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#before anyone says anything i'm fine. i promise. just trying to struggle through a lot

luveline · 2 years

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𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐛𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐬 | 𝐞𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐞 𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐧

summary eddie munson is super weird. he holds your hand too tight, he has a fascination with your neck, and he can’t give a hickey to save his life. good thing you’re super weird, too. [20k]

warnings two losers falling in love!! vampire!eddie munson, ditzy!reader (kind of), fem!reader, smut mdni (p in v, unprotected sex, oral fem receiving, general heavy petting and kissing, praise), fluff, hurt/comfort, angst (eddie struggling with guilt and grief). canon divergent (the events of volume 2 take place but there’s a mostly happy ending i.e. everyone good lives and everyone bad dies) TW eddie doesn't have suicidal thoughts, but he does think about it briefly. not with intent or anything like that though. requested here for my halloween party <3

(㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ)

Eddie Munson never wanted to be a vampire, and he wants that on the record.

It's a ridiculous existence. It's embarrassing. It's nothing like all the movies and books promised him.

He's looking at you, Bram Stoker.

In Eddie's mind, Stoker’s nothing less than a liar and a sycophant.

"Who's dick were you bouncing on, Stoker?" he demands to know, kicking fallen leaf mulch under his feet angrily. "Need'ta fucking impress some vampire lover with your over-exaggerated, over-powered, ridiculous descriptions? Great. Hope it was worth it. Meanwhile I'm here, self-esteem half the size of a grain of rice because I can't scale a building with my bare hands."

Eddie would know. He's tried.

He's not genuinely angry with Bram Stoker, but he'd rather take his frustrations out on a guy who's been dead for a hundred years than take them out on the demobats, because he doesn't want to even think about the demobats. They're all dead too. Not before they'd had (see: devoured) their pound of flesh and changed his life for the worse, though.

He shakes his head to drive out the memory like water in his ears. It's easier to pretend none of that shit in the upside down ever happened. (Impossible to pretend. He begs himself to try anyway.)

He’s pissed because science fiction has promised him a lot of things and reality has delivered on none of them. No super strength, no impermeable skin. He is faster, but that's more a reflexive thing than anything else. And being faster doesn't make running fun. That’s impossible.

Sunlight breaks through the treeline and his skin crawls. Science fiction didn't get that right, either. The sun doesn't hurt. It's just really, really annoying.

He covers his eyes, winces at his itchy hand, pulls his sleeve over his fingers and covers his eyes again. "This blows," he says, and means it.

In Dracula, the sun nulls Dracula’s supernatural abilities. Eddie doesn’t have any abilities worth nulling, unless you count echolocation.

He doesn’t.

He walks another five minutes up the road toward Forest Hills when he realises you're behind him. His senses are enhanced now as a bat’s might be, hearing fine-tuned and dialled up every second of the day — which makes living in a trailer park where everyone thinks he's a murderer an acute misery — but he's as prone to distraction as anyone else. Especially when he gets stuck in a memory.

Eddie throws his gaze over his shoulder and finds you thirty or forty feet away, talking to yourself under your breath. He knows you more for your sounds than your appearance. To be able to put a face to your mindless babbling is a mystery solved. Of course you look like that. A skirt made of soft looking fabric bounces over two cute thighs, a pretty lacy corset type of thing that isn't too tight outfits your top half. You look more like a vampire than he does.

"Hi, Eddie," you call.

His eyes widen, a deer-in-the-headlights kind of surprise. If you notice how he's frozen you don't show it, continuing to push your bike toward him. The tick of the wheels grows louder as you get closer, two hands on the handlebars with wrists draped in bracelets, both silver and fabric.

Besides your jewellery, your arms are bare. You must be freezing.

"Hey," he says.

He doesn't know your name. He doesn't know how you know his, and he’s too awkward to ask.

Your sounds peak as you close the gap. The wet scrape of your dirty black canvas shoes over shining asphalt, the soft puff of your breath, the clinking sounds of whatever trinkets you have in your bag. If he focuses, he can make out the tiniest pinches of fabric. Your short sleeves rubbing against your arms, your bra straps stretching over your shoulders.

Eddie takes a deep breath and tries to diminish his senses.

"Where's your van?" you ask curiously.

"Piece of shit kicked it in the middle of town. Just my luck."

You pause at his side, looking him up and down obviously but without the judgement or irreverent disgust he's come to expect from near about everybody in Hawkins.

"That's not good," you say succinctly.

It's such a genuine response that Eddie can't find it in himself to be sarcastic.

"God awful," he agrees sullenly.

You nod and start to walk again. Eddie falls naturally into step beside you, matching your pace without thinking.

"You should get a bike."

He laughs. Coughs to cover it up. "Yeah?"

"They're way more reliable than a car, and it doesn't hurt the zone."

Eddie squints. "The o-zone?"

"Is there another one?"

You're still so serious that he spares you the ridicule he might dole out to anyone else. If Dustin had said something like that he would've ripped the kid a new one, but you're rather sweet in an odd way. You have a soft manner of talking — each word sounds like you've thought its pronunciation through meticulously beforehand.

He ignores your question and points at your bike, ring catching the sun. "Why aren't you riding it?"

"My chain slipped."

"So much for reliable."

That makes you smile. Eddie feels it like a punch, a flat palm slapped into his chest.

"You can't put the chain on yourself?"

A brisk breeze whips your hair, your earrings. The left kisses your cheek, a silver heart-shaped hoop with pink beads that click together. You lean into it, face tilted to one side as a perplexed smile plays on your sticky lips. "You can do that?"

"Sure, you pull it back around the gear. It's easy." He hesitates for a moment, and then feels guilty about hesitating. "I'll do it for you, if you want."

"The guy in no. 62 has been charging me ten dollars." You don't sound as angry as you should, in Eddie's opinion.

"I'll do it for nothing."

You beam at him. His chest feels like a bruise.

Pretty girls don't like Eddie. Not before Chrissy, not after. He's trying to work out your angle, what it is that you want.

Or maybe you don't know.

As soon as you find out who he is, you'll turn your pretty nose up at him and walk the other way. He shouldn't smile at you, he definitely shouldn't fix your bike.

He can't help it. He's so starved for positive attention that he follows you all the way through the park, westside to east.

He checks the driveway of his own home and smiles mildly when he spots Wayne's new car. It's new in the sense that it's different. It's actually way older than the one he'd had before, the one he'd pawned to pay for Eddie's — well, Eddie's everything. His check-ups, his court dates, his goddamn bail. In the same way that this trailer isn't the trailer, but an older, smaller one as far away from their first as possible.

Kid, if I had the money…

Wayne hadn't needed to finish. If he had the money, they'd leave. Leave Hawkins, leave Indiana. Settle down in some other mediocre Midwestern state with all the same creature comforts and none of the "You were acquitted but literally none of us believe you didn't kill someone," motif.

All they have now is debt, each other, and the Great Munson mug collection.

Eddie keeps his head down as they pass the old trailer. Nobody lives inside now. Only termites.

He can taste blood by the time they reach your home. Far from the metallicity of his human blood, Eddie's blood now harbours a bitter taste. Not quite like coffee but with that same overwhelming earthiness. He pulls his teeth from the bitten flesh of his bottom lip and quickly raises a hand to his teeth, alarmed.

No knife-like points. Normal teeth.

"Are you thirsty?" you ask him.

Eddie flinches and drops his hand. You've parked your bike against the wooden lifts of your porch and are halfway up the steps to your front door, hand clasped loosely on the railing.

His heart fucking pounds.

"I have grape juice?"

"Right," he says hurriedly, "right. Yeah, that would be awesome."

Duh, you meant juice.

You send him another endearing smile and pop up the last of your steps and into the front door. It's not locked. He doesn't follow, thinking you must live with somebody (who's gonna know exactly who he is and tell him to get lost).

He turns his attention to your bike instead. It's easy enough to fix. He rolls the bike so its handlebars are resting against your concrete driveway and covers the top bar of the metal body with his sneaker to stop it from toppling. He rolls up his sleeves and bares his arms, but pulls them back down immediately when he remembers the white-purple whorls of scar tissue lurking underneath.

"Fuck," he mutters. Everything is a reminder, all of the time. He can't escape what happened.

It's everywhere.

He's getting his fingers under the chain when you reappear. You've layered up, bracelets and naked arms hidden by a black hoodie.

The wind blows and your skirt shifts. From his position he can see a ladder hiding in your tights where your inner thighs are pressed together. He whips his gaze up like a high-school perv caught sneaking peeks in the girls locker room and notices the stitching on your chest for the first time.

"You like Dio?" he asks excitedly.

"Who?"

He wilts. "Uh, your hoodie. Dio."

"I got it for three dollars in the bargain bins," you supply helpfully, all pep as you climb down the stairs and offer him a glass cup adorned in dainty enamel flowers. "Is Dio good?"

He waves his hand at the glass apologetically. "Two seconds…" Lifting the chain with the second hand, Eddie tugs and then feeds until the links are lined up with the bumps on the big chainring. The skin on his fingertips get pinched and his eyebrows pull together in pain, but it's a mild irritant at worst and after a moment the chain is back in place.

He pulls his hand away and wipes dark grease down the front of his jacket. "I think I did it."

You're glowing, earrings like a metronome as you ask, "That fast? You're awesome."

He turns the pedal and your back wheel spins in time with his heart. You're awesome. When was the last time somebody who wasn't Wayne said anything like that?

Although Dustin had told him he thought Eddie was a much cooler, more fucked up version of the guy from Van Halen the other day.

You're just saying that 'cos we're both called Eddie, Eddie had said morosely.

Learn to take a compliment, dude.

When they aren't pity compliments, he might.

Eddie lifts your bike back onto the wheels to show you that it's working perfectly. You giggle your evident pleasure. "Oh, thank you, thank you!" you say, super sweet even as grape juice sloshes over the rims of your flowered glasses and drips down your fingers.

"Here, let me," he says, taking the glasses from your purple-stained hands.

You kiss your hands clean which is a thing, a lot to watch. Eddie admits to himself that he thinks you're really pretty, recognises that that is a bad thing to think considering the likely very short life span of your acquaintance. God knows you won't be saying anything as friendly when you find out who he is.

"You're so nice," you say. It feels like you're talking more to yourself than him. "Thank you. It's slipped off three times this month, and ten dollars is ten dollars. Wait, do you want ten dollars?"

"My services were administered charitably.”

Your smile grows. You accept your glass and take a small sip, eyes lit up as Eddie steers your bike one-handed to rest against the porch.

"Do you wanna come inside? I don't have any of the Dio, but I have Blondie."

He holds in a throwaway comment about real rock and roll, astounded that you’d ask him. "Your folks aren't home?"

"I'm twenty-two."

Eddie squints at you. "Seriously?"

"You didn't think so?"

He shrugs. It's not that you don't look twenty two. Or even that you don't act twenty two. But it's been a long time since he met somebody living alone in the park. Forest Hills is where poverty comes to settle.

"A boyfriend?"

"Just me and mister Porterson."

"That your grandpa?"

"That's my pet fish."

He smiles. It's his first real, authentic smile in days. He's genuinely elated by your offer and your attitude, but he doesn't know how to handle it, struck with a sudden nightmare of you, afterward, telling somebody you'd invited him in and he'd tried to hurt you. It isn't fair of him to assume you'd do anything like that. You've been nothing but sweet and sincere this whole time.

Eddie hasn't let his guard down in a long time.

You're giving him this wide-eyed, imploring look that promptly suffocates any fear.

And in a week, when she finds out who you are and feels betrayed, feels tricked? What then, Munson?

"You know what happened?" he asks.

"What happened?"

"Two years ago. Chrissy… Chrissy Cunningham?"

Don't say her fucking name.

Your expression clears as clarity blooms. You take a step. He needs a second to realise you've come forward rather than away, fingers twitching toward his hand.

"I know about it. I'm sorry that happened to you."

He stares.

This is a trick. Two years and he can count the amount of people who believe him on his two hands, and only because they'd all gone through it with him. Sometimes there are outliers, logical people who seem to realise Eddie couldn't have killed all those people, couldn't have been in all those different places without leaving any evidence behind. And sometimes there are people who agree he didn't kill Chrissy, but he's a coward for leaving her to die. (She’d already been dead.)

Eddie doesn't know what he thinks. Wayne sets the record straight every now and then with a clap on the shoulder. You did what every parent wants their kid to do. You lived. I can't ask for more than that.

"You don't believe it?"

"That you hurt her?" You hold his gaze, face practically impassive. "No, I don't believe it."

He pulls in a breath that fills every inch of his chest. "I could learn to like Blondie," he says.

—

You're standing in the driveway of Eddie's trailer with a heavy bag over your shoulder, face to face with a man who kind of looks like him but not really. You assume it's his uncle because who else could he be? If you hadn't seen him here you'd never guess.

"Eddie's mom must've had strong genes," you say. You bring your shoulder up toward your cheek thoughtfully. "He didn't get any of your face. Was she pretty? Eddie's really pretty."

"She was," he says, peering down his nose at you.

"I got sandwiches. Do you want one?"

"What kind?"

"I have ham and cheese, or ham and lettuce and tomato, or I have pumpernickel cookies. Is Eddie a vegetarian?"

"Why?"

"'Cause I only brought one cheese and cucumber, and I have dibs."

He climbs down the last couple of steps and is still taller but definitely less imposing, face covered in scratchy salt and pepper stubble and crows feet deeply embedded into the corners of his eyes. He looks like a man who has been tired for a very long time. You make a mental note to bring him some lavender for his pillow on your next visit.

"You're Eddie's new friend?"

You nod your head briskly. "Yes, sir. I'm Y/N."

He opens his box of camels like a pro, bottom pressed to his chest. He tucks a cigarette between his lips and pulls his lighter out. He doesn't light it.

"It's nice to meet you," he says eventually, voice warming.

You search through the mess of your skirt for the zipper on your bag and peel it open, pulling out your tupperware of cookies and cracking them open to release the fragrant smell of cinnamon and almonds. It's a heady scent, fitting for the holiday season approaching.

You offer Eddie’s uncle a cookie.

"Thought pumpernickel was bread," he says gruffly, taking one.

"It is, but there's this little town in France that makes these every year at Christmas and they call them pumpernickel biscuits," — he takes a bite and winces at the hard snap — "you're s'posed to dip them in hot chocolate."

"You don't say."

You nod happily and he moves aside to let you pass.

"Thanks, kid."

You turn back to him with your fingers curled around the door handle. "Of course! It's really nice to meet you, Mr. Munson, sir."

"Wayne is fine."

You laugh and repeat his name in a similarly rough voice, letting yourself in as Eddie had told you to do. You find him immediately in a man-made corner of the living room, pale and in his pyjamas. The trailer is open planned, a living room they’ve divided by propping a couch against the kitchen counter, a slim hallway leading to a cramped bathroom and the single bedroom. It's exactly like in your home.

You're somewhat surprised to see him in pyjamas. Eddie doesn't wear comfy looking clothes out of the house — you've only ever seen him in jeans and jackets like a real rockstar.

"Are you ready?" you ask.

You've invited him to come and search for bugs with you. Catching any kind of bug, whether beetle or butterfly or spider, is really scary, but you need to be able to catch them to draw them.

You'd expressed this to him over the phone and he'd said, "I can come and help. I have good reflexes."

He rubs his hands over his knees. There's a blanket pooled around his feet, a quilt he must sleep with, and the room is decorated with not a whole lot of stuff but enough to make you take a step back.

"Is this your room?" you ask, enchanted.

"Kind of." He pulls his hair from behind his ear, obscuring a pale cheek. "I don't think I can come with you today, I'm sorry. I meant to call you."

You toy with a dark thigh high sock as you ease out of your shoes, height drastically decreasing. "That's okay, we can stay here. I brought you a sandwich. I brought you two sandwiches," you correct.

He nods. Rather sadly, in your opinion. "Alright. Thanks."

You step over a tented paperback and hand off the cookies before sitting down beside him on the couch he's occupying. It's smaller than the one against the wall and round like a clam, lots of room for your legs to stretch out.

"I feel like a pearl," you say.

You and Eddie have been friends for a little while now. Long enough for you to realise he's either depressed or mentally unwell in some way. You hardly mind keeping him company on his bad days if he needs somebody, so drawing bugs will have to wait.

His hair is limp, not totally greasy but not super clean either. His face looks fresh enough, though the bags under his eyes make you frown.

You pull your purse into your lap, thighs covered by the thin layers of your midi skirt. "I have just the thing for you," you murmur.

"Yeah? Bring me another bracelet?"

You like that he sounds eager. Making his bracelet had been a challenge, lots of knotting and double knotting, three restarts and one small under the breath tantrum. It's not anything special, black and white hearts seven strands wide, but he'd been very appreciative.

"No, but I can make you another one if you want. I mastered the inverse chevron last night."

He hums. You pull a saran wrapped sandwich from the depths of your crowded bag, glad to see it's mostly intact. When you open it up you find that it's the ham and lettuce and tomato one, so you drop it into his lap haphazardly and move onto the next.

"Aha! Here," you pull a cucumber from your sandwich. "For you."

He takes it between two tentative fingers. "Thank you?"

"For your eyes."

"There's cheese on it."

"I'll still work," you assure him.

"M'not putting cheese on my eyes."

You laugh because he probably shouldn't put cheese on his eyes, cucumber adjacent or otherwise. "Okay, don't. I'll make you a hot towel."

He drops his hand on your arm as you go to stand. You like how he touches you, soft but not scared. "You just got here. Stay here." He pats you nicely. "Tell me about work last night."

You settle heavily into the seat beside him, your thigh to his thigh, your hip squished against his hip, doughy flesh separated by nothing more than a strappy tank top and a cotton long-sleeve t-shirt. His heat quickly becomes yours, a sinking transference of warmth.

"Well," you begin, cheek turning into the couch to face him. "It was mostly okay. I dropped another plate, but this time it didn't have a stack of waffles on it."

He smiles ruefully and sinks back as you had. Neither of you eat your sandwiches. "Progress. Taking it out of your pay?"

"Yes, definitely."

"Discrimination."

"That's what I said! I said, Sarah, I was born with butterfingers and you know that."

"She didn't budge?"

"Dishwashing all week next week. Whatever, though, 'cause it's Saturday."

He laughs and shakes his head, his gaze dropping to your neck. He does that sometimes. You can't blame him; you wear a varying assortment of necklaces because you think they're pretty, and you're glad he likes them too.

"See my new one?"

"What?"

"New necklace." You look down at your chest and pull the newest addition from between the cups of your bra. "It's real silver."

"It's nice."

"It's surprisingly heavy. Wanna feel?"

"That's okay," he says, slightly strained.

Right, you think. I'm talking a lot.

You press your lips together in a mild pout and look at him through appreciative eyes. He's a very pretty boy, all soft and pale and sweet dark curls.

"Do you want me to put your hair up?"

His lips part before he talks. "I don't know if you should."

"Sure I should. It's getting in your eyes, right?" You take his hand where it's laid unsuspectingly in his lap and slip the hair tie from around his wrist, his fingertips tickling the inside of your palm. "Sit forward, Eddie."

He takes a deep breath, holds it, and sits up. You twist and then realise you need some more height, pushing a leg under yourself to kneel next to his lap.

You weave our fingers softly into the hair at the front of his face and rake away in lieu of a brush. After it's mostly tamed you pull it all into one hand and wrap the tie at the base of his head. You hum to yourself as you go, pleased when his lovely curls behave.

"Voilà," you announce, moving back on your haunches.

He breathes out. "Thank you."

You reach for a curl you'd missed at the very front and encourage it behind his ear. He has subtle indents in his cheeks today like he's in need of a good meal, and his skin is colder than it should be when you flatten your palm.

"You need something to eat," you fret. Your fingertips stroke under his eye, your thumb his smile lines.

He moves away slowly.

You pull your hand back into your lap. "Maybe we can go out and get something, if you don't like the sandwich?"

"What?" he asks, pale lips taut as he simpers at you. "Are you kidding? This is about to fix everything that's wrong with me."

His enthusiasm emboldens you. "It so will! There's ham and cheese too, if you prefer that one."

"Get it! I'm gonna eat both of them." S

Eddie eats both of his sandwiches and you eat your own, the two of you with your heads dropped back against the couch as you watch TV. There's a guy you've never seen before running around the streets of Chicago city centre looking for people to be in his play. Eddie's seen it before. He repeats dialogue in time with the characters, performing each line. Impressive, what with how tired he looks.

"What did he just say?" you ask, mouth full of cucumber.

"He said he's gonna throw himself off a bridge," Eddie informs. "Poor guy. I know the feeling."

You swallow harshly.

"Seriously?"

Your sad tone surprises him.

"I- No, I'm kidding," he says, scratching the base of his throat, friendship bracelet his only adornment.

His nervous itching makes you even more worried.

"If you did wanna do that, you can talk to me-"

He baulks, tongue poking out past his lips as he licks the corner of his mouth. "Thanks, sweetheart," he says, pet name like a kiss. It sounds silly but it really feels like one, right in the centre of your chest. "But I'm fine. Promise. It was a bad joke."

"Okay," you say, letting your suspicion shine through. You hold his eyes.

You haven't known Eddie long. It feels like you met yesterday, though really it's been two or three weeks. You fit together in a way you hadn't expected and adore more than you can articulate, two funny puzzle pieces.

"Well, I just wanted you to know. I like being your friend, I don't want you to disappear."

He laughs and licks his lips, a rough, chesty sound. "I don't want you to disappear either."

Tires crunch outside, a shushing sound and then the sharp shriek of a jeep being put into park. Eddie perks up considerably, his shoulders straightening.

"Hey, Chief," Wayne calls.

Trailer walls. Basically made of cardboard.

"Hey, Wayne. Where's the kid?"

You can't hear what Wayne says after that, words stolen by the TV.

"Is that Chief Hopper?" you ask, trying to catch a glimpse of him through the mostly shuttered blinds.

"Yeah, he- He's friends with Wayne."

"Why's he wanna know where you are?"

"'Cause I got into so much trouble."

You bite your tongue. His tone is hard, not stern but almost, and you realise you've overstepped as you usually do. You want to apologise but you don't want to pick the wound, eager to gloss over and make him smile again.

"It's pretty cool, isn't it?" you ask him.

"What?"

You spread your legs wider to slide onto your thighs and make him the taller one again, legs bent in a 'W' shape. "Coming back from the dead! First Will Byers, then Hopper."

Something surfaces in his expression. An irony.

"The undead," you croon, aiming for a smile, a laugh.

He cracks. "The undead," he agrees, smiling in bemusement. His eyes are a funny shade of brown.

—

Eddie shoo’s you home early that night but tries to do it kindly. He feigns exhaustion, a facade that's difficult to uphold when his entire body is thrumming with want. If there's one thing Eddie hates about being a vampire (there are literally hundreds of things he hates, but this one's special) it's that he wants to hurt the people he likes a thousand times more than the people he doesn't.

He can't explain it. Your blood is more appealing than any lonesome stranger's. Your pulse is practically music to his ears when you sit beside him. He'd kill himself before he ever hurt you, though. Or that's what he likes to think. Whether he has that amount of control is debatable.

No. He would kill himself before he hurt you, or Wayne, or any of his friends.

Steve can see the way that he's feeling on his face.

Hopper's delivery set to one side, a tall glass with blood congealed in a sticky ring at the bottom, Eddie curls under his huge quilt and tries not to pass out. Blood sate feels the same as a thanksgiving food coma. It's awesome.

He hates how good it feels.

"Stop feeling guilty," Steve says.

"He doesn't look guilty to me," Dustin says beside him, taller than the last time Eddie had seen him but still miles off of Steve's tall stature. He's changed his hat again, this one a garish green. It's not a good look.

"He looks like he's napping," Robin says, delighted.

"Can you guys go home?" Eddie asks.

"Shithead."

"What Steve means to say," Robin corrects, grinning her huge, catching smile, "is that no, we aren't going home. We brought games."

"I don't wanna play games." He does. Eddie needs the distraction, because eventually the blood sate will fade and all that will remain will be self-revulsion and a cruel desire to do something awful.

"I do not care even slightly," Steve says, deadpan, as he sits right there next to Eddie where you'd been sitting before. Steve's nowhere near as soft and he doesn't smell as nice, but Eddie's honestly glad someone is willing to sit next to him at all.

"Ouch, what the fuck?"

Dustin looks up from where he's sat himself on the floor. Robin giggles in her seat on the coffee table.

"Munson, are you fucking shedding? I just got stabbed."

"They don't work like that. They retract."

Eddie feels at his broken gums with his tongue. There's a clean incision where his fangs come out and then snap back inside after a time. They're remarkably thin, fitting in front of his natural incisors neatly.

Steve grumbles, hips lifted and hand searching under his butt for whatever it is that jabbed him. He retrieves exactly what Eddie had been expecting but hadn't had the forethought to prepare a lie about with a shocked gasp.

"Is this an earring? You don't have your ears pierced."

He swallows, knowing it's a very guilty gesture, and meets Steve's eyes straight on.

Funny how Steve's hair speaks as much as his expression, bobbing as he nods his head to emphasise each word, "Munson, do you have a girlfriend?"

Silence.

"...Not really."

"Holy shit," Dustin says, sounding extremely pleased. "No way."

Robin tucks her short hair behind her ears, hands paused in disbelief at her neck. "Actually?"

"I have a friend," Eddie admits.

"Thank god," Steve says, dropping your heart earring onto Eddie's thigh. The silver feels extremely hot over his pyjamas, like it's been held in the centre of a blistering hearth.

"I really thought Steve was gonna have to take one for the team and give you a pity handie," Robin says agreeably, scratchy voice coloured by genuine awe.

Eddie groans, "Harrington, get this shit off of me. You know I can't touch that."

"I forgot," Steve lies. "Can you wait? My hands are busy."

—

He has Steve put your earring between two pieces of kitchen towel and holds onto it. He doesn't see you for a week, and he keeps your damn earring in his pocket that entire time worried it's gonna slip out and brand him at any second.

Finally, you call him. He pretends he wasn't waiting.

"Hello," you say, like you're announcing something.

"Hey. How are you?"

"Eddie, I need your help. Badly."

He flinches up where he'd been leaning casually, hard enough to make Wayne jump. Eddie smiles at him placatingly and mouths a poor sorry, turning away to pretend there's a semblance of privacy to be found in such close quarters.

"Are you okay?"

"I gotta find a rainbow leaf beetle. Do you have a torch?"

"...What?"

"They only come out at night, so I'm gonna go look but I don't have a torch that works."

He relaxes, the lilting cadence of your voice enough to make his whole night. You sound so pretty even through the phone. He suspects you could hold any pitch, deep or high, and you'd still sound nice.

It's all in the way you — he says this with love — perform the words. You speak like each word you're saying has equal importance, and it's calming.

Even when you say stuff that's nonsense to him.

Right now, you don't sound upset or even worried about not having a torch, simply curious to know if he has one. If he focuses hard (and he's been trying not to, as you deserve your privacy) he can hear you all the way across the park, shifting from foot to foot in your bedroom, carpet crushed under your heels.

The action makes him think this might be more urgent to you than you'd first admitted.

"I have a torch." He also has amazing night vision. Like, impeccable. "Can I come help?"

"You want to?"

"I'd love to. Are you going out tonight?" He leans back to glance out the window. "The rain is finally stopping."

"Yeah, tonight! Is that okay for you? We could go tomorrow if you can't."

You're willing to change your plans now that he's asked to go with you. It's a gesture as lovely as you are. Eddie doesn't think you'd ever think it of yourself; your kindness is so intrinsic you don't notice it, like the fine stitching of a leather bound book. Integral and widely unappreciated.

"That's perfect."

Wayne raises an eyebrow when Eddie relays the conversation. "You're going out in the middle of the night with this girl to… look for bugs."

Eddie crosses his arms over his chest. "I swear."

"Be honest with me, kid."

"I am!"

Wayne swirls his coke can around in his hand as he thinks, a reluctance evident in his scowl. Eddie knows he's way too old for a guardian's oversight like this but he lets Wayne have a say because Wayne loves him, and Eddie doesn't ever want to put his old man through the turmoil he went through when he ran away. If that means a curfew in his twenties, Eddie's okay with that.

"If you're going to have sex with this girl, I'd prefer you did it here. You have to treat women with respect."

Eddie shivers, full body. "Wayne," he groans, covering his face. He can feel his cheeks pink under his palms, that's how quickly his embarrassment rises.

"I know you're more responsible these days, and you're a grown up. If you want a girlfriend and you want to do adult things with her-"

"Jesus Christ."

"- then that's alright. You don't have to fool around outside."

He drags his hands down on his face, pained. "It's not like that. You met her, you know she's…"

"Strange?"

"Alternative."

"No, you're alternative. She's cooky."

"Don't," he says. He knows his uncle isn't actually being cruel, so he lets it lie and fights for his own cause. "We aren't messing around. She genuinely wants me to go find these bugs with her. And…" He hates himself. "She has her own place, you know? If we were going to-"

Wayne seems stricken by the same mortified embarrassment as Eddie, raising a calloused hand in surrender. "Spare me."

"Thank you," Eddie says, spinning on his heel to hide in the bathroom for a while. It's only when he's sitting on the closed toilet does he realise Wayne hadn't mentioned his more dangerous ailment. For a time, he'd been a normal (debatable) person having a normal (horrifying) conversation with his dad. Not a vampire. Not somebody who ruins everything he touches.

—

"It's so quiet," you whisper.

For you, Eddie thinks.

You're in the forest surrounding the aptly named Forest Hills trailer park, wielding your borrowed torch carefully into the dark. Eddie's following in your footsteps, trying not to smell everything that's on you today and failing.

You smell like a person as everybody does. Over that is your soap, a faint hint of milk and honey that sticks to your skin even after you've washed it away. Over that is your deodorant, 'unscented', and over that is your perfume, which he likes most. It's a mix of smells, some Eddie doesn't know and some he does. There's lavender, though that might be down to the bunch you'd brought for his uncle wrapped in newspaper, and there's something fruity he can't quite put his finger on, all of it wrapped up in a cloying pairing of vanilla and coconut.

"Eddie?"

"What?"

"Are you okay? You're almost as quiet as the trees."

If only you knew the trees aren't quiet.

"I'm alright," he says quickly, catching up to you where you stand a few feet ahead. "What are we looking for?"

Best change the subject. How to explain he'd been smelling the notes of your perfume?

"They rest on tree trunks. You have to be careful, any sudden sound or light will scare them away. But if you flash the torch on them, they shine like oil stains."

He loves when you talk. "Where'd they come from?"

"Place called Snowdon. They're so rare, they think there's only about a thousand alive there."

"Well, how did they get here?"

You laugh under your breath, so quiet he would've missed it if he wasn't enhanced. "I don't know. How do beetles get to different places?"

"They fly?"

A twig crunches under your shoe.

Eddie tips his head to the side, thinking. "If there's only a thousand, how-" He stops, your circle of torch light growing further and further away. "Are you sure that they live here?"

"No, but if they do we'll be the first to find them."

"So they've never found any out here? In- In the midwest?"

"Not yet. Where'd you go?"

He shakes his head in an affectionate disbelief. "Right behind you."

You search in silence for a while. Eddie wishes he could say he was mad, or even mildly annoyed, wishes he had even the slightest regard for his own time, but really he thinks any time with you is time well spent. Especially if it's helping you do something you want to do. Whether you find your rainbow leaf beetle or not, he feels better knowing he's out here with you to keep you safe and in company.

Conversation is sparing. He doesn't mind. Your footsteps fill the sound and he finds even that stupid detail charming, the crunch, the pick up. His own are silent, a rare advantage to his terrible affliction.

"Any other beetles you want me to keep an eye out for?" he whispers.

"I'm not sure…" You turn to face him, torch pointed at your shoes. Rubber toes touched together, you lean in until you're all he can smell. Perfume. Blood. "If you see any cool spiders, too."

"You have the mason jar?"

"You know I do."

More than you realise, he thinks. The glass clicks in your bag.

There's enough light reflected to see the most minute details of your face. Your nose, the circle of your irises but not their colour. He suspects Eddie from early '86 wouldn't have been able to see hide nor hair, and it wouldn't shock him if you were technically blind right now.

"Thanks for coming out with me. I was gonna ask you."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, but I didn't want to come on too strong." He can sense your smile even though he can't see it. It's in the way your breathing deepens. "I know I can be a lot to deal with."

"Who told you that?"

"What?"

Eddie doubles down.. "Who told you that?" he sounds heartbroken.

He kind of is. Yeah, you're weird — Who cares? Who isn't? — but you're not a lot to deal with. He doesn't 'deal' with you.

"Everybody tells me that. All the time."

"Everybody's stupid." To say it so loudly, scathingly, is sweet. It's therapeutic. "They are. This whole town is stupid."

Your fingertips touch his thigh. He's willing you to turn the torch up and see his face, because he has a lot of feelings on display that he isn't brave enough to say out loud.

"You never make me feel stupid," you say softly.

"You're not."

You giggle breathily at his vehemence, fingertips pressing in with a touch more pressure before you pull away and shine the torch deep into the trees.

"This whole town is stupid," you mumble. "But not you."

He thinks of his friends who are definitely stupid, but he loves anyways. He's about to add them to the not-stupid (subjectively) list when he remembers Steve's discovery: your earring burning a hole in his pocket. He'd been carrying it for long enough now to forget all about it.

"Hey, I have something for you."

"You do?"

"Don't get too excited. It's not a gift."

He digs in his pocket for the tissue paper wrapping and hisses in shock as the silver plating of your hoop graces his index finger. You shine the torch at him. His eyes ache like he's been stabbed and he slams them closed, hand pulled to his chest.

How embarrassing.

"Eddie, what happened?" you question loudly.

He winces at the sudden overstimulation. Slowly, he blinks, and finds you staring at him in a worry that softens every feature, even your nose. He doesn't know the logistics.

"It's okay. Stabbed a paper cut on the back. Your earring's in my pocket, the heart?"

"The hoop? I thought I lost it." Your worry turns to confusion and then melds into joy. You step forward and fish in his jacket pocket for your earring.

"Steve found it."

"'The hair'?"

"Yeah, the hair."

You both laugh and yours heightens when you find the earring, pulling it out like a knife to be brandished. "Yes."

"I meant to tell you a dozen times that I had it."

"You're the best."

There's a crunch of wood somewhere to the left like something heavy falling over.

The forest sprawls in every direction and the trees tower, their presence looming as skyscrapers. The wind ruffles the topmost branches and their trunks groan with pressure. It's enough to freak Eddie out super sense or not, feeling suddenly like he couldn't protect you. He could hear the individual droplets of drool dripping from a lynx's bloody maw, and he can sense each twig underfoot before he takes his next step, but none of that is going to keep you safe in the face of real danger.

"Maybe we should head back," he says tentatively.

"Okay. Do you want to come over?"

His breath catches. "You want me to?"

"Yeah, we can watch movies, I have leftover pasta."

That sounds more like what he should've been thinking. "I don't wanna keep you up."

"What kind of pasta?" he asks.

The torch flickers. "With the tiny tomatoes. You'll like it, super creamy."

"How do you know?"

"You like Alfredo," you say astutely, hitting the torch into the palm of your hand. It flashes weakly, the shadow of the trees flickering and so dark they're violet.

"Try tightening the handle."

You turn the barrel of the torch and the light switches off completely. You try to undo what you've done to no success, the sound of plastic rubbing plastic almost as loud as your heartbeat. Your pulse falters and then grows to racing when the light fails to come back on.

"Eddie," you say, sounding unsure. It's a new sound on you. "I don't know where we are. How are we gonna get home?"

Your admission is like a dousing of ice water over his head. "You don't know what direction we came from?"

"No, do you?"

Eddie wouldn't know if he couldn't hear the sound of the electricity pylon buzzing somewhere to the right. But how can he explain that? "Uh, we were turned around."

You creep to his side and grab his arm with both hands. "Are you sure?"

"Hey," he says gently. "Hey, it's okay. I know where we are. We'll be fine."

"Are you sure?" you ask again.

"I'm positive."

You take a deep breath that doesn't erase your shakiness, a failed attempt at self-soothing. "I really don't know where we are."

"You're not afraid of the dark, are you?"

"Not really… I don't wanna get lost out here."

"You won't. I know how to get back. C'mon," he prompts, pulling his arm to encourage you forward.

You let go of him and navigate a few steps by yourself. He weaves through the trees, waiting for your heartbeat to slow.

It doesn't. He opens his mouth to reassure you again when you gasp, kicking your foot against a root and tripping. You barely fall, catching yourself on the trunk of a tree, and Eddie remembers himself. You can't see the trees. That's why you're worried. You can't see anything.

Then the smell of blood hits him like a freight train.

—

Your hand stings where you caught yourself, palm scraped down against harsh bark.

"Shit," you mumble.

You're panicking badly, and you're confused as to why Eddie isn't. Not only was it fucking stupid of you to come out here with only one torch, it was stupid of you to assume you'd remember what way was home. It was stupid of you to come here tonight for that stupid beetle, and stupid of you to drag Eddie along. You're an idiot, and now you're bleeding.

Your eyes sting with tears, pain like a popped seal. I'm so stupid.

"Hey," Eddie says, his tone silky soft, "you're okay. Let me help you up."

You hold your hands out.

"Eddie, this is weird." Hopefully he understands that weird means scary.

He takes your hands, fingers closing slowly over your bloody palm. His breath is loud as he pulls you up toward him like he's panicked but his grip stays kind, and you abandon the notion when he rubs over your knuckles with his thumb. "It's alright."

He doesn't sound the same.

"Eddie, we can't see."

"We'll go slowly, okay? I'll put my hand out and we'll walk around anything that gets in the way."

"Yeah," you say hurriedly, heart bump-bump-bumping against your ribcage.

He keeps one hand, the injured one, and starts to drag you slowly through the trees. His grip tightens as you go until it starts to ache, until it feels like it might bruise.

"Ouch, Eds. You're hurting me," you say, going for a lightly teasing tone and missing the mark.

Instantly, he eases off. "Sorry, sweetheart. You hold onto me, alright?"

You do as he'd asked, hand clinging to him as he leads. He doesn't squeeze you again, walking slowly as he'd promised, and the closer you get to the edge of the forest the clearer it becomes. Light pollution from the centre of town leaches through the trees like water trickling from an overflowing basin.

His second hand is in his pocket.

"Here," he says after you've traversed to the very edge of the forest. "There's the park. We're bona fide explorers."

He looks out toward the park and you look at the side of his face. Something isn't right. Something uncanny.

You drop your gaze from his face to your joined hands. They come apart, blood smeared in both your palms like two halves of a dripping heart.

—

There is something weird about Eddie. As a residential freak of Hawkins you think you're an authority in this, and you don't feel guilty for judging him. Your brain can't stop going over your night in the forest. For days you play the scenes back and for days you lose the details. You forget how the wind had tousled his hair, how he'd smelled, what he'd said.

You remember the way he'd squeezed your bloody hand. You remember the way he'd spoken, strained.

Not strained like he didn't want to comfort you, he had, but strained.

Restrained.

You're poking at the shallow cut half-healed now in your palm at work when a dude walks in, very tall, handsome, and gunning straight for you.

You straighten your badge and hide your bracelet heavy wrists behind your back, receding slightly as he approaches. He slows in front of you.

You have a light bulb moment.

"The hair," you say.

He scowls. "He told you that, huh. Typical."

"You're Steve?"

"That's me." Steve crosses his arms across his chest, his back to a booth, your back to the diner bar. "You're Eddie's new friend."

"What counts as new?" A month and a half doesn't feel so new to you.

"Trust me, you're new."

He has the strangest patch covering the outside of his left wrist, the same peculiar scarring that you can see on Eddie's waist when he reaches for a glass out of the kitchen cabinet. You don't ask because you're not a dick no matter how curious you find yourself, but it makes your heart skip. What is that? You'd assumed Eddie's was road rash. Now you're not so sure.

He tucks it under his arm.

You meet his suspicious gaze.

"You want coffee?"

"No."

You kick your foot, shoe sliding over the shiny waxed floor with a squeal. "Is Eddie okay?"

"Did you want to come to a party next Friday?"

"No," you say honestly. "Like a cult?"

"What?"

"Are you initiating me into your cult?"

He finally smiles, eyes creased with amusement. "I'm inviting you to our club."

"Club where you chew on each other?"

You look pointedly at Steve's wrist.

"No. Club where we play board games and drink jiffy pop. Come or don't, doesn't matter."

"If it doesn't matter, why are you asking me?"

It's a strangely intense conversation to have this early in the morning. Patrons chatter about work, coffee gets poured. The diner smells of syrup and sugar and bitter cold-press. You're both in work apparel, both refusing to move back. If this is some kind of shovel talk then that's fine, and if it's a test you're determined to pass, even if Eddie's been super weird lately.

"I'll come if you promise not to eat me," you say.

"It's really not that kind of club."

—

"I had the weirdest visit in the entire world today," you declare, stopping in front of Eddie's porch with a smile.

"Yeah?" he asks without looking up, guitar in his lap and pen scribbling over a lined notebook.

You wait for him to stop before you continue, leaning forward with both arms braced on the porch by his feet. "Steve Harrington came to see me, and he was super mean. You said he was nice."

He frowns at you. "I told you he was a dick."

"You like him when you tell me stories."

"How mean?" Eddie asks, patting the seat beside him.

You climb up onto the porch and plop down onto the couch, worn leather cold with the weather and damp in the seams.

You take a strand of his hair and curl it around your finger. "Not really super mean, but he was, like, acting like I killed a baby."

"He's like that."

You sigh and lean your cheek against the couch cushion, watching Eddie's stubble move as he tamps down a teasing smile. "He invited me to a party next weekr."

"It's not a party- Sweetheart, what are you doing?"

You tickle his cheek with the end of his hair. "Nothing."

"M'gonna sneeze."

You tickle him again, fine dark strands brushing over his pale cheek. He's a very ashen guy, you've found. Likely because he barely goes out in the sun and he doesn't eat enough. You draw circles around the apple of his cheek and grin softly at his growing smile, a sweet, silly thing.

"I'll tickle you back," he warns.

"Promise?"

He steals the curl back and tucks it behind his ear.

"You're not a cannibal, are you?"

Eddie chokes on air. You startle at his coughing and move to pat his back, palm slapping a steady rhythm into his shoulder. When he calms down you run your hand down the length of his arm, long sleeve t-shirt soft beneath your touch. You linger at his wrist and decide to hold it.

He drops his pen and your hand travels until he's caught your thumb. He kneads it in his fingers.

"I'm not a cannibal. Why would you think that?"

"I don't, but you and Steve are in your club, right?"

"Hellfire wasn't like that," he says heatedly.

"No, not- Not that one."

He doesn't say anything.

"You have… He has this scar, on his wrist. Like something bit him, or-" He turns to you and he looks formidable and upset and himself, not mad at you but raw emotion in his expression anyhow. It's gone as quick as it came.

"When all that… stuff happened," he begins quietly, "we got hurt. A couple of us."

You drop your head, ashamed at having pried. "I'm sorry, you don't have to tell me anything else."

"Don't be sorry…" He squeezes your hand and lets it go. "Don't worry about it."

"Okay."

"We usually call ourselves a party, these days. Not a club."

"Do you really play board games and drink jiffy pop?"

"Sometimes we get really crazy and order a pizza. You should come."

You realise as he says it how much his wanting you to go had mattered to you. Eddie's your friend, and you don't think that you're going to stay friends much longer.

"You think your friends will like me?" you ask, voice descending to a new kind of gentle.

He puts down his guitar and his notebook. His full attention is something you've come to really enjoy, not because of the hunger you often see flitting across his face — though that's neat —, but because of the inklings of adoration clinging to his smile when he looks at you. His blinking lashes. He smiles at you and just slows. A usually frenetic boy calmed.

"Maybe not Mike. Mike doesn't like anybody. Except for Will," he muses.

"What about you?"

"What about me?"

"Who do you like?"

"I like all of them." He juts his cheek toward his shoulder, conceding, " I think Dustin's my favourite. He's funny. He's funnier than I am, and he's the smartest kid I've ever met. And he knows it."

Your eyes focus on the pink outline of his upper lip as he speaks. It's a pleasure to be this close, and see him in this kind of crazy detail. When you go home tonight you might try to draw him. You'll probably forget.

It's the kind of smile that deserves to be immortalised.

"I really like your smile," you tell him, hoping it'll last a little longer.

It stretches. The pink outline turns white. "Shut up."

"I do. I've seen a thousand different smiles but I've never met someone who smiles like you do."

"How's that?" he asks, edging toward you, face a mirror in which you can see your own charmed expression.

"Like you," — you shake your head with your lips parted — "know a secret. Something you won't tell anybody."

His smile abruptly ends.

You've nothing if not a talent for saying the wrong thing.

"A good secret," you amend.

He picks up his acoustic and gives it an experimental strum. "Maybe one or two," he agrees.

Relief catches you. You nibble at the inside of your lip and watch his fingers work over the neck of his guitar, tipping your head so you can read the words he's markered over the body.

"This machine slays dragons," you murmur to yourself. "Yeah? How many?"

"Just the one."

"Save any princesses?"

"Not yet." He plucks at the strings, lost in thought, before turning to you with eyebrows raised. "Can you play?"

You exhale out of the corner of your mouth as he pushes the guitar into your lap, an arm coming around your shoulder, the other reaching to guide your curled forefinger to the strings. You turn to face him, watching him talk with a growing fondness.

"It's easy, I swear. We'll do Call Me. Blondie's basic, even a baby could play it."

He realises you aren't listening and raises his gaze, shiny brown irises stuck on your lips. This close, it would be worse if he didn't look at them.

You glance at his, an obvious thing, half a wish. If he only lifted his chin.

Your breath mingles.

"It's easy," he says again, a murmur of his usual volume as his gaze pulls back up to yours. "I'll show you."

You wonder if he can hear your heart pounding; it's deafening. You wait, and you wait, and you turn your eyes back to his guitar and clamp your fingers down against the struts so he can't see them shaking with adrenaline.

—

Eddie sits beside Steve and tries not to admit to himself that Steve Harrington is, horrifyingly, his best friend (along with the rest of the party, obviously). Steve is the closest in age and Eddie can't make excuses (though he tries and tries and tries), Steve understands how much Eddie doesn't ever want to talk about anything that's happened to them, so he talks about literally everything else instead.

"It was the weirdest pawn shop I've ever been in. They had, like, a wall of combi's playing the same video at the same time but all slightly delayed."

Eddie blinks.

Steve turns his head from the TV, having expected a response. "Did you say something?"

"No." Then, because he's not a dick. "Sorry, Harrington. Want me to sit on your other side?"

"What for?" Steve says. Not because he denies how he's hard of hearing, but because he denies having conversations with Eddie.

He does end up moving to Steve's other side with a pathetic excuse. "I can't see the TV."

Steve doesn't say a word until he's sat down again. "Sorry I was mean to your girlfriend."

"Yeah, what was that about?"

"I was cranky because it was early and I don't want her to damage the integrity of the party." He gives equal weight to both reasons.

Eddie snorts at him. "Since when do you care about the integrity of the party?" Steve barely acknowledges that they are a party. He thinks that's a very nerdy way to say friends.

"Since always, dipshit."

"And inviting her to join the party was the solution because…?"

Steve drinks the rest of his coke and pretends to really care about what's on TV. "If," he begins after a minute, refusing to look at Eddie, "something happens with her, and something happens to you, that damages the integrity of the party."

"Steve," Eddie says, jaw dropped down to his chest, "do you have a crush on me?"

"Oh my god," Steve mutters. "Oh my god," he says louder. "I can't stand you."

To prove his point, he gets up from the couch with a wrinkled nose, stops to tap his shoe gently against Max's where she's sitting in the armchair across from the coffee table, and disappears into his kitchen.

Steve Harrington cares about me enough to give Y/N the shovel talk.

He feels kind of great about it.

But he's not sure your the one who needs warning.

That night in the forest, Eddie had almost snapped. There are rules to follow if he wants to keep people safe, self-imposed, Hopper-imposed, and he's broken too many with you already, the most important being no close proximity when he's hungry. Eddie doesn't even realise he is hungry half the time. He'll be standing by you and he'll want to touch you, and suddenly it's like he's three weeks in to the month without sating.

He thinks about kissing you and suddenly he's thinking about biting you, and hurting you, and it's literally tearing him up from the inside out.

How can he want to do that to you?

"You look so depressed and pathetic," Dustin says out of the blue.

Eddie pouts and falls back into the couch, Steve's fancy throw falling onto his shoulder. "I used to like you," he says, taking in Dustin's outfit with a kind of parental approval. He's getting older and it shows, slightly more handsome than he had been — he's kept all his baby weight and it suits him, his full cheeks surrounded by the softest brown curls Eddie has ever seen. The outfit stays immature, a funny t-shirt and ill-fitting pants.

"Sad. You have a sad face," Dustin says.

"Go play with your nerd squad, please."

He doesn't listen, collapsing in Steve's still-warm seat like a cheap tent and crossing longer, thicker arms over his chest. He smiles at Eddie genuinely. "Where's your girlfriend?"

"No."

"Where's Y/N?"

Eddie tips his head so he can see past the coffee table and points to where you're almost hidden, sitting with Robin on the floor by Steve's sideboard. You have a basket of tapes in front of you, the two of you trying to choose what's going in the stereo. Eddie prays for anything but Blondie.

You will most likely choose Blondie.

"What does she like?" Dustin asks curiously.

"Everything, kind of. Why?"

"I wanna know what to say when I talk to her."

Eddie smiles at his friend's face, a soft, surprised thing. "I don't know if she knows anything about the radio but if you're happy about it she'll be happy too. She's a good listener."

Dustin picks at a piece of lint on his t-shirt bearing a white and black print of a dog wearing sunglasses. "So you talk to her?" he asks without looking up.

"I mean, yeah. What else do you do?"

"With a girl that likes you? Huh, let me think." Dustin laughs and ruins his own sarcasm, pointer finger laid against his chin in a show of thoughtfulness.

"It's not like that," Eddie says lightly.

"It could be."

"Could it? I mean… I don't even know if she'll stick around. And I feel bad 'cos I can't be honest with her."

"Why not?"

"Hopper said he would literally put me in the hole if I even thought about it." There's no need to expand. Dustin would know better than anyone what he's talking about.

He cringes at the thought, self hatred a hot poker down his throat. He must've said it to Dustin a hundred times when he finally came around from his coma (that wasn't a coma, but a death, and then a rebirth). I can't believe I put you through that. I can't believe I put you through that. I'm so sorry.

I'm just glad you're alive, Eddie.

And for a while, Eddie hadn't felt the same. The world he'd woken up to was hard. There had been lawyers and grief and guilt and becoming. He doesn't have the words to describe how it feels to become something new, something that needs to hurt people to live, something that will hurt people to live, whether Eddie wants to or not.

The loss of choice is suffocating.

Though moments like this with his friends– they don't make it 'worth it', they're just how it had to happen. There isn't a scenario where Eddie could give up. He can't leave Wayne, and he can't leave Dustin. He can live with the grief of what he is if it means other people don't have to live with grief of what he isn't.

"Eddie, are you okay?"

He's missed something. Dustin isn't the only one looking at him.

He curls a hand around his forearm subconsciously. "I'm fine. I think I'm gonna go to the bathroom, actually. Gotta piss real bad."

"Eddie-"

"I'm fine, Henderson." He puts on a good show, patting Dustin's arm. His heart, usually so slow these days, has enough life in it to ache.

He can't have been in the bathroom for five minutes when somebody knocks on the door aggressively. He's expecting Steve, pissed at his disappearance and likely preparing a speech on attention seeking behaviours and how they're hurting the youth of America, so he opens the door with a tired glare.

He finds you, beaming and pretty, dressed ridiculously nicely for his idiot friends.

"Hi," you say. He can hear something from Blondie's Parallel Lines playing from the living room, familiar because it's your favourite album. "Any room for me?"

Eddie moves back. You close the door behind you. The bathroom becomes a vacuum of your sounds and smells.

"They didn't have any Dio," you say with a smile.

"I honestly wouldn't expect any different."

"You could've brought some tapes, your mix from the van," you suggest. "I love that one."

"Which one?" he asks, and he can't help it, whenever he's with you his voice crops to a dulcet murmur. The urge to speak to you as you speak to him is unconquerable.

"One with the winking smile on the slipcase. I really like it."

"You can have it."

You lean against the sink. "I can?"

"Mm. Whatever you want." Especially when you look like this.

You smile at him, your 'thank you' smile, all sticky fondness and mischievousness. He has no idea what you're thinking.

"'S a small bathroom in a huge house," you marvel. Your voice echoes "Where does he shower?"

"There's an upstairs bathroom."

"Two bathrooms? That's-"

"Audacious?"

"I was gonna say overkill."

Your candidness has him shaking with laughter. He clutches at his sides, arms crossed and leaning forward. You visibly take in his appearance, eyes panning slowly over his clean hair. He'd taken care to look like somebody you might want to look at tonight.

"Why don't you sit down, Eds?" you ask, eyes creased with an unreadable emotion.

Eddie feels blindly for the toilet lid and pushes it down so he can do as you ask, wondering why you're asking.

"You look very handsome today."

He hugs himself. "As opposed to every other day, when I don't?"

You take a step forward, a second, hands playing with the hem of your shirt. Your outfit today is delightfully simple, a pressed black t-shirt long enough to cover the waistband of your pleated skirt. There's an expanse of thigh that makes his heart beat spin out, one longer than the other where your thigh-high is falling down.

He wants to pull it up.

"C'mere," he says.

You take that last step between his shoes and he reaches out, getting his fingertips under the elastic of your sock and tugging it upward over the soft fat of your leg. Your hands come up to his shoulders for balance, and you say, "No, you look handsome every day. Today you look very handsome. I made the distinction."

He covers your thigh with both hands, looking up into your face as you look down. "You look really pretty today," he says boldly, fingers spreading behind your knee.

"Thank you. Do you like my t-shirt?"

It's a screen print of Debbie Harry. Eddie tries not to roll his eyes. "I love it, but your dedication to Blondie is seriously worrying, sweetheart." He gives your leg a short squeeze and pulls the most giggly smile out of you yet.

"Like Madonna."

"No!" he bemoans.

You laugh and grow closer, arms on his shoulder, a hand threaded into his hair. "Cyndi Lauper?" you suggest.

He puts a hand on your waist as you move in for a hug. Your arms wrap around his neck and the tops of his shoulders, cheek crushed to the top of his head.

He'd ask if you were okay if he thought you weren't. You're not upset or seeking comfort. You're affectionate. You've been getting more and more touchy for weeks, as he has. Stolen touches, your almost-kiss on the porch last week.

"No, not Cyndi Lauper," he says, his hand skirting around your back to pull you in properly.

"R.E.M?"

"God, no. Where are you hearing all this junk?"

"The radio."

"Tuned into the wrong station."

You pet the back of his head. "Yeah," you say softly, "I think I was."

The hug is shorter than Eddie wants it to be. You make one of your happy sounds and pull away to get your hands on his face, stroking curls from his cheeks with a protective touch. "Handsome," you say, turning your hand to stroke his cheek with your knuckles. "Pretty. You have really big eyes, Eddie, so brown, and so…" You tilt your head to one side, face inching forward.

He turns his face to suit, to fit, breath held as you close the gap.

"So pretty," you murmur, and kiss him.

His hands are limp and then alive, one clutching your hip, one splaying against your chest. He can hear the thud of your heart clear as day — you're bumping with excitement as you kiss him. It's a delicate, tender thing, the party suddenly far away, the music drowned by the sounds of your breathing. You kiss as you talk, as you move, gentle but with bursts of ardency. Your lips are a blissful heat, the tip of your nose smushing into his as you part your lips over his.

He lifts his chin higher, his neck craned to receive you. He's savouring every movement. Each pause for breath that you take. The feeling of your inhales over his quick-bruising lips.

Your hands play in his hair so sweetly it makes his eyes burn with an embarrassing amount of emotion. He screws them closed and squeezes up your waist, steadying himself as you feel along his bottom lip with the tip of your tongue.

You don't get much further than that, seemingly pleased with your own brazeness or perhaps his touch, eyes glowing with mirth as you pull away.

"Sorry," you breathe, not sorry at all. "You just really looked like someone should be kissing you."

You're flushed. Eddie can practically see the heat emanating off of your cheeks. He can feel it.

He stands up, your pulse a ringing in his ears. The wet valves of your heart opening and closing.

"Eddie?" you ask quietly, lifting your head to meet his eyes as he walks you back into the door.

His gums sting. A click.

It's a compulsion.

His hands curl around your elbows, holding you in place. Your eyes are wide with confusion, your lightly swollen lips parted. He can see the tiniest slip of your pink tongue.

He holds your gaze as he leans in. Your eyelids flutter closed. You wrap your arms around him as he descends, totally trusting.

He's a meaner kiss than you are. He starts slow but swiftly loses a handle on it, kisses short but insistent, hot presses like little crescent moons against your barely open mouth.

His hands move up your arms, a near vice-like grip until he finds your sleeves. His fingers slip underneath, hands hungry for your warmth.

You make the worst sound anyone has ever made as he moves back, like something has been ripped from you. A gutted gasp, near silent.

He placates as he wades back in. Thumbs rubbing your arms, lips mouthing damp kisses down your face. The corner of your pout, the hill of your chin, the skin under your jaw. Your head tips back against the door with an audible thud. You exhale hard.

Eddie can't feel his hands.

Your pulse hammers under his lips. He kisses it once. He can't think. He can't breathe.

"You're always cold," you whisper, your hands drifting lazily under the fabric of his t-shirt. Your fingertips trail up his spine. "But your lips are warm."

He kisses your neck, his lips parting slowly, a hair's width a second as he sucks your skin into his mouth gently. It's barely a kiss. He does it a second time. A third. You start to laugh, a golden sound.

The point of his fangs touch your skin and you stop.

Eddie closes his mouth abruptly. His hand leaps to your neck and he feels your heart skip as he holds you still. "I'm sorry," he says, nose rubbing over the damp spot he's left behind, your teased skin.

Your heart hikes again.

"I'm sorry," he repeats. He pulls away, an agony.

"It's okay," you say. Your breathlessness says otherwise.

Eddie takes as many deep breaths as he can stand, wanting to clear his head and filling it with you instead. Your everything; your smell, your skin. Your limp hands against his back.

"I didn't hurt you, did I?" he asks when he gets a look at you, your unreadable expression. He takes care to keep his head angled down so you can't see the lower half of his face.

"I don't think you could."

You cup his cheek in your hand and he leans into it, his weight against yours.

"I wanted to tell you something," you confess.

"What-" He licks his lips, wincing when his fangs slide into his tongue and scrape grooves across his taste buds. "What was that?"

"I know you…" You pause, fingertips rubbing at his cheek.

Does she know? Eddie thinks, horrified. He hadn't realised how scary waiting could be. A thousand worries condensed into a handful of seconds. Does she know?

How could she not?

You press your palm to his cheek with more insistence. "I don't want you to think you have to hide anything from me. I know you have scars," you say, fingers sliding into the soft baby hair at the back of his neck. "You don't have to cover up. You don't have to cover any of it."

"I won't hurt you," he says, trying to convince himself.

"I know."

You stay a while longer. Eddie's friends pretend that you hadn't been alone in the bathroom for an inordinate amount of time together. You thank them all silently and less so, trying to talk to as many of them as you can.

There's Lucas, who's really, really nice, and his girlfriend Max, who's less so. She gives you an unimpressed look through her thick-lensed glasses, but you compliment her crutches and she comes around.

There's Mike, who actually isn't anywhere as bad as Eddie had described him. He's not frosty or standoffish, he's sweet and he asks questions. There's a girl with him that you don't catch the name of, and a boy on her other side.

There's Dustin, who you adore immediately, Robin, who you adore more, and then there's Steve.

Steve offers you a pretzel like you're more than familiar. He strolls right up to you with a bowl of them in hand and doesn't leave until you've eaten half of them.

There's a couple of people you don't manage to talk to at all, and you feel guilty about it all the way home.

"What if they think I'm rude?" you ask, tired eyes locking onto the stereo system. The time blinks analog in the dark, 12:59AM.

"They don't, don't worry about it. You have lots of time to get to know them, anyway."

You hum and turn to his face, indulgent because you know he can't look back. "You're not too tired to drive, are you?" He's spent. Yesterday had been one of his bad days.

"I'm fine."

"You say that all the time," you observe, dropping your cheek into the passenger seat's headrest.

"I'm fine all the time."

"Liar."

"Nuisance."

You huff a laugh through your nose. The strands of his friendship bracelet, the small beads at the ends, swing like pendulums in the gap between his arm and the steering wheel. You can see the rough skin of a scar creeping out from under his sleeve.

"Mike was really nice," you say.

"He has a bleeding heart."

That feels accurate. "He reminds me of you."

Eddie rolls his eyes. You feel for every detail, the strange tension between you like a gaussian filter over everything. He's gorgeous in a horrific way, heartbreakingly pale, eyes dark as pitch, hands restless. They squeeze alone the wheel, thick fingers curling tight until his knuckles are stark white. Running down the back of his hands are veins like rivers. They're more purple than green.

"Eddie," you say, playful, a tiny bit insecure.

"What?"

"Wanna stay the night?"

His hand moves forward on the wheel like he's revving a motorcycle, the tendon in his wrist rising to the surface. He clenches. "Not sure it's a good idea."

"Just to sleep. It's late."

"I don't know if I can sleep next to you."

You don't wanna say please. You don't want to ask Eddie to do anything he can't or doesn't wanna do.

He pulls up outside of your house with his mind already made up. He gets out of the car and you follow his lead. He locks it, shoves the keys in his pocket as you join him on the path up to your porch.

He's been in here enough times to know what it looks like, but for some reason you find yourself checking his face, worried about what it is he thinks of your things, all your mismatched trinkets, your stained glass lamps, your life as you let yourselves in. He ducks through the beeded curtain into your bedroom wary that they'll get tangled in his hair like they sometimes do.

"Do you wanna call Wayne?" you ask, gesturing to your telephone on the right hand side, nestled between a stack of books and a cup full of coloured pencils.

You pull your knee up to your chest and unlace your shoes one at a time. Eddie punches the number into the phone and holds the receiver to his shoulder to do as you're doing. It takes him less time to pop his sneakers off than for you to get out of yours. He's just taken the phone back into his hand when Wayne picks up.

"Wayne?" he asks softly. "Didn't wake you up, did I?"

You can't hear his response.

"I'm gonna stay with Y/N tonight. Yeah, we had a good time. Yeah…" His eyes drift to you as you peel out of your thigh highs.

"Yeah, I'm still here. What?" He meets your eyes and it feels accidental, because he throws his eyes to your bedsheets and turns his face to the wall. "No," he says firmly.

You scrape together something to wear for bed and some fresh underwear and leave for the bathroom, telling yourself that nothing is gonna happen so don't get your hopes up but not wanting to get caught out if it does. You freshen up, brushing your teeth and washing your face.

You stare at yourself in the mirror and wonder if you should've left your face-powder and your mascara on. Maybe even the skirt. You'd looked nice and pretty for the party. Now you look like yourself, still pretty but without those extra touches. Will he care? Does it matter?

You debate your pyjama pants considerably.

There's a lot happening.

Eddie is… Eddie is something else. He's different, you'd known that for a long time, and his kiss had confirmed it.

He's something out of a science fiction book.

Well, nobody's perfect.

Whatever he is, he'd kissed you. You'd kissed him and he'd responded, he'd come back for more, and now he's sitting in your bed when he could've gone home. You bring your hand to your neck and crane to one side, fingertips poking at your unbroken skin. His hickey's haven't even bruised.

You screw the pants up and drop them into your laundry basket. You take off every piece of jewellery on your person.

"Do you wanna use the bathroom?" you ask from behind the beaded curtain. "I left a new toothbrush for you on the sink."

"Yeah, desperately, I…" He takes you in as you emerge. Fresh-faced, bare-legged. As naked as you've ever been in front of him, physically and otherwise.

Eddie meets you where you're standing. He's ditched his jacket, and for the first time since you met him you can see the full length of his arms.

"You're not wearing your bracelets," he says, looking between your bodies. His hand twitches toward yours.

"You have tattoos," you say.

"They were better, before."

There's a misshapen mess of black splodges near the crook of his elbow broken up by scar tissue. One arm is less scarred than the other, an almost perfect flank of white skin.

"Is that a puppet? He's super spooky."

"Mh-hm."

You bring your hand to his tattoo and feel over the skin. It doesn't feel like it's there. Eddie holds your wrist and the two of you move together, your fingertips stroking up until you're wrapped around his bicep.

Eddie brings his free hand to your collar. His index finger straightens, encouraging your chin up so he can ease forward and kiss you. He's firm, eager, and your lips curl up into a smile underneath it. He turns his head to the right and you fall left, smile worsened when you feel his own start to form.

He nudges your nose. You take it for a telling off and laugh. "Sorry," you apologise, kissing his top lip.

"You're making this difficult," he chides.

Despite any sternness, Eddie loosens his grip on your wrists to slide his fingers between yours, pressing your joined hands to your chest. He leans back down and he's careful, almost methodical in the way he kisses. Chaste pecks, hot and precious as tiny stars.

You reach for his waist.

Eddie kisses you a final time and steps back. "I'll be back," he promises.

You lower your chin, flustered and perplexed by his sudden departure.

Walking around to the right side of the bed, you click on your bedside lamp — a beautiful glass and foiled contraption that throws dainty stripes of stars and hearts over everything close in the dark — before climbing in. You sniff one of your pillows experimentally, trying to remember when you last changed the bed. You decide they're acceptable even if they really smell like your hair oil and flip them around to be safe, plumping them up with your hands.

You've curled up on your side and almost succumb to your fatigue when Eddie returns, bringing with him the smell of spearmint and a fuzzy feeling in your stomach as he shuts off the light and sits on the opposite side of the bed, facing you. The hair around his face is damp with water, baby hair's limp.

"I'm sorry I don't have anything for you to wear, I-" Youre cut off by your own gasp as Eddie kisses you, his hand on your neck, his nose bridge sliding into your own. You hadn't been expecting it, and it's no less dizzying than any other kiss he's given you today.

"It's okay," he murmurs lowly, lips pressed to your lips, "have to wear you, is all."

You huff a laugh into his mouth. "I swear I'm always laughing when I'm with you," you muse as Eddie dedicates himself to your bottom lip. You cup the back of his head. "You're amazing."

Eddie groans and eases back. "I'm not good with words, sweetheart. To tell you how I feel about you."

You push one of your legs toward his knee. "...You can show me."

He shifts in the bed until he can lean over the entirety of your chest, hands cupping your face and lips poised hovering over your own, a millimetre of space between your mouth and his. "Okay," he says quietly.

He dips down. You can feel his bottom lip tremble, and then he's kissing you too hard to feel it anymore. You wrap loose arms around his back.

"Are you sure?" you whisper to him.

He rests his nose against your cheek, eyes closed, drawing the tiniest left to right. "I want you," he reassures.

"And you're okay?"

"Yeah, sweetheart. I'm okay. Do you want to?"

"Yeah. More than anything."

Another loving kiss against your cheek, Eddie moves down, down, down. "Tell me if I do something you don't like," he murmurs, top lip dragging and leaving a line of dampness to the base of your throat.

He adorns the canvas of your neck in half-moon contusions, big hands caressing your shoulders, your chest. You hold your breath as his fingers pass over your nipple, fighting to keep in any embarrassing sounds.

Eddie disagrees with his plan of action. You shiver as he brings his lips to a close and his bottom teeth scrape upward, as he pulls his head up and says, "C'mon, angel, breathe."

He follows his command with a manipulative touch, a circle over your nipple that makes you shudder. He kisses you and it feels like a thank you, pressure, a heat as his palm smooths over the bump of your tummy to your thighs. He squeezes the outside of one and for a while you can kiss him back, and then he pulls your thighs apart and you break away. Eddie follows, kisses you even when your reciprocation is weak.

He pushes your thigh flat to the bed.

You feel the heat of your excitement start to grow. Your stomach aches with the want to be touched.

"You're like a space heater, you're that warm," Eddie says, hand coasting down the inside of your thigh. He squeezes until fat melds under his fingers. "Are you scared?"

His whispering in your ear, his hand as close as it is to where you want it, it winds you up like a coil. You sigh as his thumb strokes the edge of your panties, sound coloured by an awful, devouring desire.

His face presses further into yours in reaction.

His touch is like the tide. He wades in, away. His thumb strokes inward over something soft and then his whole hand moves back to your thigh.

"Teasing," you utter.

"A little… Why, is there something you want me to do?"

His clueless whispering is infuriating and exciting at the same time. Your heart races and you can't discern if it's more lust or love.

"Touch me," you plead, pouting, knowing he's a pushover.

Anticipation stabs like a needle in your tummy as he slides his palm over your cunt completely. He rubs a careful, almost casual rhythm into your panties with the breadth of his fingers, lips kissing a lazy stripe up to your forehead, where he rests his face. You both watch his hand move past the valley of your rising chest.

"M'gonna pull these off, yeah?" He sits up, fingers pushing under the sides. "Lift your- yeah, thank you, sweetheart."

You buzz with his pet names, his soft voice, the feeling of your panties sliding up to your knees and his gentle exhale. You swear you can feel it fan over your slit. "Shit…" he moan, pulling at your spread cunt.

He looks like he's in pain, eyebrows pinched together and murmuring curses as he circles the wetness gathered at your entrance. You turn your head searchingly as he starts to ease his index finger inside your heat, a gentle probing.

One becomes two. He muffles your sighing with firm kisses, amorous praises, "That's it, baby, relax," as he works you open, fingers wet with slickness but not enough. He changes his position, pushing his middle and marriage finger inside and curving as his thumb slides up your slit looking for the bead of your clit.

Slow, slow circles. "There, huh?"

You shiver as he pushes in deeper, fingers as far as they can go. He spreads them wide, drops reassuring kisses all over your face when you keen. It's so new to have him kiss you at all, and to have him touching you — you're melting into nothing right there in his hold.

"I got you. Tell me if it hurts, okay?"

"Want you to- I want you to fuck me," you murmur, arms wrapping around him so you can hide your face in his neck.

"Fuck. Fuck, baby. Gonna fuck you just as soon as I can fit," he murmurs back, sinking three of his thick fingers into your snug cunt. He pulls wetness out with every thrust, a line of slick dribbling down onto the sheets underneath. He wipes it upward and pushes it back inside, his chest heaving. "Y'so tight, gotta take my time. Take our time." He rubs his nose against your head until he can kiss the highest point of your cheek. "Make sure you can take it."

"I can."

It doesn't bear repeating how quietly you're speaking, a mouthing inaudible under the wet, rhythmic thud of Eddie's pinky finger slapping your sticky cunt as he ups the pace of his finger-fucking.

"I don't think so," he coos, pulling his fingers from your cunt and making a show of spreading them wide. Your slick ribbons between them, almost invisible in the dark. "Ruin your sheets before any of that, maybe."

Eddie sits up and gets his hands under your armpits. You laugh as he tugs you up so your shoulders are on top of the pillows, but you don't have time to be confused. He quickly moves to kneel at your feet and pulls your leg over his shoulder, your back lifting unevenly from the sheets.

He starts with a sweet kiss pressed to the skin closest to his mouth, your lower thigh, and then works his way up, open mouthed, barely kisses at all until his hair whispers against your sensitive cunt and he's nipping at the stripe of skin between your thigh and the place where you most want his attention.

"Pretty," he says into your damp skin, lips shining. You reach down to stroke his hair behind his ears, worried he's gonna get it dirty.

He looks at you from between your thighs, his eyes dark in the dim light, their lashes long and soft where the outermost flutter into your skin. He's lovely.

He holds your gaze as he pulls back to your inner thigh. "Pretty everywhere," he says salaciously.

His lips part over your skin and you think he might bite you, a bruising hickey, but he pushes you down flat to the bed by your hips and kisses your clit, a simple kiss. Your fingers weave deeper into his hair. Your fingernails scratch lightly against his scalp, every tiny lick or kiss reflected in the minute tightening of your hands.

He goes slow, mouths down, kisses wetter and wetter as he reaches your entrance. "Poor girl," he murmurs, hands pulled down to further scandalise. He sinks two fingers inside and laughs into your cunt. You squirm.

"What happened? You're dripping on my fingers." Your thighs draw closed around his head as he curls his fingers against a soft spot.

"Eddie, can you-" You swallow. "Please. Please."

He pries your thighs open and rubs them soothingly, lapping at the heat of your cunt in face of your pleading. His tongue appears broad and flat up the centre of you until he's kissing on your clit, fingers pumping in rhythm. Your fingers work into his hair and he groans, the vibration enough to make you whimper under his mouth.

He laps at your clit messily and you tip your head back, breath coming in tight pants. You don't know what you say, only how you say it, desperate "please,"s and keening "Eddie,"s.

His thrusts grow in enthusiasm, fingers rubbing eagerly against something sweet. You pull your legs up and nudge his face to your cunt insistently, thigh shaking as you hold it up. Eddie doesn't need any more encouragement, his pretty pink lips suckling at your clit until you see stars. You make a pained little sound and try to move away from his kissing, startled at the intensity of your high.

Eddie lets your clit pop out of his mouth with a lewd, slick sound, his hands moving under your thighs and pulling you closer. "Good girl," he says, rubbing his wet face against the inside of your thigh. He inhales hard as you are, though he pauses to kiss your kneecap and pat your leg. "Good girl, sweetheart."

"I'm sorry," you say breathlessly, hands pulling his hair from his face. Pleasure rolls through you in hot waves.

"For what?"

"Tugging on your hair," you explain, shoulder pulled up to your cheek.

Eddie kisses your tummy lovingly and climbs on top of you to do the same just under your chin. "It’s okay, sweetheart, I like that shit. That was good, huh?" he asks, lips dropping down to yours all wet and warm.

He's not bragging, he's genuinely asking.

You nod into his kiss, your hands coming up to his sides. You swear your ears perk up as he unzips his jeans and eases them down, a hand disappearing into the mess of fabric. He moans quietly at the first touch.

You move his hair out of the way to watch. Eddie tugs at the length of his cock with a cruel hand, a short dribble of pearly precum sobbing down the tip and under his fingers. He spreads it as it goes, the slickness emphasising the ridges and veins of his cock. You can see it throb, if you look close enough.

He sits back and eases his jeans and boxers down enough to reveal a thatch of curls that brush his hand with every pump downward.

"You okay?" he asks, smirking.

You pull your shirt over your head and your chest warms at his adoring smile. "Will you take off yours?"

He doesn't hesitate like you worried he might. He sheds his t-shirt, pulling the fabric over the back of his head and dumping it off the side of the bed.

You take in his chest and it's abundance of ragged scarring still purpled with newness. He has a tattoo over his heart, a black whorl of legs and eyes. Fine dark hair crawls from the middle of his chest down his navel, joining with the thatch of coiled hair surrounding his aching cock. You shuffle forward and wait with two tentative hands held aloft until he says, "It's okay," before you touch him. You run your hands down the soft slopes of his waist.

"Does it hurt?"

"Not anymore."

"Can I kiss it?"

He snorts. "Prefer you kiss something else."

That really makes you laugh. You dot a kiss against his jaw and can't make yourself stop, dropping them all the way to the skin behind his ear. Your hand creeps lower as you go, held to the curve of his tummy. His skin is hot to touch the lower you go, and his stomach feels solid, a heaviness you know all too well.

"Can I touch you?" you whisper into his ear.

"Please."

You drop your forehead against his chest and he brings his hand up to cup the back of your head. His cock pulses as you wrap your hand around it, skin smooth and slick as you palm slowly up and down. You watch in awe as a bead of precum wells at the tip, Eddie's rough breathing loud overhead.

"Lie down, Y/N," he says, hand moving behind your naked shoulders.

"What way?"

"How do you want it, sweetheart? We'll do it whatever way you want."

You think about it. Whatever way you want. No matter how indulgent, you know he means it.

"Will you spoon me?"

He pushes you gently and follows behind, dragging your body into his front and angling your hips, cock hot and prodding your back. He gets his hand under your knee and pulls it up, splaying your cunt. You jump in surprise as he pushes his cock through your folds, tip rubbing against the still sensitive bead of your clit.

Eddie wraps his arms around you, hugging you from behind. "You wanna put it in for me, baby?"

You reach between your bodies and take his sticky cock into your hand, shifting until the head nudges against your hole. He sinks in inch by inch, arms tightening around your waist and grinding you down onto his cock until you're whimpering.

You grab at his arms with your hands and tether yourself to him as he starts to rock his hips, his thrusting tender and his face turned into your neck.

He presses his hand flat to your abdomen, an anchoring point as he moulds your weepy cunt around his length, each slovenly movement into your heat spreading you that little bit wider.

"Fuck," he says finally, sounding seconds from a black out. "Oh, fuck- You're tight. Gonna fuck you open slow, okay?"

You're pretty sure you'd let him do just about anything. You bring his hand to your mouth and kiss every white knuckle, every freckle you can see on the back, and when he bottoms out your cover your lips with his stolen hand to smother a tearful gasp.

Eddie's thrusts are spearing in their steady rhythm, a dirty slap ringing with every punching thrust forward. You curl in on yourself and hide your mouth in the sheets, wet pants smothered by fabric. Eddie's grip falls to your hip, where he pulls your body back and forces your cunt open even deeper.

His cock pushes into your sweet spot sudden and emphatic. You moan and he stills, rutting into that same space without pulling out until you're babbling his name, body knocked forward with every thrust.

Eddie turns your face toward him as much as he can without hurting your neck, your moans echoing in time with each thrust. "There you go," he says, "wanna hear how good it feels."

If he cares that you can't answer him he doesn't show it, arm coming up under you arm to grasp at your chest, your breaststroke soft and aching under his hand as he squeezes tenderly. His cock kisses at the sweet spot inside you intermittently; you're dizzy with it.

Eddie can't keep quiet either, his moans breathy, his breath hissing between his teeth when you clamp down around him. "Fuck," he begs, dragging his cock out of your heat, "fuck, Y/N."

He says your name like the syllables alone are appraising.

You can tell when it gets too much for him. He slows. His face drops into your shoulder, and he matches his pace to the wet kisses he leaves behind. Your wetness feels stickying, each of his thrusts snug.

His breath hitches, ragged pants accompanying every slow push of his hips. "Where's my girl?" he asks, eyes still closed as his hand abandons where it'd been squeezing the bump of your tummy to search further downward, fingers disappearing into your folds, short curls wet with slick. He can't find any purchase. You roll your hips, chase his touch and the pleasure that comes with it.

He groans into your shoulder. It sounds more pain than pleasure.

"Are you okay?" you ask, trying to turn in his arms. He holds you in place. "Eddie?"

"Yeah, fuck, I'm okay." He grinds up into your cunt. "Fuck, you're perfect."

"Will you kiss me?"

He does. It's nowhere near the bruising press you'd wanted. It's too careful.

"Listen," he murmurs, "I'm gonna get you on your front, okay? Gonna make you feel so good," he promises, waiting for you to nod before he pushes your shoulder away from him and climbs up behind you. You lay flat on your stomach and Eddie settles on your thighs, a heavy weight.

He pushes into your cunt with two fingers first, the new position allowing for a new pleasure. He pumps in and out and swaps his fingers for his cock quickly after, bearing the full weight of his body into your back as sinks to the hilt.

You both moan in time, hands fisted in the sheets.

He kisses your neck, lips parted, and his teeth feel so sharp that your heart sinks as it had in the bathroom.

"Eddie-" you start.

He pulls away, stops every movement.

"Eddie," you say again. What are you supposed to say? You both know what he is.

There's a lull where neither of you knows what to do filled by your too-fast breathing.

"I won't hurt you," he says, hands rubbing up the length of your back and then under. He holds a hand over your heart. He drops his lips to your back. "Do you want me to stop?"

He must feel your pulse calm under his touch, but he still asks again when you don't answer. "Do you want me to stop? It's okay if you do. You're okay, baby, I promise."

You steal a pillow from against the headboard and rise up on elbows. Your admission comes weak but completely honest. "Fuck me, Eddie, please... I want you. I want you-" Your murmuring's interrupted by a sharp breath as Eddie starts to move again, the head of his cock pushing into your cunt, a slick, perfect feeling.

He moans from the back of his throat as his cock pushes into you again and again, hips smacking the dough of your ass as his pace quickens. You hug your pillow tightly, tears popping up in the corners as he ruts deep.

"Being so good for me," he groans, clamped down on your hip with a vice-like grip. "Fuck, you feel so good. Fucking clinging to me every time I pull out, baby, Christ." His blasphemy is punctuated by a thrust that has you sliding up the bed, sheets wrinkling under your arms. You spread your thighs and wetness pools at your clit as his pelvis thrusts into you, driving pleasure so deeply it aches in your hips.

You moan pathetically and reach back to hold his hand, wiggling your fingers. He takes it in one and presses your arm against your lower back with the other, struggling to maintain a steady pace as he gets close to cumming. You're a babbling stream of sounds as he fucks in deep, swollen sweet spot tapped against mercilessly.

He throws himself back on his haunches, cock dragged out of your heat.

You pull your legs out from underneath him and curl onto your side to watch, eyes wide as white spurts of pearlescence jump out of the head of his reddened cock and drip down the bumps of his fingers. He leans back, his stomach and thighs tensed with every pump.

He groans through a smile, moan's coloured by a happy, relieved laughter. "F-uck," he drags, fisting his cock dry.

He meets your eyes as the last of it slides down onto his stomach.

You smile softly. "Fuck," you mumble.

Eddie wipes his hand in his jeans like a fucking hooligan and tucks his cock back into his boxers with a wince, and then he collapses on top of you. He's sort of nice about it, his arm over your shoulder and his face behind your ear.

"Fucking beautiful," he praises, dropping his head back on the bed so you're face to face. "You're so fucking pretty. So perfect." He kisses you. "You're perfect," he repeats, staring intently into your eyes.

You pull a hand from between your legs, smelling of sex. Eddie literally couldn't care less if he tried, and he lets you take his face into your hand without complaint.

He gets his arm under your arm and starts to rub your back. "You want me to take care of you again?" he asks, eyebrows raised gently. "Yeah?"

And you would let him, you would, but you need to see them for yourself.

You touch your index fingertip to his lip.

"Can I see?" you ask.

He loses his boisterous joy, tamps it down. He realises that he can't lie, that he hasn't been lying, and he nods. You tremble as you pull his lip up over his canine tooth, excited and scared.

A sharp, exceptionally white tooth pokes out of Eddie's gums. You're taken aback, though you'd known exactly what you'd find.

A fang.

Blood oozes at the gums.

"You're bleeding," you worry aloud, touching your finger to the dark beading at the base of his tooth.

Eddie's eyes rove over your face thoughtfully. He pulls your hand away from his lip and sets it on his neck instead. "They always do that. The gum heals, breaks when they wanna come out."

"How often do they come out?"

"A lot more since I met you. Whenever my adrenaline spikes, they seem to think it's… feeding time."

That is a dizzying thing to learn.

You're not sure how you feel, but you know one thing: he's Eddie. "It's too bad," you say, forcing a lightness that turns real more easily than you expect. "I really want to kiss you right now."

He strokes your cheek with his thumb. "I really wanna kiss you too. Maybe a small one?"

You find yourself leaning forward, unafraid.

He kisses you once, twice, three times, the two of you holding each other's faces and covered in mess. Slick and sweat and blood. The hearts and stars from your lamp spray over his hip and paint him with pinks, greens, oranges, a rainbow cutting over his trim waist. You rest your hand overtop, feel his keloid scars like hills under your fingers.

"My boyfriend's a vampire," you mutter, bemused at fate.

Eddie blinks at you. "I'm your boyfriend?"

"Yeah, I think so. Don't you?"

Eddie pulls you into his chest and doesn't let you go for a long, long time.

Your first time watching a blood sate is weird.

For one, Chief Hopper is firmly against it. He's got his kid with him, the boy from the party that Mike had been so heavily doting on, and if he didn't you might think he was a pretty scary guy.

"I think this is stupid," the chief says plainly. "I think this is stupid, I think you're stupid," — he points at Eddie where he's sitting sickly in the round couch — "and I think you're plain crazy, kid." He points at you last.

You beam at him. "People have said that about me."

His kid laughs.

"Will," Hopper says tiredly, "go sit in the car."

"Look, Chief, I know I messed up, okay, but she kind of stuck her hand in my mouth and I didn't really have a choice."

Wayne looks at you with new eyes. "You did?"

You nod at him faux-seriously.

"And what gave her the inkling that you might have had something in your mouth worth looking at?" Hopper says, which is hilarious. You laugh behind your hand.

He gives you a disapproving look that you completely ignore. If you'd taken notice of disapproval you would've stopped having this much fun years ago.

"Uh, well, she might have… felt them?" His pitch rises.

Hopper looks like he's about to blow a gasket when Will says, "What was he supposed to do? Never talk to anyone new ever again?"

"He did a lot more than just talk to me," you say. There'd been a fixed bike, phone calls, lots of sandwiches, bug hunts, an entire sketchbook full of drawings.

"I told you to wait in the car," Hopper says.

Will grins and raises his hands in surrender. "Bye," he mouths. You wave.

Hopper waits for the door to close before he continues. "I get it, when you're a teenager you think your hormones are the end of the world-"

"I'm almost twenty three."

Hopper pinches his hand closed. "But you do not understand the danger that you are creating here."

"Like a stake-ing," you whisper, very very quietly. Eddie's the only one who can hear you, and he laughs so hard he snorts.

"I'm glad you find this funny." Hopper's tone could not imply the opposite any more.

He hands Wayne a paper bag that audibly sloshes and stalks out, his anger a palpable cloud of steam rising off of his shoulders. Eddie seizes up beside you at the sound, lips parting as his fangs come through. You don't touch him because you value your blood inside your body, only slide away from him and smile. "You okay, handsome?"

"Kid, maybe the chief is right. We don't know how Eds is gonna act with you here," Wayne says.

You nod respectfully. You like Wayne, and he knows about all of this stuff more than you ever could.

"No," Eddie mumbles, putting his hand out for you across the couch.

You take it without thinking.

Wayne sighs. You can hear him grumbling as he disappears from view into the kitchen and puts a pot on the stove. There's the sound of a bag being punctured with a knife, a wet slosh. Eddie's grip on your hand tightens.

You're still fascinated that he even drinks blood in the first place. That's wickedly sickening. Wicked, because it's cool that he's a vampire, with his impressive hearing, senses and smell. But sickening, because if you had to drink a pint of blood every couple of weeks you'd throw up.

"I read about a new blood-sucker."

Eddie raises his heavy head. "Another bug?"

"No, a finch! A vampire finch. They're really pretty, Teddy. They're small and brown with long beaks and they drink blood because there's barely any water on their island." You give him a loving smile. "They aren't parasites. S'just how they had to change to survive."

He squeezes your hand, this time on purpose.

"Are you gonna come and have it in here, Eddie?" Wayne asks, one last shot at separating the two of you.

"I'm okay," he says loudly. His eyes trace your smile. "Really."

It can't be fun to have two people watch you drink a warm mug of blood, but Eddie finds it funny. He keeps laughing every time he brings the rim of the glass to his mouth.

"I can't do it if you're looking at me," he says.

Wayne rolls his eyes and looks away. You cover your face with both hands and part your fingers to spy on him through the gaps. He makes it look easy, draining the mug basically in one long pull, though his hunger turns violent as the cup empties. He chokes. Blood trickles down from one corner of his mouth.

You automatically want to reach over and wipe it away. Wayne grabs your arm before you can and gives you a fatherly look that says, I wouldn't do that if I were you.

"Shit," Eddie says, slamming his now empty mug down on the coffee table. It makes a grating sound like a ground mortar and pestle. He sits as far back on the couch cushions as he can, nausea clear on his face.

"Deep breath," Wayne says.

"Fuck, Wayne."

"You're aces. Deep breaths."

Your heart hurts watching Eddie like this. He covers his mouth with eyes closed tightly and breathes hard through his nose. Already there's colour coming back into his face, not a lot but anything is an improvement. He'd been practically grey.

When Eddie pulls his hand from his mouth blood has spread over his lips and jaw. Your eyes widen.

"I'll get the shower running," Wayne says, slapping his knees as he stands. He stops before the hallway. "Good job, Eddie."

The boy in question slouches into a ball on the sofa and nods into a cushion. You wait for the sound of Wayne pulling the shower cord that turns on the hot water before you stand up, head tipped to one side.

"You okay, handsome?".

"Tired."

"You want a hug from me?"

"Is anyone else offering?" He opens one eye to peek at you and grins at your distraught expression. "I'm joking, I'm kidding. C'mere, before I start bawling." You sit and then flop onto your side, pulling your legs up next to his. "Such a frowny face." His voice is adorably tired.

"Better than yours. You look like someone from Night of the Living Dead, baby."

Eddie's arm lies limp like a dead fish over your waist. "Lemme nibble on your brains," he says, words thick as dark honey, eyes closed. "Just a snack."

You're waiting for someone to pull the rug out from under your feet. No way your boyfriend, your cries at the end of every movie, brings you flowers because he felt like it, won't step on cracks in the sidewalk boyfriend just skulled a glass of O-negative like it was a milkshake.

You feel guilty as soon as you think about it. He's not confined to all his softest parts and he never will be. He's snarky and angry and loud. He plays guitar like a real rockstar and he doesn't take anyone's shit. He's a survivor. A glass of blood every now and then was never gonna stop him.

You keep wondering if you should let him suck your blood. It could be hot. It could also probably be the worst idea ever, a relationship faux pas up there with proposing after a month or saying I love you on the first date.

"What are you thinking about?" he asks.

You brush the hair out of his eyes with your ring finger. "Embarrassing relationship fumbles."

"Oh yeah? Like letting your girlfriend watch you drink human blood from a mug shaped like Woodstock?"

"Least it wasn't Snoopy."

"God forbid."

"Is it always like this?" You stroke your hand down his face and rub along his jaw with your thumb. "D'you always get sleepy?"

"Yeah." He turns his face so your hand covers his mouth.

You've stopped wearing silver jewellery, your wrists bare besides the endearingly awful friendship bracelet he's constructed for you. Not a friendship bracelet, he'd corrected. You're not kissing other friends, are you? Because that's really gonna put a downer on this whole thing.

You dip your forehead to his chin and the two of you lay there in silence. You can smell blood, a thick, metallic stick permeating every corner of the room. It's especially strong between the both of you.

"Do you wanna bite me right now?" you inquire without opening your eyes.

"Not really. Blood sate kicks in quickly. It's the worst for, like, the first ten seconds after. Now I wanna sleep, but Wayne's gonna make me shower."

"Maybe I can shower with you."

"I'm sure he'd jump for joy if you suggest it."

"Really?"

Eddie kisses your hand. "No," he says with a giddy laugh.

"I'll pretend I'm gonna sit on the toilet. Keep watch."

"How will you stop your hair from getting wet?"

"I'll lean out."

Eddie laughs even more than he had been, peeling laughter that warms you from the inside out as he kisses your hand again. "That'll definitely work."

Wayne clears his throat.

"Shower's hot. I'm going out. For an hour." Eddie perks up. His uncle looks him dead in the eye. "Don't make me regret this."

And while Wayne had been under the impression you and Eddie were gonna have some grown up fun together in the shower, what you really do is an innocent act of affection: you wash Eddie's hair.

"You have to lean your head back," you chide.

"I am."

"More than that."

"There's no room."

You're lucky you both fit. You're freezing standing behind Eddie, the only relief the warm water that trickles down from your hands to your elbows as you draw circles in his scalp, working the shampoo into a fine lather.

"How did you get blood here?" you ask, scratching rusty flakes from the hair behind his ear.

"I don't know. It gets everywhere. Like eyeshadow."

You push your chin over his shoulder. "You wear eyeshadow?"

"For shows."

"Really?"

"Is it hard to believe?"

You encourage his head under the water and rake your hands through his curls, encouraging the soapy water down to the ends with patient hands. "Lip gloss too? Hey, can I do your makeup?"

"Maybe tomorrow," he bargains. While the shower has helped to wake him up, lethargy remains thick and unshakeable as adamant.

You kiss the wet ridge of his shoulder blade, picturing his pretty face decked out in dark liners and sticky balm. "Thank you."

"I haven't worn any in a long time. Haven't played a show in a really long time."

You wring the water out of his hair and search in the steam for his conditioner. It's mostly empty. "You could put on a show for me. I never got to see you play," you say, shaking it really hard. A dollop collects in your hand and you work the dregs through the ends of his long hair.

"You want that?"

"I think you're the best guitar player in the world."

You're not joking. He's the best, and he plays guitar. And he's pretty good, semantics aside. You love sitting out on the porch with him and listening to him play old rock songs off the top of his head. You could watch his hands move over the strings for hours.

"If that's the case, I can definitely put on a show. Make-up, costume, stage dives. The whole nine yards. Anything for my girl."

You roll the ends of his hair between two coated palms and step back. "There. You have to let it soak in for a couple of minutes."

Eddie turns with a grin, angling his chest and hair forward, away from the stream.

"Whatever will we do?"

You wipe an escaped streak of blood off of his bottom lip and smile. "I have no idea."

You kiss. Eddie leans down and you move up, damp noses glancing off of each other. You're used to short kisses, never enough to make his heart race in case it prompts an unnecessary appearance of his fangs, so when Eddie encourages your lips apart to wade in deeper you pull back questioningly.

"Blood sate. I'm 'sated'. They won't come out."

Your jaw drops. "For real?"

He shakes his head with a pleased smile. "For real. Kiss me sick, sweetheart."

You throw your arm around his neck and drag his face to yours, kissing with an ardency that both surprises and amuses him. He laughs into your open mouth until suddenly he's not laughing at all, only breathing, pushing against you with the same urgent force and the same adoring smile.

"Does this mean you can give me a hickey?" you ask enthusiastically. Eddie has yet to give you a proper love bite.

He leans back under the show spray and pulls you in with him, laughing when you dissolve like rice paper in his arms, finally warm. There's never been a sweeter sound.

/\^._.^/\

thank you for reading! | my masterlist | my halloween party

if you enjoyed reading his, please consider reblogging. i promise it makes a huge difference

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thisonehere · 22 days

Note

Hello! How u doing?

Can I request some comforting fluff with Kuai Liang, pretty please? :'D

Like, reader is sad and hurt... maybe he promises to always take care of them? Feel free to add anything or anyone you feel like!

And sorry if it's too vague, I'm a little sleepy rn... Anyways, I love your writing! 💕

You got it!

In my arms

Kuai Liang x sad!reader

A/n: Say no more, I have lots of ideas lol

Tags: Fluff, MK1, Request, SFW, some angst

C/w: None

"Y/n," Kuai's words, soft like cotton, bounce off the walls into your ears. His voice is heavy with concern. You jump in surprise at his voice, you were so sure you had been alone. That is something you got used to for quite a while.

Kuai had been busy for the longest. He wasn't there as much as you wanted-no-as much as you needed him to be. You had been going through something for the longest. Something had happened that left you grieved.

Kuai didn't see this but you had been suffering for quite some time. He didn't hear your cries at night. Every time you looked to him for support, he wasn't there. He was off somewhere attending to some clan buisiness. You were here in grief.

Many times you didn't leave the house that much, you struggled to get out of bed, you often found yourself unable to take proper care of yourself because of how depressed you were.

Kuai had found you having a mental breakdown, one of countless others you've had. The moment you are aware of his presence you attempt to hide your face. "I'm fine." You insist as you quickly try to wipe your tears and regain your composure.

"Y/n..." Kuai softly says again, he slowly nears you. "I'm Fine!!!" You don't mean to snap at him but you do. This sudden action makes you feel so ugly inside, you've felt ugly for the longest. Like inside you was wrong, that you were disgusting and broken.

You jolt in surprise as you feel Kuai's hand touching yours. His skin is so soft, so warm. Yours is so dry, so cold, you think.

Kuai can feel his heart break in such a state. He never knew you were going through this. You seemed fine on the outside, you always gave him an enchanting smile, a lighthearted laugh. You gave no hint of anything going on inside.

"Why didn't you tell me?" He says, begging more than asking. He thought that you were fine, how he wishes he knew. You could hear how desperate he was to hear you, to reach out for you.

You try to turn away from him, too embarrassed, how you possibly gave him? Suddenly, you feel his warm hand spread across your cheek, bringing back to look him in the face. His eyes are so loving, so passionate. It's obvious that want-no- needs to know what's wrong.

Despite how eager he is to listen, you are still so ashamed. You fight with your mouth to open and force the words out. You do your best to explain, it was hard at first but the words seemed to flow out much more easily as you talked more. Kuai just stares into your eyes as you explain, taking in every word like his life depended on it.

You felt so ashamed and embarrassed and hideous. Before you can even finish, you turn away from him, you can't face him. You feel the burning hot tears run down your cheeks as your sight gets blurry from all these tears.

Suddenly, you feel Kuai's warm hand spread across your cheek as he gently pulls you back to look at him. "It is alright, I'm here." He encouraged.

You find yourself sobbing uncontrollably as Kuai quickly scoops you into a warm embrace. He lays your head on his chest and rubs your back. The sound of his heartbeat coupled with his warm hands bring some level of comfort to you and it eventually calms you down.

"Y/n, please forgive me. I should have been here for you." He says, his arms wrapping around you tighter, as if you would fade away at any second and he would lose you. "I will always be here for you, I'll always take care of you, that I promise from this moment."

Before you can provide any possible protest, Kuai picks you and Carrie syou bridal style to your bed and gently lays you onto it. He wraps the covers around you. "Kuai, I-" you try to say, but he shushes you as he sits beside you. "Everything is going to be alright, I'm here." He says as he lays next to you, his eyes beam with love and adoration for you. This settles your nerves as you finally find some form of peace.

You slowly fall asleep in his arms, though this doesn't solve the problem as a whole. But this is a good start. You found comfort in, even though this is going to be a rough journey to recovery, Kuai would be at your side. From him, you'd get support and love. And that made you smile.

#mk1 #mortal kombat #mk1 2023 #mortal kombat 1 #mk x reader #mk fanfic #mk x y/n #kuai liang #kuai liang scorpion #mk scorpion #scorpion x reader #kuai liang x reader #kuai liang x you #fluff #agnst #fluffy #request

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purrplegyuu · 5 months

Text

Cold | Choi Beomgyu

Index

Chapter four

Warnings: softie beomgyu, angst, mentions of sex, signs of abuse.

Word count: 1.3k

Taglist: @arianap23e, @haatohwa

OKOKOKOK I know you don't really like soft chapters because oc this is not a soft story, however, I think it was necessary because of the last one being soft and also because of whet do I want to show. Anyways, I promise the next chapter is not gonna be that soft. (I also wanted to say that I didn't like the beggining of this chapter T.T, but I think it gets better like at the middle?)

Let me know if you find any kind of mistake, i'm not a native speaker and this helps me so so so much ^_^

Also let me know if you want to be added to the tag list, if you want to suggest an event to happen on next chapters or if you have any question about any detail. Luv yaa (●'◡'●)

(Reblogs will be appreciated)

The boat glided smoothly over the calm surface of the lake, the rhythmic hum of the engine creating a soothing backdrop to the conversation between dad and Gaeum. As Luna landed on the other side of the lake, I noticed I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

He knows a lot about me, he knows my fears, he knows my blues, he knows at least a bit of my past, but I don’t know anything about him. And everything I think I do know, is just what I think of him, which makes me wonder if I will ever get the opportunity to listen to him talking about his own life.

We all get out of Luna easily, except for Gaeum, who seems to struggle a lot due to her height. Dad takes her hand, helping her, and even lifts her slim body when she acts scared of falling to the lake.

I see Beomgyu’s hand tensing, his face almost annoyed at his own mother’s acting. He sits on the wood chair my dad and I did eight years ago, and I sit right beside him.

While dad takes out of Luna all the food they packed, Gaeum fakes many attempts to try to help him, which makes him kiss her sweetly, telling her he can do it by himself. That’s her personality when dad’s around; the princess in distress.

I look at my phone for a few minutes, until all the meat and the vegetables are cooking on the grill. Everything seems so old, however −even though I haven’t come here since seven years ago−, dad kept paying someone to take care of everything, so it’s still clean and in fine fettle.

Dad sits on one of the chairs, talking about how his week went. He makes some jokes, and sometimes, some details from his story makes Gaeum and me laugh highly. He is so funny without even trying to be.

“Why don't you like him?” I ask Beomgyu low. He turns around to face me, looking back at the grill fastly. I notice he’s ignoring my question, so I talk once again. “I don’t want you to treat him the way you always do” It’s like he's in a good mood today, which just gives me the confidence to talk firmly to him. “I don’t like your mother, and I’m not mean to her”

“I don’t like her either” His voice sounding so deep it sends shivers down my spine. I swallow hardly, turning around to see my dad looking at me.

“Are you eating, honey?”

“I’m not hungry”

When we are finally going on our way back home, I look at dad, wondering if this is a good moment to tell him about my phobia of darkness. I look at the lake in front of me, while the small waves of the water get lost where the lights of Luna ends.

Dad starts driving Luna like he knows what’s the direction we are supposed to go, and I’d like to think he knows, because this is going to make me feel a bit less scared.

I feel Beomgyu’s hand taking mine, giving me a comforting look. As I said Before, he knows me, he knows my fears.

Once we are at home, I can feel the anxiety decreasing on my body, finally walking on the stable land. I don’t wait for anyone to get out of Luna as well, I almost run to the house, turning on the most lights I can. It’s nine thirty p. m., and we are in the middle of nowhere—it’s obviously dark as hell, and I know if I look through the window, my fear will increase a lot, so I do not.

I run upstairs and close my bedroom door, looking for my pyjamas in my bag, finding it fastly and putting it on. That weird but pleasurable feeling of the warm and comfortable fabric against my cold skin making me almost jump to my bed, ready to sleep.

I always sleep before eight thirty p. m.

I take my phone, answering the messages Jiwoo sent me on the day. Nothing interesting, actually—she’s asking if I’m excited for the school trip we’re going to have next week. She says it’s special for me since it's my first one, however, it’s already getting boring to her since they always go to the same places.

Someone knocks on my bedroom door, and I go open, thinking it’s dad telling me what time are we leaving tomorrow. However, Beomgyu’s in front of my door, wearing his emo-like pyjama, messy hair and the same weird soft and angsty aura he has since some hours ago.

He looks at me silently, not asking before entering my room, closing the door, holding my hand and taking me to my bed.

I wait for him to kiss me, touch me, make any move before he makes me know we are going to have sex once again. Instead, he lays on my bed beside me, and rests his head on my chest, closing his eyes and falling asleep quickly. He likes to sleep at eight thirty too.

When I feel him trembling some minutes after that, my hand goes to his head, caressing his soft hair sweetly until he’s sleeping calmly again.

This kind of softness makes me wonder why can’t we be this way always, why can’t he be this kind always, why can’t I feel like that always.

My door suddenly opens. I see Gaeum on my door. She looks at me coldly, and I almost can feel her anger. Does it make us look guilty? We have been hiding what we have for so many time, which makes me think we are not that obvious. But our position now… I can always say we are just close enough to be friends and have sleepovers, right?...

However, I can’t even attempt to justify our position as she closes the door so strongly I startle. The silence after that just makes my anxiety increase. Until I fall asleep.

I wake up at two a. m. when Beomgyu’s phone starts ringing. He wakes up also, and I pretend to sleep, not wanting this soft moment to end. The name of his mother on his screen letting me know who is this about. He takes his phone answering the call.

He listens to her. Then, he answers. “I don’t want to” The call ends. He looks frustrated as he looks at me one more time before getting out of his room, closing the door and walking out quietly.

The next morning, we are all in the car once again. Gaeum looked at me once in a weird way that make me feel a bit awkward. I look at Beomgyu, noticing a purple circle on his arm. Did she hurt him?

I can’t talk to him quietly like many times before because she is looking at me like she is waiting for me to do something. However, I don’t do anything. After some time travelling, she looks at me through the mirror.

“Jeongseo, do you have a boyfriend?” I frown awkwardly, turning to see Beomgyu, who looks at her weirdly. I almost feel like he would yell at her, and tell her to shut up if he wasn’t… scared?

“Am… no?” I answer. My dad looks at Gaeum like she’s doing something kind or something.

“Aw love, are you trying to get along with Jeongseo? That’s so nice!” But I notice this is definitely not her purpose. “I’m sure you’re going to be like real mother and daughter soon” I look Beomgyu one more time, but everything I see now is coldness.

#beomgyu smut #txt smut #txt choi line smut #soobin smut #tw: noncon #toxic beomgyu #tw: dubcon #kpop #kpop smut #fanfic #txt x reader #txt imagines #Beomgyu stepbrother #beomgyu overstimulation #beomgyu hard dom #beomgyu mean dom #Cold | Beomgyu #purrplegyuu

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dfortrafalgar · 29 days

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Your story with Law and the miscarriage feels very real to me. I didn't struggle to get pregnant but as I was on my second pregnancy I also got the 'there should be a heartbeat, let's just wait one or two more weeks, we could be wrong about the time...' when I was around 6 weeks, but the next consultation showed no heartbeat and no growth and I had a dead fetus in my belly for around 3 weeks before my miscarriage. It hurt like hell. And the actual sound of the blood clot hitting the toilet was truly real to me because the same happened to me. The physical pain was beyond anything I've felt, compared maybe to labour pains, and the psychological pain was quite hard as well. I regretted having told my parents and brother about the pregnancy because then it hurt like hell having to tell them about the miscarriage.

I didn't try again yet, since I already have one child but I have made peace with it. I'm fine now and I do hope this story has a happier ending.

Just wanted you to know that this feels very real and you are doing an excellent job. Thank you for sharing this. ❤️

oh my goodness anon, this message has seriously touched me, thank you so much for sharing your story and i'm so beyond happy that my little fanfiction has brought some comfort. from the other side of the fertility coin, i can absolutely sympathize and i am so sorry for the experience you went through. the fact that you shared that is a testament to your strength and i sincerely hope you and your family are doing well!!! i'm sending you all of my best wishes, whether you try again or not, you are truly loved and supported. thank you thank you THANK YOU so much for sharing this with me, god i wish i could hug you ;w;

i'm also kind of... relieved? in a strange way. i know that sounds seriously bizarre to say, but ive definitely mentioned at least once that this fic is coming from a really personal place, so recently i've started to question whether i'm making it too raw or too deep. but reading your ask gave me the reminder that i needed that topics like these are just that- raw and emotional, and that these stories deserve to be told, regardless of the format!

i can't remember if i said it in any of the chapters yet or not, but if anyone else who has read my fic struggles with any sort of reproductive health-related issues (really, anything! fertility, pcos, endo, pregnancy support, etc etc), i seriously encourage seeking out positive support groups either online or in person! throughout the research i've done on this fic, i've found a large amount of online forums dedicated to supporting women and afab people through their pregnancy journeys, the highs, the lows, and everything in between. one in particular that has been a constant read for me has been What To Expect . their community page has given me hope for humanity. r/endo on reddit has also been an amazing resource for support and experiences!

((and yes, i've started to promise it a lot more for the worried readers, but this fic will have a VERY happy ending for reader and law!!! its quite a bumpy road, and their hurdles aren't over yet, but i already have the ending written and it makes up for all of their struggles <3))

#anon #not a fic #asksforD

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nightowlwriting · 3 years

Text

summary: steve is acting weird. avoiding you, being snippy and mean, leaving the room when you enter. all you want is your boyfriend back, but all he wants is to pretend you don't exist. when he's almost hurt on a mission, you do what you're made to do.

word count: 11k

reader specifics: no race/gender/sexuality/body type mentioned, no pronouns for reader used, powered!reader, insecure!reader

warnings: steve is mean to the reader in the beginning, heavy angst, hurt/comfort, canon-level violence, brief ptsd symptoms, slight description of blood, brief mention of racism in the '30s & '40s

brief mentions of: reader's parents being toxic, homelessness, past accidents, ableism in the past & present

note: this one hurt me lmfao. idk why this went the way it did but i'm not mad at it // also i am a queer, trans, disabled american. i have fundamental disagreements with things that marvel/the mcu as it stands for and some of the more nuanced things that you might not notice unless you're looking for it. this will take place in my writing because i cannot separate myself from the lens in which i consume/create content.

title credit: lil nas x

mobile masterlist - request - support my work? - ao3

Falling in love with Steve Rogers went against every instinct you had. You knew that he was going to hurt you from the first moment your lips touched his. Sure - he’s clever, righteous, courteous… You can’t forget he’s also drop-dead gorgeous because every trashy gossip magazine in a three-state radius of New York doesn’t let you forget. Neither does the sight of him waking up in your bed every morning. (Well, actually, maybe that would remind you if he was still fucking doing that.)

But lately, you’ve had to rely on the fucking tabloids to catch a glimpse of your super-hero boyfriend. The university class you had picked up on a whim at the end of the summer - Life & Times of the ‘30s and ‘40s - avoids any mention of Steve Rogers and the Howling Commandos. Not that your classmates do because, Christ on a bike, those magazines manage to catch pictures of you and Steve in moments that you don’t even remember. Plus, you’re an Avenger too. It’s bound to catch some attention when you waltz into a college classroom.

You’re sure if you were an undergrad trying to fill a gen-ed requirement and were sitting next to someone who could kill you without blinking but also dating Captain Rogers you’d be a little distracted too. You try not to blame your classmates too much, but they do make it hard to concentrate with their -really dating Captain America?- and -wonder if I could get an autograph- whispers. None of that matters because you’re learning, really studying, in between missions and missing Steve and believing that maybe the gossip reporters are right.

Maybe he’s forgotten about you.

You grit your teeth and push the thought away. It does you no good right now, while you’re training with Peter. He’s working his way up to bona fide missions and, because you’re the only one on the team who has experience with real-life teenagers outside of saving their lives, it’s up to you to get him to the level that he needs to be. Plus, the mission where he’s going to get his gills wet is just you, Tony, Steve, Nat, and Bucky. You’d much rather be the one to train him because you won’t traumatize him.

Right now, though, you’re just kicking his ass to try and get rid of some of the tension in your body. You feel a little bad about it, but when you started as his mentor you told him point-blank that you’d never go easy on him. That meant if you were having a bad day he either needed to up his game or he’d have a bad day too. It appears he’s taken that to heart as he struggles to dodge the hits you’re throwing his way. He lunges out of the way when you try to land a right hook but practically walks into the leg sweep that sends him crashing to the ground.

“Awe,” Peter groans, letting his guard down. You take the momentary lapse of focus to grab him by the collar of the hoodie he’s wearing and haul him to his feet, jerking one fist back to cold-clock him but he beats you to it. You hear the sound of your nose cracking before you feel it but then the pain rushes you all at once. You’ve had worse but coming from Peter, the move surprises you. You don’t yell out but he does when you push him away from you and call the fight off. Peter practically yelps your name, hands up by his head as he watches you bend at the waist, both hands over where your nose is absolutely gushing blood. “I am so sorry, I just reacted-!”

“It’s fine, Pete,” You shake your head and stand straight again, the blood beginning to leak through your fingers, “Just go get me a towel, okay?” Peter practically trips over his feet to get something for your nose and as you track him on his way into the locker rooms, you see Steve, Bucky, and Nat. The latter are looking your way, eyebrows raised like they’re asking you if you’re okay. Steve hasn’t even broken stride in his conversation so you wave them off with a bloody hand. Peter’s back in a flash, pressing a wet towel into your grasp and snapping you out of your self-pity party. “It was a good hit,” You compliment as you wipe your face off, “I just wasn’t expecting it. Prob’ly wouldn't have landed it if I had.”

He wrings his hands, shifting from foot to foot. “I’m sorry-”

“It’s a good thing, Peter, means you’re getting better.” You deadpan, checking to see if your nose has stopped bleeding yet, “I don’t think you actually broke it, but I’ll go down to medical to check later.” You do your best to clean up your hands with the wet towel, but it’s so soaked with your blood that it mostly just smears it around. You grimace and shake your head. “Well, I should go now before our sparring match ends up looking like I murdered you.”

“I’ll go with,” He offers, “I’m the one who broke your nose.” You let Peter walk you down to medical even though you were originally going to refuse. Perhaps petty, but it was the way that Steve didn’t even look your way as you left that made you let the teenager walk you the two floors to where you’d be able to clean yourself up. He hums in the elevator and you know that he wants to ask you something - it’s the way he holds his mouth when he’s prying for information or keeping a secret that tips you off. Finally, just before the elevator opens, you sigh and turn to him.

“What, Peter?” He grins but then it falls when he has to skitter after you down the hall. Maybe that’s why it falls - the question he asks next nearly sends you to your ass.

“Is everything okay with you and Captain Rogers?” He easily catches up to you when you stop in your tracks, ignoring that you’re still bleeding a little bit down your face and you might be dripping blood everywhere from where it’s run down your arms.

“What?” You do your best to look confused like everything is fine, but Peter is perceptive. He may fumble around and be pretty awkward, but those are really just teenager things that he’ll hopefully outgrow. You should have known that when someone caught onto how bad things are on your end, it would be Peter. (You wonder if Nat or Bucky has brought it up with Steve, considering he’s spent more time with them in the past week than he’s seen you in the past month.) “We’re fine.” Your words are stilted as you begin walking to the medical wing much faster than before.

“I just thought I’d ask, well, because I’ve sort of noticed… Something just seems off, you know? Like, you two used to spend a lot of time together, and maybe it’s the recon mission coming up, but I was just thinking that you two really barely look at each other even when you’re in the same -”

“Peter!” You say his name much louder than either of you expected and both of you jump. “Peter,” You say softer, looking at the glass door to the medical wing instead of him, “Just leave it, okay? It’s nothing you have to worry about, kid.” Peter ducks around to open the door, forcing you to look at him. “He’s just focused on his stuff and I’m focused on getting you whipped into shape for this mission. We only have two days.” Once you’re inside and surrounded by the medical crew Tony keeps on staff, he thankfully drops it. You love Peter, you do, but it’s a lot like having a little brother. You can only love them so much before you want to fucking strangle them. Eventually, as the doctor checks to make sure he hasn’t broken your nose, you have to order him away to go study or something. “I’ll join you later,” You promise him as the doctor prods at your tender flesh, “I have an essay due soon.”

That’s another thing that’s been bugging you that Peter surely picked up on. Nearly everybody knew you were taking a course at the local community college, but nobody knew what it was about. You’d wanted to keep it a secret until you told Steve, but the day you had registered he’d flown out for a two-week mission without telling you or saying goodbye. After that, you decided it didn’t really matter if anyone knew what class you were taking, and keeping it a secret sort of spiraled from there. If they wanted to know they could look it up. Maybe it was petty, but you just wanted the class to be over and done with so you could forget that you really only picked it up so you relate to your boyfriend more.

If you can even call Steve your boyfriend anymore. You’re not so sure where you stand and, honestly, you’re really close to giving up on the relationship as a whole but you can’t do that. Before you were dating, you were friends, and Steve… He never gave up on you. Not once. How could you repay him by giving up on your relationship? The one that you thought was The One? Even if it hurts, even if you’re unsure more than sure these days, how could you? Somewhere, though, you know you deserve better. You don’t deserve the sinking, dark feeling that lingers in your gut for most of your days now or the way that you second-guess every move you make - even in the field. It’s dangerous but you can’t do anything to fix it.

You’re too scared. You know that eventually, it will happen, he’ll break up with you, but you’d like to put that day off for as long as possible. To relish in the love he once had for you, how pure and powerful it was. You’re sure that you’ll never experience anything like that again.

Hell, you might never fall in love again.

Those thoughts don’t do anything to help you, though, so you try not to have them. You get clearance from the doctor and get cleaned up as much as you can without taking a full body shower. The idea to go back to your room and take one crosses your mind but you know that Steve’s probably done training, probably heading back for his own shower, and you don’t want to open that can of worms. Instead, you go to the common room and drop into the couch between Peter and Tony. They’re talking about something something science something something, but you pull your stack of books and notebooks out from the shelf underneath the coffee table and continue outlining your essay from where you left off. The assignment was focused on how the end of WW1 changed American life and then how life changed leading up to and during WW2 but that had hit a little too close to home for you, so you’re writing about the racial tension and overall racism of the times. Tony and Peter keep talking over your back and then you hear footsteps heading toward the common room.

You barely look up when they enter - Nat and Bucky - because it’s fine. It’s normal. They’re just two of Steve’s best friends, that’s all, nothing to be jumpy about. You don’t even register that emotional pain that hits when you realize that, yeah, you’re not one of his best friends anymore. You doubt you’re even considered a friend in his book.

You groan and lean back into the couch, bringing your study materials with you. Peter glances over, skimming over your page and a half of shorthand, and gags. “Jesus, can you write like a normal person?”

“Oh, sorry,” You say lazily, not looking up as you continue to scribble in your incomprehensible code, “I do forget that some of us had privacy at home.” You lift your lips just a little bit to let Peter know you’re kidding, looking up at him through your lashes as you slouch next to him. He looks red in the face. “Besides, once you have to start doing mission reports you’ll be begging me to learn my shorthand and use my stenography machine.”

“I keep telling you that I can update that ol’ thing,” Tony draws your attention. For the first time, you realize that Nat and Bucky are on the loveseat looking at you expectantly. Steve is standing in the corner over their shoulder reading a book from the bookshelf in front of him. His back is tense and he looks like he’s not reading, just listening. You force your eyes back to Tony on your right and shake your head.

“No, because then you’d know my shorthand and it makes me too happy to see you spend hours trying to decipher it.” His eyes wander to your essay again, trying to find any patterns that he can use to figure out what the hell you’re writing on anything ever. He’s opening his mouth to make a smart-ass remark that will no doubt lift some of the weight off of your shoulders when another voice speaks up.

“Wow,” Steve doesn’t even look at you even as he says your name sardonically, “Way to be a team player.” Your mind comes to a screeching halt, trying to figure out what the fuck he’s playing at. Even Bucky and Nat look surprised at the cold way he spoke to you, Tony and Peter both gasping from your side. You can’t say anything, throat tight and burning with tears as you stare at your boyfriend with raised eyebrows. What do you say to that? How do you respond? You know it wasn’t a joke because he’s not laughing, not smiling, not even looking up from that fucking book in his hands. You can’t tell if you’re more hurt or embarrassed, but either way, you don’t want to stick around for someone to get the nerve to say something.

Instead of replying, you slam your textbooks shut and bundle everything into your arms. You doubt Steve even notices that you’re making such a hasty retreat but if he does, he doesn’t say a fucking thing. You feel like you’re in high school - practically running through an empty hallway with your notebooks and textbooks pressed to your chest, trying not to cry. It’s ridiculous. You’re a trained assassin, you’re an Avenger, you are strong and powerful and yet… And yet. You’ve given so much of your heart and soul to Steve Rogers that he can knock you down eight pegs without even trying. Without even looking at you. You can’t wait to go on this fucking recon mission, where you can put all of your focus on making sure Peter is doing okay and gathering the intel. Where you can stop thinking about how easily Steve Rogers seems to be pushing you to the side.

You spend the next two days writing your essay, ignoring almost everyone, and working on your essay. On the day of the recon mission, you’re running out the door for your eight a.m lecture, printed essay in hand, and reminding Tony that he promised to pick you up on campus after class for the mission.

You’re lucky that you went, too. You hadn’t counted on the professor making everyone stand up and tell the class the subject of their essays - didn’t realize that it would be twenty-five percent of the grade on the paper. You’ll never understand college professors and the weird shit they do, but the class is informative and entertaining. He goes around the room, starting on the opposite side of you, so you’ll be last. Great.

Several students did their papers on the propaganda of the time, one student was brave and did her essay on the ethical dilemma of the super-soldier serum and eugenics, and most of the other students focused on pop culture and how it changed. When your professor looks at you it’s almost like he’s expecting you to have done nothing but fawn over Steve and Bucky, considering you know them personally. He looks surprised when you clear your throat, stand and say: “I focused on the casual and institutional racism that faced non-white Americans at the time.” You almost preen when he looks impressed and then the shame fills you. It’s just… You want Steve to be proud of you. You want him to congratulate you on going back to school, even if it’s just for one class. You want him to be happy and surprised that he was the inspiration for taking the class.

Though, lately, the class has been more for you than for him. You like learning new things, pushing the boundaries of assignments, making people uncomfortable with the truth of the times you’re studying as told to you by two people who lived it. It’s nice. Normal.

Everyone needs a little bit of normal.

But, honestly, normal is fucking boring. By the time your class is over and you’re handing in your essay it’s like ants are crawling over your skin. A combination of nerves from the upcoming mission, a head full of fog from whatever is happening with Steve, and a little bit of fear at the thought of taking Peter into the field has you bolting for the door the moment your essay is taken from you. You’d worn your tac-suit underneath a pair of baggy sweats and a loose hoodie, so you don’t even bother slowing down as you head toward the car that Tony has waiting for you. He’s in the front seat, grinning at you from underneath his aviators and Peter is driving.

You slip into the backseat without thinking or looking at who’s there, tossing your bag in the back and peeling your hoodie off. “God, Tone, we’re goin’ to die before we even get to the mission with Petey driving.” You toss your hoodie back to join your bag and finally see who’s sitting next to you.

Of course, it’s Steve. He’s looking at you - but not really. He’s looking through you, like he can’t stand that you’re both crammed in the backseat of Tony’s electric car. His gaze catches you and holds you in place. Everything around you goes cold and fuzzy, making you miss Peter’s indignant complaining that he has his license so he should be able to drive… And then Steve scoffs and looks out his window, ignoring you. It stings but you have a job to do. You make some witty retort back to Peter, but it falls flat as you struggle out of your sweats. This is what life is, you think. Relationships aren’t meant to be forever - you learned that at a young age.

Until your accident at fifteen, you had watched your parents run out of helium, their relationship expanding and cooling in arguments, in days spent not talking, in trips to your grandparents without the other, in passive-aggressive computer searches for divorce attorneys left open for anyone to see. Then, after you were trapped between those machines - after you spent hour after agonizing hour with electricity pressing between your atoms, being torn apart and rebuilt as a young god - after that day you watched them expand against each other before the neutron core of their relationship collapsed on itself and the resulting supernova sent you to the streets. But then Fury found you. Then Tony, then Nat, then Steve.

Your parents exploded out from each other and the shockwaves ruined your life. At least now, your relationship with Steve is ending silently. There’s no explosion, no collapse, no rapid expansion to take over your cosmos. Your relationship with Steve is simply approaching the event horizon, where it will hang in the air until one of you takes the final step and you both become frozen, two collapsing objects on opposite sides of the universe. Maybe that’s what you already are. You feel so far away from him in the back of Tony’s car - like he’s eons and light-years away from you - and you feel so cold. Frozen, down to the bone. It makes you stiff in your replies to Tony and Peter, slow on the uptake when the car pulls up to the quinjet, nearing stasis and unable to respond when Nat asks if you’re okay.

Finally, you turn to look at her, nodding. “Fine,” You clear your throat, “Been a rough day.” You do your best to smile at her, but your face feels heavy. Your chest feels cold and tight, making you worry about your performance on the upcoming mission. When Peter shakes his head next to you, discreetly telling Nat not to press, you’re focused on Steve and the electricity humming in the most base part of your body.

He scoffs and rolls his eyes. You turn away and force yourself to smile, throwing a weak and numb arm over Peter’s shoulders. “Are you ready for this, Pete?” You jostle him back and forth, leading him toward the sitting area behind the cockpit. “Gonna get your ass kicked?”

“Please,” He shoves you off, nervously laughing, “Not with the skills you’ve taught me.” He mimics throwing webs, making hissing noises under his breath, and you bark out a laugh, shaking your head.

“You’re payin’ my medical bills when I have to save your ass, Spidey.” You shake your head and strap in next to the wall, Peter taking the seat to your right. Tony, from the aisle across from you, points a thick finger your way.

“You don’t pay medical bills anymore,” He waggles his finger, “So you’ll just have to make him do your homework for a week.”

“Mister Stark!”

“He’ll have to earn shorthand to do your essays,” Nat chimes in from between Bucky and Steve, who are both doing their best to not look at you - or anyone really. “You willing to share that with him?”

You lean back in your seat and jab at Peter with your elbow. “Hell no, so I guess Spider-Boy better do his best.” The arachnid in question grumbles, crossing his arms and slouching in his seat.

“No pressure, right?” He complains, “Not like I’m already nervous or anything.”

“You’ll do fine, kid,” Bucky pipes up, drawing your eyes back to Steve, “It’s goin’ to be a cakewalk.”

“Don’t jinx it, Barnes,” You warn half-heartedly, tucking in on yourself, “We need this to be easy.” From the look on his face - everyone’s face, really - you know that they heard you loud and clear when you were really saying I need this to be easy.

After an uneasy laugh from Bucky, a claustrophobic silence settles over you all as the jet begins to take off. You’re in for an hour ride and plan to spend it going over battle plans with Peter when harsh whispering catches your ear. It’s Bucky and Steve nearly crushing Nat between them until she gets up and sits across from Peter, rolling her eyes. Still, you try your best to run him through the actions you both had planned - the names, the setups you needed to execute them, everything. If something happens to Peter, you’ll never forgive yourself.

And then, cutting through your soft promptings to Peter and his equally soft replies, Bucky’s voice. “Leave it, Steve. Until after this mission.” Even Tony looks up from his tablet, curiosity piqued. Their faces are both red, set hard and angry at each other and your stomach drops. What the hell is going on that Steve ‘Till The End Of The Line Rogers is fighting with Bucky You And Me, Pal Barnes? You must shift, or lean too far into Steve’s eyesight, because for the first time in what feels like years he is looking directly at you - and seeing you, too. It makes your pulse jump and, almost instinctively, you want to reach out and ground yourself on the rubber of the seat underneath you.

You don’t get the chance, though, because Steve speaks. “No, why should I? This is clearly affecting the team.” He’s still looking - glaring - at you like you’ve done something wrong. “What’s the point of waiting? I’ve been waiting to talk about this.”

“Bo, I don’t think this is the time,” Bucky looks over his shoulder at you, then, and you know what’s coming. You know that it’s time, that Steve is about to break up with you in front of your teammates. Your friends. Your family. You steel yourself for the anguish you’re about to feel and then jerk your chin out, hardening your resolve.

“Buck, it’s fine. If Steve wants to address something, he can.”

Natasha says your name, a low warning over the hum of the quinjet. “I think he should wait.”

“Well, I’m not goin’ to wait!” Steve unbuckles himself and stands, “I have tried waiting, and look at where that has gotten me.” He puts his hands on his hips and puffs out a breath. You unbuckle and stand, too, unsure of where this is going. “You need to,” He holds one hand out, pointing at you while his voice shakes. You notice his hand is shaking, too, but fractionally. If you didn’t know Steve as well as you do you may have never noticed it. “You need to get it together.”

“I need to get it together?” You question, eyebrows nearly hitting the ceiling with how fast they shoot up. You’re not totally sure you’ve heard him right because what do you have to get together? The broken shards of your relationship? The information and research for your final paper? The awful way you’ve let yourself be treated for what seems like forever?

“You heard me,” Steve says, at the same time Bucky leans his head back and groans deep in his chest. “What? Someone had to say it.”

“We should wait for this,” Nat speaks up again, but lifelessly. She knows now that you and Steve are both on the warpath, neither of you are going to stop. (That’s also why the two of you work together as a couple so well. Very rarely are you both so worked up about something that you can’t back down, so the other is always there to meet you halfway and get you back to earth.)

“No, no, no,” You say, near hysterically, “No, he wants to do this now? Before a mission? Instead of the fuckin’ weeks we had to hash whatever crawled up his ass and died out? Be my guest. He’s already dragged everyone into this by treating me like a pariah.” You’re not sneering, but your teeth are gritted so tightly together you can hear them scraping and feel a tension headache beginning to bloom in your temples. Bucky looks… Almost incredulous at your statement. Like putting the blame on Steve is a dick move or something.

“Oh, so I’m the bad guy here?” Steve is curling his lip, glaring at you. There’s something behind his eyes, but he’s buried it so deep that you can’t reach it and figure out what it is. “I’m the bad guy, right. Right, right, right.” He scoffs, shakes his head, and then he’s running his fingers through his hair like he really can’t believe what you’re saying to him.

“Well, what else am I supposed to think?” You throw your hands out to the side and let them slap back down on your thighs. “You ignore me, you make me feel like shit, you talk down to me like I’m some insignificant foot soldier. How else am I supposed to take that, Steve?”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe ask me what’s wrong? Maybe ask me why I’m acting like this, instead of ignoring all of your problems like a child?” He mirrors your moments, but the sound his hands make when they hit the outside of his suit is more powerful than yours. Fueled by anger, you think. Anger and whatever the hell was in the serum Erskine pumped into Steve.

“Ask you?” You repeat, near-hysterical, “Ask you? Oh yeah, let me get right on that. Hey, Mister Rogers? Mister Captain America? Mister Ignores-His-Partner-For-God-Knows-Why? Hey, just why are you doin’ that?” You’re surprised that you’ve said something so snotty, but you don’t back down. (Steve looks surprised, too, and Bucky has stood up next to his friend like he’s about to start berating you as well. At least he looks more cautious about it, like he’s not totally sure that this fight should be happening.)

The more surprising part of your fight is how fast it’s shut down. Tony and Nat stand at the same time and exchange a glance like they’ve surprised each other. “That’s enough,” Tony starts.

Nat cuts him off. “I don’t care if you fight this one out instead of talking, but if you do it before this recon mission you two are going to blow it. Do you understand me?” She looks dangerous, the sharp edge of a knife spiraling through the air. You force yourself to look away from her, from Tony, from Bucky, from Steve. She’s right. You know she’s right - especially on this mission. Peter is there, going to be in real danger even though there’s not supposed to be one Hydra agent in a four-mile radius. You have to clear your mind and focus on protecting him.

Steve seems to think the same thing because he stands down. When you watch him collapse in on himself, Bucky’s arms around his shoulders, into the little quinjet seats your everything aches. Heart, lungs, eyes - everything. Even though you don’t know what’s going on, what could have possibly happened to make your relationship sink this quickly and out of the blue, you still love him. He’s still The One for you. You still want to be the one to comfort him and make him feel whole when he’s struggling.

But you can’t. You can’t and it kills you.

The heat of battle makes a lot of things fade into the background. Important things like why the fuck are there Hydra agents here? and Steve is going to break up with you when you get back on the jet and Tony swore on the fucking limited edition AC/DC vintage tour poster he has in his office that this would be an easy in/easy out information mission. None of that matters, though, because you’re in deep shit. There are seventeen of them, all primed to the teeth with weapons made to take your team down permanently.

You’re practically glued to Peter, calling out commands and plans for him to initiate. It’s when all of your plans fall through that you take a hit from a heavy fist on purpose, hitting the ground hard. “Plan F, Spidey, Plan F!” You cover the instruction with a groan and then you’re back on your feet, working your way toward him.

“Plan F?” Tony says, somewhere above you in his suit. Your comms crackle ominously as another heat-seeking grenade is launched, interfering with the radio waves your tech relies on. You don’t worry about it, because you know Tony is on it. He’s your eyes in the sky.

Peter is the one who answers his question, watching your close hand-to-hand tilt out of your favor briefly. “Plan Fuck It, Mister Stark.” He grunts as he webs up a Hydra agent, jerking him away from where he was about to slip a knife up and under Natasha’s kevlar. You finally drop the guy in front of you, ignoring Steve’s disappointed Language! and toss one of your knives toward Nat for her to use. Tony is still laughing in your ear, wheezing as he drops down and snags the rifle from one of the snipers and then takes back off.

What your little protégé failed to mention about Plan F is that it’s not just chaos, but controlled chaos. You let loose, letting a soft current cover every inch of your skin as Peter switches to his conductive webbing and takes special care to not web any of his allies. Except for you - if you’re in the way and he catches you in a web it doesn’t matter because you’re you, alive with electricity that drops the men that get caught in the web, too. You rip out of the webs and turn the current off when one of your teammates gets too close.

More Hydra agents are pouring out of the woods, topping out their numbers around twenty-five. That’s twenty-five too many in your opinion, especially when you can see Peter getting tired, his anxiety spiking, his moves having more and more hesitation behind them. You need to get this over with quickly, but you don’t have the options to do that. Steve, Bucky, and Nat are really the heavy-hitters - you, Pete, and Tony are the only ones without serums despite all of your individual abilities. Desperately you reach out for a web that’s still connected to Peter’s arms, pulling him out of the way of a baton that’s about to come down on the back of his neck.

The baton the agent is wielding glints in the coming dusk, freezing you as Peter scrambles past you with a quick apology. You’ve seen that before - seen it, felt it, know it like the back of your hand. There’s no way that you could ever forget that weapon. The man stumbles when his hit doesn’t connect but then rights himself and searches for a new target.

A long, black baton that splits into two prongs at the end is heavy in his hand. Electricity crackles between the bulbs at the end, flashing in the setting sun and your memories. The man only has one, but if it was hooked up to a machine, spinning. If there were four, five, six. If you were pinned between them, screaming in the pain as they rewrote your DNA… You’ve only felt it once, but you’ll never forget it.

And now, you’ll taste it again. On purpose this time. The man holding the stun baton is going for Steve’s back - his strong back, the one that protects people, the one that holds the weight of the world, the one that lays in your bed, the one you see whipping out of rooms as you’re entering just so that he doesn’t have to look at you - and you can’t let that happen. It only takes ten amps to kill a regular human, but you know those things are cranked up to twenty minimum. You don’t want to see how many amps of current it will take to stop Steve’s heart. You’re between the baton and Steve before you can think about what you’re doing or what comes next, the hard bulbs settling unyielding into your side and cranking out maximum power for maximum damage as soon as the current is connected and able to flow from one bulb to the other.

The pain hits you and your throat catches on it. It burns through your body, setting everything on fire - your chest hurts as your heart protests the electrons and then your powers kick in, sweeping them into your very atoms and cells. You’re a live wire now, ears humming and body thrumming with power you’ve only dreamed of. It hurts, and it burns, and you feel tears rising in your eyes because you’re back there - back begging for death or for life or for God and god at the same time - but then it’s over. The man sees that you’re not seizing up, not dropping dead in front of him, and he takes three steps back.

It’s not far enough.

You’ve only felt like this once before - right after you were unhooked from the machine that changed your life and brought you to your new family. You remember how you looked when you were put in front of a mirror with all of the pent up electricity circling your body - how your eyes were filled to the brim and dripping with bright and blue electricity, the way it was jumping across your body, how you didn’t need to breathe because your body was fully saturated with pure, unadulterated power. You wonder if you look like that now and assume you do because you can see the bright blue reflecting in the terrified eyes of the Hydra agent.

Your suit, unlike everyone else’s, is not grounded. It’s metal, metal, metal. You’re made to conduct, born for it, and the earth beneath you comes alive with bright white as you release all of the energy, the power, surges down and out. You’re practiced. You can reach out and feel the synapses and neurons of every human being in the clearing, know exactly where your teammates are standing, and know exactly how to target everything but them and the pitiful amount of electricity their brains carry. You grin, something truly feral and unhinged, and you can see the fear in the Hydra agent. Then, you let go.

You know that everyone is going to be pissed. (Maybe not everyone.) You’re not built for this, not made to take down nearly twenty fucking people at once. As you let go, you feel what they feel. The seizing muscles, the stopping of their hearts, the inside of their bodies crisping against their bones. At that moment, that delicious moment, you see the universe.

You become God. You become everything - your mother and your father and God and god and anyone else who’s watching your life from the ether. You become the judge, jury, and executioner of souls that you don’t know from Adam. You become lightning, and thunder, and exposed nerves of the cosmos at the same time. The world bends to your will and you relish in it, taking that power in your fist and wielding it to protect the man you’ll love for the rest of your life and the family that you’ve made. You will stop at nothing to end this, even if it means turning yourself inside out to do it.

You damn near do turn yourself inside out too, but that doesn’t matter, does it? The blood spilling from your ears, nose, and eyes feels like heaven. It’s hot, and thick, and it’s proof of the power that your body holds. You’re a temple and a sanctuary, a war-room and a bunker, a field of flowers and a sun-dry desert. It does not matter if Steve doesn’t love you at that moment, because you are love and hate wrapped into one package. You are everything and nothing, spread thin at the beginning and the end of time.

And then none of that is true. You are just… You. Standing in a clearing, surrounded by twenty-something dead Hydra agents and your terrified, terrified family. It hurts to breathe and you can taste blood in your mouth, but that’s an afterthought. Steve is still standing behind you, but he is alive. That is what matters.

This is what love is, you think.

Pain and pleasure.

Even if he leaves you, you will always love him.

Pain and pleasure.

You’re weak at the knees when he finally turns to see you - and you’re a sight. Struggling to stand, fingertips blackened with soot but not burnt, blood pouring from your nose, ears, eyes… You look like death, but you feel like life. Someone says something behind you - Peter, maybe? Or maybe Tony, in your comms? - but you don’t hear it. Everything tunnels out, your weak knees finally collapsing as you keel backward.

Steve bears down upon you almost immediately. You’re halfway to unconsciousness when he wraps you up in his arms, keeping you from falling in with the pile of bodies around you. He’s saying your name, harsh and soft and then in a voice like he’s ordering you to wake up. You loll about as he drops you down onto a patch of clear grass, hands searching your body for wounds. When he skims over your side, where the baton has burnt through your suit and your flesh, you surge back toward being able to have cohesive thoughts. The pain brings you back, hands wrapping around Steve’s arm and calling out his name. “Steve! Fuck, that hurts!”

“Honey,” He breathes, “Fuck, we have to get you back to the jet.” His jaw ticks, hair dirty and loose from its normal style. “Why’d you do that?” Steve doesn’t wait for an answer from you, ordering Peter to web something up to carry you over your protests.

“I’m fine,” You argue, only slurring slightly, “I feel fine.” But you’re going to let Nat and Bucky load you up on the webbed stretcher anyway because it’s the first time Steve has cared for you in a long time. You want to relish in this moment, the way that he didn't say your name but called you honey.

Well, and because Natasha slides a thumb across her neck over Steve’s shoulder in a silent threat.

You groan when Bucky accidentally grabs your calf where there is an absolutely awful stab wound, but you wave off his apology. “How could you have known?” To be honest, you hadn’t even known it was there until his Vibranium hand was slipping against it and sending shockwaves of pain through you. Peter is next to you the whole time that you’re being carried back to the jet - Tony staying back to begin scanning the bodies of the Hydra agents for the information you need and any other information they may be carrying. The poor kid is nearly at a breakdown, so you reach out to him and shake his arm when his fingers twine with yours. “Chill out, kid, I don’t know how you got it into your head that this is your fault, but it sure isn’t.” He sniffles, but hands back with Steve as Bucky and Nat get you situated in the small medical room of the jet. They transfer you and then make to leave, only Bucky hesitating near the door.

“Stevie’s goin’ to be here soon and… I don’t know what made you do what you did but you have’t explain it to him. He’s bendin’ over backwards to figure it out, and we don’t have’a clue. Came out’a nowhere.” He looks at you for another moment before shaking his head and stepping out of the room. Your head is spinning, partially from what Bucky just said and partially from the pain and stimulus of electricity. You wait there, then, because this is it. This is the event horizon. You wait there, eyes closed, until you hear footsteps approach the med room, and then the door slowly opens. Steve says your name, holding all the finality and weight of an atomic bomb. You don’t open your eyes until he swings a chair next to the stretcher and lays a hand on your calf.

“You don’t have to do this,” You finally say, pushing yourself up onto your elbows to watch him. “I know that you don’t want to.” Steve only scoffs and begins to wash the stab wound using a packet of soap and a water bottle. You say his name twice before he looks at you, something between hate and hurt curdling into a glaze over his eyes that stops you in your tracks.

“Just let me do this. It is the least that you can do.” His words are painful and stilted, like it’s taking force to push them past his teeth. You lay back down and close your eyes, content to just feel the pain of Steve beginning to stitch you up and then dress the wound before you feel the pain of Steve leaving you like you knew he always would. (Falling in love with Steve Rogers went against every instinct you had. You knew that he was going to hurt you from the first moment your lips touched his.)

When he’s done he sits back and puts his elbows on his knees, head in his hands. He heaves a heavy sigh and then shakes it off, “I’ll dress your burn, and then we’ll talk.” And normally, yes, you would agree but this is too important. You want to get it over with so you can lick your wounds metaphorically and dress them literally - and then you want to go home, you want to pack your bags, and you want to disappear and remake your life somewhere else.

Some far-off place where everyone you know won’t take one look at your face and know that you’re still painfully, deeply in love with Steve Rogers, end of your semester be damned. Family you’ve made be damned. You can’t sit around and be in love with him like a neon sign on a dark highway while it’s painfully clear that he hasn’t had a sign on his highway in a long time.

So instead of agreeing, you swing your legs over the stretcher and swallow your flinch when the burn pulls tight. Steve opens his mouth to argue but you give him a tight-lipped shake of your head and his jaw snaps shut. “No,” You say, voice not giving in to the emotion swirling in your chest. “I have let this go on long enough.”

It’s the wrong thing to say because Steve fucking scoffs again and looks away from you. “One day was long enough.” He says, cutting straight to your core. Okay, ouch. You take a deep breath and shake your head to try and bite back the tears that are inevitably rising in your eyes. If one day was long enough for him to realize he doesn’t want to be with you, why did he let it go on for nearly a full year? Why did he spend so long leading you on, pulling you by a thread before garroting your heart with it? What was the point?

“If you want to leave me, just say that,” You reply harshly, standing and wobbling away from him. He just watches you go, watches the way you struggle past the lead weights your muscles have become, the way you’re starting to feel the stab wound on your leg, the way the skin on your burn is beginning to blister and only just now losing its heat. He just watches you, where the Steve that loved you once upon a time might have helped. You turn your back on him, hands on your hips so that you can hide the way that you’re crying and your hands are shaking.

“If I want to leave you? If?” He says. You hear the scrape of his chair as he stands, “I think after what you’ve done, it’s not an if, sweetheart.” The way he says it tastes like iron. Steve never calls you sweetheart like he never calls you by your name. It’s always honey, lover, dovie. You don’t turn to face him because you’re struggling to keep yourself above water. “I spent so long thinkin’, wonderin’, askin’ myself - God damnit, will you look at me?” You turn slowly, not because you’ve never heard Steve speak like that but because his voice is desperate and raw. When you turn, you’re not sure what to expect. Maybe him, standing in front of you, broad-shouldered and disappointed like in those PSA’s he had to film once. Maybe he’d be angry, hands clenched at his sides and eyes narrowed like he gets in meetings when he doesn’t agree with something but he’s out-voted. But you never expect to see him crying, lip wobbling, folded in on himself like a young boy instead of the strong, invincible man you’ve come to love.

He looks so different.

It hits you, then, that you’re not looking at Steve Rogers. Not really. He's not Steve Rogers, not Captain America, not even Captain Rogers. You see him as he was - before America spat it’s untruths all over him and injected him with a serum that changed who he was, is, will be. He’s not the able-bodied man that you know, not strong and unreachable, not the heartthrob that overshadows the team during press events. He’s not America’s Darling, not really. Not where it counts.

You’re looking at Stevie Rogers. Stevie Rogers who, for all intents and purposes, was supposed to die before he made it out of toddlerhood or soon thereafter. Stevie Rogers who the doctors said wasn’t supposed to survive. Stevie Rogers who grew up sickly, rattling painful breaths and never playing ball with the neighborhood boys. Who couldn’t walk until middle school when he got his braces off. Who never had a partner because Bucky, strong and handsome and tall Bucky, was always deemed the better option. Who believed in his country so much that he tried to sneak into the second world war, subjected himself to a painful medical procedure so that he could change his very DNA to be what the world wanted him to be.

Captain Steve Rogers. Captain America. Strong, blond, patriotic, resilient.

You’re sure that if men don’t want to go to therapy now, in the modern age, they certainly didn’t want to go in the ‘40s. So where did that leave Steve, your Steve, standing in front of you and looking small, and broken, and sad, and alone? Did they expect him to take his new, taller, working body and run with it? Did they not think about how he would lose a part of himself in the process? How did they expect him to go from disabled to abled without some disconnect?

You think about the You That You Were Before and the You That You Are Now, and how you lost a part of yourself when the accident gave you your powers and how you’d lose yourself if someone figured out a way to take them away. You Before formed your identity around being normal - living in a shitty home with shitty parents, sure, but normal - and You Now form your identity around your powers, your team, your job, your love. If you lost those things, what did you have left? Who would you be?

When Steve lost his identity and became everything that America wanted everyone to think that America was, what did he have left? Sure, he could tell himself that he represents America - strong and patriotic and just - but it must have conflicted with everything he knew about himself before that. You know that disabled people now know that American society is unjust, unfit for them with abled people not willing to make room to allow them to thrive. You can only imagine what it was really like for Steve in the ‘20s and ‘30s and ‘40s. What he had to do just to survive. (Medical experimentation, you remind yourself. Did they know it wouldn’t kill him? Did they know his body wouldn’t rip itself apart with the new sinewy muscle they were packing on? Did they care? Or was he just a body they saw as broken? A project to fix? To turn him into something more like them and call it patriotism?)

You shake your head at him, still filled with despair, and try to figure out what he’s talking about. “Stevie,” You start, pet name easily replacing what you had been calling him because it’s not fair to shoe-horn him into a body that doesn’t feel like his own. You wonder if he still expects the bone-grinding pain that he used to tell you would happen when it rains. He raises a hand, a strong and family hand, shaking his head.

“I just need to know why I wasn’t enough for you,” Steve looks sad, slouching in on himself like he’s expecting to get his ass handed to him in another alleyway and hope Bucky is there to save him. “I need to know why you wouldn’t just break up with me if you wanted to see other people so badly.” You suck in a shocked breath because, okay, that’s not what you were expecting. Between that and the paradigm shift you’ve had on how Steve must view his identity, body, and self, you’re stunned. Steve continues like he doesn’t even register that you look shocked and pale and now you’re crying because he thinks you’re cheating on him? “And I get it. I get it. You have no idea how much I understand. If I were you, I wouldn’t want me either, okay?”

You cut him off there because what the actual God damn fuck is he talking about? “No, Stevie, I’m not cheating on you.” You shake your head again and this, your statement, lights a fire in him. He still looks like Stevie rather than Steve, but there’s anger there. You imagine that’s what it might have looked like moments before he got himself in trouble back before he was serumed. “I’m not.”

“Oh, yeah?” He challenges, jaw ticking and chin jerking up, “Oh, yeah? You can’t lie to me. I know, okay? The act is up, it’s over, I know, okay? You can stop pretending.”

“Steve, I do not fucking know what you’re talking about but I”m not cheating on you!” You raise your voice, not really angry but more out of necessity. You need to get it out of his head that he is anything less than everything you want - that you could possibly love anyone more than you love him.

“I wanted to clarify something for you,” Steve says like he’s reading an old script from when he was just a beefy, red/white/blue stage prop for the American military, “I am excited to meet with you, but there are some rules. Do not talk about Captain Steve Rogers. I don’t want to hear about him,” As he continues to recite something that has clearly hurt him, you go lax. You know exactly what’s happened - your fists unclench, your jaw drops a little bit, and it feels like someone has gutted you, “I think it is wise to keep work and pleasure separate, and it’s a rule I will enforce heavily. I look forward to seeing you again.” He’s sneering at the end, tears falling down his ruddy cheeks.

“Steve,” You try again, but he cuts you off.

“Am I just work for you?” His voice is shaking more than you thought possible, and so are his hands. You’ve never seen Steve so off-kilter, so thrown, and it breaks your heart that yes, technically, you’re the cause of this. Before this, before this horrible misunderstanding, your relationship with Steve was the paragon of trust so neither of you cared if the other read emails or texts. You remember the email - the email from your fucking college professor - because it had made you so angry that he’d referred to your relationship with Steve as something as simple and base as just pleasure - like you could even put words to the galaxy of a relationship you had with Steve - that you’d gone to the gym to work off some of that irritation. You hadn’t wanted to take it out on anyone accidentally. When you came back from the gym, Steve was gone on that two-week mission that he’d left on without saying goodbye.

Oh, God. You feel sick to your stomach as the paradigm of the way that Steve’s been treating you shifts violently to the left. You have to physically hold yourself up and try to speak past the lump in your throat. Steve looks… Brokenly smug. Like he knows he’s right, but he’d rather gnaw his own legs off than be right.

“No,” You croak, “No, Steve, you’ve got it all wrong.” You want to reach for him, but it feels like the room is closing in on you. You’re second-guessing everything now - especially what you’ve just said. How many people said the exact same thing to him pre-serum because they said something meant for Bucky to him? How many times did he hear that when he was getting a new diagnosis, hoping for the best? How many times had his own mother said it to him when he told her something someone had said, fresh-faced and not yet used to the way that abled people sometimes treated disabled people? You think you might be sick. “That email was from my professor, Steve. I’m not cheating on you, I’d never.” He laughs darkly and sits back down in his chair, head in his hands again. You try to gather the strength to move toward him when you see his shoulders shaking, a telltale sign that he’s crying.

“A professor,” He says with a watery laugh, “Right.”

Finally, you realize that he needs you, needs to know you love him, that you’d do anything for him. You can iron out the kinks later - figure out why he didn’t want to come to talk to you past the original hurt, why he treated you so coldly, why he didn’t trust that you wouldn’t do this to him - but now, you need to show him that you’re here. That you choose him. That you’ll always choose him.

You make your way to him and set a shaking hand on his shoulder. For a brief second you think he’s going to shake you off but then Steve’s hand shoots up and latches onto where your hand is resting, dipping his head to press against your arm. “Stevie, please,” You say, unsure of what you’re asking him to do, “I picked up a class, just one, and it’s… I picked it up for you, it’s about the ‘30s and ‘40s and…” He looks up at you and he looks so broken - face ruddy and wet with tears, lip wobbling, chest heaving as he tries to not sob. His brows are knit and he looks confused, “I just wanted to be able to understand you better. You had to leave so much of yourself at the door when you joined the Avengers, had to leave so much of yourself in the ice… In Erskine’s lab… Stevie, I just wanted you to be able to be you when you’re with me. I wanted to know the you that you were before you became Captain America.” Your voice is shaking, knees knocking together, and honestly? You feel like you might blackout.

“What?” He rasps, “What?”

“He sent that email because too many kids signed up for his class thinking that they’d be able to look at pictures of you and Buck for a semester. Emailed me directly because he knows we’re…” You choke on your words, shaking your head because you’re not even sure there’s a we anymore, “Because he knows I’m on the team. Didn’t want me walking in and making his class about just a few years in the ‘30s and ‘40s rather than the culture of the time.” You don’t know how else to explain it to him, but Steve isn’t saying anything - practically isn’t moving or breathing- so you continue to try and explain what’s really happening as best as you can, “And - and that email made me so angry because he singled me out, didn’t email anyone else about it, and I left to try and work some of that out; I didn’t want to take it out on you, or let it spoil - let it spoil… But when I came back from the gym, you were gone. You were gone for two weeks and I didn’t know why.” You’re crying harder now and pretty sure that within the next sixty seconds you’re going to collapse if you don’t sit down.

Steve shakes his head, still looking like he doesn’t understand. “What?” He says for a third time, “A class? A college class?”

“I just wanted to feel closer to you,” You confess, “Just wanted to understand a fraction of your life without making you do the heavy liftin’ and teachin’ me. Shouldn’t have’t do that,” You’re sobbing, barely biting out your words as you realize that something you’ve done to strengthen your relationship with Steve has destroyed it, “Shouldn’t have to explain a whole different time just to feel loved, Stevie. Should be able to be with someone who understands without you havin’ to explain.” You’re not sure you can say Peggy’s name out loud, and you hope he understands what you’re saying without making you actually say it, “Should’a been able to have love with someone who knew, and I know I’m nothin’ compared to what you should’a had, but I want to be. I want to be in the same ballpark instead’a watchin’ from the stands.” You wipe your face with your free hand and look away from Steve when he stands in front of you. You don’t want to see the look on his face - what he’s thinking about what you’ve said.

He says your name and you glance at him, but his expression stops him in your tracks. Where Steve looked broken and hurt and fuming with anger to hide the anguish, now he looks stricken. You shake your head, “No, no. I didn’t say that to make you feel guilty-”

“You think that I care about whether or not you can understand the ‘40s?” He cuts you off, hands moving to curl around your biceps, “You think that I care whether or not you can relate to a time in history when you weren’t even thought of?”

“Of course I love you. I love you more than anything in this world, but you shouldn’t have to not care, Steve,” You argue, shaking your head, “That’s what I’m trying to say. You should be with someone who understands without explanation. I just wanted to give that to you - didn’t know that this would happen.”

“I should be with someone who loves me,” He argues back, “If you love me, that’s all that matters. My past be damned.”

“But your past is you!” You try to pull away from Steve, but he anchors you there. You’re dizzy from being so close to him after this long, but also because of how many different twists this situation has taken. You can barely keep up with how bad your communication with Steve has become - barely keep up with how you need to fix it, or how to fix it. “Your past is you,” You repeat when you realize that Steve isn’t going to let you go. “And you shouldn’t have to give that up so that someone will love you.”

“But you love me,” He says desperately, ducking his head so that he’s nearly nose to nose with you, “You love me, right?”

“More than anything,” You say, closing your eyes and relishing in the feeling of being so close to Steve, “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone. I don’t care about what anyone else thinks, or anyone else. I’ll even stop goin’ to class if you want me to - Steve, I just can’t do this anymore. Can’t do this thing where you don’t talk to me about what’s botherin’ you.” You’re choking up, barely whispering, but you know he hears you. YOu can feel his warm breath on your face, “Nearly fuckin’ killed me.”

“I thought it was goin’ to be easier,” He breathes, nose bumping yours, “When you eventually decided to leave me for him. Thought I was savin’ myself some trouble.” You can practically taste his tears as they fall again, “Buck and Nat tried to tell me that you weren’t - that you wouldn’t - but I just couldn’t believe them.”

When you open your eyes, his are closed. This close to him you can see the soft freckles that are blooming over his eyelids, his soft eyelashes kissing his cheekbones. You can feel him breathing, feel him nearly pressed against you in a way that feels hauntingly nostalgic and terrifyingly fleeting; like you’ll be able to feel his warmth for years to come, but he’s about to disappear. “That’s okay,” You finally whisper, “It’s okay that you didn’t believe them. That you thought what you thought. It’s okay.” He shakes his head against yours, opening his mouth to protest, but you refuse to let him feel guilty about feeling this way - you have plenty of time to sit him down and talk to him candidly about the way he acted because of these feelings, anyway. “If I would have been in your place I’m not sure I would have believed them.”

“I treated you so badly…” He shifts and wraps his arms around you. It’s almost immediate - you relax into his arms and wind yours around his waist, keeping him pulled against you as he presses his face into your neck and you press your cheek against his chest. “So awfully.”

“We’ll talk about that, okay? But later. Right now you just need to know that I love you, Steve. I love you more than I can tell you - more than I can express.” You want to kiss him, but you can’t. Can’t kiss him, you need to wait for him to kiss you, for him to close that gap and show you that he still loves you like you love him. “We’ll have to have a talk, a long and hard conversation about this, Stevie, but for now… For now, I’m just content to be with you, okay? MIssed you so much.”

He sighs, nose pressing against yours again. “Missed you too, dovie. Missed you more than I can even say,” His voice breaks as his lips brush yours. Your relationship is not without its flaws and problems - Steve’s actions when he thought you were cheating on him are proof of that and, well, the fact that you didn’t realize what was happening, why it was happening, or a large part of your boyfriend’s psychological makeup having an impact on your relationship while it went unknown by you… There is a lot of work for the two of you to do, a lot of work to do, a lot of communication to be done… But you’d do it all for Steve, over and over again.

When he presses forward and presses his lips gently to yours, you know that he’ll do it all for you, over and over again, too.

#steve rogers imagine #steve rogers/reader #steve rogers x reader #marvel imagine #mcu imagine

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sleeping-on-cracking-ice · 3 years

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Hello! Can you write something with female Y/N and Chishiya? She helped him with something and is injured after that. She fell or burn her back or hit her head, but pretends that nothing happened since she think he doesn't care and the injury it's getting worst by days, Chishiya didn't notice at first and he just don't understand why Y/N is not talking with him but lets it go, then the day of game comes and they both have to play and Y/N faints few hours before registration. He is panicking suddenly aware of his own feelings towards her and he is SO worried and feels guilty. I hope you can add a lot of angst but fluffy end? I'm sorry if this is messy, english is not my first language 😭 Thank you!

Of course! And don’t worry your English is great 😊 I hope you enjoy! ❤️

Panicked Confession | Shuntaro Chishiya

{Alice In Borderland Masterlist}

Character(s): Chishiya (ft. Kuina, Usagi, Ann, Hatter)

Summary: You get badly burnt while saving Chishiya in a game, but made sure he knew nothing about it. Just before leaving for the next game, you pass out and Chishiya finds you, causing him to panic

Warning: swearing, burn injury, vomiting, fainting

Word Count: 4.9k

*reader is female

“Shit! Guys come on!”

You, Chishiya, Kuina and Usagi rushed through the bottom floor of the building. Flames were curling in the air around each side of you, quickly closing in to eat you alive.

All four of you had almost completed the game, being the only players left after the last puzzle of the building. It was a diamond game, a game of intelligence. You were lucky to have been with Chishiya, as Diamonds games were his specialty.

You were all sprinting across the room, together in a tight pack so the flames don’t manage to touch you. You were panting, feeling your lungs collapsing in on themselves, but you had to press on. Only a few more steps before you could jump through the glass window at the end of the room, which was quickly being engulfed.

Suddenly, you saw Chishiya, who was running next to you, trip on a loose bit of debris laying on the ground inconveniently. You looked back and saw him holding his ankle in pain.

Of course, just your luck.

You all stopped abruptly, skidding along the floor and looking back to Chishiya in fear. He saw you all, his eyes widening.

“What are you doing?! Go!” he called out, wincing in pain.

You looked towards Kuina and Usagi, watching as thoughts spiraled around their heads to figure out what to do. The flame was too close behind Chishiya for it to be safe, if someone was to help him, they would have to risk their life doing so.

Both Kuina and Usagi shook their heads and looked away. They turned away from Chishiya and began jogging towards the window again. You froze. There’s no way they would just leave him like that.

“Guys!” You called out to them. They turned to you with fearful expressions painted on their face. “What are you doing?!” You asked, fear and worry dripping from your words. You had to make up your mind soon or you would be burned to a crisp.

Kuina motioned for you to come to her. “Y/N, there’s no time! We have to go!” you could tell she felt awful about this decision, but you weren’t giving up just yet.

You looked back at Chishiya laying on the ground. He was staring at you with a worried expression, wanting you to hurry up and leave him. You couldn’t leave a friend that easy to die. You had to at least try.

You let out a big sigh and lifted your aching legs to race towards Chishiya. He began yelling at you the moment you started running. “No, no, no! Go Y/N! What are you doing?!”

You ignored his shouting and quickly knelt down beside him to lift his arm around your shoulders. You weren’t going to lose anyone else, you promised yourself that after your friends died in the first game you played after appearing in the Borderlands.

Chishiya kept arguing and shaking his head as you tried to lift his body. He was surprisingly heavy for someone his size. “Y/N, go! There’s no time! You can’t save me!” he at screamed you, becoming more desperate with every plea.

You continued to ignore him and began dragging him along towards the window, where Kuina and Usagi were already working on breaking the glass with debris from around them. “You’re not going to off yourself that easily Chishiya as long as I have a say in it,” you rasped out, struggling to keep upright with the extra weight on your shoulders.

As your heart pounded in your ears and you felt the fire become hotter and hotter around you, you suddenly felt an incredibly sharp pain across your spine. The sensation spread all through your body, from your head to your toe, making you cry out and almost collapse to the ground, but you stayed strong.

Chishiya had given up arguing with you, using his good leg to take a bit of his body weight off your pained shoulders. With his help, you managed to move much quicker, limping and staggering your way towards Kuina and Usagi, who had broken the window and were now waiting for you to come, yelling at you to hurry up.

You didn’t look back; you didn’t want to see how close the flames were. You knew it would do nothing but make the situation worse.

As you neared the window, you slowed down as Kuina ran out to help you lift Chishiya up and out of the window. You were relying completely on adrenaline at that point, having lost all of your strength through running and carrying Chishiya.

You managed to lift yourself through the cracked window, earning a few cuts from the leftover glass on the way, and collapsed onto the grass ground below you. A large barrier from inside the room (probably manufactured for the games) closed over the destroyed window as you fell, being lucky to be the last out of the four of you to escape. The flames were locked in, unable to harm you.

The four of you laid on the grass, panting and trying to regain your breath. As your adrenaline calmed down, the pain of your large burn mark set in. You covered your face with your hand and silently screamed against it, trying to drown out the searing pain somehow. You couldn’t worry the others, not after what just happened.

**************

The next couple of days was nothing but a struggle for you. As soon as you arrived back from the game, you stumbled your way to Ann’s medical room. She took a closer look at your burn wound, applying whatever she had to try and reduce the chance of it getting infected. But unfortunately, that didn’t reduce the pain.

After allowing Ann to wrap a bandage around your upper back to protect the wound, you slowly made your way back to your room on the upper floor. You didn’t want to rush yourself in case you made your wound worse, so you took your time in getting there.

Unfortunately, it was a bit too much time, as you managed to bump into Chishiya who popped out from around the corner. A small panic raised within you; you didn’t want Chishiya to see you like this! It’s embarrassing enough to like someone you had no chance with, but for them to see you stumbling and holding onto the wall because you can’t even keep yourself up? No, not today.

You stood more upright than before, giving Chishiya your best fake smile. “Hey Y/N,” he said, walking past you. You breathed a sigh of relief. Well, that wasn’t too bad.

You started to walk again before you heard Chishiya call out from behind you. “Oh, wait Y/N!”

You turned around, biting your tongue so you didn’t let out a yelp of pain as the skin on your back twisted with your movements. “Yeah?” you acknowledged him.

He gave you a half-hearted smile. “Thanks again, for earlier. I would’ve been a goner if you hadn’t risked your life like that for me,” he said, scratching the back of his head awkwardly. You’ve never seen him thank someone before, so you were shocked.

“Oh, it was no big deal! We should all help each other out, considering we haven’t really got anything else other than each other,” you said, smiling happily. You felt all giddy from him acknowledging the fact that you risked yourself for him.

“Yeah, but it was still pretty cool of you. Even Kuina and Usagi were willing to leave me there,” he chuckled as his own joke.

You laughed and shook your head at him. “I’m sure they were just doing what they thought was best for everyone else in the moment.”

Chishiya nodded and gave you a small wave. “I’ll see you tomorrow night then! Hatter let me know in the meeting this evening that you and I are together again. I’m glad though, because you seem to have the skill and brains to get through some tough games.”

You were flattered by his compliment. “Thanks, you too though! We would have burnt to a crisp if it weren’t for you during that diamond game tonight.”

The small talk was killing you. You just wanted to get back to your room and wallow in the silence that engulfed it. At least there, you could suffer from your burn wound a little louder than out in the public eye of The Beach.

Chishiya laughed at your statement. “No, I’m sure with you there it would’ve been fine,” he said back, making you smile wider.

“I’ll see you later then,” you exclaimed, waving a hand at him. He waved back with a grin on his attractive features before he turned around and continued down the hall with his hands tucked into their usual spot in his hoodie pockets.

You let out a big sigh of relief. That was close. You felt the pain seeping through your body the longer you stood there, hoping for Chishiya to just end the conversation. You felt guilty, it may have looked like you were trying to escape, since you were slowly backing towards the corner. Hopefully, he didn’t notice.

You stumbled the rest of the way towards your room, wincing and hissing in pain on the way. It felt like Ann didn’t do anything at all, but you couldn’t blame her. She had extremely limited resources and could only leave to search for more every few weeks.

When you finally made it to the door of your room, the familiar number engraved onto the middle of it, you gripped the handle and walked inside.

You collapsed onto your bed onto your stomach. There was no way you would be able to sleep on your back with this kind of pain, so you had to resort to either on your side or on your stomach.

Let’s just say, you had a restless sleep.

****************

You were hoping after a night’s sleep that the pain from your back would have disappeared at least a little bit. But you couldn’t have been more wrong. If anything, it had become worse. You probably managed to roll onto it a few times during the night, reopening any part of the wound that had sealed up over the time you’ve had it.

It took you far too long to get out of bed in the morning. You groaned and moaned in frustration as you crawled your way out of the duvet, almost collapsing off your bed. You felt rather pathetic, but who wouldn’t after not being able to do the simplest of tasks from a wound.

As you were walking to your closet to look for something to wear, you remembered you had to go see Ann again that morning. She had told you last night to return to her medical room the next morning so she could reapply a new bandage onto you, in case the other one gets bacteria or blood on it during the night somehow.

You quickly put on your usual swimmers to wear around the hotel and the black hoodie that you wore most of the time when you got cold. You didn’t want to risk anyone else seeing your wound. The gaping burn mark across your upper back was bound to attract unwanted attention.

You made your way down the hall to go see Ann again. There was nobody in the halls around the rooms due to it being close to noon. You slept in longer than you expected.

You slowly walked down the couple of flights of stairs, making your way to Ann’s medical room on the lower floor. The walk down to the lobby felt longer at that moment than it ever had.

You approached the door with the red cross along the front of it, indicating the medical room. You were about to lift your hand to turn the doorknob before you heard a loud voice yell from further down the corridor.

You shifted your eyes and saw none other than Chishiya striding down the hallway with his usual cocky smirk painted across his face. Of course, you had to run into him out of all people.

“Y/N! Wait!” he yelled as he jogged up to you.

You stayed silent, waiting to hear what he had to say. You wanted to ignore him and just walk into the medical room to see Ann to avoid any kind of questioning or suspicion from him, but you knew that would only make him more curious.

“Hey, you alright?” he frowned, questioning you. He reached out to place a gentle hand on your forearm, but you flinched away before he could touch you.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” you answered, trying to sound normal. The piercing feeling that your wound brought you began to make its way around your body again, making you slightly shift and shake. ‘Of course, it just has its moment while I’m talking to the one person that I don’t want to look like a weakling in front of,’ you thought to yourself in your head.

Chishiya frowned at your flinch, but seemed to shake it off quickly, moving onto something else. “So anyway, where were you this morning?” he asked, leaning closer to you.

“I-I was in my room. I had a late sleep in,” you said, gripping the doorknob to the medical room.

“Oh, weird. Do you remember what we talked about yesterday?” he said with a smirk on his face.

‘Oh shit, he’s mocking my bad memory,” you thought, feeling embarrassed.

“Um… no? Should I?”

“You, Kuina, Alice, Usagi and I were going to meet up this morning to steal some food from the kitchen and take it to the rooftop. You didn’t show up near the pool where we said we were going to meet!” he exclaimed. He was laughing, obviously not caring too much about your forgetfulness.

You thought for a second. You did recall having that conversation. You guessed that you forgot about it because you were so focused on trying to reduce the pain from your burn. Even if you did remember, as if you would’ve been able to run away from the chefs in the kitchen after taking the food with this injury.

“Me and Kuina even knocked on your door. You must have been really knocked out if you didn’t wake up from Kuina’s loud yelling.”

He then raised his eyebrow and smirked. “Unless you were hiding from me?”

Your could tell he was obviously joking, but he wasn’t far off from being right. That has been your intention since last night, but trust Chishiya to figure you out quickly enough.

You heart rate picked up from his accurate accusation. “Uh, sorry Chishiya, but I really have to go,” you mumbled out, giving him a quick fake smile before walking into the medical room and closing the door behind you.

Chishiya’s mischievous smirk fell from his face. You didn’t even give him a chance to say goodbye, and you seemed oddly nervous from his accusation that you were avoiding him. He felt somewhat hurt. Were you trying to avoid him?

He shook off his suspicions and continued down the corridor to the lobby to find something to entertain him for the meantime. You wouldn’t try to avoid him, would you? Perhaps he’ll confront you about it later.

*************

You were laying in your room reading a book when you heard the usual ring of the bell that was Hatter’s signal for everyone to move down to the lobby to prepare for the night’s games.

“Shit! Is it that late already?” you asked no one, glancing over at the digital clock on your nightstand.

You panicked and saw it was the time that you would head out to games. You said to yourself earlier that you would give yourself an early mark so you could get down there at the right time, considering you would be slow due to your condition, but you got distracted by your book and lost track of time.

You rushed to your feet a little too quickly for your body’s liking, causing the pain of your wound to shoot across your back without mercy, making you yelp in pain and fall forwards.

You managed to catch yourself before you face planted into the ground. You let out a few deep breaths, trying to regain your strength while the piercing pain became worse from your insistence.

You pushed yourself off the ground, placing your foot underneath you and attempting to stand to your feet. You had to make it to the cars at least, you knew if anyone found you at The Beach during game time, they would mark you a coward, or worse: a traitor.

You cursed under your breath and let out pained sobs as you tried to get to your feet again. But unfortunately, your body just wasn’t on your side at that moment.

Your feet gave out underneath you and your head pounded, causing you to feel dizzy and suddenly nauseated. You leant forwards as you emptied the contents of your stomach out onto the floor, gagging on the taste of it in the back of your throat.

Your eyes began to feel heavy, not being able to take the pain and stress you were under. You managed to roll yourself to the side so you wouldn’t land in the pile of vomit and lay yourself across the floor safely before you face planted.

“Fuck,” you rasped out, feeling helpless at that moment.

You couldn’t do anything as your vision narrowed, passing out from pain on the floor of your own room, no one around to help you.

*************

“Hello again everyone! I would like to say a few words before we all get into our groups and drive to our games!”

Hatter’s usual booming voice thrusted across the crowd in front of him. Another night, another gathering. Just like every other day.

Chishiya stood at his usual spot in the back, leaning against the cement wall and rolling his eyes at Hatter’s words. He never seemed to have anything useful to say. Just some preachy words that created false hope.

‘How about for a change, he gave us some advice? It would probably spare some people a few headaches,’ Chishiya thought to himself.

He stood on his toes and tried to search the crowd for the top of your head. He was becoming anxious. You would usually be down in the lobby by now.

He was more nervous due to the way you’ve been acting all day. Usually, you two were joined at the hip twenty-four seven, but the only time he saw you that day was in the morning when you walked into the medical room.

He wondered why you were going in there. You never went to Ann unless it was for something drastic, but you seemed completely healthy and unharmed.

As the time ticked on, Chishiya became more and more worried. You would never skip out on a game; you were too afraid of being caught by the executives for that.

Hatter finished off his nightly speech with the list of groups and which number wristbands go where. Chishiya didn’t even care to pay attention as everyone began making their way towards the entrance of the hotel where they would pile into the cars and drive off to the games. He ran the opposite way, clambering up the flights of stairs to reach the level your room is on. If you had to be anywhere, it would be there.

He powered his legs into a sprint, having to brush his white locks out of his face once or twice due to them getting in the way. He eventually arrived at your room, stopping and panting to regain his breath.

He knocked on your door quietly at first, not knowing if you were asleep or something. “Y/N?” he called out through the door. “We need to head off to the games. Did you not hear the bell?”

When he received nothing but silence as an answer, he took it upon himself to walk in to see if you were there. He opened the door and peeked his head around the side, being careful in case you were indecent for some reason.

As he walked in further, his heart dropped as he saw you laying on the ground passed out.

“Y/N!” he exclaimed, rushing over to your body and kneeling beside you. He lifted your head onto his lap gently and immediately checked your neck for a pulse. A small feeling of relief flowed through him when he felt the beat of your heart on his fingers.

“Oh my god Y/N, what’s happened to you?” he stressed, tapping your cheek with his hand to see if you would wake. He was beginning to become more worried as time ticked on. He glanced over at the clock on your nightstand and saw that it was getting later. He had to wake you up before registration closed for all the games.

He lifted you up from under your arms, using all his strength to pull you into your small bathroom. He placed you gently on the tiled floor, stuffing a towel underneath your head for support. He quickly shifted your body around, trying to look for any source of injury that caused you to pass out. He froze when he noticed a few stains of blood on the back of your hoodie. He quickly lifted the hem of your shirt to see what was causing the stains.

His eyes almost popped out of his head from the sight. He gasped at the huge burn wound on your back, stretching across from your shoulder blades to your waist. The bandage that Ann had wrapped around it had come loose, hanging off your abdomen carelessly. His heart filled with guilt as he examined it more closely. Why didn’t he look after you?

He immediately put two and two together and realized that you had probably passed out from the pain of the burn mark.

He stood up from his position on the floor and grabbed a small cloth from your towel rack, running it under the water from the tap. He knelt back down next to you and carefully placed the wet fabric against your wound. He was so afraid of hurting you, but he had to do what he could to make you better for the game.

“Oh, come on, please wake up Y/N,” he breathed out. Stress and anxiety filled his tone, making the air more tense.

“Please wake up, please be okay. I love you, please don’t die Y/N,” he suddenly felt small tears gathering in his eyes as he stood up quickly to refresh the cloth that he was using to clean the burn.

He felt his hidden feelings begin to pour out of his mouth. He couldn’t handle the strain seeing you like this was having on his emotions.

He brought the cloth back, but this time he turned you over slightly so he could place it on your face. Your eyes were still shut tightly, not showing any indication of opening.

Chishiya ran the fingers of his other hand along your cheek, tapping softly on your skin, hoping that you would wake up from the physical contact. He felt desperate. He has never felt this helpless before, not even in games.

He allowed his few tears to fall down his cheek, lifting your head and pressing his forehead against yours. “Please wake up, we have to go. Just wake up and I’ll take care of you,” he mumbled out with shaky breaths.

He didn’t know what else to do. He could do nothing but hope.

A few minutes passed with Chishiya just holding you and pressing the cold cloth onto your face, trying to make you open your eyes. And eventually you did.

Chishiya breathed in a huge sigh of relief when he saw your eyes flutter open slowly, dazed and confused. He smiled and kept the cloth pressed to your face, caressing your cheek with his thumb.

“Oh, thank god,” he breathed out, wrapping his arm around your shoulder and bringing you into his chest for a close hug. You groaned loudly at the contact as Chishiya accidentally placed his hand on your wound.

“Chishiya, be careful,” you rasped out against his chest. He flinched away immediately and apologized.

“Come on, let’s get you cleaned up,” he said, lifting you up under your arms again. You groaned, not being able to stand up on your own yet. Chishiya kept you close to his chest as you leant against him.

He managed to clean you up with you leaning most of your body weight on him. He helped you wash out your mouth and clean your teeth to get rid of the taste of vomit and reapplied the bandage that had fallen off your wound. He did it all with such care and concern, being afraid of hurting you or overwhelming you with anything.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at the games?” you asked after you had finished rinsing your face.

“I noticed you weren’t at the lobby when Hatter called everyone, so I ran to your room and found you,” he answered, fixing your hoodie on your back from when he had to lift it to clean your injury.

“So, everyone’s gone?” you asked with a worried expression. Chishiya nodded, leaning on the sink next to you to check your face to see if you were alright.

“But if they find us, they’ll mark us as traitors!” you exclaimed, fear filling your head.

Chishiya placed his index finger on your lips to shush you. “Shh, only if they can hear us. We can just stay in here and be quiet, and hopefully no one suspects that we’re missing,” he said, smiling to calm you down.

You searched his eyes for any uncertainty but chose to let it go and just listen to him. “Okay.”

You both sat side by side on the floor of your small bathroom, Chishiya running his hand up and down your arm to keep your anxiety away. After a while of comfortable silence, you spoke up.

“Thanks, Chishiya, for helping me. If it weren’t for you, I’d still be lying on the ground next to a pile of my own puke,” you laughed at yourself.

Chishiya giggled. “It’s okay. I care about you Y/N, I couldn’t just leave you there.”

You looked at him with sparkling eyes, being taken back by his statement. “Really?” you asked, not believing him.

He smiled lovingly and caressed your cheek with his fingers. “Of course, I’d do anything if it was to help you.”

You thought you would have a cute moment together, but that flew out the window when Chishiya slapped you lightly across the cheek. Not enough to hurt you, but enough to bring a shocked expression onto your face.

“But next time, tell me when you’re hurt instead of trying to hide it from me like an idiot! You really think you’d be able to hide something like this from me?” he scolded you like a mother, but you giggled at his reaction.

“Yeah, I’ll tell you next time. Why did I ever think I could keep something from someone with an intelligent mind like yours,” you teased, leaning closer to his face.

Chishiya raised his eyebrows. “Hm, thanks, I guess? Not sure if that was a compliment or if you’re poking fun at me.”

You chuckled. “Take it however you want,” you whispered. You finally closed to space between you, allowing your lips to clash against his. Chishiya let out a shocked sound, but quickly melted against you and accepted your kiss.

You both sat on the floor of your bathroom, moving your mouths together while Chishiya tried hard to place his hands on you without touching your burn mark. You appreciated his care, but he ended up having to awkwardly place them on your upper arms, rubbing up and down them slowly.

You pulled away first, making Chishiya chase your lips as you moved away, making you giggle. “There’s my thank you gift,” you said cheekily, leaning away from him and back into your seating position.

Chishiya pouted at you. “That’s it? That was barely a kiss!” he argued, trying to move closer to you, wanting more of your affection.

“Chishiya, your tongue was in my mouth. I think that clarifies as a kiss,” you stated, placing your hand on his mouth and pushing him away gently. “Maybe let down that tough guy persona more often and take care of me, maybe then you’ll get more kisses.”

Chishiya leaned back and frowned. “Fine, but don’t expect this to be the norm now. I’m not going to let you control my personality just for a bit of affection.”

Well, that was a lie.

Author’s Note: Every Chishiya fanfic I’ve written has had some sort of angsty moment in it 😂 this man is going through it

3K notes · View notes

yutanology · 3 years

Text

Promise Me | Yandere! Nakamoto Yuta X Fem!Reader

Warning : 18+, possessive, foul behaviours, sexual content(nothing biggie), mental illness, death, etc. No proofread. Please, don't be too harsh on me. I'm still new and this is my first ever one shot/fanfiction here :)

Word count : 2.4k+

"Could you just stop?" Y/n whisper shouted at her seatmate who had been bothering her since this morning.

It's not like this is new to her or to anyone in their class but today, he seemed to be more clingy and touchy than he usually was and she found it quite unusual.

By the time she stepped into the school campus this morning, he abandoned his game with his friends on the soccer field just to greet her with his dashing smile and a nice warm hug.

She didn't mind it at first as she was already used to it but when she thought he's going to leave her alone after that, he followed her around instead like a lost puppy. She could almost see a furry tail happily wagging behind him.

Everywhere she goes, he's there right beside her. Either his hands were holding hers or his arms were wrapped around her lower waist. Some people were jealous or happy when they thought they're finally officially together and when someone questioned their relationship, Y/n would immediately respond saying they're just friends while Yuta would say otherwise, leaving them confused.

He was still attached to her during her classes and even ditched his just to be with her. The teachers could only sigh in defeat and shake their head. They knew that whatever they say, there's nothing they can do to make the stubborn guy follow their orders.

At the end, he'd always get what he wants.

The Japanese boy glanced at her side profile. His head was laying on top of his other hand. Seeing her brows furrowed irritatedly, he stopped for a moment before continuing to twirl a few strands of her silky hair between his long fingers.

It doesn't look like he has any plans of keeping his hands to himself at all. She'd been trying to get rid of him for countless times and she failed with all of those useless attempts. She's so close of getting angry at him but she doesn't want to lash out on him and seem like a bad person.

With her another sigh passing through her soft reddish lips, she looked at the clock on the wall. ‘Just five minutes more, Y/n. Just a little more patience, you can do it.’ she tried to convince herself. By those five minutes, she let Yuta play with her hair.

When the school bells rang and echoed around the campus, she immediately fixed her things and rushed out of the classroom before the teacher could even dismiss them. The corridors are already crowded and she could only hope that Yuta wouldn't be able to follow after her this time.

She decided to go to the restroom and stayed there until she was certain that Yuta's nowhere around her. He's really acting weird and she couldn't understand why. Whenever she asked what's wrong with him, he'd always say the same thing like 'I'm fine. It's all in your mind.’

His gaze, the way he looks at her also felt different this time. She felt something uneasy somewhere in the pit of her stomach or maybe there's something wrong with 𝘩𝘦𝘳. Maybe she's just overthinking way too much since that's what she always do mostly when she doesn't get enough sleep and she stayed up late last night.

That's right... these shit are all just in her head.

She released an exhausted sigh and turned the faucet on to wash her face, hoping that it would also wash her frustrations away. She reached for a handkerchief from her bag and wiped her face dry as she made her way out of the comfort room.

Her heart almost jumped out of her ribs when she found Yuta standing just a single step from the exit. She gasped and her hand immediately flew to her chest in surprise. "Yah! Stop scaring me like that!" she yelled and he only chuckled in amusement.

"I've been waiting for you. What took you so long?" he asked her, locking his hand on hers as he lead her to the canteen. Eyes of the people they passed by were immediately on them like they're more interesting than the lessons that their teachers taught them.

"Wait, why were you waiting for me?" confusion was evident on her face.

"So we can eat together for lunch, of course. Come on, we don't have all the time. Classes are going to start after forty minutes." he casually said, pulling her closer to him when they walked passed a group of boys and he didn't fail to notice the way they looked at Y/n.

He didn't like it, not even a bit.

Y/n seriously couldn't count how many times she sighed at how she always end up letting Yuta do whatever he wanted to do with her. From the simple hand holds to sudden random kisses that he pepper on her face. No matter how hard she tried to push him off, he'd always stick himself even more closer to her.

It was like that for the passed weeks and it was honestly so tiring as hell. Yuta just won't leave her alone even when she goes to the restroom, he would insist to wait outside the cubicle that she had to push him away and lock the main door of the room.

She could barely talk to other people peacefully as he would shoo them away immediately and ask them to leave her alone. It was so frustrating and she's getting fed up of his unexplained foolish practices.

She's well aware that the guy likes her more than just a friend and she also can't deny that she's attracted to him but these behaviours of his are just too much for her.

The said dirty blonde haired Japanese guy was sitting closely beside her, his chin rested on her right shoulder as he watched her turn pages of the book that she's reading. He wasn't paying attention to the words written on the dead leaves. His eyes stared at her small hands, wondering how they would feel like around his cock—

"Yuta." the guy's ears perked up when she said his name. Snaking his arms around her waist, he pulled her to his chest and planted a kiss on her neck. Her cheeks heated at the unexpected skin contact but she tried her best to ignore the butterflies that he's giving her.

She's planning to finally confront him and she had to make him stop whatever he's doing cuz it's no fun at all. It's not entertaining and she's not amused at all. "Yuta." he hummed, his kisses getting wet and he started to graze his teeth on her skin, lightly nibbling on them until he finally bit hard enough to leave a mark.

A whimper tried to escape her mouth but she's fast enough to bite her lower lip, trapping the sound until it disappeared on it's own. He was disappointed when she didn't make any sound for him, thinking that he didn't do well enough to make her feel good so he ran the tip of his tongue on her neck.

His hot minty breath heated her skin and tingles spread around her body when he blew her sensitive ear, nibbling her earlobe and placing a kiss on one of her flushed cheeks. His hands wandered under her blouse, caressing the side of her hips with his thumb.

He slowly dragged his large hands up under her breasts and just when he was about to touch them, Y/n pulled away from him. A low whine and groan simultaneously erupted from him, complaining at the lose of skin contact from her.

Y/n looked around the library if someone saw them and she was thankful that no one was there but only them. She straightened her blouse, closing the book and stood up. "Where are you going?" he also stood up from his seat, ready to follow her wherever she's going.

She didn't answer him. She slung one of her bag's strap on her shoulder, walking away with the book and placed it back to where she took it. Yuta was quick to keep up with her steps, confused of why she was suddenly in a hurry.

When they finally got out of the library, she stopped at the nearby bleachers where students barely pass by and turned to him with an exasperated sigh, "Yuta, seriously, what's wrong with you?" the way she questioned him came out more stressed out than how she wanted it to be.

Yuta blinked his eyes a few times as if he's trying to figure out what she meant. "What do you mean, what's wrong with me? I'm totally fine. Are you okay?" it was his turn to ask her, walked close to her and placed a hand on her forehead.

"Are you sick? You don't seem fine to me. Let me take you to the clinic—"

"Yuta, stop." she stepped away from him before he could even hold her hand. He halted, his brows met as his eyes stared at her worryingly.

"Stop whatever you're doing to me and please, leave me alone. I also need some time for myself and other people around me, alright? You can't keep me from interacting with anyone. This is honestly suffocating, Yuta. We can't keep doing this."

He felt like his heart shattered into tiny pieces. His chest tightened and his airways narrowed, making him unable to breath properly. Without him knowing, tears were already streaming down his cheeks.

Y/n was taken aback at this, immediately feeling guilty for making him cry. She didn't expect him to be this emotional for his appearance.

"Look, I'm sorry but—"

"D-don't you love me anymore, Y/n?" He didn't let her finish her words, leaving her speechless at the question.

Her mouth left agape, struggling to find the right words to tell him. "Did you find someone else better than me that's why you're planning to leave me, is that it?" more salty water poured out of his eyes.

"Yuta, w-what are you talking about? We're not in a relationship to begin with."

"Then let's be together officially! Just you and me, Y/n. I'll do anything just to be with you. I promise, I'll be the best boyfriend you'll ever have. I'll give you everything you want—" he held her arms, "—just promise me I'll be the only one you'll ever love and want to be with. Promise me, Y/n. Promise me!"

Yuta secured his arms around her, holding onto her desperately. Scared that if he lets go, he might lose her. He can't let that happen. Like what he said, he'll do whatever it takes just to have her.

All for himself.

"Y-you have to promise me, Y/n."

Her head was clouded with a lot of thoughts. She was barely thinking straight and her emotions also messed up with her. She really likes Yuta. The increasing speed of her heartbeat and the butterflies flying around her stomach with euphoria whenever she's with him didn't lie at all but it felt wrong.

These feelings didn't feel right.

She pulled herself away from him and shook her head. "I'm sorry, Yuta..." that was all she said before she left him without even looking back at him.

She had no idea how it broke him and how it made him do things that a normal person wouldn't do. He saw nothing but red after she disappeared from his sight. Everyone who tried to touch or talk to her the next day suddenly disappeared, a minute after they left somewhere else.

At first, she didn't think much about it until the number of people disappearing quickly increased and made everyone alarmed. All schools around the place were forced to close for a moment and people were told to stay at home with tight security to keep them safe.

Everyone was scared including Y/n, of course.

It made her so anxious that she could barely sleep at night. One morning, a knock on her door echoed around her silent apartment and she panicked, quickly hiding on her bedroom.

She almost peed her pants in fear when the knocking and ringing of doorbells continued for minutes. Her phone went off on her nightstand and she ran to it. Yuta's calling.

Without a second thought, she answered it with trembling voice. "Y-yuta..."

"Y/n, are you okay? Please open your door for me, I have to make sure you're safe. I'm the one outside your house."

And that was all it took for him to be with her. Make her scared to be outside, convince her that everyone is dangerous and he's the only one who can protect her.

Whenever he goes outside to buy food and other necessities for the both of them, he'd always return with a small cut or bruises and it made Y/n scared that she might lose him too.

He's all she had left.

He made her thought of that. He's all and everything she could ever need. She'd be nothing without him.

"Do you love me?" he asked and she nodded silently.

"If you really do, promise me that you'll love me and only me, Y/n. I wanna hear it from you." Yuta looked at her straight in the eyes when he said those words.

"I promise." his heart raced inside his chest.

A smile stretched out on his plump lips. "I love you, Y/n. So much than you could ever imagine." He meant it. He always had and always will. He leaned his body closer to her, locking his lips with hers and they moved in sync.

This is paradise to him.

He couldn't explain how much happy he's right now. With her here in his arms, it's the only place where she's safe. He watched her drift off to sleep, he kissed her forehead when her eyes finally closed.

He could look at her like this forever. The love bites that he painted on her skin looks so beautiful. She's like the most beautiful painting he'd ever seen and she deserve to be placed on his art gallery but she's only for him to be looked at.

He sighed dreamily as he continued to press more kisses on her neck. He successfully made her love him. There's nothing he could ask for, now that her naked body is already tangled with him under their soft blanket.

He could only hope that she'd keep her words and stay true to him.

Feedbacks are pretty much appreciated and requests are open! Feel free to share your thoughts!

I will not always be active but I will try my best to attend each of your requests and to also interact with y'all.

I apologize for not being word-perfect in English. English sadly ain't for me—

#nct scenarios #nct x reader #yuta nakamoto x reader #yandere #nakamoto yuta #nct nakamoto yuta #nct u #nct 127 #yuta nakamoto #obsessed #posessive

154 notes · View notes

parkers-gal · 3 years

Note

Heyy. Could you repost the fic where reader announces She s pregnant but gets scared that Peter will reject her so she breaks up with him? (I had requested part 2 of the 2 parts if I'm not wrong.) You don't have to ofc! Love you 💙💙

yep, i’ll post part two too!

—

warnings: lol pregnancy, slight angst, cursing (characters are all 18+)

wc: 2k

There was a fine line between a lot of things, but being pregnant and not being pregnant was not one of those things. In hindsight, maybe Midtown should have told the students which condom brands were least effective, or maybe even May or Pepper. And just by luck, Y/N happened to have skipped her birth control pills for two days in a row, the two days she spent entirely with Peter. And now, though she didn't know it was inevitable, she was facing consequences she thought would come much later in life, if at all.

What would her parents say? How would Peter even react? Would she keep it? Would Peter support her either way?

She didn't want to find out the answers to any of the questions flying through her mind. In all honesty, she didn't want to ask the questions at all. Instead, she sat on the bathroom floor, leaning against the cabinets as she let tears slip in realization that this was going to change her life forever.

Wiping off a few last stray tears, she tucked the test into the back of the cabinet before getting up and leaving the bathroom, grabbing her purse and making her way to the front door.

"Y/N, honey? Are you alright?" Her mother asked right before she left. "You were in there an awful long time, hun."

"'m fine, mom, just thinking. I'll be back, probably gonna get more of my stuff."

Y/N was just in the middle of moving out and into her own apartment. She was corning her last year of college, and she figured it was best to slowly transition into her own life as an independent adult. As of right now, her apprenticeship wasn't the best she could get, so she was only moving into the Avengers tower with the rest of the team until she got the promotion her mentor promised her. Despite being an avenger, she didn't actually work for Tony or Bruce, and she didn't depend on them as much as Peter did. She was still close with all of them, though.

Walking through the double doors, she gave a small nod and smile to George, the man who stood on guard at the entrance of the tower. Making her way to the elevators, she pressed the button and debated on what she was going to say to Peter.

The living quarters of the tower were two main floors, but the central living center had the kitchen, so most Avengers stayed there until "curfew," as Tony had called it.

Making her way through the halls, she passed the kitchen, where Bucky, Sam, Steve, Wanda, and Natasha were located, talking and drinking what must've been one of Steve's old fashioned drinks.

"Hey, Y/N," they greeted her individually. In response, she only nodded, trying to get to Peter as fast as possible. Furrowed brows and wide eyes they were, shocked at how closed off she was being. It was only when she left the room that Wanda gasped, staring at the spot Y/N had just been on.

"What?" Nat said quickly, urgently. "What is it? What's wrong?"

Back in Peter's room, Y/N had just knocked, Peter granting her access and she stepped inside, clutching her purse close to her as her breathing quickened and her pulse increased.

"Hey, babe," Peter said, his back to her as he fiddled with something on the bookshelf.

"P- .. Peter, we need to talk."

At this, he spun around, glancing in her eyes to try and decipher what she was thinking and what she was about to say. What came next was not what he expected.

"Okay."

"We need to break up."

"W-what? Why? I though- I thought w-"

"We just need to break up- I'm breaking up with you," she rushed out.

"Baby, come on, let's talk about this. Tell me why. Did I do something? Did something happen? I can make it better, I can change- make things right, c'mon don't just-"

"Peter I'm breaking up with you," she said, her voice cracking as she finally allowed the tears to flood her eyes. Peter was full on crying as she turned around and left his room. Thirty seconds passed before he went sprinting out of the room after her.

Wanda and Natasha had called just about every Avenger into the compound's kitchen, and just in time to see Y/N leaving with tearful eyes and Peter chasing after her.

Wanda hadn't explained to anyone what she had read in Y/N's mind. Though they knew something was up, they weren't prepared to witness the action of the words (or thoughts).

"Y/N," Peter breathed out. "Y/N!" he said again, gripping her wrist to spin her around. "Why? Why the fuck would you just drop that? What happened to us?"

"Don't make this harder than it has to be, Parker."

"I'm not! I just want to know why the girl I'm in love with is leaving me so sudden! Don't you think I at least deserve to know why?"

A few more tears fell down her face before she exhaled. "I wish.. I wish I could tell you, Peter."

"Well why don't you?!"

"I- I can't."

"Did you stop loving me? Was that it? Did I do something?"

"I didn't stop loving you. I could never stop loving you-"

"Then why are you giving up on us?!" Peter exclaimed with defeat, both of his hands pulling at his hair before covering his face as he started crying again.

Y/N stepped forward, hesitantly about to reach out to console him before deciding against it and leaving altogether.

When she was gone, Wanda breathed loudly, Natasha doing the same.

"Peter.." Nat said, walking towards him slowly. "Are you... alright-?"

"She just- did it!" Peter whined out, abruptly cutting her off. Natasha rushed forward to catch him and he gripped her tight as he cried out to whichever god cursed him.

"We need to talk," Wanda whispered to Nat, before filing out and leaving the two alone.

***

"What the fuck was that about?" Sam exclaimed in the training room. The Avengers had resorted to the gym for some privacy, knowing neither Y/N nor Peter would come willingly unless they had scheduled training, which neither did.

"Seriously, though," Bucky replied. "They were doing so well, things were going so great-"

"Okay everyone just sit down!" Wanda exclaimed, pacing back and forth as Natasha stood next to her, rubbing her forehead in thought.

"Do you know why?" Steve asked after a moment.

When Wanda didn't vocalize her response, merely making guilty eye contact, the Avengers knew.

"Of course you know," Bruce said.

"Okay, what's this about?" Tony said, coming through the doors, a few minutes late.

"Y/N just broke up with Peter," Loki stated blandly.

"What the fuck?"

"I know, right?" Steve said, eyebrows furrowed in confusion and sympathy for the pair.

"And.." Tony glanced back and forth between Nat and Wanda and the rest of the crew. "Wanda knows?"

"Mhmm," Nat hummed.

"Well, wouldn-"

"Y/N is pregnant," Wanda blurted out.

The silence that overcame the group was deafening. Pure shock and surprise were overwhelming emotions as the heroes struggled to wrap their minds around the realization, the truth.

"Holy fuck," Sam whispered.

"That's why.. she broke up with Pete?" Bucky said.

"Mhmm," Wanda hummed back quickly. "I could feel the anxiety she had. I think she let it get the best of her. She was still in shock, still panicking. I don't think she's known for long."

"We have to do-"

"No, we don't do anything. Nobody says a thing, nobody does a thing," Natasha informed strictly. "I swear to fuck if any of you do something I will come for you myself. Let Wanda and me handle this. You all don't know the start about female anatomy."

"Yes, ma'am," Bucky replied, the others nodding in agreement.

***

About a week later, Y/N was walking into the training room. She saw Steve, Natasha, Peter, Tony, and Bucky standing around talking about something, and as much as she wanted to avoid him, she also knew that she had to attend training.

"Hey, Y/N/N," Tony greeted. "I'm making some schedule changes."

"Okay.." she said after a moment, putting her bag on the bench as she glanced at his clipboard before making eye contact again.

"Pete, you're in for four days a week, each a two hour session. You'll spar with Steve for two sessions, five mile runs with Nat, power training with Bucky and Sam, you know the drill."

"Y/N," he started, flipping a page. "I'm.. cutting your sessions to thirty minutes each. Only twice a week."

"What the fuck, why, Tony?" She asked.

"Yeah, that seems unreasonable and unfair. She gets less time and I get more?" Peter joined.

"Well, I just want to be cautious with the baby on the way and all that," Tony said nonchalantly.

Time seemed to freeze as the group went dead silent, all except for Peter.

"Baby? What baby? What the fuck are you talking about?" he asked, glancing between Tony and Y/N. "Y/N? Ar- are you- are you pregnant?"

She closed her eyes and exhaled, her hands clammy and sweaty as they were balled into fists.

"I'-I'm..."

"Is that why you broke up with me?" he said, his voice dropping to a whisper as the realization hit him. "You thought you'd leave me before I had the chance to do that do you?"

"I can't do this right now," Y/N breathed, rushing out of the room. Peter ran after her, and Natasha punched Tony in the arm once they had left.

"Y/N, Y/N!" Peter exclaimed, catching up to her and spinning her around. "Is it true?"

She closed her eyes before nodding again. When she opened her lids, her eyes were glossy and red, "Yeah."

"Were you ever going to tell me?" he whispered, voice cracking.

"I don't- I don't know, Peter! I was so afraid you were going to break up with me or leave me or that you were going to hate me if I didn't keep it or that my parents would disown me or some shit like that! I just did it first to avoid it all."

"Avoid it all?" Peter repeated. "I love you, Y/N," he stated, grabbing both of her hands. "A baby isn't going to change that, whether you keep it or you don't. It's your body, so it's your choice," he said, and her head rolled in disbelief as she sighed. "I love you," he stated again, tightening his grip on her hands. "And you're carrying my baby. Did you ever think I'd be happy?"

"Peter we're so young, basically fresh out of high school-"

"I know it's unplanned, Y/N, and that makes it so scary. But I would never abandon you like that."

"I really love you, Peter," Y/N huffed out, her tears beginning to free fall now.

"I know baby," Peter said while pulling her into his chest and embracing her for the first time in a week.

After a few moments, Y/N's breathing evened out and Peter spoke up. "Are... are you going to keep it?" he whispered, kissing the top of her head.

Her throat was sticky from crying, and after a few seconds, she answered. "I am."

Peter held her at arm's length to look at her, really look at her, and he kneeled down and kissed her stomach, voicing his excitement and feelings.

The Avengers, who were watching from the doorway of the training room, smiled in relief, a few of them wiping stray tears and rubbing their eyes to regain their composure.

"God they're growing up," Tony whispered.

"Not just yet," Pepper fired back, glancing at the pair before grinning herself, thankful they were in this together.

(part two is out)

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laskyy · 3 years

Text

Hey guys! I'm back from my little break! Sorry for talking so long, but now I'm back and that's all that matters! So now let's get to the imagine!

(Btw this is gender neutral)

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

You're all that I want

Tw: mentions of food and drinking water, kissing, mentions of making out (let me know if I missed something)

Genre: Fluff

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

It was currently 10 p.m. and you were with the boys of P1h on their practice room. You were Theo's best friend and he invited you to come see him practice, because he knew how much you liked to watch him perform.

"Hey guys, what if we played something?" Jiung suggested as he took the final bite out of his food.

The members had already finished practice and you guys were all just talking, eating and goofing around as usual.

"Sure, but what should we play?" Intak asked as he too finished eating.

"Well we could play truth or dare!" Keeho said excitedly as he picked up his water bottle to take a sip.

"Okay, sounds good! What do you think Y/n?" Theo asked while he softly looked at you.

"I'm down!" You said as you becme shy due to Theo's gaze.

"Me too!" Said Jongseob as he smiled.

"Yeah, let's play!" Soul said as he clung onto Keeho.

"Okay I'll start!" Jiung said. "Uhmm... Jongseob, truth or dare?"

"I'm going with truth!"

"Is it true that you think you're better than Eminem?"

"WHAT? OF COURSE I AM!" Jongseob said as we all started laughing out loud at the youngest's confession.

"Okay Jeminem it's your turn!" Jiung said as he wiped a tear that he shed because of laughing.

The game went on for a while and everyone was getting kind of tired and besides that you still had to clean up the place before going home! So you agreed to play one more time and then everyone would clean up, but things didn't really work like that.

"Okay, Theo truth or dare?" Intak asked like an excited puppy.

"I want to go with... Dare!" Theo answered while smiling. God his smile was beautiful.

"Well..." Intak started but stopped when Keeho whispered something that made the puppy like male smirk. "I dare you to stay here with Y/n and clean up!" He said and everyone besides you and Theo started cheering.

"You can't do that! We all agreed to clean up together!" Theo said trying to sound mad, but he sounded quite excited... Did he want to be alone with you?

"A dare is a dare my dear friend! So have fun cleaning up!" Keeho said while smiling.

"Do I not get a say in this?" You asked kind if shocked by the while situation.

"Well... No! Bye bye!" Intak said as he waved goodbye left the room with the other members following suit.

"Jeez! Sorry that this happened!" Theo said while looking at you with an apologetic look.

"It's fine Taeyang! It isn't your fault! And at least we have each other's company while we clean up!" You said as you smiled at him.

"Yeah you're right let's clean up so we can go rest! I'm sure you're tired!" He said as he patted your head softly.

"But definitly not as tired as you are! You killed it during practice!" You said smiling att the blush forming on his cheeks.

"Thanks Y/n, that means a lot coming from you!" He said as you guys started cleaning up.

Your little cleaning session was made up of you guys talking about random events that had been happening and laughing with each other while cleaning the mess on the floor. Once you were finished you went to the door to open it in order to walk home.

"No no no no no no!" Theo said as he pulled the doorknob as hard as he could.

"What's wrong Tae? Why isn't it opening?" You asked as you watched the boy in front of you struggle.

"It's locked! The boys must have locked it out of habit! Oh my god and they're probably already at the dorm!" He said as he put his hands through his hair.

"Okay let's calm down! You can just call one of the boys or something and they can come unlock it!"

"You're right, you're right!" Theo said as he picked up his phone to call Jiung since he was the last one to exit the practice room.

"Hello?" Jiung said.

"Hey Ji, uhm did you lock the practice room door?" Theo asked trying to sound as calm and collected as he could.

"Uhm no I didn't! I even left the key next to your bag so you wouldn't forget to lock it when you're done."

"WHAT? THEN WHY DOESN'T THE DOOR OPEN???" Theo said very distressed and because of that you put your hands on his shoulders in order to calm him down.

"Bro I don't think anyone is is the company at this time! You'll probably have to wait until tomorrow but I'll see what I can do!

"Alright thanks, I guess." Theo said.

"Bye!"

"Bye." Theo ended the call with a stressed look on his face. It's not that he didn't want to be with you, it's the fact that he feels bad that you had to be dragged into this situation.

"Calm down Theo, we'll figure something out! But now while you seem stressed we should distract ourselves alright? Now come here, I can tell you need a good hug right now." You said in a soft tone while you opened your arms for Theo and he gladly wrapped his arms around your body in hopes to relax and feel some warmth. You really loved being hugged by him.

Some time passed and you guys finally let go of the hug while making eye contact with each other, but you broke it off for being too shy to look at him for any longer.

"Uhm.. How about we talk about our first times doing things! Like your first time riding a bike and stuff like that!" Theo said as he still had his hands rubbing up and down on your arms.

"Sure! That sounds fun. Who's going first?" You asked as you both took a sit on the now clean ground.

"I can start and ask you something if you don't mind!" Theo said gently.

"Of course! Go ahead!" You answered while showing a small smile to Theo.

"Okay then, your first time having a partner, like romantically. How was it?" He asked with a teasing smile on his cute face.

"Oh my god! Well it was in middle school I think! The most we ever did was hold hands and then he broke up with me because my hands were too sweaty!"

"Really?!? Oh wow!" He said as he started laughing at your story.

"Yeah, oh well. It's my turn now! Let me think... How about your first kiss?" You asked innocently, waiting for his answer.

"Oh uhm this is embarassing actually, but I've never kissed anyone before." Theo said as he scratched his neck and laughed awkwardly.

"Oh it's okay Taeyang! You don't need to have had your first kiss at a certain age! If you didn't find the one yet, then just wait! It's better to wait to have it with the right person than to just have it to get it over with, you know?" You said reassuringly as you grabbed his hand and rubbed soft circles on it.

"Yeah I guess, but I think I already found someone." He said still not looking in your eyes.

Even though you were his best friend, you had strong feelings for him and the fact that he said this kind of hurt your feelings, but you couldn't just ruin what you had with him. You'd much rather have him as your best friend than not having him close to you at all.

"Oh, that's great Theo! You should tell them!" You said with a heavy heart.

"Well, I think I already made it obvious to who I like, but I don't know if they got the memo." He said as he finally looked at you blushing.

"Do you think the person likes you back?"

"I mean, everytime I display affection, they blush and they always hug me longer, but they might just not want to appear cold, so they reciprocate the affection."

"Maybe you should tell them clearly that you like them!" You said while looking down at your feet.

"But the thing is I'm awful with words!" Theo said while running one of his hands through his pink hair (I know his hair is not pink right now, but I pictured Theo from the image above for this imagine).

"Then maybe a certain gesture, like gift them something, like a letter or whatever." You said hoping he'd let this topic go.

"You're right! I can do a gesture, but maybe I could do something that would show my love to the person through affection... I COULD KISS THEM! Oh wait but I don't know how to do that... YOU COULD TEACH ME!"

"CHOI TAEYANG ARE YOU OFFICIALLY OUT OF YOUR DAMN MIND?" You yelled as you were shocked he would ask you such a thing.

I mean, sure, you always wanted to kiss Theo, but not just as a one time thing... You wanted him to be yours only.

"C'mon! I trust you with my life and I promise you that things won't stay awkward afterwards! Please! For me!" Theo said as he kneeled in front of you with both of his hands clasped together as he gave you puppy eyes.

You weren't going to accept, but then you thought this might be your only chance to kiss him, and as selfish as it sounds you wanted him just for yourself and for a moment you could have that.

"Fine, but just this once!"

"THANK YOU! YOU'RE THE BEST! I LOVE YOU!!" Theo said as he hugged you so hard you both fell down.

"Y-you're welcome." You said shyly, because of the proximity between you two.

"Can we stand up for this? I think I'm tired of sitting down!" Theo said as he stood up and straightened his back.

"Sure, it's fine! Wow! I never thought I'd be in this position with you!" You said as you both giggled softly.

"Well, but you are! Better make the most of it!" If only he knew.

"Okay now, for this you should be holding the person you're going to kiss in a way that's comfortable with them."

"Okay, since I'm kissing you, what do you prefer?"

"Well you can put your hands around my waist if that's okay with you!" And as you said this, his hands were around your waist and he was smiling sweetly in your direction.

"Right, what's next!" He asked enthusiastically.

"Well now you need to get closer and just do it. You need to move your lips against your partner's in a way that you enjoy, this doesn't have some sort of formula or something, you just have to go with the flow. And you might wanna picture that I'm the person you like so it's more enjoyable for you!"

He got closer to you as your lips were barely touching as he said "I don't need to imagine anything, when you're standing right in front of me. You're all that I want."

You barely had time to process what he said because he looked in your eyes and closed the gap between your lips softly and you felt as if you were on cloud 9.

You guys were lost in each other's lips. For someone who never kissed someone in his life, Theo was amazing. Your lips fit against each other's perfectly.

He moved his lips against yours in a very slow motion, almost as if he was calculating what his next move would be. You mentally gasped when he took one of his hands that was on your waist and put it in your hair as he deepened the kiss. You didn't feel fireworks like they all mentions in the movies and books, but instead you felt warmth, you felt loved, you felt high on his lips, and you never felt this way with anyone ever.

You and Taeyang kept making out. It seemed like you just couldn't get enough of each other. As if the moment you let go, the world would end. But much to your dismay, Theo pulled away from the kiss to breathe and you couldn't get enough of the sight in front of you. Your favourite boy was standing in front of you with his hair disheveled, lips slightly red and a boyish smile on his face.

"Are you sure you never kissed before? Because my god!" You said as he giggled and pecked your cheek softly, a gesture that made you blush.

"And also, what you said before you kissed me... Did you mean it? Do you like me?" You asked as your voice only got smaller. But by the look on Taeyang's face he still heard you.

"I do mean it, I always did! And I should have confessed first and then I should have courted you and only then kissed you. But I just saw an opportubity and took it. But I truly had never kissed anyone before, you were my first!!" Theo said as he smiled at you.

You didn't have words to answer so you just put your arms around his neck and kissed him as passionately as you could. Theo reciprocated the kiss and this time he went all out and even dared to lick your bottom lip, a gesture that surprised you to say the least but you granted him entrance anyway. Your tongues moved in sync as you held on tighter if that was even possible.

You didn't realise how long you guys were making out until you heard the door open.

"Guys we made I-OH MY GOD MY VIRGIN EYES!" Intak yelled as he appeared shocked by the scene before his eyes.

You guys quickly pulled away and soon the members entered the practice room and they rapidly caught on what happened as your guys' lips were slightly swollen and your hair was a mess.

"Theo! I didn't know you had that in you man!" Jiung said as he put his arm around Taeyang's shoulder. "And Y/n, I'm glad you like our Theo back! He never shuts up about you! It's always Y/n this, Y/n tha-"

"Alright! They get it Jiung! Now let's go to the dorm, me and Y/n are tired" Theo said as he interwined your fingers.

"I wonder why you're tir-OW! WHAT DID YOU HIT ME FOR?" Keeho yelped as Theo smacked the back of his head.

You all went out to the dorm and while in the van you and Theo couldn't help but share small kisses to express how happy you were. Not only you got to kiss Theo as he is now your lovely boyfriend!

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

Hope you liked this imagine guys! I decided to post it sooner to be able to finish Intak's imagine in time for his birthday! By the way this wasn't proofread so if there are any mistakes I'm sorry! Let me know what you thought of this and please do request something if you want to! Love you guys 💖💖

#p1harmony #p1harmony fluff #p1h imagines #p1h scenarios #theo fluff #choi taeyang #theo p1h #Theo

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jediken0bi · 3 years

Text

At The End Of The Day

Spencer Reid x Reader

Summary:

Reid is scared his Job is eventually going to take away the thing he loves the most. You.

word count: 2023

Spencer sat on the counter in the kitchen, sipping on his sugary coffee and watching you move around the room. You decided you wanted homemade Waffles this morning and Spencer made the quick decision to not even attempt to lend a helping hand. He usually ends up burning half of the food anyway so you're not complaining.

And if you're being honest you liked being able to do something nice for him while he relaxes. It's not like that's something you get to see all that often.

You really only get to have Spencer to yourself on the Weekends and even then your time together isn't always guaranteed.

That's something you guys struggled with a lot. He even more so than you now that you think about it. He is so quick to beat himself up over not being able to spend more time with you and it breaks your heart.

Of course you would like to see your boyfriend more often but you know how much he loves his Job and you would never ask him to quit or hold his crazy schedule against him.

After all, it's not Spencers fault serial killers don't take the weekends off.

You throw little glances at Spencer every time you add a little bit of batter into the Waffle Maker and each time you find him already looking at you with loving eyes and a silly smile plastered on his face.

You can't help but giggle a bit before shaking your head lightly.

There are certainly days where you can't wrap your head around the fact that the genius with the pretty face feels the same affection towards you as you do.

Another minute goes by before he puts his coffee down, pushes himself off the counter and walks over to you to carefully wrap his arms around your waist.

"Someone is awfully cuddly this morning", you say with a huge smile on your face. You lean into his touch so he knows you don't actually mind the closeness.

He still has days where he can't tell whether or not you're making a lighthearted joke or are trying to reject his advances. It took him a long time to be able to initiate physical contact without you having to make the first move or ask for it.

That's not because he didn't love you though. He simply didn't know what to do in a relationship.

He was trying to figure out the do's and don't's and you were more than happy to help him learn and understand what it means to be truly loved by someone.

Nowadays he doesn't hesitate to seek comfort in your arms and there's nothing you can think of that makes you happier than that.

All you ever wanted was for Spencer to feel at home with you.

He put his head on your shoulder and smiled into the crease of your neck

"I can't help it. I haven't seen you in 8 days, 5 hours and 24 minutes and now that i'm here i don't wanna waste a single second of it"

You silently put the last Waffle on the plate you set out and turned your head so you could face him.

You try to catch his eyes and as soon as you do, you press a light peck onto his pink lips.

"I missed you so much", you say while he softly grabs your waist to turn you around positioning you so that you're facing him.

He presses gentle kisses to your forehead, your nose, your cheek and suddenly stops right before your lips.

"I missed you too, my love"

Before you can form an answer he plants a firm and loving kiss on your lips making you forget about breakfast for a second.

But only for a second.

You start smiling into the kiss and lightly push him away. The distance between you two only big enough to let you catch your breath before you laugh and say

"Let's go eat. We haven't had breakfast together in a bit and i wanna cuddle on the couch and watch some Doctor Who"

He laughs and nods his head so his short curls fall into his face.

You bite your lip to suppress a grin before tucking the lose strand of hair behind his ear.

He reaches behind you to grab the plate and makes his way towards the couch you two picked out just over a month ago.

You follow him immediately, feeling giddy that you get to cuddle your boyfriend for the first time in days.

He puts the plate down, plops down on the couch and immediately opens his arms to invite you to get comfortable in them.

While you snuggle into his chest he grabs the remote and starts queuing Doctor Who Episodes for you guys to watch and analyze together.

You wrap your arms around his torso and bury your head into his neck. You sigh happily and plant tiny kisses on his shoulder and neck.

He tightens one of his arms around you and starts playing with your hair

-time skip-

Almost three hours later, the waffles long gone, you get up to get some drinks for the two of you.

As the credits to the third episode start rolling you can't help but notice that Spencer had gotten unusually quite.

You sit down next to him, put a hand on his arm and ask with a calm voice

"Baby what's wrong? You got so quiet and it looks like something's bothering you. Did something happen at work? Did the case end bad? Whatever it is Spencer i want to be there for you"

He looks at you with wide eyes. Almost like a kid with his hand stuck in the cookie jar. He looks guilty and it's making you nervous. You know you can't push him but you would be lying if you said you weren't worried.

He looks down for a second unsure of his next move. He takes a deep breath and hesitantly turns around to look at you.

Your hand immediately finding its place on your boyfriends jaw. Running your thumb over his stubble in a calming matter.

He leans into your touch and closes his eyes for a second.

You knew that he would eventually start talking so you had no problem patiently waiting for him to summon the courage to say whatever was on his mind.

"I was talking to Morgan the other day and he said something that got me thinking. Actually, i think it's fair to say that thinking turned into overthinking really quick. Although i don't know anymore. At this point, it might be a completely valid fear and i'm just trying to convince myself it's not. Of course you could apply that logic the other way around as well but - I'm rambling, aren't it", he says in pretty much one breath.

You show him a understanding smile and say,

"Yeah but it's okay. I want to hear what's on your mind. No matter how confusing"

He looks up at me and smiles with sad eyes

"I know you do and that's why the thought of ever losing you drives me completely insane"

You stare at him for a moment not understanding why he would be thinking of losing you before taking his hand into yours and asking

"Spence, do you want to tell me what you and Morgan talked about?"

He sighs loudly and runs his thumb over the back of your hand.

Looking straight at you he decides 'Now or Never'.

"He just broke up with his girlfriend and we were all trying to be there for him. He seemed completely fine but you never know with Morgan so i went to talk to him about the break up and he just smiled at me and said 'It is what it is, Pretty Boy. Relationships are doomed to break in our line of profession. Enjoy it while it lasts' "

he tells you doing a weird impression of Derek.

Under different circumstances you would've laughed.

You look at Spencer with a small smile on your face. He looks so distressed, you can't help but run your hand through his curls and climb into his lap.

He doesn't waste a second wrapping his arms around you to secure your position and before he can question you, you say

"So that's what this is about? You thinking i might leave you because of your Job?"

He shakes his head slightly and looks up to meet your eyes

"No this is about you deserving a boyfriend who doesn't spend 90% of his time a couple of states away from you every week. It's about me not wanting to make you feel like you come second when there's nothing that's more important to me than you. I would quit my Job if you asked me to. There's plenty of Jobs out there but no one quite like you. I hate to think that you might come to resent me for being away so much"

You run your hand through his curls again and smile softly. It's your turn to shake your head.

"What i deserve is a boyfriend who loves me for who i am. Someone who cares about my feelings and thoughts. Someone who doesn't mind binge watching Doctor Who with me on the weekends because i like that way better than going out. Someone who reads my favorite book so we can have a conversation about it. Someone who shows me how much he cares every single day. And i already have all that. I don't need anything or anyone else. I promise."

Spencers eyes are shut tightly and he leans his forehead on yours. He presses a light kiss to your nose and wistfully admits

"I'm just so scared my Job is going to take you away one day"

You wrap your arms around his neck and whisper

"I know a thing or two about that. Baby, you do so much good in the World. I couldn't be more proud if i tried. Let me ask you something. You like your Job, right? Despite everything it asks of you?"

He nods softly and opens his eyes

"I love my Job. Helping people gives me a chance to make a real change. It's what i've always wanted to do."

You smile at him and hum in agreement

"That's right. And you love me too, right?", you ask cheekily

He looks at you like you hung the moon, grabs your hand to press a soft kiss against it and says

"Of course i do. More than anything"

You once again nod in agreement.

"Then you have to understand that the World isn't always 'This or That'. I would never ask you to quit your job for me. I wouldn't want that. I love you too much to take away the thing that fulfills you and makes you happy. Relationships take work, Spencer. I'm not saying it won't be rough sometimes but at the end of the day you're my Clark Kent to the BAU's Superman and i wouldn't change a thing"

He looks at you with loving eyes that are glazed over with unshed tears and whispers

"I'm going to marry you one day, i promise. I'm going to spend the rest of my life showing you that you're loved beyond compare"

He starts covering your face in kisses resulting in you laughing at his antics.

This wasn't the first time you two talked about marriage. You knew that he was the man you were going to walk down the aisle to. There wasn't a doubt in your mind.

You push him back down on the couch so you can lay down on his chest and say

"Now that we've established that you looove me, i think it's time for you to start the next episode. It's my favorite!"

You said it in a mocking voice but it genuinely did make your heart beat faster and he knew that.

"Damn straight i do", he says as he reaches for the remote.

Weekends with Spencer are simply the best.

#spencer reid x reader #spencer reid imagine #spencer reid imagines #spencer reid fluff #spencer reid #criminal minds #criminal minds imagine #criminal minds imagines #reader insert

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astro-rain · 3 years

Text

delicate; b.barnes

chapter seven - “the king is dead”

delicate masterlist

word count: 1.7k

synopsis: shuri has awful news. the reader is terrified but bucky is strangely calm. the world is turned upside down, and not in a good way.

pairings: bucky barnes x fem!reader

[A/N]: this was so fun to write omg get ready it’s finally getting interesting!!! (as always, OC on my wattpad @ / typicaldaze)

Months had gone by since that day at the lake. Countless therapy sessions had been endured, several hard questions asked, many many issues worked through. Bucky suffered through a few more anxiety attacks along the way, but they never hindered his resolve, thanks to (Y/N). They had made progress, good, solid progress. Bucky was pleased; (Y/N) was thrilled. It's hard to see change when you're the one going through it. However, to the person guiding that change, every step forward is recognized. She was proud. She was genuinely proud of him. He wasn’t “fixed,” he still had struggles, but he was a lot better off then before.

There was something peculiar, though. Their relationship was strictly professional, (Y/N) knew that. However, she couldn't help but feel as though along the sidelines of their progress, they had grown to become friends. She knew that, clinically, this was not appropriate, but there were no corporate guidelines she was working under. She was helping him. So, what would it matter if after all this was over, they were friends? What would it matter if his therapist also operated as his friend? Hell, she didn't even have an official therapist position here! Sharon just sent her to help. (Y/N) had decided she didn't care about the boundaries being crossed. Nothing ever went wrong with someone gaining a friend. It's fine.

Regardless, the two of them had thoroughly addressed the anxiety and the PTSD, and he now officially had both diagnoses. He understood himself and his brain so much better, and with (Y/N)'s help, he not only acknowledged his disorders, but accepted them. She taught him to not see them as the enemy, not something that was wrong with him. They were just a part of him, same as his brown hair or blue eyes.

Bucky was so much more open now. He was less on edge and more comfortable, especially around her. In all honesty, he was usually his most comfortable with her. He had coping skills and everything!

This was all grand and good, but (Y/N) hoped with everything in her that it wouldn't be ruined by the present disaster.

"I thought he was automatically supposed to be king?" (Y/N) asked, confused.

She was at her weekly meeting with Shuri for Bucky's treatment plan, and the young genius had just told her she couldn't make it next week due to T'Challa's coronation.

"He is," Shuri started, "but it's Wakandan tradition to open the position up to a dual. So, his rule isn't set in stone."

"Oh... What if someone... challenges him?"

"Then they will fight! However, I have no worries. T'Challa is a great warrior, and though I doubt anyone would challenge him, he would win if they did."

(Y/N) admired the faith Shuri had in her brother. She could tell their bond was strong.

"Couldn't you technically challenge him?"

Shuri revealed a kind of devilish smirk that only a sibling can muster. "Oh, I have thought about it. But I am much more useful in my lab, and T'Challa wouldn't know what to do with himself if he wasn't in charge."

(Y/N) looked back on the memory anxiously as she stared in horror at the look on Shuri's face. A wicked mix of fear, grief, and stress drained all the color from the princess' normally dark, beautiful skin. Shuri had always radiated confidence and composure; seeing this change worried (Y/N) deeply.

"The King is dead."

Her face became void of any expression and all she could process was fear. She thought she gasped but she couldn't remember breathing out again. Her brain was frozen. (Y/N) was in a foreign country that just lost its monarch. She was alone, and all the people she was relying on to protect her just had their kingdom invaded and taken over by someone with the word kill as part of their nickname. She was almost certain that this would be her end.

"Dr. (Y/L/N)?" Shuri said unsteadily. "Did you hear me?"

"Y-Yes I... What are we going to do?" her voice was weak and small. Pathetic and afraid.

Then, thoughts of Bucky crossed her mind. What would happen to him? He could fight, she supposed, but he doesn't have any weapons or gear and he'd be against an entire regime. What if they killed him? What if they tortured him? Different scenarios quickly flashed through her brain, but she could only one concrete thought.

I have to find him.

"My family and I have a plan, but we can't take you with us."

Any remaining semblance of hope dissipated from (Y/N)'s body, and she swore she could feel her veins quiver with apprehension.

"What?"

Her voice felt far away.

"It is not ideal, and I'd never leave you unless I had to. But Agent Everett Ross is here. It's a long story, but as you know, he can't find out about Sergeant Barnes. He can't know that either of you are here. If we take you with us, it could compromise everything we've been working for," the nervous princess explained.

"So... what of me and Bucky?"

"Again, it's a long story, but there's a... sort of fallout shelter - I guess you could call it - that was built years and years ago when the first tribes of Wakanda were constantly at war with one another. I will give you supplies and directions, and you two must go there and remain hidden until this is all over."

Fantastic. (Y/N) would get to play Cold War nuclear fallout in Wakanda.

"How will we know?"

Shuri gave her a somber look. A look of uncertainty and immense guilt.

"I wish I could apologize enough, my partner, but I do not know. I promise I will try to contact you as soon as I get any information, but for now we must hurry. We do not have much time."

With that, Shuri took (Y/N)'s arm and quickly led her her outside. It was late afternoon and the air was beginning to cool. They ran, locked together, until they met the Queen under a large tree among the outskirts of a nearby forest. The woman looked just as shaken up as Shuri.

(Y/N) could see bags of different shapes and sizes at the base of the tree. She could only hope whatever was in there was sufficient for survival.

Shuri immediately embraced her mother, but the moment was short lived as she then bent down to gather the bags.

The Queen placed her hands gently on the sides of the psychologist’s face. "I am so sorry, child. This does not involve you in the slightest yet you are swept up in the middle of it."

Shuri handed her mother the bags and they both geared (Y/N) up with all her supplies. It was heavy. Really heavy. She realized she was carrying supplies for two. Then, there was panic.

"What about Bucky?"

"Barnes doesn't know about any of this yet. I thought it best he heard it from you," Shuri expained, "and we cannot afford anymore delays. Us or you. You must go now, tell Barnes what is happening and go. I wish I could be more help, but we simply don't have the time."

(Y/N) nodded, trying to process all the chaos. She was internalizing every bit of it. As a result, she was once again, frozen.

"Dr. (Y/L/N)!" Shrui exclaimed.

Her head shot up, snapped out of it.

"Go! You must go!"

And with that, (Y/N) took off. She had been in Wakanda long enough to know her way around the castle's surrounding land. Her speed didn't last very long as she was carrying for two, but she tried all she could to keep going as quickly as possible.

Eventually she found herself outside of Bucky's living quarters. She didn't know what to do, so she knocked.

An array of different emotions went through Bucky's face. At first he looked pleased, but then he saw the horror etched into (Y/N)'s features, and the bags she was carrying. He could tell something was wrong.

"What happened?" he asked, surprisingly calm, while immediately taking some of the bags from (Y/N). He still only had one arm but that really didn't seem to matter to him.

She was out of breath, face flushed and eyes wide.

"The King is dead," she said breathlessly. "Someone... someone killed him a-and took over."

Bucky didn't look as scared as (Y/N) felt. In fact, he looked... totally fine? She was so out of it she wanted to curl up in a hole and allow natural death. How was the anxious man she was accustomed to so at ease? The world was flipped upside down and (Y/N) had no control. She wished there was a word stronger than fear because she couldn't even describe what she was feeling.

"Okay," Bucky said, gently taking another bag, leaving her with only one to carry, "What did Shuri say? What do we have to do?"

She shook her head, trying to regain her breath and her composure. "There's um - there's a fallout shelter thing we have to go to. Here."

She handed him a crumpled up piece of paper that Shuri gave her. A map with directions. (Y/N) knew he would've been better at locating it than she could at that moment.

"Alright," more of the calm voice filled her ears. "Anything else?"

"There are more details, but - we don't have time," she sighed, restlessly. Her voice began to shake ever so slightly. "Bucky, I'm so sorry. We have to go now. I promise I'll tell you everything."

"Okay," he said again. He bent down slightly, looking her directly in the eyes. " (Y/N), we're fine, okay? We're good, and we're gonna be fine. I will get us there. Are you ready?"

She nodded, steeling herself.

Bucky looked at the map, then glanced up in the direction of the shelter. He took (Y/N)’s forearm firmly. She gave him a look, confirming she was ready. And off they went.

#bucky barnes #bucky fanfic #bucky headcanon #marvel #steve rogers #bucky reader insert #bucky blurb #bucky drabble #bucky fic #marvel fanfiction #bucky x you #bucky x reader #bucky x female reader #bucky barnes x y/n #bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes x female reader #james buchanan bucky barnes #james bucky barnes #winter solider edit

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bangtanreadingcorner · 3 years

Text

rumor has it [2/2] • jung hoseok

words — 3K

part one

You took of your shoes, haphazardly kicking them into the shoe rack, pulling off your baby pink sweater as you padded to your room, humming with a gigantic grin on your face.

It wasn't five minutes since you arrived home when a knock sounded on your door. You threw your sweater on the bed, heading to the door.

"Yeah, I'm coming." You called, and the incessant knocking ceased. Probably Minji or Jamie that wants to borrow a book or some paper to print a project. You opened the door, frowning slight when you saw who was on the other side, "Hoseok? Is everything okay?"

"I'm not feeling very gentlemanly right now." He declared before stepping closer, grabbing you by the neck and kissing you until you were breathless, your socked covered toes curling.

"Good night." He said when he pulled away, then added on, "For real this time."

You laughed a little, feeling so ridiculously happy. You wondered if you could combust from it.

"Text me when you get home." You blurted, still catching your breath.

"Promise." He nodded, licking his lips. You leaned forward to peck them one last time. For now.

You laughed again, practically vibrating with giddiness as you closed the door for a second and final time.

***

You liked to think that maybe you would have a boyfriend, in the not so distant future, after that. It's not like you go around kissing any guy you go out on a date with. And yeah, there's been some horrible dates you went on that never went anywhere, but that's a story for another day.

Right now you were more interested in listening to what Hoseok had to say. The two of you were sitting in the Quad, eating lunch together. You warned your friends to pretty please stay away for now because this thing between you and Hoseok was still new and fragile. And maybe you want him to yourself for a little longer but that was none of their business.

"So, the Dance Department is holding its yearly talent show." Hoseok said after swallowing a bit of his chicken and mayo sandwich.

"I heard," You nodded, taking a sip of orange juice. "The whole campus is talking about it."

"I entered and I was wondering if you'd come?" He asked, looking at you nervously. "For me. For, you know, moral support."

"Absolutely." You nodded eagerly, belly fluttering. You liked the fact that Hoseok had invited you to the competition, especially knowing how much dance means to him. "Can I bring my friends?"

"Sure," Hoseok grinned excitedly. "The more, the merrier."

In the three months leading up to the competition, you would scarcely see him during the week with how much he practices but you make up for it by spending most of the weekend together.

You get to know much about Hoseok in the three months that pass. Little things, like how he swears when he gets startled, all of his phobias (spiders, snakes and heights you got, but fear of water was a little bit of a strange one for you, because you're in love with water but it's not like you own a swimming pool so it wouldn't be a problem), his likes (cuddling while watching a movie) and dislikes (watching scary movies at night - or just in general), habits (biting his lip when he concentrates) and hobbies (skateboarding).

Finally, the day of the competition arrived. It was pretty much a full day event, according to Hoseok, because there was the entrance round, which took the most time, quarter finals, semi finals and finals.

You were walking to the hall where the competition would be held with your two best friends, Minji and Jamie. Your arms were linked through each other's. "Thank you guys so much for coming."

"Of course. Where else would we be?" Jamie smiled gently at you.

Minji nodded, then said, "And we've been dying to meet the guy who has finally melted your heart."

"Just behave yourselves." You told them, pointing a finger in warning.

"Who, us?" Minji gasped.

"We're angels." Jamie smirked.

You snorted, looking around for Hoseok. He said that you would all meet out front. "Sure. Whatever makes you sleep at night."

"Hey, Y/N!" Hoseok's voice caught your ears and you turn in the direction you heard it. "Over here!"

A grin breaks out on your face when you see him, a few guys standing with him, and it takes all your will power not to run to him. You didn't even look at anyone else as you walked to him, stopping only when you reached Hoseok. "Hey."

You wanted to kiss him but didn't. PDA isn't something you've discussed yet, and you definitely don't want to be pushed away or make Hoseok uncomfortable.

"Wow, you look . . ." Hoseok breathed, eyes widening when he did a full body sweep of you. You wore a dress for the first time since he's met you, paired with some matching wedges and a little bit of make-up. "Beautiful."

"Thank you." You grinned, feeling your cheeks flush. "You look very handsome." And he did - a low cut white shirt that put his collarbones and little bit of his chest on display, tucked into black, ripped skinny jeans and a pair of white Converse sneakers.

A throat cleared from somewhere around you and both of you snapped out of the little bubble that unknowingly formed around you, the pair of you ignoring the world.

"Right, I should probably introduce you." Hoseok cleared his throat, tossing a glare over his shoulder when one of his friends snickered. "Guys, this is Y/N." He looked at his friends, gesturing at you. Then looked at back at you. "Don't worry if you can't remember all their names today. There's six of them. Okay, this is Namjoon, the best friend I told you about. That is Yoongi-hyung and his best friend Seokjin-hyung. Next to them is Taehyungie and his best friend Jiminie and next to the shorty is his boyfriend Jeongguk."

"I'm not short." Jimin huffed, a hand wrapped around Jeongguk's bicep.

"Of course not, hyung," Jeongguk consoled, patting his head. Then he smirked, "Just vertically challenged."

"Yah, you gigantic brat!" Jimin snarled as he used the hand on Jeongguk's bicep to try and hit him in the back of his head. Clearly this has happened before because Jeongguk expertly ducked away and grabbed Jimin's hand, spinning Jimin until his back was pressed against Jeongguk's chest. Jeongguk wrapped his hands around him a struggling Jimin, smiling as he pressed a kiss against his hair.

"Don't worry about them, they're always like that." Taehyung said with a grin when he noticed the way you looked at them, wide eyed.

"Good to know." You laughed. "Well, it's so nice to meet all of you." You stepped next to Minji and Jamie, who were eyeing all of Hoseok's friends with interest. "And these are my two best friends, Minji and Jamie."

Jamie stepped forward, peering at Hoseok, "It's so nice to meet Y/N's new beau. She hasn't had one since high school."

"Would you shut up?" You hissed, cheeks flaming, as you pulled her back to your side.

"Aww, look. She's blushing. I've never seen her blushing. Not even when looking at pictures of Idols' abs." Minji cooed, laughter and snickering following.

"You two are dead to me." You said with a glare as you went to stand next to Hoseok.

"Hobi-hyung was so excited when he told us you were coming." Jeongguk let know when everyone calmed down.

"I'm happy he asked me, even if it is moral support." You smiled happily, smile widening when Hoseok's hand slipped into yours. Now, hand holding was something you two did a lot.

"Hah!" Seokjin scoffed. "Moral support, my ass. Hoseok doesn't need moral support, he's won this competition since his first year." You could feel your eyes widening, jaw dropping open.

"The other's don't stand a chance." Jimin smirked.

"We're not trying to be mean or anything, but our Hobi-hyung is the best." Taehyung grinned.

"Hey, how come you never told me how good you are?" You huffed, nudging Hoseok's elbow with yours.

"I thought if I told you, you wouldn't come." He admitted, a slight pout on his lips.

"Oh my God, you idiot!" You lightly slapped him on the arm with your free hands. "I would have come either way. I've always wanted to see you dance."

"I'll win for you tonight." Hoseok promised, ignoring the wolf whistles and whipping sounds that came from the direction of your friends after his words.

You just smiled fondly at him, "That's sweet, but you don't have too."

"I want too." He said quietly. "I've never danced for someone other than my friends and family before."

"Okay, fine. I'll cheer for you."

(Hoseok does end up winning first place. And you two end up having a heated make out session in his dressing room afterwards.)

***

A few weeks after the competition, your mom asked you to go and pick up your sister. You don't warn Hoseok beforehand, wanting to surprise him. You hoped it wasn't a bad surprise. This would be the first time you picked up your sister again after the first time you met. You smiled to yourself, thinking how so much has happened since then.

You walked into the studio, making a beeline for Hoseok.

"Hello again, Hoseok-ssi." You greeted with a serious voice. He spun upto you, eyes wide, and you aimed a lazy grin at him, eyes full of mirth.

"Hello Y/N-ssi." His voice was professional but there was an amused twinkle in his eyes as he smiled at you. "It's good to see you again."

"You too." Was all you we able to get out before your sister joyously shouted your name and barreled into your legs. You laughed, crouching down to give her a proper hug. "Hey squirt. How was class?"

"It was sooooo good. Hobi-oppa is a really really good teacher and fun too. We learnt lots of things. Like this." Your sister ended her own ramble as she demonstrated a move that she learnt in class today, looking at Hoseok when she finished moving, silently asking if she did it right. She positively beamed when he nodded, giving her a thumbs up.

"That's awesome." You ruffled her hair. "Why don't you go get your bag before mom gets home before us and reports us missing?" Your sister nods vigorously, before running away. You turn to Hoseok, heart swelling with affection as you immediately catch his eye. "How's she doing?"

"Good," He said, eyes twinkling. "And I'm not just saying that because she has a gorgeous sister that I like very much."

"Ohhh, keep going." You sing-songed with a grin, crossing your arms over your chest, enjoying the way his cheeks flushed. "Flattery will get you everywhere."

Hoseok tilts an eyebrow at you, "Isn't it usually the other way around?"

"Yeah, but in this case flattery will get you anywhere." You smirked, enjoying the way his flush deepend from you teasing.

Your little sister appeared by your side, looking between the two of you. Then she announced, "Hobi-oppa, my sister is single, if you're interested."

Hoseok looked away and pressed his lips together to stop himself from laughing.

You barely resisted the urge to yank her by the ears as you hissed to her, "Your sister is not single, stop trying to find her a boyfriend. I'm capable of getting one myself."

She gasped, looking at you with wide eyes. "I'm telling mom."

"Mom knows, tattletale." You deadpanned, much to her disappointment. It's true, she knows about you and Hoseok. You sister doesn't. You all decided to keep quiet around the dance school so the other children and their parents can't accuse Hoseok of playing favourites because he's dating you. You also decided not to tell your sister, because you didn't want her to accidentally let it slip out.

The three of you bid your goodbyes, and you and your sister left. You didn't get very far when your phone buzzed.

Hoseok : Not single, huh?

You laugh, practically seeing the happy grin on his face. You two made your relationship official not long after the dance competition and he loves it when you tell people that you're a taken girl. You type a reply with one hand as the other one held onto your sister's.

You: Nope, there's this really great guy that I'm dating.

Hoseok: Luckily guy.

You: I'd like to think we're both lucky.

Hoseok: Sounds fair.

Hoseok: Btw, your ass looked really good in those jeans.

You: Hehe, thanks.

You: You were were rocking the whole soft boyfriend look, btw

"Are you texting your boyfriend?" Your sister asks as she rises on her tiptoes, obviously trying to see on the screen. You make sure to keep it away from her curious eyes.

You smile down at her, "Yeah."

Hoseok: Soft boyfriend look?

"Do you love him?" She asked and you avoided answering her question to answer Hoseok's text, wondering about it. Do you love him?

You: Big t-shirt, sweatpants and barefoot = soft boyfriend look

You: For me, anyway

You: Idk about other people.

The answer came so easily to you. You smiled down at her as you wait for Hoseok to reply. "I think so, yeah."

Hoseok: Ah, gotcha

Hoseok: We still on for tomorrow???

You grinned, butterflies fluttering wildly. Tomorrow evening was Jeongguk's 18th birthday party and you were invited as Hoseok's girlfriend. Apparently it was the formal one - with Jeongguk's family - and then the next evening would be the informal one - with his school friends and Jimin's friends and their friends. You were a little nervous, because only Jeongguk's closest friends was invited to the formal party and while each one could bring a plus one, not everyone did.

At least, that's what Namjoon told you when you ran into him at a coffee shop a few days ago and told him that you'd see him at Jeongguk's party. So, it was kind of a big deal and you were kind of freaking out but mostly, you were excited.

You: Yep, I'll see you there.;)))

The next day, you decided on your nicest clothes, which was the second and last dress you own and a pair pumps.

"You look so cute, I want to eat you." Hoseok had blurted when you opened your dorm room. You raised a brow at him and smiled when he flushed and started back pedalling. "I, uh, um, what I meant to say was-"

"I think you're cute when you scrunch your nose when you don't like something." You cut him off, deciding to have mercy. "Come on in, we still have an hour until we need to go."

He smiled gratefully and you stepped closer to kiss him.

"About what I said just now Hoseok started when you pulled apart, closing the door behind himself.

"There is nothing to explain." You assured him with a gentle smile, heading to your couch.

"No, I need too. I want to be honest with you." He said firmly, but you could tell he was nervous. His shoulders was tensed and it make you feel unsteady. You didn't like that he was distressed. "It's just- I just, I've been thinking about it."

"What, eating me?" You joked, trying to make him relax a little. You looked at him over your shoulder with a teasing smirk, "Sorry, but I'm not into cannibalism."

"Y/N. I'm being serious." His tone made you sober up, turning to him. Hoseok was looking at you, biting his lip, but there was a determined set to his jaw.

"Oh." You felt yourself getting nervous out of nowhere. "Okay. Thinking about what?" You had a good idea what he was thinking about, just not if it was positively or negatively.

Hoseok cleared his throat, looking like he was searching for words before just bracing himself and saying it. "Having sex with you." So, you were right. You will weren't sure if he wanted to tell you that he wants to or not. "I want too." He added on barely a second later for clarification.

Your heart started racing. You blushed a bright red all over - chest, neck, ears, cheeks. You gaped at Hoseok and he waited silently, looking more and more nervous and unsure as each second passed.

You gathered your thoughts and told him the truth.

"Me too." You admitted softly, shyly. "I didn't want to bring it up or push for more during one of our more heated makeout sessions because I wasn't sure what you thought and while I am thinking about it, I'm just not . . ."

Hoseok breath a sigh of relief, so quiet, you almost didn't heard it it. "Not ready yet?"

"Yeah." You nodded. He took his hands in yours, tangling your fingers together.

"I feel the same. Like, in the heat of the moment I want to find out just how flexible you are, but then when I calm down its like something tells me it's not time yet. And that's okay. There's no need to rush. We'll get there." Hoseok said, squeezing your hands, both in comfort and promise.

"Yeah, we will." You smiled, wrapping your arms around his neck. You kiss him deeply, trying to show him everything you were feeling but couldn't define and put into words yet.

Months later, when both of you are completely ready, it's not just right but it's perfect in that fairytale kind of way you always thought was bullshit but secretly hoped for anyways. Afterwards, when you lay on his chest, looking up at his sleeping face, you breathe those three special words, before falling asleep to the soothing sound of Hoseok's heartbeat.

#bangtan #bangtan fanfic #bts fic #jung hoseok #bts hoseok #bts jhope #jung hoseok x reader #jung hoseok x oc #jung hoseok x you #hoseok x reader #hoseok x oc #hoseok x you #hoseok imagine

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heyboke · 4 years

Text

SWIPED RIGHT! | Kageyama Tobio x Reader SMAU

0:10 — Pinky Promise and...

NOTE: I understand if some of my readers only prefer the SMAU part, so I made this update flexible so you can still get what’s happening without reading the writing part! Keep in mind that you still have to click on ‘Keep Reading’ to access the following photos!

But, some of the parts can’t be translated through social media screenshots so reading the writing part will really help you understand the characters and what’s happening to the story on a deeper level! ☻

Word Count: 3344 words

YOUR POV

After concluding Bokuto-senpai's non-stop blabbering about the movie he watched last night to procrastinate from studying, the boys were finally able to go to their locker room to freshen up for their long-awaited BBQ Friday.

I decided to wait for them on the bench just outside the gym. Their four hour training went by so fast that when I looked up at the sky, the stars were already twinkling. The cool breeze I only get to enjoy at night hugged my skin as the winds started to lightly gust against my bare sleeves. Ugh, I forgot to bring a hoodie with me tonight.

My thoughts were interrupted as I received Tobio-kun's very random text. It was a very pleasant surprise that unconsciously plastered a huge smile on my face. I was too busy texting him that I didn't even notice the whole team standing in front of me, all ready to go.

"What's that on your phone that's making you grin like the Grinch?" Akaashi asked, trying to subtly take a peek on my phone screen. I immediately locked the device and put it inside the pocket of my sweatpants.

"No need to peek, Akaashi! Let's not waste anymore time... let's go!" I said, jumping out of the bench as the whole team started to walk, carrying on with their small talks.

The gray haired captain stood out since he was ahead of everyone, hopping like a kangaroo while shrieking about how he's been craving for Barbecue for so long now and that he can't believe he finally got the blue check on Twitter.

I was walking alongside Akaashi at the far end side of the group, watching everyone ahead of us with a comfortable silence lingering between us.

"Do you need help with your bag? I can carry it for you." He asked, breaking the silence.

"It's fine, it's fine! I can carry it on my own. Besides, you've already had such a long training. I don't want to burden you with such a small thing." I said, smiling at him to assure him that it's fine.

"Oh, speaking of my bag... hold up," I muttered, stopping on my tracks as I opened my bag to get something.

"What's up?" Akaashi uttered his third question since I saw him outside of the gym. I shuffled through my things until I finally found what I was looking for.

"Aha! Here. I got it while y’all were doing your spiking drills." I said, handing him a slightly chilled bottle of Vanilla protein shake.

"Oh. Thanks, Y/N. It's been a while since you gave me something as boujee as a protein shake. Hmm, someone's loaded today." Akaashi teased, a small smile smothering his gorgeous face. It is an unsaid arrangement between the both of us that I can only give something a little fancy to him, or to anyone, when I have extra savings with me.

"Shut up! I've been saving up for tomorrow for quite some time now. Just... shut up and be grateful for that, Keiji." I said, chuckling as I playfully hit his arm.

"Why? What's so special about tomorrow?" he asked, eyebrows scrunching up together in curiosity.

"Didn't I tell you? To—"

"WE'RE FINALLY HERE!! YAAAY!!!" Bokuto hollered, cutting me off from telling Akaashi about my plans with Tobio-kun, Hinata-kun and my bestfriends for tomorrow. The familiar aroma of savory and mouthwatering meat being grilled, instantly filled my nostrils. I just realized that I've been distracting myself from how hungry I actually am all this time.

"God, I'm so hungry. Y'all were taking so long. If I wasn't on such a good mood, I would've been so hangry by now!" I said, eyes locked on the grilling area on the side of the restaurant where the Barbecue we've been dying to eat is being prepped.

Good thing, Bokuto-senpai already reserved a table for us ahead of time. The short list of things that the simple-minded captain would not procrastinate on would certainly include Volleyball and his favorite food, Barbecue.

Everyone decided to sit down on their desired seat. I felt comfortable sitting at the very far end of the booth’s couch. Since Akaashi and I were already walking side by side, it made sense that he just sat beside me on the couch too.

The rest of the team, and most likely even me, were practically drooling at the sight of barbecue being served to the tables around us. Yukie-san, one of the current managers of the team, is known for her great love for food. She decided to take matters in to her own hands and stood up for everyone. She simply asked one of the servers to follow up our orders.

Some of the third years, Konoha-san, Komi-san and Sarukui-san, were struggling to deal with an impatient Bokuto that was on the verge of going on emo mode.

“Where’s Akaashi? Didn’t he...“ the captain mumbled, pouting as he searched for the setter that was seated beside me.

“Oh, no. Bokuto-san’s Weakness #42. He becomes impractically impatient when people make him wait for his food, most especially when he’s hungry after training.” I hear Akaashi mutter beside me. I looked at him and he seems like Doctor Strange, looking at and calculating the different possibilities of what can happen if the captain won’t be able to get his food anytime soon.

Thankfully, Yukie-san came back to our table with at least two servers holding stacks of Barbecue on their trays, gently placing them on the table in front of all of us. Bokuto-senpai’s eyes lit up, even his hair seemed to perk up in excitement as he saw the Barbecue he’s been dying to eat being served in front of him.

“ALRIGHT, Let’s dig in!! This is in honor of me getting the blue check and a reward for all of us after such a hard training!! WOOHOOO!! Enjoy, everyone!!” the captain cheered, taking at least five chunks of meat in his chopsticks and munching the all down in one go.

No matter how hungry I am, I took the time to look at the team in front of me. The mere sight of them enjoying their food is endearing me. Am I really going to be a part of this wonderful team by next week? Do I really belong here?

I snapped out of my thoughts when I saw green vegetables being plopped down on my plate. I looked up and saw Akaashi putting one last piece of greens on my plate.

“Hey, why are you putting all that? I came here for Barbecue and not vegetables, Keiji.” I mocked him, poking the vegetables he just placed on my plate with my own chopsticks.

“Shush, you have to eat those. Even just a couple. They make you healthier. Plus, if you’re going to be our manager, you can’t be getting sick and frail.” he said, not even sparing a glance at me as he started to eat his own food.

Now this... this is one of his gestures that made me grow really fond of him. Some people might think otherwise but for me, Akaashi is not shy at all. Others often mistake his silence as shyness. When in reality, he only speaks up when he thinks it’s necessary — when he thinks it’s worth it. In fact, he is very frank with his words. He’s the type of person that would call you out when you’re doing something wrong, but he’d also compliment you when you’re doing something right. If one tends to focus more on his expressions, they can be convinced that he’s bland because his face really is usually blank. He only ever shows what he feels through his expressions at very rare occasions. Thus, he shows his feelings most of the time through his gestures; be it a small one or a big one.

“Hmph, fine. I’ll just eat more barbecue with it, so I don’t taste it that much.” I said, wrapping the greens with a chunk of meat. Bokuto-senpai, who’s instantly uplifted by now, overheard what I said.

“That’s what I do too when I need to eat vegetables!!! You’re doing the right thing, Y/N!!” he laughed, as he stuffed more barbecue inside of his mouth. The other third years that were worked up on not letting him slip in to his emo mode earlier, were now having the time of their life beside Bokuto-senpai, laughing at each other as they throw jokes at one another from time to time.

“Y/N?” said someone from in front of me. I looked up and saw that the voice belongs to none other than, Kaori-san, the other current manager of the team. She’s so pretty, oh my gosh.

“H-Hello, Kaori-san. Is there anything I could help you with?” I asked, getting a little conscious about the fact that I’m basically eating like a pig in front of someone so gorgeous.

“Oh, nothing! I just wanted to talk to you, even just for a little bit.” She smiled, eating gracefully like a princess. I could never, lol.

“I’m always down for a talk with you, Kaori-san!!” I gushed. Oh my god, do I sound a little too excited? What if she thinks I’m a crazy fangirl? Oh no.

“You’re so cute! Hahaha, anyway, I’d love to hear your thoughts right now about the team manager position because I’d be really be at ease knowing that the team is in good hands after Yukie-san and I graduate.” She said, a hint of sadness was evident after she mentioned the fact that they’re graduating this year.

“Oh, of course... Hm, before I even officially become the manager of this team, I can say that I already have a pretty good bond with them... thanks to this one person,” I nudged Akaashi who was peacefully eating beside me and secretly listening to Kaori-san and I’s conversation. Akaashi-kun, you’re not so slick. I might’ve only known you for a little over three months now, but I can feel it when your ears are trying to listen, despite having your eyes focused on something else.

I continued, “I just know that they have something really special about them. At times, I even get intimidated by their bond because not all teams can easily earn it. It takes a lot of time and everyone’s cooperation as well. With that being said, I just want to make sure that I won’t get in their way or anything. I really am taking things seriously and I’ve also been thinking about it a lot lately. I don’t want to make a hasty decision just because I got blinded with such a big opportunity. It��s a commitment that we’re talking about, not just to myself, but to the rest of the team as well.”

I didn’t even realize that I’ve been blabbering like a little kid in front of Kaori-san.

“The fact that you’re thinking about it this much already says a lot, Y/N. Hell, I didn’t even know it’s possible for me to want you to take this position even more!” she chuckled.

“Your words mean a lot to me, Kaori-san! I’ll make sure to keep it in mind once I make my final decision.” I smiled, stuffing my mouth with one of the green vegetables on my plate and Barbecue.

The warmth and liveliness around the table never died down all through out the meal. We even found the gray-haired captain standing up and doing an imitation of this one funny video he watched as a kid. The trays and plates on the table were now empty, while our stomachs were full and satisfied.

“HEY, HEY, HEY!!! Let’s go to arcade now!! Yoohoo!!” Bokuto-senpai started to hop around while flailing his arms in the air, ready to go to this arcade nearby this restaurant. He was so close to leaving the doorway when one of the servers came up to our table.

“Uhm, ma’am and sir, I double checked it on the system but... you haven’t paid for your meals yet,” the server was sheepish on approaching us. She was having a hard time looking at us in the eyes. She’s probably new here.

Everyone stood there in shock and embarrassment, except for Konoha-san and Komi-san who dragged Bokuto-san back inside to pay for our meals.

“OH... I’m so sorry!! I forgot, I didn’t mean to not pay!!” the captain sincerely apologized, quickly paying for everything we ate.

Upon entering the arcade, I couldn’t help but feel giddy and excited. The air inside the arcade just makes me feel alive and want to play games there all day. People around our age and some kids filled the place. Some of them are on dates, while most of them were just hanging out with each other.

The team scattered into groups as they went to the games that best fit their liking. The captain can be seen inside a Zombie-killing booth. His hands are already holding the fake gun inside, ready to unleash his inner warrior because according to him, he always trained himself for an apocalypse that can happen in the future. Some of the third years, like Yukie-san and Kaori-san along with some of the spikers, can be seen on the bowling area.

I rushed to the counter in the middle to get myself tokens and cards to play the games. The air hockey table caught my attention the moment we stepped in the arcade. I was about to swipe my card to play, when I realized I didn’t have anyone to play it with. How much dumber can I get? I obviously can’t play this by myself.

“Go for it. I’ll play with you,” a voice I know too well spoke behind me. I didn’t realize that I kind of ditched him as soon as I got too caught up in excitement with the arcade.

“Okay. Bring it on, Keiji! Don’t you dare go easy on me!” I exclaimed, swiping the card and grabbing the air hockey paddle on the table. My competitive side was showing as I poured my energy in each stride at the puck and attempts to block it from shooting inside my side of the goal.

After a few rounds of air hockey and a little bit of Basketball, where I took a hard L because I was against a well-trained and balanced athlete that shot the ball like it was nothing, I decided to go for a game where I thought I had a bigger shot at winning. I scanned through the games again and my eyes landed on this one game that I knew I’d win against someone like Akaashi.

“Dance Dance Revolution? I never played this game all my life and now you’re asking me to play it with you right now?” he whined, uneasiness showing as he spoke. I felt a little sad, but I didn’t want him to force him on doing something he doesn’t want to do.

“Hey, it’s okay if you don’t want to do it. I just really thought it’d be nice to play this with somebody.” I looked down, speaking softly. I hear him take a deep breathe.

“Fine... just one round.” he said. I was so thrilled. I bounced around and swiped my card on the machine. We stepped on the dancing area with the arrows under our feet and got ready to play the game. I chose a dance that was moderately difficult, keeping in mind that by doing so, I’ll increase my chances of winning. It was going really well at first. By looking at Keiji on my peripheral vision, he wasn’t even that bad. I guess the footwork training they do on Volleyball also helps him. Ugh, is there something he can actually suck at?

The most complex part of the dance started and I was slowly panicking. My score was higher, but only by a little. I was getting lost in the game that I didn’t even notice that I stepped at a faulty angle and twisted my ankle.

I winced in pain as I lost my balance and held on the metal bar behind me for support. Akaashi was alarmed as soon as he saw my current state.

“Hey, I’m fine, really. What’s that look on your face, Akaashi?” My poor attempt to chuckle was horrible. I tried to stand up, but the pain I felt on my ankles were stronger than my will to prove Akaashi that I was fine. He rapidly moved away from the game and found himself beside me, checking my, most likely, sprained ankle.

“Okay, it doesn’t look that bad but you can’t work yourself up for a while. I’ll take you home. No more ifs and buts. I’ll just text Bokuto-san and the rest of the team about what happened and that we had to leave sooner than expected.” he sternly said.

The next thing I knew, he was walking me to my house. I found myself on his back, arms wrapped around his chest and legs clung on his waist as he held the side of my thighs for extra support.

The same stars that greeted me while I was waiting for them outside the gym earlier were present as I looked up again at the sky. With that, the same cold breeze of the night blew against my skin. I tried not to shiver, but it was useless since Akaashi felt that I was getting chilly because I was shaking a little.

He stopped on his tracks as he gently put me down on the sidewalk. I was feeling confused until I saw him taking his jacket off and offered me to take it.

“I noticed you were starting to get a little chilly, so here. Take it.” he said. I didn’t even hesitate anymore as I wore his jacket. I felt so much better and we started walking again while he gave me a piggyback ride.

I let out a yawn as I started to feel my eyelids getting heavier and my breathing going slower. I didn’t even know when it happened, but I just know that along the way, I fell asleep on his shoulders.

AKAASHI’S POV

I found myself in front of your house and I knocked on the door. It wasn’t the first time I’ve been here, so your mom let me in as soon as she saw me. I told her about what happened and gave her some tips that will help you recover faster. Given that I was not new to these injuries, I knew exactly what to do.

I opened the door to your room and I softly put you down on your bed. I got some pillows that will help on elevating your sprained ankle and tucked you to bed.

You looked so peaceful. You looked so beautiful.

I’ve always been blunt about what I see and feel about everything. So, why is it that I can’t tell you about these feelings that I feel solely for you?

I wish I can tell you that all your little gifts and efforts for me never go unappreciated.

I know that you’ve recently been growing closer to somebody else. I’m not oblivious about it. I know you, Y/N.

I just hope that it’s not too late by the time I finally build up the courage to tell you about these feelings.

I gave your forehead a soft kiss, before I finally got up and left your room.

YOUR POV

I woke up in the middle of the night and realized that I was already in the comfort of my own room. I checked my phone and saw that it was 2AM. I looked down on my feet and saw that my ankle was really sprained and that I wasn’t just dreaming about it.

I let out a sigh as I remember that Tobio-kun, Hinata-kun, Best Boy Yams and Saltyshima were coming over here later.

Why the fuck did I have to sprain my ankles on the worst day possible?

☆ PARTS ☆

A/N: Here goes my first actual write up in this blog! I would really love to hear your thoughts about it! Stay safe and healthy, lovelies! ♡

taglist: @sugacoatt @kokogxddess @angelynmay @kasandrafaye @exovity @notamazinglizzy @haikyuuopalite @faiima @pyblos @volleybloop @mahalau @applepiekyuu @nvthvlyy @azgucci @tchalameme @mlkytobio @bakibakini @xyelikestobio @beastboypng @nerumiz @unlikelytigerqueen @your-local-lesbo @tycrackculture @almostcrystalized101 @alienvarmint @agneyestra @kthhyj @hakueishirei @sugawsites @wiseeggspickleslime @8zmingi @idiot-juice-enthusiast @lunarknox @wemissyou3000 @90s-belladonna @yeehawnana @mysticlarizza @hyperfixation1 @literaltrash666 @animeboyscangetit @luvelyjjk @cuddlesslut @deathcab4daddy @bloomingforbts @ashleefo @mikantsumiikii @yeehawslap @michelepiekenma @kpopstanh

#kageyama tobio x reader #akaashi keiji x reader #haikyuu smau #haikyuu au #haikyuu x reader #kageyama smau #kageyama x reader smau #kageyama x reader #haikyuu!!#haikyuu x reader smau #haikyuu kageyama tobio #kageyama tobio x reader smau #kageyama tobio #akaashi x reader #akaashi x reader smau #haikyuu akaashi keiji #akaashi smau #akaashi keiji x reader smau #akaashi keiji

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