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miraclewoozi · 11 months

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DON'T SWEAT IT. - l.jh

Today — the first time in a small forever that he forgot to check the battery on his earphones (and subsequently had them die on him mid-workout) — Jihoon is forced to notice you.

pairing; lee jihoon x fem!reader. content; fluff / gym crush au / strangers to lovers / kinda idiots to lovers / smut towards the end (MINORS DNI). w/c; just a breezy 18k- and some change? warnings; swearing, this is only proof read once because if i read it again i was going to lose my mind. please let me know if i've forgotten any. smut tags under the cut ( not sure that this counts as a warning but a heads up: the gym weight units, whenever mentioned, are in kilograms not lbs because i’m british and the metric system, am i right? sorry if there are any other british-isms, i try really hard to avoid them/catch them on a proofread but there are inevitably some that have slipped through the net. )

note; gym-selfie jihoon, you will never not own my ass. ( screaming internally this is the first fic i've written since my dan + phil youtube era. i don't know what i'm doing. this has been in my wips for about two months. it's a bit all over the place. that's. literally just me. bon appetite. <3 )

smut warnings: making out, grinding, fingering (f rec), oral (f rec), blowjob started/implied (at the end), protected sex (be safe out there gang), little bit of biting, no huge power dynamics? reader & jihoon are both switches (and simps), some use of pet-names (good girl/baby).

—————

He first sees you around lunchtime on an otherwise unassuming Sunday.

As you walk in, the gym is wonderfully quiet. A handful of regulars mill about, making full use of the rare freedom of the machinery. One of the club’s personal trainers is marching an impossibly steep incline on a treadmill. It could just be any other weekend session in this criminally over-equipped and under-used gym: the town’s worst kept secret. But when the door slams shut behind you, his head jerks up; it, in this moment, is the loudest sound in the room. It’s sort of the only one he hears at all.

Today — the first time in a small forever that he forgot to check the battery on his earphones (and subsequently had them die on him mid-workout) — Jihoon is forced to notice you as he sits with dumbbells rested against his thighs. He catches his breath as he wonders who you are, if you’ve ever been to this gym before, why he doesn’t recognise you. Are you a new potential regular, maybe? Or just visiting the area and making good use of the cheap pay-as-you-go rates? Maybe, he considers, lips turning downwards in thought… maybe you’ve been coming here for a long time and he’s somehow just always been so in his own head that he’s never noticed.

The last, he thinks, is sort of unlikely. No. He would definitely remember a face like yours.

His heart rate slows more than he usually lets it as he finds himself watching you fill up your water bottle at the fountain, taking a long sip on your way over to one of the stairmasters. His brain blanks out when he realises that he’s not just looking anymore, he’s sort of staring, and swallows the saliva on his tongue hard, looking back at the mirror. He doesn’t want to be that guy. He isn’t that guy – he just got distracted by the loud noise, and this is exactly why he checks the damn battery on his headphones before he leaves the house.

The only problem is that now, he can’t remember how many sets he’s done. He lies back and stares straight into a slightly sketchy light-fixture, neglecting to pick up the dumbbells that he put aside for his next set of pushes. Jihoon adjusts the position of his shoulders against the bench, arches his back off it slightly, digs his heels into the spongy floor beneath them and pushes the ones still in his hands until failure.

Today, he finishes his routine and leaves the gym without allowing himself so much as another glance your way.

He neglects to notice that your eyes are avoiding him right back.

—————

You smile at him for the first time on a Tuesday. Not the following one – a week and a bit later.

Seungcheol is with him tonight. Jihoon prefers to train alone nine times out of ten: this is a truth widely acknowledged, accepted and respected among his friends. Gym time is his down time, his equivalent of movie marathons and comfort food, of face masks and glasses of wine. But it’s not a hard rule: occasionally, someone will ask to tag along and use one of his guest passes, and Jihoon very rarely says no. There are two reasons. One, he isn’t actually rude, contrary to approximately eighteen running jokes in the group-chat. But also, it adds a little bit of variety to his otherwise very set-in-stone regimen, and mixing it up doesn’t hurt. Like tonight, for example. Seungcheol is pulling him into the studio off the main gym floor, his own gym bag packed with boxing pads and gloves for them to play with.

Variety.

Jihoon grumbles a little at the idea, at first. He has a very love-hate relationship with cardio, favouring a simple steady-state run over everything else, and it just feels a bit against his moral code to use gym time for something like this. However, he comes to discover very quickly that smacking Seungcheol’s hands is very therapeutic; Jihoon knows he’s maybe getting a little too into it when his friend asks if they can switch around, grimacing and shaking out his wrist after a particularly beefy punch.

He agrees, albeit reluctantly, tugging off the gloves he’s wearing and pulling on the pads instead.

This half of the activity is considerably less enjoyable for Jihoon; he starts to cool down and loses his flow almost straight away and after about thirty seconds, his breathing is back to normal and he feels ready to go again. Even so, he does what he needs to do to be a good workout partner, and goes one step further into ‘good friend’ territory as he allows Seungcheol to vent about the bad day he had at work in-between hits, offering murmurs and looks of disgust when it feels appropriate. Suddenly, the impromptu request to come to the gym tonight makes much more sense, as does the slightly bizarre choice of activity, but Jihoon tries not to ask about it in too much detail.

They swing at each other for a few more rounds apiece, working up a healthy sweat and getting out a few frustrations as the hour wears on. On the last set, Jihoon switches out Seungcheol’s hands for a punching bag, putting a lot more of his weight behind every hit and really tiring himself out. By the end, his hair sticks to his forehead and his cheeks have flushed bright red; he only stops when he gets that weird, metallic taste in the back of his mouth that says he’s probably overdone it. Again.

“Hit the shower?” Seungcheol asks breathlessly as he finishes his last set of Russian twists and lies down flat on the floor, equally sticky and flushed all over.

Jihoon pats his face dry with his towel, shaking his head. “You go ahead. I’ll have one at home.”

He doesn’t give Seungcheol much of a chance to respond, already cleaning down anything he’s touched or managed to sweat on and riding out the high of the endorphins flooding his veins. Secretly, he hasn’t had a cardio session this high energy or this satisfying in a long time. He isn’t going to readily admit to that though.

“Nah, I’ll do the same,” Seungcheol agrees. He starts packing the gear he brought with him into his bag and they leave together after, heading towards the exit.

That’s when he sees you again.

He doesn’t notice at first; you’re stowing your things into one of the higher lockers, and you have your headphones slung around your neck as he walks past. It’s the sound of a song he vaguely recognises through your speakers that makes his head snap over from the conversation he’s in the middle of. They walk past at the moment you drop down from your tiptoes, and you flash a small (but insanely pretty) smile at Jihoon.

By the time he manages to process this fact, he’s already walked past you and you’re headed over into the main gym area, so even though he turns around to try and catch your eye, all he sees is your retreating figure. He stumbles over his own feet, not looking where he’s going, and just barely catches himself on Seungcheol’s upper arm before he actually does fall over. His older friend glances down at his bicep before he adopts a look that Jihoon has seen many, many times before: just never directed at him. His cheeks heat up further and he looks away.

“What was that?” Seungcheol asks, one eyebrow so far up his forehead that it’s disappeared almost entirely under his soggy hair. He looks so smug, so incredibly entertained. Jihoon wants to smack that expression off his face, immediately.

“Nothing,” Jihoon rushes, managing not to act on the violent thought even though he wants to. He clears his throat. “No-one. I-... they’re new, I think. I don’t know.”

Seungcheol lets out a soft laugh, pushing the door open for them both to leave through. “Yeah,” he scoffs, eyes glimmering with something Jihoon doesn’t think he likes the look of. “Nothing, my ass.”

—————

Three days later, he hears you speak for the first time.

Granted, you aren’t speaking to him – at least, not at first. But that’s not really what matters.

It’s late, and it’s a Friday night. Fridays are usually Jihoon’s days rest days, but sitting around his apartment had him feeling impossibly twitchy, with far too much energy to burn and no way to do so without leaving the house. And he knows that he needs to take days off, now and again. He knows that they’re good for recovery and that it’s healthy to take time to himself that involves not lifting weights. But what he also knows is that if he doesn’t manage to shake the weird buzzing feeling in his muscles, in his joints, in his veins, he’s never going to get to sleep. So, here he finds himself at almost 10PM, walking down the street to get to the gym.

To begin with, he doesn’t know (or really care) who it is that’s coming up behind him. He can hear quite clearly that the mystery person is on the phone, and that they’re in the middle of what seems to be a rather heated argument: his brain latches onto occasional words, phrases, curses. Every now and again, their voice drops to a deep, frustrated mutter and he cringes slightly, making a point to keep his eyes forward and down so as not to draw attention to the fact that this presumably private conversation has become everything but.

He touches his entry fob to the sensor on the door as he arrives and pushes it open. Jihoon uses the opportunity to stand still, to glance back at whoever it is that’s walked behind him for the past four and a half minutes, and his eyes come to land on you. He falters, noting how your eyes are a bit glassy and your cheeks are stained with what he can safely assume are tear-tracks. In this moment, he wants to run; he doesn’t want anything to do with that, and he certainly doesn’t want to hear any more of your call. It’s none of his business, and he feels plenty weird enough already with what he has overheard. But, for some unknown reason, he stays in place.

“No – no, you don’t get to-...” you hiss into your phone. “It was our fucking anniversary, you asshole.” Jihoon’s face tightens at that, lips drawn between his teeth and his eyes blowing slightly wide. You pass through the door in front of him, flashing a small smile as you go. Another smile, he thinks to himself, but he’d be an idiot to compare them in any way; this one is so dramatically dissimilar to the first, he thinks it could almost have come from a totally different person.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing ‘insanely pretty’ about it this time. Your smile is tight-lipped and exhausted, slightly apologetic. Maybe even forced. He does try to return a warmer one to you, but he doesn’t know if you notice.

“Look, I’m at the gym – we’re not doing this right now. I’ll call you later.” You hang up the phone with the kind of sigh that groans in the back of your throat.

A small part of him wants to take this moment and use it to ask if you’re all right, but an even larger part of him doesn’t. It isn’t because he doesn’t care. In a weird way, considering this is only the first time he’s clearly heard your voice and he knows absolutely nothing about you, he does care. But there are a few things that stop him. Not only are you a near-complete stranger, not only would he have no idea what to say to you if the answer happened to come out as a ‘no’, not only is he already coming over a little bit clammy at the thought of having a conversation with you… Jihoon isn’t stupid. He knows from the sound of your voice and the way you’re rather aggressively typing a message into your phone that it’s a ridiculous question.

You’re walking into the gym at 10 o’clock on a Friday night, your eyes literally brimming with tears. Of course you’re not all right.

He’s still standing in the open doorway mulling all this over, but Jihoon only realises when a gust of wind slaps over his calves and sends a draught not only through the reception area, but up the length of his spine. He comes inside fully as you close the locker you’re using – he notices, but he isn’t sure why, that it’s the same one as last time – and throws his things into the one he always uses. Two below and one to the left of yours.

It’s quiet tonight: just the pair of you and one middle-aged guy. Jihoon recognises him as the friendly man who seemingly knows everyone who comes in here – including you, apparently, judging by the way he strikes up a short but energetic conversation. When the other guy walks away, you clamp your headphones back over your ears and return to what you were doing before, occasionally bobbing your head or moving your lips in time with whatever it is that you’re listening to. Jihoon steals little glances at you now and again when you’re in-between sets, watching how you breathe deeper, how your skin glows with sweat as you tap your fingertips against your thighs.

He almost drops the bar he’s holding when you catch his eyes in the long line of mirrors. He turns away, swallowing hard, completely missing how your own gaze lingers.

Jihoon becomes so obsessed with not being caught looking at you again that he doesn’t even notice when you disappear off the gym floor completely. It’s only when he pulls his headphones off at the end of his session and glances around that he registers your absence: your third companion is long gone, and he assumes you must have snuck out without him noticing too. He settles the speakers back over his ears before pulling on an old zip-up, flicking the hood over his head to shelter him a little better once he gets outside. But he’s in no rush to get home so he takes his time, resting his bag between his abdomen and the lockers, replying to a few messages and clicking his tongue at some of the nonsense being spewed into the group-chat.

He isn’t sure exactly how long he’s standing there for, but he does know precisely what pulls him back to the world outside of the device in his hands.

To begin with, he doesn’t notice you approach, lost completely in his screen. He doesn’t hear your footsteps, or the way you politely clear your throat to announce your presence so he can move out of the way. He misses your moment of realisation that he’s listening to music and has no idea that you’re standing three feet behind him. He doesn’t even see you walk up next to him, your hair still damp from your shower and sitting loose over your shoulders.

It’s only when you try to reach over him to grab the last of your things that he snaps out of his trance. The fragrance of your body wash hits him first, and oh boy, does it hit him. Sweet, and delicate. Then, he gets something beautifully fruity: it’s not a perfume (it doesn’t smell like a perfume), but it’s you. Your shampoo, maybe? A conditioner? He can’t tell. Whatever it is, the combination of fragrances has him feeling like he’s been slammed into by a damn freight train. He drops his bag to the floor, freezing for a second, and then finally moves away just as the little door swings open.

“I’m so sorry,” he says hurriedly, tugging his hood down and pulling his headphones off completely. “I didn’t even think you were still here.” He can’t shake the smell of you, nor the feeling of your warm frame leaning so close to his own. God, why is his heart pounding like he’s just finished a round of sprints? Why can’t he breathe?

“No – hey, no, don’t be,” you rush, shaking your head. You finally succeed in pulling your coat free and start trying to get it on; Jihoon wonders if you often struggle to find your sleeves like this, if you’re always chasing them around like a puppy after its own tail. He does it too, sometimes. He gets it. It’s cute. “It’s okay. I was trying not to disturb-... I’m sorry.”

“You’re fine,” he tells you. For the first time, he’s able to smile back at you properly.

Why is it so hot in here, all of a sudden? Do they shut off the air conditioning after hours or something? He’s breaking out in a sweat.

“Call it even?” you suggest shyly, extending out a hand now you’ve managed to get both arms through your sleeves. He looks down at your fingers for a second before reaching to shake your hand once, a semi-firm grip securing the ‘deal’. (He feels a bit like he’s been electrocuted after, but he tries not to make that too obvious).

It goes awkwardly quiet for a moment then, and Jihoon wishes deeply that he had it in him to say something. Anything. But his brain has gone completely empty and apparently, all he knows how to do is stand completely still like a fucking statue. He shifts his gaze from you, to the wall behind you, to the carpet beneath his shoes, all the while tugging at the collar of his sweatshirt as if it might bring him a tiny breath of fresh air. The gentle sound of you clearing your throat has him looking back at your face again though; he assumes for a second that this is maybe you about to announce taking your leave. All the while, he’s cursing himself out in his own head for being totally inept, and he’s not entirely sure that it isn’t written all over his face.

“Alone, today?” you ask, idly fiddling with your zipper and succeeding in taking him by surprise. He really didn’t think you were going to continue this. And yet…

“Hm?” he questions.

You swallow before answering. “You… the last time, you were with a friend?” you explain, and now it’s your turn to look away. He wonders if you’re a little warm too, if he’s right in what he was thinking about the air-conditioning.

“Oh. Right.”

He nods. An annoying train of doubt in his mind wants to know why you’re asking about Seungcheol; if maybe it was him that you smiled at the other night, even though he knows your eyes weren’t looking up at the man he brought with him. He thinks maybe he should be used to these turns in conversation by now – you certainly wouldn’t be the first person to ask if one of his friends is available, after all – but somehow, he isn’t, and he has a slightly bitter taste in the back of his mouth as he goes on.

He really didn’t have ‘you being interested in one of his best friends’ on his bingo card for tonight, that’s for sure.

“Yeah. I think he’s with his partner, or… I don’t know. I don’t really bring other people, often. That was a one-off.”

You nod silently and Jihoon can’t quite get a read on what that means. He wonders if you’re upset at the revelation of Seungcheol’s partner, or maybe that he doesn’t tag along to every session. Or maybe, maybe, you were just being polite, and you don’t really care what his friend is up to that means he isn’t here. But whatever it is that you’re feeling, you do far too good a job at hiding it; he’s suddenly very overcome with the desire to run, again, except this time he might just bury his head in the sand too for good measure.

“How much were you deadlifting, just then?” you ask in the lull, just as he thinks he might have perfected the best way to say goodbye that doesn’t make him come across as even more of a tool than he probably already has. It throws him off kilter, but somehow, he manages to answer you in reasonable time.

“Oh, God… uh, one… 160?” He says uncertainly. “That’s not… I can do heavier-...” In his mind, he slaps his forehead. “Wait, no, that’s-... I mean, it’s true, but I didn’t mean-...”

You bite back your smile as he talks himself in a circle but Jihoon is too flustered to notice, convinced that he now sounds like every arrogant gym rat on the planet. God, he’s given himself the ick.

“I guessed you could,” you say.

Oh boy, this freezes him. Mid-thought, mid blink, mid-breath: he’s completely stuck. What does that mean? What does that mean? He only just manages to unstick his now suddenly dry tongue from the roof of his mouth, looking at you with surprised, confused eyes and parted lips. There aren’t any words on them, though. Like a deer in headlights, he just… stares.

“I mean, okay. Come on.” Your eyes visibly drop as you look him over, gaze lingering at his shoulders, his biceps, his waist. “You can get another twenty on that at least, right?”

He doesn’t know how to explain what’s happening to him, but if he thought he was burning up before? It was nothing compared to this, now. And there’s no way you haven’t noticed how everything from the base of his neck to the tips of his ears has suddenly started staining scarlet. He bows his head and pinches his lips tight, wrestling away the train of thought that appears as you drag your bottom lip between your teeth momentarily, still eyeing his arms. God, he’s never felt so overwhelmed in his life.

“Something like that, yeah,” he strains. He’s trying so hard to be nonchalant, even though he knows all of his personal bests by heart. Deadlift, 195kg. He hit it a few weeks ago: a couple of days before he first saw you.

“Mm. You can tell.”

Jihoon tries to shake off the compliment, but he fails. In equal measure he wishes you’d stop (he doesn’t know how much more blood can rush to his cheeks before he keels over) and never wants you to stop talking. It’s all going straight to his stomach, though, and he doesn’t remember having felt this specific brand of nervous and excited and stupidly shy since he was in high school.

He can hardly keep up. This is the danger zone.

Maybe it’s a bad idea that he says the next thing that comes into his head in a desperate attempt to change the conversation away from how much he can pull. But somehow, his voice doesn’t break when he asks, “are you parked far away?”

What? It’s dark outside, and this part of town isn’t exactly known for its upstanding citizens and pretty flowerbeds.

“Oh,” you say, eyes a little wide. “I’m-... just staying close-by. I walked here.” The space between his eyebrows must crease a little too quickly because you immediately hurry to speak again. “Really. It’s like… not even ten minutes. All main streets. It’s nothing.”

“Ten minutes longer than I’d walk around here at night on my own,” he says lightheartedly. In tone, at least. He’s actually completely serious.

You laugh at that; he lets out a chuckle, too. Now, Jihoon doesn’t believe in fairies but he thinks that if they were real, they’d giggle just like you do.

With a smile still on your face, you say, “what? A strong guy like you? Come on, now.”

Do you have to keep doing that? Fuck, he’s absolutely done for.

He tilts his head forwards, eyes closed, trying so hard to stop the muscles in his cheeks from lifting in a grin that it becomes a workout in and of itself.

“I mean it,” he says, taking what he hopes is a subtle breath to settle the fluttering in his chest. The next thing he knows, he’s leaning one shoulder against the lockers, a little reminiscent of every douchebag in every teen movie ever made. If he doesn’t think about it too much, he won’t cringe into oblivion until he gets home and replays this interaction over and over in his head instead of going to sleep. “Maybe I’ve just lived here too long. I might be jaded, but it’s still true.”

“How long is too long?” you ask.

“All my life,” he tells you.

“No way?”

“Mm.” A beat. “What about you?”

“I’m just staying with a friend, right now.”

“Oh, right.” He falls quiet again as he remembers the first time he saw you, remembers making the list in his head of all the possible reasons he hadn’t seen you before. The second was true, then.

Why does that feel like the worst possible scenario? He decides not to unpack that here.

“Maybe-...” you start, glancing down at your hands, which have been twisting in front of you for a few seconds now. Your chest inflates, filled with the words you’re about to speak, but only a breath comes out when you shake your head instead of saying them. “No, don’t worry. Scratch that.”

“Are you sure?” he asks, because he thinks that whatever you were about to suggest, there’s not much he would have said no to. He feels like it’s only fair to give you another chance to say it.

But you don’t.

“Yeah, it’s nothing.” You pause. “I… should probably get going.” He glances over your shoulder at the clock mounted on the far wall, squinting to see the time. 11:45.

“Shit. Yeah, me too,” Jihoon agrees. He didn’t realise it had gotten so late, so fast: he’s hardly ever out at this time. Lord, he already knows it’s going to be an open inquisition when he gets back to his apartment. His neighbours, Soonyoung and Seokmin, are about to have a fucking field day.

But it’s already long past the time he usually goes to bed, so he asks his next question anyway. He still can’t shake the thought of you walking back on your own at this hour. “Do-… you need a ride?”

He’s not sure if you actually consider it, or just wait a moment before you answer just to be polite. Either way, you end up shaking your head.

“It’s okay. I’ve-… got a call to make, so.” Your voice is a little quieter, lips tweaking up into a regretful half-smile, and Jihoon curses in his own head. How had he forgotten about that? “Thank you, though. Really.”

“Don’t mention it,” he says. “Just… get back safe.”

You smile and nod, taking a step towards the door and Jihoon does the same. He reaches the exit first and holds it open for you; when you’re both out in the street, he suppresses a shiver and looks in the direction of where he left his car earlier. Feeling the full force of the cold, it crosses his mind to ask again if you’re sure about walking home, but you’re already pulling a beanie down over your still damp hair and tapping something into your phone, so he doesn’t say anything.

“I’ll see you around, uh-…” you start to say, only looking back up when you falter, realising that this is the first time you’re about to use his name and it occurs to you both, at the same time, that you haven’t done this part, yet.

“Jihoon,” he introduces himself, lips quirking into a side-smile. His gaze is expectant and you respond to it perfectly.

“Y/n,” you introduce yourself.

“See you around, y/n.”

You split off in the opposite direction to where he’s heading. Before he clamps his headphones over his ears for the short walk up to his car, the last thing he hears is the retreating sound of a dial-tone.

—————

He doesn’t see you then for two whole weeks.

For the first couple of days, he only idly notices; it’s not a big deal — it’s not like you’re always there when he is, and he’s sure it’s the same vice versa. But he notices your absence, nonetheless. By the end of the first week, he casually wonders if you’ve had a change in schedule. Maybe you’re on a different working pattern, something that means you can’t be there on Monday and Thursday evenings and at 11:45am on Sundays.

It’s not weird. He only knows this because prior to that first conversation, acknowledging you as you crossed paths by the free-weights became part of his routine. It’s fine that he sort of misses those little interactions, isn’t it?

Maybe you’ve decided to start training ridiculously early in the morning instead? He tried that once. Never again. It then occurs to him, in the middle of a self-enforced rest day as he sits in the dark nursing a headache, that perhaps you’re not well. He sort of wishes he’d had the guts to ask for your number the last time he saw you, now: he thinks he’d check in, see if you were okay, ask how work was going or something.

Deep down he knows he’d probably actually just be staring at a blank text thread with a ‘casual’ message typed, tweaked a few hundred times, and ultimately unsent. But that’s fine. It’s the thought that counts.

The next time he sees you isn’t even in the gym, at all. It’s a Sunday afternoon — he finished his morning session, went home, showered, and headed back out into town after some lunch with a few errands to run. He finds himself spoiled with the luxury of a spare few hours to kill and dips into his favourite coffee place, thrilled beyond belief to find that it’s not obnoxiously busy and that there’s only one other person in the queue waiting to be served.

Oh, he thinks when he looks up from his phone and sees a vaguely familiar set of headphones sitting on top of a definitely familiar mane of hair, standing right in front of him. Oh, shit. It’s you.

Jihoon goes back and forth with himself over it but ultimately decides he probably doesn’t know you well enough to just say hello out in the wild like this, so even though the urge to do so strikes, he holds himself back. It’s agonising, though. He really wants to.

You step forward to order and he’s typing out a reply to a message in his, Seokmin and Soonyoung’s three-way group chat, in which he’s literally been fighting for his life as of late. He made the mistake of mentioning you in passing a few days ago and ever since, he’s had to vehemently deny that he has developed his first gym crush, insisting that actually, he’s just made a friend. They don’t believe him, because of course they don’t. That would be far too reasonable. Seokmin says that Jihoon wouldn’t be blushing just from saying your name if you were really ‘just a friend’. Soonyoung argues Jihoon wouldn’t have mentioned you at all.

“I’m so sorry — bear with me, just-…” your voice is quiet but Jihoon hears you apologising to the cashier in front of you, and it snaps him clean away from the tiff he’s having with the men who live in his building. He glances up and you’re elbow-deep in the bag over your shoulder, red in the face with your bottom lip pulled between your teeth. He turns his head slightly and sees the small hand-written sign that says the card machine isn’t working, and they’re cash only, today.

He can hazard a guess at your predicament.

After another few seconds of you trying to find whatever it is you’re looking for in your bag, he starts feeling bad for you. This, right here, is his own worst nightmare. Should the roles be reversed, he thinks he would’ve just turned around and walked out. It’s exactly why he doesn’t bother with backpacks and satchels day-to-day: if it doesn’t fit in his pockets, he doesn’t take it out with him. The system isn’t perfect but it has saved Jihoon a decent amount of public distress.

But the roles aren’t reversed, and he has his wallet already in his hand, so… he only gives himself a few seconds to wonder if it’s appropriate before he does the stupid thing anyway.

“Don’t worry — I’ve got it,” he says, stepping around you, pulling out the cash to pay for your order. You’re dumbstruck when you look at him, head tilted to the side. The person stood behind the counter glances at you, then at him, and back at you; you don’t see this, however, because your eyes haven’t left Jihoon’s face since he appeared — as far as you’re concerned — out of thin air.

“I can’t ask you to…” you start to protest, but your hands have stopped fishing around and he’s moving the cash further towards the barista, who hesitates just a second longer.

“You’re not asking. I’m offering. I’ve got you.” He says this with such finality that you quite literally can’t argue with him. The lady behind the counter accepts the cash and you nod, shyly, mouthing a thank you. He orders his own drink — an Americano, nothing exciting — and you both go to stand at the other end of the counter while you wait.

“Hi,” you finally say, and Jihoon can’t help but give a small chuckle.

He doesn’t have anything hugely witty or creative in his arsenal, though, so he comes back with a matching, “hey.”

“How… have you been?” you ask.

“Can’t complain, really,” he says. “Are you okay? I haven’t seen you around for a few weeks.” Oh, God — the second the words are out of his mouth, he wishes he could take them back. Why did he have to add that last part? Why didn’t he just leave it at the question?

“Yeah — about that,” you breathe, ducking your head to conceal the heat that’s spreading over your cheeks. “You know how I said I was staying with that friend?” He nods, and you continue. “I was waiting for some stuff to get sorted out with an apartment and it all finally got resolved, so… I’ve been moving my stuff over to a new place.”

Jihoon feels his heart sink for a moment, but he keeps his expression pleasant and engaged. His fingers threaten to give him away as they fiddle with the aglet on the drawstring of his sweatpants.

“Sounds tiring,” he says lightly, and you laugh again, nodding. It’s odd, having his heart taking residence low in his stomach and somehow also in his throat, all while hammering away at a mile a minute. All the caffeine in the world couldn’t have this effect on him. “Is it going okay so far?”

“Yeah.” You nod. “It’s a process, but… it’ll be worth it.”

The barista behind the counter announces herself by clearing her throat and slides your drinks across the marble surface with a little glimmer in her eye. Jihoon picks them both up, extending yours out to you. There’s a pause (in which he swallows a large helping of self-doubt) as he glances to the door, working through several combinations of his next words in his mind before he looks back at you.

“Do you… maybe have ten minutes to sit with these?” He asks. You light up immediately, not even checking the time on any of your devices, nor the wall clock behind your head. He doesn’t let himself think about why it makes him giddy that you’re accepting the offer, just like that.

“Yeah — yeah, sure.” You smile, walking through the lines of tables and sliding into one of the big, comfy chairs by the window. He unzips his jacket and slings it over the arm of the other chair before settling in himself, his long fingers wrapping around the to-go cup. The drink warms his perpetually cold palms and he sighs sweetly.

“You must be excited to get into the new place, then?” he asks after taking a sip, letting it heat him up from the inside. It could be argued that this job is already being taken care of, but Jihoon is not about to go there.

“Oh, God yes.” You nod, relaxing back in the seat with your own cup. Jihoon subconsciously leans a little forward in tandem. “It’s been fun staying with my friend, but…” You pause, lips slightly parted, before going on. “Okay, a warning: I’m a terrible person for this, I know. She’s done me a huge favour, letting me stay there — but I can’t deal with how untidy she is. It’s driving me nuts.”

A chuckle bubbles in Jihoon’s chest, cheeks starting to ache as his smile grows and grows. It hasn’t fallen since he sat down opposite you, and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, any time soon. “That bad?” he asks.

“You have no idea,” you groan, covering your face with one hand. He wishes you hadn’t — he thinks you look quite lovely when you’re all lit up like this. “She doesn’t clean her dishes after she eats — she piles them up in the sink for like, three days. I don’t think she’s used the vacuum the entire time I’ve been there. I keep finding wrappers and packets and mismatched socks everywhere —”

His snort of laughter rolls off the back of his throat rather ungraciously and he settles back into his chair. You gently bump his ankle under the table with your foot, beaming at him. “I’m serious! I can’t live like this, Jihoon. I can’t!”

The more you speak, the less he can control the fits he’s descended into, and his abs start to ache after a while; there’s desperation in your voice but it’s just wrapped up so cutely in your lighthearted frustration and decoratively tied together with your sunshine smile… he can’t help it — he’s in pieces. It’s okay though, because you’re laughing too: it makes him think of fairies again, and he can picture you with dainty, intricately patterned wings under the soft lighting in the café. He wipes the corner of his eye with the heel of his hand as he starts to calm down, taking a few deep breaths all the way into his stomach.

“You’re so much stronger than I am,” he says.. “I couldn’t deal with that.”

“You know, I had a feeling you’d be a clean person, too,” you say, sipping at your coffee again. “I mean… I’ve never seen you use the gym showers, so I wasn’t sure, but…”

“Hey,” he says, mock-defensively. “I don’t trust the locks, okay? I shower at home!”

Your cup is lifted to your mouth and he can only see you from the nose upwards, but by the creases at the corners of your eyes, he knows you’re concealing a smile behind it as you nod back at him.

Ten minutes turns to twenty and then somehow becomes thirty — Jihoon starts feeling like you’re someone he’s known for years, and not just the person he accidentally ended up paying attention to in the gym just a couple of weeks ago. He bounces off you and you bounce off him. Both of you have long-since finished your drinks, too: there’s no real reason for either of you to still be here.

Except the obvious.

“So, the apartment,” Jihoon says, leaning forwards again with his elbows resting on his knees. “Is it…?” He makes a few circular gestures with his hands with which he tries to imply something to the effect of ‘local’, or ‘nearby’, but he can’t quite bring himself to say that out loud. You seem to catch on though. Somehow.

Then again, you did say — a few subject changes ago — that Jihoon is on your wavelength. Maybe that’s it.

“About… a fifteen minute walk from here? Give or take,” you say, and his eyebrows shoot up his forehead so fast it’s like they’re on strings, being controlled by someone else. He doesn’t realise for a few seconds, by which point he isn’t even sure how to relax them.

“No way?” he says, trying to feign nothing more than an idle interest. Obviously, he’s soaring.

“Yeah. I’ll want to get back training soon, too, so there’s some incentive to get this done quickly. I miss it,” you tell him.

Jihoon comes out with what he says next without thinking. His mouth is moving before fully engaging his brain. It’s the coffee jitters. Apparently.

“Well, if you need any help with anything, I’ve got a car.”

“You’re too sweet,” you say. “I really couldn’t put you out like that, but…”

“You wouldn’t be,” he assures you with a shrug. “If I’m not working or in the gym… I’m never really that busy. It’s up to you, but-… I’d be happy to.”

You bite the inside of your lip for a moment, apparently mulling this over, before wiggling in your seat to pull your phone out of the front pocket of your jeans. You unlock the device and hand it over on a ‘new contact’ screen.

Jihoon goes completely stupid: he thinks his brain stops functioning as he takes it to put his number in — for a moment, he’s staring dumbstruck, struggling to even remember the order of the digits now he’s under pressure, but it comes back to him eventually. His thumbs dart across the screen and he checks, double checks and triple checks that he’s typed it right before placing it back in your waiting palm.

His fingertips brush against yours and it tickles, sending small shockwaves up his arms and straight into his chest. You smile down at your phone before glancing up at him.

“You need an emoji,” you tell him, and he raises an eyebrow at you.

“Huh?”

“Everyone in my contacts has one — I’ve been doing this since I was in high-school. You need to pick one, too.”

“Oh, uh-…” Jihoon swallows, and for some reason he’s completely forgotten every single little emoticon option there is. He draws a blank. “I can’t — you pick one for me. I don’t know.”

You narrow your eyes at him for a second, pouting your lips as you seem to scroll through the endless options. Now and again, you look up at him, as if trying to see what best fits him before you continue your search. He waits. And waits. And waits. He’s about to throw in an admittedly useless suggestion of some sort of boring animal when you turn your phone around to show him what you’ve chosen.

Jihoon, the contact name reads. And there’s the little angel face next to it.

“Oh, come on,” he says, blushing deeply. “You can’t be serious.”

“I totally am,” you say proudly, turning it back and pressing to save it. He hides his face in his hands. “If you won’t pick your own, you get what you’re given. You did this to yourself.”

“Wow,” he chuckles weakly, sliding his hands up into his hair and raking it back off his face. Your eyes move quickly across every inch and boy, does he notice. You shrug in response and test it, sending the same little emoticon to him. He blushes harder when it comes through and he saves your number into his own phone before placing it face-down on the table.

More than an hour after buying your coffee, Jihoon stretches his arms above his head and checks the time on his watch. He frowns slightly, not sure how the afternoon got away from him so fast, and lets out a sigh.

“I think I need to get going,” he says reluctantly. Leaving you is absolutely the opposite of what he wants to do, actually. Alas, “I have some friends coming over tonight.”

“Yeah — yeah, of course,” you smile, leaning to one side to pick your bag up off the floor. “No worries.”

You both move to stand up and he throws his coat over his arm, leading the way out. He holds open the door for you to leave first, then follows you outside into the afternoon sun.

“It was really nice to see you,” you say, turning to face him.

“You too,” he agrees. “Text me if you need anything, okay? But actually do. Don’t just say you will?”

You laugh sweetly. Fairies. His ears might have actually caught fire this time. “Okay, okay. I promise. I’ll text you — thank you.” There’s a pause, but only a tiny one. “And for the coffee, too.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he insists, waving it off. You shake your head. He thinks your hands are twitching when you stuff them into your pockets but he can’t be sure. Your breath definitely stutters, though.

“No, really. Um… next one’s on me?”

He blinks, and blinks again. Next one? The next one? He feels like he’s malfunctioned and been forcibly rebooted. The next one?

“I-…” he starts, his throat dry. “Yeah, okay. If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.” You nod, smiling with — what he doesn’t realise is — relief. “I’ll see you around, okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah — I’ll see you, y/n.”

—————

Jihoon has no choice but to admit defeat to the group chat that night when Seungcheol and Jeonghan come over for a takeout.

Within minutes, his oldest friend is asking about the girl from the gym — he’s been just as relentless as Seokmin and Soonyoung in quizzing Jihoon, except it’s slightly harder to deny to Seungcheol because he did witness, first-hand, the way you had his friend tripping over his own feet with a single smile. At first, Jihoon tries to shrug it off. Play it down. Change the subject. He doesn’t mention that he’s actually spoken to you since he and Cheol trained together, or that he accidentally bumped into you and paid for your coffee, or that you stayed talking with him for as long as you did. He definitely doesn’t say that you exchanged phone numbers.

He absolutely won’t confess to being smitten.

All Jihoon willingly admits to is that from what he’s seen of you around, you seem nice, and with a roll of his eyes he does agree that he thinks you’re attractive. He gets a bit of a glare later in the evening when Jeonghan asks if he’s thought about where he wants to take you on your first date, and Jihoon tells him to stop asking stupid questions and eat his chicken before he eats it for him. But all in all he thinks he evades the worst of it pretty well. For now, anyway — he knows their pestering isn’t going away any time soon.

Especially not when, on their way out, Seungcheol leans close and whispers that whatever is going on with his gym crush, it suits him. Jihoon jabs him on the arm and the two men leave, laughing brightly.

It’s about an hour after his friends have gone home, having washed the dishes and cleaned up his apartment that Jihoon is sitting on his living room floor doing a few lower body stretches before he turns in for the night. He finds himself tapping into your text thread — not for the first time this evening — and skimming over the short conversation you had earlier. You messaged him when you got back to your friend’s place to thank him for the third time, and Jihoon replied back telling you that if you didn’t stop being silly, he was never going to respond to you again. Your reply came in the form of a “:(“ and his was a simple “:)”. That was it, but he’s been thinking about the exchange ever since.

He’s not sure why. Nor is he certain what about that has him looking down at the messages and grinning like a fool in his apartment, alone, at 10:30pm on a Sunday night. He could probably take a stab in the dark at what it means, though. He rubs at the back of his neck with one hand as he changes conversations and types out a short message with the other.

jihoon: fine. you’re right.

seokmin: ?

soonyoung: probs true, does need context

jihoon: about the gym girl. you’re right.

soonyoung: OH

seokmin: Hahahahahaha

seokmin: Yeah, you’re definitely the last to know, dude

soonyoung: fr even chan and hansol know atp lmao

jihoon: they what?

jihoon: how do they know?

jihoon: they don’t go to my gym! i haven’t seen them in weeks!

soonyoung: because we told them?????

seokmin: So, we might have told everyone

jihoon: blocking both of your numbers immediately.

seokmin: Hey! We’re just glad you’ve accepted it

seokmin: When do we get to meet her?

jihoon: blocked.

Well, great, Jihoon thinks as he fights the urge to lay face down on the floor and let the laminate cool his searingly hot cheeks.

At least he’s admitted it now.

He’s vaguely confirmed in writing that maybe he has a bit of a thing for you — it’s out in the open and at minimum, two of his friends know that it’s real. Straight from the horse’s mouth. Fingers. Whatever. No doubt by morning, all of his friends will have found out. The point stands that he hasn’t confessed to something like this since he was approximately sixteen years old, so whatever you’re doing to him, whatever this… is, it matters.

So, he asks himself, standing up off the hardwood floor and stretching his spine, arms locked behind him and pushed back as far as they can go. He turns off all the lights, checks the front door, goes through the motions to get himself ready for bed. So… what the fuck am I supposed to do now?

—————

Come Monday evening, he’s about ready to hit the roof.

As far as bad days go, Jihoon thinks he’s in the running for one of the worst ever. He slept awfully, tossing and turning through the night despite the usual winning combination of freshly washed bed sheets and his white noise machine drowning out the occasional disturbance from the street below. He wakes up two minutes before his alarm is due to go off, only to discover he fell asleep before plugging his phone in to charge overnight, and it’s sitting at a very risky 13%. The gel he uses to keep his hair off his face at work has gone weird and only does half a job, strands tumbling back in front of his eyes the second he goes to leave his apartment, very nearly forgetting his keys. Then, to really put the cherry on top, he sees that — at some point between getting home yesterday and now — someone has scraped his car while parking up next to him. There’s a large scratch right down the passenger side, with no note nor reliable CCTV in his apartment’s parking lot to confirm who it was, and of course, the space is currently empty.

All this before he even gets to work.

He fundamentally knows that starting the week off with a bad attitude will only lead to a really shitty remainder, but when Vernon sends his routine ‘Monday Motivation’ booster message — “you’re going to have a great day, today!” — into the group chat, Jihoon responds with a crude photo of his middle finger, right in front of the massive scuff on the bodywork of his Hyundai. Jeonghan replies with an ‘oof’, Wonwoo with a ‘yikes’, and Joshua, ever the comedian, sends a picture of Garfield lying face-down captioned ‘Mondays’ that nobody replies to. All responses feel kind of appropriate. But he pockets his phone without sending anything else, sighing again; he locks the car and checks the handle just in case before he finally heads into the building.

It’s going to be a long day. He just has to get through it.

Things don’t necessarily improve. He ends up in and out of meetings all day, so when 5 o’clock rolls around and he’s on his way out the door, he’s feeling a bit like he’s done nothing of actual value. Just, for some reason, thinking about you and tapping out a catchy beat on the top of his desk as he pretends to pay attention to useless presentation after useless presentation. But it’s still somehow been exhausting on his brain and on the drive back to his apartment, Jihoon feels so drained that he contemplates skipping the gym altogether and going straight to bed. This internal argument takes up most of his journey, but it does keep him occupied during the rush-hour traffic if it does nothing else.

Nothing has ever been fixed by ruining a perfectly good routine, however — so no sooner than he’s back in his apartment, he changes out of his button-down and trousers and into his regular gym gear. His protein shaker is ready on the counter for when he’s home again, the lights are off, his bag is on his shoulder and the door is locked. He pushes against it a few times, checking out of habit, despite the fact that his only neighbours on this floor are Soonyoung, Seokmin and an elderly couple with a cat they’re not technically supposed to have. Nobody tells, though, because Boots has become everyone’s emotional support animal. The only actual security threat is Seokmin maybe stealing something from his fridge, but he’s only ever satisfied after the third test anyway.

A quick warmup and a few easy stretches later, Jihoon sets about his business. Mondays are for training legs (and often, as a result, incapacitating himself for the rest of the week), and these workouts are always some of his most intense.

So intense, in fact, that he’s sweating buckets and cherry red when he steps away from the squat rack, tugging up the hem of his t-shirt to dry his face, a brief flash of his toned abdomen on full view. He’s just about catching his breath when he glances in the mirror, and his knees nearly give out when he sees you walking in. You lock eyes and smile at him in the reflection as you start to walk towards him.

It’s not just any smile, but he’s way too flustered to notice.

He spins around to face you, mortally embarrassed that you definitely just saw that, but in a weird way… kind of elated? You drop your headphones to sit around the back of your neck to greet him as you get closer. He pushes his hair back off his forehead and tries to act as cool as he can, but Jihoon suddenly becomes incredibly aware of everything about himself in this moment: his posture, how his arms hang by his sides, the exact positioning of his feet. The fact that he’s breathing pretty deeply, that his pulse is so loud in his ears that he can see your lips moving but can’t quite hear what you’re saying.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit — you’re talking. Focus. He needs to focus.

“Sorry — what was that?” he asks, eliciting a soft laugh from you.

“I like your shirt,” you repeat, a fraction clearer. Jihoon glances down at himself, at the same sweatpants and tight black workout top he wears in here several times a week, and looks back at you with a raised eyebrow. God, he lets himself think for half a second, entertaining his own stupidity with the idea that you’re finding this as hard as he is, too. Maybe I’m not alone in this.

“Oh?” he says. “Um — thank you?”

“How’d it go with your friends last night?” you ask, hardly skipping a beat, and he’s a little thankful that you skim over his poor attempt at gratitude for a compliment he isn’t sure he deserves. Instead, his confusion wraps itself around the fact that you actually remembered what he was doing last night. Hell, even he’d forgotten in the heat of the day he’d had, but you remembered. He’s sweating over it a little and briefly wonders what the chances are of the gym floor opening up and swallowing him whole.

Slim, he decides. But not zero.

There’s hope.

“Yeah — yeah, it was nice,” he says, internally kicking himself for overthinking this so much that he’s apparently lost his ability to speak. In the space of 24 hours, he’s gone from giggling over coffee with you to completely weak just at the sound of your voice. It should be easier here, if anything — this is home turf for him. His comfort space. He supposes the tight fit of your gym clothes accentuating your hips and thighs isn’t helping matters, and neither is the wide neckline of your own t-shirt exposing your throat and a collarbone. But still. He’s not a teenager. He should be able to handle a little bit of skin.

He clears his throat, rolling his head side-to-side. Focus. “Sorry — I’m-… I just didn’t expect to see you back here so soon.”

“Yeah,” you chuckle. “I-… couldn’t stay away. Missed it a little too much.”

“I get that,” he concurs, willing his eyes not to drop down your frame to a newly exposed area of skin just around your waist, your t-shirt riding up as you adjust your bag on your shoulder. “It’s good to-… have you back, anyway.”

“Good to be back,” you agree. “Hey — can you leave that set up for me, when you’re done? I’m on legs today, too.”

Jihoon doesn’t want to say that he knows Mondays are your leg days, as well, so he doesn’t. Even if it is true. He wonders if you would find it odd that he’s remembered. “Sure,” he says with a small smile, which you return. Just as you’re about to walk off to drop your things into a locker, he pipes up again. “I mean — hey, if you wanted a spot, or to-… do, you know… anything…”

“Are you asking me to train with you?” you ask, eyes bright and smile wider than he thinks he’s ever seen it. This is torture. He’s not even lifting anything and his heart is about to burst out of his fucking chest — God, maybe this was a bad suggestion.

“I-…” he starts, but he lets the breath out of his lungs and shrugs his shoulders. “Yeah. I am.”

“Give me two minutes,” you agree, hurrying off to put your stuff away and fill up your bottle.

He manages to squeeze another set of squats in before you get back, which is sort of a miracle seeing as how his knees have gone completely weak ever since you arrived. He’s scrolling through his playlist as you cross the gym floor on your way back to him, but he looks up and smiles as you approach.

“You go ahead — I’ve just finished.”

He knows he’s really fucking done for when, after the first round, you add plates onto the bar to out-lift him. All before he’s even positioned himself behind you to be a good spotter.

Jihoon doesn’t go down without a fight though, and things get a little competitive from there. Both of you throw some of your favourite (see: most agonising) exercises into the mix over the course of the hour, taking it in turns on the equipment and creating a session that just about has him able to move by the time you’re finished. You talk to each other when you’ve got the breath to do so, otherwise focussing on your workout with more intensity than either of you remember training with for a long time.

And so what if he has to turn away from you once or twice to compose himself when breathless whines spill from between your lips on your last few reps, the sheer effort of the movements pushing your muscles to their absolute limit? So what if he feels his entire body run a thousand degrees every time you sweetly encourage him to manage just one more? So what if his palm stays tingling for fifteen seconds every time you high-five him for a set well done?

You slide out of the hamstring curl machine with a deep breath and legs like two sticks of jelly at the end of the session, and he holds a hand out to steady you as you regain your ability to weight-bear.

“You okay?” he asks, and you nod, patting what’s exposed of your chest and neck with your towel.

“Yeah. Yeah — just… fuck.” You laugh, laying your hand over the top of his and squeezing. Only for a second — not even, only for a breath — and really just to let him know that you’re okay to stand on your own, but Jihoon feels a bit like he’s been electrocuted straight up his arm all the same. “You don’t come to play, do you?”

“Says you,” he scoffs, only now moving his hand from your upper arm. “I was wrong about you — you’re insane. Clinically insane.”

Using the paper towels he went to gather while you were finishing up, he wipes the machine clean as you stretch out your now slightly exercise-swollen thighs.

“I was just gonna finish up on one of the stairmasters,” you tell him, taking a long sip of your water. His eyes widen to the point of comedy, eyebrows high on his forehead. You snicker at his horror, the rim of your bottle hovering tantalisingly over your bottom lip. “What?”

“That’s-… got to be a form of masochism,” he says, exhausted just at the idea of marching up the never ending staircase even for a minute. You almost choke on your mouthful of water, only just swallowing it in time before a sudden, uncontrollable laugh erupts from your chest.

“How?!” you ask, covering your mouth with your hand. Just like yesterday, the urge to pull your arm away, to reveal your hidden smile strikes him. He doesn’t act on it, but he wants to.

“What do you mean, how? Why would you put yourself through that after what you’ve just done?” It’s completely lighthearted, and the rush of heat on your cheeks intensifies at the cocktail of shock and awe in his gaze.

You shrug your shoulders once. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just better than you.” The way the tip of your tongue teasingly sits between your teeth as you grin at him sends bullets of adrenaline through his veins and Jihoon runs his hand over his face.

For about three seconds, he tells himself he isn’t going to take the bait. He’ll lose, he’ll admit it — he’ll put his hands up and say you’re absolutely, definitely better than he is, if it means he doesn’t have to push through a round of cardio after surpassing every single one of his physical limits. But God, he thinks you look completely irresistible standing there challenging him like this, your hands on your hips. His eyes don’t leave yours and yours don’t leave his; both of your chests stutter, just a little bit, and he can see your smile grow in his periphery.

How the fuck is he supposed to walk away?

“Ten minutes,” he concedes, matching your footsteps as you start to walk backwards towards his least favourite line of equipment in any gym, ever. “And you’re definitely getting the next coffee, now.”

——————

That Friday, you finally text him again.

His muscles have just about returned to a working state and Jihoon is quite proud to say that he has regained the ability to sit down without needing something to hold onto. He got home from work, showered the day away and has just settled down into the sofa to start on the book Wonwoo has been on his ass about reading when his phone vibrates on the side table. He reaches over for it, trying to figure out which of his friends might be trying to get hold of him early evening on a Friday, and already going over excuses in his head as to why he can’t go out to do whatever they’re inviting him to. But when your contact name flashes up on the screen, every single thought disappears from his brain.

y/n: hey :)

y/n: just out of interest, how good are you at assembling furniture?

He furrows his brows at this. There’s a very obvious answer, which is that he’s not. He doesn’t want to reply saying so, though, so he goes for what he thinks is the next best thing.

jh: well…

jh: what are you trying to put together?

y/n: a bed :(

y/n: today’s your rest day, right?

y/n: can i bribe you with dinner after? :)

Oh? His brain stalls, fingers hovering over the keypad. He can literally see your face forming a little pout before growing into a hopeful grin in his mind’s eye. He doesn’t see how he could ever say no.

jh: apparently yes, you can.

jh: text me the address? i’ll leave in 5.

He changes out of his basketball shorts and hoodie in record time, abandoning Wonwoo’s book on his couch in favour of attempting to look at least somewhat presentable for you. He tugs on a pair of jeans that he hasn’t touched in about 6 months and one of his nicer t-shirts instead, even going as far as to spritz aftershave on the column of his throat. You’ve sent him your address and he makes to leave, doing his regular essential item pat-down on his way out the door. He puts your new apartment into his phone as he crosses the parking lot, stupidly delighted to discover it’s only 7 and a half minutes away from where he lives, and settles into his car with a series of deep exhales.

The breathing exercises don’t achieve much. His head is still spinning when he parks up in the street by your new place and lingers just outside the building. He sends you a text to say he’s arrived and you reply saying you’re on your way down. You appear in the lobby just a few minutes later.

“Hey,” you greet him warmly, crossing the space and putting your arms around him in a hug. He goes limp for a fraction of a second before his arms slide around you, too. God, he hopes you can’t feel his heartbeat right now. He thinks that the effect you have on him should be considered dangerous. But whether you can or not, you tighten your arms to squeeze him once before you unwind them from around his neck and step away.

“Hi,” he says, feverish from the tops of his ears all the way down to his toes. His hands find his pockets as you take a few more polite steps back.

“Thank you so much for this.” Your bottom lip finds temporary home between your teeth before you’re nodding back towards the stairwell. “I’m on the third floor. Follow me.”

He does. He walks up the stairs behind you as you ask about his day at work, and he tells you that he thinks today has probably been one of the best he’s had in about 2 months. When he asks how your day went, you turn your head back to look at him and stumble on the next step, gently laughing and saying that you think you’re at your tether’s end with D.I.Y, but it’s been pretty good otherwise. By the time you reach your floor, his thighs are aching, a bit of residual fatigue from your session earlier in the week making it a little harder than it ought to be. He can’t imagine how you’ve coped every day since then; if his own building didn’t have an elevator, Jihoon thinks he’d have been sleeping in his car.

You give him a little tour of the apartment, and he stands next to you at the window as you point out where you were staying with your friend a few blocks away. He thinks the view is seriously pretty in the evening light, enchanted by how he can see the tops of the slightly lower buildings and the street below, lined with neon storefronts and currently alive with shoppers and bar-goers, but… He cringes at himself for thinking it, but the view through the glass is nothing compared to the one he has inside.

You’ve started to put up a few decorations and knick-knacks around the place too. He doesn’t know you very well, but he still thinks it’s very you — all of it, and he likes them. Even with the room full of boxes and half-unpacked cases, there’s so much personality in it already. Charm. He brushes off your attempts to apologise for the ‘mess’, as you called it, despite everything being neatly pushed out of the way of the main space. It’s easily tidier than any other mid-move apartment he’s ever been in.

“Did you want a drink?” you ask him, walking over to the refrigerator and resting a hand on the door. “I’ve got wine, or-… anything, really.”

“Just some water would be great,” he says appreciatively, and a few seconds later you’re handing him a bottle, turning another one over in your hand. “I really wouldn’t be much help after a couple of glasses, trust me.”

“Does this mean you are good at it, then? Before a drink?” you ask him. Is it hope in your voice? Or do you somehow know how hopeless he is, and are you teasing? He can’t tell. Regardless, clearly his evasion earlier wasn’t quite as successful as he hoped it would be.

“About that…” He chuckles, taking a sip from the bottle and glancing sideways at you. “I’m sure between the two of us, we’ll figure it out.”

“My knight in shining armour,” you say with a laugh, closing your fingers around his wrist and leading him through the door to your bedroom. You’ve managed to separate all of the individual pieces, but you haven’t made any real progress otherwise. He settles himself down on the floor and reaches for the assembly manual, pursing his lips as he looks at the little baggies of screws and bolts and various other things he doesn’t know the names of.

“Okay.” He frowns, looking back up at you where you’ve kneeled down a couple of feet away. You’re grinning innocently back at him, but Jihoon’s lips are more aligned with a pout. “You maybe should have mentioned that the instructions are in Swedish.”

——-

Ignoring the fact that you can’t understand the directions printed on the flimsy little pieces of paper, you get to work. It’s… an interesting process, but somehow between the pair of you, you successfully manage to assemble the bed in just under two hours by mostly following the diagrams (and having to backtrack several times because Jihoon managed to miss a few steps). At three minutes to nine, you’re both finally standing up off the floor, stretching out stiff joints and tight muscles; the bed is fully assembled and made up with your sheets in the centre of the room, headboard against the back wall, the lamp you set on the dresser casting a pleasant orangey glow on every surface.

“We did it,” you say, a little in shock, a lot exhausted, and absolutely starving. At least, that’s what he assumes you’re feeling, because it’s what he is. “We actually did it.”

“I mean, you did most of it,” Jihoon says. It’s true; at a point, he was just handing you the pieces you asked him for and holding parts steady so that you could fit them together. But if you want to call it a joint effort, he isn’t going to stop you, and the roll of your eyes tells him that you do want to call it that.

“Shh. You helped,” you scold him, bumping his upper arm with your elbow. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“If you say so,” he chuckles, taking another sip of his water. Jihoon isn’t sure he believes you, but the way you’re challenging him to argue further with your tongue pressed against the inside of your cheek scrambles his brain. Any remaining argument dies on his lips. “We make a good team.”

“We do,” you agree, expression shifting into a shy smile, bumping his arm again, your elbow lingering against him for a second longer. “Come on, I think I promised to feed you, too. What are you in the mood for?”

A movie has been playing in the background for about an hour by the time your food arrives and you’ve eaten everything. Jihoon relaxes back against the cushions of the couch and you’re settled comfortably next to him: there’s plenty of space on either side of you both, so there isn’t really any need for you to have your upper arm basically pressing against his, but Jihoon is too comfortable to say anything and you certainly aren’t making any attempts to move away. You shift your legs after about ninety minutes, bringing them up underneath you so your thigh is pressed against his now, as well, and you’re twisted slightly so you’re physically facing him but your head is still turned towards the TV.

Everywhere your clothed body touches him is scorching, and he wonders if maybe he should’ve worn a thinner t-shirt, or at the very least something a little less heavy on his legs. His jeans, slightly tighter around the thighs than perhaps would be their peak level of comfort, are clinging to him everywhere and he’s so aware of himself, so aware of you, of your sweet body wash, your fruity shampoo, every single one of your breaths… He’s cursed people out for breathing too loudly around him before, but he thinks he could replace his white noise machine with an eight hour track of just this and he would sleep like a fucking baby.

One of your elbows is propped against the top of the cushions behind you and you’re resting your head in your palm, and (not for the first time this evening) he glances sideways to look at you. They’ve been fleeting glances thus far, only stealing fractions of a moment before he turns his attention back to the TV. But this? This is the wrong moment. Entirely the wrong fucking moment because as his head turns, so does yours, and you catch him in the act. Fuck, if he thought he was burning up, before? He’s pretty sure he’s somehow just descended straight to the second circle of hell, greeting all the other lusty sinners like old friends. Several of his thoughts tonight have been considerably impure, and in this half second of blistering eye contact, they all come rushing back.

The universe is really testing him this evening, and Jihoon is stumbling. It feels like any minute now, he’s going to explode.

He straightens his spine and looks back at the TV, trying to force his eyes to focus even though he’s completely swallowed by the feeling of your arm straightening across the back of the couch, your fingertips grazing over the skin at the bottom of his hairline. He can feel your eyes still on him, your gaze burning into his cheek, no doubt following as his tongue darts out subconsciously over his lips. But he can’t quite help himself, can’t get the image of how sweet you looked out of his head; he clears his throat quietly and looks over at you again, coming over almost completely blank the second he notices the glimmer your eyes hold when they’re trained on him.

Any. Fucking. Minute.

“Jihoon, I-…” you start to say, and he turns himself a little bit so that he’s facing you better, completely forgetting about the movie now. That’s not a great loss: he couldn’t explain the plot even if he tried. “I don’t know if-… you can tell me if I’ve read you wrong…”

“You haven’t,” he hurries. Relief starts to ease the tension between your brows, before you scrunch them again and cock your head to the side. “I’m sure you haven’t, I mean.”

In this new position, one of his legs is bent and sitting up on the couch beneath him and you’ve adjusted your own posture to accommodate. Your knee sits just over the top of his, more of your impossible body heat radiating through his clothes, and he glances down at the site of contact before he looks back at you.

“I just-... I don’t know, I think I knew I was interested in you from the first time I saw you, but the last few weeks especially…” You’ve been rehearsing this. He can feel it. It’s written in your eyes, holding the weight of the words you’re struggling to say, and behind them he can see cogs turning as you try to get the words in the right order. (He knows how that goes, because he’s been trying to figure out how to tell you, too.) He nods, urging you to keep going.

“I can’t get you out of my head. I really like you.”

He short-circuits, then. Even though part of him knew what you were going to say, hearing it out loud flips a switch inside him and he stops functioning. Blinking at you slowly, lips parted, heart racing – he feels as if his brain has been sucked clean out of his ears and is floating somewhere way above his head. Way outside of a contactable range, way beyond any level of rational decision-making. Jihoon knows what he wants to say, of course – he knows that he wants to say that he likes you, and that he has for a while, and that maybe you should let him take you out on a date or something, but all of that sits just behind the barrier of his teeth, so…

He leans forward and kisses you, instead.

He almost can’t believe that he’s only wanted this for as short of a time as he has; it feels like it’s been building inside him for so much longer. Relief floods through his veins, the emotional dam finally breaching. It only lasts a few seconds, but with his lips pressed to yours and yours pressing back, the static in his brain goes quiet, the movie falls silent: everything stops, except you. He thinks you could’ve been carved from stone around each other — he thinks something just feels so inexplicably right. Your hand tightens in his hair and he gasps softly as he pulls an inch back, eyes heavily lidded and looking straight at you through his lashes. You move forward, leaning your forehead against his, and the feather-light hold he has on your chin slides up to your cheek instead.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know how to-…” he says after a long, long moment of remembering how to breathe, how to blink, how to exist in your space without combusting on the spot. He still isn’t sure he knows how to do any of those things, especially not now he can see every single line of your face this close. He’s trying, though. “But — shit, I’m crazy about you.”

You kiss him, then, harder than before, colliding in a mess of half-finished breaths and bumped, stinging noses. His other hand comes up to sit against your rib cage, yours pressing into the material of his t-shirt over his chest. He smiles and parts his lips as yours move against them, your tongue gently sweeping into his mouth, finding his own; a soft, low moan tickles the back of his throat, his fingertips curling slightly to tighten his hold.

Jihoon isn’t sure how you end up on your knees, straddled astride his legs with one of his hands tucked between your thigh and calf, the other on the curve of your ass — he just knows that he doesn’t mind one bit. You’re warm and comfortable, the arch of your back pressing you into him deliciously. He’s kissing you like his life depends on it (he really fears that it might), and you’re doing the same back, licking against his tongue and rocking slightly with every separation and reconnection of your lips. He feels your fingers brush at the hem of his t-shirt and slip just underneath at the same moment as you pull away from him, and he’s so dazed, so fuzzy, so lost in you that he can only tilt his head back to stare up at your face. In your current position, you’re towering over him. It’s easily the best view he’s ever had.

“Can I-…?” you ask breathlessly. The new roughness to your voice goes straight to his cock and he has to restrain himself from bucking his hips upwards.

“Yeah,” he says, leaning forward slightly to try and aid you. Your hands tug at the bottom of his shirt and peel it up over his chest: he raises his arms slightly and soon, you can toss it to the unoccupied side of the couch. He shivers slightly as he relaxes back, both at the chill in your unheated apartment and upon noticing the way you’re staring down at him. It’s addictive.

“Oh my God,” you whisper, jaw a little slack, smoothing your hands over his shoulders to feel every ridge of hard-earned muscle. You travel down his arms, over to his chest, down his stomach… Jihoon sucks in a breath, your warm hands absolutely searing against his skin, and his abdominals tighten beneath them. Tilting your head, you press a line of kisses down the side of his neck, your lips brushing against one almost unbearably sensitive spot when you continue. “Fuck, you’re so hot.”

He smiles bashfully, rolling his head to the side and giving you all the access you want. Your lips tickle euphorically against him as he tugs you flush against his chest, both his hands now tightly pressing against your ass, fingers kneading the muscle concealed by your pants. You’re sitting right over his clothed cock and he’s reasonably sure he can feel your pulse between your thighs, letting out a soft grunt when you roll your hips deliberately down into his own. Your kisses travel to the swell at the curve of his shoulder before moving back up to his lips, where he meets you with a fire that he’s never kissed anyone with, before.

“Says you,” he murmurs into your mouth, your teeth clashing, his hips pushing slightly up off the couch. Just enough to make you sit back from him, just enough for Jihoon to open his eyes and look at you. His hair, thoroughly scrunched up and pulled around by your desperately gripping fingers, fans out at all sorts of angles and his chest has taken on a rosy hue since you last looked at it. With swollen, shiny lips, glossy eyes, breathing deep, he looks completely blissed out, like a man who could unravel beneath you if you moved just right. All from a little tongue action. He’d usually feel embarrassed, but it’s hard to when you’re the person on top of him; to be honest, neither of you would mind much if he did.

You’re pushing yourself up and off him before he can really get his bearings and an audible whine of despair parts his lips at the loss of your weight against his cock. Fuck, these jeans were a bad idea: he’s straining against the denim so much that it hurts, and there’s a near perfect outline of his hard-on. He stops pouting the second you take hold of his hand and tug him upright, though, your eyes dark and determined and intense. He thinks he might faint, actually: from standing too fast and feeling as though all the blood in his body is pulsing through his aching dick, he has to take a moment to stop the edges of his vision going dark before you’re pulling him through to your bedroom.

Something flips inside him the second you have him there. Jihoon, who was more than happy to sit beneath you and let you take all the control in the living room, is pushing you back onto the mattress by your shoulder and slotting himself between your parted thighs the moment the door is closed behind him. He’s past the point of wanting you, now: he needs you, and he needs you to need him, too.

And God, do you. You prop yourself up on one elbow, staring at where he’s now leaning over you with wide eyes and your bottom lip drawn between your teeth. He bends down and kisses along your jawline in response, nipping gently just below your ear. Your back arches up and in a flash, one of his hands is beneath you, snapping open the clasp on your bra with a few slides of his fingers.

“Wh-…” you start, giggling and panting at the same time. He smirks against your pulse point.

He flattens his tongue against you and licks a salty bead of sweat off your skin. “What?”

“Had no idea you could-…” You’re cut off by a gasp as one of his hands slides under your sweater, slipping beneath the garment he just unfastened. His fingertips graze over your breast and a pleading sob escapes you. His smile grows even wider. “You were so…”

“So what?” he prompts, pinching your nipple between his thumb and forefinger. Another one of those beautiful sounds breaks the air above you. He does it again, massaging your breast with the palm of his hand. “Come on… talk to me.”

“So good,” you gasp, lying down flat and tilting your head back against the pillows. He rocks forwards to press his cock against you again and your thighs tighten around his hips, one leg hooking around his to keep him there. “So-… fucking good.”

You’re so impossibly irresistible to him, especially like this, and he sits up, settling on his knees to look down at you. Jihoon doesn’t even get the chance to move his hands towards the hem of your sweater to tug it off you though: you’re already grabbing it yourself, crossing your arms to pull it over the top of your head. He can see your bra now, and hell, it’s pretty even if it is just hanging off you. Baby pink and lacy. He thumbs over the material as he helps you pull it down your arms, briefly letting himself wonder if-…

“If only you’d been patient enough to see the set together.”

Oh, so you can read his mind now, too?

You glance down to the small space between your bodies and his eyes follow, lips slightly parted, a heavy sigh on his breath. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck — he wishes he had. Even imagining it, he’s throbbing.

“You wear all this for me?” he asks, hands creeping up the insides of your thighs. You nod up at him and he smiles down at you. “Fuck. I bet you didn’t even need my help tonight at all, did you?”

You’re bucking your hips now as his thumb brushes, agonisingly slowly, over your clothed cunt. One arm has come up to cover your face: for the first time, he acts on his impulsive need to see you shy, see you needy, and leans over you to gently pull it away and pins your wrist down against the mattress. He kisses you, his fingers on the other hand pressing slightly more firmly to where he’s pretty sure your clit is.

“Y/n, you’re so pretty. Let me see you.”

“I didn’t,” you admit, voice wobbling as he works you up so much you’re actually soaking through not just your pretty underwear, but the leggings you’ve had on all night, too. He can feel it against the pad of his thumb and he raises his eyebrows for you to continue. “Just… really wanted you to come over…”

“Mhm. I know,” he soothes, bending low again and kissing down towards your chest. His lips purse over one of your nipples and he sucks it up into his mouth, flicking his tongue over the bud. He releases your wrist with the hand currently taking most of his weight and leans on his elbow, teasing your other tit with his fingers. The weight of it in his palm has him murmuring soft praises against your skin, telling you over and over how good you feel. You push up onto your elbows to try and press him closer — when his teeth tug just slightly, you’re about ready to beg.

“Jihoon, please,” you murmur. He short-circuits, again. Goes blank. His name has always sounded so much sweeter on your tongue, but this? This? Oh, he doesn’t know if he’s ever going to recover. That sound is going to stick in his head for days, months, forever, if he has anything to say about it. But even if his brain isn’t working, his body moves on autopilot: he sits up and hooks his fingers under your waistband, pulling your pants down your legs and discarding them onto the floor.

He’s staring between your thighs with zero functioning brain cells and literal galaxies in his eyes, trying to figure out what cosmic miracle brought someone like you into his life, how on Earth he’s ended up between your thighs. The question is so overwhelming in his mind that he barely notices that you’re moving, at first. Jihoon doesn’t know what causes you to try and bring your thighs together — if it’s shyness or arousal, desperation, a search for friction? — but he stops you as soon as he realises, laying a hand on each of your legs, pinning your knees down now, instead.

“Keep your legs wide for me?” he asks, to which you punctuate a nod with an assenting hum. “Good girl.”

You’re so wet that when he strokes two fingers over your covered pussy, pressing the fabric of your panties into your heat, they come away thinly coated in the arousal that’s seeped through them. He brings his fingers to his lips then, eyes fluttering as he licks your slick off them. You taste otherworldly and he doesn’t hesitate to tell you so with a groan.

“God,” he murmurs, tugging at the waistband of your panties with his other hand. His eyes ask if you’re ready — if you’re sure, and when you nod down at him, he pulls them off completely too. His middle finger slips between your folds, collecting the wetness dribbling out of you, and he drags it slowly upwards towards your clit. He repositions himself again, leaning down over you with his head at your neck, the heel of his hand resting against your lower abdomen. He draws small circles over the bud, laying open-mouthed kisses at your collarbone and listening to the gorgeous sounds you make, learning what you like, following each gasp and moan and chasing as many of them as he can draw out of you.

At the same time as you start rocking your hips up to meet his hand, your nails scratching gently against his scalp again, Jihoon slips his finger down from your swollen clit to press it inside you. You gasp, high-pitched and needy, your cunt spasming around his finger and pulling it in deeper. He’s only in up to his second knuckle but the way you keen for him has him pushing further until it’s buried inside your pussy completely.

“S’this okay?” he asks, but he knows your answer thanks to your vocal responses to him already slowly easing his finger in and out, in and out. You nod your head almost aggressively as he glances up at your face, your eyes squeezed tightly shut, jaw tense, throat bobbing as you swallow hard.

“More — please,” you say not long after. A breath hitches in your throat when he does exactly what you ask, pressing the heel of his hand against your clit and positioning another finger at your entrance. He flexes his wrist slightly to get comfortable, pumping both fingers into you now, and he curls them upwards at just the right time to make your back arch off the bed. “Fuck — mhm, just like that—…”

He moves down your body slightly, reattaching his lips to one of your nipples as he fingers you deep and slow. He’s in no rush: Jihoon thinks he could do this all day and just deal with the RSI later on. You look so unbelievably hot with your face scrunched in pleasure, your thighs quivering as you fight to keep them apart like he asked you to, with your hips twisting down against his hand to try and get his fingers deeper and faster. When he lowers himself all the way down, settling completely between your thighs, he flicks his tongue out over your clit and your back arches up off the bed with a gasp.

“Don’t stop,” you whine, all high-pitched and rushed, both syllables merging into one hurried sound. “Fuck, fuck — please, don’t stop.”

“I’m not going to,” he murmurs, keeping pace and rhythm as he works you towards your high. God, he thinks there couldn’t possibly be anything in the world more sexy than watching you come undone from this angle. Your chest rising and falling in stuttered breaths, your hips rocking down against his hand, your pussy right on his mouth. Just the thought of it has his cock jumping in his boxers. “You gonna come for me, huh?”

“I-…” you start, releasing your death-grip on the bedsheets to bring a hand to cover your face. He clears his throat deliberately — perhaps it’s sort of closer to a growl than a cough — and he thinks maybe you really can read his mind, or maybe you’re learning that he wants to see every inch of you (especially like this), because a second later, it’s tangled up in his hair and holding him in place. “Y-yeah, fuck, I…”

“Good girl,” he coos again, and that breaks you. Your pussy tightens around his fingers and you feel yourself convulse, muscles clenching and releasing as you go over the edge with a cry. He eases you through your climax, tongue laving over your clit, fingers slowing but not stopping inside your cunt until your thighs close around his head in your oversensitivity. He takes the hint, then, and he slowly pulls away, sucking his fingers clean of your arousal while you take a few breaths to recover.

“Oh, my God,” you sigh as he moves back up and starts pressing small pecks over your chest and collarbones, your fingers lacing through his hair again to pull him up to kiss you. You groan softly at the taste of yourself on his lips, and can’t blame you. He still isn’t over it, either.

“You’re so gorgeous,” he tells you in-between kisses, one hand supporting the back of your neck to keep you close. “So pretty. So sweet. So good.”

“Shh,” you giggle, but he doesn’t. Just about every adoring adjective Jihoon has in his arsenal is murmured against your lips until you’ve gathered enough strength to get up on your knees and push him back onto the mattress, fumbling with the button of his jeans.

He groans at the relief as you tug them down over his hips and thighs. “We don’t have to do anything else if you’re—”

“Shh.” This one’s a little more insistent, and he makes a show of clamping his lips back together. “You wore the tightest jeans on the planet, had your cock on-fucking-display for me all evening, and you think I wanna stop now?”

His jaw falls slack at the words that come out of your mouth. The incredulous way with which you say them has him involuntarily bucking up into nothing. Your expression matches his when you finally get his jeans all the way off and his thin, black boxer-briefs are the only barrier between you. The outline of his cock strains against them, tenting the fabric: Jihoon doesn’t miss the way you lick over your lips before glancing up at him through your eyelashes. It’s your turn to give him the look, now, asking that this last part is okay, with your fingertips hooked underneath the elastic waistband. He nods feverishly up at your heavy gaze.

“Please,” he groans, lifting his hips so you can pull them off. His length springs free the moment they’re pulled low enough, slapping back against his abdomen, sitting pretty against his toned muscles, thick and veiny and red-tipped. Desperate. His underwear joins the pile of clothes down the side of the bed as you throw one leg over him; sitting across his thighs, you take his cock into your hand, giving it a few gentle strokes. He fucks up into your palm when you squeeze your fingers around it.

“I need you so fucking bad,” you murmur, head spinning, and Jihoon isn’t in much of a better state himself; he’s fighting to keep his eyes open, fighting to keep his breaths coming. He sits upright, one arm behind him for support, and kisses you hard as you continue to tug at his length.

“Need you, too,” he breathes, shifting so he has both arms around you. In a swift movement, muscles rippling, he lifts you off him and turns you over so he has you sitting on your now impossibly scrunched comforter.

He finds home back between your legs as you reach over into the drawer at your bedside and fumble around for a few seconds. He hears a little clatter and a rustling and when your hand resurfaces, you’ve pulled free a small foil square. You don’t even give him a chance to lean forward and take it; you’re ripping it open and looking up at him with the biggest doe-eyed stare he thinks he’s ever seen. He nods at the silent question, a grunt tumbling free as you roll the condom down his length. This is the most pathetic little bit of contact and he’s fighting demons.

“Okay?” he asks, shuffling back a little and giving you space to lie down flat on your back. You nod up at him, already wrapping your arms around his shoulders.

“Mhm, just-... take it slow?” you ask him, anticipation rendering you already a little breathless. “S’been a while.”

A grin blooms all the way from his lips to his eyes and he leans down to kiss you again, positioning his tip at your hole and pressing forward just enough to tease.

Your thighs tighten around his hips and he pushes himself further inside you with a stuttered groan, agonisingly slowly, inch by inch. He stills every few seconds, both to give you the time to adjust and so that he can take a steadying few breaths and not collapse at how good you feel wrapped around him; he stops pressing his hips forward before he’s fully sheathed inside your pussy and you let a whine slip, the stretch slowly easing.

“You can move,” you tell him, laying a kiss to his chest. “I’m okay.”

Jihoon gives a soft laugh. Oh, he wishes this was just to be polite, but no. He’s in real danger of losing control any second. “Yeah, this isn’t for you, baby.”

“Oh?” you ask. You clamp around him and he gasps at the tightness, hips jerking forward until he’s buried up to the hilt. Fuck, there’s a bruised cervix if you’ve ever had one; a high-pitched whine erupts out of your lips and he ducks his head down to your ear.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “You just-... fuck, you feel so good.”

“Mm, says you.”

It’s another moment before he thrusts with intent, though. But when he does? When he pulls out halfway before sliding all the way back inside you, losing and regaining the feeling of your heat enveloping him entirely, hearing your gasps against his collarbone? The invisible reigns holding him back unravel and he settles into a slow but intensely deep rhythm, guiding your legs around his waist. You hook your ankles behind his back and somehow, you suck him in deeper still, your bodies touching everywhere they possibly can, so impossibly close.

The arm not holding his weight slides beneath your hips and raises them just a little. Now, at this angle, every time he rolls into you he grazes against your sweet-spot and you’re reduced to an incoherent mess within a few minutes. Good, he thinks, because he’s not doing much better, himself.

You hug him tighter after one particularly well-angled thrust, sinking your teeth into the muscle of his shoulder. He hisses at the sting, and your lips part as if you’re about to apologise but he doesn’t give you the chance to; he bumps your nose with his own to ask you to lift your head slightly, before he bends down and kisses you hard.

“Do that again,” he gasps, almost all of his weight against you as the hand not around your hips comes up to rest on your cheek. When your brows tighten, he swipes his thumb over your spit-covered, swollen lips. “Please. ”

So, you do.

Maybe not as harshly as the first time, but your teeth find his collarbone and you suck a bruise into his skin, drawing from him the highest pitched sound you think he could possibly make. He squares his jaw, ducking his head back down, biting on his bottom lip before he has no choice but to speak.

“I’m close, y/n,” he confesses, fucking into you slower, trying to stave it off for a few more seconds, his hips stuttering. “Can-... can you give me one more…?”

You nod, the knot in your stomach already growing tighter and tighter with every movement he makes, and when one of your hands unwinds from around his back to slide between your sweat-slicked bodies, he moves slightly away, letting you reach down.

It’s the sight of two of your fingers finding your clit and rubbing your favourite movements out on yourself that takes him past the point of no return, his cock sliding in and out of you messily, desperately, chasing the high that he’s right on the brink of. He kisses and nips just below your ear, breathy groans tickling your neck, and your high-pitched whine tells him you’ve hit your orgasm just as he starts to spill his into the condom, gushing around him, your walls fluttering and milking him for all he’s worth.

—

You offer for him to shower first – an offer he gratefully accepts. While you’re taking your turn afterwards, Jihoon hunts down a fresh duvet cover in your room; he changes it, grabs you a glass of water for when you’re done, and sits on the edge of his bed with just the towel wrapped around his waist, scrolling through his phone. He looks up with a bright grin as the door opens and you emerge through it in your pyjamas, glowing from the light behind you, stray droplets of water clinging to your arms.

You pause gently rubbing your hair dry with the towel, eyes brightening when you see him. “You didn’t have to do all this,” you say, and he pushes a hand through his own still damp hair with a laugh.

“It was the least I could do,” he counters. You raise your eyebrows at him, crossing the room to sit opposite him. He drops his phone down onto the mattress. “I couldn’t leave and make you change them yourself.”

“Leave?” you ask, picking up one of his hands and playing idly with his fingers.

“I mean, it’s getting pretty late, so…” he says. “I probably need to get going at some point.”

“Or…” you say, tongue darting out over your lips. “Maybe you don’t.”

Jihoon looks down at your hands, then back up at you. Are you suggesting what he thinks you are, or has he still not quite come back to himself from earlier? It’s hard to say if the look on your face is hope, or something else.

“Are you… asking me to stay?” he asks.

“Only if you want to,” you tell him. He lifts your hands up, pressing a kiss to one of your knuckles, then using it to tug you closer to him until he can plant one on your own lips. “I’ve probably got an old t-shirt you could sleep in.”

“Of course I want to.”

So you slip away from him to go rummaging through your drawers, trying to find the promised article of clothing. The whole time, he’s awestruck. Jihoon can’t take his eyes off you.

——————

He wakes up next to you for the first time on a Saturday morning. His sleep-fogged brain registers lying on an unfamiliar mattress, tucked beneath new bedsheets, eyes fluttering open to take in a room he doesn’t quite recognise at first. Part of him wonders if he’s still dreaming. When he rolls over onto his side, and his eyes land on the curve of your shoulders, the fall of your hair down your back, he has to ask himself the same thing again.

All of last night must’ve been a dream, he muses, smiling shyly to himself and watching your frame rise and fall with every slow breath you take. There’s no way you really told him you liked him, too. There’s no way any of it could have really happened.

“Y/n?” He asks in the gentlest of whispers, only wanting to stir you if you’re awake already. When there’s no response, he moves a tiny bit closer to you, hesitating before he slips his arm around your waist and settles with his chest pressed against your back. A wildly insecure part of his brain tries to argue that just because you wanted what happened last night, that doesn’t mean you want all of this now. Maybe you only wanted to sleep with him, or maybe you’ll have changed your mind somehow now the sun’s come up. He considers moving away again, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling until you wake up and he can have a real conversation about where both of your heads are at with everything, but he barely gets a chance.

Those thoughts are silenced almost immediately, his brain falling quiet the second you roll over in his arms. You bury your head in the valley between his pectorals, tucked away from the world beneath his chin. His arms tighten around your sleep-warmed body.

“What time is it?” You ask. He contains a shiver at the softness of your voice, bliss running the length of his spine. Jihoon thinks that he could get used to this.

“I don’t know. Early, I think,” he murmurs, and you whine softly, burrowing deeper against his chest. “Go back to sleep.”

“Not if you’re awake,” you say. He’s not entirely convinced you can stick to that promise, though, with the way you yawn and he feels your eyelashes fluttering.

“Don’t worry about me,” he tells you, the tips of his fingers ticking against your side. He ducks his head, pressing a kiss to your hair. A soft hum rumbles in your throat and he can’t hold back the smile that spreads over his lips. “It’s okay. I don’t mind.”

True enough, you fall back asleep curled up against him and Jihoon, to the sounds of your slowing breaths, drifts off too. A few hours later, at a far more reasonable time, you wake him up with a press of your lips to the tip of his nose.

Innocent, exploratory kisses grow heated in the warmth of the sun that streams through your blinds. Hands start to travel, sleep clothes get discarded, and you have him lying on his back, pressing kisses down his chiselled stomach when his phone starts to vibrate on the floor next to the bed.

He groans at the distraction, again as you shuffle up to sit on your knees and look at him expectantly.

“Are you gonna answer that?” you ask, the tips of your fingers grazing his thighs. He shakes his head, no. “Come on, Jihoon. It might be important.”

“Not important enough,” he sighs.

“At least see who it is,” you laugh. Despite a huffed protest, he props himself up on one elbow, leaning over the side of the bed and glancing down at his phone screen.

Seungcheol.

The arrangement to go for a run this morning comes rushing back to Jihoon, who slaps a hand to his forehead and reaches down to grab his phone off the floor, looking at you apologetically.

“Give me two seconds,” he says, and you grin wickedly up at him, ducking low to press a kiss to one of the lines that disappears down into his boxers.

“Take all the time you need.”

He answers the call frowning, flopping his head back against the pillows.

“Hey, look – I’m really sorry,” he starts to say, but Seungcheol’s voice cuts him off almost straight away.

“Jihoon, where the hell are you? I got to your apartment and your car wasn’t here, and Seokmin said he didn’t hear you come home last night. We all thought you’d died,” he hurries. Jihoon can picture the expression on the other man’s face perfectly, which is pretty unfortunate seeing as how you’ve moved to start palming his hardening cock through his briefs.

“I stayed out,” Jihoon says, a little wobbly. “I can’t make the run, someth-... shit.” You press an open-mouthed kiss to the outline of his length, the heat of your breath through the fabric sending him into overdrive. “Something came up-...”

The line goes silent for a second, and his breath stutters as you do the same thing again. Each press of your lips is euphoric agony, and he’s really not hiding this as well as he wishes he could. One look down at you tells him that you’re very proud of that.

“Dude,” Seungcheol gasps, snickering suddenly. “Tell me you’re not with a girl right now.”

“Shut up. Go away,” Jihoon grunts. “I’ll call you later.”

“Oh my God, is it gym girl? Did you finally-...”

“Bye, Cheol,” he hurries, hanging up before his friend can say anything else. He drops his phone onto the mattress, fake-glaring down at you and shaking his head. “You’re the worst, you know that?”

“Yeah?” you ask, pulling at the waistband of his briefs to tug them down his legs. “Let me make it up to you, huh?”

#woozi smut #svt smut #seventeen smut #lee jihoon smut #woozi x reader #lee jihoon x reader #??? how do i tag anything lmao #running away now it's nearly 2am lmao BYE #j writes.#*

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hangmanssunnies · 2 years

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I Would Walk 10,000 Miles To You

Summary: The first thing you notice about Jake "Hangman" Seresin when he rings your doorbell at 1:30 in the morning is that no matter the time of day, he is devastatingly handsome. The second thing you notice is that he is absolutely smashed drunk. You know your hands will be full dealing with your brother's friend tonight. Well, you suppose he might be your friend too.

Pairings: Jake “Hangman” Seresin x Reader

Fandom: Top Gun: Maverick

Word count: 5.8k

Warnings: Falling in love with Brother's Best Friend (kinda), strangers to friends to lovers, pinning, Deployment, love confessions, Praise kink (if you squint), light angst, happy ending, Slight AirForce slander, drinking.

A/N: No use of Y/N this time. The readers' brother is also a pilot, call sign FreightTrain. I've been fiddling with this for a while, but I finally just decided to post it. I hope you enjoy it. My inbox is always open if you want to let me know your thoughts. Reblogs with your thoughts and tags are always appreciated as well! I love reading through them.

You and Jake had become unlikely friends. Jake was one of your brother's college friends, having graduated from the Naval Academy the same year and then continuing to flight school together. You had met him once or twice over the years back then. You had always thought he was attractive, but you were just his friend's little sister. So, you never put much thought into him outside the occasional brief times your paths would overlap.

Then a few years later, when talking to your brother on the phone, you found out that Jake was on deployment, having a rough go of things. His dad couldn't be bothered or couldn't figure out how to send Jake any care packages, and his mom hadn't been in the picture for a long time, according to your brother.

Less than a week later, you had a care package on the way to him. You filled it with some generic snacks and items that your family had asked for over the years on their own deployments. You also sent a card with well wishes and signed it from your whole family.

At the last minute at the post office, you had thrown in a note to him asking that if he had any specific requests for items to please let you know, and then attached your phone number.

The thank you text message you received a few weeks later when he got the package was short, genuine, and sweet. You hadn't thought much more about it or him after that. Your goal had been accomplished of helping out your brother's friend and a serviceman.

Then a month or so later, you received a text from Jake again. It had been extremely tentative. He asked if you could send some specific sunscreen he liked, which didn't irritate his skin and a few other products. He also included that he would pay you for it and emphasized that if it was in any way an inconvenience, you didn't have to. Repeating at least twice to feel no obligation to fulfill the request.

What were you going to do, though? Leave this man alone without necessities that worked for him? Absolutely not. So you put together another care package with things he liked and started a new note on your phone titled Hangman's likes.

This time you signed the ‘thinking of you’ card from yourself. Hangman thanked you again once he got the package, asking to PayPal you the money, but you refused. Jake didn't like that, and it led to you having a playful argument. It was the first time he had actually called you on a deployment. You had answered the call, unsure, having forgotten what his voice had even sounded like after the years since you had a conversation with the man. Those long past meetings had been minimal interactions to start with.

"Hello?" You asked hesitantly, not sure the call wasn't a butt dial.

"Hello there. How are you?" His voice was quiet and deeper than you had remembered it. There was a slight crackle to the line, something not uncommon over long-distance wifi calls like this.

"Hi, Hangman. I am well. How are you doing? Holding up, I hope?"

"Yeah, I'm doing okay over here. A lot better now that you sent me all the good stuff."

"Well, my family and I want to help support you in any way we can. I promise it's not an inconvenience at all. I understand how hard it is what you're going through." You trailed off, not entirely sure what else to say.

"I really appreciate it, but I know how much everything costs. So, you need to let me pay you back." His voice was still kind but had a stern undertone like he wasn't going to take no for an answer.

"Absolutely not."

"I will get info from your brother," he all but growled the threat.

"I will tell him to not give it to you," You quickly reply. He huffed in frustration hearing that made you laugh.

"That's not very fair," Jake complained to you.

"Sorry, I'm not big on fairness when someone needs something," you told him kindly. You ended up talking for fifteen more minutes, asking about other things he might like in a care package, with him trying to evade your questions.

You told him you had to go, and he thanked you once again for being willing to support and help him out. He also threatened that he would find a way to pay you back once again. You found it hard to stop grinning after the conversation.

Knowing products only last so long, you set up a regular schedule to send Jake some items. Like clockwork, you would get thank you calls from him and harassment on how he could pay you back. Jake would also ask about your life, seeming genuinely interested. The conversations started to vary the more you talked. Your cards in each of his care packages became more personalized, beginning to fill with inside jokes.

At the end of that deployment, you felt an odd mixture of sadness and happiness. Of course, you were glad Jake would be back stateside and on regular duty, but it also seemed like the most obvious natural conclusion of this odd friendship that had developed.

For Jake's last care package, you filled it with stuff that would be most useful for traveling back to the United States. It was also the first care package you hadn't gotten a thank you call for since the initial one.

Hangman minding his manners, had at least sent you an appreciative text. It felt like a nail in a coffin moment. You had to fight off an abysmal mood for the rest of the week, reminding yourself that you were only helping your brother's friend out. It was never any more than that, and it never would be. Telling yourself that only helped so much, though.

You call Jake for the first time, upset almost two months later. You had opened your mail to find a letter with crisp blocky lettering giving your name and address. The return address was one Jake Seresin, with a US address you didn't recognize. Inside was a beautiful thank you card filled with Jake's same neat handwriting. It had a heartfelt thank you for what a difference you made on his deployment. It made your heart flutter.

What did not make your heart flutter and instead actually made your blood boil was the amount of money that had been stuffed into the card. Inside the card were way too many hundred dollar bills lined up and, on top of that, a visa gift card.

You were clicking the call button on his contact before you even made it back inside the house. The phone rang and rang. When he did pick up, his voice was crisp and business-like. It was almost unnerving to hear him so clearly, after being used to crackly spotty calls.

"This is Lieutenant Seresin."

"Tell me, did you always have this much audacity, or did you learn it in the academy?" You asked him, voice dripping with sarcasm. There was a long pause from him before he started chuckling.

"Well, hello to you too, Darlin. I haven't heard from you in a while."

Your stomach did not flip at the nickname; there was no possible way. You almost had to pinch yourself to focus back on the conversation.

"That isn't an answer, Hangman. You know it is not safe to send this much money in the mail. Plus, you know I didn't want to be paid back!"

"I knew if I wrote a check, you wouldn't cash or deposit it," he says. His voice is still teasing, and he is clearly enjoying one-upping you."

"I am sending this back to you."

"Absolutely not." The teasing in his voice was less present now. "If you don't want to see it as paying you back, fine. Then just look at it as a thank you for being one of the only things keeping me sane during deployment."

You sighed heavily into the phone, but your anger waned at his claim that you helped him. The silence stretches a little, and you feel acceptance slowly filling you.

"I am just not comfortable with it. You know there are other ways to say thank you. I would have been delighted with just a card." You told him.

"Oh really?" Jake asked, that amused tone coming back again. "What would some acceptable forms be then?"

"It's too late; you chose money."

"I'll brainstorm some other ideas then."

"No, you can't do anything else now."

He doesn't say anything to that, only hums into the phone.

"I'm so sorry to call you out of the blue like this. Are you busy?"

"No, not busy. I just got home from work,” he tells you.

"How is being back in the States?"

"Weird," Jake says honestly.

Before you know it, you two talk for another hour, and Jake feels like your friend again. You two talk every once in a while, and you finally start to think you might actually be real friends.

During his next deployment, you don't even hesitate to start sending him care packages again. Jake is just as thankful; each time he gets your care package, flowers are delivered to your door within a day or two. Then written thank you cards come at a much more delayed pace, postage from the other side of the world accompanied by Jake's clean handwriting and sweet messages. You much prefer it over the money he sent the first time.

The pattern continues through the whole deployment and two TAD also. This time your friendship never waned, only growing stronger. You still get flutters when talking to him sometimes. It never ventures beyond that, though, and you eventually give up trying to be flirty or hopeful something would develop between you two. Jake never seems interested in you that way, and sometimes it feels more like he sees you as a little sister than even a friend, which is a low blow.

However, it really starts to reach a breaking point when Jake excitedly tells you that he is getting restationed to a naval base in your area. The concept of being an in-person friend with Jake is foreign. At first, you aren't sure you can even handle it. Seeing his handsome face, wanting him, knowing what the products you have bought for him over the last two years smell like on his skin. Seeing how his eyes crinkle when he smiles and matching up his facial expression to different tones of voice you are familiar with, it is just as difficult as you imagined it would be.

You had tried to distance yourself initially, rationalizing that you were too busy to fit a new friend in your life. However, this never worked with him; he would go above and beyond to accommodate whatever weird schedules you would throw at him. This is how he became more of a best friend to you. The whole situation really came to a boil on a Friday night in August.

The first thing you notice about Jake "Hangman" Seresin when he rings your doorbell at 1:30 in the morning is that no matter the time of day, he is devastatingly handsome. The second thing you notice is that he is absolutely smashed drunk.

"Jake?" You ask him like he might disappear and this is just a dream.

"Hello, Darlin," His accent is three times as thick after drinking, and he sways a little where he is standing. His hair was messy, and his eyes had a glassy glazed-over look to them.

You quickly look around, trying to figure out how he got here. There wasn't a car in sight, though, which was somewhat of a relief. At least you knew that he hadn't driven by the lack of his truck.

"What are you doing here?"

"I wanted," he starts to say but then abruptly snaps his mouth closed. His face scrunches like he is trying really hard to concentrate. He closes his eyes for a moment, and when they open again, he looks a bit like a lost puppy. "I don't know."

You sigh and wrap your arms around yourself, throwing open the door and ushering him into the house. "How about you come in?"

A grin instantly split his face, and he walked through your door, brushing extremely close to you, ignoring the ample space you left for him to go through the door. He went to your kitchen and slumped into one of the bar stools at the breakfast bar. You closed the front door, locking it before following after him.

"How did you get here?" You asked.

"I walked."

"You walked from where?" You were wracking your brain, trying to think of anywhere close by he could have been and gotten this drunk.

"Was at Red Brick Rhythm," he tells you, his face propped up on one of his hands, his elbow planted firmly on the counter. Jake doesn't stop looking at you either, his eyes following your every move.

You fill up a glass of water and pour in some liquid IV before handing it to him, trying to place the club in your mind. Then you gasp, suddenly remembering where it is. "Jake, that's like five miles away."

He hummed noncommittally and took a big gulp of the water. He set it down half full now and was looking at you like he was waiting for some sort of prize at his effort. You are half tempted to tell him he is a good Lieutenant, but instead, you try to escape his gaze by looking in your fridge.

"Are you hungry?"

“I'm always ravenous, sweetheart," he tells you and winks. Jake makes you laugh, and you start to examine the contents of your fridge.

"What do you want then? I'm not sure I have much."

He didn't answer you, so you turned to find him staring at you again. Jake responds in a dead serious voice, ”I'll take anything you give me."

You sighed since that didn't help you but watched him fight to keep his eyes open and decided to throw some tater tots in the Airfryer real quick.

"No complaining with what you get then."

"Yes, ma'am," he responded, nodding his head slowly. The action made him close his eyes and take a deep breath.

You parked yourself against the counter, leaning back against it to examine him. "How are you feeling? Okay, do you need anything?"

His eyes open, and he slowly blinks at you a few times, and a severe frown suddenly mars his features. You want to run your fingers over the crease in his eyebrows and the shape of his lips until he smiles again. You almost have to physically shake your head to dislodge the thought from your brain.

"Did you have a date tonight?" He blurts out as if he finally noticed the makeup on your face and your hair that is still styled. He had caught you before you were ready to wash off the night. You hesitate for a moment, not sure you actually want to talk about it, but decide to tell him. You don't want Jake to think you couldn't find anything better to do on a Friday night than stay home.

"Yeah, I did."

"How was it?"

"It was good," you lied. It had actually been terrible.

The man you met from Hinge had shown up late and ditched the bill on you, unwilling to split it as you requested. On top of that, he had asked you three whole questions before he went on a rant for the rest of the date about what he thought women should and shouldn't be doing.

The lie you told Jake didn't ease the frown on his face, though, or the darkness in his eyes. His free hand drums against your countertop in a light staccato, drawing your eyes towards them and his academy graduation ring. "Couldn't be too good if you answered the door, and you're here alone."

"Who says I'm here alone?" You ask, raising an eyebrow. "There could be a satisfied man in my bed right now. Or maybe we did the deed, and he is already on his way home."

"You wouldn't have answered the door," Jake says slowly. You can see his drunk mind doing mental gymnastics at the possibility you presented to him. However, the severe look on his face eases significantly after that. "And you don't look satisfied, Darlin."

"I don't look satisfied?" you question him. This line of conversation was quickly entering a place you two had never gone before. "And you would know what that looks like, Hangman?" You tease him.

"I could make you very satisfied. No sane man would let you out of bed once he had you there, let alone this early at night. With your pretty little mouth still looking in perfect shape, I bet you didn't even make it to second base."

His damn fingers hadn't stopped their drumming on the counter, and suddenly they were the only thing filling your thoughts about how they would feel against you, in you. He also looks distracted, though, staring at you again. You bite your lip, trying hard to clear your mind to figure out how to redirect this conversation.

"Are you doubting my capabilities to satisfy you?" He questioned your words catching up with him. He stood up from the stool he had been sitting on, looking much steadier on his feet than when he showed up at your door.

"Don't think I could ruin that pretty makeup, tangle your hair, eat you out until you cried? Make you beg for me? You doubt I could make you forget your own name? Then put you back together again?" Every fiber of your being knew he could probably do every one of those things and not even put in much effort.

"No, I don't doubt your capabilities. Just…" you finally choked out and trailed off, feeling like there suddenly wasn't enough oxygen in the room.

"Just what?" He asked you, and his voice was sinfully deep.

"Just that you don't know when I look like that." You supply, the words were stilted and awkward.

"What if we found out together then? Me what you look like. And you, what it feels like."

He made to move closer to you, but you instinctually held up one of your hands, and he stopped freezing in place. You finally averted your gaze from him to the Airfryer dinging. You grabbed a plate and threw the tater tots on it, collecting some condiments from the fridge so Jake would have options.

He was still standing in the same spot and hadn't moved any closer in the process it took you to get the food. Jake’s bright eyes burning into your back.

You can't quite quell the heat simmering in you from the line of conversation. The sinful tone of Jake's voice. Of course, those were all things you wanted from him, things you imagined. But that wasn't realistic, and he was drunk. You were his friend's little sister, probably his most robust support system during deployments, his close friend and confidant. One drunken tumble in the sheets wasn't worth risking that.

You sigh heavily, setting the plate down on the counter where he had been sitting. "Sit down, Jake, and eat."

He follows orders well because, of course, he does. He dips a tater tot in some of the homemade BBQ sauce he had given you a few months ago and shoves it into his mouth. Jake has that same look he did with the water, which he is once again sipping, like he is looking for praise. However, under that, he looks a little defeated, his shoulders hunched slightly.

"Listen," you start slowly, trying to craftily pick your words so no more damage can be done. "You are drunk, and I was just teasing. It's nothing, Jake."

"I'm not too drunk," he defends himself, munching on another tot.

"You're sloshed," you say, pointing a finger.

"I am not sloshed, sweetheart. I walked all the way here. I drank water. My words aren't slurring." All of these were valid points, and his drunk mannerisms were improving by the minute. However, he was still inebriated. He had been drinking tonight, and you could use that as a defense.

"Doesn't change that you have been drinking, Jake."

He then dropped a tater tot that was halfway to his mouth and glared at you. He had never glared at you before. You weren't sure how to handle this situation. Instinctively you flinched a little at the harsh look, which lasted for a minute longer before he dropped his head low and stared at the plate.

"Am I just your pity, friend?" He asked you quietly.

"What? No, of course not!"

"I know I'm not the only one of Freight's friends you have sent care packets." He said using your brother's call sign, which made your eyebrows raise. Jake had known your brother, FreightTrain, since well before that was his call sign and they went to flight school together.

"Of course, I help support some of them when y'all are deployed. I am literally in the American Legion Auxiliary, you know," you said, shrugging like it wasn't a big deal.

"You send Bradshaw care packages," Jake said, the bitterness in his voice unmistakable. "He told me about it. "

You glared at him then, not about to put up with him being jealous over something like that.

"And so what if I do? Rooster is my brother's friend, just like you. And the man is an orphan. Who else is going to send him packages?"

"He is a grown man who can take care of himself."

"The same can be said about you, Jake."

He huffed, and that annoying crease in-between his eyebrows deepened along with his frown. His bottom lip caught in-between his teeth, biting it a few times in frustration before letting go.

"Do you want a list of all the people I send them to? I don't understand your issue here."

"The issue is," Jake clenched his fist and jaw before growling out the rest of his sentence, "I'm not just Freight's friend to you! We are more than that."

"Are we?" You ask him quietly, not knowing that was actually true.

Silence hung in the air between you while you waited to see if he would fill it. Waiting for Jake to reassure you that no, of course, y'all were more. That he cared about you as much as you cared about him. That you weren't just a convenient and useful person in his life. That you could have your beautiful friendship and so much more. However, instead of giving you those reassurances, Jake decided to finish his water and stand up again.

"I'm sorry for bothering you tonight, Ma'am. It won't happen again."

"Jake, no," you said softly, being the one who moved towards him now. "Stop. Where are you going to go? It's the middle of the night. You can stay here and finish eating."

"I can't impose more than I already have, Ma'am."

"Stop calling me Ma'am," You snap at him, already feeling the hurt of this encounter ringing through your veins.

"I can't stay here," Jake told you, and you were just thankful he didn't attach Ma'am to the clipped sentence this time.

"Well, this is me temporarily waiving my third amendment rights. Okay?" you say gently, pleading with your eyes. You were reeling from this interaction. Part of you still felt charged by his suggestive words of what he could do to you. Part of you was desperately worried you had somehow messed up your friendship. Then there was part of you that was confused about this jealous problem he seems to have with you sending care packages to other people.

"No, not okay."

"Not okay?" You parrot back.

"Do you know why I walked all the way here?" He asked you, his tone dead serious, and the glaze that had been there in his eyes when you first opened the door was almost entirely gone.

"Because you couldn't remember anywhere else to go?"

"No," he said calmly. "I came here tonight because I was drunk, and the only person I wanted to see was you. I always want to see you. No matter how far away you are, my feet are begging me to walk towards you: from down the road, the other side of the country, the middle of the ocean. You are my soul's compass point now.

"Normally, I can resist. I can act like I'm just your friend or your brother's friend. That I was just assigned this base randomly, without any subtle and insistent requests to my superiors for reassignment here. I can pretend that I don't have every single one of your cards saved. I have so much control all the time, but I am so tired. And tonight I was drinking, then I just couldn't stop my feet anymore from walking here, to you."

Every possible thought in your brain suddenly ran to the exit. The only thing occupying your mind was the look of pure sincerity on Jake "Hangman" Seresin's face while he poured his heart out.

"Jake," you whispered, taking a few steps toward him. This time, however, he was the one who stopped you, holding up his hand.

"I've never felt like I wasn't good enough before. Maybe a bit when I was younger, but not since I got over all my childhood bullshit and went to USNA. Definitely not since I figured out I'm actually the best at something as a pilot in flight school. But now I can't escape the feeling. I run the numbers all the time. I try and figure out if I have interpreted the signs wrong. I just can't wrap my mind around why I'm not good enough for you."

Jake might as well have taken a knife out of the block sitting by your stove and stabbed you. That would have hurt less than the tight feeling in your chest hearing him admit he felt insufficient. Jake's posture, the way he shrunk into himself, was wrong. He refused to meet your eyes now. It was all wrong, so incompatible with the man you knew Jake Seresin to be. He looked like he was about to keep going, but you didn't think your heart, which had just ripped itself into pieces, could handle hearing anything else.

"Enough," you growl out, slapping your hand down on the counter. "I won't hear another word of this." That just seemed to make Jake shrink more into himself, and he looked seconds away from hightailing it out of the door.

You took a deep breath, trying to steady your nerves and make a fully conscious effort so that your voice came out kind and caring. "You are worthy, Jake. I am ashamed if, for some reason, I have contributed to making you feel like you aren't."

"That's not enough to make you love me," he whispered, still not looking at you.

"Look at me," you begged. His eyes remained on the abandoned plate, so you repeated your request just as softly. Finally, when those sea glass eyes poured into yours, they were filled with hurt and panic. You tried to find the words to adequately say how you felt, the words that could make him understand the situation you were in.

"I love you too much to love you, Jake." You immediately wanted to stick your foot in your mouth hearing the words out loud.

"What does that mean?" He asked, which, to be fair, was a valid question.

"It means I care about you too much. It means you are too special to me. You are too good of a friend to try and fuck it up by adding more. I have to have you in my life. I won't lose us just because we decide to have sex or try something else, and it doesn't work out. It could never be worth it enough to even entertain losing you."

"Well, I love you too much to keep being your friend. I can't hear about your dates or watch you care about someone else. I can't be your friend anymore, pretending I'm not in love with you. It would never be genuine, and you deserve more than that."

Tears spring up in your eyes at his words, and your hands clench into fists. The only thing that stops you from sobbing is the steady breaths you are reminding yourself to take. "Then I guess we are at an impasse."

"This is the end then," Jake's voice breaks when he says end. You can't hold back the tears anymore; all it takes is two blinks, then they slide down your cheeks in fat drops.

"Don't say that," you beg him.

"I don't know what else to say."

"Take it back, say that you are drunk. That you don't love me. That I'm your friend's annoying little sister, who you promised to keep an eye on. Tell me you aren't leaving me. Tell me something that will fix this between us."

Silence stretches between the both of you again. Tears keep falling down your face, your eyes were begging Jake for comfort, but they only meet the steady resignation in his.

"I hate seeing you cry." He finally utters, which just makes you cry harder.

"Please," you didn't know what you were asking him for, though. You wrapped your arms around yourself, trying to self-soothe and find some form of comfort. Jake continued staring at you. He made a micromovement like he was going to come comfort you at least twice but stopped himself each time.

"I'm going to go." He gave you one final look and spun on his heel towards your front door.

You only let him get to the hallway, where he originally kicked off his shoes and was starting to shove them back on his feet. You caught his arm, wrapping your hand around it, stopping his movements.

"Don't do this. I love you."

"You're breaking my heart," he whispers, covering your hand with his own. Jake's USNA ring felt cool against your flushed skin.

"If I let you have me, will you stay?"

"No, not now that I know you don't want me."

"I never said I didn't want you," you retort, squeezing his arm a little.

“No. I could have bared simply not being enough or that you found me unattractive. What you told me was worse."

"I can't lose you over this. Not over drunken words and feelings."

"I'm not drunk," he growled out with a steel edge to his voice. "I'm not even a lick beyond stone-cold sober anymore. So stop implying my words and feelings are anything beyond genuine. I ain't asking you for tonight, sweetheart. I was here asking you for forever."

God, you knew that was what he was asking for, but that only made it so much scarier. His hand started to slip from where it covering yours. You twisted your hand to catch his fingers in yours. Ever so slowly, you brought it closer to you and brushed your lips over his knuckles. Jake's eyes were tracing your actions watching intently. When your lips touched his skin, he audibly gasped. The intake of breath was so minimal you wouldn't have heard it if you hadn't been standing so close.

"My date was terrible," you whispered to him, not letting go of his hand and holding it close to yourself. Jake raised an eyebrow but didn't say anything, so you just continued on. "They always are bad, even when they should be good, because they are never with you. And I also have kept all of your thank you cards. I've dried every bouquet of flowers you sent to me, so I wouldn't ever have to throw them out.

"I dream about you and think about you all the time. I didn't even want to be friends when you first moved here, because I was already more than in love with you from texts and phone calls. The first time I smelled your aftershave, which I had bought you, on your actual skin, I wanted to jump your bones. You didn't make it easier for me, Jake, looking like you were crafted from marble by an artist. And then I found out you tip servers well. I learned you are just as funny and kind in person as you were on the phone. An accomplished, decorated Naval officer, giving me any time of day even as a friend still seems ludicrous. You are too good to be true and certainly too damn good for me, Jake Seresin."

His pupils were blown wide, and his mouth open just the tiniest bit. He leans forward, you are fully expecting him to kiss you now, but instead, his forehead presses into yours. It's a grounding feeling, the weight of skull against yours, your breath mingling. It reminds both of you that this is real. His free hand comes to cup your cheek pushing away the stray tears still clinging to your cheeks. Your eyes pouring into each other, hardly even blinking.

"I can be yours then?" he asked when your breathing had evened out.

"You already are mine. You've been mine for a long time, haven't you?" You reassured him and asked him in the same breath.

"Yes. I've been yours. Always yours," Jake muttered lowly.

"Good. You are so good. Too good." You praised him, and his face split into a grin, and you were tempted to break the moment you were having and kiss him silly.

"Will you let me love you then?" He asked you a moment later.

"Yes, but it won't be easy," you warn him.

"If I wanted anything easy in life, I would have joined the Air Force." Before the joke even fully settles, or you have a moment to defend the Air Forces' honor, Jake's lips press against yours. The way his mouth feels against yours is even better than you had imagined.

You invite him to your bed, but he refuses to sleep with you, even if it is just sharing a bed, before at least one proper date. You try to fight him on it, but Jake says he can't be anything but a proper gentleman. You make up the couch for him, taking too long to tuck the blanket around him because you keep getting distracted by kissing every inch of his face. Finally, you go to bed when you can't stop yawning, realizing it is past three am.

In the morning, you wake up sure the night before had been a dream. However, you are proven wrong when you make your way out of your room. There you find Jake shirtless in the kitchen humming to the music he has playing on his phone, flipping pancakes and bacon. The sight and scents combined literally make your mouth water.

"Can this count as our first date?" You ask him before even saying good morning. The laugh it prompts in him is warm and fills the whole room before settling your chest. You know it's a sound you never want to stop hearing.

#jake seresin x reader #Hangman x reader #topgun imagine #hangman imagine

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makriiii · 10 months

Text

Wary accord (Arthur morgan × f!reader)

Summary: Invited to Angelo Bronte's garden party, you couldn't see anything fairing well. However, as the evening fades to night, and nothing goes wrong, you let yourself enjoy it more than you planned.

Word count: 3.4k

Authors notes: This is just a one-shot with heavily referenced themes from my ongoing series rn - Caught. I had to take a break from writing hardcore and unadulterated angst. ☠️ I'm also open to any suggestions, so send them in! ;)

Warnings/tags: Lots of fluff, 90% sfw, mentions of wounds, guns, some angst.

Ao3!

Pt1 to Caught!

♡

Wary Accord.

Jack ran into his fathers arms with glee, you were just as happy as he was that he was safe and okay.

You were sure this night would've ended in blood shed. Instead, you begrudgingly had to do Bronte's dirty work, handling some grave robbers with Arthur and John.

You didn't much enjoy partaking in being nothing more than a lackey, especially for someone like Angelo Bronte. This made even worse when you heard what Dutch had to say.

"Mr. Bronte has invited us to a garden party at the mayors house." He announced, still seeming unbelieving in the invite himself whilst he chuckled. "And us, just simple country folk."

This didn't delight you, fully willing to stay behind that day if you could, but you feared something might go awry and it'd be best if you were there to help. You felt much with Arthur and John there. Plus, that Dutch. He has his way with his words, and you trusted those words.

You'd been busy helping Pearson all day, the whispers of dusk finally upon the camp. Ready to relax, you sat up against a tree near Hosea looking forward to dinner when you were suddenly startled awake by Dutch.

"Come on!" He shrieked, "If we are gonna make it to this party, we sure as shit better clean up a little."

The party. You'd completely forgotten about the party. Your original plans for the night squandered.

"So we're doing this?" Arthur asks, disbelieving you were to actually attend.

"Oh yeah." Hosea acknowledged. "Old friend Dutch Van der linde has finally shown his true colours." He teases.

Hosea could always make you smile, if not full on laugh. "Social climbing." He states flatly.

"Old Signor Bronte, that horrendous snake has invited us to the ball, Cinderella." He addressed to Arthur. You'd be sure to tease him with that later on.

"So my suggestion is we go and get you a gown." He chuckles, Hosea laughing along with him.

While they walk by, you try not to catch attention, putting ur hat lower over your face, to which Hosea comes over and flicks it off.

"You too y/n. We don't want to insult Mr. Bronte." Hosea chimes in front of you chuckling softly.

You got up hesitantly to travel into town with them, knowing your fate long since been sealed.

Your mares gait matched Arthur's. It wasnt long since you had made it into town with a group of people you never saw yourself attending a ball with.

"Arthur?" You glance to your side to see if you had his attention.

His eyes met yours instantly when you asked his name oh-so-calmly. "What is it?"

"Have you been to a ball before?"

"No," he gives you an airy laugh. "Not too many people like me have."

"Well, I hope you know how to behave then." You poked fun at him, your usual goal.

"Yeah? And what would you know about behaving?"

"More than you I reckon. We'll see who gets booted out quickest."

"Deal." He jokes, nodding with a funny look on his face.

"You know, I hope it's not too costly, I don't see another occasion that I'll use a dress again." You murmured, trailing off into your thoughts, counting the money you had now in your head.

"I can see that," he coughs a laugh out, looking you up and down. "I've never seen you in somethin' so fancy."

Your brows furrow, knowing the meaning behind his tease.

"I'd like to see you run around in a thick skirt, Morgan. I don't think you'd be so tough anymore." A grin splits across your face as the image of him with a skirt on whilst chasing someone down on foot crosses your mind.

"You doubt me too much." He fights back a small smile that tugs at his lips. "I could outdo you first try."

You started giggling when the little Arthur in your head tripped over and tumbled in response to his bet.

He raises a brow, questioning your sudden fit of laughter with just a glance.

"You wanna take me up on that offer? We'll race." Then, you thought of bringing heels into the equation.

You stopped him before he went to speak in between wheezes, adding the heels into the challenge. Now he didn't look so confident.

"If you can find a pair of heels that would fit me." He couldn't help but give up on his faked seriousness, all while you couldn't contain yourself.

You looked down to his feet, wiping tears from your eyes as you observe his feet.

"Don't think there's any that'd fit your fat feet."

"Well then, You're outta' luck ain't ya."

You exhaled sharply, calming your chest after all that cackling. "But we have to find the perfect slipper for you, Cinderella."

"Oh, shut it-" He pauses mid sentence to point to a store with dresses and suits on display. "Think that's our place, y/n." Dutch, Bill and Hosea already dismounting in front of it.

You sat in awe as you turned your horse to the ties right outside. You hadn't noticed this the last time you were through here.

"Careful, don't lose yourself in there." He snickers, dismounting with you. Clearly you had made your gawking too obvious.

"Oh please," you swat at him as you both walk for the door. "I'm not that bad."

When he opens the door to the inside, the slightly cooler air relieved you, everything smelt fresh, polished wood and all. This wasn't a place for an outlaw, made all the clearer when you spotted the clerk.

The store clerk instantly looked taken aback by your groups presence. Maybe you should've considered leaving your guns outside.

He wasn't all for you in his store, but you greeted him as softly as you could, keeping your hands well away from your dangerous metal contraptions.

"What can I do for you... folk?" His voice shrill and accented with what you could only assume as french.

Dutch waves over Arthur, who gives you one last glance before they all go to a different part of the shop, leaving you awkwardly standing there alone.

The man walks up to you after sorting out Arthur and the rest of them. "I assume you're looking for an evening gown?"

You nod, "Yeah, something that isn't too costly?"

He hums his consideration, scanning you up and down. "Measurements?" He asks out of the blue.

Now your face flushed. You would have infinitely no idea, which made you feel even more dumb.

"I-" You look away for a moment trying to think if you even knew. "I couldn't tell you..."

He makes a noise as if he already knew, gesturing his hand at you to follow him.

He sped walk so fast to your surprise, you weren't sure why he was in such a rush, having you near to jogging just to keep up.

When you reached a paltry, bright room with fabrics adorning mannequins. He had you remove most of your outer clothing and equipment. Discarding it to a chair left of you.

He was rather swift with your measurements, wandering around to find a small selection of dresses that he said would fit, with some adjustment of course.

You picked the prettiest of the bunch, almost feeling like a little girl again. Getting a new dress. It excited you - mostly.

"I'll let you try these all on, and your little boyfriend can hobble over to see, whenever he's done. But- over there." Now he shoo'd you to a dressing room, he seemed like he was trying to get the lot of you out of his store swiftly.

The curtain slid aggressively behind you, leaving you stunned inside, which you shook off but not without an amount of confusion.

You groaned, forgetting just how much of a hassle getting on dresses was, it took you a good while each dress you tried on, thankfully only three.

Once you got down the last dress - your favorite - you heard Arthur chime from behind the curtain, startling you so bad you jumped to cover yourself.

(Leaving the dress desc vague so you can come up with your own.)

"Can I see?" He questions, a mere curtain being all that separates you. He'd seen you unclothed before, but now it felt different.

"No, I'm half-naked." You scolded, but your disgruntled attitude quickly washed away when your eyes widened with shock.

Your words had only seemed to rev him up. His hand grasped at the curtain, but you stopped it before it folded back any further, slapping away his hand.

"Quit that you no-good buzzard." You hissed, fearing that the rest of the gang would hear, which would be too much for you to bear.

He crows in response, but doesn't continue dragging the curtain further. "I've seen you much more indecent than that, y/n."

Your face runs hot with his words, prompting you to start swatting and punching at the curtain to get him away.

"Get outta here before the sales clerk thinks we're doing some silly business back here." You fussed, mumbling lowly enough just for him to hear.

This prompted a defeated sigh, from the other side of the curtain. "Just give me another minute." You half-consoled, not a shred of empathy for him.

He came for the dress no doubt, but he preferred no dress just as much if not more.

"Okay, okay." He laughs, his spurs clicked as he took a few steps back.

Pulling up the sleeves that rested just by your shoulders, you took a look in the mirror.

The dress revealed a hell of a lot more than what you were use to, your bullet scar on your arm prevalent, though you didn't mind as much as thought you would.

With this dress on, there was no room for guns. So you had come prepared with a small thigh holster, only allowing for a tiny pistol.

You weren't sure what you were to do with your hair. Tapping your foot, to which you realized, you didn't have heels neither. This all getting more costly than you had hoped for.

Nestling your hair up into a loose bun, you quickly gathered the rest of your clothes before you forgot them to stuff into your saddle bags.

When you finally pulled back the curtain, you glared at Arthur with a 'are you happy now?' look for a minute. He himself stood dashing, if you put it lightly. A regular tuxedo, even on him, looked way better than it should.

You only gave him a small grace period before you walked passed him to find some heels.

"Wait-" He reaches for your arm and holds you back. "Let me get a better look, Miss l/n."

You stood in front of him awkwardly, his eyes quite literally feasting upon you which made you anxious and squirmy in his grasp.

"Hmm." His initial ogle replaced by his typical sarcastic grin, which already had you ready to sock him. "Looks fine enough, I suppose."

"And you?" You made it a point to make it noticeable that you eyeballed him up and down. "They might not let you in." It was a lie, and he could tell.

"You shoulda seen your face when you first came out." Puffing his chest out, much too proud. You gave him a small slap to his bicep, shaking your head.

Meeting with Hosea, Dutch and Bill, you finished the rest of your affairs. Climbing into the back of a carriage to eventually join the party.

The mayors house was magnificent, and damnably large. It felt daunting as it loomed over you.

Your eyes caught onto all of the intricate wood decals that sprinkled the faultless paint job. Every thing well lit by the warm street lights.

It wasn't a place you felt you belonged in with the life you led. Especially not with the people that were attending; Corrupt politicians and crime lords.

This whole situation was brittle and you had to run it nicely - not peeve anyone off.

A man greeted Dutch, then told the lot of you, no guns. No one suspected you of your gun, delightfully. So you followed everyone inside after they unenthusiastically handed over their weapons.

when you reached the inside, you flicked your head around to catch all the details in the interior. You had really only heard talk of such extravagant places like these. Certainly an experience, you thought.

Dutch looked to you, Hosea and Bill and told you to join the party whilst him and Arthur followed the man who led them to Bronte up a flight of stairs.

Your face soured, you had only a faint idea on how to seem a natural when speaking to the high flyers. Never the less, you did.

Eventually, you spotted Arthur who finally had left the balcony where he conversed with Bronte and Dutch. You dismissed yourself from the two men you spoke with, making your way to him.

"So? Did you find anything out?" You question, hoping he found out more than you had.

"No... not really. He suggested a take at the trolley station."

Your brow strung up. A trolley station? That sounded unusual to you.

"Good money, I suppose?"

He wasn't so sure either. "So it sounds. Dutch seems to trust it."

"Very well then." Nodding your head, in acceptance. "Whats he want us to do next?"

He hooks your arm in his abruptly, feeling a blush heat your face with his sudden act of affection.

"Try to talk to the mayor, get info." He says lowly, leaning over slightly as he walks with you to a group of men.

They stood in a small circle, chattering amongst themselves, scolding a man to their right that was much too drunk.

Arthur waited a moment before releasing you and reprimanding the man himself by touring him out. Leaving you with them alone.

They greeted you, to which you introduced yourself, waiting for Arthur to return, which he did, promptly.

They exchanged pleasantries for only a second before a series of pops interrupts their speak.

A splatter of blazing colours fill the dark sky, instantly captivating you. This wasn't something you'd seen before in all your long years of life.

You automatically pulled Arthurs hand to get a better view together. The sounds of the crowd behind you gasping and awing amongst the booms that sounded from the sky.

The bright twinkling and sparkling only lasted seconds each, spirals and scatters, each their own neon colours.

Greens, reds, blues, faded into smoke that matched the parted clouds, new splashes of colour never seizing to paint the gray and black behind them.

You stood in front of Arthur, sinking your head into his chest, gazing at all of the captivating lights before you.

Maybe your feelings for Arthur held you tighter than you cared to admit. He was still the one who had committed atrocities against you, which you weren't so quick to let go of.

Spinning around, you looked up to him, the blue in his eyes would perfectly match the skies if it were day, instead reflecting all the crackling lights you missed with your back turned.

"You know how to dance, don't you?" You beam, his hand in yours.

"No?-" He questions, not anticipating just what you had in store for him.

"Perfect!" Your hand tightens around his, leading him to the gazebo that stood not far from where you gathered just a moment before.

"I don't reckon we have time to embarrass ourselves right now."

"Oh, yes, you do. Believe it not, I still recall getting taught how to dance when I was younger." Snickering as you reveal your plans to a reluctant Arthur.

Stepping inside the lit gazebo, you glance around to make sure its clear. Smiling when you confirm it is.

"Ready?" Catching his hand before he felt he could change his mind - not that he had much of a choice in the first place.

He grumbles, but that tiny little spark in his eye proving he wasn't all that terribly put out by this.

His arm slowly slid down and around your waist, drawing you in close, in turn your arm raised up to his shoulder.

"Okay, now just follow my lead." You moved one foot back, the front of his shoe found your toes faster than you had imagined.

He corrects himself, much to the relief of your foot. "Shit- sorry."

"We'll go slow." You giggle, finding it funny that you were teaching Arthur of all people how to dance.

Which each step, his foot still strayed a few times, but he got the hang of it quickly.

"See? It's not so bad. But if you're still embarrassed from stepping on me, I can understand." Feigning a look of pity and a half hearted pat on his shoulder.

"I enjoyed stepping on them more than not." He shoots back, his timing lining up with the moment your heel caught on a loose board, nearly loosing your balance but Arthurs arm around you remained firm, holding you up.

"Not so tough are we, y/n?" He chortles, your pride hurting more than your feet.

You couldn't help the sheepish laugh that left you. "I demand you respect your teacher, Mr. Morgan."

"Or what? There ain't much you can do about it."

"We'll see about that." You challenge, returning to a slow rhythm. He never released you from his tight grasp.

Your bodies never left each others for the entire time, you both relished in it more than you'd ever address.

His hand eventually found your arm, his fingers gently brushing the double sided scar that he had punished you with upon your first meeting.

Dwelling for a few moments, he runs his hand up and over your collar bone, then meeting your chin. His gaze was soft, no trace of his typical cocky expression.

"I didn't mean what I said earlier." His thumb caressing the bottom of your plush lip.

"I-" He stops you from what he already anticipated you saying. Shaking his head.

"Not another word from you." He leans down, his mouth meeting yours. The most gentle show of affection he had shown you to date.

You leaned into it for as long as it lasted, cherishing each second it dragged further.

When he pulled away, there was a look you'd never be able to place on Arthurs face. You'd never forget it, that you could count on.

"I don't like that all the other men here get to see you like this too." He confesses, glancing over to the gathering, jerking upright when he spots something he didn't expect.

"I hope I'm not being too brash as I interrupt you two love sick fools." Dutch as much himself as ever with those words.

You and Arthur finally released from your embrace, standing side by side as if you both just got caught with your hand in the cookie jar.

Dutch hollered out a hearty laugh, the ability to stay mad lost with the guilty looks you both held. "Save it for camp... now I heard mentions of Cornwall from Mr. Mayor and one of his men. Quickly both of you."

He chased you of the gazebo effectively, Arthur sighed as you strode back to complete the mission you'd been sent on.

"Oh good, I was starting to regret sending you both in there together." Dutch waited no time to tease you both further, making it obvious to Hosea and Bill who had a good laugh about it too.

"Yeah, yeah. We got somethin'." Arthur confirms, waving off the insult.

"Well then," Hosea chimes, excited with the news. "Think it's time to go."

That you could agree dualy on, your eye lids started to gain weight, desiring nothing more than to return to camp.

You all made for your ride back, collecting their guns on the way out, some speak of a bank heist along the way, which definitely prompted skepticism in you. As most of these takes did.

The carriage rolled up to you, not much time spent in terms of getting in. All of you wanted out of there.

Bill's voice haughty and filled with contempt as he complained about the 'high society pigeon shit.' Which plastered a drowsy smirk on your face.

Instinctively, you sat next to Arthur on the way back, dozing off on his shoulder not long after the carriage lurched shakily over the uneven cobblestone roads.

Guys I proof read this at 3 am so ignore any mistakes...

#arthur morgan #arthur morgan x reader #arthur morgan x you #rdr2 fanfic #red dead fanfic #red dead redemption arthur #red dead redemption two #enemies to lovers #rdr2 #fluff #dutch van der linde #hosea matthews #bill williamson

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mj-iza-writer · 7 months

Text

Whumpee whimpered as Whumper ripped the collar from their neck.

"I don't want you anymore", Whumper yelled.

Whumpee began to cry, "please don't leave me, I'll do better."

Whumpee jumped awake, they had tears streaming down their face.

"Just a nightmare", they whispered and glanced at the clock. They saw Whumper, their master, sleeping peacefully. "Just a nightmare."

They sat up in the bed and pulled their knees to their chest. They quietly sobbed, making sure to hold their hand over their mouth to not wake up Whumper. They feared getting in trouble again.

Whumpee had gotten in trouble earlier that day. It was their first incident for quite a few months now. Whumper wasn't terribly mad, but they still had to correct the behavior... painfully.

They sat up the rest of the night. They couldn't sleep feeling like this.

Whumper glanced up at them early in the morning, "Whumpee what's a matter?"

"I-I had a nightmare, I couldn't sleep", Whumpee began to cry again, "I'm sorry."

Whumper sat up quickly, "why didn't you wake me up, you didn't have to deal with that on your own. Those are too big of emotions for a pet", they pulled Whumpee into their arms.

Whumpee sobbed, "I didn't want to disturb you master", they mumbled.

"You wouldn't have, what was the nightmare about?", Whumper stroked Whumpee's head lovingly.

"I dreamt that you had yanked my collar off and yelled that you didn't want me anymore. You left while I was begging for forgiveness", Whumpee leaned into Whumper's chest, "please don't leave me."

"Aww Whumpee, I would never do that", Whumper hugged them tighter, "you're mine forever."

"Can you, can you...", Whumpee stuttered.

"Yes Whumpee, what do you need", Whumper rested their chin on Whumpee's head.

"Can you tell me you love me, you never did last night", Whumpee whimpered again.

"I'm sorry, I must have forgotten. I must have been the cause of a lot of experiences for that nightmare to happen", Whumper sighed, "I feel bad now, between your punishment, not saying I love you. I caused you to have a bad night."

Whumpee breathed a shaky sigh, and nodded.

Whumper kissed Whumpee's head, "I love you Whumpee, even when I have to punish you. I love you."

Whumpee was able to relax a little, "may I have my collar on again please? You took it off for my bath last night."

Whumper released the hug to reach for the collar, "yes you may." Whumper clicked the collar into place, and jiggled the dog tags, "there you go."

Whumpee reached up and felt the collar. The familiarity brought a lot of comfort back to them. They breathed a sigh of relief.

"Here, how about we get breakfast started? You can have a rest day since you had a hard night. I'll be working from home today as well, so you won't be alone", Whumper wrapped Whumpee in another hug.

"Okay", Whumpee relaxed into Whumper's arms.

Whumpee curled up on the couch after breakfast. It wasn't long before they fell asleep.

"Whumpee I...", Whumper started to talk before going into the living room, "oh, figures you'd go right to sleep with a full belly."

Whumpee stretched through a snore.

"Aww my poor baby", Whumper sighed, "get some rest. You deserve it."

They pulled a blanket from the back of the couch and covered Whumpee.

"Enjoy your nap my little pet", Whumper grinned.

Whumpee stretched again, this time grabbing their collar, and holding onto it.

"Yes Whumpee that's your collar", Whumper whispered, and lightly patted Whump head, "I'm not taking it away from you."

Whumper grinned before leaving the living room.

Whumpee grinned in their sleep, happy dreams now.

Taglist, as always please let me know if you want to be added or removed. It's not a problem. @villainsandheroes @the-beasts-have-arrived @sacredwrath @porschethemermaid

Sorry I've been really wanting to do more pet whumps again. These are my comfort stories so I love writing them. -MJ

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redfoxwritesstuff · 4 months

Text

Threads

Summary: Loki, sitting on his throne of time struggles with the temptation of looking back at what he could have had and what he had discarded in his youth.

Merry Christmas? Look, I'm sorry- This is a gateway to something that may or may not become a series- idk. I'm fuckin tired.

Warnings: None? A bit angsty I guess.

Threads

Loki sat in a sea of green threads in the vast nothing. Time stretched out all around him, a ocean of emptiness that contained everything. There was nothing but silence and yet if he closed his eyes, he could hear everything.

He didn’t have to stay here but there was no where else he belonged. His own timeline had been destroyed before he had made it here. There was nothing to go back to.

Reaching out, he plucked a string from the air. It wasn’t the first time he had done so and it surely wouldn’t be the last time. This thread he looked at often because she was in it.

It had been centuries since he had thought about her and then, when everything stopped, he didn’t have anything else to think about but her.

Long ago, when he was young he had cared for a woman with hair the color of the embers of a forgotten fire and a smile that was brighter than the sun. He had cared for her with all the fire of a raging inferno and that terrified him.

He was young then, they both were. They had an entanglement that had lasted for what felt too long at the time. He was a prince and she was a blacksmith’s daughter. He should have never cared for her but he did.

Looking down the thread, he could see a version of him laying on a bed of hay with her tucked against his chest. The Loki he was looking at was so much younger than the man he was now.

This Loki would make the same mistakes he had, Loki had watched this story play out time and time again. Still, he couldn’t help but to gaze at the lovers in the thread passing a forbidden night after making love all evening.

Letting the thread slip through his fingers, the lovers were replaced by her broken heart as she screamed her rage for the world to hear. He had done that to her. The Loki standing before her in the thread was cool and collected.

Loki knew that her scream had cut his heart like no blade would ever again. She would never find out that he broke her heart not out of selfishness but to protect her. Sitting on his throne in a sea of threads, Loki couldn’t begin to justify why he hadn’t told her.

Instead he just ripped her heart out and spat on the shattered remains. And for what? Because he was scared? Because she wasn’t fit for court life?

He told her that he didn’t care about her, that it was a game to him but that was a lie. He did care. He cared so damn much.

More thread passed through his fingers. How often had he done this? Time moved differently here, outside the threads of time themselves.

Now he saw her standing in a gown and furs. A man who was not him stood in front of her and their hands were joined. This was the part of the timeline that hurt him the most, yet he always returned to it.

She had waited for him, tried to change his mind for some time and he had spent years of their youth acting indifferent to her. Only once he had gone from Asgard did she move on, ever so slowly.

But he still cared for her. He still fucking cared so goddamn much that every time he watched her marry another man was a stab in the heart. He had nothing else to do however, but pick at ever wound that had scabbed over and begun to heal.

Letting go of the thread, he watched as it floated back into place like he had done many times before.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Tag list: *I nuked my tag lists since I've been gone for years. Starting fresh, let me know if you want on this flaming dumpster ride.

#loki x ofc #loki x oc #loki x reader #loki x you #loki fanfic #loki x original female character #loki fanfiction #loki x original character

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loveroftoomanyfandoms · 11 months

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Angel of God, My Guardian Dear Chapter 2: Reader

Rating: Explicit (18+, MINORS DNI)

Pairing: Matt Murdock x F!Reader

Story Summary: While speaking at a local school for visually impaired youth, Matt runs into his childhood best friend, with whom he lost touch almost 20 years prior.

Warnings/Tags: no real warnings thus far.

Word Count: ~2,300

A/N: None.

I still can't believe it's really him.

Matthew Murdock -- Y/N's childhood best friend, the boy she had never stopped loving since the moment she had realized what the butterflies in her stomach when she was around him were being caused by, the one person in the whole world that she had never wanted to live without but had been unwillingly forced to do so for the past 19 years -- was not only sitting on her sofa, but also reciprocated Y/N's feelings that she had carried for so long.

Y/N had honestly forgotten about the contents of that last letter she had written to Matt -- she had written it as a means of catharsis during a bout of self-pity fueled by her breakup with Alex and had only vaguely remembered writing Matt a goodbye letter when she had awoken the next morning, all cried out over the loss of not only her relationship, but also the renewed pain of never knowing what possibly could have transpired between her and Matt, had Y/N been given the chance to tell him how she felt.

It had taken every ounce of courage she'd had to finish reading her letter out loud to Matt, and after she had finished and seen the stunned look on his face all she had wanted to do was to go crawl into a hole and hide for the next 19 years.

Instead she had picked up her drink and drank it as fast as she could, hoping the alcohol would numb the sting of rejection she had surely been about to face.

"You were in love with me?" Matt had asked.

Y/N had squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to see the look of scorn or, worse, pity , that Matt's face was sure to have worn.

She had been about to get up and pour herself another shot of amaretto when Matt had gently taken her glass and set it on her coffee table, then took her hand in his. "Y/N? Please, angel, talk to me."

Y/N's eyes had snapped back open in surprise at the undisguised plea in Matt's tone. There had been no mistaking his expression, either -- there was hope written plainly on his face.

Fueled by liquid courage and her own tentative hope, Y/N had taken a deep breath and told Matt the truth, that she was still in love with him.

Her heart had leapt for joy when Matt had told her that he not only had, but also still reciprocated her feelings, then he had pulled the cross necklace she had given him right before she had left for Florida out from under his shirt. I've always kept you close to my heart.

A strange mix of happiness and anger had flooded her system and while she was still fighting the urge to march down to St. Agnes to give Sister Bernadette a piece of her mind, her anger had admittedly been somewhat abated when Matt had kissed her a few moments ago and asked her out to dinner for the following evening.

Matt was currently looking at her somewhat nervously. "So? What do you say, angel? Go on a date with me?"

Y/N nodded. "Of course, Matty. I'd love to."

Matt grinned. "What time do you usually get off work? I'm thinking maybe you can come to my place? I'll cook."

"I get off at 5, but I'll want to come home to shower and change first, so is 6:30 okay?"

Matt nodded. "Yeah, that's perfect."

"Okay, awesome."

Matt's expression grew serious. "There's something I should probably tell you though."

Y/N's brows furrowed. "Okay."

Her mind began to race. What the hell could he possibly be talking about? "You didn't lie about being married, did you?"

Matt's face twisted into confusion. "What? No, I've never even been engaged."

"Then are you in the mob? On the run from the law? Joined some sort of weird sex cult?"

Matt laughed. "None of the above, actually."

"Then what is it? Because I honestly don't know what could be worse than you being in a sex cult, except maybe if you're a serial killer or something. Oh my God, you're not a serial killer, are you?"

Matt shook his head. "No, angel, it's nothing like that. Quite the opposite, in fact."

He took a deep breath. "You've heard of Daredevil, right?"

"That vigilante dude?"

"Yeah. Well, you see -- the thing is…" Matt trailed off.

Suddenly the lightbulb in Y/N's head went off. "It's you."

"Yeah." Matt nodded. "I'm him. I'm Daredevil."

It honestly made sense once Y/N thought about it. She had known about Matt's heightened senses as a kid and his training sessions with Stick, and the fighting style had seemed familiar in the few grainy videos of Daredevil that Y/N had seen on the news. Thinking about it now though, she figured that deep down she had kind of always known that the Devil of Hell's Kitchen had to have been the same person that had taught her self-defense as a teenager.

She took a deep breath and nodded. "I can deal with that. Just… just don't do anything too reckless or stupid and get yourself killed though, okay? I just got you back, I can't lose you again."

Matt took her hand and raised it to his mouth for a kiss, visible relief on his face. "I'll try my best, I promise. Thank you for being so understanding."

"Thank you for still trusting me even after all these years." Y/N bit her lip. "Any other secrets you want to tell me?"

Matt shook his head with a smile. "Nope, the fact that I'm secretly a vigilante crime-fighter is the only big secret I got. Oh, no, wait-- there is one more. You remember Sister Maggie from the orphanage?"

"Oh, yeah, of course. She was always nice. I liked her."

"She's my mother."

"She's your -- you're kidding, right?"

Matt shrugged. "Afraid not."

"Oh my God."

"Yeah."

Y/N huffed out a breath. "Did you know that when we were kids?"

Matt shook his head. "No, I just found out fairly recently. Needless to say I wasn't too happy about it at first, but I've made peace with it now."

"Well that's good."

"She asked about you, you know."

Y/N was taken aback. "She did?"

Matt nodded. "Yeah, she asked me how you were doing and seemed genuinely surprised that we hadn't spoken since you left St. Agnes, especially considering we had always been pretty much attached at the hip as kids."

Y/N sighed. "I'm assuming she wasn't in on Sister Bernadette's plan to separate us then."

Matt grinned and shook his head. "Actually I'm pretty sure she thought we'd be married with a bunch of kids by now."

Y/N huffed out a laugh. "Sister Maggie's your mom. Wow. Any other bombs you wanna drop?"

Matt shook his head. "Nope, that's all of them."

"Ok good, because I have a secret of my own."

Matt raised an eyebrow and grinned. "You're also secretly a crime-fighting vigilante?"

Y/N giggled. "No, nor am I actually married, running from the law, in the mob, or in a weird sex cult either. Oh, nor am I a serial killer, I promise."

"Then what is it?"

Y/N leaned in to whisper in Matt's ear. "You weren't the only hormonal teenager who occasionally had dirty thoughts about their best friend."

Matt hummed playfully, wrapping his arms around her. "Well now… Pot, meet kettle."

Y/N trailed a finger down Matt's torso. "I'll tell you about mine if you tell me about yours."

Matt smirked. "You really want to know what I would think about?"

Y/N nodded. "Mmhmm."

"Well, by the time my thoughts had gotten to that point I'd already been wanting to kiss you for years, so first off I would think about finally being able to know if your lips would taste like that coconut lip balm I always smelled on you."

Y/N licked her lips reflexively. "And did you think they would?"

"Mmhmm. I bet your lips would've tasted amazing , angel. Had to fight the urge to kiss you that last day just so I could find out once and for all."

Y/N swallowed. "What else would you think about?"

"I'd think about kissing your neck. I knew if I ever got the chance to feel your pulse fluttering under my lips that I would have to be extra careful not to leave any marks, although I'd want to so I could show everyone that you were mine."

Y/N sucked in a breath. Holy shit. She had never known that Matt had a possessive streak but Christ, that turned her on.

Matt licked his lips and smirked. "Oh, you like that, don't you, angel? You like the thought of me marking you up for everyone to see?"

Y/N huffed out a breathless laugh. "Sister Bernadette probably would've shipped me off to a convent overseas instead of my aunt's house in Florida had you ever given me a hickey, although I probably wouldn't have minded you leaving some in more… inconspicuous places."

"Oh really? Wanted to feel my mouth on you, sweetheart?"

God, yes. Y/N took a shaky breath and nodded. "I used to think about your lips a lot, Matty, used to think about -- about kissing you, be it sweet, innocent pecks or full-on makeout sessions leading to those aforementioned inconspicuous hickies."

"What else?"

"I also used to think about your hands. Wanted you to touch me, wondered what it would feel like to have those long fingers of yours tracing more than just my face."

Matt groaned. "I used to think about that too, what it'd feel like if I'd been allowed to touch you outside of the platonic cuddles and chaste hugs we used to share."

Y/N shivered with desire, the gruff tone in Matt's voice sending lightning straight to her core.

Matt made a vague gesture towards Y/N's face. "Speaking of me tracing your face though, may I? I'm still picturing teenage you and to be honest, it's kind of freaking me out -- all things considered."

Y/N chuckled. Matt had mapped out her face a couple of times as they were growing up, and she still remembered the look of concentration on his face as he had put together a mental picture of her. "Yeah, of course."

"Okay. Good. Great." Matt shifted to face Y/N more fully and tentatively reached out to touch her. "You ready?"

Y/N nodded and closed her eyes. "Yeah. Go for it."

She fought to not lean into Matt's touch as he took his time tracing her features, his fingertips slowly gliding over her forehead, eyes, cheeks, nose, lips, and finally jawline.

Y/N opened her eyes as Matt leaned back. "I know I got older, but do I still somewhat look like what you remember?"

Matt shook his head solemnly, his eyebrows furrowed in thought. "Actually… no."

Y/N blinked in surprise. " No ? Have I really changed that much?"

A smile spread on Matt's face. "You're even more beautiful now than you were back then."

Y/N huffed out a laugh even as her face heated. "Matthew."

Matt shrugged, his smile widening into a grin. "What? It's true."

Y/N shook her head fondly. "Actually as attractive as I thought you were when we were kids, I think you're even more handsome now."

Matt chuckled. "That's nice to hear."

Y/N licked her lips, the lust and alcohol coursing through her veins emboldening her. "Matty?"

"Yeah, angel?"

"Enough talking."

Matt grinned and cupped the sides of Y/N's neck with his hands, then pressed his lips to hers once more.

Y/N relaxed into Matt and willingly opened up to him as he deepened the kiss, the flavor of Matt himself even more intoxicating than the whiskey Y/N could taste on his tongue.

Matt slid one hand down to her waist and pulled her closer to him, his other hand sliding up to tangle in her hair.

Y/N pressed her hands to Matt's chest to stabilize herself, marveling at just how solid he was under her touch.

Matt groaned, trailing his lips down Y/N's jawline to her neck. "Used to dream about being with you like this, Y/N," he murmured against her skin. "Wanted you so much."

Y/N gasped as Matt placed a kiss just under her jawbone. "Wanted you too, Matt. Still do."

Matt let out a soft growl against her pulse point. "As much as I want to make love to you, the first time I take you to bed I want both of us to be clear-headed."

Y/N nodded. As much as she wanted Matt and as amazing as his five o'clock shadow felt scratching against her skin, she knew it wasn't a wise decision to jump into bed with him right then. "Yeah. Yeah, me too."

Matt sighed and nuzzled Y/N's neck before leaning back. "Actually, I should probably get going. It's getting late."

He pointed to the letters that were still on Y/N's coffee table. "May I have those?"

Y/N nodded again. "Yeah, of course."

They gathered the letters and put them back in the box, then stood.

Y/N wrapped her arms around Matt in a hug. "I'll see you tomorrow night?"

Matt nodded and pressed a kiss to Y/N's forehead. "Can't wait."

Y/N tilted her face up to him and smiled. "Me either."

Matt reached up and caressed Y/N's cheek with his thumb, then gave her a soft kiss on the lips. "I'm really happy I ran into you today. I've missed you."

Y/N nodded, her heart fluttering. "I've missed you too."

"Good night, angel."

"'Night, Matty."

Y/N let Matt out and locked the door behind him, then let out a happy sigh. Never had she imagined that her day would turn out like it did, but she couldn't have been happier that it had.

#lotmf writes #AoG Masterlist #matt murdock x fem!reader #matt murdock x female reader #matt murdock x reader #matt murdock fanfiction #matt murdock fluff #matt murdock smut #matt murdock x yn

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exosorcery · 3 months

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- THE EXOSORCEROR -

@dukeoftheblackstar tagged me EVER so long ago to fill this in, and - in typical Life of the Teacher fashion - I am just now getting time to do it. So here you go.

It's been so long since I was last able to post, I'm gonna just assume everyone has forgotten who I am.

Name: Kim :) My nickname is Kasey/KC.

Pronouns: They/them

Where do you call home? Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada - a little city on the Bay of Fundy. Interestingly, CNN voted it THE place to visit in the world just recently. I am still in shock over that.

Favorite animal: Horses. I love to ride. I used to lease a horse but it became cost-prohibitive and now I just WISH i rode horses. My favorite breed is the Morgan horse. Rode them waaaay back when and loved them.

Cereal of choice: Um, good question. I love MINI WHEATS but they make me gain weight faster than you can say YUM. So, no. I love them - but, NO.

Are you visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learner? Auditory OUT. I walk around talking to myself every single hour of the day. The busier the day, the louder and more constant the dialogue. My High School students just nod and smile, now. Their mums and dads (who had me as a teacher) did me a huge favor by warning them it just was my way of processing; I am not peculiar.

First pet: A stray Tabby chonker my family named Tuna. I still seem to adopt cats from all over the neighborhood... Expo, Fanta, Oliver... The list goes on and on, and I STILL do it. That's how I got Simon (the cat I have now. AKA "Pussy Pissyfoot".

Favorite scent: I am a perfume collector, so this will be a super precise answer. I LOOOOVE Vintage Poison (I know. Cringe.) A super modern one I like a lot is Fenty. Try it and thank me later.

Do you believe in astrology: Yep. I was an amateur astrologer in University in the early 90's. I also read palms and was really good at that. I am a Gemini, Moon in Pisces/Aries, Gemini Mercury, Sagittarius Mars and Taurus Venus. My chart is all over the board. I am sure this is no surprise to the people who know me well.

How many playlists do you have on spotify/apple music? I've lost count. My favorite I Tunes playlists are my 80's playlists. I also love my Bjork and Kate Bush playlists.

Sharpies or highlighters? Sharpies.

Song that makes you cry? "End of Innocence" by Enigma. Every time... but they're happy tears. It brings back wonderful memories of driving across Quebec with my family in the 90's. Quebecois have terrific taste in music and the rural stations ALL had this on their station playlist.

Song that makes you happy? "Faces" by Clio.

And finally, do you write/draw/create? Yes :D

The above image is a painting/with artistic filter I did for another graphic novel I have been working on forever. I was the reference for the female character Case... I feel like I'll never finish it. Bummer :(

#kel dor #plo koon #star wars fan art #star wars fanfiction #plo koon simps unite!#gottabeKD!

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marzmeltdown · 10 months

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Familiar Taste of Poison - pt.3

⌦ Pairing: Wonwoo x Fem!Reader ⌦ Genre(s): series,, angst,, fluff ⌦ chapter specific genre: fluff,, angst ⌦ Warning(s): !!TW: LIGHT MENTIONS OF Drug Use, Alcohol Abuse, mentions of depression!!, reader kinda uses Wonwoo, a lot of this will be in multiple pov's(I will clarify when it changes pov's), some mention of being sick, swearing, most of this chapter is all Wonwoo's pov, Wonwoo goes on a date with someone else. ⌦ Word count: 3.07k ⌦ Summary: You and Wonwoo have been friends since childhood, though you're both a little estranged from one another, the only contact being when you call Wonwoo for help. ⌦ A/N: This chapter is a bit longer than the last two but a lot happens to push the plot forward. It's really random that I put skz in here but I needed someone who had a sister. Fun fact about me, cause it's brought up in this chapter: I'm allergic to apples. The end of this chapter almost had a bitch crying at 4 am. If there's anything you feel I should improve on in the future, don't hesitate to let me know! You can find progress updates on this story and everything else I write in my pinned post every Wednesday.:) ⌦ I have attached a link to a website with help hotlines around the world, this series has heavy themes of mental health and substance abuse. This link will be added to every chapter. ⌦ International Mental Health hotlines

⌦ Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6

⌦ marz’s tag list ⌦ marz’s req form

⌦(Wonwoo's pov) It had been a little while since he had heard from you; granted, you had never gone longer than a month without needing him to clean up your messes. This new-found silence from being your knight in shining armor allowed him to begin streaming again. For awhile, he had stopped because your calls of need would come in at least 4-5 times a week.

To say he missed you would be an understatement; he would lie awake after a long night of streaming, waiting for his phone to ring so he could pick you up. After three weeks of no calls, he began to believe that you had fully forgotten about him, all because of a little spat that he could've handled better. He had plans to express how he felt about you, but the world had different plans that day. Maybe you two just weren't meant to be friends anymore.

Wonwoo had tried to take his mind off things; he would distract himself by playing video games until the sun went down. That night, like every other night, he stayed up to play online with a few friends.

"If I die one more time because you're not paying attention, I'm gonna strangle you," Vernon threatened through Wonwoo's headphones. To be honest, Wonwoo was a little distracted today; he kept glancing down at his phone, hoping for a call, a text, or something.

"Sorry, I've just got a lot on my mind," Wonwoo replied, the sounds of his mouse clicking and keys clacking filling his room and his eyes beginning to grow tired from staring at such a bright screen for an extended period of time.

"Woo, you need to let her go. She's clearly not interested in your friendship and hasn't been for awhile," Minghao said. If Minghao were talking to anyone else, they surely would've been offended, appalled that he could say something so cold so calmly, but Wonwoo appreciated his honesty; he wouldn't want Minghao to be any other way.

"I agree with Hao; you should put yourself out there; stop waiting for someone who isn't hurting without you," Seungcheol chimed in, everyone having paused their game to give Wonwoo some free therapy while they sat in the Fortnite lobby.

"Are you guys suggesting a date?" Wonwoo asked, pushing his glasses up as he put his hands on his face, muffling his question just a bit.

"Well, I wasn't, but I know someone who'd be great for you," Seungcheol said. He could hear the shrug in his voice, playing matchmaker so nonchalantly. "I'll send you her info; she thinks you're cute anyway," he added. Within seconds, his words were emphasized by the sound of Wonwoo getting a text message. He glanced at the notification, half hoping it was from you and half hoping it wasn't.

It wasn't.

Wonwoo opened his phone, seeing that Seungcheol had sent her Instagram profile along with her phone number. He clicked on the link, leaning back in his chair as he scrolled through the professionally taken photos that filled the girl's profile.

"She is really cute," Wonwoo said, clicking on a few photos. There was a familiar face in a few of the photos, though they looked too much alike to be anything more than siblings.

"Seungcheol, is this Chan's sister?" Wonwoo asked, zooming in on one of the photos to get a better look at the girl's alleged brother.

"Bang Chan?" Seungcheol asked.

"Yea, Bang Chan,"

"Yea, why?"

"Just curious," Wonwoo said. He chewed on his bottom lip as he swiped back into his messaging app, looking down at the series of numbers Seungcheol had given him. "You said she thinks I'm cute?"

"Yeah, she talks about you all the time at work," Seungcheol said.

"Well, I'll text her when we get off. Wanna go for one more round?" Wonwoo asked, setting his phone down and getting ready to unpause the game.

"Sounds good," everyone said, continuing with their match.

One game turned into two.

Two games turned into four.

4 turned into 6.

By the time Wonwoo looked at the clock on the PC that displayed his Discord server, he was shocked.

3:26 a.m.

Wonwoo must have really had a lot on his mind; he never stayed up this late, not unless you had needed his help. He yawned, stretching his back when they were back to the games lobby, cracking his neck as it had grown stiff from sitting hunched over a keyboard for so long.

"I think I'm gonna get off guys, I'm getting tired," he said, not waiting for them to object before closing the game and turning his headphones, mic, and pc's off. Wonwoo grabbed his phone as he got up, walking to his closet to grab a pair of night pants and changing into them.

He unlocked his phone, looking at the number again as he began brushing his teeth. After a moment of hesitation, he finally added Hannah's contact information to his phone, messaging her as soon as he finished brushing his teeth.

⌦ Wonwoo: Hey, it's Wonwoo. I know this is super random, but Seungcheol gave me your number, if that's okay.

Wonwoo didn't expect an immediate answer; it was almost 4:00 in the morning. He looked at the unopened message as he left the bathroom, slipping his phone into his pocket and turning off the light. His phone dinged as soon as he walked into his room, and he only opened it once he had lied down in bed.

⌦ 3:55 a.m.

⌦ Hannah: Hey, Wonwoo! It's totally chill; why're you up so late? (Read 3:55 a.m.)

Wonwoo found himself smiling at her message and answering immediately.

⌦Wonwoo: I could ask you the same thing, lol. (Read: 3:57 a.m.) ⌦Wonwoo: But I was playing Fortnite with Cheol and a few other friends and lost track of time. (Read: 3:57 a.m.)

⌦Hannah: That sounds like a lot of fun. (Read: 4:00a.m.) ⌦Hannah: Why did Cheol give you my number anyway? (read: 4:00 a.m.)

⌦Wonwoo: Uh, he's trying to play matchmaker. (Read: 4:00 a.m.)

⌦Hannah: Right (Read: 4:01 a.m.) ⌦Hannah: Well, what are you doing tomorrow? (Read: 4:01 a.m.)

⌦Wonwoo: Nothing as of right now. (Read: 4:02 a.m.) ⌦Wonwoo: Why are you trying to ask me out? (Read: 4:02 a.m.)

⌦Hannah: Yea. (Read: 4:02 a.m.) ⌦Hannah: How's coffee sound tomorrow at noon? (Read: 4:02 a.m.)

⌦Wonwoo: You're straight to the point, aren't you? lol (Read: 4:03 a.m.) ⌦Wonwoo: But, noon tomorrow sounds great! (Read: 4:03 a.m.)

⌦Hannah: Great, I'll send you the cafe's info tomorrow. I'm about to fall asleep (Read: 4:03 a.m.)

⌦Wonwoo: Awesome, sleep well (Delivered: 4:04 a.m.)

Wonwoo reread the small interaction he had with Bang Chan's sister, smiling softly as he put his phone on the charger. He turned off his light, took his glasses off, and went to bed.

⌦(Wonwoo's POV cont) Wonwoo was thankful for his habitual routine of waking up at 9:00 a.m. every morning, regardless of when he went to bed. He forgot to set an alarm, having fallen asleep as soon as he put his glasses on his nightstand. Waking up this early gave him a few hours to kill before he had to get around, creating a schedule in his head for how long it would take him to eat breakfast, take a shower, shave, get dressed, and drive to the cafe. He planned on being 15 minutes early; he was always early.

Hannah had already sent Wonwoo the address of the cafe; thankfully, it was only a fifteen-minute drive from his apartment complex with traffic. He ate a light breakfast of two pieces of toast and a glass of apple juice; he'd be damned if he were going to willingly drink orange juice. He rarely ate toast, but with few food ingredients in his fridge or cabinet, toast was his only option.

With thirty minutes to spare after getting ready, Wonwoo grabbed his keys, locking his door as he left to go to his car. Hannah was already at the cafe when he got there, sitting in her car as she waited. Wonwoo parked next to her, pulling out his phone to let her know he was there. When she looked up from her phone, he waved at her with a smile, stepping out of her car to greet her on the sidewalk.

"Hey! I'm so glad you could make it," Hannah smiled as she pulled the taller male into a hug. Wonwoo was stunned at first; she surely was a bold woman, which he seemed to like about her.

"Why wouldn't I?" He chuckled, hugging her back for a moment before they pulled away and walked into the cafe.

It was a small cafe owned by a sweet elderly couple from France. The cafe always had French music playing softly through the store speakers; normally, Wonwoo would have found it nice and cozy, but today it felt cheesy. The two sat down after having ordered their drinks, exposing the poor barista to a small argument over who was paying for their drinks. Hannah won.

"So, tell me about yourself." Hannah smiled, taking a sip from her cappuccino before moving it to the side of the table so she could place her elbows on it, letting her chest rest against her forearms.

"There's not much to know," Wonwoo chuckled, swirling his straw around in his Americano and watching the ice move around with it. "But I'm in college for mechanical engineering, I stream on Twitch sometimes, and I'm a big Marvel buff," he said after a moment.

"Mechanical engineering? So you're smart and cute, huh?" Hannah teased, smiling at the redness that grew on Wonwoo's cheeks from her compliment.

"Tell me about yourself," Wonwoo said, directing the conversation back to the original topic.

"Well, I'm in college for fashion design; I also really like Marvel; and I want to get into PC gaming," she said. Wonwoo looked up at her, stunned that Seungcheol had finally set him up with a girl who shared some of his same interests, and he was already friends with her brother.

Wonwoo was pulled out of his thoughts as his phone rang in his pocket. He looked down at his pants and pulled his phone out of his pocket. Your name and contact photo were displayed on his screen; seeing this made his smile drop slightly. He clicked the side button, silencing the call, before looking up at the girl he was on a date with. "Sorry about that; I thought I put my phone on silent," he said as he placed it back into his pocket.

"It's no problem; if it's important, you can step out and answer it; I won't be upset," Hannah said, gesturing to the window that the two were sitting by. Wonwoo shook his head.

"It wasn't, and besides, it'd be rude to answer a call on our first date," he said.

"And you're considerate? Well damn, I might ask you to marry me right here," she laughed. She stood up after a moment, and in that moment, Wonwoo half expected her to get down on one knee and ask her to marry him. Instead, she grabbed her coffee with one hand and his hand with the other, pulling him up from his seat. "Wanna go on a walk?" She asked, swaying their hands back and forth.

"Are you gonna murder me?" Wonwoo asked, grabbing his coffee from the table.

"I might," she winked, sipping her cappuccino once more.

"At least you're honest," Wonwoo chuckled. His phone began to ring again once they left the building. He looked at it and canceled the phone call.

"Wonwoo, if you need to answer that, I don't mind," Hannah reassured as they began walking along the pathway.

"I don't, I promise." He said.

The walk was nice, and Wonwoo and Hannah seemed to be getting along a lot better than he would have ever imagined. It didn't take long for it to start raining. May's weather was never consistent, which seemed to be the only consistent thing in Wonwoo's life. Inconsistency. Wonwoo had given Hannah his sweater as they walked back to their cars; only when Hannah safely got into her car and pulled out of the parking lot did he leave.

He looked at his phone for a moment, seeing that he had five missed calls and ten messages from you, asking for your help. He almost answered the texts, apologizing that he was busy and couldn't get to his phone. Just as he was about to send his text, he sighed, thinking about what his friends had told him only 12 hours ago. Instead of sending the text, he closed his phone and drove home.

⌦(Reader's POV) You groaned angrily when your phone went to voicemail for the second time. Where was he? Why wasn't he answering? Was he still mad? Your head began spinning, even though you couldn't tell if it was because of your impaired state or because Wonwoo was finally giving you a taste of your own medicine. You had ghosted Wonwoo for the better half of your freshman year of college, having found new friends and devoting all of your weekends to partying, so when you finally got ahold of him, he was shocked.

"He works from home; where is he?" You said it angrily, your plethora of messages having been delivered but unread for the better part of two hours. That was what really set you off. He couldn't even give you the respect to apologize.

Against your better judgment, you snatched the keys from your kitchen counter and stumbled out of your apartment, having decided to confront him at his apartment. You've had a few years of practice when it came to driving under the influence, taking back roads, watching the road extra carefully, and driving cautiously, it was easy. Parking your car, you stormed up to his apartment, noting that his car wasn't in the parking lot when you had gotten there.

You called him again.

and again.

Until finally, you gave up on calling him and decided to send him a hundred more text messages.

⌦You: Wonwoo, I need your help... (Delivered: 11:00 a.m.)

⌦12:45 p.m.

⌦You: Wonwoo, why aren't you answering me??? (Delivered: 12:46 p.m.)

⌦12:57 p.m.

⌦You: Hello? Where are you??? (Delivered: 12:58 p.m.)

⌦1:05 p.m.

⌦You: I'm at your place (Delivered: 1:05 p.m.) ⌦You: Hello!!!!! (Delivered: 1:05 p.m.)

Just as you were about to call him again, you saw that all of your delivered messages had been read. You watched as the three dots by Wonwoo's name appeared.

Then disappeared.

Appeared again.

Until they disappeared for a final time.

Your texts to Wonwoo began to be sent one right after the other, sitting with your back against his front door as you drunkenly blew up his phone. Fifteen minutes had passed before you saw a pair of feet standing in front of you. You looked up and saw the man in question.

Angrily, you stood up shoving your phone in his face as you began to speak.

"I've been trying to get ahold of you for two hours now! Where were you?!" You yelled, and Wonwoo gently pushed your phone out of his face. He looked down, unlocking his front door before opening it to let you in. He waited for you to walk inside, quietly apologizing to his elderly neighbor before stepping inside himself.

"I got coffee," he said, setting his keys on the table by his front door and taking his shoes off.

"It took you two hours to get coffee." You asked in disbelief, crossing your arms as your blurred vision did its best to lock onto him.

"You didn't let me finish," he continued. He sat the now-empty to-go cup on his kitchen counter. "I was on a date."

Your heart dropped, and you weren't sure why either. He was only your friend, your shoulder to cry on, and your emergency contact because you knew he would bend over backwards for you.

"Oh," you said.

"Yea."

"You still could have answered after she left," you said. Your anger had softened just a little bit.

"Why? So I can pick your drunk ass up from some stranger's front lawn? It's 2:30, and you're already fucked up." He said, "Your jaw dropped. What was his deal? Why was he being like this?

"What the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you being such a dick all of a sudden?" You asked.

"Because I'm tired of only seeing my best friend when she needs me to be her chauffeur because her other friends left her strung out on God knows what in some stranger's bathroom because she's too drunk to get home." He said. You could see that his words were hurting him just as much as they were hurting you; he wasn't making eye contact with you either. "I can't drop everything to come save you every time you need me; I have a life too," he said. This time his words were soft, almost upset that he'd finally told you how he really felt.

"Fine. I'll leave then." You said this, stepping toward the door only to have the pathway blocked off. "Wonwoo, get out of my way."

"No, I can't let you drive home like this," he said.

"Wonwoo. Get out of my way." You repeated. He didn't move.

"No," He said.

"Now you care about my safety?"

"I've always cared about your safety!"

"Evidently not; evidently it was a burden to you!"

"Do you know why I always dropped everything to come get you?" He snapped.

"To feel better about yourself?" You asked, your words laced with anger. Your eyes began brimming with tears, and your body began to shake. You need to get out of here as soon as possible.

"Because I love you, y/n!" Wonwoo snapped back. He stopped for a second, realizing what he had just said.

"What?" You asked, finally looking up at him.

"I love you.. and it kills me that you're killing yourself like this, but I can't be around you anymore if you're going to continue to hurt yourself. I will always love you, y/n; I hope you know that." He said this, grabbing his keys off the table once more. "Let's go; I'll take you home." You were sure this would be the last time you'd ever hear from him again.

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ladyaj-13 · 1 year

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Sunday Snippet

It's actually Sunday and I've actually written something... it's been so long since I had something to share I've forgotten who may have tagged me in the past, so I'm tagging myself to share this, from my upcoming @zouisfics fest fic Pageant Material.

“Hey, Rhode Island,” Louis quips. He knows the kid is called Mark now, but sue him, he’s got a soft spot for Sandra Bullock. “A few of us are getting together after this. Maine over there, Niall, he’s like a jukebox on the guitar.”

Mark frowns at him incredulously. “The competition starts tomorrow.”

“Yeah...?”

“So I think I’ll get some sleep?” Mark adds, like Louis is some kind of dunce. Jesus, the kid’s worse than Liam was.

“Sure,” he answers easily. “The crack and hookers can really show up on your complexion the next day if you’re not used to it.”

“Louis,” his mum scolds absentmindedly, then shows Lottie another hairstyle on her phone. The girls’ competition starts in a few days, and Lottie just missed out this year, placing third at state level. They’ll be distracted with plans for next year all weekend. Something twinges when he realises that even if Lottie does get to raise that crown, he likely won’t be there to see it, buried under books in a library three states away.

Louis shrugs, directing his attention back to Mark. “Your call, man,” he says. Your loss, he means. But this is the last time, and he’s not exactly sorry that their last year will be just the five of them riding high together again.

I'll tag back @zanniscaramouche @neondiamond @lululawrence @nouies @mercurial-madhouse and anyone else who wants to be tagged :)

#sunday snippet #my fic: pageant material

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turbles · 9 months

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(I posted this on twitter back in early March but since that platform is going down the tubes rn I'm reposting here as well for archival purposes)

Some background here. 6 years ago I took up reading fanfic as a hobby. Very quickly I realized I'd need a way to mark which fics I'd already read or tried to read and dropped, so I wouldn't keep running across the same ones over and over and forgetting I'd already read them. So I started bookmarking EVERYTHING regardless of my actual opinion on it (I'll come back to this)

Anyway eventually I realized that, via the filtering options AO3 provides for your bookmarks, I had a pretty good way to collect pointless data about my reading habits and make some really pointless graphs. So when I reached exactly 2000 bookmarks I decided to do that. as a reward to myself.

data for the original 2000 was collected from whenever I started doing this, through March 6th 2023

Caveat: obviously the possibility of human error in this data is significant. I was never consistent on whether I should bookmark all individual fics in a series or just the series itself if I read the whole thing, for instance, and I've surely forgotten to bookmark plenty of things I did read over the years. this is just for fun though so I'm not sweating it.

thank god for how detailed ao3's tag system is tbh

Anyway here's a pie of all fandoms (with over 50 bookmarks):

For some temporal context of the above, I fucking counted every bookmark from the top 9 categories there and arrayed them by month-bookmarked so I could make this chart of growth rates:

Genshin impact will of course continue to grow because the game continually releases new stuff and characters. Numbers spiked in October coinciding with sumeru's release. we'll see if another spike happens once fontaine releases in a few weeks from now. interestingly to me, I started been playing genshin like 6 months before I started participating in the fandom because it took me that long to get accustomed to the uh.. genshin-ness of the characters and the story, enough to start making inroads towards actually caring about the characters.

looks like FE3H grew the fastest, but it will eventually plateau like yoi, dragon age, and ffxv before it. Still kinda going strong though,since there's just lots of people writing for this fandom, and helped by the fact that it has a really large cast.

This next chart will take a little background info. So to indicate to myself something about the quality of the fic, when bookmarking I would choose to "Rec" it or not. As I said previously, I am literally bookmarking everything I read whether I loved it or hated it or it caused me pain or whatever. My criteria for whether I Rec a fic or not has never been set in stone, but THE IDEA is that recced fics were ones I overall quite liked, felt were well written and would be willing to go back & reread or had something else that made them stand out from the crowd. A recced fic isn't necessarily one I would literally recommend to people to read, and non-recced could mean anything from it was good but had one part that bothered me, to I had just read a bunch of that author's other works and this one was weaker than their others, to it was horrendous and ruined my whole day, to it was just kinda boring.

HOWEVER I did add my own more curated tag, Greatest Hits, for the ones that I really loved, that stuck with me after reading it, that I regularly desire to go back and revisit. While I rarely ever adjust my recs, I have often added (even sometimes removed) the Greatest Hits tag from fics years after first reading them.

Anyway that means this chart could be said to express in a really general way my opinion on the general quality of the writing in a given fandom:

I found it interesting that AA has such a high proportion of recs. I think its overall lower number of total bookmarks works in its favor here, as I tend to dip toes into a new fandom by first looking at top-kudosed fics and then when I find authors I like, trawling their bookmarks for more and branching out that way. So I tend to find pretty good fics earlier in the process. the longer I'm looking through a more stagnated fandom, the less good fics I find, is I guess the logic here. So in the case of AA, I suppose I didn't get much deeper than skimming the cream of the crop before I moved on?

Comparing genshin and fe3h vs. dragon age and ffxv, which all have more similar total bookmarks, was interesting too, to explain why genshin/fe3h's ratio of recs is higher. Both genshin and fe3h have really large casts, and therefore lots of different characters and pairings to read about, so it's almost like each pairing is kind of its own pool of fics that I'm skimming the best ones out of. with DA and FFXV there's really only a couple ships I'm interested in, and their ratios are similar accordingly

because we all know. that the main draw for fanfic tends to be shipping. so here's the top 10 most bookmarked ships pie:

and because genshin and fe3h are sizable enough to warrant a further breakdown of ships for that fandom alone, here's some pies for that:

it makes me laugh that dimiclaude is statistically significant when really I was just trying it out and ultimately decided I really don't even care for that ship

And a growth rate chart for genshin impact ships specifically:

so funny story, as I was playing through the liyue story chapter I was NOT a fan of childe at all, in fact I passed up two of his reruns before reading on the wiki (almost immediately after his 2nd rerun ended) a key piece of his backstory that all of a sudden caused his whole characterization to fall perfectly into place in my mind and he shot up the list to being my top fav character in the game literally over the course of like ten minutes. and yeah that was november 2021 and as you can see that's when I started really reading genshin fics LOL

forecasts have haikaveh and cynonari continuing to trend up for a little while, though the next region and thus a whole new cast releases soon and could stymie those trends. zhongchi is a staple genshin ship and imo a bit more flexible content- and dynamic-wise than many of the other pairings here, so I predict it maintains a regular gentle incline even in the face of shinier newer pairings.

The less stacked roster fandoms don't have as interesting breakdowns, but here they are just for curiosity:

and yeah that's all I made at the time! I only thought of it after but I'll be recording data on Ratings from now on as well. I'd also considered looking at things like average word count on recs or greatest hits fics, but absent of even more highly specific filtering tools that would probably fall under diminishing returns. maybe someday.

This was dumb but very engrossing and fun to make and I learned how to use google sheets out of it so we'll see if that ever comes in useful in my life

#fanfic #ao3 #op

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galacticwildfire · 1 year

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Memories | Bucky Barnes

Eleven

Bucky Barnes x oc

Word count 5.3k

Tags: winter soldier time, sam being a sweetheart, language, violence, blood

A/N; here we go

2014

A year's passed since I met the Avengers, and Steve was right, they are a team. Yet I can't help but find myself wanting to go rogue. Steve said it took him years to feel semi-normal in this society, but I think it's going to take me far longer than that.

Natasha has been a help. I was wary of her at first for a long while, but eventually she earned my trust. She earned it with what she did to bring down the Red Room. We may be decades apart in our training but it seems little changed in that time.

She helped me build a new identity, separate from who I was in the 1940's. Steve's clung to who he was as a guide, but me... looking back is only painful. Becoming someone new is far easier.

And so I trade my 40's clothes for leather and denim, my victory rolls for chopped chin length hair, anything to not recognise the person in the mirror. Yet still I keep the key to the apartment James and I shared close. Still wear our tags around my neck. Unable to truly let go.

It's when we're on a day off, driving through the city she suggests "You should go on a date."

I just laugh. "I'd rather not."

"It would be fun," she tries to convince me. "It doesn't have to be anything serious, it could be just sex."

"I'm from the forties, I don't do casual sex," I tell her, having a particular distast for how that part of society has become. "Unless he shows up at my door with roses to take me dancing and buy me drinks I'm not interested."

"Let me set you up with someone," she says and as I roll my eyes begs "Come on, one date."

Begrudgingly I agree. "Fine, one date if that's what it takes to get you off my back."

It's Friday night, I'm waiting for a text from Natasha to tell me where it is, but as I don't get any message I leave it. Phone and texting, another thing that still feels foreign.

And so I'm on the phone to Steve who for once isn't in apartment next door but out walking, complaining about this date.

"They just don't get it, how dating was back in our day," I say, him being the only one who understands, and so he hears it often. "And I'm not ready. I'm a widow Steve, I can't just jump forward seventy years and pretend I've forgotten an entire life."

"Don't worry, Nat's been on my case too," he assures me. "But I'll admit, I might have had a hand in it."

"Steve you bastard," I groan, ignoring his complaints about my language. "Why?"

"Because you're miserable," he tells me. "I know you'll always love him, I know better than anyone, but I also know that he made me promise to look after you if anything ever happened to him, to make sure you end up with a good man who will as well."

"I don't need a man," I scoff, that attitude at least being somewhat more accepted in today's society. "I need-" I cut myself off, reminding myself not to go there because if I go back down memory lane I'll get stuck there. "I'll go on this date okay, but no promises."

I hang up the phone by going to put it down but remembering I have to press the stupid button and end up just tossing on the couch. It's then the doorbell rings and I stand there confused, having thought Nat would be giving me an address of a restaurant in town.

With my pistol I keep mounted on the back of the door I open it and I'm pleasantly surprised to see who stands there.

"Hi."

Sam Wilson stands there with flowers in hand and smiles "Hey, Steve told me you liked roses."

I could call him an acquaintance through Steve, one I'd never paid too much attention to, but the gesture is something that makes me feel something.

"Thank you," I say, still standing there in surprise as I take the roses. "I didn't expect you to pick me up from here."

"Well when you're set up on a date with a girl from the forties you do things a little differently," he answers and I smile as I sit them on the table just in front of the door. "I hope you're hungry."

He takes me to a classic American diner, where over burgers and fries we finally become acquainted and find we have more in common than I could have ever assumed.

"I'd served two tours, saw what it did to my brothers out there," he tells me, something I know too well. "So when I left the airforce I decided to do something about it, try to help the guys who made it back."

"PTSD," I say slowly, and he nods. "It wasn't a term we had back in the war but we all knew it was something awful. Even the strongest of us weren't the same as we were at the start."

"Neither was I when I left," he says and opens up "I lost someone out there and I wasn't the same after that." I nod, struggling as my mind goes back to that day, he sees the way my fingers fidget uncomfortably behind my drink and says "I'm sorry, if you aren't comfortable talking about all that-"

"No, it's- it's that I understand," I say, having been briefly forced to see a therapist who told me I wouldn't get anywhere unless I could talk about what happened. "I lost someone too, it was just like any other mission, I never thought for a second he wouldn't be coming home."

He nods, and asks "Was it one of the Howling Commando's?"

And I realise he doesn't know, that Steve didn't tell him about James. Steve and Natasha are the only Avengers who know about him, I made sure of that. Because if anyone asked me about him I think I would lose it. I sit back in the booth, looking at this man whose company I enjoy, who I genuinely respect and ask "How much do you know about my past?"

"Not much," he admits to me. "The basic story, Russian spy turned American warhero, supposedly died after Steve got frozen."

"What if I told you it's all bullshit?" He leans forward, listening closely. "I was never a war hero, in fact I was removed from the team right before Steve got frozen in ice. I was raised the same as Natasha in the red room, but my father was an American general, a true war hero. Killed at Pearl Harbor. My mother had sent me to spend summers with him in America so I could perfect my accent and mannerisms to be the perfect spy. It was in Russia I was injected with an experimental version of the serum they eventually used on Steve." I decide to gloss over the torture and conditioning. "I came into the possession of the Americans but they never trusted me."

"Because you were Russian?" he asks and I nod. "So how did you come to work with Steve."

That is a memory that does make me laugh. "We were the only supersoldiers alive and what did they do with us? Stick us in costumes and have us sing songs for the real soldiers. I hated it, despised it. But then there came an opportunity for us. Steve and I went rogue and infiltrated a hydra prison, saving dozens of soldiers. Those men became our closest supporters and Steve insisted I become a Howling Commando with him."

"See, you might be a black widow but you did some good," he tries to assure me and I laugh.

"Red widow actually," I correct, raising my glass. "I was the original."

"Red widow," he repeats back. "It does have a ring to it. Where did the red bit come from? What's the difference?"

"Communist Russia," I reply, my accent slipping out a little. Another thing I've changed this past year. Doing as Natasha does and only speaking with an American accent. "And all the blood."

"Makes sense," he laughs, not realising I'm being serious and admits. "I'll be honest, I was a little surprised when Steve asked if I'd be interested in taking you out."

"Oh, not the right phrase," I return jokingly the moment it starts getting into the romance bit. "In my line of work getting taken out means something else."

"I remember asking him what I could have in common with someone like you," he reveals to me. "It seems war, whether it's 1940 or 2010, it's all the same."

"Yes well, that is the only thing that hasn't changed," I say, and find myself blurting out. "I find it ironic really. The last first date I had was with Steves best friend in 1943, now Steve's new best friend does the same." I raise my drink again, a Russian custom, finding the words coming from my mouth before I can think them through. "I'll admit, I didn't want to come. I'm a 92 year old with enough baggage and trauma that it should scare any man who looks at me away."

I realise then it's the first time I've shown him something real, not just my story recited in the same way it was to the Avengers and the therapists I've refused to see after one session, and yet it doesn't seem to scare him.

"You should come to one of my sessions," he says gently. "I know it doesn't seem like it compares, but a big part of what we do is try to rehabilitate soldiers into a society they don't feel like they belong in anymore."

I look at him, letting my accent slip and hearing it as strong as ever. "What if I never belonged to any in the first place? America never felt like home, more like a dream just out of reach, and Russia... all I knew then was the Red Room."

He asks me "Was there ever a moment or a place you felt at home?"

My head goes quiet, and I find myself home in Brooklyn. The only place that truly felt like home. A place I've refused to visit since the first time after I woke.

"Yes," I confess. "But what if that place only makes me sad?"

Sad. A simple emotion amongst the agony I so desperately try to fight.

He sees the dog tags around my neck, something I haven't been able to bear to take off. It being all I have left of him. He sees the two sets and knows.

"You know, Steve really must be stuck in 1945 if he thinks a date's going to change the fact you're still mourning someone you can't talk about," he tells me, and I could almost sigh from the relief that finally someone isn't forcing me to pretend like I'm not. "You're a gorgeous woman, and if there wasn't that fifty year age gap things might have been a little different." We both laugh, there being no hard feelings, instead something more valuable than a mere date coming out of this. "But you need help Ada. You need support. I know your situation is something no therapist could even begin to comprehend, but if you want to be around soldiers who might have the slightest understanding for what you're feeling, you've got my number."

"Thank you Sam," I say, and for the first time since waking up, I actually feel the slightest hope that something could make me feel better. "I think I'll take you up on that."

Steve calls me two days later, asking me to come with him to the hospital, not needing to explain why.

We sit there beside Peggy's bed. One of the few people still alive. Usually I refuse to come, because seeing the love between them still there after all this time is like twisting the dagger in my chest. But one thing Sam's meeting taught me, was that I can't run from what I feel.

Beside her sits pictures of her family, and she tells us "I have lived a life." She looks directly at me and I see in her everything I could be. She lost Steve, she lost so much, and yet she lived a full life, an extraordinary life. Something I need to see. "This is your second chance Ada, there is life after grief."

"How?" I ask her, genuinely at a loss. "I've tried to forget... but I can't."

"So often I tried to forget," she tells me. "I tried to forget you both but realised holding your memory dear, holding onto the love and friendship we shared, it began to bring comfort rather than pain."

I lower my head wiping away the tears as she reaches for Steves hand and tells us both "The world has changed, and none of us can go back. All we can do is our best. And sometimes that best is to start over."

I watch as she breaks into a coughing fit and Steve brings her water, a reminder that for us, that we'll never truly get the life she has. She was an agent, she helped found Shield, but she wasn't a supersoldier. Neither of us truly know what that serum in our bodies will do to us, if we'll age as she has, if we won't suddenly drop dead at fifty. But for so long during the war, I clung to the idea of a normal life, something I never had. Perhaps I still cling to it. But that life is gone now.

And I don't know what comes now.

I watch as Peggy's eyes widen as they always do, when she forgets us and remembers again. I have to turn my head away to hide the tears as she breathes his name. My only friend in the war, forgetting us and finding us all over again. Her reaction the same every time, tearful awe. I watch Steve fighting tears as he smiles to comfort her whilst I have to leave the room.

Outside I break down in tears, wishing just once I could find him. Wishing just once he could look at me, an old man in a hospital bed, and hold me again. But he's gone.

And that I still cannot bear to accept.

I sit at the back of the room, listening to the stories of the soldiers. People who fought for what they believed in and lost. People who feel betrayed by their government. People who don't know what home feels like anymore. People like me.

It's my third meeting with Sam, still I haven't brought myself to talk in it, but he assures me just coming is more than enough. Yet I'm surprised when I catch Steve lingering in the doorway, listening in. Us both in need of guidance.

When it ends I help Sam clean up his pamphlets and papers, and Steve comes over.

"I caught the last few minutes, it's pretty intense."

"Yeah brother, we all got the same problems," Sam says. "Guilt. Regret."

I'm quiet as Steve asks "You lose someone?"

"My wingman," Sam answers and I look at Steve. "Riley. Flying a night mission, standard rescue op. Nothing we hadn't done a thousand times before. Til an RPG knocked Riley's dumb ass out of the sky." He shrugs. "Nothing I could do. It's like I was up there just to watch."

And there we both are again on that fucking train, Steve the only thing holding my back from jumping off after him as I screamed bloody murder, having never felt so helpless in my life as I watched the man I love fall to what I thought was his death.

Yet all Steve says is "I'm sorry."

"After that I had a really hard time finding a reason being over there you know?"

Steve asks "Are you happy now? Back in the world."

"Hey, the amount of people giving me orders is down to about zero," Sam says, and I can't help but smile at that. "So hell yeah. Are you thinking about getting out?"

"I don't know," Steve admits, a question I've been asking myself. "I wouldn't know what to do with myself if you did."

"You could do whatever you wanted to do," Sam says, the same words he's spoken to me and asks the question I still can't answer "What makes you happy?"

He has the same answer as I do "I don't know."

Sam and I are at his place after the meeting, I sit on the couch as he decides which film he'll culture me with next.

"Come on, you've got to watch Star Wars."

"I fought the Nazi's I don't need to watch space wizards fight space Nazi's," I laugh as he flops down on the couch beside me. "In fact I don't think I want to watch anything with fighting at all." He watches me as I sit there, feeling the weight on my chest lighten at one thought. "I don't think I want to fight anymore Sam. I want out."

For this past year I clung to who I was, the supersoldier, the red widow. But everything now seems to be drawing me to one conclusion.

"You want out?"

"I don't want to kill anymore," I confess to him, my hands having been stained with blood since I was a child. "I'm tired of bloodshed, of fighting. I just want to go home."

Except I don't know where that is and Sam tells me "I went to the Smithsonian." He looks at the tags I wear and says quietly "There was only one in your squadron that died in action." He sees the tears well in my eyes. "I'm sorry Ada."

Teas wet my cheeks as I smile, trying to hold the memory close without wanting to die. "We would always tell each other when the war ended we could go live in his apartment in Brooklyn, and have a normal life. Something I'd never had. I'd never admit it, but it was all I ever wanted. It's still what I want."

I reach over to take his hand, looking at him, remembering what James wanted for me. For a good man to take care of me. To give me a normal life.

I have one in front of me, and yet he lets go of my hand.

"I'll never be that guy in Brooklyn," he tells me, voice gentle. "I could be me, but I know that's not what you want."

I blink away tears, knowing it's true. "That guy from Brooklyn he-" I hold the tags around my neck, telling him something only Nat and Steve know. "He was my husband."

He leans forward, and the look in his eyes is one no one's ever given me, sympathy. "You were married?"

"For less than a month before I lost him," I tell Sam. "We eloped the day after Christmas at the court house in Brooklyn. Then by the end of January he was gone, and Steve followed a few weeks after."

"I'm so sorry," he tells me, and asks something no one else has "What was he like?"

I smile through the agony. "His mind was damaged from Hydra, just like mine was, but he never let it show. He was a true soldier and a gentleman when he wanted to be." I remember those nights when he was both a gentleman and something far more crude, but he always knew which I liked. "I was a woman in world war II, I had to fight for every bit of respect. I remember when they sent us over to Europe to fight, they put me in the most ridiculous fucking skimpy red white and blue outfit. I was told either I wear that or I don't go. But he came back with one of his own uniforms for me and stood up to the colonel when he ripped us apart for it." I look at the tags I wear, running my thumb over his engraved name. "He always respected me right from the start, he knew what I was and what I'd done, but somehow he saw the best in me, right until the end. He gave me hope, hope that we would have a normal life once the war was over. Something I'd never had."

"And that's still something you can have," he promises me. "But just not how you imaged it."

I look at Sam, Peggy's words on my mind.

"I can't go back," I say, and confess to him. "But I don't know how to move forward."

He nods and says "I can help you with that if you'll let me."

I nod back and he leans over, pressing a kiss to my forehead, his touch gentle. He brings his hand to my cheek and experimentally I lean forward and press my lips to his. It's soft, brief, confusing. But it's enough to give me hope that there is something after this pain.

That night when I return to the apartment complex I find Steve chatting with Kate, the lady down the hall and immediately he seems interested to see me coming back late, following me inside my apartment as he interrogates me over Sam. "You two seem to be hitting it off."

"We went on one date that ended with him recommending me come to his therapy group," I laugh and try dismiss. "We're friends. Good friends." We might have kissed but that was all, one movie later and I came home before anything else could happen. "We- I don't know, we have an understanding. I like the way his head works."

"And what does that mean?"

"That he's the only person I know who's trying to sort their shit out," I retort and confront Steve. "He lost his wingman too, I think you could benefit from actually talking to him."

"About what?" he asks, being defensive.

"James," I breathe, the name neither of us dare mention to one another. "Bucky. My husband and your best friend."

He just shakes his head. "One day maybe."

"I thought you were supposed to be the one with your shit together not me," I say, pouring myself a whisky. "You've been here longer than I have, but you're just as lost as I am. You aren't giving me much hope."

"I wasn't aware that was my job," he begins but we're cut off by a groan. Immediately I pull the pistol off the back of the door and it's then we see him in the darkness.

"I thought you two were meant to be the best, I could have killed you both five times over by now," Fury says and Steve switches the light on, only for us to gape in horror at the sight of him.

"Fuck Fury!" I gasp out and run forward, Steve locking the door behind us. "What the fuck happened?"

He raises a finger to his lips and says "My wife kicked me out."

Immediately I run along with it. "I didn't know you were married."

"Most people don't know you were either," he replies and shows me a message typed on his phone.

EARS EVERYWHERE.

Steve and I look at each other, neither of us having expected this tonight.

"I'm sorry to do this to you, but I had nowhere else to crash."

He shows us another message.

SHIELD COMPROMISED.

Fuck.

"Married life is tough," I say, making conversation as Steve looks around the room for bugs. "I know I kept mine secret too. Who else knows about your wife?"

"Just my friends," he answers, getting to his feet with some struggle and showing us on his phone.

JUST YOU AND ME.

"Friends?" Steve asks. "Is that what we are?"

"That's up to you," he answers and I give Steve a nod just as an explosion rings out and Fury's thrown back into the wall, the shot barely missing his head as he collapses to the ground and I jump down, taking cover as Steve drags Fury out of the line of fire.

As he's struggling for breath on the floor he passes a drive into my hand and gasps out "Don't. Trust. Anyone."

The door's kicked open and I hear the voice of the woman who lives down the hall. "Agent Morgan? Captain Rogers?"

I look to see her walking in with a pistol and pull mine on her, only for her to tell us "I'm Agent 13 of Shield Special Service. I was assigned to protect you."

Steve's immediately partial the pretty woman, but I'm more inclined to shoot her dead here and now to save us a problem down the line.

"On who's order?" Steve demands to know as I trail her, but relax at the look of shock on her face as she stumbles upon Fury.

"His."

She checks his pulse and brings out a transceiver. "Foxtrot is down, he's unresponsive, I need EMTs." Steve stands there in a state of shot whilst my eyes move on the blood on the floor, and then back to the window the sniper shot at him through and spot movement.

"Do we have a twenty on the shooter?"

"You're about to," I reply and get to my feet running with pistol in hand, Steve following. He may be stronger but I'm faster as I leap from the window, crashing into the window across the street, the floor above where the shooter was spotted. Steve takes the floor below, the sound of glass shattering and things breaking following him while I move silently above until I crash through the glass to the building below where I catch the shooter below, firing blindly only to hear the bullets ricochet and it's then in the darkness, illuminated just enough, I see it.

I see the metal arm and just like that I'm frozen in place, frozen in a state of utter disbelief at the sight, as if this is some terrible coincidence until he looks back at me. But I could never forget the way he holds himself, could never forget him.

"No," I whisper as I catch his eye, face smeared with black but his eyes as blue as ever. "James."

But just as his name leaves my mouth Steve comes crashing down and I look away for just a moment to see him land beside me and when I look back he's gone. Without a trace.

"Did you see him?" Steve asks me and I open my mouth, struggling to find the words. "Did you see the shooter?"

I find myself shaking my head, unable to speak, unable to think, just drowning in the impossibility of what I just saw.

As Steve looks for any sign of where he could have gone I bring my trembling hand into my backpocket, pulling my phone out to call Nat.

He told us trust no one. But she's not no one.

"Nat," I whisper, my voice so shaken I don't recognise it. "It's Fury."

Steve stands outside the operating room watching, whilst I sit curled up in a ball on the bathroom floor, unable to breathe, unable to talk. A trembling wreck like I've never been before. Coming back to one explanation. The only one that makes sense.

Sam taught me people with PTSD can see things that aren't there, can confuse someone in the street for someone they know, can lose their grip on reality. It's the only thing that makes sense. He's dead. He was there when the building collapsed. A collapse heavy enough it kept me underground for seventy years. Seventy years. He's dead and gone. He has to be.

Steve didn't see him, he was gone in an instant. Perhaps there wasn't even anyone there. Perhaps this is it? Perhaps I'm finally starting to lose it.

The sound of the door opening has me jumping out of my skin, only to see Nat standing over me pale faced, having never seen me like this before.

"Oh my god," she says bending down and helping me to my fight. "Are you hurt?"

"I'm going fucking crazy," I breathe as she grips my hands tight. "I'm fucking losing it."

"Well you can't afford to do that, not now," she says, panicked. "Fury is down and Shield is compromised."

"I saw a man," I tell her, needing to get it off my chest before I scream. "He was fast- too fast and too strong. He shot fury. I chased him I- he had a metal arm." All I can feel is the metal grip around my throat even now after all these years and watch her face change. "Then he just disappeared, I don't even know if it was real." She takes me into her arms, strangely silent as I beg her "Don't tell Steve."

I never told Steve the details, I never told him about the metal arm- about how he tried to kill me. I could never bring myself to tell him the truth about how they made him the Winter Soldier, and I can't now.

Come morning we stand over Fury's body, feeling a shared doom that we're alone in this now. It's the first time I've ever seen tears in Nat's eyes.

I follow her as she leaves the room and she turns on me, asking "Why was he in your apartment?"

"I don't know," I tell her honestly as one of Shield's Strikeforce agents interrupts.

"Captain, they want you back at Shield head quarters."

"Yeah give me a second."

"They want you now," he insists, persistent, and again Fury's warning is at the forefront of my mind as he leaves us there, with more questions than answers.

Steve and I are called in for questioning by Pierce. Steve being the responsive one whilst I'm utterly silent. Listening to his story about how Nick saved his daughters life by disobeying orders. It's a classic interrogation tactic. Sharing personal information to subconsciously provoke the other person into sharing as well. Something I hope Steve hasn't fallen for as we're asked the big question.

"Why was Fury in Agent Morgans apartment last night? Seeing as you're neighbours I say he intended on both of you finding him."

Steve shakes his head like a good boy as he answers "I don't know."

Pierce looks to me "Agent?" I just shrug my shoulders and he asks a deeper question "Did you know it was bugged?"

I watch him carefully, not trusting him one bit. "I've been a national security risk since the 1930's, I'd be an idiot if I didn't assume it was."

Not the answer he wanted.

"Did Nick Fury tell you he was the one who bugged it?" he asks me, hoping to elicit a reaction but I just laugh.

"Who else would have?" I ask him, not feeling betrayal at the thought. "He's dealt with me since they brought me back to America, I've threatened violence on more occasions than I can remember. I always assumed Shield was keeping tabs on me, Nick by extension, he'd be an idiot not to."

Still unhappy with how this interrogation is going he plays a video of a known criminal we've dealt with, and Steve asks "Is he a suspect?"

One look at him and I know it's not him, but I keep my mouth shut, listening to his theories of classified intel trading going sour being the reason for Nick's death, but I don't believe a word out of his mouth.

Neither does Steve.

"If you really knew Nick Fury you'd know that's not true."

Pierce nods. "Why do you think we're talking?"

That's when I speak up. "Romanoff and Hill should be here. They were Nick's most trusted agents."

"They aren't who I wanted to speak to," he replies and goes on "You see, I took a seat on the council not because I wanted to but because Nick asked me to. Because we were both realists. We knew that despite all the handshaking and the diplomacy and the rhetoric, to build a better world means sometimes having to tear the old one down."

My blood runs absolutely cold and there's venom in my voice as I stand from where I've been sitting behind a desk, Steve looking at me in alarm. "I once knew a man who thought the same." I step around from behind the desk to where this pretentious fucker stands lecturing us. "By today's estimates he was responsible for the deaths of over twenty million innocent people." It's then Pierce truly pays attention to me. "I was responsible for personally carrying out three hundred and thirteen of those deaths from 1938 to 1944. Stalin believed that by destroying the old Russia he was building something truly great with the Soviet Union."

"He was a misguided and evil man by all accounts," Pierce says, realising for the first time he is standing in a room with the NKVD's greatest assassin. "We are not the Soviet Union."

"Still, after dining with Stalin and being the blade of the NKVD, I have learned not to trust old pretentious fucks who think by destroying people's lives they're creating a better world."

"Ada," Steve warns at my language, but Pierce brushes him off.

"It is a free country, we are all entitled to our beliefs," he says and tells me "Revolutionaries often make enemies. People who call you dirty because you have the guts to stick your hands in the mud and try to build something better. And the idea that those people could be happy today, makes me really really angry."

"Then you better suck it up."

I've looked into the eyes of enough men like him to see what others don't, and his voice turns accusatory. "Agent, you and the Captain were the last people to see Nick Fury alive. I don't think that's an accident, and I don't think you do either."

"Nothing is ever an accident."

"Good, we have an understanding," he says, his voice turning serious. "So I'm going to ask again, why was he there?"

"Like most powerful men he was paranoid, just like you," I tell him, able to read him to filth. "He didn't trust anyone, told us not to either."

He doesn't like how easily I see through him, he doesn't like me. "I wonder if that included him."

"I'm sorry." Steve speaks up, voice final. "Those were his last words. Excuse us."

But as we go to leave Pierce speaks up "Adelina Viktoria Alekseeva." The first I've heard that name spoken since I first woke. "The Red Widow. Don't assume Shield and its agents don't know what you've done. I'd advise you to check yourself before you lecture anyone on their moral standings."

Slowly I turn back to him, feeling Steve bracing himself for a fight, but I only give a warning "If you know anything, you should know the American Government was terrified of me then, and they should be now. Including you."

"Someone murdered my friend and I'm going to find out why," he warns us. "If anyone gets in my way they're going to regret it."

I just laugh, a man like him threatening people like us. "I've killed enough people to know whatever power you think you have does not matter when you bleed the same as everyone else."

With that we leave, Steve and I walking with haste to get out of the building, knowing by now Fury was betrayed and we're next.

"Are you armed?" he asks me as we enter an elevator.

"Of course I am."

We both wear our suits, he may be in stars and stripes but I am in black and red, daggers concealed alongside the pistols at my hip.

But before the elevator can go down we're stopped by the head of the strike force, Rumlow. He pushes the doors open and steps inside, followed by his men.

He greets us and tells us "Evidence response found some fibres on the roof they want us to see, you want me to get the tact team ready?"

"No let's wait and see what it is first," Steve replies and we share a look as we analyse the situation, trapped in a room with armed men after Fury has been betrayed.

The elevator opens again and a group of desk agents enter with their briefcases, leaving the space too crowded for my liking. Agents all seeming terrified.

"I'm sorry about what happened with Fury," Rumlow says. "It's messed up what happened to him."

"Thank you," Steve says and I dare to ask

"What did ballistics find from the scene?"

"Slugs. Untraceable. Soviet origin."

My blood runs cold at those words. Soviet.

It's then as I stand there in a room of people I do not trust I realise I'm not fucking crazy.

But I might just go mad from what this means.

Security guards enter the elevator as the office people leave and I feel my heart racing, slowly starting to hyperventilate and stretch my fingertips to reach into the pocket of my leggings, feeling the handle of a blade.

It's then Steve gives the signal "Before we get started, does anyone want to get out?"

I'm the one who draws blood first as they bring out the tasers and restraints to bring us in. Steve has never been one to spill blood unless it was absolutely necessary, but it's second nature to me. Whilst I take out the rest of the agents Steve deals with Pierce, by the time he throws the bastard into the roof the elevator is splattered with blood, as am I.

Steve stares at me in horror. In combat and on missions his rule was always to disarm and leave them unconscious. But something in me's snapped. It snapped last night on the rooftop.

I could be fucking crazy, or something far worse could be afoot, but I don't care anymore. This is what I am. The Red Widow. I said no more bloodshed, but I should have known better than that.

"Ada-"

I slam my hand down on the button to open the elevator door, only to find a dozen men with rifles drawn on us.

"Hands in the air!"

Steve doesn't waste a moment using his shield to sever the lines holding the elevator up and we go crashing down until we jolt to a stop, but hear the men on the other side of the door.

"Give it up Morgan!" they yell out. "Surrender with your hands up."

We look out the glass elevator to the glass building below, but it's the only way out, and so he grabs me as we throw ourselves through the glass, the shield breaking the floor as we crash through the glass roof into the building below onto the ground floor of shield headquarters. They gape at us in horror, covered in blood and glass as we get to our feet running, knowing it's our lives at stake and escape on motorbike before they can lock down the bridge, only to send one of their armed helecarrier's after us.

"Stand down!" it orders, lowering its automatic weapons at us. I keep on the ground to cover him from fire as Steve uses his shield to knock out their engines and bring the craft down.

And just like that, we're America's number one fugitives.

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