sets you up in the bathroom with ease, making sure you have towels and everything you need. Your heat is coming, building inside your body with every cramp and rush of warm blush, but their combined scents keep things calm enough for you to take care of yourself a bit. He asks you to keep the door unlocked in case you need help, and leaves you to your moment of peace. You let the cool water settle your body, taking solace in this dip of your pre-heat before things get worse.
When you’re done, wrapped up in fluffy towels and feeling decidedly less sticky from the combination of sweat and slick, you make your way out into the hall. There are three bedrooms, an empty one you assume is Yunho’s, one that’s been converted into an office, and then one larger room at the end of the hall that you know must be Mingi’s.
He appears in the doorway before you make it too much further and smiles, “Feeling better?”
“Yes, thank you so much,”
“Mhm,” He reaches for you, “come on in, we got everything ready for you,”
His bedroom smells overwhelmingly like cinnamon when you first cross through the door and you feel a tense flutter in your core. His room is tidy, clean and organized well, which feels surprising for Mingi given how chaotic and busy he can seem at times. The bed is made, but the covers are pulled back for you and you see a folded shirt and thin sleep pants at the edge of the bed. Yunho is sitting in a chair in the corner by the foot of the bed and waiting, the dresser adjacent to his side equipped with almost everything you’ll need. Water bottles, pain killers, and ice packs, an unfilled bowl with a few washcloths stacked inside.
“How do you know all this?” You catch Mingi’s eye.
“My girlfriend in college went through terrible heats,” He explains easily, directing you towards the bed, “I remember what used to make her feel a little better,”
“Ah,” That explains so much of him, and his easy reaction to finding you in the locker room.
“Do you need help getting dressed at all?” He asks.
“No, I just really want to lie down,” Your limbs are starting to feel heavy and achy.
“We’ll leave you be then,” Yunho offers, “and when the food gets here we’ll bring some in,”
“Mhm,” You sigh, sinking down onto the bed, “thank you both again, so much,”
When you’re finally alone in Mingi’s room, you start to take stock of your body and how it feels, getting a sense of how far you are from the real thick of your heat. Judging by the intensity of your cramps and the fact that you’re starting to produce slick, you know you’re not too far off, maybe a few hours at most. The onset of your heat is normally much slower than this, a long few days of light pre-heat into a couple of days of uncomfortable cramps and extremely high arousal. On suppressants it feels easy, off them everything is unpredictable.
You pull on the clothes they left you, but they smell like stale lavender, artificial like laundry detergent and it’s not helping. You find the hamper in the corner and toss off the top, digging through Mingi’s clothes until you find a hoodie and you bury your face in it before taking a deep inhale and letting the warm smell of him pass through you. It might be crossing a line, but you don’t really care, you need them.
A pulsing wave passes through you and you collapse back into the bed, tugging on the hoodie and curling yourself up in the covers. The bed smells like him too, and you gather a pillow to your chest and take a deep inhale. Your neediness is starting to build up again with every passing minute, flushing heat through your chest and where you were cold a moment ago you’re suddenly overheated. You kick off the covers, but keep them close, and pile the pillows around you too so you can better inhale his scent.
Slick rushes forwards again and you bite your inner cheek to stifle a moan and keep things in check. You push off the sleep pants they had given you, and fish through your gym bag until you find a clean pair of underwear and some wipes. You clean yourself up a bit, and change your underwear for the third time today, before deciding that there’s no point in putting the pants back on. Mingi’s hoodie falls low over your shorter frame, dragging along your thighs.
You bury yourself back in his bed, and do your best to get a little rest before what’s to come.
When you wake, it’s to Mingi pushing back his hoodie so he can see your face a little better, “Hey,” he murmurs, “how are you feeling?”
“Tired,” You sigh, “and sore,”
“Okay,” He smiles and tugs lightly on the strings of his hoodie, “is this helping?”
“Mm,” You nod into his palm, but nervous knots start to curl up in your belly, “where’s Yunho?”
“I’m here,” Yunho’s voice comes from the opposite side of the bed, and you twist in the sheets to find him, a cramp pulsing through you as you do and you groan, gripping onto the bed sheets beneath you.
“Easy,” Mingi scolds you softly, “you need all the rest you can get,”
Yunho finds your eyes and smiles, “What’s wrong?” He asks gently, noticing your nervous fidgeting.
“I don’t know, I thought you left,” You manage.
“I’m an idiot,” Mingi sighs behind you and his hand that rests on your hip shifts away, “stay with her a second,”
“Mhm,” Yunho’s eyes don’t leave you, and he reaches out to rest his hand on yours, “we’ve got dinner, and then once you eat you can rest, we won’t go anywhere.”
You watch his face as he studies your features, his breathing slow and steady, when you hear Mingi come back into the room behind you. “Here we go,” He says, and you feel a large, soft blanket draping over you. The smell of wet earth and rain in the air fills your senses again and you drag the blanket up and around you with a sigh.
“You’re nesting,” Yunho observes, his mouth dropping open, “of course,”
“She couldn’t smell you in here,” Mingi explains with ease, “she needs you to relax,”
You nod, your cheek pressed against the blanket, “You smell like a thunderstorm,”
Yunho sits slowly on the bed by your side, brushing your hair back behind your ear and smoothing his thumb along your cheekbone, “Is that right?” he smiles.
“I love thunderstorms,” Your eyes drift closed.
Mingi chuckles, “I think she’s found herself a heat partner,”
“Only if she wants one,” Yunho presses, “and only after she eats,”
Your eyes reopen, and you push yourself up to your knees, dropping the hood of Mingi’s sweatshirt and running your hands over your warm cheeks. “We need to talk now,” You blink hard and take a deep breath, “before I get too far into this,”
“Let’s eat then,” Mingi gestures for you to sit back more comfortably and you watch as he and Yunho both produce boxes of take out from bags on the dresser, “what are you thinking?”
“Well,” You shift up the bed to lean against the headboard, dragging Yunho’s blanket with you, “I haven’t gone through this in a while. I’m not sure how it’s going to be, but you said you wanted to help. What did you mean by it?”
Yunho looks like he’s not sure exactly what to say or where to start and Mingi cuts in smoothly, “I’m willing to help with all of it. If you want me gone, I’m gone. If you want help to come to take the edge off, I can do that, and if you want me to actually knot you,” he gestures for you to fill in the blanks.
“Right,”
“But,” Mingi cuts in and your eyes shift back to him, “You seem to want Yunho,”
His eyes flick down to the way you’re rubbing his blanket between your thumb and forefinger and you drop it instantly, not even realizing what you were doing. Mingi smiles softly and adds, “I think you prefer his scent,”
“No!” You exclaim, wincing at the way your body tenses up, “No, it’s not that, at all.”
“Earlier,” Mingi takes a seat on the edge of the bed, “you said my scent was making it harder, that’s not what I want to do for you.”
“Mingi,” You shake your head, “I meant because it’s good, both of you. So, no I don’t have a preference.”
“Oh,” Mingi smiles, and then turns to Yunho, “how are you feeling?”
He clears his throat softly and nods, “The same as you, I’m all in.”
“Okay,” You exhale slowly, “then so am I,”
Mingi passes you a take out container and a pair of chopsticks, “Eat this, okay?”
“Mhm,” You’re caught between exhaustion and adrenaline, but you stay focused on the task at hand. You all eat quietly, the atmosphere a little awkward now that you’ve all agreed.
As you finish the container of food, Yunho smoothly passes you another and he says, “So, you feel comfortable with us?”
“I do,” You nod, shifting a little at a slight pain in your back, “I like you both, and if I can trust you in the studio, I can trust you with this.”
“And if you ask us to knot you?” Mingi prompts.
“Right,” You swallow, resting the container of food on your lap, “I guess there are some things we should say now,”
They look at you, waiting expectantly.
“People say things during heat,” You start, imagining all the things you might beg them for for the next few days to come. “It’s not like I’ll be out of my mind or anything, you know that,” You nod to Mingi.
“Mhm,”
“But it’s still hard to control,” You explain, and Yunho listens intently, “I don’t know what it’ll be like for me. It’s been a long time, but you have my permission to do whatever we need to. If I ask you to knot me, knot me.”
“Okay,” Mingi nods, “it’s good that we’re clear.”
You feel another flush up your chest and you breathe slowly, “But no matter what,” you hold their gazes, “if I ask you to claim me, don’t. Don’t do it, even if I tell you I’m sure.”
“Absolutely not,” Mingi’s brow furrows, and he looks shocked that you’d even have to say it, “there’s no way.”
“I know you know,” You swallow and reach for a water bottle on the nightstand, “but Yunho, you’ve never done this before.”
“That might be true,” He shakes his head, “but I know you wouldn’t mean that, it would just be the heat talking,”
“Exactly,” You nod, “I might sound like I want that or like I need that, but I don’t.”
“Understood,” Yunho nods, “I wouldn’t, I swear,”
You sink back into your pillows and tuck back into your box of food, “I just want you to be prepared,” you explain, “and before I start crying and begging you to give me a pup, I wanted to say it,”
Mingi laughs into his food, choking a little, “Sorry, no, not funny,”
You smile, the mood a little lighter now, “It’s kind of funny.”
Yunho smiles, shifting further onto the bed as he all but inhales his noodles, “You seem a better, I thought it was going to just get worse,”
“Oh, it will,” You shrug, “but the food is nice, and you’re both here with me. When Mingi found me I was scared and alone, which always makes it worse,”
Mingi’s hand rubs a comforting line up your shin, “You’re very safe now,”
“I know,” You nod.
“Eat some more,” Yunho notices that you’ve taken too long of a pause, and he gestures for you to keep going, “and then what would be nice? Some sleep?”
“Maybe,” You dip back into your rice, “would you stay?”
“I’ll stay,” Yunho murmurs.
“Me too,” Mingi adds.
They keep on you to eat, making sure you’ve had your fill. Afterwards, you rest between them watching some television, keeping your mind off things as best you can while you’re still feeling somewhat okay. They’re careful of you though, every shift of your body and soft hiss through your teeth drawing their attention. Mingi is still cool and evenly calm, but surprisingly Yunho is too, and you wonder what they talked about while you were in the shower. Did they discuss what to do at all? What the night and the next few days would be like?
You’re so exhausted, slipping further down into the bed, nestled in pillows and wrapped in Yunho’s blanket. They naturally gravitate closer, their hands finding their way to your skin, and you’re not sure if it’s just their alpha nature or if it’s them, but you’ve never been more grateful for it.
The cramps start to become unbearable again soon after they start to hold you. You’re not sure if their presence is making things move more quickly, let alone being with two alphas, but within the hour the pain sets in.
You curl into Mingi’s chest as tight pain cuts through you, “Fuck,” you pant against him, “it hurts,”
“I know,” Mingi soothes you, scooting down the bed until he’s eye to eye with you, “but you’re not alone,”
A sharper, biting pain rips through you and a flood of heat washes over you. You grip down hard on Yunho’s hand, curling into yourself with a taut moan, “It… it hurts,”
“Shh,” Yunho kisses your hair, running his hand up and down the expanse of your abdomen, “I know it hurts, jagiya,”
You whine at the name, desperate to hear him call you anything and everything. Your omega thrums inside you - every touch telling you just how much closer your heat is than you realize. “Please,” You plead, but you don’t know exactly what you’re pleading for, “I can’t breathe,”
“Yes, you can,” Mingi tries to sooth you, his hand on your cheek, “look at me, y/n, come on omega,”
Tears well in your eyes, heat flooding through your veins and a pulsating need fluttering through you. If they don’t touch you, you might wither into nothing. Your hips tuck back into Yunho’s and you groan, “I can’t,”
“She’s burning up,” Yunho murmurs from your side.
“Let’s take this off then,” Mingi tugs on the sleeves of his hoodie slowly, coaxing your arm through. He can see your rising panic at the idea you won't be wrapped in their scents, but he shakes his head slowly, “easy, love, let your alphas help,”
As the heavy sweatshirt is pulled away, you drop back on the bedding between them. The thin t-shirt they gave you is all but soaked through with sweat, sticking to your curves. Your head is aching, waves of feverish heat washing over you again and again, and you whimper, your legs twitching as you try to find a somewhat comfortable position.
“Hey, hey,” Yunho’s thumb settles over the swollen gland in your neck, and he strokes it soft and slow, “just breathe,”
It settles you, just a bit, and you let your eyes drift shut. With a sigh you reach for Mingi just to feel a bit of his skin on yours, “I’m not even properly in heat yet and I feel like I could crawl out of my skin,”
“Hot?” Mingi brushes the damp hair back from your forehead.
“It’s like my skin is tingling,” You murmur, “like a nerve,”
“Okay,” He nods. He shifts off the bed and your eyes flutter open. Mingi soothes you with a gentle hand, before moving towards the dresser, “Yunho, get those clothes off her,”
Yunho’s eyes lock on yours, “Can I?”
You nod, your head feeling full and pained.
Yunho’s hand slips under the edge of your damp shirt, coasting up your stomach as he pushes the fabric up and the drag of his hot hand sends a pulse through your body. You moan, head dropping back into the bedding, and you feel another gush of slick.
“It’s okay,” Yunho soothes as you he drops your shirt to the side of the bed, “there’s nothing to be embarrassed about,”
You huff, a light laugh as you shake your head, “Easy for you to say, you’re not falling apart whenever I touch you,”
“Yet,” He smiles.
“Who are you kidding?” Mingi returns to your bedside with a bowl of cool ice water and a damp washcloth. He throws a smile at his friend before ringing out the washcloth over the bowl, “The minute you saw us in the hall you were all alpha protection mode, scenting her and everything,”
“Shut up,”
You grin, but Mingi sweeps a cold line up your body with the cloth and you shudder, “Fuck, that’s nice,”
“Good,” Mingi murmurs, passing another wet washcloth to Yunho. When Mingi presses a firm line up your chest, and sweeping a little too close to your neck your body arches and your nipples harden into painful peaks.
You blush hard and drop a hand over your face, “I can’t believe we’re doing this,”
“Why?” Yunho asks gently, wiping your brow with the cool cloth.
“We work together,” You sigh, “closely together… I probably should have made you take me home or something but,”
“Do knotting dildos even really help?” Mingi asks bluntly.
“I mean,” You shrug, “they get the job done,”
“Hmm,” Mingi shakes his head, “not with a heat like this,”
“Maybe,” You sigh.
“y/n,” Yunho asks, “have you had a heat partner before? Have you been knotted?”
“A long time ago,” You nod, “it wasn’t a great experience, but you know, it is what it is.”
Yunho passes the cloth down your chest and you shudder, but he keeps the conversation going, “Why in the world are you off your suppressants then?”
Your eyes flick down, and you swallow hard, “I can’t afford them right now,”
“Wait,” Mingi shakes his head, “what?”
“The brand I’m on is the only one that works for me,” You explain, “they’re not priced like the generics, and I don’t have coverage yet. I’ve been rationing them out, but,”
“You should have talked to me about it,” Yunho shakes his head, brows knit together in concern, “we could have done something for you,”
“Yunho,” You meet his eyes, “I appreciate that, but I’m still kind of new here. I’m just trying to prove I belong here, and I didn’t want a reason to need a special exception.”
He looks like he wants to say something, but settles on nodding, “I can understand that.”
“I’m,” You tense up as your cramps intensify, “I’m glad to know I can talk to you, I’ll do it in the future, I just couldn’t come to you about this.”
“Alright,” He nods, his voice shifting to soothe again as your eyes clamp tightly shut.
“Are they worse?” Mingi asks.
You can’t answer, not yet, your muscles are locked up in crippling pain and you feel like you’re drowning in a sudden wave of hot air. You gasp as you feel your body produce more slick, your thighs surely sticky now, and you’re suddenly hyper aware of their hands and where they rest on your body.
“I think,” Your hips jerk as Mingi slides the washcloth just an inch up your side, “oh God, I think,”
“Okay,” Yunho pets your hair gently, “okay, just breathe,”
Your fingers tighten in the sheets beneath you and an overwhelming ache between your thighs reminds you just how empty your body is. You press your thighs together, feeling a throb in your core, and you can’t stop the whimper that bubbles from your lips.
“Let’s get these off too,” Mingi murmurs, his hands settling on your hip and tugging at your underwear to slowly peel them off.
Things are spinning around you, tense and painful suddenly and no amount of cool washcloths or gentle touches are going to help you now. Your vision feels blurry, and you curl into yourself, tucking your body into Yunho’s chest with a pained hiss.
“Oh, come here,” Yunho tucks you close, “I’ve got you,”
“Alpha,” You feel like crying suddenly, your stomach tense, “alpha, please,”
“What, jagiya?” Yunho murmurs against your hair.
You can’t explain what you need, all you know is that you can’t feel him close enough and you push the edges of his shirt up to try and find more of him, “Please,” you whine as you try to feel more of his skin on yours.
“Whoa, whoa,” He tries to catch your hands but it just makes you more tense.
“K-knot me,” Your stomach cramps, your cunt feeling swollen and sensitive, “please,”
“y/n,” Yunho tries again to pull your hands away but you drive forwards, pressing your cheek against his bare chest where his shirt is ridden all the way up and you sigh into his skin, pressing frantic kisses along his body.
“Please,” You beg again, “I’ll be so good for you, so good,”
“I know you will,” He manages, but he can’t deter you, and you feel the moment his body responds to yours. His hands tighten pleasantly on your hips, and you hear the change in his breath. He releases your hands and swallows hard, “Alright, alright,”
“No,” Mingi interrupts, “not yet,”
“Why?” You sob.
“You’re not ready yet,” He soothes, shifting closer behind you and placing a warm kiss on your bare back, “and Yunho and I are not going to hurt you tonight,”
“I don’t care,” Your hands slide down Yunho’s chest, searching for his waistband.
“Mingi’s right,” Yunho groans, attempting to disconnect your hands from him.
“Omega,” Mingi’s voice is firm, and your hands fall away, “be still.” You’re sure you’re shaking like a leaf, and he sighs, “You need a little sleep,”
“I can’t sleep like this,” You shake your head, “everything hurts so much,”
“We’ll help with that,” Mingi pulls you away from Yunho’s chest, ignoring your tense whine at being pulled away from him, and slides a hand down your thigh to press your legs open, “we’ll help you sleep,”
Yunho rests his hand on your inner thigh, bending your knee to open you up for Mingi’s hand, “Let your alphas make you feel good,”
You’re shaking in their grip, Yunho’s hand feeling like a lead weight, and Mingi settles down low by your side so that you’re almost nose to nose, holding your gaze as his fingers gently sink into your wet folds.
“P-please,” The sound in your throat is tight, “I need you to fuck me,”
“Mhm,” Mingi nods, unfazed by your sudden shift in demeanor as your heat finally starts to build, “we will, but not yet,”
You stifle a groan and turn your head away from him, tears gathering in your eyes as Mingi’s middle finger flattens out over your clit and starts to rock. All it does is stoke heat inside you and your vision blurs, the empty pocket inside you aching like never before. “Alpha,” You sob, “it’s not enough,”
You expect Mingi to respond, but instead it’s Yunho, cupping your cheek and drawing your face towards his, “Shh,” he shakes his head, a gentle expression on his face, “we have you, sweetheart,”
Something in his face calms you for a moment, the feeling of his warm gaze filling you and you want nothing more than to know he likes you. Approves of you. Your breath is slight, just a whisper in your throat.
Seeing your response he slides forwards, pressing his mouth to yours in a warm, tender kiss. His hand slips down and he brushes over your gland again to keep you at ease, “Be patient for us,” he kisses you again, “and you know we’ll knot you nice and full,”
With a desperate pant you catch his mouth again, moaning against his mouth when Mingi finally, finally sinks a finger deep inside your aching core.
“You’re still so tight, omega,” Mingi murmurs. He pushes a second finger inside and starts to pump them in and out, and it’s not enough, nowhere near enough, but little blooms of pleasure spark up your spine and you fall back from Yunho into the bedding once more.
“More,” You widen your legs and cant your hips, “please, Mingi, please,”
He presses his lips to your forehead, nuzzling you softly until his mouth is close to your ear, “You’re so beautiful, omega. Did you know that?”
A wash of pleasure crashes through you and his fingers speed up, pushing into you more firmly, his thumb catching against your clit to heighten every thrust. You moan against him, gripping hard on his shirt and jutting your hips into his hand.
“And so good for us,” Yunho kisses your shoulder, traveling down until lips close around one of your stiff nipples.
“Ah,” You arch into his mouth, “ah, god,”
“Close already, omega?” Mingi teases, shaking his head despite the smile across his lips, “Are you that sensitive?”
“D-don’t tease me,” Hot pleasure sparks up your body and your head twists back, your body tight and stiff.
“Then come,” Mingi bites down on your earlobe gently and you whine.
“Do as your told,” Yunho urges you, sucking hard on your nipple and pressing your leg open wider, “our sweet little omega,”
You come so hard your brain whites out, your ears ringing and your body trembling. After an entire week of build up to your heat, and hours of feeling like your body was being stretched out long like a rubber band, snapping apart in their hands hits you so much harder than you ever could have imagined.
Your brain reconnects when you feel Yunho’s soft blanket tucked around your naked body, and you’re too exhausted to open your eyes, but you feel them cuddle close before you drop off into sleep drowning in cedar and cinnamon.
You have no idea what time it is when you wake again, your brain is too foggy and pained to even check the time. All you know is desperate need, all consuming emptiness and aching. When you reach out in front of you, the bed is empty and you stifle a sob. You’re alone, they’ve left you alone. You’re alone and you’re in heat, and you thought they wanted you, but all you can feel is shame. The primal part of your brain tells you that you’re not good enough, that if you had been a better omega for them they would have stayed. You’d be good and knotted by now.
Curling into the sheets you try to push yourself up, but find the effort even harder than before. You’re soaked in sweat, trembling uncontrollably, and the throbbing pulse of your cunt is so heady that you find yourself seeking any friction at all, squeezing your thighs tight and grinding against the balled up comforter.
You feel a body roll behind you, shifting closer, and when you hear his groggy, sleepy groan, you almost cry in relief. “A-alpha?” You can’t move too much, too it’s too painful, but you reach back for him.
“Hey,” Yunho’s voice is a little hoarse, and it takes him a minute to realize what’s going on, but in the early morning faded light he watches the way you’re struggling. “Oh,” he breathes, “it’s really started,”
You nod desperately, “I need help, alpha, please,”
“Okay,” His voice drops, and he slides across the bed to slot himself perfectly behind you, “I’m going to take care of you now,”
“Y-Yunho,” You squeeze yourself further back into him, “I’m so empty,”
His face is above yours now, studying your expression to try and determine if this is really it, and you don’t know where Mingi is to guide the situation but at the feeling of Yunho’s body behind yours, your will to care is fading away into nothing. He’s not touching you fast enough, and with a whimper, you twist your head in the sheets, bearing your neck and submitting.
“Oh,” Yunho’s hands tighten on you, “oh,”
“Please,” You press again, “it hurts, alpha,”
His cock stiffens behind you, and you almost cry in relief, rolling your hips back against him. “Fuck,” His face drops against your hair, “oh my god,”
“Inside me,” You beg, reaching back and tugging at his shirt, “now, please,”
He moves so much more quickly this time, pushing down his sweats and reaching between your thighs to check you, finding you soaked with slick and aching for him. You moan when you feel the press of his cockhead against your entrance, and in one fluid motion he slides home, fully seating himself inside you.
You’re shaking in his arms, the feeling of being this full making you almost delirious with joy. Yunho doesn’t move though. He has you pulled as close as possible so that your back is flush with his chest, arms wrapped around you and keeping you perfectly still. His forehead rests against the top of your head and you can hear his shaky breath. You need him to move, to fuck you, to fill you with pups and never leave you, but he doesn’t.
Slowly, his hips draw back just a little before sinking forward again, thrusting inside your tight channel experimentally like he’s trying to get a feel for you. Despite how your body prepared you for this, making you wet and relaxed to be able to accommodate an alpha’s knot, the feeling of his cock stretching you open is almost enough to make you come right then and there.
He thrusts again, slowly, and you whimper against him. You need more, and fast.
Yunho groans as he holds himself deeply inside you again, caressing your body with his free hand, “You are the best thing I’ve felt in my entire life,”
Your brain spins, pleasure flooding you and distantly you can hear yourself asking him to knot you. You’re not prepared for what he’ll feel like fucking you in earnest.
“Is that what my girl needs?” Yunho pants, and hand locking down over your hip to help pull your body back against his hard thrusts.
“God, please!” Your eyes close, falling apart into the sensations of him inside you.
He groans against you, “Tell me what you need, omega,”
The low tenor of his voice is nothing but alpha now, his instincts guiding him just as much as yours. You’re never going to last, not if he’s going to talk to you like this. With a taut moan you beg him, “Fill me up, alpha please, knot me please,”
His hand slides up your chest, up your neck until you’re shaking with need, and closes his fingers on your jaw until he draws your face up so he can watch your eyes. His hips shift their pace, no longer driving into you with frantic need but instead firm, deep thrusts of his cock. His eyes are blown wide with desire, his mouth falling open as he watches you falling apart on his cock, “You’re all fucking mine,”
You nod, hot tears gathering in your eyes from the overwhelming sensation and you cry out desperately for more.
“All mine,” He repeats and surges forwards to lock his lips on yours, “you belong to me,”
“Yes!” You choke, “I’m yours, only yours,”
“Good girl,” He angles his hips, and on the next thrust you’re spinning fast into the crest of your orgasm. With his face pressed against you, his lips at your ear, his next words snap you open. “I’ll give you perfect pups,” He pants, his knot swelling, “I’ll breed you so full,”
There’s nothing now but the feeling of him, all encompassing as your orgasm crashes down over you, muscles spasming around his hard length. You’re a babbling mess, but so is he, so close to coming that the first sensation as your eyes reopen is his knot pressing hard at your opening.
He’s so large already, larger than any partner or knotting dildo you’ve ever used, and you scramble a little in his hold, “Y-Yunho, I can’t,”
“Shh,” He holds you against him, “you can, I know you can,”
Pushing your hips down with his broad hands, he angles himself upwards until you feel the pressure of his knot pushing past your entrance and finally slipping inside you fully. It burns, your body aching to accommodate him, but with the way he’s holding you and the throb of his cock inside you, none of that matters.
He grinds his hips desperately into you, his knot swelling further inside you, and when he comes, releasing hot with a shuddering groan, you finally feel sated. Your body melts into him, pleasantly foggy and at ease, his knot no longer uncomfortable but essential.
You’re finally, finally full.
It takes time for Yunho to come back to his senses, his hands still locked on your skin and breathing shaky as he tries to regulate it. You realize now that you have a little clarity that it was his first time. Deep, instinctual need had guided him, but the longer he stays quiet, the longer you wonder if you did well for him.
After another minute or two you find his hand and lace your fingers together, “Yunho?”
“Yes?” He murmurs from behind you, his forehead still against your hair.
“Can you hold me please?” You murmur, squeezing his hand.
“Come here,” He sighs, shifting slightly to spoon you properly. As he does, the knot locked inside you shifts and you make a startled hum at the sensation. He smooths your hair back and tries to get a good look at you, “Does that hurt?”
“No,” You shake your head, adjusting so that you’re resting on his bicep, “I just feel full,”
“Mm,” He kisses your temple, nuzzling your skin with his nose as he breathes in your scent, “you’re perfect,”
Warmth blooms in your chest, “So are you,”
“I want you like that again and again,” His hand slips out of yours so that he can coast it over your body, feeling your warm skin under his hands.
“You can have me like that again and again,” You smile, “I’ll be in heat for days.”
“Days of this,” He sighs, his hand dipping down over your hip and settling over your stomach. He inches his fingers down, passing over your sensitive nub and feeling the place where your bodies connect, locked together.
“Does it feel good for you too?” You murmur, a little breathy as his hand slips back over your clit.
“I’ve never felt anything like this,” He presses closer to you, “it’s incredible,”
You chuckle, kissing his arm and relaxing further into his touch. You’re about to agree, to say more, to confess that in truth it’s your only experience in heat that so far hasn’t been terrible, but the door to the bedroom opens and Yunho tenses.
Mingi opens the door slowly, and Yunho pulls you close, his hand closing over your stomach and his other arm wrapping around your shoulders. It’s just Mingi, but Yunho’s brain must still be fogged with the intrinsic need to protect you and in the presence of another alpha, he can’t see that it’s just his friend.
“Mingi,” You shake your head, feeling how tense Yunho is behind you, “give him a minute,”
“You’re okay?” He checks, staying rooted to the spot at the door, knowing that Yunho could hurt you if he stops thinking straight and tries to defend you against the imagined threat of another alpha.
“I’m perfect,” You assure him, “I promise,”
“Is he?” Mingi looks anxious.
“He’s fine,” You nod, smoothing your hand across his arm to try and relieve some of his tension, “but we need some more time.”
Mingi nods, “Come find me when you’re done,”
“We will,”
Mingi’s eyes flick to Yunho, “Be careful with her,”
“I got it,” Yunho’s voice sounds strained.
Mingi nods once, and then disappears, leaving the door open, and you suspect it's so he can hear things a little better should you need him. Yunho’s muscles unlock slowly, his thumb unconsciously rubbing a steady line over your abdomen, and he exhales heavily into your hair.
After a while, you expect his knot to have gone down, but he’s just as locked inside you as ever. The overwhelming alpha quality though has started to fade, and you rest lazily in his arms as he plays with your fingers and waits it out.
“Does it normally take this long?” He asks finally.
“Not usually,” You shake your head, “but it’s your first time knotting someone properly, so it might just take a little bit.”
“I’m sorry,” He murmurs.
“Why?” You tug him a little closer to your back, “This is exactly what I need,”
“Everything felt right?” He pushes himself up onto one elbow so that he can look down at you a little better, propping his head in his hand.
“Mhm,” You assure him, “Better than right,”
He smiles, his eyes flicking over you appreciatively.
“What about for you?” You bring him back to center, rubbing a circle into his palm with the pad of your thumb.
“It wasn’t what I expected,” He says honestly, and your mouth drops open. “No, no,” He cups your cheek, “I meant that it was just… much more intense than I expected. I said a lot of things to you, and I don’t know, I guess I thought that type of thing was just played up in porn,”
“Oh,” You grin, delighted a little by the way his ears run red.
“Yeah,” He smiles, blush creeping into his cheeks now, “I just couldn’t stop myself,”
“Mm,” You nod, “I get it, completely. This is why I wanted to talk before I was in heat,”
“Was it too much?” He checks in.
“No,” You assure him, “It was just what I needed to hear, and it doesn’t mean anything outside of my heat, it’s just instinct.”
He nods and sighs, dropping back to the bed and cuddling you close again, “Good,” he murmurs, “then don’t worry about how clingy I’m about to get,”
“You? Clingy?” You giggle against his chest, “I don’t believe it,”
“I’m a softie,” He shrugs, “I don’t know what to tell you,”
“But you always seem so serious at the studio,” You murmur, “and I’ve seen you go out with a lot of women,”
“Ah,” He laughs, “well the studio is work, and I’m responsible for a lot there. And as far as the dates,” he corrects, “I am trying to appease my mother because she desperately wants me to find a wife, which I’m not really focused on right now, but she’s pretty obstinate.”
“Such a mystery, Jeong Yunho,” You prod him lightly.
“Not really,” He kisses your hair, sighing into you, “I’m just a guy,”
You hum and let your eyes drift closed as he holds you.
He yawns and sighs again, “So, forgive me if I cuddle you to death while you’re here, like I said, softie,”
“I’m not complaining,” You sink into his touch.
He groans a little, his knot finally softening but he stops you when you shift your hips, “Go slow, I don’t want to hurt you,”
“It’s okay,” You assure him, feeling the way his knot fades down into being barely there. His cock starts to soften, and you slowly ease your way forwards while he shifts his hips back, disconnecting you both with a soft wet sound.
His release floods out of you, leaving you messy and sticky, but Yunho kisses your shoulder and shifts away, “Hold tight, I’ll get a towel,”
He seems incredibly unembarrassed about the messy state of heat sex, which you’re eternally grateful for, and within a few minutes you’re cleaned up and dressed again in yet another pair of clean underwear and one of the largest shirts of Mingi’s that you’ve ever seen.
“How are you feeling?” Yunho asks as you finish cleaning your face up in the mirror of Mingi’s bathroom.
“A little sore,” You tell him honestly, “and cramping a little again, but it’s not too bad yet.”
“You want to come see Mingi then? Get out of this room for a minute?” He brushes his fingers down your back as he watches you in the mirror.
“Perfect,”
In the living room, Mingi is waiting. He’s pouring over with nervous energy, his leg bouncing and his fingers fidgeting with his phone, refreshing his social media feed over and over again. The television is on, but he’s clearly not watching, and instead you see him perk up at the first sounds of you emerging from the bedroom.
“Hey,” He twists around on the couch, looking a little relieved when he sees you completely fine and cleaned up wearing one of his t-shirts.
“Hey,” You smile, moving towards the couch, “can I sit?”
“Of course,” He gestures towards the couch, but that’s not exactly what you meant. The sight of him waiting for you, and the palpable taste of his anxiety in the air makes you feel needed, and you push his arms open to settle in his lap.
“Oh,” He adjusts his legs to give you a better seat and winds his arm around your back, “is everything okay?”
“Mhm,” You take his hand, rubbing your thumb gently over the gland in his wrist to soothe him, “you can relax, I’m perfectly fine,”
Yunho takes a seat on the opposite end of the couch, chewing the inside of his cheek as he watches you and Mingi together. With a nudge to his friend’s thigh he gets Mingi’s attention and shakes his head, “I’m sorry I snapped at you,”
“It’s cool,” Mingi shrugs, “I know the feeling.”
“Where did you go, anyways?” You ask, leaning into his chest. The familiarity between the three of you should feel strange, before last night you really were only coworkers to each other. You might have even become friends, but now you’ve pushed so far past that you don’t know what you are except to accept that their hands on your skin feels right.
“I shouldn’t have left, I could feel you were getting restless,” he explains, “I went to make you some broth and get cold water, just putting a few things together, but by the time I got back you were both in it,”
“Ah,” You blush looking down at your hands, “sorry,”
“Don’t be sorry,” Mingi’s broad, warm hand rests on your bare thigh and gives you a subtle squeeze, “I’m glad Yunho could help. I just didn’t think it would be smart to interrupt you,”
“Good thinking,” Yunho adds, running a hand over his face and sighing, “you were right,”
“I told you,” Mingi nods, “it can be intense,”
Yunho passes a hand over your shin before pushing himself back up to stand and he stretches long and tall before groaning, “Alright, I’m starving.”
You clap a hand over your mouth, chuckling into your palm, “Classic,”
“Can I make you something?” He asks, “Either of you?”
Mingi shakes his head, “I’m good,”
“Me too,” You agree, “I should be hungry, but I’m really not,”
Mingi’s nose crinkles, “You should still eat,”
“Maybe in a bit,” You try to appease him.
“In a bit you’ll be jumping our bones again,” Mingi counters.
“I know,” You sigh, “but really, I’m okay. I feel pretty good,”
“This is really just because it’s day one right?” Yunho asks, a little less joking than before.
“Yeah,” You nod, “day one and two are never as bad, and you definitely have more lucidity as long as you’re managing the spikes well. Day three, four, and sometimes five if it lasts that long, are usually a lot harder.”
“How much is a lot?” Yunho asks, stepping close and running his hand over your hair, “You were already in a lot of pain,”
“I’ll be less coherent, and the fever can be worse. I probably won’t have down time like this,” You explain, “the pain isn’t necessarily worse, it’s just more consistent,”
He frowns, “Then you’re eating now,”
You sigh heavily and shake your head, “Honestly, you don’t need to, I can make myself something in a bit or,”
Mingi cuts you off and makes a dismissive noise with his tongue against his teeth, “y/n, relax. This is what we meant when we said we’d help you through your heat. It’s more than just orgasms and knots,”
You swallow back your words, holding his gaze.
“Alphas are meant to provide,” He reminds you, “so let us,”
A flutter of warmth bubbles through you, and you can only nod, no use arguing now when your mind is spinning and telling you to accept. Yunho drops a quick kiss on the top of your head, before disappearing into the kitchen. You’ve never had an alpha provide, never once. In your limited experience before going on suppressants, you were used to being knotted incredibly quickly and then left alone, or having a partner that never really knew how to fully satisfy, leaving you to feverishly deal with your needs while they slept. You’ve never experienced a heat where you felt wanted before.
You ease into Mingi’s chest, resting a head on his shoulder and letting your muscles relax for as long as you can. They make you food, massage your sore hips, and keep you distracted with stories and memories from before your time at the studio. They hold you close, and they ease your pain, they provide.
#honeyhotteoks fics#this night together fic#yunho x reader#mingi x reader#yungi x reader#yunho#jeong yunho#yunho fic#yunho smut#alpha yunho#mingi#song mingi#mingi fic#mingi smut#alpha mingi#ateez#ateez ff#ateez series#ateez smut#ateez fic#yungi
2K notes
·
View notes
Text
ii. santorini.
pairing. tourguide!joel miller x fem!reader.
series synopsis. on the brink of undergoing a life-altering change, you runaway from your problems in the only way any sane person can: embarking on a mediterranean cruise. there you meet joel miller, a grumpy, private tour-guide, who just so happens to be tasked with touring you through each stop on your cruise. from greek goddesses to roman ruins, you have ten days to avoid your fate. maybe a frowning, southern, sex-on-legs of a man is just what the doctor ordered.
chapter summary. tensions are high as you and joel spend your first day together exploring the popular island of santorini. back on the boat, joel gets a glimpse at more than he bargained for.
series warnings. no use of y/n, set in 2015, no apocalypse au, cruise!au, rom-com, enemies-ish to lovers, tour-guide!joel, unspecified age gap, depictions/discussions of grief, angst, fluff, a whole load of smut, a lot of cheesy stereotypical romance tropes bc i just wanna see joel not suffer ( too much ) <3
chapter warnings. mild smut ( female masturbation, mentions of oral sex + piv sex ), bickering, alcohol, mild angst, so much cheese it'll turn you lactose intolerant!! btw joel hates santorini and he makes that known, but none of his opinions reflect my own ( please don't be mean to me over things characters say <33 )
word count. 7.9k
hyde’s input. the majority of this chapter was written with a mixture of medicine flowing through my veins, it's a miracle it's even intelligible. apologies for the wait, the holidays and health issues got in the way <3 as always, i hope you enjoy, comments an dreblogs are always appreciated !!
previous chapter - next chapter - series masterlist
It is a known fact that your name and late rarely exist within the same sentence.
The mere thought of being late fills you with a sickness you cannot cure. The extremes you’ll go to avoid it know no bounds. From arriving four hours before a flight, to waiting in your car a whole hour before entering a lecture hall, adulthood is a phase in which you’d sworn to repair the damage of a childhood worth of not arriving late.
Late to school, late to birthday parties, late to dentist appointments.
It wasn’t that you were a particularly difficult child, running rampant around the house as your mother tried to dress you, or your father tried to feed you. Quite the contrary, really. Often, it was little-you who chased around after them, and who waited by the door, school bag in hand, tapping your foot with every second that ticked by on the clock. You were too young and hadn’t the ability nor the empathy to understand that your parents were held up with sorting through things directly influenced by your existence, like cleaning up the messes you left at the breakfast table, or fixing the doorknob you and your sister broke in an intense game of hide and seek.
Nowadays, you can count on one hand the times you’ve been late.
First, you were late to your own surprise birthday party, but that was down to you getting stuck an extra hour at work. It was out of your control.
Then, there’d been your graduation ceremony. Your father missed an exit and ended up taking you on a mystery tour of the city, trying to find the next turn that led to your campus. Again, out of your control.
The third time is the one you remember panicking over the most, knee bouncing uncontrollably with nerves as you sat squeezed between two strangers on a plane. Your sister, barely halfway through her third trimester, had gone into labour, and where were you? Stumbling around drunk on a private beach in Cancún, mumbling along to the lyrics of some early 2000s classic you forget the name of. Your niece, all 4 and a half pounds of her, had decided now was her time to shine and there was nothing, not even the 4 weeks she had yet to grow in utero, that was going to stop her. By the time you arrived, mascara smudged eyes and with the stench of tequila still on your skin, she was laying peacefully in her incubator, the tiniest little fingers clenched into fists and a name tag around her wrist. This too was out of your control.
But the fourth time you’re late, as you stride urgently across the wooden decking of the ship, weaving in and out of lounge chairs and polo-neck wearing crew members, it’s completely within your control.
Yet, it’s not entirely your fault.
An alarm that never went off. A game of hide-and-seek with your purse. An unfortunate slip on bathroom tiles adding another bruise to your knees. An elevator that refused to travel faster than the speed of a snail. It’s as though Lady Luck had set out in favour of being against you, doing her utmost to ensure you arrive exactly seven minutes past your deadline. His deadline.
Best be on the deck by 7 am, darlin’, or I’m dockin’ without ya.
Your head whips from one side to another, eyes finding a familiar figure amongst the few passengers meeting their own private guides. It’s the same man from yesterday, out on the balcony, the memory of him cheering his champagne and shooting a tipsy smile your way replaying. Only now he’s clad in plaid, with a frown etched into his forehead as he stares at his watch. There’s another man, hanging off his arm, fusing with the collar of his shirt.
“She’s late,” you overhear him say, voice firm and leaking with annoyance.
“Maybe she just slept in!” The man next to him is cheerier, tired eyes full of optimism, even as he turns his head and stifles a yawn. “Give her a few minutes.”
“What kind of shitty tour guide sleeps in?” Balcony-Man huffs, and you can’t help but think of your niece and her pouty face whenever she fails to get her own way. “Does she think I’d not rather be asleep too? Lazy c-”
“See? This is why I told you to eat that damn croissant before we left.” The taller of them seems to snap, rolling his eyes. “Brighten up, Bill, or so help me God you’ll be leaving this boat a divorcee.”
Trying to tune their voices out, as the guilt of prying crawls its way into your bones, your gaze points down at your feet. The very same heels you’d worn last night, pretty as they may leave you, have you cursing at the Sun and the Moon. If you’d have just worn your sneakers, maybe you could have ran up the stairs instead of taking the snail-evator.
Joel, tour guide, Signore Miller’s voice- though your imagination can’t quite reach his level of arrogance- rears its irritating head through your mind, recalling his words from last night. Wear somethin’ a little more… practical. That had been enough to awaken that stubborn mule inside of you, hell-bent on proving him wrong.
But now, late, and with him nowhere in sight, your heels seem to have had the opposite effect. They’ve proved him right.
Which leaves you here, moping so pathetically you’re incapable of appreciating the shine of a rising sun over the horizon of aqua blue water.
Five minutes, you decide. That’s how long you’ll allow yourself to dwell in self-pity. Then, you’ll trek your way over to the Excelsior lounge, hit up the breakfast buffet, and await the general disembarking time.
Who knows, maybe you’ll get a call to say there’s a miraculous spot opened up on one of the tour groups.
If not, you’ll be fine! You’ve travelled alone before, you’ve got an all-inclusive data plan on your phone and you’re pretty well-acquainted with the less-than-accommodating features of Google Maps. You don’t need help, or a tour guide, much less one as blood-boiling, skin-prickling, irritating as Joel Mil-
“Wasn’t sure how ya like your coffee, but you look like a milk, two sugars kind of girl to me.”
Speak of the Devil and he shall appear. Or, in this case, think of him.
Turning a little too fast, you stumble a step or two back, and, sure enough, there he is. A tight fitting, dark grey t-shirt stretched over the swell of his biceps, a pair of washed-out denims, and two well-worn running shoes, one on each foot. Trailing up the swell of his tanned neck, you count the freckles up to his eyes, and find there’s bags under them. The growth of hair on his face is just as unkempt as yesterday, yet already it seems to have grown longer, making the litter of greys stand out more. The hair that sits atop his head is damp, and the strands that have managed to dry are being messed around by the morning air. He’s still got that ever-present frown stamped into his forehead, yet his mouth doesn’t seem to curl into a snarl as he calls your name.
You must stare a moment or two past his comfort level, for he clears his throat and nods down at his hand. Two to-go cups, the smallest streams of steam floating out the hole in each lid.
He’s extending one out- the one in his right hand- towards you. “If you’d rather black, you can take min-”
“No!” You snap back into your own body, all too quickly and all too volatile. Clear your throat, and then try again, this time with a little less of that im being held at gunpoint shake in your voice. “No… Thank you. It’s fine- Milk is fine.”
It’s more than fine.
In fact, he’s gotten it spot on. Down to the number of sugars you take.
But, still stubborn, you yearn to not give him the satisfaction of being right so early in the day, and instead settle for accepting the coffee out his hand. You welcome the golden warmth eagerly, eyes unable to resist slipping shut as you take your first sip. When they reopen, you find Joel watching you, intently. Purposefully, as though you’re something to be studied.
Clearing your throat, you glance to the side and spot Balcony-Man and his partner greeting an apologetic woman.
“Thanks for the, uh,” his stare is intimidating your nerves, setting you on edge of something you’re all to eager to jump off. “Coffee. Yeah. You didn’t have to… I mean, I actually thought you’d, you know, uh-”
“You thought I left without ya.” He states. All you can do is nod. “I could’ve. I did warn you not to be late.”
“You did.”
“I also told you to wear somethin’ other than them heels.”
“I know.”
“Yet here you are, late and in heels. You’re not very good at following orders.” He exhales something akin to a chuckle, as devoid of humour as it may be, and you swear he’s suddenly closer than you remember, knuckles brushing against your own as he bumps his paper cup against yours. “Just what am I gonna do with ya, huh?”
For a moment, you swear your heart has leaped from your chest and up to your throat, threatening to choke you with the beat of it. There’s no sense you can make of it, this reaction he rouses, a heat you can’t control creeping down your loins as you drag in a whiff of some manly cologne, the kind you’d usually turn your nose up at for being too overbearing. Yet, on him, it’s not. On him it’s just right, like he was born with pine soaked skin, and a tobacco stained kiss, and-
Before you can think of pulling in another breath, Joel’s stepped back, allowing a cool breeze to pass between you and get a hold of your senses.
“C’mon, we’re slotted in for the first tender that leaves for shore.”
“Oh my God.”
You’re half certain Joel’s growing sick of hearing those three words roll off your tongue. He’s likely felt this way since it first left your mouth, feet struggling to safely step out onto the dock as your mind became enchanted by the picturesque view in front of you. Only the burn of his hand meeting your lower back, nudging you ahead to make space for himself and the other passengers to step off the tender boat, was capable of dragging you back into your own body, the wanderlust that had gripped your soul yearning to be free to explore every building that sits carved into rock, every water-taxi that flows idly on cristaline water, every step that winds up and up and up the island’s cliff where, at the top, civilisation seems to lie.
The port you’ve docked on is rather small, with naught more than two docking strips and a walkway of shops and confection stands, with boats that find no space along the docking strips tying themselves to any safety they may find over the expanse of the walkway. It is no wonder the cruise floats safely out in deeper waters, alongside several other cruise lines, with no space for such large vessels. And, yet, the port is alive with something. The ground seems to pulse, like a beat of a heart, and the air, as fresh as the grass after heavy rainfall, almost dances its way down your lungs. Voices swim all around you, tourists scrambling past each other, fighting in a race towards something you’ve yet to identify.
“So this is Gialos, also known as the Old Port of Fira.” Somewhere, behind you perhaps, Joel’s voice pipes up, a speech so rehearsed and robotic, a part of your wonders how many times he’s recited it, how many people he’s recited it to. The other part of you, however, is much too fixated on the stairs ahead to pay him true attention, eyes following as two men and several donkeys descend. “That, up there, is Fira, the capital of Santorini. We’re going to need to take a cable- Are you even listening to me?”
“Yes!” You’re quick to react, a defensive rise in your voice. He meets it with a deadpan look and the crossing of his arms over his chest, which quickly becomes something you wish he wouldn’t do as you watch the tight fabric of his shirt stretch itself thin over the bulge of his arms. “No. Sorry, I’m just… Wow.”
You hope he appreciates the restraint you show towards repeating those three dreaded words again.
“You have all day to stare,” his words trip over his own irritated scoff, and you bite back a question of why he’s a guide if he seems to hate it so much, fearful he’s too honest to not tell you a truth that may hurt your fragile feelings. A truth where it is not so much his job he dislikes, but rather, your presence and all that it brings. “Right now, we need to move. Don’t wanna spend all day waitin’ in line now, do ya?”
This need for speed that hooks the other tourists seems to filter over into your guide, who’s forcing you forward, that heat of his palm now hovering inches away from your lower back. It’s enough to lead you where he pleases. As a pair, you weave in and out small clusters of people, till the space between you both and the large gathering crowd slowly diminishes. It is there where his once telepathic leading fails, with Joel turning left towards it as you stray right, over to the ascending pathway of stairs.
“Where are you going?” His tone is offended, almost, as he comes to a halt and watches you fail to do the same, to notice the space between you both and correct it like some puppy who’s been called to heel by its master.
“Where am I going?” The question, at first, is one you mistake as rhetorical. Staring back at him with an equaled confusion, you gesture to the stairway, as though it is the most obvious answer. Because, well, where else could you have been heading? He said so himself, that up there is Fira, the capital of Santorini, and you’ll be damned if you don’t get to see it. “Where are you going?”
“To the cable cars, that’ll take us up the island.”
Above the crowd of people, hanging over doors of small businesses, lay several signs. CABLE CARS - 6€ ! stands out, impossible to miss. Symbols you scarcely recognise sit beneath it, in smaller text, and you assume it’s Greek. In the distance, you spy the movement of the mobile boxes, people being carted up the length of the cliff at a speed that promises them a journey of mere minutes.
“Oh.” So, perhaps his option makes more sense than your own far longer, more tiring one. Still, stubborn as a mule, you double down on your decision to take the scenic route, inching closer towards the first step. Your guide, still in the face, refuses to move, daring eyes willing you to continue. “You want us to take the lazy man’s route? You go ahead, I’ll take the stairs and meet you at the top.”
You press one foot up onto the first step, weary of where you rest the point of your heel.
Glancing a few steps further up, there’s the unmistakable sight of a mound of brown substance, no doubt excreted out of one of the donkeys that walk ahead, tourists mounted on their poor backs.
“I don’t think you understand,” he finally inches closer, if only slightly, hands clenched at his side. “There’s five hundred and eighty-eight steps until you reach the top.”
The number is more daunting than you expect, and you pray he can’t read this on your face. “Only? I’ll be up in no time then!”
You feel more than see the way Joel’s eyes travel down the expanse of you, stuttering almost over the curvature of your chest, the dips at your hips, till they rest at your feet. The question hangs loose between you, unspoken yet evident.
In those heels?
“Listen, Joel,” taking a second, third, and fourth step, you aim for a literal higher ground, staring down below as he continues to drift closer and closer towards the stairway. “If you’re not fit for the task, or the climb’s no good for your knees, you can just say it, there’s no shame. Like I said, I’ll meet you at the top. Promise I won’t even report the fact my private guide abandoned me in favour of his own comfort.”
Defeat has never come easy.
Well, to phrase it better towards the truth, acceptance of defeat has never come easy.
There was always something more to be said, another excuse to be given for any of your shortcomings. When you’d been turned away from the school’s soccer team, you’d told yourself it was because you were a girl- ignoring the fact three girls in your year made the cut. When you’d lost an arduous game of Monopoly, you’d sworn you’d caught your sister sneaking notes out of the banker’s pile into her own. When you’d been beaten, round after round, by your own niece at Mario Kart, you’d stuck your tongue out at her and told her you let her win out of pity.
All that had been before, of course, back when you still roamed school hallways, when your sister sat across from you at the dining table, when your niece still laughed freely, wildly, celebrating her own victories with an over-the-top, uncoordinated dance around the living room.
As changed as things may be, defeat is still your foe.
It is that reason alone that you bite back a complaint.
You’d enjoyed the initial moments of your trek. Maybe it was the salty air in your lungs, or the beautiful views of your surroundings, or the idle grumbling coming from Joel, a few paces behind you, kicking up dirt under his feet with every step he travelled up. Whatever the reason, adrenaline had been flowing, into your heart and through your veins, covering every square inch of your body, a tingling of nerves from the tip of your toes to the top of your spine.
But, by the 10 minute mark, a dull ache forms in your feet. Each step of your heel feels more life threatening than the last, as the stairs grow slippier, dustier, and well-worn the further up you advanced. By stair who-knows-how-may, you take a near fatal tumble backwards, the crunch of crumbling rock threatening to be the last thing you hear. Till he appears behind you, fast as light, huffing out a breath as you smack down against his solid chest.
“Mind your step.” From anyone else, you would mistake it as a sign of care. From Joel, you know better than to think it’s anything beyond a humourless taunt.
You try to keep count of the steps, from then on, an effort to motivate yourself to move faster with each ten-pace you count. By 50, you lose your place and begin counting all over again.
The journey is difficult in other ways, too, with the constant passing of donkeys who obligate you to stand aside and make way for them. And the distant movement of cable cars, firing up and sliding down more times than you can keep track of.
When a particular step proves itself too steep, you can no longer hold back and, finally, a hiss slips out between your clenched teeth as pain shoots up your ankle, the leather of your shoe rubbing even harder into your brittle skin, threatening the promise of a blister yet to fully swell. Pushing the pain down, alongside a complaint, you take another step. Hiss. Then another, hiss. You can fight it no longer, bending at the waist to slip off your heel and examine the irritated skin.
Sure enough, it’s been rubbed raw, broken and spilling a small pool of blood.
Behind you comes an exasperated groan and, before you can straighten yourself to even register what’s happening, Joel barges past you and the figure of him up ahead slowly diminishes the faster he climbs up hill.
“Hey!” You call after him, hobbling to slip your shoe back on, but it’s to no avail.
He’s long gone, growing further and further out of your reach with each passing minute.
Cursing him under your breath, you decide to hell with the no complaints of his preferred regard for his own comfort. He’s abandoned you, injured and hobbling up the steps, all because he has the patience of a toddler who’s been waiting far too long to go potty.
“Wear somethin’ a little more sensible…” You’re bound to seem deranged to any passers by, half hopping up the steps, mumbling to yourself in a mockery of his deep voice “Yeah, right, how bout I shove somethin’ a little more sensible up your ass. Oh, what’s that? There’s no room up there with the massive stick you’re already carryin-”
“A local man warned me bout ya, on my way back down. Said there was some no-good girl casting out bad juju.” You freeze, foot stopped in mid-air. Shifting your gaze up ahead, you find Joel there, skipping a step every so often as he grows closer and closer. At his side, dangling from two fingers, sits a plastic bag. “Told him it ain’t no juju or curses you’re casting, just throwin’ a little tantrum.”
Like a fish out of water, all you can do is stare at him, wide eyes and mouth agape.
Joel pays your silence no mind, almost delighting in it. With a pop and a crack from his knees, he crouches down before you, holding out the palm of his hand.
“C’mon,” he mutters, pointing towards your injured foot. “Lemme see.”
You’re hesitant, at first, but ultimately lift it and let him curl his grip around it, holding you in place as the shoe slips off you. A tut meets your ears as his eyes meet the bloodied mess, and you watch how he contemplates, for a moment or two, before wetting his thumb with his tongue and swiping it over your broken skin.
It stings, like salt in a wound or a bee’s stinger through skin, and you try to flinch back, retract yourself from his hold. But Joel’s strong, resilient, nails biting at the flesh of your ankle to keep you in place. His free hand digs into the plastic bag he’d discarded at his side and pulls out a white box. Fiddling with it for a short period, he manages to open it at last and slips out a bandaid. He rips that open a lot quicker, using his teeth, and slips it over your open wound perfectly, thumb and pointer finger smoothing it around the curve of your heel.
“D’ya see now why I told you to not wear those things?” You feel like a child at his words, reprimanded like you once were for touching your mother’s curling iron. “And why I said we should take the cable car?”
Biting the inside of your cheek, you refuse to meet his eyes. But he just won’t let you be, craning his own neck to infiltrate the space you stare off into. There’s a pleased look on his face, smugness pulling at the right corner of his mouth. Alarmingly, you think of how it’s the closest you’ve gotten to seeing him smile.
You continue your pursuit of silence, repeating a mantra of how you don’t care that he’d tried to look out for your comfort, or how he’d then tried to save you the effort of an uphill battle, or how his hand, big and warm and rough at the fingertips, is still holding your foot in place, absentmindedly rubbing your ankle in a circular motion.
“Look at ya, gone all quiet on me,” that corner of his lip curls higher. You register the rustling of the bag, his hand digging back inside it. “Ain’t one for bein’ put in your place, are you?”
Out comes his hand once more, though this time it’s not a box of bandaids. Now, resting firm in his grasp, sits a mixture of navy blue dyed cotton, stitched atop a flat, thick layer of a straw-like material. A slip-on canvas shoe. Joel doesn’t await permission, nor does he even ask for it. He simply takes charge, slipping it onto your foot, mindful as he straightens out the back to lay against your heel.
“Other foot, up.”
Switching feet, you stumble as your weight completely shifts onto your injured side. Your hands, reaching out to stabilise your swaying body, are quickly directed by his own to rest atop his head, curls of brown threading between your fingers. You contemplate asking what products he uses to achieve locks so smooth and shiny, then rethink it as soon as you imagine his reply of a disinterested grunt and a snarky ain’t use anythin’ but dirt water and a splash o’ whiskey.
“How’s it feel?”
Soft, you almost reply, then realise he’s asking about the shoe.
With a wiggle of your toes, you tell him it’s fine, and leave it at that. He doesn’t need to know they’re surprisingly comfortable.
Joel rises with a bit of a struggle, yet refuses the help you offer. Rough hands scoop up your discarded heels, tossing them into the bag, and then he straightens his back, lets out a noise of discomfort, before nodding up ahead.
“C’mon, only got a hundred or so to go. We’ll be up in no time.”
The sun sits high in the sky when you reach the city of Fira.
Crossing over that last step, 588 painted in white across it, you huff out a sigh, exhaustion aching you out of any enjoyment of your victory over the stairway from hell. Before you can even utter a word of your thirst, Joel is already reaching into his bag of wonders, unscrewing the lid off a bottle of water and passing it to you. Grateful, you take a sip, and lament the few drops that spill down your chin.
At least they don’t go to complete waste, cooling your skin ever so slightly.
It’s a shame to see Joel start moving again, moments before you’re even ready to gain back your breath, but you follow after him, nonetheless, mindful to not press your foot too hard down. Through streets he winds, past shopkeepers he walks. Eventually, after a few minutes, you ask him where you’re both heading.
“To catch a coach,” his hand moves quickly, tugging you closer as a bicycle shoots past behind you. Your own find themselves against his chest, and realise it is nothing like his hair. Solid, warm, wide. It’s almost a shame to lower them back down to your side. “Less you think you can walk from here to Oia, too.”
Truth be told, you don’t know where Oia is.
But you do know your walking for the day is over, happy to follow Joel onto the coach. You take the aisle seat, he’s by the window. Across from you both sits a couple, young and giggling into one another’s ears, as though the sounds of their joy is sacred to none but them. A pang of envy thumps your soul, and you quickly turn your face.
Only to find that Joel’s is grey.
Not the hair that lines it but, rather, his whole face, paled and blood-drained. It’s a sickly image, and one that’s quick to get your heart racing.
“Are you okay?” Any thought of keeping your composure becomes mute as you hear your own voice, a treacherous shake to it that gives your panic away. “You look…” There is no word kind enough for you to use to relay the image of him, so you lock your lips.
It takes a few seconds for you to get a reply, as your hand moves up to feel his forehead. It’s sweaty, warm, and you move to pull your hand back when he’s holding it firm in place, eyes slipping shut. “‘S cold. You’re cold,” seems to be his explanation. “I’m fine, it’s just- Carsick.”
“You get carsick, yet you work on a cruise.”
“Not the same. Ship’s big, somethin’ bout the size and my own visibility, ‘s what stops me getting seasick.”
You sit like that the rest of the coach, your hand pressed to his forehead, his eyes slipped shut.
“What’s your favourite stop on the cruise?”
As it turns out, Oia is exactly what you’d pictured Santorini to be.
White washed houses, deep blue domes for rooftops, turquoise waters, all for as far as the eye can see. Joel complains, more than tells you, of the rise in tourism over the years, of how it’s turned the beautiful village into a party-town for idiots abroad, disregarding the clean environment, shamelessly blocking paths to snap a frame-worthy shot, raising prices to the ceiling. When you ask him if he thinks he’s in part to blame, if people like him are to blame- running tours, bringing guests onto the island, earning a wage off the visiting of such a place- he grumbles out something about missing breakfast, needing lunch.
So you find a cafe. Or, more, Joel leads you to one. He greets the doorman, with a wave and a pat on the back, before sauntering his way through to a back terrace, overlooking the whole village, the water perfectly framing it. Stepping out and sitting down, the view robs the very breath out of your lungs.
It’s like sitting inside a postcard.
Joel asks if you like Greek food.
You tell him you’ve never had it.
He orders for you both, a mixture of different plates, and swears he’ll find something you’ll like.
It turns out you’re rather fond of baklava.
“Florence.” Joel’s taken his time to answer, staring at you like a deer caught in headlights. Disbelief more than fear in his eyes, you have to wonder if it’s the first time someone’s thought to ask him, in all his years as a guide. Naturally, this leads you to wondering how many years that is. “It’s a real site. Full of history, a real story to be told.” He tilts a ceramic dish your way, eyes glancing down in an offering. You follow them, and spot olives. Shake your head, no, then smile, thanks. He shrugs, more for me, and pops two into his mouth. “There’s this…” he pauses to chew. “This library.”
“A library?”
“‘S not just a library.” He slips out the olive’s pip and raises another into his mouth. You try not to think about how thick his fingers look, rolling the remaining briny green pebbles around in the pot. “There’s a cinema built inside it. Plays some classic films. I always- or, I try to go whenever we dock.”
It’s hard to picture Joel inside a cinema, something about the setting too busy, too loud to place his scowling face in. Would he be the kind to have a favourite seat, perfectly picked to optimise the sound quality? Does he speak animatedly, excited any time he recognises an actor? Or is he a shusher, the kind to roll his eyes when someone dares to even clear their throat?
A part of you wants to ask him if your tour involves a trip to this library.
Something tells you it’s not a place he likes to share, though. It’s his own little corner, safe to sneak a moment of selfish indulgence amidst a week of catering to another’s needs.
“A cinema inside a library?” A waiter interrupts you, asks if everything’s alright. Joel orders another serving of baklava. “Isn’t that a bit of an oxymoron?”
“Yeah.” For a moment, you think you see a smile creep across his lips. “Suppose it is.”
Another interruption comes in the form of your ringtone, rippling the water in your glass as your phone vibrates upon the table. You’re well aware of how Joel spots the word Mum displayed across your screen. Just like you’re aware he sees how you swipe down on your screen and switch on aeroplane mode.
Before he can ask any questions, or the sudden silence can become too deafening, you throw out another question. “And your least favourite?”
“Least favourite stop?” You nod, affirmative, and he needs no time to reply. “Here.”
“Here?! How come?”
The baklava arrives, as if on cue, and you point down at it, as though it is reason enough to be enamoured with the island. It seems to do little to convince him, his hand reaching out to push the plate closer to you, inviting you to indulge yourself.
“Compared to the other stops, Santorini’s bland.” He says it when your mouth is too occupied to protest, stuffed full with layer after layer of pastry. “Kind of like a diamond, y’know? Real pretty to look at, empties your wallet, and, at the end of the day, ain’t much you can do with it.”
“People propose with diamonds.” You point out, and cough as a flake of pastry hits the back of your throat.
Joel’s already passing you your glass of water before you even think to reach for it.
“People propose with rings. Diamonds are just custom, not a guarantee.”
Sunset arrives with no warning, a hue of fiery orange melting down into the calm waters on the horizon. It’s Joel who makes the call to head back, one glance at his watch enough to tell you the last chance to catch a coach is nigh. It’s only as you go to call for the bill that he tells you it’s covered and you realise his earlier trip to the bathroom had been a ruse to go pay.
The trip back is calmer, quieter, with the coach full of sunkissed and heat exhausted tourists.
Again, you take the aisle seat, and Joel, the window.
Keeping an eye on him is easy, switching your gaze towards the approaching darkness of the night sky calling upon the street lights anytime he meets your eyes. When you notice the increase in breaths and the paling of his skin, you wordlessly unscrew the cap off a bottle and slot it into his hand, inviting him to finish off the last sips of your water.
Skipping out on a trip down memory stairway, you quietly follow him into the cable car and, when you reach the Old Port, you try your best to block out his smug remark of how easy and fast the ride was. A feat which becomes easier as you stumble halfway up the dock and turn back.
Like hours before, as you first stepped off the tender, your mouth falls agape. Only, this time, wider. The view of the island lit up in all its glory is enough to leave you breathless, hands scrambling to fish out your phone, open the camera and-
“You gettin’ on or what?” Joel calls out from behind, and you find him waiting on board one of the tenders, hand held out towards you.
It’s a demand, more than it is an offer, to hurry up. The collective of other passengers are watching the interaction, and a feeling you’ve come to know all too well crawls its way into your veins.
A burden, holding them all up, that’s what you are.
The feeling follows you back, as you slip into a damp seat and watch as the boat carries you further and further from the island, it’s lights twinkling in a way that chokes you up, drains you out, eyes stinging from more than just the salty air. You’ll love it, I swear! The memory plays out in your head, those words gushed at you. Hands squeezing your cheeks, a smile blinding you under its brightness. Just wait till you see it at night, the lights shine over it like stars!
You blink.
A tear pools at the corner of your eye.
“Here, look,” something nudges you. It’s Joel, inching his phone into your view. Through blurred sight, you glance at it. And find yourself, centre frame, lit only by the moon. In the back lies the whole skyline of Santorini, lights reflecting down onto the waters below. “Best view you can get, the whole island in one shot.”
Afraid to hear your own voice, you smile.
He answers by pointing his phone back at you, snapping another photo.
Back on the cruise, the two of you part ways, with Joel telling you to meet him in the same bar, same time as the night before.
Dinner had been part of your plans. With a glance over the listed restaurants on board, the ache in your tired bones asks you to stay in bed and make use of the room service. You listen, order something light, easy. It arrives in under 10 minutes and your hunger is satisfied sitting out on the balcony, watching the dark waves roll past.
Phoning your mother is the next port o'call.
Unlike with your food, that takes longer than 10 minutes. Much longer, and involves you countlessly reassuring her that yes, you’re okay, and no, you don’t need her to fly out and meet you in Naples.
“I’m a big girl,” you even throw in a laugh, hoping it’ll ease the worry lines you can picture splayed over your mother’s face. “I think I can climb up a mountain without my mum’s help.”
“Honey, you know that’s not what why I’m worri-”
“Did you know you can get carsick but, at the same time, not seasick?”
You hang up shortly after, with a promise to try your best to answer when she calls tomorrow, instead of hours later, when she should be fast asleep.
The time on your phone tells you there’s still forty minutes until you need to meet Joel. The image of that grandiose bathtub flashes before your eyes and, in record timing, you’re sinking into scalding waters, a complimentary bath bomb dumped in and granting you the childish gift of bubbles.
You try to relax, at first.
There’s no need to wet your hair, so you indulge yourself. Lay your head back, close your eyes. Feel your muscles loosen with the warmth, ignore the sting of soap in your blistering heel. Your hands struggle to find a resting place, until they meet your thighs. They sit still, for a moment or two, before one slips down, inching into the crease of where your legs meet.
Something stirs in your core, comes alive as you think of how long it’s been since you last felt someone. A few months, it has to be. A fellow graduate, if you remember correctly, that stupid robe still on his shoulders as he let his mouth come down on you.
Your hand is soon on your core, before you really notice, mind on a mission to recall the hazy encounter. When you think of his tongue, messy yet eager, your finger’s already on your clit, pressing against it with a tease of pleasure. When you think of his cock, uncut and thicker than your ex, splitting you open on his bedroom floor, your hips cant up against yourself, chasing friction. When you rewind how soft Joel’s hair had been between your fingers, your free hand grips one of your breasts, fingers pinching at your nipple.
Your eyes snap open.
Joel’s hair.
Joel.
Something you should not be thinking of right now, hand buried between your thighs.
You wait a few seconds, remind yourself of the graduate’s face.
His blue eyes, your fingers roll over your nipple.
His blonde hair, your legs spread wider.
Joel’s solid chest, your fingers dip inside your cunt.
Your breath is shaky, Joel’s annoyed groan echoes.
The shame of it, of thinking of him, is almost as tantalising as touching yourself, fucking your own hole full with as much of your fingers the angle will allow. It’s a one time thing, you justify. You just need to get it out your system. One and done, cum and done. No more of Joel Miller between your thighs, this is the closest he’ll get.
Someone knocks at your door.
You nearly miss it over the sound of your breathing, the pounding of your heart.
“Who is it?” You don’t like how weak you sound, but it’s too late to take it back now.
Another knock.
“Can I come in?”
A hand still between your thighs, orgasm titering on the edge, body fully submerged in lukewarm water. “No!”
“Ain’t safe to leave your door unlocked. Anybody could walk in- Jesus!”
You’ve never screamed louder.
Joel takes up most of the bathroom doorway, same clothes save for the shirt that’s got two buttons undone and the sleeves rolled halfway up his arms. You’re pressed right back into the bathtub, as physically far from him as you can get, knees pressed up to your chest, ankles crossed over.
In Joel’s defence, he’s quick to turn away, presenting you with a view of his back. A hand runs through his hair.
“Why are you in my room?!” You inch even further back, the water suddenly dropping several degrees.
“I asked to come in!”
“And I told you not to!”
“Well obviously I didn’t hear that!”
“Why are you in my room?” You’re back to your first question, eyeing up your towel.
It’s across the room, on the bathroom sink. No way for you to reach it without the risk of him seeing you reflected on something.
“You were late. Came to check if ya tripped on them heels and broke your neck.”
“I,” you’re not sure what time it is with your phone sitting by the bed, charging. That's now five times you've been late in adulthood. “Didn’t realise the time. I can meet you at the bar in ten minutes.”
He nods, and you watch him take a step, then immediately pause. “You know, I’ve heard a few things from passengers…” You may not see his face, but you swear there’s that half-smirk, smug look upon it. It’s practically dripping off his words. “The shower head, fourth setting. Seems to get the job done for most ladies on board.”
Grabbing the closest thing in reach- a bar of soap- you launch it and watch it bounce off his irritatingly wide shoulders. “Get OUT!”
You make it to the Tipsy Byson in 15 minutes.
Dressed more appropriately than the night before, your flared jeans and crop top garner less stares. It’s just as busy, if not busier, yet it’s not hard to spot Joel on a barstool, nursing a glass of something syrupy looking. Behind the bar is Luke, head thrown back at something Joel says.
They’re an interesting pair to observe, you realise as you make your way over. With Luke, so tall, so lanky, so bright-face, his energy warm and inviting, and Joel so- well, Joel.
“There she is,” Luke cheers, a little too loudly, calling attention to you as you slip into the stool next to Joel. “My new favourite customer.”
“Thought I was your favourite,” Joel’s yet to look at you, and it’s a relief. He’s looked at you enough for one day, one week, one lifetime.
“Sorry but she smells better than you, Joel,” the barman winks at you, a cheeky grin on his face. “ Plus, she’s a hell of a lot nicer to look at.”
Joel scoffs, you giggle.
“Not sure about the whole smelling better thing,” your response comes minutes later, after Luke’s already served you a glass of wine and turned away your cash, telling you he’ll put it on Joel’s tab. “But thanks!”
Unprompted and uninvited, Luke bends over the bar and takes an exaggerated sniff. “I don’t know, smell alright to me.”
“Really? I’m not even wearing perfume, I forgot to pack any-.”
“Yeah! Go on Joel, give her a whiff, tell her she smells fine!” There’s resistance on his end, but Luke’s adamant, hand clamped on the back of Joel’s head, shoving him face first into your neck. Joel’s nose brushes against you. You hear him inhale. Exhale. Inhale again, then the urge to cross your thighs begins to nag at you. “Well?”
“Yeah, smells nice- Fine. Ya smell fine.”
“Be still my beating heart! Someone alert the press that Texas said something other than-”
Joel interrupts Luke’s dramatics, scowl on his face. “Don’t you have a job to be doin’?”
Only once the bartender is down the other end of the bar, engrossed in a heated discussion over what beer pulls a better head, does Joel speak again, sipping on his drink. Whiskey.
“So I noticed somethin’, when I was checking your bookin’ info.” You nod, urge him to continue, and take a sip of your own drink. Some country song plays over the speakers and you notice a sudden shake in Joel’s knee, his foot tapping to the beat. “Says there should be two of you in my guide team.”
“Oh,” the lump forming in your throat falls safely back into the pit of your stomach as you take another drink of wine. “Must be a printing error. You know how technology can be, always complicating things.”
“Hmm,” it’s easy to write off the awkward energy between you with the excuse of earlier events, and it’s the first bright-side you find to him walking in on your intimate bath. “Well, you know the drill for tomorrow. 7 am on that deck or I’m-”
“Docking without me, I know.”
You finish your drink first. When Joel orders himself another glass, you smile politely and turn it down. Yawn, then tell him you best head to bed.
Before you can slip out the entry, someone calls your last name. Loud enough to turn more than just your own head.
It’s Joel, approaching you, effortlessly parting crowds through the lively bar as though he is knife and, the people, butter. The loud music seems to ring louder in your ear, impeding you from hearing the words that leave his moving lips.
“What?” You call out, hands clasped over your mouth in an attempt to amplify the volume of your voice.
His response is to step closer, hands holding you in place by the waist as he leans down. A hot breath on your neck, the smell of whiskey on his breath, the soft brush of lips against your ear.
“It’s your turn to bring the coffees.”
series taglist. @auteurdelabre
#joel miller series#joel miller smut#joel miller x reader#joel miller fic#pedro pascal smut#joel miller fanfic
206 notes
·
View notes
Text
Viper’s [y/n] dying on field
Warnings: angst, mentions of death, torture and depression. Very angsty
No one wanted to give the news, fearing for her reaction.
But when that happens, she looks normal, no overreactions, just a neutral face.
But that's just outside
On the inside, when she finally realizes what was really going on, she felt like had she died with you.
She alternates between the stages of grief, being anger, bargaining and depression. But she'll never be able to accept and get over the fact that you're really gone.
She goes back on the fraternization rules and much stricter. If she knows of something going on between two agents, the punishments are...terrifying.
It might sound like a sour thing to do, privating everyone of having a loved of because of the lost of hers, but she genuinely doesn't want anyone to go through what she's going now.
What is ironic that she herself broke her own rule and suffered the consequences of her “imprudence”
Sometimes she wishes you weren't as sweet and loving as you were. Everything would have been easier if she hadn't fallen under your spell.
No one will touch your room. She made sure to make it clear to everyone that everything that belongs to you will remain in that room, locked, forever.
In the dead of night, when the sadness is too strong, she goes to your room and lies on your bed in search of a solace, but noticing that your perfume is subtly disappearing from your belongings no matter what she does, it only makes the pain in her chest get worse.
She's definitely going to go after your killer, and she's not going to kill them fast with a headshot; no, she will torture them as cruelly as Viper can until you are avenged, then leave them to die and rot in a place where they cannot be found or remembered.
After the revenge, she feels an even greater emptiness. What was still holding her steady was the hope of getting her hands on your killer, now that it was all over… what's left for her?
Days working non-stop, just on automatic, wanting to find a way to overcome what happened
The agents went more than a full week without seeing her, locked in her lab and honestly? Everyone was worried about her mental health but again, no one has the courage to say anything
Security protocols on missions have also been intensified and training is almost obsessive.
Sabine can't let anyone die in combat anymore, there's no Brimstone or Sage or Omen to change her mind about the new protocols
Many have tried to talk to her about her attitudes, but she just can't change. She couldn't protect you from death and remembering that you died alone, scared, makes her determined to protect others like a big ferocious lioness.
Viper will always be the shell of a woman who has lost the love of her life.
She won't and doesn't want to move on, find someone new. You'll always be her partner and she'll try her best to honour you.
There is no more sparkle in her eyes or the will to make a better world if you are no longer by her side, ready to share the happiness of a life together.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤ ㅤㅤㅤㅤ ㅤㅤㅤㅤ ㅤ ㅤ˙·٠•●♥ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ ♥●•٠
@ Do not copy any of my works, translate and/or post it on others websites.
#Valorant#valorant x you#valorant x reader#valorant headcanons#viper#valorant viper#viper x reader#viper x you#valorant viper x reader#Sabine callas
175 notes
·
View notes
Text
American healthcare did a fuckery
My fellow Americans, I regret to inform you that our beloved health insurance industry has done a major fuckery. I know this is hard to believe, given the probity and honor we associate with our fine insurance companies, but the evidence is incontrovertible.
Back in 2019, the Trump administration ordered insurers and hospitals to start disclosing their prices, despite tens of thousands of comments filed by employers, insurers and hospitals objecting to the proposal.
This is one of those pox-on-all-your-houses/you-can’t-get-there-from-here situations. The Trump admin wanted to continue the fiction that the blame for America’s worst-in-class health care was the result of bad market dynamics. Without transparency on pricing and service, employers can’t shop for plans, hospitals can’t know if they’re getting a bad deal from insurers, and sick people are denied information needed for effective bargaining.
That’s all true, as far as it goes. The stubborn, remarkable opacity of American health-care pricing is an enormous source of mischief. Two patients receiving the same procedure, medicine or service might see bills that are thousands of dollars apart, at the same hospital, delivered by the same personnel.
Without price transparency, patients can’t know if they’re getting ripped off. But if you know that the hospital charged the person in the next bed $3 for the Tylenol tablet that you got charged $300 for, you can go to the hospital billing department and say, basically, “Oh, come the fuck on — seriously?” and maybe get $297 knocked off your bill.
That’s why insurers and hospitals don’t want price transparency. Hospitals don’t want insurers to know that they’re getting gouged, and insurers don’t want their competitors to know that they’ve cut sweetheart deals that are being subsidized by eye-popping profits extracted from their rivals.
Ending those practices will make marginal improvements to US healthcare, but only marginal ones. The problem with health-care isn’t that it’s an imperfect market — it’s that we treat it as a market at all. Markets may help organize and allocate discretionary goods and services, but the core of healthcare is not discretionary.
Fundamentally, an unconscious person in cardiac arrest being loaded into the back of an ambulance cannot send a price-signal by shopping for a hospital emergency room and directing the driver to take them there. Even less extreme examples — cancer treatment, insulin, a sick child, a broken bone — do not lend themselves to market dynamics.
Health care always turns into a planned economy. The only question is: who plans it? Right now, we have a monopolized health-care supply-chain, with a handful of companies controlling insurance, hospitals, pharma, pharmacy benefit managers, hospital beds, powered wheelchairs, etc. Each of these sectors is locked in a death-battle with the others, fighting to shift profits from one balance-sheet to the other — but no matter which one wins, the rest of us lose.
There’s a reason that Americans pay more for worse health outcomes, and why American medical professionals get paid less for worse working conditions, than their counterparts abroad. A hospital chain and an insurance company might be well-matched for negotiating power and thus able to arrive at an equilibrium that lets both of them thrive — but workers and patients are disorganized and atomized, and we’re easy pickings for both insurers and hospitals.
Sure, hospitals and insurers fight over us, but the prize they’re seeking is the right to drain our wallets — not the right to win our business through excellence. They are not our champions, they are our tormentors, and whichever one wins, we lose.
Back to transparency. Despite the tsunami of bad-faith objections to publishing prices, the Trump admin enacted the rule, because the rule was key to the pretense that the market for health-care could be fixed — while the alternative was that it should be abolished and subsumed into a single-payer system, like the ones that every other rich country with successful healthcare use.
The insurers and hospitals switched tactics: they simply ignored the rule. Months went by. Deadlines passed. The prices remained a secret, or were publishing in incomplete form, or in obscure formats that couldn’t be readily understood or compared. The Biden admin threatened the sector with fines and public draggings, with increasing severity as the stalemate continued.
Then the insurers switched tactics. Over the summer, the nation’s mammoth insurance companies began dumping enormous amounts of price-data — and I do mean enormous. Humana dropped 400 billion prices in 500,000 CSV files totaling 600TB.
https://developers.humana.com/Resource/PCTFilesList?fileType=innetwork
That pales in comparison to the dumps from Unitedhealthcare — a private-equity backed behemoth that scooped up dozens of smaller companies — whose 250TB dump of 100,000,000,000 prices:
https://transparency-in-coverage.uhc.com/
[Image ID: Alec Stein’s chart showing the scale of the insurance pricing dump.]
All told, the industry has produced more than a trillion prices. Writing on Dolthub, Alec Stein contextualizes this unimaginably large dump: larger than English Wikipedia, the Library of Congress, Libgen, and all of Netflix — combined:
https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2022-09-02-a-trillion-prices/
Where did all this data come from? The insurers are breaking out prices by “who’s paying, who’s getting paid, what they’re getting paid for, plus some extra fluff to keep track of versioning,” combining all of these to produce generally meaningless distinctions that only serve to chaff the data so it can’t be readily parsed.
This is pure malicious compliance, a monopolist’s version of work-to-rule whereby they follow the letter of the law in a way that is clearly designed to frustrate the spirit of the law. Stein — who works for Dolthub, and wants to highlight the power of its database product — has thinks we can still wrangle all that data.
He proposes reducing the amount of data by 99% by eliminating extraneous metadata, as well as data on rare procedures at the margins of health care. Then, he wants to parse the remaining data through “data bounties” that pay data scientists to perform specific tasks — Dolthub already did this for a smaller set of hospital data, and it worked:
https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2022-07-01-hospitals-compliance/
Then, Stein says, we can further whittle the data down by zeroing in on the 70 codes required by Medicare, and break those out by hospitals by using Medicare’s “national provider identity” codes.
All of this will be useful work. Assigning precise dollar-figures to the dysfunction of a commercialized healthcare sector is a necessary-but-insufficient precursor to creating a sensible universal system. Likewise, this data will be useful for the the DoJ and FTC when they block future mergers and unwind existing ones.
You can help! Stein wrote custom scrapers for each insurer’s dumps and posted them to Github, and you can scrape the data yourself:
https://github.com/alecstein/dolt_datascience/tree/master/transparency_in_coverage_filesizes
As useful as all of this will be, don’t take your eyes off the prize. America has the worst-performing, most expensive healthcare in the rich world. Fixing it means more than tinkering in the margins with price transparency. Health is not a market — it’s a human right.
[Image ID: Ticker-tape parade for presidential candidate Richard Nixon in New York in 1960.]
298 notes
·
View notes
Text
Happy Deltarune Chapter 2 Day! 🎉
Presenting a revisited old idea I had:
Recruitable Party Member Spamton!
Available in [Big Shot] RED and PIPIS [Blue Blue Electric Blue]
Normal! Spamton (Red Mage)
Acquired via Normal Route
According to Final Fantasy Wiki, Red Mages can learn the spells of White and Black mages, but it comes at the cost of lower stats.
He's more Addison looking because we made him a Real Boy tm! Behaviorally, not much has changed apart from being more composed.
Normal! Spamton's starting armour are the "Bargain Hunters" - the spiffy orange glasses he's wearing. This orange is a blend of the Dealmaker's pink and yellow. From what I read, orange lenses are ideal for foggy and low light conditions and filters out blue light.
Normal! Spamton has the ThornRing in his inventory. It's an incompatible weapon type so he cannot equip it. (But if one asks Malius to fuse ThornRing with an equippable weapon…)
Weird! Spamton (Blue Mage)
Acquired with the presence of any Weird Route save file
Referencing FF Wiki again, Blue Mages learn spells from enemies.
Weird! Spamton often freezes and stutters in his speech and actions. Other than that, he is Spamton.
I left him a puppet because you didn't "free" Spamton in Weird! Route (and also to show how bad the Player messed up)
His starting armor is the "Snow Visor" - those snazzy purple glasses. I read that purple (technically red/purple) lenses are good in snowy weather. This purple is the complimentary color of the orange in Normal! Spam's glasses.
He has the Dealmakers in his inventory. They can either be exchanged with the Snow Visor or the Player snag them for themself.
Spamton Stats
Health: 150 * Attack: 8 * Defense: 0 * Magic: 7 * Guts: 1
I took his base game stats for this. Health is 600 ÷ 4, because the OG value seemed too high for a starting party member. The 7 in magic came from adding 1+9+9+7 and then dividing by 4 (6.5) and rounding up (7). (9 + 4) ÷ 2 also equals 6.5
His Guts is 1 because I wasn't sure what other number to give him.
Funny Stats (Normal! Spam): [Hot Stuff]: 1997, Sleaziness: 94
You know why these numbers are here 😉
Funny Stats (Weird! Spam): [Ice Cream]: 1997, Sleaziness: 94
Regular Attack has him throw a Pipis
[That's A Spicy Meatball]
Specils: Money Vacuum (Damage + Chance of Stealing D$ or Items from the enemy), Minitons (Summon clones to harass the enemy), Word Bullets (words *can* hurt your enemy)
Normal! Spam has Heal Deal (heals 60 HP to entire party)
Weird! Spam replaces Heal Deal with [Market Research], which allows him to copy an enemy's last used attack for the duration of one battle. (Works like the Mimic move in Pokémon.) He also has a < 20% chance of Freezing enemies when he attacks them.
Regardless of form, Spamton's starting weapon is The Big One, a broken sword with a blue polished pommel resembling a Pipis. (It's meant to be the sword he sells in his shop.)
#meg makes a thing#spamton#spamton deltarune#spamton g spamton#deltarune au#au#pixel art#deltarune spoilers#tag just in case
23 notes
·
View notes
Text
How could somebody as clever as you me be so stupid?
(cw: religious indoctrination, conversion therapy, CPTSD)
When I was sixteen years old I voluntarily sought out and joined an online youth support group for an ex-gay “ministry” and spent the next three years trying to pray the queerness out of myself and investing a lot of my social and emotional energy in a group of people dedicated to the same goal.
I cannot possibly overemphasize how much nobody forced me to do this. Because nobody had to. My religious programming had so completely taken hold at that point that it was basically running itself.
I left both the ex-gays and The Church (i.e. institutional Christianity in general) altogether, only after my mental health was completely unraveled by three years of deep investment in a cult-like group that thrived on the members’ self-hatred. I had to have a total nervous breakdown before I couldn’t do it anymore.
I left my childhood faith only when I had no other choice because staying was destroying me.
Moving across the country to live with the part of my family that wasn’t batshit religious helped. I completely removed myself from the sphere of influence of my old church and the ex-gays and I distanced myself as much as I could justify to myself from my religious family.
And then I spent years struggling to accept the losses. The loss of my faith, which shattered my entire worldview. The loss of my identity as a member of that faith. The loss of my church community. The loss of any closeness I’d had with the religious side of my family. The loss of my basic sense of trust in other people, because if the community I’d loved and trusted above all else had spent my whole life teaching me to believe in harmful myths and propaganda, how could I ever trust anyone ever again?
And the loss of trust in my own mind, because how could I have been stupid enough to believe it all?
While I was struggling with all of that, the religious indoctrination I’d absorbed my entire life was still alive and well in my head and I was struggling with that, too. Some of it was the kind of stuff you’d expect, nightmares about Hell and Armageddon and a long and painful process of reevaluating my politics (because my church was politically opinionated too, oh yes).
But there was also a particular voice on a loop incessantly in my mind for literal years, trying anything and everything to rationalize going back to church again because it still hadn’t fully let go.
At first the voice said You’re a failure, you failed God and the church because you didn’t try hard enough to cure yourself. You could have become what God and the church expected you to be if you’d just done more.
But later on it became You’re a selfish coward for running away. How are things ever going to get better in the church if people like you just leave instead of staying and trying to make a difference from the inside? What about the other people like you who are still trapped in their indoctrination? You can’t just abandon them.
Later still it became You should find a progressive church to join. How short-sighted, to write off the entire faith. It isn’t going anywhere, so it’s your duty to lend your support to the progressive wing of the church, so your part to make sure they win this culture war.
On and on and on. My mind spent over a decade going through every possible form of bargaining, inventing new and increasingly flimsy reasons why I somehow owed it to The Church to go back to them. Trying some way to make the loss less total, less permanent. Because I had loved my church growing up, been devoted to it in a way that defined my entire childhood and adolescence. And part of me kept desperately trying to find a way to stay connected to it.
I would tentatively check out churches in my new city, hoping to find something that gave me what I missed from my childhood faith without also hurting me. I was stuck in a weird cycle where I would briefly become involved with some new church or other faith based group and then get triggered, panic, and quickly leave again. I was basically trauma-bonded to the entire institution of Christianity, and it was only a few years ago when I finally had some serious therapy that I was able to completely sever the bond and fully accept that for me, faith and the church were dead and I was never ever going back.
But I still have CPTSD, the kind you develop when the curtain is pulled back on something in your life that you’d grown up thinking was good and you realize that it was deeply dysfunctional and was slowly and insidiously poisoning you for the first 19 years of your life, actually.
And I still look back and struggle to forgive myself, because as much as I’ve kept the focus of this story on how my indoctrination harmed me, it’s also true that teenage me could be an insufferable little shit, going around parroting off all kinds of bigoted, messed-up things I’d been taught in church. Some of the kids I went to school with probably hated me and I can’t blame them, tbh.
I started this blog mainly to brain dump about Good Omens and connect with other fans but I can’t really delve deeply into my perspectives on the story without delving into some of this stuff. So…consider this the first of an undetermined number of posts about my personal religious history, that I will probably link to in the future when writing metas (or at least that are helping me organize my thoughts to write metas).
#religious trauma#religious indoctrination#religious deconstruction#exvangelical#ex gay#ex ex gay#conversion therapy#cptsd#this is going to mostly be a nerdy things blog I swear#but I have some shit to get off my chest too#it’s all connected
9 notes
·
View notes
Text
absolutely not trying to make this about us but i feel incredibly powerless and i feel for astro fans and moonbin's loved ones because i know how painful and heartbreaking this situation is. i know how difficult it is to receive such news and navigating through everything over time doesn't get any simple. i wish i could shield them from this and from what's to come because i know for a fact how unpleasant the environment gets. it gets hostile a lot of the time and people can be very insensitive. everywhere you go, it'll be plastered with thinkpieces on mental health or performative comments. it's something you just can't escape and you'll always find someone ready to remind you and pour salt on your grief. i'm so sad that i know how it feels and so sad that i can't do more than i wish to help. i offer my virtual presence and i genuinely pray for his family, his members, his friends, his fans to be able to find a bit of peace somewhere safe. please do get off the internet and if you find that it'd be best for you, leave your fandom accounts for good. you don't necessarily need to stay and submit yourself to something you cannot take. you need to put yourself first, you need to think of ways to sit with your grief and handle it however you can. i also want to remind you, whoever you are, that grief is not a linear process. i myself still feel so helpless typing this. somedays it'll hurt like hell. you'll feel anger, denial, bargaining, mixed emotions, back and forth. on some other days you'll cope better. so please be gentle with yourself in this fluctuating experience. and for everyone else, you should not reduce moonbin to what happened and respect him instead. please please just don't erase who he is and what he's done. he has been such a talented, loving, dedicated performer, dancer, singer. so keep celebrating him in his entirety, keep that memory intact and don't dilute him.
11 notes
·
View notes
Note
I am your servant. [ he's being false-polite. like the really bastardy version of saying 'at your service :)' when what you mean is 'i'm going to be incredibly inconvenient for you :)' ]
THE HALLS OF STONE ARE QUIET . his mortal servants , gone about their duties for the evening . many a woman warming a noble's bed . he is a different man today than he was decades ago , and he would be another one a decade from now . a different banner to fly over a distant land . somewhere else , far away . these people , long forgotten . a meal , unsavory . golden knives ran slick against teeth ------ crimson veins , their lives , digested . the fire dies cold in the hearth .
and that was all until he would return , ever the king .
such stories were always passed down . so ancient , from one tongue to the next . when he was king , and king again , and again . when the world had forever known of his wicked name . there then came the written word . no longer were these stories ever held by village elders & sage wanderers , eager to tell tales . battles could be forever alive . the horrors of war , ever fresh , like ink of page . even the deeds of mythic heroes & dastardly monsters , now a joy to keep on one’s shelf .
a great plague had passed through europe , sparing few . a rampant , raging disease , vile in its merciless holds . and yet , vandal savage remained untouched . gloriously so , the picture of health . his hair , dashingly curled from an untied braid , his skin , an fine bronzed velvet . a glint in his darkened eye . nothing suggested sickness . and to other men , the lesser , the filthy , were desperate to tear him asunder . what was it ? whatever was it that had protected him from this such a deathly pox ? alchemy ? prayer ? a faustian bargain , as kit had so written ? none of those things , of course .
vandal closed his book for the evening , and blew out his candle . this strain had ground his plans to a half . unexpected , but well worth the study , in the mean time . wispy spirals of smoke filled the shadowy room , only to curiously dance , illuminated . the candle sparks itself to life once more , vandal staring suddenly . even in the halls , did the hearth illuminate . something beyond his will had happened . an ethereal trick .
the man’s voice is knife-slick & dreadfully smooth . a niveous vision in horrifying white . bone-pale . if it could be called a man ------ a beast of a guest within the house of another beast . for whatever it was , it might’ve been all of man’s horrors distilled into a vague , human-like shape . subtle here , severe there .
there are three distinct clacks of teeth . vandal cannot see them all , only one , and what a ghastly smile it is .
“ I am your servant , “ speaks the mouth , bones pushing against pale lips , grinning in shadow . a single , small candle for light still dances . he is not scared — vandal savage fears no man , and yet again , he notes that this , perhaps , is no man , indeed . wondering if it would bleed , should he slit its throat ( as the need arrives , and lords , how it does ) . but he isn’t one to question why such a being would creep into his castle . he knows why he is being watched . has seen it in the eyes of every innocent he slaughtered . a raising of the blade against tender skins . the screaming , the pleading . a scene of slaughter unending , mercilessly unyielding in his cruelty . a hand sick with want , and a thirst that could never be quelled . endless . endless , as they say , is ever the wants of men . and vandal savage dreams in crimson . he dreams of carnage , an empire built atop the corpses of his enemies . as things should be . as they once were .
“ and not even the etiquette to say good evening . my dear corinthian , wherever are your manners ? “
@nightmarecountry | DEATHLESS .
#nightmarecountry#( 𝐒𝐔𝐑𝐕𝐈𝐕𝐀𝐋 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐒𝐓 . ) | incharacter .#i thought this was going to get feral-er .#huh .#that just means#MORE FERAL-ER NEXT TIME#i also rewrote this LIKE NUMEROUS TIMES . SO . ERAHIOWHOIEAFRGBUFEALNJDFVBK#BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK#ask to tag .
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
On the Suicide of a Friend
TW: Suicide
I think we're trained as, I don't know, Americans(?) to constantly imagine that we could be the hero in any given story.
What if I had said two more things to him Monday night when I saw him at choir?
Or, what if I had just sent him the right text at the exact moment he did whatever it is he did (and I do not know what he did and I suppose it is none of my business).
And, I suppose this is classic bargaining, there's the part of me that wants to sit him down (something I cannot do because he is dead) and be like "Bro, literally on Monday half the choir was wearing shirts that said 'Gary for President' clearly you are well loved."
But then, suicide never exists as a logical thought. No one sits down with a life coach and makes a T-chart and is like "upon objectively reviewing all the evidence, me and my closest advisors have chosen suicide" (Or, well they do, but only in countries with assisted suicide options and only in the face of terminal disease)
And I can make some educated guesses on "why" he did, he was a 50 year old single gay man who lived alone and doesn't that sound lonely? But, that's not *really* the reason he did it right? He did it because something went wrong with his brain and by extension his mind.
So as a good Christian leftist (even when I'm mourning) absolutely, let me remind us, the living, and the well, to reach out to your friends, especially the ones who might be lonely (even if they've never say it) and remind them that they are not alone. This as an important ministry. I'm reminded of the first verse of "My song is Love Unknown"
My song is love unknown–
my Savior’s love to me;
love to the loveless shown,
that they might lovely be.
Gary was lovely, and it's horrendous that his brain told him anything else.
But, there's a bigger picture. There are cultural and systemic things we need to talk about:
1. Phoenix has been over 100 degrees almost every day of October. I know that seems tangential, but it fucks with our brains and so I want to start there. Climate change is deadly on so many fronts
2. We've built this disgustingly atomized society built primarily on individual's living in a house, and the only proper and adult way to occupy that house is through monogamous pairing, and with the children resulting from that monogamous pairing. That is actually not natural or historically normal. It's deeply isolating to go from empty house into empty car to work where maybe you like those people but it's easy to write off those relationships merely as professional. Gary, you weren't alone, but I understand why you thought you were.
3. Healthcare in America is impossible. It's opposed to the gospel of Christ at every turn, and that's most true towards mental health where it's generally not covered. Very few plans cover it. Even my Psychiatrist appointments (and that's a "real" doctor) come with a heavy co-pay. Gary was clearly sick, but his friends didn't know. Not really. We had inklings, but not this. Healthcare could've seen he was sick, but the insurance industry blocked that from view.
So anyways, we live in a deeply fallen world. I'm doing OK. It's a shock, it'll feel more real on Monday when I go to choir practice and he isn't there, and will never be there again. It'll be a shock when I look towards the back of my humble church on my wedding day expecting him to be my friend and guest organist/ianist and he's not there, but we muddle through, don't we? He was going to play hymns, and the Rose Garden Theme from Utena, and Liebestraum no. 3 in A, and the star trek theme.
We were going to do a clarinet and organ recital.
That's all gone now.
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
Some obvious reasons to organize:
The 4 day work week. IWW’s dream is 4 hour days 4 times a week. That’s 16 hours. Wages do not go down. And yeah sometimes there’s days or weeks where that can’t happen—so you get paid OT, time and a half OR comp time, your choice, with a union.
Better health care with lower premiums! This is the best health care I’ve ever had.
Retirement! The world we live in isn’t normal. 401ks—retirement money—are now an unstable, classed thing, and they were invented to be one “leg” of a three legged “stool” of retirement: pensions, 401ks, and Social Security. Except that social security is under threat and most workers don’t have pensions anymore. I do. Protecting our pensions is one of the main reasons my workplace organized. What if everyone had a pension, or hell, the entire stool?
Long commutes bc you’ve been priced out of your city? Yeah we’ll talk about wages but what if your commute counted as work time? This is something unions were interested in fighting for pre the Nixon stomp. Let’s bring it back.
Historically low wages? Raises that don’t match inflation? We can fix that. When I took this job a few years ago, I took a steep pay cut. Thanks to my union I am now making 12% more than my previous salary. Equal pay? Under a bargaining agreement your pay will be standardized. You won’t make less just because you are a member of a marginalized community.
Your boss hates you? Too bad. As soon as you organize you are no longer an “at will” worker. You cannot be fired without just cause and after progressive discipline. Your job is safe and stable. You can focus on other, more important things, like living your actual life.
“What if my employer hates me and breaks the law and fires me or refuses me accommodations or violates our bargaining contract.” My guy. That’s what your shop steward is for.
Some important reasons people may not want to organize:
Racism. The labor movement has historically been super super racist and white, and unions used to deny black workers membership. There is no instance of American life where we can discuss class without discussing race. This is still in play imo—for example, DSA has very low black membership. But unions can also be used to empower workers from marginalized communities.
Politics. It’s illegal for unions to use union dues to lobby but most ppl don’t know this, and a lot of unions are active in politics. Membership is low in more conservative areas for many reasons but this is a big one of them, especially if your union is seen as predominantly leftist. This is to say nothing of how rabidly anti union certain states and workplaces are.
Solidarity. “How am I supposed to have solidarity with _____?!” I’ve definitely struggled with this. But at the end of the day, everyone you work with is more of an ally than your employer in this issue. The bigger your membership the stronger threat you’ll be at the bargaining table and the easier it will be for you to get what you want.
#the union makes us strong#believe it or not this is a very brief post on the topic#this is. not a comprehensive list.#things I didn’t talk about: bargained for bonuses for retention & boosters. inclement weather leave.#in fact I didn’t really clarify that part of the reasons to organize is THE RIGHT TO BARGAIN OVER LABOR CONDITIONS#the length of your workweek & your wages & your commute are all labor conditions#I think my other main criticism of the labor movement is they assume everyone is coming into this with the same knowledge baseline#yeah we aren’t! anyway that’s a separate post
6 notes
·
View notes
Text
Justification
Part 23 of the Dragon of the Yuyan
Read on AO3 | Series Masterpost
The Fire Nation section of Wan Shi Tong’s library is ashes.
Sokka’s moaning about the tactical disadvantage this puts them (him) at, but Zuko can’t stop staring. He suddenly, keenly understands how Aang had felt seeing the unintentional (at best) desecration of the Northern Air Temple.
This is the history of my people. Thousands of years of Fire Nation history and tradition and culture, things from long before fucking Sozin rose to power and ruined everything, just gone. Destroyed.
“This is why I did not want humans, especially firebenders, in my library,” Wan Shi Tong’s deep voice comments, well laced with bitterness and disgust. “Humans do nothing but destroy each other and themselves and everything around them.”
Zuko wants to argue, he really does, but he gets the feeling that attempting to do so could potentially be hazardous to his health. Instead, he turns to face the owl spirit head on and drops into seiza.
I can’t apologize for the actions of all humans, because that is not my place, he signs, but as Prince of the Fire Nation, I can apologize for the despicable actions of my countrymen. I am deeply, truly sorry for this destruction, and this irreplaceable loss. If and when I am Fire Lord, I will do whatever I can within my power to assist in rebuilding your collection. You have my word, as Zuko of the Royal Caldera and of the Yuyan Tribe. He then folds into a full bow, forehead resting on the ashy stone floor, hands placed at an obtuse angle, and holds it for just slightly longer than he would for a reigning Fire Lord or Earth Monarch.
Wan Shi Tong’s beady black eyes are fathomless and penetrating, but Zuko gets the sense that he managed to surprise the spirit somehow.
“How interesting,” Wan Shi Tong muses. “You put much more effort into lying to me than your Water Tribe companion.”
Zuko freezes. He’s never been accused of being a liar in earnest— the only time had been the fight that had gotten Zheng transferred to Banli Squad. It’s a well-established fact in both the Yuyan Archers and Team Avatar that Zuko can’t lie for shit, and Toph takes great pleasure in reminding him of that fact every chance she gets.
I'm not lying! Zuko protests. I swear! I swear on my mother's memory!
Wan Shi Tong blinks. They stare at each other for a few endless moments, until the owl spirit hums.
"How novel––a human who tells the truth, in as much as he knows it," Wan Shi Tong declares. "Very well, Zuko of the Royal Caldera and of the Yuyan Tribe. You will ascend the Caldera Throne of the Fire Nation, and you will do everything in your mortal power to assist in rebuilding what your countryman has destroyed. In exchange, I will allow you and your companions to leave unmolested with the knowledge you seek, so long as none of you ever return.”
Thank you, Honorable Spirit, Zuko signs, then folds back into another full bow.
Wan Shi Tong makes a mild hrmph sound, almost exactly the way both the Head Librarian at the Palace and the Head Archivist at the Stronghold had, and turns away. “Come,” the owl spirit commands, and Zuko leaps up to obey.
They walk in silence through the library, and reach the planetarium just as Sokka’s voice rings out: “—we’ll invade the Fire Nation when they’re totally helpless. The Fire Lord is going down!”
Zuko slaps his forehead as he feels Wan Shi Tong’s feathers bristle.
Honorable Spirit, please remember our deal, he signs rapidly. My friend is a moron and shouldn’t have tried to trick you, but I swore on my mother’s memory to help you rebuild your Fire Nation collection. I cannot hold my end of our bargain if you kill me and my friends before I can claim the Caldera Throne.
Wan Shi Tong’s eyes narrow dangerously, and Zuko has the distinct feeling of being on the receiving end of an impressive sneer if the spirit had lips to curl. The glossy black feathers stay bristled on the spirit’s shoulders for a moment or two more, then smooth down as Wan Shi Tong sighs.
“Very well.”
The spirit glides into the room, voice ringing out. “Humans are so predictable. And such terrible liars. You have betrayed my trust, but Prince Zuko has convinced me to allow you to leave here with your lives and the knowledge you have gained. Leave now, and do not come back.”
Wan Shi Tong turns and leaves, leaving two growling foxes behind. Sokka scrambles back over to the mechanism in the center of the room, frantically turning the dials until the planetarium shows a total solar eclipse. He scribbles down the date, and then they all book it for the rope they'd used to enter the library. As Zuko climbs up the rope hand over hand, he feels eyes on his back, and turns to find Wan Shi Tong's fathomless gaze directed at him. He bows his head to the spirit, and Wan Shi Tong nods back.
They emerge from the top of the library spire into a blinding sandstorm, and are forced to hug the outer wall of the spire as they rappel down. When they reach the ground, Zuko forces Sokka and Katara to shield Aang while he carefully navigates the base of the spire to find Toph. He literally trips over her as she's huddled on nearly the opposite side of the spire from the rest of the group. He grabs her arm, taps it's Zuko on her shoulder, and shields her from the wind and sand with his body as he guides her around the rest of the spire to join the others. Sokka shifts to nudge Toph snugly beside Aang, and Zuko takes position beside Katara on Aang's other side.
It's two hours before the storm finally dies down, according to Zuko's sense of the sun. They're very nearly buried in sand, and Zuko's scar stings like it hasn't in years, but they're alive.
They're alive, but when they dig out and look around, Appa is gone.
Previous | Next
#atla#atla fanfic#awkpen productions presents#dragon of the yuyan#part 23 justification#full text post
11 notes
·
View notes
Text
🪙 Four of Pentacles🪙
*Pentacles are often also referred to as coins.
4 of Coins Couture Tarot Deck tarotismyreligion.tumblr.com
Upright
Possessiveness, Security, Stability, Control
Possibly a dragon’s favorite card, the four of pentacles upright can mean hoarding wealth. While saving money is always encouraged for the sake of stability and comfort, make sure you’re not being greedy.
Alternatively, this card can represent control. This can mean that you’re controlling. You don’t need to be in charge of every little thing. In the extreme, this can mean you’re literally controlling others, though it often means that you’re someone who enjoys things a specific way and that you can get irritable if things don’t go as planned. If this is the case, allow yourself to relinquish some of that control, preferably to those around you who you trust.
Reversed
Recklessness, Loss, Lack of control, Unpaid debts
The Four of pentacles reversed can indicate recklessness, specifically in the financial department. Though this could also mean that you’re spending your time recklessly. Take a second to look at where you’re putting your energy, is it getting you where you want? Could you spend elsewhere and receive more? Sometimes the best “bargain” is not saving your money, energy, and time for something better.
This card reversed could also be telling you that it’s time for a debt to be paid, either with actual money or with something else. Have you kept your end of the deal or promise?
On the other hand, this card can signify the feeling of losing control or the fear of it. Come to terms with the fact that we can’t be in control of everything all of the time, and release the things that you cannot control so that you can focus on what you can control.
Notes
Stability, work, perspective
Four indicates stability, this could mean a stable job, or self-discipline. This could also suggest putting down roots and establishing yourself, perhaps making a family.
Often four may indicate the need to ground yourself and organize.
The message this card sends is “slow and steady wins the race”.
(From my Numbers post)
Element: Earth
Feminine or passive energy
Meanings: Wealth, fertility, finances, work/work-life, external consciousness, creativity, health.
Associated Signs: Virgo, Capricorn, Taurus.
Pentacles are often best associated with money and finances. They could indicate financial gain or struggles. This could also indicate greediness and materialistic, possessive attitudes.
Since they are related to external consciousness or our physical level of consciousness, they could represent self-image; this could also represent self-esteem, self-acceptance, or ego.
Earth is literally a grounded sign, this suit could represent being (or needing to be) grounded or humble. Pentacles could represent support; supporting others or needing support.
The negatives of this suit could be stubbornness, bullheadedness, or possessiveness.
(From my Suits post)
10 notes
·
View notes
Note
1. Maybe it's the conspiracy theorist in me, but I also think part of the reason conservatives don't want better social programs is because they don't want the working class to have more power (for reasons I cannot understand, as I know many working class conservatives). Free college, universal healthcare, and high unemployment checks mean workers have more freedom to bargain with employers-after all, if I can quit my job and still have healthcare, go back to college for free/cheap to gain
the education to work elsewhere, and will be compensated well by unemployment until I can get a new job, it means workers have 0 incentive to stay at shitty, low paying jobs or in toxic work environments, and it would force all jobs to have good work environments, pay more, and offer more benefits to attract workers, such as 401k and maternity and paternity leave. It almost feels like they're afraid of that happening-of the working class getting more power-but I don't know why.
I discussed the working-class support of the "myth of meritocracy" in this post. In a nutshell, the "fantasy of class mobility," or the unfounded belief that one day they themselves will join the elite or upper classes and gain large amounts of wealth, keeps them defending the unjust system as it currently exists. They want to pretend that they will eventually benefit from the rules designed to favor rich people, rather than make any sustained attempt to actually stop being poor and change the system that deliberately keeps them that way. They're likewise conditioned to believe all the capitalism-is-great, America-fuck-yeah propaganda, and as I have also discussed before, there's a large amount of ingrained racism; they will reject any changes or politicians that might benefit them economically, out of a fear that "undeserving" people of color will also get a cut of the pie. Basically, they think that no matter how materially deprived their lives are, they're still white, and they will vote in the interests of upholding hierarchical white supremacy, rather than any notion of re-distributive economic justice.
Likewise, yes; late-stage capitalism relies on a constantly struggling working class that has no other options but to put up with the shitty, low-paying job (tying health insurance to being employed, for example, is one of its more evil innovations; you literally can't quit or good luck paying for any medical treatment). Any sustained improvements and social welfare reform that gives them more flexibility, more pay, more choice, or more education is a threat to that model, which is why the oligarchic economic interests lobby so hard against it. Because the white conservative working classes are so thoroughly inculcated to support white elites instead of their more racially diverse economic brethren, they will again usually often agree with this, and parrot taglines about "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" and "making it on your own" without "sucking on the teat of Socialism!!" In this case, it's framed as a personal virtue to struggle without asking for help or expecting any more assistance from the government, tied to those hoary old American stereotypes about "making it on your own" as a self-reliant man etc etc. But yes. As is often the case in America somehow, the core reason is racism, white grievance, and libertarian mythology that views everything as individual, not structural. Alas.
21 notes
·
View notes
Text
IhatethisIhatethisIhatethisIhatethisIhatethisIhatethisIhatethis
ok so. honestly have no hope but i cannot just keep quiet while facing five "this has been deleted. sorry!"'s straight.
thankfully, the bookmarks around them show it was my world trigger bookmarks, and by process of elimination i was able to figure out at least one (1) fic i remember because the premise was really memorable (but it also means those bookmarks were from the same author 😭)
the fic itself was titled something like "in pinkness and health" and it was set in a soulmate au where a sickness called "pink" would sometimes go around. basically, everyone has a limited amount of words they can speak, but the only way to know your soulmate is if their first spoken words would conjure on your skin. the consequences of running out of words was pinkness, where the person would turn pink, and general sickly attributes like fevers, and then die. it created this culture of reserving your words. the actual story follows yuma around who is an inventor, and his current invention replica, who would find people's soulmates. when traveling, yuma comes across a crying and yelling osamu, and they bond. oranges were a prominent part of the fic, osamu giving some to yuma and stuff. after some bonding, osamu, who worked as a choir boy, has caught pinkness and is close to death. yuma tries his best to find osamu's soulmate with replica, but they don't. osamu doesn't die, but i can't remember how they saved him TwT. i know at some point yuma goes to the government to like, bargain replica to help osamu, but everything has left me now
<(＿ ＿)>
if nothing else, i want to immortalize that fic in this post because that story changed my fucking life, its prose was so good and the imagery so vivid. i remember in the author notes they mentioned that the concept of 'pinkness' was inspired while they themself were sick with a fever, if i remember correctly.
if anyone has read it and would like to add on, or have a copy, i would cry you a river /_ \
one instance during the fic had yuma helping two child soulmates, and their exchange of words were liken to "butthead" or something similar, and it was so cute
#world trigger#ワールドトリガー#fanfic#rose rambles#i am genuinely so sad#i remember that author#because i went through their work after reading this fic#and i remember being excited because they wrote Another fic that i loved#i didn't mention it but i think both this one and the one im mentioning were yuma/osamu#i have vague memories of the other three fics#but i'll create separate posts so they can be memorialized by themselves#(T_T)#just#god man#there's already so little fics on ao3#because world trigger just isn't popular in america#i know its more popular in japan#and to have this author delete these really beautiful stories#genuinely mourning the existence of these fic
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
'Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt shared a sweet moment at the Oppenheimer London Premiere at the Odeon Luxe in Leicester Square on Thursday night.
The co-stars wrapped their arms around each other and cuddled on the red carpet while posing for photos.
Emily, 40, flashed a huge smile and giggled with Florence, 27, as their promotional tour of the upcoming biographical thriller.
The actresses made sure to bring the drama in their sensational ensembles with Florence wearing a plunging burnt orange dress.
She was dressed to the nines in the gown, which flashed some side boob and had a daring cut-out section across her midriff.
Florence added a dramatic and glamorous touch with the puffy skirt and accessorise with silver hoop earrings.
Emily, meanwhile, wowed in a black sequin gown with skirt fringing and a cut-out section at the midriff.
She styled her blonde locks in soft waves and added a boost to her height with black heels.
Emily, who starred alongside Cillian in A Quiet Place Part 2, hugged the actor as they posed for photos.
The London premiere of Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer was moved forward an hour early on Thursday so the cast had time to walk the black carpet ahead of the writer's strike.
The last minute change came after the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists announced it had voted in favour of taking action, after a deadline to reach a deal passed.
Leading man Cillian Murphy joined Emily Blunt, Florence and Matt Damon on the black carpet at 5.45pm in Leicester Square, to avoid a clash.
A whole host of Hollywood stars, including Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence and Mark Ruffalo, are poised to join writers on strike for the first time in 60 years.
Thousands of members of the Writers Guild of America have downed tools after talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers over pay fell apart.
At the center of the row is the rise of streaming - with the guild claiming that even as budgets have increased, writers' share of that cash has consistently shrunk.
The untimely clash is a bitter blow to Christopher Nolan who has shelled out £81million on the production.
Peaky Blinders star Cillian takes on the role of Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 'father of the atomic bomb' and after Paris' premiere earlier this week, critics have tipped it to win big.
Attending a photo event on Wednesday, Oppenheimer star Matt said while everyone was hoping a strike could be averted, many actors need a fair contract to survive.
'We ought to protect the people who are kind of on the margins,' Damon told the AP.
'And 26,000 bucks a year is what you have to make to get your health insurance. And there are a lot of people whose residual payments are what carry them across that threshold.
'And if those residual payments dry up, so does their health care. And that´s absolutely unacceptable. We can't have that. So, we got to figure out something that is fair.'
It is the first time since 1960 that actors and writers picket film and television productions.
Members of the Writers Guild of America have been on strike since early May slowing the production of film and television series on both coasts and in production centers like Atlanta.
A spokesperson for SAG said: 'After more than four weeks of bargaining, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) – the entity that represents major studios and streamers, including Amazon, Apple, Disney, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount, Sony and Warner Bros. Discovery – remains unwilling to offer a fair deal on the key issues that are essential to Sag-Aftra members.
'The companies have refused to meaningfully engage on some topics and on others completely stonewalled us. Until they do negotiate in good faith, we cannot begin to reach a deal.
'We have no choice but to move forward in unity, and on behalf of our membership, with a strike recommendation to our national board. The board will discuss the issue this morning and will make its decision.''
#Oppenheimer#Emily Blunt#Florence Pugh#SAG-AFTRA#A Quiet Place Part II#Cillian Murphy#Christopher Nolan#Matt Damon#Peaky Blinders
5 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
