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hopelesslyromanticshark · 2 months

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hiii can I request a Percy x Zeus!gf hcs!!? but don’t focus on how they’re so powerful together in combat and stuff and more on how they chill

⋆⭒˚.⋆ percy jackson x daughter of zeus! reader hcs

content: percy jackson x daughter of zeus! reader hcs warning: language but i think that's it as per usual author's note: kicked my butt, this one here. idk why, zeus is always so hard fr. like something about his bitch ass be setting me off. making it hard to write and shit. go suck a dick bro fr.

KING AND QUEEN OF UNOFFICAL SLEEPOVERS

just a girl in need of a nap with her bf who just wants to make her happy fr

each others cabins become like a second home quickly, since you both got hella lonely when your siblings weren't there

"hey, do you have my left shoe in your cabin?"

"the blue one or the white one? actually, i think the white one is your right shoe-"

also, this man has so much beef with your father, how he hasn't gotten smited yet no one knows

(if zeus so much as thinks about laying a hand on percy, you'll take olympus down yourself, brick by fucking brick)

percy fr be making offerings like 'dear all mighty zeus, may your daughter's ass and tits look stunning tomorrow, like usual. amen and hallelujah.'

does he get shocked by every door handle he touches? yes

is it worth it? more than you can imagine

once you and percy started dating, all of his clothes were instantly yours.

he's since stopped asking if the shirt is his bc like...it's his without a doubt

"i need that back by friday. school spirit days or something."

"ummm this is my shirt??" you reply, your face scrunching up in confusion

percy reaches into the shirt and produces the tag, which his initials are there in thick black pen

"yeah, p and j. uh- oh! property...of...uh jupiter like uh zeus...yeah."

percy just rolls his eyes and walks away

the shirt was folded at the end of his bed by thursday evening obvi

also, i just know you start spending so much time in the poseidon cabin bc the zeus cabin is creepy as shit.

like you are constantly telling percy that you can hear hercules in the walls but he always things your joking

you are not

places is haunted as fuck, probs the doing of hades or one of his kids or something

whatever, it's just another excuse to sleep in percy's cabin.

he's a snuggle bug, i know it

but at some point in the night, he's lost a sock, he's starfish-ing over the bed and you, and has managed to shift so much in bed he's half falling off

so, it's kind of a pain in the ass but he's just so cute you can't help but love him

when he wakes up, he always moves back to your side and pulls you into his chest, smothering you with kisses.

"good morning! wake up, princess of the sky, come on!"

"go away," you huff, shoving him off you in an attempt to get more sleep but he always just comes rolling back

"nah, you're too pretty to leave alone."

"you're so annoying...annoyingly handsome," you joke, joining in with a sleepy smile

"you think i'm handsome?" percy prompts with a smirk, like you two haven't been dating for two years.

"the handsomest," you confirm, shaking your head sleepily and patting his cheek lovingly.

"wanna know what would make you even more handsome?"

"hmm?"

"letting a girl sleep in. get out of my bed if you're gonna be awake."

"your bed- bitch, this is my cabin!"

"the fuck you just call me?"

"the love of my life??"

"wrong...asshole."

"hEY!"

#postcards from covey ౨ৎ #all my love ౨ৎ #pjo #pjo fandom #percy jackon and the olympians #percy jackson #percy jackson x reader

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histarean · 9 months

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barracks bunny

könig x fem reader

summ: you're known as the barracks bunny while you and könig are dating

word count: 1.8k

content/warnings: angst, comfort

a/n: i love könig and writing angst so why not combine them? this is my first cod "fic" so i'm pretty excited! i know my account has been primarily aot but i hope this reaches the cod fandom. love you all

Rumors spread fast in the military. Everyone on the base knew that, especially you.

König and you had been together for a while now and while all the guys knew you were his, there were still whispers floating around. Whispers soon turned to stares, stares to quiet laughing and eventually, the whole base knew you as the barracks bunny.

Now, König’s not stupid, of course he heard what the other cadets were saying and to say he was not happy was an understatement. He knew he had to do something but with three warnings racked up (for beating up other soldiers who were talking shit about you) he couldn’t just fight everyone on the entire base. The next best option was to confront you about it.

His footsteps down the hall sounded like thunder and his breathing was lightning. Each step he took was filled with anger and everyone he passed could hear it. How could these people say those things about his schatz?

“You know she’s slept with half of us already?”

“She’s such a slut”

“I wonder if I’ve ever got a chance with her”

It's so cruel. His precious lover being reduced to a “slut” a “whore” a “barracks bunny” it was all too much. König was trained to keep cool during battle, to withstand weeks of torture, to take stabs to the chest and bullets in the leg but this? No. This was unacceptable.

He’s closer to your room now. Closer to finding out the truth and his thoughts are racing. What if it is true? Has this whole relationship been a sham? Rumors don't come from nowhere, there has to be some validity behind it. He hopes it’s not true. He really, really does because what would be left for him without you? What would he be fighting for?

König stands outside your door. Just standing. His hand is on the doorknob but he can’t bring himself to open it. He can hear you laughing on the other side with someone else. So it was true. König could feel his heart break and shatter into a million pieces. The already faint talking started sounding like gibberish as he slowly let his hand fall from the door to his side. It felt like time had stopped and everything around him faded away into oblivion. Maybe he had been there for 30 seconds, a minute, 5 minutes, who could say. Nothing mattered anymore.

Thoughts of leaving KorTac crossed his mind since..what was left for him here? You had lied to him. You promised it was all a joke and nothing happened. That you were his one and only.

The trance was suddenly broken when the door opened and a hand pressed against his chest.

“König, what are you doing?” your familiar voice brought him to his senses.

He couldn’t look you in the eyes. His head bowed, eyes settling on the ground.

You tried shaking his arm but he barely budged.

So tense, you thought.

“Hey talk to me big guy” you brought your fingers to his chin lifting his head. It’s a reach. “Please”

König let you lift his head but averted his gaze to the room in front of him. It was Ghost.

Ghost was the one in your room. Why him of all people?

“You lied to me” , his accent thick.

He felt betrayed. His only love had gone behind his back and stabbed him in the heart. This hurt more than any wound he’d ever had. Bullet holes were nothing compared to this. No knife could cut deep enough to produce the same pain he was feeling.

“When were you going to tell me? That there were others in your life” he struggled to get the words out of his mouth.

“What are you talking about?” you were audibly confused. “Is this about those rumors you’ve heard? I told you they were all fake”

König mustered up the courage to look you in the face. You were so beautiful. Even though he was angry, he couldn’t get enough of you. He could look at you forever if he wanted. Your eyes seemed to suck him in like a black hole. Once you’re in, you can’t get back out. No matter how hard you try. No matter how hard he tried.

But past all that, he couldn’t find a hint of deception in your face. You looked genuinely lost.

“Why is Ghost in your room?” König glanced up to him.

Ghost wasn’t doing anything. Not hurriedly pulling up his pants, not putting his shirt back on, nothing that would point to them being interrupted. He was calmly sitting on a chair, observing a rifle. Fully clothed, mask and all. You, on the other hand, were still dressed in cargo pants and a creme tank top that hugged your chest. So what the hell were you two doing?

“He was showing me how to load ammo more efficiently” you turned back to Ghost, he was completely unbothered. Not even looking up.

Everyone knew you had a hard time loading ammo quickly and were often stuck using knives and other weapons in place of guns. Price was even close to discharging you because of this.

Lovers quarrel, he thought. It was a ridiculous argument and Ghost wanted no part of it. He got up to leave, tossing your AUG on the bed. He casually walked out, ignoring a stare from König that could burn cities.

“Good luck” he whispered to you, passing the door and disappearing into the hallway.

Now you are alone. With König. This would usually be ideal but now it was scary. You know he would never ever lay a hand on you but maybe it was different this time? You hadn’t done anything but he didn’t know that. All he knew was another man was in your room while he wasn’t. This would make anyone angry. The whole situation was just a huge misunderstanding.

“I don’t want to have this conversation in the doorway. Can you please come in?” you reached for his arm but he pulled away before you could touch him.

You were dirty to him. Tainted. He was aware you weren’t a virgin before you met him, but when you’re in a relationship, sex is sacred. At least to König.

He walked in the room first, scanning it for any disturbances or abnormalities. None. There wasn’t anything out of place: sheets tucked tightly under the corners of the bed, clothes hung up in the small closet, everything was in order.

He took a seat on the same chair Ghost was occupying minutes earlier. It was still warm. You sat on the bed facing across from him. König’s leg was bouncing so fast it made the chair shake and his hands were fidgeting with themselves.

You slowly got up and kneeled down in front of him, taking his hands in yours. He looked down at your interlocked fingers then to your eyes. You looked sad. He never wanted to make you feel this way but what you did was unforgivable.

“Believe me König, I would never do anything to hurt you” you had a slight smile on your face, trying to comfort him.

He didn’t smile back. What he needed was the truth. Where the rumors were coming from, why you got weird stares, and how long this has been going on. If you couldn't tell him, or if he thought you were lying, he might just have to end this. He doesn’t want to but how can he be with a liar, a cheater, someone unfaithful.

“Tell me everything,” he said in a deep voice. Eyes fixated on you, unmoving.

“There is no everything, König. Just stupid boys trying to start something out of nothing” you explained, “I promise”

His leg had slowed down to a steady pace, still bouncing, but more controlled. You rubbed your thumb along his knuckles. Soothing. Like a mother’s touch. Except he could never remember his mother touching him like this. Like anything. You were the first one in his life to show any affection. Romantically or platonically.

“Do you promise?” he squeezed your hands.

Please don’t lie to me schatz. You’re all I have.

“I promise”

That’s all König needed to hear. He wrapped his arms around you in a tight hug. It was awkward. He wasn’t used to hugging people. It was suffocating but warm. His large frame surrounding your small body made you feel at home. He was your home. And you were his.

“Ich liebe dich Engel. Bitte bleib für immer bei mir” he muttered into your neck.

“Ich liebe dich auch” you replied through broken German.

He had taught you some of his native tongue when you had spare time. Simple phrases like “I love you” “cuddle me” “please” and so on. You wrote down all the things he taught you in a little notebook and often referred back to them when you had the chance. In your opinion, it was a pointless language with long words that made no sense and unnecessary diacritics, but you’d do anything for your king.

You held each other for a while, slightly rocking back and forth. He breathed in the scent of your hair and you rubbed his back, stopping for a moment then continuing.

You felt your body begin to lift, feet dangling in the air. You wrapped your legs around König’s waist for support as he carried you to the bed. He slowly lays you down, stepping back for a minute.

“Aren’t you coming?” you patted the space next to you.

Of course König was coming, he just didn’t want to hurt you. Lying down directly on top you would surely suffocate you and he couldn’t do that to his little Maus. You were so small compared to him, so fragile. He’d seen you kill countless men, but in his eyes you were still his delicate Blume.

“Yes my dear, I need to know you are comfortable though” he looked down at you.

Your safety and needs always came before his. In the bedroom, on the battlefield, and anywhere else you might be. You were his whole world and he wanted to make sure you knew that. You did. He told you everyday. Constantly showering you with compliments and praises.

“I am”

König’s gentle climbing in next to you, careful not to crush you. He lays on his side as you snuggle into him, face in his chest. So warm. You could hear his heartbeat, such a steady and comforting sound. A slight smile forms on his lips as he wraps you in his arms engulfing your torso. You stayed there for what felt like forever, savoring this sweet moment. Who knows how many more of these you would get. Your jobs were dangerous to say the least. Living to see another day was a gift, not a promise. But being with him made it all worth it. He’s the love of your life. You would never want to be with anyone else. Only him.

“You are everything to me, Meine Liebe” he whispered, pressing a kiss to the top of your head.

His Liebe. Forever and always.

#konig x reader #konig x fem reader #konig x female reader #konig x you #konig fanfic #cod mw2 #cod fanfic #konig cod #konig call of duty #konig mw2 #konig #call of duty #call of duty fanfic #konig imagine #konig angst #konig comfort #konig fanfiction

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damazcuz · 2 months

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I don't think people responding to the scrambled "uh oh, we got caught" Tumblr AI announcement with "just nightshade and glaze all the art you post guys! it's your own fault if you don't do that small step! It's ok we'll get through this!" are Getting It:

Everything has already been scraped, including the account you haven't been able to access since 2015. Yes even the private, locked sideblogs of all your old art. Did you glaze it? did you nightshade it? in 2015? can you log in and check? no? Opted in.

This also includes any writing, creative or otherwise, posted to Tumblr. Did you nightshade the poetry and fanfiction you posted to Tumblr on your old account in 2018? why not? not a plan-aheader huh? Opted in!

It's opt in by default and by design. People who left Tumblr ages ago will likely not hear about this and won't know to regain account access and opt out. People who have died won't be able to log in and opt out. People who deleted past accounts or sideblogs won't be able to log in and opt out. People whose content is reposted here from Pixiv or other external sources by unrelated third parties won't have any way to say "hey half of that blog is MY stuff. Opt ME out."

Sorry. They just have everything ever put on the site. And you didn't opt out in 2015 when you lost access to your login email, so it's included. This is on purpose because they don't WANT people to be able to opt out, they want people to stay opted in saying "well my art sucks so I'm poisoning the data model 👍" while posting jokes and creative writing, they WANT you to say "well I'm unaffected" and keep posting photos and text and stuff. Midjourney wants that and Tumblr wants to do anything it can to satisfy Midjourney and scrape some cash out of that deal.

I'm sorry because I love this place too, but genuinely the decisions being made here are business decisions being put into place by a company trying to squeeze the last drops of blood out of a stone. Tumblr is not your friend. Staff is not your friend. Automattic is not your friend. The CEO has hopefully PROVEN he is not anyone's friend. This is a business first and a product that they are selling, not to you and me, but to advertisers and partners. Tumblr will ensure that Tumblr users see their ads and supply them data.

Frankly I do not trust this company or this website and I cannot in good faith just believe that they're going to look at my opt out checkbox and say "okay! ^_^ we will remove everything Dama has ever said or done from our AI scrape. we promise to do it!" and then actually do it. They already have the data. They can just claim that whatever is produced through machine learning based in part off of my data is unrelated, came from other sources, etc. I do not have trust in this website. I don't see how anyone could at this point.

I feel like I'm watching a trainwreck from the inside and no one wants to get out of their seats and try hopping off into the safe grassy field. Wait, they say. Let's see if the train just climbs back onto the tracks, they say. The fire and explosions are all part of the process, they say. Eventually people will stop panicking or dying and it'll be a smooth ride, they say. Just look at how bright the horizon is.

#🛤️ well frankly i hope it explodes even faster.#lawsuit save me. lawsuit. save me lawsuit.

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lebrookestore · 4 months

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sixteen | l.dh [part ii]

Pairing: Lee Donghyuck x reader

Themes: strangers to lovers, highschool! au, coming of age, lovers to exes, exes to lovers to ??, producer! donghyuck (very lightly explored), roommates! au but with a twist, second chance romance, slowburn, angst, fluff, romance, PG 15. (moodboards: i | ii)

Warnings: profanity, heavy ANGST, kissing, food, underage alcohol consumption and alcohol consumption in general, drug use, smoking (vaping, cigarettes and weed consumptions), crude humour, teenagers doing dumb shit as teenagers do, cheating, betrayal.

Word count: 21.6k

Summary: Youth is always accompanied with a fragile glimmer of hope, with you and Donghyuck viewing the world through the rosiest of glasses. But as the ephemeral days of teenage foolishness bleed into the harshness of adulthood, the rosy hue begins to diminish, and you learn that for some people, it just isn’t meant to be.

Playlist: here

Notes from brooke: here it is!! the second and final part of this fic that has taken me a whole year to write and i'm as proud of it as I am nervous to put out the rest of it here for all of you. as always, feedback would be much appreciated<3

➳ read part i here!!

vii] now.

The aroma of coffee beans being ground wafted through the air, somehow managing to brighten your foul mood. You had never been much of a morning person and could barely start your day without some form of caffeine in your system. On most days, you made your coffee at home before setting out to work, but today you wanted to treat yourself a little bit, and what better way than to put your money towards something practical?

(This was a hundred percent your attempt at trying to convince yourself the overpriced eight dollar coffee you had just ordered was worth it.)

“Iced Latte for Y/n?”

You got up from the stool you had occupied, making your way over to the counter and barista who had called for you. In another life, you would be one of those cool working ladies who managed to down americanos without flinching, but in this one you were quite content with the milky sweet goodness of a latte. You handed over the money you owed and lifted the straw to your lips, sighing in happiness as soon as the drink hit your tastebuds.

“Hey, I had placed my order…” A man's voice startled you, but it wasn’t the abruptness that caught you off guard- that was pretty typical for a busy Tuesday morning in New York- but rather the familiarity of it as it trailed off. You spun on your heel quickly, coming face to face with a rather dumbfounded looking Donghyuck.

You stared at him, lips parting in surprise at his presence there. The barista behind cleared her throat expectantly, waiting for Donghyuck to reiterate his drink order.

He snapped out of the initial shock of seeing you at that. “Right, sorry. I had asked for a caramel frappe about ten minutes ago?” Of course he still had the same order from when you were teenagers, one that was much sweeter than yours.

“Oh yes, it's ready. Sorry for the delay sir!” Her cheery voice rang out as she held out the drink.

You were still rooted to the spot in front of him.

He pressed his lips together, cocking his head to the side to silently motion towards the counter, signalling that you were currently in his way. “Uh.”

“Oh.” You stepped out of the line, feeling embarrassment quickly creep up upon you for your slowness right then. He grabbed his drink, and moved out of the way for the next person as well, stopping before you for a second, eyes lingering on your face as if trying to read your expression, gauging whether he should say something or not.

Terribly self conscious, you took another sip of the latte you held, though it did nothing to soothe your frayed nerves. He sighed softly, seemingly deciding that doing nothing was for the best, and walked away.

What were the odds of you running into him like this? You had banked on only having to see him when Yeonmi had him over, but now you realised that was incredibly naive of you, since run ins were bound to happen from time to time. It seemed that your naivety from your youth hadn’t quite run out yet.

Often, you thought about how you had been so quick to shut down his pleas to talk about things with you that one movie night, how defensive you had been from the get go. He had done his best to be cautious while approaching the topic, as if he had seen the mental caution tape you had wrapped around your heart when it came to him, but you had been so afraid.

Afraid that whatever explanation he provided you with wouldn’t be sufficient to heal the would he had inflicted. Afraid that if you even began to let him in, you’d forgive him immediately and feel pathetic about dismissing the part of you that was so angry at being left behind without so much as a goodbye.

But as you watched him walk away and to the door of the cafe, you couldn’t help but wonder why you didn’t let him speak.

Wasn’t closure something everyone wanted and deserved? You more than anyone knew this and maybe that's what you would have gotten if you hadn’t been so stubborn that night.

Your legs moved on their own, carrying you towards his departing figure. “Wait!”

He stilled, turning around slowly to make sure it was him you were talking to, which was a surprise in itself to him. You bit down on your lower lip, scrambling to find the words you needed to communicate with him.

“Do you have a few minutes?”

His gaze softened the way it used to when it came to you and he nodded. “I can make time.”

You glanced down at your watch, grateful for actually having one sitting on your wrist. In truth, you had only bought it after noting how almost everyone in your workplace wore one. It didn’t seem professional to constantly be checking your phone for the time, but you did it anyway, leaving the watch to be just another accessory you donned.

Right now, its utility made itself known. 8:00 am. “I have to be in office in an hour,” you informed him. “So I can’t stay long but….we can talk?” You mentally winced at how you ended what you had hoped to be a confident statement as a question.

“I’d like that.”

The two of you made your way to a small table in the back, sitting opposite each other. You were grateful for the window on your left, which served as a good distraction from the man in front of you. Cars whizzed by on the busy NYC streets, painting the scene in a blur of reds and yellows against the grey concrete background.

He tapped his fingers against the table periodically, the rhythm finally giving you the courage you needed to begin.

“You were right,” you said finally, desperately searching for the words to appropriately approach the topic at hand. “We do need to talk. I should have listened.”

“It’s okay, I should have approached it differently considering,” he paused, mulling over what he was about to say, not wanting to be insensitive but also not wanting to underplay the severity of what you felt. “Well, everything.”

“It’s fine.”

Clearly, this was going nowhere and was getting increasingly more uncomfortable with every passing minute. You should have just let him leave instead of heeding to your intrusive thoughts and going after him, you should have watched him walk away and bit down your tongue in regret later on in the privacy of your room.

It was as if he had sensed your trepidation and decided to put you out of your misery. “How are you?”

Small talk. Right. You could do that.

“Good, good,” you had no idea why you said it twice. “Mostly just busy with work and you know, adulting. You?”

“Pretty much the same, work.” He smiled softly at you, and you wondered how he somehow still made that feel like a reward for you, how something as simple as that could have a deceitful warmth bubbling in the pit of your stomach. “I have to get to the studio in a bit.”

“Studio?”

“I’m a music producer,” he clarified, and the conversation was almost too reminiscent of his date with Yeonmi, except a little more meaningful this time. A certain sense of shyness washed over him at telling you what he did for work, because although he was extremely proud of his job, your opinion of it mattered to him more than anyone else's ever could.

“That's amazing! Do you like, get to meet famous people?” Your reaction was genuine, just as you had always been with him. You had once been the only person he thought believed in him. He could see the fraction of joy that sparked in your expression, truly happy on hearing this news.

He chuckled and nodded, “Yeah, I do. There are a couple of them I regularly work with.” It wasn’t in his nature to brag, but the starstruck look that appeared in your eyes made it worth it for once.

“Wow,” you mumbled, fiddling with the straw in your drink. “I just work in HR.” Your life felt awfully boring in comparison to him, but then again, that was a feeling you had made your peace with a long time ago. He had always been the more interesting, more magnetic person from the two of you- or perhaps from everyone in general. A stranger could take a look at him and know that he was made to walk a path different and more vibrant than most.

An awkward silence settled after that, only succeeding in increasing your anxiety levels. Pleasantries were over, so where the hell were you supposed to go from there?

“I didn’t know Yeonmi was your roommate,” he said quietly, not looking at you. “I’m sorry for the position I’ve put you in, I promise you it wasn’t intentional.”

“I never thought it was,” you assured him. “I didn’t think it was you she was talking about either. This is just some sort of freak coincidence, I guess.” You hesitated for a moment, before deciding to not overthink anything having to do with the situation. There were so many questions left unanswered that you had no qualms with getting right to the point now that you could. “I don’t even care actually, I just want to know one thing.”

The flippancy in your voice almost made him wince. “Anything.”

“Why did you do it?”

And suddenly, Donghyuck felt as if he was back as his teenage self, staring at you through his younger self's perspective. He had been so unforgivingly impulsive at that age, and selfishly so, unable to put himself in anyone else's shoes. Of course, he had felt guilty for what he had done, to the point where he felt sick in the days that followed, but he had done it to protect himself from having to deal with your reaction to the news. News that had, back then, ruptured the little world of bliss he had cultivated with you by his side.

How could he have explained anything back then anyway? He had always hidden that part of his life from you, the constant instability and fleeting nature that it possessed. Putting it together made it sound like a bad excuse, and you definitely did not deserve that.

But he wasn’t an avoidant teenager anymore, and neither were you. What you deserved was the whole truth and nothing but that, and so he steeled himself, glancing at the clock on the wall behind you. 8:15 am. He didn’t really have much time, but he was going to do his best.

“I spent most of my childhood moving around from place to place. I think the longest I stayed in a town was two years at most, and for the longest time, I resented my mother for that.”

This was something you had waited for all your life, or at least, that was how you felt, and now you were finally going to get the explanation you had spent years trying to put together for a fickle sense of closure. Here you were, finally getting what you had spent birthday wishes and pennies down fountains for since you were sixteen, hoping and praying that it would happen for your sake. Here you were, getting it from your first love.

It was three in the morning and though the caffeine from your coffee had long since worn off, you found yourself lying in your bed wide awake. It had been a few hours of tossing and turning underneath your sheets, trying to find a position comfortable enough to succumb to sleep but evidently, seeing that you were now staring at your ceiling in frustration, had been wholly unsuccessful.

You were going to need an extra large cup of coffee to curb your inevitable grumpiness the next morning. A sigh left your lips as you threw your covers off, sitting up in your bed and taking in your room in the darkness, hoping you would feel the heaviness set in on your eyelids. When that didn’t happen, you swung your legs over the side and landed on the wooden floors, slipping your feet into your house slippers and opening your door as quietly as possible.

A glass of water should put everything right and curb your restlessness. Your optimism was admirable, if not downright stupid. The cause of your current state was fairly obvious.

So there you were, now holding an empty glass. You had finished your water, and didn’t feel any better, not wanting to go back to bed in the slightest.

Donghyuck rippled through your mind, and you shut your eyes, trying to block him out. The sight of those sad eyes of his as he explained what really happened all those years ago had been imprinted in your mind, and it had left you with nothing but contempt.

You despised the childish reasoning that consumed the entire explanation, the way it felt like everything that had happened and what you felt had been so trivial and completely avoidable if he had just spoken to you. Eight years, that was how long you had waited just for it to feel as if he had just rubbed salt in your wounds, and you hated every second of it.

What you hated most though, was the way you completely understood why he did it.

The more you thought about what he told you, you couldn’t help but empathise with him. Sure, you wouldn’t have done what he did if you were in his position, but that was the thing, wasn’t it? You had never been in his position, and it was clear that his younger years had been scattered all over the place.

How could he have known any better when he too was learning how to navigate his emotions at that age? He was a child and you couldn’t hold anything against a child now that you were an adult.

I’m sorry.

Suddenly, why those had been the last thing he ever said to you made sense. He knew what he was doing and did it anyway. The burn that you felt every time you thought about it hadn’t subsided.

Your younger self was angry at how things had turned out, pissed at being left in the dark even if you understood why. You wanted so badly to hate him for what he had done to you, but no matter how hard you tried to push yourself to do so, you just couldn’t. Instead, another emotion lied in the place you tried so hard to fill with hate, and it scared you even more.

He had hurt you to such a colossal extent, and yet that little flame inside of you refused to be put out, or even have the mercy to dim itself for your sake. It flickered back to life the moment you set eyes on him again and you knew this to be true by the effect he still had on you.

You never stopped loving Donghyuck. You only started hurting, and let the pessimistic degree of that feeling drown out everything else.

“I should have handled it better,” his frustration with himself was clear by the way he exhaled agitatedly. “I know I was a dick to you, and I’ll never forgive myself for that. If I could go back and do it all again, I’d do it very differently, but I can’t.” He sounded pained, his sorrow cutting deep into your freshly reopened wounds and making you realise that he had hurt himself in the process of doing what he did.

While you had been painstakingly stitching yourself back together after him, he had been doing the same, reaping what he had sown in your garden. He was as old as you had been, and emotions are often magnified in the melodrama of youth.

It didn’t feel like that magnification had dulled out though, the regret potent in his voice, matching your emotional state.

“But if there's anything I can do now….I’ll do it in a heartbeat.”

You were drowning, sinking rapidly below the surface as the waves thrashed around you, unrelenting and ruthless. You gripped the cup in your hands, a warm pressure building behind your eyes, making you feel even more miserable than you already were. The realisation of your present feelings overwhelmed you, and you crumbled against the counter, letting yourself lean against the cupboards as you settled on the floor.

He’d do anything for you. He said it himself.

So then…would he…?

A choked sound escaped your throat- something that sounded like a cross between a bitter laugh and a sob. You were deplorable, truly, for even letting the thought cross your mind, but god.

Would he end things with Yeonmi for your sake?

The topic of your roommate hadn’t been brought up during your chat, the two of you skirting around the topic for all you were worth. It felt like taboo, and although it was probably something worth mentioning, you were glad you hadn’t needed to deal with it just yet. You held so much love for Yeonmi, but right then she seemed like more of an obstacle than anything else.

But if she knew the truth and Donghyuck and you, wouldn’t she think the same? She had done nothing wrong, so you were the problem here. You were the obstacle you had never signed up to be.

The question sat heavy upon your tongue, and you so desperately wanted to ask it.

You couldn’t do that to your friend, you would never. She hadn’t been this happy with someone since her sorry excuse of an ex broke her spirit, and you couldn’t bear to be the one to take that away from her. You couldn’t, even if it meant that it broke you, because goddamnit you were still irrevocably in love with Lee Donghyuck.

And all you wanted to do was hate him.

viii] then.

Donghyuck’s room was much planer than yours, with just a clock hanging on one of its walls. A keyboard in one corner of the room and a guitar leaning against the side of his closet, you supposed that he hadn’t had much time to put too much thought into decorating just yet.

“You can put up posters of all those bands you keep talking about,” you suggested, running your fingers through his hair. You were sitting on his bed, leaning against the headboard with him lying in between your legs, looking up at you fondly

Your boyfriend frowned lightly, “Too much effort.”

You rolled your eyes, “You’re just lazy. I can help you, you know. We could go print the posters after school.” Your enthusiasm was endearing, but he didn’t really see a point. Nevertheless, he didn’t have the heart to shoot your ideas down and nodded noncommittally, enjoying the feeling of you absent-mindedly massaging his scalp.

“Whatever you say, pretty girl,” he said lazily. A silence settled, and although it wasn’t uncomfortable by any means, he began humming a melody.

You had heard him sing several times now, usually while he accompanied himself on guitar and his voice was just like the rest of him- captivating. It was gentle but still strong, his tone conveying the message and feel of any song he picked perfectly. He had once confessed that he would love to work in the music industry one day, no matter what the role was, but then brushed off the wish, saying that it was a shot in the dark.

To counter this, you told him that if anyone could make it, it would be him. By no means did your words shake off his doubts or uncertainty, but you could tell that the faith you had in him helped him feel better.

“What song is that?” You tilted your head, looking down at him. He shrugged.

“It isn’t one, just a tune that came to me,” it was such a simple thing, and it still somehow earned him an impressed look from you, making him laugh. “It’s not a big deal.”

“You’re the coolest person I know.”

“You’re the dorkiest.”

“Hey! Dork-? Is this the shit I get for being nice to you?” You pouted, the offence heavily lacing your voice making him laugh, and to soothe your ruffled feathers, he dropped a chaste kiss to your lips.

“A cute dork.”

His mother was out, leaving the house empty save for the two of you. The privacy was nice, much better than your house for sure, where your mother was always hovering for some reason, even though you hadn’t told your parents about your new relationship just yet. She was overprotective, and while you were definitely going to tell them, you didn’t particularly want to deal with any outbursts just yet, wanting to savour the beginning of it all and keep that joy just for yourself.

As far as you knew, Donghyuck didn’t have a father, but he had never gotten into the details. He made sure to tell you that it wasn’t because it was hard to talk about, but because there wasn’t much to say about the man anyway, since he had never known him or even met him.

You narrowed your eyes at him, trying to fake annoyance to the best of your abilities, but you weren’t and never had been immune to the butterflies he managed to set free in your stomach with that kiss, a smile slowly forming on your face. Your hands moved to his face, cupping it gently as you leaned closer.

“Sweet talk won’t get you anywhere.”

“Yeah?” His eyes sparkled with mischief, “What will then?”

“A proper kiss maybe,” you mused, matching his playfulness. He immediately took you up on your proposal, smiling into the kiss.

You were glad his mom wasn’t around.

Neither of you had ever kissed anyone before, but somehow he was still very good at it, a single touch of his igniting a pleasant buzz on the surface of your skin. Everything you knew about kissing came from books and movies, but you could only hope you had the same effect he had on you.

If you only knew. It had been a few weeks since the two of you had started dating, and he had memorised everything he could about you he possibly could- the shape of your mouth and the slope of your nose, the crinkles around your eyes when you laughed and the sound of it, he knew it all like the back of his hand. It wasn’t hard to be with you, it came to him like second nature, and part of him was convinced that everytime his mother had moved them from place to place, it was to bring him here to this moment.

To be lying in your embrace, tangled in your arms and the gentle, loving kisses you pressed to his mouth and forehead- this was the definition of bliss, and everything about it was so utterly ignorant.

“You taste like sour patch candies,” you muttered softly, looking at him through half-lidded eyes. You had quickly grown addicted to Donghyuck, deciding right then and there that you wouldn’t trade this for anything in the entire world.

“Mhm, I was eating them before you came over.”

You chuckled. “You, sir, have a problem.”

“Drama queen, you’re exaggerating a little too much. I only had a few.”

“You had an entire packet, didn’t you? No wonder it's so noticeable.” The light wash of crimson that appeared on his cheeks at being caught gave him away.

“It can’t possibly be that noticeable.”

“It wouldn’t be if you didn’t consume copious amounts of that candy.”

He simply kissed you again in retaliation, a consequence you could definitely live with and had no complaints about whatsoever. “Shut up, you know you secretly like it.”

You never had the chance to argue with that one, once again silenced by his lips against yours. He was undoubtedly right about that accusation, for you liked it almost too much. You liked everything about him too much, and for the first time you understood the typical giddiness that was portrayed in every teen movie you watched growing up.

Every school day was something to look forward to now, making it possible to spend almost every day with him. You sat on desks next to each other, sometimes listening to music together and trying not to get caught talking to each other. The teachers had definitely picked up on the fact that there was something between the two of you, considering the amount of disproving looks you had gotten sent your way for laughing a little too loud at the jokes he would crack under his breath.

Holidays were spent with you trying to finish all your homework as quickly as possible so you could hang out with him or Sakura and Chenle, making it so that every single day was bright and exciting from the moment you awoke.

“You have no proof of that,” you pointed out, sitting up straighter to be able to kiss him better, savouring the way his arm immediately slid around your waistline. He smirked, his hand slipped just under your t-shirt but staying at your waist, fingers tracing abstract shapes upon the expanse of your skin.

“You’re still kissing me, aren’t you?”

The local playground was pretty deserted after eight on Sunday evenings, mothers having taken all their babies and toddlers back home for their nightly routine. Other highschool juniors or seniors didn’t really hang out there, opting to spend their time at the small skate park on the other end of town, which made it a perfect hangout spot for you and your friends.

Chenle slipped a cigarette pack out of the pocket of his designer hoodie, along with a bright red lighter. “Does anyone want one?”

Your reaction mirrored Sakura’s, who currently wore a frown. “Since when are you a smoker?”

“Johnny hyung taught me yesterday when he invited me to hang out with the seniors,” he filled you in, and you groaned, leaning into Donghyuck’s touch. He had an arm around your shoulders as the two of you occupied the bench swing, while Chenle and Sakura were sitting on the ends of the metal slides.

“Please don’t follow in his footsteps.”

He lit one of the cigarettes, rolling his eyes. “Can you chill?”

“You do not have to smoke Chenle, you’re sixteen, not a wildly miserable forty year old divorcee. You’re doing it just because you think it's cool and because Johnny does it.” Sakura shared your view of the senior, and as hospitable and lovely as he was, you didn’t particularly support his life choices.

“That is not true,” Chenle contested, and your other friend huffed. “Johnny is a great friend.”

You shook your head in disapproval. “He’s a bad influence.”

“He’s not! He’s really cool Y/n, I swear,” He waved his cigarette around, gesturing towards your boyfriend. “Right, Donghyuck?”

His admiration for the senior boy had only grown since the day of the party. To put it plainly, he thought the absolute world of the older boy, making an effort to spark a friendship. To say that he was overjoyed when Johnny started inviting him places was an understatement, if the excited call you got from him said anything.

Donghyuck looked all too amused and nodded. “He is pretty cool.”

He got two scathing looks as a result, one from Sakura and an unimpressed stare from you, causing him to clear his throat, quickly following up. “But! That doesn’t mean you should follow his every move. You definitely shouldn’t smoke, smoking is bad.”

Now that he was back in your good graces, you kissed his cheek and looked at Chenle pointedly. “Please don’t end up like him.”

“I would love to end up like him.”

Jesus Christ. There was no saving him.

“With all the shit he pulls, he’s going to end up dead by twenty-five. Do you want to die?” He put the pack and lighter back in his pockets, brushing off Sakura’s grim statement.

“One cigarette won’t kill me.”

“Yes, but if you make smoking a habit and get addicted, it will eventually. Lung cancer is a thing, you know.” Your reminder was not taken kindly, and he groaned, taking a puff before dropping it to the ground and crushing it with his heel, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to smoke it in peace with you guys around anyway.

“You are all so boring.” He whined, glaring at Donghyuck. “And you’re a hypocrite. Didn’t Johnny teach you how to smoke too?”

Having stayed a silent observer for most of this conversation, Donghyuck seemed to momentarily scramble for his words. “Only at the party, I haven’t smoked anything since then and I don’t intend to do it casually. It was a one time thing, and it was almost two months ago.”

“Remind me to only ever smoke at Yuta hyung’s place, because you guys are too annoying.”

Sakura perked up where she was sitting, blinking rapidly. “Nakamoto Yuta?”

He nodded, smiling almost evilly at her. “Yeah, I hang out with your crush more than you do. Maybe if you didn’t have such a stick up your ass, he’d invite you too.”

“Ugh, I hope you do die.”

She had gained quite the infatuation with Yuta, having flirted with him at the party and hung out with him for quite a bit of the night. All her confidence to do so had come from the alcohol though, because she ran in the opposite direction of him at school, too nervous to go up to him and strike conversation so casually.

You snuggled closer to Donghyuck, the evening air taking a turn for chilly. You loved having him around and was overjoyed at how well he fit into your little group, getting along with them as if they were his best friends as well. Being with him was effortless, just how it should be.

“You should at least try talking to him,” you suggested, “If you don’t try, how do you know he’s just going to reject you? Didn’t he spend almost the entire party with you?”

“Easy for you to say,” she scowled, but you knew she meant no ill will and was simply joking. “You got the guy from like, the moment you met him.” Her words had you bite back a bashful smile.

“That's true,” Donghyuck quipped almost proudly, rubbing your shoulder and dropping a kiss to your temple. He noticed the way you had tucked your hands under your legs. “Are you cold? Do you want my jacket?”

“Don’t you need it?”

“I’ll be fine,” he reassured you, taking it off and draping it over your shoulders, and resuming his previous position of having his arm around them. Sakura and Chenle simultaneously pretended to gag.

“The two of you are disgustingly adorable.” She complained, and Chenle agreed.

“Yeah, you make me feel so single I want to smoke.”

The sound of Sakura hitting his arm at that comment resounded through the empty park, making you laugh. You hadn’t realised how bland your life had been before this year because now it was like the colours were brighter and much more vibrant than before, so much more interesting. This was how highschool was supposed to be, you thought to yourself as you slid your arms into the sleeves of his jacket, simple and rosy tinted, without a single worry in the world.

ix] now.

This was the tenth time Donghyuck was listening to the track.

He paused it and dragged it back to the start, playing the song once again. Something about it was off, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it just yet, subjecting himself to analyse it over and over as a result.

He shut his eyes, trying to absorb the song and search for what was not clicking for him, letting himself be consumed by the music. The melody washed over him, the powerful vocals and enticing beat soaking into his system. In his expert opinion, it was one step away from being a hit on the charts. He just had to figure out what step he had to take in order to achieve that.

Usually, he would stay and work on it until he managed to come to a solution, but for some reason all he wanted to do was go home today. He wasn’t focused on his work, as much as he loved music and what he did, for some reason today he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Maybe the thing that was off with the song was his demeanour at that moment. For all he knew, when he felt better and more motivated to work on it, it might sound ready to put out into the world without him having to change a single thing.

Donghyuck needed to clear his head. He pushed himself away from his desk and stretched his legs, walking to one of the windows of the studio and peering outside.

He loved the studio, he practically lived there half of the time, sleeping on the sofa when he stayed too late or was too tired to drive home amidst a project. Every instrument inside was precious to him, every piece of equipment important. It was filled with happy memories for him, with artists waltzing in and out of his space and entrusting him with their life’s work. Their vision collided with his artistic view, and even though his name wasn’t bedazzled in the lights and he wasn’t directly in the limelight, he had somewhat managed to make a name for himself in the industry he had always loved.

The studio was more his home than his apartment, so then why did he so want to go back to the latter at the moment?

Looking out into the streets of New York, it hit him.

It wasn’t his apartment he was yearning for, per se, but more so the idea of home. It was something he had struggled with coming to terms with for the longest time, having never stayed anywhere long enough to consider home throughout his formative years. As a default, home had never taken the form of a place or a house on a particularly named street, but instead had always been a person.

During his childhood, it had been his mother, for she was the only truly constant thing in his life back then. As his teenage years rolled around, even she started to feel alien to him. He began perceiving her as less of a home and more of the reason he didn’t have one.

And then there was another person who became his home, and she came in the form of you. You were his age and much more relatable, it was much easier to place all his hope and trust in you, especially when just being around you made him forget about all his problems. When he was with you, his life seemed to lose that intense sense of instability that always kept him on edge.

You somehow stabilised him, but he lost that stability in less than a year. In an attempt to reconcile with his guilt, he began punishing himself by changing his number and cutting you off completely, telling himself that it would help you as well. Once again, he was without a home, and his relationship with his mother was further strained.

At eighteen, he moved out to New York.

New York was his home now, the place he had stayed for the longest time. It was a place finally, somewhere he could point out with his finger and proudly say he lived in. He finished up his education, going to college and teaching himself music production on the side. He worked two part time jobs and enrolled himself in production classes.

It was hard being all alone in a city as big as New York, in an unfamiliar and cold place. The loneliness hit him hard, and that led him to calling his mother. After a year in the city, working and studying hard, he finally understood why she had done what she did while he was growing up and appreciated her for it.

He had his big break at twenty-two while working under a small record label. The song he had worked on as a producer went number one on the billboard charts, rocketing the singer from an unknown person to a household name and right under theirs, was his.

He was being praised by critics for his experimental style and the little things in the production that made the song what it was. Suddenly, he was in demand and made real, good money- amounts that he had never seen in his life. He sent half of it to his mother and could now visit her as many times in the year as he so pleased.

Every sacrifice was worth it. It had gotten to where he was standing and made him who he was.

But you being in his home now?

That made him question it. You displaced him.

New York had only started to properly feel like home when he had made it big, the big scary city not seeming so scary anymore. He finally felt like he belonged somewhere after years of lacking that.

The only time he had ever belonged to someone was when he had been with you.

When he left your town, he had left a piece of his heart behind with you, just as he had taken a piece of yours with him. He had never gotten it back, searching for it- something, someone perhaps- in the faces of strangers.

He had put all his faith in finding that in Yeonmi, a woman who reminded him of you, only to find out that she was simply influenced. He was stuck, frozen in place by a choice that seemed impossible to make. Whatever course of action he took, any option he picked, it always seemed to make him the bad guy. He couldn’t just drop her for you because things were too complicated for that, and it would in turn make you the bad guy as well, but he couldn’t keep on feeling this way while being with someone else.

Home. Donghyuck knew right then that he wasn’t yearning for his apartment, or the city itself. He was yearning for you.

Donghyuck wanted you there in his studio, in his apartment- just with him maybe would be enough. Not just wandering and brushing shoulders in the vast city that you called home as well, but by his side constantly, to once again be the home that grounded him.

The realisation washed over him, but it didn’t come as a total surprise. Part of him had always known that you were it for him, especially when he saw you for the first time again that night he dropped a drunk Yeonmi home to you. The reason he couldn’t focus was you, how badly he wanted to run back to you and ignore all the complications that came with it, right back into the arms that were his true home.

Occasionally, you would think about Sakura and Chenle.

You had long since lost contact with your highschool best friends, inevitably drifting apart from them with the course of time. Once university began, even managing to text each other turned into a chore, and the only times you saw each other or hung out was during the summer when you went back home. Once you moved to New York and started going home less, those few moments turned into nothing at all.

Nevertheless, you hadn’t forgotten about them. They had been your constants for so long, people you trusted with all your heart and soul, always running out of your house to meet them. You fondly recalled all the late night calls and sneaking out and sleepovers, complaining about examinations and school together, and spending your summers with iced teas and hanging out at the local diner. From drinking sprite to sneaking alcohol, a lot of your firsts have happened with them.

They held you together when Donghyuck left. They picked up the shattered pieces, sticking them back together the best they could with the resources they had. They were the ones that got you to smile again and eventually forget about him long enough to forget that you were trying to.

Even though you haven’t spoken to them in years, you still thought about them. You would never stop being grateful.

You also wondered how they would react if they knew what your life had come to.

The coffee you had ordered this time was hot, and you cupped the mug, letting the warmth of the drink seep through the ceramic and to your fingers. You were in what had become your regular booth in the cafe, and across from you sat none other than Donghyuck himself.

Ever since that day, an unspoken sort of agreement to at least be friends had passed between the two of you- a truce of sorts. It was only logical, considering he was technically with Yeonmi, and it meant that you would have to learn how to put everything aside for that. Oddly enough though, you never talked about your roommate, and he didn’t make an effort to bring her up either.

Sakura would have glared at you in disbelief. Chenle would be laughing his ass off in some corner.

Meeting at the cafe had turned into a ritual of sorts. You would meet him there every Tuesday before work and both of you would chat and have your drinks before parting ways. Admittedly, you had started looking forward to these little rendezvous with him, they somehow managed to make your entire week.

Really, you shouldn’t have been surprised at this. Donghyuck had always had that effect on you and clearly nothing had changed. He still made you laugh more than anyone else and left you with that warm, fuzzy feeling that made you think that anything was possible.

Yeonmi did not know about these meetings.

You had never mentioned them to her even once, and you were willing to bet that Donghyuck hadn’t either. He seemed to avoid talking about her entirely, and it seemed that he hadn’t been talking to her very much either, since your roommate had worriedly mentioned his lack of communication this past few weeks.

“He still talks to me,” she explained, eyes knit together in worry. “But not as much, you know? I can’t help but wonder if something is wrong.”

“I’m sure everything is fine.” You assured her when you were not, in fact, sure. You didn’t have the courage to ask about it anyway, and selfishly enough you didn’t particularly want to spend any of the little time you got with him talking about her.

You abhorred the way you had subconsciously turned against your friend, but it was fine because you had it under control. You could never do anything to hurt her, this was completely innocent. The two of you were just talking.

“You’ve met Lee Jieun?!” You exclaimed, eyes wide in awe. He held back a laugh at the starstruck look on your face, nodding as he stirred the sugar into his coffee.

“Yeah, she’s very sweet and extremely talented. Worked on a few tracks on her last album.”

“I bought that album,” you said, putting your mug down and clasping your hands together. “I’ve been saving up for tickets to her concert.”

His lips twitched in amusement. “I can get you some if you’d like.”

Mouth falling open, you stared at him in shock, no words leaving your lips for ten seconds straight. “If I’d like?? I would love that, my god. I’ve been a fan for four years now and she’s always my top artist on spotify every year during spotify wrapped. My most listened to song is also always hers and she’s just so-”

You faltered when you glanced at him and noticed the doting expression he wore while looking at you- the sides of his lips were just slightly upturned, eyes following your movements keenly and hanging onto every word. It had heat rise up to your face and made you self-conscious because goddamnit, that was the exact way he would look at you when you were together.

Fuck.

Your throat felt dry, and you swallowed hard, averting your eyes as you felt your cheeks burn. “I’m rambling,” you mumbled, fiddling with the teaspoon on the little place your cup sat in. “Sorry, I talk too much. I’ll shut up.”

“Don’t,” he immediately said, “I like hearing you talk.”

You blinked.

God. He really hadn’t changed at all, had he?

“R-right, uh, I just really, really love her music.” Everything about the moment threw you off. The way he was able to so skillfully grab you and plunge you back into the past you had tried so hard to run away from was jarring. It wasn’t even something that slowly crept up on you, instead clutching you by the collar and throwing you straight into it, right back into your sixteen-year-old self’s shoes.

“I can tell. I’ll do my best with those tickets.” His promise almost flew over your head entirely and you forced a smile, staring down at your coffee awkwardly. He still liked hearing you talk and your loquacious nature. Some things stayed the same no matter the course of time.

You let yourself wonder if he felt the same way about you as well, but just for a second.

There was no way you could let yourself get away with thinking about it anymore because it would strip you of any dignity you had left. Your feelings for him had only grown dormant over the years and were now being awoken from their hibernation with every minute more you spent in his invigorating presence. It was unrealistic and childish to think that he felt the same way anymore.

The lack of any mention of Yeonmi, the way he seemed to be talking to you more lately and going so far as to meet with you on a weekly basis, well, the signs were definitely there, weren’t they? You were well aware of how much of an asshole move this was from both your ends towards your oblivious roommate, but as much as you tried to, you couldn’t bring yourself to care. It was terrible, but there was nothing happening. You were allowed to enjoy these fleeting moments that when boiled down to it, meant nothing at all.

But as he smiled at your excited demeanour, looking at you like you were everything he could ever want, you couldn’t help but wish that it did.

Yeonmi stood in front of the ice cream display, scanning all the different flavours at her disposal. You stood by her side, already digging into your own ice cream and waiting patiently for her to be done.

“You’ve already chosen what you want,” you pointed out. “Do you want a second cup or something?”

She shook her head. “Not for me, for Donghyuck. I’m going to meet him later on and since he likes sweet stuff I thought I’d get him a tub.”

You paused your movements. Their meetings had grown sparse from what you had heard from her, with her having to plan most of them and him simply agreeing. It killed you a little on the inside, filling you with guilt at the suspicion that you had something to do with it.

The earnest lilt in her voice, her eagerness to please him- it reminded you so much of yourself. You disliked the way he was treating her, but you also found a sense of relief in it, and when you acknowledged that, you officially accepted that you were probably the worst friend in the universe.

“Have you chosen what you would like yet?” The teenager behind the counter asked impatiently. She looked like she would have rather been anywhere else in the world, but she was probably a highschooler who wanted some extra cash and this was the best she had gotten.

“No, sorry,” your roommate said dejectedly. “I’m not sure what he’d like.”

Deciding to put her out of her misery, you spoke up. “Can we get a tub of cookies and cream?” The girl nodded, boredly taking one of the tubs out of the freezer and sliding it across the counter, calling out its price. Yeonmi flashed you a confused look and fumbled with her purse for a few seconds, taking out a few dollar bills and handing it over.

The two of you walked out of the ice cream store, and she doubtfully looked at the tub. “What if he doesn’t like this?”

“He likes cookies and cream ice cream.”

“How would you know?”

You stopped walking and glanced at her, quickly realising you had slipped up. You tried not to take offence at the defensive nature of her tone, knowing that she had every right to be that way. She was technically his girlfriend, she should have been the one to know what flavour he would want.

So you bit down hard on your tongue when the urge to tell her that you knew him better than she ever could sprung to its tip. You were bitter at having to let that go, your ego bruising from the fact that you weren’t entitled to the position of being the one who knew him so well, even though you had everything for it.

“He told me.” You said weakly, dropping your now empty cup into one of the bins on the sidewalk.

“When?”

Eight years ago. That was the truth, but you knew very well that you couldn’t possibly tell her that after pretending you had never met him before. The edge that her voice possessed right then put you off, but you brushed it to the side, knowing deep down that she had the right. “That one movie night we had.”

She frowned. “I don’t remember talking about ice cream at all.”

“You fell asleep, remember? We spoke about it after that, just before he left.” The lie tasted sour, but not the pleasant kind of sour that is followed by a sweetness like a sour patch candy. This type of sour was persisting, the type that tainted your mouth from just its feel, spreading to your lips and the back of your neck.

“Oh.” She sounded hollow, letting the arm that held the bag containing the tub of ice cream fall limply to her side. “Okay.”

“You can tell him you picked it out.”

You knew he wouldn't believe it anyway. “Okay,” She repeated, but you could tell how miserably she truly was. Resentment filled you, but just as quickly so did pity, replacing the former in the blink of an eye.

She had finally moved on from her sorry excuse of an ex and found happiness in another man, only for him to suddenly pull away right when she was ready to give it her all. You understood that more than anyone ever could, but in a completely different sense. To her, Donghyuck was emotionally absent now. For you, he had been wholly absent, snatched away and out of your reach for so long.

Yeonmi still had the chance to hold him, if he let her. You never had that.

And then your pity for her was replaced by anger.

Donghyuck had no right to run her around in circles like he was doing. You wanted to yell at him, tell him to make a decision on whether he wanted her or not.

You didn’t want to know the answer though, because the chances of it breaking your heart were high, and you didn’t think you’d be able to handle another heartbreak at his hands. It could also remove him from your life once again, and you’d continue to be haunted, just by new memories this time around.

And just like that, you understood why he couldn’t make a decision so easily, because you couldn’t either. You wanted nothing more than for him to choose you, but it was the very last thing you would ask for, reluctant and afraid to hurt someone else in the process of healing your very own innate brokennes.

So you walked with Yeonmi back to your shared apartment and talked about insignificant things to take her mind off it all, trying to do the same for yourself.

x] then.

When a storm is coming, you can almost always tell.

It may not look like it, but intuition works in mysterious ways. That sinking feeling that stirs deep within your gut, discomfort flooding your system slowly and warning you of something bad to come. You try your best to ignore it, to pretend as if you’re overthinking and going crazy and that everything is fine. You revel in ignorant bliss and sunny days, growing all too comfortable with the stability of the everyday life you have grown accustomed to. You let yourself believe that the calm before a storm is permanent.

Donghyuck knew something was wrong the moment he walked into his house that fateful November evening, four whole months since he had first stepped foot inside it when they first moved in. He had learned the pattern of the switches, he knew the layout of the house by heart.

His mother sat on the dining table, her face buried in her hands. Usually, he would walk upstairs to his room and not bother, but this time something made him stop.

“Mom?”

She looked up at him, and he noticed just how exhausted she looked. His mother was a beautiful woman, but time had worn her down just like it did to everyone, and all the stress she was under had caused some of her black hair to turn grey. Wrinkles showed on her palms, her laugh lines had grown deeper.

“Donghyuck,” she said his name with a heavy sigh. “Come. Sit.”

On most days he had an excuse to avoid this, saying that he had homework or a project to work on, but today he complied, taking a seat next to his mother.

“How was school today?”

“Good,” he answered. She gave him an encouraging smile that was clearly forced for his sake, and clasped her hands together.

“Good, good.”

“Is….is that it?” He asked gently, suddenly not wanting to be there. It was like his body was trying to get him out of the situation, knowing something was off before his brain did. Unfortunately, some things were unavoidable and inevitable, and just like that the clouds began to darken.

She shook her head, “No, there’s something I need to talk to you about” She reached out and grabbed his hand that was on the table, squeezing it hard. “It’s important, okay?”

He nodded slowly, now trapped within the conversation with no escape. His mother exhaled and shut her eyes, dropping her head in what seemed like defeat. “I’ve been offered a job.”

“A job?”

“Yes- with a much better salary. Of course, I’m beyond blessed with the amount I get now but we’d be more comfortable, it’s a better opportunity.” She rubbed the hand of his that she held soothingly, as if trying to soften the blow she was about to give.

The waves gradually grew more turbulent, slow but definite. It was clear that she was trying to approach whatever she was trying to say with as much tact as possible, but was only succeeding in frustrating the boy with her vagueness.

“Just spit it out, Mom. What's happening?”

“We’re moving, Hyuck.”

Donghyuck sat there, stunned into a silence at what his mother had just said. Finally, she was done beating around the bushes like he had wanted, but now he wished he had let her take her time. It almost didn’t even feel real to hear, the true weightage of her words not quite registering just yet.

“What?”

His voice was devoid of any emotion, falling flat and harshly against the gentle, apologetic facade that his mother upheld. “In a few months, I know that it’s hard to hear and I’m sorry I have to uproot your life once again but I promise it’ll all be worth it I just-” She shakily exhaled, as if trying to expel all the fatigue she had accumulated over the years of switching out jobs and moving around in an attempt to create a better life for her only son. “I promise I’ll try and make this bearable and it’ll be the last time.”

If she had the choice, she would never have chosen such a turbulent lifestyle. After all, who would ever want to thrust their child into such an unstable environment- it being unstable due to its ever changing nature? But being a single mother was difficult and she had to do whatever she had to in order to survive.

The ship that Donghyuck stood upon began to rock as the storm intensified.

“It’s been less than a year,” He said icily. “Five months.”

“We’re not moving immediately. I have to finish up some work here and get everything together before we leave. Three months.” She rushed to assure him of this as if it fixed anything.

“So eight months. That’s still less than a year, Mom.”

“I know sweetheart, I’m so sorry.

Sympathy filled her expression and she squeezed his hand, trying to convey that she understood his frustration. That notion was perfectly ridiculous sounding to Donghyuck, how could she even begin to think that she understood how he would be feeling? If she did, then why was she once again ruining his life?

If she was really so sorry, she wouldn’t be doing this in the first place. He clenched his jaw, looking away from his mother and around the living room he had finally grown familiar with. Every other time this had happened he had always grinned and bore with it because there never seemed like a reason to fight back. He had grown complacent and used to the cycle, expecting it almost.

But this time he had prayed it wouldn’t be the same. This time, he had grown attached to the dusty streets of the town and the long school days. He had a favourite store, more friends than he had ever had in his life and more importantly, a favourite person. This time, it wouldn’t just be him leaving behind a bunch of acquaintances, it would mean him having to leave you behind as well.

He couldn’t bear the thought of that, his fury welling up and coming to the surface. For once in his life he had someone he wanted to stay for.

“If you’re so sorry,” he said, voice low and enraged all the same, “You won’t do this again.”

Her eyes softened, “I have to. I won’t ask you to understand, but-”

“I hate you.”

The moment he said it, he could see his mothers countenance crumble, but the sympathy in it only increased. No parent ever wanted to hear their child say those words to them and he knew that in his heart, he didn’t truly mean them, but he was just so indescribably angry with her and the world for constantly doing this to him.

It was cruel for him to say it without any hesitation, that much was certain the moment he saw tears well up in her eyes. She was a strong woman, refusing to let them escape and fall down her weary face for his sake, and he couldn’t take the sight of it any longer. Aggressively, he pushed his chair back and stormed off, bounding up the stairs of the house that would no longer be his with his heart hammering in his chest.

It was only in the comfort of his room that he let himself let out the sob that had been choking him up as he crumpled near the foot of his bed, a heavy sense of loss already passing through him. His eyes drifted to one of the walls of his room.

He had never put much thought into decorating, but there on it were three posters you had managed to convince him to put up with you, insisting that they livened the place up a little. He would have to tear them down now, just like everything else in his erratic, volatile life. Every other time was easier because there had been no bonds to sever in the process. He had let himself foolishly trust that his continued resilience was all for the happiness he had ultimately found now.

Perhaps this was why he had been so reluctant to let you help him decorate his room. Subconsciously, he had known that it would all be for naught when the nature of his life caught back up to him. Somehow he had already known that this was never meant to be anything more than temporary.

The waves capsized his ship and down Donghyuck went, sinking beneath the surface of the storm and below the storming sea, drowning in his sorrow.

You sat in the driver's seat of your father’s car, legs propped up on the seat with your cardboard container of fries balancing on your knees. Donghyuck occupied the passenger's seat, biting into his burger.

The both of you were parked in the local diners parking lot in the late evening after school. Donghyuck had said something about not feeling like going straight home, and since you had driven to school that day, you suggested taking a detour and hanging out for a little.

“I was thinking,” you started, picking out a fry and biting into it, glancing sideways at the boy who owned all of your teenage affections.

“Hmm?”

“I wanna tell my parents,” you declared finally, finishing the fry. He blinked, lowering his burger and looking at you pointedly. “About us.”

“All of a sudden? Why?” His mystification was justified since ever since the two of you had begun dating, you had been adamant on trying to hide it from them. It hadn’t been the intent initially, you simply were procrastinating their reaction- not that it would be a bad one- and as time went on, it got easier to put off. That being said, it also got harder to hide.

You shrugged, shifting in the car seat and reaching out to adjust the volume of the radio. “I just think it’s time, you know? I’ve been putting it off long enough and I want them to know about you. The smile that crept up on your face when you said that was enough to have a pit form at the bottom of his stomach.

Guilt is an ugly emotion. It manifests slowly, digging into your insides as it grows in its magnitude until it's up to your throat, depriving you of air and choking you.

Needless to say, you weren’t the only one putting off telling someone the truth.

Avoidance wasn’t something that was inherently built into his nature, but it came into play almost naturally now. He had managed to evade being around his mother as much as possible over the past week or so, ever since she had dropped the news that completely displaced his entire world. Similarly, he had been avoiding bringing up what was happening to you, telling himself that he still had some time

But the truth was, saying out loud and admitting it all to you was just too much for him. It made it feel real and not like some terrible nightmare he had been living for the past few days. He didn’t want the reality of it all to hit him just yet.

“Do you have to?”

“Kind of?” You raised an eyebrow at him in question. “We’ve been dating for almost three months now Hyuck, do you expect me to just keep it from them forever?”

He winced internally, beating himself up about how you were talking about your relationship with him. It felt wrong to let you naively talk about a supposed forever when he knew that simply wasn’t going to be the case.

Your forever was going to be quickly cut short.

“Of course not,” he mumbled, sighing softly. “I don’t know. Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

You frowned slightly, turning the volume down and putting your fries on the dashboard, giving him all your attention. “Hey, is something wrong?”

Everything was wrong. He wanted to laugh, mostly because the only other option he had was to cry and he couldn’t do that without having to expose it all. Instead though, he shook his head as nonchalantly as he possibly could, refusing to meet your eyes and instead staring at his burger. “Nope.”

You scoffed. “Oh yeah, that was definitely believable. Come on, tell me what's wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“You said you didn’t feel like going home today. Is it something to do with that?”

You were too smart for your own good. He rolled his eyes, attempting to remain lighthearted, “What if that just meant I wanted to spend more time with you?”

“Weird fucking way of putting it, then. You could have just said you wanted to hang out.”

He put his burger on the dashboard as well and turned to you, holding your gaze firmly in the hopes that it would thwart your suspicions by appearing to be sincere. “Y/n,” he said your name steadily, a slight smile playing upon his lips that from the outside looked effortless, when in reality it was the most forced he had ever been. “Nothing is wrong. Drop it.”

You bit the inside of your cheek, realising that whatever it was, he clearly wasn’t in the mood to talk about it. You could respect that. “Alright, I’ll back off.” You raised your hands to the sides of your face to mimic surrendering and earning an amused look from his end in the process.

It scared him a little bit, how you seemed to be able to look right through him without even knowing the full extent of what he was going through. He had known you for so little time- too little almost- and yet you knew him better than anyone else.

Leaving you behind was going to be the thing that hurt the most.

He leaned over and kissed you gently. “Thank you. And you’re right, you should tell your parents.” Your trusting countenance clawed at him, only worsening the sickening feeling of culpability that swirled in his gut. Maybe he’d tell you tomorrow, or the week after. Maybe he’d wait for another month so that he could gather his wits first.

If you doubted his confident facade, you didn’t let it show.

“Hey Donghyuck?”

“Hm?”

“I think I love you.”

Five little words should be entirely inconsequential, but even as young as he was, Donghyuck knew their true weightage. He knew you meant it by the credulousness in your gaze and the gentle squeeze of your hand on his.

The two of you were sitting on the roof outside your room's window, you clad in sweats and his jacket- the very same one he had given you weeks ago at the playground. You had never given it back to him. He was in casual clothing as well, having sneaked onto your room during the early hours of the morning to hang out with you.

Time with you seemed to be fleeting now, and so he clung onto every minute he got. You had your head resting on his shoulder as the sun began peeking over the town and spilling its golden rays all over the little houses and buildings, lighting them up and bringing vibrancy to the town.

Love was a complex emotion, a haphazard mishmash of several others in proportions that were unique to every occurrence it manifested itself in. Trust, admiration, infatuation and many more- they made up the feeling that everyone on the planet supposedly sought after so desperately. If it was truly so unpredictable, how did anyone know what it felt to be in love?

He sucked in a breath as seconds passed. Then, he squeezed your hand back.

“I love you too.”

xi] now.

Yeonmi was a great friend, ever ready to show her endless support for you in all your endeavours.

“Smile! And for god's sake, get a drink and lighten up. It’s all your friends here.” She slid her index finger under the strap of your dress, lifting up to its correct position on your shoulder.

You sighed and complied, flashing a smile for her sake, promising to make your way to the kitchen and do as she asked. She inspected your eye makeup one last time, pleased with how her handiwork had turned out and left your room, reminding you to hurry up and get out there.

You had gotten a promotion at work a week ago, and when you had revealed the news to her she insisted that you celebrate properly for the occasion, taking it upon herself to organise a small party at your apartment. She invited some of your friends from work and a few mutual friends of yours- not too many people in all, but since your apartment wasn’t the biggest, it was already starting to feel a little cramped.

Pulling yourself together, you left the confines of your room, finding yourself humming along to the music that she was playing. The dress you had donned was definitely not as short as the ones you had insisted on wearing during your highschool years, having opted to go for a more respectful length now that you were older, but it made you feel pretty and put-together.

Among the familiar smiles and toned down congratulations that you received, you found your eyes wandering until they met another pair that was already trained on you.

Donghyuck was there, of course he was. Yeonmi had already told you that she had asked him to attend and you had been expecting his presence.

So why then did you feel your heartbeat pick up a little, as if it had come as a surprise?

You looked away

A slow hour passed.

In your teenage years, parties had been something you had always enjoyed partaking in, but right then you felt a tad uncomfortable. You quickly deduced that this was because all those times, you had just been another partygoer, lost among the rest of the drunken crowd. Here, you were the subject of the party, the centre of attention.

People came up to congratulate you and make small talk. It struck you then, just how different your life was now from what it was back then. You were older in a different city, surrounded by people who had nothing to do with what felt like your previous life. Your old best friends, people you had thought would stick by you to the very end were not there, you were far away from your parents and were no longer a child that depended on them for everything. You had an apartment you called your own that you shared with your roommate.

The only thing- person- that had somehow belonged to both your youth and adulthood was Donghyuck.

Flushed with the alcohol that you had consumed, you excused yourself from the umpteenth conversation you'd been dragged into with some of your colleagues and made your way to the kitchen, wine glass in hand. Shutting the doors behind you, you revelled in the momentary silence.

You noticed the bottle of wine sitting on the counter and looked at your empty glass. Being the focal point of everyone's attention had never been something you particularly enjoyed and so to ease the bubbling anxiety inside of you, you walked over and poured yourself another, swirling it around and taking a good, long sip.

The sweet wine trickled down your throat, kissing it soothingly with its tart berry flavours. You were no doubt tipsy at this point, having subconsciously fallen back upon the alcohol to support you through all the socialising. You truly wished Yeonmi hadn’t been so insistent on this stupid thing, you would have been more than happy to celebrate by going out to dinner, just the two of you.

“Oh! You’re here too.”

You spun around, clutching the stem of your wine glass a little tighter and automatically leaning your back against the counter when you felt your balance slip away from you a little. Donghyuck shut the door, hesitating.

“Am…Am I intruding?”

He totally was intruding on your solitude, but you couldn’t bring yourself to care when it came to him, thus shaking your head ‘no’. “Not at all, I just needed a moment.”

“I can leave if you’d like.”

“Don’t.” And you meant it. You didn’t want him to leave and he was the only one you would willingly tolerate at that moment. He flicked the lock of the door, sealing it shut to the rest of your guests and walked over to you with his own glass. You handed him the bottle of wine.

He nodded in silent thanks. “Congratulations on your promotion, by the way.”

“Thanks,” you took a small sip of your wine, looking at him and allowing yourself to study his matured features. There was not a thing about him that didn’t explicitly shine, a being so enigmatic and beautiful that it had you in awe of him even eight years later. “Not that it’s anything exciting like your job. I just sit in a nicer office now.”

He chuckled softly. “It’s still pretty cool, you’re still pretty young for your own office, aren’t you?”

You nodded bashfully. Even though you tried to remain as modest as possible when it came to the good news, you were quite proud of yourself. “Yeah, I didn’t think I’d get so far so quickly out of college.”

Donghyuck shuffled a little closer until he was right next to you. The urge to lean into him sprung up out of nowhere, the little voice in your head telling you to do so abruptly growing stronger. You drank the rest of your wine in an attempt to drown it out, only succeeding in doing the complete opposite.

God, he smelled amazing. You could get hints of the cologne he had on, a musky scent that had hints of something citrusy in the mix- thoroughly dizzying to you. You despised how much control he had over you without even knowing it.

“I had to repeat my senior year of highschool.”

His words snapped you out of your self-induced reverie, and you cocked your head to the side in question, prompting him to continue. As of late, your little coffee dates (your mind had defaulted to calling them that, even though you knew you shouldn’t), he had begun sharing bits and pieces of his life, and you had started doing the same. However, this was quite out of the blue, piquing your curiosity.

“After we moved,” he clarified, uncertainty creeping into his voice as if he was afraid of how you would react. “I almost flunked the eleventh grade finals in my new school and barely made it to the twelfth, and then that began, I barely attended, bunking almost all my classes to hang out with this group I had somehow managed to fall into.”

He sounded regretful as he spoke and you didn’t dare interrupt. You had often speculated what he was doing after he left, while you mourned the loss of your love, you had spent countless sleepless nights tossing and turning, wondering if he was thinking about you as well.

“They were terrible influences, but at the time I couldn’t bring myself to care. I was never in class, always at one of their garages with some sort of alcohol. A lot of that year was a blur, with me being drunk almost every day. I’d leave the house in the morning and say I was going to school and take a detour. My grades fell but I never paid attention to it because of how unhappy I was.”

Your eyes stung with emotion for him, because although you had resented him so much, he was still only a kid back then. Pairing this new information with what he had told you about his flighty childhood, you couldn’t even imagine the sheer level of frustration he must have experienced with having to adapt to yet another place.

“By the end of the year, my attendance was so terrible that they couldn’t let me write the finals, nor could they let me graduate, leaving me with the option to drop out. My mother was in tears and we fought a lot when I told her about it. At first I was fine with just dropping out and giving up, but she said something that made me rethink that.”

“What did she say?” You whispered, your heart feeling as if it was in your throat. You hadn’t even realised you had moved in position, now even closer and directly in front of him.

He sighed heavily. “She told me she didn’t want me to end up like her. She wanted me to live without having to uproot every year or so, and the only way I could do that is if I didn’t give up. And that got me thinking about everything.”

His glass was empty now. “I realised I didn’t like my so-called friends, I hated what I had become and I didn’t want to continue living the way I had for so long. I thought long and hard about what my mother said and then…then I thought about you.”

Your breath caught in your throat as you held his gaze, searching his face for answers before he presented them to you.

“Me?”

He reached out, his fingers oh-so-carefully brushing against the skin of your cheek, dragging back slowly and tucking a strand of hair that had fallen into your face behind your ear, lingering there.

“Yes, you.” A wistful smile made a show on his face. “I thought about how my mother said she wanted me to graduate and push forward so I wouldn’t live the same life she created for us, and how if she had done the same thing she was begging of me, maybe-” His voice cracked, causing a jolt down your spine and your sight to blur slightly with the emergence of tears, but they didn’t fall just yet.

“-Maybe I wouldn’t have had to leave you.”

Fuck.

A single tear trickled down the apples of your cheeks, and the moment it did, his thumb wiped it away gently.

“So I agreed to the second option, which was having to repeat my senior year. I attended every class that I could, I studied and worked hard for every test. I graduated late, but I managed to do it, and then I moved to New York just before I turned nineteen.”

“Donghyuck…” you trailed off, not knowing what to say. It was clear to you now that he had to grow up a lot earlier than you had, even if it hadn’t seemed that way at first. You had a good family life and a stable, comfortable childhood. You were allowed to figure it out slowly, never being exposed to any sort of extreme turbulence that shook your world so deeply other than his leaving- and you had support through that as well in the form of your friends. Donghyuck had none of that, left all alone.

“All I wanted to say was that without you, I wouldn’t be where I am.”

“Don’t do that,” you said almost sorrowfully, “You did it yourself. I just happened to be a part of it for a little while.”

“You should have been a part of it for longer.”

He wiped the stray tears that escaped your eyes at that, knowing how much weight that statement alone held. You shut your eyes, sucking in a deep breath to try and pull yourself together, but to no avail. Quietly, you responded. “I know.”

“Don’t cry,” He whispered, tilting your face up by your chin, a fond expression gracing those gorgeous features of his, and your eyelids fluttering open to look at him, committing every single detail about them to your memory. “You look beautiful tonight, Y/n.”

The compliment stung, like needles digging into the surface of your skin roughly. You knew you were completely undeserving of it, that it should have been directed to your friend who was somewhere outside the privacy of the kitchen and yet there you were, basking in his attention like you always did in the few stolen moments you got with him.

You were quite aware that you weren’t sober and you were willing to bet that he wasn’t either. Here the two of you were once again, eight long years later at a party, alone yet together. The irony of it all was not lost on you, and you somehow knew exactly what was going to happen in the next few seconds and still you made no motion to stop it.

His lips found yours instinctively, kissing you hard. You let him, the familiarity of it all rushing back to you so quickly that it nearly knocked you off your feet. Your hands rested upon his arms as his mouth moved against yours, rendering you breathless and at his disposal. You were his, you had always been his just as he had always been yours, no matter how much time had passed or how much the two of you had changed.

If the wine had gotten you tipsy, his kiss had you downright intoxicated. You were drunk on the sensation, leaning into him to get as close as possible to take it all in. You memorised the way his thumb traced your jaw so tenderly as if you were made of glass and he was afraid to break you.

Life had somehow brought you right back to him full-circle, ending right when it had started the two of you off. Perhaps it was a cruel joke, to give you everything you had ever wanted in such a limited capacity and to simultaneously make it completely off-limits.

Eight years you had waited for this, and nothing had ever felt as liberating as it was wrong.

“We need to talk.”

It was the second time you were hearing these very words from Donghyuck’s mouth, and you were just as reluctant to comply as the first.

“No.”

He looked at you, frustration decorating the expression he had directed towards you. “We can’t keep avoiding it.”

Yeonmi had invited him over again for a movie night, but realised you had run out of coke and had volunteered to run down the store and get some more, blithely unaware of the clear tension between him and you. Then again, she had never noticed anything when it came to that, but it made your life much harder.

“I think you’re just fine at that.” God, you couldn’t even begin to explain the magnitude of your anger. He was sitting there on the other end of your couch after a week of saying nothing to you- which was mostly your fault, considering you hadn’t shown up for your little coffee date that week and had stoutly ignored any calls or texts he sent your way- but that wasn’t the point.

The point in question? The fact that despite having kissed you, he evidently hadn’t broken things off with Yeonmi.

He frowned, “What do you mean?”

Now, it wasn’t as if you wanted him to break up with her for you or anything, but rather because it was the right thing to do. Of course, this wasn’t to say that you didn’t secretly hope the former would be the reason for it, but deep down, you knew that you couldn't even indulge in that. The incident had been eating away at you ever since it happened–

– Well, what exactly had happened?

You recalled the way you broke out of his touch the moment he whispered your name against your lips and brought you back to reality. You remembered how the crash felt, the way you had been on top of the world for a few seconds before it all crumbled right at your feet, the long-growing anticipation dying out into unadulterated guilt.

You remembered thinking of Yeonmi, your sweet, supportive friend who hadn’t done a single thing to deserve what you had just done to her.

When that happened, you wordlessly left the confines of the kitchen, avoiding him for the rest of the evening. Your cheeks felt hot and you felt light headed, but you had to keep up your image until everyone had gone home. He disappeared some time after that, the reason unknown to Yeonmi, who informed you of his sudden departure.

“I mean, you’ve done a great job at completely avoiding talking about Yeonmi before, so you should have no problem avoiding talking about whatever happened between us.”

He clenched his jaw. “That's not fair and you know it.”

You did. You were too proud to admit it to his face though, refusing to let him pummel through your already shattered dignity. “Whatever.” You were still seated, staring up at him in defiance as your fingernails dug into the cushioning of the couch.

“Don’t do that, don’t shut me out again. Talk to me.”

“I shut you out because you left me, Donghyuck. I’m sorry for not letting you back in with open arms, if that's what you wanted from me.” You were terrified of this, manic at possibly having to face the music. You were so much better at running away from it all, away from him.

He sighed in retirement. “We kissed.”

Your throat felt dry. “Yeah.”

“Y/n-”

“Don’t,” you warned, feeling emotion bubble to the surface and crack into your speech against your will.

“I want to talk about it. I need you to talk about it with me.”

Stupid, perfect Donghyuck. You loathed the way that even after everything, after all this time, trouble and everything in between, he was somehow still everything you had ever wanted.

You kept your voice airy and as light as possible although your tongue felt heavier than it had ever been. “If you’d like, we can pretend like it never happened in the first place, just like we pretended we weren’t a thing.”

A thing. What a gross, unjustified oversimplification of what you had with him when you were younger, and cruel too, but you had no choice. You had spent every waking hour going over the possibilities, every outcome of the situation you had stumbled into and had come to a singular conclusion: you were going to get hurt.

Donghyuck stared at you in disbelief, getting to his feet and pacing around the room as if he was trying to create space between him and you to get away, but coming back moments later. “Don’t pin that on me. That was all you.”

A bitter laugh left you as you stood up, now face to face with him. The tension was arid, almost choking you, but his gaze had an even more adverse effect, cutting right through you like you were nothing at all and holding you accountable. He was so close to you, close enough to reach out and touch and kiss once again if you so wished.

But wishing for the unattainable was futile.

His eyes dropped to your lips. Futility be damned, you wanted another taste of what it felt like to be kissed by Lee Donghyuck already, having been stripped of that luxury without having any say in it all those years ago. Just like that, you were breathless and your thoughts scattered, the air between him and you turning electric.

God, you were so tempted to just give in and press your lips to his, but you knew you couldn’t, no matter how the way he was looking at you made you consider risking it all.

“Oh and what did you expect me to say? That it was wonderful she was dating my ex-boyfriend?”

And that's when you heard glass shatter.

You startled, taking a step away from Donghyuck immediately and your head snapping to the direction of the sound, only to find Yeonmi standing by the door.

Two broken glass bottles of coke lay near her feet, their contents spilled and pooled around her shoes. The look on her face told you everything you needed to know- the disbelief in her eyes and agape mouth, those features laced with striking betrayal. In the heat of your argument with Donghyuck, you hadn’t heard the door open, neither had you heard your roommate enter, and you were certain that she had heard that last bit.

Worse, she had seen the two of you like that. It didn’t matter how quickly you had retreated away from him.

The scene was horrific in her eyes, and you could only imagine it from her perspective. The man she was dating and her roommate, someone she trusted and considered close, looked as if they were about to kiss each other right in front of her as if she didn’t exist in the first place.

“Yeonmi– I can explain–” You scrambled to try and piece together something that sounded plausible.

“Explain what, exactly?” She asked quietly, staring at you like she had seen a ghost. You had never heard her speak with such hollowness and it scared you. “That you, the both of you, lied to me?”

You had nothing to say to that because it was completely true. Everything about this was your fault and you could relate to the betrayal that she felt right then, you understood the hurt that she undoubtedly was experiencing right then.

“It makes sense now,” she said, tears springing to her eyes as she looked from you to him. “How you knew she knew so much about you, why you suddenly distanced yourself from me when I thought things were going well.” Donghyuck exhaled, looking at the ceiling and shutting his eyes. “You never really wanted me.”

“I’m sorry, Yeonmi.”

You watched as tears made their way down your friend's face. You felt like a fraud for still referring to her as a friend when you had been anything but one to her. She opened her mouth to say something, but it seemed like her grief took over, only a choked sob leaving her.

“I never want to see you again.”

And she turned around and walked out, storming into the hallway outside your apartment. You followed her out as quickly as possible in desperation, leaving Donghyuck behind. The yellow hallway felt intimidating all of a sudden, as if it was staring you down for the sins you had committed against your roommate. “Yeonmi, wait–”

She stopped outside the elevator and turned around to face you. “Why?” Her question felt like a sharpened rod prodding at your heart, or perhaps a knife driving through you and leaving you there to bleed out. “Why did you lie to me?”

“I didn’t know what to do,” Your helplessness finally escaped you in a rush, your own tears gathering in your eyes. “I didn’t want to, I swear I never wanted to hurt you.”

This was all wrong. You had never wanted to hurt someone else, you had never wanted to spread the pain you had carried with you all these years to her and had done everything in your power to avoid doing so. You had done everything you thought was right and yet here you were, having made a mess of it all anyway.

“I never…” You trailed off, your voice failing you as your tears trickled down, stinging your skin with their heat. “I never meant for it to be like this. I’m so sorry.”

“He’s your ex.”

You nodded miserably, burying your face in your hands and pressing your palms over your eyes hard. You let your hands slide into your hair, tugging in frustration before you gathered the courage to finally look at her again.

“A long time ago. We were kids.”

“And you’re still in love with him.”

You didn’t bother answering that one because you knew it wasn’t a question, looking at your feet until your vision got blurry from all the tears, some of them dribbling down your chin and onto the thick carpet beneath your slippers, staining it a darker colour than it was. Of course you were in love with Donghyuck, but it had come in between her own falling for him and she, despite having done nothing wrong, had to suffer the consequences.

“Fuck,” she muttered, leaning against the wall. “You should have told me. I would have stopped seeing him immediately if I knew.”

This wasn’t groundbreaking news, you had inherently known this from the start. “I know.”

“If you knew, then for fucks sake, why didn’t you tell me?” Her anger was warranted in every sense and ever scenario having to do with this, the force and outrage in her tone making you visibly flinch.

“Because,” you hesitated, before deciding that hiding anything more from her wouldn’t do you any good. “Because you were happy.”

She softened slightly at that. “But you weren’t, Y/n.”

“I hadn’t seen you that happy since…” You didn’t need to finish or mention her ex, you knew she understood. “I couldn’t bring myself to take that from you.”

She took a few steps towards you, failing to portray any malice now. “You ruined it anyways, and I think this is much worse.” Pity exuded off of her while she spoke to you, but just as quickly as you felt it, it was gone, replaced by the sheer magnitude of deception she felt. “You let me experience a false sense of happiness and consequently ruined it, and I don’t think I can ever forgive you for that.”

You certainly didn’t expect her to. You didn’t even dare ask her for forgiveness, knowing that you didn’t deserve it at all.

“But I can’t blame you for loving him. And I can’t blame him for being in love with you either because I can see it. It finally makes sense now.” She sighed in defeat, wiping her tears with the back of her hand. “I hate you.”

“I know.”

“And I can’t be happy for you either, so I’m going to leave. I’ll stay over at Chaewons.”

You shook your head. “No, I should be the one who goes, you should stay at the apartment.”

“Yes, but I’m the one who deserves to have a friend to talk to, so I’m going to go.” You could tell how hard she was trying to remain calm, removing herself from the situation before she did anything stupid. She walked away from you and towards the elevator, calling it to your floor. You nodded, letting a defeated sigh escape your lungs.

“Okay. Drive safe. I’m sorry.”

“I will.” Yeonmi stepped into the elevator and faced you one last time, pressing her lips together. “I’m sorry too Y/n, because I never want to see you again either.”

xii] then.

You occupied one of the swings, humming an idle tune you had heard on the radio earlier that day while you looked through your phone. Currently, it was 7:15 p.m, fifteen minutes after Donghyuck had promised to meet you at the park. You didn’t think much of it though, since he was usually on time and would show up soon enough.

“Hey.”

Speak of the devil.

You looked up from your scrolling to see him standing there a little away from you and smiled. He seemed out of breath as if he had run all the way here and his hair was tousled from the wind that blew, biting into your exposed skin. You realised you had left his jacket at home.

“Hey you,” you hardly ever recognised the tone your cadence took on when it was directed towards him, and you couldn’t pinpoint when it switched to such transparent affection either, but you weren’t one to question such things. Your love for him was as sure as the cycle of the earth around the sun, an inevitable happenstance of fate.

“I can’t stay for long,” he informed you regretfully, walking over and occupying the swing beside yours. “I have to be home earlier today.”

“That’s okay,” you checked the time. 7:17. “How early?”

He winced, “Eight technically, but I’m sure I can stretch it till eight-thirty.”

You waved this suggestion off, shaking your head. “Nah it’s fine, I don’t want you to get in trouble. We can talk while we walk home.”

“Okay.” He followed you out of the park and onto the streets. Still being winter, the days were short and the sky was already dark, the streetlights provided the pair of you with illumination, second to the moon peeking out from behind the clouds as if it was afraid to call the sky its own before its usual time.

You reached for his hand, intertwining your fingers with his as you fell in step with him, enjoying the warmth he provided. “We can just hang out tomorrow.” The next day was a Sunday, which meant you had the entire day to yourselves if you so pleased.

His smile faltered slightly as he nodded. “Yeah, tomorrow.”

You completely missed the uncertainty coating the word and the anxiety he felt right then, pulling him along with you as you walked. Teenage foolishness was truly a fool's paradise, your blissful unawareness blessing you with a bounce in your step and a worry free mind. Donghyuck meanwhile was struggling to keep up, his guilt making it feel as if his feet were heavier than ever, the knowledge he possessed and had effectively kept from you being the cause of his misery.

So you talked about your day, the difficult question on your test that day and about Sakura’s progress with Yuta (which had been minimal at best, but you were proud of her nonetheless because at least now she could wave ‘hello’ to the boy). He listened to you chatter endlessly, the sound of your excited rambling distracting him from his troubles. There was never a moment he was bored when around you and he truly did love to listen to you talk.

He’d miss that more than anything. He’d miss you more than anything he had ever had the chance to miss.

“Oh we’re here,” you stopped outside your house and turned to him, walking right into his arms for a quick goodbye hug, planting a chaste kiss upon his lips before you pulled away. “Thanks for walking me home.”

He swallowed the lump in his throat and nodded, watching as you began walking to your door. He already missed the feeling of your skin against his, wishing he had held you for a little bit longer. Was he already forgetting the taste of your kiss, even though you were only a few feet away from him?

“Y/n?”

You stopped and looked back at him, your smile visible in your eyes. “Yeah?”

He was leaving tonight. That was why he had to be home early, because it would be the last time he ever set foot in that house. Tonight he would be gone, and you still didn’t know a damn thing. It was too late to explain. That was his own doing and now he’d simply have to live with the guilt plaguing him for what would probably be the rest of his life. Every time he thought about you, it would attack him once more and push him underwater, holding him there until he ran out of breath.

So he would have to settle for something small and manageable to quell his culpability, at least by a little.

“I’m sorry.”

He knew that it wasn’t nearly enough to make up for everything. Two meagre words couldn’t do much at all and it wasn’t capable of fixing anything either, but it was the best he could do. His heart felt heavy, and he could feel his eyes sting with tears at the sight of your confused face at this, finally letting the unhappiness he felt crack through. “I’m so sorry.”

Concern bled into your features. “For what? Hyuck, are you okay?”

Donghyuck shook his head and blinked rapidly to stop himself from crying in front of you, stuffing his hands into his pockets and taking a step back. “Yeah, I’m fine, I just– see you tomorrow.”

And with that, he walked away, leaving you to eye his figure as it sauntered down the street and disappeared around the corner. He was confusing sometimes, switching from being happy to something entirely else within seconds.

You opened the door and walked into your house as night fell.

The next day, he was late again.

Usually he would pick you up on holidays before you went anywhere, but today he was nowhere to be seen. It was noon now, and you glanced outside your window, anticipating his car to pull into your lane any moment now.

You momentarily entertained the idea of him possibly forgetting. It did seem like he had a lot on his mind as of late, so you wouldn’t blame him if he had. The only issue was that he wasn’t texting you back, nor was he answering your calls and so you decided to stop waiting around for him to show up, opting to go over to his house instead.

The sky was cloudy that day, a chill in the air that had you remembering to pull on a jacket before you set out this time, the gravel beneath your feet crunching loudly in the silence of the afternoon. Most of the town took their midday nap on a Sunday such as this one, making it seem a lot quieter than it was.

So when you walked up to his door and noticed all the lights in the house seemed to be off, you didn’t think much of it, preparing to apologise for disturbing if his mother happened to answer as you rang the bell.

No response.

You frowned, waiting a minute or so before ringing the bell again twice in succession. When nothing happened, you slipped your phone out of your pocket and clicked on his contact, holding it up to your ears. It didn’t ring at all, immediately playing a recorded message instead.

‘This contact is temporarily out of service.’

Your intuition kicked in, telling you that something was inherently very wrong. Swallowing thickly, you tried ringing the bell one last time, louder than before.

“Y/n? What are you doing here sweetheart?”

You looked over to your right to see a lady in her fifties- a friend of your mothers- standing outside the neighbouring house, wrapped up in a robe. Embarrassment at causing a disturbance flared up inside of you as you rushed to explain yourself.

“I’m sorry Aunty, I just wanted to visit my friend Donghyuck.” You gestured toward the door to aid in your explanation, earning a perplexed look from her end.

“He’s not here anymore.”

There it was again, your intuition kicking you from the inside and clawing up, dread beginning to fill you. “I–I’m not sure I understand Aunty.”

“They moved out sometime late last night, his mother had told me about it a month or so ago when she needed help fixing a hole in the wall to get her deposit back from their landlord. I had my husband help her– but that’s beside the point. They’re gone.”

The implication of the new information hadn’t quite registered yet, leaving you to stare at the lady, dumbfounded. “Gone,” you repeated under your breath. “Oh.”

“I thought you knew since you were such good friends with her son.” Friends. The word sounded bitter right then, because you had been so much more than that, but as you stood there and listened to your mothers friend talk, you wondered if you even qualified for that. Didn’t friends tell each other things?

“Is everything okay, darling?” Why didn’t he tell you?

“It must have slipped my mind. I’m sorry for disturbing you Aunty.”

She waved it off, forgiving you easily and retreating back into her house. You stared at the door.

He couldn’t have been gone- it made no sense whatsoever. Just yesterday he had been by your side and had made plans to meet with you today. Why would he have done that if he was going to leave?

I’m sorry.

His cryptic words from the day before rushed back to you and you gasped to yourself when their magnitude finally hit you, causing you to stumble back and off of the landing of the house. He did know, he knew and had blatantly lied to your face without a second thought. Your mind went into overdrive as you tried to piece what had just happened together to form a coherent set of thoughts, failing miserably at doing so.

Two things were clear: Donghyuck was gone and you had no idea where or why.

You tried calling him again, punching in his number into the dial pad almost furiously, willing him to pick up. When the same monotone message repeated itself, you cursed, accidentally dropping your phone onto the path you stood on in your frenzy.

“No, no, no, no” There was a certain manic quiver to your voice as you picked up the device, staring at his profile picture. It seemed to mock you now, the bright smile he sported in it that portrayed joy directly challenging the torrential downpour of agony that you were inflicted with, thus rendered utterly despaired.

Your boyfriend was gone, and he hadn’t bothered to tell you about it.

The boy you loved, heck, the person you adored and meant the most to you in the entire world had left you without so much as a proper goodbye, leaving you behind to wonder why. You hadn’t the faintest idea where he could have been at that moment, just knowing that he wasn’t where he had promised he’d be and where you needed him most.

Hot tears spilled out of your eyes, catching onto your eyelashes and making it hard for you to see. You didn’t bother to stand back up, the asphalt beneath your knees digging into it harshly, no doubt going to leave a few minor cuts. The amount of questions you had were innumerable, each one crashing into the other until your head was full of incomprehensible nonsense that made it spin.

It felt too normal for him to have been gone. The rest of the town functioned as normal and yet it felt as if your entire world had just been flipped upside down.

When Sakura and Chenle sat you down and asked you about what had happened when they found you sitting all alone in the park after skipping school a few days later, you left out the parts describing how you desperately tried ringing the bell a few more times afterwards. You didn’t tell them about how you had so hoped that it was an elaborate prank, nor did you go into detail about how many times you had called him, hoping and praying for him to pick up.

The days melted into weeks without Donghyuck.

You hated how it felt as if he was everywhere, having tainted all your favourite places and being the majority of your most beloved memories. You half expected him to walk out from around a corner and surprise you, taking you in his arms and kissing your forehead.

But hope is a foolish sentiment, especially hope fueled by naive teenage fallacies. The rose tinted glasses that had been worn by you for the months you had been with Donghyuck seemed to fade in their vitality, sucking out all the colour from your life until it felt as if you were left with a dull combination of greys and blue hues to paint the rest of your life with. You were missing the components that gave it warmth.

For you, Donghyuck was the sun, enigmatic, alluring and all too elusive. He was everything you could ever ask to have and yet just outside your reach, your fingertips barely brushing against it before it disappeared again. You quickly learned that you were the moon, waiting amidst the stars and hoping for those moments when both the sun and moon were painted across the same canvas of sky.

That very sky had fractured into a kaleidoscope of colours when he left, leaving you to pick up the shards of your broken heart.

xiii] now.

You stood in the doorway of what used to be Yeonmi’s room, comparing it to how you remembered it looking before. The only thing left was the bedframe and an old cupboard, the rest of the room was bare.

She had moved out a couple days after the incident, leaving you alone in the apartment. You would have to look for another roommate or simply cover her part of the rent yourself considering you could afford to now with your promotion. Still, the silence was overwhelming, reminding you constantly of how easily you had ruined a friendship.

It seemed to be one of the core themes of your life- to experience debilitating loss over and over without having any time to prepare for the same.

The doorbell rang.

Ungluing yourself from her former doorframe, you dragged yourself to the door and opened it, your eyes widening in question when it fell upon the person who stood there.

“Y/n."

Donghyuck stared back at you with those captivating eyes of his, pulling you into a trance of sorts instantaneously. You forced yourself to snap out of it.

“What are you doing here?”

He combed his fingers through his hair, evidently agitated. “I didn’t know what else to do. You won’t answer my calls and I need to talk to you, even if you don’t want to.”

You were so tired, the events that had transpired over the past few weeks crushing you beneath the weight of it all. Looking at him now, all you could do was weakly shake your head, a frantic sort of fear consuming you whole.

“No,” you said, taking a step back. “I don’t not want to talk to you, I can’t.”

“Why?”

The question made you freeze in place, your feet rooted to the flooring of your apartment. Why? After everything that had transpired, it was for some reason much too hard for you to answer although the answer was at the forefront of your thoughts and on the tip of your tongue. Truthfully, you were afraid to sound it out, knowing that you wouldn’t be able to convey it correctly.

When he left you eight years ago, you didn’t have the opportunity to talk to him. He had taken away that possibility for you without ever considering if you’d want it, and gradually you grew used to silently harbouring ache that bloomed in your ribcage.

It occurred to you then that the same was the reason he wanted to talk. Donghyuck had forced himself to cut you off in every way after he moved, following his own teenage justifications that told him it was for the best. Now, older and wiser, he knew not to repeat the misdeeds of his youth, but the very opposite notion had been instilled in you.

“Donghyuck,” you whispered his name, giving him a knowing look, one that was filled with so much sadness and despair that he could barely recognise you. Where was the ever-cheery girl he had fallen for?

Was he the cause for her disappearance?

If so, he promised himself he’d be the one to bring her back too. “Be with me.”

You gasped softly at his proposition, shaking your head furiously, “Are you insane?”

He simply nodded, taking a step closer towards you. “Yes. About you, I’ve always been insane about you.” Conviction hung onto every word, and perhaps if you were younger you would have swooned and run straight back into his arms.

You missed your naivety, for life would have been so much easier with it. It was a boon, but now you were wary for the sake of your fragile heart. You could feel your teenage wistfulness rise to the surface as if it was trying to break out of the cage you had locked it in, doing its best to claw its way out and hand the rest of the pieces of your heart over to the man who had the missing bit you had been searching for all these years without him.

But you knew better.

Instead, you shook your head, squeezing your eyes shut as if that would make him go away. “No, no, no.” It seemed to be the only word your tongue could form right then and so you repeated it over and over, clinging onto what it meant as if you were trying to convince yourself that you truly meant it. “I can’t be with you.”

“Yes, you can. You know you can.” His own desperation began to shine through, exposing his own years of heartache. He had waited so long for a moment like this. Every goddamn day since the day he had left you, he had regretted it, heartache permanently etched into his bones.

You snapped your eyes open, disbelief overtaking. “Are you serious?”

“Dead serious. Be with me.”

“We just hurt Yeonmi,” you said, your words getting caught in your throat. Then, once again, your chagrin towards him glared up as you glared. “And that was because she happened to walk in on us talking. What if she had seen us kiss? Tell me, would we even be having this conversation if she hadn’t found us?”

“I…” He frowned and you scoffed.

“Would you have ever broken it off with her?” Or would I have had to deal with our intertwined web of lies all by myself? The bitter thought lingered.

“Yes.” The answer was immediate. “If you wanted that, I would have done it.”

“Of course I wanted it!” You blurted out, your fingers curling into the palm of your hand into a fist. “But I couldn’t want it, because she was my friend, Donghyuck. Even if you had broken it off, I still couldn’t do a damn thing.”

He swallowed thickly, “I know, its fucked up, but I–”

“Yeah, fucked up. Too fucked up for me to even think about being with you.”

“But you have, haven’t you?” The question threw you off, and as if he had magically read your mind, he clarified, “You have thought about it.”

You froze, and your silence betrayed you immensely. There wasn’t a single lie you could have uttered in response that would have been convincing enough, not even to yourself.

“I can do it this time,” he said so earnestly that it broke your heart all over again, his coffee-coloured eyes pleading with you. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll never leave you again Y/n, I’m not a kid anymore. I can be here for you.” Promises fell from his mouth, sweet pledges and assurances that felt like balm to your wounded soul.

But how were you supposed to trust the very person that had given you trust issues?

How were you supposed to put those trust issues to the side and take him back with open arms without bruising your dignity any further? How were you to do it without falling apart?

Melancholy was a funny thing to have taken over you right then, self pity flooding your system, as well as pity for him. For so long, you had blamed him, but now that you took a step back and viewed your situation, you realised that you would have to do the very same thing he did so long ago.

The cyclical nature of life was pitilessly cruel, ravaging everything in its path no matter the case. It had brought you back to all you had ever known and wanted, all the while forcing you to let go, pulling the rug from under your feet without giving you the chance to find your footing. It had made him leave you and come back, only to have you walk away because of how wrong things were.

Love found in dark, twisted places was never love that was meant to be nurtured. Love emerging from lies and deceit, situations that were impossible- it was love that would forever have to be left behind, no matter how pure it might have once been.

“I can’t love you.”

“Y/n please-”

“I’ve already hurt her, and if I love you again I’m going to hurt myself as well because I–I’m always the one that's left to sit and think about you. And it fucking hurts Donghyuck, it hurts.” You couldn’t believe him when he said he’d stay, because he had told you the very same thing all those years ago. You couldn’t be with him without guilt haunting your every move when you had so severely hurt Yeonmi due to your own agony.

You didn’t even realise you had started crying, tears cascading down your face. It was all so unfair, how something that had always been advertised as being simple had been anything but for you. Love had never once ended well for you, constantly picking you up and throwing you back down subsequently without giving you a moment to breathe.

Love was supposed to be the most beautiful thing in the entire world, so why was it so goddamn ugly?

It crushed him to see you like this, so openly broken and yet guarded at the same time, your wall built up so high that he wasn’t sure he could ever break it back down again. He hated how it was him who always brought you to this point, and he tried to reach out to you to wipe away your tears, but you only flinched away from his touch.

How the hell had you ended up like this?

“Then tell me you don’t feel it.” He had to know. He needed to hear it from you.

Your lower lip quivered. “Feel what?”

God, you felt so much. Just looking at him was enough to stir up a surfeit of emotions that you hadn't the faintest clue how to handle, but one in particular overpowered the others, an ache emanating from your rib cage that was so potent, it exhausted you.

“Feel what you did when we were sixteen. Say it.”

Sixteen. You had felt so loved by another that barely understood the concept of it himself at the time, its meaning so completely untainted by the passage of time and complications that came. That innocence wasn’t to be found within you, but the remnants of it had grown and interwoven itself with what only he could bring out of you.

“I–”

“I’ll say it then, because goddamnit Y/n I love you.” The look on Donghyuck’s face ripped right through you. “I’ve always loved you, from the moment I saw you when we were teenagers. You’re the only person I’ve ever been in love with and I know you love me too.”

It fucking hurt. You couldn’t understand how the only person in the world who understood you so completely and saw right through everything you were was the one person you couldn’t let yourself be with. It was Donghyuck who used to notice even a slight switch in your mood when you were upset and it was him who would cheer you up the best he could. It was him who used to let you ramble on into the late of night and text you into the wee hours of the morning and him who now naturally gravitated towards you, just as you did to him. It was his jacket that you still had buried somewhere in your closet from all those years ago, with you unable to let go of it no matter how hard you tried.

Even now when you had only reunited for a bitterly short period of time, he was still the one who intrinsically knew every part of you. He knew you loved him still.

You inhaled sharply, noticing the red tint to the white of his eyes, realising that he too was struggling to keep himself together right then. Shaking your head slowly, you moved closer towards his figure, touching his face gently and cupping it between your palms, searching his eyes intently.

“I love you.”

He shut his eyes the moment you said it, tears slipping down and catching on your fingertips as you brushed them away.

“But even you know we can’t be together.”

The world had ripped the two of you away from each other once, and you had to trust that there was a reason for it. You knew you couldn’t let yourself go back because it was simply not meant to be with the circumstances and cards life had dealt you.

You loved Donghyuck- fuck, you loved him more than you thought was possible, and it still wasn’t enough. Neither of you could communicate through anything and shit was a hell of a lot more complicated than it was when you were just teenagers. He was right, he wasn’t a kid anymore and neither were you, but too much had happened. The timing was never right for him and you, there was always one thing or the other standing in the way, and the repercussions of everything was too much for you to simply put in the past, making the two of you something that would never work.

“I know.”

The syllables left his lips so brokenly that you instinctively had the urge to somehow fix him- whatever part of him that was fractured. The front he had been parading around, the false sense of confidence that he had pretended to have about you had finally collapsed, leaving him with a truth he hadn’t come to terms with just yet. The resignation he possessed broke you further, and you pressed your lips to his firmly, trying to mend your fragmented souls.

But it was fruitless. This was a brokenness that you would have to learn to live with until time bandaged your matching wounds, dulling it down into what would one day just be the thought of how terribly it burned.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered against his mouth. “I love you.”

Disentangling himself from you, he stepped outside of your apartment and looked at you, imagining you once again the way he had first met you.

“I love you too.”

It was ironic, how words could mean something entirely different to what they were, how seemingly unrelated sentences were connected, a confession of affection serving the same purpose as a final farewell. Goodbyes of such permanence were merciless things and so when presented with one so absolutely brutal, he couldn’t help but think about the beginning, from the very first hello that passed between him and you.

I love you. The very last time you’d ever hear it from him.

Those fragile, lovely rose tinted glasses you wore in your youth had snapped a long time ago, and you could see everything for what it was.

And now, he could too.

Time was said to heal all wounds, but only if it was a wound that was ready to be healed.

Everything about Donghyuck and you was unfinished back then, the millions of questions you had haunting your every move ever since it had so abruptly ended. For eight years that wound had been left wide open and time had only assisted in letting it fester, burying its memory deep within your psyche.

But time also brought wisdom in its stride.

You picked up the mail your new roommate had left on your coffee table, shifting through the pile until you found the envelopes with your name on them. Leaving the rest behind, you made your way to your room, sighing in relief at finally being back in your comfort space.

Sitting atop your bed, you began opening each envelope. A letter from your grandmother who refused to learn how to send you a text, a card from an aunt and a few bills- the usual collection, but one stood out from the rest. The sender's address was entirely unfamiliar to you, and you frowned lightly, carefully tearing open the top and tipping out its contents.

A soft gasp escaped your lips.

Right there on your lap lay two tickets to Lee Jieun’s upcoming concert.

As if you were afraid that they would disintegrate, you gently picked them up and inspected them, in utter disbelief at the fact that you were holding them. You had failed to get tickets of your own when you had tried and yet here you were with not one, but two of them in your grasp- and they were the expensive kind, the ones where you had access to go backstage and meet the artists as well.

For a moment you entertained the possibility of this being a mistake, but then you stopped your train of thought when it slammed head first into the only explanation as to how they had gotten here.

A small, wistful smile crept up upon you as you glanced back at the envelope, noticing a small piece of paper still inside. Taking it out, a breathless chuckle was all you managed after reading what it said.

‘Thought I’d at least keep this promise. – L.D’

Suddenly, you were taken back to that cafe where you had the conversation with Donghyuck. You hadn’t stepped foot in there since the last time you saw him- over two months ago when you knew it was over.

Sometimes, a story doesn’t have to have an ending to be finished.

You knew that a part of you would always love Donghyuck due to the ephemeral, innocent nature of the young love you had for him that had been ingrained within you. You had made your peace knowing that the two of you were something written into the world to die out eventually, something that you had to let go of even if it made no sense to you.

It was apparent that this was a love that could never truly be yours, as magnificent as it seemed it had never been yours to begin with in the first place. It was a mishmash of bad timing and rash teenage decisions mixed in with that sort of hopelessness you only found in the blissful oblivion of adolescence. You could wish and want a million things, but at the end of the day, now and then, some things were simply not meant to be.

The love between the two of you was something you were never supposed to claim, time and time again slipping through your fingers, and yet you still grieved for its loss.

But grief could be overcome. You shut your eyes, imagining his cheeky smile and fond eyes, the way he’d look at you while you were talking and all the pretty, empty promises he had made. All the talks of the future that had always been fractured for the two of you and moments of tenderness.

For once, you didn’t just picture him apologising to you over and over again, that ache having finally dulled out.

And when you opened your eyes, you didn’t feel sixteen anymore, instead you felt as if time had passed almost too quickly and reality was finally catching up. You felt older, properly this time, and much more experienced.

Donghyuck had been your first love at the tender age of sixteen, the cause of your flushed cheeks and racing heart; affectionate, shy smiles and chaste kisses underneath streetlights. He had been the torrential downpour of rain upon a stormy sea, as violent as it was beautiful. All you felt about him had only ever been intense in nature, your youthfulness unable to process them in any other way. Now, looking back, perhaps there were several things you would have done differently, and maybe some you wouldn’t have done at all.

You would remember it all, every single detail of course, but when you thought about Donghyuck, you’d think about all the good. You’d remember laughing out over him singing along to your favourite songs on the radio while aimlessly driving around town, the late night conversations you’d sneak out together to have and the ice cream you’d share on hotter summer days. You’d think about his infectious laugh and the way he always managed to make you happy, the way he’d take care of you when you were sick and kiss your forehead goodbye each and every time. How your hand would perfectly fit in his, fingers intertwined and clasped together tight, how he’d whisper the three words that you so cherished back then at the most unexpected of times. You’d remember the love that was very real and very much lost and its seemingly magical, wild nature that you doubted you’d ever find again.

You’d remember sixteen.

fin.

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mysecretlittlelibrary · 7 months

Text

Nervous

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Reader

Word Count: 3.2k

Warnings: eh none actually

Genre: fluff

Summary: You need a date to convince your mom to stop meddling in your love life; "You've got me nervous to speak // So I just won't say anything at all" - Nervous by The Neighbourhood

***

"Yes mom I'll be there, of course I will." You roll your eyes as your mother talks your ear off. You love her, obviously but man sometimes it's like she only talks to hear herself, and now she's insisting you come to some party she's having.

"Good! I have a gentleman I'd love you to meet. He's my friend Theresa's son. He's so sweet. You'll get along great I think-"

"Mom if you're trying to set me up with this guy you're wasting your time." You cut her off.

"Wasting my time? Come now y/n do you have any plans to settle down ever? It's almost like you want to be single for the rest of your life."

"That's not what it is momma." You sigh.

"Well if that's not it then why wouldn't you want to meet him? He's a wonderful man."

"I'm sure he is mom but I'm very content with the state of my dating life, I don't need your help." You say.

"The state of your dating life? You have a dating life? Wait wait do you have a boyfriend?! Y/n you have to bring him on Saturday! I have to meet the man who finally managed to get your attention!"

"Mom I didn't say-" you pause and sigh. "If I bring my boyfriend to your party will you stop trying to set me up with people?" You ask her.

"As long as he's up to par I see no reason to ruin a happy relationship." She says.

"Fine. I'll bring- him on Saturday. Be nice."

"Of course, of course. I'll see you then darling." Your mom hangs up then and you breathe out.

"What on earth am I gonna do now?" You run a hand down your face and dial your friend.

"Y/n!" Natasha says excitedly.

"Hey Nat!"

"You're still coming, right? Wanda is totally psyched about movie night."

"Of course! I'm actually calling to let you know I'm on my way now. I'd have been over sooner but my mom called me and you know she can talk for ages." You tell her.

"No worries, but hurry up! We're waiting for you." Natasha says.

"I'll be there in twenty." You say before hanging up. You grab your things and head out the door to meet Natasha and Wanda over at Avengers Towers. When you arrive, Wanda meets you before you even make it all the way through the door.

"You're here!" She squeals throwing her arms around you.

"Of course I am. I wouldn't miss movie night." You say with a laugh.

"Okay we've already got snacks and stuff set up so come on." Natasha pulls you towards the living room as soon as Wanda lets you go.

"Prepared as always Romanoff." You chuckle.

"Duh." She shrugs.

"You took a while to get here so we had time to kill." Wanda says.

"Sorry about that, my mother's just insane." You scoff.

"What?" She frowns.

"I told her to stop meddling in my dating life and now she thinks I have a boyfriend that she expects to meet at a party she's having this Saturday."

"Wait you lied to your mom about having a boyfriend?" Natasha laughs.

"I told her I was content with my dating life and she got it in her head that I was implying there was a man in my life so now she expects me to bring one to her party or else she'll never leave me alone about dating."

"But you don't have a boyfriend. Do you?" Wanda looks at you.

"No. I don't, but if I don't produce one by Saturday she'll be setting me up with strangers for the rest of eternity." You sigh.

"What are you going to do?" Natasha asks.

"No idea. So if either of you wants to offer some advice I'm all ears." You say.

"You could borrow Vision. I'm sure he wouldn't mind." Wanda suggests.

"I- really don't think a red synthezoid would convince my mom that my dating life is going great without her honestly." You grimace slightly.

"Yeah she might just lock you away for that one." Natasha chuckles.

"Well do you have a better idea Natasha?" Wanda asks.

"Me? It's not like I have a boyfriend in storage you can borrow."

"Oh come on when have you ever met a problem you didn't have a solution to?" You scoff.

"Evidently today, finding a way to legitimize the lie you told your mother by producing a fake boyfriend for you is a bit out of my wheelhouse."

"I disagree." Wanda says.

"Don't disagree." Natasha shakes her head.

"We all know you could totally make shit shake if you gave it a second thought." You say. Natasha blows out an annoyed breath as she considers. The elevator dings then and out of it comes Steve, Sam, and Bucky. You each shoot greetings at the trio as they walk through to the hall.

"Oh hey Wanda, hey Nat! Hey, y/n I didn't know you were coming over tonight." Steve greets you all first.

"Hey ladies." Sam follows his lead.

"Hey Natasha, hey Wanda." Bucky says to your friends first, then without even looking at you he nods and mumbles your name as the group disappears. You roll your eyes. You're pretty used to Bucky's dismissive behavior towards you. He hardly even tries to be cordial with you. A nod and a grunt of your name is the best you'll get in terms of acknowledgment. Most of the time he straight up ignores you- not that it matters you guess. It's not like you come here to visit Bucky or anything but you can't help but wonder what it is you did to make him so vexed around you.

"Alright! Someone in this building actually owes me a favor. I could maybe cash it in to get you a fake boyfriend for Saturday." Natasha says.

"Would you really?!" You blink at her.

"I mean I know your mom can be- overbearing. If you really need an out with her, I will call in that favor. I don't need it for anything else right now anyway." She shrugs. You throw your arms around her excitedly.

"Thank you Natasha! You have no idea what you're saving me from!" You tell her.

"I know you'd do the same if the shoe were on the other foot." She shrugs.

"Wait, who are you asking?" Wanda asks her.

"Well I've got a couple of options so I'm not gonna make any promises until I confirm." Natasha says. You give her a suspicious look at her response. She's probably up to something but it's not like the who matters so much, plus it's not like you don't already know everyone who could owe her a favor 'in this building'. You can make it work.

"That's so vague?" Wanda frowns.

"Shhh let's start the movie." Natasha says. You roll your eyes with a laugh as she presses play on your first watch of the night. You spend most of the night with them, laughing your way through movies until entirely too late.

It's not til Friday that Natasha calls you regarding your mom's party. It's not that you forgot she was going to take care of things, you just had other things to think about during the week.

"Hey Nat."

"Hey! You still need a fake boyfriend for your mom's thing tomorrow, right?"

"Oh, well yeah. Don't tell me you couldn't call in that favor. I don't have time to put a backup plan in motion if you didn't- you waited til the day before to call-"

"Have I ever let you down?" She asks.

"Well-"

"Nevermind. I've sorted it out. He'll come pick you up at 1. You said the party's at 2 right? Should give you plenty of time to-"

"Oh no my mother's parties don't ever start on time, since it starts at 2 he should come get me by 3. Also who- is coming to get me?"

"3? Alright, I'll let him know, I have to go now though- I'm being summoned to defuse- something. I dunno."

"Natasha who is coming to get me?" You ask.

"Have fun tomorrow, bye babes!" Natasha hangs up before you can repeat your question and honestly, that alone should've told you what kind of stunt she would be pulling but you can't even describe the shock on your face when Bucky knocks on your door the following afternoon.

"James!?" You blink at him.

"Are you ready to go?" He sighs.

"Wait a second Natasha got you to take me this afternoon?"

"Well, it's not like I came here just because."

"This is- okay sure, whatever. Let's go." You grab your purse and lock your apartment before following Bucky down to his car. The first half of your drive is pretty quiet, neither of you willing to break the silence.

"Do you have a story?" He asks eventually.

"What?"

"For your mom. I'm pretending to be your boyfriend so we need a story."

"Oh- well to be fair I didn't know Nat would be sending you until you showed up at my door. Since we do actually know each other it's not like we have to fake much. We met through Natasha, you were immediately obsessed with me and extremely determined to woo me, took you months to finally get my attention though and the rest is history." You shrug. You're joking of course.

"Obsessed with you?" He scoffs.

"It's a story James it doesn't have to be the truth."

"But it does have to be believable."

"I don't like what you're implying." You pinch him. "Wing it then. I don't care really just as long as it convinces my mom I don't need her matchmaking." You turn your attention to the passing scenery, effectively ending your conversation til you arrive at your mother's ten minutes later.

"You should know, nobody close to me calls me James. I might forget to respond if you use it." He tells you before getting out of the car. You roll your eyes and get out too, the two of you walking around the house to the backyard where the party is in full swing, although you're sure it's only just gotten to that point. Your mother spots you before you can even finish surveying the situation and makes a beeline towards you.

"Y/n!" She beams pulling you into a hug.

"Hi ma." You say, your reaction much more subdued than hers.

"And who might you be?" She turns her attention to the man beside you.

"Mom this is Bucky, Bucky meet my mother." You say.

"The boyfriend?" She asks you with wide eyes.

"Yeah." You nod.

"Bucky- that's a strange name."

"Don't start momma. It's a nickname, short for his middle name Buchanan. His first name is James but no one really uses it." You sigh.

"Hm." She hums. "Well, Bucky I have a lot of questions for you! Let's get you some food. Y/n go say hi to people!" She loops her arms through his and practically drags him off. You cringe and mouth an apology to him.

You only leave him alone for like 20 minutes, enough to make your rounds greeting other guests and to make your own plate. When you return your mother is laughing with him excitedly, even Bucky is smiling slightly and you almost can't believe it.

"Y/n! I can't believe you've never told me about him. James here is adorable!" Your mother gushes as you join the pair.

"Well it's- not that I was hiding him from you or anything." You mutter. Bucky puts an arm around your chair when you settle in beside him.

"You definitely didn't share. No worries, James has been answering all my questions quite well." She smiles.

"Has he now?" You give Bucky a sweet look but your eyebrow quirks up in a silent question.

"Your mother just wanted to know how we met so I told her about Nat bringing you around to the tower, that first time I saw you." Bucky tells you.

"Oh y/n he makes it sound so dreamy, you should hear what he said about you!" Your mom says.

"What did he say?" You ask skeptically.

"It's so much better coming from him, James tell her what you said to me." She demands. Bucky chuckles a bit, his cheeks turning the lightest shade of pink.

"Mrs. y/l/n I don't think she wants to hear-"

"Oh no, please share. I'd love to hear what you're feeding my mom to have her so animated baby." You throw in the pet name at the end and place a hand on Bucky's knee, the combination making him shift under your gaze.

"I just- said that I knew from the moment I saw you that my life would never be the same. That the first time Nat introduced you to us, it felt like taking a breath for the first time, like my life was incomprehensible and I didn't know it until your eyes met mine and suddenly the world made sense in ways I didn't even know possible. That you brought me to my knees in awe of you, rendered me- useless." Bucky's voice is gentle, too gentle, too raw, his eyes are intense and you have to find a way to break the tension. Now. You blow out a breath and tap the back of your hand against his chest lightly in a playful smack.

"You spend too much time reading poetry. You sound like a Shakespeare sonnet darling. No wonder my mom's all starstruck." You laugh and Bucky blinks at you in shock, as if you're reaction caught him off guard. He recovers quickly though and laughs a little.

"What can I say? You bring out the Parnassian in me." Bucky says with an easy smile. Situation diffused. You need to be careful. He's maybe a little too good at this. You almost believed him.

"Oh you two are so cute!" Your mom gushes.

"Mom." You groan and Bucky chuckles. Someone calls your mom away then and she leaves you with Bucky as she tends to the rest of her party.

"Who knew you could be such a sap. I'm impressed, you really sold the story there." You nudge him lightly with your elbow. You only just catch the incredulous look he shoots your way in reply. "Why are you looking at me like that? It's a compliment, Barnes." You frown at him. In that moment you wish you understood him enough to read his face but in the stretch of silence before he answers you, no amount of searching gives you an explanation to the way he's staring at you.

"Nothing." He shakes his head. You squint at him for a moment longer as if you expect the truth to pop up over his head before you decide not to press the issue.

"If you say so." You hum. The party goes on for a few hours longer and while you try not to leave Bucky alone too many times, several guests haven't seen you in years and insist on catching up. Bucky seems content to sit and watch most of the action anyway, assuring you he's fine every time you check on him. Somehow you end up staying long enough to help your mom with some of the cleaning up before you finally begin the drive home. Neither of you speaks on the drive back to your place. You need the time to decompress from all the socializing anyway. It isn't until Bucky's walking you up to your apartment that either of you says anything.

"Thank you for today. I know you did it as a favor to Nat and all but it really helps with getting my mom off my back so, thanks." You say.

"Like you said, just doing a favor." He shrugs.

"I know. Still you- did well. All that stuff about breathing for the first time and being brought to your knees when we met, it was- very romcom. I almost believed you." You chuckle.

"Almost?"

"Well yeah- unlike my mother, I have the context of the rest of our interactions so- although the words were very sweet I know they were just for the story." You shrug.

"Is that what you think?" He looks at you with a frown.

"Oh come on we don't have to do this. You and I both know you can barely be in the same room with me, you practically shut down whenever I'm over. You are by no means subtle about your dislike and that's fine, you don't have to like me but we don't have to pretend this was anything more than a favor to your coworker." You say.

"A favor to my coworker? You think I did this just because Natasha asked me?!" Bucky scoffs.

"Yeah that's usually how favors work." You shrug.

"Have you ever stopped to think about it for more than a minute?"

"Think about what?" You ask, grabbing your keys from your bag to unlock your apartment door.

"Why I don't say much when you're around. Have ever given it more than a moment's thought?" Bucky asks and you turn to look at him with your brows furrowed. His voice is getting a bit louder and you're taken aback. He's not quite yelling but you can tell he's impassioned and you're very unsure as to why.

"Are you angry with me because I can't read your mind? How is that my fault? You don't talk I assume it's because you don't want to that's usually why people don't talk." You frown.

"I'm not angry with you." He says.

"Well you sound angry, you look it a bit too, your face is getting kinda red." You mutter.

"Yeah that happens!"

"When you're angry?"

"When I'm around you!"

"What?" You blink at him and he sighs.

"I don't talk because I'm afraid I'll say something stupid, I don't stick around because you make me so nervous I'm sure I'll do something stupid and even if I don't the moment you speak to me I'm worried my face will give me away. I wasn't selling a story to your mom- meeting you really did feel like breathing for the first time I am completely and utterly hopeless when it comes to you I- I care for you, a lot, and knowing you don't feel the same-"

"You're an idiot." You cut him off.

"I know." He frowns, eyes dropping to his shoes. You lift his face gently with your hands on his cheeks.

"I meant for assuming I don't feel the same without even asking me." You say softly. "I can't say for sure how much I care about you since- you've basically avoided me since we've met but I do think you're attractive. So if you decide to ask me on a date, we can take it from there. Okay?" You tell him, hoping the sincerity is clear in your eyes as you look at him.

"Will you go on a date with me?" He asks so quietly his voice is a whisper.

"I would love to." You say with a smile.

"Is it too soon to kiss you?" He asks and while under normal circumstances you would absolutely say yes, you simply giggle and press your lips to his. You keep the kiss short but the look in Bucky's eyes when you pull away is one you'll never forget. Bliss and adoration shine brightly as he gives you a dopey smile.

"That's all you get until our date. So make it good." You tell him.

"It'll be the best date you've ever been on."

"That's a big promise."

"And one I intend to keep."

"I'll believe it when I see it. Goodnight Bucky."

"Goodnight y/n. I'll call you about our date soon."

"You'd better." You smile one last time before shutting your apartment door although you really don't want to. You're practically floating through your apartment as you get ready for bed completely content with the way things unfolded. You'd have to give Nat a call and thank her probably- turns out it wasn't Bucky doing her a favor but her doing one for both of you.

***

#marvel #marvel fanfiction #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes #bucky x reader #bucky #bucky barnes fluff

338 notes · View notes

seonghwaddict · 3 hours

Text

super duper pretty — kim hongjoong

in which you haven’t heard from him in years but a single drunk phone call ends up with you tangled up in your bed.

musician!kim hongjoong x fem!reader. genre. angst, suggestive, friends to lovers. warnings. drinking, tension, kissing, suggestive content. wc. 4k. rating. pg-13.

lilo’s notes. AGHDHSJDJJAJDJSJDHSJS GRRRR WOOF WOOF AWOOOO GR AHHHDHDHDHHDS

listening to. right here, chase atlantic.

masterlist.

you weren’t someone hongjoong could bring himself to think about much these days. despite having known each other since childhood and been best friends, he hadn’t spoken to you in three years, too caught up in his thriving music career.

album, tours, interviews, collaborations. it all kept him busy and away from you. his chase for stardom had him isolating and distancing himself from friends and family. and, sure, it was shitty, but he didn’t have time to dwell on the people he was told would hold him back. he didn’t have time to regret it. regretting leads to stagnating and stagnating would lead to the end of his career.

that’s not to say he didn’t miss you. of course, he did. but on the last day he spoke to you, it ended in an argument he didn’t have the energy to resolve. so, he left. he left you.

him not having time to regret it was more an ideal rather than a truth.

in reality, he regretted leaving you more than anything else.

but three years later he still hadn’t talked to you, afraid it would ruin his pride if he came running back to you. yet he couldn’t deny how he felt like he was on top of the world, the best producer and rapper in the scene. his career was thriving and his newest album topped charts across alll platforms. when all the interviews and promotions were finally over, he decided to treat himself ot a little celebration, renting a club in town and inviting every major celebrity he had connections too.

the night was spent dancing and throwing back shot after shot until he could barely stand. he enjoyed it at first, but slowly the effects of the colourful drinks made him feel much too hot and cramped in the sea of dancing bodies. making sure no one noticed, he escaped through a back door into the cold, fresh air. he felt the sudden urge to leave, but in his drunken state it would be difficult to navigate his way home.

without thinking, he slumped against the red brick wall and pulled out his phone, dialing a number he’s always know by heart. it rang three times before the person picked up.

“hello?”

hongjoong didn’t realise how much he missed your voice until you uttered that word so softly. he could picture you somewhere in your appartment, maybe in the kitchen to get a snack, tilting your head in confusion at the unfamiliar number.

“hey,” he really didn’t know what else to say, staring intently at a leaf on the ground.

you went completely silent on the other end and for a moment he thought you’d hung up. but, eventually, you spoke again, only this time a certain firmness to your voice.

“what do you want?”

“come pick me up,” his words slurred and molded together and you had a hard time unnderstanding him, sat stifly on your couch, “please, i need you to pick me up. just… just this once?”

you didn’t know what to say. you wanted to scream and yell at him and demand a proper explanation as to why he just walked out of your life like it was nothing, but at the same time, you wanted to sob and confess how much you missed him.

still, you couldn’t help but ask, “what the hell happened, hongjoong?”

"i- i'm drunk," he slurred, sounding even worse than before as he shuffles his feet on the floor pebbled floor. "like, really, really drunk," he insisted with a quiet groan, but you already came to that conclusion. "come pick me up… please?"

you stood up from your couch, pacing around you living room as you listened to him speak before stopping by your window and looking out into the night sky. he was the last person you thought would call you at this house, not having heard from him in three years. but here he was, drunk and begging you to pick him up from god knows where.

“fine.” you said simply, swallowing down the lump in your throat as you grabbed your coat from the entrance of your apartment and slipped on some shoes, not bothering to change out of your nightwear. “where are you?”

“um,” he looked around. the back door led into an alley, but if he walked off to the right he’d be right by the entrance. with his free hand supporting him on the wall, he did his best to get there. “outside the, uh, club,” he explained, though it was really helpful, “by the-” he cut himself off with a sigh, resting his forehead against the wall and squeezing his eyes shut in frustation of his lack of clarity, “the red one.”

your eyebrows furrowed at his vague description as you got to your car, getting into the drivers seat and just sitting there until he could give you a proper answer. “the… red… one?”

“it’s got, um,” he looked around the surrounding area, spotting a familiar place just across the street, “in front of that café we used to go to?”

“oh.” you recognised that, hesitating for a moment before starting the car, unwanted memories of the countless hours you spent with him there clouding your thoughts. all the talking and studying and laughing. “find somewhere to sit.”

“okay,” he nodded to himself, taking some steps to a wooden bench and pointing at it as if you could see, “i’m gonna sit on this thingy.” his drunken stupor had him laughing at himself as he takes the final steps to sit down. he swayed a little but not enough to make him lose balance and fall. once sat, he nodded and grinned at nothing in particular, just proud he was able to manage the simple task you gave him. “i’m sitting.”

“good, great,” you hummed approvingly, holding back a smile at his antics, “now… just hang tight, i’ll be right there, okay?”

“okay.”

it felt good to sit here, he realised with a sigh as he leaned back and tipped his head to look up at the stars. the gentle caress of the night air and the dimmed sounds of the city around him a soothing backdrop to the chaos in his head.

a silence followed his words, tense but not uncomfortable. the red exterior of the cheap club came into view soon enough and you slowed to a stop to park in a free space. you got out of the car and looked around until you found a familiar figure sitting on a bench tucked below a little tree. you hesitated again for a moment before walking to him as slowly as possible, your heart pounding in your chest. he hadn’t noticed you yet, having shut his eyes at some point.

it took you some long moments but you finally pulled yourself together and cleared your throat, making him startle as you muttered a tentative, “hey.”

he glanced toward the sound of your voice, blinking away the drunken haze as he attempted to focus on the world around him. his vision unclear and unfocused as looked up at you, struggling to recognise you for a moment. the bright streetlights made his head ache a little; the world a blur and all he could do was struggle to focus until he could see you properly, the familiar feature snapping him back to reality.

you shifted back and forth on your heels awkwardly, waiting for him to say something as he just stared at you, face flushed and intoxicated. your hair was messy and you wore shorts and a loose light grey sweater. you wondered if he even recognised you, or were you just a stranger to him?

“you came,” he breathed after a while, eyes taking in every detail on you. he focused on you; the way the moonlight caught on your skin, the soft furrow of your brows and subtle downturn of your lips. your eyes, his favourite eyes in the world, looking back at him. “you actually came.”

“you called,” you answered, almost breathless as you also took him in. his style looked a little edgier than when you’d last seen him, though still as chic as ever. short bleached hair, the corners of his sharp eyes smoked out.

“i did,” he nodded, attempting to stand up before slumping back again, “but you actually came.” the alcohol made his words feel heavy, pushing them out in soft sighs as his eyes locked with yours again. he grinned stupidly, “you’re like, pretty.”

you almost laughed at his words, shaking your head lightly, “and you’re like, drunk,” you scoffed jokingly, “come on, it’s late, let me get you home.”

“no, i mean,” he whined, pouting dramatically and now you weren’t sure if the pink tint of his face was from the alcohol or something else, “you’re like super duper pretty.”

unsure of how to respond to his compliment, you only chuckled nervously and offered him a hand to help him get up. “come on.”

he stared at your hand for a few long moments before grasping it and standing up with your assistance. he stumbled a little but caught himself as you led him to the car. your nudged him to get into the passenger seat as you walked around to get into the driver’s.

it was dark in your car, your face dimly illuminated by the screen that displayed a map of the area. you look even prettier in this light, he thought, the sharp shadows making your features stand out that much more. your cheeks soft and round and your eyes sparkling with reflections in a way that made his wander all over you.

neither of you said anything for a while as you sat there. seemingly lost in his drunken daze, he realised how familiar this felt, being there with you, just you and him. everything felt right. he let out a soft hum before leaning back, tilting his head back against the seat and closing his eyes.

“my place is closer than yours,” now that he wasn’t looking at you, you felt comfortable enough to break the silence. finally buckling your seatbelt, you tried to ignore the way butterflies swarmed in your stomach at the thought of his eyes on your body, “you can stay for the night, if you want.”

“do i get the couch?” he turned his head to peer over at you as you start the car, “or…” he giggled, “or… we can share the bed.”

you raised an eyebrow at him, surprised at how flirtatious he was being. “we’ve shared before so, i guess… if the bed is more comfortable for your then i’m fine with sharing it.”

memories of your late night excursions with him rushed back to you and you briefly wondered if he would touch you the same as you laid together. would the feeling of his hand in yours bring you the same comfort? or the protective grip on your back or thigh? you don’t mention any of it.

“let’s just share,” he whispered back. he sounded tired, though if asked he could probably go on a ten page rant of how much he missed being close to you.

he, too, thought of all the night you spent together. the laughs and the touches that felt so real. he remembered how comfortably you would fit in the same bed, laying side-by-side and watching random movies until dawn broke. how easily you’d fall asleep as you shared blankets, face mere inches away from each other but never quite touching.

he wondered if it was possible to relive those times, gazing over at you for a moment before shaking his head and look out the window. those were nothing but drunk fantasies.

“okay,” you whispered back, trying not to look at him, trying not to shiver at the softness of his voice. a little slurred, but still soft.

he was always like that with you. soft.

people would mistake the two of you for lovers more often than not when they first met you, but it was always denied with flushed cheeks and awkward giggles. and it was true. no matter what was said or done, you always remained just that. best friends. it was for the better, made things much less complicated. especially when he took off and you never saw him again.

at least, until now.

the silence in the car was palpable, broken only by quiet breaths and the low hum of the car. it was a calm silence, mildly comfortable despite how heavy it felt, weighted down by all the things unsaid.

eventually, you slowed to a stop and pulled into your parking space in front of the apartment building you lived in. turning off the car, you got out and beelined for the entrance. he knew where to go anyway, not looking back at him as you led the way to your apartment.

the door opened to your living room and kitchen area, just a little messy since you weren’t expecting anyone to come over anytime soon. you made quick work of shucking off your jacket and placing your shoes aside, telling him to wait for a moment before you disappeared through a hallway he knew led to your bedroom.

you returned quickly, a pile of folded clothes in your arms that you held out to him, explaining he had left them a while ago. his body itself didn’t change much, so you figured they should still fit. you didn’t want his sweaty dishevelled suit on your bedsheets.

as he changed, you paced back and forth in your bedroom nervously, thinking about all the possible things that could happen. but you stopped quickly when you heard the bathroom door unlock, practically jumping to lay in bed. you tucked yourself into one side of the large bed, covers pulled up to your chin as you face away from him.

you heard him pause for a moment before you felt the bed dipping behind you and the covers shifting as he blanketed himself too. despite there being a considerable amount of space between you, you still felt him body heat brushing against yours in the thick silence. even though you can’t see him, you knew for a fact he’s probably laying on his back to look at the little glow-in-the-dark stars you stuck to my ceiling years ago and never took down.

you sighed and whispered, “hongjoong?”

“uh-huh?” he hummed, eyes closed for a moment before he turning his head to glance at your back.

you squeezed your eyes shut, taking a deep breath before finally asked the thing you’d been dying to know. “did you ever miss me?”

“more than anything,” he breathed and you felt him shift to lay on his side, facing you. he wanted nothing more than to reach out and hold you like he used to. his voice held a hint of melancholy but he didn’t elaborate more.

you turned too after a moment, not taking a second to notice just how close he was, the thick white covers shifting slightly from the movement. your voice quivered slightly as you spoke, eyes stinging with welling tears. “i missed you too, you know… i missed you every day since you left and every day i hoped you’d come back. but you never did.”

his heart clenched at you admission, the voice he loved so much threatening to turn into sobs. the truth was, he wanted to, countless nights sat alone, wishing he turned back to knock on your door.

“i-i wanted to,” he stammered, whispering ashamedly.

“it’s fine, i got over it,” you forced yourself to focus on the pillow under his head instead of his handsome face.

his brows furrowed as you averted your gaze, eyes following yours even if you refused to look at him. he knew you well enough to know when you lied. he knew you well enough to know you didn’t get over it. didn’t get over him. he mumbled, “did you really?”

your lip trembled at his question but you kept your gaze locked on the white fabric, pressing them together to get them to stop as a few tears spill over the corners of your eyes.

you shook your head, your little voice breaking with overwhelming emotions, “n-no, i didn’t.”

you shifted your look to his hesitantly, your skin tingling from his warmth. your eyelids fluttered as you tried to hold back the tears.

"don’t," he whispered, thumb slipping down to caress your jaw. his eyes searched yours, your eyes wide with sadness and something he couldn’t quite understand. "don’t hide it. you don’t always have to be so strong. not in front of me.”

those words snapped something in your mind, no longer able to swallow down the lump in your throat as you threw yourself into his inviting arms, yours wrapping around his neck as you sobbed into the slope of his shoulder.

“why- why did you leave, w-why didn’t you come back... p-please, i need to know.”

he didn’t expect the sudden break down, but still held you close. one hand at the back of your head, the other holding you by your waist, your bodies pressed against each other and he let his lips press against the top of your head, making you shiver.

he rubbed your back, letting your tears fall wherever they man, muttering reassurances iagainst your hair. his faint scent of whiskey and mint mingled with your vanilla shampoo, his eyes shutting at the oddly comforting mix of smells. you felt him press repeated kisses to your messed up hair.

sobs racked your body for a few more minutes before the tears stopped falling and your breaths evened. you nodded against him, pulling your head away from him to look up at his face, at his eyes. the hand at the back of your head slipped forward to cup your cheek again, brushing his finger along your skin. he traces your cheek bone and along your harline down to your jaw, his eyes shifting between yours in disbelief that his skin was on yours once again.

“i was afraid,” he admitted, barely a whisper, “i was afraid that if i came back, i’d fall for you more… and then i wouldn’t have been able to spend a day without you, wouldn’t be able to chase after my dream. but… at the time, i didn’t recognise you were part of it, you know, my dream.”

your breath hitched as the words registered, “you- what?”

you cut him off with something you'd been wanting to do for a while; you kissed him, hands holding either side of his face. his eyes are widened in surprise, though he didn’t hesitate to lean into the kiss, returning it as quickly as you did it. his hands tightened around you, pulling you as close as he could.

your lips fit against eachother so perfectly, like the lego sets you’d force him to build with you when you were younger, every curve and edge of your bodies slotting together naturally. he got lost in the sensation of finally getting what he dreamed of, a hand slipping below the hem of your shirt to hold onto your bare waist, just wanting to feel closer to you.

his mouth tasted of exactly what he smelled like, mint and traces of whiskey, whimpering against his lips as you welcomed the taste and the touch. your whimper unlocked something, the kiss growing more urgent, restlessly pushed against each other without air left between. you could barely breathe, but you didn’t care as long as his lips stayed locked on yours for as long as possible.

but eventually, he bit down on your bottom lip ever so slightly before pulling away, catching his breath as you caught yours. your chest heaving as you refilled your lungs with air, face flushed from the realisation of what you just did and from the thought of what else you might do.

he glanced down at your swelling parted lips, jimmy coated by your mixed saliva, his pupils blown wide with desire.

“i wanna…” he mumbled, breath unsteady, “i want to…”

he wasn’t sure what he was trying to say, at least not until he noticed the way you peered up at him expectantly with that curious gaze. “what is it, joong?”

that nickname. he hadn’t heard it in a while. three years, actually, because you were the only one that called him that. his eyes searched yours.

“i want to do that again,” he admitted, cheeks warming, “and again and again and again… and so much more than just that.”

your breath hitched, intestines tied into knots as you struggled to figure out what you should say. the truth was that you wanted that too, wanted to feel his lips and hands all over your body. but, as his breath fanned over your face and you caught the traces of alcohol folded into the smell of mint gum, you were reminded that there was a thin possibility he didn’t mean any of it.

“you’re drunk, joong… it’s better if we don’t.”

he frowned, his grip on you loosening. “but you want to, don’t you?” he countered, “you know you want this too, so why not?”

“i just-“ you paused to sigh, continuing with an even tone, “i just don’t want you to regret anything.”

“i meant every goddamn thing i said,” his brows furrowed for a moment and he squinted, trying to emphasise his point, “so, i can’t regret this. i can’t regret you.“

you bit your lip, thinking carefully before sighing, the tension leaving your body as you played with the string of his hoodie.

“how about this…” you suggested, speaking slowly, “if you can wake up and tell me you remembered all this, then we can see where this goes.”

“and if i don’t, you’ll never mention in again?”

you nodded, slightly anxious as you wait for him to agree. it didn’t take too long, seemingly an acceptable compromise for him as he nodded.

“okay,” he agreed, his hand on your waist beneath your shirt tightening once again, “let me just kiss you one more time though, i won’t be able to sleep if you don’t.”

you laughed at his silly excuse, forehead dropping against his shoulder for a moment before lifting to look at him again with a grin that made you feel so stupid and in love. “fine, just one more time.”

networks. @cromernet @wonderlandnet @cultofdionysusnet @pirateeznet @atzhouse

permanent taglist. @ad0rechuu @sankatchu @mlink64 @yeosangsbb @seonghwasbbgirl @likexaxdaydream @dreamingofyeo @yalyallic @yunhoswrldddd @coffee-addict-kitten @thunderous-wolf @chngbnwf

#cromernet #wonderlandnet #atzhouse #cultofdionysusnet #pirateeznet #ateez x reader #ateez #hongjoong x reader #hongjoong imagine #hongjoong imagines #hongjoong fluff #hongjoong angst #ateez angst #ateez fluff #ateez imagines #ateez scenarios #ateez fanfic #ateez smut

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janitorhutcherson · 17 hours

Text

Groceries, Taxes, & Laundry (MSchmidt Fluff)

hey guys, it's me. i'm finally back. did y'all miss me? the writing of this is a lil diff, sooooo please enjoy and lmk what you think!

content: pure fluff yall.

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

Grocery shopping with Mike Schmidt is… special, to say the least. He absolutely despises it. The dreaded time comes around at the end of every week, your vegetables in the fridge starting to wilt, the meat from the previous trip used up, and all of your snacks have been devoured from late night munchie runs to the pantry (xoxo i love gardening!!!). He knows it has to happen. He knows you’ll wake him up early on Sunday morning like always, because apparently it’s “better to get it out of the way,” which he thinks is, well, to put it lightly, utter bullcrap.

You’ll drag him and Abby out to your local grocery store, her drowsy and jittery all at the same time with the promise of pancakes from a local diner after. Once you arrive, you’ll pull out all of the far-too-expensive reusable bags out of the trunk of Mike’s dingy car, ready to fill them with the necessities. Why get those for 3 bucks when you can get the plastic ones for free? He’ll never understand your logic, something about saving the environment, but it’s okay, he loves you enough not to complain, at least out loud.

The fluorescent lights of the room filled with half asleep employees hits Mike’s eyes like he’s looking directly into the sun. He lets out a small grumbled sigh as he takes in the scent of sterile cleaning supplies and produce mixed in one, with the strange almost play doh like smell of the bakery. Your eyes cut over to him, eyebrows raised, Abby’s hand in yours as she rubs her droopy eyes. Mike can’t help but to crack a small smirk, his lips pursed together. “What?” he’ll question innocently, letting out a small snicker as you go deeper into the dreary establishment.

At the produce aisle, Mike shivers a little as the water from the misting sprinkler on the shelves hits his bare skin. He should’ve worn his jacket today, he usually does, and he’s regretting the one time he hasn’t. Your eyes are glancing over carrots, broccoli, cucumbers, and squash, all that are somehow both too ripe and too.. What's the word... unripe? Sure, he’ll go with that. His hand reaches out to grip yours in a gentle grasp as Abby points to a particularly fluffy bushel of broccoli. “I want that one! It looks like pretty trees,” she giggles out, finally starting to wake with the day. You let out a giggle of your own and Mike smiles because of how pretty your laugh is.

Next, you’re in the snack aisle, filling the cart with doritos, barbeque chips, pringles, salt and vinegar chips (mike gags when you eat them too close to him), peanut butter filled pretzels, whatever can go in Abby’s lunch box and whatever is tastiest. Mike insists on buying the cheap queso, his nose scrunching up at the price of the name brand one. He knows it doesn’t taste any different.

Now you’re looking at meats, finding chicken breasts and filets, steaks, pork, whatever was on your list from meal prepping. Yes, meal prepping, Mike did that now. Apparently stable people with stable lives who had stable relationships did that. He’d grown fond of sitting over a recipe book with you on Saturday nights, really, shoulder to shoulder, pressed up on the couch well after Abby had gone to bed. Something about it felt safe, a kind of domestic feeling he wasn’t used to.

You’re basically done now, and he couldn’t be more relieved as you make your way towards the dairy section. He grabs a few things, string cheese, yogurt, cream cheese, cheese slices for sandwiches for work. Oh, did he mention he works in construction now? It’s stable, makes good money, and he’s home on time to see you, to be a husband-not-yet-husband (he plans to propose soon, but that’s another story), a brother-more-like-a-father, a person with a regular schedule. He looks over at you, watching as you and Abby skim over the different selections of chocolate and strawberry milk, finally settling on a carton of strawberry. He once again scrunches his nose, smiling all at once. “Nasty,” he mumbles out. Abby playfully hits his arm and you lean in for a kiss.

Finally, thank god, you push the cart towards the bakery section, grabbing bread and a sweet treat or two for the week. Cookies, a birthday cake for no particular reason, cheese danishes, whatever his little family was feeling for the week, that’s what it’d be. This week, it was a huge box of chocolate chip cookies and some kind of cherry pastry he’d never had before. You three finally head to checkout, where everything is stuck in those stupid reusable bags and the price of everything you got feels obscenely huge for what’s in your cart, but he pays it anyway. Walking to the car, in the trunk the groceries go as you all climb in one by one, ready to head for pancakes.

As he reverses the car out of his good (only because it was so goddamn early) parking spot, he can’t help but sigh, this time with contentment as Abby rambles on about a new imaginary (hopefully) friend, your own grin wide as you ask questions, making sure she feels heard. “I love you guys, love doing things with you guys,” Mike mumbles out, reaching his hand over to your thigh as he glances back at Abby too. And it was true, he’d do anything with you two. Hell, if all his life consisted of grocery shopping, taxes, and laundry? Yeah, he’d be ok with that too.

#mike schmidt x reader #mike schmidt fluff #mike schmidt smut #mike schmidt #mike schmidt fic #mike schmidt blurb #josh hutcherson #josh hutcherson smut #josh hutcherson fluff #josh hutcherson x reader #mike schmidt imagine #josh hutcherson imagine #josh hutcherson fanfic

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gavisuntiedboot · 1 year

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Hey, I love your gavi fics. Could you do one where reader is very confident and flirty, always making him nervous with how straight forward she is. Loves to compliment him and kiss his hand. Maybe even him getting teased my his teammates about it.

sry this is extremely specific 😅

Forward (Gavi x reader)

This was such a cute request omg.

*************************************************

"Good morning Vogue Espana! I'm y/n, and this is Valeria, and today we'll be playing Vogue's 'Bestie Quiz'!"

You looked over at Valeria and gave her a wink, causing her to roll her eyes and laugh. The two of you made up 1/2 of Rumores, a Spanish pop group that rose to popularity through TikTok because of your relatable lyrics and how easily people could connect to the group members. You all had fun and bubbly personalities, still fimlimg vlog-style TikToks despite blowing up. Since you dropped your first album as a group, everyone was eager to get a piece of the next hot thing.

You had been contacted by an agency in Spain to get signed, and all moved into Barcelona within about a month. Since then, it had been borderline mayhem. Award shows, fashion shows, exclusive parties - the works. You were now at Vogue Espana headquarters, preparing for a group cover shoot. The editors had asked you and Valeria to pair up and make some video content, as you both had addictive personalities and bounced off each other really well. Long story short - any time you two filmed together, it got millions of views.

"Alright y/n lets start off with an easy one: what is my Starbucks order?"

You tried to cross your legs, almost falling over in the chair, causing the whole production crew to laugh.

"Ignore me almost dying. She's only asking me this question because she knows it really embarrasses me to my core to order this, especially here in Barcelona! It's a venti iced caramel macchiato, 9 pumps of caramel, extra caramel sauce on the top and bottom. Can you imagine having to say this out loud?"

The set was filled with laughter. They cut the take to get your makeup touched up, which was now melting off under the bright studio lights. You both continued to quiz each other, laughing and bantering playfully. You looked down at the cue cards with the questions, letting out a loud groan at the next question.

"Val this is rigged in your favor. How come I get all the hard questions and you get this? It's literally the easiest possible question?"

"Stop complaining because the producers think I'm cute and want life to be easy for me. Just ask the question."

"Okay okay: Who is my celebrity crush?"

"Oh wow you're right. That's so easy it's borderline cheating. Have you not seen her social media? Of course it's Pablo Gavi."

You leaned over the back of your chair dramatically, fanning your face.

"Ughhhhh Gavi! Have you ever seen a man so fine and so talented and so freaking delicious?"

Everyone in the studio had to hold back their laughter as so not have it be heard in the recording.

“She’s obsessed you guys I don’t even know how to explain.”

“I think obsessed is the wrong word.”

Valeria turned to you and gasped, getting up from her seat and running over to you, wrestling your phone from your hands. She pulled it free, walking up to the camera with it.

“Let me just make sure she has no inappropriate notifications. Not obsessed? Please look at her Lock Screen. It’s literally taking over her life.”

You hid your face in your hands as your screen lit up, revealing a picture of Gavi from the World Cup as your Lock Screen. The camera zoomed in on you, capturing your embarrassed reaction.

“Listen listen listen. I’ve been a Barça fan since forever. He’s fine and talented. How am I supposed to not fall in love with him?? I feel like that’s too much to ask for.”

Your crush on Gavi was not a secret by a long shot. It has been obvious to your audience since the World Cup qualifiers, when you posted a picture of him in the white uniform, captioning the photo “who is this and where can I find him 😍😍”. Your followers had come through, sending his handle in your DMs several thousand times. You followed him on Instagram and started fangirling in the comments of all his posts.

@uruser

“ Great job today Pablo 🥰”

“My favorite color is now pablo- I mean purple 🥵”

“The only heat in Qatar is gonna be you on the field 😘”

One day, as you did your makeup on a livestream, idly talking to your phone, you noticed the chat moving at a much faster pace than you were used to. You looked at the messages, trying to read something, but it moved so fast the letters blurred together.

"Wait wait how do I stop the chat I can't read you're all typing too quickly."

You figured out how to stop the comments flying by your face, reading the words "GAVI FOLLOWED YOU BACK".

You screamed at the top of your lungs. You started jumping in excitement, shaking the floor so much that your phone fell to the floor. Comments continued to fly in about how this was the beginning of your love story.

This was officially your in. Now that he followed you, you were able to swipe up on his Instagram stories. Every couple of days when Gavi would post, you would leave him flirty messages, never thinking he was going to respond.

"Amazing goal Gavi! You know you could score with me any day tho ;)"

This unfortunate cheesy message got a like. When you saw the small scarlet heart, you almost went into cardiac arrest. It was working. Slowly but surely you were getting him to recognize you.

Gavi hated pulling out his phone in the locker room. He would instantly hear wolf whistles and cheers from his teammates.

"Ay, Gavi, who are the messages from? The pop princess or the real princess?"

He would turn bright red, hiding his face in his shirt. He had seen your comments, and he didn't know who you were at first. He approached Pedri one day, asking him if he knew who you were.

"Gavi please be serious. You haven't heard of Rumores? They're opening for Rosalia this summer. They're super talented. And each member is hotter than the next."

"Wait," Balde chimed in, "who from Rumores is sending Gavi messages?"

"y/n"

Balde's eyes widened to the size of satellites. He grabbed the phone and started recording a voice message on the messages between you and Gavi.

"y/n my darling, this is Alejandro. Forget about this idiot Gavi and DM me your number. Let me appreciate you in a way that he cannot."

Gavi grabbed the phone back. The voice note had already sent, and you had opened the message. Shit. He was practically shaking, not knowing what to do.

"Ale! Why would you do that?" He asked, trying to look away from the three dots that indicated you were typing.

"Pablo you idiot. Do you know that she was number 5 in the "World's Hottest Women" ranking? She won best face AND best ass in Spain last year. If she wants a Barca player and you're fumbling, I am willing to step up." Gavi shoved him on the shoulder, eliciting a laugh from Pedri.

"Hermano, talk to her. She has made it more than clear that she likes you."

Gavi looked at his phone again, still confused as to what to say, when a new message popped up on the screen.

"Thanks for the offer Ale, but I'm still holding out hope that Gavi will message me back one of these days ;)"

He smiled and bit his lip, locking eyes with Pedri, who wiggled his eyebrows at Gavi suggestively. He hit the older boy on the shoulder, and they went out to his car. When they arrived at Pedri's, dragged Gavi onto the couch to show him clips of you talking about Gavi.

*y/n being in love with a spicy midfielder for 17 minutes*

"Pedri why do you have this video in your favorites?"

"Be quiet and watch."

The video started playing, and Gavi was stunned when you popped up on the screen. It was a clip of you at an award show, dresses in a gorgeous maroon two-piece that showed your midriff and lower stomach, as well as ornate stomach jewelry.

"y/n you look absolutely gorgeous this evening. We heard you were a Barcelona fan? Is this true? And if so, who is your favorite player?"

You smiled widely, causing Gavi's intestines to twist into pretzels.

"Of course I'm a Barca fan. All hot girls are Barca fans. My favorite player of all time is Messi, but on the current squad? Pablo Gavi. He's so talented and not to mention gorgeous."

Gavi brought a cushion to his chest and hugged it tightly. He was used to people calling him attractive in comments, but it was different seeing it live, hearing it from someone who the whole world thought was gorgeous. The next clip was a TikTok, in which you and Valeria danced in matching Gavi and Pedri jerseys.

"See Pablito, she already has your shirt for when she comes to the games to support you."

That comment earned Pedri a swift smack, which he was unable to dodge. Gavi continued to watch the rest of the video, borderline kicking his feet at how fuzzy he felt hearing that you thought he was hot and talented.

"Thanks for watching the Bestie Quiz! Make sure to like the video and subscribe to Vogue Espana. Bye!"

The camera switched off, and you and Valeria stepped off the chairs you were sat in. You immediately got onto Instagram live to pub the video.

"Hey everyone! We just got done filming for Vogue Espana's YouTube channel! Make sure to tune in when the video comes out. And... tomorrow we'll be touring a certain football stadium. Make sure you're following us here and on TikTok to stay up to date with all the latest from us!"

Gavi's jaw dropped. Of course he tuned into the live. He was eager to hear the sound of your voice, see your face lit up with joy. He had been thinking about you for weeks now, unable to say anything to you from embarrassment. He didn't know how to be charismatic and suave and the man that the internet portrayed him to be. He was a dork. He didn't know how talk to you. So when he heard that you were visiting a football camp, he texted the groupchat.

[Gavi]: Is that girl group coming to Camp Nou tomorrow?

[Pedri]: ah ah ah no one respond. Gavi, go ask your admirer. A good way to start a conversation.

[Ansu]: ^^^

[Alejandro]: retweet

He rolled his eyes. They were right. It was the perfect opportunity to reach out to you. But he was still nervous - what if he didn't live up to your expectations?

He typed out a simple message and hit send with his eyes closed.

@pablogavi - are you coming to el campo tomorrow?

"Valeria, remember how you told me that he would never talk to me because I was 'creepy' and a 'weirdo'? Well, eAT YOUR WORDS HE JUST MESSAGED ME!"

You flopped onto the couch, kicking your feet like a lovesick teenager.

@uruser - if I am, will you give me a special tour? xx

@pablogavi - i'll try

The next day you were positively giddy with joy. You were going to get a private tour of Camp Nou with your three closest friends. And you were going to be breathing the same air as Pablo Gavi. This was your chance to shoot your shot. You put on a black tank top and some light wash jeans that enhanced your award-winning ass. You turned on a livestream so people could watch you and Valeria do your makeup, playing Meg Thee Stallion as you got ready. You started dancing, twerking a little bit in the mirror.

"She's practicing for later when she sees Gavi."

You slap Valeria on the arm, the chat exploding at the idea. You ended the live shortly after, getting in your car to be driven over.

Gavi was a nervous wreck. He had changed his shoes three times, wondering which pair of Dunks would impress you the most. Gel or natural hair? Should he wear his classic long sleeve or just the jersey? Pedri's honking was disturbing the whole neighborhood. He ran downstairs (he picked the gray dunks), getting in Pedri's car as fast as possible.

"If Alejandro get to her first, you only have yourself to blame."

Gavi laughed lightly, but he felt like he was going to be sick.

You and the girls arrived to Camp Nou at 10am, eager to take a tour. You were greeted by several members of staff, including Sara, who worked the team's social media. She would be following you all throughout the day to get clips for the official Instagram and Twitter accounts. You walked into the office, greeted first by Xavi. You were all super excited to be in the presence of the coach and World Cup winner. He spoke with you about the history of the club, then lead you through the facilities to the locker room, where you would be meeting the players. Your group members walked in ahead of you as you grabbed a selfie with Xavi.

Gavi would never admit it, but he stood on his tiptoes to try and catch a glimpse of you. He was in jeans and a jersey, ditching the long sleeve since he wouldn't be hurting his arms (not because he saw a video of you saying that you were in love with his arms. That could never be the reason). You walk in and it was like someone had lit his veins on fire. He was so overwhelmed by your gentle laugh and your bright smile. Your eyes scanned the players and landed on Gavi, biting your lip and winking at him. He looked to the floor, hiding the satisfied look on his face from the cameras recording. You greeted all the players, and after getting past Ferran and Alejandro, you got to Gavi. He put one sweaty hand out for you to shake.

"Nice to finally meet you, Gavi. You're even better looking in person."

You shook his hand and pulled him in, giving him a kiss on each cheek. Typical for Spain, but not something you had done for the other players.

"I as well also think meeting you is good." Gavi stammered out, making absolutely no sense. You smiled at him, causing his heart to race faster. Your hand lingered on his for a moment before you moved on to Pedri.

"You're going to make a really bad impression on Xavi if you break our young talent in the middle of the season." He said to you, causing you to pull away and laugh, pretending you didn't have the faintest idea what he was talking about. At the end of the greetings, the team members pulled out the shirts that had been prepared for all of you. Sara pulled out yours and handed it to Gavi, knowing keeping you together would produce the best trending content. Fan service pays the bills. He unfolded the shirt and saw your name at the top, and under...

"Number 6?" He asked, lifting an eyebrow at you. You looked at him from your seat, patting the spot next to you. He reluctantly sat down, and held up the shirt for the photo. You placed your hand over his for the photo, and he felt like he was 12 again experiencing his first crush. When the photographers looked down to make sure the shot was clear, you leaned into Gavi's ear.

"I wanted to wear your new number. I hope it can bring you some good luck."

"You... you want me to have g-good luck?"

"Of course Pablo. When you do well you're happier, and then I'm happier."

Gavi was going to explode. What kind of woman were you? Who was this forward about their feelings? He took a deep breath and composed himself. The girls were all taking sneaky pictures, wanting to capture the moment that you and Gavi first fell in love (because they knew that you would never let him out of your sights now). His teammates were snickering, in awe of how the firecracker that they had come to love was now a pile of mush, blushing like a schoolgirl and stuttering over his words.

"Alright, we're going to film some challenges in pairs now. The rest of the team will get their pairs. Gavi and y/n, you're going to come film with me." Sara said, walking quickly outside the locker room, expecting you both to follow. Gavi got up quickly and gestured towards the door.

"Um, after you."

"Wow, you're such a gentleman." You said, giving him a gentle squeeze on the bicep before you followed Sara. What was he supposed to do now?

You walked outside into the stands and both took your seats, handed personal mics to attach to your shirts. You clipped yours on in about a minute, having done this numerous times for different shoots. Gavi, on the other hand, was struggling slightly.

"Do you want some help, Gavi? Of course that would require me to touch your chest."

He looked up at you, wire still tangled. "You're going to touch my chest?"

"Only if you want me to gorgeous." You replied with a wink. He didn't trust himself to make words, so he nodded instead. You gently grabbed the wire, threading it through his shirt, fingers lightly brushing against the toned muscle of his chest. You clipped it at the top, smoothing his shirt when you were finished.

"All done. Now we need to test them out with a sentence to make sure the staff can hear. I'll go first. Test sentence: Gavi is adorable and I'm going to ask him out before I leave today."

"You're going to do what?!" He said, eyes widened, sweat glands activated.

"It's just a gibberish test sentence. Your turn."

"Um, hello?"

"It needs to be longer than that." You said, getting comfortable in your seat.

"I don't know what to say." He said, smiling shyly and looking down.

"Try whatever comes to your mind Gavi. Literally anything."

"Okay. Ehem test sentence: I'm really nervous around y/n so I hope I don't make a fool of myself in this video."

Your cheeks heated up but you looked away, trying to play it cool. You loved that you were making him a little bit flustered, but he was gaining some confidence to respond. The camera crew stated that you were rolling, and you looked at the camera.

"Hello everyone! I'm y/n and I'm here today with Gavi, and we're going to be playing Barca's 7-second challenge!"

"Ah, my brain is too slow for this game." Gavi said, tossing is head back. The staff handed you the envelopes, and you began.

"Alright I'm going to be asking first. Name three Barca players that contributed to a goal against Real Madrid."

"Ah easy. Leo Messi, Luis Suarez, and me." He said, winking at the camera.

"Good job. You would have been my first answer." You responded. Your rizz game was insane today. You wanted to make an impression- who knows if you would ever have a chance again?

It was Gavi's turn. He opened the envelope and read the question.

"Ah this is too easy. Who are 3 Barca players that have worn the number 6?"

You smirked at the camera. "Super easy. Denis Suarez, Xavi, and the best looking in number 6, Gavi." You said, winking at him. He smiled widely, turning away from you.

"Ah lalala don't let Mister Xavi hear you say that."

After you finished filming the game, the sun had moved from the middle of the sky, making the field more pleasant. The staff informed you that the final piece of content you would be filming would be Gavi showing you how to play football. Gavi was excited. Finally something he could excel at (and maybe embarrass you for once). You both got onto the field, and you laced up the football boots you had been given by the staff. From your position on the ground you looked up.

"Should I keep one untied so I can play as well as you?"

"I- I think you should keep them tied. I'm used to falling, but I don't want you to get injured."

"Awe how cute Pablo you don't want me to break my face." You said, getting up from your spot on the ground and pinching his cheek. It was quite warm to the touch.

Once the cameras were rolling, he taught you some basics, and then he decided to show off. He started playing keep-up with the ball, moving from hit feet to his thighs to his head and shoulders. He passes the ball to you, and you tried to receive with your chest, forgetting about the extra tissue there. You bent over in pain and he came up to you, checking on you.

"Don't worry I'm fine. But if you ask nicely I'll let you kiss it better." He stood frozen with his hands on your shoulders.

"I, I, I- do you want to do something else?"

"No no, it's hot watching you play."

Gavi was at his end. He was embarrassed beyond belief. He could not believe how forward you were, and he could not believe how much he liked it. He felt special - wanted. He brought you to the front of the box, deciding to end the day by teaching you to shoot a penalty. He helped position you, and you two spent the next ten minutes making shots at the goal and joking with one another. At the end, the crew came and collected your mics, and you waiting for the other girls and players to join you.

"Oh, I almost forgot. Here, can you sign my jersey?"

You handed him the pen, turning around and lifting your hair out of the way. He bent over slightly, uncapping the pen with his teeth.

"Who should I make it out to?" He asked.

"Make it out to your future wife. Or future long-term girlfriend if you don't believe in the institution of marriage." You felt the pen meet your back, smiling to yourself.

"I have never met a girl that was as forward as you. It's a little intimidating."

You turn to him, taking your pen and sticking it into your back pocket.

"I know I've said this a million times on every platform, but I think you're cute and interesting. I'm not going to be shy about that. If I make you uncomfortable though I'll stop."

"No no. That wasn't a complaint, but I was wondering...."

"Yes, dear husband?"

"Were you serious about asking me out?"

"My God Gavi. I have made it so painfully obvious that I'm had over heels for you. I have to ask you out as well?"

"You make me shy! I can't even begin to think of where I could take you on a date. I'm just going to let you stay in the driver's seat and I'll keep being a little stupid."

"What're you going to do when I come to one of your matches? Blush and giggle in midfield?"

"You're going to come to a match? The we have to go out before then. Let me get the awkwardness out over dinner so when I'm on the field, you'll be the one blushing and swooning."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~A/N: this is so long omg :') thank you so much to whoever requested this. It was really fun to write a super confident character. I hope this is what anon was looking for, and I'm so sorry if not. I hope y'all enjoy this one, and please leave any feedback in the comments/ send them in my asks!

#pablo gavi x reader #gavi #gavi x reader #pablo gavi imagine #pablo gavi #gavi x you #gavi barcelona #fc barca #pablo gavi fluff #gavi fic #gavi fluff #pablo gavi fanfiction #gavi fanfic #pablo martín páez gavira #pablo gavi one shot #gavi imagine #gavi one shot #footballer #footballer imagine

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astrophileous · 1 year

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Love Bugs (Pt. 03)

Pairing: Derek Morgan x Female Reader

Synopsis: You and Derek Morgan have an arrangement. At work, your relationship is strictly business. Under the sheets, it's all about pleasure. Nothing more, nothing less. Until, of course, your feelings start to get involved. Your situation is complicated enough without the unexpexted predicament that suddenly befalls upon you. But with a maniac serial killer on the loose, will you ever get the chance to make everything right?

Warning(s): pregnancy, brief talk of abortion, stalker behavior, kidnapping, curse words (this shouldn't even warrant a warning at this point lol) pls lmk if I miss anything

Word Count: 2000-ish

Author's Note: told ya the pt 3 would be here sooner than you'd expect! as always, LIKE+COMMENT+REBLOG cause these give me the motivation I need to finish the parts sooner and maybe upload more frequently 👀

Love Bugs Masterlist / Criminal Minds Masterlist

You always took pride in your ability to predict things correctly. It was one of the best traits that made you a great profiler.

Not this time, though.

This time, your ability to conjure correct predictions just seemed like a big joke that the universe purposefully played out to torture your ass.

The ringtone of your phone's incoming call snapped you back to reality. Without looking at the caller ID, you pressed the green button and brought the device to your ear.

"(Y/L/N) speaking."

"Hey, Beets. Where are you?" came the voice of one Penelope Garcia. "Hotch is looking for you. Are you coming in today?"

"Huh? Yeah, I'm coming in. Sorry, it was an emergency. Tell the others I'll be there shortly."

After ending the call, you rushed through the rest of your morning routine as quickly as possible. The three opened boxes on the bathroom sink were thrown into the garbage can in no time. Their contents sitting on the counter, however, required you to pause and contemplate what course of actions you would want to do to deal with the problem at hand.

Upon realizing that this was not the kind of dilemma you could solve in a matter of minutes, you decided to fuck it before dumping the items into the same garbage can.

The three tests with two little pink lines would have to wait.

You had a serial murder case to solve.

If five months ago someone had told you that you'd someday end up carrying the child of Derek Morgan, you would have ordered a psychological evaluation for them right then and there.

The past few days had been a catastrophic turmoil. At first, the irrational anger had devoured you whole. You were this close to calling the company who produced your pills for claiming that they had 99% chance of preventing exactly the kind of mess you were going through from happening. Granted, they had put the minus 1% up there to save face in case anything like this were to ever happen. But what were the chances of you being one of the outliers in that small percentage?

Apparently, a pretty good one.

Then, the panic quickly had taken control and messed up with your head. The endless anxiety of having to bring a child into such a cruel world and bearing the responsibility of raising it, while having witnessed what kind of evil lurked underneath its facade, almost threw you to the brink of insanity. During those moments of fear, you had even entertained the idea of possibly terminating the pregnancy, even going as far as calling the nearest facility to question more about the procedure.

But once the fog had cleared, and you were able to start thinking rationally again, realization soon dawned upon you.

You wanted to keep the baby.

In some curious plot twist, you discovered that the idea of having this baby wasn't as scary as the knowledge of having to face Derek and inform him of the news.

And that was exactly what had been occupying your entire mind: how to break the news to Derek.

You barely even had the guts to talk to him directly anymore. Yet somehow, you had to find a way to tell him that you were pregnant, right to his face, as if you were bringing the news of a new movie that had just premiered in your nearest local theater.

How the hell were you ever going to do that?

And it wasn't like you were worried that Derek wouldn't be supportive about your decision to keep the baby. Even if he was unsupportive, there was nothing he could do to persuade you to change your mind. But Derek--sweet and kindhearted Derek--would never do such a thing. Having lost his father at a very young age himself, there was no way anyone could keep him from taking care of his child, no matter how they came to be in this world.

So, before you could gather your thoughts--and yourself--you had decided to put off telling Derek about your current condition.

"Still nothing, Garcia?" Hotch asked from his place in front of the board.

"I'm so sorry, sir. I've tried everything, but there was nothing else I could uncover from that tape."

The rest of the team was seated around the round table. It had been two weeks since the BAU received the video tape from the UnSub, and Garcia had finally revealed that there was nothing more to be analyzed from the tape despite having only obtained insignificant details out of it.

It also didn't help that the UnSub had been lying dormant since that video was delivered.

"It just doesn't make sense," Rossi said frustratedly. "Why would he stop now? What is he waiting for? This guy gets off on attention. Stopping his theatrics at a time like this doesn't fit his profile at all."

"He must be looking to get his attention from somewhere else," Derek chimed in.

"Yeah, but the question is where?" Reid interjected.

"And what is he planning to do to make sure he gets it?" Hotch let out a long sigh before pinching the bridge of his nose. "Alright, we're not going to stop just because this guy has. Emily, JJ, try interviewing the victims' families, friends, and the witnesses again. See if they suddenly have something useful for us. Morgan and Rossi, follow up on our other leads. Reid--"

"The case files. I know." Reid nodded.

"Right. And (Y/L/N)--" Hotch pinned his stare towards you, "--I need to talk to you. Thank you, everyone. Dismissed."

"Are you in trouble?" Emily leaned in as the rest of the team scattered out of the room.

"Not as far as I know," you whispered.

As you walked the path to Hotch's office, your mind began searching for the possibilities behind Hotch's sudden request to see you privately. You didn't get to guess for too long, though, as you finally arrived in front of his door almost in no time at all.

"Come on in, Agent. Close the door behind you," he commanded. You turned around to nudge the door closed. "Have a seat."

You didn't spend any time beating around the bush once you had sat down.

"Can I ask what this is about?"

"Shouldn't I be the one asking you that?" Hotch looked at you with a raised eyebrow. "I heard you requested a half day off today."

"I, uh... yes. Yes, I did. Is that why I'm here?"

"No. That is not why you're here." Hotch leaned back against his seat. "You've been distracted lately. You're coming late to work, and you can't seem to focus when you're around."

"I-I'm sorry, sir. It won't happen again."

"You should know that I've received concerns about you from the other members of the team."

What?

"Was it JJ?" you asked. "Because if this is about what happened in the bathroom--"

"It was Garcia, actually."

"Oh."

Hotch looked at you curiously. "What happened with JJ in the bathroom?"

"Nothing, sir. It was nothing."

The next few seconds were drowned in silence. The ticking clock on Hotch's desk became the only sound echoing against the walls. Hotch was examining you as if you were a suspect in the interrogation room, and with how much scrutiny was sizzling inside those eyes, you might as well have been.

"They're not the only ones concerned about you, (Y/L/N)," he spoke carefully. "I've also noticed that you haven't been yourself lately. You seem tired all the time. You look paler every single day." Hotch readjusted his tie before continuing, "I know that what we do here isn't easy. This job, it's not for everyone. Sometimes our limits are much smaller than what we thought it would be, and that's okay. If you'd like to put in a request for a transfer, I'm sure I will be able--"

"Sir," you stopped him before he could go on any further. "I don't want to transfer. I like working here."

"Just because you like working somewhere, it doesn't mean--"

"Hotch," you cut him off once more. "I'm pregnant."

The priceless look on Hotch's face at the sudden drop of your announcement would forever be ingrained in your brain.

"What?"

"I found out two weeks ago." You smiled tentatively. "I've been having severe morning sickness, and my appetite has also not been the best. Probably why I look tired all the time. I didn't mean to let my condition affect my work, I'm sorry."

"No, no. That's... wow. You're pregnant." Hotch started to nod as if the news was just beginning to fully settle upon him. "Congratulations, Agent. That's wonderful news. You are... happy, right?"

You smiled at his considerate question. "I am very much. Yes."

"How far along are you?"

"My guess is eight to ten weeks. I'm not so sure. Today is my first ultrasound, hence why I requested for half a day."

And then, by some unknown piece of miracle, Aaron Hotchner started to laugh. A real, actual laugh that had both of his eyes wrinkling in the corners. You didn't even know that he could do that without Jack around.

"When I called you in here earlier, this isn't exactly how I pictured the conversation would go," he admitted.

"Neither did I."

"Well--" He cleared his throat, "--there's, of course, a few things we need to go over in rumination of your current condition, but I'm sure we can manage that some other time."

"Of course, sir."

"And (Y/L/N)?" You stared at him expectantly. "You can come to me if you ever need anything. You know that, right?"

The sincerity in Hotch's declaration nearly brought you to tears. You immediately tried to blink back the emotions before you could make a mess of yourself in front of your boss.

"Of course, Hotch. Thank you."

You got up from the chair and began walking towards the door. Before your fingers could touch the handle, you decided to turn around once more.

"Hotch?"

"Yes?"

"I would appreciate it if we kept this between us for now."

"Of course, Agent." He nodded. "You have my word."

And with that, you exited Hotch's room before heading back straight to your desk.

A few hours later, you were finally returning home after attending the doctor appointment.

Confirming your earlier prediction, the doctor had put the estimated age of your fetus at around ten weeks. According to the internet, your baby was not larger than the size of a mere apricot. It was nothing more than a tiny blob in the sonogram image, but the sight of it alone somehow made you want to break down in tears.

Before you could turn into a sobbing ball of mess, you decided to put the picture right on the front of your fridge.

"Alright, I think that's--"

Thud.

Your head instinctively whipped around at the mysterious sound.

Without wasting another second, your hand immediately reached for the gun tucked safely in your holster. The tiny footsteps you took sounded deafening in the silence of your apartment. You first checked the bathroom, finding it empty with nothing out of the ordinary. The two bedrooms were pretty much the same. Quiet and a little messy just the way that you had left them that morning.

Sighing, you brushed off your paranoia as a result of your overactive hormons and creeping exhaustion.

When you reemerged from taking a shower nearly an hour later, the feeling of dread once again washed over your entire being.

At first glance, not a single thing in the apartment seemed to be out of place. But somehow, the feeling of another presence in the room was indisputable. Your wet feet slowly moved along the floor, careful as to not make as much sound as possible.

Once you arrived in the kitchen, you took in your surrounding, making sure that things really were staying in the places they should have been in.

You were about to sigh in relief until you saw it.

The sonogram image you previously had glued to the fridge.

It was now lying on the floor.

Before you could have a chance to grab the nearest weapon, the door to the second bedroom behind you suddenly began to creak.

"Boo."

That was the last thing you remembered before everything went dark.

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anaalnathrakhs · 1 year

Text

i wish nothing but rest and happiness to mick mars for his retirement from touring,

however.

imagine

februrary 18 2023, mexico city, the first show of the world tour is about to start. the crowd’s getting impatient, no band has walked on stage yet. your friends have gone for drinks or for the merch booth, so you check your phone to kill time.

#motley crue #mick mars #don't pay attention to the french or the tubbo i can't edit everything out and the app doesn't let me switch to english display #i've already had to edit multiple text displays just to switch them to english so it isn't too jarring #motleyposting on main #hey look at me i'm producing content #edit: put the wrong image in you saw nothing

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solara-bean · 1 year

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Jut found out that the full Touchstarved game might not be out till 2025 so here's a scenario I imagined with Ais. Has the others interact with mc too, but Ais is the main love interest. Hope this doesn't feel too much like my oc. I chose the Unnamed route so that may be brought up.

Worth The Trouble ( Ais x GN Reader )

( Content Warning: Violence, Blood, cursing, Ais being Ais, Remember what he did to that guy in the demo )

MC = Y/N ( I'm too tired from finals to type the slash, sorry 😭)

It started off as a normal day in Eridia, or at least as peaceful as things could be in the hellscape of a city. MC went to the market for some light grocery shopping, their small tote bag half full, when a group of kids zoomed past them. For a flash they could see that the kids' arms were full of produce, a few stray fruits leaving a trail in their wake. It was mere seconds before an enraged yell from a man was heard.

" Get back here you little shits!!!" the a man, a local produce seller, barreled down in the kid's direction. Nearly knocking down passersby, MC included.

One of the smaller kids tripped, dropping all of their stolen goods. They called to their friends for help but it was too late. The seller had already grabbed them by the collar like a stray puppy.

" Stupid maggot! I'll show you what happens to thieves around here!!" He pulled back his meaty fist to strike them.

Without thinking, MC ran to grab his wrist before the blow landed.

" Hey! That's going way too far."

The seller looked down at them and snarled.

" Stay out of this! This is between me and this little thief here."

" I get that but look at them." MC pointed to the kid's dirty clothes that were holding on by threads. " Clearly they aren't stealing for the fun of it. Can't you let them go?"

The seller scoffed at them, foul breath fanning their face. Thankfully they held back their disgust.

" I'm not running a charity. If the kid wants to eat the kid's gotta pay."

MC thought for a moment as they stared at the child, who was still curled in a protective ball. Although their face was covered, it was clear by their trembling that they were crying. MC immediately remembered all the times they'd been hungry and in need after they fled the temple. While they survived they couldn't imagine doing so at this child's age. How long had they been suffering?

" I'll do it."

" Do what?"

" Pay." MC reached into their cloak and pulled out their coin purse. " I've got plenty to spare." which wasn't true but they'd manage. The seller gave them a long, calculated glare before sighing.

" Fine."

He put the kid down. They gave a quick glance to the seller then the MC before grabbing their haul and scurrying off to where the rest of the group went. MC wasn't expecting a thank you, but the last look the kid gave to them over their shoulder was enough.

" Ok," MC counted the coins in their palm, leaving the purse nearly empty. " Will this be enough?"

The seller took the coins. Counting each while scratching his stubbly chin.

" Yeah, almost..."

MC looked at him confused. They were sure that they gave him much more than his nearly, spoiled produce was worth. They almost didn't notice his arm go up. But they did feel the strike across their face. Everything went white for a moment as they stumbled. Pain flared over the entirety of the right side of MC's face. They pressed their palm to it and whipped their gaze back to the seller stunned.

" What the fuck is your problem??!!" they shrieked at him.

" Don't look so confused. You said you'd pay for everything. That includes punishment. " He let out a dark chuckle and walked pass them. " Maybe think twice next time you wanna be someone's savior."

MC gawked at his back. What kind of asshole pulls a stunt like that. He got his money fair and square. Clearly he just wanted a reason to cause someone harm. They wanted to let it go and move on but crap that hit really hurt. His hands were big enough to crush their skull and they were pretty sure that his ring cut their cheek. There was no way they were gonna let him walk away so easily.

" Hey!"

The seller turned around and was met with a fist right to the nose. He reeled back, giving MC enough time to land a kick to his kneecap. He fell to the city floor with the gracefulness of an old dying ox, MC's coins going down with him. They grabbed a handful of them before making a break for it back to the Wet Wick.

Out of breath, energy, half their coins and what little faith they had in humanity, all MC wanted to do was go to sleep in their room and maybe have some of their scraps for dinner. It could've been made into a full meal but they hadn't realized they'd dropped their tote bag until it was too late. Thankfully, the bar sounded empty from the outside, so at least they could avoid the headache of possibly socializing.

" Hey sparrow."

Shit.

There right in his usual spot at the bar sat Ais, accompanied by Vere and Leander.

" Hey Ais..." they said weakly, pulling up their hood even more to hide the blooming bruises.

" Um Excuse me. I'm here too dear. Goodness has being here already dulled your manners?" came Vere, tail playfully swaying.

" Hey Vere." they said quickly as they tried to flee to their room, but that would've been to easy.

" Oh MC how was the market did you get anything good?" Leander asked, conveniently getting in front of them and blocking their path. They didn't look up at him and did their best not to adjust their hood again.

" Yeah, yeah it was good."

" But where's your tote ba-"

" It's getting late I'll see you guys later." MC swerved around him, nearly home free.

" Sparrow."

They stopped. Ais' piercing gaze burning into their back.

" Come here, please." he instructed in a soft yet stern tone. They couldn't resist him. He'd only pry more if they did, so reluctantly they sat next to him, avoiding eye contact.

" Take off your hood."

They stayed still. The air filled with a tense silence.

" Ais come one. They've probably had a long day. I'm sure their fi-" Lenader nearly choked when MC took their hood off. " What the hell happened?! Are you ok?!"

" Obviously not." Vere scoffed. " Thought I smelled blood but that's nothing new for you. Do tell, what mess have you found yourself in this time, MC?"

MC let out a tired sigh. Leander's worrying and Vere's teasing made for a sickening combo on an already shitty afternoon.

" It's nothing. I just ran into a bad guy at the market. Nothing interesting." They were about to get up to leave when Ais' hand was placed firmly on their shoulder.

" Humor us would ya? What really happened?" While the slight smile on his face was meant to be assuring, MC knew he was up to no good.

" Really it's nothing. I just saw some kids steal some food and one of them got caught by the seller. So I thought hey why not be nice and help this clearly starving child. But nope! As usual the situation blew up in my face. Apparently coins weren't enough payment for the guy so he- " They mimicked the back-handed slap motion they'd been a victim to. " The asshole didn't even have the decency to warn me first, so I thought it was only fair to get in a few blows in myself then run like hell before things got too heated. So yeah that's it. Nothing special."

After what they hadn't meant to be a ramble there was another thick silence. Crap maybe I said too much. Then a low chuckle came from beside them. Oh good Ais found the story amusing, maybe they were worried for nothing. But that was quickly put aside when they turned to look at him.

His grin was downright dangerous. Fangs gleaming and all. His eyes were even worse, glowing with a bloodlust that would scare a soulless shitless.

" I'll be right back." he said, getting up from his seat and stretching out his tired joints with a pop.

" Ais." Leander warned. " Let's think about this, ok buddy."

" Nothing to think about. Now," He stood in front of MC and leaned down to their level. " Which seller was it?"

MC felt their pulse quicken. Not just from being at eye level with Ais, but also from the immense violent aura he began to exude.

" Really Ais it's fine. I hit him pretty hard so we're even."

" I'm sure you did. But this is purely for my own selfish vices. I can't rest easy knowing this jackass is going around threatening kids and hitting customers. So who was it?"

" Ais. It's not worth the trouble just let it g-"

Ais' hand swiftly taken ahold of their chin. With a gentleness that greatly contrasted his character, he tilted MC's face to better examine the damage. They couldn't help the heat that rose within them.

" Plenty worth the trouble to me." He tilted their head back to face forward. " Who was it, MC."

Maybe it was the softness of his tone or the way he said their name instead of Sparrow, but they confessed. Even down to what stalls the seller's had been next to. He gave them a small, genuine smile and went on the hunt.

" Well, there's no stopping him now. Let's get some ice on that bruise, hm." Leander went around the counter, paying no mind to MC's breathless expression. In no time he came back with clean rag and another with ice inside. " Alright let me see."

Before he could attend to their face, Vere cut in.

" Leander, didn't the doctor leave some magic elixir or whatever for minor injuries in the backroom?"

" Oh you're right. He did. I should go get it."

" Yes you should." Vere smiled sweetly then frowned once Leander was out of sight. " Good I couldn't tolerate him for much longer without Ais here."

" Don't get too excited, he'll be back soon." MC reminded him.

" No he won't," Vere swiped the rag that Leander left on the counter near the ice bag before turning back to them with a mischievous smirk. " I poured those nasty medicine bottles out weeks ago."

MC gawked at him.

" Why would you do that? What if someone needed those?"

" What like you? Don't be such a baby you'll be fine. Now hold still. I can only take so much of you blood smelling up the place."

With a similar gentleness as Ais, Vere took hold of their chin and began to dab the blood away from the cut that was already beginning to close. MC didn't have the energy for anymore shock today, so they relished in the care.

" You know. This pacifist act you're playing won't do you any good in this city"

MC sighed and grabbed the ice bag to put on their bruise once he was done with the cut.

" I'm not a pacifist. Trust me I've got nothing against that jerk getting what he deserves. I just don't want Ais to get in any trouble because of me."

" Hmph, now why would Ais get in trouble?"

" Because, he's a monster. What if the Senobium punishes him for being too violent?"

Vere hummed to himself. He carelessly tossed the bloody rag on the floor and leaned back against the counter, tail swishing languidly.

" Oh don't fret dear. The Senobium's too up their own asses to care about a few lowtown brutes getting torn apart. Besides I highly doubt Ais would do anything so dreadful as to get a punishment like mine. And if he did..." Vere's eyes turned a bright pink, his fangs seemed longer as well. " I'd tear this city to the ground before they laid a finger on him."

MC just stared at him for a while. The primordial fear in their gut was unmistakable, but they couldn't help but feel a bit relieved.

" Well I'm glad Ais has a friend like you to look after him."

The fox scoffed.

" I'm not his friend."

A bit confused by that response, they were sure he was joking. The duo seemed as close as Mhin and Kuras if not more.

" Ok then I'm glad you're his very close, foxy furry acquaintance."

Vere's ears went down as he scowled at them.

" I can break you like a twig. Don't forget that."

They merely chuckled at that although they weren't entirely sure if he was serious or not.

" Sorry for the wait!" Came Leander's chipper voice. He rejoined the two with a small container of bandaids and a bottle of unknown liquid. " Took me forever to find this elixir. I could've swore we had more bottles. Thankfully, I always stash a spare."

" Wow how great is that Vere." MC gave him an innocent smile that in turn got them glare. Vere definitely meant that threat now.

----

Ais arrived back at the bar late into the night. He wreaked of blood despite his best efforts to clean himself. He didn't want to make another bad impression on his new...new friend? Acquaintance? Whatever they were he wanted them around him more often. Which would be hard if they were scared of him. Did he scare them before when asking about the seller? They seemed nervous, but most people were around him, especially after knowing about his brutal tendencies.

Perhaps they didn't mind. He got a good look at the seller's broken nose, and what he could assume was an injured knee that made it all the easier to catch and corner him. The sparrow really did have a tough side after all. He was almost sad that he sullied their work with his own. No one would suspect that what was left of the asshole was the handiwork of two pissed off individuals. Maybe returning their tote bag full of goods and the coins that he'd swiped from the guy's pockets would be a good enough apology gift.

The barkeep was cleaning shot glasses when he arrived. Out of no where a wave of unease hit him. Maybe he came back too late and should just leave their stuff here.

" Got something for MC. Can you give it to them for me?"

The barkeep only spared him a quick glance.

" Do I look like a delivery boy? Drop it off at their door yourself, I'm busy." She replied with a bitterness that he always found amusing.

" Yes ma'am."

He was in front of their door when the doubt came back, sweaty palms too. What the hell was he nervous for? He doesn't get nervous. This was just a small favor for a frien-aquaintance. Just put the stuff down and go. But what if someone took it? Maybe he should see if they're awake first. Maybe not what if he wakes them up.

Annoyed by his rambling thoughts he did least smart thing and opened, which should've been locked, door. It was dark inside, aside the moonlight from a small window. His higher than average vision could make out a small bed with a lump under the covers. Next to it was a dresser. He made his way to it quietly, mentally cursing the metal on his boots for the creaks they made in the floorboards.

Finally at his destination, he set the tote bag and coins on the dresser and turned to leave. But curiosity got the best of him. He snuck a peak at MC and it was all over. The covers were up to their nose. There was a small bandage on their cheek. The bruising seemed to have healed a bit. Ais had never seen them look so peaceful. It was actually pretty cute. Then he realized how creepy this whole situation was and made his way to the door.

" Ais...?"

Shit!

He stopped mid step, looking over his shoulder at them. Their eyes were barely open and their voice was quiet and soft.

" That you?"

He sighed.

" Yeah it's me sparrow. Don't worry just wanted to return your bag. I'm leaving, go back to sleep." he kept walking.

" Are you ok?"

He stopped again, wide eyed.

" What?" he asked.

They yawned.

" I smell blood."

Oh, he thought. They were worried about him? That's actually really sweet. When was the last time anyone got worried for him? Vere and Kuras maybe. But they knew he could handle himself. It's what's he's good at. Looking out for himself when no one will. When everyone else leaves eventually.

But maybe MC wanted to stick around.

He smiled, unsure if they could see his face so he made sure they could hear it in his voice.

" I'm just fine sparrow. It's not my blood you're smelling."

They smiled back before yawning again.

" Good. Well see ya later I guess..."

They curled back into their blanket and pillow, already drifting. He took in the sight one last time before leaving and closing the door.

" Yeah see ya later."

The barkeep and every wander through the night had no idea why the feared demon renegade, Ais, had the softest smile on his face all the way back to the wastelands.

#touchstarved game #touchstarvedgame #ais touchstarved #ais #ais x reader #touchstarved ais x reader #red spring studios #vere #leander #touchstarved #breaking news local eridia demon bad boy who claims to have no friends gets giddy over having a new friend #him and vere need to stop tripping they like each other 🙄#vere low key liking mc mostly because ais likes them #leander liking mc cuz he's a lonely big tiddy loser who gets jealous of ais and honestly I like that about him #its so funny haw vere can't stand him #also he totally knew that vere poured out the medicine 😂#god I love it when when bad boy character types softly pine for their love interests🥺💕#autocorrect keeps mispelling all their names except for leander😤

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hopelesslyromanticshark · 2 months

Text

⋆ ˚｡⋆౨ৎ˚ My Grease-Covered Hero

content: leo valdez x daughter of posiedon! reader fic warnings: language and fast pace fr author's note: this is me core at its finest. this is me as a person. wouldn't be caught dead in sweatpants unless i am flying or dying. and i have nothing against people in sweatpants, in fact i am a bit jealous. but some people just never get over winning best dressed as a senior superlative (its me, i'm some people)

can i get a kiss? and can you make it last forever? i said I'm 'bout to go to war (uh-huh) and I don't know if i'ma see you again can I get a kiss? (can I?)

leo was woken up by his phone buzzing and ringing out the chorus of ‘see you again’ by tyler, the creator. only one person in his phone had a specialized ringtone, which is why his hands were blindly searching through his sheets to find the little metal box. finally, his fingers managed to grasp the phone and he pulled it up to his ear, yawning against the back of his hand as he slowly sat up in bed.

“hey, mamacita,” he spoke, clearing his throat to lose the morning voice even though he knew she loved it.

“leo, i’m sorry, i know you’ve got late mornings on thursdays but-” the girl heaved into the phone, getting cut off by stuttering breaths and the sniffling of her nose. leo was instantly awake, his brows furrowing at her state.

“y/n, you need to breathe, honey. it’s okay, no ones mad, just talk to me,” leo comforted, picturing tears rolling down her cheeks and her bloodshot eyes which felt like a knife to his heart. he often had to tell y/n that no one was upset with her, a normal assumption she had picked up from her mother and father, the temperamental sea god. he listened as y/n took a few deep breaths through the phone before trying again.

“my car is making a weird noise, i woke up late, the outfit i planned out last night looked so bad this morning that i’m in sweatpants. sweatpants, leo, sweatpants. i have like fifteen minutes to get to my class but i can’t stop crying in the parking lot and- and i hate sweatpants,” y/n moaned into the phone, a new wave of tears brimming her eyes. he could see her, curled up in the driver seat with the phone held in her shaky hands.

“okay, okay, i've got a plan. you go to class, i’ll come by at lunch, check out the car and bring you a change of clothes. how’s that sound, baby?” leo offered, knowing he had nothing going on today. he was enrolled in some fancy block schedule high school, which gave him thursdays off every week. which he was grateful for on a whole new level today, the sound of y/n’s relieved tears sounding like it was straight from the heavens.

“thank you, thank you, thank you,” y/n mused into the phone, over exaggerated kissing noises as well. leo laughed, shaking his curls out as he glanced out at the rising sun.

“yeah, yeah. i’ll text when i’m there, okay? enjoy your class, love you,” leo mused into the phone, smiling wider at her laughs.

“okay, hammer head, i’ll see you later. i love you more,” she laughed into the phone, promptly ending the call before leo had time to argue.

he rolled his eyes at her, shooting off a text claiming he loved her most before crawling out of bed. he got dressed quickly, grabbing his tool bag and keys as he left, informing his foster parents of his plans as he scampered out of the door. he pulled up outside of the jackson-blofis household, producing a key that sally had insisted leo take, sick of the climbing through the windows from both him and annabeth. he opened the door, walking in and being met by a surpirsed paul, who held a sandwich in one hand and a baby bottle in the other.

“…hey, leo,” paul prompted, nervously glancing about.

“oh, hey, sir, i’ve just come to get some clothes for y/n. she’s having a rough day,” leo explained, rocking on the balls of his feet. he’s met y/n’s biological father and been less nervous around him. and he's a god that could smite leo for sneezing wrong.

“that would explain the stomping around this morning. poor girl,” replied paul before waving leo off to y/n’s room as estella whined and made grabby hands towards the man.

leo waved to the little girl as he easily made this way through the apartment, swinging y/n’s door open. he walked in, shaking his head at the pile of clothes on her bed, surely from the morning. she usually kept her room painfully organized, which leo had a habit of messing up, not that she cared much. leo dug through the pile for a moment before pulling her pair of flare leggings out, remembering she told him once they went with everything. he grabbed one of her tops, a low neck dark red one that he loved. finally, he made the impromptu decision to grab her makeup bag, knowing she’d want to at least fix her mascara. he shoved it all into a tote bag and began to make his way out of the apartment.

“thanks, sir, i’m off,” leo called and paul called with similar wishes of safe travels.

leo, knowing he still had some time, made a sneaky stop for iced coffee for her before making his way to her college campus. she had texted him her lot and spot earlier. plus, it was a cobalt blue vw beetle, kinda hard to miss. he pulled up next to it, scrolling through his phone to pass the time until he heard her voice approaching.

“oh, don’t even worry about it, katie! i don’t even use my physical copy anymore, the online version is just easier for me,” y/n’s voice mused and leo couldn’t stop the smile that took over his lips as he leapt out of his truck, approaching her car with her tote bag and coffee in hand. she was, in fact, in a pair of sweatpants but leo still thought she was the most gorgeous girl he’d ever seen. and he’d seen the goddess of beauty (who took a striking resemblance to y/n when they’d met but he's sure that's unrelated.)

“there’s my sweet girl,” he spoke, y/n’s eyes instant darting from her classmate to leo, a large smile taking over her face.

“leo!! aww, you didn’t have to get me coffee,” the girl whined, though she quickly stole it from his hands and took a sip while leaning into his side. he rolled his eyes at her words with a smile.

“please, you love coffee more than you love me,” he huffed, winking jokingly over at her friend. leo briefly introduced himself and shook her hand, katie responding similarly but she was clearly shy.

“that could change if you can fix my car,” y/n sang jokingly, tossing him her car keys as she pulled the passenger door open, dropping her stuff off into the seat before reaching into the back and producing some book. leo had popped the hood already, looking around for problems and what not.

“here, katie. keep it for as long as you need. oh, and i already started highlighting before i got the online version, i think to chapter three,” stated y/n, setting the book into the girl’s hands. she looked up at y/n like she’d hung the stars in the sky.

“thank you, y/n, truely,” katie managed to get out, returning the bright smile y/n gave her.

“of course! if you wanna plan a study session for that book, just shoot me a text,” y/n replied, waving the girl off before turning to leo, who was deep inside her car's engine.

“hey, lee? you got my clothes?” she questioned, folding her arms on the car before resting her head against. leo glanced over at her with a smile, reaching into his tool belt for something which he managed to magically produce.

“yeah, i put it in your driver's seat. leggings and that red top,” leo huffed, pulling out a flashlight and somehow going even deeper into the car.

“the one you love?” she asked with a smirk and leo pretended not to hear her as his cheeks began to tint red. y/n laughed before walking away, to assumable change in his car, which had more space. a few minutes later, y/n came bounding up to him as he was no longer leaning into the car. she collided with his side, leo laughing as he wrapped his arm around her but kept his fingers away to avoid getting grease on her.

“better?” he asked and she nodded against his chest, causing the boy to press a kiss to her temple.

“good, because your tits look great,” leo joked with a wink, y/n laughing with a shake of her head.

“i’m not wearing a bra, leo,” she told him, glancing down to see what all the fuss was about.

“i think we should abolish bras then. let's start with yours, i'm your guy if you wanna burn 'em,” continued leo, getting more joy from hearing her little giggles.

“did you fix my car or not, repair boy?” y/n mocked, earning her a playful smack against her hip.

“you know i hate that nickname,” he huffed with a smile, knowing he only liked it out of her pretty lips but shaking his head at the girl, “and yes, i did fix it.”

“awww, my grease-covered hero,” y/n mused, taking his face into her hands, holding him a few inches away from her before pressing their lips together. leo leaned into her lips easily, enjoying the lip gloss that transferred to his lips and the way her hands felt against his cheeks. and even though he hated coffee, he thought it was becoming his new favorite as he could taste it on the girl’s lips.

“you got time to catch lunch?” leo asked as they pulled apart, opening his eyes to see the lovestruck look she was giving him.

“for you? always.”

#postcards from covey ౨ৎ #all my love ౨ৎ #pjo #heroes of olympus x reader #hoo #leo valdez x reader #leo valdez

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staytinyville · 7 months

Text

Stay Alive (10)

BTS poly!ot7 x Reader

Magical Creatures AU

Series Masterlist

Warnings: None

A/N NOT BETA READ (I did try the best to my ability). We're heading into the chapters where I tell you guys about their creatures. I want to hear your thoughts for each one!

After you spent some time with Jungkook, you decided to check on Namjoon before meeting with the others. When you knocked on his door, there had been no answer so you allowed yourself to look around the room to find the man.

“Namjoon?” You called when you didn’t spot the large man. “You in here?”

“I'll be out in a bit.” He called from the bathroom. You figure with the steam coming out of the bathroom door he had been taking a shower.

“Okay!” You called back to him. As you waited for him you took the moment to look around the room. It was much like Taehyung in the sense that there were a lot of different things that created Namjoon’s personality.

He had his own bookshelf that was filled to the brim. There were a bunch of art magazines and books scattered around the room that made you smile. The man seemed to be super artistic and it really called to your attention. You knew he was an intellectual person and you admired that side of him.

As you shuffled around the room, you didn’t take notice of the pile of clothes on the floor in front of the bed. You hadn’t heard the bathroom door open either seeing as the moment your feet got tangled in the fabrics. You let out a yelp as the floor suddenly grew closer.

You grunted as your hand swung around to find something to hold onto. Instead of thinking you had grabbed onto the bed, searing hot skin came in contact with your palm. It felt as though you had touched a pan sitting on a turned on stove top.

“Ah.” You screamed, retracting your hand back from the burn. Namjoon had recovered from the slap you gave his chest to hold onto your body to keep from falling over. “Namjoon!” Your eyes went wide as his palms seemed to cause a burning sensation from over your clothes.

As you realized the heat was coming from his body, you gasped out in worry. “You're burning up.” You stressed, quickly letting go of him to look around the room. “Let me check your temperature.”

Your head shook as you tried to come up with a viable answer as to why he was so hot. “You're not okay.” You whispered to yourself.

“Hey.” He grabs your shoulders to make you look at him. “Hey, I'm okay.” His hands moved down to your arms. “Look.” He dropped his hand down to yours, moving it to place it over his chest. “See.”

Your fingers twitched on his tanned chest as his skin seemed to sooth the burn you had gotten in the first place. His body felt like any normal temperature, a bit clammy from the steam in the shower. You were too busy worrying about his body temperature to even realize he was shirtless.

“But you were burning.” You whispered, looking up at him.

“Was probably from the shower.” Namjoon sighed, letting go of your hand as he looked down at you. He turned to the pile of clothes you had tripped over. “Let me move this.”

When you had rubbed at your stinging palm, you turned over to Namjoon. A gasp escaped your lips as more skin lesions were found along his back. The skin looked irritated, probably from the shower he had just taken. They were raw and it brought tears to your eyes at how much they probably hurt him.

“Joon. Let me cover these.” You spoke up, watching as his head snapped up to you. He looked at you with a raised brow and a wide eyed look. You frowned as you thought over what you had said.

“Sorry, for calling you Joon.” You said as you realized your informality.

He felt something tighten inside his chest as he heard the nickname leave your lips. It was a common nickname for him, especially from his close friends. Hearing you say it brought some kind of content to him. He found you calling him that to cause endorphins to be produced tenfold. It brought a smile to his face.

“It's okay.” He smiled softly. “You can call me that.”

You grew closer to the man, sad eyes looking over his skin as you kept your eyes on his torso. He watched as you hesitated to bring your fingers to his skin for fear of hurting him. “I was hoping you'd get better.” You spoke softly.

He wanted to reach for your hand and give you comfort but he held himself back. He realized your emotions were the ones affecting his mental capabilities which left him to act the same way with you.

His empathic abilities were a force to be reckoned with if he was to use them correctly. However if someone felt something too much he would sometimes succumb to their callings. He had been so used to the anger and annoyance from his old nurses that being with you he was easily influenced by the softest of emotions.

He sighed, allowing you to touch his chest as he fell into the temptation of feeling your own emotions. While it was a negative emotion, he knew the worry you had was for his well being. It was a different kind of worry to him. It told him your care.

“They had to take samples the other day.” He softly told you.

Your eyes turned bitter, your emotions taking a turn as an irritated emotion befell Namjoon. “They did a terrible job.” You scoffed, fingers touching his chest. “Your skin is dry too.” You began to shake your head, turning from him. “Let me go get some kind of moisturizer.”

He watched you enter the bathroom, smiling to himself when he heard your small noise of triumph. He took a seat on the bed as you returned back, opening up the moisturizer to put a good amount on your hand. You rubbed them together to create a lather before walking closer to him.

You paused as his dark eyes peered up at you. Your breath hitched in your throat as you realized what it was you were about to do. It was just now dawning on you that you were about to rub his naked chest with lotion and it left you blushing mess.

You were so worried about his injuries that you hadn’t even gotten the chance to appreciate what was known as Namjoon’s pecks. They were just there and it was so hard for you not to keep staring. You were a nurse! This was your job. If you had to give him a sponge bath, you would give him a sponge bath.

It was nothing. You kept lying to yourself.

Namjoon had to purse his lips to avoid laughing at your expression. Your panic was seeping out of you, which prompted him to pull you out of your internal struggle. “You can touch me.” He told you.

You squeaked, nodding your head as you tried your best to lather him in lotion while avoiding his raw skin. Your fingers were the best you could do when moving around the wounds. His chest moved up and down with his breathing which you found yourself subconsciously trying to follow along with.

Under your fingertips you felt his skin start to heat up quickly which almost made you pull back. However, it would somehow return to normal quickly after Namjoon felt you pause. It was a game of back and forth.

The man was trying his hardest to not slip into a calming headspace. His biggest worry though was purring as your touch soothed him. Your emotions were not helping his headspace either.

As you finally reached the tops of his shoulders, you looked up at him. “Can I get your back?” You whispered.

Namjoon’s eyes fluttered open, a look of euphoria drifting from his face as he nodded at you. He shuffled around in the bed, turning his body so that his back was facing you better. You hummed in thank you, fingers moving over his skin again. You sighed as his back looked to be worse with larger patches covering the expanse of his shoulder.

You delicately moved your hands along his shoulder blades. You were too busy to notice the almost purring noise that was starting to come from his chest. He had slumped over with his head hung low as though he was falling asleep. When he felt you stop your movements, he looked over his shoulder.

He noticed your expression and felt a wave of sadness wash over him. “It'll heal.” He told you. “Don't worry about it.” He tried to comfort you.

“Yes but it'll take a while.” You sighed.

“I'm different.” He smiled lightly, turning to face you completely. “It'll heal quicker.” He reached out to take your hands, running his thumb over the back of it. “Promise. I'll go put on my clothes.” As he felt the lotion seep into his skin, he got up to get changed.

You watched him put a shirt on, covering the wounds from your eyes. “Would you like anything else?” You asked as he turned back to you.

His dimple showed as his lips pulled up into a smile. “Take a walk with me?” He asked you.

Your smile was soft, causing Namjoon to swoon. He had never met someone who was able to do that to him. However you were beyond adorable to him. He didn’t know how much he missed before meeting you.

“Sure.” You told him.

He allowed you to walk out the room first, closing the door behind him. As you began to walk alongside him, you both fell into a comfortable silence. You kept glancing at him, your eyes moving down to his arm.

“What is your condition like?” You asked, wanting to talk with him.

He sighed deeply. “Like there are a thousand ants biting and filling you with their venom.” He expressed. “It burns until eventually it goes numb. They grow back but it still hurts every time.”

“Maybe they'll find something to fix it here.” You spoke up, hopeful for him. “That is why you're here.”

“That's not why I'm here.” Namjoon shook his head, his jaw ticking.

“What was that?” You asked, not hearing his whispered reply.

“Nothing.” He sighed, turning to look at you. He looked down at you, your eyebrows raising at the soft look he was giving you. “You're too sweet to be here.”

“What do you mean?” You frowned, tilting your head to the side.

“I mean there's more to this than you aren’t seeing.” He told you. You watched as his eyes seemed to cloud over and a blank look overtook his face. When he came back from whatever it was, you only gave him an even more confused look.

“I'll take you to Jungkook.” He told you, turning around. “He's looking for you.” He added.

“How do you know?” You asked, trying to keep up with his long strides.

“I just do.”

Series Masterlist

@h3earteyes4mingi , @fangirling-all-the-way-tbh ,

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spoilmesweetieforficssake · 8 months

Text

Pussy...I Got A Guy For That

I honestly haven't intended to be away from writing for as long as I have and I know I have messages, requests and prompts still to respond to (and I will) but this pesky finger is still making typing a literal pain so please bear with!

But for now, I'm sorry not sorry for the terrible pun in the title and have no idea where this idea came from but...

~*~

“What d’you mean you need to drop it off now?” Melissa hisses into her phone. This was not part of her plan. “I’m at work! What happened to tonight?”

“Look, if you don’t want it I can find someone else?”

“No!” she’s quick to reply. “I want it, I just…can you drop it off at the school?”

Creeping through the halls with a pet carrier, Melissa finds herself shaking her head. How the hell had she talked herself into this? Returning to her class, who it seems have made good on their promise of staying quiet on the promise they get to see the contents of said carrier if they behaved.

She places the box down behind her desk where it can’t be seen from the door. “Okay,” she sighs, turning to look at her class. “Two at a time. Five minutes each. Oh, and Miss Y/L/N comes by, one of you guys miaows to cover, ‘kay?”

Jacob is practically vibrating with excitement when he appears in Melissa’s classroom as she lines her kids up to take them to lunch. She had messaged him to ask whether he would look after the kitten at lunch, knowing you would start to ask questions or come and find her if she was absent. Once he got over his initial shock at her messaging him in the first place he had quickly agreed.

“Where is it?” he asks excitedly, clapping his hands together.

“Behind my desk,” she hisses. “And keep your voice down! It’s meant to be a surprise!”

He’s barely listening as he practically runs towards the pet carrier, immediately kneeling down to coo at the little creature within.

Melissa shakes her head. The thing is barely four inches tall and it has everyone at its beck and call. “I owe you!” she tells him as she starts to lead her kids off.

“Consider the kitten cuddles payment!” he grins.

The red head rolls her eyes, turning her attention back to her kids. “Any of you tell Miss Y/L/N if you see her at lunch you already failed your next test, got it?”

“Seriously, the kids are being weird today. This one kid just keeps miaowing at me,” you say as you slide into the seat next to the red head, smiling as she pushes a fork towards you and motions for you to dig in to the shared lunch she made.

Melissa lets out a forced laugh. “Probably just a phase. Watch, she’ll start barking at Barb next week.”

After lunch, Melissa managed to convince Barb to hide the kitten in her room for the afternoon knowing the kindergarten teacher had a free classroom while her kids were in music.

A message from her friend telling her she had better come black and clean up the furry little creature had her stomping her way through the halls. She was beginning to think this whole plan had been one very bad idea.

“Hey,” you smile as you rest your shoulder against the doorframe of Melissa’s classroom, enjoying the sight of her with her glasses perched on her nose as she looks at something intently on her phone. You hear the miaow and straighten up. “Sorry, I didn’t realise you still had kids in.”

“I don’t” she replies, looking almost guilty as she pushes herself up from her chair.

You frown as you hear the miaow again, watching as she produces a cat box from behind her desk. “Oh no, did someone find a stray?”

“Not exactly,” says the red head, placing the box in her desk, the wire door facing you and revealing one very cute ball of fluff.

You look up at her, only just managing to tear your eyes away from the adorable kitten. Now it’s your turn to frown.

“You’ve befriended every cat on the block and when you video call your parents it’s the cat you’re more interested in seeing than them so…”

“Oh my god,” you whisper. “Did you get me a kitten?”

She shrugs, leaning against the edge of her desk, thumbs hooked into her pockets. “So maybe I did?”

You’re not sure quite when the tears began to gather in your eyes. “You…you actually got me a kitten? This kitten? This cat is ours?”

She catches you as you launch yourself at her, hugging her tight.

“I can’t believe you did this!”

She knew you’d be excited but she didn’t realise you’d be quite so high pitched with it. She not sure she’s ever seen you like this. There is sheer, childlike joy on your face. “It’s a cat,” is all she can managed in response.

You shake your head, releasing her enough to pull back and meet her eyes. “It’s not just a cat!”

She sees the tears in your eyes and immediately reaches to wipe them away. “I thought you’d like it.”

“I do,” you’re quite to assure her. “I just…I never expected you to…You don’t even like cats!”

“I didn’t say I don’t like them,” she mumbles. “I just said they were little furry assholes. Speaking of which, whatever comes out of that thing you clean up, because let me tell you something that small should not be able to smell that bad!”

You let out a wet chuckle. “You got me a kitten.”

She shrugs, trying to act like it’s no big deal. “You wanna meet the little guy before you thank me? You might not even like him.”

You open the cat box, gently coaxing the little kitten forward until he lets you lift him up. “Look at his little nose,” you coo as you gently boop him, laughing as his tiny paws come up to playfully tap at your fingers. “And his teeny tiny paws!”

She watches as you baby the tiny creature, smiling fondly at you.

“I see the cat is out the bag,” says Barb, smiling as she approaches, tickling the kitten’s exposed belly where it lays in your arms.

“You knew?” you ask.

“Who do you think is gonna tell me ‘I told ya so’ when this turns out to be a terrible idea and that thing pees on the floor and scratches the furniture?”

You turn to face the red head, pouting as you hold the kitten towards her. “How could that little face do anything bad?”

At home that night Melissa charges you with getting everything set up for the kitten while she makes a start on dinner. She had managed to earn another tight hug and bring tears to your eyes once more when she revealed she had been collecting and hiding away things for the kitten for weeks. Those same tears had spilled when you told her you just had to tell your parents that they already knew. Or at least, they knew she was getting you a kitten, having already asked them whether they thought it would be a good idea.

Leaving her sauce to simmer, she pokes her head around the door to see you lying flat out on the floor, nose to nose with what she has been informed is your furry son. You look utterly adorable, and though she’d never admit it, that was why she had finally caved and found a guy who could get her a little furry guy. She’d lost count of the number of times you’d be out somewhere, only for you to abandon her in favour of making friends with a random feline who had crossed your path. Thankfully, on such occasions you’re usually too preoccupied to see that while she’s standing a few feet off with her arms crossed, it’s the fondest of smiles on her face as she watches on. She has a reputation to uphold, after all.

#melissa schemmenti x reader #melissa schemmenti

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