#again i want to stress that these are really coming from my own experiences and are what have shaped my own understanding of what i want so | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

moon-rivr · 5 months

Note

crazy scientist!miguel smut and you’re his experiment 👀

(i mixed the request with ‘stressed out miguel accidentally overdosed himself with the spider injection thing and calls for spider readers help.’ so i hope you both don’t mind :p)

greatest accomplishment

pairing: miguel o’hara x spider!fem reader

contents: substance abuse (?), smut, oral (f and m receiving), face fucking, unprotected p in v, ice play, mirror sex, spanking, biting, web bondage, male masturbation, fingering (sorry if i missed anything 🫣)

author’s note: thank you for being so patient, i hope you enjoy <33

word count: 3.9K+

You were what Miguel considered his greatest achievement and his greatest failure. during his time at Alchemax, he'd worked on several human trials with few of them showing any signs of success. At most, he managed to regenerate lost limbs but the achievement still felt little to what he believed he could do. that was, until you showed up at Alchemax with glossy eyes and anticipation.

You had been used as a weapon in private government affairs until eventually the operation shut down. While everybody involved had some kind of direction in their life, you didn't know that anything existed beyond fighting or living to serve the purpose of someone else. You'd signed up for the human trials that Alchemax was offering, being aware of all the stakes at hand, in hopes of being able to lead a normal life.

"So, you basically have spider-like abilities that are in the control of someone else and you want me to change your DNA?" Miguel asked, pushing his glasses back up as he looked up at you from the clipboard. "Well, I know that ai can't really get rid of the powers, but I was hoping that maybe you could help make them my own. because even as we're sitting here, I still feel that urge to need to protect," you responded, hoping that he'd be a little sympathetic towards your situation.

While Miguel didn't feel anything towards your situation, he did feel a thrill of doing something more than regenerating lost limbs. He didn't feel the slightest bit of guilt towards using you to fulfill his personal desires. "Alright, well I can't really promise that the operation's going to be successful. Are you okay with those odds?" He inquired before the two of you got started, calling in a nurse to take your vitals and do your blood work. "Sounds good."

The operation had gone successfully, much to Miguel’s disbelief and he felt that thrill rushing towards him again. The excitement of being a geneticist once more. You enveloped your arms around him, your superhuman strength threatening to pop his eyes out of the sockets.

"Thank you," you whispered, though you felt the words couldn't convey how grateful you were at the opportunity Miguel had given you. He tapped on your arm, forcing you to let him go before he fixed up his jacket. "Thank you," he muttered after you left, completely fascinated as he looked through your file.

A couple of years had passed when you got a phone call from a strange number, excitement coursing through your veins as you answered. Though you'd had the desire to live out a civilian life, a part of you would always long for being able to use your abilities. "Hello?" You asked, hearing someone's breath on the other side. "It's Miguel, I'm not too sure if you remember me. Can you meet me at my place? I'll send you the details," he spoke quickly before he hung up, leaving you confused as you looked down at your phone.

You opened the door to miguel's penthouse, noticing that the curtains were all pulled to darken up the room. You sat down on the couch, deciding to wait for him to come out to talk. "Would you like a glass of water?" A yellow hued hologram woman appeared in front of you, pushing her heart shaped glasses up her nose. "No, but thank you," you responded, watching her as she faded away. You looked up when Miguel came into view, sweatpants hanging low on his waist.

"Sorry, I know you wanted to escape fighting when you came to see me last time but I'm starting up this society for spider people," he spoke up, sitting on the couch next to you. "Spider people? Does that include you?" You inquired, looking over at him as you noticed how much he changed throughout the years. He'd bulked up immensely, his biceps almost the size of your head and his eyes almost had a red hue to it. "It does, but that's not the point here. I'm asking if you want to help me," he responded, keeping eye contact with you.

You'd felt immensely grateful towards Miguel for allowing you to take control of your life once more so you'd agreed on joining him. Despite the fact that Miguel seemed to easily irritated, he helped you out in using your abilities for good this time around. While you were skilled at harnessing your abilities, you'd only used them to inflict pain on others. He helped you establish a good workout routine without pushing you too hard past your limitations.

The days had started to blend together for Miguel, losing all concept of time. Anomaly reports hadn't stopped coming in and spiders were currently working on overtime to be able to control the damage. His eyes were bloodshot as he looked at the monitors, dark circles under his eyes with only coffee to fuel his body. He grabbed his mug from the table, filling it up with some coffee he'd made three days ago? Maybe four. The cold coffee provided no taste as he sipped it, but it did provide him with the caffeine rush he needed.

His eyes drifted over to the collection of empty vials he had on the corner of his desk, having used most of the drug he'd created throughout this week. He deactivated the shoulder part of his suit, the green liquid providing him with the strength that he needed to continue staying up. His eyes strained as he returned his attention back to the monitor, the brightness hurting his dry eyes.

As the anomaly reports started to die down, he overheard through some of the speakers at the society about what the spiders were planning to do after work. He turned on the cameras, instantly spotting you talking to one of the spider-women and decided to listen in on the conversation. He felt his right eye start to twitch and his fist clench up as he heard you mention going out on a date tonight, immediately turning off the camera.

He grabbed the monitor like he wanted to crucify it for your actions, tossing it on the ground as he stomped on it. "You know, half our budget goes to replacing shit you break. Soon enough, we'll just be working with broken computers," LYLA spoke up, appearing in front of him as she folded her arms. "Like we'll ever go bankrupt," he mumbled, picking up the scraps of the monitor. "What's got you all pissed off now?"

Miguel ignored LYLA, eyeing the last bit of the serum that he had left. He was starting to feel his body want to submit to humanly desires such as sleeping and eating, but he genuinely believed that he didn't have any time to spare towards those things. He grabbed the last vial and headed toward the chemical lab at HQ, looking over what he could mix it with. He wanted to make the mixture more potent, something that would keep him up and keep him strong for a long time.

He mixed a couple of chemicals that looked like they would work, the mixture turning a bright purple. Normally, he would've been more cautious about mixing things he wasn't sure of but he felt like a junkie desperate to have his next fix. He deactivated the shoulder part of his suit once more, injecting himself with the strange liquid. He was expecting to feel that instant bit of relief like he did with the original serum, but he didn't feel like it did anything. Miguel let out a loud scream, pissed off at himself for messing up the mixture so much that it didn't have any effect.

A couple minutes later passed by when he felt sweat dribbling on his forehead though the temperature in the room had seemed to drop a couple degrees. He gripped the corner of the table as he coughed, his body rejecting the modified version of the serum. His head began pounding and suddenly, everything was too bright and everything was too loud. He hastily opened up a portal to his house, unwilling to stay at HQ where anybody would just come in and find him in that state.

He laid down on the ground as he stepped out of the portal, bile building up in the back of his throat. He brought his hand closer to his face, the limb feeling like deadweight as he scrolled through his watch. He texted you to meet him at his house urgently, his text morphing into one word. He knew that you were out on your date even in his drug-infused state, but he wanted you to pick him instead of your stupid date. He told himself that allowing you to work on the antidote would provide you with experience your college wouldn't give you, but he just wanted your company.

Miguel’s lids were starting to shut when you arrived at his house and you shook him awake, helping him up to his feet. "Stay awake for me, please," you spoke softly, seeing the pained expression on his face as you helped him to the couch. He pointed to a couple empty flasks with labels on them and you rushed to get them so you'd have an idea of what you needed for the antidote. "I'll lead you the lab," his speech slurred as he talked and you had to offer him some kind of support as you walked with him.

"What are you doing here, anyways? Thought you had a date," he mumbled, his brows furrowed as he unlocked the door. "He didn't show up," you simply said, walking with him inside as you looked over at the multiple shelves filled with chemicals. Truth was, you'd cancelled on the date because you didn't think it would make you happy. You weren't sure when, but in the midst of all the gratitude you felt towards Miguel, you'd started to catch some feelings for him. He was easy to like despite his attitude, he was protective of those he cared about and would do anything for them.

"You could've called one of the more experienced spiders for this, so why'd you call me?" You inquired as you read over the labels on the flasks. "I wanted you to be here. Plus, i figured you'd get some hands on experience," he responded, his speech still coming up garbled. You mixed up a concoction of chemicals, whispering a silent prayer that it would work as the colors began to blend together.

You injected the drug into miguel's shoulder, still exposed from the last batch he'd taken as you watched intently for any more adverse reactions. You watched as his body slumped with relief, the color returning back to his face as his eyes opened. "Thank you," he muttered, standing up from his chair. You nodded, picking up your jacket as you got ready to leave. "Don't go yet, I still have some ways to express my gratitude towards you."

You were unsure of what he meant by that but when you turned around, his lips were already on yours. "Tell me you don't want this and I'll drop it. We can go back to just being coworkers," he mumbled, pulling back slightly to give you enough space to leave if you wanted to. You stayed in your place, wrapping your arms around his neck as you returned the hasty kisses he was giving you. His lips enveloped yours in a thirsty way, almost like he needed this to live. It morphed into a clash of teeth and tongue as he explored every inch of your mouth, letting out a soft moan at the taste.

He picked you up, placing you on one the lab tables before restricting all movement with his webs. Though he knew that you could easily break through them, he found himself needing to be in control of the situation. He glanced over at the mini-fridge in the corner of the room, getting a bucket of ice before placing it to the side. His talons unsheathed and in one swift motion, he'd ripped the dress you were wearing in half. The tattered pieces scattered to the ground, leaving you in just your lingerie at his mercy.

He held one of the ice cubes between his front teeth, dragging it across your skin as he made his way down from your neck. He loved seeing the way your body fidgeted under the cold substance, his tongue lapping up the small water droplets. Your nipples hardened as he rubbed the ice cube on them, his tongue swirling against your areola. You whined at him to keep going but he pulled back, stopping his movements. You were nervous that you'd scared him off but he tore your panties off, shoving them in your mouth.

"Don't think for a second that this is for you. It's all for me, understood?" He told you, his hand resting on your thigh as he spoke. You nodded rapidly, arousal leaking to the lab table as you waited for his next movements. He brought the ice cube back to your breasts, the difference in temperature between his tongue and ice cube having you shiver. When the cube melted, he picked up another one and dragged it across to your pussy, swirling the cube on your clit. Your hips bucked up to get more of the sensation but your body couldn't help but want to squirm away at how good it felt.

The ice cube melted, the water droplets combining with your slick as it made a mess on the table. His tongue began to collect the slick on your folds, his eyes intently on yours. The small muffled whimpers that you were letting out spurred him to keep going, his tongue thrusting inside your pussy while your walls clenched around it. He let out a small moan as you released more slick, the taste of you threatening to take him over the edge. His fingers took place instead of his mouth as he kissed on your thigh, sucking on the skin to leave his mark behind.

You let out a muffled yelp as he bit down, the sting from his fangs overwhelming your senses. You couldn't help the arousal that leaked out of you at the sensation, the pain mixing in with the pleasure of having his fingers stretching you out. He moved his fingers in a scissoring action to stretch out your walls, his mouth still kissing your thigh. You heard some moaning coming from Miguel, looking down to see that his hand was tightly wrapped around his cock while precum leaked onto his palm.

Just the fact that he found getting you off as a turn on made your mind grow hazy, your toes curling as his mouth circled over your clit. His tongue swirled against it, his fingers curled up to hit your g-spot. He let out another moan, the vibration hitting your clit directly and you couldn't help but clench around him even more. His fingers were hardly moving with how hard you were gripping them, arousal coating them knuckle deep as his teeth gently pulled on your clit.

He looked up at you, desperation evident in his eyes despite the dominant presence he was putting on and your orgasm approached you quickly. You moaned into the cloth, the sound coming out muffled as your release coated his fingers completely. He took them out, his mouth closing around his fingers while he sucked them off. You looked down at his cock, the tip angry red as it dripped precum onto the glass floor of the lab.

Your head was tilted to the side, immediately at eye level with his cock while he reached down to take out the makeshift gag. You opened up your mouth, the tip of his cock inside of your mouth as you swirled your tongue around it. You collected the precum leaking out as he began to thrust his hips, using your mouth at his disposal. "Who would've known you liked to be treated like such a slut? Pinche puta," he spoke, his voice coming out with a small groan as your eyes watered when he pushed further inside of you.

Your cheeks hollowed as you tried to take the length and girth of his cock but you felt tears forming at your waterline from the intrusion. His hips snapped forward, the tip of his cock hitting the back of your throat and you couldn't help but gag as your nose hit his pubic bone. "You're all good, don't worry. You're taking it so well. Esa boquita esta haciendo tan buen trabajo," he mumbled, feeling your tongue running down the sides of his cock. (that mouth is doing such a good job)

Your tongue traced the two veins running down the side of his cock, a small shiver running through Miguel’s body as he felt the sensations hitting him all at once. He grabbed the back of your head, thrusting into your mouth repeatedly as he took out the amounts of stress that had piling up out. The tip of his cock kept hitting the back of your throat repeatedly, your tongue brushing up against it with every thrust. You felt his cock twitch in your mouth, a clear sign that his orgasm was approaching him rather quickly. The salty substance went down your throat in his final thrust, his eyes locked directly on yours as his chest heaved.

His talons worked on releasing you from the webs but before you had the chance to move, he picked you up and led you to the bathroom. You were bent over the counter, his cock slightly pressing up against your folds before he pushed it in one swift thrust. Your walls clenched up against his cock instinctively and he took a couple seconds to let himself bask in the feeling of you before he started moving.

He pressed your face against the mirror as he forced you to look at yourself while his cock stretched out your cunt, your knuckles turning ghost white from how hard you were gripping the counter. Your breath fogged up the mirror as he kept pushing inside of you, his cock reaching places that no one had ever had. His hands came to rest on your hips as he eased you in and out before one of them squeezed your ass. You yelped as you felt his hand strike your ass, the pain morphing into pleasure as he rubbed at the reddening skin.

You stood on your tippy toes as you tried to remain upright, your hands coming to grip his arms. "Look at what he's missing out on, then again, I don't think he could please you the same way I do," he murmured against your skin, bringing you up right as his mouth closed around the sensitive skin on your neck. He bit down, not hard enough for his fangs to release any of the venom but just hard enough to protrude your skin a bit. Your nails started digging into his skin as you felt him shift the angle a bit, his cock hitting you in all the right places.

One of his hands was on your breasts, tugging at the nipple as the other one played with your clit. He kept his gaze with you on the mirror, enjoying the way you squirmed underneath him and the way you couldn't keep eye contact for too long. Your pussy was gushing around his cock, allowing him to focus on giving you an angle that would provide pleasure, that would make you cum all over him. His fingers on your clit and as his mouth bit down on your shoulder, and you couldn't help the orgasm that washed out of you.

Your release formed a creamy ring at the base of his cock as he pushed deep into you, his thrusts becoming more sporadic and his moans becoming incoherent babbles. "Taking me so good, mami," he murmured, whispering other sweet nothings about how good your cunt was to him. He pulled out of you just in time, his cum dropping on the globes of your ass. He reached over, grabbing a piece of toilet paper to clean you off.

As he pulled his cock out of you, he couldn't help but look at you with a concerned expression. "I didn't hurt you too bad, did I?" He asked, taking note of your tear-stained cheeks and the bite marks all over you. "No, no. Don't worry about it," you responded, shooing him away so you could do your business. Truth be told, you'd never experimented having rough sex before but the idea of someone having an animalistic-like need towards you always enticed you.

You finished up in the bathroom, expecting to find Miguel ready for round two but he'd left the lab. You cleaned your slick off the table with a piece of toilet paper before heading up to the bedroom to check up on him. You opened the door, hearing his snores pouring over from the bed. His exhaustion had finally caught up to him and he had relaxed enough that sleep came easy to him. You left his house after getting dressed, not thinking too much about the encounter with him.

The day that you showed up at the office, you heard rumors circulating around that Miguel was more approachable to others. Though the marks he'd left on your skin had faded away due to your healing powers, the mark he left on you still lingered. You figured that he'd just used you for some stress relief so you didn't pursue anything with him. You walked to your desk, finding a cup of coffee with a note from Miguel sitting there but you refused to let yourself think about it too much.

A couple of days passed by and miguel continued to leave coffee cups before you showed up at work, leaving them with small notes. You figured he was thankful for the antidote so you pushed away the thoughts that made you a bit delusional, focusing on your work. You couldn't help but notice that even though he'd been more gentle with you, he'd gone back to his stoic personality with everyone else.

"If you didn't have any feelings for me, you could've just said so instead of ghosting me," he finally approached you one day, staring down at you coldly. "Excuse me?" You inquired, your brows contorted into an expression of confusion. "I thought that it was obvious that I liked you," he muttered and your eyes widened a bit. "No, I thought you were just thankful," you muttered, watching as he walked closer to you.

"I should've been more obvious given how clueless you are, but I'm telling you straight up that I like you," he spoke up, holding your hands in his. “Sorry I didn't take the hints you gave me," you responded, tilting your head to give him a small kiss on the lips. The kiss was nothing like last time, taking the time to enjoy each others presence rather than having the clash of tongues element to it. He walked with you to his office and just having you around as he looked at the monitors kept him from getting too stressed.

1K notes · View notes

undreaming-fanfiction · 1 month

Text

As a crazy cat lady, may I offfer...

Eddie who has always loved cats, how free and soft and elegant they are, how they purr and close their eyes in affection, how they make him forget all his worries and stress. He's loved them ever since a neighbor's cat found him crying behind the trailer after he got bullied for his new haircut, the last gift from his shitty dad before Eddie got whisked away by the social services. The cat ignored his sniffling and jumped in his lap, plopping herself over the bony knees and thin thighs, and when she started rubbing her face against his scraped palm, Eddie felt complete.

He can't adopt one yet because he lives with Wayne who is allergic. Wayne offers to take antihistamines but Eddie refuses, he doesn't want to inconvenience him in his own home. Still, he dreams of one day sometime in the future, a small apartment of his own and at least two cats who will greet him when he comes home.

Eddie finds himself volunteering in a shelter and when a new cat café opens, he jumps at the opportunity. He is hired and spends his days taking of their cat ensemble and preparing delicious coffees. Cats help him be less jittery and more grounded, so it's a win win. Eddie loves this job.

Enter Steve Harrington, an insanely handsome man who stops by to make a reservation. Eddie is his usual flirty self, although he expects Steve will bring a date and that's the end of that. But then Steve leans to Eddie and asks: "Listen, uh...I will need some help."

Suppressing an internal groan, Eddie asks: "what, do you need me to drop an engagement ring into the coffee or something? Because can do, but it needs to be sanitized first."

"Oh no. Not that, no..." Steve runs his fingers through his hair and even though it looks like a nervous gesture, Eddie is seconds away from a cuteness induced nosebleed. "Not at all. I just...I have a little sister, you know? I mean, my adoptive dad is fostering her and she's the kindest girl you've met, but she had it rough in her original family. Apparently there was something involving animals and...she loves cats so much, but is terrified of hurting them. She would never!" he clarifies when he sees a frown forming on Eddie's forehead. "It's just that whenever she showed affection to any animal, her biological father made sure it would get hurt or at least chased away. And that's gone, that man is in jail and I just...I want to show her that it's okay to love animals again. That she can pet a purring cat without worrying about its safety."

Eddie just stares at him with mouth open. "That's...wow," he says. "Sorry. Processing."

Steve does the hair thing again and laughs and Eddie thinks that this man deserves a brother of the year award, yep, he'll ask Gareth to 3D print one right fucking now. "Yeah, sorry. I didn't mean to dump all that on you, but I had to be honest because this is a big deal to her. To me as well. Just...listen, I like cats a lot, but I'm not the best at interpreting what they mean, their body language and all that. And I really need Jane to have someone here that can tell her what to do, when she's doing a good job...someone who will protect the kitties if she messes up. Her words. I know it's a lot to ask, but..."

But Eddie shushes him. "Say no more, big boy. I'll be here and I'll give the young lady the cat experience of a lifetime."

Eddie used to think he couldn't love his job any more. But with Jane's uncertain smile and big eyes, her incredulous squeal when a cat chose her for the first time, when she kept asking Eddie for specifics of each cat in his care - "which one is more shy, which one likes to be picked up, which one is a picky eater?" - he thinks he's finally found his calling. Steve beams at him and comes back the next day with a bag of approved cat treats for the cats and a box of chocolates for Eddie as a thank you, then asks him out for a dinner - "if that is even appropriate, shit, sorry, I don't want you to feel pressured or something, this is your job, I get it, but I just really admire you and you were amazing to Jane, uh, and the stuff you say about cats is so interesting I'd just love to hear more". Eddie's heart flutters like the traitor it is and he thinks - maybe this is someone I could adopt a cat with one day.

And unsurprisingly, he's right.

#steve harrington #eddie munson #eleven stranger things #jane hopper #steddie au #cat cafe au #steddie #steddie drabble #stranger things #THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ONE PARAGRAPH FFS

555 notes · View notes

dcxdpdabbles · 6 months

Note

Hey, I dont know if you are currently acepting asks but... Please can you write something with Clockwork/Alfred? I'll give you a cookie?

I really love how you write and i cant find fics with this ship

Danny gets a cryptic message from Clockwork the night that he, Sam, Tucker, and Jazz are supposed to go on a three-week College tour road trip.

A trip that they were going to use to decide where the three graduating students planned on going to college. Jazz was coming along to ease their parents' worry, mainly as a voice of reason. She had taken time off of work and classes just to make this happen.

It had taken months to plan.

So cryptic messages put a damper on the mood. Granted, all notifications from Clockwork were cryptic, but that didn't make this any less stressful.

He had just sat by his bed, leaning his back onto his lower bed frame and mattress, when he noticed the glowing sticker note on the carpeted floor.

"What does it say?" Sam sighs, closing her suitcase. She was kneeling a few feet away from him, double-checking their luggage. "A warning about the trip? Insight of an upcoming trial? Oh, let me guess, one of us is pregnant?."

"It's me, isn't it?" Tuck asks from where he's lying on Danny's bed. He places a hand under his chin with a sigh. "I've noticed a glow in my reflection lately. Danny, you're the Father."

"Shut it, Tuck." Danny laughs, turning the glowing sticky note over. "It just has an address, a date, and a time. Nothing else. I think he wants us to go there when the day comes."

Jazz walks in carrying a tray. She insisted they all take some bedtime tea to help them get enough rest for the drive. She recently started making her own blends after much research and experimenting. Danny loves it and always begs for a jar of her tea whenever he visits her. "What's going on?"

"We have to add a stop to the road plan," Sam sighs. She takes the black mug covered in white laughing sculls, nodding in gratitude to the redhead. "In one week, we have to go to Gotham."

"That's doable. We'll be going through Bludhaven by then. We would use the following two days to go sightseeing a few cities over, but we can sacrifice one of them to head to Gotham instead." Jazz hums, mentally going over their planned-out map that she likely memorized.

Danny groans, carefully resting the black mug with white constellations on the floor beside him. "I really wanted to see the hot springs resort, though."

"Member next time, Danny." Tuck pats his head while his own black mug- this one with little game controllers- is held carefully in his other hand. "After the baby is born, we'll go again."

"Why are you stuck on the whole baby thing?"

"Danny, that's no way to speak to the father of your children, especially while he's carrying," Sam chided from her corner. "The stress is bad for the baby."

"Please stop."

"But Danny," Jazz cuts in, sitting across from him. She crosses her legs underneath her, and her black mug with white books completes the set. "You should be supportive of Tucker in this very delicate time."

"I'm going to Go Ghost and never come back."

"I knew you be a deadbeat dad," Tucker tsks.

The four burst into impish laughter; the ease of the teasing joke and the calming tea rekindled the mood of excitement, even with Clockwork's glowing sticky note being shoved into their luggage to be revisited in a week.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Are you sure this is the place?" Danny asks again, leaning forward to where Tucker is driving.

Jaz looks around in fascination at the large houses and spacious yards they pass while Sam sleeps beside Danny in the backseat. She just finished her turn driving for seven hours and wanted to catch up on sleep.

Personally, Danny thinks she shouldn't volunteer for the first shift- they set out at four in the morning to keep to their road plan- but he knows no one else would do it if Sam didn't.

Neither Fenton works well before nine a.m., while Tucker needs help seeing in the dark, so he always gets the day shift.

Tucker's grip on the steering wheel tightens as he grits through his teeth. "For the sixth time, Danny, this is where the GPS said to go. I am literally staring at the icon move on the map as I drive."

"It's just....look at this place! It's rich people. I think they call the cops on us for driving through here." Danny defends, knowing his consent doubts driving his bed friend up a wall but unable to stop fretting.

"I don't think they call the cops....but I think we should move as quickly as possible." Jazz advised as the houses started to grow in both size and property amount. "We're almost there."

"Why would Clockwork want us to come here?" Tucker hissed as their old beat-up fan made a turn into a road that had the trees cut into arches above their heads. It was so obviously fancy that the three got highly uncomfortable. Even Sam's house wasn't so drenched in wealth, and this was just the front entrance.

"Maybe he wants us to investigate a haunted mansion." Danny offers, "Since we're in the area and all."

Danny leans back in his seat. He glances over at Sam; upon noticing the blanket she was using had slid down, he reaches over to tuck her in.

It's just as he sits back that his enhanced sight catches the faintest outline of a man in the trees, crouched down on a branch and watching them. Danny's heart spams, but he has no time to react further as the van moves on and the man's figure disappears in the floral.

"Holy shit!" Danny swears loudly, causing Tucker to jump and tilt the van.

"Dude!" Tucker hisses, "Don't do that! You scared the shit out of me."

"Sorry, sorry." Danny places a hand over his heart, trying to calm the rapid beating. "I think I just saw a demon. Pretty sure that's what Clockwork wanted us to investigate."

"A demon?" Jazz whimpers, eyes flickering all over the trees with unease. "Are you sure it was a demon?"

"It looked liked like a one," Danny responds. "I highly doubt some guy will just go around dressed like a bat for fun."

" Great. Just great. A demon, that's going to be so much fun to deal with," Tucker complains, pressing on the gas more. They don't call him out as the feeling of being watched becomes suffocating.

The sooner they're out of the open, the better.

The end of the driveway opens up to a grand manor that would have made any noble Lord green with envy. Tucker drives around the giant fountain, pulling up to the park in front of the stairway of the main entry.

He squints out the front window as he loops before gasping. "Is that Clockwork?"

The Fenton Siblings each press their noses to the glass of their windows when they come to a complete stop. Both gasped at the exact same time and in the same volume at the man who was casually waiting for them at the door.

It's obviously Clockwork, but he's not in the form they are used to. Not the flouting child, not the sticking middle-aged man, or the aged old entity. No, the form Clockwork uses is a man in his early fifties, with the grace of a sliver fox and, oh, not a ghost.

"Hello, children," Clockwork says, walking down the stairs to meet them. The three are staring at him with slack jaws, half out of their vehicle but lingering in their doors just in case.

Sam snores.

"I'm ever so glad you have come." Clockwork continues, his green eyes flickering with mirth. A smile pulls at his lips, causing laughing lines to appear around his eyes, and it complements his warm bridge skin. He is not blue. "Not a moment too late. Punctual as ever, Jasmine."

"I- ugh, thank you, sir." Jazz shutters before getting her wits about her. "Why did you call us?"

"I will be delaying your trip for the next week." Clockwork lifts up a hand as if to stop any complaints this announcement may cause, which isn't really necessary, seeing as none of them can find the strength to speak. "I will, of course, make it possible to make up the time lost. I just need you four to act as my children for the next week."

"Why?" Tucker's voice is barely above a whisper.

"I can only keep this form for seven days, as I am not a halfa, but in that time, I hope to woo a man. He is a family man through and through, so if I can show him that I am more than capable of caring for a large family, it will help me in the long run." Clockwork then shrugs. "Plus, I need an anchor, and what better than four virgins?"

"Hey!" Danny shouts offended.

Clockwork raises a brow. "Am I wrong, Daniel?"

"No, but you didn't have to expose me like that," Danny grumbles.

"Who are you trying to woo?" Jazz asks, trying to steer the conversation back on track.

Clockwork's cheeks gain a reddish hue, and the three eyes practically pop out of their socket. They never knew the time god could be so...human. It's jarring. "Alfred Pennyworth. The butler of Wayne Manor, four houses down from our manor."

"A butler?" Tucker repeats slowly, "You, the god of time and overseer of all that is, has been, and will be, want to seduce a butler?"

"Yes. He is the love of my core," Clockwork nods determinedly.

Well, who can argue with that?

"Alright." Danny agrees. "So what's our cover story?"

"Yes, my four children- all adopted- and I have recently decided to go learn about our family roots and visit our ancestral home. Only to remodel and check out the family records, we will be out by the end of the week to our next grand adventure. We are old money but one that faded from importance due to lack of contact with the rest of high society. To remedy this, I will be taking you to high-class events." Clockwork sighs dreamily. "We were invited by the Waynes to a gala tomorrow night as a welcome-back party. There, I will see Alfred."

"Alright. And the demon?"

"Demon?"

"A man in the driveway that looked like a bat." Danny helpfully says, even though his voice wavers slightly.

"Oh, you mean Bruce. Yes, that's Alfred's son. Don't worry; he can not cross our driveway. I put a spell that causes humans to forget why they were coming here if not invited by us. Also, he is not a demon. He is a human who dresses like a bat to fight crime. Bruce's children dress like birds to help him."

There is silence that sounds louder than it should as they all take in this information. Clockwork smiles at him, mischievous and graceful in equal parts as they try to make sense of the weird kid Alfred the Butler has.

"I'm going to need a lot of stress-reducing teas for this week." Jazz sighs.

"We can go buy some for you tonight," Clockwork promises, pulling out a black card and grinning with all his teeth. "We're old money now, darling."

"oh my god."

Master Post Link

#dcxdpdabbles #dc x dp crossover #Woo thy Butler my Lord #Old Timers #Fake family #Clockwork is human and here to simp #Bruce was checking out the new neighbors. He's suspicious of them #Team Phantom just wanted to check out colleges

898 notes · View notes

genderqueerpositivity · 9 months

Text

CW: testosterone therapy, periods, physical changes from HRT

Earlier this year, I'd reached a point where I was wondering if I'd already seen all of the benefits and changes from testosterone therapy that I could possibly receive. It really seemed like everything had come to a halt as far as changes from HRT go.

Worse, what started as random spotting and painful cramping (which I originally blamed on really high stress) eventually became full blown periods, and this went on for months. At one point, it really felt like I wasn't even on T anymore. I blamed myself, because I would occasionally be late or forget to apply my testosterone cream. I thought that the bleeding, the inconsistent T levels, and the lack of progress was my own fault.

And then, I had to switch compounding pharmacies. And every single one of my problems disappeared within two weeks of starting the first tube of cream from the new pharmacy.

Nothing else has changed. Not my dose, nor where I apply it. I still forget and apply a few hours late sometimes, other times I miss a day entirely.

But the periods and cramping haven't returned. And I'm beginning to see small changes here and there again. I have to trim my ear and nose hairs now; I have more chest hair than ever before. It's time to face the fact that testosterone has made me a bear lmao.

Point being, looking back I really think that the quality of the testosterone cream I was getting from that first compounding pharmacy was kind of suspect. Looking at reviews online from other people really confirmed my suspicion; many people claimed that the quality of the prescriptions they received was wildly inconsistent from month to month. Not to mention, more recent reviews seem to suggest that their business is going under entirely, and from my own experiences attempting (and failing) to get my prescriptions filled with them in a timely manner, I'm not surprised.

I don't often see a lot of posts from trans folks on testosterone who use compounded cream, so I want to put this out there for others to see. If you're struggling to maintain consistent T levels, don't rule out the quality of your prescription as a possible cause. Make sure that the compounding pharmacy you're getting your T from is reputable and has good reviews.

#op #ftm hrt #testosterone therapy #gender affirming hormone therapy #gaht #transmasculine #genderqueer #genderqueerpositivity #personal #hrt journal #periods tw #menstruation tw

2K notes · View notes

currentlylurking · 10 months

Text

Thinking about... low stake Fenton Family headcanons. Those kind of things that have no wider world-context when it comes to fic ideas but really speak to their family dynamic.

Like, one of my favourites is that Danny doesn't avoid swearing because it's a kid's show from 2004; he avoids swearing because when he and Jazz were little, Maddie and Jack caught them repeating what what they'd heard from the lab. So they promised their children that if they could make it the next decade or so, until they got their drivers licenses, without swearing in front of them, Maddie and Jack would buy Jazz and Danny each their own car! They assumed the kids would forget before they had to follow through, but Jazz did not. And once she was sixteen, she traded the inability to swear for a car.

Danny can fly. He doesn't technically need to get his driver's license. But by this point he's committed, and won't swear at all - he doesn't want to risk slipping up in front of his parents, and losing his chance at a car!

Another one I really love is that up until he was about ten, Danny spent most of his time at the public pool. Maddie had him and Jazz in baby swim lessons, but Danny loved the water, so she kept him in it. And Danny was an amazing swimmer - he was incredibly fast and by the time he was seven, could dive well enough that there was barely a splash when he hit the water. Danny thrived in the water, and with some guidance, absolutely could have become an olympic level swimmer.

Unfortunately, when he was 10 or so, he mentioned to his parents that the chlorine in the pool hurt his eyes so Jack tried to replace the pool filter with an ecto-based one, which went very badly. And the family was banned from the public pool. They set up a blow-up pool in the backyard for Danny during the summer, but it wasn't the same.

Fortunately, he turned 14 and gained the ability to fly, so he doesn't miss it too much anymore, but Jack does still feel bad.

And of course, the last quality one - none of the Fenton family can cook. Maddie and Jack can bake extremely well, but baking and cooking are different. They like the experiment too much with their cooking, and even without ectoplasm, it usually leaves their food inedible. Jazz can make simple things, like macaroni, but whenever she's tried something more complicated it hasn't gone to plan. She's too much of a perfectionist to risk that.

Danny, meanwhile, has burned soup before and will burn it again. But he's still eaten it. Sam and Tucker have joked about how Danny's tastebuds must've died in the portal too, because there's no way a normal person would eat the kind of things he does, but he's always been like that! He's far too ready to eat almost anything.

It was particularly stressful for his family when Danny was a baby, because it seemed like for the first four years of his life, his sole goal was to eat every single battery he could find.

#Danny Phantom #Currently talking #please reblog and add your own btw #I love this genre of headcanons #and of course. you KNOW I have more. for almost every character in the series #feel free to ask for more related to a specific character lmao #anyway rip to jazz. always chasing her brother around yelling 'WHAT DO YOU HAVE IN YOUR MOUTH'

1K notes · View notes

our-happygirl500-fan · 6 months

Text

Something that I have kind of been thinking about is how Rise having new spins on characters from previous iterations such as Raph being the oldest & the leader to start with and Leo being a middle child instead of the eldest is possibly exploring wants & desires that Leo & Raph have expressed in previous iterations.

Raph: Look just because you're leader doesn't mean that you have to get into everyones face!

Leo: Don't start on that leader thing again Raph!

Raph: I'm done taking orders

Throughout the various iterations of TMNT there has kind of been a Leo vs Raph dynamic where though Leo & Raph do unconditionally love & trust each other, still tend to argue with one another. One of their main arguments across iterations seems to be Raph kind of resenting having to follow Leo's orders which leads to Raph sometimes stating that he should be leader instead.

Leo: I'm tired of being the responsible one, when do I get to have fun?

Mikey: I think all of you should just lay off the poor guy, I mean it can't be fun, always being the responsible one and we're the ones who really benefit

Meanwhile something that comes up in multiple iterations of TMNT for Leo is how Leo's responsibilities as the eldest brother & the leader of the Turtles means that Leo kind of finds himself unable to relax or have fun the way his brothers seem to & Leo seeming to find himself either unable to enjoy himself & have fun or not allowing himself to as he believes he has to focus on looking after his family & his brothers.

Raph: I’m the leader. The leader wears the suit.

Leo: Hot Soup!

And Rise, in a way kind of gives Leo & Raph the chance to experience what other versions of themselves have wanted, Raph gets to be the oldest & the leader and Leo gets to be a middle child & have the chance to mess around & have fun for himself.

Raph: Why can't I do this..? I'm failing you

Raph: I only do that because you guys are irresponsible.

Raph: I'm the oldest here. I'm responsible for keeping us safe and making sure we can handle anything that comes our way

Leo: There’s no team with just a faceman. I need my brainy guy, and my smashing guy and eats peanut butter with his fingers guy. I’m nothing without them.

Leo: How come nobody trusts me? None of you guys have any faith in me. Why?

Leo: This whole time I was sure my family needed me, but the truth is I need them

However even though in Rise, Leo & Raph kind of get to experience things that their other selves have kind of expressed wanting in Rise Leo & Raph still have to deal with the other side of getting those wants granted.

In Rise Raph gets to be the leader & the eldest, he's the biggest & strongest brother who his whole family can rely on but on the other side of things he has to deal with stress of being the eldest & the pressure of being responsible for his his family & having to be responsible for them. Meanwhile in Rise Leo gets the chance to have fun to rely on other to take care of responsibilities for him & to have fun & be a kid but on the other side of that he has to deal with his family sometimes no taking him seriously & without the automatic position of eldest brother & son, Leo struggles to have an identity on who he is & his place in his own family.

Something I kind of wonder about is if this is possibly a coincidence or if the Rise team deliberately took the concept of Raph wanting to be the leader & Leo wanting to not always have to be the responsible one that Raph & Leo have expressed in previous iterations & decided to use Rise to possibly explore the concept.

#rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles #teenage mutant ninja turtles #leonardo hamato #raphael hamato #tmnt 2007 #2003 tmnt #2012 tmnt #rottmnt #tmnt

548 notes · View notes

strawb3rry-acid · 2 months

Text

König and Social Anxiety

I just wanted too ramble a little bit about how I personally believe that König's social anxiety affects him, coming from someone who struggles with severe social anxiety. I've seen a bit of misconceptions in the past (though it seems to have died down now thankfully) about social anxiety, so I just wanted to give my own opinion. Per usual, this is fairly long lol ♡

This post is purely meant to analyse his social anxiety instead of his personality, and just talk a bit about social anxiety in general. If you hold different opinions that's completely okay. These are just my thoughts.

If you're struggling/have struggled mentally in any way, shape, or form please know that you are not alone. You're loved, accepted, heard, appreciated, and cared for. Keep going, you've got this. It'll all be okay, I promise 🫂

─ 𓆡𓆝𓆞𓆟𓆜𓆛 ─

So, for starters let me just get it out of the way that we, unfortunately, know practically nothing about König, or anything about the ways in which his social anxiety makes an impact on his life. The most when know when it comes to the latter would be the mentions that it's severe, likely developed due to his experiences with being bullied as a child, and that he likes to go unnoticed. Sure, we have voicelines, but I don't personally feel it captures clues as too how his social anxiety affects him. It eludes to his personality sure, but not so much his symptoms. I feel it's also important to mention that his disorder isn't his personality. It may have an affect on it of course, but it's not his personality.

Coming from someone who struggles with the same mental health condition I can be a completely different person in a place I feel I'm at my best in. Hell, sometimes it can seem nonexistent, but put me in a different situation, and it's nearly impossible too miss. In a military setting, König is definitely in his element. Not only is he in his element, but the military also provides structure, and consistency, which is very important when it comes to coping with any form of anxiety disorder, or any mental health condition in general.

I think it's important too mention as well that social anxiety isn't the same thing as being introverted, and/or shy. Does having it make it more likely for individuals too be introverted, and/or shy? Absolutely, but it doesn't always mean they will be. Social anxiety also doesn't mean that you don't like people. For many people it tends to mean that you're frightened about the negative possibilities when it comes to interacting with people. (For example, I love people, and I love getting to know people, but I'm often way to scared about humiliating myself/being judged to actually do it, so I usually I won't, and will avoid social events like the plague.)

I have no doubt in my mind that König feels like everyone has their eyes on him 24/7, and that they're somehow judging him in some way. Going off of his bio, I personally think the mentions that he was often bullied, and that he only found acceptance in fighting indicates that the bullying was likely on more of a severe scale. I doubt he found confidence in others very often, if at all, and really lacks skills in the socializing department.

He picks and chooses his words very carefully, and spends quite sometime practicing what he wants to say. He likely plans for every way the interaction could turn out, especially the worst case scenario. After the event, it'll be on his mind for quite some time as he replays it over and over again in his head, searching for any clues that he made them uncomfortable/embarrassed himself all while beating himself up for not saying/doing something better.

When he's not a blood thirsty, loud, human battering ram on the field I think he's very quiet, and is the type of person to stick to a wall, or the corner of a room. He's very observant of the people around him, and will try to be alone as much as possible to avoid any stress. When coworker's try to approach him, especially if it's unprompted, then he's very short with them. Of course, this makes him come off as rude, which I don't think he's trying to be most of the time. He's just nervous, and wants to be left alone so it doesn't show to other people. Plus he's very awkward, and doesn't want too risk saying the "wrong" thing that could result in him being judged/humiliated. Especially if he hasn't had the time to plan what he wants to say.

I do think he does feel bad when he behaves that way towards someone with genuinely good intentions, and who just wants to get to know him better, but he isn't too sure how to handle it if it comes out of nowhere. He tries, but he's not very good at it most of the times. He's polite enough, he's just very awkward which tends to come off as him being standoffish, and his discomfort tends to get misinterpreted as him being an ass. He's usually bad with words, and people overall which results in him being probably a fairly isolated man.

I think that when he's on leave, and out living the average civilian life is when it presents itself. He's expected to act a fairly different way when compared to how he acts on the job, and is completely out of his element. I think he's very different with civilians than he is with the people he works with. He knows that he really intimidates them, especially women and children, and tries his best to make himself appear as less frightening as possible. His tone is likely more hushed, his face is more soft, and he tries not too be as short as he is with coworkers. Kinda backfires though in some ways as he can come off as sounding very serious unintentionally, which makes him feel like a dick.

I think it's important to mention again that his social anxiety is specified as being severe which means it heavily impacts his life. Does that mean that he doesn't know how to cope with it, or live a fairly normal life? Of course not, but it still majorly effects him even if it doesn't show outwardly. There's likely some things he simply can't/won't do often, or at all due to his social anxiety. These thing's probably involve big social events, and instances where all focus is soely on him. Combine those two together, and you have a situation he'd never willingly put himself in.

He probably does have panic attacks. He probably will sweat, blush, stutter, and show other physical symptoms of anxiety in high stress situations that he can't escape from. I don't think this happens often (At least not in front of people. The last thing he'd want people to know is that he struggles with social anxiety in case it makes him a target.), but it most likely does happen. I want to mention this because I think it's important to talk about, but I've seen some people bring down other's for including symptoms of König's anxiety in their writing, and it's really disheartening.

He may be an intimidating, middle aged mountain of a military man, but he still had feelings. He's still a human being, not a complete monster. He's not going to start a random verbal/physical altercation with a random person that hasn't started anything with him to try to bring them down. I personally think, just like most of the other characters, he's a normal guy when not on the job.

#cod mw2 #konig cod #konig mw2 #könig #könig call of duty #könig cod #könig mw2 #cod mwii #cod x reader #mw2 #modern warfare 2 #cod modern warfare #call of duty modern warfare #cod mw3 #modern warefare ii #modern warfare #modern warefare 2 x reader #cod #mw 2023

212 notes · View notes

thelov3lybookworm · 8 months

Note

Can I ask somthing? You can totally ignore this if you're not comfortable!! Can you write somthing like reader has been SA'ed before and az or cass or Rhys(your choice who) doesn't know this and tries to take things to 3rd base but reader gets really uncomfortable and tells them what she's been through so the bat boy comforts her saying he'll wait however long he has to for her, holding her and then goes all angry psycho on the person who SA'ed her.

(I was SA'ed a few years ago and the 'date' is coming closer that's why I just need somthing to keep my mind distracted. Plzzzz ignore this if you aren't comfortable with it!! I totally understand!)

Finally Safe

Summary: Reader is the youngest of the Vanserra's, but like Lucien, is the daughter of Helion. She has a pretty dark past that she doesn't even want to think about, and so, no one other than she herself knows about it.

When her mate tries to take things further in their relationship, everything she has kept inside herself comes spilling out.

•○●⛦●○•

A/n: Hi my love! I am soo glad that you sent this ask, it makes me so happy (this one is the first fic request I've received! I also feel extremely honored that you chose me for writing such a sensitive topic).

Also, I'm soo sorry that you had to go through that! I've never had any experience with SA or anyone who went through it, so I'm not sure if I can write something that really captures the depth of the situation, but I did listen to a few SA stories and podcasts ('Rotten Mango' podcasts, if any of you wanted to know) and I'll try my best with this.

Also, I've had this story idea for like a year now since I finished reading acosf, so I'm going with Azriel for this one.

Aaand I tried to make it as long as possible, hope it what you wanted to read.

Hope you like it! Enjoy!

Tw: mentions of SA, not graphic torture scene under '•○●⛦●○•', none more that I can think of, so let me know if I need to add anything.

•○🌑○•

Everywher her eyes went, there was darkness.

All she could hear, laughter, grunts and disgusting words spewed from equally disgusting mouths.

All she could smell was sweat, her own tears, and things she didn't want to think about.

All she could feel was the nauseating touches of a male she didn't know and the cool ground under her back.

All she could taste was the bile climbing up her throat.

She just wanted it to be over. She just wanted them to leave so she could curl up into a ball and cry herself to sleep.

Why?

She kept asking herself.

Why me?

She would probably never get the answer to it. And even if she did, she'd never understand how someone could do something as horrible as this.

Then she started screaming. As she always did.

•○🌑○•

Y/n jerked up, her chest heaving. She sat up, scooting back towards the headboard and pressing herself against it, tugging the blankets to cover herself as her eyes frantically searched around for any sign of movement in her chambers.

Of course, there was no one, but the fear never went away. Probably never would.

Long moments went by as she tried to calm herself, telling herself that she was safe. That she wasn't in that dungeon anymore. That she was far from it, she was in Day Court.

Her actual father's domain, apparently.

Soon after Amarantha had trapped everyone Under the Mountain, her mother had broken the news to her. That she wasn't Beron's daughter, but Helion's. And then, secretly, over the decades, Helion and Y/n had started to spend more time together. Her father was guilty that he hadn't been there for her when she was a kid, and so the two of them tried to make up for the time they had lost.

Y/n shook her head, laying down again and deciding to atleast try to get some sleep. There was going to be an important meeting in a few hours, and all the High Lords were going to arrive for the meeting. For planning the course of the war against Hybern.

She needed all the sleep she could get as it would be very stressful and she was supposed to be present as her father's Second in Command.

Still, she could not sleep. Knowing she would not be able to sleep anytime soon, she finally stood and made her way to the washing chamber when the watery rays of sunlight filtered in through the window.

She scrubbed herself raw in scalding hot water in hopes of washing away all the phantom stickiness she still felt on her body. After that, she got dressed in a white and golden flowy gown, the colours of Day.

Being the second of command of Helion wasn't the only reason she wrote this colours.

It would also be making a statement. That she had chosen Day Court over Autumn Court.

Beron knew she wasn't his daughter. He also thought that she was picked up from a dumpster. That's what Lady of Autumn had told him.

When she was pregnant with Y/n, she had stayed away from Beron for months, and when she returned, she returned with a newborn, saying she found the baby on the side of a road near a dumping ground. Beron didn't care as long as he was not concerned in the child's upbringing.

After Feyre had ended Amarantha's reign, Y/n had left the Autumn Court, making the excuse that she wanted to settle somewhere else.

And that's how she had ended up in Day. She had tried her best to convince Helion not to do this, as it could put relations between the two courts in jeopardy, especially as Beron would see it as a sign of betrayal. But he didn't care.

Y/n just prayed to the cauldron that the meeting would go without anyone dying.

•○🌑○•

She stepped into the airy meeting area, her dress fluttering around her feet.

The guards outside had informed her that the High Lords from Dawn and Summer Court had arrived quite some time ago, and Night Court had just come just moments before she did.

All eyes went to her, and all the Lords' eyes lit with recognition. She just gave a then a polite smile, before grinning at Rhys, who grinned back and pulled her into a hug.

"She was a friend Under the Mountain." He told his Inner Circle, pulling back from her. She nodded at the members that were present before her eyes landed on an Illyrian standing near a doorway, his eyes alert and on the High Lords.

As if sensing her gaze, he glanced at her. And when he did, everything in the world stopped. At least for Y/n.

Snap.

Her body locked up, her eyes widening. She stared and stared at him. She vaguely heard her name being called, but she couldn't process it.

"Y/n?" Her father touched her arm and she jerked back, gasping. She looked up at him, her eyes frantic. He had a confused smile on his face. She took a deep breath, pulling an indifferent mask on.

"Yes?"

"Are you okay? You look alarmed." She swallowed, glancing at the winged male to see if he had felt it too. By the confusion lacing his featured, he hadn't. She tried not to let her disapointment show.

"Yes. I'm fine."

Her father nodded, unconvinced as he gave her a look that said we'll talk about this.

Then she felt a tap on her mental shields. She opened a pathway and let Rhys in.

What is it? He questioned.

She thought for a moment before answering. Mate.

His eyes lit up and he smiled. That's amazing.

She nodded and walked to her seat, plopping down on it.

As everyone waited for others to arrive, Y/n couldn't help but keep glancing at the male.

Beautiful. He was beautiful.

As the meeting progressed, she kept chiming in with her suggesting but not really paying attention, completely avoiding looking at Beron. She also learned that the male's –her mate's– name was Azriel. She knew she had heard the name before, but couldn't place where.

But she would, soon enough.

•○🌑○•

"My dear, what happened back there?" Helion asked as soon as he and his daughter were alone.

She turned to him helplessly. "He–he was–is, my mate."

His brows furrowed. "Azriel?" When she nodded, a smile as bright as the Court he ruled over spread across his face. "You found your mate! You must tell him! Oh Mother, I'll hold a ball in your honor. I–"

"Dad. Who is he?" She would've called him father if not for his very pouty request that she call him dad. Father sounded too formal, according to him.

"Oh, I'm so sorry. How could I forget! He's the Spymaster of the Night Court."

Her jaw dropped. "The feared Spymaster of Night Court?" He nodded happily. "Then should we not be scared? Doesn't he have... quite the reputation?"

"That he does, but from what I've gleaned from my centuries, he's a sweetheart with people he cares about. Atleast, that's what Rhysand has been telling me. If he's lying, I'll be very sad."

Y/n couldn't believe it. One of the most feared male in all of Prythian was her mate. Her gods darned mate.

She didn't know how she would tell him, considering she had never had an interaction with him. Still, she'll have to figure it out.

Because, feared or not, he deserved to know.

•○🌑○•

After the war.

She had realised that any one of them could die at any moment after the war, and then she'll feel guilt for not telling her mate about the bond. And so, she wanted to get to know him first. She had no idea how she'd do that, but her father did.

The war was over, but that didn't mean that everything was fine. And so, under the excuse of strengthening ties with the Night Court, her father had sent Y/n to help in Velaris. Of course, when she had called his bluff, he had acted innocent and declared he didn't know what she was talking about.

So now, it had been a week off her staying in Velaris, and she hadn't had any sort of conversation with Azriel except for a few polite smiles here and there.

She was in a room right next to Azriel, which Rhys claimed had nothing to do with their bond.

She huffed and turned onto her side, trying to fall asleep.

That was when she felt a panicked tug on the bond. She practically flew out of her bed and into Azriel's room to find him writhing on the bed. It was pitch dark, his shadows frantic.

She quickly made her way towards the bed, realising he was having a nightmare. She gently placed her hand on his bare shoulder, tying to wake him up because she didn't know what else to do.

She shook him slowly so as not to startle him, but when he didn't wake up, she put a little more force into it.

Which was, she realised a little too late, was the wrong thing to do.

One second, she was kneeling on his bed trying to wake him up. The next, she was pinned on the mattress, Azriel snarling in her face, one of his hands wrapped around her throat, the other clutching her hands above her head. But that wasn't what caused her breathing to grow shallow or her instincts to scream at her to flee.

No. It was the fact that she was helpless as she was pressed into the mattress.

Dark dungeons.

Beron's Second in Command sneering at her.

Her screams.

She couldn't breathe she couldn't breathe she—

Suddenly, the weight was lifted from her body, her hands free and the grip around her throat vanishing. She gasped, scrambling to sit up and scoot away from Azriel, who was kneeling in front of her with a horrified expression.

"I– I'm so sorry. I didn't mean–"

Y/n shook her head, trying to find her voice. "It's okay." She rasped.

"Did I hurt you?" She shook her head. He seemed to think for a moment. "Did I scream?" When she shook her head again, his eyes narrowed. "Then how did you know I was having a nightmare?"

She paled. "I just thought you– I didn't..." She knew lying to him would be futile, he was a damned Spymaster for a reason. So she swallowed and told him the truth. "I felt it."

She did not meet his eyes, though he stared at her. "How?"

She stayed silent. A few moments passed before she sighed and tugged on the bond. Gently at first. When he gave no reaction, she tugged harder.

He gasped, leaning forward and clutching his chest, staring at her with wide eyes. It felt like eternity had passed before he finally spoke.

"How–how long have you known?"

She looked at him as she cleared her throat. "Since the High Lords' meeting. Before the war."

"That's why you kept staring at me. Why didn't you say anything?"

"I wanted to get to know you first. I was scared."

He seemed to have regained his composure as he nodded. He stayed quiet for a moment. "Do you– do you want the bond? It's okay if you don't want it. Want me. I know my reputation isn't... the best."

"I want this Azriel. I just want to get to know you more before we accept the bond."

A smile stretched across his face, stealing Y/n's breath away.

"Then... how do you feel about getting dinner tomorrow?"

She smiled. "I would like that. Very much."

•○🌑○•

It had been a few months since that night, and Azriel and Y/n had been courting each other traditionally, like they would have if they weren't mates.

They took it slowly. Just last month they had shared their first kiss.

They had told each other everything about their pasts. She knew all about Azriel and he knew all about her. Except that one thing that not even her father knew. It wasn't as if she didn't want to tell him. She just didn't know how to.

As she knocked on the door to his new home, she wondered if she should tell him today. Better late then never, right?

He opened the door, an instant grin spreading on his face as he opened the door wide.

"Welcome home love." He mumbled, kissing her temple as she passed by him. She smiled and set the box in her hands on the corner where the other boxes were. "Dinner's ready."

He had recently bought this house for the two of them. His stuff was already here, and the box Y/n had been carrying was the last of her belongings.

When she had insisted that she could bring her stuff herself and didn't need him, he had declared that he'd be cooking dinner then.

They sat in comfortable silence as they ate. After the plates had been cleared away, he forced her to sit and relax while he did the dishes.

So as she sat on the kitchen counter, she told him of the new book she'd been reading. Soon enough, he had finished his work and was standing between her knees, leaning on his hands on either side of her hips, listening diligently as she finished her story.

"And that, my love, is how they got their happy ending." She flicked his nose.

He sighed. "I wonder if I'll get my happy ending tonight."

She giggled. "And what do you think your happy ending will be?"

"Just a few sweet kisses from my sweet sweet mate."

She laughed and kissed him. He smiled into the kiss.

It was amazing and dreamy, like she had always imagined and wanted her life with her mate to be like.

But the dreaminess of the moment soon started summoning her nightmares as Azriel's hand started to inch higher on her thigh, his other hand tugging her towards the edge of the counter.

Panic flared in her as she placed her hand on his chest, trying to push him away gently.

But then his hand brushed the waistband of her pants, and she pulled away with a gasp, her chest heaving. "No."

His brows furrowed as he searched her eyes. "What happened, darling?"

Tears formed in her eyes as those memories started creeping up on her. "No– not yet Azriel. I–I can't–"

Seeing those tears, his face softened with understanding. "Hey, its okay. We can wait. There's no hurry. Can you tell me what the matter is? Is it something I did?"

She shook her head, taking a deep breath. "A century ago, I was still living in Autumn Court. Beron's Second in Command hated me, for no other reason that I existed, apparently. He was always trying to get me executed or imprisoned. One time, he succeeded. He convinced Beron to throw me in the dungeon because I was being rebellious, according to him. A few days in the dungeon would discipline me. And–and that he would personally look over my imprisonment." As her voice broke on the last part, Azriel's hands clutched her own and squeezed.

She swallowed. "He... he did overlook my imprisonment. Quite personally too."

He searched her eyes, his face hard. "The guards? They did nothing?"

She laughed, tears streaming down her cheeks. "They enjoyed watching him... discipline me." She wiped her face with her sleeves. "I'm so sorry, you have to wait because of me–"

He shushed her. "One thing I always want you to remember is that it wasn't ever your fault. It was his. Never apologise for someone else's mistakes." She sniffled as he pulled her into his arms, her head resting on his shoulders as she wound her hands around the back of his shoulders. He clasped the back of her neck as his other hand rubbed her back. He then carried her to their new bedroom, while she clung to him like a child, all the while murmuring about how it wasn't her fault.

He sat her down on the bed, helped her change into her night clothes before laying her down and settling down next to her. She lay her head n his chest, breathing in his calming scent.

"Can you tell me his name, love?"

"Orvyn."

She could feel him nod. She wondered why he asked, but couldn't think straight as sleep started creeping in.

She would ask him tomorrow, she decided.

•○🌑○•

Azriel's pov.

He was alert as the footsteps became louder and louder, until that bastard came into view. Azriel wanted to gut him like a fish, but that would not calm his rage. So he calmly stepped out of his shadows, only enough that he could be heard without having to shout.

"Orvyn?" He questioned. The blonde male turned, squinting to make out who had called his name. "Are you the Second in Command?"

Azriel watched as his chest puffed at the mention of his title. "Yes. That's me. Who might you be?"

Then Azriel stepped completely away from the darkness concealing him and smirked. He prowled closer, noticing how fear entered Orvyn's eyes, and how he refused to back down.

But while he was busy staring at the Spymaster, he failed to notice the shadows winding around his legs and arms. When Azriel was close enough to him, he whispered. "Your death."

Orvyn's eyes widened as he opened his mouth to scream, but before he could even take a breath, Azriel had winnowed the both of them away to the dungeons. The place where his mate had been kept.

•○●⛦●○•

As the darkness cleared from his vision, he found that his shadows had already bound Orvyn to the wall, keeping him standing. Some of them held his hand next to his head while some had bound his mouth so he couldn't scream. And some had already gone to keep an eye on anyone who might be coming near, sealing the ears of the guards nearby.

Azriel smiled at Orvyn as he whispered. "Where shall we start?" He pulled out Truth–Teller and placed it near his fingers. "Here? I think that's a good idea."

And then, as slowly as he could, he cut off the bastard's fingers. The stench of piss hit the air. "What is this? I thought you were supposed to be very brave and powerful. What happened now? If you're crying and pissing yourself now, I wonder what you'll do when I carve your dick out. I'll do that, then maybe even take your eyes as souvenirs. What do you say? Oh, and also, I want you to know that I'm not doing this because I'm being paid for it or anything. I just found out you assaulted my mate. Remember? Her name was Y/n."

His eyes were wide in recognition as tears started streaming down his face and Azriel clicked his tongue. He pulled out another ordinary dagger from his array of weapons and stabbed it in his thigh.

Then he placed Truth–Teller on his face and set to work.

•○🌑○•

Y/n's pov.

She groaned as she blinked the sleep from her eyes and stretched her hand out in search of her mate's warm body. But all she came across were cold sheets.

She was confused as she sat up and looked around for any indication of where he might be. He would have left a note if he was going for work. Maybe he was in the kitchen.

So she got up and waddled down the stairs, hunting for her mate. But she couldn't find him anywhere in their home.

Where was he?

Just then, she heard the front door opening and she rushed to meet Azriel. She had already expected him to be out, and he had returned now. Maybe he'd been running some errands.

What she hadn't expected was for him to be covered in blood.

"Cauldron boil me! Are you okay? Are you hurt?" She asked, trying to usher him into the bathing room.

"What makes you think I'm hurt?" He raised an eyebrow.

She faltered. "Well, first of all, you look like you just took a swim in a pool of blood. Forgive me for expecting the worst." She began turning on faucets and filling the tub for him, adding oils into it before turning to him. Hurt or not, he would want to take a bath.

"I could have been doing my Spymaster things." He said, stripping and stepping into the water, sighing.

"Whenever you leave for work, you leave a note. Where were you, Azzie?"

"Just having some fun." When she continued to glare at him, he finally told her. "Hunting down bastards." She raised a brow. "Second in Command. Orvyn."

Her eyes widened. "What did you do to him?" He ignored her. "What did you do Azriel?"

So he told her everything in detail, so much so that she wanted to gag even as pride surged in her for her amazing mate. When he finished, he stood and toweled off, coming to stand in front of her.

She sighed. "Don't you think this could strain the already fragile relations between Night and Autumn? Beron could decide to attack–"

He grasped her jaw and tilted her head back as he leaned closer. "Y/n, I do not care about any of that."

"Are you sure? I remember you saying that you would do anything for this Court."

"Night Court is important for me, but not as much as you and your happiness. The whole of Prythian could go to hell if it meant you would be happy. Just say the word and I'd set the world on fire for you, my love."

Wetness gathered in her eyes and she furiously swiped at them. He pulled her hands away, smiling softly. "I don't want to cry." She choked out. He laughed and pulled her in for a hug. She wrapped her arms around him so tight she wondered if he would choke.

But he didn't do anything other than hug her back just as fiercely.

And finally, after all these years, Y/n felt like she was safe. Nothing could hurt her as long as she had her mate.

And she couldn't ask for anything more.

•○🌑○•

Taglist: @eos-princess

674 notes · View notes

miraclewoozi · 1 month

Text

HIGH FIDELITY, PT 1. -c.hs

getting back on the horse is hard, and failing to hit it off with the cute gamer guy you went for a drink with last night has the potential to be your love life’s last straw. but when up and coming rockstar VERNON unexpectedly canters into your life, you find yourself asking one very important question: do you have it in you to saddle up, one more time?

pair ; vernon x fem!reader. content ; strangers to lovers. up-and-coming musician!vernon x record store owner!reader. fluff, angst, parts two and three will contain suggestive themes and smut. (MINORS DNI). warnings ; drinking + alcohol is a big theme pretty much throughout. mentions of past relationship breakdowns. reader experiences a lot of stress, anxiety and feelings of doubt, reflected in self sabotage. wc ; 13.5k ( ~35k total. ) disclaimer ; this fic was inspired by rob + liam in the series high fidelity and is therefore pretty influenced by the show. if you’ve watched it, you’ll probably see a lot of similarities! i just felt so drawn to vernon in this kind of role that i really wanted to try and put a spin on it. i do not claim that every idea behind this is original. notes ; been working on this one for a while. hope you enjoy it.<3

“What do you mean, no?”

Your best friend and longest standing employee Seungkwan turns his head away from the customer he’s serving to look at you with filth in his eyes. Unsurprisingly, his features don’t soften when you double down on your response to him.

“I mean, no,” you laugh. “I’m running on fumes, dude. I’m not going. No way.”

“But…” he whines, putting down the record in his hands. “No, come on. I told you about this weeks ago. You’re really gonna make me go on my own?”

“You won’t be on your own. Chan’s still going.”

Your younger friend, upon hearing his own name, whirls around from where he’s been rearranging the wall of cassettes and lifts an eyebrow. “Hmm?”

“You’re still going to that guy’s show tonight, right?”

“Are you kidding? Of course I am. Why?” Chan eyeballs your guilt-adjacent expression for a second before his face falls and he looks at Seungkwan with a curled lip. “What did you do? Why’s she not coming anymore?”

“I didn’t do anything!” Seungkwan barks. The customer he’s still not finished ringing up flinches at the lift in his voice, but he doesn’t notice. “Why is that always your first–”

“Shut up, don’t start this right n–”

“I’m not starting anything! You started–”

“Guys!” You interrupt, looking between the two of them and doing your best to smile apologetically at the poor lady fumbling through the cash in her fingers like it’s an Olympic sport. “Can we park this one? For five minutes? Please?”

The bickering pair fall quickly into silence and Chan sends one last glare at Seungkwan before he turns back to the cassettes, grumbling something under his breath.

With a clearing of his throat the only giveaway, Seungkwan drops seamlessly back into his customer service voice and plasters a charming smile onto his lips. He checks the register and warmly tells the young woman her total, holding out his palm for her to place the money into. Even knowing him as well as you do, the switch-up gives you a little bit of whiplash.

The customer passes over her cash and accepts her change from Seungkwan’s hands before making perhaps the swiftest exit you’ve ever seen anyone make. No sooner has the bell above the entry to OFF BEAT Vinyl rung and the door has clicked shut, the two men turn once again.

But not on each other.

On you. And it’s the more gentle of them that pipes up first.

“Why aren’t you coming?” Chan asks, abandoning his little project and hurrying over to the desk with a frown. You’re sure it’s supposed to look sympathetic to whatever issue it is that’s changed your mind, supposed to fool you into believing that this has nothing to do with him still blaming Seungkwan entirely. But… you know him better than that. You know them both better. If Chan and Seungkwan weren’t both employed by you, you don’t doubt that they would have ripped each other to shreds within the first hour of meeting. Their dynamic is fascinating to watch — one minute, the best of friends, the next just seconds away from throwing fists; you’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve had to send them to different rooms to avoid having to clean blood and tears off your shop (and sometimes your apartment) floor.

“I didn’t sleep so well last night, I just want to go to bed early. Is that… okay?”

(This is an embellishment of the truth, but what they don’t know can’t hurt them.)

“No,” they both exclaim at the same time, but Seungkwan goes one step further and slams his hands down on the counter for good measure. You purse your lips and narrow your eyes at him, but he keeps his palms flat and doesn’t give any indication that he’s about to apologise, so…

“Okay — God.” You turn away from them, heading towards the little office out the back of the store to try and get a few minutes’ respite. “Whatever. Fight with the wall, you guys – I’m not going. Check in with me before you head out, okay?”

Behind you, Seungkwan dramatically calls you a traitor and says he’ll never forgive you for this, but you just shake your head and continue on your way. The world falls into silence as you shut the door after yourself and you lean back against it, letting out a deep exhale and pinching the bridge of your nose.

Now, you did have an awful night’s sleep last night, and after how on-and-off busy the store has been all day today, the headache you woke up with this morning has only slowly gotten worse. But there are reasons for those things outside of what you’re going to admit to out in the main storefront. As close as the three of you are, there are some things that you’ve always thought it wise to keep… a little bit hushed. Especially at work.

When Chan and Seungkwan start an inquisition into your private life, it feels like it may never end. And so sue you, you’d actually like to make it home at a reasonable time, today.

True to your parting request, the two men close down the store for you while you sit out the back in your ‘office’, lights dimmed, pouring over both a new store playlist you’re trying to compile and a few less exciting — but actually important — tasks. Chan heads out first, all puppy-dog eyed when he pokes his head through the door and asking if you’re really not coming out. You shake your head, telling him to have fun and tell you all about it on Monday when he’s next penned in.

Seungkwan is slightly less easily brushed away. A few minutes after Chan says his final goodbye, your other employee slides into your office and shuts the door, sitting down in the armchair opposite you with his eyebrows scrunched together.

He doesn’t speak for almost a full thirty seconds, at which point, you look up at him from the small mountain of receipts you’re trying to organise and click your tongue.

“What?” you ask, leaning back in your own chair and crossing your arms. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You know why.” Seungkwan shifts forward on the cushion until he’s sat almost entirely on the edge of the seat. “You might think you’re really good at hiding your shit, okay? But you’re not. Not from me.”

“Please,” you sigh. “It’s nothing. I’m telling you, I’m just tired today.”

“And I’m telling you that I know you better than that. Come on, talk to me.”

This is, unfortunately, something you can’t deny. It also seems to be his unfailing last line of defence every single time you’re stubborn over discussing your problems. One of these days, you’ll be ready for it — you’ll have a response sitting on the tip of your tongue ready to shut the conversation down, and he’ll be the one on the spot, and you’ll treat yourself to a pint of ice cream or something when you get home as a victory snack. But today? Isn’t that day; Seungkwan stumps you, once again, so you groan in defeat, cradling your head in your hands.

“I went on a date last night,” you say under your breath.

“What?”

Clearing your throat, you look up at him. You say, louder, “I went on a date last night.”

His eyes blow wide and if he could get any closer to you without actually sitting on top of your coffee-stained worktop, you think he would. Which is strange, if you really let yourself think about it, because Seungkwan is sort of an ex-thing, and talking so openly to someone who has quite literally been inside you about going out with other people… shouldn’t come as easily as it does.

But that was quite some time ago, and for three long months, you drove each other nuts. The two of you are way better off as friends. (Whether you’re better as colleagues is still up for review.)

“You what?” he whisper-shouts. It feels almost like he’s hinting to an invisible audience that this piece of information is extremely scandalous: all wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Which would be fine, except it’s not really that scandalous at all, and neither should it be a surprise: you’re single, you have been for a while, and you have an entire sub-folder in your phone dedicated solely to dating apps — you’re at perfect liberty to go out with whoever you like. You just continue to stare at him, refusing to repeat yourself for a third time.

“You haven’t even been home, have you?” Seungkwan asks after letting the dust settle, the silence just on the brink of uncomfortable. “Oh my God. Tell me everything.”

“Shut up,” you groan. “His name’s Wonwoo. I met him on Hinge. And fuck you – yes, I went back to my own place.”

You pause for a second, taking a breath when his features cloud with the question he’s about to ask.

“It’s just-... so did he.”

Seungkwan leaps to his feet and claps loud enough that your already tender eardrums feel assaulted, adding an ‘I knew it!’ for good measure. You cringe at his volume, rubbing your temples – you should’ve known telling him this wouldn’t calm him down, but a small part of you was still hoping. This time, he actually does circle around the desk, carelessly shoving a few bits of paper out of his way before sitting on the newly cleared wood.

“Had you up all night, didn’t he?” Seungkwan asks. You shove his thigh, looking away from him, embarrassed. “What was the date?”

You just wish it was the kind of embarrassment that he thinks you’re feeling. Flustered, shy, giddy even. But it’s not any of those things.

“If I tell you, will you please turn it down a notch?” You ask, and Seungkwan nods, giddily kicking his legs over the side of the desk. With a sigh, you continue. “We just went for a drink. It wasn’t special, okay? It was bad. We had nothing to talk about, he was awkward, I didn’t even wanna be there – I took a bathroom break after like… a half hour, and I tried to bail but I’d left my phone on the table so I had to go back.”

“And how did that end up with him in your panties?” Seungkwan asks, thankfully a little quieter when he speaks this time.

“Do not talk about my panties out loud ever again,” you grunt, drumming your fingertips on the arm of your office chair. You give a dejected sigh as you answer him properly. “I guess… It felt like a sign that I was trying to give up too early. So I stayed a little longer, told him the truth about how I was feeling. I don’t know, maybe it took the pressure off or something? But we got talking a little more, we found some stuff we had in common… It just got easier and he started cracking a few jokes, so…”

“So… he laughed his way into your—?”

“He doesn’t drink alcohol,” you interject slowly, narrowing your eyes. “I asked him if he minded driving me home.”

“You devil,” Seungkwan grins, lightly prodding your calf with the side of his foot. “Was he good? Was it big?”

“Seungkwan!”

“Did he make you–”

“He was gone this morning when I woke up.”

Your friend doesn’t say ‘oh, shit’ out loud, but he doesn’t have to. The silence he suddenly falls into speaks for itself, his newly adopted slack-jawed expression the exclamation mark at the end of his unspoken sentence.

“Always the fucking ‘nice’ guys.” You push up from your desk and start to gather your things, shutting off your computer and grabbing your phone off the desk. You’re over it – you can deal with all this tomorrow.

Seungkwan hops down, biting the inside of his cheek as you pull your keys out of the pocket of your jeans. “Come with us tonight,” he tries one more time, laying a hand on your shoulder and sounding the kind of gentle that makes your skin itch. You swerve out from beneath his palm, shaking your head at him again. “Maybe it’ll take your mind off it.”

“I don’t need my mind taking off anything,” you insist softly. “I’m fine, I just don’t feel like going out. Gonna order in some food and get my ass to bed. Okay?”

Knowing he’s fighting a losing battle, your best friend finally stops pressing. He circles around you and flicks on the overnight alarm, letting you lead your way out of the office and then through the front of the store. He helps you pull the shutter down and tests the lock for you, as he so often does, before he holds both of his arms out in front of him. With a resigned roll of your eyes, you walk into his embrace for a couple of seconds.

“I’m okay, Seungkwan. Go without me. Have fun and let me know if this Vernon guy is any good, okay?”

“We’ll miss you,” he says as you pull away, and you clap him on the upper arm once before turning away, slipping your headphones on over your ears.

What you neglected to inform Seungkwan, even after allowing yourself those rare few moments of vulnerability, is who you bumped into on your way to the bar where you met Wonwoo last night. The encounter that set the tone in the first place. The reason you were so cold with the stranger who sat across from you in the booth, the reason you tried to bail, and two-thirds of the reason you’ve felt so damn out of it all day. That’s a story for another time, you tell yourself on your walk home. Maybe.

But… then again. Maybe not.

You’ve been marinating on your couch in a pair of sweatpants and a crisis hoodie for at least two hours and are currently on your second bowl of evening cereal when you hear a knock on your apartment door. You purse your lips and set the spoon back down inside the milky sludge, but you don’t set your ‘dinner’ to one side just yet. It’s probably just the old lady next door, asking if you’ve seen her cat, Houdini (you can’t help but feel like she was asking for trouble giving him a name like that) (in any case — no, you haven’t), or the middle-aged couple opposite asking you to turn your music down (you won’t) (it’s not even that loud).

You’re not getting up. All you have to do is wait for them to give up and away.

Knock, knock, knock.

They’ll leave.

Knock knock.

Any second, now.

…

Knock, knock, knock, knock, knock.

You groan loudly as you haul yourself to your feet and skid over to the door, crossing your arms tighter over your chest to try and shield you from the chill that always lingers in the hallway.

“I’m sorry, Mrs P, I haven’t seen H—” you start on exasperated autopilot, falling quiet the moment your eyes land first on Chan’s beaming smile, and second on Seungkwan’s guilty eyes. “How… the fuck did you guys get in here?”

“We followed someone in,” Chan tells you as he slides past, inviting himself into your haven and heading through to the living room where your favourite album is spinning on your record player. “That really tall guy – I think he lives on the second floor? Crazy hairline. Like, right back h—?”

“Cool,” you interrupt, except it’s actually everything but cool. Seungkwan steps through the door too, following behind you as you stalk after your younger friend. “Next question. Why are you guys in here?”

“You’ve been in a funk all day,” Chan says, tossing himself down onto your couch and nearly tipping your cereal all over the cushions. He eyes the glass you have on the side-table, raises a brow and looks back at you. “And you can’t deny that. You’re drinking rosè and eating fruit loops at 9pm on a Saturday. You need to get out of this apartment.”

“I don’t need to do anything,” you tell him, sitting down on the armchair to Chan’s left that only ever gets used when these two idiots show up at the same time.

“One hour?” Seungkwan tries again, crouching down in front of you and taking hold of your hand. “You don’t have to be out late. And – and I’ll open tomorrow. You can stay in bed as long as you want.”

“Do you guys ever stop?” You ask them, and in tandem, the two men shake their heads at you. “I’m staying here. You’ve gotta go, or you’re gonna be late.”

Chan whines your name loudly, stomping like an upset toddler. “You know it won’t be as fun without you.”

“It’s gonna have to be,” you shrug, picking your feet up off the floor and resting them on the coffee table. “Come on. I’m serious. Get out of here.”

Seungkwan watches you for a moment longer but when you eye him sternly, he stands up again, giving your hand a squeeze and sending a nod to tell Chan to get up and follow him. First taking a long sip from your wine glass, the younger man does as he’s instructed, concern etching a frown onto his lips as he walks towards the door.

“If you change your mind, you know where we are, okay?” Seungkwan says and you nod at him. “See you in the morning.”

The door clicks shut behind them and you feel your shoulders droop, a long sigh leaving your lungs now you’re finally back on your own again. You roll your head side-to-side, relieving a tiny bit of the tension that you’ve been holding up in your neck all day, before relaxing back against the cushions behind you.

I’m not going out tonight, you tell yourself as you try to time your breaths to the beat of your music, letting it drown out the fact that the young couple who live two doors down have started arguing just outside your front door. It’s not gonna happen.

There’s no way.

The chill of an ice-cold glass meets your palm not even an hour later.

Chan and Seungkwan had been sitting on the stairs outside your apartment building, giving you fifteen more minutes just in case you happened to change your mind. To your credit, neither man had expected you to get out of your quarter-life-crisis outfit. Each gave a whistle of approval as you stepped outside into the air in a nice pair of jeans and a cute, long-sleeved shirt.

You all set off in the direction to the Arrowhead (so-called thanks to the venue’s unconventional triangular room shape) and both of your friends managed to successfully paint a few smiles on your face along the way. Once inside, Seungkwan dragged you by the wrist up towards the main bar space. Before you even had time to process the blurred faces that you walked by and the fuzzy neon signs all the way up the stairwell, enthused cheers and applause from the room ahead and the melodic strumming of a guitar drowned out the dread you’d been feeling ever since you woke up.

“This guy is not covering U2,” Chan says almost incredulously as he thrusts the drink he paid for into your hand. You manage to work your way through the crowd a little: it’s busier in here than you’ve ever seen it before, and certainly way more full than you would have really expected, but there’s still just enough movement room.

“Yeah, he is,” you say as you weave your way into a decent spot, where you can actually see the musician whose logo has been plastered on every notice board around town for the past month and a half. You even end up with a bit of breathing space, which is a rare, but welcome, treat.

But whatever you were about to say next – about how you don’t like U2, and how you’ve never really forgiven them for putting their entire new album onto everybody’s iTunes back in 2014 – dies a magnificent death on your tongue. You pause with your drink halfway to your lips as your eyes land on the main attraction, the man up on the stage; he has a small band up there, too, but all the lights draw your focus to him. His eyes are sparkly. Both his hands are wrapped around the microphone like he’s caressing it, his rosy lips brush over the metal as they move with each word that comes out of his mouth. Watching him quickly becomes almost hypnotic.

So. This is Vernon.

Long, dark hair sits low over his temples, perfectly parted and shaped in the middle to frame his brows. The top few buttons of his emerald satin shirt are popped open, sleeves rolled up past his elbows, the hem half tucked into his black jeans. He has rings on almost every finger. A silver chain around his neck. He looks good, but his voice?

I think I hated this song ten minutes ago, you think to yourself, but there’s something about Vernon’s deep, rough-edged tone that has you considering never listening to anything else. If you could stand to look away from the way he cradles his mic, and the way one of his eyes squeezes tighter closed as he lifts up into a higher note, and the way he moves on the stage like he was born to be on one, you might notice your friends (and everyone else around you) equally entranced by this gorgeous rendition of Beautiful Day as yourself. You can’t, though, so you don’t.

You keep your attention locked on the singer and instead start to wonder just what he injected the air with when he stepped out from behind that curtain.

Vernon’s eyes flutter back open right as he hits the final line of the song, a smile spreading over his lips. You realise only now that you’re hardly breathing, nor blinking — your body doesn’t remember to function in the ways it needs to survive, too caught up being immersed all the way to the last beat. You think he looks right at you from up on the stage, you swear one of his eyebrows lifts and his features twist into a satisfied smirk. You’re certain, because for half a second it feels like the world tumbles into slow motion and it’s like he’s reading every single one of your secrets, scouring every corner of your mind.

And then… he looks away. He looks across the crowd applauding and cheering and whistling for him, before crouching low and taking a sip from the water bottle sitting on the floor beside his mic-stand. Only then does he speak.

“Risky opener, I know,” he chuckles, his speaking-voice deep and smooth and wholly entrancing. The room erupts into soft laughter, a series of whoops coming from the crowd, everyone disarmed by his slightly awkward charm; the singer’s cheeks turn rosy and a gummy smile lights up his face before he continues. “Thank you guys for giving it a chance, though. If you didn’t know… I’m Vernon—…”

You’re hooked on his every word as he starts to introduce himself and the band behind him — everyone is, but you don’t care about the people around you. Despite being shoulder-to-shoulder with your two best friends and with every breath inhaling the overpowering cologne of the guy standing right behind you, it feels, in a way, like you and the singer could be the only two people in the entire room.

The set lasts just over ninety minutes and is a carefully put-together mixture of mostly original songs and a couple of crowd-pleasing covers, a few slower ballad-types to offset the higher energy rock songs that he beams the whole way through. In-between, Vernon wins over the crowd with his dry sense of humour and a natural charisma that has you feeling mortifyingly warm, despite the fact that you know he isn’t speaking directly to you when he breaks to talk. You’ve been to more than your fair share of gigs in this venue over the years, but few performers have ever made one of their shows feel so genuinely intimate; by the time he says goodnight and heads off the stage, bidding everyone a safe journey home, it feels, in a weird way, like… you know him.

Most of the more local artists who play in the Arrowhead tend to hang around after their sets – sometimes they’ll have copies of EPs, others come with pins and badges showing off their logos, various cute freebies for people to take home. A few even just stand around in the bar and talk for a while, thanking people personally for coming, sharing information about their upcoming releases and future gig schedules. Unless you’ve been really blown away, this isn’t something the three of you often stick around for, though.

It’s therefore a bit of a surprise that when Vernon re-emerges some fifteen minutes later, you don’t even have to convince your friends to work your way into the crowd already starting to form. If anything, the look exchanged between you all establishes that wanting to praise this guy and say hello is very much mutual; the time that ticks by before you’re face-to-face with him really feels like no time at all.

The people in front of you move off to the side and you catch your first actual, unobstructed glimpse of him. He takes a sip from his glass and wipes his upper lip with the back of his hand before greeting you kindly. Somehow, he’s even more handsome up close. You really didn’t think it was possible.

“Amazing set, man,” Chan says brightly, doing little by way of snapping you out of your trance. “Super fresh.”

“Seriously. So, so good,” Seungkwan gushes.

Vernon pushes away from where he’s leaned against the bar, pulling his other hand out of his pocket and extending it to your friends in turn.

“Thank you so much,” he says. “Glad you guys liked it.” Another one of those easy, bright smiles spreads over his face. Maybe you entertain, for a second, that it grows a little more when he holds his hand out to you, too.

You’re still stunned into silence by how breathtaking he is, but you put your drink in the other hand and wipe the condensation off your palm on the side of your jeans before shaking his hand, as well. He’s really warm, maybe even a little clammy, but when he squeezes with his fingers and looks straight into your eyes, this becomes a very negligible detail.

“Your vibe really reminds me of someone… God, what was his name-...” Chan starts to babble, clicking his fingers at lightning speed as if it’ll help him remember. “He was on that survival show-...”

“We’re sorry about him,” Seungkwan interjects after a few more seconds of nonsense and half-spoken, incorrect names, lifting a hand and covering Chan’s mouth. “He gets a little… it’s just when he’s excited.”

“No I don’t,” Chan huffs, swatting Seungkwan’s hand away. You inhale deeply, trying not to cringe as you watch Vernon’s amused eyes bounce between your two friends like he’s watching a tennis match.

“Do too.”

“Do not.”

“Case in point—” Seungkwan starts, at which stage you lay one palm on each of their shoulders to try and get them to stop talking.

By some miracle, it works. At least, their mouths stop moving; there’s definitely a silent conversation ongoing in the filthy looks they continue to exchange, but they stop bickering aloud and that’s good enough for you, for now.

“Come on, let’s leave the poor guy alone,” you say, and Chan shoots Seungkwan a filthy look before he nods and takes a small step back from the altercation.

Vernon’s eyes glitter under the venue’s neon lighting, wide and focused on you while you do your best to mediate. You only notice this when you look back at him, by which point it’s far, far too late to stop the eruption of butterflies in the pit of your stomach.

“You’re really good,” you compliment finally, a smile tugging your mouth up on one side.

“Thank you.” Vernon grins, briefly dipping his head in your direction, but looking for a second as if he’s about to say something else. His chest rises with a breath, his lips push forward like they’re about to separate again, but before he can, Chan finds one more thing to come out with. Of course. (Seungkwan, regretfully, was right — he does get a little…)

“Do you like records?” he asks, pulling Vernon’s gaze away from you. The singer tilts his head, questioning. “Records. Vinyl – albums? Records.”

“Shit – yeah.” Vernon nods then. “Yeah, sorry. I um-... Sure. Yeah. Totally.”

“She owns a record store,” Chan says, jerking his head towards you. You feel your eyes blow wide and you’re tapping harshly at his back in an instant, begging him to stop. “OFF BEAT Vinyl. Not too far from here – it’s a cool spot.”

“No kidding?” Vernon says, glancing back in your direction, but you’re too busy silently pleading at Chan to shut up to realise.

“Mm. You should swing by, some time,” Seungkwan agrees, and all of a sudden, you’re overcome with the urge to fight him, too. “We all work there.”

“All right, let’s go,” you cough eventually, grabbing both men by the wrist and tugging. Vernon chuckles softly at the interruption; it’s almost as sweet a sound as his singing.

“OFF BEAT Vinyl,” he repeats, tasting the store’s name on his tongue, swirling it around his mouth like a wine he’s trying to savour. “For real. I’ll look it up.”

Chan grins proudly, finally letting himself be pulled away from the singer, and you manage to make exactly two paces before Vernon’s voice rings through your eardrums one more time.

“Hey, uh – what was your name?” he asks. It’s unmistakable who the question is aimed at (your friends don’t even entertain for a moment that he could be asking them), but regardless, it takes you a moment to let yourself believe he really wants to know. Vernon doesn’t push, though – he knows you heard him and he waits for your answer, leaning a little forward.

So, you look over your shoulder and you tell him. You see his lips move silently as he repeats it to himself, just like he did with the name of the store. He tastes it. Plays with it on his tongue, remembers the way it feels. As if it’s something he really intends to remember.

“Cool,” he breathes, pushing his hair back and off his forehead and making it very difficult to feel in any way rational. “Well – it’s great to meet you guys. Thanks for coming out, again.”

Finally, you manage to get your friends away. One of them, at least – Seungkwan decides that he actually wants to grab a few copies of his EP (‘one for me, a few for the store’) and rushes back towards the singer; you tell him to just meet you back at the bar.

Then, with another round of drinks on order, you turn to Chan and land a gentle thump on his bicep.

“Dude,” you groan, and he looks at you incredulously, rubbing his upper arm with a pout. “Why did you do that?”

“Do what?” Chan asks.

“Tell him about the store!”

“I mean – I didn’t think it was classified?” he says. “Shit’s slow right now, and he seems like the kind of guy to have a record collection. What’s the damage?”

Seungkwan appears behind you with his hands full of CDs, badges and a scrap of something that you’re reasonably sure is firstly, a napkin, and secondly, has been signed. So you rest your elbows on the bar and place your head in your hands, grumbling quietly about how you don’t know you’ve managed to survive this long knowing these two losers.

“Because you love us,” Seungkwan says, fastening a button to your t-shirt. “Stop trying to deny it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” you sigh, accepting the drink from the bartender and taking a long sip. “God, you better have been serious about opening up for me, tomorrow.”

(Well. You have to give it to him: he was.)

“It’s just my opinion!”

From your perch on top of the store’s counter, you raise both of your palms in a display of your innocence. Chan stands in the middle of the R&B aisle, looking personally offended, fingers curled around the top of one of the wooden crates holding your stock.

“Me saying ‘I don’t think Welcome to the Black Parade is the best track on that album’ is not me saying that it’s a bad song.”

“But how can you say that?” Chan groans, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Who’s hearing the opening note to Famous Last Words and feeling the same way as they do with the Black Parade?”

“Most iconic doesn’t mean the best,” you counter. “Besides – I never said you weren’t allowed to have it as your favourite. It’d be a boring game if we all had the same answer.”

“I cannot cope with you anymore,” Chan whines. “You know what? No. I don’t even believe you. You’re just being a contrarian.”

“Why would I do that?” you ask.

“Because it’s the best song on the goddamn albu–”

The bell above the door chimes loud and clear through the store and both of your squabbling voices fall silent. Your head turns in the direction of the entrance, an autopilot greeting already forming on your lips, but you feel them fall slack the moment you realise who it is that’s just walked in.

It’s been five days. Though it would be a mistruth to claim you hadn’t thought about the singer since the night of his gig, it’s not one to say you didn’t think he would ever actually come into your place of work.

Much less at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. On a Thursday.

He pops his wrists as he walks a little further into the store, glancing around. Barring one of your regulars who walks about with his earphones in all the time, the store is completely empty; an adrenaline spike prickles the hairs on your arms, all the tiny muscles beneath your skin pulling them to stand upright.

“Hi,” he says once he deems himself to be close enough, stopping in his tracks and kicking the toe of his shoe against the floor.

“Hey,” you greet him in return.

“I’m-... Vernon. We met at the show, the other night?”

“Yeah — yeah, I remember you,” you smile. “I’m-... well. I’m still y/n.”

“Still y/n,” he says on a relieved exhale, grinning and glancing away from you. “I uh… I just had some free time. Thought I’d swing by and see what you guys had going on here.” Vernon adjusts the collar of his t-shirt, the silver of his rings glinting under the flickering yellow light overhead.

(It was definitely somewhere on your list of things to get fixed. Honest.)

“Sure, yeah,” you nod, swallowing hard and trying your best not to stare at him. It’s hard, though – in broad daylight, the way the flannel tied around his waist floats down over his hips and the way his jeans hug at his thighs is… you don't even have the words. “Let me know if you need help finding anything, okay?”

“I will.” He starts to thumb through one of the wooden boxes, offering a small smile your way. “Thank you.”

You’re holding your breath a little as he pulls a few 80’s rock albums out, his lips downturned in surprised approval at some of the records you carry. He holds onto a couple as he moves around the store and the entire time, you can feel Chan and Seungkwan staring at you. If there wasn’t a very real danger of Vernon looking your way again at a moment’s notice, you know you would be showing them your middle finger.

Really, they come away lucky.

“You don’t even know how long I’ve been trying to find some of these,” Vernon says after a few minutes, sauntering toward the desk – you’re still sitting on top of it, your legs swinging in the air beneath you. “Might have to make this my new stop.”

And displayed beside you on the counter – right by the cash register – are a few of his albums. The ones Seungkwan picked up after the show; until about two seconds ago, you had forgotten they were even there.

Vernon’s face lights up when he notices, turning to Seungkwan. “Come on, no way. I thought you were kidding about that.”

“Deadly serious,” Seungkwan laughs. Out of the corner of his eye, he must see you start to freeze up: he keeps talking instead of letting the silence settle. “It was on the speakers yesterday. Four people asked us about you.”

“For real?” Vernon asks. When all three of you nod your heads, you see the beginnings of a blush start to creep up his neck. “Wow. Thank you – um. That’s really cool of you guys.”

“It’s good music,” Chan shrugs. “You’re super talented.”

You’re not sure what it is about the onslaught of passive praise that gets so deep into Vernon’s head, but he doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself other than repeatedly saying ‘thank you’. Relief comes in the form of another customer jingling the bell above the door and drawing the attention away from him for a few moments.

“I’ll take these,” he says breathlessly as he turns to face you again. You find yourself a tiny bit lost in the warmth of his eyes and it takes you a second to remember to swivel around and slip off the other side of the countertop. You do, though. Eventually.

“Nice,” you say softly as you shuffle through them, ringing each one through. He’s got pretty decent taste, even if less than a week ago you were actively cringing at his choice of cover song. (It’s okay. That was before you knew better.) “Do you– need sleeves, or…?”

“I’m good. Thank you, though.” Vernon rests his hands against the edge of the counter and drums a quiet rhythm out with his thumbs as you tap away at the register. “Are-... you guys busy tonight, by the way?”

You look up from placing the records into a paper bag, glancing over to your colleagues who both rush to shake their heads. Vernon looks from them, to you, and you mirror their action. Even if I was, you start to think wistfully. I’d make time.

“I’m playing at the Orchid? Uh— it starts at eight thirty; I could get you guys on the list, if-... um…”

“That’d be awesome,” Chan says, nodding so hard you’re surprised his head doesn’t roll off his shoulders and start bouncing across the floor.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Seungkwan adds.

Vernon grins at them both, humming softly, before turning back to you and fumbling with his wallet to take out his card to pay for his purchases. You turn the machine around to face him; he hovers with his hand just above it.

“Maybe… I’ll see you tonight, too?” He says.

You can’t help the delight that rises inside you, as if it’s been injected straight into your bloodstream. It’s everywhere, all of a sudden. In your brain and your heart and your bones and in your lungs.

Yet, you somehow manage to keep your composure when you say, “yeah. Maybe you will.”

The payment goes through and you slide the bag over towards Vernon, your eyes never leaving his and his eyes never leaving yours. His fingers brush over yours as he takes it from you, the bite of the cold ring on his index finger a shocking contrast to the warmth the rest of his hand radiates. You hope your little gasp isn’t too audible, but… the way Chan whirls around to face away from the scene in front of him (presumably to poorly conceal his laughter), you know you haven’t gotten away with it.

“Cool,” he says, hesitating another second before finally pulling himself away. He bows his head in the direction of your friends, sending another of those irresistibly sweet smiles at you, and then he starts off towards the door. “See you, then.”

You feel your heart finally start to slow down as you grip the counter for dear life, setting out a long, drawn-out breath. What just happened? Why do you feel all… fuzzy?

“Maybe… I’ll see you tonight, too?” Chan asks in the deepest voice he can muster, snapping you out of your own head none too pleasantly. You turn in their direction as your other favourite moron feigns tucking hair behind his ear and flutters his eyelashes across at Chan.

“Yeah… Maybe you will.” And Seungkwan’s imitation of you is a little too accurate. Creepily so, and you want to curse him out for it. Instead, you scrunch up a bag to throw towards the pair of them, grinning despite yourself as they both swerve to dodge it.

“Oh my God, shut up,” you chastise them. You don’t have any bite, though, your brain still tingly and positively reeling and seeing Vernon’s dazzling smile every time you so much as blink. And when Seungkwan takes a running start and launches himself, full-force, into Chan’s unsuspecting arms? When Chan lifts him up and spins him around, and when they start making kissy-noises at each other between unearthly cackles?

You know that the next few hours are going to be the longest of your entire life.

The rest of the afternoon goes by without much disturbance and with evening plans now in place, you make the executive decision to send the boys home half an hour early. The three of you agree to meet outside The Orchid at just after eight o’clock, giving you all a chance to eat, wash up and change before the show; your friends separate and head in the different directions to the places they call home, making a promise to text your group chat before you leave to coordinate the link-up time. You head back into the office to finish tying up your loose ends and manage to depart just an hour later.

On your way to your apartment, you plan everything out to the minute in your head. You even allocate yourself twenty minutes to sit on the couch and decompress from your working day. So, when you settle down a little further into the cushions and put your head back, resting your eyes… when you tell yourself you’ll get up in just a minute and hop into the shower…

You certainly don’t expect to be woken up two and a half hours later as your phone vibrates on the floor of your living room.

With one eye still closed, you pick it up, yawning and stretching the lingering wisps of slumber from your body. Seungkwan’s contact name shows on your screen and you swipe to answer the call; on the other end of the line, a song you’ve never heard before is audible, but it’s accompanied by a voice you most definitely do know.

Everything snaps into place at once; in an instant, you’re wide awake, and you feel physically sick.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” you hiss into the speaker, scrabbling upright, tugging the phone away from your face to see the time. How is it already past 9pm?

“Oh, hello to you, too!” Seungkwan has to half-shout to be anywhere near audible over the music. You can almost perfectly visualise the way he’ll have sandwiched himself in a corner of the venue, pinching the bridge of his nose, head resting against the wall to try and block out enough sound to hear you. “Good to know you’re actually still alive!”

“Dude, I’m so sorry,” you say, rushing through to your bathroom to check if you can get away with leaving the house as you are. (Jury’s out, but you don’t have much of a choice.) “I… don’t know what happened. I fell asleep – I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

Seungkwan chides you again, this time reminding you that he’s been on your ass about going to a doctor to get your iron levels checked for months, that your timekeeping is terrible and that you really better hurry. You promise you’re on your way and hang up the call, pocketing your (horrifically under-charged) phone and slipping into a pair of sneakers you keep by the door before you head out. You told him you’d be here. Seungkwan’s voice rings loud and clear in your ears as you lock up your apartment.

But of course, bad things never happen in isolation. Waiting on the street outside your apartment block, you find yourself being cancelled on by not one, but two uber drivers: by the time the third reaches you, and has to follow the world’s most inconvenient diversion to get past some construction work, it’s 9:35. You know it doesn’t matter how quickly you run down the last stretch of the street and get up the seemingly never-ending staircase: it’s going to be too late.

You only manage to catch the literal last two songs of Vernon’s set. You’re not sure he even knows you’ve arrived, and in a way, you hope he doesn’t. Maybe having him believe you were a no-show is better than him knowing you’re about as low-functioning as a grown adult can be. You just slip in through the door as discreetly as you can and hover at the very back of the room as he rounds up for the night; Chan slips an arm around your shoulders as you turn to the bar and order yourself a drink, but it doesn’t do much to reduce the guilt that weighs heavy in your chest.

Which… is odd, really, you suppose. Seeing as you hardly know the singer much beyond his name and, now, a fraction of his record collection. Seeing as you certainly don’t owe him your presence at any of his performances. But there’s something in the way he made sure to ask you personally if you’d be able to make it, too, and you can’t shake it off, and… yeah, screw it, maybe you did want to be here. Maybe you did want him to notice. Maybe you do care what he thinks of you.

Maybe… you hope he feels the same about you.

Your drink hasn’t even arrived yet by the time you hear a chain of ‘excuse me – sorry, can I just? Yeah, thanks – sorry, excuse me’ -s behind you. Your eyes fly wide and you almost choke on your own spit at the sound, growing closer and closer, somehow audible over the background music floating through the speakers, over the other chattering voices and shrieks of laughter in every direction. Part of your breathlessness, admittedly, is to do with how immediately you just knew who that voice belonged to.

“Excuse m–” it sounds again.

And then, softer: “Hey.”

You turn around on your bar stool, barely managing to bite back a smile. “Hi.”

Vernon grins at you from a few feet away, a dark singlet hanging loose on his frame, showing off his long, lean arms, displaying the few bracelets he wears on one of his slender wrists. You’re staring – you know you are; you don’t even notice the fact that Chan takes several steps away from you, or how he throws a side-along glance toward Seungkwan, nor the fact that your two best friends start talking quietly among themselves, leaving you and Vernon almost alone.

“I’m so sorry, I don’t know how I managed to…” But Vernon’s already shaking his head, coming up beside you at the bar, settling into the seat on your left.

“Don’t worry about it,” he insists, glancing over at you where you’re sitting. “I’m just glad you’re here, now.”

Chan stumbles over to you somewhere around midnight and claps his hand down on your shoulder, interrupting Vernon’s very enthusiastic explanation as to why flying is totally a better superpower to want to have than invisibility. Your giggles fall silent and Vernon stops mid-flow, waiting to hear what your friend wants to speak to you about. Unfortunately, Chan’s words are barely intelligible; it’s only when a marginally-better-for-wear Seungkwan appears too a moment later that you’re able to make any sense of him.

“We’re gonna–” Seungkwan hiccups, covering his mouth with his hand and wincing, no doubt at the burn of everything he’s had to drink now sitting high in his throat. “Gonna head out. Are you coming? We’ll split a taxi with you.”

You find yourself glancing over to where Vernon is standing, propped against the pool table that you’re now leaning on the edge of. He just smiles back at you, lifting his shoulders.

“I think… I’m gonna stay here a little longer,” you say after chewing it over. “You guys go ahead.”

Seungkwan looks between the two of you and frowns slightly. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, yeah.” You nod. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Vernon gently pipes up from your side, sliding over a little so that his palm rests flat on the felt of the table, his forearm supporting your hips from behind. But it isn’t you he addresses, despite this butterfly-inducing contact. All deep and serious, he says, “I promise, she’s safe with me.”

He takes his time to show it on his face, but ultimately this satisfies Seungkwan, who (despite being just about able to support both his and Chan’s weight in his current condition) has before, and still will, ignore his body’s demands in the name of ensuring your safety. But maybe he sees a trustworthiness in Vernon, or maybe he knows that you can and do handle yourself quite well. Whatever it is, he’s happy with this development, and your two friends bundle you in a hug so tight that it squeezes the air out of your lungs before they make their way towards the exit.

Once they’re out of view, you turn back to Vernon again, raising both brows at the man now closer to you than he’s ever been. But it’s far from claustrophobic – not as these things can so often be. No. No.

It’s addictive.

“Oh you promise, huh?” The tease comes out before you can do anything about it. You even end up batting your lashes at him for good measure.

“Cross my heart,” he says with a small shrug of his shoulders. His eyes dip from where they’re boring into your own, glancing down a fraction, just for a moment, and you’re sure you see him start to lean. Drawn to you like an opposing magnet, like a moth to a flame — his breaths feel hotter as they fan against your skin, his cologne starts to smell a little stronger… then, his fingers on the other hand curl around the pool cue he’s been balancing on his side and he drags himself away from you. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not gonna kick your ass one more time.”

One more game of pool quickly turns to two, and it even threatens to become a third as you tease, again, that Vernon just got lucky and he flashes you another one of those looks that says ‘oh? Try me’. But as tempting as it is, you don’t think your pride can withstand any more losses. You resign yourself from the table with a huff when he rests his palms flat on the velvet covering, leaning towards you in that mouth-watering way he’s been doing for hours. The thing is, for the size of his pool-playing-ego, Vernon isn’t even that good. Not if you consider the number of completely missed shots, questionable connections and pocketed cues. But, because your own skill level leaves plenty to be desired, he doesn’t have to be up there with the big leagues.

He just needs to be a tiny bit better than you.

Asshole.

An announcement for last orders from behind the bar tells you that it’s nearing one in the morning as he starts to circle around the table and makes his way towards you. The bar has emptied considerably since you arrived, the music has steadily started getting more and more cheesy, people in all four corners of the room have started draping themselves over one another like well-dressed blankets, having already chosen the individuals they’ve decided to take home tonight. By all accounts, it’s the perfect time to leave. If you head out now, you’ll miss the rush of people flooding into the street and, if you’re lucky, the surge in taxi prices. The really good takeout place around the corner doesn’t close for another half hour, too.

There’s just one problem. You don’t want this night to end just yet.

“I think I’m gonna get some fresh air,” you say to Vernon, trying to stretch out a burning knot in your shoulder. “It’s like, a thousand degrees in here.”

Vernon nods. “Yeah – cool. I’ll come with you.”

And with your bag slung over the arm not causing you an ache, you start off down the stairwell. The doors are already open and the late night breeze has you feeling like you’re walking through the gates of heaven as you head outside. You inhale deeply, making the most of this very rare occasion of the city’s air not feeling thick with car fuel and cigarettes. Your eyes fall closed.

“I always liked being out at this time,” Vernon says as he joins you, leaning one shoulder against the brickwork of the outside of the bar. “Feels peaceful.”

“Sure,” you nod, craning your neck to look at him. His face is half-illuminated in the neon red of the bar’s sign above you. The harsh lighting and the shadows cast by his angular features have him looking… sort of sinful, in a weird artsy way that you can’t explain thanks to the pleasant buzzing in your brain. Straight out of an arthouse, indie movie. I bet he likes those, you think absently.

He looks straight into your eyes, intense and focussed as if he’s trying to search them, though for what you’re not sure. Honestly, you think if he gave a few more flutters of those beautiful lashes, you’d bend in-half-and-half-again to give him anything he wanted, so in a way you’re interested to ask what he’s thinking about. You don’t end up saying anything, though. There’s something wonderful in these little unspoken moments with Vernon. Something raw.

Something… unexplainable.

Sitting at the bar and stealing tickled glances as the waitress fumbles and drops a tray full of glasses on the floor. Subtle winks of his right eye (always, you’re discovering, the right?) from across a pool table when he succeeds in making a shot he has absolutely no business pulling off. Standing opposite you in the store you own, waiting to find out when – not if – he’s going to see you, again –

“You know,” he starts, the tiniest edge of nervousness in his voice for the first time tonight. Is the performance adrenaline finally wearing off? Is he… maybe starting to feel a little shy? Whatever it is, your last train of thought melts away into the drain just to his right, and you focus on him as he continues down this new path instead. “I got a new coffee machine in my apartment last weekend and I haven’t had the chance to use it for anyone yet.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah.” He nods, swallowing. “I uh…” He bounces one fist in the palm of his other hand, searching for the right order to put the words into. “I mean, it’s not like, one of those super fancy ones, or anything… but it’s sorta retro looking? Which is cool, and—”

“Vernon?”

“Yeah?”

“You‘re a little out of practice, huh?”

He chuckles on an outward breath, bowing his head, a grin that threatens to split his pretty face in two taking residence on his lips. “That obvious?”

“A tiny bit,” you say. “It’s cute though.”

He glances up at you, head a little tilted. “Yeah?”

“Mm… getting less-so by the second,” you tease him. “You can just ask me to come with you.”

“I-…” he starts, but he takes a deep breath instead and corrects his posture, as if it’ll prepare him somehow. “Okay. Okay — do you… maybe wanna come back to my place, with me?”

Not without flashing him a look first that says ‘now, was that so hard?’, you find yourself nodding up at him.

“I’d love to,” you say.

He pushes away from the wall and when you do the same, he falls into step, heading in the direction of his apartment. You try to discreetly roll your shoulder out again but it’s obviously not discrete enough; it draws his attention down to your arm, and he frowns slightly.

“Is that giving you trouble?” He asks.

“It’s fine.” You wave him off, stretching the muscle as best as you can by tilting your head as you walk. “It’s been like this for years.”

He scrunches his brows. “Here — can I?” He asks, his fingertip looping beneath the strap of your bag. You look down at your shoulder, then back up at him, before raising one brow, dropping the other.

“I mean — I don’t know if it’s your colour?”

Vernon barks out a ‘ha’, easily slipping your bag down your arm, the tips of his warm fingers brushing against your comparatively cool skin. You make no effort to stop him. He positions it on his own shoulder instead, the one furthest away from you so he can still walk right against your side.

“There’s a reason I wear all black, okay?” He says. “It makes everything my colour.”

His fingers smoothly slip between yours as he says it. It was quite the move, and for a second you’re impressed. At least, until it turns out that this simple action seems to jolt him back to his factory settings, because—

“I’m so serious about this coffee machine, by the way.”

“I know you are,” you laugh, bumping your weight against him and squeezing his hand. “I’m counting on it.”

“Okay, so,” you start, settling into Vernon’s couch and tucking one of your legs up beneath you. You cradle the mug of coffee he’s made you — admittedly, the retro-style machine was pretty cool — between both of your hands, a thumb brushing over the raised pattern on the ceramic. The fresh air from the walk here seems to have decently sobered you; barring a pleasant buzz, you feel almost like you haven’t drunk a thing. “How did you get into music?”

Vernon matches your posture play-for-play, biting the inside of his cheek before he answers. He drank less than you in the first place, but he seems steadier now, as well.

“Uh… a couple things, I guess,” he starts. “I mean, my parents are big into music. Sometimes they'd take me with them to shows and stuff, had a bunch of CD’s all over the house — all that. You know? I really grew up on it, so…"

You nod, tilting your head to gesture for him to continue.

“Then… I don’t know. There’s- okay, I was kind of a loser in high school,” he goes on. You roll your eyes; Vernon nudges your thigh with his knee playfully, shaking his head.

“I just mean, I didn’t have a lot of friends.” He pauses, pursing his lips. “So…, I mean, that’s— that’s whatever. The point is that I spent a lot of time on my own and I basically had an earphone in any time I thought I could get away with it, and–... and sometimes even if I couldn’t.” He chuckles. “Weird. Most of my teachers didn’t like me much either.”

You laugh too now, and Vernon bows his head a little; every single one of his handsome features brightens up and you don’t really know where to look. His never-ending lashes are so long they cast shadows down onto his cheeks, and the ambient lighting reflects off his eyes so beautifully that they look like they’re glimmering.

He goes on, “there was one, though. My bio teacher? She was really cool. She had a lot more time for me than the others did. And uh, she called me into her office after school one day and just said… basically, my options were to start giving a shit about… cells, and mitochon– whatever, or start really working for this great big thing that I spent all my time daydreaming about. And it’s been a little up and down, but…”

He trails off, shrugging on one side.

“I think you’re doing pretty okay,” you chime in, leaning one arm against the back of the couch and resting your head in your palm. “I bet those kids would lose their minds if they could see you now.”

“Oh?” Vernon asks, setting his coffee down on the side-table. You click your tongue at him.

“Don’t– come on.”

“No, seriously,” he laughs. “What do you mean?”

“I mean-…” you start, shaking your head. “Okay. People go out of their way to listen to you. Everyone who comes to one of your shows… that’s an hour, two hours, whatever – of making people feel exactly the way you want them to feel. They... all want to understand you. Right?”

Vernon just looks at you, forehead a tiny bit creased — the cogs in your brain tick away trying to find a better way to explain what you mean, but he finally speaks. (You’re glad, because you were struggling to come up with anything else.)

“Shit, I thought that was just an in to say you thought I was hot, or something.”

You push at his chest lightly, your palm lingering on his vest a moment longer than is, perhaps, strictly necessary.

“Shut up,” you groan. But a second later… “I guess there’s that, too.”

He sits back a little, pushing his hair off his forehead with a chuckle. “I dunno, I mean — I sort of… is it weird if I don’t really think about it that way?”

“Of course not,” you tell him.

He gets that look back on his face again; the pensive one, where he appears like he’s seconds away from saying something else, something important. But he falters, and when he glances back at you, his engine stalls.

Then, with a shake of his head, he says, “wow, okay, enough about me. I’m so sorry. Can I ask you a question?”

You take another sip of your coffee and set it down, too, nodding ‘yes’. To be honest, you were quite enjoying talking about him; at the same time, you know what it is to feel a little too perceived sometimes, so you let him move on without argument.

“How do you just… own a record store?”

You laugh. It’s been a while since you’ve had to explain this one. (When was the last time one of your dates was interested enough to ask?)

“I’m not as good a storyteller as you are,” you preface, mirroring him when he rolls his eyes, pretending not to notice that he shuffles even closer. You launch into it easily enough — the old store owner was a friend of the family, he let you work there while you were in college, took you on full-time after you dropped out. When his eyesight started deteriorating, he chose to retire and told you it was yours, if you wanted it.

“Place would’ve closed down, otherwise,” you shrug. “But I couldn’t do it on my own, so I brought the guys in to help. Two years later... yeah. I guess that's how.”

The whole time as you talk, his eyes don’t leave you. He’s quite expressive, you find — whether he’s lifting a perfectly shaped brow, nodding along to what you’re saying, smiling at you… you feel listened to. When he’s sat across from you, you feel heard; you feel known.

“Well, first — take it back. You’re a great storyteller,” he says. You feel your face grow warm and you nudge him with your knee, but you don’t argue — you aren’t convinced he’d let you win, anyway. “But that’s… really cool? Actually.”

“Oh yeah, I heard nine-to-five retail is the coolest thing you can do, these days,” you laugh.

Vernon scoffs at you. “You close at six thirty.”

(How on Earth does he remember that?)

To avoid thinking about it too much, and so you don’t have to try to navigate asking, you roll your eyes.

“You’re right,” you say to him. “That’s way better.”

“Do you like what you do?” He asks, and you tilt your head at him. “Well — okay. If you ignore the… boring, back-office stuff.”

“Yeah,” you say after a pause. “I guess I do.”

“Then it’s cool.”

Your coffees both go cold as you talk more, and more, and more — he asks about your life, and growing up, your friends, and he answers all of your questions in turn when you ask them. He has an interesting way of talking about himself outside of his job; it’s not so much that you have to pry for information, but he’s not super forthcoming. It’s as if he’s taking all of your questions at face value, like he doesn’t know how to go about expanding on them.

Maybe he’s just more of a listener, you contemplate once he turns yet another of your questions back on you and you teasingly pull him up on it. It flusters him, which you can’t help but find very endearing.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry — I just… you have such a pretty… voice?” he confesses, rubbing the back of his neck, ears burning pink.

“Oh?” You ask, stumped for a moment as your heart lurches in your chest. When he nods, you find the gall from somewhere to say, “takes one to know one.”

(You’re not sure how.)

And on it goes. On, and on, and on. More questions, more answers, more lighthearted shoves and lingering touches and shy glances away from each others’ scorching gazes as heat rushes to your cheeks. He even shows you his record collection and puts on one of his favourite albums for background noise before you settle back into the couch. It’s so natural, even when the vinyl runs to the end and the only noise from the player is a distant crackle. Being in his space and having mindless conversation after mindless conversation feels almost as comfortable as being in your own home.

You notice something, as you’re rounding off a monologue about why your highschool math teacher was the worst person you’d ever met. A tiny hair on the apple of his cheek. One of those lashes you envy so much. Even as you try to focus back on your closing remarks, your eyes keep dropping to it and you trail off into silence a few words short.

“I’m sorry, you’ve-… got an eyelash,” you say, tapping roughly the same spot on your own cheek.

“Mm. I have a few of them,” Vernon counters, wiping the heel of his thumb against his skin. He misses, though, and drops his arm back down with the lash still stuck to his face.

You move before you can stop yourself, hand lifting up to his face and hovering just a few centimetres away.

“Can I?” you ask.

Vernon nods, wordlessly. He goes cross-eyed and his lids twitch in a flutter as he watches you get closer; you brush the lash onto your thumb and he only breathes again when you rebalance it on the tip of your finger. You hold it up to him, settling back into your own part of the couch; he just stares back at you.

“Make a wish,” you prompt.

His confusion is poorly concealed, head cocked to one side as he looks from the lash to you and back again. “Huh?”

“Don’t you…?”

He shakes his head.

“Okay, wow,” you laugh, glancing down at your finger too. “You have to make a wish on your eyelashes when they fall out.”

“No, I got that part,” Vernon snickers. “I just mean — why?”

“I—” you start to explain, but you fall short of an explanation and frown instead, biting the inside of your cheek. “… I don’t know. It’s just what you’re supposed to do. I’ve always done it.”

The downturn of your lips doesn’t last very long, though.

“Well, what if it’s not an eyelash? What if it’s like… one of my eyebrows, or something?” He asks.

It's such a simple but off-the-wall response that you can't help but laugh, except it comes on so suddenly you start to choke on your own saliva. One of his hands circles around you and rubs soothingly between your shoulder blades as you cough, succeeding in bringing him even closer and failing to lower the fever you’re starting to feel creep up on you. By some miracle, you don’t drop the lash, even as you hack pathetically into the crook of your elbow; Vernon waits for it to subside, a weirdly fond look on his face all the while.

Now, when you turn your head, he’s right there. In your space. His arm still around your back, the glint of the bar pierced through his brow drawing your attention up away from those smiling lips.

“I guess it just doesn’t come true? I don’t know,” you say, shaking your head. “I’ve never tried wishing on an eyebrow before.”

“I’m just saying,” he starts, falling back against the cushions now he knows you’re not suffocating. His arm doesn’t move, though. If anything, he sort of pulls you with him. “What if it ends up like a reverse wish. Whatever I ask for, the opposite comes true, or something.”

“If you don’t want it, I’ll take it,” you say, starting to bring your finger closer to yourself.

Quicker than you can blink, he reaches to you and lightly lays his fingers around your wrist, stopping you in your path.

“Wait,” he says, pouting a little. “I didn’t say that.”

Both of you glance down to this new point of contact. Two sets of lips stay parted but two identical breaths remain held, burning in both your lungs and in Vernon’s. His gaze shifts back up to your face, eyes wide and wholly serious and unblinking.

“What do I do?” He asks on the eventual exhale. It reminds you to breathe again, too.

“Close your eyes.”

It takes him a second to obey, but he does. His eyes flutter closed and you clear your throat, lifting your finger until it’s just in front of his face.

“Make a wish.”

A few seconds later, his brows relax and he nods.

“Then… blow.”

His lips purse and he pushes a breath through them, lifting the stray lash off your skin and sending it out into the room. He opens his eyes, then, smiling in a manner that you can tell is absolutely despite himself.

He doesn’t move away, and his cologne, fresh and citrusy, mixes tantalisingly with the sandalwood candle he lit on your way back to the couch a little while ago, both accented by the chewing gum he popped to get rid of the mocha aftertaste still lingering on his breath.

“What did you wish for?” You ask, dropping your hand back down to your side.

He frowns.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to tell you,” he says. “Pretty sure that’s against like… wish laws, or something.”

“Boring,” you chide, slumping your shoulders, but he just grins at you, darting his tongue out over his lips.

Out of the corner of your eye, you see his Adam’s apple bob in a thick swallow and you can feel the gentle brushing of his thumb. The slow movements, up and down over the exposed area on your hip where your shirt has started to ride up, make you shiver, and you know your chest stutters when his fingers move to press wholly against your bare skin. You know he notices, because he does it again. And again, and again.

It's maddening. You end up stuck in this never-ending feeling of falling head-first into his arms.

“Where do you think the laws stand on showing you, though?” He asks, inching a little closer.

You hold your breath, little more than anticipatory static flooding your brain.

“I think they’re okay with it.”

You mirror, slowly, hooked in the gaze that has adrenaline dripping down the length of your spine like honey, and you can’t bring yourself to look away until you can practically taste him. He closes the space between you in half speed, but gently, like you’re both made of tissue, he brings his thumb and forefinger to your chin and touches his lips to yours. His nose presses against your cheek.

It’s comfortable. It’s warm. It’s easy, it’s exhilarating, it’s perfect. You feel like your heart just might burst clean out of your chest—

But… you can’t.

“I’m so sorry,” you gasp, tugging yourself away and clamping your hands over your mouth. “Shit — I’m-… I’m sorry.”

Out of nowhere, you’re fighting to catch a breath, head spinning in circles, and no longer in the good way. Have those beers finally come back to bite you in the ass? Or, deeper down, do you know your sudden intoxication isn’t alcohol related at all? Vernon shoots back from you like you’ve gone up in flames and he might catch, too — his eyes search your face as you scramble to get to your feet, and he looks… scared.

“Are you okay?” He asks. You don’t respond right away, already looking around the apartment for where you left your shoes, already trying to locate your bag too. (As you try to swim towards the surface, you forget that it wasn’t you who still had hold of it when you came through the door and placed it on the loveseat back in the living room.) “Hey… is everything-…?”

“I’m fine,” you interrupt. You’re not. “I just-… I remembered-… I have to go.”

You catch sight of your shoes, hidden behind the ones Vernon kicked off just after you, and you hurry across the apartment to get to them.

No bag. Where’s your bag? Where did you leave it? But… ah, your keys are in one back pocket and your phone is in the other and maybe it’s not the end of the world if you never see that lipstick again—

“It’s really late,” Vernon says as you bend down to re-tie one of your laces, hovering just a few steps behind you. “Are you gonna be okay to get home?”

“I’ll be fine,” you rush. “I’ll get a cab.”

“Well, at least let me wait with you until it—”

“I said I’m fine,” you insist, you snap, only now looking up at him again. He tenses, but his eyes stay soft. It’s not in the same way you’ve seen them all night, though. Not in a nice way. Not glittering and full of intrigue. No. He’s hurt. And like a wounded animal, he takes several stiff, unsure steps back away from you, swallowing hard and looking anywhere, everywhere else.

“I’m fine,” you say again, trying to sound a little quieter, a little calmer. Even if that is miles away from the truth.

“Okay,” he says, unconvinced and wringing his hands in front of his stomach. “If-… I’m sorry if that was-… I didn’t mean to make you-…”

You shake your head, standing back up to your full height, but you don’t close the gap between you. You don’t reach out to him, even though you want to. You just have to blindly hope he can read your mind somehow — there’s no way to explain it quickly enough without leaving you both in a mess, and right now...

“Hey,” you say, forcing him to look at you once more. “It’s not-… it isn’t you. I just have to go, okay?”

He doesn’t seem overly reassured by this, but he nods anyway. “Can-… you text me when you get home?” He asks. Then, hurried: “Just so I know you’re back safe. That’s all.”

You swallow hard.

“Yeah,” you say on an outward breath, cringing at how exasperated it sounds. You don’t mean it to — you’re really not mad at him. “I will. I’ll message you.”

Biting the inside of his bottom lip, Vernon takes another step back. He doesn’t say anything else, just shoves his hands as far into the pockets of his jeans as he can and watches you.

“I’ll message you,” you repeat, opening the door, speaking more to yourself than to him. “I promise.”

Then, you’re stumbling out into his hallway. Hurrying down the too-narrow staircase. Leaning your back against the brickwork outside, a light drizzle of rain splashing all over your bare arms. The stone prickles through your t-shirt as you slide down, as you feebly try to suck thick, damp air into your lungs, as your head starts to ache, as a dull throb starts to reside behind your eyes.

It takes ten minutes of staring into the empty road in front of you before you feel steady enough to attempt to wrestle your phone out of your pocket. No matter how many buttons you press, no matter how many times you tap it, the screen refuses to come to life and you only now manage to recall the ‘low battery’ notification that came through several hours ago. Briefly, it crosses your mind to go back upstairs and ask if you can request a ride on Vernon’s phone. You know he’d say yes. Hell, he’d probably throw a blanket over your shivering shoulders and fix you another cup of coffee while you waited, too. But you can’t. The look on his face as you slid out his front door is burned into your memory like a brand and there surely couldn’t be anything worse than having to go back in there and face him like this.

Five more minutes pass before you find the energy to stand, to stretch out your bunched up muscles, and start on the walk home. Another thirty until you’re trudging, sodden and blurry eyed and heavy-hearted, through your apartment door. Three and a half after that before you finally manage to text Vernon to say your phone died, but you’re back, you’re safe. That you’re sorry.

Barely ten seconds tick by before it pops up that he reads your message. (Followed by ninety seconds of staring down at the bubble that says he’s typing, waiting for a reply that ultimately doesn’t come.)

And four hours later, you’re still wide awake, lying under your covers, staring blankly up at the ceiling. You think you ought to be giddy, squirming, hiding your smile in your pillow — that’s how first kisses are supposed to make you feel. Isn’t it? Alas, you’re flooded instead with visions of the last time a first kiss felt like it made this much sense; in place of all the endorphins you’re sure should be ricocheting off every inner surface of your brain, all you know is heartache and dread.

So you stare, and you stare, and you keep on staring; even when your eyes start to burn, you stare a little more.

thank u so much for reading, i hope you enjoyed it! as always, likes, reblogs, comments & feedback are so so appreciated. parts 2 and 3 are very nearly finished, as well, so stay tuned.<3

#vernon fanfic #vernon imagines #vernon x you #vernon fluff #vernon angst #vernon x reader #seventeen fanfic #seventeen x reader #kpop fanfic #j writes.#re. high fidelity.#*

169 notes · View notes

the-hydroxian-artblog · 3 months

Note

I like that your art looks like a reheated pizza that was put in the microwave for too long so its all bubbly and melty and such

The analogy makes sense and that's an observation I can really appreciate. As a pizza fanatic however please use a toaster oven if you have one. I only reheat my pizza in a toaster oven, using specific settings that ensure bread is made crispy and the cheese melts again, but without much bubbling or the bread charring (There are settings on mine that switch between "Warm" to "Bake" to "Toast" to "Broil", etc, and what I do is set it to Warm, then the temperature knob to 400+, and then the timer to 8 minutes for one slice, 10 for two, and 11 at most three. Depending on your tastes, the type and quality of the pizza's dough you're working with, along with the type of toaster you yourself use of course, you're likely going to have to experiment to achieve optimal results.). But seriously like I need you to understand you're speaking to someone with "eccentric Jojo side-character" levels of specificity when it comes to reheating pizza and I needed to physically withhold myself from responding with "IN THE MICROWAVE?? FOR TOO LONG?? WHO" which is somewhat hypocritical since I also used to use the microwave before I figured out toaster ovens, and reheating food with the microwave can be very difficult to get right, if possible at all. And it's also presumptuous of me to even assume your own practices since you're just giving an example, and not stating specifically how you individually reheat pizza. A weaker Hydro would take this as an insult but I want to stress that I do know what you mean. I know i also sound insane but there's so much context behind my response and I feel a compulsion to write out this response to its fullest for you to understand the weird places and leaps in logic my brain just went through My brushes definitely have a blobby look to them, especially when viewed close up, so I totally see what you mean. I also think people should reheat food however way they want and there's definitely no wrong way to do it

#bouncebloom #Normal Hydro Response

236 notes · View notes

ajortga · 3 months

Text

i'm not coming home.

pairing: vada cavell x fem reader

warning! sensitive topics ahead include: character death, suicide, overdose, massive angst with NO happy ending.

thank you egg for your request! cried a little making this which usually.. isn't quite normal to happen. hope this might make your angst heart pour a little.. p.s this was partially inspired by some other fics i read that i loved and this was particularly based off the lyrics im not coming home, not really my future:o

I just saw that song fic you made, it was very nice. So I’d like to request one of my own…

My future by Billie Eilish?

Obviously for my favorite girl Vada Cavell. Who else would I request for?

Her eyes looked at the moon, Vada’s brown eyes looking at the way the moon shone across the city.

“The moon is pretty, isn’t it?” A voice said beside her.

Vada's eyes glanced at you, a small smile forming on her lips.

“Yeah. But you were always prettier.”

“You used to say that a lot.”

“I know. It’s because I think it’s true.”

You stood there in silence, Vada scooted closer to you, pointing at the flowers right ahead of you guys.

“Do you remember when we planted those?”

“Yeah, they grew so pretty. We wanted to make a whole flower garden together.”

“The garden is growing I think.”

“I think so too.

Silence once again, the only sound was the dark trees rustling in the blue moonlight, stars above the two’s heads. Vada bit her lip, looking at the stars, her knees tucked under her arms.

“Do you think in another universe, we’d be in love?” You whispered, catching her off guard as she looked at you, seeing the way your eyes looked hurt.

Vada shrugged, thinking for a moment, “I don’t know..”

Another pause.

“Maybe in another universe, I never so badly wished it was this one though.”

She heard a small laugh, hurt laced behind it, “It once was.”

“In this universe we’re not. Because you’re no longer here.”

…

“I know.”

Vada wishes she could take those words back.

Vada needed space to herself after trying to heal from traumatic experiences it was so hard for her to deal with. You were just trying to help.

You were just trying to help.

Offering to hold her hand in the hallways, reassuring back rubs, kisses on the forehead, sticking by her side.

It was too much for her. She just wanted to be left alone, but she didn’t want to tell you.

You just were so worried, you made sure to love her.

The day Vada was the most stressed, she took all her anger out on you for just trying to comfort her.

“Can you stop being arrogant for once and get it into your brain that you need to leave me alone? You have to let me go and it’s getting so frustrating you can’t get that into your system! Just give me my space when I need it!”

Vada’s voice echoes through the house, her eyes looked enraged as she saw the way your figure looked so small.

“Okay.”

That was the last word she heard you say before you left the apartment to just.. Process.

Vada felt bad, seeing the way your shoulders dropped as you walked out the door. But she was just so frustrated with all these events she couldn't bring herself to apologize. She was too tired.

Ding

...

Ding

....

Ding ding ding ding ding

"Oh my god.." Vada groaned tiredly, her phone light almost lighting up the whole room as she rubbed her eyes, stirring from bed.

Who the hell would be notifying her at 2:43 AM?

Her hands flipped her phone over as she looked at the messages, the way her eyes widened was indescribable.

my sweet y/n♡: vada they won't go away.

my sweet y/n♡: i'm so scared.

my sweet y/n♡: it won't stop, vada it won't stop.

my sweet y/n♡: i can't breathe

my sweet y/n♡: i just want it to stop.

my sweet y/n♡: baby please i need you. i don't feel good.

4x call missed

my sweet y/n♡: i'm sorry.

my sweet y/n♡: i love you.

my sweet y/n♡: i love you with my whole heart and i promise that you can finally be left alone like you wanted.

"No! No no no no no!.." She said louder to herself, immediately jumping off the bed and hitting the call button. No response.

"Please just pick up!"

She grabbed her keys and slammed the door shut, immediately going to your house with an inhaler and meds.

She kept ringing and ringing as she heard you pick up, immediately putting the phone to her ear.

"Baby! Baby.. Talk to me. Talk to me please."

"...Vada.." you cry, your voice barely a whisper, "It hurts."

"What did you do? Y/N.. Tell me please, what did you do? Did you take something bad?"

"I just.. I..."

Vada hears you breathing heavily, making small hurtful breaths.

"I just wanted everything to stop... I'm so tired.."

"I'm almost there baby.."

Vada makes a full on swerve as she busts out of her car, hearing the way your labored breaths were gradually beginning to grow shakier. The call ends as she makes a plead of frustration. She grabs the keys she snagged when she left the house and frantically unlocked your door.

"Y/N!" she cries, the house was dark as she turned every corner before rushing into your room, barging in.

There you were, curled up on the ground, your arm over your stomach as she saw the way your chest shook, the way you let out cries. There were pills scattered around you, your hand holding a pill bottle that was almost half empty. Vada screamed as she immediately knelt down as you turned.

"Baby, Y/N, wake up!" She cried, shaking you

You were barely able to make a noise, she could only hear you say her name, your voice barely an audible whisper with tear-stained cheeks and glazed over eyes.

Vada let out a painful cry as her hand reached up to caress your now cold skin. You were shaking as Vada picked you up and cradled you, calling the 3 numbers as quickly as she could, begging for the ambulance to come as quickly as they could.

"Everything is going to be okay. Don't close your eyes sweetheart. I promise you'll be okay.."

You curled your body into hers, your head drooping down as you look at her, your vision unfocused.

Oh how your eyes were the ones she loved so much, the ones she loved so much now looking like this. Lifeless, barely hanging on.

"I'm so sorry. Vada's so sorry baby. I should have never said those mean things to you. You mean the w-world to me. I love you so much," The guilt was stirring in her stomach, unlike anything she's seen before.

You whimper against her, "I-I d-don't feel good... I-I feel s-so c-cold.."

Vada sobbed as she wrapped a blanket around your shaking, fragile body, hugging you tightly.

"I'm here. Help is coming," she whispered, looking down at you, fallen tears beginning to drop on your clothes.

Your eyelids were half-open, Vada's voice was beginning to become muffled. You knew Vada was beyond worried, you just wanted everything to stop for a while.. You also knew deep down, you wouldn't be able to make it. You wouldn't be able to make it out alive. You wouldn't be able to spend the rest of your life and marry Vada. Maybe live in the green meadows like you always dreamed of, cuddling as you watched the stars at night. Maybe have had a cat too and looked like the romantic sweethearts everyone envied of, sharing small gentle kisses in the corners of every place you traveled.

You knew you couldn't be with her till her last breath, but you knew she would be with you till yours.

You knew you wouldn't be able to live your love, so you mustered all the left-over strength you still had and croaked out the 3 little words.

"I love you."

You felt it. Vada did too. The way your eyes glassed over, it was no longer the warm, pretty eyes she adored, they were now foggy and dark. The way your body began to lose it's warm comfort that Vada ever so loved feeling when she cuddled you to bed. It was all fading. And she knew your life was fading too.

Vada cried, she didn't want to loose you. She was sobbing and she couldn't do anything about it, she was so so scared.

"I love you too. I love you so fucking much Y/N. I.. I.." She didn't know what else to say, she was so scared that she couldn't speak anymore, wailing.

You gave her the weakest smile you could muster, though she knew that it wasn't the smile you gave her when your eyes would light up as soon as you saw her, it was the smile that you finally understood.

You understood. The cracking smile that showed you were ready.

"That's all my heart can ever ask for. I-I'll be there with you, as a pretty deer in the moonlight, or the shiniest star. I-I'll be there whenever y-you need me.. It was never your fault.." You whispered, before she could see your eyes go still, your shaking body beginning to slow. The last teardrop that would ever fall go down your cheek.

"No! Open your eyes Y/N! Baby! Please! I'm here! You can open your eyes now! Wake up!"

Vada didn't know love could make her cry this hard as she felt your skin turn cold, she wished she could just take it all back. She'd remember you through every memory. But she'd remember that the memories of the person she loved most would never exist in the future. It was all in the past. She knew that you were gone as she cried into the wind. The ambulance was just too late as they saw her hugging your soulless body, never wanting to let go.

"Vada's so sorry.." She cries in a whisper.

Vada felt herself sniffle, she could feel the way her memories invaded her brain. She could never forgive herself for it. On every shooting star she wished that it could've never happened in the first place.

She then noticed the way she felt her cheeks suddenly stain with tears, seeing your pretty body fade away in the moonlight above. Seeing the way that you bit down a hurtful expression, smiling with a cracked heart as she sniffled. The night sky is now beginning to reflect through you.

It was all her fault. She couldn’t bear to hear it. But she knew now that you weren’t going to come home. You never would.

She knew one day you would fade from her mind completely. She couldn’t bear to know that one day, she’d forget the way you sounded. She knew that one day, your ghost would eventually fade away, your faded presence beginning to slow as time healed. There would be a day that your ghost would stop showing up completely.

She knew that one day, all your memories would turn into months, years, decades.

Until it’ll all be too old for her to remember. To remember you and the way you were the first person Vada felt her stomach tingle with fluttering butterflies as you kissed her so gently. To remember the way you would hold your umbrella for her as it poured rain, seeing the way your forehead would drip with water from protecting her before you could shelter yourself.

"Keep our love special okay? Keep it just between us. Keep it in your heart." You whispered, before you faded away, knowing one day you'll appear once again.

Vada nodded, slowly, she still can't believe she isn't over it. How could she be?

Her hair was wet, she was so used to feeling a hood over her head. She was so used to being protected by you. Rain drenched her clothes as her body shook, staring at the way the city lights dimmed below her.

She knew that you weren’t going to come home.

Because there she was, sitting on a wet patch of grass, drenched in the rain. Knowing that once before, you sat with her in the rain, holding an umbrella over her head as you hugged her, cuddling for warmth.

Vada let out a shaky, broken sigh as she looked up, seeing the way the stars shone. One shone so bright as she smiled. Her star.

From the wind blowing so gently in her hair with rain showering across the city, the deer peeked behind the tree, making a soft noise.

"Every night and day I wish I could feel your cuddles, kiss me and tell me it was all a nightmare, but it's been too long to know it's not just stupid nightmare. I miss you more than words can possibly describe."

Vada rubbed her cheeks, wiping the tears that were falling, feeling the rain drizzle with her sadness, making a quiet cry.

"It's been 5 months Y/N. I love you. I wish you were here with me. "

Maybe you wouldn't be with Vada till her last breath, maybe her grieving wouldn't last that long. But she was there for yours, that's all you could ever ask for. Your girlfriend hugging you as you took your last breath. That was special.

#jenna ortega x fem!reader #vada cavell x reader #jenna ortega x reader #jenna ortega x you #tara carpenter x reader #jenna ortega imagine #tara carpenter x you #jenna marie ortega #jenna ortega x y/n #vada cavell x y/n #vada cavell x you #Spotify

198 notes · View notes

farfromstrange · 2 months

Text

Weed Cookies | Matt Murdock x F!Reader

PART 3 of The Vault

See this post for more information on my Valentine's Day Special & Follower Celebration, but these fics can be read separately!

Pairing: Matt Murdock x F!Reader

Summary: Karen receives a box of cookies from one of their clients. Foggy and Matt take a bite. Even with his heightened senses though, Matt doesn't realize what's wrong with the cookies before he's absolutely wasted, and you have to babysit him. Yes, they were edibles.

Warnings: Fluff, faint hints at S3 depressed!Matt and suicidal ideations, attempt at humor, crack fic, accidental drug use, for the sake of this fic we are going to pretend that the edibles were made well enough for Mister I-Know-Everything to miss it

Word Count: 3.4k

A/n: I wrote this after watching the episode of Grey's Anatomy with the Weed Cookies. I took some behaviorisms from my own experiences and exaggerated them a little to fit the vibe of this fic. I scraped parts of this and once again adjusted them because this was even more poorly written before than it is now, and I added the Nelson, Murdock & Page Season 3 narrative again because that's now the running theme of this event. Anyway, if you choose to consume edibles, stay safe! (Also, I'm just copying and pasting my usual tag lists. if anyone wants to be added for this event, do let me know)

“We just got cookies from Ms. Lebowsky next door,” Karen announces happily when she enters the office, balancing the transparent Tupperware in one hand and her handbag in the other.

“She told me to thank you for helping her get out of that hellhole,” she says. Her eyes crinkle in the corners as a mischievous grin takes over her face. “There’s plenty for all four of us. Although she did mention Matt a few more times.”

“Ms. Lebowsky?” Foggy asks. He stands in the doorway of his office, holding a freshly brewed coffee. “Isn’t she the elderly lady we helped last week?”

“Yeah, that’s her. I think she has a crush on Matt.”

He rolls his eyes. “Of course, she does. Who doesn’t? Not that I do, but—well, you get the gist.” The blood rushes to his cheeks, and Karen giggles in response.

From the office on the left, Matt’s voice rings out, “We just did our jobs,” he says. “She made us cookies, dude!” Foggy inspects the box on Karen’s desk. “They’re chocolate chip cookies. Our favorite. See what good looks can buy you?”

Matt chuckles, his fingers tracing the Braille indentations in the documents that are starting to form a mountain before him. “I think we got them because we’re good lawyers, Foggy.”

“Yeah, right. No way! That woman was smitten the second she came in. I really gotta get that blind thing going. I mean, she’s way too old for you, but come on! You’re in a serious committed relationship, and women still come piling at your door. It’s not fair.”

The way he whines like a little kid who has just been denied his favorite candy makes Karen laugh at his antics, and even Matt can’t help but join in. No matter how stressed he is, and how badly he wants to focus, Foggy never fails to lighten the mood.

Ever since moving offices, things have been going well for the trio.

When Matt met you, he was at his lowest. You helped him climb out of a dark hole that was threatening to swallow him whole after losing Elektra and almost losing everything he worked so hard for to Wilson Fisk. Thanks to you, he found the will to fight again. You brought him back to life.

He wanted to die. He hated himself for the longest time after the building collapsed and forever took the first woman he ever loved down with its ruins, but then you came into his life, and you didn’t care about his baggage. You were far too good for him, but that didn’t matter to you.

He fell for you hard and fast, and maybe the timing was a little off because what he needed was therapy and not someone new to get attached to. Still, if you hadn’t pulled him back to his feet and encouraged him to fight back against Fisk, saving his friendship with the people he cares most about in the process, he would have never made it far enough to get therapy.

Matt trusts you with his life because he feels like he owes it to you, but he also loves you more than anything. You’re the best thing that has ever happened to him. You’re his soulmate, and he couldn’t be happier.

Nelson & Murdock added Karen to their permanent repertoire. With her, things are flowing much more smoothly, and they’re actually making money now. They’re expensive, as Foggy likes to say it. Matt’s friends are just as happy as he is, giving him hope for the future.

“Hey,” Foggy snaps him out of his trance, “Earth to Murdock.”

Matt blinks behind his glasses, his fingers halting their frantic movements along the paper. “While I don’t disagree with what you’re saying,” he says, “please don’t let my girlfriend hear you say that women are piling at my door.”

Karen snorts. “Trust me, Matt. She knows,” she says.

“Yeah, but you shouldn’t remind her of that.”

“My lips are sealed. Foggy?”

He sighs, once again dramatically. “As long as you don’t sleep with them, you have nothing to fear, my friend.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” says Matt. “The one I’m sleeping with is incomparable.”

Foggy grimaces. “Oh, dude. Gross! You know, God made conscious thought as a mechanism for humans to know when to shut up.”

“To be fair, ninety percent of the population don’t know how to use that mechanism,” Karen jumps to Matt’s defense.

As he laughs, he takes a whiff of the air surrounding their new baked goods. Matt can smell the sweet chocolate of the cookies, and somewhat of a herbal essence, but he can’t quite pinpoint why the scent seems so familiar.

Karen walks around her desk to drop her bag and her coat. “So, do guys want a cookie?” she asks, swiftly changing the subject.

“I’ll take one,” Foggy is quick to answer.

Matt nods from his desk. “I’ll try one, too.”

The innocent decision to indulge in a sweet treat soon comes back to bite them in the ass though. Heavily.

When Matt first bit into the cookie, he didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. It tasted like chocolate mixed with basil, sugar, honey, and the kind of flour Ms. Lebowsky used, but he didn’t find much else wrong with it. Perhaps if he hadn’t allowed himself to get distracted by his phone calling out your name and the sweetest text he could have possibly received this early in the morning from the love of his life, he would have noticed that something tasted off about these cookies. And that what he believed to have been basil as a secret ingredient was something else entirely.

When lunchtime finally rolls around, you drop everything you were doing before and make your way to Matt’s office. You always spend lunch together. It’s your favorite time of the day. For an hour, you can forget the stress of your workplace and focus on him. He’s your safe haven. Your home. You crave to memorize his features anew every day so that you will have something to carry around with you when he has to work a bit longer, or when he goes out at night and his Daredevil duties drag on beyond what he planned.

You need to be with him as much as possible because you’re scared that your happiness will shatter on a white cloth, and you will be forced to move on—you can’t imagine losing him. You dedicated your life to loving him, and the thought of ever losing that privilege kills you.

On your way out, your phone vibrates in your pocket. You smile, thinking that it’s Matt, but when Karen’s number pops up on your screen, you frown.

‘We have a problem,’ she texted you. Without context.

All the alarms in your head start blaring, and you start to walk a little faster. You start imagining all possible scenarios. When you ask Karen what’s going on, she doesn’t even reply. What if someone got hurt? What if something happened to Matt? You almost lost him once; you can’t go through that again.

You burst into the new office space that your friends share a few minutes later, your chest heaving and sweat dripping down your pulsating temples. You’re ready to fight whoever dared to hurt the man you love, or possibly threaten your friends, or both, but when you look up and see your darling boyfriend with his cheek pressed against one of the leaves on their gigantic office plant as if the overgrown Calathea were the coziest pillow he has ever touched, you understand why Karen texted you that you—both you and her—have a problem. A big one, too, judging by the looks of it.

“What is going on here?” you ask the dreaded question, shutting the door behind you.

Only then do you notice Karen to your right in Foggy’s office, trying to get him off of his office chair. He’s belting the chorus of Defying Gravity at the top of his lungs, and he’s got a broom clutched tightly in his right hand.

Oh boy. Your wide eyes drift to Karen’s desk in the middle of the room. As soon as you see the chocolate cookies inside the Tupperware, it slowly begins to dawn on you.

You’re not sure which is worse: Matt cradling a houseplant with his glasses discarded and the first three buttons of his dress shirt undone as he’s coated in sweat, or Foggy singing one of Broadway’s greatest ballads so off-key that the Calathea is starting to wither.

It takes Matt much longer than usual to sense your presence in the room. He calls your name, and his lips curl into a bright grin. Even completely out of it, he looks like an angel on earth.

“Matthew,” you say. You approach him like you would approach a little kid. He’s on his knees, so the analogy isn’t far off.

“Hi, honey. What’s going on?”

“Sweetheart,” he greets you, and you have never heard this man sound so relaxed. His hazel eyes are red-rimmed and glazed over, but the most obvious change lies in his behavior.

“Feel that.” He reaches for your hand when you’re close enough for him to smell you, but he misses. “Where are you?” Matt pouts. “I can’t see.”

You want to laugh, but this is not the time. “You are blind, baby,” you remind him.

“Since when?”

“Over twenty years.”

“Oh.” He finally gets a hold of your hand. The conversation seems to go right over his head. “Feel the power of nature,” he tells you. “It’s so soft.”

You want to drag him away from the potentially dangerous plant if he decides to eat it, but the sight of him is one to behold. He looks downright adorable.

You have to focus though. You gently pat his hand. “Maybe later,” you say, and then you make your way to Karen’s desk to inspect the cookies.

Behind you, she calls your name. You twirl around. From the looks of it, she managed to get Foggy down from his chair, but he remains singing at the top of his lungs. All the signs point to one thing, and one thing only.

“Did you give my boyfriend weed cookies?” you sound a lot more condescending than you planned to.

Karen shakes her head. Her face is pale, and she looks just as panicked as you do. “Those are not mine,” she says.

“But you knew they were edibles?!”

“Of course, I didn’t! I started questioning it when Matt started cuddling the plant because his Braille felt like boobs and he didn't want to cheat on you, so he decided that he needed to touch some grass.” She points to him, exasperated. As if on cue, Matt lets out a happy little sigh.

Your brain struggles to process all of the information at once. “I’m sorry, what?”

“He said that his Braille feels like boobs. I don’t know! I thought he was messing with me until Foggy turned into Elphaba, and that’s when I took a bite and realized there was weed in them,” she says.

You groan, your worried eyes momentarily flicking back to your high boyfriend. High. That’s not a word you thought you would ever associate with him. “How did this happen?” you ask.

“Ms. Lebowsky, the lady next door, we helped her out the other day, and this morning, she gave me these cookies. I called her when these two started acting like idiots—more than usual, anyway. Turns out, she confused them with the ones her niece made for her birthday party tomorrow.”

“Her niece made edibles for her birthday party?”

“Please, don’t ask. I don’t have all the details. I just–”

“It’s fine,” you cut her off. “Just tell me that you’ve got Foggy under control.”

Karen peeks in through the window to his office. “More or less, yeah. You’ve got Matt?”

“Yeah, I’ve got him.”

You have to take care of him. He’s your responsibility. But as calm as he is right now, his heightened senses make the situation a lot more complex than the mere accidental consumption of edibles.

Walking over to him, you try to haul him up. He protests, at first, but then he feels the fabric of your shirt, and he slacks.

Matt wraps his arms around you, burying his face in your neck. “You’re so soft,” he coos. “You smell like honey.”

With his entire weight on you, you have to widen your stance so you won’t fall over. His usually quick reflexes are nonexistent right now; he won’t be able to catch you if you trip, and then you’re both going to get hurt.

“You know what’s even softer?” you ask.

“The plant,” he answers confidently. He sounds like a more careless version of himself. You can’t deny that it does something to you.

“No, silly,” you chuckle softly, “I meant your bed.”

“Oh. But I’m not tired.”

“You’re high.”

He pouts. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I know.” You stroke his back. “It’s okay. I’m not mad at you.”

He stiffens and relaxes at the same time. You swear you can feel the electricity in his veins as his nerves respond to the feeling of your skin on his. It’s like he’s on fire. Like your touch feels a million times more intense, and he’s being crushed under the weight of it in a way that makes him crave more.

He squeezes you tighter, trying to get swallowed by you, consumed to the point that you are the same person. The drugs are doing a number on him, and his already heightened sense of feeling has increased tenfold to the point you’re not sure if it’s pleasurable or painful or both. It must be agonizing, yet at the same time there is a high chance that the weed is calming his nerves and dampening his perception to the point he’s taking everything in without the added weight—he’s enjoying the newfound sensations in limbo, and he’s unaffected by it. You wonder how long that is going to last.

After bidding farewell to Karen, wishing her good luck with Foggy who has now reached a point of his high where he’s lying on the floor, demanding to listen to Bohemian Rhapsody and cry over Freddie Mercury. She assures you that she has got it under control, apologizes again, and then sends you on your way.

“Bye, Karen,” Matt says. “You have very nice hair.” His hand tangles in yours, and his face lights up like a Christmas Tree. You managed to convince him to put his glasses on, at least, or he might get irritated. “Never mind,” his voice turns into a pur.

Usually, you would shiver at his fingers in your hair, tracing the strands and sensually massaging your scalp only he knows how to, but today is not one of those days. You’re still concerned about the effects that the weed might have on him, so you want to be careful, although you’re not sure how much longer you can keep yourself from laughing.

As you maneuver Matt through the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, his cane hovers above the ground and his arm is hooked around yours. Without you, he would have run off into traffic by now. He has absolutely no spatial awareness anymore.

Every sound, scent, and texture seems to capture his attention, but there's one sensation in particular that he can't seem to shake: thirst. You’re not even home yet, and you had to stop by a convenience store to get him a bottle of water. He shed his coat, which you are now carrying for him while also guiding him while simultaneously trying not to attract any unwanted attention.

You can’t help but look at him as though he is your whole world. He is. He is everything to you, even high on edibles he never meant to consume, and acting like a feral toddler. If anything, you are even prouder now that he is yours.

“Hey,” he whispers, leaning close to you, “do you think fire hydrants taste like licorice?”

You shake your head. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Matt, don’t lick the fire hydrant.”

He pouts. For a moment, you think that you have steered off any possible disaster, but that was only wishful thinking.

Matt’s curiosity knows no bounds, and he’s soon reaching out to touch anything that catches his eye. He runs his fingers along the rough brick foundation of a building, marveling at the texture, and he stops to sniff a flower, declaring, “This is the most beautiful flower I have ever smelled.”

You pluck it for him, and he carries it in the pocket of his coat with a happy smile.

You’re both exhausted when you finally make it to his apartment. Getting his large frame through the door is one thing, stopping him from tearing the tap off the sink as he desperately searches for liquid with the words, “Water!” is another.

“Okay, okay,” you try to calm him. You grab a bottle from the fridge, open it for him, and force him to take it. “Drink.”

One touch is enough for him to drop it. “It’s cold,” he recoils in agony.

You sigh. “Tap water it is, then.”

You have never seen him down so many glasses of water. He is severely dehydrated and sensitive to changes in temperature. It’s either too hot or too cold, and you’re so glad that Karen texted you when she did.

You manage to get him to the couch with some snacks that he devours within seconds. If he moves one more inch today, you may not be able to catch him again.

His lip twitches. “Chickens don’t have any arms.”

You pause in the process of wrapping him in a blanket, staring blankly ahead at him. “Excuse me?” you ask.

“Chickens don’t have any arms,” Matt states. “Every American citizen has the right to bear arms under the second amendment in the constitution. If an egg was fertilized on US soil, and the chicken hatched there as well, technically, that makes them a citizen of the United States of America, therefore allowing tiny creatures without arms the right to bear arms, but who gives the bears their arms?”

You’re so flabbergasted that the absurdity of the situation eludes you. The words process only slowly in your mind, and when they do, they cause a wave of confusion to wash over you before it turns into genuine amusement, and it takes every ounce of self-control to keep yourself from laughing at him.

You can pinpoint the exact second the thought escapes his mind and something else replaces it. His hand brushes over the leather couch. “Smooth,” he observes. You haven’t even fully processed his very philosophical question about the animal kingdom before he drops his cheek down on the couch.

The man who has been carrying the weight of the world in bricks on his back for years is finally relaxed; it shouldn’t leave such a bitter aftertaste in your mouth.

You kneel in front of him, reaching out to touch his cheek. “Do you need anything?” you ask.

Matt’s gaze is filled with an odd sort of clarity. “Nah. Just you,” he mumbles.

A soft smile tugs at your lips as you brush a sweaty strand of hair away from his forehead. "I'm right here," you reassure him.

He nods, his eyelids drooping as the effects of the edibles start to take their toll. “Good.” He searches for your hand, and you help him intertwine your fingers. A giddy smile finds its way onto his face. “You’re warm.”

You lean in to press a gentle kiss to his forehead. “And you’re high,” you tease.

Matt huffs out a breathy laugh. “Mmh, yeah,” he says. “But it’s okay. ‘Cause you’re here.”

Despite the chaos and the unexpected turn of events, there’s a sense of contentment settling over you as you watch him drift off into a state of bliss. He deserves it more than anyone.

You stay by his side, watching over him as he succumbs to the pull of sleep that you’re all too familiar with after a sudden high.

“Note to self,” you say to yourself, “never eat a stranger’s cookies without drug testing them first.”

And love has funny ways of making even the most absurd moments feel strangely beautiful.

Matt Murdock Tag List: @littlenerdyravenclaw @yarrystyleeza @etanordoesbullsh1t @thychuvaluswife @harleycao @schneeflocky @imjustcal @pipsqueakkitten @merlinbtch @sya-skies @amberritonicole @thatonegamefish @norestfortheshelbywicked @mattkinsella @itwasthereaminuteago @linamarr @gpenguin666 @acharliecoxedfan

#matt murdock x reader #matt murdock #matt murdock x f!reader #matt murdock fluff #matt murdock x you #daredevil #daredevil x reader #reader insert #from the vault #charlie cox #weed cookies

157 notes · View notes