#Brittleness relationship

[flowers-roses]

Brittleness

#Philadelphus ‘Virginal’ #flower #white flowers #confession #heartlessness #brittlenes #arrugance #Brittleness relationship

[anotherpapercut]

hi more drug question

I have been told many many times that using ecstasy will basically fry your seratonin receptors so that you will never be able to feel happy again unless you are using the drug. I am assuming now that this is false but I am curious now as to how false. Is it something that CAN happen if you take too much at once or too often, or is this just random Drug Scary misinformation

Also also since wellbutrin is not an SSRI does LSD work when you are on it or does it also cancel it out

lol that's kind of an extreme version of what I usually hear! you're right that basically the answer here is no. this comes from a couple different things. first is MDMA induced serotonin toxicity, and 2nd is something called "serotonin syndrome" which is a real thing that can happen, but it's really really hard to get like this. prepare for a very long answer lmfaooo

MDMA induced serotonin toxicity occurs when you take too high doses too frequently. MDMA IS slightly neurotoxic, but so are many prescription drugs so don't let that word freak you out too much! basically MDMA works by dumping large amounts of serotonin into your brain, hence why it's the happy/love drug lol. if you take too much too often, your brain will straight up run out of serotonin. obviously that's bad! it's not as simple as "never feeling happy again" but you will essentially have depression for a bit because of lack of serotonin (on its own, low serotonin levels following modest MDMA use is not damaging and resolves within a few days) but the real problem is that if you are on MDMA with depleted serotonin, your brain will continue releasing dopamine which will attach to the serotonin receptors and damage them. this is what can cause long term depression symptoms, the damaged serotonin receptors. ultimately your brain will heal this on its own unless for some reason I guess you keep taking it a lot (which would have no effect. when you take too much MDMA your brain just runs out of serotonin to dump so like. it just won't work lol)?? it can also be treated with the supplement NAC, which I would recommend taking any time you use MDMA because of this!

to sum up MDMA toxicity: it can happen but only if you're misusing it! it's generally recommended that you dont do much more than 1 dose every 3 months or so to make sure your brain has time to reset. research interactions with anything else you're using (prescription or not), take some NAC in the weeks following a dose, drink a lot of water, keep your body temperature regular because that can worsen it, and take some antioxidants like alpha lipoic acid and grape seed oil during/immediately after taking MDMA - it's when you come down that your brain is delicate and could use the protection. also this may sound counterintuitive but weed also has antioxidant properties, so smoking it as you come down helps a lot. also if you DO have MDMA toxicity taking more MDMA will not help u feel happy unfortunately it will just make it worse lol, your brain only has so much serotonin to give

now serotonin syndrome can happen with the misuse of any drug that works on serotonin including MAOIs, SSRIs, and SNRIs, usually by taking a VERY large dose (but some people are just extremely sensitive). it usually takes care of itself eventually, but the amount of time it takes and stuff is kinda hard to pin down bc it's REALLY misunderstood and tends to be overly self diagnosed. again this is like super super hard to do. you would have to take a MASSIVE dose or mix it with other serotonin affecting drugs (ESPECIALLY MAOIs. DO NOT MIX MDMA WITH MAOI ANTI DEPRESSANTS). like 5 times the normal dose at least probably (partner is currently trying to find some literature on it so he'll add that in the replies if he finds anything interesting). it will cause things like heightened anxiety and body temperature and can cause kidney problems or seizures if it's like really bad and untreated. but you'd feel REALLY bad before it got to that point, so in general like, if you take any type of drug and feel extremely bad after go to the doctor lol. mostly this will also just heal itself; your brain is pretty resilient! again usually if this does happen it's very minor. cases bad enough to require hospitalization are exceedingly rare

to give you an example of what these can look like, I have a friend who was given about 3-4 times a regular dose by a fucking piece of shit asshole she knows and, this part is crucial, it was mixed with a very large amount of alcohol AND acid (which can slightly increase the neurotoxicity. normally not a huge issue but becomes one in circumstances like this), AND coke; like she was blackout drunk and while not on a lot of acid or coke, this is just too many things to have in your body and brain at one time. the mixture of such a large amount different drugs caused her what I'm guessing was a mild case of both of these things at once. she experienced slightly worsened depression for about 6 months after, and actually had a mild stutter for almost a year. I made sure she took some NAC and other things that aid brain healing, and she didn't try molly again for a long time to be super sure she didn't overload her brain before it was ready. this is a pretty extreme case, and even with that she has fully recovered thankfully. do NOT EVER do drugs with someone you don't trust with your life. DO NOT EVER do drugs in doses you have not confirmed for yourself to be safe and DO NOT EVER mix drugs without finding out if it's safe!!! just as a small aside though: usually taking molly and acid at the same time is perfectly safe. in fact it's called a candy flip and I HIGHLY recommend it because it's fucking awesome. again, just make sure you are taking safe doses in a safe environment

OKAY now finally your specific question about Wellbutrin: I actually take Wellbutrin so I can answer this one from personal experience! Wellbutrin should not alter the effects of LSD in any way HOWEVER! both of these drugs lower your seizure threshold! I'm on the max dose of Wellbutrin (which is the max dose BECAUSE of seizure risk) so when I plan to drop acid I usually either skip my dose entirely that day or only take half depending on how much acid I'm planning to take. because of the way Wellbutrin works, this shouldn't cause you any problems as far as that goes. for me, not taking my Wellbutrin for a day mainly has the effect of making me more fatigued, and acid counteracts that really well by making me feel very awake/aware. if you don't want to skip or halve your dose though you can also take things that will RAISE your seizure threshold. so like I sometimes will smoke hemp because CBD actually will help with that. the risk here isn't huge either way especially if you have no history of seizures, but again if it's something you're concerned about you should be just fine skipping or lowering your dose for the day. acid usually lasts about 12 hours too so i personally don't even care about skipping the Wellbutrin that much because it basically does the same thing for me. I did take my full Wellbutrin dose the last couple times I've done acid though because I was taking a very small amount of acid (about half a tab)

in summation lol sort of TLDR I generally would recommend MDMA for recreational use because the risks of damage are low and it's safe if you are safe about it. and it's honestly just a really fun one! the only negative effect I've ever felt is some emotional and physical fatigue the following day, and this is largely because of how emotional and energetic you are on it. I just make sure to have the next day off to lay around and listen to music :)

taking it with a partner or loved one will give you an especially beautiful experience, as MDMA has been proven to facilitate extremely open emotional conversations. in fact, when MDMA was first synthesized it's primary use was in psychotherapy! research was shut down during the war on drugs, but in recent studies it's demonstrated amazing abilities to treat and even straight up CURE disorders like PTSD. for a personal anecdote, my partner actually completely fucking cured his alcoholism on a combo of MDMA and whippets (nitrous oxide) lmfao. like dude straight up went from getting black out drunk multiple nights a week to drinking nothing for the past year and a half without any other treatment program. LSD has been proven to have similar incredible results with treating and curing things like depression, anxiety, PTSD and addiction and is also a very fun and very safe one.

sorry to reiterate for the billionth time lol but it's important: these drugs are safe and fun if you make sure they're safe and fun! do your research and never use in an unfamiliar environment with people you wouldn't trust in an emergency! also I know this sounds like a lot, but remember I'm giving you like the absolute safest possible practices and emphasizing sort of over cautiousness because I think it's always better to be too safe. I've taken molly without nac and I've taken kinda big doses a little closer together than I should have without any problems. there's a bit of flexibility to these guidelines, but it's always better to think of them as being rigid so you don't end up too far in the other direction. like I've said it's really really hard to do actual damage that would last more than like a day or 2 max. most of the time you'll just be sleepy the next day from all the dancing so it's nice to do it on a day 1 of a weekend. also it only lasts like a couple of hours lol so it's not your whole day or anything!

#sorry this took me like a fucking hour i kept having to check myself w my partner + google to make sure i wasnt talking out of my ass lmfao #im sure ill be rereading and editing it for the next hour as well #damn just spent like another half hour #hope this is thorough enough for ya ajdbsjhdkshdkshs #on a tangentially related note: ive been weaning myself off of my SNRI (venlafaxine/effexor) bc it didnt help at all #and made my nails extremely brittle ????? like so bad they were constantly breaking to the quick and making me bleed #so pretty soon ill be able to do acid and molly again. sweet blessed molly how ive missed you #cant believe i forgot to mention this but as another personal mdma anecdote: my partner and i started dating while candy flipping #hed been staying at my house for like 4 months at that point but we hadnt really talked about like. relationship definitions #and I was EXTREMELY nervous bc id never even like kissed someone fr before him #but the acid and ESPECIALLY the molly made talking about our feelings with each other really easy and safe feeling #we do it every once in a while as like a poor mans couples therapy lmfao. its much easier to be open and honest and vulnerable #while crucially taking down the defensive wall that can cause you to lash out and stuff #highly recommend 👍 #wtiting a book called the couple that rolls together stays together. its about doing molly but also skateboarding #drug ed #i cant stop adding to this post im sorry

[patrick-jennings]

Velvet in the Sand

Recovering from trauma is a difficult task, but harder is living broken and brittle, a condition as harmful to oneself as to others. Learn to be soft, again.

Be softShe saidLike velvet Bend with the windLike grassIn the field So when othersTouch your lifeThey are not cut And if they lean on youA little hardYou do not break All this broken glassYou wear From your past It harms youAs much as thoseYou love And what is not Already brokenIs brittle With the slightest pressureIt shattersInto shards you weald as weapons Learn to be softBefore you crumbleTo…

View On WordPress

#brittle #broken #Canada #healing #photogaphy #recovery #relationships #soft #trauma #travel

[celesterayel]

something out of my dreams | luke castellan

pairing : luke castellan x dionysus!reader

request: could you possibly write a luke x daughter of dionysus please? maybe she’s like super nice and when percy gets to camp she becomes like an older sister and luke is super whipped for her? @elz-zalarrr

IN WHICH — all he knows is that you were something out of his dreams.

"trust him like a brother, yeah, you know i did one thing right. starry eyes sparkin' up my darkest night" - t.s.

w.c. 1.8k

warning(s) : cheesiness ゜✭・.

✩ ‧₊˚ author's note okay i've begun to realize that low-key i feel like i write in cursive if that makes sense? if a feeling could describe it i'd say its like using poetry to write? that's likely not any better lol :)

there was but one person that everyone could agree they adored at camp half blood.

it didn't matter what grudge who had with whom or what ancient rivalries transcended the ideals of reality, everyone loved you. not the typical type of brittle love that crumbled at the slightest of touches, but pure adoration that endured the sands of time.

you with the gentle soul, who healed others with each laugh and smile. when new half-godlings were brought to camp, you made sure to comfort them and make them understand that they belonged here and would find a home whether they wanted to or not. you made sure that no birthday was forgotten, no deed undone.

children of minor gods or elders, of Ares or Aphrodite, you became an older sister to all who needed you. you, the daughter of fertility and chaos, the god dionysius.

there was no debate that at camp half blood there was only a before you and an after you. you were like that high right before the free fall–invincibility and smoke and curiosity wrapped into the form of a demi-god. you were the gentle breeze during summer nights when the heat became too much. and none ached more to feel it than luke castellan, who had been burning for as long as he knew.

your relationship in itself was tentative, you danced around your feelings–scared one wrong touch or word would break the shaky, fine line that lay between you two. but you could not hide the way you loved the other to yourselves nor the children of the beings of divine blood. 

luke castellan loved you like the stars would fall out of the sky with one harsh touch, free and incandescently self-destructive. like you were a wild, wonderful thing out of a fantasy.

you loved him like there was no hell or heaven but the cosmos that lay in his eyes and the worlds that lay in his soul. something so sacred and rare. a love so true and mortal it put all the greek tragedies to shame. 

you knew that whatever you and him were made of, in every lifetime or the next you two were made for each other. 

loving luke castellan would be both your redemption and destruction in the making, your elysium for whatever good thing you had done in your previous life. 

✩ ‧₊˚

you first met percy jackson when he came to camp, he was a scared little thing who had just lost his mother when the veil between reality and deception flickered. everything he’d known came crumbling as quickly as the truth was uncovered: gods and monsters were real and played games of hell and heaven on earth. some thing about him called out to the vulnerability you once knew when you first came to camp so you made it your mission to be the sister he never had. 

you met him at the front of the steps of the main office, “my name is y/n, percy jackson. welcome to camp halfblood.”

“do you just somehow know everyones name,” he raised his eyebrows at you. 

“yes.” no, but you supposed it’d be fun to let him think that. 

“of course you do.”

“come along, i’ll show the ins and outs here. if you're nice enough, i might let you in on the cook's secret stash of blue ice cream,” you laughed out.

he contemplated his choices before grabbing your outstretched hand and shaking it, “deal.”

you showed him who to avoid and the best people to befriend. the history between your kind and why the gods were as they were. the truth behind his bloodline and the legacy that he was now responsible for. the tribulations and the pain that was cursed to follow the children of the gods. 

“and this is chris. the best person to ask if you need to know what plants are poisonous,” you say, introducing him to a guy with black hair and soft eyes. 

percy looks at chris before looking around to see where the hermes boy is, “we’ve met. he was with luke when he was showing me around”

you’re cheeks heated at the mention of his name; looking around to see if you can spot the familiar tan skin and soft eyes that belong to your luke. 

“oh! luke! yeah, he’s around here somewhere. he’s sly like that, wandering and then popping up the next second.”

a voice pipes up behind you suddenly, “y/n, already telling percy everything about me?” 

you whirl around and there he stands in all his glory with the curls you love and the sun in his eyes. your golden boy.

“just telling him the truth, castellan. you’re hard to get a hold of sometimes.”

a hue of pink covers his cheeks, “i’m never far from you.”

both of you oblivious to percy and chris who seem to be conversing about you both and the tip-toe dance you play. 

percy just wonders what’s happening here: firstly, luke is looking at you like you’ve hung the moon and the stars and that’s saying something because he has shit observation skills–his analysis essays can attest to that. secondly, he swears he can see hearts in his eyes from where he’s standing and is that…is that a blush?

he turns to chris, who is just staring at the two like it's not out of the normal for what’s happening, “what’s happening here? is he blushing?”

chris just nods, “yeah. luke’s kinda–very obviously to everyone–in love with y/n. if i didn’t know better i’d say she’s gotten him insane in love. very likely as her dad’s the god of insanity.”

he turns back to the two who are laughing and standing closer than before, “like super, super in love. if there was a word for love, luke’s found it”

“huh.” 

chris says it like it’s common knowledge like how the best food is blue jelly beans, “i mean i ship it, y/n’s the sweetest person around here–the type of person people write songs about. she’s like a sister to us older ones and a mother to the younger ones. the whole camp is waiting for him to just man up and ask y/n. they make each other happy, you know?”

“yeah, i think i do.” 

percy thinks it’s something the poets would write about.

✩ ‧₊˚

fridays are capture the flag days.

you’re not the type of person to engage in these types of games all that often but you suppose there’s a first time for everything. someone’s got to show the percy boy how it’s played. 

“okay, percy. remember, keep your senses open and make sure that no one gets close enough to engage. once they engage, it’s hard to fight them off.”

all around you two, people have begun to don their armor and raise arms. the sun has just reached its height and you’re huddled together discussing your gameplan. even though your cabin house is pretty small, you’ve joined athena and hermes for this game. 

percy’s voice rises a little high as he tries swinging his sword around only to drop it, “yeah, okay. i’ll just try not to die, i guess. that’s not like hard or anything.”

“just follow my lead and if i’m not here find luke.”

you're not exactly excited about percy’s odds. the kid is lanky as is and his sassiness doesn’t help him out much when others target him for it. 

that’s exactly why you’re gone to his rescue when he nearly gets hit in the face by a spear after he insulted one of the boys from house ares. 

your heel nearly buckles under a sharp hit after you block the attack that’s directed to percy. you manage to reset your heel and push the sword off before you drop down into a crouch and sweep the legs of the warrior in front of you.

unfortunately you're slightly too focused on what’s in front of you and protecting percy you don’t realize that someones charging toward you from the side. 

fortunately, a block from a familiar sword stops any attack that might meet you head on. no sooner do you hear the block that luke’s got the other guy on the floor and surrendering. 

you grin at him, “i had that handled.”

giving you that grin that makes you feel like your future's right in front of you, he replies: “i’m sure you did. but why let you deal with him when i can save you the trouble.” 

“why don’t you go and help annabeth win the games, romeo.”

he gives you a wink, throwing a quick ‘yes ma’am’ before he’s already running off again. 

no sooner than later, a quick gong resounds throughout the camp, concluding the games. you’re standing slightly battered while percy walks behind you pointing out all the flowers he’s found. you definitely need to teach him how to defend himself. 

the players are just trickling in for the woods they’ve been fighting in to reband together and in the distance you see a figure running toward you. 

holding onto the flag, he continues to look at you like you’re everything he’s ever needed to breathe. he’s taken his helmet off and you can finally see him fully: brown eyes and all dimples.

“see you’ve found the flag.”

he takes a couple of steps closer to you until only two steps separate him and you, “yeah, someone told me to go win the game so I did just that for her”.

“really now?”

he whispers, “yeah.” 

his eyes twinkle and you’ve never wanted anything more than to continue to stare at them. 

you hope he’ll make the next move but luke castellan, the boy you’ve fallen for in every lifetime, is always content to admire you.

so, you take those two next steps, grab him by his neck, and press your lips to his. 

he stands shocked for a minute, wondering if what’s happening is really happening. but no sooner, he’s dropped the flag on the grass and holds you like your the greatest treasure he’s ever had.

there’s a certain type of tragedy that your golden boy tastes like, fire and freedom all in this moment. it’s the price of redemption and damnation that you’re willing to pay. 

to him, it’s the stars aligning like you’d will them to–the power you held and every thing he’s ever needed. your his past, future, and present: the threads in his life giving him the one thing he’s ever wanted. something he’s only ever dreamed of. 

he pulls back slightly before murmuring, “in every lifetime or the next, i am yours. i don’t know what i did to deserve you. you’re something only out of my dreams, y/n.”

"you sap"

you just kiss him again, ignoring all the campers and those still trickling in. 

✩ ‧₊˚

“definitely a child of dionysius. she’s reduced him to insanity,” pipes up percy as he tears off the petals of the flower he holds in his hand. 

chris just grabs a flower and continues to rip the petals off like the boy beside him. 

“damn straight!” shouts luke toward the two.

#luke castellan #luke castellan x reader #percy jackon and the olympians #percy jackson #pjo fandom #pjo series #luke x reader #percy jackson show #percy jackson x reader #luke pjo #pjo x reader #pjo x you #pjo #ignore the cringe

[fuckyeahisawthat]

Up until the almost-end-of-the-world, the way Aziraphale and Crowley maintained their relationship was through a collection of well-established and repeated patterns (dances, you might say). These little rituals were what they used to communicate affection, intimacy and trust when they couldn’t say the things they wanted to say out loud. I like spending time with you. You make me happy, and I like making you happy. We’re in this together. I’ll always be there for you, even when your own side is not.

In season 1, as the stress of the impending apocalypse puts more and more pressure on their relationship, we see their patterns start to break down, and it’s very distressing for them. They’ve been communicating like this for so long that they don’t know what to do when one of them doesn’t follow the dance steps.

When we first see them in season 2, they seem in some ways to be closer than ever. They touch each other more easily, Aziraphale in particular. Crowley is comfortable enough in the bookshop that he has a Spot for putting his sunglasses when he takes them off by the door. They’re more open about acknowledging how much time they spend together and how many things in their lives are shared.

And I think, also, we expect them to be happy. They won, didn’t they? So it takes a while for the cracks to start to show.

It wasn’t until this post pointed out that the whole season, we never see them sit down and share a meal together in the present day (no, Crowley doesn’t eat; yes, it still counts) that it started coming together for me. The closer you look, the more you realize the old patterns they’re used to relying on are broken.

Three times, we see them sit down to their usual table for two (at the coffee shop, the bar, and the French restaurant) and then almost immediately get up again. This post also points out that we don’t see present-day Aziraphale eat anything on screen, other than one of the little candies in the Bentley. This in the same season we learn that Crowley is the one who introduced him to food! It’s one of their oldest rituals!

Even one of their most visually recognizable patterns starts to go wonky this season. In season 1, when the blocking allows it, Crowley’s always on Aziraphale’s left. When they’re standing or walking side by side, and most of the time when they’re sitting side by side together (there are some exceptions due to camera angles)…Crowley’s always on Aziraphale’s left (screen right if they’re facing us, screen left if we’re behind them). It’s one of the clues about the body swap that is easy to see when you know what to look for—in Berkeley Square they are each initially sitting on the “wrong” side of the bench. It’s so reliable that Aziraphale hears a little miracle bling in the sushi restaurant in s1 ep1 and turns to his left—because that’s where Crowley would appear—only to be startled by Gabriel on his right.

Go look at the scene where we find out Gabriel and Beez are a couple. You know the one.

And of course, many people have noted that in the end credits, we’d expect their positions on screen to be switched. They’re on the wrong sides. And it’s such a long shot that I think it has to be intentional.

Some people have speculated that this means they swapped bodies again. I don’t really buy that. Rather I think it is supposed to indicate what becomes extremely clear on a second viewing, that things are Off and Wrong. They are not okay.

And the more you watch them you see that Aziraphale’s excitement during his little adventures is manic and brittle, and that he misses having a place and a purpose and a mission to do good. And Crowley is depressed, unhealthily codependent, even more hypervigilant and cagey and angry than he was before. They both have layers and layers of trauma, and no way to talk about it. They have the time and freedom now to talk about what they want to be to each other, now that they don’t have to hide and encode and maintain plausible deniability. But they have no way to talk about that either, because that’s never been an option before. They don’t know how, and they are both so, so afraid.

And in the fights they have in episode 1 and episode 6, you realize they haven’t resolved anything from season 1. They’re having the same fight they had at the bandstand. Crowley wants to run, keep the two of them safe and damn the rest, and Aziraphale wants to stay and help, believing he can make a difference even in an imperfect system, and neither of them really understands the other’s position. It’s the same damn fight. They haven’t been able to move past this impasse, and it’s the exact thing that breaks them in the end.

And it’s just. Fuck. It’s such a human thing to have happened to them. To make it through the fire (metaphorical and literal) and then have everything go to shit afterward because of unaddressed traumas and insecurities and things left unsaid until they fester.

I know this is not at all how I expected the season to go, and I think it took a little while for me to parse what was going with their relationship, because we are predisposed to want them to be happy and to want things to be easy for them now. But it makes so much sense that this is where they ended up at this point in the story.

I know they’ll make it back to each other. They both love each other too much to give up. They’ll fight their way back together, and I know they’ll figure it out in the end.

But goddamn.

#good omens #good omens s2 #good omens s2 spoilers #aziraphale #crowley

[pseudowho]

Debellatio

You ask Nanami Kento to help you and Higuruma Hiromi on a mission, after the events of In Flagrante Delicto (link here); you find yourself at the mercy of both men after they are struck by the aphrodisiac Curse.

An introduction to Greynami from my Post-Shibuya!AU Nanami; see Grey and Post-Shibuya AU!Nanami Headcanons

Warnings: 18+, another sex pollen fic because I'm utterly depraved and godless, threesome, I don't like to ruin surprises

(help me find the Higuruma artist in the banner, for crediting and thanks/permission!)

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

"Kento. We're friends...right?"

Nanami Kento's one good eye narrowed at you, you, sat so surreptitiously on the arm of the sofa in the coffee shop you had asked to meet him at. Kento briefly considered lowering his newspaper, but decided he'd wait to see what you wanted, first. No longer working for Jujutsu High after the Shibuya incident, he did, however, stay in contact with you, one of his favourite colleagues.

"Friends?" he teased, "I don't have friends." You pouted, slapping his arm lightly, and he  continued, "Alright...what is it you want?"

You scooted next to him on the sofa, emboldened by his invitation; "It's Hiromi," you said, already desperate, almost begging.

Already on first name terms, Kento thought, a light jealousy twisting in his gut, having thought he and you always had potential together. "Higuruma?" he pressed, scarred face neutral. You nodded.

"I released him to the wild," you stated, filling Kento in, "I don't think he was ready, but he was insistent, he's been out on his own for a while now...anyway, he seems to have been alright. Alone."

You did not tell Kento how Hiromi Higuruma had spent every night over the past week in your bed, spurred on initially by an aphrodisiac Curse he had failed to exorcise. You had not told anyone at Jujutsu High, in fact. How would you tell them that you and Hiromi were...what? Colleagues with benefits? On an uncertain path towards boyfriend and girlfriend? Pleasuring each other blind every day and night, lost in each others' minds and bodies? You almost blushed, aware your underwear was damp with the seed he had left inside you just that morning.

Kento raised one thin eyebrow at your pause, imploring you to continue. You took a deep breath.

"There's a mission tomorrow, and they want to send more than one First Grade, they think it's big, apparently. They chose Hiromi, and me. But I've worked with him, and he's...he's..." you trailed off, searching for the words. Kento helped.

"Difficult? Doesn't play well with others?" he offered lightly. You nodded, hands clasped in your lap.

"Can you come with us? Just as a buffer. We won't even need you I don't think, just..." you tailed off again, hoping Kento agreed.

That familiar jealousy burned in Kento's gut again. 'We'. 'Won't even need you'. Kento kicked himself mentally, wondering if he'd left it too late to ask you out to dinner, to make his move, wondering if Higuruma of all people had showed up and pipped him to the post. His jaw clenched as he put down his newspaper, giving you a gentle reassuring smile. Of course he agreed.

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

"Why is he here?" Hiromi pressed you, rolling his gavel between his hands in irritation. Nanami Kento stood a few feet away from you and Hiromi, catching up with Ijichi while the veil was prepared around a derelict shopping centre, held together by ivy and abandoned "SALE!" banners.

"Just for back-up, Hiromi. Anyway, I haven't seen him in ages. You'll be friends in no time, I'm sure of it," you cooed.

Hiromi bristled. He had heard you speak fondly of this...this...sexy pirate, Nanami Kento, and in these early, brittle stages of your relationship together, Hiromi couldn't help but feel threatened by this imposing figure of a man. Allowing himself a moment of fragile masculinity, he shook it off, reminding himself that you weren't a competition.

But that if you were, you'd chosen Hiromi and he had won anyway.

Kento smiled fondly at Ijichi, gripping his hand in a friendly squeeze, before heading over to you and Hiromi, the veil descending below him in an oily drip down an invisible dome. Kento's face remained neutral as he approached, he and Hiromi reading each other, both shrewd, calculating. You swallowed at the palpable tension, before trying to bridge the gap with a reassuring smile to them both. Kento spoke first.

"The electricity's back on, so we're not operating in the dark. We should introduce ourselves. Nanami Kento," he said shortly, offering a brief bow, his gaze piercing into Hiromi even through an eye patch, it seemed.

"Higuruma Hiromi," he offered, "I've been told you're just here as..."

"...insurance," Kento finished coolly, "as you're rather...new to this." Hiromi felt another pang of irritation, smiling tightly at Kento.

Kento turned to you, giving you a smile so warm and sincere that it cracked through his icy demeanour. When you smiled back, Hiromi gritted his teeth, reminding himself again to behave. Eyes now on you, he threaded his fingers through yours, tapping your joined hands against his thigh in an act of affection and possession.

"Come on then, my love. We'll lead the way, shall we?" Hiromi pulled you ahead of Kento as a pair, and Kento glowered silently at your backs as he followed you into the building.

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

"Have you read The Day of the Triffids?" you mused aloud to Hiromi and Kento, running your hand along the network of enormous vines, some as thick as your thigh, clinging along the inner walls of the building. A hazy mist had settled within the confines of the corridors, dewy and tropical in the summer humidity of central Tokyo. Exotic and otherworldly flora popped in bursts of colour from the ceiling and floor as the corridor curved away from you.

Hiromi and Kento both confirmed immediately, competitive, flashing each other furious glances. You were oblivious, examining the tendrils and flowers in glittery-eyed fascination. Hiromi and Kento stewed, both hovering close to you, irritated by the invasion of each others' space.

"We should go deeper into the building," Hiromi stated, confident, tapping his gavel against his adjacent palm, "the main Curse body is probably hiding centrally." Kento cleared his throat, imitating politeness as he disagreed.

"Many of these Curses linger on the edges, like spiders in webs. It would be more thorough to scout inwards from the edges, first."

"Well that sounds pretty inefficient seeing as we know--"

"--well we don't know, you're just assuming--"

"--based on experience, I think--"

"--oh yes, and what experience would that be?" Kento finished, curt, brittle. He turned to you, shoulders clenched in a taut line under the clipped corners of his suit. Hiromi spun to catch your eye, anger burning low at Kento's interference. Both beseeched you, seethingly, to agree with them.

You blushed under their stares, feeling their Cursed energy rising, competing, and gulped, feeling naked and exposed.

"I think," you started slowly, "that both options are as viable as the other," both Kento and Hiromi huffed air out of their noses, lips curled in annoyance, "and so you two should decide between you."

"Either way," you continued, the air thick with tension, "we have to go this way to get to the rest of the building anyway. It will give you two time to make a decision, and maybe learn to get along?" Both men bristled at your gentle chastisement, facing each other, chins out, teeth gritted.

You continued behind Hiromi and Kento along the corridor, watching with mute horror, as conversation escalated into debate, descended into argument, spiralled into insults--

"Well you're apparently so smart," spat Kento at Hiromi, "that I probably should let you decide, even if you find out the hard way, but you're not dragging her into danger too, so--"

"--sorry we can't all muscle our way through our problems, Nanami, she probably should stay with the brains of the group, so--"

"--she's coming with me!" Their voices rang through the corridor in tandem, and you shouted in warning, as they both tripped, distracted, their legs tangling in a flower-covered vine, like trip wire across the floor.

A puff of yellow pollen shot up from the flowers, clouding Kento and Hiromi in a clinging haze. They coughed, sneezing, staggering backwards out of the cloud. Kento cleared his eye with a swift wipe, looking down at himself, surveying the damage.

But, Hiromi spun to face you, barely disguised panic in his eyes; "Shit. Shit. Not again--"

Your jaw dropped, appalled; "Again? Hiromi? Was this-- is this--"

Hiromi groaned, and leaned heavily, shivering against the wall as the pollen seeped through his pores, the yellow fading as it sunk into Hiromi's bloodstream. Kento's back was to you, but dread crept into your belly, low and hot, as you saw his shoulders roll and shudder, his scarred hand clasped over his mouth as his chin dipped towards the floor.

As both Hiromi and Kento turned slowly to look at you, hunger glowing in their eyes, you began to take tentative steps backwards, your speed gradually increasing as you spun, quickly building into a full sprint back down the corridor.

Kento was burning from the inside out; every nerve was on fire with desperate arousal, his cock rapidly hardening in the confines of his slim suit trousers, and he knew in furious desperation that if he didn't pin you down and ram every inch of himself into you, that he would surely perish in these sordid flames, and--

As Kento's legs bent with intent to hunt you down the corridor, he felt slim fingers grip around the front of his throat, Hiromi stepping into his vision, clearly suffering just as he was, but determined and steely, hooded eyes smouldering with threat.

"Not my girl, Nanami," Hiromi spat, squeezing the sides of Kento's thick throat with surprising force. Kento chuckled, full of dark mirth as he gripped Hiromi by the wrist, twisting it away from him; Hiromi held fast, hand shaking with exertion.

"You were the back-up, Higuruma," Kento rumbled, smirking, judgement clouded by wild, throbbing need, "so back off. Daddy's home now." Kento swept Hiromi's legs from under him, elbowing him to the ground, before leaping over his scrabbling form and stalking down the corridor, with surprising grace for such a big man.

Hiromi was on Kento in seconds, spinning him into a resounding thud against the wall, and Kento roared in frustration, as the two continued to scrap along the corridor, concrete cracking under their feet and shoulders as they bodied each other into the walls, trying to gain the upper hand.

You had reached the end of the corridor, the stairs blocked with a bawdry tangle of prickles and vines. You scanned the corridor, spotting a lift to the right, and you ripped fine vines away from its entrance, pressing the lift's button in a frantic panic, hearing the roars and crashes of Kento and Hiromi moving down the corridor towards you.

You had a moment of dread, fearful that the lift was now inoperable, before a tinny little ping announced the lift's arrival. Clambering over vines and into the lift, you saw a puff and crumble of rubble down the corridor as Kento was thrown into a wall, the ceiling partly collapsing above him.

You pressed the button again, again, again, your heart thick in your throat. You saw Hiromi round the corridor, zigzagging across jigsaws of vines, eyes intently on you.

As the doors grinded closed, Kento and Hiromi descended upon them, still scrapping, bloody, fighting with mindless desperation and rage. The lift stayed still, halted by your own paralysis as you caught their eyes through the glass, both begging you to let them in.

You swallowed, your belly hot with anticipation, wanting to help but utterly incapable of accepting the only means by which you could help. You mouthed wordlessly at Hiromi and Kento. You pressed a shaking finger to the lift's 'down' button, and Hiromi swiftly countered by pressing the button outside the lift doors. The lift pinged, juddered, stopped, started, indecisive, torn.

You were at a stalemate. You ran your hands through your hair.

"I can't...I can't help both of you," you cried, turning to look at Nanami, eyes brimming with apology as he rested his forehead against his fist, breathing out in a shaking moan.

"Kento, I...Hiromi and I, we..." Kento thumped his fist against the outside of the lift, the lift trembling at his strength.

"You choose him?" Kento spat, feeling precum leak down his thigh in a constant damp stream. He coughed, arousal burning through his throat, and reached down to squeeze his cock, desperate for relief, moaning softly as he bit into his fist.

"You'll-- you'll help me, though?" Hiromi urged, hopeful and throbbing, palms and forehead pressed flat to the glass of the lift, eyelids heavy and breaths hot and urgent. You swallowed, considering your promise to always help Hiromi, and nodded slowly, swallowing, memories of how desperately he took you the first time sweeping through you, your clit aching and pussy clenching around nothing.

"Open the door. Please, please, open the door," Hiromi whispered in prayer. Kento accepted, sickly, that you had made your decision, still certain he may die without relief. The pollen pulsed through him, toxic and ruinous, and he felt his vision fade into animalistic shades of black, white and red.

"I can-- I-- just let me watch," Kento forced out, begging through clenched teeth. You hesitated, eyes flicking towards Hiromi in question. Hiromi scowled, lips curled in distaste.

"Watch, don't watch-- I don't give a fuck. But I'll have your head if you lay a finger on her."

Kento snarled, lips pulled taut against his teeth-- but nodded his agreement. Your hand lowered, hesitantly retracting from the button as Hiromi calmly pushed the 'open' button from the outside, eyes burning into you with unholy intent.

As the door opened, Hiromi stepped to you, trembling with restraint, fists clenching and unclenching as he urged you backwards, caging you in against the wall with outstretched arms. Not breaking eye contact, he reached down to grab one of your hands, pressing it hard against his straining erection with a low groan, eyes closed against the enormity of the tiny relief and the promise of more to come.

Keeping your hand pressed against him, rutting into your open palm, Hiromi dipped his mouth to your neck, taking your skin between his lips in a deep, bruising lovebite.

"You know how this works," he intoned, low and slow, licking your neck as he rubbed your hand on the outline of his rigid cock, "and I know you can take it." You hesitated as Kento moved slowly into the lift space, the doors closing behind him. His eye shot daggers through you, the burned side of his face twisted in agony, until his gaze flicked downwards, staring hungrily at where Hiromi rutted his cock into your open hand. Kento's tongue darted out to lick his lips, his hand sinking slowly to undo his own belt.

As Hiromi continued to devour your neck, moaning with abandon as he pressed closer to you, humping his weeping clothed cock against your body, you felt your own inhibition fade curiously away. Your trepidation was slowly being overtaken, being seeded and overgrown by a burning hunger. You took a gasping breath, high off your own desire, head swimming--

"Hiromi-- the pollen, it's-- it's on your clothes," you urged, your brain clouding, thrumming, succumbing as yellow mist soaked into your skin.

Kento watched with erotic fascination as you became pliable, supple as water under Hiromi's mouth, your eyes half-closed with aching arousal, a desperate keening noise rising from your throat.

"Oh god yes," groaned Kento, voice gravelly with lust as he released his throbbing erection, pumping his thick cock in his fist, biting the backs of his knuckles on his free hand, "keep going, don't stop-- don't--"

Hiromi drank up Kento's begging, seethingly determined to prove his ownership of you, and grasped your top between his hands, ripping it open like paper, snapping the front of your bra so the cups hung loosely over your pebbled nipples. Hiromi heard Kento release a shuddering whine behind him as he latched his tongue and lips over your nipple, still rutting into your hand, which was joined by the other now as you worked frantically at Hiromi's trousers to release him.

Kento and Hiromi both gasped as Hiromi's cock sprang upwards, and was instantly grasped between your fingers, your first squeeze releasing a thick dribble of precum down Hiromi's length as he shuddered, moaning into your breasts, pressing his fist into the wall as you began to masturbate him. You ached to your very core, reeling with need.

"Please fuck me," you begged Hiromi, voice whispering and pleading in his ear, "cum inside me, as much as you want, I need it, I--"  Hiromi didn't need to be told twice and lifted your legs to straddle his hips, holding you up against the wall as he flipped your skirt up, ripped your tights and sticky wet underwear at the groin, and allowed you to line up his cock between your puffy, glistening folds.

Kento's hand worked harder and harder on his own cock now, stopping to circle his thumb around the sensitive head, spreading his precum, fighting the urge to throw Hiromi aside and thrust into you himself. Biting his lip hard enough to draw blood, he instead focused on where Hiromi's cock lined up with you.

"What the hell are you waiting for?" Kento growled as Hiromi paused, panting into your neck, "get inside her or I will."

With one aggressive thrust, Hiromi's cock rammed into you to the hilt, slamming you back against the wall as you cried out, clawing at him desperately. Your hands clenched the front of his shirt, gripping and ripping, buttons scattering over the floor with faint skitters, so desperate were you to feel Hiromi's skin on yours.

Hiromi fucked you ruthlessly, eyes fixed on where his cock crashed into you, hips snapping back and forth with barely controlled fury. Spurred on by your mewls and whimpers, Hiromi panted, chasing his relief, agonised cries breaking from his mouth with every other thrust.

Kento's eye had drooped closed behind Hiromi, stroking himself now to the sounds of you and Hiromi alone, feeling with agonising certainty that cumming in his own hand would do little to relieve his deadly need, but needing to chase his orgasm regardless. He felt his pleasure building rapidly as he heard you cum, falling apart with trembling cries around Hiromi's cock.

Hiromi didn't last long, his first orgasm hitting him with a wave of relief so violent, his knees almost buckled, relying on you for a moment to hold yourself up against him. Hiromi felt blinded as rope after rope of his seed spurted into you, coating your cervix, soothing your aching belly with warmth. Kento came with a shuddering gasp, streams of thick cum splattering onto the floor and coating his hand, face contorted in pain when he felt little to no relief despite his orgasm plundering through his every muscle.

You and Hiromi clung onto each other, still joined, and Hiromi's cock felt no softer at all, still rigid and held with urgency against your cervix, sucked in by your velvety walls.

"I'm-- I'm sorry I-- I can't stand--" Hiromi stuttered, dropping to his knees with your legs still wrapped around him, still pressed core to core as you wrapped your arms around his neck, straddling him, riding him as he whimpered into your mouth. Lost in your own pleasure, your eyes had drifted shut as you rode Hiromi, slippery with cum, keeping his cock jealously inside you, unwilling to let him pull out by more than an inch.

You felt a strong hand wind into your hair, tipping your head backwards and sideways, and as you gasped, you felt a droplet of salty cum drip onto your tongue. Kento's other hand, sticky with his own seed, ghosted around your lips as he stared down at you, scarred face impassive, but his eye urgently begging, and he dipped a cum-covered thumb into your mouth, stroking across your tongue.

Hiromi flung a hand out sideways, clawing with fury at Kento's thick, corded thigh; "Nanami," he hissed in warning. Kento ignored him, still staring at you, pleading, impeaching--

You nodded slowly, opening your mouth, holding out your tongue. Kento groaned his appreciation, and leant down to dip his tongue against yours as you gripped his thick cock in your hand. Hiromi scowled, thrusting you harder onto him in possessive punishment, satisfied to hear you squeak against Kento's tongue. As Kento pulled away from you and your mouth started to close, he gripped your jaw, stopping you.

"Open," he barked and you acquiesced, jolting and groaning as you felt him spit into your mouth, mixing with the drips of cum his fingers left behind. Humming lowly in satisfaction, Kento stood tall, manoeuvring your head and thrusting his full length down your throat with little warning.

Despite himself, Hiromi was hypnotised as Kento gripped you by the hair, ramming into you; Hiromi kept pace with Kento, matching his timing by slamming your hips down onto his. His eyes fixed on your mouth as you coughed and spluttered, cheeks covered with cum and saliva as you choked down wet gags, Kento barking orders at you as he slammed his cock repeatedly over your tongue and into your throat.

"Harder, Nanami," Hiromi ordered, blinded by lust as he felt your cunt clench around him, fluttering weakly as Hiromi slipped his hand between your legs, finding your clit with practiced ease, rubbing rapid circles, lubricated by the slick of your cum.

You were overwhelmed, floppy and malleable as you embraced being used by Kento and Hiromi, covered in fluids, sticky and sweating, and you shivered weakly as Hiromi dragged you to another orgasm. You felt Hiromi ram you onto him once, twice and three more times until he came with a frantic shout, legs cramping underneath him as he felt his seed shoot through him like electricity, dripping out of you and soaking the patch of trimmed black hair at the base of his cock. Hiromi whined, his balls clenching painfully, watching as Kento finished in your mouth.

Kento pulled you to him, his knuckles deep in your hair as your nose hit his neat honey-coloured pubes, gulping as streams of his hot cum trickled down your throat, Kento growling his relief-- "good girl-- good girl-- swallow now"-- as you drank him down.

Kento let go of your hair and you pulled back, gasping and coughing, his cock still rigid, sat wetly on your cheek as Kento rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck from side to side, still tense. Hiromi was wrecked, burning with need, but crippled and paralysed with a bone-deep exhaustion as he straightened his legs under you, his cock still rigid and throbbing inside you as he came down from his orgasm.

"Not-- not enough--" Kento rumbled, still desperate, devastated by the lack of relief.

"Enough, Nanami," Hiromi gasped, "She needs a--"

"'She' can handle it," you interrupted, nose to nose with Hiromi as he looked into you, glassy-eyed and worried. He nodded slowly. Kento rumbled his approval, pressing you forwards by the back of the neck until Hiromi was laid on his back on the floor, cock still inside you, and you laid down belly first on him.

Without hesitating, Kento mounted you from behind, his mouth ghosting against your ear as he bit it, relishing your squeaks as you pressed your cheek into Hiromi's chest. Lining up his cock with where Hiromi was already seated deep inside you, Kento pressed his cock into you.

You saw stars as your pussy was stretched more than it ever had been, clawing wildly at Hiromi's chest as Kento bottomed-out; Hiromi shivered with delight at the impossible tightness and slickness of you, his groans cracking as Kento's cock slid against his with every thrust. Higuruma lay unmoving at first, colours popping in his eyes, before digging his fingers into the plushness of your hips, and thrusting into you in tandem with Kento.

You were ruined, completely prone on Hiromi as you felt Hiromi and Kento's lengths bully in and out of you, your thighs shaking with urgency as your clit was shunted against Hiromi's pubic bone every time Kento rammed into you. Hearing Kento's groans, broken and velvety behind you, had you tipping over the edge, your arousal spurting out around Kento and Hiromi, your cries and whimpers echoing weakly around the little chamber.

Kento felt fire burst through his hips, back and belly as he came for a final time, barely able to keep himself from collapsing on top of you as he felt himself weaken, Hiromi's cock twitching against his as Hiromi shuddered, sandy gasps leaving his throat as his seed mixed with Kento's inside you.

Hiromi reached around you, rolling you all sideways so Kento could collapse onto the floor. You lay together, stunned, sticky and panting. The air was thick with the smell of sweat and desire. Kento chuckled, low and shaking, as you nuzzled into Hiromi, planting tender kisses on his jaw.

"Alright," he rumbled, reluctant, "so she's your girl. But I still owe her dinner."

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

Hiromi and Kento at the end of this:

The reader:

This took me two large glasses of wine to write.

#jjk #kento nanami #jjk nanami #kento nanami x you #jujustu kaisen #nanami fluff #kento nanami x y/n #kento nanami x reader #nanami kento smut #jjk fluff #jujutsu nanami #jujutsu kaisen nanami #kento nanami smut #nanami kento #nanami kento fluff #nanami kento x reader #nanami kento x you #nanami smut #nanami x reader #nanami x y/n #nanami x you #jjk higuruma #higuruma fluff #higuruma hiromi #highly recommended #higuruma #higuruma smut #higuruma angst #pseudowho #Pseudowho is utterly depraved

[aziraphale-rights]

So, what is the deal with the world’s most conspicuously uneaten Eccles cakes? (A meta)

Well, I wouldn’t say it’s bad writing, not even the on-purpose-as-a-secret-message kind. I agree there is a visual ‘loose thread’ here that the creators wanted us to notice, but I don’t think the meaning has anything to do with Metatron or the eventual plan for S3. I think the eccles cakes are all about what’s going on in this episode with Crowley and Aziraphale, and they’re unsettling in exactly the way they’re meant to be, even if we might not register the full implications consciously on first watch.

On the most straightforward level, this shot is the punchline to a joke set up by Aziraphale and Nina in the coffee shop. Crowley orders six shots of espresso, bound to get him all worked up and stressy. Aziraphale, who desperately wants Crowley to be thinking clearly when he learns about the Gabriel situation, says to Nina: ‘What do you sell that calms people down?’ And she replies: ‘Eccles cakes.’ From this moment on the cakes are a visual symbol of what Aziraphale needs from Crowley right now.

That’s why they get so much screentime as we cross the road and go into the shop. Aziraphale won't leave those eccles cakes behind because he’s still hoping that Crowley will respond to the request they represent: Please stay calm, please be patient and listen to me with empathy.

But Crowley never does respond, and as he storms out we get that close-focus shot of the abandoned plate to make sure the subtext hits home. The cakes are framed sitting in front of the horse statue, brilliantly dressed up in Crowley's sunglasses, to remind us that they were brought there for him and he's dismissing them. (Crowley is the frantic horse who can't be managed!)

There’s another level to it, though, which doesn’t fully become clear until episode 6. The episode 1 meeting in Nina’s café is the first time that Aziraphale and Crowley share a scene in the present-day in S2, which means that the last time we saw them together was when they were dining at the Ritz. As viewers, we quickly recognise the visual language of their partnership: a table for two, a drink, a dessert. It feels familiar. But the food gets delivered and then nobody eats it. On that level, it is a set-up without a pay-off and it really niggles as you watch. S1 closed out their relationship with a happy toast after a resplendent dinner; S2 opens it with a snack that gets ignored. The dynamics of who offers food to whom are also off, atypical. It’s a sign of how things are going to go later on, hinting at the fact their dynamic is dysfunctional right now, even though it might seem OK on the surface.

Which brings me, finally, on to the other thing I’ve wanted to point out…

The punchline is that Crowley doesn’t eat the eccles cakes, but the really subconsciously disconcerting thing is that Aziraphale doesn’t. That he seemingly never planned to, and never orders anything for himself. In fact, we don’t see Aziraphale eat anything substantial in any of the present-day scenes in S2. The only things he consumes onscreen are sherry, tea, and a travel sweet. (Oh, and Manipulation Coffee, which is definitely a callback to Crowley’s disastrous sextuple-espresso.) We see him with food, yes, but primarily he wants to give it to other people.

For me this little detail of S2 – not something you even fully notice until you think about it – is a very telling understated cue in terms of Aziraphale’s post-Heaven state of mind. It's about what amuseoffyre puts so well in another meta: 'the whole series looks like he’s having so much fun doing silly human things, but there’s this brittleness to it.' At first glance, we see Aziraphale interacting with food and assume he is now living the happy Earthly life we wanted for him, but on closer inspection he's not engaging much in the pleasure of eating for his own sake. He gets a quick sweet pick-me-up on his way somewhere else in the Bentley - all alone - and that's it. He's too anxious, too busy, he doesn't have time. Crowley doesn't have time to invite him for lunch.

I find it fascinating that Gabriel gets a squillion cups of cocoa in this season, waxing all lyrical about them, and Aziraphale gets none. Aziraphale's mug becomes Jim's mug, even. And he mostly makes the tea to show Muriel how to blend in. In short, S2 Aziraphale is terribly preoccupied with looking after/managing others, and not taking the time to look after himself. Like the Maggie and Nina match-making, all that kindly treat-offering is displacement, displacement, displacement.

No wonder it all goes wrong.

#SORRY for image quality #good omens spoilers #good omens meta #good omens #takes by me

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Zuck’s gravity-defying metaverse money-pit

Tomorrow (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:

"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (Stein's Law)

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)

Both of these are true, even though they seemingly contradict one another, and no one embodies that contradiction more perfectly than Mark Zuckerberg.

Take the metaverse.

Zuck's "pivot" to a virtual world he ripped off from a quarter-century old cyberpunk novel (reminder: cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion) was born of desperation.

Zuck fancies himself an avatar of the Emperor Augustus (that's why he has that haircut) (no, really). The emperors of antiquity are infamous for getting all weepy when they run out of lands to conquer.

But the lachrymosity of emperors has little causal relationship to the anxieties of tech monopolists! Alexander weeps because he just loves a good conquest and when he finishes conquering the world, he's terminally bored. That's not Zuck's problem at all. When Zuck attains monopoly status, his company develops an autoimmune disorder, as his vicious princelings run out of enemies to destroy and begin to knife one another.

Any monopoly faces these destructive microincentives, but tech is exceptional here because tech has the realtime flexibility and speed that brick-and-mortar businesses can never match:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Sociopaths with tech monopolies are worse for the same reason that road-rage would be worse in a flying car: adding new capacity to indiscriminate self-destructive urges turns ordinary car crashes into low-level airburst warfare:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The flexibility of digital gives tech platforms so much latitude to break things in tiny increments. A tech platform is like a Jenga tower composed of infinitely divisible blocks. The Jenga players are the product managers and executives who have run out of the ability to grow by attracting new business thanks to their monopoly dominance. Now they compete with one another to increase the yield from their respective divisions by visiting pain upon the business customers and end users their platform connects. By tiny increments, they increase the product's cost, lower its reliability, and strip it of its utility and then charge rent to restore its functionality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/24/cursed-bigness/#incentives-matter

This is the terminal stage of enshittification, the unstoppable autocannibalism of platforms as they seek to harvest all the value created by business customers and end users, leaving the absolute minimum of residual value needed to keep both stuck to the platform. This is a brittle equilibrium, because the difference between "I hate this service but I just can't stop using it," and "Get me the fuck out of here" is razor-thin.

All it takes is one tiny push – a whistleblower, a livestreamed mass-shooting, a Cambridge Analytica – and people bolt for the doors. This triggers the final stage: the "pivot," which is a tech euphemism for "panic."

For Zuck, the pivot got real after a disappointing earnings call triggered a mass sell-off of Facebook stock, history's worst one-day value incineration, which lopped a quarter of a trillion dollars off the company's market cap:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-19/dramatic-stock-moves-of-2022-led-by-meta-dive-nordic-flash-crash

This was when the metaverse became the company's top priority.

Now, in my theory of enshittification, the step that follows the pivot is death: "Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Many people have asked me about the conspicuous non-death of Facebook! That's where I have to fall back on Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Facebook can't continue to annihilate value, alienate its workers, harm the public, hemorrhage money in support of a mediocrity's cherished folly forever. Can it?

Admittedly, it sure seems like it can. Facebook's metaverse pivot has thus far cost the company $46,500,000,000. That is: $46.5 billion. That's even more money than Uber torched, seeking to maintain the illusion that they will be able to create monopolies on both transport and the labor market for driving and recoup the billions the Saudi royal family let them use for the con:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Don't worry: the Saudi royals are fine! They cashed out at the IPO, collecting a tidy profit at the expense of retail investors who assumed that a pile of shit as big as Uber must have a pony under it, somewhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

Uber has doubled the cost of rides and halved drivers' wages, using illegal gimmicks like "algorithmic wage discrimination" to squeeze a little more juice out of the nearly exhausted husks of its workforce:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But Stein's Law hasn't been repealed. Drivers can't drive for sub-subsistence wages. Do that long enough and they'll literally starve: that's what "subsistence" means. We lost a decade of transit investment thanks to the Uber con, at the same time as traditional taxi drivers were forced out of the industry. Uber can't be profitable and still pay a living wage, and the fantasy of self-driving cars as a means of zeroing out the wage-bill altogether remains stubbornly, lethally unworkable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Which means we're at the point where you can get off a commuter train at a main station and find yourself stranded: no taxis at the taxi-queue, no busses due for an hour, and no Uber cars available unless you're willing to pay $95 for a ten-minute ride in a luxury SUV (why yes, this did happen to me recently, thanks for asking).

As more and more of us are exposed to these micro-crises, the political will to do something will increase. This can't go on forever. "Don't use commuter rail" isn't a viable option. "Walk three miles each way to the commuter rail station" isn't viable either. Neither is "Pay $95 for an Uber to get to the station." Something's gotta give…eventually.

"Eventually" is the key word here. Remember the corollary of Stein's Law: Keynes's maxim that "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, but that is no guarantee of a soft landing. You can't smoke two packs a day forever – but in the absence of smoking cessation, the eventual terminus of that habit is stage-four lung cancer. Keep hammering butts into your face and your last smoke will come out a crematorium chimney.

Zuckerberg hasn't merely blown a whole-ass Twitter on the metaverse with nothing to show for it – he's gotten richer while doing it! In the past year, his net worth increased by 130%, to $59 billion, thanks to an increase in Facebook's share-price, driven by investors who stubbornly remain irrational, keeping the Boy Emperor solvent long past any reasonable assessment of his performance.

What are these investors betting on? One possibility is that the rise and rise of Facebook's share-price represents a bet on technofeudalism. Since the Communist Manifesto, Marxists have been predicting the end of capitalism. That end seems to have come, but what followed capitalism wasn't socialism, it was the return of feudalism, an economic system where elites derive their wealth from rents, not profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Profit is the income you get from investing in capital – machinery, systems, plant – and then harvesting the surplus value created by workers who mobilize this capital. Capitalism produces massive returns for its winners – in the Manifesto's first chapter, Marx and Engels just geek out about how productive and dynamic this system is.

But capitalism is also a Red Queen's Race, where the winners have to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. Capitalism drives competition, as other would-be winners pile into the sector, replicating the systems that the current winners are using and then improving on them. This is why the prophets of capitalist end-times like the FBI informant Peter Thiel say that "competition is for losers."

Capitalism's "profits" stand in contrast to the feudalist's "rents." Rents are income you get from owning something that other people need to produce things. The capitalist owns the coffee-shop, but the feudalist owns the building. When a rival capitalist opens a superior coffee-shop and drives the old shop out of business, the capitalist loses, but the rentier wins. Now they can rent out an empty storefront in the neighborhood everyone's coming to because of that hot new cafe.

Feudal and manorial lords also made their fortunes by extracting surplus value from workers, but these rentiers don't care about owning the means of production. The peasant in the field pays for their own agricultural equipment and livestock – control over the means of production is necessary for worker liberation, but it's not sufficient. The worker's co-op that owns its factory can still find the value it produces bled off by the landlord who owns the land the factory sits on.

The jury's still out on whether American workers really see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," but America's capitalists have a palpable, undeniable loathing for capitalism. The dream of an American "entrepreneur" is *PassiveIncome: money you get from owning something capitalists and/or workers use to create value. Digital technology creates exciting new possibilities for rent-extraction: a taxi-operator had to buy and maintain a car that someone else drove. Uber can offload this hassle onto its drivers and rent out access to the chokepoint it created between drivers and riders, charging all the traffic can bear. This is feudalism in the cloud – or as Yannis Varoufakis calls it, cloudalism.

In Varoufakis's Technofeudalism, he describes Amazon as a feudal venture. From a distance, Amazon seems like a bustling marketplace of manic capitalism, with sellers avidly competing to offer more variety and lower costs in a million independently operated storefronts. But closer inspection reveals that Amazon is a planned economy, not a market.

Every one of those storefronts pays rent to the same landlord – Amazon – which determines which goods can be offered for sale. Amazon sets pricing for those goods, and extracts 45-51% of every dollar those sellers make. Amazon even controls which goods are shelved at eye-height when you enter the store, and which ones are banished to a dusty storeroom in a distant sub-basement you'll never find:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/14/flywheel-shyster-and-flywheel/#unfulfilled-by-amazon

Zuck's metaverse is pure-play technofeudalism, Amazon taken to the logical extreme. It's easy to get distracted by the part of Zuck's vision that will convert us all into legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-resolution cartoon characters. But the real action isn't this digitization of our fleshy wants and needs. Zuck didn't spend $46.5B to torment us.

The cruelty isn't the point of the metaverse.

The point of the metaverse is to rent us out to capitalists.

Zuck doesn't know why we would use the metaverse, but he believes that if he can convince capitalists that we all want to live there, that they'll invest the capital to figure out how to serve us there, and then he can extract rent from those capitalists and start earning "passive income." It's an Uber for Cyberpunk Dystopias play.

Zuck's done this before. Remember the "pivot to video?" Zuckerberg wanted to compete with Youtube, but he didn't want to invest in paying for video production. Videos are really expensive to produce and the median video gets zero views. So Zuck used his captive audience to trick publishers into financing his move into video. He fraudulently told publishers that videos were blowing up on Facebook, outperforming boring old text by vast margins.

Publishers borrowed billions and raised billions more in the capital markets, financing the total conversion of newsrooms from text to video and precipitating a mass extinction event for print journalists. Zuck kept the con alive by giving away (fewer) billions to some of those publishers, falsely claiming that their videos were generating fortunes in advertising revenue. These lucky, credulous publishers became judas goats for their industry, luring others into the con, the same way that the "lucky" guy a carny lets win a giant teddy-bear at the start of the day lures others into putting down $5 to see if they can sink three balls in a rigged peach-basket.

But when we stubbornly refused to watch videos on Facebook, Zuck stopped spreading around these convincer payouts, and precipitated a second mass-extinction event in news media, as the new generation of video journalists joined their predecessors in Facebook-driven unemployment. Given this history, it's surreal to see publishers continue to insist that Facebook is stealing their content, when it is so clearly stealing their money:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Metaverse is the new Pivot to Video. Zuckerberg is building a new world, which he will own, and he wants rent it to capitalists, who will compete with one another in just the way that Amazon's sellers compete. No matter who wins that competition, Zuckerberg will win. The prize for winning will be a rent increase, as Zuckerberg leverages the fact that your "successful" business relies on Facebook's metaverse to drain off all the value your workers have produced:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

This can't last forever, but how long until Zuck's reality distortion field runs out of battery? That's the $46.5B question.

The market can certainly remain irrational for a hell of a long time. But the market isn't the only force that regulates corporate outcomes. Regulators also regulate. Europe's GDPR is now seven years old, and it plainly outlaws Facebook's surveillance.

For nearly a decade, Facebook has pretended that this wasn't true, and they got away with it. Mostly, that's thanks to the fact that Ireland is a corporate crime-haven with a worse-than-useless Data Protection Commission:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

But anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Facebook has finally been dragged into EU federal jurisdiction, where it will face exterminatory fines if it continues to spy on Europeans:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/07/luck-of-the-irish/#schrems-revenge

In response, Facebook has rolled out a subscription version of its main service and its anticompetitive acquisition, Instagram:

https://about.fb.com/news/2023/10/facebook-and-instagram-to-offer-subscription-for-no-ads-in-europe/

For €10/month, Facebook will give you an ad-free experience across its service offerings (it's €13/month if you pay through an app, as Facebook recoups the 30% #AdTax rents that the feudal Google/Apple mobile duopoly extracts).

But this doesn't come close to satisfying Facebook's legal obligations under the GDPR. The GDPR doesn't ban ads, it bans spying. Facebook spies on every single internet user, all the time. The apps we use are built with "free" Facebook toolkits that extract rent from the capitalists who make them by harvesting our data as we use their apps. The web-pages we visit have embedded Facebook libraries that do the same thing for web publishers. Facebook buys our data from brokers. Facebook has so many ways of spying on us that there's almost certainly no way for Facebook to stop spying on you, without radically transforming it operation.

To comply with the GDPR, Facebook must halt surveillance advertising altogether. There's no way to square "spying on users" with "you can't surveil without explicit consent, and you can't punish people for refusing."

And of course, "not spying" isn't the same as "not advertising." "Contextual advertising" – where ads are placed based on the thing you're looking at, not who you are and what you do – is hundreds of years old. Context ads underperform surveillance ads by a slim margin – about 5% – but they're vastly more profitable for publishers. That's because surveillance ads are feudal, controlled by rentiers like Facebook, who own vast troves of the surveillance data needed to run these ads. Traditional ad intermediaries (agencies, brokers) took 10-15% out of the total advertising market. Ad-tech companies – the Google/Facebook duopoly – take 51% out of every ad dollar spent.

Eliminate surveillance ads and you torch their feudal estates. Facebook will always know more about someone reading a news article than the publisher – but the publisher will always know more about the article than Facebook does:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

There are rents under capitalism, just as there are profits under feudalism. The defining characteristic of a system is what happens when rents and profits come into conflict. If profits win – for example, if productive companies beat patent trolls, or if news publishers escape Facebook's rent-extraction – then the system is capitalist. If rents win – if investors continue to bet large on the metaverse as its losses pass $50 billion and head for the $100 billion mark – then the system is feudal.

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. The question isn't whether the platforms will eventually become so enshittified that they die – the question is whether they will go down in an all-consuming fireball, or whether they'll go down in a controlled demolition that lets us evacuate the people they've trapped inside them first:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/09/let-the-platforms-burn/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/30/markets-remaining-irrational/#steins-law

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puente_de_las_cataratas_Victoria,_Zambia-Zimbabue,_2018-07-27,_DD_10.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

#pluralistic #mark zuckerberg #meta #enshittification #facebook #twitter #elon musk #billionaires #follies #failing up #metaverse #steins law #big tech #technofeudalism

[suguruplsr]

comforting suguru in the shower after he’s having a hard time to trying to keep his priorities straight and you convince him to retire and move in with him smut & fluff? PLEASE 😞

Just tell me when it hurts

✰ ✰ ✰ your boyfriend hasn’t been at his best lately..

જ⁀➴ i love suguru and i totally kinda forgot the move in part <3 but i made up for it !

,, depressed?suguru x fem!reader , they’re in their early 20’s , fluff , angst w/ comfort , smut , unprotected , shower sex , wall fucking , nipple play , finger sucking , cum eating ? , creampie , breeding ? , dirty talk , pet names ( baby , pretty girl , sweet girl ) , mentions of them becoming parents <3 , idk

your eyes flicker to the cracked door of your shared bathroom. suguru’s been in there for over 20 minutes, and it worries you. you know he’s not dead or anything like that, considering he called out to you when you came home from your latest mission. but he’s been like this a lot lately, long showers, sleepless nights, late mornings. he even stopped his important weekly hair care routine on sundays, and his skincare routine. he also stopped making that smoothie for you two that apparently increases several factors of your health. at least that’s what the old lady at walmart said. he even stopped going out in your evening walks. and he loves those.

yet, you know this isn’t because of a sudden dislike for the activities. far from that. it’s exhaustion. you have half a mind of what he’s exhausted of, but you need him to talk. to just say why. getting up, you throw your phone on the bed and strip yourself before reaching the bathroom door, slipping in and seeing suguru through the fogged glass. he’s just standing under the water, body soaked, eyes closed, and brows furrowed. you’ve caught him like this a few times, unresponsive and stuck in whatever thoughts cloud his mind. he doesn’t even react when you slide open the door.

“suguru?” you hum, hands finding his waist and slowly wrapping around him when he spreads his arms for you. “i hope i didn’t worry you..” suguru’s voice is tired, breaking in a way that makes you hug him tighter, immediately shushing him with sweet ‘nono’s and kissing up his spine. “of course not. how have you been lately suguru?” you know exactly what to say, your concern coax’s him into nearly breaking down. you didn’t ask if he was okay, or if he’s feeling good, even if he’s clearly not. but you ask generally, and it’s a question that has him opening his eyes to adore the way your manicured nails run along his chest comfortingly.

“am i obvious?” suguru attempts to laugh, yet it’s croaky and brittle. “more than obvious.” he can feel the smile of your lips into his back, and it calms his mind way more than the hot water, which he can feel gradually turning cold. “could you ever hate me..?” he finds himself speaking the one thought that circles his mind. he just needs to know. he’s not sure why though, maybe because he knows he’ll say something that would make you hate him? or because he can feel his mindset and morals wavering on a plane that he’d hate for you to see him fall off of.

“depends. i don’t like it when you don’t tell me things though..” your voice gets quieter with each word, as if scared of bringing up the biggest complication in your relationship. but suguru hears it loud and clear, and it’s enough to make his shoulders drop in relaxation. if he were to do one of the inhumane thoughts that corrupt his thoughts, then at least he’d have some who understands right? “i’m tired of this.. of protecting non sorcerers..” suguru’s heart waits heavily at your silence, his trembling hands going up to yours, fingers interlocking together.

you know there’s more, and you know suguru isn’t as confident in his words compared to his usual straightforwardness. “keep going.. at your own pace. i’m listening.” your voice sounds like honey, another kiss being placed on his back and suguru’s falling in love again. you don’t sound distant or disturbed. bothered or perturbed. you’re listening, and you’re understanding. and him being aware of that makes him realize that he just needed someone to listen. “i just keep thinking, is this what our purpose is? as sorcerers. to protect those who create and cause these mishaps.. and humans, they’re just so..”

you’re leaving another peck when the tone of his voice shakes with an emotion of disgust. but you don’t do it out of your worry, more so encouragement. you’d rather hear it all in its ugliness than him changing his words for your sake. “they’re so.. sick. i can’t blame them for being ignorant of our troubles. but why should we protect them blindly? people who harm each other because of their stupid self righteousness..” suguru’s bitter, hands aching to clench together into a fist. he’s reminded of the incident at the village a few years ago, of course, nanako and mimiko are safe but sometimes he wishes he had burnt the village down, rightfully so. but he didn’t, and he doesn’t clench his fist. he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he had ever traumatized the two girls that live with his parents currently or accidentally hurt the warm hands in his hold.

you feel ashamed. noticing the drastic change in his beliefs as a sorcerer compared to when you first started dating him. how could you let him fall this much? “so what do you want to do..?” you finally ask. the sounds of the shower head and the warm water hitting your body brings you out of your thoughts, the silence feels unbearable, but for suguru, you can wait. you unravel your hands from his, letting them explore his chest in a manner that soothes him, laying your head on his back in content. your hands feel like they’re touching him for the first time, smoothing over his wet skin and finding new scars that you’ll make sure to adore later in bed.

“i don’t wish for curses to be eradicated anymore, instead.. i think non sorcerers..” suguru trails off. he spoke without even thinking. yet those words were the only thought kept appearing in his head each time he searched for an answer. and it makes him understand the gravity of them when you let out a sigh. “but we can’t do that..” how could you still speak to him with such an obvious tone of love laced in your voice? after he practically admitted to wanting over half of the human population to die.

“i.. i know i just. i just can’t deal with this loop of life. what if in the end, protecting those.. those people, end up with us sorcerers dying? for people like them?” suguru’s frustrated, and he feels like he’d tip over the edge without you, without the reassuring squeeze you give one of his hands, without the way you gently gesture for him to turn around the second he sees you in all of your beauty, you kiss him. you kiss him despite all of the trials in his head he’s confessed to, kissing him even if he’s all sick and twisted, at least suguru thinks.

“y/n—“ “quit.” you murmur against his lips, hands cupping his face, staring up at him with a look that makes his entire world light up. suguru feels conflicted, he can’t sit by and watch as the jujustu world falls because of non sorcerers inability to control themselves.. but another part of him screams to say yes. he needs it, not just a break, but to leave completely. he knows he's unhealthy, his mind all mushed hatred that makes him blind towards the effect it has on himself. on you. and his heart is breaking, he doesn’t even need to ask if you’d retire with him because he knows you’ll say yes with no hesitation.

“that’s a big change..” suguru’s eyes drop to meet yours, and you can see every single emotion welled in those pretty eyes of his. every single emotion that weighed heavy on his heart. which is something you’re always willing to carry for him. “it’s a change you and me both know you need. just think about it..” and he is, the two of you have so much time left in life, about to be reaching your mid-twenties, so much youth left. maybe you two could build a shop? go out of the country? own thousands of pets? maybe have a family?

suguru pulls you in for another kiss when he recognizes his answer. because his answer is you. nothing will ever beat having you in his life. everything he could possibly do living a regular life, has to be with you. “you’ll leave with me right?” “you don’t even have to ask..” both of you are fighting for another kiss after your words and suguru’s careful to not drop you as he holds your waist up to the slippery wall. “love you so much baby..” your wrap your arms around him as he’s mumbling into your neck with kisses that even have your heart smiling, if it could.

“and i love you more..care about you so much..” your giggle is like a melody to his ears, but suguru’s not that corny to ever admit that. your hand runs through his hair as he brings a hand up to one of your perked nipples. he’s twisting the little nub with a small smile as he hears the little gasp that escapes you, your legs wrapping around him even tighter to pull him closer when he kisses your neglected one. “yea? gonna let me show you how much i appreciate that pretty girl?” suguru’s latching his mouth onto your wet breast at the sound of your ‘mhm!’.

you’re just so cute, only able to dig your nails into his shoulder in fear of you two slipping as he stimulates your nipples, his tongue swirling around the nub like magic. “sugu c’mon.. wanna feel you in me..” you never fail to amaze him with how quickly your mind switches the second you two get even a little bit heated. you were just convincing your boyfriend that mass murder wasn’t right, and now here you are, convincing him to stuff you up.

“so greedy. but s’okay, whatever you want.” suguru doesn’t bother to hide his enjoyment, already moving to hold you up with one hand while he shuffles, trying to align himself with your hole. he’s a bit worried, he always preps you before actually penetrating you and he doubts the water droplets hitting your skin is enough to help you take him. “hold on baby, don’t let go, okay?” you nod eagerly at his words, biting your lip when the head of his cock tries to bully through your entrance. he rubs his tip along your folds, sucking in a breath when he feels your slick begin to slowly coat him, pussy starting to pull him in.

“suguru..” you’re hiccuping when he slides in, his cock head finally pushes through into your gummy walls. suguru never fails to see heaven for a split second every time he's in your pussy raw. “that’s it, you can do it.” suguru’s guiding you down on his cock until you’re slumped in his neck, whimpering in his ear as he handles you with ease. “sugu, you’re so deep n’ it feels so gooood~” you’re choking when he suddenly starts fucking up into you. good deep thrusts that would’ve reached your cervix if he wasn’t holding you still against the wall.

“fuuuuck. fuckin’ love you a-and this pussy.” suguru can already feel his dick throbbing, aching with the need to spray your walls each time you clench around him. he might throw away his box of condoms if raw sex with you was always like this. both of you enter a messy kiss, the loud smacks of your skins meeting probably weren’t hidden within the loud sounds of the water. if anything, the water made it seem even more lewd, flesh slipping and mashing together each time his hips bucked up into you. like some porno.

“l-love you! i love you suguuu! m’gonna cum, cum with me suguru~ fill me up. please?” you’re moaning in his mouth, nails scratching his back and pleading with such an adorable expression. lashes wet with water and tears, lipstick messy, and your hair all wet. he thinks he can already hear your later complaints of trying to deal with your wet hair. suguru’s never came inside you before, always having a good pull out game or sticking with those annoying condoms. but the way you’re holding onto him like you never want him to let go has him holding your waist tighter, head tilted back as he fucks you.

he’s sharper, thick cock dragging in your walls so fucking filthly. “cum on this cock sweet girl, gonna keep this pussy stuffed everyday. want me keep it full of cum yea? gonna make you a mommy. a cute housewife.” suguru nearly wishes he was lying but the idea of having some boring office job and being able to come home to you every night has his mind going places. or helping you with dinner if you two had kids, tucking them in at night, seeing them off to the bus stop, all that cute mundane shit suguru thought he’d never experience.

his words make you squeeze on him, your orgasm washing over you as he keeps pumping his dick into you. “do it sugu. wanna be a mommy~” you’re whining in his ear, trying not to cry from how overstimulated you’re getting, then suguru kisses you roughly, your mouth hiding his moans as he’s spilling a thick load of cum into your cunny. you two stay like that until you tap his shoulder, weakly stating that he had to let you down and that the water bill is probably high as fuck after today. but he cheekily smiles, swiping up the leaking cream from your pussy and sticking his thumb in your mouth. “needa keep your pussy full right?” he’s so smug, low eyes squinting in amusement when you suck it off obediently.

suguru carefully picks you up off the wall, holding you while he turns off the shower and gets towels for the both of you. he sits you on the bed before reluctantly pulling out, cleaning you two up and then wrapping a big warm towel around you. he gets comfortable in his own towel before sitting beside you, kissing your cheek with a small smile, “thank you.” your eyes twinkle at his words, laying your head on his shoulder, “i’m always here suguru..” you say softly, humming when he gives another kiss on your forehead. “i know, and im grateful for that..”

you two spent nearly an hour cuddled up in your towels before finally deciding to change into some clothes. currently, you’re ordering takeout, walking inside your shared room and seeing suguru who was writing, which you presumed to be letters. “baby it’s not like we’re ghosting them. you can still say goodbye to everyone after our meeting with the higher ups.” you chuckle, walking over to his desk and tilting his head towards you. suguru was wearing his pair of pink glasses, a color you suggested as a joke but he still got. and standing above him makes you want to see him from this angle often. he’s so cute.

“i know.. but y’know how satoru will get..” suguru sighs, and you look over, smiling at the sight of three whole papers filled with words dedicated to his said best friend, along with one unfinished one. “i doubt even five letters is enough for him. also your mom texted me.” “really? does she need something?” suguru’s concern immediately melts when he sees the ever growing grin on your face, “nope. but apparently nanako and mimiko miss their parents.” suguru frowns, confused, “but they know their parents are—“ you’re holding his cheeks with a pout, huffing, “suguru they meant us! like me and you.” you give an exasperated sigh, kissing his lips as he pulls you into his lap.

“so you want to visit them soon? we can leave after tomorrow.” suguru’s adorable, lips curled into a loving smile as he snuggles into your neck. “we can do that. but i was thinking that after we settle down, into a bigger house.. we could completely adopt them. plus im sure your parents want to finally experience some alone time..” your nervous eyes don't reach him. you knew he loved the girls as much as you did but what if what he was in the shower was just something in the moment? but you can’t care to ponder on your uncertainty anymore when he kisses you deeply. your lips mesh perfectly like puzzle pieces, your breath taken away as you enjoy the shared moment before he finally pulls away.

“i’d love that so much, and i love you.. so much.”

#jjk x fem!reader #jjk x reader #jujutsu kaisen #jjk #jujustu kaisen x reader #geto suguru #jjk geto #jjk smut #geto suguru x you #geto x reader #geto fluff #jujutsu geto #getou suguru smut #getou suguru x reader #geto smut #geto x y/n #geto x black reader #geto x you #jjk suguru #sugurugeto #jujutsu kaisen suguru #jjk x you #jjk x y/n #jjk fluff #jujustsu kaisen x reader #jujustu kaisen #jujustsu kaisen smut #jujutsu kaisen smut #getou suguru x you #getou suguru x y/n

[feyascorner]

blurry eyes

summary. Orin takes Astarion as a hostage and you nearly lose your mind trying to get him back. Even when you do, things aren't the way they used to be.

warnings. angst/comfort

pairing. Astarion x GN!Reader

a/n. fluffier break from TFBU bec it's draining the soul out of me🧍‍♀️ this is kinda messy but for me orin always kidnaps lae’zel and Im glad it’s never astarion but what if;;;

You're not yourself. Everyone knows it. Not since Orin showed up at camp wearing Astarion's face, his own blood smeared on the poor imitation of the cheeks you love so deeply. She taunted you, smiling wickedly in a way that made your stomach churn before you lunged at her with a blade, only for her to vanish into a mist of red.

You usually prefer to use your silver tongue to get out of a dangerous situation. But now, all you want to see is her blood sprayed across a wall.

There are bags under your eyes, going days without sleep. You hadn't realized how accustomed you'd become to his arms cradling you in the dead of night, his cold hands wrapped around your shoulders and your cheek pressed against the crook of his neck. You hadn't realized how attached you'd gotten to him.

The fight is quick. Despite your companion's warnings to get some rest, you charged into Bhaal's temple the moment you had access to it, and rightfully so, because she didn't stand a chance against your wrath.

And now, even with him at your fingertips, laying so peacefully on a stone slab with his eyes shut, all you can feel is the adrenaline coursing through your veins. You gently touch his cheek, and you find that it's cold, as it's always been. There's a slice of a knife, surely to leave a scar if it's not treated well. You smile a bit, the first time in days, thinking of how he'd complain about the blemish a few weeks from now.

He finally stirs, and when his eyes peel open to your face, his face falls.

"Gods above," he whispers. "Stop with the damn tricks, Orin. I'm no fool."

Your heart breaks. And while all you want to do is wrap him in your arms and wipe away his frown, the adrenaline holding you together is long gone. You're exhausted, you realize, only managing to grab the edge of the stone slab before you crumple onto your knees, vision going blurry.

Ah, maybe you should have rested.

No, not when he'd been here to suffer alone, forced to face Orin's blood-thirst. Not when you'd smelled his blood on her blade.

You want to comfort him, but nothing comes through your throat.

The two of you don't speak much. He doesn't speak much to anyone, for that matter, for a few days. You can sense the uneasiness of your other companions, who don't dare ask what Orin did to him while you'd nearly lost yourself trying to get to him. You don't approach him, fearing he might recoil away.

The only thing you can do is watch over him while he writhes in his bed, drenched with sweat and nightmares you cannot take away. You're not even sure if they're about Cazador or Orin anymore, but you can't bring yourself to touch him or the healing scar on his cheek in hopes of soothing him.

It's only two weeks later when most of your companions have gone out, and it's just the two of you on opposite sides of the room. You rub at your blade with a cloth, numbly focused on sharpening it for a bigger foe while he's still reading his book in a silence that should feel comfortable but only makes your mouth dry.

"Hells, I can't do this anymore."

You blink as he strides across the room, and he's suddenly sitting next to you while you continue staring at him like he grew a mushroom from his head. "Do what?"

"We must talk about---well, you know, darling."

Even in this brittle stage of your relationship, the way he says your nickname is loving. It makes your heart squeeze.

You place the blade on the ground. "Okay. We can talk."

There's a silence that hangs in the air before he sighs. "Torture is not a foreign concept to me, my dear. If my years under Cazador's palace did anything for me, it's made my pain tolerance impossibly high."

You frown. This does not make you feel better.

He eyes you from the side, leaning back on both his hands. "What I'm trying to say is, you don't have to worry so much about me. Even if I were to perish, I'm sure there are other vampires willing to help you with your cause to defeat the Elder Brain, though they'd be considerably less charming."

You're immediately on your feet. "Of course, I was worried about you! And I don't care if you've gone through hell and back, pain is still pain, and I don't want to see or think about you even stepping foot into something like that, much less the temple of the Lord of Murder!"

He stands after you. "I didn't mean it like that."

"Other vampires?" you say in disbelief. "Well, I don't want other vampires, I want the one that I can't even sleep without."

Your eyes are glossy now, and you hate yourself for it. You should be consoling him, not becoming emotional over the torture that he experienced. But the words come out like vomit, and you can't stop yourself.

"Love, please don’t ruin your pretty face with tears,” he tries, hands awkwardly hanging in the air as he struggles to find what to do.

“Don't act like getting kidnapped isn't a big deal," you swipe at your eyes. "You won't even talk to us."

He blinks. "Me? Avoid speaking with you?"

"Yes!"

"Well, forgive me for giving you space. You looked positively demented after you were done stabbing that vile woman to the death, I assumed you needed time to recover before I could approach you."

"What? I was giving you space."

"I assure you it was the other way around.”

“You were avoiding me!”

“Because you were avoiding me!”

You're both just staring at each other now, at a loss of words for what turned out to be a miscommunication that should have been resolved days ago. The silence hangs thickly in the air, and a rush of emotions runs between you two, expressions shifting every few moments before they simultaneously become one.

He purses his lips to refrain from smiling. You stifle a laugh.

Then you're both laughing and while the topic of discussion does not warrant as such, you can't help yourself when days of ignoring one another have come down to such a minor bump between you. When both of you calm, you sigh again, this time in utter relief. "This was anticlimactic."

"It was," he confirms. "But this one time, I don't mind."

Wordlessly, you wrap your arms around his torso, burying your face into his chest while he returns the gesture by holding you tighter. You stand there a bit, quietly, until he clears his throat.

"For the record, I don't want you to go around searching for other vampires."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

You decide he can tell you more about what happened when the time comes, but now, you're more than happy the way you are.

#astarion ancunin #baldur's gate 3 #astarion x tav #baldur's gate astarion #bg3 astarion #astarion x reader #astarion #bg3 x reader #fluff #angst with a happy ending #bg3 tav #bg3

[theemporium]

[5k] neither of you considered the possibility of your family and friends finding out about your relationship. however, in a series of events, they discover you and quinn are together. but it's fine as long as luke doesn't find out, right?

part one // series masterlist

.

When the season started, you thought it would be easier to hide your relationship from everyone you knew. Never once did either you or Quinn expect to be caught. 

And never once did you think the first person to learn about you and Quinn would be Trevor fucking Zegras of all people.

Before the semester had even started, it had been an unspoken agreement between you and Quinn that you would fly out during reading week. It would be difficult to avoid questions—mostly from Luke who would be offended you weren’t going to fly out to New Jersey—but it was doable. It just took a few weeks of you dropping hints and clues about flying out to Canada to your best friend for him to not really question it when you said you were going to visit your brother. 

And after months away, it was a fucking dream to have this week with Quinn, to settle that uneasiness in your chest that had been lingering since you left the lakehouse that summer. 

You both knew the hockey schedule was insane. You knew neither of you could really leave his apartment. But with a string of games at home for the week, it seemed worth having that week together. 

You didn’t think anything could go wrong.

“What are you thinking in that pretty head of yours?”

Your fingers paused the random shapes they were tracing on his bare chest, moving to lift your head to find him already staring at you with a fond look. 

“You. Us. This. Everything.” You listed off, your lips twitching upwards when he rolled his eyes. “What? You asked and I answered.” 

“I think you’re holding out on me,” Quinn retorted, his hand squeezing where it rested on your hip. “Wanna share what things you were thinking about? More specifically, those thoughts about us.” 

You snorted. “Get your head out of the gutter, Hughes.” 

“Maybe you need to get your head down there,” he countered and, before a witty response could even pass your lips, he had flipped you both over until you were laying on your back with him looming over you. “It’s fun down here, I think you’d like it.” 

You tucked your lip between your teeth. “Yeah?” 

“Mhm,” he hummed as his fingers traced up and down your bare thigh, a small grin on his face when he felt your body shiver in response. “Gave me a few ideas too.” 

You swallowed harshly as you noted the dark glint in his eyes, the way your stomach twisted in desire as his fingers kept moving upwards. “Like what?” 

Quinn’s smirk widened a little. “Like—” 

KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK! 

Your brows furrowed in confusion, feeling as though your body had been doused in cold water as you sat up a little. “Were you expecting someone?” 

Quinn frowned, sitting up himself as he tried not to show his clear annoyance at the interruption. “No, I told the boys to call me if they needed me outside of practice. I don’t know who that could be—” 

KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK! 

“You should probably go get that,” you murmured, trying to bite back your smile as Quinn grumbled something under his breath. 

“If it’s any of the boys, I’m making them do bag skates at practice,” he huffed, crawling out of the sheets and reaching for an abandoned pair of sweatpants on the floor before he left the bedroom. 

He could feel his annoyance brittle when the person knocked for a third time, this time hitting the door over and over again until Quinn reached for the handle and yanked the door open. 

The last person he expected to see was Trevor Zegras on the other side, grinning at him like it was a totally normal thing for him to be on Quinn’s doorstep on a random Tuesday. 

“There’s my favourite Hughes!” 

Quinn blinked once. And then twice. And then a third time just to make sure he was actually standing there. 

“What the fuck, Zegras?” 

“I wanted to surprise you! We didn’t have anything on before the game on Thursday so I thought I’d head up a day earlier than the others and—” Trevor paused, seeming to catch on to the way the older boy was glaring at him. “Geez, this wasn’t the reaction I was expecting.”

“I—” Quinn took a deep breath. “And what reaction were you expecting?” 

“At least a hug, I mean—” Trevor moved to take a step forward, his arms open like he was going to reach to hug the other boy, only to pause. It was like he was finally taking in Quinn’s attire for the first time—or the lack thereof—before his eyes focused on the blossoming bruises along his neck and collarbone. 

It was scary the way the grin spread across his face.

Quinn frowned. “What? Why are you doing that with your face?”

“You got a girl in here, Huggy?” Trevor grinned, not even giving Quinn a chance to react before he was pushing his way into the flat. “Aw shit, Jack never told me you were seeing someone! Is it new? What’s her name? Is it a dude? Listen, I don’t judge! I’ve seen the edits with you and Pettersson.” 

Quinn blinked. “I—what?”

He was still standing in shock, trying to process the words that just left Trevor’s lips before he realised the boy was walking deeper into his flat. His eyes widened, his brain shutting out whatever random rambling that was coming out of Trevor’s mouth as he tried to reach out to stop the boy—but it was useless. 

It was like the whole world froze when Trevor shoved the bedroom door open. His words came to an abrupt stop, his jaw hanging open as he looked at you sprawled on Quinn’s bed with a sheet covering your clearly-otherwise naked body. He looked at your face, then back to Quinn before they settled on you again.

“YOU’RE BANGING LADY HUGHES?!”

Quinn winced. “Why do you have to say it like that?” 

“I…oh my god…you…WHAT?” Trevor spluttered out, looking between the two of you like you were aliens to him. “How long has this been going on? Why the fuck did no one tell me? What the fuck?”

“Well, we can’t tell you something nobody else knows,” you supplied with a sheepish expression.

His eyes widened further. “Nobody else knows? Like at all?” 

You shook your head.

His face instantly brightened. “So I’m the first?” 

“Not by choice,” Quinn grumbled under his breath.

“You can’t tell anyone, Trev,” you said, a pleading look on your face. “Especially not Luke. We are gonna tell him…just not yet. You cannot tell a soul, not even Jack.” 

“I won’t. Scout’s promise.” 

Quinn glared at him. “Were you even a boy scout?” 

“No, why do you ask?” 

“I—” Quinn just shook his head. “Can you just…wait outside whilst we get dressed?”

“Aw, I knew you’d be happy I was here, Huggy,” Trevor beamed, patting the older boy’s cheek before he bounced out of the room, most likely helping himself to whatever was in Quinn’s fridge. 

Quinn turned to you, looking exasperated but you just grinned. 

“Guess that’s one less person we have to worry about hiding from?” 

He just sighed deeply in response. 

…

Trevor ended up keeping his word, not telling a soul. Though, he did go out of his way to bug you and Quinn—mostly Quinn—about your relationship.

You would have thought the situation with Trevor would have prompted the two of you to be more careful. You thought it would have been your lesson learnt that not even the season being fully underway would be distracting enough for you to be as laid back as you were. You thought it was the small reality check you needed. 

As it would turn out, it wasn’t even two weeks later when the next slip up happened. 

It was a stupid, drunken promise that led you to the Hughes’ family home in Ann Arbor, bright and early on a Saturday. When the boys had revealed to you that all three batches of the cookies they had meant to make for a charity sale the university were holding had burnt to a crisp because all of them were incapable of baking, you had offered up your amateur baking skills to make a few batches. 

You were drunk and emotionally compromised and it was really hard to say no to the pleading eyes of Ethan Edwards.

However, with your kitchen barely being big enough to hold two people, Ellen had kindly offered her kitchen for you to use. Plus, she had been wanting to catch up with you since the semester had started, especially considering it was the longest time you and Luke had been apart.

It was somewhere in between the second and third batch when your phone started ringing on the counter. 

“Hey Ellen, could you grab that for me?” You called out over your shoulder, your hands preoccupied in rolling small balls of cookie dough to place on the tray. “Just answer it and put it on speaker.”

There was a beat of hesitation. “Are you sure, sweetheart?” 

“Yeah, just place it down on the counter beside me,” you said offhandedly, frowning at the batch of cookies as Ellen pressed the little green button and let the ringing stop.

You were elbow deep in a bowl of batter when a familiar voice echoed through the Hughes’ kitchen. 

“Hey babe, quick question: did you say you were coming up for Christmas break or not?” 

The whole room fell silent as you looked over your shoulder, finding Ellen already staring at you. She had an amused glint in her eyes, her lips twitching upwards in a smile that was a little mischievous—it reminded you so much of Jack. You dared a glance at the doorway where Jim stood, eyebrows raised in surprise but something quite happy in his expression. 

“Uh, can I call you back? I just have to…deal with something real quick.”

“You okay?” 

“Yeah, just…” You trailed off again, your cheeks burning as Ellen and Jim stared at you. “I’ll call back in ten minutes when I’m finished with these cookies, okay?” 

“Okay, miss you.” 

“Miss you too.”

The sound of the call cutting sounded through the kitchen and none of you said anything for a few seconds. And much to your surprise, it was Jim who spoke first. 

“God dammit, kid, you cost me twenty bucks!”

You blinked. “Huh?” 

Ellen smiled fondly, taking a few steps until she was beside you. She gave your elbow a soft squeeze, something knowing in her gaze. “I always knew you’d end up with one of my boys. Jim was just convinced it would be Jack.” 

Jim huffed. “I bet your parents twenty bucks each.” 

Your eyes widened. “My parents?” 

“We aren’t blind, kid,” Jim retorted, something soft and fond in his voice. 

Ellen snorted. “Clearly you are since you thought it would be Jack.” 

“I—” You started but you weren’t even sure what to say.

Ellen turned back to you, smiling like the whole conversation was normal. “I always knew it would be Quinn. I saw the way he looked at you, even when you were young.”

Your brows furrowed. “Quinn barely liked me when we were kids.”

And Ellen just laughed like that was the funniest thing you could have said. It wasn’t exactly the way you wanted either of your parents—Quinn’s and your own—to find out about your relationship. 

But, unlike Trevor, Ellen and Jim understood the unspoken rule and just how…complicated the situation was, despite Ellen’s insistence that her eldest son had been crushing on you for a lot longer than you believed. 

Nobody tell Luke.

…

It was your fault for leaving the room.

When you had enrolled in Michigan, there was a small part of you that was worried college would be the thing to tear you and Luke apart. In retrospect, it was a stupid thought to have. But you were young and scared and entering this unknown era of your life, and you just wanted to cling onto what you knew, what you were used to—onto Luke.

You realised pretty early on that the thought was stupid when the hockey team had practically adopted you. You were an extension of Luke, but it never felt like that. They were your friends as much as they were Luke’s, and you found yourself fond of these boys who had wiggled their way into your heart. 

Knowing you still had them despite Luke being in New Jersey made coming back alone so much easier. 

However, the life of a D1 athlete was an intense one, along with the fact classes were getting harder and assignments were getting longer. But the boys had practically demanded you come over at least once a week so you didn’t ‘forget who your new best friends are’, as they so kindly liked to say over and over again. Mostly just to annoy Luke.

It was one of those nights. You had made your way to their house after your last class, faceplanting down onto the couch until the group of you had decided on ordering pizza. You had some random comedy movie running on in the background, just senseless noise to accompany whatever random debates Ethan had managed to drag up. It was nice and easy and relaxing, and made you feel a little more sane in what was turning out to be a gruelling year. 

You were in the middle of showing Rutger a random video Jack had sent you of Luke decking it on the ice during practice when the doorbell rang. 

“I’ll get it,” you told them without missing a beat, leaving your phone in their hands as you collected the pizzas from the delivery man. 

What you weren’t expecting was to come back and find all of them staring at you with creepy matching grins on their faces.

You froze, eyeing them suspiciously. “What? What happened?” 

“You are a sneaky lil’ thing, aren’t you?” Rutger spoke up, looking far too smug over something you were still in the dark over. 

You glanced between them before your eyes settled on Rutger again, your confusion clear on your face. 

Rutger continued, “when were you gonna tell us you have a boyfriend?” 

Your body froze. “I don’t know what—”

“And when the fuck were you gonna tell us it’s Quinn Hughes?” Mark jumped in, turning your phone around to show a picture you and Quinn had taken during your last visit. 

He had taken the photo in an elevator mirror, your back to the camera as you wrapped yourself around the boy. But he was grinning, so big and unbothered and it was one of your favourite sights. It was one of your favourite photos of him. 

And it certainly wasn’t the photo you left them with.

“Did you go through my phone?” You finally managed to blurt out when words found you again. But the damage was done and you knew there wasn’t much you could do considering the last time they were aware, you barely spoke to the oldest Hughes brother.

“I can’t believe you kept this from us!” Ethan huffed out, shaking his head like he was genuinely offended. He probably was. He tended to be the more dramatic one. 

“I can’t believe Luke allowed this,” Mark snorted. 

You flashed them a sheepish smile. 

“Oh, dude,” Rutger murmured with a shake of his head.

“You can’t tell him. You can’t tell anyone.” You shifted in your spot, something a little desperate and pleading in your voice, and it was enough for the boys to sober up a bit. Become a little more serious. “We didn’t wanna tell anyone yet and I just…”

“We won’t tell a soul,” Mark reassured you, a soft smile on his face that eased some of the anxiety in your chest.

“As long as you tell us everything,” Ethan added, a knowing smirk on his face. “And I mean everything because how the fuck does any of the Hughes brothers have game?”

And you couldn’t help but snort in response.

…

Jack didn’t accidentally find out more than he put it together. 

It wasn’t often that the Devils and the Canucks met during the season but when they did, it was a family affair. You had decided to join the Hughes parents on their trip up to Vancouver, each of you wearing your hybrid Canucks/Devils jerseys that Ellen had custom made for these occasions. 

The game itself went by as you expected. There was a lot of media coverage on the ‘Hughes Bowl’, meaning each of the boys had been dragged into interview after interview before the game. It was a good game, a clean one too. You tried not to wince too much when the final buzzer blared through the arena and it was a Devils win. 

You knew Quinn would be a little gutted, even if he wouldn’t fully show it in front of his family.

The group of you had decided to head out to one of the Canucks’ favourite bars, something that Luke had whined a little about considering Ellen and Jim insisted they join. But it was wholesome and sweet and made you crave the summer weeks a little more than the current early January weather.

You were settled at the bar, laughing at Jack’s attempt to catch the bartender’s attention to order another round of shots he had dragged you into doing when you felt the warmth of another body settle beside you. For a short moment, you smiled thinking that maybe Quinn had snuck away from whatever conversation he had been stuck in with Petey and Jim. But when you turned your head, you found a stranger standing beside you. 

“Hey gorgeous,” he smiled, and something instantly unsettled deep within your chest.

“Hi,” you replied, short and blunt as you tried to shift away but there wasn’t much space by the crowded bar.

“Hey, where are you going? I just wanted to chat,” he said with an easy smile on his face, his hand resting on your elbow and you instantly jerked away from his hold. 

“I’m not interested,” you answered.

He laughed and the sound grated on your nerves. “That’s a bit presumptuous that I wanted something, sweetheart. Think you’re all that, huh?” 

“Just leave me alone,” you said as you took a step back. A part of you wanted to turn your head and try to catch Jack’s attention, try to ask for help. Another part of you didn’t want to look away from this man. You didn’t trust him.

He huffed out a chuckle. “Don’t be like that—”

“She said no. Fuck off now.” 

A mix of relief and surprise washed over you when you felt a body settle behind you, and you didn’t need to turn your head to know it was Quinn standing behind you, but you still did just to settle the tightness in your chest. 

His face was set in a blank expression, but you recognised it well enough. When he got angry—truly angry—he didn’t have a frown on his face or a crease between his brows. His face just looked…blank. Like he was so lost in his own rage that no expression could really encapsulate how he felt. 

You rarely saw it. He rarely showed this side of him.

His hands were on your waist, pulling you closer to his body as his eyes never left the stranger’s. He tilted his head to the side when the man opened his mouth again, and that seemed enough to shut him up again. 

“Go.” 

The man decided to do the smart thing and scuttle into the crowd of people, disappearing with a blink of an eye until neither you nor Quinn could see him. But even with him gone, you couldn’t shake the uneasiness in your chest.

A second passed before Quinn moved, now standing in front of you with your face in his hands as he tore your gaze away from the crowd to look at him instead. His brows were furrowed together in concern, his lips turned downwards as he glanced over you to make sure you were okay.

“Hey, you with me?” He murmured, his voice soft and comforting and you clung onto it.

“Mhm,” you nodded, flashing him a shaky smile. 

His frown deepened. “Don’t lie to me—”

“I’m not,” you told him honestly, your hands fisting the material of his shirt like you were scared he was going to step away. “I just…you make me feel better.” 

His face softened and the last of his resolve went out the window as he wrapped his arms around you, hugging you close until you were pressed into his chest. You nuzzled your face against his sweater, letting the familiar smell of his cologne wash over you and calm the last of your nerves. 

And when you opened your eyes, you found Jack standing a few feet away from you. Quinn hadn’t noticed he was there and Jack made no move to announce his presence. But he gave you this smile, one that was kind and knowing and felt like a stamp of approval you didn’t know you wanted or needed from the middle Hughes brother. 

But Jack smiled at the sight of you and his older brother, raising his shot glass like a promise to keep your secret and knocking it back without a moment of hesitation.

…

You had no plans on telling Luke about you and Quinn the night it actually ended up happening. 

There was a mutual agreement between you both that you couldn’t keep it from Luke any longer. It wasn’t fair on him to be left in the dark, it wasn’t fair on you two having to sneak around and it wasn’t fair on the people who already knew having to keep your secret.

And with the normal season coming to an end, it felt like a clock was running against you to tell your best friend you were dating his brother before you were all locked in the lakehouse for the summer together.

When you had imagined the moment in your head, it was the three of you. You would sit Luke down, explain your feelings and hope that he wouldn’t feel too betrayed. You imagined he would say something stupid like ‘yeah, I already know, losers’ and you could live your lives happily ever after.

It was probably never going to happen like that, but you certainly didn’t expect it to happen like this.

After a rough season and a streak of rough games for Luke in particular, the news of the Devils’ head coach stepping down felt inevitable and, truthfully, it was a relief when you saw the news come through. Luke had called you, far too smug and giddy for someone whose team was technically without a key member—but you guessed it was mostly second-hand from the other boys. 

You swore you could hear Jack and Nico talking about popping open a bottle of champagne in the background when he called. 

It felt like an unspoken agreement for you to fly out when Luke told you about a huge party they were throwing that weekend. Not for the recent retirement, obviously. If anyone asked, it was a simple bonding experience for the boys to motivate them through the last leg of the season.

And somewhere between the beer pong game Luke dragged you into and the really strong margarita Simon made you, you had snuck off into a small bathroom to call the one person your drunk self craved to see.

“Hey, pretty girl.”

You grinned at the sight of your boyfriend’s face on your screen, his hair tucked under a beanie as he walked around his apartment. “Hey, baby.”

He took in your flushed cheeks and glossy eyes, snorting a little. “Having fun?” 

“So much fun,” you giggled before letting out a heavy sigh. “I wish you were here.”

“I’ll see you soon,” he promised, like he was counting the days. He probably was. You knew you were too. “Spring break, remember?” 

“Hmm, I can’t wait to have you all to myself,” you mused, sinking back against the wall of the bath you were currently leaning on. “I’m sick of sharing my boyfriend with Petey.” 

Quinn laughed. “I thought you loved Petey.” 

You sighed deeply. “I do love that big, blond Swede.” 

He shook his head in amusement. “I’ll let him know. I’m sure he loves you too.”

You perked up a little. “Really?”

“Really, baby.” 

“Woah,” you breathed out, your eyes falling shut as you leaned against the cool ceramic of the bathtub. “I know I said it before…but I really wish you were here.”

Quinn’s face softened. “Me too, babe. Me too.” 

You opened your mouth to say something, probably some random drunken thought that you felt the insistent need to share with your boyfriend before knocking on the bathroom door interrupted you. 

You froze when you heard Luke calling your name on the other side. 

Quinn frowned at the way your face paled a little. “Baby, what’s happened? Who is it?” 

You heard shuffling on the other side before Luke’s muffled voice sounded through the door. “Are you talking to Quinn?”

You could have hung up. You could have told him you were talking to someone else entirely. You could have done a million and one other things that made more sense. However, for some fucking reason, your drunk brain panicked. 

“I don’t know a Quinn!” 

Quinn furrowed his brows in confusion.

There was a pause on the other side of the door before Luke tested the handle, finding the door unlocked. He let himself in, standing by the entrance as he stared down at you curled up beside the bathtub with a frown.

“Why are you hiding in here? I need another beer pong partner and Holtz sucks so—”

And because the universe liked to fuck with you, it seemed like there was some sort of lag on Quinn’s side because his voice was echoing through the small bathroom before you could even warn him about Luke’s presence.

“Baby, what’s happening? You’re starting to scare me.” 

Your eyes widened as silence suffocated the small room. You looked at Quinn before looking at Luke, who was looking at your phone with a mixed expression. 

“Did…did he just call you baby?” 

“No?”

Luke narrowed his eyes. “What’s going on? Why are you on the phone to Quinn? And why are you hiding in the bathroom? And since when do you talk to Quinn?” 

You flashed him a sheepish smile. “Since we’ve been dating,”

Luke blinked before he snorted. “No, I’m being serious.” 

You swallowed. “So am I.”

Luke let out another laugh, but this one was a little less convincing. “I…no, you’re messing with me. Jack put you both up to this, right?” 

You stayed silent. 

“Right?” Luke asked again, a little more desperate.

Your eyes shifted down to Quinn—the lag thankfully gone—before you looked back up at Luke with a nervous expression. You shifted so your phone screen was now facing him, watching as his eyes dropped down to his brother’s face. 

“We wanted to tell you—”

“You,” Luke sneered, his eyes narrowed. “You have been planning this.” 

You blinked. “Huh?” 

“He’s been planning this!” Luke said with such confidence, though that might have been the mix of rum and tequila talking. “He’s been planning this since the sour patch kids!”

Quinn shot his brother a look. “You think I’ve been planning to date your best friend since you were seven?” 

“Yes.” 

You didn’t have to look at the screen to know Quinn was rolling his eyes at his younger brother.

“How long has this been going on?” 

“A while.” 

“That’s not an answer,” Luke frowned before looking at you.

“Since last summer,” you whispered.

“Summer?!” Luke spluttered. “You two have been dating for eight months and no one knew?” 

You winced.

Luke’s eyes narrowed. “Who knows?” 

“Just Trevor,” you said with a shrug of your shoulders. 

He deflated, blinking. “Oh, well I guess—” 

“And your parents and my parents and Ethan and Rutger and Mark and Jack,” you blurted out quickly, your cheeks heating up as Luke stared at you like he didn’t know you.

“So everyone but me?” 

“Luke—”

“Everyone but me knows?” 

“I’m sorry,” you whispered. 

“This is just a bad dream,” Luke murmured to himself before nodding his head, a little more confidently. “No, yes. This is a bad dream influenced by Nemo’s shitty bartending skills. A bad dream where my older brother is stealing my best friend. It isn’t real at all.” 

You blinked. “Luke—”

“Just need to play out the rest of the bad dream and I’ll wake up,” he continued muttering away as he reached for the door handle, ready to leave the small, cramped bathroom. “Just a bad dream.” 

“Luke—” 

But he was already gone before you could say anything.

“Well, he’s gonna have a brutal reality check in the morning.” 

You turned your phone to glare at your boyfriend. Though, much to your surprise, he was grinning in response. 

“Quinn, this is serious.” 

“Baby, I know.” His face seemed to soften a little, but the smile remained. “But now he knows. This is what we wanted. And now we don’t have to hide.” 

Your annoyance melted away at his revelation, a warmth settling in your chest that only Quinn seemed to bring. “Stop being cute.” 

“I’m being realistic, baby. Now you can come up any time you want.”

You snorted. “I still have classes.”

“I’ll find a way around those too. You can’t stop me, baby, gonna tell the whole world how much I love you.”

Your face softened with a smile. “I love you too.” 

Quinn’s smile mirrored yours. “Now go make sure my brother doesn’t do something stupid whilst he thinks he’s in a dream. Mum will kill me if his face is plastered on a tabloid in the morning.”

“Pretty sure Jack will go out of his way to make sure that happens.”

“Please don’t let it happen.” 

You gave him a mock salute. “Aye, aye, captain.” 

He shook his head with a fond expression. “I’ll call you later, okay?” 

“Okay. Bye, I love you.” 

“I love you too.”

“And I love Petey.”

Quinn snorted. “Yeah, I love him too. Get in line.”

.

#quinn hughes #nhl #vancouver canucks #quinn hughes x reader #quinn hughes x you #quinn hughes x y/n #quinn hughes fic #quinn hughes one shot #nhl x reader #nhl x you #nhl x y/n #nhl fic #nhl one shot

[denileisariver]

pairing: batman aka bruce wayne x f!reader

warnings: old man!bruce, descriptions of male and female genitalia, mating press/cowgirl but not really, oral sex (f!receiving), some somnophilia (could this count as dub-con/non-con?), age gap but by how much isn't specified, cum-dump reader ♡, uses of the word(s) 'baby' and 'daddy' but only once, breeding kink sorta?, basically pwp.

a/n: wowowow the horny is real. idk if this has been done before, but it's okay, lol.

sheesh, thinking about an older batman :(

his body is a bit worn out from so many years of crime-fighting, littered in scars, bones that are becoming increasingly brittle, and his stubborn ass swears it doesn't bother him but it's obvious in the way his movements become tired and the dark circles underneath his eyes. they were usually always there, but it's even more evident now that he's older.

and god, he's so damn touch-starved from not being in a relationship or having a decent fuck because of his nightly activities and his massive horde of children. his balls are so heavy and full from not releasing in so long, barely having time to even masturbate because he's so busy.

but when he fucks you for the first time it's almost like none of that even matters. he manages to make some time for you in his hectic schedule.

the both of you are so sensitive and get over-stimulated easily the first time :(. you, due to your lack of experience, especially fucking someone like bruce, and him because it's just been that long since he's had sex.

large calloused hands would force and hold you down, your feet by your head and knees pressed to your chest. he wants to be slow and gentle at first, to take his time with it, but that doesn't last long at all. the way your tight walls stretch and attempt to make space for his massive girth is just too much for him, eventually losing control and using your body to his hearts content, pounding your tiny cunt nice and deep till you're cock-drunk and mindlessly babbling and moaning for him.

he cums quickly, but his cock is still so hard, feeling like a damn teenager all over again, ready for more rounds. bruce fills your pussy to the brim with his seed, the sticky, hot substance dribbling down to your ass and wetting his balls in the process. he's constantly petting at your clit and tits, obsessed with his new little toy right in front of him.

even in his older age, his stamina is just too much for you to take, eventually passing out on him without even realizing it. he'll take your unconcious state as an opportunity to lap his tongue at your juicy folds, savoring the sweet taste of your cum mixed with his, groaning lowly because of how damn good it is. it's really for his own pleasure, since you can't really feel anything till you wake back up and see bruce with his head in between your legs, his eyes shut and enjoying his meal.

it isn't until you pull at his greying hair that he realizes you've woken up, whining cause your clit is swollen and sensitive, but he just doesn't care. "it's okay, baby.." he'd mumble a bit, fucking your tiny hole with his tongue.

"daddy's not finished with you yet,"

he'd switch your positions so you're on top, holding you tight against him cause you're too weak to ride him. he's strong enough to pick you up and fuck you like a doll, stuffing his cock up into you with a bruising grip on your hips and thighs. and you can't do anything but hold on for dear life, nails digging into his broad shoulders and biceps. the filthy sound of skin slapping against each other and the wet squelch of your pussy filling the room, and it only spurs him on that much more.

he cums hard for the last time, his tip an angry red, pushing you down on him to make sure it fills your womb, and you're too limp and tired out to do anything about it. your cunt milks his cock for all he's got, tears falling down your face cause he's pressing a hand onto your lower tummy, feeling so full of his cock and cum.

and he's suprisingly gentle afterward, pressing a kiss to your forehead and praising how good you were for him, his hands soothingly rubbing up and down your body while you try to catch your breath. he makes sure to take care of everything, cleaning up the mess on the bed, and running you a warm bath that the two of you can share.

yeah, okay, he's an old man now, but everything about you just makes him feel young again..

a/n: sorry for ending this so abruptly, lmao

#batman x reader #bruce wayne x reader #smut #batman #bruce wayne

[faetreides]

MARLBORO REDS - ANAKIN SKYWALKER

cause good men die too, so i’d rather be with you

summary: mechanic dilf!anakin x gender neutral kindergarten teacher!reader

wc: 8.4k

cw: “soft” dark content, made padme’s death vague on purpose, anakin has the vibes of a married father of 4 hitting on you while you’re waiting on their table at olive garden, daddy kink, anakin imagines killing someone, MALE MASTURBATION (the most graphic fantasies are skull fucking and anakin kinda hoping you’ll tear when he puts it in), bra mention (reader does have a fem style but i’m nb so that’s how i see it and men can also have a fem style), it’s not mentioned but anakin is going through cigarette withdrawals, anakin’s canon typical inability to be in a healthy relationship, possibly predictable plot twist (?), i wanted to be a lot grosser, anakin is 42 and he’s depicted as such, age gap (reader is in their early 20’s), this takes place in the U.S.

requests are open (read the rules first)

block & move on if uncomfortable

do not repost or translate!!

The exhaust fumes transported him for a moment, somewhere tropical with a cigar in one hand and a tit in the other as a wet body slid adjacent to his. His hard-earned vacation went up in flames as a shrill car horn hunted down his eardrums. Anakin snapped out of it and stared through his brittle bangs with dead eyes. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, how to act like a normal human being one of them. 

"Alright, that should be everything. Since we just needed to rotate your tires and do an oil change, we're looking at about 142 dollars."

"Thank you so much, I'll just go pay at the front desk. Have a good one!"

Anakin sighed and gave a half assed wave that she didn't even see. He has nowhere near as much spunk as he did back in the day, but his energy is always shot to hell long before he sees his last customer of the day. Luckily it was just a routine maintenance type of thing, he would've just bashed his head in with a wrench if it was anything more. 

Puddles of blood trot after said customer, he’s amazed that they can drive so well considering they have a bullet in their head. 

There’s no bullet or rivers of blood in actuality, but a man can dream. 

His knee joints creaked as he got out of his squatting position. He groaned from the effort while smearing his fingers in more grease trying to wipe them off on the pants of his overalls. The whole workshop smelled like garbage and he probably smelled even worse. His trusty grease rag was subsequently discarded on top of his portable tool tower. He noticed that a tub of lighter fluid was on its side so he prevented that big mess waiting to happen and screwed the cap shut, picked it up, and set it back on the shelves in the storage room. He had to remember to leave one of his employees a post-it notifying them that they were almost out. 

His sleeves were shucked up his soft muscular forearm to check his watch. His eyes nearly popped out of their sockets like moles in a whack-a-mole machine when he saw the time. 

SHIT! 

It was 4:30, the time he's expected to be at Alderaan Apples Elementary to pick up his twins. He didn't have the time it would normally take him to drive 20 minutes back to his place for a 10 minute shower, and then drive 30 more minutes to be at his kids' school. He normally didn't work that late, since he owns the shop he can choose his own hours. But Anakin lost track of time obsessing over work and now he'd have to embarrass his kids by showing up covered in it. Their teacher would probably be there to chew him out, but in his defense this really didn't happen all that often. 

That teacher being arguably the biggest reason why he hated that they’d see him looking how he did right then. They're awfully pretty, with a chest that he's pictured slapping and sucking while their thick ass recoils from bouncing on his uncut cock. They had just moved to their average sized town at the start of the year, they told him at the parent teacher conferences at the beginning of the school year. Something about yearning to get away from their lackluster small town but also being too afraid to venture out into any kind of big city on their own. 

They were making the cutest little gestures when they were shyly talking his ear off too, shifting their thighs together as they swayed and never letting their eye contact stray too far away from their freshly polished mary janes. Anakin was very careful about remembering everything he could about Luke and Leia's first real school year. Hell, he was more scared than they were. But there was just something in the way this new teacher did their best to soothe any worries the kids might have. 

"It's okay, we'll be going on this new adventure together. And I'll do my very best to be there for you every step of the way. I hope you can be brave and look after me too!"

Luke nodded timidly but with a newfound sense of determination. Leia shouted an affirmative, being more extroverted in comparison to her brother. 

Their teacher was young, somewhere in their early 20's. Most likely having flown into town right after getting their degree. It made something in his gut swirl and simmer, imagining their delicate finger tracing his crow's feet and tugging on the gray in his hair. Their head nestled gently in between his squishy pecs, some of his muscle definition was lost with age but he had a feeling you'd like how much the slight softness of his belly highlighted the muscle underneath. 

The cliche apples in the blouse their teacher was wearing seemed to have Anakin in a trance as he zoned out. He grunted in acknowledgement when he needed to and slipped every form and newsletter he was given into his satchel. When it was time to head home, Luke and Leia clung to their teacher's legs. Anakin rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly and bent over to pry them off. He explained how sorry he was, being a single dad meant that whether or not he meant to, the kids still looked for a mother figure. 

He'll never forget the way your eyes widened by a fraction, flicking up to make eye contact with his feigned nonchalant stare. You seemed.... happy to hear that he was single. But that could've just been an old man getting wrapped up in the delusions that he still has it. 

"I'm so sorry to hear that, Mr. Skywalker. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you how hard it is to do what you do everyday, but let me just say that I think you're doing an excellent job."

He thinks you'd do even better. 

By the time he had finished reliving that fond little memory, he could spot the street sign for the street the school was on. Ruffling his hair, he made a sharp right turn and slowly pulled into the parking lot. His black chevy truck performed beautifully like always so he gave her a solid pat on the hood. He turned on his heel, immediately seeing his children hugging either one of your legs. He was only 10 minutes late, it wasn't any better but he would never make his kids feel like he abandoned them. He never wanted them to go through what he had gone through when he was their age. 

He adjusted his collar and made a last ditch effort to wipe his fingers off on his clothes. He heard a  quiet cough. He shot his head up to catch your unamused eyes. A wry smile appeared on his face as he jogged over to you. When he reached  the three of you, he immediately crouched and placed a hand on Luke and Leia's shoulders. 

"Dad's really sorry, okay? He just lost track of time but he rushed over here as fast as he could as soon as he realized what time it was."

Luke peeked out from behind your leg, "Like the Flash?"

"Yes, Luke, like the Flash." Anakin chuckled, slowly opening his arms wide in the hopes that his kids weren’t too mad at him. 

Thankfully he was instantly overwhelmed by two bodies slamming into him, almost knocking him onto the ground and tumbling down the concrete steps. Luke was clutching onto him so tightly and Leia was giggling up a storm. He stood up and gently ushered his kids into holding one of his hands so they could stand beside him. 

He cleared his throat a few times before finally addressing you. 

"I'm so sorry, I don't know if you overheard but work was really hectic today and I didn't want to waste more time cleaning up. Please just think of me how you did before, I won't look like this tomorrow."

You sighed, shaking your head with a small smile. Your blouse had a floral pattern today, blue covered in peonies and apple blossoms. Your pants were some kind of plaid thing but you make them work so well. Anakin had  to actively keep his eyes from eye fucking your wide hips and oggling the expanse of your butt in the tight pants. Just thinking about how little must be left to the imagination made his cock ache in his overalls. But he restrained himself, he was going to ask you out when he was in a much better and.... cleaner state. He pushed the thoughts down and settled himself down with daydreams of the near future. 

"It's alright, Mr. Skywalker. I understand your situation, so long as it doesn't happen frequently and the children don't have to wait too long, we won't have a problem." You gently admonished the older man, not hiding the protective tone in your voice but still looking up at him with bashful warmth in your eyes. 

Stars, the way you were already so protective over his kids made him even harder. He briefly wondered how you'd be with their younger siblings. The image made his heart flutter and a wide smile stretched his lips. He shuffled from one foot to the other, praying to whatever God is out there that he's able to hide his boner in his baggy overalls. He still had quite a few years before he even wanted to think about having the birds and bees talk with the kids. He adjusted his overalls quickly and reached out a greasy rough palm to you. 

"I swear this won't happen everyday, thank you for being so kind. I definitely won't forget it." He murmured with a wink that was open to interpretation. 

You bit your lip as you leaned forward to slip your smooth palm into his. A sharp shiver traveled up Anakin's body and butterflies erupted in your stomach at the contact. You clicked your heels together and shook his hand, the weight of it made certain kinds of thoughts pop into your head that you'd rather not deal with at the moment. 

Reluctantly Anakin pulled his hand away, making sure it lingered more than was necessary or appropriate. He put his back to you and double checked that Luke and Leia had one hand in each of his and their other hands on the strap of their backpacks. Luke had one with planets on it while Leia had one with dinosaurs. He looked down at their feet to make sure that they were going slow and steady on the steps. They reached the bottom of the steps and walked across the parking lot to Anakin's truck. He opened the back seat, lifting Leia first and waiting for her to settle in before nearly throwing out his back bending down again to help Luke in. He buckled them up and made sure their seatbelts were fastened properly. He took a few steps back and gingerly closed the backseat door on Luke's side. His back was screaming at him on the trip around the back of the truck, it especially burned when he haphazardly threw his door open and climbed up into the driver's seat. 

The drive home was the same as it was everyday. Leia excitedly told her father all about every single detail of her day and Luke needing less coaxing to talk about his as the school year progressed. Luke was upset when they ran out of apple juice at lunch because that meant he had to have grape. Leia bragged about the rock she painted during craft time. Anakin listened intently, no matter what kind of depraved shit he felt for their teacher, he wanted to take extra care that both of his kids felt heard and appreciated at the end of the day. He responded with jokes and questions to keep them talking, it distracted them from realizing how long the drive was to the house.

They pulled into the house's garage half an hour later. Anakin was about ready to collapse into a pile of bones in his recliner. Luke and Leia ran like bats out of hell through the door and up the stairs to their bedrooms. He could hear the sounds of them putting their backpacks on their hooks and unzipping them to go through the jungle of papers they stash in them. 

The fridge was fresh out of Dr. Pepper so Anakin grumbled and got a can of bud lite from his locked minifridge on the counter. He managed to make it to the couch before he let himself fall face first onto the cushions. 

The pitter patter of tiny feet bounding down the stairs yanked him from sleep so he sat up and leaned his cheek against the arm of the couch.

"Dad! Dad! Dad! Look!" Luke blurted out, shoving some kind of paper in his dad's smushed face. 

Anakin grimaced but made himself sit upright. He reached out and took the paper from Luke, holding it at a good distance away from his face and at a downwards angle so he could read it properly. 

"What's this, buddy?"

"It's a paper for the party, Dad! The Valentine's day one that's um.... this Friday, i think.” Luke nervously wrung his hands in his striped shirt as he spoke. “I want to get something for my teacher too…” 

Anakin rubbed his shaved chin as he read the paper. Luke was right. It was a newsletter informing parents about the Valentine's Day party each class would be holding on Friday. There would be no working or classes and instead every class would have an all day party for both the children and their parents. Students were allowed to bring any snacks of choice, but they had to bring a box of valentine cards for their class and give one to every student in their class.

"That must be nice, having no school for a day. Well, i'll be there on Friday and tomorrow we can go to the store and get the supplies for you and your sister." 

“And we can get something for my teacher?”

“Of course Luke, that’d be a very nice thing to do for them.”

"Okay! Thanks, dad, love you!" Luke cheered, bouncing on his feet and kissing Anakin on the cheek while giving him a second long side hug before running back upstairs. 

The next day the Skywalker family was back in the truck on the way to the biggest local supermarket in the area. It wasn't too far, just in the next town over. They could've gone to the smaller store back home, but the kids liked having options and liked car rides that were like little road trips. (Why they hated the longer drives when they were to school but liked them in situations like this, Anakin could sympathize. 

Anakin shut the radio off when they pulled into the large parking lot of the supermarket. He put his car in park and turned the engine off. The wind chill smacked him right in the face as soon as he stepped out of his seat. He rubbed his hands up and down his arms to warm himself up and walked over to get Leia and Luke out of the car as quickly as possible without freezing his ass off. They did the standard routine of holding their dad's hands while they crossed the parking lot. Anakin was telling them to look both ways to watch out for any cars that were coming as they walked along the crosswalks. Mercifully they weren't in the cold long before they entered the store.

The bright white LED overhead lights made Anakin want to pass out but he followed closely behind the kids that were already running themselves ragged all over the place. He reminded them what they were here for and his arms were pulled to their breaking point all the way to the card aisle. There were so many options of valentine card packs. There were Bluey ones, Spiderman, ones that looked like the cootie catchers you fold and pull apart, et cetera. 

Luke ended up choosing Spiderman ones that came with pencils. Leia chose a kitten design for her cards. 

Anakin almost fell asleep on the ride home. He let the kids pick out drinks from the little displays in front of the registers so they were miles away in sugar rush land. He made a note to pop a couple ibuprofens before he went to bed. Some days are easier than others but since his wife passed away when his kids were newborns, he’s never known what it was like to be able to depend on someone else to always be there to help. His childhood friend Obi-wan stops by every so often to stay over, his mom and step-dad babysit when he stops being stubborn, but that’s once in a blue moon. The sunset casts light onto the sunspots and hair on his arms. He rolled both of his sleeves up because his body typically runs hot and global warming making the temperature 65 degrees in the middle of February does him no favors. 

The McDonald’s they drove through got the kids happy meals wrong three times, something that was clearly a sign of the apocalypse. 

He had to remind Luke and Leia not to run too fast as they clammored out of the truck with his assistance and bolted to the front door. Anakin sighed his millionth sigh of the day and clamped a hand on Leia’s head to steady her as he searched his rusty old keyring for their house key. His steady hand inserted the key into the lock, ushering his kids inside with his free hand while he pushed the door open. His long legs moved at a sloth like pace, Leia and Luke ignored him and shot up the stairs like two little rockets.

“Guys, slow down. Marshmallow feet, remember?” He reminded them and leaned around the corner so they could hear him, shaking his head in exasperation when all he gets in response is a couple “Okay, dad!”s. 

The white and orange ibuprofen bottle stored in one of the many dark wood cabinets over the fridge beckoned him with a come hither motion. He’s little more than a slave to his baser instincts so he dutifully heeded the call. The cabinet creaked when he cracked it open but he couldn’t give less of a fuck as he dove for the pill bottle and shook out a few orange pills. He exhaled in relief in a way that would suggest he was smoking weed when his adams apple bobbed as the pills hit his stomach. 

With that mindless task out of the way, Anakin slowly journeyed up the stairs to get Leia and Luke ready for bed. He kept a stern eye on them to ensure they brushed their teeth, used their mouthwash properly, and washed their faces. After the kids completed their bedtime routines, he tucked them into bed while humming a lullaby Obi-Wan had taught them when he held them as infants. He gave them their time to say goodnight to their mom, Luke looked at the glow in the dark stars on his ceiling when he said it and Leia clutched her stegosaurus plushie when she whispered her goodnight. 

Anakin didn’t contribute but he warmly kissed his twins on their foreheads and tucked the corners of their comforters around their shoulders. 

His heavy work boots thundered against the hardwood floor of the hallway as he walked out of their room and down the carpeted stairs to the den. He unhooked the buttons holding up his overalls on his shoulders and shimmied his ruined overalls down to his ankles. His hairy thighs expanded as he stepped out of them so he could kick them to the other side of the room. He was left in only his boxers and a white tank top that would never be white again. So he flexed his arms as he took that tank top off too. Grease stains were all over his body but he could at least take a shower now. 

His boxers joined the towels from yesterday’s shower on the floor as his soft cock flopped out. He gave it an absentminded stroke that injected something molten into his bone marrow. He bent over to reach the faucet and turned the water on. The shower didn't start until the water babbling over his thick calloused fingers was hot enough to cook a lobster in. 

He rolled his shoulders back as he stepped into the shower. His mouth dropped open in a silent exclamation and his neck popped as his head lolled back. The onslaught of boiling hot water pin pricked his skin in a pleasure-pain sort of way that made his thoughts temporarily quiet down. 

His cock gave a couple twitches but Anakin elected to wait until he had at least washed his hair before he rubbed a much needed orgasm out. 

3-in-1 shampoo that smelled like some dior cologne was all up in his hair, his hands unhurriedly glided through his short-ish soapy strands. He angled his head back and let the lather he had worked up be drowned out by the shower head. He grabbed his vanilla & shea butter body wash and let the spout rest against his glistening pecs as his fingers curled around the stocky bottle and squeezed. The smooth liquid spurted out over his pecs and dripped down his body. He reached his hands right up under the steady stream and soaped up his pecs, ghosting his thumbs over his puffy nipples before spreading his hands out and spreading the soapsuds all over the rest of his body. 

Squelching sounds echoed off the shower floor as Anakin widened his stance. His right hand was subconsciously traveling closer and closer to his half-hard cock. He had worked so hard, finally being able to relax and luxuriate in the silence made the blood in his body migrate further south. 

A certain teacher flashed through his mind, his head whipped down in shock to discern how greatly his flushed cock swelled up faster just at the single image of his kids’ kindergarten teacher. 

An aurora borealis of fantasies swirled in the air. 

You’re kneeling on a pillow (he would be at serious risk of getting more brow wrinkles if you had to touch the harsh dirty floor with your bare skin.) and bobbing your head up and down the fat cock making a bulge in your cheek. Your sparkling eyes have this glazed over look to them as he anchors his hands on the back of your head. He widens his stance and bullies your throat with his heavy cock. You squeak and sputter but you take it like such a good pet. Your plump lips slide off of his meat a couple inches but before he can do anything, you’re groping his taut ass as you wiggle your head down to the base of his cock. Your eyes flutter shut as your brain shuts off; your nose is buried right in his musky bush. His face scrunches up in the best kind of pain, but he locks his gaze on the way your eyes roll back when he begins to skull fuck you.

Thank god for oral fixations. 

“Gonna let Daddy soak this warm throat pussy?” Don’t worry, he knows you can’t exactly use your vocal chords properly at the moment. So he nods your head for you, deepening his thrusts into slow sharp jabs. 

He’d baptize you in cum if you let him, your skin would look so pretty and glossy covered in it. He’d help you wipe it off after he cements the image of your eyelashes sticking together in his mind. 

Now he’s grabbing your love handles while his cock builds his dream home in your guts. Your ass shakes back against his hips as you try to steady the phone in your hands and face it towards the overhead. He grabs your hair in one fist and gently tugs your head up so you can pay attention properly. He didn’t go through all this just to let you hide away from him. In a perfect world, the kids would be staying with his mom so you’d be more than welcome to lose your voice.

The vision in his mind shifts to you being on your back, hands trembling trying to hold your legs as close to your chest as possible. You’re looking up at him like he was born in the center of the sun. He’s looking back at you like you’re the moon made flesh, eternally encapsulated in his sea of stars. Anakin smiles triumphantly but with a heady passion in his gait that threatens to burn his lungs to ash, coughing them up over your open heart. 

“You’re doing so well puppy, that’s my brave baby.” He coos and pries your hands off your thighs finger by finger. 

Once your hands are free, his larger ones ardently seek out yours like a dog going after a bone. The rough texture of his digits feels like an uncomfortably pleasant caress as they lace together with your own. He doesn’t look at anything else; can’t think of anything else when you make the cutest little watery gasp as his cock humps along the crack of your hole. The red tip of it gets caught against your outer sweet spot as if trying to give your crotch small pecks. His eye wrinkles crinkle when his smile widens and he offers a breathy laugh. 

He squeezes your hands tightly as he wraps a hand around his cock and directs it to its northern star. Your nails digging into his knuckles don’t distract from your hole stretching itself wide to suckle at his encroaching length. 

And if in the shower he spilled into his feverishly fucked fists at the concept of crimson liquid mixing with cum to make a pink swirl where your bodies meet, you’d never know. He thumbed at the glans under his cock tip as he came down from his high, skirting a fingernail up a vein on the side and wishing he was mouthing the space between your shoulder blades; preening your white feathers with his scratchy tongue. 

The next couple days were gone with a couple of blinks. He never deviated from his routine; wake up, wipe off the drool on his face, get kids ready and take them to school, go to work, clean up, go pick kids up from school, help with whatever work 6 year olds would have, put them to bed, jerk off in the shower till his legs ache, fall asleep on his stomach with his the right side of his face smushed into a pillow. 

He did find some time to put together a teacher’s appreciation basket for you. You more than anyone else deserved a few something somethings on a day meant to represent love. The gifts were packed nicely and neatly in a vintage wicker basket wrapped in a red gingham bow and covered in see through red plastic wrap. Your reaction would regrettably have to be viewed from afar, but he’d know how to move forward depending on what adorable expression you had all over your face.

The night before the party, Anakin allowed Luke and Leia to stay up a smidge later than normal so that they could get all of their things ready for the party. Anakin’s special present slept soundly in the seat next to his in front of his truck. An additional gift from Luke was tucked inside along with an item from Leia who had insisted on it when she found out Luke was getting you something.. The basket being hidden away for the time being allowed him to focus completely on helping his children with their gifts at the coffee table. 

Luke’s eyes were droopy as he wrote down the names of his classmates in the hearts made to look like Spiderman’s mask in his cards. He inserted  most of the pencils in the intended slot on the left of the cards by himself before he slumped against Anakin’s arm and weakly pushed the pile of cards towards his dad. Anakin chuckled as he ruffled Luke’s fluffy blonde hair and teasingly whispered that he didn’t know a boy could be so sleepy. His son blinked at him as if to say how unfunny his dad was before yawning and snuggling further into his father. 

Anakin pushed the rest of the pencils into the card slots and sealed all of the cards with red heart stickers. He lifted his head to look across the glass coffee table to check in on how Leia was doing. For how fiery his daughter was already at such a young age, she wasn’t immune to getting tired before 8:30. The signature buns on her head that she loved begging him  to do for her had loose hairs poking out of them because of how Leia had buried her head in her arms. 

Anakin blew a breath out in fond chagrin as he easily reached over the table and delicately removed the pins holding the buns in place. He fluffed out the hair that fell down so her scalp wouldn’t feel weird when she woke up. 

He hoisted Luke up in one arm and Leia in the other (something they were getting a bit too big to continue doing) and slowly but surely deposited them on the couch. He snatched a white plush blanket from the linen closet and settled it over them before turning back to the massive amount of paper cards on the table. He finished the last of Leia’s cards a short while later. He sorted the cards into orderly piles and put them in sandwich bags that he took to the kids room so he could put the bags in their backpacks. 

Anakin came back to the living room as he tried to shoo the sleep away by digging his knuckles into his eye sockets in a lazy rub. He opened the cabinet and took out a package of pink frosted sugar cookies with red heart shaped sprinkles, a pack of capri suns, and a tupperware bowl full of mini brownies. With a long drawn out yawn he set the snacks out on the counter so that he would remember them tomorrow morning. He got a set of paper plates and a sectioned set of cutlery in case you needed any extra. Maybe you’d give him one of those corny gold star stickers as a thank you. 

Friday morning was ushered in by  two children risking their dad’s life by flopping on his stomach with all the strength they had while he was sleeping. 

“OH FU-“ He shouted before he remembered who was in the room and gently rolled them off of his stomach. “What exactly do you two think you’re doing?”

 "It's time to wake up dad, we're gonna be late for school!" Leia said with a dismayed look on her somewhat chubby face. 

Anakin looked away and meekly mouthed a 'sorry' as he looked at the led clock that he had forgotten to set an alarm on. 

Fuck, not again. 

He sat up in bed and hunched over; his head buried in his hands. Luke and Leia crowded around him as they tried their best to comfort their father, giving his back light pats. He let them pull his hair so that he'd look up at them. He smiled in gratitude and crawled out of bed as quickly as he could to get the day started. 

He made a comical sight; hobbling around the floor with his ripped jeans pooled around his feet as he raced to get his kids ready for school in time. His belt was a fairly new black leather piece that he'd been keeping for a special occasion, but the anxiety of the morning made him grapple with getting the buckle in place. Once that was done a shameful amount of time later, he shoved his clothes to the side in his closet as he searched for a nicer, more "classy" dress shirt. Anakin gnawed at his bottom lip and eventually decided on a black silk button up that matched his belt. He crouched, chanting in his head that he hoped he wouldn't tear a muscle, and chose a pair of italian leather slides that his mom had gotten him for Father's Day a couple of years ago. The bathroom mirror held back no punches when it showed Anakin the state of his head. He crossed his fingers and smoothed back his hair with the tiniest glob of gel; the water he splashed on his face would have to do some serious charity work. He could only hope that you liked the naturally unkempt but not too unkempt kind of look, a striking sort of ruggedness. 

"Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad..." Luke droned, understandably fed up with waiting on his dad to deal with another one of his mini mid life crisis episodes. 

"I'll be right there Luke, hold on a second, please."

Anakin gave into his son’s begging and let him brush his teeth with the birthday cake flavored toothpaste today. Even though the dentist moaned about how hard it was to clean out when they introduced it to Luke at his last appointment. His Spiderman toothbrush played a jingle meant to sound like the theme song when Luke did his 2 minutes of brushing. Anakin stood protectively behind him as he spit in the sink, his hand hovered over his head so he wouldn't hit it. He took Luke's toothbrush and ran it under the water before he put it back in the clear organizer next to the faucet. He poured the recommended amount of mouthwash from the bottle and passed the lid that acted as the cup to Luke. Luke grimaced but he tipped the cup up so the blue liquid would pour in his mouth, he swished it around and then spat it out too. He sipped from the glass of water that was handed to him and proudly beamed at his father.

"Good job, Luke. I'm so proud of you." Anakin congratulated him, Luke was still finicky about floss so today would not be the day that he attempted to get him to use it. 

Being a parent means knowing how to pick your battles and what time to schedule them. 

Anakin brushed Luke's hair and fluffed it out a bit like a surfer (how Luke likes it). He grabbed his son by his underarms and lifted him off of the step stool. The mirrors in their house were still a bit too high for his kids to see properly so for now the stools had a purpose. He would be sad when they no longer needed them. 

Anakin quickly dipped into the twins room to grab their backpacks. He had already gotten them dressed after he got out of bed earlier. He helped Luke put his on and then repeated the same process with Leia. Her toothbrush made a loud roar when she finished brushing, and she had a fit of giggles in response. His daughter preferred straightforward mint toothpaste so morning routines really weren't that much of a struggle with her. Once she put the glass of water down on the sink, she eagerly turned her back to her dad and pointed at her loose hair. Anakin saluted as he began shaping her hair into the buns she loves so much. He reminded her not to mess with them too much or they'd fall apart, and she always responded that she knew that already. 

They got in a single file line on their mission out the door. Anakin nabbed the containers of snacks and briefly freaked out wondering if he lost the cards before he remembered that they were in the kids' backpacks. He double checked if his keys and wallet were in his pockets, and to his relief everything was where it was supposed to be.

Well, mostly everything. He'd never forget about you, don't worry. 

He put his phone on do not disturb before tossing in the front seat next to his along with the basket already sitting there. 

Anakin told Luke and Leia to buckle their seatbelts as he inserted his key into the keyhole and started the car. He heard them buckle up and waited for the tell tale clicks before putting his car into drive. They had to leave than some of the other kids in their school would have to since they lived farther away, but because it was so early the twins could only yawn and hold onto the other twins' booster seat. Anakin thanked the cosmos and turned the radio on but kept it a low volume; Frank Sinatra's rich voice was the best company on a drive like this. 

The school entrance was abundantly decorated. A large white banner along the front entry archway announced the festivities. A flurry of red, pink, and white ribbons hung across the ceiling of the lobby. Every door had hearts representing the students in their class covering them, the kids's names scrawled in their own messy handwriting with cheap crayons. 

The door of your classroom was the last one on the left. You kept a bottle of hand sanitizer in front of it because you were very particular about hygiene, a trait that served you extremely well in your job. Luke and Leia pointed out where on the door their hearts were as they waited for you to open the door. The Skywalker family were the first ones there so Anakin wasn't sure if it was okay to just drop in on you unannounced. He wished that you would drop on him unannounced. He cradled his gift basket  in his arms as if it were a fragile baby.  

A few minutes later, your heels were heard clacking against the tile floor. The silver door knob jiggled before it stopped moving and the door took its sweet sweet time opening. Your head poked out and your face brightened when you saw who was at the other end. You sunk down into a squat, putting your hands on your knees as you addressed the children. 

"Why, hello Leia; hello to you too Luke. You're a tad early, but you can go ahead and hang your backpacks on the hooks in your cubbies. I haven't finished setting everything up, so you can sit down on any of those chairs at the front of the class." You greeted them and shook their hands before pointing out where they could sit. 

The twins obviously sat together. You didn't have assigned seating in your class, and you felt that Leia and Luke would be more comfortable sitting together during their first year at school. It wasn't guaranteed that they'd be in the same class next year. You were too sensitive to try to separate them. You cried a lot because of how scary school was when you were in their place, so you couldn't imagine being the cause for any tears your students shed.

Anakin was once again too caught up in studying your outfit. You had on a fitted shirt with a cardigan on top, it had thin strings that could unwind with no effort from him if he reached out and just pulled.

But that could wait. 

The kids scattered off to choose their seats. Your classroom had three circular tables with five small red chairs. Each chair had a small blanket on the back with a valentine's pattern. The table at the front where Luke and Leia were sitting had heart shaped placemats with a lace trim that looked like it should've been a doily, but in a… good way. You had red and pink plates on the smaller table next to your desk, as well as clear forks and spoons that looked like they had confetti inside of them. You figured that the parents would bring all of the refreshments and you didn't know what your students would want; you thought that the safest bet would be to hang back. 

Anakin did the most he could to soften his gaze when you straightened up and automatically locked eyes with the older man. He clocked how you instantly glanced down at the floor for a split second. You adjusted your collar, for some reason, and gave him the world’s smallest smile. Anakin was so certain that if he leaned in close enough, he would be able to hear your heart racing at the same accelerated pace as his.

 Some say that means it’s love. 

You fluttered your eyelashes, “Hi, Mr. Skywalker, thank you for coming. It’s always a pleasure to see Luke and Leia, but i’m glad that you could be here for them”

“Believe me, no one’s more happy about me being here than I am.” He blurted out without thinking, ‘Uh, I brought some snacks and drinks for everybody.”

You took in the capri suns and the desserts as your smile grew. Your hand curled around his bicep subconsciously, “Oh my gosh, that’s so nice of you! I’ll just put those over the-“ 

You couldn’t even finish your sentence before Anakin sauntered past you to put the food down on the table next to your desk. He placed the frosted sugar cookies down first, followed by the capri suns and brownies. 

He turned to face you and his shirt seemed to tighten over his chest as he rested his hands on his hips. His fingers flexed absentmindedly, like they wished they were gripping something else. 

“I can handle it, sweetheart. I’m 42, not 72.”  He chided you, strolling back over and chucking you under the chin; you were cute if you thought you’d be lifting a single finger the entire day. 

The way you nearly fell head over heels trying to fix your assumed faux paus was even cuter, “No, no- I- I didn’t mean anything- I just- Y-you look very capable to me, sir.” 

If your brain would let you, you would rip your face off to hide from your big mouth. Why the hell would you tell the much older father of two of your students that you think he looks “very capable”? WHAT POSSESSED YOU TO CALL HIM “SIR”? 

Anakin scratched his chin and decided that he’d let you off the hook with no more teasing from him. That’s a lie though, he was confident that you could take whatever he gave you. 

“Careful, don’t stroke my ego too much or I'll have to stroke yours. And please, I'd hate to have to remind you again, my name’s Anakin.” He was flirting a little too shamelessly for where you were, but he was still thinking with his upstairs head and guided you to a back corner. 

“I actually got you something myself, but uh,  if it’s all the same to you, I'd wait to open it until you’re nice and snug at home.” 

He gladly took a short walk to your car with you and helped you set the basket down safely in the trunk. He told you to stand back as he slammed the trunk door shut; slapping it for good measure to make sure it was properly closed. 

The two of you returned to your classroom and like the good little helper Anakin wanted you to know he could be, he helped you greet the incoming parents and students. He even took any concessions they brought and put them with the others

By 8:15 everyone you expected was in your classroom. A few kids were without their parents so you asked some of the other students to invite them to enjoy the party; a party’s no fun alone. 

At some point around 9:00 you had the stray daydream of Anakin pinning you against the wall outside of your door as he savagely plundered your mouth with his teeth and tongue. Finger shaped bruises and a promise to ‘see you at home, baby’ would keep your usually freezing cold body warm. You glance at the man out of the corner of your eye to see that he was already staring. He looked like he wanted to teach you a lot of things.

Whatever that meant. 

The morning half of the day consisted of the cafeteria delivering breakfast and watching a couple of movies that the class voted on. The Lego Batman Movie was first (a unanimous decision), and Wreck-it-Ralph was picked after that (some kids wanted to watch the minion movie like always but you were secretly happy that they weren’t the majority.) 

Lunchtime was when you decided to let the students have the snacks, they were welcome to go down to the cafeteria with a guardian if they wanted actual food but they didn’t have to. You weren’t surprised when none of the seats became empty. 

Anakin had to wrench the small plastic chair away from his ass before he winked charmingly and speed walked to the snack table to help you. The air between the both of you had inexplicably become charged with insurmountable tension. The chaos didn’t give you much chatting time so you could only glances and brush your arms together; how accidental those touches were was up for debate. 

Especially when he needed to get through to the plates and forks behind you. 

“Sorry, let me just squeeze past you.” He whispered in your ear, his big hands using your waist to steady you as he pressed his back flush against your chest. 

In the blink of an eye he was gone. The invisible hands chained to your skin remained. You fanned your face with one of the cheap paper plates as you floated back to your body and got a hold of yourself.  

You looked over at the Skywalker trio to see Luke and Leia point at you as they tirelessly tug on their dads sleeves until he caved. You saved him the trouble and went to them, bending down so you could hear the twins properly.

“Do you two need something? I could see you making a fuss over here.” You teased. 

“Dad forgot to give you our presents….” Leia mumbled and Luke nodded sharply. 

Your eyes widened, “Oh! You didn’t have to get me anything, but the day’s not over yet. You can give them to me now.”

“I did not forget, Leia.” Anakin shook his head, fidgeting in the uncomfortable chair. “They’re in the basket Dad brought, and your teacher has it in her car outside, okay?” 

You nodded and confirmed their fathers words, “He’s right. I didn’t know that there were things from you and your brother in it too but it’s safe and sound. I pinky swear.” 

Two much smaller pinkies met you halfway and wrapped around yours. The Skywalker twins giggled as they turned it into an impromptu arm wrestle competition and beat you easily. (You felt they were going to snap your finger off if they kept tightening their hold so you bowed out.) 

Anakin watched with hearts in his eyes and his head propped up in his hand, his eyes crinkled at the inherent domesticity of the act. 

Luke and Leia agreed to call their exhibition match a draw. 

The sun had already set by the time you got home. You were so tired that you nearly dropped your keys down the stairwell; you didn’t want to spend your night fishing them out of the grass.The wicker basket in your arms was at risk of falling too but you got your door opened and you crumpled on the loveseat.

 “Oof, I should probably get this sorted out now or I'll just forget about it.” You said as your body protested you moving a single inch from your sunken spot. 

You grabbed your emerald green pair of scissors and cut the top of the plastic wrap off.The wrapping  squealed as you tore it off the rest of the basket. You peered into it and thankfully it looked like a run of the mill teacher’s appreciation gift; for a valentine’s day it was a little strange but since it was from Anakin… you’d slip on your rose colored glasses. 

There was a medium sized teddy bear, a couple three wick candles; your favorite was the one that smelled like the conversation hearts candy. There was also a custom made box of chocolates from the bakery you frequented, and three burgundy roses that you trimmed properly before dropping them in the vase on your kitchen island. 

The ‘world’s best teacher’ stood out like a sore thumb but it made you smile anyway. 

The teddy bear was incredibly fluffy and bubblegum pink; it’s holding a sparkly red heart with the word ‘princess’ sewed in hot pink thread in the center. You swept the fur away from its black eyes so it could see. The bear was pretty cute, and you had a problem handling your stuffed animal addiction, so you headed to your bedroom and laid it down with the rest of your plushies. 

You yawned and your mouth stretched like a goldfish when it does the same thing. The strings of your red cardigan came undone by your hands and you let it slide off of you and hit the floor. Your pink ribbed top joined it when you gathered enough energy to give a damn and move your arms. 

Your white bra was so plain but like hell if it didn’t make the man palming himself over his jeans rock hard. The kids were sound asleep in bed and the walls were thick so he could be as loud as he wanted. But this particular session wasn’t about achieving some grand climax. No. He just wanted to take things slow tonight. If he happened to gradually tumble over the edge along the way, he wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Anakin loved you, every inch of your body would soon be blissfully aware of that. 

The miniscule camera in the dot above the i in Princess loved you just as much. 

The fire that would wait to invite itself in for a surprise visit until you had left for work loved you more. 

a/n: i had this in the drafts for a bit but i was having a moment so i didn’t post it until now. happy valentine's day 💞

#dividers by cafekitsune and roseschoices #anakin skywalker #anakin x reader #star wars anakin #anakin smut #star wars x reader #mdni #tw dark content #yandere x reader #male yandere x reader #male yandere #yandere smut #anakin skywalker smut #anakin skywalker x reader #⚰️.deaddove

[arachniee]

  ࣪𓏲ּ ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִֶ 𓂃 He once was mine

-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈ Lucifer Morningstar x Seraphim!reader (main couple)

                              (side couple) Adam x Seraphim!reader   ┈➤        

જ⁀➴ Summary : After he fell from grace, you did your best to move on. Drowning yourself in knowledge, hoping that if you continued to fill your mind with information, you’d eventually forget about him. All the effort you put into it was useless in the end and everything came crumbling down after you met his daughter. 

જ⁀➴ Warnings: mentions of killing, betrayal (?), self-isolation, curse words, self-neglection, mentions of wounds and injuries, not proofread; there might be grammatical errors, mc is a workaholic insomniac 

જ⁀➴ Note: this is kind of an alternate version of the mc's background story from my series ‘medical haywire’, so the events here would still be similar to the one in my series, just slightly altered. Also, the mc here has the same profession as the mc in medical haywire, aka a doctor and stuff (can u tell what my fav profession is)    

part two

╰⪼ As one of the first seraphims to exist, you’ve witnessed how heaven grew and bloomed. With curious eyes, you’ve seen how everything developed. You were one of, if not, the only seraphim who held such interest in new knowledge. God knew, and he commended you for it, creating libraries as big as mountains, thousands of books in your care. You were in no doubt the most favored one, you were the brightest, kindest, and purest, after all.

Which is why Lucifer knew he could tell you about his plan. You’ve been together since the beginning of everything. The trust in your relationship was unshakeable. Undeniably, you two were the closest, always seen together in the libraries you manage, strolling around the city in your free time, and everywhere in general. Everyone knew of the intimacy in between the two of you, and it was adorable. 

When Lucifer first told you about his plan, you were skeptical at first. He expected it, though what he didn’t expect was for you to try and convince him to not do it. Spewing nonsense about what his father would do to him if he found out. You wanted to join Lucifer, you really did. Just as how he supported your wants and wishes, you wanted to do the same for him. But you knew too well not to do so. 

You didn’t want to go against everything heaven stood for. You had your duties and responsibilities, you needed to prioritize the well-being of heaven over anything and everything. Your heart clenched at Lucifer’s next statement, eyes going wide as you tried to reach for him.

“It’s either me or them.” 

You were conflicted, so much. All of your hard work into helping the development of heaven, all of your friends, every thought about the consequence of your choice spiraled deep within you. Why did you even need to choose?  

Lucifer knew what he was getting himself into, he thought about the risks, but chose to ignore them. He knew what his stand was, he won’t waver for anything, or anyone. He didn’t want to make you choose a side, but with his plan, he knew he’d be separated and divided from heaven. 

“Lucifer- please, just-” 

Each plea that came from your lips was not the answer he was seeking, not the answer he was expecting. Your voice was brittle and quiet, but he heard each word loud and clear. You did not agree to his plan, and that itself was obvious with how hard you were trying to stop him.

You watched when he was banished from heaven with Lilith, the first female human that God had created. You couldn’t deny that unsettling and disgusting feeling in the pit of your stomach when you found out about it, how he fell from grace with another woman. But you knew why he chose her, to rule hell alongside with. She was the one who supported him when he needed it, she was the one who helped him, even though everything didn’t go according to Lucifer’s wishes.

Despite that melancholic feeling that crept up on you, you were still glad that he wasn’t alone through it all, that he had someone he could hold close and cherish, and someone who would do the same for him. No matter how much it cracked your heart. 

Every day that you spent without him was absolute misery. The guilt about not being able to help him ate you up from the inside and out. Each time you entered one of the libraries you would spend most of your time in, you always reminisced about how he used to run through these shelves, how he would childishly complain about a certain book being so high up on the shelf and that he can’t reach it. He wouldn’t stop pestering you about reaching it for him until you eventually give in, handing it to him and watching him beam with joy (even though you know he won’t actually read it). 

You would start to lock yourself up in the libraries, avoiding anyone who tried to get a word with you. Each time someone wanted to speak with you, you’d remember the way he’d come up and join the conversation passively, excusing both you and him, claiming to have important business to attend to. Successfully whisking you away from the others, grinning to himself now that he has you to himself. 

You still did your duties as a seraphim, yes, but any interaction outside of that would be non-existent. As soon as a meeting ends, you would immediately leave. Though the longer you stayed alone in the libraries, the more you started to resent being there. The memories you had with Lucifer were all nothing but good ones, and it pained you so much. 

When Adam first arrived in heaven, you would remember how he often received wounds from a few accidents when he was still getting used to having and using his wings. You were just in one of the libraries in the city when he came in suddenly. He thought that this place was boring and that no one would find or see him here with the new scratches he got while still trying to learn how to fly properly.

You were slightly irritated at first, but to witness the first ever human, now an angel, struggle to adjust to this new lifestyle, it was feeding your curiosity like a feast. He’d just shrug it off, trying to act like it isn’t a pain in the ass to take care of (his ego took a hit when you told him to be less reckless and clumsy next time). He’d usually stay for almost a whole week, waiting for the wounds to completely disappear, and to be in his presence was annoying for you. So you reluctantly treated his wounds, you had enough knowledge on how to treat them, so you thought that maybe if you treated his wounds, he’d leave sooner.

He didn’t admit it (and he won’t), but the tingling feeling in his stomach was a very obvious indication of his appreciation and gratitude for your actions. He was still pretty much down about the issues with his previous wives, again, he won’t admit it, but knowing you were there to help take care of him even when he didn’t need it, he was happy.  

And the fact that no one in heaven, even the other Seraphims and Archangels, has been graced with your care in eons, aside from him, that filled him with a sense of pride. Sometimes, he even thought of purposely getting himself hurt just for you to treat his injuries, but he decided against it, he didn’t want his pride to take a hit. Though when he does get injured, he immediately goes to you without hesitation, much to your dismay.

It made you realize that some accidents may happen in the future if more humans eventually came to heaven, so with a little hesitation, you sought to meet God after not seeing him in so long. You wanted his permission and insights about opening a place for those who need assistance that involved their health and well-being. You also stated your concerns about how pregnant angels would need a place where they can properly give birth.

God would’ve been surprised, seeing you out of the comfort of your libraries, but he expected this. There was a reason why he held you in high regards, because out of all of his creations, you were the one that cared for the others the most. Despite your initial reluctance to come out of your shell, you pushed through for the sake of your people’s health and comfort. 

Everyone who knew you long enough missed the old you. God himself included. He thought about your plans, and wondered if this could be the key to shaping you back into your old self. He agreed to your ideas, not just for the sake of heaven’s future, but to see if granting this would give you your spark back.

Just as how he provided you with your libraries, you were given everything you could have needed for your goal. Everything started off small, but as heaven’s population grew, so did your little medical company. You were getting busier and busier that your duties piled up like mountains. 

The libraries you used to manage started getting more attention by heaven’s residents, so you had to focus on that as well. You created a number of books during the time you were trying to forget a certain someone, though your books weren’t about him, no. Most of them being about information on an angel’s biology and all its wonders. While the rest were about instructions in treating a wound and such. 

With each day that passed, you buried yourself in your work. Your diligence was another thing everyone praised you for, you always got the work done perfectly and on time. But when you heard of Sera's decision about the extermination they were planning, you wanted nothing more than to just run away and finally have a break. As per her request, which you obviously expected, you were to monitor all those angels who were chosen to participate in the extermination. You had to keep an eye on their health and overall condition to ensure that nothing would go wrong. 

Everything went as expected on the first extermination. It was successful, but many of the exorcists returned with numerous, minor injuries such as scratches and such. You wanted to scold Adam for his ridiculous leadership, can’t he do better in training and providing them with proper fighting gear? Then again, you couldn’t care less anymore about anything involved with the extermination. You wanted to focus more on the current events in the city publicly instead of those private matters. 

As the years flew by, you barely interacted with anyone other than God, Sera, and Adam. You spent all of your time howled up in either your office or the lab. You would usually report your medical areas’ performances to God from time to time, while with Sera, you would discuss your seraphim duties and responsibilities. And with Adam, topics about the extermination and stuff which involves it would usually fill your conversations. 

Each day was a never ending cycle of the same tedious things that need to be done. Sleep wasn’t part of your vocabulary anymore, no, it’s not even in your dictionary anymore. Aside from the creator himself, you had the most knowledge and wisdom about almost everything. You wouldn’t say it was worth losing all your time for leisure, but there’s nothing you could really do now. 

With how packed your schedule was, you haven’t seen the light of day in so long. You barely have time to rest, nonetheless go outside. You weren’t really complaining, you felt more comfortable surrounded by knowledge and machinery rather than people. 

You haven’t been able to visit your libraries because of how busy you are. And you doubt you’ll ever be able to after you were informed that the extermination schedule was changed from once a year to every six months. If you could just quit your job, you would’ve done so. Without hesitation. 

The report you received about the exorcist that was beheaded kept your mind preoccupied. Surely, now that those demons know what they’re capable of doing to angels, you expect more bloodshed in the future. And you are not fond of the idea of more work. Seriously, what the fuck was Adam thinking?

With how busy you are now, you can’t even attend meetings anymore. Sera and the others understood your situation, so most of the time they’d just send you the summary of the meeting after. You were grateful that they understood instead of forcing you to attend. Just as the piles of work you had to do grew more and more, you started taking in too much caffeine to stay up. How ironic, as someone who advises and treats others involving their health, you barely took care of yours.

Adam would never admit it, nor anything for that matter, but he deeply missed his little interactions with you. He was already sour enough that you needed to take care of others now too, not just him, but he was grateful that you helped monitor his exorcists' health and condition. He made the decision to move the extermination day partially for his entertainment, but deep inside, he hoped that he’d see you more often because of this. He was quite disappointed that because of his decision, you got busier and busier. He was already pissed with that, but the fact that the princess of hell wanted to meet, man, what a pain.

.

.

.

.

.

꒰  ꒱ؘ ࿐ ࿔*:･

Excitement brewed inside Emily as she waited for the princess of hell to arrive, her sister, Sera, right by her side. With all the curiosity she held for hell and demons, she was ecstatic when she heard about the meeting. She wanted to tell you everything, from the information about the meeting to the knowledge she’ll receive about the residents of hell. She was the one who was tasked to report everything that happens every meeting to you. That was how you met her, you two would usually converse through technology, but recently, she’s been frequenting your office. Which you appreciate since you didn’t need to leave the hospital for a meeting. 

She welcomed both the princess and her girlfriend with a bright smile, St. Peter and Sera greeting them as well. She was really happy about showing the newcomers around, it showed in her aura and energy, while Sera was more on the calmer side. 

Charlie, on the other hand, was slightly nervous. Though she tried her best to brush it off, hoping that no one would notice. This was her chance, if she were to do or say anything that the angels didn’t like, then everything she has worked hard for will all be for nothing. She was too focused on overthinking that she didn’t notice where they were. They stood in front of a cafe, it seemed so cozy and welcoming. She glanced around and noticed Sera’s absence, eventually, she turned to Emily when she heard the young seraphim speak. 

“Sera went inside and ordered for us! Come on, it usually gets crowded inside there, so it's best if we wait for her here.”

Emily gestured to one of the tables that surrounded the cafe, smiling brightly as she watched both of the visitors take a seat and made themselves comfortable. They spoke about a few things before Sera came back, taking a seat next to Emily, right across from Vaggie. In a couple of minutes, their conversation was interrupted by one of the servers who held four strawberry parfaits in a tray. Everyone at the table thanked the server, though Vaggie only mumbled a small ‘thanks.’

The conversation continued, but Charlie’s nervousness slowly started coming back when Sera asked (on Emily’s behalf) about hell and the life there. She sweatdropped, she can’t say that hell was full of cocky, shitty, and power-hungry demons! Of course, not all demons were like that, but the majority of the demons in hell were, as described, cocky, shitty, and power-hungry. She let out a small laugh, trying to keep the cheery personality she previously had. 

Her answer was mostly based on the demons who resided in her hotel. She described her experiences to have their ups and downs, but there were demons there that stayed with her and even supported her project! Her nerves started calming down the more she spoke about her friends and the hotel. Vaggie could only smile proudly at her, glad to see how joyful her girlfriend was when talking about her dreams. 

Emily seemed to beam with happiness when the princess would talk about her life in hell, much more when she saw how highly she spoke of her friends. Unfortunately, she leaned in a little too close out of excitement, causing the table to slightly jerk forward towards Charlie who was in front of her. The young hell-born slightly jumped when it caused her glass of parfait to hit the floor. The glass shattered, both Charlie and Emily panicked. 

Charlie immediately stood and tried to pick up the broken glance, not wanting to make a mess, especially since Sera was there. The young seraphim apologized profusely, standing from her seat as she moved around the table to get to the princess, who was being helped by her girlfriend. Sera called for one of the servers, who understood and grabbed his supplies to clean up the shattered glass.

Emily was immensely guilty when she realized that Charlie had accidentally wounded herself from the pieces of broken glass. She turned to Sera who went to inspect the wound in the princess’s palm. It wasn’t too deep, but enough that blood started to drip from her palm to the floor. Emily started panicking even more, even though Charlie told her she was okay. 

Your clinic was just around the corner, so the young seraphim immediately fished out her phone and dialed your number. She was too paranoid about what happened, but still, Charlie was the princess of hell, she deserved to be treated with utmost care. So when you reluctantly agreed to sacrifice your 10 minute break to treat her friend (she didn't tell you that it was the princess of hell) , she quickly escorted the two lovers outside, Sera following close behind. She knew Emily had asked you for your help, but she and her sister both shared the same respect for those with high status, so she didn’t question any further, expecting you to be the one to treat the princess’s wound. 

As a clinic came into view, Charlie wondered if she should open up a small clinic for the hotel as well. The most medical assistance that was ready in case of an accident were just a few first-aid kits, none of them really had much knowledge on how to treat wounds so she thought of hiring a doctor or a nurse soon. They were met with a lot of people and Sera separated from the group to speak with the receptionist while instructing Emily to bring the princess to your office. 

The young seraphim nodded and led both of the visitors down the hallway. While walking, Emily apologized once again, her excitement brought pain to another, and she couldn’t bear it. Charlie assured her that she was okay, though the other still apologized. Vaggie just silently watched the two, holding her lover’s wounded hand with such gentle care. 

As soon as your office came into view, Emily hurriedly knocked on the door. Once she heard a  small ‘come in', she gestured for the two girls to follow her. The room was neat despite the many files they saw everywhere they looked. Their first impression was this person sure was busy as fuck, because damn that’s a lot of work. Their gaze eventually followed Emily when they saw her walk towards the table. Charlie immediately perked up when she saw you. A sense of nostalgia hit her as she stared longer at your form. You seemed familiar to her. Memories of when she and her father would draw together came rushing back to her. She'd remember seeing her father draw their family, of course. Her mom, him, and little Charlie. Though there was a time that she caught her father draw an unfamiliar lady. With how her father drew this lady, it led her to believe that she was beautiful. And she couldn't miss the fact that you shared some resemblance to the mysterious lady.

You were frozen in place when your eyes fell on her. The atmosphere suddenly became tense, Vaggie taking a step closer to Charlie out of protectiveness. Your aura wasn’t menacing and hostile, no, but it was unreadable, just like your expression. Emily watched with a tilt of her head, she was confused. Did you know the princess of hell or something?

With wide eyes and a mouth slightly agape, you watched the young hellborn stare at you. Her eyes were exactly like his, her hair was the same shade of blonde like his. Everything about her seemed similar to him.

Then it hit you. Everything that you’ve worked so hard to forget, every act of effort you made just to relieve yourself of the pain, in the end, it was all for nothing when you realized the bittersweet truth. 

You were staring at his daughter. 

#hazbin hotel x reader #hazbin hotel adam #hazbin hotel sera #hazbin hotel emily #hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel charlie #charlie morningstar #hazbin hotel lucifer #lucifer morningstar

[rafesapologist]

the set up — rafe cameron

𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗺𝗮𝗿𝘆: you've been one of the pogues since childhood, and your loyalty has always lied within your friend group, who is practically your family. when a threat by the name of rafe cameron begins to threaten the pogue's plans, they assign you to gain the trust of the dubious kook and keep an eye on what he's up to. however, now it's been six months since your friends set you up to spy on the kook prince himself, but what you didn't anticipate was to fall head over heels for the boy. your relationship had soon become inviolable shortly after your guys' first exchanges, much to your friends' dismay, and you two became practically inseperable. that was, until rafe discovers the truth.

𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴(𝘀): angst, cussing, mentions of alcohol use, some mentions of violence

𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗿'𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗲: she's a bit of a long one so bare with me. there will likely be a part two!

It was 9 o'clock at night and your phone was abnormally barren and noiseless. Nightfall was creeping up on you before you knew it, distracted by the long day of galavanting at the chateau with your best friends'. On a typical day, by the time the sun was setting your boyfriend, Rafe, was eager to call you and maunder about his day. It never mattered what his schedule consisted of, whether it was golfing with topper and kelce, or working with his dad, he made it a part of his routine just to call you and hear your voice before the day was over.

However, this night was different. It was unusual for Rafe to not at least shoot you a text letting you know he wouldn't be calling for a bit, something he usually did when he was busy. Perhaps he was caught up in family matters with his dad and couldn't get to the phone? You thought. But it was still out of character for him not to find a way to contact you, even if it costed him being scorned by his dad.

You sat cross-legged at the foot of your bed, pondering. You began to feel an itching urge to text him and ask if everything was okay, but you hated feeling pushy and your pride was always one to get the best of you in most situations. The idea of texting Sarah soon came to mind and seemed like the best route to take without disturbing your boyfriend in the chance that he genuinely was extremely busy and couldn't get to the phone. You unlocked your phone and went straight to the iMessage app, immediately finding Sarah's contact and beginning to type out a quick message. But, before you hit send, your body began to feel hot and your hands went clammy. Your mind was beginning to get the best of you as it started to race with unnerving thoughts that clouded over your prior hopefulness. Despite how close you were with Sarah, you feared that if you were to ask her what Rafe was up to, she'd become aggravated at your nosiness. But by the growing hour, the urge to find out became overwhelming.

Your fingers shakily typed out a short, to-the-point message followed by them instantly hitting send.

*Y/N: hey, i haven't heard from rafe all day and i'm getting a little worried tbh. is everything okay??*

Your eyes flickered over the delivered message for what felt like a million times as you found it harder to sit still with the nimiety of anxiety coursing through your veins. Your foot tapped vigorously while you bit at your brittle nails. You couldn't seemed to get past the thought of something bad happening to the boy you loved so deeply, and the mere cogitation of the scenario made you feel sick to your stomach.

*SARAH: hey! that's odd. i have no idea, i haven't heard from anyone. maybe stop by my house and see what he's doing? i know wheezie is there, she'll let you in :)*

You breathed out a sigh of relief at her response, thanking the girl mentally for providing you some sort of response, although clarity was not fully provided and the answer as to what was up with Rafe still remained undetermined. But Sarah's message was enough solace to muster up the strength to head over to the Cameron's household, hoping with everything inside of you that your boyfriend was in there. Enough time had passed to where you didn't even care if it was just him ignoring your texts, you just needed to know if he was alright.

After a brief interval of stalling out of pure apprehension, you finally coaxed yourself into driving over to the Cameron's estate. Your legs sped down the stairs hurriedly, making your way passed the coat rack as you snatched the car keys off of it before sprinting out the front door without acknowledging your parents who watched you exit the house with an alarming haste. Their attempts to call out to you and ask where you were going went ignored as you were too focused on one specific thing - Rafe. You wanted to get to him, you needed to get to him.

The fifteen minute drive felt like two hours as you sped to your boyfriend's house, so eager to locate him that you barely realized the speed that you were going down residential areas. But you couldn't care less about anything else than the boy that was prominent in your mind, the one that you spent nearly every single day and night with over the last six months; some of the best in your life so far. Tears begin to prick at your eyes as you gave attention to the thought of losing Rafe, hating how vulnerable and manic you felt in that moment during the drive. Memories of the boy flooded through your thoughts, ones of him holding you as close as he possibly could while you two fell asleep entangled in one another, peppering soft kisses on your face and neck during early mornings just to wake you up because he knew how much you despised getting up before noon, and all the times he would go out of way just to make you happy. Everything about your relationship with Rafe was perfect, regardless of how much your friends' hated the fact that you were together, considering he was at the top of their enemy list.

Once the visual of the enormous white mansion came into view, your heart began to feel as if it was going to pop right out of your chest. Your foot nearly slammed into the floorboard as you raced onto the property's driveway, wasting no time to put the car in park and scurry up the steps that led to the front porch. With three swifts knocks at the door, you were quickly met with the familiar face of the beloved youngest Cameron sibling, Wheezie.

"Y/n! What are you doing here?" Wheezie questioned, a vaunting smile present on her freckled face.

"Hey Wheeze, have you seen Rafe anywhere? I haven't heard from him all day." You confessed timidly while you attempted to keep a calm composure around the adolescent girl, fearing that you'd alarm her if you expressed your true state of distress.

A noticeable frown grew on Wheezie's face in response to your inquiry, which automatically planted a nauseous feeling at the pit of your stomach. Her eyes averted from your gaze and fell to the ground in avoidance to your burning gaze of worry, "Rafe is.. In the kitchen. He got home a few minutes ago, but I feel like I should warn you before you go see him." She admitted diffidently with her stare still pinned at the ground just before your feet.

"What is it, Wheezie?" You catechized due to her visible hesitancy, a state you had only seen the young girl in once when she witnessed Rafe in a yelling match with is dad, one that nearly resulted in him hitting Ward straight in the face.

"He doesn't look very good, Y/n. When he came home he.. He looked like he was on something and he had blood on him. His eyes were all bloodshot, too. I've never seen him this angry before, I think something happened. I don't know what's gotten into him." Wheezie admitted hastily, displaying a sense of urgency that sent goosebumps across your chilled body.

"Okay, okay, it's alright, Wheeze. Just listen to me," you crouched down to meet her height, gripping onto her shoulders with a light squeeze, "go upstairs and close your door. Turn a movie on or play some music, yeah? Just promise me you'll stay in there until I come get you, okay?" You asserted earnestly with your first priority to remove the innocent girl who had fear plastered all over her face. She simply nodded in reply to your request, wasting no time before turning around and heading up the stairs. You waited until you heard the sound of a door closing before stepping foot into the household, your feet feeling like a ton of bricks as you approached the kitchen with caution.

Upon entrance, you were met with the sight of an extremely disheveled Rafe, worse than you had ever seen him before. His eyes were glossy and accompanied with a bloody red appearance over his scleras. Your eyes trailed down to the noticeable blood splatters stained onto his grey polo, an observtion that took the air out of your lungs and your mouth go dry.

"Rafe?" You mousily called out to the fretful boy that was pacing the kitchen while he ran his fingers through his hair in distress. The sound of your soft voice cause his body to come to a halt, freezing in place with his back still turned to you. The sound of a dry, menacing laugh erupted from your boyfriend's throat that broke the defeaning silence in the air. Your eyebrows furrowed, sensing that his hostility may be aimed at you.

"What do you want?" Rafe subtly scoffed in response, still refusing to turn around and look at you.

"I came to make sure you were okay," you spoke up with a timorous voice, "I was worried cause I haven't heard from you." You folded your arms as you stood in place, displaying an evidence lack of confidence in your body language.

"As if you care." He spun around which took you by surprise, getting a better look at the state of disarray he was truly in. The bags under his eyes painted a deep shade of bluish-purple as though he hadn't slept in the last 24 hours. To make matters worse, dried blood was present on his mouth and chin, seemingly from the laceration of an open wound on his bottom lip. You shivered once you noticed how his normally soft features were replaced with a look of anger and resentment.

"What are you talking about? You know how much I care about you, Rafe." You stated, defending your point as he seemed to question your fidelity towards him.

"Cut the bullshit, Y/n! Haven't you lied to me enough? Aren't you tired of keeping up with all these lies?" Rafe squinted his eyes down at you, pointing at you in an accusatory manner that made you flinch. He had never been aggressive with you, far from it. Truth be told, it frightened you to see him like this, especially with the stench of alcohol exuding from him potently.

"Rafe.." you squeaked, feeling small and powerless under his tall stature, "You're scaring me. I don't know what you're talking about. You need to calm-"

"Our whole relationship has been a fucking lie, Y/n! Even down to the moment we met, you and your little piece of shit Pogue friends had this all planned out. I bet you've told them every single thing I've told you, I fucking trusted you! I should've known you Pogues were no good. All you guys do is stick your noses in places they don't belong." Rafe spat at you causing you to stumble back from him some, your back hitting the wall as he cornered you against the wall.

"You can thank your beloved 'friend' JJ for telling me. Boy's got a mouth on him," Rafe snickered as he shook his head in disbelief as he recounted his interaction with the blond Pogue, "ran into him at the golf course and he was running his mouth as usual. Guess I pissed him off so much that he blurted your guys' whole plan out, trying to get a reaction out of me or whatever. Got the shit beat out of him instead." He snarled.

Tears formed in your eyes at the revelation of Rafe finding out about the foolish plan you and your friends came up with months ago. They were always suspicious of the unpredictable Kook, rightfully so, but their mistake was setting you up to gain the rapport of the unknowing boy, who couldn't help but to melt at the sight of you. It was an easy operation, with Rafe falling under your spell within the first three weeks of meeting. But, what they didn't anticipate was you falling for him just as much.

He scoffed again, interrupting your fit of choking sobs, "No, don't cry. Do not stand here with that look on your face like you're the victim in this. You have no idea, y/n, no idea what it did to me when I heard that, and from all people, JJ fucking Maybank."

"Rafe, please-"

"Stop! Stop," Rafe's voice began to break as his words trembled in sorrow, tears escaping his azure eyes, "I loved you, y/n. So much. Never in my life have I opened up to someone, gave someone so much, as I have to you. Every damn day I woke up, only wanting to talk to you. You were always the first thing on my mind, first thing in the morning, last thing at night. You.. You were everything to me, and to think this whole time it's been some fucking sick game to you. Running back to your worthless Pogue friends that are nothing but trouble. How could I be so stupid? Trusting a fucking Pogue like you." His words put wounds in your chest and tore at your heart from the pure hatred for you that exuded from them. You never imagined you'd be at the other end of Rafe's spiteful outbursts at the end of it all, but there you were, looking up at him with a cold look in his eyes.

"I'm sorry, Rafe. I'm sorry, okay? I know that doesn't fix this but I didn't plan for this to happen. I told them it would only be a month and I would be done, but then I fell in love with you. I didn't spend all that time with you because of them. Our agreement was only-"

"Our agreement," he scoffed at your words, "do you hear yourself? You're unbelievable. You think that makes me feel better? Oh, you were only supposed to manipulate me for a month? How generous of you." Rafe mocked back at you, the high levels of alcohol in his system causing him to slur his words some.

"I-I know, I know that nothing I say will make this better. I know that you'll never trust me and you'll hate me forever after this, but I'm so sorry, Rafe. I didn't mean for this to happen." You looked up at him with sincerity, a pleading look in your eyes.

"I don't hate you. That's the fucking problem." He muttered.

"What?" You questioned, confused at his admission.

"I don't hate you, y/n. Believe me, I wish I could right now, but I don't. You think after everything we've been through that I could just hate you like that? That easy? Y/n, you're the love of my life. Don't you get that? I wouldn't be in the state I'm in right now if I didn't love you. I don't know what to do, and I'm at a war with myself because one part of me needs you, and the other can't even stand to look you in the eyes right now." Rafe sighed as he combed a hand through his dirty blond hair. His harsh demeanor was beginning to slip as his features softened and was replaced with an appearance of sadness and void. It was clear that the boy was completely shattered, and it broke your heart. Your mind began racing in that moment, unsure of really what to do in order to comfort the heartbroken boy. Do you leave him be and rip the bandaid off? Was that too cold of you to do? Or were you supposed to hold him and tell him that everything was going to be alright, despite the uncertainty that things would be.

"Rafe.." Your words trailed off as you watched Rafe's bloody lip begin to tremble. He closed his glossy eyes at the sweet sound of your voice, only hurting him more to realize that he'd miss that beautiful noise. He hated how much he craved you, how much he needed you, because he told himself a million times than he could never trust you again after JJ's confession. But he couldn't bring himself to push you away, although you put him in the position he was in. Hurting him worse than anyone has in his entire life.

"I don't wanna think about it right now, okay? I can't.. I can't stand the thought of waking up without you, y/n. I mean call me fucking crazy, but fucking hell, I still love you. I don't know what's wrong with me." Your boyfriend broke down in sobs, tears streaming down his bruised face.

"There's nothing wrong with you, Rafe. You didn't deserve this." You shook your head at his insecurity, assuring him that none of this was on him.

"Please stay with me tonight, we can talk about this in the morning or whatever, but please." Rafe pleaded, looking down at you with a pitiful look on his face that made your heart swell. His hand was placed at your waist, with a fistful of your shirt in his grip, pleading to your with full sincerity.

"Of course I will."

#rafe cameron x reader #rafe cameron #rafe obx #obx #drew starkey #rafe cameron x pogue!reader #rafe imagine #rafe cameron imagine #rafe angst #angst #rafe cameron fanfiction #rafe outer banks #outer banks #rafe x reader #rafe

[sleep-deprivedracoon]

Pairing: Gojo Satoru x f! reader

word count: 3680 Summary: Satoru doing his best to get you out of your downward spiral. He failed Suguru but he won't fail you. Author's note: based on this prompt. I think I speak for most of the fandom when I say we all need some extra fluff and love from Gojo after the week we've had with the anime and manga. So this one is for all of us Gojo wives. Ngl, I am literally shaking right now as I dare to post this. I don't know if y'all will like this or if this just flops. CW: depression, food habits, angst, implied relationships, patterns of isolation, fluff, angst to comfort, helplessness, mentions of smoking

Satoru Gojo stood before your door, an unusual sense of foreboding gnawing at the edges of his normally self-assured demeanor. It was a feeling he wasn't accustomed to, one that clashed against the confident façade he typically wore like armor. He couldn't shake the nagging sensation that something was terribly wrong with you, something that went far beyond the physical injuries. It had been weeks since you returned from that mission, and something had changed in you—It was as if something was tearing you apart from the inside.

He'd delved into the mission reports, scouring through the details, looking for any signs of what might have transpired. The mission had been a success, technically flawless, with only a handful of unfortunate bystanders caught in the crossfire. You'd managed to take down a first-grade curse with no fatalities—by all accounts, it should have been considered a triumph. So why had it left you so shattered?

As the door creaked open, revealing you on the other side, his sharp eyes caught the flicker of a smile that didn't quite reach your eyes.

Your smile, once a beacon of light that never failed to brighten his day, now seemed a mere shadow of its former self. It was as though the spark within you had dimmed, leaving behind an empty echo of what used to be.

"Toru," you greeted, your voice a little too forced, a little too brittle.

Gojo pulled you into a tight embrace, his arms wrapping around you with a desperation he couldn't quite put into words. He pressed his lips to the top of your head, a gesture that had become second nature to him, a silent declaration of affection. “Hi, sweets.” he murmured, his voice tinged with concern.

As he held you, he couldn't shake the feeling that he was teetering on the edge of a precipice, that the ground beneath him was unstable. He hoped beyond hope that he was merely overthinking, that you were stronger than he feared. But deep down, he knew. He knew something was fundamentally wrong.

You gently pulled away, and he followed you into your apartment, his senses immediately assaulted by the disarray that greeted him. Sure, you were a chaotic person, but there was usually an organized chaos to your living space. Books strewn haphazardly on shelves, art supplies scattered on tables, and the comforting scent of incense in the air—all elements of your usual environment. The chaos was familiar, a reflection of your vibrant, unpredictable personality. But this... this was different. There was an air of neglect, a sense that even your usual disorder had lost its usual rhythm. He took in the scene—the scattered papers, the toppled books, the forgotten articles of clothing strewn across the floor. Each item seemed to whisper a tale of neglect; a story of a mind too preoccupied to care for its surroundings. He saw the remnants of a once vibrant spirit, now muted and worn.

He followed you into the kitchen, concern etched into his features. "Have you eaten yet?" he asked, his voice laced with genuine worry.

You mumbled a half-hearted "yes," but he wasn't fooled. He opened your fridge to place a few drinks, and his heart sank at the sight. It hadn't been stocked in a while; the shelves almost barren. It was a stark contrast to the usual assortment of ingredients and snacks he was accustomed to stealing. He glanced at you, silently noting the tired lines etching your face, the weariness in your eyes that belied your attempt at a smile

You stood beside him, trying to deflect his concern with a forced smile and a weak excuse. "I've been lazy, just ordering takeout."

He glanced at the trash can, noting its emptiness. He saw right through the lie, but he didn't push it. Instead, he turned his gaze back to you, taking in the disheveled state of your hair, the dullness in your eyes, the weight loss that had left you looking frail. It was a familiar dance—one he had witnessed before, with someone else he had cared for deeply. That smile you offered him, that empty, hollow smile with closed eyes, it hit him like a tidal wave of dread. It reminded Gojo of Suguru after Amanai's death—their once lively friend reduced to a mere shell, hiding behind a facade. The parallels between you and Suguru's descent sent a shiver down his spine.

The weight of helplessness settled like a leaden anchor in Satoru Gojo's chest. He cursed inwardly, the bitter taste of regret mingling with the dread that had consumed him. How was it happening again? Why was it always the ones he cared for the most? The memory of Suguru, his once-vibrant friend reduced to a mere shadow of himself, haunted him. He had failed Suguru, and that failure still weighed heavily on him.

The mantra of his own strength echoed in his mind, a bitter irony. He was the strongest, but in this moment, he felt powerless. Weak. Useless. Helpless. As you stood before him, offering a smile that barely masked the turmoil within, you felt so distant, so far away. It was as though an impenetrable barrier had risen between the two of you.

It had started weeks ago, with your return from that fateful mission. Even then, something had felt off. You had been fatigued, weary, and Gojo had been there for you, trying to help you unwind and recharge. But you barely spoke of the mission, your words guarded, your gaze distant. In the ensuing weeks, he had watched as you withdrew, not just from him, but from their students. He noticed how you declined Nobara’s invites to go shopping, how the playful banter with Megumi had all but disappeared. Even your calls with Yuta who was overseas had become brief, the once-lively conversations now reduced to strained exchanges.

He caught a whiff of smoke around you one evening, a scent that hung in the air like a lingering secret. He knew then, without needing to ask, that you had turned to cigarettes for solace. There were signs, always signs. The subtle shifts in behavior, the hollow looks, the moments of silence that stretched on longer than they should. But he had chosen to give you space, believing that time would allow you to heal and find your way back. It was a mistake, one he deeply regretted now as he saw the signs he had missed piling up.

Gojo's gaze settled on you once more, his heart heavy with concern. You had lost weight, your eyes dulled, your once-lustrous hair now a tangled mess. It was as though a part of you had withered away, leaving behind a hollow shell. The pain in his chest intensified as he realized that he couldn't afford to stand by and watch you slip away. He had to act, to break through the barrier you had unknowingly erected around yourself. But how? That was the question that haunted him as he searched your eyes for a way to reach you, to pull you back from the abyss you seemed to be falling into.

He turned to you, his eyes tracing the weariness etched into your features, the fragility in your frame. "Sweets," he murmured, his voice laced with a mix of concern and determination. "We can't keep going on like this. You don't have to face this alone.”

As Gojo's concerned gaze bore into you, he couldn't help but notice the immediate defensiveness in your body language. Your chuckle, dry and forced, cut through the air like a fragile attempt to push his worries away. "I'm okay, Toru," you insisted, your voice wavering just slightly.

"(Y/n) …" he urged; his voice gentle but firm. "You don't have to pretend with me. I can see that something's eating at you. You can rely on me, you know that, right? I'm here to shoulder whatever burdens you're carrying."

You met his gaze, eyes guarded, and shook your head, a hint of stubbornness in your expression. "Toru, really, I appreciate it, but I'm okay. You're worrying unnecessarily.”

You remained closed off, a wall of resistance that he couldn't breach. Your insistence that everything was fine felt like a dagger to his heart, but he understood that pushing you further at this moment could risk you shutting him out completely and he couldn't bear the thought of losing you to the darkness.

So, he accepted your words, even as they left a bitter taste in his mouth. "Alright, sweets. Just remember, I'm here whenever you're ready to talk."

Ordering takeout seemed like the most rational thing to do, a glimmer of normalcy in the midst of the storm. He chose a spicy Chow Mein with Gyoza on the side, knowing it was a combination that never failed to put a smile on your face. As the two of you sat in silence, he couldn't help but notice how you toyed with your food, pushing it around on the plate rather than really eating.

He teased gently, "You know, you're starting to remind me of a kid being forced to eat their vegetables. Come on, at least take a few bites for me."

You glanced up, a faint glimmer of amusement in your eyes, and complied, taking a few bites to prove a point. It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. It was through these small steps, he realized, that he needed to slowly guide you back from the darkness that threatened to consume you.

After dinner, he bid you farewell, his footsteps heavy as he walked away from your apartment. Once out of your sight, he clutched his hair in frustration, a tumultuous storm of conflicting emotions swirling within him. He couldn't bear to see you like this, not again. He couldn't let another person he cared for slip into the abyss.

With a determined exhale, he removed his shades and reached for the black blindfold that he rarely wore when it was just the two of you. He tied it securely and looked back at the window to your apartment. In that moment, he vowed to himself that he wouldn't let you slip away. He would fight for you, even if it meant stepping into the darkness alongside you.

-------------

In the days that followed, Gojo remained steadfast in his determination to pull you out of the suffocating depths of depression that had ensnared you. He knew he couldn't do it alone, and admitting that fact was a monumental step for someone as self-reliant as him. It surprised even Shoko, who had known Gojo for years, to witness his newfound vulnerability.

He started with small, manageable gestures, well aware that overwhelming you would only push you further away. Slowly, he began to tidy up your apartment, one step at a time. He organized the scattered papers, straightened the toppled books, and restored a sense of order to the chaos that had overtaken the space. He did it in small iterations, so as to not catch you off guard.  He knew that even the semblance of cleanliness and organization could bring a sense of calm. Another day, he arrived with a bag of groceries, quietly slipping into your kitchen to prepare a meal. At times, he found himself sneaking food into you, taking advantage of moments when your mind wandered elsewhere. He'd feed you, offering fruits and treats while you mindlessly chewed on it, lost in thought. It was a silent promise that he was there to support you, to ensure you took care of yourself.

Then came the day he dragged you out, insisting that you join him and his students for a shopping excursion. It was an attempt to remind you that there was still joy and fun to be had, even in the midst of the world's worries. He made sure to bring his students along, Yuji and Nobara, who shared a single brain cell with their hairbrained schemes, and Megumi, who often found himself the target of their antics. As you wandered through the bustling market, you couldn't help but be drawn into the silliness that surrounded you. Yuji and Nobara's playful banter, Megumi's exasperation, and the way his students relied on you for the silliest of things slowly began to chip away at the darkness within you. There were moments when you couldn't help but smile, caught up in the absurdity of it all. Watching Yuji and Nobara embark on their ridiculous plans, seeing Megumi squirm in embarrassment, witnessing the camaraderie among his students—it all served as a poignant reminder that life held moments of levity, even in its darkest corners. Gojo reveled in these small victories, each one a testament to your gradual recovery. His approach was slow and deliberate, mixing moments of genuine concern with his signature goofiness.

"Hey, sweets," Gojo said, nudging you playfully as Yuji and Nobara attempted to outdo each other with their ridiculous purchases. "You see what I have to deal with every day? They're a handful. Why do I always end up taking care of brats?” He sighed in exaggeration.

The sound of your giggle was a melody that resonated in the depths of Satoru Gojo's being. He couldn't help but be drawn to the warmth in your laughter, a glimmer of the vibrant spirit that still lived within you. Your fingers brushed against his cheek, a gentle caress that sent a jolt of electricity through him. He leaned into the touch, his heart leaping at the connection.

"You know," you teased, patting his cheek affectionately, "you adopted these brats yourself. You're such a mother hen, Toru."

His lips curled into a playful smirk. "Well, what can I say? I've always had a soft spot for the misfits." He took your hand, pressing a soft kiss to your palm. "And I'm glad that this mother hen has you as my favorite rooster to come back to whenever I need a break from these rascals."

Your laughter, though still fragile, filled the room, a welcome sound that eased the weight in his heart. He was getting closer, step by step, to uncovering the vibrant spirit that resided within you.

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Several days later, the Tokyo Jujutsu High planned a retreat to an Onsen resort in Gunma. The students shared rooms, and Gojo, in his usual annoying fashion, had managed to finagle Yaga into assigning you to share a room with him. After all, you were both teachers and adults—it shouldn't have been a problem.

Gojo sat on the tatami floor of your room, dressed in a yukata, having just returned from the baths. He sipped on cold coffee milk, enjoying the tranquil atmosphere of the traditional inn. When he heard the sliding door open, he looked up, and his heart skipped a beat. You looked ethereal in the Yukata, the fabric draping gracefully over your form. Your hair was still damp from the baths, strands clinging to your skin in a way that made his heart race. There was a newfound fullness to your cheeks, a healthy flush to your complexion that spoke of progress.

In that moment, he realized just how far you had come. The bags under your eyes were still there, but the overall transformation was striking. He clicked his tongue several times, pulling you gently to the tatami floor in front of him. He reached for the towel that hung around your shoulders and scolded you gently, "Sweets, you need to dry your hair properly. You'll catch a cold like this."

His fingers moved through your hair with a soothing touch, the room enveloped in silence save for the rustle of fabric and the soft hum of the night outside. He was meticulous, his actions deliberate as he dried your hair strand by strand. As he continued to pat your hair dry with gentle strokes, he noticed that you were trembling. Frowning, he stopped, his concern growing. And then he heard it—the soft, muffled sniffle that escaped your lips. In an instant, he turned you around to face him, his eyes widening as he saw the tears welling up in your eyes.

Before he could say a word, you began sobbing, your shoulders shaking with the force of your emotions. You buried your face in his chest, and he wrapped his arms around you, holding you close as you cried. He didn't brush away your tears or offer empty reassurances. Instead, he let you cry, allowing the dam you had built around your emotions to finally break. He could feel the warmth of your tears soaking through his yukata, the shudders that racked your body, and the tremble of your hands as they clung to his robes. It was a raw, vulnerable moment, and he was there to bear witness to it, to share in your pain and offer his silent support. Gojo's touch was gentle, his hand stroking your back in a steady, rhythmic motion. He didn't speak, understanding that this moment was about you and your release. His heart ached with each anguished sob that wracked your body, but he remained a steadfast anchor, giving you the space you needed to let it all out.

As your sobs began to subside, your words spilled out in a torrent of emotion. You spoke of the mission, of how it had torn open old wounds, making you confront shadows from your past. The cursed technique of the first-grade curse had exploited your own memories, forcing you to relive the pain and uncertainty.

Gojo had been privy to your painful past, as you had confided in him long ago. He understood the emotional scars that had marked your journey, and now, he could see why you were descending into darkness.

Your voice trembled as you confessed your fear. You longed to return to the person you used to be, but you were terrified that you had lost yourself in the process. The fear that in losing yourself, you might also lose him gripped at your heart.

Gently, Gojo cupped your cheek, his sky-blue eyes locking onto yours. He removed his shades, allowing you to see the sincerity in his gaze. "No matter what version of yourself you present to me," he said, his voice soft but resolute, "I will love you. Whether you're happy, sad, angry, or anything in between, it doesn't change a thing. If you somehow turned evil, I'd love you. If you don’t want to be a sorcerer anymore, I’d love you. Even if you transformed into a worm, I'd love you. I will love every version of you that has been and that is yet to come, (Y/n). " He couldn't help but inject a touch of his signature playfulness into the moment. "Well, unless you turn into Gakuganji," he added with a mock shudder, "then you might be pushing it. But hey, I'll even love you if you morph into that old fart. Just… just don't test me on that one." He kisses your trembling lips gently. “I don’t think my heart could handle that.”

A small giggle burst from your lips, and you playfully swatted his arm, the sound like a gentle chime amidst your tears. It was a moment of relief, a brief respite from the weight of your emotions. Gojo couldn't help but chuckle in response, his grin boyish and goofy. “I will always love you (Y/n). Even if you lose yourself, I will walk with you to help you rediscover yourself. I am great at helping people find things. These six eyes are here for a reason, you know?”

You gently shook your head, a small smile playing on your lips as you leaned in to kiss Satoru Gojo on his lips, your gratitude and affection evident in the tender gesture. "Thank you," you whispered against his lips, "for being you."

His lips curved into a soft smile as he returned your kiss, savoring the warmth of your affection. "It's been my pleasure, (Y/n)," he replied, his voice filled with sincerity. “After all, nobody is best at being Gojo Satoru other than Satoru Gojo himself.” He winks.

You continued, your voice barely above a whisper, "I know what you've been doing, Toru. All these days, you’ve been taking care of me, helping me even if I didn't want to admit it to myself. But I needed it, and I needed you."

Gojo's eyes softened as he gazed at you, his thumb brushing against your cheek. "If the roles were reversed, you would've done a far better and more efficient job," he admitted, a hint of shame coloring his voice. "I should've seen it sooner, (Y/n)."

You silenced him with a gentle finger against his lips, his mock pout making you smile. "Don't blame yourself, Toru," you murmured. "I didn't want you to find out, and it's not your fault. I feel lighter now than I have in days, although I am still struggling to cope.”

In response, Gojo spoke with unwavering determination, "I'll be here beside you, sweets. However you want and in whatever form you need.

“Whatever I need huh?” A wistful smile tugged at your lips. "Maybe turning myself into Gakuganji would help," you mused, a playful glint in your eyes. “won’t it, Toru?”

Gojo groaned dramatically, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. His fingers danced along your sides and ribs, eliciting giggles and laughter from you as you squirmed beneath his touch. It was a moment of pure, unadulterated joy. His fingers attacked your sides and belly, evoking peals of laughter from you. The tatami floor beneath you seemed to come alive with the sounds of your giggles and Gojo's playful laughter. As he tickled you mercilessly, Gojo's thoughts were clear—he would do anything to keep that light in your eyes, to see you smile, even if it meant turning into Gakuganji himself. Anything at all. And with every joyful laugh that filled the room, he knew he was one step closer to bringing you back to him.

Taglist - @hiraethsdesires Note to @hiraethsdesires: thank you, Hira. I thought I'd never be able to get back into writing again. I thought I had lost it. But it felt so nice to dive right into this again. The first character I had ever written for in this blog was Gojo. It feels just right to get back into it with him again.

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