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uvobreakmylegs · 3 months

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Dark Light Within

part two of Lamp of the Body

Chrollo x female!reader

Part 1

Warnings: trauma, mentions of death, mentions of murder, manipulation. unhealthy relationships, smut, oral (male receiving), choking

Word Count: 12.1k

In the days that followed the compromise you and Chrollo had come to, you found that you were doing well. Over that period, the nightmares stopped and you actually got a few full nights of sleep for the first time in a long while. Finally you had mornings where you woke up feeling completely refreshed and ready for the day, and you had the energy to do more around the apartment as well, happy to no longer be stuck doing one or two tasks you'd set for yourself before you inevitably needed to take a break and recharge.

Admittedly, it was a bit performative as you were trying your hardest to prove that you were okay. That the days of you feeling exhausted from a restless night were over with and had only ever been a temporary problem, one that had solved itself. That Chrollo didn't need to move away from the city for your sake and that the both of you could continue to live here as you had been.

Soon enough, you'd be able to go out again, you were sure of it.

Chrollo obviously noticed your change in mood as he commented on it one evening while you were rinsing off the plate you had used for dinner.

“You seem a bit better recently,” he said.

“I've been feeling better,” you answered.

“That's a relief,” he replied, smiling as he added “maybe I was a bit hasty in my suggestion to move.”

“Maybe,” you repeated, “it's a good thing we held off on that. We saved ourselves from a lot of hassle.”

“So it seems,” he agreed.

You went to bed that night feeling good about yourself.

The fact that the nightmares started up again that very night was ironic. Or it would've been, were it not for the fact that they now felt worse than ever. The new constant was the figure being on top of you, their hands around your throat, squeezing and letting go only to repeat the process over and over again. You always woke up in the middle of the night now, feeling worn out and terrified.

During the times that Chrollo would wake up after you and asked what was wrong, you came up with excuses, mostly claiming that you were feeling restless and joking about how your internal clock was wired wrong since you could no longer get any sleep at night. The look in his eyes told you that he didn't believe you, but he would accept your explanation regardless, even if it seemed to be reluctant.

You just wanted to be okay again.

You were in a good place now; there was no reason for these attacks from your subconscious to continue as they did. They needed to stop so you'd be better, so you could go back to the way things had been before.

Get over it already

But as much as you tried to will yourself into better health, it just wasn't happening. Not on its own. And it was clear that Chrollo could see that. Even without his ability to be as insanely perceptive as he was, no doubt anyone could see that you were tired.

He'd held off on any major discussion of it, but there were comments made here and there that let you know what he thought: that you should stop being so stubborn and putting yourself through unnecessary stress, though you doubted he would ever use such wording. The next time the two of you sat down to actually talk about the issue, you knew you would lose. He had a million reasons as to why his decision was correct and there wouldn't be anything you could do to prove otherwise.

That was what drove you to an impulsive decision.

It came on a day where Chrollo was away running errands; nothing that would last too long, so he had no need to call in any more favors from his friends. And no one else being around you meant that there was no one that would keep you from going out.

It wouldn't be anything major. You were just stepping outside of the building. In your mind, being able to do that without any negative affects would prove that things were okay.

Nothing bad would happen, you told yourself. It was killing two birds with one stone, actually. You would prove that you were doing okay by leaving the apartment while also getting a much needed breath of fresh air. Of course, Chrollo would have argued on the second point that you could've gotten that by going out onto the deck outside your apartment. But that wasn't the same as walking around freely. That was probably part of your problem; that he'd essentially kept you under house arrest out of concern for your safety. Although his concern was appreciated, it felt like that was probably part of why you weren't doing well. Being locked inside had left you feeling stir-crazy, which didn't do any good for your mental state during a time that you were supposed to be recovering.

Dreams and nightmares have meanings, you remembered hearing. Maybe you being paralyzed and the figure that watched you was a representation of your deteriorating health while being kept trapped.

…. It probably wasn't that deep. Your mind was just running with random thoughts because it didn't have anything better to do. Again, another sign that staying cooped up was bad for you, regardless of what Chrollo told you.

It didn't feel good to sneak around him, but surely if you did this, he might ease up a little.

That thought had you feeling pretty good as you made your way down to the apartment lobby, pushing the button for the ground floor of the elevator and absentmindedly humming to yourself to pass the time as the elevator began made its descent. The last time you'd been out was when you were returning from the Dentora Region in Padokea, and you hadn't seen any of it as Chrollo wanted you to keep a bandage over your eyes until it was safe to remove, which was, of course, after you were back home.

There were two others present when you entered the lobby: a woman you didn't recognize who seemed to be a resident like yourself and a receptionist stationed at the desk. They were chatting with one another and didn't pay much attention to you when you walked past them. Heading towards the main doors of the building, you only glanced at them for a moment longer before bringing your attention to what was in front of you. Through the glass doors, you saw the street outside, the people who were walking along the sidewalk and the traffic in the streets.

Perfectly normal, nothing to be worried about.

But when you grasped the handlebar of the door was when you froze, and you stayed in place as you fully took in the sight before you.

The sad part was that nothing had really happened.

There was no dramatic scene outside that made you pause, no recreation of your accident with you being a bystander this time – it was simply a normal day outside in the city streets that were teeming with traffic.

And yet after that sight had set in, you stopped in your tracks.

Why? Nothing bad had happened. You'd been out before. Very briefly and while you were being transported to and from different hospitals and airports with Chrollo at your side, but still, dread filled you when you looked upon that street. Your hand gripped the handlebar so hard that your knuckles paled and your breathing got heavier.

Maybe it was because you were alone, because Chrollo wasn't here.

From behind, you heard the woman at the counter saying something that seemed to be directed at you. You couldn't hear it clearly. Then she got closer, and she said something else when she stood next to you. By that point, her words were background noise.

You weren't able to focus.

Suddenly you were in the backseat of that taxi, checking the weather forecast on your phone while some advertisement played on the car's radio. The driver was chatting with you about something mundane and unimportant while you half-listened to him, adding in some commentary of your own from time to time. Everything was fine.

Then the driver made a left turn and you heard him shout.

You looked up in time to see an oncoming car hit the taxi head on.

Then nothing.

Just the feeling of waking up with a curtain of darkness over your eyes that refused to lift.

This was a bad idea

Go back upstairs, you told yourself. Go back up and if you need to have a breakdown, do it in the comfort of your own home. Go back up.

Those thoughts ran through your head as you continued to look at the scene outside, unable to move.

Go back up.

“What's wrong with your eyes?”

You didn't really understand the question at first; all you knew was that someone was talking to you and you looked over to find that the woman was standing next to you. Better to apologize if she thought you were behaving strangely and to explain what had happened to you a year ago. Surely she and the receptionist would understand, and they would encourage you to go back up so you could recover in private.

But when you looked to the woman, you found that her expressions wasn't one of worry, but that of being disturbed, or even fearful, and she took a step back when you looked at her. When you glanced over to the receptionist who was still seated at their desk, they seemed confused until you made eye contact, and then their expression mirrored that of the woman.

They both looked at you like there was something wrong with you.

“Seriously,” the woman said, “what the hell is wrong with your eyes?”

You heard the question, but again, it didn't register. All you saw were the disturbed gazes of the two before you, and all you wanted in that moment was to get away from them.

Without saying anything, you made your way back to the elevator, pushing the button to summon it and hoping it would come down quick.

It didn't.

And with the two still staring at you for a few more agonizing moments and you feeling like you could tear and claw at your own skin as you desperately wanted them to stop fucking looking at you, you opted to take the stairs back up to your level. Before the door closed behind you, you heard them talking in hushed whispers almost immediately after you were out of sight.

You felt your heart rate increase on hearing that.

You were lucky enough to not run into anyone else on your way back to your unit, though you didn't feel that way when you slammed the door shut and leaned against it after, supporting yourself while you tried to level out your breathing. What just happened? Why did you freak out? How could you still be so unprepared for life outside these walls?

Why did those two look at you like that?

You had no clue. What was that woman even talking about?

Still no clue. Your throat felt dry, though.

Pushing yourself off the door, you made your way to the kitchen. A glass of water should fix that. And maybe getting some fluids into you would help you feel better after that ordeal.

On your way to the kitchen you caught sight of something strange in the reflection of a decorative mirror that hung on the wall as you passed by. Something that looked red.

You paused after you passed it, then took a step back and looked into the mirror.

Your heart could've stopped in that moment.

Where you should've seen two gray eyes in your skull looking back at you, the color you saw in the irises was red. Two violent, bloody red eyes staring back at you, and you saw clearly when your expression grew distraught as you backed away from the mirror.

Why?

In an effort to tell whether or not you were dreaming, you dug your nails into the skin of your arm, just enough to cause you pain. If this was just a dream, the pain would be enough to snap you out of it and bring you back to reality. But as the minor amount of pain made itself known in the flesh of your arms, the image before you stayed the same: you, looking back at yourself in the mirror, and a pair of red eyes in your skull.

Why?

Not convinced that what you were seeing was real, you ran to the bathroom, wanting to see if those eyes would appear in the mirror in that one, too.

They did.

Why?

Desperate to be wrong, you went to the bedroom and pulled out a hand mirror, wanting to believe that somehow, the other mirrors had been tampered with and that this one would show you the truth.

The same bloody red eyes stared back at you a third time.

Why?

Panic overtook you. Your heartbeat was thundering in your ears and you felt so light-headed that you ended up on the floor, sinking your fingers into your scalp while you breathed hard in and out through your mouth. Why was this happening?

What happened in the moments after that point was hard to remember exactly. You were so wrapped up in your panic that you didn't notice when time passed or when someone entered the room.

Chrollo found you on the floor of your bedroom, still staring at the image in the hand mirror that lay in front of you while you cried. He spoke your name as he placed both hands on your shoulders, and that snapped you out of it, looking up at him as you finally realized that you weren't alone anymore.

He stared at you for a moment before saying “it's alright now,” and pulling you against his chest. Without another thought you grabbed at him, holding onto him while you continued to cry. How long he held you like that was also unclear, but once you felt a bit more calm, you noticed that the sun was lower in the sky now than it had been when you first ventured out. Eventually your sobs quieted and your breathing became more regular.

Sensing that you were doing better, Chrollo gently pulled you away, caressing your cheek as he asked “what happened?”

After taking a few breaths, you spoke.

“I'm sorry,” you began, “I wanted to go out. I thought I'd be okay, but when I got down there…. I don't know, I freaked out.”

That wasn't the issue, you remembered. It was your eyes.

Your eyes. That he clearly saw.

You felt stupid. It would've been the first thing he noticed. You were looking right at him, and currently, his expression was neutral. Had it not hit him yet how strange it was? Would he have a similar reaction to the two downstairs? The thought of Chrollo looking at you like that almost sent you into an entirely new panic. But you shoved that down as you forced yourself to speak.

“You can see them, right?” you asked, “my eyes.”

He nodded slowly, but said nothing.

That only made your panic worse.

“I don't – I don't know why this is happening,” you stammered, “I don't know why this happened, what could've caused it. I swear this hasn't-”

Chrollo brought a hand up, and you stopped talking.

“First things first; we should get off the floor,” he told you.

Taking both of your hands into his, he pulled you to your feet and kept his grip firm on you when you stumbled. Once you were steady, he led you out of the bedroom and took you to the kitchen, where he sat you down at the table before pouring you a glass of water and urging you to drink it. You did as he told you, and as you downed the glass, he pulled up a chair to sit closer to you, keeping a hand on your shoulder as he watched your expressions. The water and his touch had you feeling more at ease.

When you placed the glass back down, he asked “are you feeling better?”

“Sort of.”

You reached up to touch the area beneath your eye, asking “but I don't understand why this is happening.”

Upon hearing that, Chrollo's hand that had been softly rubbing your shoulder stilled, and you looked back to find a resigned look on his face.

“Chrollo?”

“It's alright, love,” he said, “you were going to find out sooner or later.”

Your eyebrows furrowed as you asked “find out what?”

Chrollo considered you for a moment before he spoke again, saying “I'm afraid I have a confession to make.”

“Confession?” you repeated.

“About the origins of your current eyes.”

You weren't sure where this was going, so you stayed quiet and waited for him to explain further. But instead, he asked you a question.

“Have you ever heard of the Kurta clan?”

Your eyebrows furrowed again as you shook your head.

“That isn't too surprising. They were a very small, secluded group of people that lived on the other side of the world,” Chrollo explained, “there isn't much known about them due to the way they isolated themselves, but the main thing that was known was what would happen to their eyes once they became agitated or upset in some way.”

What he was saying clicked for you as you asked “they turned red?”

He nodded.

Part of you wanted to feel relieved. Technically speaking, it wasn't so bad. Sure, it would be inconvenient for your eyes to turn red whenever you become upset, and learning to manage that would be difficult, but it could be worse. At the same time, however, you didn't understand why Chrollo had kept this from you. Since he had labeled this as a 'confession', there was no way for him to claim ignorance about the eyes. Maybe keeping this from you for the first few weeks was somewhat reasonable, but to stay silent for all this time? What reason could there be?

“…. So my eyes came from a donor from that clan?” you asked.

You didn't like the way he frowned after you said that, and the sinking feeling you were having only got worse.

“I'm afraid that the story is far more gruesome, love,” he began.

“How?”

“The scarlet eyes were considered by many to be a wonder of sorts, and the way the Kurta hid away from the outside world only made those people want to see them even more.”

You said nothing, but you couldn't help but note that he had referred to the Kurta in the past tense this entire time.

“It ended with the Kurta being massacred several years ago, and the eyes of those that had stayed red after death were harvested and sold on the black market.”

“Black market – people buy them?” you asked, incredulous and not sure what point you should address first.

“They're considered to be a collector's item,” Chrollo explained, “and their value tends to be high, given that there are only thirty six pairs in existence.”

Then he added “although now the number of eyes that one can buy has dropped to thirty five.”

It all clicked into place in that moment, and no words could escape you. All you could do was stare at Chrollo in shock.

He didn't fault you for that as he continued to speak.

“I'm sorry, love. I knew you wouldn't be happy once you learned the history behind them, but after realizing that you may never be able to see again, I decided to take matters into my own hands.”

You didn't know what to say, and your hand returned to your cheek as you processed what he'd just said. Things made sense now. Why he didn't want you going out. Why he made sure you weren't alone for any long periods of time. Why he wanted you to leave the city with him. All it would take was one really bad moment out in public and you would become a spectacle. Like what had happened downstairs in the lobby.

Just how long was he planning on keeping this from you?

Fuck

None of what he'd just told you could've been legal. He said that the eyes were sold on the black market, right? How many crimes had Chrollo committed to help you?

He must have sensed that your thinking at that moment was something along those lines, as he made a point to assure you that nothing bad would come from any of it, that he'd been thorough in making sure nothing would lead back to either of you. That no one knew he'd gotten the eyes aside from the specialist in Padokea, and that they'd been paid to not talk about it. Everything would be fine as long as the two of you were careful.

Everything would be fine.

He'd said that a lot during the past few months, and him telling you that had done a lot to keep you calm. Your thoughts went back to the many, many times he had his hand in yours as he said that, and how at peace you felt when you heard him say that.

And as for right now…. You still wanted that. Chrollo brought about a certain sense of security with him, and as you weren't sure how to take in this new information, it would've made you feel better to feel his touch and have his arms around you again as you decided what would've been the best way to react to all of this.

It didn't feel like you could do that right now as another question was on your lips.

“You bought the eyes of a murder victim off the black market?” you asked.

He was quick to respond.

“I know it sounds nasty, but it was for the best, love,” he answered, “there's nothing that can be done for that person who died, but their eyes can be put to good use for your sake.”

….. You didn't know how to reply to that. And despite his attempts to continue to talk to you, you weren't able to say anything else.

This was all too overwhelming.

You needed some time alone.

When you began to stand up and pull out of his grip, he spoke your name. But you didn't let him get any further as you interrupted him.

“I'm not leaving or doing anything stupid. I just need some time to process this on my own,” you told him.

He didn't seem happy about it, but he let you go and didn't follow after when you walked back to the bedroom and shut the door behind you, though he watched you the entire time. Once you entered, your gaze immediately went to the hand mirror that you had left behind on the floor earlier, and you approached it tentatively, scared of the sight you might find in it again.

Relief hit you when you looked into the mirror and found that the red color had dulled. It wasn't gone completely, but it wasn't as vibrant as before. Hopefully it'd be gone completely soon.

You let out a breath you hadn't realized you'd been holding, and you settled down onto the edge of the bed.

….. The room felt stuffy.

Being on your own wasn't enough. After spending who knows how long in here freaking out, you needed out of this room completely.

The door that opened up to the balcony slid open and you stepped out. Taking in a deep breath as you got the fresh air you'd failed to get earlier, you sat down on the balcony flooring and wrapped your arms around your legs before resting your chin on your knees as you collected your thoughts.

How the fuck had you ended up in this situation?

In the span of a single conversation, you'd found out that your boyfriend of several years had done dealings on the black market by buying the eyes of someone who had been murdered. You'd learned of a clan who seemed to have been driven into extinction because people decided it was better to cut out and pickle their eyes like collectibles, and then that your boyfriend had essentially used one of those pairs of eyes as spare parts so you could go back to the way you'd been before the accident.

Where do you even begin to unpack all of that?

Legally, all of this was wrong. Buying body parts was illegal, and getting involved with the black market and possibly the mafia would be opening up a whole world of potential trouble. How much had all of that cost? The eyes along with whatever he had paid that specialist in Padokea – how much had you drained him financially? You knew Chrollo did well with his job, but would there be any resentment on his part for how much you had cost him?

You hadn't noticed anything off about him, but then again, Chrollo was good at hiding things. This revelation was proof of that.

And then the eyes themselves. Or rather, where they had come from. You'd assumed that they had come from someone who'd been in an accident and had signed up for organ donation. That had made you a bit more comfortable with the idea, that the eyes had belonged to someone who didn't want them to go to waste. Now that you knew what had really happened, it felt morally wrong that you were using them. Someone had died for something as silly as preserving an eye color, and now their eyes had been used just so you could see again.

Spare parts.

Those words came to mind again and you felt guilt for it.

If only that accident hadn't happened. If only you hadn't gone out that day. If only, if only.

You pressed your head against your knees while wrapping your arms tighter. Fat lot of good that kind of thinking did.

The door to the balcony slid open, and you turned your head to find Chrollo standing outside. He had one of your hoodies in hand which he held out to you.

“It's cold out, love,” he said, “wear this.”

You didn't feel that cold, but you accepted the hoodie anyway and gave him a soft “thank you” in response.

He seemed pensive as he watched you pull the hoodie on.

“Do you still need to be alone?” he asked.

It hadn't been that long since you separated yourself from him – it was a few minutes at best – yet you answered “I don't know.”

He hummed as he shut the door behind him and took a place next to you on the balcony, both of you sitting on the floor while you looked out at the buildings across the way. You glanced over at him a few times, only to find that you couldn't really read him in that moment. Your worry from earlier reared its head again – was he mad at you? Did he feel like he'd spent so much time, effort and money only for you to turn out to be an ingrate? What would happen if that was the case?

“Are you angry with me?” you asked. Your nails were digging into the skin of your leg, scared of what his answer might be.

“Of course not, love.”

Chrollo pulled your hand away from your leg and held it, clearly not wanting to see you hurt yourself.

“I should be the one asking if you're upset with me,” he then said.

He kept his eyes on you while your gaze stayed on the city as you thought over what he'd said.

Were you upset?

Yeah.

But how much of that was directed at him?

“I don't think so,” you answered.

“You don't think so?”

It took you a moment to collect your thoughts before you were able to get the words out.

“I don't want to sound ungrateful, because I'm really happy that I got my eyesight back, and it also makes me really happy that you would do so much just for me, that I matter enough for you to go that far,” you began.

“But it's really scary that you would involve yourself with criminals.”

He stayed quiet as you continued.

“I don't want you to get involved with dangerous people and get hurt for my sake. It would kill me if someone went after you because you bought the eyes just so I could see again. If I had known that was what you were going to do to help me, I would've told you not to go through with it.”

Chrollo seemed thoughtful as he considered your words.

“I suppose I wasn't thinking about that,” he told you, “all I could think about was how I could help you.”

That was sweet, you had to admit. And it made you feel guilty for pulling away from him earlier. He was just trying to help, right?

“What made you go that far?” you asked.

“That's a silly question, don't you think? Why wouldn't I do everything in my power for your sake?”

…. That also made sense. And you knew that if the positions were reversed, you would want to do everything you could to help him if he needed it.

The whole issue of the eyes themselves was still strange, however.

“Why didn't you tell me that the eyes would change color?” you asked.

“I wasn't sure they would change at first,” he said, “when they were preserved, they were permanently stuck in their red form. It was quite surprising when you first opened your eyes and I saw that they were gray.”

Had he seemed surprised when you took off the bandages? You couldn't recall; being able to see again had been too overwhelming for you to remember much of how he'd been acting during that time.

“Did you ever realize before this point that they could still turn red?” you asked.

He nodded.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

For once, your boyfriend didn't seem to know how to respond. An unusual sight to see, for sure.

“I was going to once we left the city,” he eventually said, “I thought it'd be good to do it then once we were in an environment that was better for you.”

“I think I would've preferred you told me before this.”

“That's understandable. And for that, I'm sorry.”

Chrollo squeezed your hand gently as he added “thinking on it now, I was using that as an excuse to put off telling you about it. I couldn't think of any way to ease you into revealing the truth.”

He had a point there. As hard as you tried, you couldn't think of any way to open up a conversation like that.

He still should have told you, though.

But there wasn't much you could do about it, so all you said was “at least I know now.”

Chrollo was oddly quiet once again.

“Can I ask you about something else?” you added.

“Of course.”

“Was the specialist you took me to also involved with criminal stuff?” you asked.

“There were no legal avenues I could take to restore your vision, love.”

That made sense. It explained why the doctors at the hospital you'd gone to told you there was nothing that could be done. It was also scary; Chrollo had entrusted everything to some shady individual who operated outside of the legal limits. What if something had gone horribly wrong? What if they'd done something to you and you were left off worse than you were after the accident?

But Chrollo wouldn't have let that happen.

You needed to believe that.

The two of you remained quiet. Your brain couldn't come up with any other questions at that moment, and Chrollo was waiting for you to speak.

Not long after he took the initiative to ask a question of his own.

“What else is bothering you?” he asked.

“…. I feel guilty,” you said.

“Because of how the scarlet eyes came to be available?”

“Yeah.”

“You shouldn't,” he said, “after all, you didn't have anything to do with what happened to those people.

“I know that,” you began, “but I just feel like the person who had the eyes originally would be mad that I was using them. They died because of their eyes, and then I end up using them like they're spare parts for a car.”

“That's quite a pessimistic view.”

“Doesn't mean it's wrong.”

“True, but think of it this way, love,” he continued, “instead of leaving their eyes floating in jars to be gawked at, you're putting them to good use. I'm sure that, whoever they were, the Kurta Clan member would have preferred that someone actually use their eyes as opposed to allowing them to gather dust while they sat on someone's shelf as a decoration.”

…. It did make it sound a bit better, but it wasn't like the guilt could be pushed aside just like that.

That would likely be something else you'd need to learn to live with.

“Are you sure you're not mad at me?” you asked.

“Not at all,” he told you, “I know that the steps I took to help you are ones most consider to be wrong, and I understand the guilt you feel after finding out where the eyes came from. But I hope that you also understand that I did what I did because I wanted to help you.”

“I do. And I really am grateful.”

You sighed, adding “I just wish that accident had never happened. Then we wouldn't even need to have this discussion.”

“I know.”

With that, Chrollo squeezed your hand softly again, just like he had during those long days from before. That made you feel a bit better.

“Can you just promise me something?”

“Promise you what, love?” Chrollo asked.

“That you won't buy human body parts off the black market again. Or anything similar to that. Even if you're just trying to help me,” you said.

To that, he smiled, and brought your hand up to his mouth so he could kiss it.

“I promise I'll never buy body parts off the black market for any reason,” he said after.

You let out a sigh.

“Never thought I'd need to ask you something like that,” you said.

“Life is full of surprises,” said Chrollo.

“That's one way to put it,” you answered.

Sunset was quickly approaching, given the golden hue in the sky. Nightfall would come soon after, and accompanying that would be a drop in the temperature. It probably wouldn't be the greatest idea to be sitting on the floor for too much longer.

Chrollo certainly realized that as he squeezed your hand again and said “we should go back inside, love.”

You nodded.

“Okay.”

With that, he stood back up and pulled you up after. One of his hands went to cup your cheek, his thumb rubbing softly at your skin.

“I think it's time we got started on dinner, don't you?” he asked.

You nodded again.

“And after if you'd like, we can watch one of those terrible horror movies that you enjoy so much.”

At that, you couldn't help but let out a little of a laugh.

“You must be desperate to make me feel better if you're willing to sit through one of those with me,” you said.

“Whatever it takes to make you happy,” he answered, jokingly adding “even if I feel my brain cells slowly shriveling up while I sit through the trash you make me watch.”

“Rude.”

“It's the truth, love.”

You laughed again as he led you inside. This felt good. The normal, playful banter between you two that signified that things were fine. As questionable as everything he'd revealed had been, you didn't want to think about it much right now. It was easier to push it to the side and focus on other things. Like the intentionally awful movie you'd pick for him to roll his eyes at.

But as you were considering that, another thought came to mind.

“Actually….”

Chrollo turned to you after shutting the balcony door, tilting his head in question.

“After dinner, would you read to me?” you asked.

He smiled.

“Of course, love.”

After dinner, the two of you found yourselves on the couch, with you resting your head against Chrollo's shoulder while he read aloud to you, his free hand in your own and your fingers intertwined with his.

After the accident, when you'd been brought home but your leg was still in a cast, Chrollo would read to you often. With you being largely confined to the bed, he would settle down next to you as he read to you, holding out his hand so you could take it in yours. More often than not you would wrap both of your arms around his, your cheek resting on his shoulder while his hand would hold yours firmly. Those moments on their own made the days while your leg healed more bearable.

The feeling of Chrollo's hand holding yours had become a familiar one during that time. It helped a lot more than you would've anticipated – with sound alone, you weren't always sure of where he was around you, but the feeling of his hand in yours while he talked with you or read aloud to you helped you to know for certain that he was by your side.

That he really wouldn't leave you.

He stopped suddenly in the middle of his reading, and you looked up to find his gaze on you.

“What's wrong?” you asked.

“I have to admit, I was worried,” he said, “after learning everything, I thought you may want to leave me.”

“Me? Leave you?”

That thought hadn't crossed your mind even once. While you'd been shocked and incredibly worried when it came to the black market dealings in particular, you couldn't envision any sort of future where you packed up your things and left him behind. Certain things he'd said still scared you, and maybe for some people, those admissions might be enough to make them leave. But everything that had happened, you couldn't imagine spitting in his face like that.

Even if some of what he said was scary, it wasn't like his actions had directly hurt anyone, you told yourself.

You shook your head as you said “I don't think I could live without you, Chrollo.”

The second you uttered those words he kissed you.

It was far more forceful than you'd experienced in months and the pure passion of it surprised you, leaving you slightly stunned. He held you after he pulled away, and again you were surprised, this time by how firmly he held you.

Chrollo had been that worried that your response would be to leave?

You reciprocated his hug, silently communicating that you wouldn't do that.

You sensed the way he smiled against your hair.

He understood.

The day you learned the truth about the scarlet eyes had been a hectic one, yet it had managed to end calmly. Despite that, however, a majority of the days that followed were more in line with what had happened down in the lobby: out of nowhere, something would come over you and leave you unable to function properly as you struggled to control your emotions. Sometimes it was triggered by a phobia that suddenly made itself known, other times you were once again left confused as to why it happened at all.

Maybe it was all because you knew now what would happen once you became upset and how you'd see similar reactions from others like the two downstairs. It could be really bad for you if you freaked out in public and someone from the group that killed the Kurta found out and think that they'd missed one.

It was safe to say that your desire to go back out had died completely.

Even if the chances of those killers finding out about you were slim, you decided that it was too dangerous to risk it. Especially with how out-of-control your emotions were right now. You didn't want people to know – to look at you like that again.

The only one you could depend on was Chrollo.

Your boyfriend was always quick to rush to your side when he saw you weren't doing well – now easier to tell than ever due to the mood ring quality your eyes possessed. Despite this new bought of helplessness you were now displaying, you still got no sense that he was annoyed with you over it. He was just as understanding and calm as he'd been prior.

He stared at your eyes a lot, though.

It took you a few times of it happening before you realized just how often he would stare, his gaze on the blood red color in your eyes. There was always some reason he had to pull away from you, be it to grab you something to drink or to cup your cheek and caress it softly. With that latter action, there was always the silent encouragement to turn your face up towards him, his hand ever so slightly angling your jaw so you would look at him. And when his gray eyes met your scarlet ones, you felt as though you could see something strange moving within them. Some emotion of his being betrayed despite the expression on his face showing something different.

There was some manner of fascination he had with them, you came to realize, and you wondered how long he had known of the scarlet eyes before your accident even happened.

…. At least he wasn't disgusted with you. The faces of those two in the lobby frequently came to mind, especially during those moments of duress. At least Chrollo wasn't looking at you like they had. And even if the way Chrollo would at times treat you as though you were made of glass, you knew it came from a desire to protect you, perhaps born out of whatever feelings of helplessness he had felt once he finally received word that you had been in that accident, that you had been hurt so badly while he happened to be gone.

Chrollo looking at the scarlet eyes the way he did wasn't a big deal, you told yourself.

The fact that he cared about you so deeply was more important.

The other upside during that period of time was the fact that your nightmares had stopped. Maybe that was because you were simply too exhausted from the stress to have the energy to dream. Regardless, you preferred it that way, even if your days weren't all that better.

When Chrollo broached the topic of moving again, you didn't fight him on it. There were too many stresses that came with living in the city. The last few days had made that clear. If you wanted to live a healthy life, you couldn't continue on like this, and while you were sad to leave the life the two of you had made together here, Chrollo encouraged you to think on it positively. It wouldn't be the same, but it would be better for you.

You agreed.

After that point, the panics that took over you almost daily slowly died down as you began moving preparations.

In your mind, that was because you were being moved to a place that would be better for your mental health, with less things that would stress you out. While a part of you would always be sad that you likely wouldn't be back here, the fact that your panic died down cemented to yourself that this was the right decision.

The days were filled with moving boxes and packaging. Monotonous work that left you tired and sweaty after moving around heavy boxes. Today had largely consisted of packing away a majority of Chrollo's book collection, so you were more tired than usual. After a shower, you were standing in front of the bathroom sink in the middle of your bedtime routine, ready for another dreamless sleep.

When Chrollo entered the bathroom and came up behind you, the way he wrapped his arms around you after wasn't entirely unexpected, looking at you through the mirror as he held you close to him.

You leaned into his touch, placing a hand on top of one of his as you asked “everything okay?”

He nodded.

“I'm just grateful we can still have moments like this,” he told you.

You smiled and lightly squeezed his hand as you said “me too.”

Chrollo smiled back at you.

He turned you around and placed a kiss on your lips. You returned the gesture, placing your hands on his chest as you leaned against him.

Then one of Chrollo's hands reached up to cup the back of your head while his tongue pressed against your lips in a not so subtle way of asking that you open up for him. You obliged, and his tongue was then moving against your own while his free hand wandered down and squeezed your ass. The noise of surprise you made was muffled by the kiss.

Ah.

It'd been a while for both of you, hadn't it?

With all that had been going on since your accident, with your broken leg healing up and your recovery after getting the eyes, sex had been one of the furthest things on your mind. But now that you had Chrollo's body pressed up against you and his lips on yours, you realized just how much you needed him. To have that skin on skin contact and that ache in your legs afterwards.

You wrapped your arms around his neck while your teeth nipped at his tongue that was still in your mouth. Chrollo's hands immediately went down so he could hoist you up onto the counter, opening your legs after so he could slot himself between them.

He must've been pent up as well, but had held off until he was certain that you were better.

Always looking out for you and your well-being.

You pulled away from the kiss to whisper “I love you, Chrollo.”

“I love you too,” was the response he gave before he pressed his mouth against yours once more. He seemed needier than you were used to – no doubt a result of him putting his needs aside for you. You decided then that tonight you would do whatever he wanted.

A strand of saliva kept you connected when he pulled his mouth away from yours before it broke as he stood up straight. His hands went to the hem of your shirt with the intent of pulling over your head as he looked back to you-

And then he froze.

Chrollo blinked at you, as if he was surprised. You, on the other hand, were confused by why things had stopped.

“What is it?” you asked, still a bit breathless.

“Have I upset you?”

His question confused you as you answered “what? No, of course not. Why would you think that?”

“Your eyes.”

“Huh?”

You turned your head so you could look at the mirror and see what he was talking about.

Oh no.

Your irises had turned red.

But why? You weren't angry or upset – you wanted this. Why had they changed color when you were fine?

Then you felt Chrollo begin to take his hands off of you, and you quickly turned your attention back to him, grabbing onto his shirt as you said “Chrollo, I'm not upset. Really. I want this, too. I promise.”

One of his hands came up to caress your cheek as he gazed into your eyes.

Then after a moment, he nodded as he said “I believe you.”

Relief filled you, and you glanced back at the mirror again, taking in the red of the irises.

“I don't know why they turned red, though,” you mumbled.

Chrollo hummed as he moved your head so he could look into your eyes again.

“Perhaps,” he began, “the Kurta eyes don't change color just from anger.”

“Wait, you mean they also turn red from….?”

You trailed off, for some reason finding yourself too embarrassed to finish the sentence. But he decided to finish it for you.

“Arousal, yes,” he confirmed.

“…. Did you know about that?” you asked.

“It's new information to me,” he answered, “I doubt that the Kurta clan would have wanted to advertise such a thing.”

“Ah, yeah. That makes sense.”

He was still staring at your eyes, not saying anything. And the longer things stayed like that, the more awkward you felt. Until he'd approached you, you weren't aware of how much you wanted him, the tiredness you'd felt moments earlier gone completely. Now that he'd stopped you desperately wanted to continue where you left off just a few moments earlier.

Did he not want to now? You'd realized that he had a fascination with them, but was adding sex into the mix too off-putting for him?

“… Does it bother you?” you asked after another beat of silence.

He smiled at you.

“On the contrary,” Chrollo said, pulling you off the counter and turning you around once again, making you squeak as he did so.

“You were upset those times before, so it seemed inappropriate to say anything about it-”His hand gripped your jaw as he made you look back at your reflection.

“-but it is a beautiful color, don't you think?”

With little other choice, you looked to the reflection of your eyes in the mirror.

The vibrant scarlet was still present, but now that you were made to really look at them, you found that the color was darkest around the outer circle of the iris, with bits of lighter shades of red speckled around going up towards your pupils. The blood red color itself was so vivid that it almost looked as though it was glowing. Your pupils dilated the longer you looked, and then you noticed another quality they had: an odd shimmer within the scarlet, like a halo that surrounded your pupil that almost seemed to have an iridescent quality to it. All of those things were odd, to say the least, yet you found that you couldn't disagree with your boyfriend's opinion.

You looked back to Chrollo through the mirror and found that he was waiting for a response from you.

“…. It is,” you agreed softly.

He smiled at you before leaning in to kiss you on the cheek.

“It really-” you were cut off when he buried his face in your neck, sucking at your skin with the intent of leaving marks. Looking at the mirror during that felt strange, so you looked to the side while you gripped at the counter.

“It really doesn't bother you?” you managed to get out when you composed yourself.

“I promise you; it doesn't.”

His free hand snaked down beneath the waistband of your pants as he said that, and you let out another squeak when his fingers began to play with your clit.

“Chrollo-”

“Keep looking, love.”

Those fingers continued playing with your clit while his other hand re-positioned itself on your jaw, making you look back at the mirror. While you did try a few times to move your jaw out of his hand, you were forced to give up as his grip was scarily strong. And when you shut your eyes as you felt Chrollo's fingers slip into your cunt, a nip on your neck forced them back open, and he whispered as he once again told you to keep looking. Remembering what you told yourself of doing what he wanted, you followed that instruction.

You saw how your fingers held tight onto the edge of the counter, unable to find purchase anywhere else. You saw how you bit your lip in frustration when Chrollo began to tease you by pushing his fingers in before immediately pulling them of you in favor of caressing the lips of your pussy. You saw how his arm moved as he delved into you again with the intent of scissoring you open. And you saw the way his eyes flashed over to look at you through the mirror when he heard the noise that escaped your mouth.

Through all of that, you found yourself always looking back to the red reflection of your eyes that only seemed to grow more vibrant.

It felt embarrassing, to be made to watch a reflection of yourself becoming a flustered mess from the way your boyfriend toyed with you while he kept you pressed against the counter. Every time his fingers brushed over a part of you that was sensitive would have you jolt against his firm chest, and every time you felt his teeth biting ever so softly into the skin of your neck had you moaning.

By now you could feel how hard he was as his erection pressed up against your ass.

His fingers were gliding out of you even easier now and your underwear was a wet mess. The heat inside of you was building up as you moved your hips against his hand, trying to get him in deeper.

Chrollo glanced up at you again through the mirror and your eyes met.

And then he stopped.

You managed to keep a frustrated whine contained within you as he pulled his hands away from you, leaning them against the counter as he remained on top of you.

“Would you do something for me?” he asked breathlessly.

“D-do what?” you asked in response that was just as breathless.

“Turn around and get on your knees for me.”

“Ah…”

He pulled away from you as you understood what it was he wanted, and though you were immediately missing the way he touched you, you told yourself not to be selfish.

The fibers of the bathroom mat protected your legs from the cool tiles of the floor as you knelt down before him. Though your hands were shaky, you went to undo his zipper before you pulled the material of his pants and underwear out of the way, allowing his cock to spring free of those confines.

You let out a soft breath as one hand went up to stroke him, fingers gliding over his length with a feather light touch. When you gripped him fully was when you felt him twitch in your hand. You continued like that, hand running along his dick while you leaned in to place a kiss at the head, licking the tip after. You heard his sharp intake of breath and saw from your peripheral vision the way his hand clenched into a fist. Remembering once again of how pent up Chrollo must've been spurred you to not waste time with teasing him and in moments you had his length in your mouth, your tongue moving against the underside of his dick and your cheeks hollowing as you sucked.

The appreciative groan that came from his lips and the gentle hand that settled in your hair after told you that you were doing good, and you closed your eyes as you continued to bob up and down his dick.

“Don't do that.”

Those words surprised you, and you stopped suddenly to look up to him, uncertain of what you'd done wrong. The intensity of his stare caught you off-guard and you pulled off of him. Or you would have had it not been for the hand that kept your head from moving any further. Within a moment, that same hand moved to caress your cheek just beneath your eye.

“Keep looking at me, love,” he said, “just like that.”

You made a noise of affirmation before you continued as you had been, keeping your eyes open this time. It felt a little awkward for you to stare at him the whole time, but if that was what he wanted, you would do it.

You wanted him to be happy with you.

His cheeks became more flushed and his breathing was getting harsher, all the while those gray eyes bore into you. Chrollo always had an odd way of seeming to look right through you, and that was no exception now. Though never had there been such an intense look of fascination and awe until now, as his eyes gazed into yours.

You would be lying if you said it wasn't slightly unsettling.

It won't always be like that, you told yourself.

It's only because it's been so long since you did this for him.

Both of Chrollo's hands ended up tangled in your hair, and he stopped your movements completely as he forced himself down your throat. A soft groan from above and the clenching of his thighs served as the signs that he was about to cum, and soon you felt his release running down your throat, forcing you to gulp as you swallowed it since he still held you in place.

When you felt him begin to soften he finally let go, pulling out of your mouth and leaning against the sink counter as he collected his breath. You watched him from your spot on the bathroom floor, your thighs pressing together while you bit your lip. Your pussy was dripping and you were desperate for him to do something about was the frustrating ache inside of you. Remembering the way Chrollo had his fingers inside of you for that brief period only made it worse, and all you wanted was for him to continue where he left off.

He noticed, smiling at you as he asked “shall I take care of you as well?”

“Yes,” you answered without any hesitation.

He laughed.

“Eager, aren't we?”

“I was a little worried you weren't going to,” you admitted.

“When have I ever been that cruel to you, love?”

He said that while holding a hand out for you, one that you took and allowed him to haul you up to your feet. You ended up leaning against his chest, wide eyes staring up at him.

Out of curiosity, you glanced over to the mirror. Your eyes were still red. What a surprise. At least you were getting used to the sight. Chrollo then turned your jaw once more so you would face him as he leaned in for a kiss.

A weird pain suddenly shot through your chest once you saw his face.

You should hate him

…. Why would you ever hate Chrollo?

You weren't given anymore time to think on that as your lips met his and your arms wrapped around his neck while you pressed yourself against him. That weird feeling was pushed down into the depths of your chest; this was all you cared about right now.

Chrollo was on top of you, his arms caging you in on the bed while he thrust his hips against yours. You were squirming beneath him, one of your hands insistent on holding onto one of his own while you did your best to minimize the amount of pained noises coming from your mouth. He knew he was being too rough; you hadn't had sex in months and he should've been more gentle. But the sight of you laying beneath him and the red Kurta eyes staring up at him so lovingly caused Chrollo to simply not care as much at the moment – as long as he didn't hurt you beyond some bruising, you would be fine. And even that could be soothed in the moment. Whenever those noises of discomfort did become too loud, Chrollo would lean back down to place tender kisses on your lips or suck on your neck, and the feeling of his lips against your skin had you mewling while you squeezed his hand.

The marks on your neck, shoulders and chest tallied up while you forgave him easily, likely in part because of the past few months and how much of a burden you must've felt like during that time, as well as because of the sheer gratitude you had towards him, that he had done so much to give you back your sight.

He could get away with being a little rough.

And as he pushed himself back up so he could stare down at you again, he once more brought his gaze to the sight of the scarlet eyes that he admired so much.

It was a surreal sight, one he had never anticipated.

Nor had he planned on using the scarlet eyes for you. Not at first.

It began after bringing you home. Determined to keep the promise he'd made to you at the hospital, he had tracked down a transmuter who had the skills to replace your old eyes with ones that worked – a pity he couldn't steal their abilities for himself – and once you were well enough to travel again, Chrollo had looked about the area where the two of you lived to find a suitable replacement. At that point his goal had been to find a pair of eyes that looked close to yours, spending a considerably long time trying to find the correct shade of your original color while you recovered under the supervision of other members of the troupe.

He thought he knew what he wanted when he found a woman who had the color you once had, and after learning her schedule and when she would be alone, he'd gathered up what he needed for the job: the blade he would use to slice her throat so he could kill without her crying out, the tools that he would use to extract her eyes from her skull without damaging them, and the jars filled with fluids that would keep the eyes preserved until they could be transferred to you.

Chrollo was moments away from ending that woman's life when he remembered that job from years prior, when he and the troupe had attacked the Kurta Clan. Handling the jars had brought the memories back, as they had brought over a hundred of them for the heist; yet most had ended up unused as they hadn't been able to kill enough of the clan members when their eyes had been in the scarlet state.

While the massacre of the Kurta Clan had been a success in the troupe's book, he had always been personally unsatisfied with the final results of that heist. There was something lacking in the end result for him, as the eyes in the jars didn't look the same as when they did in the heads of those Kurta members who had died by his hand. The vibrance that had been present in living eyes that held emotion – that was gone. After the deed was done, all he saw in the dead eyes that floated in those jars was a waste of effort.

It was disappointing, to say the least.

That was when the thought struck him: what if he gave you one of the pairs of scarlet eyes?

… It was impractical, he thought after. For one, it would require him to track down someone who had a pair of the eyes, and once he found them, he'd need to steal them and more than likely kill the owner in the process. And going through all of that would cause you to wait longer. It was much less trouble to go with what he had planned initially and settle for the eyes he had already picked for you.

There was no need to go that extra mile when you would be grateful either way.

But now that the idea had come to him, it itched in his brain. The thought of not only being able to see the scarlet eyes as they were meant to be seen, but also that you might have them.

That mental image was all he could think in that moment, and it was then that Chrollo knew that he wouldn't be satisfied with anything else. So he walked away from his would-be victim's apartment, the woman within completely unaware that a passing thought of his had saved her life.

It was more for him than it was for you. He was well aware of that. And during the time he spent tracking down one of the thirty six pairs, he was aware of the disappointment you felt at how often he was gone, though you kept those thoughts to yourself. He could tell even without Pakunoda informing him that you were desperately terrified at the thought of him leaving you. The relief you felt when he always returned was evident in your voice, your body language and the way you gripped his hand.

The stress he was putting you through his search and retrieval of the eyes was wholly unnecessary.

But he pursued it regardless, intent on making the vision in his mind a reality.

And within a relatively short amount of time, he did just that. Now not only did he have you, but he also had the sight of the scarlet eyes with the life brought back into them.

Your pussy walls fluttered around his cock and he heard you moan. This time it sounded far more pleasurable and he sensed you were getting close. Without missing a beat Chrollo moved his hand so he could rub your clit with his thumb.

That was enough to make you cum on his cock, and the legs you had wrapped around his hips clenched hard onto him while your grasping fingers intertwined with his and you rode out your high beneath him.

That shade of red truly was mesmerizing, Chrollo thought to himself, his eyes focused on yours. Everything he'd done had all been worth it just to get to this moment right now.

He reached down once your orgasm had subsided, softly petting your cheek while you breathed through your mouth. You leaned into his touch immediately, smiling up at him.

“Love,” he began, “may I finish?”

As expected, you agreed. You didn't say anything when he resumed his harsh pace from earlier; you only readjusted your grip on his hand. With another love-bite left on your neck, Chrollo pushed himself back up with his arm, staring down at you while he continued to thrust his hips and fucked you into the bed.

“You're perfect.”

He breathed those words out and you smiled, somehow managing to seem embarrassed by the compliment despite everything he'd done to you tonight, as you glanced away. Chrollo cupped your cheek, bringing your gaze back on him.

When the scarlet eyes looked up at him again he began moving faster.

This surprise you both learned about the Kurta Clan eyeballs was a welcome one. Now he didn't need to force you into a panic to see them again. No more need to use any stolen ability to get your adrenaline to rush during the day while you were left inconsolable. No more need to interrupt your sleep schedule to gaze at them during the night while you silently cried. Now if he wanted a view of those eyes all he needed to do was force you onto your knees and push his cock in your mouth.

He'd be doing that more often. Definitely.

And you would be eager and willing to do so, jumping at any chance you could to show your appreciation for all that he had done.

As Chrollo looked into your eyes, he felt as his hands moved to your throat, grabbing you and holding you just hard enough to cut off the circulation. He'd done it without thinking, continuing the habit he'd picked up from those nights he spent watching you. There was something about the way you looked up at him while he had you like this. How helpless and at his mercy you were.

Your reaction was let out a soft gasp in surprise and to move to place your own hand on his forearm. There was no attempt to pull him off.

Once more, he was fascinated by the sight. And once more, he had to wonder if those eyes had looked at him like that before when they'd been in the possession of their previous owner. If this particular set was one that he himself had collected and bottled up.

If the eyes that now gazed up at him so lovingly had once done so in hate.

His grip on your throat must have gotten too hard, as the hold you had on his forearm tightened ever so slightly while you whined. Hazy scarlet eyes stared up at him, looking up in a mixture of arousal and fear.

He fully lost control then, stopping as he pressed himself as deep as he was able while he came, his hot release spilling into you and making you whimper as you felt his cum dribbling out of you.

That was long overdue.

With that, he released his grip on your throat and relaxed, falling onto the bed next to you as he pulled himself out of your sore pussy. Your eyes were still that shade of vibrant red, and they would remain that way until your heart rate returned to normal.

As relaxed as he felt, he noticed how tense you had become, your eyebrows furrowed as though you were thinking about something unpleasant.

“Is something wrong, love?"

You blinked as you looked over to him in response to his question, looking blank for a moment before forcing a smile on your face and shaking your head. Chrollo brought his hand back up to cup your cheek, asking “are you sure?”

“Yeah,” you answered.

The way your eyes moved about told him that you weren't being entirely truthful, and he wondered for a moment just how much you were able to remember of those nights he spent gazing at you.

But before he could begin to do any sort of damage control, you spoke again, asking “Chrollo, could you do something for me?”

“Anything,” he answered.

Your smile seemed more genuine as you softly asked “will you hold me?”

Within an instant Chrollo had pulled you against his chest, cupping the back of your head with his hand as he said “you never need to ask for that.”

You hummed happily, nuzzling your face against his chest. The tenseness of your muscles melted away shortly after.

He'd been far too greedy tonight. He was so focused on the eyes and the newfound knowledge of the color also being linked to arousal that he'd wanted to drink in the sight at every moment. So much so that he'd held you down to keep you in place, something he'd never really done before the accident.

He would need to do a better job of controlling himself in the future if he wanted to keep you happy and complacent. While the chances were slim, there was always a possibility that you could learn the truth about everything: about him, about the troupe, and about who really was responsible for the death of the Kurtas.

Even with his efforts to ensure that you were heavily dependent on him, you wouldn't want to stay if you learned all of that. You might not even want those eyes in your skull anymore.

Better to not put you in situations where you could remember something unpleasant involving him and begin to put the pieces together. Keeping you happy while he kept you away from the rest of the world would be better for you, even if the alternative possibly gave him more opportunities to see that red color he admired so much. Losing the way you so eagerly clung to him wasn't worth it.

“I think we sabotaged ourselves,” you mumbled against his chest.

“Hm?”

“It's so late, and we still need to do so much. We're going to be exhausted tomorrow,” you continued.

“We'll manage,” he said, “just like we always do. Right?”

You smiled against his skin as you nodded, and Chrollo took the opportunity to place a kiss on top of your head.

“Getting some sleep is a good idea, though,” he added.

You hummed in agreement as Chrollo turned to flip the light switch, and held you once more as the room was shrouded in darkness. Moments passed before you spoke once more.

“Chrollo?”

“What is it, love?”

“Things will be better now, right?”

Chrollo smiled to himself as he answered “of course they will, love. You can trust me on that.”

#reader insert #yandere x reader #yandere hunter x hunter #chrollo x reader #yandere chrollo #chrollo lucilfer #yandere hxh #yandere #hxh x reader

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taexual · 4 months

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sleepwalking ● 19 | jjk

pairing: jungkook x fem!reader

summary: due to unfortunate circumstances, you ended up managing your ex-boyfriend’s band. you thought you’ve both made peace with it, but suddenly he’s very eager to prove to you that first love never dies.

genre: rockstar!jungkook / exes to lovers

warnings: explicit language, ANGST & FLUFF (i mean it, watch out), SLOW BURN

words: 14.5k

read from the beginning ○ masterlist

chapter 19 ► so dig two graves, ‘cause when you die, i swear i’ll be leaving by your side

When the tour bus arrived in Glasgow, you realised that you had slept perhaps a quarter of an hour in total tonight. Discomfort and Regret had become unwelcome companions that kept you up.

Last night, you had planned to talk to Jungkook, but he flipped the script and did all the talking instead. And if you had to describe your choices from then on, you’d have to accept that, essentially, you had run away without saying anything.

You realised now, through tossing and turning in your bunk the whole bus journey, that this was your recurring pattern.

When you and Jungkook first broke up, you’d barricaded yourself in your apartment and only ventured outside when it was unavoidable, like to go to work. Or when your friends forced you out of bed. They tolerated your need for silence in moderation—a few days of self-imposed isolation were okay. But two consecutive weeks was a little excessive.

In Stockholm, the impulse to run away had gripped you right after your conversation on the bridge sank abruptly in the waters below. In Oslo, you had actually run away after you’d almost kissed. You could still feel the shivers on your skin from the cold night air on the rooftop terrace. And, of course, you’d also planned to avoid him when you arrived in Manchester.

It was a pattern that was doomed to end in failure every time, yet you stubbornly refused to give it up.

You wanted to escape the feelings that frightened you, but they only ran faster. They chased after you like daunting shadows. They caught up with you. They engulfed you.

This perpetual cycle wasn’t just futile, it was also unfair—to you and to Jungkook. And to Rated Riot, too.

It had gone on for too long.

You were determined to redeem that today.

While Jungkook and the boys were doing an interview on a local radio station after the soundcheck, you chose to stay at the venue to work. Initially, you only intended to answer internal company emails and update the label executives, but unsurprisingly, that morphed into more tasks that needed your immediate attention.

Seated at your laptop in the band’s dressing room, you spent a good couple of hours finalising Rated Riot’s schedule for the rest of the week, emailing back journalists and verifying their credentials before issuing backstage passes for upcoming interviews, and humming along to a tune playing in your headphones.

It was then—during the chorus of an old Bad Omens song that was loud and messy enough to keep your mind alert and focused—that Seokjin decided to tap you on the back.

You jumped up as high as it was humanly possible and pushed your laptop away as if to protect it from intruders—which was what your mind assumed Seokjin to be, apparently. He took a step back, shocked and very entertained by your violent startle.

“Shit, sorry,” he said, attempting to suppress a smile. “You’ve been—you’ve been working here by yourself for hours. I’m taking a coffee break. Want to join me?”

With one hand pressed to your chest, you slid your headphones off and checked the time on the corner of your laptop screen. “Uh, sure. Coffee sounds nice.”

The two of you found a quaint café a few blocks from Barrowland where Rated Riot would be playing later that evening. But despite the cosy setting, you chose to grab your coffee to-go. It was a warm, sunny day outside. Seokjin thought you could use some fresh air.

“So,” he said eagerly, as soon as the café bell tinkled, announcing your exit, “what’s on your mind?”

You met his question with surprise. “What do you mean?”

He maintained an air of nonchalance, sipping his Americano and observing casually, “your pupils are massive. You look like you’re planning a revolution. Or a massacre.”

You took a sip of your drink and regretted not stirring the caramel in better. You wondered what it would be by the end of tonight: revolution or massacre.

“I was—well, it’s nothing much,” you said. “I was just thinking that things might be different when we got home.”

“How so?”

The two of you crossed the street towards a small, vibrant green space—not quite a park—with a tree-lined pathway in the middle and an old blue police box nearby, reminiscent of Doctor Who.

“Well,” you said, “I hear Brazil is really nice that time of year.”

“You’re thinking of going on holiday?” Seokjin asked, surprised. He’s known you since you joined the company, even before you started to manage Rated Riot, and he was well aware of your lack of holidays. The HR department, however, remained blissfully ignorant about it.

You shrugged. “For starters.”

“And then?”

“And then we’ll see.”

The ambiguity in your response wasn’t worrying in itself, but combined with your reluctance to meet his gaze and the intense concentration on your coffee—even though you winced every time you took a sip—it was certainly alarming.

“You’re not… going to quit, are you?” he asked hesitantly. “I’ve heard about Reconnaissance.”

Of course, he’d heard. At this point, enough people knew about it for the news to have a ripple effect and circulate backstage.

“No,” you said, trying to dispel the tension with an airy laugh. “Of course not.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

“I’d find a replacement first.”

Seokjin’s casual stride came to an abrupt halt. A few steps ahead, you realised he’d stopped and turned around.

“No,” he said.

His firm declaration made you stutter. “Th-that—that wasn’t a question.”

“And that’s not an option,” he argued. “You can’t quit.”

“I’m not saying I’m leaving for sure. I’m just saying that if I did leave, you wouldn’t even notice the difference,” you said. “I’m a very good teacher.”

With that, you started to walk away, leaving him little choice but to catch up.

“And I love all of you guys,” you continued while Seokjin grunted next to you. “I wouldn’t leave you with someone I didn’t personally trust to take care of you and the band.”

He shook his head, his determination unwavering. If he had known about the band members’ conviction that no one would blame you if you left Rated Riot due to the alluring offer from Reconnaissance, Seokjin might have been tempted to express his disagreement with his fists.

Of course, people would blame you—Seokjin was the people in question.

You belonged here. You were an essential part of the team.

He was convinced of this, and he was going to be annoying about it.

“Okay, I appreciate that,” he said, his tone tinged with incredulity. “Except, what the fuck are you thinking? Of course, we’d notice the difference! You’re you. We love you.”

“That means a lot—”

“But not enough?”

You hesitated, caught off guard by the intensity of his anger. “No, it’s—”

“Alright, look.” He stopped walking again, the paper cup of coffee in his hand more of an accessory than a beverage. “Is this about Jungkook?”

An unexpected heat surged through you and a cascade of excuses immediately raced through your mind. You scanned the pathway, reading the names of the bands imprinted into the pavement with colourful stripes—artists who’d performed at Barrowland before, you assumed—so you wouldn’t have to look at him.

But this was Seokjin. If there was anyone who knew everything that was going on in the band, it was him. You didn’t want to give him pretend reasons.

“In part,” you admitted.

“Well, if that’s the case, then it’s an even more definite no,” he asserted, his resolve unyielding.

You sighed and attempted to smile, but there was a hint of awkwardness in your expression. “I’m not taking votes, Jin. I’ll talk to Jungkook about this, and—”

“You can talk to anyone you like. All the gods you can find, even,” he interrupted. “But you’re not leaving.”

“Jin—”

“Look, when you accepted this job, the fact that you and Jungkook used to know each other didn’t matter,” he stated, tactfully omitting the word ‘relationship’—a nuance you appreciated. “What difference does it make now?”

As you bit your lip and lowered your eyes, Seokjin sensed that there was a difference, after all. It occurred to him that perhaps he wasn’t entirely up to speed on everything that was happening on the tour, after all.

“Okay, you don’t want to talk about it, and I’m not asking you to,” he said, his words gentle, but his tone strict. “What I’m saying is that nobody cares. You can date, you can break up, you can—I don’t know. You can pretty much do anything as long as you don’t kill each other. No one cares.”

“The label cares,” you blurted, the words unpolished and agitated. “I care.”

He waved his free hand dismissively. “The label cares about profit. We’re making a profit from you both. Maybe even more when you’re together because you’re both less annoying that way.”

Your eyebrows furrowed. “How are we annoying?”

“Are you kidding? All mopey and sulky?” He stuck his tongue out and pretended to gag. “You make me sick and miserable.”

You snickered softly at the dramatic display. “Fair. Sorry. But fact is, it’s still a good opportunity.”

“Well, sure,” he conceded. “But is that really the reason you want to leave? Or is it because you think that what you’re doing with Jungkook is wrong? You think others will disapprove or think less of you. You think this is highly unprofessional, and it would make more sense to work elsewhere.”

It felt oddly incongruous to hear him articulate—so easily, without a moment’s hesitation—everything that you had been thinking.

“Well, that’s a factor, too, of course…” you said, your voice faltering.

“I think that’s the main factor.”

Taking a sip of your coffee, you mumbled, “I think you think too much.”

“I think you don’t think enough,” he countered. “You can’t leave, not even for Reconnaissance. You’re part of the team, our team. We all are.”

You looked at him, and he raised his eyebrows expectantly—waiting, clearly, for you to admit defeat.

While you didn’t technically need his consent to quit, the sheer determination in his stance made you feel as though his approval was, indeed, a prerequisite for anyone choosing to leave.

“Now you’re making me feel guilty,” you said.

“As you should!” he said—nearly bellowing in his frustration. “But you should feel guilty about mistakenly thinking that you should leave. Not about being in love with him.”

His words struck a deep chord and your heart began to rattle violently in your chest. “I’m—right. Yeah. I need to talk to him about—about everything.”

His tone softened at your reaction.

“I think you should sit down for ten minutes and gather your thoughts before you do that,” he advised. “You should sit and accept that we don’t care if you go out with Jungkook. Whatever you decide, we’re all cool with it. As long as you are, too.”

Afraid that your eyes would betray your thoughts, you shifted your gaze to the silver barks of the graceful birch trees around you. “Do you know about the bet?”

Seokjin took a slow sip of his coffee to allow more time between these overlapping conversations.

“Yeah,” he said. “Is that... uh, have you two worked it out?”

“We’ve—I think we have. I think the bet wasn’t even the main issue, actually, it just—it sort of highlighted all our problems,” you admitted. “We—we’ll have to work through the rest.”

“Right. Okay,” he said. The sun rolled out from behind the buildings, casting a golden glow on the trees and the empty path ahead of you. He squinted and took a sip of his coffee before speaking. “Well, then I can safely tell you that everyone backstage knows about it.”

The disappointment on your face was absolute. “Oh. That—that’s lovely.”

He smiled sympathetically as the two of you continued down the faintly coloured path. Despite the sunshine, the cool breeze toyed relentlessly with the edges of your jackets.

“Don’t worry about it too much, though,” he said. “It’s nothing more than a silly joke backstage. We’re not judging either of you.”

You did worry about it. “What… do you mean by ‘silly joke,’ exactly?”

The two of you arrived at a large sycamore tree with leaves that glimmered in emerald hues under the sun, and Seokjin stopped, grateful for the shade.

“One of the roadies started it,” he explained. “It was just a game. A bet, actually! Funny.” He chuckled at the irony, but stopped himself when he noticed your stoic expression. “Anyway. Someone suggested that Jungkook’s friends were trying to sabotage your relationship by making this bet with him. So, we bet on Jungkook fighting his friends for you. Which—that cost me money, actually. When he showed up at the airport in Cologne with a black eye, I lost fifty euros.”

It took you a minute to process this, and you felt so uncomfortable that your fists itched with an urge to fight someone, too.

“You—so, you bet that he wouldn’t fight his friends?” you clarified, almost hopeful.

“No. I bet that he would,” he said. “But I got too big-headed and bragged about how he wouldn’t miss a single punch. So, everyone claimed that I lost and took my money. Really, I thought he knew how to fight. And he was doing it for a noble cause.” A dramatic pause ensued, and then Seokjin smirked. “I mean you, by the way.”

“No, yeah, I got that,” you said bitterly. “But you didn’t even know the actual—everyone just assumed he had a black eye because of me?”

He pulled his lips together to stifle a chuckle as he moved his cup of coffee away.

“Can you blame us?” he asked with a leisurely shrug. “He’s in love with you, and his friends are complete idiots. And then he shows up with a black eye! The dots connected themselves. Although, personally, I thought Luna or Maggie could have socked him in the eye, too. You three are very protective of each other.”

You tilted your head, your posture a warning. “I see. So, we’re a telenovela to you. Did you bet that I would knock someone out if I found out what you were up to?”

“Not yet,” he said, clearly delighted by the prospect of this happening in the future.

“Did you get your money back at least?”

“Yeah. But then I lost it again.”

The leaves of the sycamore tree rustled impatiently as you groaned. “How?”

“Another bet,” he said. “Some people—including Jimin, by the way—thought that Jungkook’s friends would never come to another Rated Riot show. In the UK specifically. We were very specific about the details in this bet.”

“Right, of course.”

He smirked, unapologetic about the amusement he derived from this. There were all sorts of games happening backstage at any given point in the tour; nearly everything became a joke here. And Seokjin hoped to show you that yes, people did know about you and Jungkook. But unless they could find ways to make it funny, they didn’t care.

He could tell that the more he talked to you about this, the more you started to recognise the absurdity of it all, too.

“Right. Well, Jimin won that round. I actually—I thought Jungkook would change his mind and bring his friends back,” Seokjin confessed. “Serves me right. I should have trusted him more.”

You raised your cup in his direction.

“Yeah,” you said. “Serves you right for making bets about this. He blacklisted Sid.”

“He—oh!” Seokjin seemed very pleased to hear this. “Well, that was worth my money, then.”

“Hmm.”

He grinned, the mischief still lingering in his eyes.

“We have another bet going on,” he said.

“Anoth—well, of course.” Your teeth dug into the coffee lid as you tried to take a sip, but reconsidered. “So, what? Who’s getting a black eye this time?”

“It’s whether you’ll get back together.”

Your irritation wavered in surprise. A rustling stirred inside you as though you had swallowed the wind and carried it within.

“Well,” you said. “Where’d you place your bets?”

“Drink your coffee,” he said. You did. It had cooled and turned unpleasantly sweet as the caramel settled. “I haven’t bet on that yet. But if you told me if you’re considering going back to him, I could win my money back.”

You made sure to swallow before looking up.

“That’s not solely up to me, though,” you said, sensing an obvious defensive undertone in your own voice. You didn’t make much effort to conceal it; he would have read right through you anyway. “A relationship typically involves two people. I can’t force him to be in it.”

Seokjin offered a patient smile.

“Please,” he said. “Everyone knows he’d burn down half of Europe for you.”

You swallowed again.

It was just you. The only one still fighting it.

“Well, in any case—” Seokjin said, distracted, suddenly, by a particularly cheeky pigeon that kept flying up to your ankles, then to your knees. “That bird is going to steal your coffee.”

You glanced down, and the shift in your position frightened the pigeon into flying a few metres away. Seokjin nodded in approval.

“Anyway,” he said. “What I meant to say is that I don’t know how much my opinion is worth, but if the only reason you’re considering quitting is because of this, then that’s nothing. You sit down, you work through your problems, you get back together, and you’re good to go. Well, good to stay. It’s up to you. No one else cares.”

You raised your eyebrows. “Everyone’s talking. They’re making bets about us. We—we’re a joke backstage. And yet you think we should get back together?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Give us something else to bet on.”

Exasperation flashed across your face. “I’m thinking I’d like to sic that pigeon on you a little bit.”

“Oh, but what would you do without me?” He was grinning in a manner so endearing and genuine that you felt your lips stretch into a defeated smile as well. “You know we’re family. That is what we do. And you said it yourself – everyone’s already talking. And no one’s truly bothered by it. You might as well do what you want.”

You took a big gulp of your coffee to finish it.

Some of the humour faded from his eyes while he watched you. He looked around—to make sure the pigeon hadn’t returned and to gather his thoughts.

“Just think about it, okay?” he said. “You know how they say ‘measure twice, cut once’? Why don’t you measure three times? Four, even. Five. Or, I don’t know, as many times as it takes until you realise that there’s no need to cut anything. Everything’s great as it is.”

Your face felt warm. “That’s very profound.”

“It is.” He nodded, his exaggerated confidence faltering a little when he saw the gratitude in your eyes and suddenly found himself timid. “I’ve also got a few carpentry jokes if you’re in the mood for those.”

Laughing finally, you shook your head. “Maybe later. But thank you for this.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “And notice how I’m not saying ‘anytime’? Because there can’t be another time that this happens. In fact, the next time I see you, it’ll be as if we never had this conversation.”

Still smiling despite his threatening tone, you put your palm to your forehead and extended your fingers in a salute. “Sir, yes, sir.”

He nodded, content with your response.

“Now go back to that café and bring me a scone,” he ordered, his expression bright again. “I got distracted by your misery and forgot to buy one.”

You snorted and nodded—you did owe him a scone, at the very least. Seokjin stepped deeper into the shade by the tree and waited while you jogged back towards the café. He looked up to see your lighthearted expression reflected in the window across the street and felt himself exhale in relief.

He’d done his job—you knew everyone needed you here.

You returned to the venue with enough scones for the whole staff, and as you passed them out, almost everyone on the team regarded you with a mix of curiosity and anticipation. It was a nice change from their earlier concerns about your health, but you still felt uncomfortable.

There was an obvious reason you enjoyed working backstage: here, you successfully evaded the spotlight. You did your work quietly and got to spend time with your friends.

But lately, you’d been feeling everyone’s eyes on you and, naturally, your instinctive reaction was to flee. Really, this had to be inherent; you wondered if your brother shared a similar flight-or-flight-never-fight response when confronted with an uncomfortable situation.

And still, you forced yourself to wait.

Following your conversation with Seokjin, you decided on the key points that you needed to discuss with Jungkook. And they were simple: share your thoughts with him and make a decision together.

You’ve never really tried this with him before; open communication was a recent development for the two of you. But you meant what you told Seokjin: a relationship involved two people. And regardless of what -ship you and Jungkook were currently in, your decisions still influenced his, and his influenced yours.

You had hoped to speak to him after he returned from his interview, but it was almost funny how time worked against you today.

After the band returned, you went to help Jungkook with his bandages, and the company executives decided to respond to your email with a phone call. And so, you were forced to stay on the phone with the label the whole time before Rated Riot went on stage.

That was okay. You figured you would talk to Jungkook later.

But later just wouldn’t come.

After the concert, you waited for the band to finish taking pictures with their fans before you took them to another interview with several more radio hosts. And when you returned to the bus, the curtains on Jungkook’s bunk were drawn. You didn’t want to wake him in case he was asleep.

The only time you finally had direct contact with Jungkook was on the plane to London. He surprised you by approaching you from behind and casually lifting your carry-on to the overhead compartment. Then, as though he hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary, he turned around to return to his seat.

“Wait,” you called out. “Can I—can we talk? Yoongi said he’d switch seats with me.”

Jungkook stopped, his stomach sinking. He was the undefeated champion of misinterpreting situations—he hadn’t forgotten how your conversation had ended last night, but he still thought this was about Sid.

Because while you were beating yourself up about your avoidant tendencies, Jungkook was grappling with a different problem.

Since this morning, he had been bombarded with incessant text messages from an unknown number that ranged from vaguely bothersome (“UR SO DUMB LMSAO”) to genuinely threatening (“DNOT THINK THS IS OVER YOU FUCKVING CUNT”). All texts contained a certain distinctiveness: full capitalisation, typos, and a disturbing scent of wounded ego.

It was Sid, Jungkook was absolutely sure of it.

He seemed to be in a white powder induced frenzy, which wasn’t particularly unusual—Jungkook didn’t think he could remember the last time Sid had been completely sober—but the frequency of the texts was a little unsettling. Jungkook thought the bet was over now, even if Sid wasn’t satisfied. But clearly, Sid was craving something more.

Jungkook wasn’t sure how you would know about this or why you would bring it up now, but he felt his phone vibrating in his pocket again, and he thought this had to be the reason why.

“Sure,” he said, trying to mask his apprehension. He turned on airplane mode on his phone and looked up. “What’s, uh—what’s going on?”

You gestured at his seat. He sat down with bated breath—as if his life was about to change and he needed to brace for it—and waited for you to settle beside him.

“I wanted to, uh, explain myself,” you began as the plane filled. The rhythmic sound of people shuffling across the aisle was oddly soothing. Jungkook, however, appeared perplexed. “And to thank you, actually. For being there when I—well, when all of that happened. I’m sorry I caused—”

“You’ve already thanked me,” he interjected. “And you better not tell me that you’re apologising for fainting right now.”

“I’m—well, I’m just saying, you were right,” you said, disheartened by the disbelief in his eyes. You placed your water bottle on the fold-out tray and shifted in your seat. “I should have known better. Rested more. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m sorry I didn’t listen, and it all led to... that.”

He sighed. This wasn’t about Sid; this was about something worse.

“That’s who you are, though,” he said. He should have known this would be something you would blame yourself for once you recovered. “You always have to get everything done, or you—you can’t sleep. You need to, uh, work on that, but you don’t need to apologise for it.”

You looked down, tracing a shaky finger over the armrest between your seats.

“And,” he added before you could speak, “to be fair, a lot of things that happened on tour were actually out of your control. You had no choice but to put in extra time and effort, I guess. The stage constructions collapsed, the venue was flooded—”

“Right, but these—well, anyway,” you cut yourself off, reverting to your original train of thought. “I’m sorry you had to drop everything a-and worry about me. Well, not just you; the whole thing ended up being a big scene that disrupted everyone. But I—I wanted to say this to you, first of all.”

He observed you for a long moment. Between the truce you’ve decided on in your hotel room, the conversation he’d overheard about your meeting with Nick, and the disturbing messages from an unknown number, Jungkook was having a hard time comprehending what he’d done to warrant an apology from you right now.

Then, a troubling thought occurred to him: what if this was your way of saying goodbye?

He had let you go last night. What if you had decided to leave, and this was the prelude to the end of your time together?

“I’m—I didn’t have to do it,” he said. “I did it because I—well, I mean, you were passed out. Of course, I wanted to make sure you were okay.” He leaned forward in his seat. “It kind of sounds like you’re forgetting that you’re not just the manager here. You’re also my—uh, y-you’re our friend. We all would have acted the same way if it had been anyone else. It’s an ‘all for one, and one for all’ situation with us. You know that.”

He was right; your team had grown so close that none of you would have hesitated to help each other. Your unease simply stemmed from the fact that you were the one receiving help this time.

You swallowed. You thought you owed him an explanation about everything, but you haven’t even really gotten to it yet.

“Thank you,” you said. “For what you said and—and for what you did. I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

He gave you a hesitant smile. “Was I really so terrible at taking care of you that it made you change your workaholic ways?”

You raised your eyebrows, surprised by the gentle teasing in his words.

“No, you di—you were great. Except for the fact that you didn’t need to do that,” you said, shooting him a look that he promptly rolled his eyes at. You added, “I say that with gratitude, of course. But, um, I felt very uncomfortable just lying there while everyone else—well, can’t let that happen again. Anyway, this isn’t—”

“I hope it won’t happen again,” he interrupted. “But it’s—well, you’ve spent your whole life taking care of... everything. Your brother, your mum, uh, e-even me. It’s second nature to you, I don’t know how else to—you can’t help but actively try to fix things. So, I-I don’t mind being the person who reminds you to take it easy sometimes. I just want you to listen.”

He’d said something very similar to you last night and you dug your teeth into your lower lip so you wouldn’t argue.

You thought you weren’t doing a very good job of fixing things—nevermind that you’ve subconsciously turned absolutely everything around you into your personal responsibility, and it was simply unrealistic to take care of it all.

“Thank you,” you chose to say. “I just, um—I don’t want you to think I’m talking to you so you’d make me feel better. You don’t need to do that. And it’s my turn to expla—”

He whipped his head to look at you so suddenly—an almost offended expression on his face—that the rest of your sentence got caught in your throat.

“Wh—why do you always think that?” he asked. “That I do something for you because I feel like I have to?”

“I don’t—I know you’re not—ah.” Leaning back in your seat, you attempted to rearrange your thoughts as if you were shuffling stubborn cards in a deck—trying to find the one you needed to win a game against yourself. “That’s not even the main thing I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Okay,” he said, a little worried. “What is the main thing?”

It took you a moment to find your breath.

“The conversation that we had last night—well, not just last night, actually, it’s been happening for a while. But, uh, last night specifically—it wasn’t supposed to end like that,” you said. He lowered his eyes. “That’s what I wanted to, um—to bring up. Because we’re not talking again, you know? I mean—okay. That’s not true. You are talking. But I’m not. I-I think it’s still new to me that we’re—that we’re actually talking about things. About everything. I’m sorry I haven’t said much to you in return.”

You exhaled when you finished speaking—finished stammering, really—but you didn’t feel relieved. There was a lot more you had to say.

Jungkook, on the other hand, felt his thoughts drift back to Amsterdam once again, when he had entered your hotel room to apologise, and you told him you forgave him and apologised in return. He remembered the pained, laboured beating of his heart as he listened to you—thinking, all the while, that he had no right to want you all for himself.

Now, he had some additional time to think about how to respond, because the flight attendant started the safety demonstration at the front of the plane, preparing for take-off.

He fastened his seatbelt, relieved by the silence on his phone—but the quiet pause between you as the plane lifted off the runway felt very loud in his head.

“You know,” he said after a few minutes, “you find the weirdest things to feel guilty about.”

You furrowed your brows while Jungkook idly twirled the onyx signet ring on his index finger.

“You’re never obligated to respond to what I tell you,” he said. “I didn’t say any of those things to you in Manchester in exchange for your immediate forgiveness, or for some similar stories, or for—anything, really. You don’t owe me anything. I just wanted to tell you everything, and that’s it.”

“I-I get that,” you shifted in your seat, restricted by the seatbelt, “but I’m your manager. And I-I left you in a confusing, stressful situation by yourself when I refused to talk to you right away. That was—it was unprofessional at best, and cruel at—”

“You’re more than that to me, though,” he cut in. You gripped the armrest tighter. “You know that. And you didn’t… leave me in that situation as my manager. You left me there as my ex-girlfriend. You have that right. You were confused and stressed, too.”

Your gaze slid over his black and grey flannel and the t-shirt with a Rated Riot logo underneath. The plane cruised at the designated altitude, but you still felt pushed into your seat like you had during take-off.

“I don’t—I’m not sure those two roles can be separated any longer,” you admitted.

Oh, whispered an alarmed pang of his heart. And, oh? echoed the multitude of shivers rippling underneath his skin.

“What are you saying?” he asked.

You drew in a breath. You didn’t want to start from the beginning because you had a feeling that he might not let you get to the end, so you decided to start from the explanation—the one that you’d come here to give him, but kept getting sidetracked as he responded to you in ways you weren’t anticipating.

“People on tour,” you began, “are very invested in our, uh—situation.”

Jungkook arched an eyebrow. “They’re invested?”

“Apparently, we’re a popular topic backstage.”

Quickly enough, he thought he figured out your implication: if he hadn’t played along with Sid, the staff on this tour might have been having very different conversations.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“No, that’s not—well, it’s not just your fault,” you replied. “It takes two, right?”

“Right, but I was the one who made the bet.”

“You—okay. But this isn’t about the bet—” you paused. Reconsidered. “Well, alright, the bet sort of kick-started a lot of things, but it’s not—that’s not the problem from my point of view right now.”

Oh, once more. And then, ah.

You were talking, he realised, about the things you didn’t want to talk about in your hotel room in Manchester. The things you’ve affectionately labelled as “a confusing, stressful situation.” The things you were supposed to discuss later, when the time was right. Except he had succumbed to the terminal case of nothing-matters-anymore-if-you’re-leaving-the-band and got drunk instead.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s… fine with me.”

“Alright,” you said. “So, here’s our problem: I’m your manager.”

Jungkook raised his eyebrows and pulled his chin back.

“If that’s our only problem,” he said, “we are very lucky people.”

A brief smile flickered on your face.

“It’s our biggest problem,” you clarified. “But we definitely are lucky.”

Encouraged by the amusement in your eyes, he grinned. “Because we have each other?”

Your smile grew and even the plane itself seemed to shake a little when his heart rate accelerated at the sight of it.

“Because we can solve this problem,” you said.

His face fell. He thought he could guess where you were going with this.

“How do you mean?” he still asked, his voice a low murmur.

You thought you could have used some of the whiskey that Jungkook had sought out last night.

With a measured breath, you said, “I leave the band, and—”

“Wait,” he cut you off. “Is that supposed to be—”

“Hear me out first—”

“No, listen—if the problem is that you’re my manager,” he said, “then you leaving Rated Riot is not the solution.”

Jungkook sounded a little like Seokjin had earlier—a stark contrast from the way he’d spoken to you last night by the bus.

“Are you suggesting that because people are talking about us backstage?” he pressed.

You turned away. “It’s not just that. I mean, they’re already talking and that’s—well, it’s not great. But we can’t stop the wheel from turning now, or however that saying goes. What we can do, however, is stop it before it gets worse. And by that I mean, you know—we need to decide what the hell we’re doing.”

That was what he wanted, he thought. But now he was confused.

You seemed to want to make a decision about your relationship together. Yet you also seemed to believe that leaving Rated Riot was the best option. He failed to see how both of these things were possible at the same time.

“So, you’ve made up your mind, then?” he asked. “About leaving?”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” you said. “I don’t want to leave the band, but—”

“Well, that’s the thing, then,” he said sharply, unfastening his seatbelt. Turning to face you, he stumbled over his own confusion, “I’m—I don’t want to hold you back. I told you. But I thought you—I thought it would be—I thought you wanted to leave. I thought—but you want to stay. So, stay.”

Stay.

It was very simple, really, very concise. But it carried a lot more weight than his words last night when he had caught you off guard. When he had let you go.

You wanted to stay. You just didn’t think you should.

Your response wasn’t particularly verbal. “Hmm.”

“Is it me?” Jungkook asked. “Am I the only reason you’re thinking of leaving?”

He didn’t sound accusatory, even though you were prepared for it. He sounded apologetic instead—almost guilty—and you were completely unprepared for that as a million tiny needles pricked at your heart.

“You’re not the only reason,” you replied. “You’re part of it. And I don’t—look, I-I don’t want to leave. But that sounds reasonable when you look at where we are right now.”

He heard nothing of what you’d said.

“That’s not reasonable in the slightest,” he insisted.

“Jungkook—”

“You have to stay. If you—”

“But if that’s the choice that would make more sense for us,” you interjected, exasperated, “then I don’t mind leaving. If—if we weren’t working together anymore, then maybe we could try to finally figure our shit out.”

Now he heard it.

He had a vague awareness that the other passengers behind you had turned off their screens and removed their headphones, choosing to listen to your conversation instead. But he was too stunned by the look in your eyes to care.

So, that was what you were trying to say: you were prepared to leave Rated Riot to fix your relationship.

He opened his mouth to speak, but it took another minute for coherent words to come to him.

“We can—we can figure our shit out while working together,” he said. “Why do you have to leave?”

“It’s—you have to understand,” you said, “that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m pretty sure neither do you, but that’s how you usually function.” Jungkook sobered up enough to offer a noncommittal shrug. You continued, “but for me—this is freaking me out. I don’t—I don’t know what’s going to happen and what we should do, and—leaving the band sounds—it seems reasonable. It seems safe. Smart. And that’s what I’m clinging to.”

He swallowed, not trusting himself to move. “But that’s—”

“Please, it’s—this is what I wanted to say to you—what I should have said to you last night.” There was a pleading tone in your voice. He nodded, quiet while you continued. “If I stay with Rated Riot, and we try to solve our problems… there are only two ways that can go, right? We both know as much. Either we get back together, or we don’t.”

Jungkook was mesmerised by how glaringly simple this was, in principle: either you used a label on your relationship, or you didn’t.

He knew he was going to love you either way, but he couldn’t breathe, suddenly, at the thought of this other choice in this dilemma—the choice where you didn’t get back together, and he spent the rest of his life deliberately going crazy, so he could return—at least in his mind—to that day seven years ago when he first met you.

“Well, uh, yeah,” he managed to say. “That’s pretty much the choices that we’ve got.”

You reclined in your seat, lifting your gaze to the light control buttons overhead.

“If we get back together…” you began, exhaling. “Then, we might have to face a lot of problems from the label. But we might be alright in the end. I don’t know.”

Jungkook tightened his jaw. He attempted to formulate a response that would be logical and appropriate in this situation. But really, his head felt too small for his thoughts and his tongue too big for his mouth.

“That’s… that’s good to know,” he eventually said.

“Mhmm,” you replied distractedly. “But see, what if we don’t get back together? Or we do, but it doesn’t work out?”

That was what worried him, too—but for different reasons.

He knew that you were looking at this from a pragmatic perspective. A logical, what-would-make-more-sense perspective.

He didn’t think he’d ever looked at it this way. For him, this was simple: he loved you and wanted to be with you. He didn’t care how inconvenient and illogical it might seem to those around him, and he refused to think about what would happen if this love didn’t work out. It would have to. How could it not?

But he recognised his privileges; he knew he didn’t have as many responsibilities as you did. And, alright, fine, he thought about it—realistically, if you broke up again, he’d probably drink until he turned into a puddle of whiskey, while you’d flee across the globe to get away from it all.

And yet—was that all there was to this? Just rationality and calculated decisions?

Jungkook cleared his throat and asked the question that he believed really mattered here.

“Do you love me?”

Someone on the plane gulped audibly and held their breath. He wondered if it was him.

The colour of your eyes deepened, then blurred. “I-I—that’s—that’s not—”

“Answer me,” he whispered.

You tried, but no words came out. This moment resembled the nightmares that haunted you lately: you opened your mouth to scream, but silence stifled every sound you tried to make.

“T-that’s—” you began and stopped yourself before you could stutter any further. You took a breath. “That’s not important right now—”

“How can it not be—”

“Because I do love you,” you said quickly—the words slurred into one desperate Idoloveyou, a hopeless Idoloveyou, a how-can-you-possibly-expect-me-not-to Idoloveyou. “But I don’t think I should. I don’t think you should, either. We’re a—we’re a fucking mess.”

Visibly frozen, Jungkook found himself thinking that if this was the sixteenth century, and the two of you just happened to have this conversation in some public square, the townsfolk would have surely accused you of witchcraft.

It was uncanny, the way you cast a spell on him with just four words—all four of which he heard with perfect clarity: I do love you. Granted, he wasn’t sure if he heard the rest. He felt like he was already burning in your place.

“Right,” he thought he said. He couldn’t feel his face. “But we’ve always—”

“I’m—I have to—I do owe you,” you said. He watched you, his expression oscillating between mild confusion and outright bewilderment. “You said I don’t, but I do. I could have told you what was going on in my head like you told me. Honestly, all this time, whenever I talked to people, they all told me to speak to you. To talk it out. And I closed up in my head instead. If I don’t talk about it, I don’t have to deal with it. You know?”

He blinked, finally. “That’s—”

“I’ll explain it, though, okay?” you said. “Please?”

You gave him too much power—as if he could ever say no to you. As if he could stop listening. As if every fibre of his being didn’t ache to stay close to you.

Warm—so unbearably warm that it felt like he was in the middle of exploring the landscapes Dante depicted in Inferno—Jungkook wiped off the sweat from his palms on his dark jeans.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, okay.”

“It won’t take long,” you assured. “Really, I don’t even have much to say. I’m fucking scared. That’s all there is to it.”

Jungkook seemed to be practising the lost art of swallowing his tongue. He wanted you to continue and you were biting your lip in a way that suggested that this was not all there was to it. You only wished it was.

You took a trembling breath, and your lungs followed—quivering, it seemed, as they tried to provide you with the oxygen necessary for all that you were about to say.

“I spent the first fifteen years of my life watching my parents break up and get back together again,” you began. “And do you know what I felt every single time they broke up? Actual rage.” You laughed wryly here like this reaction was absurd. “But when they got back together, I was fucking—I was hopeful. I refused to speak to them, of course—I was a teenager—but I was… Inside, just like my mum, I also hoped that this would work. That this time would be the one.”

You swallowed and lapsed into a silence so long and heavy that Jungkook worried you might never speak again.

Fifteen years, he thought. And all this time, he’d assumed that your dad left for the final time when you were twelve. That was already bad enough, of course, but Jungkook hadn’t realised that the back-and-forth between your parents that you’d mentioned back in Tilburg had taken place after that. He hadn’t realised that you and your brother had gone through three years of almost having a father—and your mum through almost having a partner.

“I knew they were a tragedy together,” you continued. Jungkook didn’t know how to raise his eyes to look at you. “It was obvious that it wouldn’t last. I always knew it, and I always said that to my mum. But deep down, I still fucking hoped that they’d get together and it would work.”

You shook your head with a cold, unforgiving smile.

“How fucking stupid,” you concluded. “All hope does is bring misery and disappointment.”

“You were a child,” he said, his brows drawn together—sad and a little scared for your younger self. “You just wanted your parents to be together. You wanted a family.”

“Yeah,” you said with a sigh. Then again, “yeah.”

A minute passed without either of you speaking. Flight attendants crossed the aisles, offering complimentary snacks, but missing you—either by mistake or because there was no one in your seats on the plane. The two of you were somewhere else.

“I think,” you said once the commotion around you quieted, “that I wasn’t just angry at my mum for trying again and again, even though it never worked. Or for never losing hope that maybe they could be happy together. I think I was also angry at myself. Because I never truly lost hope, either.”

Jungkook hung his head, his lips tight in silent contemplation.

“So that’s what I’m afraid of,” you said. “I’m scared that this—us—will turn out to be like that. I’m scared that we’ll let wishful thinking take over, and we’ll get back together even though we shouldn’t. Even though it’s obvious that we won’t last.”

Right away, he wanted to insist that you would defy those odds. That there was nothing obvious about the two of you whatsoever. He wanted to promise all that and more, but it wasn’t right—not after you endured fifteen years of broken promises between two of the most important people in your life.

“You, um—” he started to say and coughed suddenly, caught off guard by his dry throat, “—you told me before that you admired your mum’s courage. F-for trying again.”

You handed him the overpriced airport water bottle that you had bought earlier. Jungkook nodded in gratitude.

“I did,” you confirmed. “And I do admire that about her. But I don’t have any of her courage.” You brought a shaky finger over your forehead, not quite scratching it. “I always say that I don’t believe in second chances, but the truth is, I think I do believe in them. I’m just debilitated by my fear that these second chances might not work out.”

Jungkook lowered the bottle. He’d emptied almost half of it in a single gulp, but an anxious undercurrent inside of him had absorbed it before he could feel any relief.

“Is that, um,” he tried to ask, “is that something you feel in general or—or because it’s us?”

You thought about that for half a second and shook your head.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where a second chance held so much significance,” you said. “This isn’t a mistake that you can fix. It’s not a human error. It’s you and me. And it’s so—it’s final. There won’t be another chance for us, it’s now or never. And what if it’s never?”

You lowered your gaze, your fingers restless as they toyed with the sleeves of your black shirt. Every now and then, you’d lift your hand to your bare neck—you still hadn’t found any of your necklaces—as if seeking a distraction from the weight of the moment.

“Y-you are—you’re my—” you tried and couldn’t. Finally, you looked at him, and the words you couldn’t voice were right there, shimmering uncertainly in his dark eyes. “You’re my first thought in the morning and the last one at night. I don’t think my heart could take it if I started to have hope for us again, but we didn’t work out in the end.”

Jungkook felt his heart trip over several beats—

Stumble down his ribs—

Crash into his stomach—

Roll around the hollow cavities somewhere at the very bottom—

Rise suddenly, all the way back to his chest—

Expand—

And explode, it seemed. In a flash of light so vivid and intense that for a minute or two, his blood stopped running and he survived on nothing but the words you’d just said.

“And so that’s what I meant,” you finished, and he struggled to hear your next words over the loud pounding in his chest. “If I stay here and we don’t get back together—or we do, but not for long—then what? We see each other every day, we try to act like nothing’s wrong, we learn how to go back to being professional, and then four years later, you make another bet?”

Jungkook found the end of your sentence so utterly unexpected that he wasn’t sure if he had even heard you correctly. His response was half of a gasp and a fractured “I—” before you cut him off.

“I’m joking,” you said with a gentle smile—one that managed to feel both, very fitting and completely out of place in this situation. “That’s—well, that is why I think it’d be more reasonable for me to leave. That way, I think, we could figure it out without some dramatic, tragic consequences in case it, uh—in case something goes wrong.”

“R-right,” he said. A warm haze settled on his face in a delicate shade of pink. It appeared almost soft to the touch. “I… I understand. I-I don’t—I don’t know if there’s anything I can say that would take that away. All of your fear.”

You swallowed and nodded. “Yeah. There might not be anything to say at all.”

Jungkook hurriedly ran his tongue over his lips. He wasn’t thinking about you leaving right now. He was thinking about you staying and fighting through it.

He wanted to say something more, but he didn’t think he could mend these particular wounds in your heart. They ran deeper than his love could reach.

It wasn’t him that you should have talked to about this. It wasn’t him that could help you reach an agreement—or, at least, an understanding—with your own self.

“You should talk to your mum,” he said.

You looked up from the floor of the plane, surprised. “What?”

“Talk to her,” he repeated. “Just to hear what she thinks about everything. To hear her reasoning. To understand why she made the choices that she did. I think that would be good for you both.”

Your surprise deepened and gained an edge. You looked alarmed, as if the notion that a caregiver could ease your hurt rather than deepen it was new and foreign.

“I’ve—we’ve never—my mum and I have only talked about her relationship with my dad maybe once in our whole lives,” you said. “I have never even talked to her about my own relationship. You know I haven’t.”

He nodded solemnly. “I have, though.”

“What?” you asked. There was a ringing in your ears. “You have—you’ve talked to—to my mum? About—”

“I’m sure she’ll tell you everything.”

For a good minute, you watched him with an expression that held more questions than possible ways of asking them.

“I—I’m very confused right now,” you managed.

He nodded again, understanding, but still not offering any explanations.

He’d told you most of everything, really—he’d called those bits of the story “Haunting” and “Cursed.” But the rest of it had to be something you pieced together on your own.

For a long time, he had imagined this to be something that would hit you years later, perhaps when you would accidentally hear an old Rated Riot song. You’d think no, it can’t be, and you’d rush home. You’d pull out the albums, the track lists, and the lyrics.

And you’d know.

These conversations with your mum were his far side of the moon—invisible, but still present, still heavy.

These conversations were his thoughts and hopes and countless fears.

They were everything he brought to Rated Riot and everything he expressed in the recording booth, in Namjoon’s studio, and on stage.

They were his past and his present, and someone else’s future.

They were him without you, but still searching for you every morning when he woke up.

They were you, you, you.

Everything he’d ever talked to your mum about had been his songs. And all his songs had always been a tale about you—in every banal, every impossible narrative he could find within himself.

They were about seeing you and growing wings.

About kissing you and coming home.

About losing you and bleeding out.

About forever and five minutes that don’t mean anything once they’re over.

“I’m sorry,” he said, not capable of much else. “I needed her help with something. I didn’t really tell her anything, uh, directly, so to speak. But she—she knows. She’ll tell you everything. It’s just, um—you have to talk to her, too. You have to tell her what you told me.”

Airplanes, you realised suddenly, made it very easy to force yourself to stop running away. There was nowhere to escape—you could see the clouds reflected in his eyes and you were already falling in them anyway.

“I’ll talk to her,” you said.

Jungkook gave you a small nod and scratched his knee absentmindedly.

“I want you to stay,” he stated. “With the band. It’s—it’s selfish, but it’s the truth. I’ve always tried to encourage you to stop thinking so much a-and just do what you wanted, and this—this is what you want, despite your fear. You want to stay.”

You looked at him with a forlorn expression and he felt his hands twitch at his sides.

“But what will we do?” you asked.

“We’ll figure it out,” he promised. “I mean, we’ve gotten this far, right? So, give us a chance. We’re not completely hopeless. We can... talk our way through it all, step by step.”

You’ve talked your way through a lot and you have gotten this far, that was true. Even if the journey hadn’t been pleasant.

Seokjin had told you earlier today that as long as you stayed with the band, no one would care about what happened next. And, really, no matter how you looked at it, this was what it all boiled down to: it was just you.

Only you—afraid of what others will say, afraid of getting hurt and hurting him again, afraid of doing too much, and afraid of not doing enough.

“I’m—” you tried, “w-we don’t know what will happen. That’s why I’m—”

“I know,” he said. “And you’re right. We don’t know what will happen. That’s fucking terrifying. I’m scared, too.”

He did look a little scared, but he licked his lips and successfully collected himself.

The two of you were so close to meeting in the middle and taking that first step together—just a little more strain between your shaking, outstretched hands.

“And I-I know that the bet is another thing that—that might make it harder for you to believe that we can—that we can work it out,” he added, spinning his ring around his finger twice more. “But I want you to know that it—the bet was a fucked up thing to do. But it gave me a reason to talk to you about everything that I already wanted to talk to you about. I’m—even without the bet, I would have approached you, eventually. It just—I was fucking scared, so it might have taken me longer.”

It wasn’t just you.

Fear was in the epicentre of everything you were saying to each other. It was like the wind in every city you visited on this tour—inescapable, uncontrollable, persistent.

He was afraid, too—of trying and failing. Afraid of getting his heart broken and breaking yours. Afraid of never finding the forever that he desperately wanted with you.

“My point is,” Jungkook finished, “I think this is inevitable, because—well, let’s be honest,” he chuckled softly, trying to lessen the gravity of his confession, “all I’d ever wanted in my entire fucked-up life was you.”

Your breath trembled.

Something very deep inside of you wanted you to believe that inevitability was meant for the two of you, too.

“It’s been four years, though,” you said with a faint shake of your head. “What if it takes us another four to find a way to make this work?”

“It—well, I don’t really care how long it takes, to be honest,” he said. “I’m going to die yours.”

He said that and your heart stopped beating for a moment to listen.

To wait.

To make one thing very clear for you: you would never survive losing him again.

And you were scared—completely petrified—to find yourself in a situation where losing him was possible. Where it was likely.

Jungkook saw it on your face. He saw everything—the anguish, the pain, the doubt, the fear.

But he felt a little exhilarated to find the fight in your eyes, too. This fight was the reason you were talking to him about things that you’ve never talked about. It was the reason you were here.

“We’ll decide everything else when the idea of—of trying again doesn’t scare you so much anymore,” he said, keeping his voice steady. “When you hear your mum’s point of view, and you can make a, uh—an informed decision.”

He noted that there was something softer in your eyes when you looked at him again, but he could still discern the lingering edges of doubt.

“You think that’ll help me make an informed decision?” you asked, touched by his choice of words.

“I hope it will,” he replied. “But we can work it all out, either way. I just think you need to talk to her. It’s been so long.”

“Right. It has been.” You clasped your hands around your neck and tucked your chin between your palms. “It—it probably won’t be an easy conversation, though.”

“Nor will it be short, I imagine.”

“Hmm. Probably not.”

He sensed the growing distance between you as your eyes ran over the back of the seat in front of you. He knew you well enough to understand what you were doing: you were mapping out the rest of your story in your head.

He didn’t like that. Your stories rarely had happy endings.

“You don’t—don’t start planning it ahead, though,” he said hastily—before you reached the unhappily ever after in your mind. “It’ll be late when we land in London. You need to sleep. Talk to her after that. When you—when you’re not working. We can wait. We have time.”

Finally, you allowed your gazes to meet again—and to linger a little longer this time.

You took a moment to note that, despite knowing Jungkook for so long, every time you looked at him, you still needed a minute to will yourself to keep breathing. You remembered thinking, after your first few dates, if that would ever go away—logically, it should have.

But you watched him now, seven years since you’ve met, and the beating of your heart still felt backwards.

I’m going to die yours

I’m going to die—

“Okay,” you finally said. “I’ll call her as soon as possible.”

He nodded twice and closed his eyes for a brief respite—but hesitated, suddenly, before opening them again.

He wondered, for a suspended moment, what it would mean for you—this ‘as soon as possible.’

Then he looked at you and decided to tell you what he wanted it to mean.

“Before that happens, though—before you talk to her, I mean—I-I want to still be able to see you,” he said and did so assertively, using the phrase I want, but really meaning, I must. “I don’t want to not talk to you.”

You felt your frosty expression crumble effortlessly into a soft smile.

“We’ve agreed to a truce, right?” you said easily. Lightly.

His heart soared.

He was smiling, too, but with caution—his lips were pressed together as he bit into his lip ring to contain his smile to a level that he thought appropriate.

His shining eyes gave him away, however, and you wondered—the thought sudden and overwhelming—if there was a point in your life when you weren’t in love with him when he smiled.

“Let’s try a friendship,” he proposed.

“Oh—” Your smile abruptly turned into laughter as you remembered trying this once before. It had lasted for about two days. “You know we can’t be friends. We don’t know how.”

The gentle cadence of your laughter made him weightless.

“What are you talking about?” he teased—so high that he was certain the flight attendants were going to ask him to take it down a notch because it was dangerous to float on the ceiling in the middle of a flight. “We can be whatever the fuck we want to be.”

Your laughter grew bolder, strengthened by the relief that you’ve had this conversation, that you’ve decided on your next steps, however uncertain they were—and his smile spread.

You could see him beaming through your half-closed eyes, and there was absolutely nothing—no matter how big or small, significant or not at all—that you wouldn’t have done for him when he looked like that, and no amount of fear could have stopped you.

He'd burn down half of Europe for you, Seokjin had said.

You were worried you’d burn all of it for him.

“Honestly,” you said, “we’re such a mess that I have nothing else to say. Sure. Let’s try being friends again. Why not?”

“For the time being?” Jungkook asked. There was a tentative glint in his eyes. “Until we figure out if—until we decide what we’re going to do with us?”

It was very considerate of him to say ‘we’ here, when you knew that you were the one who needed to get it together in the end.

“For the time being,” you confirmed.

“And you’ll stay?” he asked once more. “With Rated Riot?”

Last night, he had told you he was letting you go, and you needed to hear it—not just to see how much he’s grown, but to fully understand yourself. To stop jumping from possibility to possibility. To accept that it was okay to do what you wanted sometimes.

The past few days were like flipping a coin and realising, while it was mid-air, which side you were hoping it would land on.

“I’ll stay.”

Jungkook thought that this flight was going to be the most thrilling part of his day. But a miracle happened as soon as the plane touched down in London.

His grandmother called him.

It wasn’t an accident like he had initially assumed when he saw her name on his phone. She called because she missed her favourite grandson and wanted to wish him good luck at his concert (and chastise him a little for not wearing “enough clothing” on stage).

Jungkook wasn’t sure if the tears in his eyes were because she’d remembered who he was, remembered what he did for a living, because she’d called, or because she’d confirmed his long-held suspicion that he was her favourite grandson.

Perhaps, and most likely, it was all of these things.

He was so excited that he stared at his phone even after the call had ended, ignoring the influx of more unintelligible, frantic messages from the same unknown number. He probably would have spent the rest of the night fixated on the screen if his battery hadn’t run out by the time everyone settled in the hotel.

At that point, there was nothing Jungkook wanted more than to tell you about the fifteen-minute phone call. However, he couldn’t call or text with his phone off—and waiting for ten minutes until he found the charger in his suitcase seemed like half of an eternity.

Unaware of the lateness of the hour, he lingered outside the hotel, thinking of a plan.

In the end, he decided he didn’t want to draw more attention to your friendship—he hiccupped on the word even in his thoughts—and approached the decorative garden at the front entrance. Ficus plants (artificial, as it turned out) rested in a bed of pebbles (real, for some reason) and Jungkook grabbed a handful of those before heading back to the south wing of the hotel.

He counted down the windows until he identified yours, then took half a dozen steps back from the wall and tossed a pebble at your window. It hit the glass with a gentle thud and dropped onto the grass four floors below.

Jungkook waited for a minute—or what felt like a minute—and tossed another one, making this one bounce against your windowsill before it slipped into your room through the crack of the open window.

He waited again and, finally, your curtains fluttered. A moment later, he saw your puzzled face as you opened the window and covered your squinting eyes with your hand, peering down into the darkness.

“Jungkook?” you called out. “What—what the fuck are you doing?”

“Trying to get your attention!” he shouted with an elated lilt in his voice.

You picked up the pebble from the windowsill and lifted it. He couldn’t see it very well from the ground, but he could see your confused expression.

“By throwing rocks at my window?”

“Yeah!”

“How—are you—for what—”

You stopped. There wasn’t a singular question you wanted to ask, because nothing about what he was doing made any sense whatsoever.

You leaned over the windowsill to get a better look at him, but it didn’t help much. The light from your hotel room made it difficult to discern his expression in the pitch-black night. And the garden lights adorning the exterior of the hotel only highlighted his white sneakers.

“I’m sure there were a lot of steps you could have taken before you had to resort to this,” you shouted into the night. “Most people text. Or knock on the door.”

“My phone’s dead,” he explained, lifting a black block that you assumed was the dead phone. “And I didn’t want anyone to see me going into your room. Can you come down here?”

“Wh—hold on a second.” You retreated into the room to put on a robe over the t-shirt you had worn to bed. The night wind felt a little less frigid when you leaned out of the window again. “Can you just come up here? It’s nearly six in the morning, no one will see—”

“Come on, we finally have a few days off!” he shouted, implying, clearly, that you’d have time to catch up on sleep later. After days of him forcing you to rest, this was very unusual—but, really, quite welcome.

You realised that something important must have happened for him to do this. However, his buoyant voice—and this whole situation in general—also made you wonder if he was drunk.

“I meant that it’s cold outside,” you said. “Wouldn’t it be warmer to—”

“I can—it’s not that bad,” he ended up saying after quickly surmising that his offer to warm you might lead to you throwing that same pebble right at his forehead. “Please?”

You were well aware that this could go on for a while, and it probably wouldn’t be long before your Romeo-and-Juliet-esque conversation attracted the attention of the hotel staff, who would politely ask you to find a different accommodation. The manager already didn’t seem especially pleased when he found out that a rock band would be staying at his hotel.

“Alright. I’m coming down,” you said. “Put the rocks back where you found them.”

He snickered and watched you close the window, disappearing inside of your room.

By the time he returned the remaining pebbles back to the garden, the sky was already beginning to paint itself red. The clouds obscured the rising sun, but Jungkook turned his head just in time to see you walk through the hotel door, and he felt like it was the middle of the day already.

“What’s going on?” you asked, a little concerned about the size of the grin on his face.

“My grandma called me,” he said. “She’s having a good day. She remembered me.”

“Oh, my God!” you gasped. All of your irritation about leaving your warm hotel room at this hour vanished in an instant. “That’s great news! Did you talk to her?”

“Yeah!” He nodded, nearly laughing in pure, beautiful euphoria. “The whole call, she was okay. Even scolded me for breaking the glass on her favourite picture frame when I came to say goodbye to her on the last night before the tour.”

You laughed, infected with his bright mood. “Jungkook, that’s—that’s fantastic. I’m so—”

Instinctively, he pulled you to him by wrapping his arms around your waist. For just a moment, he tightened his embrace and lifted you up slightly, laughing breathlessly when you gasped in surprise.

“I know,” he murmured into your neck as he lowered you to the ground. “I still can’t believe she really called.”

He held you close to him with one hand around your waist, and another one on the back of your neck—and you were stunned for a split-second. Then finally, muscle memory roused you, and you wrapped your arms around his neck, resting the side of your head against his.

“I’m—I’m so happy to hear that,” you whispered, feeling his breath on your shoulder and the goosebumps that rose on your skin as a result.

“I am, too.” He slowly pulled his head back to look at you, and the sight of the smile on his face was enough to pierce your heart with something that you could never remove. “You’re the first person I wanted to tell this to.”

Wordlessly, you pulled him back into a hug. You could feel the stretch of his cheeks against yours as his smile widened, and you realised you’d never want to run away from this. You’d always want to stay.

You were going to stay.

No. That wasn’t right.

You wouldn’t just stay with Rated Riot, determined to destroy every ounce of your fear for him. You’d have mopped up whole oceans for him. Captured shooting stars and stuffed them into jars. Flooded the entire world with an endless sea.

You’d have done anything to have him here like this: smiling so much that he could barely speak while his chest thud-thud-thudded against yours.

You felt so much of it—this vast love that refused to die no matter how much it was beaten—that you didn’t know what to do with it all.

A minute later, you pulled back slightly—a little dizzy from the intense whirlwinds inside your chest.

“T-thank you,” you stammered. “For telling me. I’m really—I’m so happy for you.”

His hands lingered on your waist, extending the moment to the very end.

“Thank you,” he replied, taking a reluctant step back. “She, um—she asked me to say hi to you. You know, from her.”

You were surprised that she remembered you—and brought you up!—and your smile returned, encouraged by the bashful look in his eyes when he said this.

“Give her my best the next time you talk to her,” you said.

“I will.” He nodded eagerly, then slowed down. “Although, I, uh—well—I don’t know when that’ll be.”

“That’s okay,” you replied quickly, not wanting to lose the lightness of the moment so soon. “The important thing is that she’s having a good day today. And she called you!”

You raised your voice at the end of the sentence, and it was enough to rekindle his excitement.

“She did!” he sang. “She said I was her favourite grandson, by the way. So I was right.”

“Oh—hmm.” You remembered pretending to argue with him about this in Stockholm and couldn’t help yourself. “Well, alright. I guess that makes sense. Remember that stray orange cat that she used to feed every night? Reginald?”

“Reggie,” he said, grinning. The cat was one of the first things his grandmother mentioned when she called tonight; it had stopped coming to see her, but continued to take up a large place in her heart. “What’s he got to do with this?”

“Well, I mean, she loved him so much, even though he scratched her every time she got too close,” you explained. “Clearly, she always had a soft spot for troublemakers.”

“Okay, now,”—he clicked his tongue—“my grandma did actually love that cat a lot, so I’ll take that as a compliment.”

You snickered and he laughed, too, and for a moment, he thought his chest might have exploded if he felt any happier than he did right now.

Then he noticed you clutching your robe closer to your body. Whatever you’d worn underneath wasn’t enough to keep you warm now that the initial excitement slowly began to fade.

“Do you, uh… want to go back inside?” he asked, gesturing at the exposed skin of your wrists. “You’re shivering.”

You looked down at your hands. “I’m okay. But maybe we could sit?”

You turned to look around. There was a bench right at the edge of the garden, next to a bronze-coloured flowerpot that was placed in the pebbles Jungkook had used to “get your attention”.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

You shivered all over again when he sat down next to you, and the bench turned out to be smaller than it had appeared. You could feel every bounce of his restless legs.

“So,” you said, “what did you two talk about?”

He brightened at your question, and suddenly, you didn’t think he was anywhere near close enough.

“Oh, so many things,” he said. “She told me she’d like to see us perform. Can we make that happen when we go back?”

“Absolutely,” you promised.

“Yeah?” His smile widened and his bouncing increased. “She’ll probably hate it. Mosh pits aren’t her thing.”

“We’ll put her in the balcony seats,” you suggested. This conversation felt so ordinary that it was hard to imagine you could be talking to him about anything else. “She’ll love every second of watching you on stage.”

“She said she saw pictures from the tour,” he added, giddy. “My cousins showed her Maggie’s Instagram profile.”

“Did she see your pirate cosplay?”

Jungkook displayed a remarkable resilience to the pirate jokes after that first concert—you and Jimin suspected that the response from the audience played a big part in his newfound immunity—and he chuckled at it now.

“She did,” he said. “She said I reminded her of Kurt Russell in Escape from New York.”

You pulled back a little to get a better look at him, even though he no longer needed to wear the eye patch. Most of the discolouration around his eye had already faded and you’d managed to cover up the scratches with a few smaller, skin-coloured adhesive pads.

“Well, shit,” you said. “Maybe I do kind of see the resemblance. You’ve got the hair.”

“I don’t know who that is,” he admitted.

You widened your eyes. “Jungkook. You don’t know Snake Plissken?”

“No, but my grandma said all her friends had a crush on him after the film came out,” he said. “Except for my grandma, of course. She insists she only ever had eyes for my grandpa.”

You both chuckled at this with a childlike glee—the thought of a love that spanned decades felt exhilarating and very possible as the sky awakened above you.

“My mum liked Kurt Russell, too, after the film,” you said. “And she was nine at the time. She snuck into the theatre with her brother and his friends.”

Jungkook inclined his head thoughtfully. “Maybe that guy’s not so bad, then.”

“He’s a classic,” you corrected. “But your taste in films isn’t.”

“That’s actually exactly what my grandma said,” he remembered. “She told me not to come home until I watched it.”

You could hear his grandmother saying this exact thing to him and felt yourself smile again.

“I think you’d love it if you watched it,” you said. “So, it’s not much of a threat.”

“Really?” He looked at you, but only for a fraction of a moment. “Would you—I mean, it’d be cool if we could—”

You knew what he was asking. And your response—like most of everything else tonight—came as a reflex. “I’m sure we can rent it on Amazon.”

“Okay,” he said, his shoulders slumping against yours in visible relief. “That—I’d like that.”

Unwelcome, the raw breeze of the late hour caught up with you, and you felt your body shudder involuntarily once more. Determined to ignore the chill, you opened your mouth to continue the conversation, but Jungkook suddenly leaned forwards.

“Here,” he said, slipping out of his dark flannel. “Put this on. It’s not much, but—”

“No, no—” you tried, but he drew closer to drape the flannel over your shoulders. “You’ll catch a cold.”

“I’ll be fine,” he insisted, pulling back. To further reduce the significance of the gesture, he added, “it’s what friends do. And I’m warm anyway.”

You clutched the collar of the flannel tighter to prevent it from sliding off. Or just to have something to do with your hands. “Well—thanks, friend.”

A powerful waft of his cologne permeated your senses, and you closed your eyes, preserving the refreshing blend of woody and citrus notes that already took up a significant amount of space in your memory.

Every time you inhaled, his scent mixed with a different moment from your life—and it all flooded your mind in an unstoppable sequence.

Meeting Jungkook—

Kissing him for the first time on that rainy night in the park—

Hugging him hello every morning before class—

Borrowing his clothes when you stayed at his dorm—

Losing your mind when you found yourself alone and his scent returned to you, uninvited.

Jungkook appeared to be sharing your memories in real time as he inhaled sharply and tapped his fingers against his shaky thighs.

“Friends,” he said, swallowing, “probably don’t kiss each other.”

His words ignited a fire in the pit of your stomach without any matches.

You glanced at him from the corner of your eye. “Yeah, uh—t-they probably don’t.”

“Hmm. Right.”

“As your friend,” you said, sitting up straighter and letting his flannel settle around your shoulders while you lowered your hands to the wooden bench underneath you, “I’m pointing out that you’re on a high because your grandma called. That’s why you’re thinking about—”

“I’m on a high because I’m with you,” he stated. “My friend.”

The fire inside you spread rapidly, wildly, uncontrollably.

The way you were starting to lose feeling in your fingers from gripping the bench so tightly, yet you refused to let go of it, should have probably been studied scientifically.

“Well, then,” you said, “let’s look at it this way: have you ever kissed friends before? Sid maybe?”

Jungkook snorted. “God forbid.”

“Minjun, then?”

“No,” he said. “Do you think I should?”

You snickered. “No. But if we’re friends, too, then we probably shouldn’t do that, either.”

He looked at you, his lips puckered in thought. Unconsciously, you had started to scrape at the dark paint of the bench.

You hadn’t meant a word of what you’d said. He suspected as much.

“Probably not,” he agreed. “But we’re such a mess, though, right?”

The echo of your own words on the plane brought a smile to your face again—a reaction more rooted in easing the sudden surge of anticipation rather than genuine amusement.

“Yeah,” you said quietly. “We’re such a mess.”

Jungkook felt a little afraid, which was something that he always felt when the world around him blurred, and he found himself incapable of looking away from your lips.

It was dangerous, this tunnel vision. This singular focus. This impossible, magnetic pull that defied all reason, that made the whole universe tremble with a silent—

He leaned closer.

For a fleeting moment, the space between you was filled with nothing but your echoing heartbeats and silent memories.

For a fleeting moment, time itself held its breath.

You remembered Oslo and the way Jungkook had pulled away. You remembered how worried you were, how horrified—he was drunk, and he’d pulled away. He’d done the rational thing.

Funny thing, rationality.

You thought you were perfectly rational when you closed the remaining distance and your lips brushed against his—hesitant, uncertain, tender. A permission, a question, and his unequivocal death, all in one.

Jungkook inhaled—as if checking if he was alive or just pretending to be—and reached up to touch your cheek. He pulled you closer and stole the remnants of your breath with his kiss.

It was fair, he thought. You had stolen his entire soul.

The touch of your lips lasted for less than a minute—not nearly enough time for the trees around you to exhale in clandestine relief—but the softness of his mouth, the slow, intoxicating smacking of your lips against his, and the faint notes of mint on his tongue did irreparable damage to your pulse.

He stole that too, he supposed, because when he pulled away, his heart seemed to beat with enough strength to support the lives of half the population.

“Do friends discuss what it means if they kiss?” he asked, winded. His chest touched yours every time it rose in an attempt to recover.

Your laughter was breathless, too. “I’m thinking no.”

“I like what you’re thinking.”

Something very tranquil and very happy was inscribed into the contours of your features.

Soft red feathers spread across the sky above you as the city slowly stirred awake.

For the first time in a long time, everything felt like it was supposed to.

“I have a free day tomorrow,” you said. “Well, today.”

Jungkook was a bit puzzled by the shift in conversation but went along with it nonetheless. “Yeah?”

“Mhmm. The girls and I made plans, but I’m, uh—I’m going to call my mum before I go. I set an alarm for it and everything,” you said with a self-conscious chuckle. “I’m going to talk to her.”

“Oh.” He was shaking a little, he realised. He hoped you wouldn’t notice it and decide to give him his flannel back. “Well, that—that’s good. You should do that.”

You nodded, lowering your gaze to the grass and the pebbles below. “Yeah.”

“I’m going to kiss you again,” he decided. “For good luck.”

Your surprised smile overshadowed everything else he wanted to tell you.

“Oh,” you said. “Is that what friends do?”

“Yes,” he replied. “You didn’t know? It can’t be just one kiss, that’s bad luck.”

“Actually, I heard even numbers are bad luck.”

He gasped theatrically. “Oh, but that’s terrible! I’ll have to kiss you three times, then. To be safe.”

You smiled and shook your head. He died a little then, because everything was here, just like in his worst nightmares and his favourite daydreams: your scent, your eyes, your smile. All of you.

“You’re always such an idiot,” you said with so much affection that the wind crept away miserably, defeated by the warmth in Jungkook’s gaze when he looked at you. When he felt your hand on the side of his face—gentle and careful so as not to touch the healing bruises on his cheek.

“Hmm.” He wasn’t sure if he’d ever remember how to breathe again. “You said you love me, though.”

“I do,” you said, beaming, as you ran the tips of your fingers over the edges of his wolf cut. “It’s a burden I have to live with.”

He shivered from your touch and leaned in—impatient, all of a sudden. His lips met yours with a soft, rehearsed touch, and he thought he died all over again when you pulled him closer.

Your heart brought back the memories of sensations that you’ve tried to bury; it revived them and set them loose in your chest when you kissed him back and felt the smile on his lips.

Your heart threatened to quit it, to burst into flames and take you down with it when you felt his tongue slowly glide over your lower lip.

Your heart settled right against his when you parted your lips. When you felt his warm breath mingle with yours. When you held onto him with everything you were feeling, and he held onto you.

He kissed you in every way that a friend wasn’t supposed to, and groaned softly when he touched the back of your neck and felt the relentless roughness of goosebumps under his fingertips. Your body reflected everything he was feeling.

Every time your lips met—gentle and feverish—every time he pulled you closer—frantic and heated—every time you inhaled when he exhaled—sharp and eager—you were setting fire to something that once was and building something new in its place.

There seemed to be small fragments of a foreign nature inside of you both—fragments that had danced with each other long before your first kiss and would continue the lively, eternal swaying for years and years after your last.

Maybe it was dust from two neighbouring stars, drawn together by a force stronger than them, but forced to crash somewhere on earth and settle and quiver and wake up inside of you both.

Or maybe it was something less grand. Maybe it was just luck. Just coincidence.

“See,” you whispered, pulling back. “I told you we don’t know how to be friends.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he replied, kissing the corner of your lips. The sparks inside him were fierce and relentless when you smiled in response. “I think friends can decide what sort of friends they want to be.”

“What sort of friends are we going to be, then?”

“This sort.”

You could see the northern lights and the tails of comets in his eyes before he leaned in to kiss you again. You could taste the longing for the Milky Way and the whispers of timeless meteors on his tongue.

And it all solidified this for you: the two of you were not luck and not coincidence.

You were something much more.

chapter title credits: bring me the horizon, “follow you”

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astroa3h · 5 months

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lilith through the houses ✨🥀

Lilith in the 1st House: Here, Lilith influences your self-image and personality. It’s like having a shadow self that’s rebellious and defiant, constantly challenging the way you present yourself to the world. You might struggle with anger or impulsiveness, feeling like an outsider even in your own skin.

Lilith in the 2nd House: This placement touches on your values and possessions. Lilith can manifest as an intense, sometimes destructive relationship with material things and self-worth. You might experience deep-seated fears about security and survival, or find yourself obsessing over possessions as a way to fill emotional voids.

Lilith in the 3rd House: Communication gets a Lilith twist here. Your words might carry a sharp edge, often veering into taboo or controversial territory. Misunderstandings can be frequent, and you may feel like your true thoughts are too dark or intense for everyday conversation.

Lilith in the 4th House: In the realm of home and family, Lilith can stir up deep, unresolved issues. This placement often points to a tumultuous home life or unresolved trauma from the past. You might feel like an outcast in your own family or struggle with a sense of belonging.

Lilith in the 5th House: Lilith’s presence here can bring intense, sometimes tumultuous experiences in love, creativity, and pleasure. Romantic relationships might be fraught with obsession, power struggles, or taboo elements. Your creative outlets could also be a source of inner turmoil, expressing the darker aspects of your psyche.

Lilith in the 6th House: In the house of work and health, Lilith can manifest as a rebellious attitude toward daily routines and responsibilities. You might find yourself in constant conflict with authority figures or grappling with issues around control and perfectionism in your work or health routines.

Lilith in the 7th House: Relationships are a battleground with Lilith here. Deep fears of abandonment or betrayal might surface, or you could find yourself drawn to partners who bring out your darkest qualities. Relationships may feel like a power struggle, where intimacy is intertwined with control.

Lilith in the 8th House: This house is already about transformation and deep bonds, but with Lilith, it goes to another level. You might have an intense fear of loss or betrayal, or find yourself drawn to dangerous or taboo aspects of sexuality and intimacy. It's a realm of deep psychic wounds and transformational healing.

Lilith in the 9th House: Beliefs and higher learning take a dark twist with Lilith here. Your belief systems may include taboo or unconventional elements, and you might feel a deep sense of alienation in your quest for truth. There's a potential for fanaticism or an obsession with dark, forbidden knowledge.

Lilith in the 10th House: In your career and public image, Lilith can manifest as a fear of authority or a desire to rebel against societal expectations. You might feel misunderstood by the public or struggle with a public persona that feels inauthentic or oppressive.

Lilith in the 11th House: Your friendships and social circles may be impacted by Lilith’s darker energy. You might find yourself drawn to social groups that are unconventional or taboo, or feel like an outcast among your peers. Your hopes and dreams could also be tinged with Lilith’s intense energy, leading to a sense of disillusionment.

Lilith in the 12th House: In the realm of the subconscious, Lilith can bring up your deepest fears and insecurities. You might struggle with feelings of isolation or be haunted by fears that you can't even articulate. This placement often indicates a deep need for inner healing, as Lilith brings to light the darkest corners of your psyche.

xox astro ash

Get your own Lilith Reading @ astroash.net

(Find Under Single Placement Reading)

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copperbadge · 6 months

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youtube

Feeling a little overly perceived by Dr. Dodson right now, not gonna lie.

I'll throw a transcript under the cut, but both reading the transcript and listening to the video can be difficult as it's quite long, so here's some highlights. As always, these are the opinions of a specialist but only one specialist, so take with a grain of salt, and if you have research to add to this, please feel free to comment or reblog with it. I believe this presentation is from sometime in 2022.

ADHD appears to derive from issues in the corpus striatum in the brain. In most people, the corpus striatum filters out all but the most important input AND output; with ADHD, the things normally handled "outside of awareness" must be handled consciously.

People with ADHD don't see their emotions coming. Emotion is immediate, intense, and unfiltered, making therapies like CBT or ACT difficult, because you can learn the technique but you won't have time to employ it. Because people with ADHD have impulse control issues, expressing emotions "inappropriately" is common, leading people with ADHD to believe they can't trust themselves.

One function of ADHD-typical dysregulation is Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, which nobody understands even a little. People who have it can't even adequately describe it to people who want to study it. It is intense, painful, and apparently impossible to control. Prevention is based in maladaptive behaviors designed to avoid it entirely (perfectionism, people pleasing, generalized withdrawal). The only currently known treatment is alpha agonist medication.

Lastly, by the age of twelve, a child with ADHD has likely received twenty thousand more "negative or corrective" messages than their neurotypical peers. (This isn't relevant to the rest, I just found it sufficiently horrifying to warrant inclusion. Fortunately for me, if I got 20,000 negative or corrective messages, I wasn't paying attention for most of them.)

Anyway, here's the transcript of the first half. I did this by copying and cleaning up the auto-transcript on YouTube, but I stopped at Question Time, so this is only the first half (the presentation). Transcription of the second half is available at YouTube.

There is suddenly a very large interest in the whole subject of emotional dysregulation and ADHD. That has been driven oddly enough by the Food and Drug Administration, which has just opened up several pathways that drug companies can study emotional dysregulation and whether or not their medications can get an FDA indication for emotional dysregulation. So it's sort of follow the money. Up until then, there was not a great deal of interest for ADHD emotional dysregulation.

We have to understand that the ADHD diagnostic criteria were not made for people like you and me, either practitioners or people who have ADHD or their families. They were designed for and made by people who do research and pretty much that's it. People who do research have to have criteria that they can physically see and count. "Little Johnny was up and out of his chair three times in the last hour," and you can write a three on your clipboard. Things which are invisible, not always there, hard to count, or even hidden by the patient, don't lend themselves to research very easily and so tend to be ignored. And so consequently this is one of the main reasons why emotional dysregulation -- until there was some other motive provided -- was pretty much ignored and disregarded.

Consequently ADHD right now, if you look at the 18 diagnostic criteria, are almost entirely behavioral criteria. What is the person doing? Not how is the person thinking, what is the patient feeling, how are they controlling their emotions, how are they sleeping. Things that are all very, very important to the person who has ADHD but which is essentially ignored by the diagnostic criteria.

Why should you care? Who really cares about this? Well, the definition of what ADHD is and isn't defines who and what will be studied. It defines who will actually get into a study and what questions will be asked. It defines who will be diagnosed with ADHD and who will not. One of the most common problems I get is with a secondary referral to me -- somebody clearly has ADHD but they're not pinging off the walls, they can sit and do their work, especially when they get into a hyperfocus, and so they're told they couldn't possibly have ADHD. When really they just have the inattentive subtype and they're not being driven by their behavior, their overt behavior. Therefore it defines who will get treatment, who will get insurance coverage for that treatment, and who will get accommodations in school when they're young and at the workplace when they're older.

Consequently we should also care because the other major components of ADHD get ignored. These are the ones that if you really stand back and look at it cause the greatest amount of impairment, the greatest amount of embarrassment, the greatest amount of just…problems in general. We're talking about cognition and thinking, that people with ADHD fundamentally think in a different way than do neurotypical people. They are able to engage with the tasks of their lives in a totally different way. Their ability to control their emotions and their behavior, control their emotional responses, tremendously affects their self-esteem and their self-definition. Who am I? What am I worth? What am I valued? Why am I valued in a certain way? What do other people think of me?

It affects tremendously the nature and healthiness of relationships. How you respond emotionally to the people in your realm makes a great deal of difference about the healthiness and gratification you get from your relationships. Being highly dysregulated in terms of your energy and emotions also affects deeply how well you sleep, how easy it is to fall asleep and awake refreshed, and of course it affects emotional dysregulation.

And this is probably, when you look at it in the long term and especially with adults, probably the most impairing part of the ADHD syndrome. The vast majority of people with ADHD have found ways around their academic and work performance, but they haven't found their way around their emotional reactions to the people and events of their lives.

At all points in the life cycle -- child, adolescent, adult, and elderly -- people who have ADHD nervous systems lead intense, passionate lives. Their highs are higher, their lows are lower, all of their emotions are much more intense. And that really is what we're talking about: not really the quality of the emotions -- people who have ADHD have the same types of emotions for the same reasons that everybody else does. What we're talking here, in terms of dysregulation, is two things: one, the expression of emotions, being able to choose whether or not you let an emotion out. And then, when you do decide to express it, how intensely that emotion is experienced and expressed by you as a unique individual.

Consequently just about everybody with ADHD, but especially little children, are always at some sort of risk of being overwhelmed by their own emotions from within themselves. This is something that needs to be really emphasized: a lot of people with ADHD grow up not being able to trust themselves.

So why is this happening, especially to people with ADHD? I think that just about everybody now would agree that ADHD is primarily a problem of insufficient inhibition, being able to slow down and keep things from happening. If you look at the mass of the human brain, 85% of all the nerves in your brain and out in your nervous system are inhibitory in function. We happen to be aware of the other 15% because we can see what happens when those nerves are used: they create movement, they create emotions, they create our experience and memory. We have to remember they are a minority of the actual mass of the human brain.

Most of what happens inside the brain occurs outside of awareness. What happens is the brain starts something, it gets it moving, and then uses inhibition to guide that toward the destination it wants. It's like shooting off a rocket -- shooting it off is the easy part, guiding it to where you want it to go is the hard part.

When you look at where stimulant class medications work, they work solely in the deep areas of the brain down in the basal ganglia, and especially in an area called the corpus striatum, which is just Latin for a "striped body". That's how it looks when you look at it -- it's got many very fine stripes in it. This area, the corpus striatum, is almost entirely inhibitory in function. What it does is that it inhibits neurological input and output to just the one piece of information or one action that happens to be most important at that time. Everything else gets handled, but it gets handled out of awareness.

Probably the easiest place to see this in action is when we're driving a car. Driving a car is the most difficult thing that the average human being ever has to learn how to do. It's a very difficult process, if anybody has ever had an adolescent learning to drive. But once we learn how to drive a car we do it largely outside of our own conscious awareness. We can drive along, talk to the person on the seat next to us, think about what we're going to have for dinner, sing along to the radio, and not really pay attention, conscious attention, to what's going on around us. But if suddenly something is out in front of the car, even before our conscious brain can process what that thing is, our corpus striatum has already handled it. Slam on the brakes, swerve to miss it, start to question that person's parentage, in the twinkling of an eye. The corpus striatum has been scanning everything, handling everything.

So basically what ADHD is, is that relative lack of inhibition that should be there. Inattention, which is a cardinal feature of ADHD, is the relative lack of the inhibition of other inputs or distractions. When we look at physiologically what's happening, we don't actually pay attention to one thing. Neurologically, we suppress every other thing we might engage with except the one thing that we want. It is maximally inefficient in that way.

Impulsivity is a relative lack of inhibition, of the expression of actions and emotions before you can think about them and make decisions about that expression. Hyperactivity is the relative lack of inhibition of physical and mental activity. When the physical activity of the hyperactive little boy who's pinging off a wall goes away in adolescence, they're still very much mentally active in their own brains.

So what? The “so what” for most of us is that when this area of the brain is not working as it should, people cannot regulate the experience and expression of their emotions. Emotions are experienced as completely unmodified and unscreened. The word that most people use is that they are raw. They come out without any modification at all, they go in without any modification at all. People can see this in hyperacusis, where somebody chewing or the conversation across the restaurant comes in loud and clear because it can't be screened out.

All this is tremendously overwhelming. We get overwhelmed by entirely too much input, and the impulse to have entirely too much output. It's exhausting, and when it does get inappropriately expressed it's embarrassing, so consequently people with ADHD must always be vigilant of themselves.

Now, when we look at the traditional therapies that have been used, or tried to be used, with ADHD, they have had very very poor track records. They're largely ineffective in helping people control the expression of what they think and feel. The reason for this is that people with ADHD don't see their own emotions, their own actions, coming. They find out about their emotions and actions the same way everybody else does: it's already out there before they even know that it's coming. Consequently they don't have the time and the warning to use the techniques and new skills that they may have learned in behavior modification therapy, or in cognitive therapy. They learned them, learned them perfectly well, but the cat’s out of the bag before they can make use of them.

Right now, as we sit here today, medications are the only thing we have to offer that have a proven track record, because they're there all the time. We have two basic groups: we have the stimulant class medications which are amphetamine, methylphenidate, et cetera, which help directly with inhibition. They help slow things down, they help inhibit both input that would distract us and output. It gives you the same two seconds that everybody else has, to see an emotion or an action coming up, to play it out in your mind. “If this happens then this will happen, then that'll happen. Oh, I don't want that to happen, I'll redirect it.”

The alpha agonist, of which we have two -- guanfacine and clonidine -- inhibit the energy driving the speed and intensity of response. Interesting enough, when we look at just clean effectiveness, when we measure how effective is this treatment, the alpha agonists are significantly more effective than are the stimulants. Usually that's kind of a false choice, because most people end up taking both classes of medication.

A very special type, I think, of emotional dysregulation is -- again a terrible technical term -- what's called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. We actually don't know what it is. It's much too early to tell. But it does seem to be a thing with which many people with ADHD identify. There was a brief article from ADDitude that got posted on Reddit, on their subreddit on ADHD; that particular posting got twice as many responses, in less than a month, than any other posting that had ever been put on that subreddit. It really touched a lot of people in a strong way.

In my own checklist, when I'm asking about Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, the question I have is: “For your entire life, in other words going all the way back into childhood, have you always been much more sensitive than other people you know to rejection, teasing, criticism, or your own perception that you’ve failed or fallen short?” This is directly from a psychiatric textbook, an old one, and it's the definition of a technical term, for psychiatrists called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.

It's important to note, this is all a matter of degree. No one likes being rejected or criticized. Everybody hates it when we fail, we fall short, especially in front of other people. Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is much more intense, and is much more than this universal discomfort.

When they were originally doing the research on this particular idea, 45 years ago, they wanted to get that intensity right up there in the name, and so they chose the word dysphoria -- which unfortunately happens to be Greek -- but it means “unbearable”. Because that was the description they were getting from people over and over and over again. Again, for reasons unknown, people with rejection sensitivity have trouble describing what the intense emotion is all about. They can describe its intensity -- “it's awful, it's terrible, it's catastrophic,” -- but not the quality of the mood. And so, over and over again, these research subjects would finally just tell the researcher, “Look, man, back off. I can't find words to tell you what this awful feeling feels like, but I want you to know I can hardly stand it.” And so that's where the word dysphoria came from. A researcher at Harvard who decided to put it into Greek, but that unbearable quality is very much a part of what's going on, a part of the experience of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.

It's extremely common in people with ADHD; my guess is that about 95% of my patients report it as a significant impairment, and about a third of my patients say that it is by far the most impairing part of their ADHD. For the majority of people, and most occurrences, it is not that particularly disruptive, but when it hits, it turns your life upside down.

So how is rejection sensitivity experienced? There's no warning. It hits out of the blue; there's no way to protect yourself from it. It happens all at once, it goes from zero to a hundred percent instantaneously. It is commonly experienced as being physically painful, as if someone just punched you in the chest or punched you in the stomach -- there's an aching in the core of your being.

Once it gets started it seems to be largely uncontrollable until it's run its course, whatever it is. The quality of the mood is indescribable. Most people struggle to find any words at all to describe this feeling, even though it's massively intense. The duration can be a few minutes to several months. It's a very potent experience and can make it very difficult to risk ever being rejected or criticized again.

If this very intense emotional reaction is internalized, it looks for all the world like an instantaneous major depression, complete with suicidal thinking. And so a lot of times people do get a diagnosis of major depression, because the clinician they're working with fails to pick up the triggered, instantaneous nature of the onset of that depressive-looking syndrome. If it's externalized, it presents as a rage that is directed at the person or situation that wounded them so terribly. In fact, being “wounded” is is a very common description. This sort of sudden trigger change, with an intense emotional response, not uncommonly leads to a misdiagnosis of borderline character organization.

So if you can't see it coming, and you can't do anything once it's happened, how do people try and protect themselves from episodes of rejection sensitivity happening in the first place? Some people use perfectionism; they try to be above reproach. They feel driven to be the very best at everything they do. These are the penultimate overachievers. It works, but it's also an absolutely terrible, driven way in which to live.

By far the most common response is that people become people pleasers. They are constantly scanning everybody around them and trying to figure out what that person wants or would approve of, and that's what they give them, so much so that it is the to the exclusion of what they want for their own lives. These are people who take care of others, please others, to the exclusion of any sort of gratification in their own lives.

Another very common way that people try to deal with this is that they give up trying anything new, giving up anything in which they might fail or be embarrassed. I have hundreds of patients who have never been able to apply for a job or ask someone of the opposite sex out for a date. Just the imagination of being told no is so frightening, so devastating, that they just say, “No, I'm not going there. I'll sit this one out.”

One of the most effective ways of dealing with this are the alpha agonist medications, and when they work they can be almost completely effective. Alpha agonist again is a tongue twisting name, but it's not as tongue-twisting as the full name, which is alpha-2 selective adrenergic agonists. So you can see why we shorten it a bit. They were originally blood pressure medications that came on the market in the early 1980s. They worked very poorly -- when they did work, at most they lowered blood pressure about 10%, which was measurable but it still required other things that needed to be done in order to get most people's blood pressure down into a therapeutic range.

We have two of them, guanfacine which was marketed both as immediate release and extended release under the name of Intuniv, and clonidine, which was marketed under the trade name of Kapvay, both as an immediate release product and as a delayed release product. They have been used as a treatment of the hyperactive component of ADHD for more than 30 years, so these are not new medications for the field of ADHD. They're very much the treatment of choice for the “hyperactive, disruptive, and obnoxious little boy” that is what most people have in their minds when they consider the notion of “What does a person with ADHD look like?”

The exact mechanism of action of these medications both in ADHD and especially in rejection sensitivity is highly unclear. We really don't know -- we have a couple of ideas but they are very definitely theoretical. The only thing that we know for sure is that the stimulants don't work by stimulating anything, and that the alpha agonists don't work by being alpha agonists. How they do work is completely unknown.

We have two medications, they seem to work equally well, so there's nothing that would lead you to choose one over the other. The problem is that the robust response that we're looking for that really changes people's lives, is disappointingly low -- at about 30% to either molecule. Luckily that 30% is a different 30% of people, so that 30% of people get a good response to guanfacine but it's largely a different 30% that get a response to clonidine. So if the first medication tried does not work, it makes good clinical sense that that one should be stopped and the other one tried. There was an unfortunately worded sentence in an article I wrote for ADDitude several years ago that gave the impression that you could use the two medications together; they should not be used together. You try one, if that doesn't work you try the other.

The typical dose of either one is in the range of three milligrams of guanfacine per day or about three tenths of a milligram of clonidine per day. If you take all the people who get a good robust response to either one of these medications, about 80% are going to end up at these doses, so it's by far the most common dose.

There are of course side effects. Anything that's going to adjust the adrenaline system of the body is going to have the potential for sedation as a side effect, and this does occur for about 25% of people. It's usually mild and it does go away -- over a period of several months. So a person has to be fairly patient with that. It can cause dry mouth, and it's by a different mechanism then the stimulants can cause dry mouth, so the two of them together can really make your mouth cottony dry. And the third one is an accentuation of a universal experience we've all had, when we stand up quickly and suddenly and we get dizzy, get kind of a head rush, vision goes a bit gray. The technical term for it is orthostasis. And this can happen more frequently when you take the alpha agonist medications.

The benefits of the alpha agonist medications take a while to develop. When you change the dose it takes five days for the benefits to develop, so once again they're not like the stimulants where what you see is what you get at one hour. It takes a while for these medications to work and to see all that they can do.

Now just as a side note, Strattera has been looked at in two studies for emotional dysregulation and the results have been what they call mixed. If they did work it was only to a very minimal degree, almost undetectable, so Strattera does not seem to be a medication one could use and expect to have it help with emotional dysregulation.

So in summary, emotional dysregulation is a basic feature of ADHD, is almost universal in ADHD, and it should be considered as a core symptom of ADHD that ought to be evaluated in every initial evaluation. Rejection sensitivity…it's unclear yet -- this is an old concept that has only been brought up in the last couple of years. Its exact nature is still unclear. It does seem to be a specific form of emotional dysregulation, especially in regard that it does respond very well to medication. But again, how it fits into emotional dysregulation is completely unclear at this point. It does seem to be something that's really important, though. It is a thing that resonates with a large number of people with ADHD.

#adhd #sam has adhd #rejection sensitive dysphoria #RSD #emotional dysregulation #Youtube

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hopefulfuturenovelauthor · 1 year

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Headcanons of what's like to date Bruce, Dick, Jason, Martian, Wally, and Clark?

Hi, sorry for taking so long, but I am very grateful for your patience!

Here you go...

Headcanons of what's like to date Bruce, Dick, Jason, Martian, Wally, and Clark?

I would like to state that I’m assuming you meant Martian Manhunter and not Miss Martian, but in the case that I am wrong and you meant Miss Martian let me know and I’ll add her to this or write a super-long essay of your guy’s relationship or something!

As always please do not copy my work in any way, shape, or form. Thanks!

Warnings: none i think... not spell checked...

Bruce Wayne

Dating Bruce Wayne? Gotham’s favorite Billionaire and the Batman? Wow, good luck.

There is a lot of angsty shit in your relationship. Keep in mind it’s not like you guys have like crazy issues or anything, not to say that the Joker isn’t a crazy issue, but I mean that you don’t actually fight with each other a lot.

You disagree quite a bit considering you watch him on monitors and he goes out and actually gets hurt, but all of that frustration and worry comes from a place of care.

However, you didn’t talk to him for days when he decided to let Dick join him in the field. You were beyond upset, especially since you knew the dangers of crime-fighting yourself, seeing as you used to be a vigilante.

Regardless of that, it was Dick that convinced you to cut Bruce some slack. Eventually, you came to agree with the teenager, but only after you kicked Bruce where the sun doesn’t shine.

On a nicer note, definitely lots of gifts coming from his end even though he is called the dark knight.

Even when you were both playing hero and he didn’t know who you were under the mask he gave you little gadgets. You two had also met outside of hero-ing and in your real lives where he constantly graced you with the treat of coffee and/or donuts.

He likes to get you nice treats and sweets. He knows you don’t care for expensive gifts, especially since you work for a lot of nonprofits.

As for PDA on a scale, I will give you a 7.5/10. A solid 2.5 for physical affection such as hand holding, forehead kisses, whispering in each other's ears, and being a little too close to each other but not so close that you freak out everyone else around you.

As for that leftover 5 on the scale, holy shit do you guys never shut up. The constant flirting is where most of this score comes from. Saying embarrassing and inappropriate shit anywhere and everywhere is common with you. You tease each other relentlessly and enjoy seeing the other squirm. It can be quite uncomfortable for others around you, but you tend to keep the more spicy comments quieter, which leads to all of your odd whisperings.

You sort of live with him…? You guys are most often at his place, but you did decide to keep your own just because you wanted something that you paid for and could afford unlike his gigantic fucking manor.

Bruce cares for you deeply and understands why you want to keep your independence and have at least something of your own, especially considering that you guys work together often.

You are close with all of his family, including each kid he adopts, takes in, or has under his proverbial wing. In fact, you kind of think they prefer you over him, or at the very least Jason definitely does.

It might also be common sense now that Alfred also likes you more than Bruce because, in your guys' relationship, you have all of the brain cells and are logical.

You both can be impulsive and rude. You both can come across as very blunt and private people. You work well together despite everything.

You were very glad in the end that you both found someone so supportive and understanding.

You both were also glad that you had the guts to kiss him because, honestly, he was never going to make the first move without it being an epic disaster.

Dick Grayson

Yay! Okay, this guy and you wow. May I just say couple goals here. Like yes, wonderful, perfect together.

Will you go off on someone for hurting his feelings? Count on it. Whether it is physically fighting or verbally berating someone, you also support everyone’s favorite Blue Bird.

Cute nicknames? Yes, as I stated previously, Blue-Bird, you know because he had been Robin and then he became Nightwing, and Nightwing’s suit is black and blue. Also, his eyes are blue and they look so pretty you could stare at them all day. Also, often used but none as creative as Blue-Bird, sweetheart, darling, cutey, and love.

His pet names for you, are Darling, beautiful, sweetie, bundle of too much adorableness, most wonderful human being to ever exist, my reason for getting out of bed every morning, and love. It is obviously a wonderful mixture of names, and yes, sometimes you do worry about him.

I mean how could you not, you were there since he became Robin, you comforted him through every phase, from being a rebellious teen by denouncing Bruce, becoming Nightwing, forming his own group of heroes, and making the obvious mistake of wearing tights as a part of his costume (that one was particularly hard for you).

I will now rate your PDA, congrats you have received a 6/10. You guys like to give small face kisses (forehead, top of the head, cheek, nose, temple, etc.), you guys give each other small pecks on occasion, and always say ‘I love you’ when one of you has to leave. You hold each other's hands a lot. You guys are very sweet and very wholesome. The only time you aren’t is when you get reunited after a long time (2+ weeks) or a life-threatening thing happens (which is pretty often, I’m not going to lie).

When you reunite do you share that time slowed down and you are running to each other with the wind in your hair moment before frantically grasping one another to share a passionate kiss.

Sometimes he will tickle you and pick you up just to spin with you. This happens quite a lot and the two of you often have tickle fights.

You get along with his family, but you have no trouble standing up to them for him. You will fist fight with Jason and tell Tim to ‘shut up and go to sleep’. If Damian starts talking crap you won’t physically hit the child, but you will steal away his pets with treats, which annoys him because food > him.

You will scream at Bruce if necessary. Dick and his adoptive siblings will have to physically pick you up to get you away from the situation.

You guys never fight, except when you eat the last of each other’s ice cream.

Jeez, you two are so cute together.

Jason Todd

You met early on but got together a few years after his death.

He used to annoy the shit out of you, but the events involving the Joker led you both in the same direction.

You both have a better understanding of each other than anyone else. You are field partners and the only real anti-heroes of Gotham.

You were quick to share an apartment once you both learned each other’s civilian names.

It is easier than you both expected to fall into a rhythm, which only made it easier to go from something platonic to something romantically domestic.

You never seemed to get in each other's way and could somehow calm the other down when the world became a little too quiet or loud. You both rarely slept in the separate beds you had brought and maneuvered into the one bedroom. In fact, neither of you really slept on a bed.

Most nights you stayed up as late as you could and either returned home and passed out on the couch or watched tv till 3 am, cuddling, and passed out on the couch.

You guys are a little different than others. PDA is more of healthy ways to deal with trauma mixed with a little codependency (but nothing terrible, sometimes shit just gets hard for you both and you have some really off days). Hand holding, back rubs, hugs, and playing with each other's hair and hands are just ways to calm each other.

But back to PDA. Yes. 9/10. You will both totally make out in front of other people spontaneously without a care in the world. He tends to initiate it, but you certainly never have an issue with it.

After all of the shit you two have been through you don’t really care about other people’s comfort around you because you feel safe with each other and are each other's security blankets.

Pet names are definitely common. It is probably the most annoying thing he does when you work together fighting crime. You always hated how he was so arrogant and acted childish when he was Robin. Now he just calls you pet names and flirts ceaselessly with you while you fight together. He will call you sweetheart, darling, beautiful, gorgeous, love, my love, love of my life, and more when you are in the field. He calls you them outside of your night shift too, but that does not annoy you at all.

You tend to use many of the back, if not all of them, because he means just as much to you.

He always makes the most adorable face when you cradle his head and call him beautiful. Like this is the softest he will ever be with someone else and he just looks so small and cute and in need of a hug.

If he annoys you, expect gifts in the form of food and drinks. If you annoy him, expect to give him extra hugs and books.

Yes, you read together, cuddling. Typically different books, but he acts as your personal heater and you love it.

Coffee shop dates, take-out-stay-in dates, and video game dates are to be expected. Also, pastries on top of buildings in the middle of the night are a great pastime.

Also, one last thing, just to mention, you are the only one allowed to use or even touch his guns.

Martian Manhunter

Telepathically communicating, yayyyyyyyy! Okay maybe too soon with that one. But really, expect to be snorting in a silent room as everyone looks at you like you're crazy except for him because he’s smiling fondly at your reaction.

You two are very sweet together. You help the Justice League with PR stuff, so you talk with the group of heroes all the time.

You often work with the big names and more controversial people in the League, but you work with everyone when you need to.

Also, J’onn can fly so expect to be carried in his arms all the time. He won’t even think about it twice because why would he take you somewhere in a car when he can literally swoop you off your feet bridal style and fly off as you look up at him in complete adoration.

For the moment you’ve all been waiting for, PDA rating. I would say 3/10 in public and 6/10 in private. By that I mean outside world public and the justice hall, mount olympus, etc. as private. In your guy’s place he’s just a cuddle bug or a second cat because yes he bought you a cat for one of your anniversaries.

He cooks you dinner. You join him often, but like he loves to cook you dinner. You think it is really sweet, but he also loves to learn different earthly activities. That and M’gann sends him recipes she thinks you’ll like (and you always love them).

You once made him chocolate cake by the way and now he has a new favorite thing. He loves it and didn’t stop talking about it for months.

He likes to hold your hands a lot. Sometimes when one of you is stressed the other reaches out in hopes of grounding them before they overthink. It’s very sweet and you both love the gesture.

You sort of also took M’gann under your wing when she first arrived and it melted yours and J’onn’s hearts when she first called you her aunt/uncle. At this point you're like the mom of the YJ and the go to friend for the league. It’s all very sweet but sometimes J’onn feels like the League is hogging you and ‘has to’ drag you away from everyone quite literally, which goes a little something like this:

“Oh, but J’onn, I was having a lovely conversation with Bruce.” “Oh, I’m very sorry, Y/n, but we really have to go,” as he starts to pull you out of the room. “Alright, sorry Bruce we can talk, more some other time?” Once you both make it out of the room you release a breath, “Dinner?” “Yes.” “Great because I’m hungry and Bruce was gnawing my ear off.” After that you both just laugh.

Dinner goes great by the way and you share chocolate cake at the end before going home to cuddle with your cat and watch baking and cooking shows.

Wally West

Just to get it out there, you show your guys affection through food and physical touch

You make Wally whatever you can cook and make a lot of it for his boosted metabolism. You also order extra pizza for him.

He tries to bake you your favorite desserts but sometimes lacks the patience and other times he eats half of it.

He typically just always buys you your favorite snacks and desserts. Even then he always ‘sneaks’ a bite.

Your PDA is surprisingly low, but as he matures it definitely increases. Like Dick had told you all those years ago it took a while to get used to Wally eating.

I would rate you a 2/10 at the beginning of your relationship and an 8/10 when at your best. (basically Young Justice S1 Wally compared to S2)

You are always touching each other. I don’t mean in an inappropriate way, but considering it is Wally that isn’t unheard of, just not often done in public.

On top of that, he will carry you everywhere, superspeed, normal speed it does not matter. Hand holding always, hugging always. He just wants physical contact. And piggy backs.

But like also, his pickup lines. I repeat his pickup lines. They are so cheesy and corny and you find them endearing somehow. I mean I do too, he is a sweetheart so yeah.

He treats you so well too. Your well-being matters so much to him and if you need something, he will be there in like 3 seconds regardless of where he is.

Nicknames should be expected: whatever you do, whatever you like he finds a way to make it a nickname. He does use babe a lot, but it feels a little basic so he comes up with new one's all the time. Sometimes they stick and other times you choke on air, but the scientific method says that you will fail and retry so it doesn’t phase him.

For the record though, he is Wally so a lot of his nicknames are food based: honey, cupcake, sugar cube, sweet potato, and more.

If you nerd out with him he will never, I repeat, never let you go.

Also if you wear his merch he will be all over you. Depending on the situation and the place it might get a little spicy, but in most cases he will wrap his arms around your middle and just hold you tightly as he falls back into a chair or couch or something. He will not let you go and will nuzzle his face into your neck for hours. For someone that is so fast and gets bored so easily, he will never want any of this to end.

Clark Kent

Yeah, you know. You knew. You were well aware of who he was. One single pair of glasses did not fool you. I mean, you didn’t say anything until like the seventh date, but you knew.

Yay, lucky you are normal, in fact, you do not play hero in your free time, but you do have some abilities.

You blame the particle accelerator explosion that occurred in your last home for your abilities. But they were easy to hide and really helped with your job.

You are a psychologist/part-time therapist. You met Clark through an interview you did about the effects of the most recent attack in Metropolis on the citizens' mental health. You had to fight for this article to even exist, but you did so because you could feel the fear that radiated throughout it.

You did everything you could to provide as much help and information as you could on the topic. Clark had been the photographer for the interview and you both immediately hit it off.

He asked you out to dinner when you stopped by his office to discuss doing another article. Clark said that to celebrate the occasion he could take you out if you wanted.

You said yes because free dinner was nice and he seemed like a good guy, so you thought why the heck not?

Of course, the date went well and you highly enjoyed his company. He asked you out again and said yes.

On your third date, he had to leave early for whatever reason, and then a minute later Superman flew by and started to stop a robbery a block away. Interested, you got as close as you could and were very shocked when you saw Superman’s face.

You didn’t mention it, but he had the same aura with the slightest bit of guilt that you thought was likely toward leaving you mid-date.

Once he knew you knew he eased up a lot and told you all about his past and Krypton and his powers and his hero-ing.

You guys have great communication, which is in part due to your empathic abilities. You can always tell when something bothers him and he is more than willing to talk through whatever troubles him. You do the same understanding that you both thrive off of honesty with each other.

Conversation always comes easy.

Some activities you like to do together are going out for dinner, movie nights, baking, picnic dates, and annoying Bruce Wayne.

Your PDA scale would be like a 4/10 at most. You are very sweet with each other, but sometimes you both find it odd being extra coupley with others around you. Since Clark has super hearing he can tell when people are uncomfortable and since you have your empath abilities you can feel it too. Other people’s moods also affect yours in general so the more people there are the more overwhelmed you feel so you try to avoid anything more than a quick peck on the cheek.

However, it is still very obvious you two are together because you spend a lot of time with each other and go to lunch together basically every day.

Around the Justice League, you can be a little more open with your affections but you both still prefer privacy.

Nicknames: yes. There are some of the basics: darling, dear, love, etc. Clark particularly likes calling you my dear and you enjoy calling him sweetheart. Sometimes you joke around when he enters a room and you say, “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s my boyfriend, Clark Kent.”

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doberbutts · 1 year

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@corvus--caurinus

Yup! Per my neurologist, before the mid/late 00s the medical community was sort of, uh, unconcerned about so-called "minor" concussions, because the symptoms didn't seem to last longer than a few seconds and thus it was treated as a non-issue. Most parents didn't take their kids to the doctor for them and the few who did were told to let the kid rest for a day and then get back to life as normal.

Then a breakthrough study happened and revealed there is no such thing as a "mild" concussion. All concussions are concussions and all concussions are brain injuries. And all concussions run an exponentially higher risk of increasingly dangerous and life-affecting symptoms as you knock your brain around more and more. And with each subsequent concussion, you run the serious risk of these symptoms becoming permenant brain damage. Turns out, your brain does not actually like to be jumbled around in there, who knew.

The white flash is usually caused by one of two things: a jarring motion in your retinas (not a concussion) or the impact of your brain banging against the fluids and other matter inside of your skull (that's a concussion). Same if you "see stars"- the "stars" are the damaged nerves that just banged into something firing off electrical impulses trying to figure out how to cope with what just happened. And of course if you hit your head or are shaken to the point of losing consciousness, that's your brain's equivilant of the computer that, when smacked, turns itself off. All of these are concussions, and while it may seem like knocking yourself out should result in a worse concussion than just seeing stars, brains don't always follow that rule. All of these concussions will eventually stack on top of each other and will cause a major TBI once you hit your head a little too hard or perhaps even just one too many times.

So when he said "okay so you were never *treated* for a concussion but have you ever had this happen after hitting your head?" well... yes, actually. I was hit in the head by a thrown baseball bat (accidentally) in gym class and promptly took a nap. I was awake and otherwise fine in a few minutes so besides being sent home that day and having a large bruise/egg nothing really happened. I was doing flips on the gymnastic bars and lost my grip and whacked my head against the ground and, you guessed it, was unconscious. By the time my friends got the recess teacher over I was already awake and just a little dazed- again they sent me home but that's it. I fell through one of those dome monkey bars at a playground with my mom and hit the ground head/neck first. This was before the age of cell phones so Mom told me she was trying to figure out what to do about her very unresponsive child in the middle of the park (it's dangerous to move someone who may have broken their back/neck but she also can't just leave me laying on the ground to knock on someone's door to call 911) when I woke up and outside of a stiff neck seemed "quiet but fine".

In fairness according to my neuro there's not really much a doctor *could* have done medically as I bounced back without any problems except maybe have me take it easy for a couple weeks (I'd've died of boredom with no stimulation) but it still should have been noted that each of those were concussions. Then the amount of times that I've been dazed or saw lights... too many to count. I work with high energy dogs in an impact sport, they headbutt me or punch me or knock me to the ground all the time. I was an active kid and an athlete prior to my heart acting up, so sport-related injuries just sort of come with the package and that includes knocks on the head.

But sitting in his office and hearing him say that, and then recovering from the TBI and examining what it's done to my life... it made me realize how much people take for granted. It just takes one too many knocks on the head. He said the major thing he regrets as an older neurologist is that for a very long time, most of his practicing career and certainly a significant portion of my own life, no one really cared about concussions. But the line between concussion and TBI is very blurred, because in truth a concussion *is* a brain injury, and at some point you will concuss yourself much much worse than you were expecting due to the buildup of damage from not taking hitting your head seriously.

The best way to think of it is breaking your ankle. A broken ankle is a broken ankle, there's no such thing as a "mild" broken ankle. But there are grades of severity- a hairline fracture on a single bone is a broken ankle, but recovery time and process are relatively straightforward in most cases. Completely shattering multiple bones on the other hand significantly lengthens recovery time and the process is significantly more involved with a risk of further complications. If you keep doing whatever it is that gave you a hairline fracture, one day you won't be so lucky, and you will completely shatter the whole joint assembley.

That's how concussions are. Those cute little knocks that cause a white flash and nothing else? That's a warning to stop doing that and be more careful. You get to hobble around in a boot for a while to think about your choices leading up to this point. Knocking yourself out? Well you've snapped a bone. You get a cast and some crutches. Full blown TBI? Congrats, the whole ankle is fucked and you need major surgery now.

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batmanisagatewaydrug · 30 days

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Hi,

I am very much not american so I must admit that my first impulse when seeing all the rap/racism discourse was something like "do I really need to consume more american culture, it's fucking everywhere already". Idk but to me it feels like american/english-speaking culture absolutely dominates a lot of the world, sometimes at the cost of out own cultures and languages, if something is in English it is "good", if it is in own own languages it is "bad". Musicians often start singing in English and more american-like after a while to get bigger. We value American culture and music, they mock our accents (and languages sometimes) and best case scenario see us as funny and silly.

Then I started thinking. Do you think that americans kind of see rap kind of like foreign music still? Like low-brow unexotic foreign music.

I don't know this is a really fresh thought and I'm not sure if I am explaining it very well.

hey first off I just want to say -

you are entirely correct in your reaction that people outside of America/the English-speaking world do not need more American culture thrust upon them! this discussion is extremely centered on Americans, the reception and reaction to rap within America, and excuses that white American use to avoid interacting meaningfully with Black culture, art, and ideas. while anti-Blackness as an issue obviously extends far outside of America, this particular conversation is deeply tied to American culture. I appreciate you pointing that out!

I also think you're point about rap, and by extension other Black artforms, being Othered in American pop culture. certainly in terms of language, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), which is utilized by many rappers, is still heavily disputed in its validity as a "real" language, with many dismissing it as a bastardized version of "proper" English and associating it heavily with those who are lower-class and uneducated. in a similar way to many international artists having to work in English to gain wider recognition and validation, many Black Americans are proficient in "code switching," the practice of switching between AAVE that they likely grew up speaking and an English dialect that is considered more "professional."

similarly, I think your use of the term "low-brow" is very apt. Black music has always been met with distrust and disdain by white audiences. there's a reason that so many people feel the need to bring up sex, drugs, and violence when they talk about rap; to many white cultural gatekeepers that was all rap was. (and, like, we should very much talk about why that is in and of itself a bad thing, when white crime is so often glorified in pop culture. why is the Godfather a classic masterpiece but Black men making art about their own experiences with racism, violence, poverty, and survival don't deserve serious consideration?) and that didn't start with rap! in the early 20th century jazz, also a Black creation, was seen as dangerous for promoting promiscuity among nice white teens. no matter what Black people make, white cultural gatekeepers will find a way to start a moral panic about it.

the reverse also happens as well, with Black people being treated as foreigners even in music genres that they helped pioneer. Black Americans were hugely formative in the early days of country, but are met with hostility in the contemporary country scene. Lil Nas X's Old Town Road was one of the biggest songs of the year it was released and undeniably country but was largely snubbed by country music community, and Beyoncé's new country album, Cowboy Carter, is a direct response to her hostile reception at the Country Music Awards in 2016.

the point being, yes, I don't think it's off-base to say that, to many Americans, rap and Black music and art generally are like... very optional and avoidable parts of pop culture in the way that more white-dominated genres are not, similarly to a lot of international and especially non-English art.

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spongeyspot · 7 months

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Toxic Traits/Red Flags HC

Characters: Arthur, Javier, John, Lenny, Dutch, Micah, Charles, Sean, Hosea, Mary Beth, Abigail, Tilly, Karen, Sadie, Molly

(A/N): WE WERE JUST TALKING ABOUT THIS DAWG. I LOVED @cowboyfromh3ll 's take on that shit sm and these hcs have literally been swimming in my head for weeeeeeeeks bro

Edit: some of these were kinda hard because there's not a lot of bad in the characters themselves... I had trouble with specifically Charles, Lenny, Mary Beth, and Tilly. Sorry if they may be OOC. IM EVEN DOING THE GIRLS BECAUSE IM IN A SILLY GOOFY MOOD

Content Warning: female reader, jealousy, self hate, narcissism, gaslighting, physical abuse, verbal abuse, mental abuse, mentions of murder and violence, mentions of infidelity, mentions of sex (Sean, Micah, Sadie kind of) (MINORS DNI)

Not edited btw

The boys

Arthur Morgan

- Honestly, I feel like Arthur would have this insane, crippling fear of rejection, especially when it comes to dating. - His self hate/deprecation plays a huge part in this, and quite honestly, him and Mary not working out probably also probably contributed to it. - Very emotionally distant. Has a hard time expressing his feelings openly due to that same fear of rejection.🚩 - Bottles shit up until he feels like he's gonna explode 🚩 - His impulse control is almost nonexistent 🚩 - Will resort to saying things that he doesn't even mean. He just says things when he's angry🚩 - Will hate himself even more if he makes you cry - Won't hesitate to run away from camp for a while to cool off. This isn't necessarily a bad thing per se, but he usually takes his time away to overthink the fuck out of everything - Prone to acting violent. (not to someone he cared about, but to other people, absolutely)Also due to his poor impulse control. 🚩

Javier Escuella

- Has a flirty personality, but around women, it just seems to get worse. 🚩 - Tells you you're overreacting if you tell him it bothers you🚩 - Overprotective of you. Always has his eyes on you, and practically orders you to stay in camp where it's safe. - As if you step one foot outside the camp without him, you'll spontaneously drop dead - Jealous asf. Are you laughing at what Bill just said? It wasn't even that funny. Why are you standing so close to him? You should be at least 6 feet away from him, not 5 and a half. 🚩 - Also has a problem with how you dress sometimes. God forbid your shirt is ever low cut. He'd probably ask you to change. 🚩 - And if you get offended or upset, he'll lie and tell you it's because he can't stop staring at your chest, and he'd like to focus of whatever it was he was doing.🚩

John Marston

- Stubborn as all hell. Doesn't listen to anybody for anything.🚩 - Commitment issues up the ass - Says mean things out of anger and sometimes actually means them 🚩 - Won't apologize half the time. He thinks kissing it better actually makes it better 🚩 - Regularly ignores his own bad habits instead of actually facing them 🚩 - Will run away from problems like Arthur, but worse. He'd be gone a really long time.🚩 - Gets annoyed with you if you get angry at him for leaving and staying away for a while. He told you he needed space, didn't he? What else do you need from him?? 🚩 - Ignorantly clueless half the time. Head empty, no thoughts.

Lenny Summers

- Not assertive in the slightest, and usually, respectfully, keeps to himself. -Takes orders without verbal complaints but inside he's annoyed as fuck 🚩 - Even if he hates doing something he'll probably just go "Okay" and do it anyway, and he'll sulk all day afterwards - Refuses to tell you what's wrong because he thinks he'll sound childish.🚩 - If you push the issue, he might snap at you out of annoyance like "Would you just let it be??" - Immediately feels guilty and shameful, and he'll hide away until he's ready to apologize and face you again - Also kind of a know-it-all... He'll correct you a LOT. It would get annoying 🚩 - Would blatantly tell you you're wrong before correcting you🚩 - Not necessarily an asshole about it but he still tends to get under your skin sometimes

Dutch Van Der Linde

- The BIGGEST Narcissist you'll ever meet.🚩 -He loses another piece of his mental state with every breath he takes. Slowly but surely losing his mind.🚩 - King of gaslighting🚩 - How could you even think that about him? He could never do anything wrong! You must be crazy...🚩 - Tries to recite his "pretty words" from Evelyn Miller to try and sound smarter than he actually is 🚩 - Expects you to just feed his ego without him actually doing anything to earn it🚩 - Will try to correct you even when he's wrong🚩 - Refuses to admit he's wrong. He can never be wrong. That word isn't even in his vocabulary unless he's talking about literally anyone but himself🚩

Micah Bell

- Where do I even start with this guy - Not above putting his hands on you if he doesn't get his way. Let's be honest here.🚩 - Mega Narccisist, almost as bad as Dutch 🚩 - Will brag and share every sexual encounter you've ever had with him like he's talking about the weather🚩 - VERY prone to Violence 🚩 - NO impulse control. Murders people for fun.🚩 - Backhanded and borderline abusive compliments 24/7 "You'd look so good if you weren't so fucking fat..." 🚩 - Selfish lover. Thinks just sticking it in will do the trick, and it does, for him at least.🚩 - Little to no affection. What are you? His girlfriend? Wait...🚩 -If he actually does show you affection, and you react in surprise, he'll tell you to go fuck yourself, and that that's the last time he ever does anything nice for you.🚩

Charles Smith

- Impossible to read sometimes - Like Arthur, Charles tends to keep a lot of his emotions bottled up until he feels like he's gonna pop 🚩 - Like most of the men in the Van Der Linde gang, Charles is also prone to acting violently. I mean, he started a bar fight with a fucking chair, and he fights in street fighting rings, let's be real for a second.🚩 - He's incredibly quiet and reserved a lot of the time, and sometimes you just assume that he's listening to you when you talk, but a lot of the time, he's lost in his own thoughts. - Will do everything anyone asks him to at the expense of his own free time and energy, and sometimes he works himself to exhaustion just to try and please everyone.🚩 - In doing so, he sometimes doesn't have time for himself at the end of the day. It also seems like you spend time together less and less as the days go on. - If he ever got himself hurt and you tried to help him, he'd decline any help with anything to save his own pride. The last thing he needs is you thinking he's weak. 🚩 - Extremely Overprotective. Like to the point where he'd beat the shit out of anybody you asked him to🚩

Sean Macguire

- An Alcoholic🚩 - horny 99% of the time, but half that time he probably has whiskey dick. Still asks you to try but doesn't understand that it's like trying to play pool with a rope... - If he can manage to be sober enough to actually get it up, and you're not in the mood, he'd get pissy and annoyed with you for "wasting his boner" 🚩 - Will probably also brag about having sex with you to everyone🚩 - Needy as all hell - Bro sulks on purpose - Low key loves the attention you give him when you continue to ask him what's wrong, but he never actually tells you and constantly says "I'm fine..." or "It's nothing..." 🚩 - But then sighs dramatically and continues sulking and dragging his feet so you keep giving him more attention 🚩

Hosea Matthews

- Ignores his physical health until he's practically dying. You've told him to get that cough looked at for literal years and he just says "I will" and does nothing 🚩 - sometimes talks to you as if you're a child especially if he's around Dutch -low key gaslights you sometimes 🚩 - and he says it with such a gentle tone, its hard to catch it 🚩

The girls

Mary Beth Gaskill

- Daydreams way too much - Likes to live in her romance novel fantasy land rather than face reality 🚩 - Cries a lot - Tries to be angry but can't help but cry instead - If crying makes you feel bad for her, she'll probably do it on purpose so you comfort her and give her attention🚩 -If you're in a fight, she'll turn on the crocodile tears to get you to stop being angry with her or whatever it is you're arguing about.🚩

Abigail Roberts

- She can be verbally abusive if she's pushed far enough 🚩 - Holds in a lot of her emotions🚩 - Neglectful of her own personal needs to make sure you or Jack are fully provided or cared for🚩 - a lot of the time, when she's upset with you, you're probably given the cold shoulder and the silent treatment - incredibly protective. Not necessarily a bad thing, but she can sometimes be super overbearing.

Tilly Jackson

- Tells it how she sees it, sometimes accidentally sounding a lot colder than she means to 🚩 - Too sarcastic for her own good 🚩 - Laughs a little too much sometimes when you tell a joke, and you can often tell it's actually incredibly fake🚩 - gets irritated really easily, especially if she's bothered while doing her chores. The last thing she needs is Grimshaw on her ass again.🚩 - irritable a lot of the time, unintentionally becoming short or snapping at you - like john, she also believes that kissing it better is better than actually apologizing

Karen Jones

- An alcoholic 🚩 - picks fights with you for fun, finds it entertaining to see how red your face can get from anger 🚩 - Screaming matches are a regular occurance between you guys, and she starts it almost every time 🚩 - Pretty jealous when it comes to the opposite sex🚩 - Has self doubt and believes that she can't give you everything a man probably could

Sadie Adler

- The nosiest woman in America. No chill. She reads everyone's mail. - Makes a lot of loose threats 🚩 - Anger issues🚩 - Low impulse control🚩 - Can be a little too rough sometimes 🚩 - If she's upset with you, she'll either yell or storm off. Sometimes both. 🚩 -(She tends to walk away a lot more often because she's actuall self aware that her anger issues are a problem) - She'd never admit that to you though.

Molly O'Shea

- Even more jealous than Javier🚩 - Glares at and envies anyone you talk to that isn't her🚩 - Has immaginary conversations with people in her head🚩 - Rubbing her hands together when the real life conversations are following the script she had planned out in her brain - Needs constant reassurance - "D'you even love me anymore?!"🚩 - Overthinks everything 🚩 - Paranoid as hell about infidelity - Gets mad at you when she dreams about you cheating on her🚩

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shiraishi-kanade · 2 months

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An Shiraishi is always trying to be someone else: a short and messy analysis on how Vivid Street (unintentionally) messed her up

You know, I kind of have my own issues with the "Wishing to the Blue Sky for Your Happiness!" event, but a lot of my criticism of it boiled down to "huh, it's kind of weird how they gave An this insecurity out of nowhere, she didn't struggle with being herself before. Seems to be a reach just so Shizuku could have a role."

But that was before the Vivid Old Tale, and boy I'll admit I was very wrong.

The relationship between An and Nagi are... Very interesting, to say the least.

But there's no doubt that An absolutely idolizes Nagi. Sure, there's been this line about An always wanting to he a musical like her father, but we also know that for the most part, it was Nagi who taught her to sing, as well as Nagi who acted as An's mentor figure in a more emotional way.

In a way, An won the lottery. She was born into a family that loves her, into a community thay loves her, and just so happened to be talented and passionate about something that community values most. However, that talent has left her little to no space to actually... See herself as someone outside of it.

Now, none of this is actually necessarily negative by default. Having high expectations to one's children isn't necessarily bad either; with the right approach, it can make them grow and want to grow. We've also seen this happen with Touya in his childhood, which us another neat parallel.

But, unlike Touya, An has been very comfortable in her role, precisely because of her talent and being able to reach the very high bar raised for her. That comfort just... never made her reach out to something other than the place and the future she was already familiar with, because she never needed to. She was Ken's daughter and she was talented and everyone in town loved her and she promised to be the better than her dad and everyone took her seriously. What else could she possibly need?

In a way, An had her dole cut out to her before she was even born.

And then there's Nagi.

Yes, Nagi is An's role model. But there's more to that than just An looking up to her.

More than just being taught by her, An actually picks up Nagi's mannerisms, forms or speech, and even moral values (pretty much the entire point of Vivid Old Tale).

An saw, too, how much Nagi meant for the people of Vivid Street. She wanted to mean as much for them, too; rather, she already did mean as much, but she needed to be someone to justify being loved. It's not necessarily a conscious thought process but more of a subtle one: if you notice your community loves some traits of you more than the others, or values some aspects of you more, you start to lean more and more into them in order to fit in and be accepted.

For An, those particular traits were being talented, being Ken's daughter, but also... Being very similar to Nagi.

Them acting "like sisters" has been highlighted over

and over

and over again, even by people unfamiliar with Nagi, well into An's teenage years.

And it's not exactly... A complete coincidence on everyone's part. At one point, Nagi openly states she wants An to be like her, to be able to see things from the same perspective. At least to some extent, some of the actions Nagi takes to make that happen are completely deliberate.

So An tries to be like Nagi. This is both a conscious effort on her part and something that just... Is sort of a hidden force that shapes her into who she is. If you watch Nagi and compare even the way she talks with people of the town to the more mature, somewhat-grown up but not quite there yet An we have today... There's so many similarities it's uncanny. An is still much more hot-headed and impulsive, but that caring, considerate side of her shines through even more than before.

An doesn't try to deny or hide that, too. In fact, she's actually pretty proud of it.

(Whether Ken lied to her to make her feel better or if that expression was just a reaction to being reminded of Nagi passing away & the masquerade that followed after that, we'll never know.)

But here's the kicker: there's so much of Nagi in An it's hard to pinpoint where Nagi-san's traits end and An's own personality begins, if it even does. Because of how early has everyone decided on An's future, and because An never did anything to even hint at wanting to do something different (which she didn't! Sometimes people want to continue their family's legacy and that's completely normal and fine - again, she just got really lucky, both with her talent and supportive surroundings), An subconsciously kind of accepted that being like Nagi is... Just who she is.

That comes with taking on Nagi's part in the community, too. In the same way Nagi took care of everyone in town by helping them out at events, so too, does An - just to a much lesser extent, by going out of her way to keep in touch with everyone, going to events, and helping at a cafe, too.

But An doesn't purposely mold or change her personality to be like her role model, too. This is important: An doesn't wear a mask because she doesn't need to. In her mind, she already is like Nagi, or at least, she's on track to be, without doing particularly anything different. Because they're just so similar they're so close and practically behave like sisters, and because An grew up singing in the town exactly like Nagi did, and because she loves the town just like Nagi did - what else could An possibly need to do except get better at singing and get more grown up?

You know, to reach that mature and down-to-earth side of Nagi that we often see in the past?

That side?

Yeah.

Now the Shizuan event's conflict isn't so out of place, is it?

But anyway, back to the point.

Because of Nagi wording things the way she does and because of people on Vivid Street making such a point of their similarities, An naturally assumed she would eventually become like Nagi. This is why, even aside from Kohane's improvement, aside An's abandonment issues, Kick It Up a Notch is a giant slap to the face for An, as well as her wake-up call.

Kohane taking on Nagi's mantle before An was able to, or potentially ever could, isn't just about singing - it's an attempt at An's entire sense of self, just as well as her place in the world, and on the smaller sense, her hometown, too.

Because if An is not Nagi, she doesn't belong.

Because An never knew how to do anything but sing. Because becoming like her family, like Nagi, was the only option she ever imagined for herself ever since she was a child.

And if An is not Nagi, then who the hell is she?

[this post was very much inspired by @the-one-that-weeps 's An analysis post, who kind of put this much more eloquently than I could! Go check them out.

All translated lines that aren't taken from the wiki transcripts are by lozybug on YouTube!]

#jay rambles.txt #jay's character analysis #project sekai #prsk #an shiraishi #vivid bad squad #i spent like a solid 3 hours writing this

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intimidating-fettuccine · 8 days

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What drew some of them to you as yanderes

For Toby, it was your kindness. Toby in general has always wanted someone to fully accept him, but that is multiplied tenfold when he's a yandere. I think you two probably started out as friends, maybe naturally, or maybe he spotted you being especially kind in a park one day and orchestrated your entire friendship from the beginning. Regardless, once Toby spots you and decides you're the kind, loving individual he's been searching for, there's no getting away from him. He's the only one deserving of your kindness, and he'll make sure you understand that if it's the last thing he does. Even when he has to show you repeated unkindness in locking you away, injuring you on a regular basis, it's for your own good, and one day you'll understand that.

For Jeff, it was how docile you were. Yandere Jeff strives to constantly be in control of you and everything around you, and after witnessing you being particularly docile, regardless of the situation, his mind convinced him that he could do it, he could control you easily. Regardless of whether that is true or not, Jeff is one of the fastest moving creeps when it comes to abducting you as he moves on impulse, and you'll be in his clutches whether you'll be nice and docile for him or not. Unfortunately, it's not like it matters how you behave, as his control and anger issues can hardly ever be toned down or stopped, but you can certainly try your best to make life more bearable.

For Slender, on the opposite side, it was how confident you were. Slender wants a darling that can be conditioned into behaving, but also still retains a backbone. He doesn't want your spirit to wear down, no, he wants a fighter, someone to push back so he has a reason to constantly remind you of your place and the fact that it's below him. Whether it was how kind and excitable to those around you that you were, or how strong and resilient you appeared, the fact that you were clearly confident in who you are as a person drew him right into you. Of course, ever the master manipulator, Slender has no qualms in turning the tables in his favor and getting you to be his. He just hopes you'll put up a good enough fight while he does so, so make sure to keep him entertained.

For Helen, it was how strongly you shined in his eyes. Helen is the most reverent as a yandere, viewing you as a God he has to praise, rather than a human being he's keeping locked away. Everything about you just seems so holy to him, so absolutely perfect, so beautifully made, and something like that has to be protected. You're so precious and delicate, you have to be hidden away from the outside world so nothing can sully you or taint you. It's up to him as the only person who understands your true worth to keep you locked away and safe, where he can praise you every day and make sure that beautiful shine of yours never fades away.

For BEN, it was how entertaining you are. When BEN decides to lock you away and hold you prisoner to himself, he does so because he finds you so inexplicably entertaining. No matter how you react, no matter what you do, he just finds so much enjoyment and entertainment in every single thing you do. It doesn't matter if you hate him or if you love him, or if you decide to just ignore him altogether, he just can't stop getting a laugh out of the whole situation. He supposes he'll just have to keep you all to himself forever, that way he never has to miss out on any of those absolutely adorable reactions of yours when he holds you prisoner, when he destroys anything you once held dear, when he puts anyone interfering with him holding onto you in harm's way. You're just so cute it's laughable.

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cryptocism · 3 months

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Since I think about clones like I’m getting paid for it, I've been rotating those alternate universe "what if Bart and Thad were actually raised together" scenarios in my brain, with Thad either post-redemption-arc or pre-villainy. Because adjusting Thad's character to fit an ally role while still keeping true to his core motives and personality is so so fascinating to me.

Like I think there's an immediate first instinct to slot Thad into a "bad" twin category: ie rebellious and prickly, doesn't get along with people, mean lil shit. And obviously it's not wrong bc we're outside the realm of canon, but the reading still feels a little left of center.

Because Thad is mean and prickly in canon. In the Impulse comics he belittles Bart and Bart’s friends/family constantly in his appearances. He loves to goad, and monologue about his own superiority and intelligence. He’s very Not Nice, and he causes many problems, and he even does it on purpose.

But, I think it’s important to consider the context. From the jump Thad knows very little about anything except which team he’s on and who he’s playing for. He gets his orders from an unseen authority and he carries out his tasks because success means his team wins.

For all his self-aggrandizing talk, everything he does is in service of an end goal that doesn't actually center him. He's trying to get revenge for grievances he's never personally suffered, retribution for actions never committed against him. Everything he does is on someone else's behalf.

Thad sees in black and white, us or them. Up until the final few issues of Mercury Falling, Bart and co. are Thad's enemies, of course he's not going to be nice.

So Thad's motivation seems pretty simple: Thawne Supremacy™.

But it’s in Mercury Falling where this starts to fall apart, and the real core of his motivation gets revealed. Thad pretends to be Bart and suddenly Helen is nice to him. Bart’s friends think he’s funny. Bart’s teachers are impressed with his grades. Max ruffles his hair and gives him hugs and tells him he’s done a good job.

If he was actually an inherently mean and standoffish character, if Thad actually had significant personal stake in the Thawne VS Allen conflict, the weight of such tiny acts of kindness wouldn’t completely break him the way that it does in canon.

Thad thinks his goal is superiority and revenge and Thawne Supremacy™, but he's chasing validation. Thad doesn’t have a personal stake in the Thawne VS Allen conflict. He wouldn't get much satisfaction if he actually destroyed Bart and his family. Thad's personal victory would be the recognition after the fact: the praise and attention from the other Thawnes (a group of people he has literally never met) for his success.

He wants validation. That's basically it. And the fact that he gets it so easily from Bart's family and friends doesn't align with how he's told himself things are supposed to work.

Actually tangentially, Bart and Thad’s respective relationships to authority is so diametrically opposed and tbh kind of subversive in a superhero narrative. Where the hero is the one carving his own path without regard to social or societal rules, no fucks to give what anybody thinks of it. And the villain is a chronic people-pleaser.

Just based on Thad’s reaction to simple praise and affection from Max I really think Thad’s motivation has more to do with the response he gets than whatever the details are of any given task. He has no actual personal convictions beyond getting positive attention, and whatever he did have crumbled as soon as Bart’s friends laughed at his joke one time. Which of course leads into the core of his whole conflict at the end of Mercury Falling. He cares too much about Bart’s friends and family now, he doesn’t want to kill them, but worse than that, he’s faced with the sudden realization that he’s on the wrong side.

The Allens gave Thad everything he actually wanted and needed, but his conception of himself is inexorably tied to the Thawnes: who gave him jack shit. These two facts are in opposition to each other, and he can’t reconcile the reality of it.

Anyway all this to say, in an AU where Bart and Thad are raised together or Thad gets an actual redemption arc etc etc, I think my personal take on Thad’s personality whether it be pre-or-post-villainy would be one that is extremely socially conscious. He is much more of a people-person than Bart. Whether he's actually accurate in assessing people's feelings and how to respond to them can be hit or miss, but he wants to behave in a way that gets people to like him.

Pretending to be Bart isn’t remarked upon as, like, a difficult task for Thad. In his internal monologue he’s literally bragging to himself about how easy it is. But what’s especially notable to me is where his act differs from Bart's typical MO. Everyone notices, and lots of people comment, and presumably if Thad didn’t have the excuse of Max’s illness to “motivate” Bart to do better he would’ve been found out immediately. And those things are, specifically: paying attention in class, doing his chores, staying on task, and being helpful around the house. The one thing about Bart he chooses not to emulate is Bart’s rebelliousness.

Thad wants to prove himself, constantly, to whatever authority he respects (probably Max in this scenario) and will do whatever it takes to make that happen. In contrast to Bart, who only listens to authority when the shit they're saying actually makes sense to him. It’s excessively difficult to convince him to go against his own interests. (And I think a key part of that is Bart’s security in knowing that no matter how much he fucks up or doesn’t listen, the people he loves will always love him back.)

Thad’s got the people-pleaser in him that has to deserve whatever he’s given. It’s why he’s happiest when he’s given a clear goal or objective to complete, because it gives him an opening to prove himself.

All this to say that if we are quantifying Bart and Thad as a "good" or "bad" twin, in the eyes of every authority: Bart is the bad twin. Bart is the bad twin, Bart is the bad twin. Bart is the one who doesn’t care about school and whose grades vary wildly depending on his personal interest. He’s the one who goes off to do dangerous shit for fun and gets in trouble constantly and doesn’t do his chores and is thoroughly unconvinced by any authority figure trying to sell him bullshit.

Thad is the one who needs to know all the rules just so he can experience the joy of following them. Relentlessly obedient. He'll put all his effort into doing all the right things that’ll endear him to whoever he wants to impress - meaning he’s the asshole who reminds the teacher about the assigned homework. Bart might be the most popular boy in school, but Thad is a pleasure to have in class.

Like Thad can (and should) still be high-strung and short-tempered and sarcastic and edgy and mean, because he is. But he can’t be doing all that without rhyme or reason. Colouring every interaction has to be that one-zero binary of ally or enemy. He needs to have somebody he’s proving himself to: a team he’s on and a team he’s against. He’s not an inherently rebellious character. He can go up against The Enemy, whoever he deems as such, but it has to be in service of a hypothetical future in which somebody eventually tells him he did a great job.

And in the interest of continuing to beat a dead horse, it connects to their respective upbringings. Thad and Bart were both raised in VR, but Bart’s experience had the side effect of basically hard-wiring him against insecurity. His world was a playground tailor-made for him, and he was never made to feel bad or insufficient about any aspect of himself. His first interaction with a real human person was Iris moving heaven and earth to save him, without him knowing her, without her knowing him, with no reasoning for the act needed beyond Being Her Grandson. Which is probably a significant factor in why Bart moves through the world with frankly atomic levels of autistic swag.

Thad’s VR upbringing installed self-consciousness in his psyche before any other personality trait. As in: he is immediately made conscious of himself and his relationship with everyone he will ever encounter. He’s told two things: he’s a clone of someone else (inherently derivative, lesser) and that he was made to be superior (a status to achieve). Which is such an instant clarifier for Thad’s everything. Where superiority is a condition that everyone either has, or does not. It’s the one-zero binary again: are they better than me or am I better than them. Being above others is mandatory, and if his superiority is ever challenged by hard evidence or god forbid nuance Thad’s brain physically cannot take it. He needs to be better, to be worse is unthinkable, and there is no other way to be.

And this status of better or worse is, crucially, not up to Thad to decide. He needs The Authority to validate him. Bart never tries to prove himself because he has nothing to prove. Thad’s entire identity hinges on the self-worth he gets from doing a Good Job.

It is such an inherent part of his motives in the Impulse comics canon, which is why it always feels a little off when he’s interpreted as a jackass indiscriminately.

Like I don't think he needs everyone to like him. But I do think he has either one person or a set of very particular people that he needs to like him. Everyone else is either in that circle or outside of it.

(Which is why Bart is such a great foil for Thad tbh. There is no set of words or behaviors that’ll change Bart’s opinion of Thad, because Bart is unaffected by obedience or charm. So ironically Bart is probably one of few people that Thad doesn’t bother to put on even a little bit of an act for.)

While Bart goes with his instincts, his personal beliefs and convictions at all times, Thad is hyper-conscious of big-picture goals. They balance each other out that way. Thad's keeping track of whatever expectations he has placed on him, and how his actions reflect on him and the team beyond short-sighted solutions. He's a team player. AND he's an asshole.

#soapbox #dc #thad thawne #thaddeus thawne #inertia #bart allen #impulse #like he cannot be mean indiscriminately... u must interrogate WHY hes mean and to whom #if hes being raised with Max and Helen he would not intentionally do anything to make their lives more difficult #if hes being raised by Meloni same situation #he needs to be trying to get validation from SOMEWHERE u know #and of course he'll mess up and hurt the people he loves or wants to impress he is a human being #but while that can sometimes be the result #that is never the Goal u kno #not his Core Motivation #i feel like the more i talk about this the less sense im making

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fr3sh-tragedies · 1 month

Text

Good Luck Charm

[Arcane] Jinx x Female Reader

Summary: Jinx has been told she's a mistake and a...well, a jinx her whole life, which is why it's such a surprise when you tell her she's your good luck charm.

Word Count: 3.09k Content Warnings: A small breakdown Category: Angst + Heavy fluff || Oneshot

[A/N]: Not proofread. Just wanted a quick break in between characters again. I couldn't stop myself from writing for this dork, especially after seeing the teaser for season two.

Enjoy!

“Alrighty, toots, I think I’m gonna head to bed. You wanna come with, or you gonna stay up a bit longer?” You turned your head over to glance at Jinx, watching as she repeatedly turned her chair partially back and forth with her eyes fixed on you. Smiling warmly, you shrugged. “Well, I’m not tired just yet, and I wanted to finish this book,” you started, watching from the corner of your eye as she seemed to slump down at your words already. “But I can just keep reading in bed.”

Jinx stood and let out a small cheer, trotting over to you and gently taking ahold of your wrist to tug you toward the bedroom you often crashed in. Ever since you had grown close to the “loose cannon” of the undercity, things in your life had rapidly changed. It started off simple – you would spend far more time hanging out with her than anyone else. Then, as things started to develop between the two of you, you began staying the night almost every night with Jinx cuddled up against you as you slept. Even when she couldn’t sleep, you could feel her arms wrapped around your shoulders while she traced random patterns against your skin.

When Jinx had told Silco of your relationship, you feared the worst, already preparing to write your will or find a way to escape his wrath. Surprisingly, though, he was rather accepting. When you asked Jinx about it in private, she told you she believed it was because he had seen how happy she had been ever since you showed up. A few days later, her theory was confirmed when Silco had called you into his office to set rules about dealing with Jinx and her issues with trust.

He warned you that Jinx could get extremely clingy and would get overprotective of you, which you had already noticed she had begun to do, so you simply nodded. He continued to speak of things such as her hallucinations and wish to keep her past a secret. You agreed to all of the terms he had set to be with his daughter, unaware of the figure stationed above you on her usual platform. Her eyes were trained solely on you, legs swinging back and forth as she let herself rest on her stomach. With her head cradled in her palms, a wide grin made its way to her lips as you calmly agreed to take care of her.

It seemed, however, that she had done the opposite, meaning she seemed to take care of you more than the other way around. More often than not, if you were outside of her hideout, it would come across more as possessive than anything. She’d blurt out insults and impulsively pick fights with people who threatened or flirted with you.

Once they realized who they were dealing with, they backed off instantly. The few poor souls who decided to test their luck suddenly went missing, as well as Jinx for a short time, and then were never seen or heard from again. You had learned to come to terms with her reckless and apathetic behavior towards outsiders rather quickly.

“Trinket? Hello? You in there, or… did ya leave this planet?” You blinked, glancing back over at the blue-haired girl as she waved her hand in your face.

“Hm? Oh, sorry. I was just thinking about what’s going on in my book. I’m near the end, so everything is getting chaotic.” She snickered and hooked her arm around your shoulders as she led you into the bedroom. “Ah, then you’ll have to let me borrow that book sometime. You know I love a bit of chaos. Or a lot of it.” You smiled at her and rolled your eyes, playfully bumping against her and earning another chuckle.

As she plopped down to sit in her spot on the bed, she watched you silently while you flipped your book back open and sat on the other side of the mattress. Once you had leaned back against the pillows, it didn’t take long before you felt a head land gently on your shoulder. A quick look down let you know Jinx had already bundled up under the covers and shuffled over to cuddle against you for the night. With weary eyes, she peered down at the pages of your book, briefly skimming over the short excerpt of the story she could see.

Soon after, she let out a yawn and tucked her head further against your neck. “G’night, sweets. Love you.” You beamed down at her and pressed a small kiss to the top of her head. “Love you too, hun. Sleep well.”

By the time you had finally woken back up the next day, Jinx had already been up for a few hours. She hadn’t left the bed, but she was tracing patterns and words into your arms and back. When you shifted and yawned, she smiled and perked up rather quickly, sitting up in her spot and peeking down at you. Once you had rolled over to look her in the eye, her grin only grew. “Mornin’, toots. Did you sleep well?” You nodded and sat up, yawning again.

“Yeah, what about you?” She shrugged and toyed with the hem of your sleeve. “Eh, I slept okay. I got kinda restless after a while and woke up, and then I couldn’t go back to sleep.”

You nodded at her words. After a while of you trying to keep your eyes open, you felt Jinx lean against you and tug you close. “I don’t wanna leave to go work on those stupid experiments,” she confessed with a frown. “I just want to stay in here with you. I wish I could come down with you to your job instead.” With a small smirk, you raised a brow and glared over at her. “Oh? And why’s that?” She smirked back at you and slipped her hand down to lace your fingers with her own. “‘Cause I could keep you safe. I could beat up all the pervs that keep trying to get their nasty paws on you.”

A gentle chuckle escaped you as you pulled her further into your side. “Yeah, that’s what makes you my good luck charm. Nothing seems to go wrong for me when you’re near.” You had expected another teasing remark of some kind, though nothing came. Instead, you were greeted with silence. After a while of not receiving any kind of acknowledgment of what you had said, you looked down at Jinx. You blinked in surprise when you saw her gazing right back up at you, eyes filled with a concoction of emotions that couldn’t seem to even out.

Her brows furrowed together. One moment, she seemed confused, and the next, she seemed upset or in disbelief. Similarly to her eyes, her eyebrows couldn’t focus on which emotion to express.

“Uh, hun? You okay?”

“What’d you call me?”

“What?”

“What did you call me?”

You continued to stare at her, unsure of what you were supposed to say. “I called you ‘hun.’” She shook her head and lifted it from your shoulder to be eye level with you. “No, before that. What did you call me before that?” It took a moment for you to recall what you had said a mere moment ago. The confusion of the new situation had made it hard to wrack your memory. “‘My good luck charm?’”

She was silent for a few minutes, which felt like hours with how thick the tension had grown.

“You think I’m lucky? That I’m a lucky charm to you? Do you really think that?”

An uneasy smile and chuckle left your lips. “Well, yeah, of course I do. I mean, I always love being around you, and because of all you do for me, everything seems to go right when you’re around. You really are like a being of good luck to me.”

She seemed troubled at that, which certainly was not what you had expected. Tears welled up in her eyes and prompted them to grow glossy, though she fought them back. “But – no, I’m not lucky. I’m, I mean, my name is “Jinx” for goodness sake! I’m not good. I’m a horrible person. I mess everything up. How could you possibly believe that I’m a good luck charm? I don’t understand.” You felt your nerves spike, recognizing that she was at the beginning stages of another episode. “Woah, hey,” you whispered, placing a hand softly on her shoulder in an attempt to ground her back into reality before she could fly too far away from the present.

“No, I’m not lucky, I’m a Jinx. I’m the opposite of lucky – I’m unlucky. I didn’t – no, please, I’m not. No, shut up! She’s not trying to – stop it already!” Unintentionally, you leaned back, making sure to keep your hand in place. It seemed like Mylo had taken over again, throwing insult after insult at her and flooding her mind with false realities.

“Love, I’m sorry,” you murmured. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” She glared at you, eyes fixed on you in front of her, though she seemed to be staring so far away. Her eyes flickered as though she were reading some sort of script, incoherent mumbles rolling off her tongue. “No, you shouldn’t be… you didn’t – shut up! You shouldn’t be the one apologizing!”

You remained silent, waiting for the right time to chime in as Mylo continued to torment her. Although you had no idea what he was telling her, you could get a general idea based on the few words you could make out in her sputtering.

It took forever, but she ultimately calmed down, panting for breath and clutching handfuls of hair. When she came back to her senses, she found you holding both of her hands to prevent her from tearing her strands out again. Sometime in between her episode and her break into reality, she had begun copying your breathing the way you had helped her practice each time she had gone through it in the past. At length, she sighed and let her eyes bore down into her lap.

“I’m sorry,” she whimpered.

Softly, you cupped her face in your hands and lifted her head up to look her in the eye. She shifted her focus away from you, unable to meet your gaze. “It’s okay, I promise. I’m not mad.” The feeling of the pads of your thumbs grazing across her cheeks to wipe her tears away brought her a feeling of relief. Her tense shoulders drooped down after she sighed once again.

Moments passed. She finally forced herself to meet your eye. “Did you really mean it?” She whispered with a broken tone. “That you think I’m lucky?” You nodded with a weak grin. Again, tears pricked her eyes, though she leaned forward and buried her face in your shoulder before they could fall. Her arms lifted from her sides, hands grasping at the back of your shirt as she sucked in multiple shaky breaths.

“I’ve always thought you were lucky.”

Weeks had passed since you had started referring to Jinx as your good luck charm, then it shifted into months, and your list of nicknames began to grow. It became a common occurrence for her to hear you call her “lucky charm,” “charmer,” or even “bluebird.” It seemed as though you were shifting to just focus on positive nicknames instead of entirely pinpointing each play on the words “good luck charm,” though she wasn’t complaining.

She certainly wasn’t used to all of the compliments and the nice names. After all, she had been referred to as a jinx, a screwup, and essentially a burden her entire life up until she met Silco. It would take a while for her to accept what you said as truth, but she had started to come around to the loving nicknames. After a while, she even began to look forward to what you would call her for the day. She had started rubbing off on you in terms of nicknames as well. “Trinket” and “sweets” began to creep into your vocabulary, and she adored the way it sounded rolling off your tongue when it was directed at her.

Soon enough, the positivity had worn down part of her insecurity, so long as she was around you. You made her feel safe and secure, which wasn’t something she was used to either. Often, she could be seen practically bouncing down the halls with a cheesy grin plastered on her face, even if she had just left Silco’s office. Silco and Sevika had definitely taken notice of her sudden shift, and although Sevika didn’t understand why she was so much livelier than normal, Silco found himself smiling more often at the sight of Jinx when she’d suddenly remember the nickname you had chosen for her for the day.

When she’d sit up top on her makeshift platform in Silco’s office, she had to be given reminders in between meetings to settle down. Her legs would swing over the edge and kick at the air rhythmically, and her hands would pat randomly at the wooden planks.

She loved the nicknames, to put it bluntly. She absolutely adored them. Since that night, not once had you referred to her as Jinx. Somehow, even though everyone else called her by her known name, the mere mention of what you were calling her for the day gave her a boost of confidence. Whenever a mission would go wrong, she’d come straight to you to talk about it, then listen with a soft smile as you told her repeatedly how things would be okay and how she’s still your lucky charm.

With how suddenly all the flurry of names were thrown at her, she struggled to pick a favorite. Even so, her energy and overall glee grew daily, even beginning to show in her work. Weapons were crafted more cautiously, produced quicker, and had more expressive markings made by her oil crayons. Sevika didn’t enjoy the increase in enthusiasm, Silco certainly appreciated everything.

He still didn’t fully trust you, though it was growing increasingly obvious to him that you weren’t a threat, and in his eyes, you were there for a reason. You made Jinx happy, and that was all he really wanted in the end. As far as he was concerned, you had his blessing. He knew things could change, but after seeing how you treated her during every emotion she expressed, he figured that was a slim possibility.

As he sat in his office one day, he sighed and ran a hand down his face. The door had closed only a moment ago, and still he could hear the tapping and swaying above him. Leaning back in his chair, he gazed up at Jinx sitting on her small platform, biting back a small smile when he saw her grinning gleefully. “Jinx,” he called out just loud enough for her to hear. She finally turned her attention to him curiously. “Hm?”

“You know you need to be quiet when I have people in here. It’s very distracting with you shuffling around up there.” Jinx chuckled nervously. “Sorry.” He finally allowed himself to smile, catching Sevika off guard from her spot on the sofa. “Why don’t you spend the rest of the day with [Y/N]? You’ve earned a break, both of you.”

Instantly, Jinx dropped from her spot above and landed on Silco’s desk. She crouched down and looked him in the eye. “Really? You’re okay with that?” He nodded. “So long as you two don’t cause any major problems,” he added. She beamed brightly at his words and her eyes lit up. “Thanks!” Within an instant, she turned on her heel and hopped off the desk, already out the door and skipping down the hall to find you.

Silco grinned softly with a small shake of his head. He leaned forward again and motioned for Sevika to shut the door as he picked up a few papers to straighten them.

When Sevika returned to her spot on the sofa, she huffed out a heavy sigh and pinched the bridge of her nose. She bit her tongue with what she wanted to say, but a look of warning from Silco made her waver. “What are you breathing so heavily for?” She waited, trying to rephrase her words before speaking them, but ultimately gave up.

“It’s nothing against either of you. I’ve just never seen her this energetic before, and I’ve seen her get energetic in the past.” To her relief, Silco hummed and smiled. “Yes, she’s certainly been in a better mood as of lately. It’s refreshing, in a way.”

Sevika waited momentarily, unsure of what to say. “You think that girl is the reason she’s been so cheery?” “I know she is. Her name is [Y/N]. She’s known Jinx for a couple of years now, and the two of them have grown quite close in such a short amount of time. I don’t entirely approve of that girl, but Jinx has taken a liking to her, and I’d be a fool to take that away from her.”

Even with her disliking of the blue-haired girl, Sevika couldn’t help but grin at his words. “Yeah, it is nice to see she’s stable with someone. I was worried she’d drive someone away. [Y/N], was it? She’s patient, and that’s definitely good for someone like Jinx. To be honest, I’m glad they met.”

“Yes, I am as well. I suppose I should include a few of the names [Y/N] has been using to refer to Jinx as when speaking to her. It seems to put her in a better mood, as you’ve said, and I’ve noticed an improvement in her crafts and missions.” A chuckle slipped from Sevika before she could stop it. “Yeah, she hasn’t screwed up another task in a while.”

“Pardon?”

Sevika swallowed and cleared her throat. “Sorry, sir. It was nothing.”

All the while, as they chatted away about her improvement, Jinx trailed down the hallway and all the way to her hideout. When she saw you there, sitting comfortably by her desk in the extra chair she had pulled into the room to have you nearby while she worked, she couldn’t help the smile that stretched across her lips from ear to ear. As she grew closer, she wondered what you would refer to her as that day.

#fluff #x reader #female reader #slight angst #jinx imagine #jinx x reader #arcane jinx #jinx arcane #jinx x y/n #jinx x female reader #jinx x you #jinx league of legends

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