#but then i added more. and then i took that more away. then i changed it. etc etc

[ahollowgrave]

L'APPEL DU VIDE

Mateus | Mists | W24 P29

The house Odette's great-aunt left her. Not in the mists in-character, but still cradled on the coast of Vylbrand on a decent plot of land. Most of the house remains closed off, in various states of abandonment, but the wing Odette does occupy is kept tidy. She has certainly added her own touches and has claimed an attic bedroom for her own. If you swing by for a visit please leave a message! And mind the shadows.

#Pigeon Screens #FFXIV Housing #“Pigeon” i hear you cry “This looks exactly the same” and yeah I did warn you #also I got impatient but I will 100% be rearranging some clutter and adding more #I've got about 20 slots left and while some of that will go to a studio in the basement #i can still add some things #idk what yet but #anyway really into her bed where she lays to pine for women #(also it's not entirely the same as the last time I updated but it IS pretty close) #(I swapped out a lot of the partition and half partitions to match better and I took away some windows) #(I will not detail every single change) <- me @ myself #anyway #i must lay down for a bit or I will explored

[w2soneshots]

Dad mode -W2S

Words: 0.9k+

Warnings: none.

In which Harry takes care of your baby while you’re away.

a/n: hello lovelies!! Please send it more requests! My baby fever is officially back😚. I hope you enjoy this dad!bog fic🧸💓

Today I'm leaving my baby girl Millie for the first time. She just turned three months old. It's been amazing so far. Me and Harry love her with every ounce of our being. I was a little bit apprehensive about leaving her but it's only going to be for twenty four hours and I know I can trust Harry.

I packed an overnight bag then left the apartment at 7am. Unfortunately I didn't get to say goodbye to Millie since she was still asleep. I did say a quick bye to Harry though and he could tell I was nervous so he reassured me that everything would be fine and that he would send me regular updates. Which calmed me. Harry's looked after the baby for a few hours but never overnight.

Harry's pov:

I fell back asleep after y/n left. Then just half an hour later I woke to the sound of Millie crying. I quickly slid out of bed then grabbed her from the small bassinet that sat in the corner off our room. "Shh, I've got ya." I whispered as I picked her up and held her close. I changed her nappy then made her a bottle. "There we go." She sat on my lap and peacefully drank her milk.

After quickly eating my own breakfast I got dressed. Then I picked out an outfit for Millie. I put her in a light pink long sleeved onesie with some denim overalls over the top. It was actually an outfit y/n had put her in a few weeks ago so I knew she looked ok. I grabbed her nappy bag from her nursery (that she hasn't actually slept in yet) along with the buggy. Once I was ready to leave I sent y/n a text that read "she's had her bottle and she's in a good mood. I'm gonna take her on a walk. Love you x" she replied almost immediately. "I knew you'd be fine. Love you xx"

Once I got Millie into her buggy we left. I walked just over fifteen minutes until I was stopped by a young girl. "Excuse me, are you Wroetoshaw?" She asked. I nodded. "Could I please get a picture?" "Yea, sure." I took a quick pic then she turned her attention to Millie, who was sound asleep. "Thank you. Your babies really cute." And with that she happily walked away.

Ten minutes later I was outside the tall building where we film more sidemen and everything for side plus. I checked in at the front desk then pushed the buggy into lift. "Ey! Bog!" Ethan shouted once I was inside. "Hey." I replied. JJ rushed over. "You brought Millie!" He excitedly looked into the pram. "Yea y/n's on a work trip so I'm looking after her today. Thought I'd come and say hi." On the way up she'd woken up so I pulled her from the pram and gave her to JJ. He has really taken to being an uncle. I didn't know he liked kids that much but he turns into a marshmallow when he's around her and Olive.

Tobi also came to say hello. "I swear she's grown twice the size since I last saw her!" Tobi commented as he held her. "Yea! She's growing up to fast." JJ added. She always gets a massive fuss made over her when she's around the boys and she loves it. After a little while I left the boys to film and headed back home.

Once I got home I sat with Millie while I watched the most recent Chelsea match. We both had some lunch then I got a phone call from y/n. "Hey." I answered putting it on speaker. While she told me about her day I gently rocked Millie. "So how's it going? Did you take her to see the boys?" She asked, since I'd told her yesterday that I planned to visit them. "Yea, they made a fuss as usual." I replied. She giggled.

When 6pm rolled around it was time to put Millie to sleep. I slowly placed her into the cot but she immediately began screaming. My eyes widened. "Okey-dokey." I sighed as I picked her up again. y/n was usually the one to put the baby to sleep and I do the morning shift so I hadn't had much practice. "Shh shh." I rocked her. She continued to cry. "For fudge sake." We decided that we should try our best not to swear around the baby so we say, sugar, shoot and other random words instead.

I grabbed the tv control from y/n's side of the bed then clicked onto youtube. I selected 'night changes' by one direction. Since it seems to be one of the only things that calms her down. And it's ironic since that's actually the song that was playing when she popped out into the world. She slowly stopped crying until it was just a small sniffle. "There we go. No need to be  so upset you donut." I whispered as she drifted off to sleep. I held her for a few more minutes until I placed her into the cot. Thankfully she stayed asleep. I grabbed the baby monitor from the side then crept back into the lounge.

The next morning I woke to the smell of bacon. I jumped out of bed to follow the smell. y/n stood in the kitchen, Millie on her hip, hair in a messy bun and a slight bounce in her step as she hummed quietly. "She looks beautiful." I thought as I lent against the door frame. "Morning." I smiled as I walked towards her. She jumped slightly. "Sugar! You scared me." I laughed. Then pecked her on the lips.

#w2s #harry lewis #harry w2s #wrotoshaw #wroetoshaw #w2s x reader #w2s fic #w2s imagine #wroetoshaw x reader #wroetoshaw oneshot #harry lewis x reader #harry x reader #youtuber x reader #sidemen x reader #british youtubers #fanfic #image #oneshot #x fem!reader #x y/n #x you #x reader #dad!harry

[buckactuallys]

18 or 25 for the relationship prompts? 💗💗💗

hi and thank you for the prompt! sorry this took me so very long to write, but i hope you like it anyway 💕

18. brushing through the other's hair while talking/25. feeding each other their food

[read on ao3]

It’s a slow shift. Not from the beginning, they get called out plenty in the morning, but the afternoon is slow already and now it’s 9pm and they haven’t had a call since before dinner. 

All the chores are done, everything is clean and fully stocked and put away. 

Bobby is in his office with some paperwork, but he insisted that he doesn’t need any help before heading downstairs. 

No one was in the mood to play a game or anything, so they’re just sort of lounging around the loft, an action movie playing on TV that no one’s really paying attention to. Hen and Chim are on the armchairs, but they’re turned mostly away from the TV, their focus on each other and Buck, and the conversation the three of them are having.

Beside Buck, Eddie keeps sinking lower in his seat until his head eventually comes to rest on Buck’s shoulder. Buck shoots him a fond look and lifts the hand that’s currently on the backrest of the couch to scratch at Eddie’s scalp gently. 

Eddie makes a soft noise and rubs his cheek against Buck’s shoulder like a cat, which Buck takes as encouragement to keep going.

It’s fine – they agreed to keep this on the low for a bit (not really a secret, but they’re not telling anyone yet either. Well, except for Chris, because that would’ve felt like lying, and Bobby, because they didn’t want to risk anything by keeping secrets from the brass), but so far no one’s even looked at them twice. Buck has had his arm slung over the back of the couch and essentially around Eddie for ages now, and no one’s said a word.

They’ve always been close after all, and for the last three weeks, they’ve slowly been adding more little touches to the list of things they do, like a head on the other’s shoulder, or, like today, Buck’s hand in Eddie’s hair. 

It’s been kind of fun finding out what they can get away with before anyone figures them out. 

He keeps combing his fingers through Eddie’s hair absently while talking to Hen and Chimney, and it’s easy like this. 

With his last relationship, with Tommy, they made it public so quickly kind of accidentally, but it was fine, because there wasn’t that much at stake. Sure, it doubled as his coming out to a lot of people, but Buck’s glad that happened so organically and without him having time to overthink or worry.

With Eddie, the situation is completely different. There’s so much at stake for them, everything, that they felt safer keeping it between themselves for a few weeks, to see how they adjust to this change. The two of them – and Christopher.

But it’s been three weeks now, and things have been great, so it’s okay if they want to be a bit more open with it. And Buck wants.

Ever since he realized how he feels about Eddie, about seven minutes before he kissed him for the first time, he’s been wanting to shout his love for him from the rooftops. It hasn’t been easy keeping that in, and his hands to himself.

So it’s easy, letting himself be a little bit more affectionate with Eddie like this, up here in the loft of their fire station, with their friends.

The low hum Eddie lets out and the relaxed lines of his body pressing against Buck’s tell him that he feels the same way. And if anyone asks – that’s fine, they’re ready to share whenever it happens.

But Hen just keeps telling her story about the latest shenanigans Denny and Mara have gotten up to, pretending to be annoyed by them even though it’s obvious she loves that they’re getting along this well. Chimney chimes in with stories from his and Kevin’s childhood, and Buck occasionally shares something he did as a kid just to shock Hen.

“You’re not hanging out with my kids unsupervised,” she says after he finishes telling them about a prank he and some other boys played on a teacher, and gets up from her chair. “I’m making popcorn. You guys want some, too?”

“Yes, please,” Eddie says sleepily from Buck’s shoulder, raising his hand.

Buck smiles at him, endeared, and squeezes the back of his neck gently. Without looking up, he tells Hen, “I–I’ll take some too, thanks, Hen.”

“You know if it’s there, I’ll eat it,” Chimney says. His chair creaks when he stands up too. “I’ll help you.”

The two of them head to the kitchen, bickering quietly, and Buck takes the opportunity to turn his head, brushing his nose along Eddie’s forehead and pressing a kiss to his brow.

“Tired, sweetheart?”

“A little,” Eddie mumbles, turning further into Buck, his knee pressed to the side of Buck’s thigh. “And you’re comfortable.”

“I’m not complaining,” Buck says, and starts combing his fingers through Eddie’s hair at the back of his head again. “Just say the word and we can go to the bunkroom.”

“No, I want the popcorn now,” Eddie says, blinking his eyes open. “I’m awake.”

Buck laughs and kisses his temple. “If you say so.”

Hen and Chim return with the popcorn not much later, and their conversation has moved on to a movie Buck hasn’t seen, so he’s happy to just sit back, one hand always on Eddie, listen to their familiar voices, and snack on his popcorn.

“Gimme some of that,” Eddie says quietly, jerking his chin towards the popcorn in Buck’s hand.

“The bowl is right there,” Buck says, but he’s already extending his hand.

Eddie gives him a smile that makes butterflies erupt in his stomach and brushes his fingers along Buck’s hand while he grabs some of the popcorn. “Thanks.”

Buck rolls his eyes, but they both know it’s just for show.

The next time he reaches for the bowl, he pops some in his mouth and offers the rest to Eddie, holding it between two fingers.

Instead of taking it from him, Eddie leans forward and eats it straight from Buck’s fingers, lips wrapped around them for just a second that’s enough to make his entire body go hot, especially his face.

Hen and Chimney stop talking.

Eddie looks at Buck like everything is completely normal, then turns to Chimney and Hen to ask, “What?”

“What is up with you two tonight?” Chimney asks, exasperated. “You got something to tell us?”

Eddie shrugs, jostling Buck a little. His eyes practically sparkle, shining with mischief when he turns to Buck, and Buck loves him so much. “I don’t know, Buck, do we? Do you know what he’s talking about?”

“You’ve basically been,” Hen makes an impatient gesture that encompasses both of them on the couch, “fucking cuddling for an hour. And now you’re feeding each other popcorn? You’re always all over each other, but this is…different.”

“Well, I didn’t expect Eddie to eat it like that, either,” Buck says, and blushes even more when Eddie just winks at him.

“Chim, I never want us to be the kind of best friends they are,” Hen says, and Buck makes the mistake of meeting Eddie’s eye, both of them bursting into laughter.

“I sure hope you won’t, since you’re both married,” Eddie wheezes, and Buck descends into laughter again.

“What does that have to–” Chim pauses. “Hold on.”

“Oh, they’re getting there,” Buck says in a stage whisper, reaching out to wipe a tear from the corner of Eddie’s eye.

Eddie catches his hand on the way back and presses a kiss to his palm before tangling their fingers.

Both Hen and Chimney are gaping at them, and Hen calls out weakly, “Cap, are you seeing this?”

“Yep,” Bobby’s amused voice wafts over from the kitchen. Buck didn’t even hear him come back. “But they told me three weeks ago already.”

“What!” Hen yelps, and Chimney shakes his head like a wet dog, looking beyond confused.

“So are you saying– you’re really—” His eyes flick down to their hands, then back up to their faces, moving rapidly from Buck to Eddie and back.

“Together?” Eddie asks. “Yeah.”

“Since when!” Hen demands, and she somehow looks both appalled and delighted. “How did this happen? How did I miss this?”

“I guess you just didn’t know what to look for,” Buck says, turning his head to smile at Eddie. “I can relate to that.”

#buddie #911fic #buddie fic #911 fic #911 abc #pia writes #ask #kitteneddiediaz

[kawaii-leilei54]

Please don't change

Best friend!Jk x Reader

Genre: Fluff, Suggestive themes, domestic (Friends to lovers)

You and Jung kook spend a day at the beach, enjoying summer together.

You were excited that you could finally go to the beach.

Work had been really busy and you hadn't been able to find time to hang out with your best friend.

It didn't bother him as much at first but then he realized how much he missed you.

He missed you.

Ever since that one day, where you met on campus, you two would meet up.

It was library dates at first then outside of campus, going to explore different parts of the college which were abandoned.

You both found them more interesting and peaceful, you would sit in the grass and talk about whatever was on your minds.

And after crying your eyes out, would go to the convenience store and get ice cream.

You two grew close over time, that is until you got a job to help afford the tuition.

He had been working too, work and school had been busy and you two hadn't been together in a while.

Jungkook: Hey.

Y/n: Hey!

Jungkook: Let's go to the beach

Y/n: Sure! When?

You suddenly hear knock at the door and you go to the door hesitantly, you see him standing there impatiently.

You chuckle and open the door.

"Well hello there."

"You ready?"

You look down at your pajamas and look back at him with your hands on your hips.

"Does it look like it?"

He rolls his eyes and walks in.

"Hurry up." He says as he goes to sit on the couch.

You sigh and mumble to yourself as you go back to your room and start to get dressed.

You put on your bathing suit and pack your back before going back to the living room.

He looks up from his phone and smiles softly.

"You look good." He says shyly.

"Thanks." You say sheepishly and grab your phone.

"Yeah.." he says softly as he stares at you a bit longer.

You two had always had a tension between you too, but never resolved it. You friends would always tease you about how you had a crush on him but you always would try to change the subject or flat out deny the situation.

He gets up and follows you to the car.

He gets in and starts the engine and you connect your phone to the car.

You play your playlist that you two made months ago, adding songs both of you like.

He opens the sun roof and pulls out the driveway, you roll down the windows and look around as the wind flows in your hair

The summer was finally here, you couldn't relax much because of the rush hours at work, but you did appreciate the small moments you had, whether it was alone or with your friends.

Your best friend.

You wondered if that would ever change.

You get pulled out of your thoughts as you hear his stomach rumble.

"Ah!" "I'll feed you soon." He says as he pats it gently.

You laugh and shake your head.

"I'm pretty hungry too."

"We're almost to the store." He says as he continues driving and taping his fingers on the wheel to the music.

You stick your hand out the sun roof and feel the air, smiling at the breeze and enjoying the moment.

Your favorite song comes on and he turns it up, letting you sing your heart out.

He sings with you as he pulls into the parking lot and lets the song play before getting out.

You smile as you walk in and the smell of convenience store food hits your nose.

You both look at each other with the same thought and start to walk towards it.

There was someone standing there selling potatoes on a stick, which seemed to please both of your hungry stomachs.

"Can I get two of these?" He asks politely and the person at the stand takes two out and hands it to him.

He pays the money and hands one to you, you smile softly and start to eat right away almost burning your tongue at how fast you were eating.

He snorts and shakes his head before walking off and walking around the store.

You grab a cart and start looking around.

🫧

You smile as you get out of the car, stretching from the nap you took.

The waves crash against the sand, bringing the calming noise you loved.

"It's so pretty." He sighs

You nod in response as he opens the trunk and starts to unload the car.

You were excited, finally able to spend time with your friend who you had missed, not to mention the delicious food you bought.

And of course:

Ice cream.

You set the cooler down and sigh, looking at the water always makes you feel better, you jump slightly when you feel an arm pat your back.

"This must be nice after all those hard exams huh?" He chuckles.

"Totally." You chuckle back.

🫧

You were about a few shots and a highball in, you take another one after loosing a game of uno.

For the nth time.

"This isn't fair." You pout as you take the shot.

He chuckles and sets back in his chair.

The sun had set already and the fire was cackling, adding to the calming ambience.

"Well, if you don't want to have to keep taking shots, then step up your game." He shrugs.

"Your cheating!" You pout.

"Now, let's not lie." He giggles.

"You just suck." He shrugs.

"But we could play something else." He suggests.

"What?"

"Truth or dare." He smirks.

"What are we?" "In high school?" You snort.

"Oh come on, just a few rounds." "plus, I want to finish this." He says as he raises his highball.

"Fine." You mumble and sit back in your chair.

"True or dare?"

"Truth."

"Do you like me?"

You spit out your drink, coughing aggressively.

He comes to you quickly.

"You okay?" He says, his tone sounds worried.

You shake your hands reassuringly.

"I'm fine." You choke out.

He hands you some water and pats your legs.

"Drink."

You drink the water and start to feel a bit better.

Though now you're embarrassed.

How could he ask that?

"W-where, uh..where did that come from?"

"What?"

"Why did you ask that?"

"Why do you think I asked?"

You scoff and push him playfully.

"I like you." He says.

Suddenly time had stopped.

Just for a moment.

You stare at him.

After all that time of you just playing it safe with your feelings, feeling like he wouldn't feel the same, those times where you wanted to tell him, when you felt jealous that other girls were interested in him, thought that he would give them the time.

The thought that he would never be yours.

All of those anxious feelings melted away.

Those precious words..

Meant the everything to you.

"I like you too." You say after a while of silence.

You stare at each other, taking in the fact that you just confessed.

Every worry had melted away.

Faster than the ice cream that your probably left in the car.

"Yeah?" He says as a smile forms on his face.

He takes your hand.

"I want us to be together, no more hiding, no more playing it cool." "I really like you, and I want to be your boyfriend." He says seriously.

"I want us to be together too." "I've liked you for so long, I just didn't know how to tell you." You confess.

"I've felt the same." He says in a soft tone.

He reaches up and grabs your chin.

"Can I be your boyfriend?" "Please?" He says, his big doe eyes staring into yours.

"Only if you admit that you cheated in uno." You say playfully.

He chuckles and shakes his head.

"Now you're doing too much."

You laugh softly and look at him with soft eyes.

Not with friendly ones, but with a look of love.

The look of a new bloomed romance.

"Of course I'll be yours Koo." You says softly.

He smiles and kisses you softly.

You kiss back and put your hand on his cheek.

"Oh!" You say as you pull back, suddenly remembering something.

"Should we have some s'mores?"

He looks around and nods.

"Whatever you want." He says as he looks around for the bag on marshmallows.

"I must've left them in the car." He mumbles.

"I'll be back." He says as he grabs the keeps and runs to the car.

You smile and nod as you wait for him to come back.

You hear an irritated but cute yell from the car.

You walk over to the car curiously.

"What's wrong?" You ask.

"The ice cream melted!" He says as he picks it up.

He pouts and laughs as the ice cream drips.

You both dramatically sob over the wasted ice cream.

"Should we eat it anyway?" You pout.

He shakes his head and looks down.

You pat his head.

"Don't worry, we can always get some more." You say positively.

He nods and cleans up the mess of the ice cream.

You both clean everything up and decide to make s'mores before going home.

You sit next to each other, playing music to forget about the ice cream.

You almost burn yourself from the melted marshmallow and you pull back and wince.

"Carefully baby." He says with furrowed eyebrows as he scolds you.

He was always protective of you when it came to you getting hurt.

It could be the smallest thing and he would always scold you cutely about being careful.

You loved it.

His face would scrunch up and his eyebrows would furrow though he would talk in pout.

"Don't do that."

"Be careful."

"See?" "What did we learn?"

You would always try not to be serious though it was hard too because of how cute he looked.

But to Jungkook, he couldn't stand the thought of you getting hurt.

You practically devour your s'more, making him laugh.

He wiped your cheek softly.

"Messy girl." He says to himself and wipes some of it off your cheek and licks his thumb.

You blush and look away.

He had always been so caring, but it also made you think, how long had he been waiting to do that?

"Koo."

"Hm?"

"Don't change."

"Change what?"

"How we are, like this."

He smiles and nod.

"I won't."

#jungkook #jungkook fanfic #jungkook fluff #fluff #bts fluff #friends to lovers #jk fanfic #bts jk

[piratecaptainscaptainpirates]

fic prompt: Ed & Stede watch a bird raise hatchlings through their bedroom window (I hope you're feeling better soon!)

"Stede, Stede, babe, holy shit, c'mere!"

Stede held out the teacup he'd brought for Ed, taking a sip from his own as he joined him at the window. "What's - oh, wow!"

"Yeah." Ed took a sniff of his teacup to get a whiff of the cinnamon Stede added at this time of year before taking a drink. The baby birds in the tree by their upstairs bedroom window were some kind of swallow, Stede thought, and looked to be pretty fresh. "Look at them - all cute and naked and everything."

"Just like you were last night," Stede said, nudging an elbow playfully into Ed's side.

"Heh." Ed leaned against him, his smile growing fond. "Pretty cool, right?"

"Pretty cool."

The birds were nice to check in on as they went throughout their days, Stede thought. They watched as they started to get feathers, as their eyes opened, as they started to look more like birds and less like gross little raw meat cutlets. Ed liked when they could spot the birds' mama, and always called for Stede to come watch so he could see her feed the babies and hop around, too.

That was why it was a bit unusual when Stede returned to their bedroom with a stack of folded laundry to see Ed quietly sitting on the bed, watching by himself.

"Alright, sweet pea?" Stede put a hand on Ed's shoulder, depositing the laundry on the bed to be put away later.

"Mhm." Ed leaned his temple against Stede's hip, and when Stede followed his eyes outside, he was a bit surprised to see two adult birds hopping around the nest. "They've got a dad. Didn't know bird dads were, like, very good."

"Ah." Stede clicked his tongue. "Well, maybe bird dads are shit, we don't know -"

"Nah, man, he's an excellent dad!" Ed's lip wobbled, just slightly, as he looked up at him. "Did you know birds got to have that? A dad who - who loves them, and feeds them, and teaches them how to flap their little wings around?"

"Well..." Stede sat next to him on the bed, pulling him into his side. "Sometimes, some birds get excellent dads, and some birds get awful dads. And it's not the birds' fault which one they get."

"Maybe it is," Ed said bitterly, his eyes shining. "Maybe if they were just better at doing their little bird chores and had better bird personalities, their bird dads would like them more."

"Oh, honey, you know that's not true." Stede leaned their foreheads together, looking out at the soft blue sky outside and the birds in the tree. "Baby birds don't have anything to apologize for. They're just babies. They've never done anything wrong."

Ed was quiet, for a long moment, and when he spoke his voice was very small. "It's not fair."

"No," Stede agreed, thinking back to cruel words spoken in a low, unkind register, thinking back to feeling small and somehow wrong for it. "It's not fair at all."

They were both a bit sad when they went upstairs for bed one night and the birds were gone. They'd known it had been coming, they'd watched them flapping their little wings and venturing onto the branches, but it was still a bit sad.

"I hope they'll be okay," Ed said, looking out the window as he got changed into his pajamas. "It's a hard world to be a little baby bird in. I hope..."

He trailed off, his head tucking in the way he did when he thought he was being silly in a way Stede wouldn't like, which just wouldn't do.

"I hope," Stede said brightly, "that they make friends, and maybe even lovers...do birds have lovers? I hope they find out, I guess."

"And I hope they have a good life."

"The best," Stede agreed, joining Ed at the window, wrapping an arm around his waist. "And I hope they always have somewhere to go. Where they feel safe. And loved."

Ed brought Stede's hand up to his lips, kissing his palm. "I hope so, too."

#pccp's kidney stone fics #thanks so much for this one!! don't know how it turned out to be about daddy issues. but it did.

[v-hope]

glad you’re missing TF bc me too, i wanna see them finally settling and knowing they’re ready for the next big step in their lives or even just discussing building a family after grad or when they’re at a good stage in their careers🥺🤧

pairing: jeon jeongguk x reader

genre: slight angst, flufffff, established relationship, non-idol au

warnings: pregnancy scare, mentions of condoms, mentions of unprotected sex

word count: 2.3k

a/n: um. hello after years lolll. i started going through very old requests in my ask box yesterday in case i found anything that’d bring some inspiration to my very uninspired self, and i found manyyyy tiger flower ones and this one in particular reminded me of a headcanon of mine that i never wrote nor mentioned (i think) but for some reason it was??? an actual Thing???? in my mind????? so yeah lol here i am. i don’t think anyone even cares about tiger flower (minus one person. u know who u are<3) anymore, BUT fuck it, i missed them and enjoyed writing this. i hope whoever reads it enjoys it too, bye<333

A pregnancy scare wasn’t something you were expecting only two months into moving in together after your graduation. It wasn’t something you were expecting at all.

At most, you and Jeongguk had agreed on getting a puppy as a new addition to your family of two. Said discussion happened when the two of you had only been together for a few months, a little over a year ago, where you both agreed on moving in together after you graduated college and then get a puppy right away.

Moving in together was not up for debate — you knew so the moment Jeongguk got a job in the last year of college and so did you, saving enough money to get a decent place and looking for apartments throughout the entire year, so you could secure a lease as soon as your previous ones ended. On the other hand, although you were still excited as hell to get a dog, once you were settled in your shared place, you were both too busy and overwhelmed trying to keep up with your new jobs and all the new changes in your lives to even think of adding another responsibility on top of them all, let alone one that had to do with a living creature.

If neither of you felt ready to get a puppy yet, how the hell were you supposed to raise a child?

Your heart beat so fast against your chest, you felt like you would pass out any moment, as you paced around the bathroom while you waited for the pregnancy test to tell you whether you’d bring another human being to the world in nine more months or not. Endless thoughts running through your mind as you did so, and you internally cursed at yourself for not having waited outside with Jeongguk instead — God knows you needed his arms around you to bring you comfort.

You definitely needed Jeongguk to hold you, you realised the second the alarm you set as soon as you took the test finally went off, managing to somehow turn it off with your shaky hands, and fighting not to drop your phone as you took a deep breath and closed your eyes for a moment before taking a look to the test on the sink.

Once you earned enough courage to finally open your eyes and focus them on it, you exhaled all the air you didn’t know you were holding up until then — instant relief washing through your body.

Negative.

You were given another chance not to raise a child when neither of you were ready.

And yet, a part of you couldn’t help but feel a little bit disappointed, empty even, now that said possibility was out of the way.

Although it was not the right time, a family with Jeongguk was something you’d always be happy about — and something you were only now realising you longed for way more than you thought you did.

Coming out of the bathroom and meeting a very distressed Jeongguk waiting right outside the door, you shook your head no right away, just like that letting him know you were on the clear this time around.

He let out a heavy, shaky sigh, rubbing his eyes with his palms as he processed the news, before he pulled you into his arms like you so badly needed him to — melting into his familiar touch and inhaling his scent as you felt yourself begin to calm down.

He said nothing, you said nothing. Your arms around one another and feeling each other’s comfort were all you needed right then.

Jeongguk didn’t let go until he felt your body stop trembling, only pulling away enough to rest his forehead on yours and cup your face in his warm hands.

“You okay?” He wondered; for a change, not being able to tell what the expression on your face meant right then.

He genuinely didn’t know whether you were relieved or not. And, therefore, he didn’t know how to react to the news. Yes, he had sighed in relief a minute ago, but that was as much as he’d let himself express until he knew how you felt about the whole situation.

You nodded, still a little bit stunned — not knowing whether you should say what was on your mind. Then again, it was Jeongguk the one in front of you, holding you. You knew you could tell him anything and he would understand, or at least try his best to do so.

“Is it wrong that I feel a little bit disappointed?” You finally mumbled, catching his attention. “I mean, I know we’re not ready, and we haven’t planned it at all and I would be so fucking terrified had it turned out positive, but, I just…”

“I get it,” he stepped up when he realised you wouldn’t talk anymore, gently reaching for your hands and holding them in his. “Of course I’m relieved we’re not having a baby right now, but… a part of me really wants to start a family with you now”.

“Now?” You playfully raised an eyebrow.

“Not now,” he panicked. “But, I mean, in the near future, but not that nea—ugh, you get it”.

You couldn’t hold back a giggle, biting your lip when he rested his head on your shoulder, embarrassedly hiding his face in the crook of your neck.

“I know,” you reassured him, running your thumb on the back of his hand. “I can’t wait to start a family with you either. It’d be cute, wouldn’t it?”

He nodded — one hundred percent on board with it, yet pensively.

Up until that day, you hadn’t really discussed your future together. It was more of a given. Unspoken, but you both knew you wanted everything with each other. From moving in together, to getting married, to having kids, to growing old together.

Maybe it was finally time for you to actually bring those thoughts up.

“What do you think is a good age for us to start trying?” Jeongguk wondered, his voice gentle as ever.

You puckered your lips as you pondered your options. “I mean, we’re only twenty three this year… Maybe in another two or three more?”

“Yeah…” he quietly agreed. “We still need to get the hang of living together on our own…”

“Getting a puppy…” you added.

“Save some money” Jeongguk considered.

“Get a bigger place”.

“Get married”.

You smiled at his addition, feeling the by now very familiar butterflies fill your stomach. Reaching your hand up to cup his cheek, you sweetly ran your thumb over the corner of his mouth.

“You wanna marry me?”

“I am marrying you, Y/N” he confidently stated, only to feel his cheeks burn the next second when he caught the way your eyes lit up. “I mean, if you’ll take me, of course…”

You giggled once again, this time throwing your head slightly back as you rejoiced at the new bit of information your boyfriend had just provided you with. “I am marrying you so hard one day, Jeon Jeongguk”.

He beamed, giggling against your mouth as he searched for it and trapped your bottom lip in between his smiling ones.

You couldn’t help but let out a breathy laugh of your own, wrapping your arms around his neck when he held you up by your thighs and took you to the sofa only a few steps away in your living room — not letting go of you for a second as he carefully lied on his back with you on top of him.

Lying your face comfortably on his chest, and running your fingertips up and down on it, you let out a contented sigh.

“So, kids sometime after we’re twenty six?” You returned to your previous conversation, before you got carried away by your desire to spend the rest of your lives together.

He hummed in response. “We should already have achieved all our previous goals by then, so I think it’s the most reasonable”.

“After twenty six it is then” you settled, smiling brightly when he reached for your hand and interlaced your fingers. “How many would you like?”

“Two or three would be nice,” Jeongguk confessed. “I’m okay with as many as you’re willing to have, though”.

“I always thought two… a girl and a boy” you admitted, feeling him smile against your head. “But I wouldn’t mind having three of them with you” a smile curved up your lips at the simple thought.

He chuckled, pressing a soft kiss to your head. “Two girls and a boy, or two boys and a girl…”

“What if it’s three girls?” You looked up at him.

“That’d be nice” he smiled.

“And if it’s three boys?”

“That’d be nice, too”.

“Mhm…” you squinted your eyes, suspiciously staring into his. “You want at least one girl so bad, Jeon Jeongguk”.

“I didn’t say that?” He defended himself.

“I can see it in your eyes” you playfully poked his forehead.

He rolled his eyes in amusement, tightening his hold on your hand to stop you from poking him again. “Well, sue me for wanting a mini version of you”.

Your heart melted, and you were pouting before you knew it. “I want a mini bun, too”.

“Too bad, we’re only having three girls now” he teased.

“Shut up,” you whined, slumping your face back down on his chest. “You just created a new need for me”.

Jeongguk’s chest trembled as a blissful laugh escaped his lips, wrapping his arms around you and pulling you so close to him you almost found it hard to breathe. You would never complain about it, though, let alone when his lips began to pepper kiss after kiss on the crown of your head.

“I love you,” he said. “And honestly I’ll be happy with whatever sex they are as long as they’re ours and we raise them together”.

His words brought tears to your eyes and a lump in your throat, being apparently still too sensitive over the whole situation not to feel like crying when he said the most reassuring words you needed to hear.

“You’re gonna make me cry” you let him know, looking up to meet his doe eyes once more. “But I’ll be the happiest as long as that’s the case, too”.

Jeongguk smiled timidly, gently pushing your chin slightly up for your lips to come in contact with his; pressing a soft kiss on them before his arms were once again tightening their hold around your waist.

“I’m sorry” he mumbled, nuzzling your hair.

“What for?” You questioned.

Jeongguk shrugged, fingers drawing small circles on your back. “For putting you through this…”

You chuckled, burying your face in his neck. “It takes two to make a child, bun. Which we didn’t get to make, by the way”.

“I know,” he pouted, holding you somehow tighter against his body. “But last time I was too horny to go get a condom”.

You snorted. “Nothing we haven’t done before. We just tested our luck for the hundredth time and it backfired on us for once”.

Although you weren’t looking at him right then, you knew a pout had just formed on his bottom lip. You tenderly kissed his chest, in hopes of making the sad look on his pretty face go away.

When you felt him be distraught still, you decided to switch the mood a little bit.

“Still, I did have the scare of my life, so we’re going on a sex strike for a bit”.

His mouth fell open in disbelief, pulling you up by your shoulders so he could look you in the eye. “You’re not serious”.

“I am” you stated, trying your best not to allow your lips to break into a smile. “One month at least”.

“At least?!”

“Aren’t you the one who went twenty one whole years without having sex?” You raised a teasing eyebrow. “This should be nothing to you”.

“Petal…” he whined, hiding his face in your neck. “It’s not the same now”.

“Why not?”

“Because I got a taste of it with you two years ago and I can’t control myself around you now, you know it”.

“Sucks to be you” you shrugged. “One month starting today”.

Letting out a defeated cry that could only have you finally releasing the laugh you managed to hold for so long, he rested his head back against the couch.

“Can this month end already”.

“So you’re just accepting your fate?” You were the one in disbelief now. “You won’t even try to convince me otherwise?”

“No, it’s up to you” he said, closing his eyes as he threw an arm over them. “If you don’t want me to touch you then I’ll just keep my hands to myself and suffer in silence”.

You half cooed, half laughed, not having expected such a touching answer to your playful question. Then again, it was Jeongguk the one you were dating; you should know better by now.

Removing his arm from his face, you pressed a brief kiss on his nose. “I love you, bun” you ran your fingers through his hair. “As if I’d be able to go a whole month without jumping your bones”.

“Now don’t say it like that” he laughed, throwing one of his legs over your body and making you lie on your sides now.

Properly face to face now, you cupped his cheek and gently caressed it as you rested your forehead on his. “Give me two weeks tops to shake the fear off my body?”

He nodded, lovingly bumping his nose on yours. “As long as you need me to”.

#bts #bts imagines #jungkook imagines #jeon jungkook #bts fluff #jungkook fluff #kpop #kpop fanfic #bts fanfic #jungkook fanfic #bts scenarios #jungkook scenarios #bts reactions #jungkook reactions #bts x reader #jeon jungkook x reader #bts jungkook #jungkook #bts imagine #jungkook imagine #bts angst #jungkook angst

[thechaoticdruid]

Hunted [1/2]

Astarion x Named! Tav (Winnie)

Plot: While traveling through the mountain pass the tadfools stumble upon an abandoned wagon full of goodies.

Content/Warnings: MDNI, Mention of a severed limb, Smut towards the end, PiV sex, fingering, female Tav, She/Her pronouns.

The mountain range was warm as the sun beat down on it. Winnie and her merry band of weirdos had begun to search for the Githyanki creché. There was a slight cool breeze blowing through the mountains as the warm sun kissed down upon the earth. The druid stretched out her arms with a grunt. It was indeed a very lovely day, and the scenery was absolutely breathtaking.

“Too bad we can't hang around here for a while.” Winnie said as she looked over the horizon. She was standing close (but not too close) to the edge of a cliff. The wind whipped through her hair as she sighed. 

“Yes it is quite the shame. These mountains are truly a sight to behold.” Gale exclaimed. 

“They're tediously steep is what they are. If I have to climb any further my legs will give out.” Astarion huffed. 

“I'd be willing to carry you if you ask nicely, my fair maiden.” Winnie teased him. Astarion rolled his eyes but smirked.

“Oh? Well aren't you chivalrous. You might make the others jealous if you keep spoiling me like this, darling. “ Astarion winked playfully. Winnie blushed darkly as she tried to think up what to say next. She was shit at flirting.  

Before either of them could speak Scratch began to bark at something off  in the distance. A crashed and seemingly abandoned wagon came into view as they got closer.

“Do you see anyone nearby?” Wyll asked as he inspected the cargo, “this must have belonged to someone.”

“Well whoever they were, they're gone now. Probably dead. More loot for us then!” Astarion grinned.

“We can't jump to conclusions, Astarion. They could still be around here. They might be injured.”

“I think they might be a bit more than injured.” Winnie stated before pulling a severed hand out from under the wagon. 

“Gods above.” Wyll gasped.

“Well that explains that. Let's see what treasures the dead have left us, hm?” Astarion looked through the cargo, opening up a trunk and skimming through the contents. Winnie looked over his shoulder eyes spotting a green folded up dress. She grabbed hold of it and looked it over.

“Hmph! It's just a bunch of junk!” Astarion complained and threw some old books over onto the ground.

“Have you no respect for literature?!” Gale quickly picked up the books off the ground and examined them.

“What you got there, soldier?” Karlach asked, approaching Winnie from behind. 

“Just a dress, it actually looks pretty new.” Winnie hummed as she folded it up in her arms. 

“Let me know if you find a pair of hiking boots. I fear these mountains will only get steeper.” Shadowheart added.  

Winnie turned off to the side as she continued to look down at the dress. She couldn't really remember the last time she wore one. It had to have probably been back when she was a child. 

Eventually the party continued on through the mountains eventually setting up camp as the terrain got flatter and the sun began to set.

Winnie set up her bedroll a bit away from the others per usual, but tonight she couldn't help but continue to look at the dress curiously. When the others weren't looking she slipped behind a tree and quickly changed into the dress. She looked down at herself and smiled slightly. The dress was a little big on her which made her feel smaller than she actually was. She looked into her pack and took out her hand mirror to examine how the dress looked on herself when she noticed her herb pouch was empty.

“Shit. Guess I'll need to get some more.” She sighed in annoyance. Winnie looked back at the others. They probably wouldn't even notice she'd slipped away if she was quick. She just needed a few things. Winnie pulled her boots and pack on before sneaking away into the forest. 

The air had a nice earthy smell to it. A slight breeze was blowing through the trees as the stars shone above, illuminating her path.  

The druid sniffed the air, searching for the herbs she'd come for, however as the scent of flora hit her senses so did another familiar aroma. Winnie glanced around in the dark. Her lack of dark vision made it quite difficult to identify her surroundings, but she was able to pick up the glow of eyes watching her from afar. 

Without another thought Winnie turned and began to run, the sound of leaves and sticks crunching behind her as a shadowed figure began to chase after her. She picked up the pace, sprinting through the grass. Adrenaline was coursing through her body. Her heart was pounding and she began to pant a bit, becoming winded. 

She'd honestly forgotten why she was running at that point and let out a series of giggles before suddenly tripping and tumbling over into the grass, her pursuer quick to pounce.

“A-Astarion!” She giggled feeling herself be pinned to the forest floor as the red eyed figure chuckled above. The vampire smiles, fangs glinting in the moonlight.

“Hello darling, out for a midnight stroll are we?” His voice was smooth as silk. The scent of bergamot wafers over her senses. Despite him quite literally stalking her like  prey in the middle of the night, his smell was comforting to her.

He was like a big playful kitten when you got to know him better.  

“What are you doing?” Winnie asked him, suddenly feeling him move a little hair behind her ear as he gazed at her. 

“What any creature of the night does. The real question is what are you doing out here by yourself?” The elven vampire hummed.

“I ran out of some herbs I needed for healing potions so I went out to find some.” Winnie replied honestly. 

“And you decided to venture out alone wearing only this lovely dress? How careless of you. You're lucky some ravenous beast didn't appear and decide to devour you.” 

“Perhaps I wanted to be devoured…” Winnie murmured, a slight blush spreading upon her face.

“My, isn't that a delicious idea?~” Astarion purred out, hand stroking up the druid's leg. “I must admit it is rather delightful seeing you all dolled up like this.” Winnie shivered, feeling Astarion's cold fingertips glide across the skin of her thigh as he sneakily slipped a hand under the dress. His pointed nails gently grazed over her tender flesh. 

“Not that I dislike your usual attire, but this certainly has its benefits.” He practically purred as his fingers crawled further up her leg, beginning to teasingly stroke her through her underwear. 

“Ahh..” Winnie covered her mouth quickly, face turning red. Astarion looked down at her, eyes softening. 

“Do you want me to stop?” He asked, voice barely above a whisper as he pulled up her dress, revealing her soft cushy thighs. 

“No. Please don't.” Winnie looked up at him, eyes round and puppy like.  Astarion lifted up her leg, kissing along her calf slowly as he moved up her thigh.  Fangs just barely teasing her skin. 

“A-Astarion..” Winnie gasped out, catching the vampire’s attention. “Could we move it along? I don't want anyone to come looking for us…” She said with a deep blush. 

The elven vampire chuckled, “you're awfully eager tonight aren't you, pet?” 

Winnie looked off to the side in embarrassment. He wasn't completely wrong.  Their little game of chase had gotten her blood pumping among other things. The brunette haired druid would have never thought she'd ever find herself actually turned on by the idea of being hunted. But her pursuer seemed to be an exception. Winnie knew he wouldn't hurt her, not physically at least. She'd grown to trust him, despite her companions always reminding her not to let her guard down around him. Astarion purses his lips in thought as his crimson eyes scanned her.

“Beg. I want you to beg for your pleasure.” Astarion smirked.

“P-Please.” Winnie whimpered out feeling his move back to her clothed groin, rubbing her through her underwear.

“Mmm…Again lover.” He purred.

“Please!” Winnie begged feeling him slid her panties to the side and slip two fingers inside her.

“Very good. Now tell me what you want.~”

“Y-You…” She huffed.

“Be a little more specific my sweet. What is it you want from me?” He cooed, curling his fingers inside her.

“Take me. Astarion please. I want you to take me, bite me, whatever you want. I'm yours!” Winnie exclaimed, squirming a bit in anticipation. Astarion was slightly taken back by her words, not quite expecting them. He quickly resumed his seductive mask, pulling his fingers out of her and licking them slowly. He then proceeded to undo his pants and slide them down just enough to free his cock before positioning himself between her legs. Winnie moved closer, wrapping her arms around his neck as he moved her panties to the side. 

With a soft grunt the silver haired vampire pushed into her, causing her to cry out noisily. Astarion let out a pleasured sigh, slowly inching himself into her.  Winnie leaned forward pressing her lips to his in a needy kiss, moaning into his mouth as he began to thrust into her. 

The druid's fingers tangled into his hair as he fucked her against the forest floor, thrusts speeding up each time he hit her core. Winnie brushed over the tip of one of his ears, sending shivers down his spine. Astarion smiled into the kiss, playfully nipping her lip before sliding his tongue inside. He eventually pulled back, taking a look at Winnie’s flustered moaning face as she pushed her hips back against his, clinging to him like her life depended on it. Astarion ran his tongue over her neck, tracing the delectable vein that he was all too eager to bite into. But as the tips of his fangs pressed against his lover's tender flesh he heard the sound of a crossbow being loaded. An unfamiliar tiefling stood behind the two of them, crossbow aimed right at the vampiric elf. 

“Get off the girl, spawn.” He spoke up, voice low and menacing.

To be continued......

~Druid

Taglist: @vixstarria , @paganwitchisis, @kerwin290710 , @anukulee , @gobbodoggo

#bg3 #baldurs gate 3 #astarion ancunin #astarion bg3 #astarion x tav #astarion my beloved #astarion #bg3 tav #astarion x reader #astarion x female tav #astarion x oc #astarion x druid tav #Winnifred The Druid #oc tav winnie #astarion romance #smut #gale bg3 #wyll bg3 #shadowheart #karlach #BG3 x oc #Bg3 x tav #astarion x human tav #human druid

[devildom-moss]

Flowers for Them (Beelzebub)

Continuation of a request where MC returns the favor for the characters giving them roses. Kind of a sequel series for the Roses for You series (links here)

Beelzebub x gn!MC

(Suggestive)

Word Count: +1,400

Magenta lilacs

You had spent all morning preparing for your date with Beel while he was busy at practice. The thought of finally being able to return the favor and present him with a bouquet of flowers had you giddy. All the planning and consideration that went into the selection would hopefully pay off when you surprised him.

Beelzebub happily hurried home after practice – not even stopping for a snack. He knew he had a date with you, even if you refused to tell him what you had planned, and he was eager to return home, get ready, and spend the rest of his day with you.

By the time Beel stepped foot in the entrance to the House of Lamentation, you were already waiting in the twins’ bedroom with a picnic basket. Belphegor lazily made conversation with you while snuggling up to his pillow in his bed; he was clearly tired and ready for another nap, but Belphie couldn’t resist the desire to keep you company while he had you to himself. Beel made his way upstairs to drop off his equipment and get a change of clothes, recalling that you told him he could wear something casual and comfortable. When he entered the room, he was surprised to see you there.

“Oh! MC, were you waiting long?” Beel asked, dropping his bag near the foot of his bed.

“Not at all. How was practice?”

“Good.” Beel approached you with a smile and caressed down your cheek before tilting your chin up and stealing a quick kiss. Belphegor groaned and turned over in his bed so that he didn’t have to watch. When Beel pulled away, his grin was softer and sweeter than before. “Do you mind if I take a quick shower and change before we go?”

“Go ahead.” You smiled reassuringly. “You know, I’m only here so early because I got too excited to see you. You can take your time.”

Beel’s shoulders relaxed at your admission. He glanced over at the red chair in the center of the room, and your eyes followed his. “Will those clothes work for our date?”

A pair of shorts with flame patterns printed along the hem, a black cropped sleeveless shirt, and a deep red overshirt were sitting on the chair – thoughtfully laid out earlier that morning. Next to the chair was a pair of lightly worn black, red, and white sneakers. “Yes, Beel, that will be fine. I’m sure you’ll look handsome.”

“I’m glad.” Beel smiled shyly, proud of himself. He grabbed a towel and headed for the bathroom, but before he left, he added, “I’ll be back soon.”

When Beel returned to the room shortly after in a towel, it was hard to tell whether he had forgotten to grab his clothes or if he intended to change in front of you the entire time. You watched as drops of water dripped from his hair and fell down his bare chest. With a light blush on his cheeks, Beel caught your gaze, causing you to quickly avert your eyes.

“Sorry,” you mumbled an apology.

“You can watch if you want to,” Beel shrugged, “I don’t mind.”

So, you did; you soaked in every second as Beel’s exposed muscular body was covered once more. It was hard to tell if seconds or minutes had passed before Beel slipped his shoes on and offered you his hand.

“Ready to go?” he asked. You nodded, grabbing the picnic basket. “See ya later, Belphie.”

Belphegor moaned sleepily and forced his arm up to wave goodbye to you both.

The location you had planned for the picnic was only a short walk away from the House of Lamentation. Less than a minute into the walk, Beel offered to carry the picnic basket for you, which you agreed to so long as he didn’t peek inside. Beel nodded, taking the basket, and followed your lead happily – like a puppy, content to go wherever you took him as long as you continued to guide him with his hand in yours. He thought to ask where you were taking him, but he trusted you, and that was enough to keep him quiet on the matter.

You arrived at a field near a lake. The moonlight shined alone along the surface of the water with the light pollution from the nearby city dulling the stars. It was such a lovely scene that Beel immediately knew that you had reached your destination. He set the basket down near the edge of the water where the grass was low and fewer wildflowers were growing.

“Here is okay, right?” Beel asked.

“It’s perfect.” You beamed at him, but your smile grew confused as Beel took off his overshirt and spread it out, signaling you to sit on it. “Uhm, Beel, I brought a blanket for us to sit on.”

“Oh.” Beel shyly picked his shirt off the ground and tied it around his hips while you pulled the blanket out of the picnic basket. You spread it out over the spot he picked out and flamboyantly gestured for him to take a seat, causing Beel to chuckle.

“I told you I’d plan everything, didn’t I?” You caressed his cheek with your thumb, causing it to warm and grow pink beneath your touch. “But that was very sweet of you. And speaking of sweet, close your eyes for me, alright?”

Beel softly shut his eyes – half-expecting you to kiss him. When he heard you rummaging through the picnic basket, a different anticipation rose in him. You had prepared an array of lilac flavored food and drink: lilac lemonade, a limited spring flavored lilac Demonus that a certain witch had helped you procure, lilac honeycomb pancakes, lilac syrup, lilac honey posset, lilac shortbread cookies, lilac and acid lavender sweet butter with a loaf of milk bread, and lilac and hell rose lollipops. As you set up your picnic spread, Beel sniffed the air; everything smelled so sweet and delicious.

You pulled the last item out of the basket – a bouquet of magenta lilacs – and held them out for Beel before announcing, “Ta-da.”

Eagerly, Beel opened his eyes. He was visibly taken aback by the flowers you had thrust towards him. His hands reached out and settled over yours. “Are these for me?”

“It’s all for you.”

Beel took the flowers in his arms, the scent engulfing him and making him even hungrier, tempting him to take a bite directly from the bouquet itself. However, he restrained himself and smiled at you, helplessly enamored. “I’m not used to getting flowers. They smell good.”

“All the food and drink contain lilac. I was hoping that would keep you from being tempted to eat the bouquet.”

Beel let out a deep and gentle chuckle. “You know me so well.”

“I’d hope so. If you really want to eat the bouquet, you can, but I wanted to encourage you to wait long enough for me to tell you what magenta lilacs mean.” Beel’s mouth formed an “o,” and he pulled the flowers closer to his chest while staring at you expectantly. You continued, “they convey passion and a deep, unrestrained love. That’s what I feel when I think of you.”

Beel felt a shiver run up his spine, but the romantic mood was dampened by a subsequent growling from his stomach. Beel’s cheeks flushed a deeper shade of pink – affection, desire, and embarrassment swirling inside him. With hazy, lidded eyes and drool threatening to spill from the side of his mouth, Beel stared at you. “Please. . . feed me.”

You happily obliged him, coating a stack of pancakes with lilac syrup and lifting a forkful up to Beel’s lips. He took a bite, still maintaining eye contact with you. As he chewed, a blissful look came over his handsome face, and you were quickly distracted by a drop of syrup clinging to his lower lip – glimmering and sweet. You wanted to lick it off him. Perhaps Beel could tell from the way you were looking at him, or maybe he was simply overcome by his own desire, but he leaned in and captured your lips. What started soft quickly deepened as Beel set the bouquet of lilacs to the side. Between the sweet taste of his lips and the heat of his breath, you were hardly concerned with how your bodies came together – how you ended up on your back with Beel on top of you, your hands wandering all over his body. When Beel pulled back, his blush had reached his ears.

“Maybe I should be restrained,” Beel admitted in a whisper. He lowered himself until his lips were just above your neck. “I’m so hungry.”

Lucifer | Mammon (soon) | Leviathan (soon) | Satan (soon) | Asmodeus (soon) | Belphegor (soon) | the others

#requests #gn!mc #obey me series #beelzebub #obey me beelzebub #obey me #beelzebub x mc #beelzebub x reader #I want to both top and dom him #Please. He would be so cute being absolutely ruined next to a pretty lake #I'm normal about this I swear.

[lovesuhng]

start over

fluff, strangers to ?

Ending a relationship is always difficult, especially when it has lasted for years to the point of becoming an engagement. It was painful what you went through, but now it was time to start over, to take some time to rediscover yourself. 

That's how you decided to take a solo trip to a paradisiacal place. You weren't the kind of person who liked beaches, spending the day under the sun, but you felt it was necessary to have a new experience. You were at this hotel by the sea, where everyone said it had the best sunset view in the whole city. You had arrived and settled at one of the tables about an hour before the sun was supposed to set, as you had heard it would happen at 6:20 PM. 

You ordered a beer, took a book out of your bag, and looked around, seeing everyone busy taking photos to update their social media. Actually, almost everyone. Your eyes fixed on a man who was sitting alone a couple of tables away from you. He was wearing sunglasses and drinking white wine. The wind seemed like a paid actor gently swaying his black hair. The open buttons of his shirt revealing a bit of his tattoo added the perfect touch to make him extremely attractive. 

Yes, he was definitely the most attractive stranger you had ever seen. 

You realized you were staring at him for too long when he looked in your direction, as if he felt he was being watched. You quickly looked back at your book to hide how embarrassed you were at being caught and missed seeing the smile on his face. 

A few minutes later, when you were truly focused on the pages of your book, you felt a presence beside you and were surprised to see the man standing there, very close to you, holding his wine glass. 

“Excuse me, may I sit here?” he said with a charming smile. You just gestured towards the chair next to you, closing your book and placing it on the table. As he sat down, he asked, “Sorry, but I’m curious to know how such a beautiful woman is here alone reading a romance novel in this wonderful place.” 

You laughed at the man’s comment, then took a sip of your beer and replied. “First, thank you for the compliment.” He raised his glass as if toasting to the wind. “Second, this was the best way I found to wait for the sunset, but I guess now I’ll have to change my plans a bit.” You mimicked his gesture, making him smile. 

“Sorry for the lack of manners, I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Johnny.” He extended his hand and you shook it, introducing yourself as well. “I found it interesting that you’re here and not taking photos.” He pointed to the other people who were doing just that. 

“I’ll leave the photos for later. But what about you, what brings you here?” 

Johnny explained that he was a DJ and had played at a party nearby the previous night, but wanted to stay a few more days to rest and enjoy the city. When he asked why you were traveling alone, you thought about telling him what had happened, but it was better to forget about it. 

“Let’s just say I want a fresh start. But let’s save that conversation for another time.”

“So, we’ll meet again?” Johnny said in a flirtatious tone and all you could do was laugh at his attempt to flirt with you. 

“Well, we’re staying at the same hotel, we’ll be here for a few more days, so we’ll run into each other.” 

“Perfect.” 

The conversation lasted for a while and you were surprised by the chemistry between you two. You talked about everything; Johnny shared his preference for drinking white wine during the day and red wine at night because, according to him, they matched the vibe. You said that even though you loved wine, you didn’t know much about it and preferred to drink beer on a hot day like this one. You spent the rest of the afternoon laughing, sharing some stories, and when he was about to tell you one of his travel adventures, you noticed the sun beginning to set. 

You asked him to help take some photos of you and you did the same for him. Then you both stayed there, watching the sun disappear into the vastness of the water, enjoying each other's company. 

“This is one of the most beautiful things I've seen,” you said, sighing, still with your eyes fixed on the horizon. 

“I agree, it’s really beautiful.” 

When you turned to Johnny, his eyes were fixed on you and it was the first time you looked directly into his honey-colored eyes. You felt him getting closer, your breaths mingled, and when your noses touched, reality hit and you quickly pulled away from him.

“Sorry, we just met, but I found you so interesting that—” 

“Calm down, Johnny, it’s okay. I’m not angry or anything, I’m just… not ready. I’ll explain later.” 

“Is that one of the reasons you’re here?” 

You just nodded. Then he tucked a strand of your hair behind your ear and gently held your chin, making you look into his eyes once more.

“It’s okay, I won’t pressure you into anything. But, would you do me the honor of having dinner with me tomorrow?” 

“Like, a date?”

“Like a date.”

You laughed again at how comfortable he made you feel. 

“Alright, I accept. That way you can properly explain to me how red wine matches the nighttime vibe.” 

It had been days since you had a great time as much as you did that afternoon. 

You were ready to start over alone, but, on second thought, it would be more fun if this new beginning happened alongside an attractive stranger during beautiful summer days.

#nct scenarios #nct #nct fanfic #nct fluff #nct 127 scenarios #nct drabbles #nct 127 fluff #nct 127 #nct x reader #nct 127 drabbles #johnny nct 127 #johnny drabble #johnny suh x reader #johnny #johnny fluff #johnny x reader #johnny suh #johnny au

[avocadorablepirate]

What Do We Call This? - 10

prev || mini masterlist || next

Pairing: Trafalgar Law x fem!reader

Summary: On a quest to find what you've been looking for, you acquire the help of the Straw Hat pirates, who've agreed to let you temporarily join them. There are however many challenges that come along with your temporary recruitment - an alliance with a certain Trafalgar Law being one of them.

Word Count: 2.2K

Warnings: fluff, angst, kinda slow burn, swearing, the occasional OP spoiler

A/N: Damn I can't believe we've made it to ten chapters (and I still don't know what to call this). Anyway, thanks for sticking around and I hope you like this one as well!

—⁠☆✿☆—⁠

You were aware of the beyond uncomfortable position you were in. The soreness of your back and numbness in your arm evidently the reasons for your discomfort. But the warmth radiating from your side refused to have you wake up. It was like being covered by a thick blanket on a cold winter's day, and you wanted to relish in it for as long as you could. And as if understanding your need for more of its warmth, the blanket pulled you further into its embrace.

The creaking of a door and a loud gasp is what finally startled you awake. At the entrance to the room stood Bepo, his doe-like eyes wide, and reflecting shock, making your brows furrow in confusion. At the same time a low groan and a tug at your waist came from beside you, the grip warm and firm, anchoring you to the spot. Confused yet again, you turned your head only to find yourself face to face with a tattooed chest. It took your brain a while to process who the chest belonged to, but when recognition hit, you tried to pull away from it.

The sudden movement within his arms made Law's grip tighten around you. His eyes blinked open to see what was causing such a ruckus, and his expression soon mirrored your surprised one. His cheeks flushed red as he immediately pulled away from you, apologise flowing out of his mouth. It had seemed that somewhere during the night he had accidentally pulled you down with him as he nestled into his bed - or maybe nestled into you.

Only then did Law notice the white bear standing by the door, still bewildered by the sight in front of him. Law stood up quickly, his body tense as he eyed Bepo, and seizing your chance, you scrambled out of the bed. Though you couldn't get out of the room just yet; Bepo remained unmoving by the door, rooted to the spot until his captain called out to him.

"Cap-Captain!" came a high-pitched squeak, before he cleared his throat, "We'll be approaching Wano in a few hours. We..we couldn't find you around the sub, so I thought I would come here. Sorry captain," he said with a little bow of his head. His apology only added to your flustered state as you realised what the situation must have looked like to him.

"I'll be out soon, just give me a minute," Law directed to Bepo, but you took that as your sign to leave as well, quickly following behind the Mink even before Law could think of calling you back.

You hurried back to your temporary quarters on the Polar Tang, exhaling a sigh of relief as you found it empty. You weren't exactly sure how you would explain to Robin and Ikkaku why you were sheepishly returning in your disheveled clothes from the previous day. While you were sure they would believe your explanation, you also knew that it wouldn't stop them from teasing.

After quickly freshening up, you made your way to the kitchen, the scent of freshly brewed coffee welcoming you as you entered the room. Robin and Ikkaku sat at the table, engrossed in conversation, but as soon as you took a seat beside them, their attention shifted to you, their expressions changing into ones of suspicion.

"(Y/N), where have you been? You weren't in your bunk when I woke up," Robin questioned, not taking her eyes off you as she sipped at her coffee.

"Oh, you know, just exploring the sub," you answered with a shrug, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible as you poured yourself a cup of the dark liquid. Although the two of them didn't seem completely convinced by your reply, they didn't press further, resuming their conversation, which you joined. As the three of you settled into easy banter, you found yourself drawn into the lively discussion. You and Ikkaku chatted animatedly while Robin listened, chiming in from time to time. It hadn't taken long for the two of you to befriend Ikkaku; it had happened almost overnight on your first day on the Polar Tang, and since then the three of you always seemed to have something to talk about.

Engrossed in your discussion, you were so immersed in the conversation that you didn't notice the tall figure that stood over you until you heard a throat clear, and the table fell silent. Shifting in your seat, your heart skipped a beat when you found Law standing behind you, his gaze fixed on your form with a certain intensity.

"You left this," he said, handing you the pouch from last night. You hastily grabbed the bag from him, offering a small smile of thanks while silently praying that Robin and Ikkaku hadn't overheard his words. However, the curious glances from the two women behind you said otherwise. They had clearly caught Law's previous actions and were now observing his continued stare at you as if he were contemplating his next words. Ikkaku, growing impatient with her burning curiosity, was on the verge of questioning her captain when Law finally spoke up.

"If you'd like to come to my room again, I could show you some books I have about islands," Law stated casually, unfazed by Ikkaku and Robin's mischievous grins that followed.

"Again?" Robin asked, arching an eyebrow and you felt a wave of panic wash over you.

"Let's go now," you said hurriedly, grabbing Law by the arm and pulling him along before either Robin or Ikkaku could protest. You and avoidance were well acquainted, and right now, it was your best bet to escape their incessant questioning.

You raced down the corridor, with Law in tow. The weight of his gaze bore into your back, intense like last time, yet unreadable as always. Once you were finally within the safe confines of his quarters you let go of his arm, your face flushed with embarrassment, "You didn't have to say that in front of them," you mumbled, unable to meet his gaze.

"Say what?" Law asked, tilting his head in confusion before realisation dawned on him, a small smirk forming on his lips, "You didn't have to rush out of the room," he remarked, a hint of amusement in his eyes.

"Yeah, well, I didn't really feel like answering a bunch of questions," you replied. You would take their curiosity over their teasing questions any day. "So, what are these books you have?" you inquired, eager to change the subject.

Law made his way to the shelf by his bedside and rummaged through it, his fingers trailing along the spines of each book until he found what he was looking for.

"You're looking for an island, right?" he asked, as he read through the summary at the back of the book he had selected. "It's an old book, and from what I know it's the only copy. It has details about the Grand-Line's lesser-known islands, and some extra pages about islands that have disappeared over the years."

You quietly whispered a word of thanks as you accepted the book from Law, your fingers lightly brushing against his as you did. For a second your gazes met, and you could have sworn that he let his hand linger on yours, but you quickly turned your attention to the book.

As you flipped through the contents, your eyes gleamed with excitement when you found a few maps towards the end, eliciting a smile from Law. Settling on the edge of his bed, you started reading through the pages, and he sat beside you, pointing out interesting facts and occasionally stealing glances in your direction. Law couldn't help but adore the way your face lit up with every turn of a page. Yet you remained completely oblivious to it, your focus fixed solely on the book in front of you.

Nearly an hour had passed when a soft knock at the door interrupted the peaceful atmosphere. Law called out for the person to come in, and the door opened slightly to reveal Bepo. A gasp came out of the Mink again, and he immediately launched into a series of apologise, leading Law to roll his eyes.

"We're just reading Bepo," Law muttered, his tone tinged with irritation. A blush crept up to the apples of your cheeks at the reminder of the earlier misunderstanding, and you glanced away, trying to focus back on the book.

Bepo shuffled awkwardly at the door, still unsure of whether to intrude or not, and Law sighed at the bear's hesitance. "What is it?" he asked, his voice softer now, though a hint of impatience was evident. In truth, Law hoped it was nothing serious. He was enjoying this calm, quiet moment with you and he didn't want it to end. The warmth of your presence seemed to stop time and eased the tension within him.

"Kin'emon wants to brief us before we reach Wano, so we're needed on deck," Bepo answered, and Law inwardly let out a frustrated sigh, his gaze momentarily flickering back to you to gauge your reaction. You, however, slammed the book shut and took to your feet. The prospect of a new adventure excited you, and despite the interruption, you felt a rush of eagerness.

"Let's go," you said with a bright smile, looking at Law. His frustration eased at the sight of your enthusiasm, and he couldn't help but give a faint smile back.

"Alright," he agreed, standing up as well, and the both of you followed behind Bepo to the deck.

_______________________________________________

"No."

"What?"

Law's jaw clenched as he glared at Kin'emon for his suggestion before his gaze shifted to you, softening. His mind raced with concerns for your safety, unwilling to expose you to any unnecessary risks after what you had told him last night.

"I said no," Law said firmly, redirecting his attention to Kin'emon, "It's too risky. Having both her and Robin as geishas will attract too much attention. We'll get caught."

"Maybe an oiran then?" Kin'emon suggested, and Law's jaw clenched tighter as he thought about the implications, the mere thought of other men laying eyes on you, setting his protective instincts into overdrive.

"No!" Law practically yelled though he tried to maintain his composure as he formulated another protest to Kin'emon's suggestion. "It's still too dangerous. The attention would be just as bad, if not worse."

You glanced at Law, not expecting him to be protective even now. His concern was evident, even if he hid it behind practical reasoning, but this wasn't for him to decide. You tried to interject, wanting to voice your opinion, but Law's firm protest silenced you before you could even get a word out. Kin'emon, too, seemed to ignore your attempts to speak, his attention focused on Law's objections.

"But Law-dono, we need to get as much information as we can," Kin'emon insisted, his brow furrowing in frustration. The urgency of the mission weighed heavily on him.

"Yes, but sending in too many people to the same place could jeopardize the entire plan," Law countered, his voice steady and unwavering.

Kin'emon hesitated for a moment, considering Law's words carefully, "Perhaps you're right," he conceded, finally turning his attention to you, "In that case, how about you work as a waitress instead? It's a less conspicuous role, but there's a place that Orochi's men frequent, so you'll still have the opportunity to gather information."

Law visibly frowned at the proposal but was quick to hide it. He would have protested to this plan as well if it wasn't so obvious that he was being overprotective. Law was generally someone who agreed with the best possible course of action. But with you things were different, he preferred to keep you close rather than risk your safety, even if that meant a few compromises would have to be made.

You exchanged another glance with Law, feeling a surge of annoyance bubbling within you. Despite understanding his intentions, you couldn't help but feel frustrated by the way your opinion was completely disregarded. Nevertheless, you bit back your objections, not wanting to cause further conflict. With a forced nod of agreement, you reluctantly agreed to Kin'emon's suggestion.

As Kin'emon turned to leave, satisfied with the compromise, you couldn't shake the feeling of irritation that gnawed at you. While the others dispersed, returning to their tasks in preparation for your arrival at Wano, you remained stiff by the railing, trying to quell your frustration.

Law approached you, his footsteps echoing against the deck as he closed the distance between you. "We still have some time, do you want to get back to reading?" he offered casually, trying to stop the corners of his mouth from lifting in a small smile.

"No," you replied curtly, your voice betraying your annoyance. Law's brows furrowed at your change in demeanor, and his eyes searched yours for a hint to your sudden change.

"I need to prepare for when we reach Wano," you explained, hurriedly walking away before he could further question you. Left puzzled, Law watched your retreating figure, worry clouding his mind as he contemplated following you. He couldn't stand the thought of you being upset with him again, not when you were gradually opening up to each other. Yet duty called, Shachi needed him in the control room. With a heavy sigh, he turned away, deciding to check up on you later, hoping to mend whatever rift had formed between the two of you.

_______________________________________________

A/N: I LIVE FOR THE TENSION...just going to keep causing problems for the both of them ╮⁠(⁠＾⁠▽⁠＾⁠)⁠╭.

taglist: @trafalgardaria @deathsmajestysworld @cottoncandyloverrrr @magnificenttaledreamland @kitsunechan707

#law x reader #trafalgar law x reader #law fanfic #one piece x reader #law x you #trafalgar law fanfiction #trafalgar law x y/n

[echonidae]

little uh.. redraw? i guess? of a screenshot of mission #7 from dishonored 2. (´▽`ʃ♡ƪ) absolutely love that mission so much, and i love me a good ruined mansion ;v; this was great practice for painting and background stuff, though i don’t think i’d call it a study or anything :v

i’m a big fan of Very Saturated Colors so i couldn’t keep myself from adjusting the saturation before beginning, but here’s the og screenshot:

#artists on tumblr #digital painting #fanart #dishonored #artenidae #finished stuff #fanart stuff #game fanart #my art #digital art #dishonored fanart #screenshot repaint #screenshot redraw #artwork #dh2 #this took about. 10 hours i think? maybe a little less #i could keep on adding more details and such but i already spent much more time on this than i meant to #as per usual i'm not entirely satisfied tho #and i do realize that changing the saturation that much does Take Away a lot from the Vibe of the place too #and the whole point that the place is yknow abandoned and falling apart etc etc #and the dust too. severe lack of dust #anyway #this was still really nice to paint! #had fun just messing with the colors too! didn't use the color picker on the (edited) ref at all. just eyeballed it the whole way through #i have two other screenshots from this mission i'd like to repaint #and i might just. go through the games again and grab a couple more screenshots #i'm slowly playing through dh1's dlcs again so...... #brigmore manor....... 👀

[lpbear]

I can’t believe they made me prefer Shyamalan’s adaptation. I can’t believe they’ve done this to me.

#like he did a bad job but he at least tried something #he failed but he was definitely aiming for something I can appreciate #the new one just took out all agency and everything important about each character #I’m not even talking about sokkas sexism #although that also shows a huge misunderstanding of the original to think that that needed to be taken out to update it #I’m talking about aang not even being allowed the flaw of running away from being the avatar and being a scared kid #he just goes out to fly around a while to like clear his head and gets caught in a storm??? #pro tip if your plot is driven by coincidence it is a Bad Plot #him being a kid and being dragged into this world and responsibility is like Important and Good to explore #and also they didn’t they didn’t even get rid of silks being sexist btw they just don’t call it what it is #which is WORSE #he still thinks katara can’t fight or protect the village but all the boys can #they try to frame it like it’s just about leadership?? oh yeah?? why does he think he should be a leader and katara shouldn’t? #whats that called? #and yue works in the kitchen now to be more relatable? #they took the sexism out of his plot line and put it into the show itself #I need to stop adding tags but I could literally go on all day #I’m not precious about adaptations #it’s fine to change things #but if all the changes you make are just removing characters’ agency and growth and the POINT of them #those are Bad Changes #you did it Wrong #also they literally CLUNG to tell don’t show as a guiding principle #they didn’t do the most basic storytelling once #not once did they show something to us instead of just telling us what we’re meant to think over and over #first episode includes about five retellings of the opening monologue #aang TELLING gyatsu that he’s playful instead of once just showing him goofing off #this is fucking storytelling 101 #all that to say the movie is terrible but it’s like funny and more like a failed attempt at something decent #this series is more like a successful execution of a bad approach to the story and I think that’s worse

[dreaming-of-the-end]

lessons in fire, lessons in hate: Marella

A/N: this has been sitting in my drafts for too long. Comments/reblogs are better than the satisfaction that comes with being right!

Summary: Marella was fourteen when she began to hate fire.

What happened was this: she woke up engulfed in it.

TW: self hate, fire, swearing, tell me if I should add more!

Taglist: @steppingonshatteredglass @real-smooth @sunset-telepath   @stardustanddaffodils @jaxtheoraliestanner  @song-tam @turquoise-skyyyy @skycourthouse @silveredviolets @wu-marcy  @b-blurryyfacee  @rune-and-rising @lavender-and-rainy-days @chasteliac @confusedamphibian @hellomyfriends @cadence-talle @kai-i-guess @callas-starkflower-stew @a-harmless-poison @professionalwhalewatcher @theogony @keeper-of-the-jew-jew @gay-otlc  @confuzzled-fox @almostfullnerd  @athenswrites @synonymroll648

Marella was nine when she learned to fear fire.

The lesson was this: fire burns, and so do you.

Simple enough when everything in her life was so complicated. Complicated like when you take a step too far and feel your body start falling; complicated like how lemon juice squirts in your eye when you try to make lemonade; complicated like watching your mom cry from the staircase when she doesn't know you're looking.

So this was a simple rule.

Fire burns, and you will with it.

(unless...)

She learned to fear it, scribbling down the lesson in her mind, taking notes on what not to do and what to do. She learned so well that it was written into her very being. DNA is unchangeable? Well, she changed it to be afraid of fire, like everyone told her to, because every else didn't really have to learn to hate it.

Lack of self-preservation was a shitty side effect of being unique.

Yes, she memorized, watching her father's lips move as he taught his lessons and rules. Yes, fire is bad.

(...unless you're smart enough to avoid it. unless you're quick enough to run. unless you know not to love it, not to like it, not to look at it like that, Marella stop looking at it like that—)

...

Marella was eleven when she decided to fear fire.

She'd learned her lesson two years ago (about how things are complicated, and fire is simple), but never once had she believed it.

Rules were hard, and not following them was easy. Rules were hard, like when you shake out your clothes after a night on the floor because your mother isn't there to tell you to pick them up, like when you give up on lemonade and sprinkle sugar directly on the lemons wedges and eat them like that to savor the puckering sweetness, like when the girls at school make fun of you for having messy hair and messy braids and a messy life.

Rules were hard, especially the ones about fire and how she had to stay away.

She'd learned to follow the easy rules: show up to class, don't talk to the Vackers (especially the youngest), help your mother on her hard days (even if she couldn't quite adjust to letting her mother help her), and don't complain.

The last one was the hardest. But she learned well.

But this was worse than that. This wasn't a rule, this was a fact: fire is bad, and so is anyone who can use it, anyone who loves it, (anyone who looks at it like that Marella please stop looking at it like that—)

So, she decided, it was time to fear it.

First, she lit a match. Then, she set her favorite shirt on fire.

It burned faster than she'd expected. There was more smoke than she'd planned for, fanned into her face and making her eyes water, swallowed with the gulp of air she tried to take, sending her into a coughing fit. By the time she remembered to pour water on it, it had already spread to her carpet, growing until she drowned it with her ready bucket.

More smoke went up. She coughed. The fire went out. The smoke drifted out the window lazily, turning the pure sky briefly gray.

Her shirt (pink, with sparkles around the edges) was crumbled to ashes. A portion of her carpet (blue, fluffy, with a pattern of scattered purple petals) was blackened with fire.

Marella sat down in the middle of her ruined carpet and let her tears clear the smoke from her eyes. She waited for the smell in her room to go back to normal. Then she shoved the ruined remains of her favorite shirt into a bag and threw it away, cleaned her floor as well as she could with the water and towels from her bathroom, cut away the burned part of her carpet, and went downstairs like nothing happened.

Another thing she learned that day was that fire was hungry. It spread faster than water could reach it.

That was the day she decided to fear fire.

...

Marella was fourteen when she began to hate fire.

What happened was this: she woke up engulfed in it.

That was the simple answer, the easy answer. The complicated, the hard, the dangerous answer took longer to say. It's the danger of not looking before you leap, the danger of tilting your face to the sky and staring straight at the sun as long as you dare, the danger of taking a breath and another and another and smelling smoke instead of air. The danger of fire.

So the answer was dangerous, and it was that Marella imagined herself crumbling into dust like the shirt she'd burned. She imagined the carpet catching (she had a new one now, one that didn't have a big section at the ends cut away) and spreading to her parents and the rest of her house without her bucket of water there to stop it. She would be ash. She would be burned. She would be—

Warm.

She was so warm.

The only thing she could do was roll around her room to put out her fire, and scream. Scream from the pain that didn't exist, scream at the top of her lungs, the ones that weren't giving out from the smoke.

Something thudded, and then she was choking, losing her air, clutching at her throat, burning and dying and she couldn't breathe—

Air flooded her lungs and tears flooded her eyes as she gulped down air, knees stinging on her ruined carpet.

Her clothes were steaming.

"Marella—" Arms encircled her, flinched back. "Marella, you're burning hot. Boiling. Are you all right?"

"Does it look like I'm all right?" she forced out, a tear dripping down her cheek. She tried to wipe it away, but it had already evaporated. Her skin didn't feel hot to her. Her throat was the only part of her still on fire.

Her dad's face appeared in front of her, creased. "Look around you."

She did.

Her room was ruined. Blackened, charred, smoky. Her bedsheets, her closet, her carpet. The door to her bathroom had blackened, but was far enough away to be fine. Everything on her desk was in ashes. She would have to think of new excuses for her half-finished homework.

Heat swirled around her.

She could feel it in the air, in her very blood. It wanted her to touch it, wanted her to let it spill from her hands, to dance and twirl around her destroyed room with her. Hungry, hungry, hungry.

"Where did the fire come from?" Marella asked dully, staring at her hands.

Durand brushed a finger down her cheek, wiping away a tear. He winced like she'd burned him. Maybe she did. "I don't know."

But he did.

He did know.

And so did she.

"Your mother called a Regent when we realized there was a fire, Mare. They're coming now." Durand placed a hand on her knee, protected by a layer of still-hot pajama pants. They were an old pair, sparkly and pink from when she liked that sort of thing. His eyes searched hers, matching blue finding each other in the remnants of smoke. "They're coming here."

She sucked in a quick breath, choked, coughed. "Can you get rid of the smoke?"

"I took away your fire's air to put it out. I could blow away the smoke, but they're still coming here. It wouldn't dissipate in time."

Your fire, he said. Yours.

The doorbell rang from the end of a tunnel. "Where's Mom?"

"Waiting," he answered softly. Waiting for you to be safe. Waiting for the Regents to arrive. Waiting, waiting, waiting for it to be okay.

Marella stood on shaky legs. Durand stood with her.

The Regent had dark, deep eyes, like staring into an ocean. Dark skin, curls flopping around her head. Her ears were curved, but angled ever so slightly in a way that showed her age.

"What was the issue?" she was saying as Marella got close enough to hear.

"A fire," Caprise said, her voice strong. So this was a good day. Not a dangerous one. Not a hard one. Not a complicated one.

"Was it an accident?" This one knew who Caprise was. Knew what she was.

Was it an accident?

Marella started forward, but Durand placed a hand on her shoulder. "Yes."

"Of course. Where did it occur?"

Caprise looked at Durand, at Marella, her windblown hair, her unmarked skin. Her mouth tightened. "I set it. It was an accident, but it's out now."

Marella's eyes widened.

"How did you set it?" The woman wasn't surprised. Marella decided then and there that she hated her.

"During one of my moods." Caprise emphasized the last word too much, widening her eyes, making her bottom lip move when it shouldn't have.

Crazy Caprise. Where's your mom? Why isn't she here, Marella? Big talk from someone with a crazy mother, Redek. Why don't you let us come over to your house anymore? My dad says your mom is dangerous to be around. He says I can't sleep over unless she's not there. She might hurt me because she doesn't know what she's doing.

The woman nodded.

That was when Marella began to hate fire.

...

Marella is sixteen, and she doesn't know how she ended up here.

Here: hating herself like this.

Of course, she can trace every step that got her to this point.

She knows that Caprise falling off that balcony wasn't at fault any more than the person who pushed her. She knows that Sophie Foster didn't make Stina bully her after their friendship tore apart, and she didn't make Marella ostracize herself and hate every girl for being who she couldn't. She knows that Forkle didn't make her a pyrokinetic and Fintan isn't the reason she's dangerous and it isn't Biana's fault that she's too fucking beautiful.

Making everyone else at fault was an accident, and accidents happen all the time.

Accidents that she can count. Accidents like her mother's tumble, like Stina tripping her in the hall, like forgetting to flatten her uncombed hair before class or setting another fire or Gisela getting away for the millionth time or Keefe getting taken because Marella convinced Linh to take him underground.

If she burns the world down, it won't be an accident. It'll be the kind of burn that comes when lemon juice gets into a cut, when the sugar you tried to add turns out to be salt, when you aren't trying to catch yourself anymore because you fall down the stairs and land running, when you hear your mom crying and leave the house so you don't have to remember that you can't help anymore.

(she's crying because of you. because she found your plans to burn the world down. why'd you leave them out like that?)

She counts everything in her life, so why not mistakes? Why not dreams that never came true? Why not faults and blames, fires and flames, burned plans and lemons squeezed dry and flamed to charred bits of fragrant peel?

Fintan tells her that she shouldn't hate the fire erupting from her skin, that he doesn't hate his power even after everyone he's killed.

She can see it in him. How unafraid he is of himself, how proud he is of her power. Sometimes, she doesn't know if his satisfaction is in her or in the power constantly simmering in her veins.

"Don't be afraid of it, Marella!" he shouts constantly at her whenever they train. "Don't be angry! Fear and anger, this is how you lose control, of the fire and of yourself."

But fear and anger are all she has ever known. Fire burns, and she has to be ready to burn with it—

"It's everywhere!" she screams back, something in her voice breaking. The smoke is making her eyes tear up, and she's too afraid of crying to keep going. She puts out the flame with a twist of her wrists and falls to her knees on the ground, clothes steaming. She wishes Linh were here. "It's everywhere. All the fucking time. It's all over me."

"That's your burden. And your gift." Fintan's anger is clear in his voice. She's failed again. No fake pride today. "Start feeling the sun instead of wishing it was night."

"The sun shouldn't feel like fire ants when I use it." Her nails dig into the skin on her arms. "I can't forget it. I can't ignore it. I can't use it. Fintan, it hurts so bad. It hurts so bad."

"If you can't ignore it, then stop trying to. You are not afraid of your gift, you are not afraid of me." He's stone-cold like she's not on fire. "What are you afraid of?"

Her tears steam up as they fall. "Everything."

#i have 200000 different endings to this written #originally it ended after ''you have to be ready to burn with it--'' #but then i added more. and then i took that more away. then i changed it. etc etc #thats why the ending is wonky #summer's writing #kotlc #keeper of the lost cities #marella redek #angst #angst without a happy ending #kotlc writing #the bare hint of marelliana snuck into this LMAO #fire tw

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

Fandom can do a little gatekeeping. As a treat.

So I finally decided to archive-lock my fics on AO3 last night. I’ve been considering it since the AI scrape last year, but the tipping point was this whole lore.fm debacle, coupled with some thoughts I’ve been thinking regarding Fandom These Days in general and Fandom As A Community in particular. So I wanna explain why I waited so long, why I locked my stuff up now, and why I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a-okay with making it harder for people to see my stories.

Lurkers really are great, tho

I’m a chronic lurker, and have been since I started hanging out on the internet as a teen in the 00s. These days it’s just cuz I don’t feel a need to socialize very often, but back then it was because I was shy and knew I was socially awkward. Even if I made an account, I’d spend months lurking on message boards or forums or Livejournals, watching other people interact and getting a feel for that particular community’s culture and etiquette before I finally started interacting myself. And y’know, that approach saved me a lot of embarrassment. Over the course of my lurking on any site, there was always some other person who’d clearly joined up five minutes after learning the place existed, barged in without a care for their behavior, and committed so many social faux pas that all the other users were immediately annoyed with them at best. I learned a lot observing those incidents. Lurk More is Rule 33 of the internet for very good reason.

Lurking isn’t bad or weird or creepy. It’s perfectly normal. I love lurking. It’s hard for me to not lurk - socializing takes a lot of energy out of me, even via text. (Heck it took 12 hours for me to write this post, I wish I was kidding--) Occasionally I’ll manage longer bouts of interaction - a few weeks posting here, almost a year chatting in a discord there - but I’m always gonna end up going radio silent for months at some point. I used to feel bad about it, but I’ve long since made peace with the fact that it’s just the way my brain works. I’m a chronic lurker, and in the long term nothing is going to change that.

The thing with being a chronic lurker is that you have to accept that you are not actually seen as part of the community you are lurking in. That’s not to say that lurkers are unimportant - lurkers actually are important, and they make up a large proportion of any online community - but it’s simple cause and effect. You may think of it as “your community”, but if you’ve never said a word, how is the community supposed to know you exist? If I lurked on someone’s LJ, and then that person suddenly friendslocked their blog, I knew that I had two choices: Either accept that I would never be able to read their posts again, or reach out to them and ask if I could be added to their friends list with the full understanding that I was a rando they might not decide to trust. I usually went with the first option, because my invisibility as a lurker was more important to me than talking to strangers on the internet.

Lurking is like sitting on a park bench, quietly people-watching and eavesdropping on the conversations other people are having around you. You’re in the park, but you’re not actively participating in anything happening there. You can see and hear things that you become very interested in! But if you don’t introduce yourself and become part of the conversation, you won’t be able to keep listening to it when those people walk away. When fandom migrated away from Livejournal, people moved to new platforms alongside their friends, but lurkers were often left behind. No one knew they existed, so they weren’t told where everyone else was going. To be seen as part of a fandom community, you need to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known, etc. etc.

There’s nothing wrong with lurking. There can actually be benefits to lurking, both for the lurkers and the communities they lurk in. It’s just another way to be in a fandom. But if that is how you exist in fandom--and remember, I say this as someone who often does exist that way in fandom--you need to remember that you’re on the outside looking in, and the curtains can always close.

I’ve always been super sympathetic to lurkers, because I am one. I know there’s a lot of people like me who just don’t socialize often. I know there’s plenty of reasons why someone might not make an account on the internet - maybe they’re nervous, maybe they’re young and their parents don’t allow them to, maybe they’re in a bad situation where someone is monitoring their activity, maybe they can only access the internet from public computer terminals. Heck, I’ve never even logged into AO3 on my phone--if I’m away from my computer I just read what’s publicly available. 

I know I have people lurking on my fics. I know my fics probably mean a lot to someone I don’t even know exists. I know this because there are plenty of fics I love whose writers don’t know I exist.

I love my commenters personally; I love my lurkers as an abstract concept. I know they’re there and I wish them well, and if they ever de-lurk I love them all the more.

So up until last year I never considered archive-locking my fic, because I get it. The AI scraping was upsetting, but I still hesitated because I was thinking of lurkers and guests and remembering what it felt like to be 15 and wondering if it’d be worth letting a stranger on the internet know I existed and asking to be added to their friends list just so I could reread a funny post they made once.

But the internet has changed a lot since the 00s, and fandom has changed with it. I’ve read some things and been doing some thinking about fandom-as-community over the last few years, and reading through the lore.fm drama made me decide that it’s time for me to set some boundaries.

I still love my lurkers, and I feel bad about leaving any guest commenters behind, especially if they’re in a situation where they can’t make an account for some reason. But from here on out, even my lurkers are going to have to do the bare minimum to read my fics--make an AO3 account.

Should we gatekeep fandom?

I’ve seen a few people ask this question, usually rhetorically, sometimes as a joke, always with a bit of seriousness. And I think…yeah, maybe we should. Except wait, no, not like that--

A decade ago, when people talked about fandom gatekeeping and why it was bad to do, it intersected with a lot of other things, mainly feminism and classism. The prevalent image of fandom gatekeeping was, like, a man learning that a woman likes Star Wars and haughtily demanding, “Oh, yeah? Well if you’re REALLY a fan, name ten EU novels” to belittle and dismiss her, expecting that a “real fan” would have the money and time to be familiar with the EU, and ignoring the fact that male movie-only fans were still considered fans. The thing being gatekept was the very definition of “being a fan” and people’s right to describe themselves as one.

That’s not what I mean when I say maybe fandom should gatekeep more. Anyone can call themselves a fan if they like something, that’s fine. But when it comes to the ability to enjoy the fanworks produced by the fandom community…that might be something worth gatekeeping.

See, back in the 00s, it was perfectly common for people to just…not go on the internet. Surfing the web was a thing, but it was just, like, a fun pastime. Not everyone did it. It wasn’t until the rise of social media that going online became a thing everyone and their grandmother did every day. Back then, going on the internet was just…a hobby.

So one of the first gates online fandom ever had was the simple fact that the entire world wasn’t here yet.

The entire world is here now. That gate has been demolished.

And it’s a lot easier to find us now. Even scattered across platforms, fandom is so centralized these days. It isn’t a network of dedicated webshrines and forums that you can only find via webrings anymore, it’s right there on all the big social media sites. AO3 didn’t set out to be the main fanfic website, but that’s definitely what it’s become. It’s easy for people to find us--and that includes people who don’t care about the community, and just want “content.”

Transformative fandom doesn’t like it when people see our fanworks as “content”. “Content” is a pretty broad term, but when fandom uses it we’re usually referring to creative works that are churned out by content creators to be consumed by an audience as quickly as possible as often as possible so that the content creator can generate revenue. This not-so-new normal has caused a massive shift in how people who are new to fandom view fanworks--instead of seeing fic or art as something a fellow fan made and shared with you, they see fanworks as products to be consumed.

Transformative fandom has, in general, always been a gift economy. We put time and effort into creating fanworks that we share with our fellow fans for free. We do this so we don’t get sued, but fandom as a whole actually gets a lot out of the gift economy. Offer your community a story, and in return you can get comments, build friendships, or inspire other people to write things that you might want to read. Readers are given the gift of free stories to read and enjoy, and while lurking is fine, they have the choice to engage with the writer and other readers by leaving comments or making reclists to help build the community.

And look, don’t get me wrong. People have never engaged with fanfic as much as fan writers wish they would. There has always been “no one comments anymore” wank. There have always been people who only comment to say “MORE!” or otherwise demand or guilt trip writers into posting the next chapter. But fandom has always agreed that those commenters are rude and annoying, and as those commenters navigate fandom they have the chance to learn proper community etiquette.

However, now it seems that a lot of the people who are consuming fanworks aren’t actually in the community. 

I won’t say “they aren’t real fans” because that’s silly; there’s lots of ways to be a fan. But there seem to be a lot of fans now who have no interest in fandom as a community, or in adhering to community etiquette, or in respecting the gift economy. They consume our fics, but they don’t appreciate fan labor. They want our “content”, but they don’t respect our control over our creations.

And even worse--they see us as a resource. We share our work for free, as a gift, but all they see is an open-source content farm waiting to be tapped into. We shared it for free, so clearly they can do whatever they want with it. Why should we care if they feed our work into AI training datasets, or copy/paste our unfinished stories into ChatGPT to get an ending, or charge people for an unnecessary third-party AO3 app, or sell fanbindings on etsy for a profit without the author’s permission, or turn our stories into poor imitations of podfics to be posted on other platforms without giving us credit or asking our consent, while also using it to lure in people they can datascrape for their Forbes 30 Under 30 company? 

And sure, people have been doing shady things with other people’s fanworks since forever. Art theft and reposting has always been a big problem. Fanfic is harder to flat-out repost, but I’ve heard of unauthorized fic translations getting posted without crediting the original author. Once in…I think the 2010s? I read a post by a woman who had gone to some sort of local bookselling event, only to find that the man selling “his” novel had actually self-published her fanfic. (Wish I could find that one again, I don’t even remember where I read it.)

But aside from that third example, the thing is…as awful as fanart/writing theft is, back in the day, the main thing a thief would gain from it was clout. Clout that should rightfully go to the creators who gifted their work in the first place, yeah, but still. Just clout. People will do a lot of hurtful things for clout, but fandom clout means nothing outside of fandom. Fandom clout is not enough to incentivize the sort of wide-scale pillaging we’re seeing from community outsiders today.

Money, on the other hand… Well, fandom’s just a giant, untapped content farm, isn’t it? Think of how much revenue all that content could generate.

Lurkers are a normal and even beneficial part of any online community. Maybe one day they’ll de-lurk and easily slide into place beside their fellow fans because they already know the etiquette. Maybe they’re active in another community, and they can spread information from the community they lurk in to the community they’re active in. At the very least, they silently observe, and even if they’re not active community members, they understand the community.

Fans who see fanworks as “content” don’t belong in the same category as lurkers. They’re tourists. 

While reading through the initial Reddit thread on the lore.fm situation, I found this comment:

[ID: Reddit User Cabbitowo says: ... So in anime fandoms we have a word called tourist and essentially it means a fan of a few anime and doesn't care about anime tropes and actively criticizes them. This is kind of how fandoms on tiktok feel. They're touring fanfics and fanart and actively criticizes tropes that have been in the fandom since the 60s. They want to be in a fandom but they don't want to engage in fandom 

OP totallymandy responds: Just entered back into Reddit after a long day to see this most recent reply. And as a fellow anime fan this making me laugh so much since it’s true! But it sorta hurts too when the reality sets in. Modern fandom is so entitled and bratty and you’d think it’s the minors only but that’s not even true, my age-mates and older seem to be like that. They want to eat their cake and complain all whilst bringing nothing to the potluck… :/ END ID]

-

“Tourist” is an apt name for this sort of fan. They don’t want to be part of our community, and they don’t have to be in order to come into our spaces and consume our work. Even if they don’t steal our work themselves, they feel so entitled to it that they’re fine with ignoring our wishes and letting other people take it to make AI “podfics” for them to listen to (there are a lot of comments on lore.fm’s shutdown announcement video from people telling them to just ignore the writers and do it anyway). They’ll use AI to generate an ending to an unfinished fic because they don’t care about seeing “the ending this writer would have given to the story they were telling”, they just want “an ending”. For these tourist fans, the ends justify the means, and their end goal is content for them to consume, with no care for the community that created it for them in the first place.

I don’t think this is confined to a specific age group. This isn’t “13-year-olds on Wattpad” or “Zoomers on TikTok” or whatever pointless generation war we’re in now. This is coming from people who are new to fandom, whose main experience with creative works on the internet is this new content culture and who don’t understand fandom as a community. That description can be true of someone from any age group.

It’s so easy to find fandom these days. It is, in fact, too easy. Newcomers face no hurdles or challenges that would encourage them to lurk and observe a bit before engaging, and it’s easy for people who would otherwise move on and leave us alone to start making trouble. From tourist fans to content entrepreneurs to random people who just want to gawk, it’s so easy for people who don’t care about the fandom community to reap all of its fruits. 

So when I say maybe fandom should start gatekeeping a bit, I’m referring to the fact that we barely even have a gate anymore. Everyone is on the internet now; the entire world can find us, and they don’t need to bother learning community etiquette when they do. Before, we were protected by the fact that fandom was considered weird and most people didn’t look at it twice. Now, fandom is pretty mainstream. People who never would’ve bothered with it before are now comfortable strolling in like they own the place. They have no regard for the fandom community, they don’t understand it, and they don’t want to. They want to treat it just like the rest of the content they consume online.

And then they’re surprised when those of us who understand fandom culture get upset. Fanworks have existed far longer than the algorithmic internet’s content. Fanworks existed long before the internet. We’ve lived like this for ages and we like it.

So if someone can’t be bothered to respect fandom as a community, I don’t see why I should give them easy access to my fics.

Think of it like a garden gate

When I interact with commenters on my fic, I have this sense of hospitality.

The comment section is my front porch. The fic is my garden. I created my garden because I really wanted to, and I’m proud of it, and I’m happy to share it with other people. 

Lots of people enjoy looking at my garden. Many walk through without saying anything. Some stop to leave kudos. Some recommend my garden to their friends. And some people take the time to stop by my front porch and let me know what a beautiful garden it is and how much they’ve enjoyed it. 

Any fic writer can tell you that getting comments is an incredible feeling. I always try to answer all my comments. I don’t always manage it, but my fics’ comment sections are the one place that I manage to consistently socialize in fandom. When I respond to a comment, it feels like I’m pouring out a glass of lemonade to share with this lovely commenter on my front porch, a thank you for their thank you. We take a moment to admire my garden together, and then I see them out. The next time they drop by, I recognize them and am happy to pour another glass of lemonade.

My garden has always been open and easy to access. No fences, no walls. You just have to know where to find it. Fandom in general was once protected by its own obscurity, an out-of-the-way town that showed up on maps but was usually ignored.

But now there’s a highway that makes it easy to get to, and we have all these out-of-towner tourists coming in to gawk and steal our lawn ornaments and wonder if they can use the place to make themselves some money.

I don’t care to have those types trampling over my garden and eating all my vegetables and digging up my flowers to repot and sell, so I’ve put up a wall. It has a gate that visitors can get through if they just take the time to open it.

Admittedly, it’s a small obstacle. But when I share my fics, I share them as a gift with my fellow fans, the ones who understand that fandom is a community, even if they’re lurkers. As for tourist fans and entrepreneurs who see fic as content, who have no qualms ignoring the writer’s wishes, who refuse to respect or understand the fandom community…well, they’re not the people I mean to share my fic with, so I have no issues locking them out. If they want access to my stories, they’ll have to do the bare minimum to become a community member and join the AO3 invite queue.

And y’know, I’ve said a lot about fandom and community here, and I just want to say, I hope it’s not intimidating. When I was younger, talk about The Fandom Community made me feel insecure, and I didn’t think I’d ever manage to be active enough in fandom spaces to be counted as A Member Of The Community. But you don’t have to be a social butterfly to participate in fandom. I’ll always and forever be a chronic lurker, I reblog more than I post, I rarely manage to comment on fic, and I go radio silent for months at a time--but I write and post fanfiction. That’s my contribution.

Do you write, draw, vid, gif, or otherwise create? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you leave comments? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you curate reclists? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you maintain a fandom blog or fuckyeah blog? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you provide a space for other fans to convene in? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you regularly send asks (off anon so people know who you are)? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you have fandom friends who you interact with? Congrats, you're a community member.

There’s lots of ways to be a fan. Just make sure to respect and appreciate your fellow fans and the work they put in for you to enjoy and the gift economy fandom culture that keeps this community going.

#ao3 #lore.fm #fanfiction #fandom history #gift economy #caelum rambles

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google’s enshittification memos

[Note, 9 October 2023: Google disputes the veracity of this claim, but has declined to provide the exhibits and testimony to support its claims. Read more about this here.]

When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.

Think about Unity President Marc Whitten's nonpology for his company's disastrous rug-pull, in which they declared that everyone who had paid good money to use their tool to make a game would have to keep paying, every time someone downloaded that game:

The most fundamental thing that we’re trying to do is we’re building a sustainable business for Unity. And for us, that means that we do need to have a model that includes some sort of balancing change, including shared success.

https://www.wired.com/story/unity-walks-back-policies-lost-trust/

"Shared success" is code for, "If you use our tool to make money, we should make money too." This is bullshit. It's like saying, "We just want to find a way to share the success of the painters who use our brushes, so every time you sell a painting, we want to tax that sale." Or "Every time you sell a house, the company that made the hammer gets to wet its beak."

And note that they're not talking about shared risk here – no one at Unity is saying, "If you try to make a game with our tools and you lose a million bucks, we're on the hook for ten percent of your losses." This isn't partnership, it's extortion.

How did a company like Unity – which became a market leader by making a tool that understood the needs of game developers and filled them – turn into a protection racket? One bad decision at a time. One rationalization and then another. Slowly, and then all at once.

When I think about this enshittification curve, I often think of Google, a company that had its users' backs for years, which created a genuinely innovative search engine that worked so well it seemed like *magic, a company whose employees often had their pick of jobs, but chose the "don't be evil" gig because that mattered to them.

People make fun of that "don't be evil" motto, but if your key employees took the gig because they didn't want to be evil, and then you ask them to be evil, they might just quit. Hell, they might make a stink on the way out the door, too:

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engine-employee-resigns/

Google is a company whose founders started out by publishing a scientific paper describing their search methodology, in which they said, "Oh, and by the way, ads will inevitably turn your search engine into a pile of shit, so we're gonna stay the fuck away from them":

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

Those same founders retained a controlling interest in the company after it went IPO, explaining to investors that they were going to run the business without having their elbows jostled by shortsighted Wall Street assholes, so they could keep it from turning into a pile of shit:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/

And yet, it's turned into a pile of shit. Google search is so bad you might as well ask Jeeves. The company's big plan to fix it? Replace links to webpages with florid paragraphs of chatbot nonsense filled with a supremely confident lies:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/14/googles-ai-hype-circle/

How did the company get this bad? In part, this is the "curse of bigness." The company can't grow by attracting new users. When you have 90%+ of the market, there are no new customers to sign up. Hypothetically, they could grow by going into new lines of business, but Google is incapable of making a successful product in-house and also kills most of the products it buys from other, more innovative companies:

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Theoretically, the company could pursue new lines of business in-house, and indeed, the current leaders of companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are all execs who figured out how to get the whole company to do something new, and were elevated to the CEO's office, making each one a billionaire and sealing their place in history.

It is for this very reason that any exec at a large firm who tries to make a business-wide improvement gets immediately and repeatedly knifed by all their colleagues, who correctly reason that if someone else becomes CEO, then they won't become CEO. Machiavelli was an optimist:

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

With no growth from new customers, and no growth from new businesses, "growth" has to come from squeezing workers (say, laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years), or business customers (say, by colluding with Facebook to rig the ad market with the Jedi Blue conspiracy), or end-users.

Now, in theory, we might never know exactly what led to the enshittification of Google. In theory, all of compromises, debates and plots could be lost to history. But tech is not an oral culture, it's a written one, and techies write everything down and nothing is ever truly deleted.

Time and again, Big Tech tells on itself. Think of FTX's main conspirators all hanging out in a group chat called "Wirefraud." Amazon naming its program targeting weak, small publishers the "Gazelle Project" ("approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”). Amazon documenting the fact that users were unknowingly signing up for Prime and getting pissed; then figuring out how to reduce accidental signups, then deciding not to do it because it liked the money too much. Think of Zuck emailing his CFO in the middle of the night to defend his outsized offer to buy Instagram on the basis that users like Insta better and Facebook couldn't compete with them on quality.

It's like every Big Tech schemer has a folder on their desktop called "Mens Rea" filled with files like "Copy_of_Premeditated_Murder.docx":

https://doctorow.medium.com/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself-f7f0eb6d215a?sk=351f8a54ab8e02d7340620e5eec5024d

Right now, Google's on trial for its sins against antitrust law. It's a hard case to make. To secure a win, the prosecutors at the DoJ Antitrust Division are going to have to prove what was going on in Google execs' minds when the took the actions that led to the company's dominance. They're going to have to show that the company deliberately undertook to harm its users and customers.

Of course, it helps that Google put it all in writing.

Last week, there was a huge kerfuffile over the DoJ's practice of posting its exhibits from the trial to a website each night. This is a totally normal thing to do – a practice that dates back to the Microsoft antitrust trial. But Google pitched a tantrum over this and said that the docs the DoJ were posting would be turned into "clickbait." Which is another way of saying, "the public would find these documents very interesting, and they would be damning to us and our case":

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic

After initially deferring to Google, Judge Amit Mehta finally gave the Justice Department the greenlight to post the document. It's up. It's wild:

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-09/416692.pdf

The document is described as "notes for a course on communication" that Google VP for Finance Michael Roszak prepared. Roszak says he can't remember whether he ever gave the presentation, but insists that the remit for the course required him to tell students "things I didn't believe," and that's why the document is "full of hyperbole and exaggeration."

OK.

But here's what the document says: "search advertising is one of the world's greatest business models ever created…illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs) could rival these economics…[W]e can mostly ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats and sales."

It goes on to say that this might be changing, and proposes a way to balance the interests of the search and ads teams, which are at odds, with search worrying that ads are pushing them to produce "unnatural search experiences to chase revenue."

"Unnatural search experiences to chase revenue" is a thinly veiled euphemism for the prophetic warnings in that 1998 Pagerank paper: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users." Or, more plainly, "ads will turn our search engine into a pile of shit."

And, as Roszak writes, Google is "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand." That is, the company has become so dominant and cemented its position so thoroughly as the default search engine across every platforms and system that even if it makes its search terrible to goose revenues, users won't leave. As Lily Tomlin put it on SNL: "We don't have to care, we're the phone company."

In the enshittification cycle, companies first lure in users with surpluses – like providing the best search results rather than the most profitable ones – with an eye to locking them in. In Google's case, that lock-in has multiple facets, but the big one is spending billions of dollars – enough to buy a whole Twitter, every single year – to be the default search everywhere.

Google doesn't buy its way to dominance because it has the very best search results and it wants to shield you from inferior competitors. The economically rational case for buying default position is that preventing competition is more profitable than succeeding by outperforming competitors. The best reason to buy the default everywhere is that it lets you lower quality without losing business. You can "ignore the demand side, and only focus on advertisers."

For a lot of people, the analysis stops here. "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Google locks in users and sells them to advertisers, who are their co-conspirators in a scheme to screw the rest of us.

But that's not right. For one thing, paying for a product doesn't mean you won't be the product. Apple charges a thousand bucks for an iPhone and then nonconsensually spies on every iOS user in order to target ads to them (and lies about it):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

John Deere charges six figures for its tractors, then runs a grift that blocks farmers from fixing their own machines, and then uses their control over repair to silence farmers who complain about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

Fair treatment from a corporation isn't a loyalty program that you earn by through sufficient spending. Companies that can sell you out, will sell you out, and then cry victim, insisting that they were only doing their fiduciary duty for their sacred shareholders. Companies are disciplined by fear of competition, regulation or – in the case of tech platforms – customers seizing the means of computation and installing ad-blockers, alternative clients, multiprotocol readers, etc:

https://doctorow.medium.com/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse-3cc01e7e4604?sk=85b3f5f7d051804521c3411711f0b554

Which is where the next stage of enshittification comes in: when the platform withdraws the surplus it had allocated to lure in – and then lock in – business customers (like advertisers) and reallocate it to the platform's shareholders.

For Google, there are several rackets that let it screw over advertisers as well as searchers (the advertisers are paying for the product, and they're also the product). Some of those rackets are well-known, like Jedi Blue, the market-rigging conspiracy that Google and Facebook colluded on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

But thanks to the antitrust trial, we're learning about more of these. Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – was in the courtroom last week when evidence was presented on Google execs' panic over a decline in "ad generating searches" and the sleazy gimmick they came up with to address it: manipulating the "semantic matching" on user queries:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

When you send a query to Google, it expands that query with terms that are similar – for example, if you search on "Weds" it might also search for "Wednesday." In the slides shown in the Google trial, we learned about another kind of semantic matching that Google performed, this one intended to turn your search results into "a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape."

Here's how that worked: when you ran a query like "children's clothing," Google secretly appended the brand name of a kids' clothing manufacturer to the query. This, in turn, triggered a ton of ads – because rival brands will have bought ads against their competitors' name (like Pepsi buying ads that are shown over queries for Coke).

Here we see surpluses being taken away from both end-users and business customers – that is, searchers and advertisers. For searchers, it doesn't matter how much you refine your query, you're still going to get crummy search results because there's an unkillable, hidden search term stuck to your query, like a piece of shit that Google keeps sticking to the sole of your shoe.

But for advertisers, this is also a scam. They're paying to be matched to users who search on a brand name, and you didn't search on that brand name. It's especially bad for the company whose name has been appended to your search, because Google has a protection racket where the company that matches your search has to pay extra in order to show up overtop of rivals who are worse matches. Both the matching company and those rivals have given Google a credit-card that Google gets to bill every time a user searches on the company's name, and Google is just running fraudulent charges through those cards.

And, of course, Google put this in writing. I mean, of course they did. As we learned from the documentary The Incredibles, supervillains can't stop themselves from monologuing, and in big, sprawling monopolists, these monologues have to transmitted electronically – and often indelibly – to far-flung co-cabalists.

As Gray points out, this is an incredibly blunt enshittification technique: "it hadn’t even occurred to me that Google just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better." We don't know how long Google did this for or how frequently this bait-and-switch was deployed.

But if this is a blunt way of Google smashing its fist down on the scales that balance search quality against ad revenues, there's plenty of subtler ways the company could sneak a thumb on there. A Google exec at the trial rhapsodized about his company's "contract with the user" to deliver an "honest results policy," but given how bad Google search is these days, we're left to either believe he's lying or that Google sucks at search.

The paper trail offers a tantalizing look at how a company went from doing something that was so good it felt like a magic trick to being "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand," able to "ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers."

What's more, this is a system where everyone loses (except for Google): this isn't a grift run by Google and advertisers on users – it's a grift Google runs on everyone.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

#pluralistic #enshittification #semantic matching #google #antitrust #trustbusting #transparency #fatfingers #serp #the algorithm #telling on yourself

[cherienymphe]

His Father's Son

Rafe Cameron x Reader

Summary: After the untimely death of his father, Rafe takes it upon himself to become the man of the house.

warnings: NON-CON, STEPCEST, AGE GAP, mentions of major character death, depression, alcoholism, stepmom!reader, underage drinking, canon ages

➥ banner by @vase-of-lilies | ➥ divider by @firefly-graphics

⭑

The overwhelming feeling of being watched turned out to be true.

You flinched at the sight of the figure standing next to your bed, eerily still and eerily familiar in the darkness. Reason took over, and your heart started to slow just as quickly as it had started to race. You struggled to move, legs twisted within the sheets as you reached over to turn on the lamp. Sleep was still clinging to you, desperate to pull you back in, but you pushed it away with one look at Rafe’s face.

“It’s 8 o’clock,” was all he said in that tone you had never cared for.

Once his words actually registered though, you swallowed down the mild irritation that had threatened to bubble up. You felt your heart drop to your stomach as you blinked, staring at him with parted lips before hurrying to search for your phone. When it bounced out of your unsteady hands and onto the floor, you cursed.

Sliding out of bed, you unfortunately confirmed that it was indeed 8 o’clock.

Now 8:03.

“Shit,” you breathed, pressing your hand to your forehead. “Um…”

You swiped your tongue between your lips, noting how dry they felt.

“Tell Wheezie-.”

“I already took Wheezie to school.”

The teenager’s words surprised you, and your hand fell, staring at him in a mixture of shock and shame. At those words, you finally registered the look on his face, and you found yourself thinking that his tone earlier made a lot more sense. You opened and closed your mouth, fighting to figure out how to respond. Unfortunately, you didn’t come up with anything clever.

“…oh.”

You watched the blond cross his arms over his chest, head tilted with the barest of frowns between his brows.

“I’m sorry,” you finally added, letting out a sigh. “I overslept and my alarm didn’t go off and…”

You found yourself trailing off, hating the sound of your excuses.

You got the feeling that Rafe hated the sound of them too by the even stare he fixed you with. You imagined that he hadn’t planned on dropping Wheezie off to her first day of school this year, and while it was something you both knew he should expect to do sometimes, it was also something he should’ve been asked to do. You couldn’t even remember going to bed the previous night, and you were sure the two bottles of wine you’d consumed had something to do with it.

“Should I anticipate dropping her off tomorrow too?”

There was an edge in his voice that you didn’t like but couldn’t necessarily be angry at.

“No,” you told him, tone sheepish. “I’ll get up on time.”

Rafe didn’t respond, but he also didn’t leave right away. He simply stood there, drinking you in with a frown. There was a look that passed through his eyes that made you think he probably wanted to say something, but if that were true, he swiftly changed his mind. You watched him silently leave, and you resisted the urge to sigh, closing your eyes instead.

When you married Ward Cameron two years ago, it wasn’t for the most honorable of reasons you’d admit. However, the same could also be said for him. After all, what would a forty-year-old man possibly want with a twenty-seven-year-old woman? Probably something equally as superficial as the same reasons a twenty-seven-year-old woman would want to marry a forty-year-old man. With that being said though, you hadn’t actually expected to fall for him. In hindsight, how could you not?

He had never been bad looking, and he was far kinder than you ever expected. Sure, the money and security of a comfortable life were what pulled you in, but after saying yes, you realized that he wasn’t the typical cold and rich husband you expected him to be. Seeing him do his best with his children only made it harder to pretend like it was some loveless marriage of mutual benefit.

You loved him.

…and then he died.

With one boating accident, you were suddenly the single mother of three teenagers. It wasn’t something you were prepared for, and while one was technically an adult, that still left two who weren’t and couldn’t possibly fend for themselves. On top of it all, you still found it hard to get out of bed most days, a problem that wasn’t so bad during the summer.

…but the new term was here, and you couldn’t put your responsibilities off any longer.

Reminding yourself that you’d quite literally drank yourself to sleep the previous night and therefore overslept, you noted that you were off to a bad start. The thought made your eyes burn, the full realization of your new reality hitting you. After Ward died, Rafe was basically the one to take care of everything while you spent most days in bed, but months had passed and summer was over and now your time had come to be a parent.

Resisting the urge to cry, you stumbled to the bathroom, hoping you didn’t look as bad as you felt.

“Did you hear me?”

His voice pulled you out of your own head and you slowly turned to look at him.

“What?”

Rafe stared at you for what felt like a long time, and it was then that you realized he’d probably been speaking to you for some time. You swallowed at the realization, noting that you’d spaced out again, and when Rafe heaved a sigh, you actually felt like the scolded child.

“Sarah’s staying over at a friend’s house tonight,” he told you.

You could feel his gaze on you when you nodded, and deep in the back of your mind you knew that you should’ve asked some follow up questions, but you couldn’t bring yourself to. You’d always trusted Sarah and her judgement—Rafe being the one you and Ward always worried about—and considering the circumstances, you wouldn’t question her on this. In your current state of mind, you were positive she could ask you to smoke a blunt and you’d give her the okay.

You were pulled from your thoughts again by the sound of your name.

You were unsurprised to meet Rafe’s gaze.

You couldn’t place the look on his face, but he seemed like he was deep in thought. Rafe’s behavior and demeanor had taken a 180 after Ward’s death you had to admit. Granted, you supposed that was to be expected, but for some reason it surprised you. Maybe it was because the change was so drastic or maybe because Rafe seemed so set in his ways that it was hard for you to remember that he was only nineteen and still had so much capacity to mature into someone entirely other than what you knew him to be.

Your thoughts on the matter didn’t really matter, you supposed. All that mattered was that he’d stepped up where you’d so clearly dropped the ball, and maybe that was why you found it so hard to snap out of it and be the responsible parent, now. There were days when your grief paralyzed you, and you didn’t feel that nagging obligation to get out of bed because you knew Rafe would handle it.

The blond didn’t say anything, but his thoughts were plain as day as he reached along the counter and slid your drink from in front of you.

“Rafe-.”

“I think you’ve had enough,” was all he drawled, and you found yourself frowning.

“Who’s the parent in this scenario?”

“Apparently me,” he fired back, making your jaw tick. “I’m the one running the business and taking Wheezie to school and making sure there’s actually something to eat in the house.”

You blinked at that, recalling that you couldn’t remember the last time you went grocery shopping. Shame filled you once again, and your gaze lowered, eyes tracing the patterns of the granite. The silence that descended between you was thick, and just when you were about to apologize, Rafe spoke.

“Look, I get that you loved him or whatever, but… So did we…,” your eyes met his at that. “…and Wheezie and Sarah still have to go to school, and I still have to talk to people and deal with contracts and bullshit I didn’t think I would for at least another ten years.”

You realized that Rafe was right, and it made you feel worse because you didn’t think Ward would have married you if he didn’t think you were capable of looking after his children should something happen to him. Yet here you were…letting him down…

Rafe moved from his spot on the other side of the counter, and you only let him when he gently took your arm and forced you to stand. It was a far cry from your dynamic only five months ago. In your defense, you never clicked with Rafe. It wasn’t for lack of trying on your end, but Rafe was so troubled and had so many pent-up emotions and awful drug habits that it only proved to be a breeding ground for disaster.

You could think of too many instances in which you tried to be a parent to him only to be met with the same snarky and cruel demeanor he gave to everyone. He never quite took to you as his new parental figure, and you’d quickly learned that Ward was the only authority he’d respect and listen to. You tended to try and stay out of his way as a result, but Rafe was the one to catch you when you collapsed after getting the news that day.

Overnight, he’d gone from treating you like the ugly stepmother and instead like some injured foal he needed to look out for.

“That’s not healthy,” Mrs. Thornton said to you a few days later.

You watched her set her tea down, lips twisted into disapproval as she marinated on your words.

“You are the parent,” she sternly told you. “It’s your duty to pick up right where Ward left off, and instead you are letting some teenager run things.”

You knew that she was right, but you didn’t exactly relish hearing it.

You had never cared for the older woman, her upbringing influencing the majority of her opinions and stern exterior. However, after the boating accident, you desperately needed another actual adult to talk to. You were out of your element, and everyone knew it, and the first time you sat with her after your husband’s death felt humiliating. Now, however, you practically relied on her to keep your head on straight.

“…but I don’t know how to parent two teenagers all by myself, let alone handle the family business that I was never all that privy to.”

She made a noise at your admission, and it only served to humiliate you further. You had long suspected that she didn’t approve of Ward marrying a significantly younger woman, and by telling her that you weren’t included at all in the important decisions, you only validated her suspicions that you were only ever for show.

You forced yourself to ignore it.

“Their relationship was rocky, yes, but… No one knew Ward like Rafe,” you quietly admitted. “…and Rafe is the only one Ward talked to about all of this. Rafe knows how to make the decisions Ward would want.”

“He’s nineteen,” she scoffed. “Barely older than my own son.”

At your unsure expression, she leaned in closer, brows drawn together and lips pursed.

“You are his parent,” she repeated. “…and the longer you refuse to act like it and let him handle the business and the household and his siblings, he will forget it and start to challenge you in your own home.”

You didn’t have the heart to tell Mrs. Thornton that it didn’t exactly feel like your home anymore. At least not without Ward. While it relieved you that Sarah and Wheezie still treated you as they did before his death, you still couldn’t help but worry that without him around they would soon refuse to take you seriously as a parent. Part of you wouldn’t even blame them.

You’d only been in their life for three years, six months of which you were just their father’s silly twenty something girlfriend. You didn’t need to be a genius to know that they never expected him to actually marry you. Rafe had made that pretty clear when Ward had broken the news with you at his side.

It was a week later when you found yourself knocking on the door of Ward’s study. You supposed that it belonged to Rafe, now, and that correction made your heart clench. Even seeing him in the same spot where Ward often sat made you falter, and it took you a moment to remember why you’d disturbed him. Mrs. Thornton’s words were front and center in your mind.

“We need to have a serious talk about the business.”

At your words, Rafe only tilted his head, and you noted how out of place he looked in Ward’s space. Rafe was so young and everything about him betrayed his mindset and inexperience and impulsive tendencies. He didn’t belong, at all, but who were you to deny him his birthright?

“What about it?” he finally wondered, and you were hyperaware that he was watching your every move as you walked about the room.

“I think that I should be more involved with it,” you told him, continuing at his frown. “Rafe, you’re only nineteen, and like you’d said. You weren’t prepared to be fully involved in this for at least another decade.”

You watched him toss some papers aside at that, and the look he fixed you with made you swallow. It was reminiscent of the Rafe you were used to. You didn’t miss the way he dragged his blue gaze over you, sizing you up, and you definitely didn’t like it.

“You don’t know anything about it.”

The acknowledgement that Ward had never included you in these matters stung, but you only sighed.

“No…but…”

Your words died in the air as Rafe stood, and you had an inkling of what he was going to say by the look on his face.

“Do you even want to be involved in my dad’s business?” he asked you, leaning against the desk with his hands pressed into the wood. “Or are you just listening to Topper’s mom again?”

The blond chuckled at your silence, and it lacked humor.

“My dad left it to me,” he finally said, holding your gaze. “…and I know you think you should be involved because…well…you’re the parent, now…”

You didn’t like the way he rolled his eyes at that, and you blinked when Rafe straightened, nearing you.

“…but you don’t get it.”

Rafe looked between your eyes.

“I disappointed him too much while he was here, and this… This is my chance to make him proud,” he admitted, and your shoulders drooped.

“Rafe…”

“…and not just with his business,” he continued. “He’s gone…so now I have to step up and be the man of the house.”

Despite the fact that you could see where Rafe was coming from, you didn’t necessarily agree. He was too young to be putting so much pressure on himself to follow Ward’s footsteps and make up for his absence. That was your job, and you heaved a sigh, looking down. You’d just started to shake your head when he spoke again.

“Besides…you’re still knocking back…what? Twelve bottles a week?”

You reared back at that, lifting your gaze as he’d already started turning away from you.

“I’m not saying it to be mean,” he assured you, leaning against the desk and intently watching you. “I’m just stating a fact.”

Your throat felt incredibly thick all of a sudden.

“My dad’s death hit you really hard, and I get it. Mrs. Thornton is telling you that you’re the parent—the adult—and so you need to put me in my place and step into your role.”

You looked away, avoiding his eye.

“…but you can barely function most days, and I treated you like shit on more than one occasion, so…” you reluctantly met his gaze again. “It’s only fair that you let me look after you, now.”

You wanted to tell him that that wasn’t his job, and that more importantly, it should be the other way around. However, he was right. In your condition, you’d screw everything up and drive the whole family into debt. It wouldn’t be like this forever, you knew that, and so you reluctantly agreed that you needed time to get yourself together before you fucked it all up.

You woke up in tears, chest tight as you struggled to breathe.

It wasn’t the first time you dreamed about Ward, but instead of a good dream it was only a memory of that day Shoupe had knocked on your door. You’d felt trapped and panicked as you watched on, telling yourself not to answer it. Somehow, if you didn’t answer it then it wouldn’t be true. He wouldn’t be dead but just…still on his boat…enjoying a long vacation.

The events played out just like they did that day. You’d been able to feel the dread deep in your gut at the look on Shoupe’s face, and you kept screaming at yourself to kick him out of your house, that he had nothing good to tell you. You watched the way your face fell and the way your hands shook, and Rafe had only walked into the room for two seconds before hurrying to grab you when your knees buckled. He’d held you, fighting to calm you down as you wailed…

Much like he was doing now.

“Hey, hey,” you heard him harshly whisper, arms tight around you as he kept you from bucking around on the bed. “Y/N…”

Your nails dug into his arm as you tried to catch your breath, but your choked sobs were coming out too fast to give you any kind of reprieve. You could feel Rafe’s chest at your back as he moved closer, and one of his arms snaked around your neck as he held you in place.

“Is she okay?”

It was only then that you realized the hallway light was on and bleeding into the otherwise dark room. Wheezie sounded worried—scared—and you cursed yourself for doing that to her. You were supposed to be their support, comforting them and providing a safe space during this awful time in their lives, and instead it was the other way around.

You both heard and felt Rafe sigh.

“Yeah, she’ll…she’ll be fine. Wheezie, you should go back to bed,” he told her. “Now.”

You could only assume she listened to him, and Rafe only let you go when your breathing started to slow. You weren’t crying as hard when he laid you back down, and his absence was only felt for a few minutes before the bed dipped again. You felt him put a pill in your hand, and you frowned at it as he pulled you into a sitting position.

“Take this,” he told you, pushing your hand towards your mouth.

“What…?”

“It’ll help you sleep,” was all he said, forcing you to pop it into your mouth, a glass of water being pressed to your lips almost immediately.

In your distress, some slipped past your lips, and Rafe beat you to it in brushing his thumb across your chin. Slowly blinking, you laid back down, and you heard Rafe set the glass of water aside. You naturally thought that he’d leave, but you were surprised to feel his hand on the side of your face, smoothing it over your face and hair.

You really didn’t like that he was taking on a role that should’ve been yours, and after some time, you quietly mumbled an apology.

“I loved him,” you whispered in the darkness, and you felt Rafe freeze. “I know you guys think that I didn’t. I know what you and your friends have probably said about me behind my back.”

You tiredly scoffed, more tears escaping as you squeezed your eyes shut.

“…but I loved your father very much, and I wasn’t prepared to do this alone.”

Rafe didn’t say anything, but he didn’t move either, and you pressed your hand to your face, feeling the pill taking effect.

“I don’t know what to do,” you choked out. “He was supposed to be here, Rafe, I’m not supposed to do this alone.”

You could feel your chest tightening again, and Rafe shushed you. You could feel your body becoming lighter, and you welcomed it, face relaxing and breathing slowing. Rafe was still next to you, his body so close to yours that you could feel the heat coming off of it. You didn’t have the strength to push his hand away as his fingers grazed your cheek, and after some time you felt him pull the cover over you.

You didn’t feel him move or leave, but you became less concerned about that the more your fatigue grew.

You stared at Wheezie’s hopeful face, chewing on your lip as you contemplated her request.

“Have I met Natalie’s parents before?” you wondered, and you realized your mistake in asking that when her face dimmed.

“I don’t think so, but…dad did.”

You slowly nodded at that, whispering a small ‘right’ before looking away. It was a Friday evening, and in order to make up for your less than stellar behavior, you’d planned to cook and have dinner as a family—something that hadn’t been done in months. However, Sarah’s plans with her boyfriend put a damper on that, and now Wheezie was asking to stay over at a friend’s.

It didn’t seem fair to make Wheezie stay while Sarah didn’t. Granted, Sarah hadn’t exactly asked you, but still. The plan was to have dinner as a family anyway, and without Sarah, that wish was already ruined. The way you saw it, you might as well let Wheezie go, but you didn’t know Natalie’s parents, and so you felt unsure.

Rafe came into the kitchen then, and with one look between you, he deduced that a serious discussion was being had.

“What’s wrong?” he asked no one in particular.

“I’m asking mom if I can sleep over at Natalie’s tonight.”

“…and I’ve never met Natalie’s parents so…”

You watched Rafe chuckle at that, lips curving into a smirk as he moved to taste the vodka sauce on the stove.

“They’re almost as uptight as Topper’s mom, so Wheezie will be in good hands if that’s what you’re worried about,” he told you, tone light.

While that reassured you, you still felt a little down about your plans for the evening being ruined. You got the feeling that it was noticeable, and you flinched a bit when you felt Rafe’s hands briefly come down on your shoulders before brushing past you.

“You can do your family dinner thing another night,” he suggested, shrugging at you. “Sarah won’t be here anyway.”

Wheezie gave you a pouty lip, and you thought it over. If she said that Ward had met them before, and Rafe confirmed that they were indeed trustworthy, then you didn’t see why not. Even still, you unintentionally found yourself looking to Rafe, and when he gave you the barest of nods, you smiled at the thirteen-year-old.

“Okay,” you breathed, and she jumped up with her phone in hand.

“Natalie’s mom is picking me up,” she threw over her shoulder, hurriedly heading for the stairs.

You were happy to see her coping better with things, so you tried to focus on that instead of the fact that you’d be eating alone. Turning back to the stove, you turned the dial down to a simmer, half expecting Rafe to be gone when you turned around. He wasn’t, and you didn’t miss the way he eyed you as he leaned his arms on the counter.

“Let me guess, you have plans too? It’s Friday, and that usually means you’ll be out somewhere with Topper and Kelce.”

The crooked smile on his face was mocking as he peered up at you from beneath his lashes.

“It’s family dinner night.”

You only rolled your eyes at that, turning away from him.

“You’re nineteen, Rafe. I don’t expect you to turn down plans with your friends just to stay home and sit across from your stepmom,” you sighed. “You can go, it’s fine.”

“You and I both know I don’t do anything I don’t want to do,” he said, something you silently agreed on. “I want to stay.”

When you looked at him again, you were surprised to find him standing much closer, now. You hadn’t even heard him move nor realize just how close his voice was. You couldn’t place the look on the blonde’s face as he stared at you, and you watched him reach up to grab a plate.

“Why?” you chuckled.

Despite how nice he was being now, you both knew that it was only the case because of Ward’s death. Rafe had never cared for you, and if the circumstances were different, he wouldn’t hesitate to get as far away from this house as possible. You felt like Rafe’s thoughts were probably mirroring your own, something passing through his gaze that looked a lot like confusion.

“…because you loved him. Probably more than me,” he shrugged.

You frowned because you didn’t agree with that, at all, and you told him so.

“I think there are very few people who can love someone as much as a son loves his father.”

You threw Rafe a small smile, reaching out to rest your hand on his arm.

“…and you did love him, Rafe. Sure, you guys fought worse than teenage sisters at times,” you breathed, frantically blinking at the memories. “…but that’s just because he wanted the best for you, and you had your own problems that didn’t stop you from disappointing him.”

You tilted your head at him when he looked away.

“You idolized him, and all you wanted was to make him proud. It made things very complicated, but please don’t ever say I loved him more than you did.”

When Rafe looked at you again, there was a deep frown on his face, and for some reason, you felt very small beneath his stare.

“…but you did,” he said with a small shrug, gesturing around. “I mean, look at you.”

You blinked.

“You have to be medicated just to get some sleep, and you still don’t remember staring at the wall for days after he died.”

You felt a chill pass through you at his words, hating how much you’d let them down, but also because there was something about the way Rafe stepped towards you and held your gaze that you didn’t think you liked. It made an unsure feeling twist deep in your gut for some reason.

“So, no. I don’t want to go anywhere with Kelce and Top, not when my dad’s wife is one bad day away from a psychotic break,” he whispered. “He would want me to take care of you.”

His words were reminiscent of the same ones he’d spoken to you in Ward’s study that day, but unlike that day, today they made you feel uneasy, and you didn’t know why. You dropped your hand, taking a step back from him just as Wheezie’s voice reached your ears.

“Natalie’s mom is outside, I’ll text you when I get there,” she called as she ran through the house.

Your voice cracked when you told her to have fun, but you didn’t think she heard, the door slamming shut mid-sentence. Forcing yourself to turn away from Rafe, you grabbed a plate with shaky hands, Mrs. Thornton’s words echoing in your mind that Rafe’s new role in the household wasn’t healthy.

“I swear I’m not doing it to be a bitch, okay?” Sarah’s voice reached your ears. “It’s just really hard to be around her without thinking about dad.”

You swallowed at her words, taking a step back on the stairs,

“Especially when it’s obvious just how hard she’s taking it,” she said. “I mean, she’s a little better, sure, but those sleeping pills you give her aren’t doing a thing. She’s not tired, Rafe, she’s depressed.”

“Well, you’re making her feel like shit,” you heard him reply, a tone in his voice that you hadn’t heard in quite some time. “This is the fourth dinner you skipped out on for your Pogue boyfriend.”

The younger girl didn’t respond right away.

“I’m sorry,” you heard her eventually say. “When did you start caring about her anyway? Weren’t you the one who called her some gold-digger, saying she was coming for your spot in the will?”

That didn’t shock you nor hurt you, long imagining that Rafe had said far worse. You heard him heave a sigh, and it sounded angry.

“Dad’s gone, Sarah, and that means we should stay together as a family,” he sneered. “…and I’m doing what I can to make that happen.”

You heard a slight scuffle, and you hurriedly made your way down the stairs and towards the kitchen. It had been some time since you heard Rafe and Sarah fight, something you definitely didn’t miss, but considering the topic of this discussion, it didn’t surprise you that it was a little more emotionally charged than normal.

When you rounded the corner, Rafe had a tight grip on Sarah’s arm, the younger girl trying to leave with her purse in hand. The expression on his face was unnerving, a deep frown between his brows with his lip curled over his teeth a she got in her face.

“Things are going to be different, now.”

“Rafe.”

Sarah’s eyes were wide and terrified when she looked at you, relaxing a bit at your presence, and you were relieved when Rafe let her go. Sarah only briefly acknowledged you on her way out, desperate to get away from Rafe, and you watched the way he glared after her.

“Rafe, it’s fine,” you told him. “She’s allowed to hang out with her friends for whatever reasons she wants, especially now.”

“Are you going to use that excuse forever? Just because dad died it doesn’t mean that she can do whatever she wants,” he snapped, gesturing towards the door.

“She’s grieving!”

“She’s using it as an excuse to be a shitty daughter, and you’re just letting her.”

You reared back at both his words and his tone, and for the first time in months, you felt something like anger bubble up in your chest.

“It’s not your place to tell me how to raise her. She’s not your daughter,” you spat.

The small laugh that he let out lacked humor, and by the look on his face, you knew that there was something on the tip of his tongue that you would hate.

“Yeah, well, she’s barely yours.”

You could tell that he wanted to take it back almost as soon as he said it, and you pressed your lips together just as he touched his forehead.

“Fuck, that’s not…”

His words trailed off, and you crossed your arms over your chest. You were only thirteen years older than Sarah and knew her for all of three years, so it wasn’t like you didn’t feel the same at times, but it still hurt to hear. It’s like Rafe was voicing your worst fears that she would come to lack respect for you and your presence in her life as a mom.

You didn’t know how to do this…and everyone knew it.

“I just feel like…you’re treating her like dad did, letting her get away with everything, and I hate it,” he slowly said.

Rafe’s feelings about Sarah had never been a secret, and neither had Ward’s. You wouldn’t ever deny the fact that Ward favored her, and it was unfortunately noticeable, something that was always visibly distressing for Rafe. With Ward gone—and with Rafe feeling like he now needed to be the man of the house—this made for a very complex situation.

You couldn’t tell what was rightful concern and what was just Rafe wanting to put Sarah in her place, something he’d never been subtle about.

“I wasn’t expecting to be left raising teenagers by myself before I was even thirty, Rafe,” you finally replied. “I’m trying…”

“I know you are,” he hurried to say, quickly approaching you and reaching for you. “That’s why I’m trying to help.”

You backed away from him before he could touch you, and you didn’t miss the way his expression clouded over at that. Looking away, you swiped your tongue between your lips, choosing your next words carefully. You could feel his heated gaze burning a hole into your face.

“I get that you’re trying to help, and believe me when I say I’m so appreciative of it, Rafe, but… It is not your place,” you carefully said, looking at him again.

You watched him roll his eyes towards the ceiling, nodding to himself. His throat bobbed as he swallowed, and when his gaze fell back to you, you immediately knew that you didn’t like it. Rafe’s nostrils flared, and you didn’t need to be a mind reader to know that your words had bothered him, no matter how carefully you chose them.

“What you mean is you’re the parent, I’m not, and I need to stay in a child’s place.”

You sighed at that.

“Not necessarily, I just-.”

“…because if that were true, who would’ve driven Wheezie to school on the mornings when you couldn’t even get out of bed?”

You didn’t appreciate him throwing that in your face, and by the look in his eyes, you could tell he wasn’t done.

“You want me to stay in my place, but I’m the one who made the funeral arrangements and answered the important questions and kept this house together when the woman our dad married was too grief stricken to even stand on her own two feet.”

You bit your tongue, warily eyeing him as he moved to stand directly before you.

“Dad died, and I stepped up. Not you…me,” he firmly told you. “…and now that you’re sort of kind of getting your shit together, you just want to pretend like I should have no say in any of this.”

You didn’t like how close Rafe was, but when you went to take a step back, his hand shot out to dig into your arm, preventing you from doing so. You winced at the tight grip, and you swore you saw his face soften some at the sight. His grip certainly did, and you almost wished that it didn’t because the gentle way he held your arm and the gentle way he looked between your eyes made you deeply uncomfortable.

“Someone has to be the man of the house, now…and it falls to me,” he whispered.

You didn’t even have a proper response for that, feeling wholly unnerved as you stared at one another, and you took a deep breath.

“Let go of me, Rafe,” you quietly said.

You were relieved when he listened, almost convinced that he wouldn’t, and you touched your arm with a step back. You studied his face, searching for what? You didn’t know, but again…Mrs. Thornton’s words would not leave your mind, and you hated the way your lips trembled.

“Do not touch me like that again.”

Your tone was even, but you were sure your eyes betrayed you because Rafe merely raised an eyebrow at you.

“Or what? You’ll send me to my room?”

Your heart sank at his mocking words and the subtle challenge in them, and despite how much nicer Rafe’s next words were, they didn’t make you any less uneasy.

“I’m just trying to do right by my dad and look after everything he left behind.”

His words seemed innocent enough, but for the first time, you allowed yourself to wonder just what that entailed exactly and what role he expected to play in this family. You didn’t want your mind to linger on something that couldn’t be true, and so you left him without another word.

The feel of a hand shaking your shoulder is what pulled you from sleep, and it took you a long time to peel your eyes open. Doing so felt difficult for some reason, and when you exhaled—smelling the wine on your breath—you realized why. Rafe’s face was the one that met you, and you immediately squeezed your eyes shut.

“Y/N,” he gently said. “It’s late.”

As he said this, you realized that you were on the couch, and it didn’t take you long to surmise that you’d fallen asleep there. You didn’t want to move, but you also didn’t want to spend the rest of the night on the couch, knowing you’d regret it the moment you stood up in the morning. Just when you were about to mumble to Rafe to leave you be, you heard him sigh before feeling his arms slide underneath you.

In an effort to keep from falling, you quickly held onto him.

“Rafe,” you mumbled, disapproving.

“Wheezie has friends coming over in the morning,” you were barely able to make out. “I don’t think their moms would appreciate stumbling upon you asleep and hungover on the couch.”

He chuckled to himself as he climbed the stairs.

“They already don’t like you…”

You merely hummed at that, and you were relieved when you felt yourself being deposited onto the bed. Rafe was saying something else to you, but none of it registered as you sought out sleep once again. Your intentions were interrupted though when you felt a hand on your face, and even in your inebriated state, you knew it didn’t feel right. Forcing your eyes open, you struggled to push Rafe’s hand away.

“I just want to make sure you don’t throw up in your sleep,” he mumbled when your eyes blearily met his. “Is that okay?”

You drunkenly blinked at him, lips trembling.

“Why don’t you call me ‘mom’?”

Your question was whispered, voice shaky, and as much as you wanted him out of your bedroom, you also wanted him to answer the question. The house was quiet, both Wheezie and Sarah asleep, and the only light was that of the light in the hall. You didn’t take your eyes off of Rafe as you waited for him to answer no matter how much you wanted to.

In the low lighting, you could see the way his dirty blond hair hung onto his forehead, the light glinting off of his blue eyes.

“I never have,” was his response.

“Well, maybe you should,” you forced out. “I don’t want you saying my name anymore.”

You didn’t miss the way his nostrils flared at that.

“Why not?”

“…because I don’t like it,” you confessed, tears kissing your eyes. “Not anymore.”

His face fell a bit at the way your voice cracked, and when he reached for you again, you hurriedly sat up.

The silence was loud as you just stared at each other, something unspoken passing between you. You felt like you wanted to crawl out of your own skin whenever he so much as looked at you, now, thoughts running wild with what you prayed to be untrue. His stony expression told you that they weren’t, that he’d been found out, and in your drunken state, you couldn’t stop your tears from spilling over.

When he reached for you again, it startled you right off of the bed.

The night stand shook as you fell against it, and you cried out in pain just as Rafe cursed. You didn’t want his help, but that didn’t mean that you didn’t need it as he hurried to reach you. The feel of his hands on you burned and not in a good way, causing you to flinch away from his touch. That didn’t deter him though, and his grip was tight as he kept you in place, his other hand reaching for your head.

“Did you hit your head? Are you-?”

“Don’t touch me,” you hissed, shoving at his chest, and Rafe grew quiet.

The only sound for a while was your soft sobs, and Rafe’s refusal to leave you alone kept him kneeling before you. When you tried to stand up, he ignored your protests, reaching out and helping you. You swayed, and Rafe kept you close much to your chagrin. You wanted him gone as soon as possible, so you were quick to sit back down, but Rafe didn’t let your waist or your hand go.

Swooping down, he captured your lips in a kiss.

You wanted to gag.

His hand was almost painfully twisted around yours, making you wince, and every attempt to scoot back was only met with the resistance of his hand on your waist. Your stomach churned as he moved his mouth against yours, wanting to be sick at the feel of him kissing you on the same bed where Ward used to sleep. When his fingers dipped beneath your shirt, you bit him.

Hard.

You took the moment to remove yourself as he cried out, hurrying towards the bathroom and locking yourself inside. That awful sick feeling wasn’t as hollow as you thought, your knees hitting the floor almost as soon as you made it inside, head bent in the toilet. You couldn’t stop crying as you emptied your stomach, throat scratchy from the alcohol that was coming back up.

When you were able to catch your breath, you were shaking. You could still feel Rafe’s lips on yours, and on top of everything else you were forced to deal with in the months following your husband’s death, this was the last thing you’d ever anticipated.

You’d slept on the bathroom floor that night, refusing to leave and face Rafe. If Sarah and Wheezie noticed the tension between the two of you, they didn’t comment on it or at the very least, not to you. The knowledge that Rafe wanted to take Ward’s place in every facet of the household made you sick, and while neither of you mentioned that night, it also felt clear between the two of you that it wouldn’t be ignored forever.

You wanted him out of the house.

…but that wasn’t your place, was it? Rafe had more of a right to all of this way more than you did, and you couldn’t be the one to leave. Rafe may have been nineteen and an adult in the eyes of the law, but no matter how much of a 180 he’d done, you couldn’t trust him to properly raise Wheezie and Sarah. Especially now that you knew his 180 had less to do with just wanting to be a better person or more about taking on the role Ward had played in every way.

You shuddered at the thought, and oddly enough, this tempted you to drink yourself into a stupor more than Ward’s death ever did.

You and Rafe were ten years apart, so seeing him like a son had always been hard at times, but it didn’t stop you from treating him like one in the years that you’d been with his father. You’d liked to think that the sentiment was returned, and maybe at one time it had been, and maybe after Ward’s death things just…changed.

Was this your fault?

Had you dropped the ball so hard that he couldn’t even bring himself to see you as a parental figure anymore? Did he stop trying to respect you as one or…? Or did it have to do with how much he’d had to take care of you? You didn’t treat him any different, talk to him any different, so maybe you hadn’t done anything to change his perception of you.

Even if you had…what could you possibly have done to make him see you as a potential partner?

As if your nights weren’t bad enough—haunted by memories of Ward and that day you’d been told he was dead—you were now also kept awake by the knowledge that your stepson very much wanted to fill the void left by his father. And maybe if Rafe were anyone else, you could’ve talked about this, tried to sort through this, but Rafe was Rafe, and you reminded yourself that the Rafe you were accustomed to had only disappeared less than six months ago.

…and you’d seen hints of him just peeking from below the surface.

You resisted the urge to drink these days, positive that one sip would have you spiraling. You didn’t know how to cope with this new development, but you knew it couldn’t be that way. It didn’t go unnoticed that the night Rafe kissed you, you’d been drunk out of your mind, completely vulnerable to him. You also couldn’t bring yourself to take anymore sleeping pills, recalling Sarah’s words that day as she’d told Rafe that you were depressed…not tired.

She was right.

…and so despite the difficulty, you forced yourself to try and sleep without medication night after night. It was hard for several reasons, the most pressing of which being the unnerving presence of the nineteen-year-old just down the hall. It made it hard to find sleep most nights, and on the nights in which you did, you still do so with only maybe four hours to your name.

It was noticeable.

“I can stay and help, you know. It’s just John B., and he’ll understand why I’m late,” Sarah offered.

You could see by the look on her face that she was worried about you, and despite your attempt, you knew that your reassuring smile didn’t convince her.

“Sarah, it’s a Saturday night,” you told her. “I’m not going to make you stay and help me clean the kitchen, especially when you helped me cook and stayed for dinner.”

She looked like she wanted to argue but decided against it.

“Yeah, I’m glad I did.”

Her tone told you that she was feeling bad about the other dinners she’d skipped out on, and you were proven right.

“I’m sorry about not staying for all the others and…basically avoiding you,” she quietly apologized. “It’s just that Ward cared about you a lot, and when I’m around you, it’s easy to see why…and it just makes me think about him.”

You only exhaled at that, letting out a small chuckle as you washed the dishes.

“You don’t have to apologize, Sarah. I get it,” you whispered, pausing. “I miss him too.”

“Yeah, well, he’s an asshole, but Rafe was kind of right in confronting me over my behavior.”

The mention of Rafe had your hairs standing on end, and you swallowed down a sigh, still unsure what you were going to do about the blond.

“There were better ways for him to get his point across…”

Sarah only found that funny, softly laughing to herself.

“Yeah, but he wouldn’t be Rafe if he didn’t be rude about it, so,” she trailed off, pushing away from the counter. “I’ll be back before 1.”

You hummed at that, letting her know that was okay, and it was only ten minutes later that you were alone. Wheezie went to a sleepover just after dinner, and Rafe hadn’t been home all day. Before where that would have concerned you, now you could only be relieved to get some reprieve from the oldest Cameron. God knows that you needed the space to think.

Going over every scenario in your mind, the best one seemed to be to hope that it would just go away. You didn’t want to find yourself in some sort of legal battle if you even attempted to kick Rafe out and basically bar him from his own home. Legality of it all aside, it just wasn’t morally right. This was where he grew up, his safe space, and you couldn’t even pretend to feel comfortable at the thought.

The other option just wasn’t even an option. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t just pack up and abandon Wheezie and Sarah. Never mind the fact that you’d been in their lives for three years now, but now more than ever they needed stability. Their father only just died, and what kind of person would you be if you decided you just didn’t want to be responsible for them anymore? Allowing Rafe to run you off wasn’t an option.

Besides, there was a tiny and terrifying voice in the back of your head anyway that said he wouldn’t even let you.

It was an hour later that you found yourself in bed after cleaning the kitchen and taking a bath. You needed the soak, needed to do whatever you could to relax you. It wasn’t even ten o’clock, but considering how hard sleep was for you to find lately, you figured there was no harm in letting your head hit the pillow early.

Maybe you could trick your body into going to sleep at a decent time.

The minutes dragged on and were made to feel like hours, but the silence of the house and the fact that you were alone did more wonders than you thought. You could feel your eyelids becoming heavy, and what little sounds you could make out from outside slowly started to fade. The last thing you recalled was your body feeling heavier…

…and then you were standing in front of Shoupe, and he was telling you that Ward was dead, and you couldn’t even stand on your feet anymore.

You sat up with a gasp, struggling to breathe, and by the way your vision blurred, you knew that you’d been crying in your sleep. There was a voice in your ear shushing you, and despite the fact that you knew who the hands on your arms belonged to, your mind was too preoccupied with painful memories to fully register it.

Rafe pulled you against him, holding you to him as you sobbed, thinking to yourself that it had been a few weeks since you’d had a really bad reaction. You shook in his hold, head bowed as you wailed, and you were momentarily grateful that the house was empty. The blond rocked you, forcing you to press your face into the crook of his neck, and it was only then that you registered the smell of alcohol.

Before you could gather yourself to ask Rafe where he’d been, his hands were clumsily grasping at your face.

You sharply inhaled when he kissed you…again. You could taste the alcohol on his tongue, and you were so distraught that it took you too long to realize what was happening. The kiss was hungry, Rafe tasting the inside of your mouth and kissing you in a way that might’ve taken your breath away under different circumstances.

As it were, you could only register that you were being kissed by your deceased husband’s son again. It made your stomach twist uncomfortably, and your efforts to reach up and pull his hands away from your face were futile. You made a noise of protest, attempting to lean away, but he ignored it. Even when you bit at him like before, he ignored it.

With horror, you realized that Rafe wasn’t stopping it.

Panic began to set in, and when you shoved at his chest, he quickly reached to close his hand around your wrist. At the same time, he leaned into you more, forcing you back, and you didn’t put your hand down in time to prevent that. With him now on top of you, your heart was threatening to leap from your chest.

“Rafe,” you gasped when he pulled away. “Rafe, stop!”

Your voice came out panicked and shrill, but instead of listening to you, the sounds were only joined by that of your shorts ripping.

“He would want me to look after you,” he drunkenly murmured, making your stomach drop.

You both fought for the right to your shirt, you trying to keep it on and Rafe trying to take it off. You felt like you were on the verge of a panic attack, telling yourself that this wasn’t happening. In the worst way possible, you discovered that Rafe was much stronger than he looked, feeling like you got the wind knocked out of you when he roughly shoved you down after your attempt to sit up.

You could hear yourself crying, and you knew that Rafe could too.

With a hand tightly snaking around your throat, his other fumbled to get his own pants off. Focused on trying to breathe, you reached up to pull at his hand. You could hear a ringing in your ears, and your chest felt tighter than it did when you first woke up from your nightmare. His lower half was pinning you down, and the blood you could feel yourself drawing on his hand and arm didn’t slow him down.

He was shushing you when you felt his skin against yours, and one of your hands twisted into his shirt as he started to push himself into you. The feel had your feet stretching, and you let out a choked sound despite the pressure on your throat. He was torturously slow in stretching you out around him, and with every further push of his hips, you clawed at his shirt some more.

He only let your neck go when his hips were firmly pressed against yours.

As you coughed and wheezed, he reached behind his head to pull the fabric off, tossing it somewhere without a car. The moment his chest was bare, he reached for you again despite your difficulty to breathe, and his lips covered yours in another kiss. You didn’t even have time to register the kiss because he was thrusting into you with abandon. His hips were wildly snapping against yours, and you gasped into his mouth.

Rafe searched for your hands, threading his fingers through your own and pinning it against the bed next to your head. His other hand was digging into your hips, kipping them in place as he fucked you. You struggled to catch your breath, sharply inhaling and gasping with every thrust. The stretch was unfamiliar, and your mind spun with the fact that you hadn’t experienced this in months and also who it was with.

When Rafe pulled his lips away from yours, you let out a sob, and he gently shushed you, curving his hips into yours.

“Let me take care of you,” he murmured in the darkness. “It’s okay.”

You had so much you wanted to scream and shout at the blond, but you couldn’t even find the words. With every feeling of his cock sliding against your walls, your eyes rolled. His head fell next to yours, his heavy breathing in your ear as he pinned you down with his entire body. You weren’t able to move, only forced to lie beneath him and feel what he was doing to you.

He grunted in your ear with a particularly hard thrust, and you let out a yelp.

Just then, you heard the door open downstairs, and hearing it too, Rafe stopped. He was quick to cover your mouth with a hand, and he was completely still as you heard who you surmised was Sarah coming up the stairs. Your heart was so heavy in your chest, and it was all you could hear in your ears.

When she made it to the hallway, she stopped.

“Y/N, are you asleep?” she called.

At that, Rafe pressed down harder on both your mouth and you, and after a few moments, you heard the younger girl sigh. When the sound of her room door shutting reached your ears, Rafe kept his hand on your mouth, but he felt compelled to keep fucking you.

He was slow in doing so, now, and you squeezed your eyes shut.

He slowly dragged his cock in and out of you, pulling his hips back until just the tip remained—sometimes pulling out completely—before pushing back in and making your chest arch up into his. He quietly told you that it was okay, softly groaning as you unintentionally squeezed him. Rafe’s lips brushed against your neck and jaw, and now that the two of you were no longer alone, the room was deathly quiet.

So quiet that you could hear the sound of his cock plunging into you.

It was a sound that embarrassed you, a sound that made you want to cry. Rafe’s arms trembled as he fought to keep himself from just relaxing on top of you completely, and you didn’t have the heart to tell him that if he uncovered your mouth, you wouldn’t even scream. You would be too ashamed to let anyone know what Rafe Cameron was doing to you.

With his lips at your neck, you could feel them move as he talked.

“My dad’s gone…”

The mention of Ward in this moment made more tears spill over, and when he slowly removed his hand, you let out a shaky breath as you silently cried. Lifting his head, Rafe’s gaze found yours, his hips still slowly pushing against yours.

“…and I know that it’s killing you, but…”

He swallowed, looking between your eyes.

“…but you have me, now,” you let out a soft cry at that. “You do, and I’m…I’m going to take care of you.”

His hand reached up to touch your face, the tips of his fingers grazing your wet cheek. You shook your head, feeling like you were going to be sick, and Rafe only shushed you. His lips followed yours as you attempted to turn your head away, and you could taste your tears in the kiss.

“I’ve got the business…I’ve got the family ring…” his lips moved against yours as he spoke into the kiss. “…and I’ve got you.”

#rafe cameron x reader #rafe cameron #dark!rafe cameron #dark!rafe cameron x reader #rafe cameron fanfiction #rafe cameron imagine #obx #outer banks #obx fanfiction #obx imagine #outer banks fanfiction #outer banks imagine