#if only because I was reminded of it because of a Buddie fic

[livingemkayde]

between blurred lines

best friend's dad!/dad's best friend!joel miller x f!reader

(pre-outbreak)

↳ warnings: this is rated for 18+ only! minors, please do not interact. smut, unprotected pinv, fingering f! receiving, cockwarming (!?!?!?) uhh dom!joel, significant age gap, dad's best friend mixed with some best friends dad (?!!?!?!?). i think that's it, let me know if i forgot anything.

↳ a/n: I LOOK PRETTY GOOD FOR A DEAD BITCH (she's alive!). im back from my tumblr break bearing a gift! i missed you all like crazy. gonna spend finals week catching up (procrastinating) on all the reading ive missed out on for the last month. i hope you guys like this one.

AND a very special thanks to @joelsversion for beta reading this in it's very early rough, rough stages. my ride or die fr 🤞

↳ summary: joel miller has always been...there. never different, always sporting a brooding scowl etched into his handsome face. he's your best friend sarah miller's dad, arguably worse, your dad's long time buddy. things are never different. not until this summer. not until now.

↳ follow @livingemkaydenotifs if you would like to be notified about more fics like this. love ya'll big time

↳ if you would like to read more of mine: masterlist

“You shouldn’t be in here.” “No,” you agree breathlessly. “I shouldn’t.” He slots himself against you, his other hand grips your hip and pushes you back into him. You gasp softly.  “Let it go.” You realize he’s talking about your dress. You squeeze your eyes shut. His lips skate against your neck in a way that makes you dip your head to the side in a silent surrender.  “Let it go,” he repeats.

You grew up with Sarah Miller. 

Soccer teams, high school football pep rallies, prom, homecoming, college acceptance season. Even though it turned into long distance facetime calls, and text chains nine messages long once college hit, Sarah Miller will forever and always be your best friend. 

It’s good to be back in Texas. Both you and Sarah moved back into your childhood homes the second after graduation hit. It’s good to be back, good to see her, your parents, and…Joel. 

You hadn’t seen him in a while. The last time you remember spending more than five minutes in his passing presence was when you and Sarah decided on that Chinese place for a post-high school graduation ceremony meal. He’s close with your dad. In an old school kind of way. In a lets raise our kids together kind of way and a the wives can go shopping together kind of way — before Sarah’s mom split, that is. 

Joel Miller, always brooding, always gruff and quiet. He’s never different. Though, you can’t help but think things might be different now—

No. You almost have to remind yourself out loud. He’s not different. He never is. He’s Joel Miller and you’re — you’re just a kid. You’re as old as his kid. 

Sarah, despite your hardened efforts, managed to drag you out of bed and into the shortest dress you own for a night at some club halfway across town. 

“Sarah, are the shot glasses still in the top cabinet?”

You reach for the knob, barely getting onto the balls of your feet before slipping on the cold laminate tiles in the kitchen. Your open palm balls into a fist and makes the cabinets shutter. Sarah responds with something from her room equally as unintelligible as your question was to her. You can feel your dress starting to ride up a little in your efforts, but you rifle through the Miller’s cabinets like it’s your own home. In some ways it is. 

“Hey, kid.”

You spin around, and quickly shuffle the hem of your dress back down. He nods his head in a lazy greeting. 

“Hey.” You’re breathless for some reason. It’s not because of the shot glasses. 

“Been a while,” Joel says, shuffling into the kitchen and setting a mug in the sink. He looks the same. Tousled hair and a beard just beginning to tinge gray. He’s always — always the same. 

You clear your throat. “Yeah. Been a while.” 

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks.” 

“Good to have you back,” he mumbles, settling back against the kitchen counter. You can see his arms flex when his palms settle onto the countertop. He’s strong, so much bigger than you. You never really noticed the big broadness of him until now. You’re not used to guys like him. All the boys you ever really experienced were clean shaven, soft in a way that told you they’ve never hauled ass through a day’s work. A lifetime of work. 

“Good to be back.” He clocks your outfit. You try to change the subject. “How are things?”

“Same ol’ same ol’.” He grabs a beer from the fridge. “Your dad’s gettin’ into golf. Tryna make me go out with him.” 

You laugh. “Not your scene?” 

“No, not quite.” He shakes his head, sipping on his beer with a smirk that almost makes your knees weak. “What’d you study again?” 

You scoff playfully. “Like you remembered in the first place.”

“Play along.” He smirks.

A knot sticks to your stomach, just below your navel. His voice is sickly sweet. Syrupy and Texan. His voice is like medicine. 

“Education. Just applied for jobs in the fall.”

“You teachin’?” 

“That’s the plan,” you let out with a breathless kind of laugh. 

“Smart girl.” 

His head cocks, and tilts it to the side. Your breath catches in your throat, palms sweaty against the black fabric of your dress. “Hardly.” 

He pauses, eyes you. It’s fleeting—you might think you dream it. You pick at the skin of your own thumb. 

“Your dad know you’re goin’ out?” 

You scoff. “I’m an adult. Don’t need my dad’s permission.”

“Don’t be a smart ass.” 

You eye him, a smirk plays on his lips. 

“I’m not—just…grown up, I guess.”

Something unreadable spreads across his face. “I guess.”

You hitch a tough breath. 

“What’d you need?” He swigs at his beer. 

“Oh.” You look back towards the cabinets, then. “Shot glasses.” 

“Moved ‘em,” he nods and stalks forward, backing you against the counter. He’s got a dark swirl of something warming behind his gaze. You don’t try to scoot away. Even when he reaches up next to your head and you hear the clink of two shot glasses brush up against each other in his fingers. 

“Don’t have too much fun,” he whispers while he pushes the glasses into your hands and leaves the kitchen.

__

You desperately, for your life, cannot keep up with Sarah Miller. 

She drinks entirely too quickly, efficiently, and practiced for your poor alcohol tolerance to keep up with. She’s a machine, and after three shots in, you’re already wasted. It wasn’t even midnight when your vision started to pull in a sideways direction and everything seemed a little slow. You knew things were taking a turn for the worst when the blonde quaffed frat guy with a Texas A&M polo shirt started sounding a little too funny. He was glued to your hip the entire night, though you aren’t sure you even remember his name correctly. You have your bets set on Colter, but then again, after your second shot, everything started to sound a little fuzzy to your rosied ears. 

And when Colter called you and Sarah an Uber at three a.m., you didn’t have the guts to ask him his name, only shooting him a half hearted thanks over your shoulder—your liquid courage having sobered up by the time the Uber rounded the corner to the Miller’s house. 

Even though Sarah Miller can throw back shots like it’s her day job, she passed out onto her bed as quickly as you both left her childhood bedroom while running late for your driver to the club. 

Before she promptly fell asleep, she mumbled something almost unintelligible into the pink sheets of her twin sized bed. But you could make it out enough to spring back from her words while your heart skipped a beat. 

“Get a shirt from my dads room.” 

So you knock, quietly, almost too quietly, and when you rap your knuckles against the wood of Joel Miller’s bedroom door a little harder, it pushes open slightly. The crack of it floods black, you can’t see inside, only the dim night sky illuminating the window sill and curtains in its wake.

When you push it open a little further, the door creaks so loud you push your eyebrows together with worry and freeze in your timely steps. But it’s empty. The bed isn’t entirely made, the covers a little rumpled and haphazard. You spot his dresser and make a quick beeline for it, itching to get out of your uncomfortable dress. 

The drawer slides open with a shift of wood on wood and you snatch up the first black t-shirt you find sitting neatly on top of the pile. Subconsciously, you bring it to your nose—sunlight, and evergreens, and a little hint of musk that peaks through the laundry detergent. The worn, soft cotton of it makes you sigh deep into the dark bedroom. You close your eyes, ball your fist up around the collar and lean into the dresser with your palm fitting against the edge of wood. Just as you turn around and move to close the drawer in your exit, a voice pulls your eyes up from the darkness. 

“What’re you doin’?”

You jump, almost instinctively bringing his shirt to your chest. A sinking, uneasy feeling settles right under your throat. It’s almost like you’ve been caught red handed—you most definitely were. 

You don’t say anything. The light pouring in from the hallway surely illuminates you enough. Joel’s eyes trail down to your bare legs, then to his shirt you have clutched in your hands. 

“That my shirt?” He points to your chest with a vague gesture of his hands. You look down at the material balled up in between your shaky fingers, then back to his eyes.

“I don’t—” You shake your head even though you know your efforts are fruitless. The least you can do is tell the truth. 

“Sarah—she’s—she’s sleeping. Told me to get clothes in here.” You make a slight nod of your head towards his open dresser. He doesn’t say anything, but he takes a step towards you. 

“Sorry, I can just—” You point towards the door behind him, and move to leave. 

“‘S fine,” he mumbles in that deepened, soaked drawl. All honey, and velvet, wrapping you up into something warm and inviting. It tugs at something just beneath your belly. 

When he gets closer, your breath punches out in a staggered rise and fall of your chest. Your fingers don’t move from clutching his shirt. When he nears, he slips a hand past you, brushing your waist, and shuts the drawer closed with a soft thunk. 

Your breath catches in your throat, his eyes trail your figure. 

“Fun night?” 

You clear your throat, nod, slowly, still studying his darkened gaze. “Yeah.”

You clock how close he is when you put your weight on one hip and his jeans brush up against your bare thigh. His breath swirls on your eyelashes. He tugs on his shirt in your hands and lets out a hearty sigh. Shifting from one foot to the other, then again. It seems like you both stay like that for years. 

Brown. His eyes are brown—maybe a little darker than they normally are. His eyes try not to roam, but that hint of something is gone before you can blink. 

He backs away then, towards the door. Most likely seeing you out. He settles near the entrance and looks back at you. Your bare feet shuffle through the carpet. He nudges the door open with a rough palm on the doorknob, leaning against the frame as you approach. 

You’re about to leave, but he catches your elbow, and you spin back to him in a desperate kind of way. 

“You look pretty,” he whispers to your surprise. “Forgot t’mention it earlier.” 

Pretty. 

He thinks you’re pretty. You didn’t even think pretty was in his vocabulary. 

You didn’t think he would notice. 

You don’t say anything. Your eyebrows furrow with want. You study him, eye his brown stare and the way his chest rises and falls under the navy blue t-shirt he’s wearing. And you slowly—slowly push the door shut. You both watch it close. It clicks, the sound of it deafening to your ears. 

He would never, ever make the first move. You’re smart enough to know that for certain, but—pretty. He thinks you’re pretty, and after all this time, it’s still always Joel. 

So you turn your back to him, swipe your hair over one shoulder and turn your head to the side. You can hear him silently swear under his breath. 

“You mind?” you say, gesturing to the zipper of your dress. His soft steps pads on the floor. You can almost feel his chest against your shoulder blades. 

His fingers toy with the zipper, hot and rough but—hesitant. He pulls it down slowly anyways, exposing your back to the crisp air conditioned air, and the heat of his gaze. The straps fall as the zipper does, he curses again, succumbing to your decided fate. 

You hold the front of your dress to your body on instinct, even though the only thing you want to do right now involves him ripping it off you. 

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t do anything else—doesn’t back away or come closer or leave. So you reach your hand backward to find him and gasp softly when his fingers tangle with yours. You pull his hand to your body. He locks onto your waist like a leech. 

“What’re you doin’?” He rasps against the shell of your ear, almost like he’s pleading with you. He sounds like he’s in pain. Maybe he’s torn between pleasure and good judgment. You want him to forget about the latter entirely. 

Your stomach drops, you glance to the side again. 

“I thought—” 

“You thought, what?”

Your face goes hot, stare at your feet instead. His hand doesn’t leave you. 

“I don’t…” 

“You thought this was a good idea?” 

You don’t say anything. For some reason you didn’t think it was a bad idea. Not when his hand reaches around to grab your hip.

“What would your daddy think?” 

“I don’t really care what he thinks.” An admission more than anything. 

He sucks in a breath. A quiet contemplation. The look on his face doesn't read pissed, but it's a far cry from happy. You don't know what is behind his gaze.

“Nothin’ but trouble.” He breathes out in a heavy sigh. “Ain’t ya?”

His voice is so much deeper now. His accent shows through, silken and so southern it makes you grip your dress a little harder on instinct. You’ve lost count of how many times your breath has gotten caught up in the tightness of your throat. 

“‘S one word for it.” 

He almost growls, his hand skits down to the hem of your dress and pushes his fingers under it, trailing upward, but stopping before he meets lace. 

“You shouldn’t be in here.”

“No,” you agree breathlessly. “I shouldn’t.”

He slots himself against you, his other hand grips your hip and pushes you back into him. You gasp softly. 

“Let it go.” You realize he’s talking about your dress. You squeeze your eyes shut. His lips skate against your neck in a way that makes you dip your head to the side in a silent surrender. 

“Let it go,” he repeats. 

You drop the hand on your chest and his t-shirt with it. Your dress falls to the floor in a black blanket of smoke. You gasp when his hands are on you, inching slowly from the hem of your underwear to grasp your breast in a rough, teasing palm. 

A small sound escapes past your lips. His other hand, quick to respond, slots over your mouth, silencing you and your whiny moans. 

It’s — rough. The way he pushes his palm into your face to quiet your whimpering, forcing your head back to rest against his shoulder. The way he pushes your underwear down your thighs to rest with his forgotten t-shirt, and your all too tight, too short dress. It’s rough, but so, so gentle. 

It feels like heaven. 

You pitch your back, arching into him in a desperate way. Writhing against him when he finally pushes a calloused finger in between your dripping folds. 

“Jesus.” He shakes his head. You can feel the scratch of his beard against your temple. You wonder what that scruff might feel like between your thighs. “Been wantin’ it all night, huh?”

It’s a question, but not one he needs an answer to. The mess between your thighs is evidence enough. 

Joel. You try to plead, but he’s relentless in his quieting attempts. The pad of his finger brushes against your clit and you’re keening against him. You can feel him smile. 

“Quiet,” he whispers into your ear, then lifts his hand from your mouth, hovering, waiting until the inevitable moan to escape past your lips. But you try your hardest, bite at the skin on the inside of your lip, and he rewards you. He’s a gentleman like that. He sinks his middle finger into your cunt, rubbing tight circles on your swollen clit with his thumb. Everything about him is just so, just right. 

Maybe, usually, with other guys, you’d be disappointed if they’re stingy with the foreplay. But you walked throughout the bar all night with slick dripping through soaked lace just at his words in the kitchen. Smart girl. So you push back into him and beg him—

“Joel.” You’re breathless. You plead at him with your body, with everything you have. “Please,” you whisper simply. 

Something like desperation and want and a little twinge of anxiety settles in your stomach when he releases you. He walks you back to the edge of the bed. It smells like him when you lay down and the softness of the blankets kiss the edges of your face. You can hear the clink of his belt buckle and you suck in a tiny breath.

“How do you want it, baby?” 

You push him back, and his eyes go wide. It’s the first reaction you’ve gotten out of him the whole night. A peak behind his brooding mask. And when you settle each leg on either side of his hips, he groans. It makes you a little more brave. 

“Like this,” you whisper, placing your hands on his chest. He grabs at your wrists, and pushes them under his wide palm to his stomach so you lean forward down to him. He pushes his boxers down and you try not to look, but you make a small sound at the sight. 

“Look good—” he grunts. You take his tip and notch it at your entrance. “Always look so pretty.” 

Your heart pounds in your chest. Everything is different. Everything is new. 

Pretty. 

“Fuck,” you whisper, glancing down at just the sight of him. The size of him. 

“You’re okay, angel.” 

Your gaze snaps to his face. He nods. You believe him. 

“I—ah—” you whimper. “I can take it.” 

“I know you can,” he grunts when you sink down an inch and take the tip of him. Your hips cant at the feeling, taking more of him through groans and pressing whines. He lets you set the pace. Let's you take your time. Even when he’s panting through his gritted teeth and tight lips. 

You sink down on him until there’s nothing left to take. It’s almost painful. But he’s right there, playing with the pearl of your clit, massaging your hips. He knows how much you can take and when you can take it. He seems to know alot about you while knowing very little. 

“Shit,” you groan. “Oh my — god.”

You can hear him muttering something along the lines of perfect. 

It feels that way—perfect. He fits inside you with a tight stretch but nothing compares to the feeling of his throbbing length resting inside you. You would die here with your wanton moans and you would wake to find nothing less. 

“Joel,” you whine, clenching around him, the stretch starts to sweeten. 

“That’s—fuck—yeah, good girl,” he whispers. He sounds like something sweet and dark and rough. You fist at his t-shirt. Just like the one left forgotten by the door. You don’t remember what you came in here for anymore. Not when you’re dangerously close from his thumb rubbing slow circles on your clit. 

“Fuck. Yeah?” He can feel it. From the inside. “Y’gonna come, baby?” 

It’s embarrassing. That you could come like this, with him waiting patiently inside you. You don’t have it in you to lie, you don’t have it in you to bounce up and down or move at all. He turned your legs to jello. 

“I-I don’t—” 

“C’mon,” he grunts and grips your hips to keep him flush to your body. “Know ya want it.”

It only takes one swift rock of your hips. His hands, broad and sprawled out across the plushness of your sides. Your body stalls out on top of him. He sits up to wrap his arms around you and brings you close on instinct. If your brain wasn’t so hazy and you weren’t so lightheaded your heart might swell at the thought. You bite out something sounding somewhat like his name—it’s a garbled whisper and cut of words but you think he gets the gist. 

“I—Ngh—fuck,” he whispers into the crown of your hair. You can feel him throbbing inside you. You chuckle something halfway coherent and let him flip you over, settled on your stomach with your face in the sheets. His fingers skip over your backside. 

“Joel,” you breathe. “I—” 

“Relax,” he says behind you, spreading your folds and staring at the way your cunt clenches around nothing. “Just relax, angel.” 

So you do, you sink boneless into the mattress and let him press you down into the sheets. He feels so broad. He feels so good. You tell him quite as much, in not so many words. You feel the weight of him settle behind you, his hand coming up to brace himself by your head. 

“God, you feel so fuckin’ good.” He sinks in, inch by inch. It’s not so much of a stretch anymore. Carving a place for himself inside you. It feels like he belongs there. You think to yourself that he probably does. You’re squirming beneath him, wringing your fists in dark blue sheets. 

You clamp your eyes shut when he bottoms out. Even more so when he finds a pace he likes and sets it. You don’t have to beg him anymore. Your legs shake beneath his hips, even more so when he hikes your leg up on the bed so he can push deeper. 

Something deep rolls through you again. It shocks you. Most of the guys you’ve been with haven’t made you come once, let alone twice. 

“I can’t—” you whine. “I—fuck.” 

He picks up the pace. 

“Y’can,” he grunts. “Know y’can, c’mon, baby.” 

You nuzzle your face in cotton. His hips chase his release and you know you’re close when he nudges against your g-spot.

“Don’t stop,” you whine. “Please don’t fucking stop, Joel, please, it—ah."

When you come, he grunts through ragged breaths. White hot pools in your stomach and you whine so loudly you’re worried about the neighbors. His hand comes to brace against the back of your neck. You’re so fucking soaked he slides through you easily. 

“Jesus, fuck,” he growls. He bears down on you and your hips and sinks to his elbows when he can’t keep himself up anymore. You feel the cotton of his t-shirt brush against your back. It sends a shiver up your spine. He comes, pulling out and spilling over your back. You try to hide your disappointment. 

He lays beside you for a minute, you barely reach your hand up from the bedsheets to brush against his bicep. He studies your face and pants through a slack jaw. He’s scruffy and broad and — perfect. 

Your gaze flick to his mouth, then his eyes. You silently realize he never kissed you. 

“Gonna get me killed,” he whispers. It’s almost weirdly affectionate in a way only Joel Miller could say. Still stuck in a limbo between pleasure and reality. You smile, softly. 

He climbs off you, and slinks to the bathroom. You wait with baited breath until you hear the water run. He emerges with a soft looking towel, damp with water, clinging to his fingers. You watch him and shiver when the towel touches your back. 

“Okay?” he whispers when you sit up and turn to look at him. 

“Yeah, okay.” 

It feels like something is supposed to happen now. You’re not used to this. Everything slowly comes back as the pleasure ebbs and you blink back to reality. You open your mouth, then close it. He does the same. 

You can hear Sarah’s door open and you both freeze. His brown eyes search yours through a furrowed brow. Your heart goes back into normal rhythm when you hear the bathroom door shut. Then nothing. 

He snags a new shirt from his dresser and tugs it over your body. 

The Texans. 

“Cute,” you gesture to the shirt. It’s soft underneath your fingers, worn. A gentle kind of faded navy blue. Joel picks up your dress off the floor and folds it into your chest while scoffing. 

“Shut up,” He shakes his head, but he can’t hide the smirk on his face. “Get outta here.” 

It’s all oddly playful. Like you both can’t believe it and are giddy at that fact.  

“Same time next week?” 

Something deeper flicks across his gaze at the doorway. “Is that a promise?” 

“You can’t answer a question with another question.” 

You turn when you leave the doorway and settle into the hallway. He’s got his hand on the doorframe, leaning into it—towering over you and already burning something hot through you. Again. 

“I just did,” he grumbles with a smug look, and then shuts the door. 

__

#joel miller #joel miller fanfiction #joel miller x f!reader #joel miller x reader #joel miller x female reader #joel x reader #joel miller x you #joel miller smut #joel tlou #joel miller hbo #tlou fanfiction #tlou fic #pre outbreak!joel #the last of us hbo #joel miller self insert #the last of us #joel fic #the last of us fanfiction #joel the last of us #pedro pascal #pedro pascal as joel miller #smut #joel x f!reader #joel x female reader #joel x you #dom!joel #dom!joel miller #joel miller fic #joel miller angst

[augustslippedavvay]

like real people do (eddie munson)

summary: you’ve known eddie for a few months now, but nearly every day you discover something new about him that breaks your heart and makes you desperate for him to know how much you care for him.

author’s note: eddie deserves soft and sweet and gentle love he deserves to be held and to feel loved and to be cared for and to know a life outside of the cruel world he was born into and i intend to give that to him one ~1.5k word fic at a time

pairing: eddie munson x reader (this one is gender neutral - no gendered terms used!!) word count: 1.4k warnings: hmmmmmm none

“Eddie?”

“Hmm?”

The two of you have been lounging in bed in his shoebox studio apartment all afternoon, passing a couple of blunts back and forth and shooting the shit. You had curled up onto your side, facing him, only twenty minutes ago, and haven’t shifted since, transfixed by the way his profile – his beautiful, beautiful profile – moves, the way his smile reaches his eyes, the way his Adam’s apple dips, as he talks. Talks about music, and movies, and maybe going to the lake for the weekend, or to the city to check out a new record shop one of his buddies had told him about, and he doesn’t give you the chance to interject, but it’s alright, because he’s so pretty, and you think you’re starting to fall in love with him. So you’re alright with listening to him talk.

“What were you like in high school?”

Eddie turns to face you, a slow smile spreading across his face. His hair tickles your nose, fanned across the pillow beneath the both of you, and you edge your face just that much closer to his.

“You wanna know?”

You nod and he hums, shifting onto his side, bringing one hand up and underneath his cheek to prop his head up. It’s easier for him to look at you this way. 

“I…I used to, um…”

You look at Eddie expectantly as he trails off, his chest stuttering on an inhale, his lips twitching into a grin.

“Do you know what Dungeons & Dragons is?”

There’s a moment’s pause before you start giggling. Hurt flashes across Eddie’s face and you put a hand onto his chest, shaking your head as he asks, “What? What’s so funny?”

“No, no, I’m sorry,” you laugh, “I’m not laughing at you. It’s just – I used to play D&D in high school, too.”

“What?!” Eddie sits up abruptly, your hand falling from his chest onto the bed. You roll onto your back so you can look up at him and nod. He prods your side and you giggle, smacking his hand. “You what? How has this never come up before?”

You shrug, hiding your sheepish face behind the palms of your hands. “Didn’t want you to think I was a nerd.”

“Baby,” Eddie whines and pries your hands back from your face. “I like nerds!”

“I know that now!”

“We’re discussing this later. You played a rogue, didn’t you? Or maybe a ranger. You little sneak.”

You grin and he snaps. “Fucking knew it. I know my baby. Remind me to circle back to this.”

Eddie laughs and you join back in, the two of you giggling like children. Eddie falls back down onto the bed beside you, curling onto his side and laughing into your neck, before he palms your cheek and turns you to face him again, your body following your head, your mouths inches apart. Your stomach aches in the best way and you pant against his lips, his eyes trained on you.

“No, but seriously,” you breathe, carding your fingers gently through his hair. He leans forward and kisses the end of your nose. “What were you like? Wanna know.”

Eddie shrugs. “I was a nerd. An outcast. A freak, or whatever. I played D&D and listened to loud music and lived in the trailer park on the edge of town with my uncle, so people thought I was plotting to kill them and unleash the power of Satan unto Hawkins. Which, for the record, I was.”

You laugh, but you can tell that he’s deflecting because the subject is painful for him, uncomfortable. You run your thumb over his cheek and smile when he sighs against your mouth. 

“I don’t know. I was just some guy, you know?”

You shake your head in disbelief. Some guy. “I would’ve had the biggest crush on you, you loser.”

Eddie’s mouth gapes slightly, the apples of his cheeks rosing. “What? What do you mean?”

“Okay, well, first of all: you’re a total fucking smoke show.”

This invokes a guttural reaction from him that you think might be a combination of Eddie’s versions of embarrassment and desire.

“You listen to all of my favorite bands. You play Dungeons & Dragons, apparently. Those stupid rings you wear, and that vest you cut up and put patches all over –”

“You think my rings are stupid?”

“Munson,” you huff, smacking him playfully, no heart behind it, on the chest. “I would’ve been so hopelessly in love with you.”

“Yeah?” The sound of his voice tells you this is perking him up.

“Yeah,” you say, biting your lip, running your fingers along the bare skin that’s peeking out from under his tee shirt where it’s ridden up. “You would have looked at me from across the cafeteria and I would have melted into a puddle right on the floor. Like, if we had any classes together and you ever asked me to borrow a pencil? Or if you had a question about the homework? I’d have been done for. I mean, I don’t think I ever would’ve done anything about it…but I would’ve crushed on you so goddamn hard.”

Eddie has this giant, giddy grin on his face, and you can’t decide if you want to kiss or smother it from his face. “Why wouldn’t you have done anything about it?”

“I was a loser, too, Eddie,” you laugh, squeezing his cheeks. “People thought I was a freak. We would’ve been the same brand of freak, sure, but I didn’t have any courage in high school. I never would have thought about asking you out, because I would have assumed you’d turn me down.”

He considers this for a second. “I wouldn’t have turned you down.”

“Once again, I know that now, duh.” 

Eddie has one hand on your neck, his thumb stroking the length of your jaw. He watches your face for a second, then murmurs, “Do you think we would have been friends?”

“Maybe?” 

“Why only maybe?”

“I dunno,” you whisper. “You’re so…outgoing. And I’m a lot different now than I was in high school, but I was so shy.”

“That’s cute,” he says, surveying you with pursed lips, and you roll your eyes. “Well, you’d have been in Hellfire, right? In this hypothetical scenario where we went to high school together. That was the D&D club at Hawkins. You’d have joined?”

“God, if you were Dungeon Master, Eddie, I’d have…I don’t think I ever would have been able to pay attention. You would have…”

Eddie laughs at you as you trail off, running his hand your side down to squeeze your hip. “Yeah? You’d have had a crush on your Dungeon Master, is that it?”

You roll your eyes, but you don’t tell him he’s wrong.

“That’s frowned upon, you know,” he jokes, cupping the back of your thigh and pulling it up and over his. 

“That’s why you wouldn’t have known!”

Eddie smirks at you, something unspoken passing between the two of you, and you know that no matter whether you’d said anything or not, he would have known. He’s been able to read you from the jump - from the moment you’ve met, there’s never been anything that you’ve felt that he hasn’t picked up on. 

“I’m glad you’re here with me, now. I’m sorry high school sucked for you, baby.”

Eddie shrugs again, but you shake your head and tuck yourself into him, push one hand underneath his torso so he has to shift closer to you, too. He lays his head against your chest and lets you start to run your fingers through his hair.

“It sounds like none of those people really knew you. That’s what it sounds like to me.”

Again, you get nonchalance in response. You worry you’re about to cross a line, to overstep some unspoken boundary - you have only been seeing one another a couple of months, after all – but you feel Eddie squeeze you tighter when you try to pull back even a little bit.

“You’re allowed to be mad about it, Eddie. At the people who made everything miserable for you.”

“It wasn’t all miserable,” he murmurs into your neck.

“No?”

“No.” Eddie sighs. “I had the Hellfire Club. And my band. And my uncle.”

“Tell me about them, then.”

He grins against the skin of your neck, and you close your eyes as he starts to tell you about all of the reasons he would have stayed in Hawkins. You can’t help but feel glad he decided to get out.

#eddie munson #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson fluff #eddie munson/reader #eddie munson fic #eddie munson fanfic #eddie munson fanfiction #stranger things #stranger things 4 #eddie munson stranger things #stranger things season 4 #stranger things season four #eddie munson blurb #eddie munson oneshot #eddie munson one shot

[whiskersz]

Fell free to ignore or delete, but a fic (or headcanons) of Adam falling in love at first sight and then just continuously flirting and trying different ways to get their attention?

Hey there! I decided to do HCs for this simply because I have 2 fanfics about Adam in the works already, hope that's okay :3

Divider : bunnysrph

Adam x Reader - Love at first Sight HCs

⋆ Adam isn’t really the type to fall in love at first sight; sure, he flirts with a large amount of people on a daily basis if he’s single at the moment, but it’s rare that someone catches his eye so much that he considers it love.

⋆ He’s tried to flirt with someone multiple times when he was interested in a one night stand with them, but never went past that after the loss of Eve and Lilith, even though it’s been a long time since then. He simply believes at the end of the day they would meet Lucifer sooner or later and fall for his charm as well, so he doesn’t bother looking for a serious relationship.

⋆ When he sees you for the first time though, he’s completely stunned. He confides to Lute that he needs to get you to like him back, even though you’ve barely talked to each other. Your beauty and charm are unprecedented, and for the first time in eons he worries about leaving a good first impression too.

And so it begins, the process called flirting;

⋆ Luckily for him, one of his band members actually knows you by name, and is aware of the places that you usually frequent in your free time. How they do, he doesn’t even bother to ask; he’s immediately off to coming up with ways to ‘accidentally’ end up in the same place at the same time and flirt with you.

⋆ Adam can be obnoxious; he’ll definitely try flirting by talking about himself and bragging at first, all whilst invading your personal space, because why not, am I right? Usually this works with other people, as most of them are charmed by the fact that they’re talking to the first man alone, but this doesn’t seem to be the right tactic when it comes to you.

⋆ Next comes the ‘asking for help to Lute’, except she’s not a romantic person herself, so even this plan doesn’t end well. She suggests pick up lines because that’s how other people used to and still flirt with her, he’s not entirely convinced but he gives them a try. “Did it hurt? When you fell from- wait, fuck, that’s not... ah, whatever!”

⋆ And finally, his buddies advise him to just be himself, which doesn’t only mean boasting and making distasteful jokes around you. He personally invites you to one of his gigs, and his band members agree to leave the two of you alone afterwards, reminding him to try and not mess up by calling you a ‘bitch’ or something akin to that on your first actual date.

⋆ He resorts to pet names instead, and taking into consideration the advice that his friends gave him prior to the date he even lets you order first if you go out to eat, and asks you where you want to go afterwards – wow! Usually he’d take you to some cheap stand where they make smoothies and such, but you decide on a more secluded place, where you tell him that you’ve been noticing the fact that he’s been trying to flirt with you a lot lately.

⋆ It’s hard for him to fully open up emotionally, especially with someone he barely knows, so all he does is tell you that yeah, you look very attractive and he’d like to go out with you more frequently, seeing as you don’t seem to be as vain and boring as the other people he’s flirted with in the past.

Whether you accept or not, is up to you!

#hazbin hotel x reader #hazbin x reader #x reader #hazbin hotel #adam x reader #adam hazbin hotel #adam hazbin #hazbin adam #hazbin hotel headcanon #adam headcanons

[python333]

scary dog privileges — python333

— — — —

synopsis ur super duper scary to almost all 141 soldiers, but to price soap ghost and gaz ur just the sweetest little thing ever :3

relationships platonic!taskforce 141 & gn!reader.

characters cap. price, soap, ghost, gaz.

word count 4.6k

warnings 2nd person pov [you/yours/yourself], no usage of c/n [call sign chosen for this fic is 'Cerberus'!], might sound kind of rushed/shitty :{

note normally i try not to rush fics BUT i started this at like 12 pm and as im typing this out its 11 pm and ive only written 2285 words so im kind of rushing this so i can keep up my little posting daily thing!! this idea has also been rotting in my brain for a while, so i might make a hcs thing from it, idk, but for now its just this fic!! also, thank you everyone who gave reblogged my last fic, reblogs are the best sorta motivation for a reader and i absolutely appreciate all of them :> anyway this is all fluff + comfort no hurt and has some soft!ghost in it because hes my dad and i love him so enjoy!!

The Private in front of you may as well have been pissing his pants with how scared he looked. His commanding officer, and one of your closest friends, Soap, had reported him to you for ‘insubordination’. He’d said, verbatim, when telling you about him, “I’d deal with him myself, but I’m too tired to,” so now you had to deal with one of his subordinates. 

You sighed through your nose as you looked down at the Private in front of you, the latter comically small compared to you, both physically and mentally. 

“Well?” You ask expectantly, raising an eyebrow at him, “Are you gonna tell me what happened?” The Private shakily nods and you can hear him gulp, “Right, yeah, so basically, it was earlier this morning and I was following orders and everything, doing what I was supposed to, then I accidentally interrupted Soap while he was giving me orders, which I didn’t mean to do, I swear, I just wasn’t thinking and it happened and I just— I didn’t mean to do it. And then later on, we were both—me and Soap—talking with a few other people who I guess were some higher ranked soldiers from different tactical operations and I accidentally interrupted some of them. It was—” “I’m sorry, hold on,” You put a finger up to silence him, to which he responds with immediate silence, letting you talk, “You don’t accidentally interrupt someone. Either you do it or you don’t. You don’t just slip up and interrupt your CO in the middle of him giving you orders. Secondly, always refer to Soap as ‘Captain MacTavish’, or ‘Captain’ if that’s somehow too hard for you, don’t act like you get to talk about him like you’re both all buddy-buddy and—” “Okay, but if you’d just let me finish—” The Private tries to interrupt you, making you draw your eyebrows together in confusion. “Excuse me?” You ask, mildly offended that he had the audacity to interrupt you, “Did you just interrupt me?” The Private stays silent for a moment, looking up at you, wide-eyed. His whole face looks even more stupid like this—like he doesn’t even know what he did. 

“I asked you a question, Private,” You remind him, leaning down a bit, tilting your head to the side questioningly, “Did you just interrupt me?”  “Right, yeah, I did, sorry about that—” He tries to apologize, “Didn’t mean to. Swear.” “Right,” You narrow your eyes at him, standing back up straight and crossing your arms, “Remember what I just said? About not accidentally interrupting people?” “Yeah, I do.” “Could you say ‘Yes, Lieutenant’ instead of that?” You ask, “This isn’t a casual conversation. This is one of your superiors telling you that you can’t blatantly disrespect your commanding officer, so act like it.” “Yes— Yes, Lieutenant,” The Private stammers, which really shouldn’t make your lips twitch at the corners but it does, and you have to fight off a smile, pursing your lips instead. 

“Like I was saying earlier,” You continue your words from earlier, “In conversations like these, when you’re not out doing an assignment, I don’t want to catch you referring to Captain MacTavish as just ‘Soap’ ever again. And you don’t want me to catch you doing that either, you understand?” “I understand, Lieutenant.” “Good, good,” You nod, before gesturing for the Private to keep giving you his side of the story, “Continue telling me what happened then.” “Right, so, after that, Captain MacTavish gave me some new orders, and I felt like I had a better idea of what to do than him because I’d thought of something that makes more sense than what he told me to do, so I told him as such, and he acted all shocked like I didn’t have a really good idea, and told me that I was to follow his orders not the ones I tried to give to myself so I told him that mine were better and—”

“Have you read the military regulations and codes of conduct? Ever?” You interrupt, making the Private shut up almost immediately and hesitantly nod his head affirmatively. “I really don’t believe you. Everything I’ve heard so far is a direct violation of it, I just—” You pause to give a small, humorless laugh, “You have me speechless here, really.” The Private watches nervously as you struggle to find the appropriate words to say, before you finally come up with, “Is there more that you need to tell me about?” “… Yeah,” The Private answers sheepishly, making you sigh through your nose and gesture for him to tell you the rest. He clears his throat before starting up again, “And then he said that he’s the commanding officer for a reason and that what he says goes so I said okay and did what he told me to do. Then after that whole thing, he told me to go to your office and tell you what I did.” Why do I have to do all his dirty work? “… Okay then,” You look up at the ceiling and try to think of what to do, before taking a deep breath and looking down at the Private, muttering, “Well, I appreciate that you didn’t go into my office without my permission, at least you know not to do that.” You clear your throat before speaking louder, “Let’s head into my office instead of just standing out here. This is probably violating some sort of code…” The Private nods and lets you unlock the door to your office that’s just a few steps away and walks in after you, being sure to close the door behind him. He automatically sits at the chair across from your desk and you sit down at your own chair behind your desk. 

“Right, okay, let’s see…” You dig around the drawers of your desk, before letting out a small ‘ah-ha!’ and pulling a corrective action assignment form out of one of the small drawers of your desk and setting it onto the top of your desk. You grab a pen from the small cup by your desk and write down the date on the form in your usual neat handwriting. 

You read a question on the form and look over at the Private, “Could you give me your full name, please?”

“John— John Williams,” The Private stammers again, making you raise an eyebrow.

“Your name is John-John Williams?”

“No, just John Williams, Lieutenant.” “M’kay,” You write down his name and fill out a few more things on the form before signing it off with your name and looking over at the Private once again, folding the paper in half as you do, “I’m gonna trust you to bring this to Soap, and tell him that it’s from me. You think you can do that?” “Yeah, of course,” John breathes out, grabbing the paper from you as you hand it to him. “Yes what?” “Yes— Yes, Lieutenant.” “There we go,” You sigh and lean back in your chair, “Go on and pass that to him. And tell him to send anyone else who’s being insubordinate to Ghost or something, anyone but me.” 

John simply nods and gets up, walking out your office door and making sure to close it behind him. You cap the pen you’d used and put it back in the cup where the rest of your writing utensils are, before yawning and leaning forward to rest your head on your desk when suddenly there’s a sharp knocking at your office door. You muffle a groan and wait a moment before calling out, “Come in!” You watch as your door slowly opens, making a creaking sound that hurts your ears a bit, and much to your annoyance, yet another Private is standing in your doorway, looking just as sheepish as the last. “Oh my f— you know what?” You stand up and take a deep breath to momentarily calm yourself, “Who sent you? Was it Soap?” “… Yes,” The Private answers, their voice shaky as they speak to you, the whole thing only making you more annoyed. “Where is he right now?” You ask, walking towards the door and opening it wider, towering over the much smaller Private in front of you. 

“The— the training facility.” You blink at the Private and you take another deep breath to calm yourself. “Yeah, no sh— ugh, you know what? Thank you. Just—” You look up at the ceiling and tell yourself not to snap at this poor rookie, and look back down at them, “Just follow me. I have to go yell at him.” 

“What?” The Private asks dumbly, their eyes widening a bit in surprise. You don’t bother to look over your shoulder and check that they’re following you, instead just walking out of your office, somehow hearing their footsteps even with the thundering stomping your boots made as you walked. 

You eventually made it to one of the training facilities, the only one that currently had anyone in them, and opened the door louder than you meant to. You walked in, the shaking Private behind you as you walked up to Soap and took several deep breaths to calm yourself, ignoring the several rookies that stared at you as you walked over to him. You could hear small whispers forming amongst Soap’s small platoon of soldiers, but ignored them as well, simply walking up to Soap, who finally noticed you. He turned to you and gave you a knowing grin, like he knew exactly why you were here. “Hey, L.t—” “Why have I had two Privates coming into my office telling me you sent them because you couldn’t do your damn job?” You question him immediately, ignoring the small gasp from the Private behind you, “Do you know how many CAA forms I have left? Three. Three forms. Because you can’t deal with your own rookies. If I wanted to be dealing with them, I would’ve let Price make me a CO. You know what I said when he asked me to be one? Fuck no. I said it for a reason.” 

“… Sae ye din’t want me tae report onyone else tae ye?” Soap asks, like the little shit he is, in a teasing tone. “Absolutely not.”

“Noted,” He nods, as if he understands, and gestures for the Private he’d sent to you to come back over to him, “I actually got yer message a minute ago from Williams. I think he almost shat himself.” 

“I’m kinda happy about that, honestly,” You mutter, “Everything he told me was like… a direct violation of the code of conduct and was just so stupid.” “I ken!” Soap agrees, “I swear, naebody reads the code ‘o conduct ony mair.” “I asked him if he did, and he said yes, but I know he’s lying,” You roll your eyes before adding on, “And you know what? I’ve only had issues with British people ever since you and Gaz started reporting people to me. I think that they’re just the issue.” 

“Jesus, I ken,” Soap mutters, “Fuckin’ Brits.” “Fuckin’ Brits.” You nod in agreement, before sighing and looking over at the rest of Soap’s platoon. You look back at him, “I also told Williams to actually refer to you as ‘Captain MacTavish’, so… there’s that.” “Guid, guid,” Soap nods, before clearing his throat and continuing,

“So did ye only come here tae yell at mae?” 

“Yeah.” You admit, making Soap laugh lightly.

“And yer done now?”

“… I guess,” You mutter, making him chuckle and pat you on the shoulder.

“Guid,” He says, looking over at his group of soldiers he’s meant to be training, “I think yer scarin’ my soldiers more than mae.”

“How can you tell?” You ask sarcastically, following his gaze to the rookies that were trying their best not to look like they were eavesdropping when they clearly were. “They don’t even know we’re talking right now.” Soap huffs out a small laugh, “Right, o’ course.” 

“I’m gonna head back to my office and take a quick nap,” You let Soap know, “So don’t send me anymore people. They’re stinking up my office, it’s ridiculous.” Soap raises an eyebrow at you questioningly, “Why don’t you just go to your sleeping quarters?” “Don’t tell me what to do.” Soap raises his hands in surrender, “Alright, then.” You huff out a tired breath and say, “So if anyone asks where I am, just let them know that.” You don’t wait for a response before you walk away from Soap and immediately hear whispers starting up again, but you ignore them as you walk out the door, sort of used to them at this point. You didn’t know why you were so scary to some of the lower-ranked soldiers (and even some of the higher-ranked ones), considering you never intentionally did anything to scare them. Sure, you were taller than most of them, and maybe just a bit quicker to lose your temper with people, but it was never that bad. 

You vividly remember Gaz and Soap when they both found out a majority of the soldiers that were apart of the 141 were afraid of you or at least intimidated by you, the two had said that they wanted you around more often, just hanging out with them, so that they wouldn’t get bothered as much by people for unnecessary things.

Scary dog privileges, you remember they’d said, laughing as they did. It’s actually where you’d gotten your call sign, Cerberus. 

It’s not that you hated it at all, in fact, you didn’t mind being a little scary if it meant people were less likely to bother you, it’s just that it makes it a hell of a lot harder to actually talk to people without them starting to stammer or shake.

It was one of the reasons you turned down being a commanding officer—you didn’t really like the thought of commanding a platoon of soldiers that cowered in your presence. Plus, it was getting really annoying, not being able to talk to another soldier that wasn’t Price, Soap, Ghost or Gaz without them looking like all they wanted to do was leave the conversation. 

You finally make it back to your office and let out a sigh of relief as you open the door and walk in, closing it behind you, not even bothering to lock it as you immediately walk over to the chair behind your desk and sit down in it.

You reach below your desk and pull out a nice, fluffy blanket and a fluffy pillow to go with it that you always kept in your office—just for times like this, when you felt like going to sleep in your office, for whatever reason.

Were you supposed to be napping at all? No. Would your superiors let you anyway because you’ve somehow managed to get emotionally adopted by both Price and Soap? Absolutely.

You move some of the papers cluttering your desk out of the way and set down your pillow, as well as wrapping yourself in the blanket, and sigh happily as you lay your head down onto the pillow. 

Just as you’re getting comfy, you hear a knock at the door. No. You don’t get up to answer it. You just sit there, head on your pillow, nice and comfy. In fact, you refuse to answer the door, because you’ve opened it for two other people already, and God knows who you’re gonna snap at once you open that door.

Another knock—you ignore that one too, knowing full well you told Soap to tell anyone who was looking for you that you were in your office but also knowing that you never said you’d open the door, you just said you’d be there. 

You bury your face into the pillow and scream into it, knowing the scream wouldn’t be too muffled with how loud it was, but doing it anyway. You then take a deep breath and call out, unenthusiastic and tired, “Come in!” 

You watch the door open and see Ghost step in, and you’re silent as you watch him close the door behind him and walk over to you, his century old shitty laptop in hand as he sits down in the chair in front of your desk and sets down said laptop.

You pay no mind to it, deciding you’d rather take a nap, and set your head back down on the pillow, pretending that you can’t feel Ghost’s eyes on you. “… Are you okay?” He asks, sounding a little concerned as he looks at you bury your head into your pillow, before his concern turns into confusion as he asks, “When did you get a pillow in here— you have a blanket, too?” 

“Mmph.” You don’t respond with actual words, even if you did they’d be muffled beyond relief by your pillow. You can’t see him but Ghost raises an eyebrow at you and his lips twitch into a small, amused smile. 

“What, you’ve just had those in here?” Ghost asks, knowing he’ll get nothing more than a muffled hum from you. 

“Mmph.” “Alright, then,” He mutters, “Keep your secrets.” “Mmph.” You feel too tired to bother responding with anything else. “I feel like you shouldn’t sleep in your office, considering you have your own sleeping quarters you can sleep in.” “… Mmph.” “That’s fair,” Ghost nods. You hear him opening his laptop and you hear it crack when it opens, the noise making you huff out a small laugh into your pillow. God, that thing is so old, it’s ridiculous.

“What’s so funny?” Ghost asks as he types in his password. You don’t say anything in response, which doesn’t shock him in the slightest.  You feel yourself start to get closer to sleep, but can’t get quite there, instead sort of just hanging right on the edge of sleep.

You quietly grumble in frustration and shift a bit in your seat, not knowing what the issue is. Ghost notices this and raises an eyebrow at you, but doesn’t do anything about it just yet, instead getting back to his work. Why’d he have to go into your office to do his work? Who knows.

You shift again in your seat and Ghost knows that he’s not gonna be able to focus if you keep shifting—why wouldn’t he just go to his own office?—around, so he sighs and picks up his laptop and drags the chair in front of your desk with him around to behind your desk where you are.

You lift your head up to try and see what he’s doing, confused, and see him putting his chair right next to yours and setting his laptop down onto the desk. 

Before you can ask anything, he gently puts a hand on the side of your head and guides it to rest on his shoulder, and—oh. This is much better, somehow. 

He seems to know that it’s that much better, too, because his eyes crinkle a bit, giving away the fact that he’s smiling. However, he stays silent, and keeps his hand on the side of your head for a moment before letting it fall down to the side of your forearm, his thumb gently rubbing soothing circles into your skin.

He opens up his laptop once again and types in his password with one hand, the typing going by significantly slower than it would’ve if he used both hands, but he decides against keeping his hand off of you, seeing as it assists in helping you go to sleep.

Are you supposed to be asleep right now? Definitely not. But like mentioned before, Price wouldn’t mind. And you’d probably laugh if Soap minded, because even if he’s a Captain, he’ll always act like a little shit. Ghost knows this too, and with this information, he figures that he might as well help you sleep, since he knows exactly how to help you sleep. 

One too many nights spent pacing in your room, which eventually woke Ghost up, which led to him helping you sleep, so that he could sleep too, You sleepily remember, He always said he was annoyed by the pacing, and that’s the only reason he helped you sleep. But now, seeing what’s happening now, makes you question that a bit. Was it his annoyance, or something else? Or am I thinking too much about this?

Cutting off your train of thought is another knock at the door, and it’s not loud enough to completely snap you out of your drowsy haze but it’s enough to make you a little more aware, and for you to readjust your head your head so that your face is practically buried in the crook of Ghost’s neck. His thumb stops rubbing against your forearm, and he glares at the door like it was the door’s fault it got knocked on. 

The knocking persists and neither of you say anything, just waiting on whoever it is on the other side to give up and go away, but whoever it is must be feeling pretty determined because even louder knocks sound at the door, making you and Ghost sigh in unison.

You both continue to stay silent, hoping that whoever was on the other side just goes away, but they don’t. You don’t hear any footsteps retreating, and the knocks keep coming.  

“Hello?” You both hear Price’s voice on the other side, “Cerberus? You in there?” “Say no,” You mutter into Ghost’s neck. He nods and clears his throat. 

“Nope!” Ghost calls out in response to Price’s question. 

“… Ghost?” Price’s surprised voice comes through, “What are you doing in there?” “Say this is your office,” You murmur, making Ghost huff out a small, amused laugh and nod again. 

“This is my office,” Ghost responds, “Why wouldn’t I be here?” “What? No,” Price’s voice becomes confused, “This is Cerberus’ office.” “No it’s not,” Ghost denies, lying straight through his teeth. You laugh quietly against his neck. “Uh… but it is?” Price argues, “It has their name on the front.” “No it doesn’t,” Ghost blatantly denies, continuing his thumb’s slow circle movements on your skin, the soothing action making you hum contently. You don’t know how, but somehow your humming is loud enough for Price to hear. Does he have his ear against the door or something?

“I can hear Cerberus in there,” Price argues again, “Don’t lie to me.” “Sorry, lamb,” Ghost apologizes to you softly, tone significantly more soft than it typically is, “I think he’s caught onto us.” “… I guess it’s fine for him to come in, then,” You mumble against his neck. He responds with a nod. 

“Come in!” Ghost calls out, and almost immediately you hear the door open and Price’s loud footsteps walking in. You can’t see him, but he opens his mouth to say something, when his eyes catch on your face buried in the crook of Ghost’s neck.

He looks questioningly at Ghost, the latter simply blinking over at Price, daring him to comment on it. 

He doesn’t, and instead closes the door behind him and walks up to the desk. 

“Cerberus?” He asks. You hum offhandedly, and he takes that as a sign to continue, “You okay?” “Mhm.” “You know you can sleep in your own sleeping quarters, right?” “Mhm.” “And you’re choosing not to?” 

“Mhm.” Price blinks at you for a moment before muttering, “Alright, then,” under his breath and turning to Ghost, “And you’re here because?” “Felt like having some company,” Ghost answers simply, watching as Price glances at his thumb rubbing circles into your forearm, and continues to watch as his eyes slowly make their way up to the way your face is buried in the crook of his neck. 

Price looks at Ghost, mouthing the words, ‘I’m telling everyone about this,’ to which Ghost mouths back, ‘Don’t you dare.’ Price grins at this and opens his mouth to say something else before there’s another knock at the door. 

“Are you always this popular?” Ghost asks you, sounding both mildly annoyed and amused. 

“Mhm.” You hum affirmatively. 

Ghost sighs and he and Price call out in unison, “Come in!” The door opens and you temporarily readjust your head so that you’re just resting your head on Ghost’s shoulder with your face facing the door, and you watch as Gaz enters the room and his neutral face turns into one of both surprise and confusion. 

“Were you lot having a party in here, or something?” He asks, closing the door behind him.

“Not originally,” Ghost deadpans, watching as Gaz walks over next to Price and leans against your desk, “What’re you here for?”

“Needed an extra corrective action form,” Gaz answers. Ghost looks down at you for permission to rummage through your desk drawers and you nod.

“Second drawer to the right,” You mumble, and Ghost opens that exact one up and pulls out a CAA form, handing it over to Gaz, who takes it with a ‘thank you’ and folds it in half, stuffing it into his back pocket.

He looks between you and Ghost questioningly, and opens his mouth to say something, before Ghost gives him the same look he did to Price, and Gaz immediately snaps his mouth shut.

“If you’re tired, Cerberus, you should go to your sleeping quarters,” Price comments, tone worried. You look over at him.

“What if someone needs me, though?” You ask, slowly blinking at him.

“Kid, I don’t think anyone would get any good help from you with the state you’re in right now,” Price says honestly, ignoring the small glare you send him. “Anyone who needs you can just refer to someone else.”

You hum neutrally and sigh before muttering, “Fine,” and tentatively take your head off of Ghost’s shoulder and unwrapping the blankets you’d wrapped around yourself earlier, bundling it into a little ball and putting it into the box under your desk, putting the pillow in there as well.

You crack your knuckles quickly and get up from your seat, quickly putting your hands on the edge of your desk to steady yourself, standing up on slightly shaky legs. “I can help you get over there,” Price offers, frowning a bit when you shake your head negatively. Ghost lets out a sigh and stands up, closing his laptop before quickly walking over to you and wrapping an arm loosely around your side, over your arm, pulling you closer to him and helping you stand up a bit straighter. Gaz observes all of this with a raised eyebrow but otherwise says nothing, instead watching with Price—who watched this with disbelief in his eyes—as Ghost walked with you to the door wordlessly, opening the door and walking out of it with you, not looking back as he closes the door behind him. “You think everyone’s gonna think Cerberus is all scary after they see them leaning on Ghost trying to get back to their sleeping quarters?” Gaz asks Price, staring at the closed door. “Somehow, yeah,” Price says after a moment, still caught up in his disbelief, “That is… the strangest thing I’ve seen all day.” “It’s only thirteen, Captain.” “I don’t think anything’s gonna top that.” “Top what?” Gaz asks, a little confused, “Seeing Ghost helping out Cerberus?” “Yeah.” Gaz huffs out a laugh and pats Price’s shoulder, “Jesus, man. I’m surprised that’s the first time you’ve seen that.” Gaz ignores Price’s confused look and walks towards the door, opening and closing it as he walks out, leaving Price dumbfounded in Cerberus’ office. “Huh?”

#its 2 am #i hate it here #cod #cod hcs #hcs #task force 141 #simon ghost riley #john soap mactavish #captain john price #kyle gaz garrick #tf141 #platonic taskforce141 #platonic #platonic task force 141 #platonic task force 141 x reader #platonic cod #task force 141 x reader #price #soap #ghost #gaz #it took me longer than it shouldve it write this #its literally only 4k words?? like bitch #why did it take u so long huh #whatever its fine now #enjoy #comfort no hurt #fluff

[babydollmarauders]

ILLICIT AFFAIRS — QUINN HUGHES

quinn hughes x fem!reader

summary: in which y/n is Quinn’s little secret.

specific lyrics: “what started in beautiful rooms; ends with meetings in parking lots” and “you wanna scream, don't call me ‘kid’, don't call me ‘baby’, look at this godforsaken mess that you made me” and “look at this idiotic fool that you made me” and “for you, i would ruin myself, a million little times”

warnings: cheating, 18+ content in the middle, ANGST!

notes: you will not think highly of the Quinn in this fic. i know i’m supposed to be writing the Speak Now Fic List— bear with me. this was written as a way to get out of my writers block.

i can always stop.

i can.

i have freewill to refuse his advances.

i think.

but the stolen stares, the weight of his body against mine, the feeling that comes with knowing he wants me in the way i’ve longed for him to want me, it’s an addiction.

a drug that i just can’t quit, despite how dirty and used i feel afterwards. despite having to sneak away with my hood up and my head down.

the high of being his, just for a moment, outweighs the inevitable self-criticism in the aftermath.

because that’s the thing about illicit affairs; they make you hate yourself a million little times.

**

i’ve barely just climbed off of him, my back skimming the mattress, before he’s already standing from my bed.

my eyes follow his movements, the fluidity and grace of flowing through steps he’s done a million times before.

his dress shirt buttoned back on, his suit pants following, his tie lazily swung around his neck and his suit jacket pulled over to complete the look.

while i’m tangled in my thin sheet, still recovering, he’s fixing his hair in the mirror above my dresser and letting his own eyes graze his neck for marks. finding none, as i know better than to make myself known on his skin.

never seen, never heard, always secret. no marks, never wear perfume nor lipstick, never leave any trace of existence. a ghost above all else.

his eyes lock with mine in the mirror, catching my longing stare with his indifferent one.

“i’ve gotta go. you watching the game?” he knows the answer, he always knows.

“yeah, Quinny, i’ll be watching.” my cheeks flush. “i always do.”

“good. i’ll try and score a goal for you.” he winks in the reflection, my heartbeat picking up as it does every time. “bye, baby.”

there’s no goodbye kisses, no whispered sweet nothings, just quirked lips and the sound of my bedroom door shutting behind him.

it’s not long until the bliss wears off, leaving me with nothing but self-depreciating thoughts. no one to blame but myself.

he has a girlfriend.

one who isn’t you.

aren’t you ashamed?

aren’t you disgusted with yourself?

don’t you deserve better?

although, maybe not.

my phone buzzes on the nightstand beside me, an incoming call from my best friend, and despite feeling like an idiotic fool and a betrayal of my own morality, i accept the call.

“hey, Lukey!” false cheer drips from my tongue, but just like every other time, i know he won’t know the difference. “to what do i owe the pleasure of your call?”

“hey, y/n/n!” Luke’s chuckle crackles over the speaker of my phone. “i just wanted to talk, i’ve been missing you extra the past few days. i want my movie buddy.”

“i miss you too, Lukey.”

god, if only he knew how badly i’ve fucked up without him to lead me the right way.

“don’t you have Jack now to watch movies with?” i question, shaking off the urge to confess my sins. to ask for his forgiveness and plead for him to talk some sense into my love-riddled mind.

“it’s not the same. he doesn’t pay attention to the little details as well as we do.” i can hear his pout through the phone, making me giggle.

“just one more month, then we’ll have the whole summer to watch as many movies as we want.” i remind him.

“yeah, one more month.” he replies, solemnly. “anyways, UBC is still treating you good, right? no chance you’d wanna transfer to, i don’t know, Rutgers or Princeton?”

i chuckle at his lame attempt at convincing me to leave my dream school.

“i’m sorry, moose; but UBC is still where my heart lies.” oh, if only he knew just what, or rather who, the reason was for that.

“yeah, alright. it was worth a shot.” he sighs. “and Quinny’s taking good care of you, right?”

i my throat closes up and i choke on the air in my lungs.

“what?” i ask him, sitting up in my bed and pulling the sheet closer to my body.

“Quinn.” he repeats. “he promised he’d look after you. has he?”

“oh, yeah. yeah, he’s been checking in on me. making sure i’m okay.” i guess that’s one way to put what we’ve been doing.

“good. i’d have to kill him if he let you get hurt.”

**

my feet have barely touched the ground outside of my car before the lake house door is flung open. my best friend bounds out of the house, his middle brother hot on his trail, attempting to speak to him about something long forgotten by Luke.

“YOU’RE HERE!” Luke’s arms are flung around my waist, hoisting me up in the air and spinning me around.

the melody of my laugh mingles in the air as my arms wrap around his neck.

“Lukey, put me down, i already feel sorta car sick! it was a very long drive.” despite the fact that my words are true, i can’t wipe the smile off my face from being reunited with my best friend.

my feet finally fall flat on the ground as Luke backs up to look at my face, his fingers grazing all over it, more specifically the under eye bags from stress and sleepless nights.

“i thought you said you were doing great? what are these?! they’re new!”

his concern is heartwarming but before i can respond, i notice all the people behind him on the lake house porch. Jack, their friends, and most importantly, Quinn. the real reason for my newly spotted dark circles.

i muster up a chuckle, rolling my eyes.

“they’re designer. they come with the UBC tuition.” i stress, hoping he buys the ‘i’ve just been working myself to the bone with schoolwork’ excuse.

“checks out. you’ve always been my little nerd.” he grins, slinging an arm around my shoulder and turning towards the porch. “aren’t you guys gonna come say hi?”

“didn’t wanna impose on your moment.” Jack jokes, hopping down the porch steps to pull me from Luke’s grasp and into a hug.

“hey, bubby. welcome back.” he smiles, ruffling my hair mid hug. i step on his foot in retaliation, making him push me back so he could check on his white sneakers.

“it’s good to be back, bubba.” i grin as he rolls his eyes.

“hey kid, long time no see.” my head snaps over to look at Quinn, who smirks at me with a knowing look.

we saw each other three days ago, the day before he flew out to Michigan.

“hey, Quinny.” a bashful smile takes over my lips and my heart beats overtime, the natural reaction when i’m in his vicinity.

“no.” Luke speaks, pulling me into his chest protectively. “you don’t get to ‘hi’ her. you got her all year. this is my turn.”

his words make me blush and i pat his chest.

“don’t worry Lukey, this is our time.” i reassure him. “i but i would like to go inside now.”

“yeah, right.” he nods, letting me push away from him. the guys all head back into the house, leaving me to open my trunk and grab my bag.

a strong hand encases mine on the handle of my suitcase, soft lips i know all too well grazing the shell of my ear.

“i hope Luke doesn’t mind sharing.” Quinn leaves me frozen behind him, taking my bag and my breath with him.

beats of time pass before i follow suit, closing my trunk and locking my car before jogging up the porch steps and into the house.

this will be one hell of a summer. literally.

**

“i’m going for a run.”

my words are spoken through Luke’s shut bedroom door, followed by the opening of said door.

“a run?” he asks me, sleep still prominent in his face from his mid-afternoon nap. “since when do you run?”

“i started running when i was in Vancouver. i thought i told you that?” the lie is like a sour candy on my tongue, spit out quickly as though another second of these words in my mouth would make me sick.

“oh, okay. how long will you be gone? i’ll have the movie set up for when you get back.”

“i shouldn’t be too long. like an hour at most.” i tell him, tightening my ponytail.

“you’ll actually probably be all sweaty when you get back. just wake me back up when you get back and i’ll get the movie ready while you shower.”

sweaty and flushed, for sure.

“okay.”

*

“Quinn, please.” my heavy pants turn to pleads, begging Quinn to get me over the edge. his hands hold mine behind my back as i grind my hips against his.

unable to risk being caught at the lake house, our rendezvous settings have downgraded from my bedroom back in vancouver. to the parking lot of a field, only a 15 minute walk from the house.

“you want me to make you come?” his words cause a shiver down my spine, my head nodding at rapid speed. “use your words, baby. say it.”

“i want you to make me come.” i beg. that’s all it takes for him to flip us over, my body laid across his back seat as he thrusts into me, hooking one of my legs over his shoulder.

“fuck, you’re so wet baby. feel so good squeezing my cock.” i clench around him, his dirty whispers echoing in my head as the coil in my stomach tightens. he angles his hips, thrusting up into the spot that makes my eyes roll back.

“right there.” i gasp, my hands coming up to grip his shoulders. i’m careful not to dig my nails into his skin. careful to never leave any sort of marks. his right hand trails down my body, settling on my stomach.

“right there?” he teases, repeating his previous move, all while pushing one hand down on my stomach. my legs shake, and i clench around him one final time before the pressure relieves and i achieve my orgasm.

Quinn thrusts a few more times, riding me through my high and chasing his before his hips stutter and he pulls out, painting my stomach with his release.

the glass windows are fogged, the car hot and reeking of sex, the only sound being our heavy breathing as we gather ourselves again.

my eyes flutter, my energy spent.

“hey, baby.” Quinn’s hand snakes onto my thigh, shaking it slightly. “you should go. Luke is probably waiting for you.”

i nod. i know he’s right, but it still stings, being dismissed so quickly.

i wipe my stomach with a napkin from his glovebox before slipping my biker shorts back on and pulling my tank top back over my head.

“i’ll see you at the house.” he bids me goodbye, as i slip out of his car, starting my walk back to the house.

aren’t you sick of this?

don’t you feel guilty for lying to your best friend?

for betraying him like this?

don’t you think you can do better?

that you deserve better than clandestine meetings?

than being someone’s ‘other woman’?

than being tossed aside the second he’s done with you?

i’m done.

*

“alright, you ready?” Luke asks, plopping down on the couch cushion beside me, a bowl of popcorn clutched in his hand.

“yeah, press play, moose.” Luke is just about to hit play on the netflix movie when the front door swings open. Quinn steps into the house, shutting the door before noticing us on the couch.

“hey.” he gives us a nod, walking towards the stairs. “oh, Olivia is flying in tomorrow morning.”

my heart stops, my muscles tensing.

Olivia.

Quinn’s girlfriend.

the one we’ve been sneaking around for four months.

“oh cool, what time?” Luke is oblivious to my silent panic.

“six a.m, so i’m heading to sleep. night, Luke. night, kid.”

there it is again. that stupid nickname. ‘kid’.

Quinn heads up the stairs and i hear the faint sound of his bedroom door shutting.

my head snaps over to Luke.

“hey, i gotta go get something from my room, i’ll be right back.” i pat his leg before rising from my seat, making my way towards the stairs.

“oh, okay.” he nods, getting on his phone as i walk up the stairs.

i come to a stop outside of Quinn’s door, debating knocking before i decide not to, in order to not raise suspicion from Luke.

i swing the door open, slipping in before quickly shutting it behind me.

Quinn sits on the foot of his bed, head rising from looking at his phone. his brows furrow before he raises one in questioning.

“didn’t get enough of me earlier?” he teases. “aren’t you and Luke watching a movie? i don’t think we can have a quickie right now-”

“we’re done.” his lips snap shut, whether in shock, or disbelief, or just plain speechlessness, i’m not sure. but he’s silent, so i continue. “no more meetings. no more.”

my heart aches in my chest, my throat getting tighter and tears bubble up in my eyes.

i thought it would be easy to stop.

i used to tell myself i could do it whenever i wanted. but now, i know it’s not true.

there was no ‘last time’, only this afternoon. no soft goodbyes. i’ll be stuck seeing him for the rest of my life. he’s a mistake that i became all too comfortable with. with him, i let my morals wash away like a drawing in sand. but i was done hating myself, thinking so low of myself for my forbidden actions.

he chuckles as if i told him a joke, as if i didn’t just tell him we were over. standing from the bed and prowling towards me, his hand raises to cup my cheek.

“what are you talking about, baby?”

it’s always ‘baby’ in secret. ‘kid’ while in company. he makes me feel so stupid, like i’m a child; naive and small.

“don’t call me ‘baby’.” i swat his hand away from my cheek. “and don’t call me ‘kid’, either. do you not know my name?

“do you not know the name of the girl you’ve been fucking in secret for the past four months? that you’ve known since you were ten?”

his nostrils flare, stepping back as though i’ve slapped him.

“i know your name, y/n.” his words drip with venom, his lips press together into a straight line. “they’re just nicknames.”

“they’re cruel.” i spit. “you know what you’re doing. i’ve made myself available to you for too long. i’ve let you use me and throw me to the side as if i’m nothing. i’ve become something i never would’ve imagined i would be-”

“y/n-”

“no! this is my turn to talk. look at this godforsaken mess that you made me. i’m actively lying to my best friend, your brother. i’ve become the ‘other woman’. a title i would’ve smacked myself for, just six months ago. i’ve lost my sense of morality. i’ve become someone that i don’t even recognize; because of you. so, i’m done.

“i will not be your secret anymore. i deserve more. i deserve better than someone who keeps me hidden. who dismisses me mere minutes after using my body.”

tear tracks stain my cheeks, my face feels tighter under the salty liquid and i quickly wipe them away.

“you’re right.” my lips part slightly, my gaze fixating on the man in front of me.

he seems genuine. his eyes glistening with pity and an unrecognizable emotion.

“i’m sorry. you deserve better.” he tells me, nodding his head solemnly.

“i do.” i reply. “and i’ve been rejecting everyone that is interested because i’ve been hoping and praying to any higher power that you would love me the way that i’ve loved you since i was sixteen, but that’s not gonna happen, is it?”

he shakes his head ‘no’ and i can’t even hold it against him, because at least he’s finally being honest with me.

i bite my lower lip, nodding dejectedly and gripping the doorknob behind me.

“for you, i’ve ruined myself a million times.”

i slip out the door, padding back down the stairs and leaving the man i love, and our illicit affairs behind me.

Luke’s head rises when i return, his eyebrow raised and his lips parted, surely ready to question what took me so long. but with one glance at my tear stained face and bloodshot eyes, his mouth closes, his arms opening instead.

i drop onto the couch, burying my face into his neck. his arms wrap around me tightly, one hand holding the back of my head as the other rubs my back.

“i know.” he whispers. “it’s okay. i know.”

his words are mumbled against the shell of my ear and the emotion with which their spoken confirms that he knew what i’d been doing. they only succeed in making me feel even more guilty. all this time, i thought i’d been doing a pretty good job of hiding our meetings this summer, but my best friend is smart, catching on a lot more than i realized.

“i’m so sorry, Lukey.” i sob, my apology muffled by his skin.

“it’s okay. and i promise, it’ll be okay, y/n/n. i’ve got you.”

#quinn hughes #quinn hughes x reader #quinn hughes imagine #quinn hughes fic #quinn hughes blurb #vancouver canucks #nhl blurb #nhl fic #nhl imagine #faithlynn’s writings <3

[m0chisenpai]

Can you write a fic about Jake sully x reader where she has a terrible father and she completely shut him out of her life and one day he comes back for reader and Jake is just super protective over her? <3

father!jake sully x daughter!reader

You often forget you were once human along with your adoptive father. Then moments would ground you, and remind you of that little star in the sky you’d once call home. And the primal look in your fathers eye right now looked far from human.

You’d never heard your father hiss like that before and you hoped you never did again. Usually, when you did he would playfully bare his fangs at you and you would copy him with a fit of giggles. But his teeth now bared in a show of dominance against the man who held your arm in his. 

“Let her go” Jake spat out and the man immediately tightened his grip. You felt like the world would end right then and there, the new life you’d knit together came unraveling in front of you.

Your father made a name for himself as soon as he caught wind of Pandora. When you were younger you were naive to it. All you knew was that daddy would spoil you with a pretty little dress, and a bigger dollhouse cause he got special rocks from this planet in the sky. 

Then you got older and you heard things, whispers from the cracked doors of that study. How he was investing his money toward some foreign element with an old college buddy, Parker Selfridge. You were still a child, just well into entering those double digits, but all you knew was from that day on every gift your father gave burned your hands.

You would have given anything to get away from your father. Perhaps you were only there to carry the name, but you ran from that gilded cage long ago. You convinced Grace Augustine you were some young prodigy in the making and the woman was more than welcome to teach you about the plant life on the planet and about the Na’vi people. 

Life was beautiful again. Following the war, you found this as a gift from Eywa herself, the chance to love and be loved by a real family. Neytiri spent her days on the hunt even while pregnant and you trained by her side, learning the ways of the hunter and the future Tsahik. She loved you fiercely and saw you as hers despite not sharing blood. 

None of you expected a search party to be placed, yet here you stood in the grasp of the man who once called you father. Jake saw red when he heard your cries and found you in the arms of the man. His heart thudded in his ears, the world around him a blur as you had his entire focus. 

His eyes calculated every nervous shift the man whom you once called father stepped back with you held tight. “Y/N tell that thing you are not one of them.”

This only elicited another primal hiss and fangs bared at him and your father finally released you and took a slow step back. “Ok, ok.” He finally released you from his hold and you quickly ran to Jake who kept his eyes trained onto the human but reached a hand back to press into your stomach. 

“Y/N, baby I know things went so badly wrong. But please. Come home baby, we miss you. We’ll do what we can to fix you back and mama is home ready and waiting. Please baby.” And you felt tears fall, because it was all a lie. Your father used that very tone when you ran up to him in a fit of tears begging to know if your friends were true, that Santa wasn’t real. And he rubbed his hand down your back and cooed at you with syrupy words that the man was indeed real.

Those sticky sweet words make your stomach burn as you tightened the grip on Jake’s hand, no your father’s hand. “I wanna go home, please.”

“I know baby, we’re going home. Let me fix this baby.” he whispered back, lacing his fingers with your own and squeezing what strength he had into you. 

The human cooed your name again, and you balled up your fist hissing weakly at him.

“This is home” you retaliated, “not back there. Not where I was a shadow, a guest in the place that was supposed to be home. Mama didn’t want me and you knew it just as much as she did. You abandoned me once you can do it again.” Your nails dug into Jake’s palm as your voice raised and your eyes screwed shut as you pressed your forehead to his back, taking in gasps full of air. 

“Y/N.” He took a step forward, arms reached out and Jake lowered himself over you more, tail swishing in agitation as he prepared himself. “Baby, I don’t want to cause a muck on this planet, you don’t want to bring unnecessary harm. Just come home and we can leave the natives alone. No unnecessary bloodshed.” His hand once again reached out, the dark glint of metal shined in Jake’s eye. 

He knew what that was slung over his shoulder.  He was no match against it, and who was to say he wasn’t surrounded now? That their wasn’t an army waiting for him, ready to attack if he came back empty handed.

Yet just as he went to take another step forward arm reaching to his weapon, an arrow shot from the trees above and lodged itself in front of where your fathers hand would have been had he not moved back fast enough.

Your eyes flickered into the trees above where your mother stood, arrow drawn with another bow. She gracefully leapt down, her stance unwavering as she took a spot beside her mate. Eyes never once leave the human man whose face was painted in fear. “Another word, and I shoot again.”

Silence fell. All you could hear and see was your father whose arms fell in defeat finally turning his back to you, arms raised. When he was far enough your fathers arms gathered you into his chest where he pressed you so tight you feared you would pop. 

“You’re fine baby, let it out” his words washed over you as you let your cries out, gripping onto him tightly. His words and Neytiri’s hands stroking your back brought you peace. You were safe, you were home.

#avatar x reader #jake sully x daughter reader #jake sully x reader

[eoieopda]

FORCE QUIT // EPISODE III: SPIDER

somebody has to make sure you make it through the firefight alive.

pairing: lee minho x reader | series masterlist (3/4) | prev. episode series summary: it's 2077, and life's a fucking nightmare. corporate titans ate the state and shat it back out, leaving citizens of the new republic to fall in line, or fall to their knees. a reckoning is coming — where will you fall? au: series — dystopian, cyberpunk; episode — mutually-pining fuck buddies. ➢insp. by: cyberpunk 2077 + the true lives of the fabulous killjoys genre: smut + angst word count: 23.5k rating: 18+ — minors do not have my consent to interact. series warnings: violence (hand-to-hand, firearms, explosives), depictions of injuries (blood/bruising/burns), some characters have cybernetic modifications, class conflict + poverty, surprise - corporations are bad!, unethical medical/tech experimentation, self-indulgent references to non-skz idols, reader is afab and uses she/her pronouns. episode: above + combat leader!minho, disabled!hacker!reader, pov switches, time skips, reader has a prosthetic/cybernetic leg, loss of limb due to injury (not depicted, minimally described), ref. to hospitalization + recovery, sunshine/storm cloud dynamic, minho is kind of a dick, depictions of combat violence, minor character death(s), unprotected p in v penetration. a/n 1: this part required a lot more external resources than anything else i’ve written, so i’ve kind of… footnoted? what i used. see the note at the end of the fic for the list! a/n 2: each episode features a different member x reader pairing, but the plot is linear, so you'd need to read them (in order) to get the full picture! you can sign up for the taglist to be notified of the next uploads. thank you to my beloved @sailoryooons for beta'ing this and @jihopesjoint for being my emotional support internet wife even though she doesn't stan skz. ily both endlessly!

Yours is the Black Screen’s worst kept secret.

The irony of that isn’t lost on you. Professionally, your most marketable skill is your ability to lower others’ defenses; to build and break walls as needed to take what you want for keeps. With finesse few can imitate, you vault over boundaries. Unfortunately for you, you don’t personally have any of those.

You’ve always been this way — no poker face, no affinity for bluffing, no discernible self-preservation instinct — and just the same, you’ve always wished you weren’t.

Time and again, your cards are on the table the second they’re dealt. If that alone wasn’t shitty gameplay, you and that relentless optimism of yours raise the stakes, double down. There’s no hesitating before you go all in; and there’s no surprise when you lose it all, either. Nothing you’ve ever felt has shocked anyone because they saw it coming in the previous turn.

Like Seungmin, for example, who won’t stop rolling his eyes at you from the other side of the room.

“If I took a shot every time you looked up at the door…” He sighs, gesturing from your corner of the Hub to its entrance, “I’d have died of alcohol poisoning six times over by now.”

The grimace you don’t want to concede can’t be hidden, so you rein your gaze in and direct it back at the screen in front of you. You don’t absorb any of the information flickering in front of you, however, because Seungmin has a point. Any second you haven’t spent staring wistfully out of the room is wasted on glancing at the clock. 

It’s close to nine o’clock now, which means your not-so-secret distraction is due any minute.

That reminds me…

You check again, wondering how many minutes have passed since you last looked, only to learn that it’s been less than one. That’s when the reflex takes over. Without your permission, your eyes wander from the glowing, green digits on the wall to the door — just in case.

No dice.

Damn it.

In a feeble attempt to cover your chronic — terminal — hopefulness, you try to refocus on your work. All it takes is a few seconds of staring before your eyes glaze over again. That disinterest isn’t reflected in your rigid posture, though. Your brain may be a flat tire, but your body is a bow drawn back, ready to fire.

Anticipation is a hell of a drug, isn’t it?

Seungmin crosses his arms. From the corner of your eye, you can see the knowing look he shoots you. He may not speak his favorite words, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hear them, loud and clear.

Told you so.

“It’s kind of funny, actually,” he says instead. 

You know better than to be thrown off by his trademark, flat affect. This is the most amused you’ve seen the weaponsmith in weeks. The corner of his mouth even twitches slightly; it might be the closest he’s ever been to smiling. “He only steps foot in here when you do.”

With all the heat you can muster, you aim to warn him — to puff out your chest a little, just this once — but it just sounds like a whine. “Seungmin…”

As if on cue, light footsteps sound off from down the hallway, shifting closer with every muffled step and cutting your would-be bickering off in the process.

Even with Seungmin’s judgment focused elsewhere, you continue to pretend that the glaring, blue light in front of your face has garnered any amount of your attention. It doesn’t. It hasn’t and won’t, so long as you can feel the seconds tick by in your chest.

He snorts. “Like clockwork.”

Damn it.

For being as light on his feet as he is, Minho tends to drag them more, the longer the day lasts. You never point that out to him; he doesn’t need to know that you’ve noticed. That fact sits among the million others you try to keep to yourself, just like your ability to identify him by gait alone.

Besides, you think, he’d never listen if you begged him to slow down, even if it’s just for a night. Rest doesn’t feature on the short list of things Minho wants from you. Come to think of it, neither does advice or concern for his well-being.

“Well, well, well. Look who it is,” Seungmin sings out when the shuffling stops short. “You lost, hyung?”

The way your head snaps up has nothing to do with Seungmin’s mocking tone and everything to do with the flutter in your chest. You’d attempt to keep that a secret, too, but then Minho walks in, and it’s game set. 

He’s fatal with his tattered, grey t-shirt half-tucked into ripped, black denim; and you have to clench your jaw to keep it from dropping. Before your dry throat can choke you, you clear it, swallowing down the thought that Minho and his jagged edges are the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen.

It gets easier to get a fucking grip on yourself when Seungmin starts needling again: “No, seriously, are you lost? What are you doing here?”

Dark, cat eyes flick to you, then back to their target. Deadly, you think, just like the rest of him.

“Wishing you weren’t,” Minho responds without missing a beat. 

As usual, his tone is carefully balanced between bored and annoyed. You suspect that’s purposeful. A tactic. It leaves listeners in the dark about his feelings, so they have to guess whether or not they should run.

Nine times out of ten, they guess wrong.

This time, Minho deigns to give a hint. It’s quick enough that you would’ve missed it if you hadn’t been staring. Thankfully, his target sees the microscopic flex of his eyebrow, too. 

All that bark leaves Seungmin in a hurry, no bite to follow. With his tail between his legs and his palms raised in defeat, he skirts around Minho before slipping wordlessly out the door. 

You frown slightly as you watch him flee, although you sure as shit won’t mind his absence.

“Seungmin’s harmless,” you remind Minho quietly, although you don’t know why you bother. He’s never felt threatened in his life, as far as you can tell. You don’t necessarily hate it when he flexes that fact in front of you, but that doesn’t mean he should. “You don’t need to scare him off.”

Minho crosses his arms and tilts his head in a way that makes you only the slightest bit insane. “I’m not scary,” he rebuts matter-of-factly, as if that’ll make it true.

You make the mistake of looking him in the eye then. Like it always does in moments like this, heat immediately rushes to your face like a backdraft.

Like he always does, Minho senses the spike in temperature. To crank it higher, he meanders his way across the room to you, eyes glittering impishly all the while. Your heart thuds harder with each footfall. Stupidly, you wonder if he can sense that, too.

“In fact, I’m offended,” he corrects you as he closes in.

His palms press down against the opposite side of your desk once he reaches it. This close, you can read the mischief scribbled all over his face, which only serves to tear you in two — equal parts fucked up by his assertiveness and the rare playfulness that only comes in flashes, only with you.

Minho looms over you now, his hardened stare softening just slightly. Whispering through what almost looks like a pout, he adds, “And you’re mean.”

For a second, you think that the hand inching its way across the tabletop is seeking yours. Anticipation makes your fingers twitch. Try as you might, you can’t think of a single fucking thing you want more than to slip them between his. 

Proving once again that you’ll never read him right, Minho’s hand darts out to your side instead. You watch in slow-motion as he snags the bag of honey twists from its resting spot near your left forearm, which is nowhere near fast enough to catch him before he pulls away. Useless, your empty hand drops back onto your desk. 

You stare longingly at the stolen packet, so dejected that you really could cry, and mumble, “It took so much effort to get those.”

“It shouldn’t have,” Minho counters with a shrug.

He isn’t wrong, and you hate that.

The Black Screen’s demolition expert, Lee Jihoon, is as hard to crack as the shit he blows to pieces. His footlocker full of snacks — a rarity, given the whole everything going on in the world — is even more impenetrable. Charming your way through his stony exterior had been your only option to gain access. It took months, as well as unrelenting friendliness administered in small, persistent doses.

Just like —

Minho wouldn’t have wasted his time with flattery or nuance. He never needs to open his mouth to get what he’s after because his presence — from his stance to his intense, vaguely violent gaze — does all the talking for him. All he would’ve needed to do is blink in Jihoon’s direction, then he would’ve walked out of there with the older man’s treasure trove and the jacket off his back.

Having just been robbed blind yourself, you keep your mouth shut about that.

Shrugging once again, Minho throws down the gauntlet: “Finish your shit quickly, and I might decide to share them with you.”

How thoughtful.

If he’s expecting a verbal response, he won’t get one, you decide. The most you give is a disgruntled sigh. Dying star that you are, you collapse in on yourself, sinking deeper into your chair until you wind up as a half-crumpled heap on the desk below your monitors. It’s a perfect picture of abject failure, making this the only thing you’ve gotten right all day.

You don’t expect Minho to ask after your current state, so you’re not disappointed when he doesn’t. Or, at least, you will yourself not to be. In reality, your bated breath is held for a second or two before you remember who you’re dealing with. 

He does speak, though, which surprises you. Your first guess would’ve been that he’d give a hard pass on your dramatics and wander back out the door while your face was buried in your arms.

“Spider,” he sighs, and his tone is so gentle that it shocks the hell out of you. Intimate, almost, even if it is just a caricature. “Call it a night.”

More curious than cautious, you lift your head enough to blink up at him. Between his eyebrows, there’s a small crease that you don’t see often enough to competently translate. You stare at the tension there for a beat longer than you mean to before your gaze drifts downward to meet his.

See? Beautiful.

The second Minho sees your eyebrows raise slightly in question, a switch flips. He shuts the light off, irons out his expression. Whatever softness you found there is gone as quickly as it came.

He clears his throat, then huffs, “Come on.”

You frown and gesture to the screen ahead, pointing out the program you’ve spent all goddamn day working on to no avail. The silent protest doesn’t work on Minho. His stare only becomes more expectant the longer he levels it at you.

“Seriously. Fuck it.”

Having chosen the hill you plan to die on, you envision roots tying your unmoving body to the floor beneath you. Your frown deepens. No, you think emphatically, as if making your internal monologue shout will make him listen.

Minho tries again. “It’ll be here to ruin your day tomorrow.”

You don’t budge, and it pulls an exasperated noise out of him. Curling his right hand into a loose fist, he taps the knuckle of his index finger lightly against your elbow, like the contact will force your mental task list to shut down. 

“I’m bored.”

You know exactly what that means.

“Come up to the roof with me.”

Strike that.

“The roof?” You peep, hardened expression smashed to bits before you can blink.

Minho looks a little too pleased by your sudden concession. He even makes one of his own, chuckling slightly before he rolls his eyes and elaborates, “It’s nice out.”

It’s nice out, so you want to fuck me… on the roof?

The hand at your elbow pulls away and re-routes towards the back pocket of his jeans. When it returns to the space between you, there’s a dented, silver flask glinting in his grip. He shakes it, arches one eyebrow, and tops it all off with a wolfish grin that makes your stomach flip. 

“Stolen whisky tastes best in restricted areas, I hear.”

He nods his head towards the door, beckoning you to give in, and you’re on your feet without needing the invitation to be repeated. 

The sudden movement after sitting for so long means that your body isn’t as enthusiastic as your brain. A sharp pinch pulls a slight gasp out of you. That’s the extent of your own reaction, but Minho isn’t used to this the way you are. Alert eyes flick down to where your residual limb slots into your manufactured one, then back up to search your face. 

Once again, he asks without saying a word. You answer with a wave of your hand, “All good.”

Minho’s concern doesn’t immediately dissipate. To prove that you meant what you said, you snatch the packet of honey twists out of his unsuspecting hand and circle around the desk until you’re face to face. 

“If I’m on my ass for too long, my leg forgets how to leg,” you explain, grinning more out of triumph than reassurance. Then, you dangle your reclaimed prize from your fingertips because you are nothing if not a little shit. “I’m not a doctor, but I think science says that food helps.”

“Science says?” Minho snorts. 

You nod authoritatively, then you turn to the spare folding chair near your work station. Your jacket waits for you there, carefully folded on the cracked, plastic-coated cushion. Shrugging it on, you shove the honey twists in your right pocket and tease, “Sure does.”

The corner of his mouth tugs slightly upwards, and you swear there’s an affectionate smile threatening to break loose.

It doesn’t.

Instead, after pushing off his palms, Minho stands fully upright, nods his head towards the door a second time, and starts making his way towards it. You follow because you always do, biting back your lips to keep your giddiness to yourself.

As the pair of you exit and head down the hallway in comfortable quiet, you note his proximity to you. It’s always the same; he’s always close by but never near enough to touch. The edge of his shirt sleeve brushes against your arm, although his skin never does. 

You stopped wondering about that a long time ago, unwilling to figure out if this is a tactic, too.

Halfway to the nearest stairwell, Jeongin appears in a doorway. The room he emerges from used to be an office for the human resources department, back when the factory was operational — back when employers bothered with pretending to give a shit. 

Now, the room’s function lands somewhere between a bar and a bedroom. The latter only comes into play when the former makes staggering upstairs to the residential area too much of a hassle. From what you can see over the younger man’s shoulder, that’ll likely be the case tonight.

Jeongin gives you a cursory smile before directing his full attention to the man keeping cursory distance at your side.

None of it makes sense to you, all this effort spent to hide intentions. Maybe, you think, that’s why you’re so fucking terrible at it.

“Hey, hyung!” Jeongin chirps as the pair of you approach. He lifts his hand to wave, but it just looks like he’s shaking the deck of cards in his hand at Minho. “Do you want to —”

Without slowing down, Minho cuts him off mid-ask and at the knees. “No.”

And then his finger slips into the belt loop of your jeans, tugging you along beside him as he keeps up the pace. You’re gone before you can see Jeongin’s face fall, but you’re sure it does. 

Yours would.

When you reach the stairs, Minho matches your careful pace, albeit much less awkwardly. For as life-saving as the chunk of metal and carbon fiber on your right side has been, there’s at least one problem it hasn’t solved: going up steps is a bitch. 

To compensate for your less dynamic knee, your left leg takes stairs two at a time so you can simply step straight up with your right. And even though you’re a bit out of breath from the extra effort, you open your mouth to comment on what you just witnessed.

Minho stops you before you can start. Shooting you a look you know far too well, he sighs, “Don’t.”

You’re as good a faker as you are a listener.

“He’s just trying to —”

He releases his grip on your belt loop. It’s the only reason you realize he’d still been holding on. Stopping at the landing, Minho turns to look back at you. “Can’t think of anything I want to do less than sit next to someone and have to hear about their fucking day.”

Eyebrows raised, you stare up at him. This time, you don’t say a word, letting your expression speak for you.

“With the ever-present risk that I’ll be murdered by the state tomorrow, forgive me if I’m not wasting today by listening to shit I don’t care about.”

There it is, you think.

The combat leader’s insistence that his life will only end one way: too soon and bloody.

That unexploded ordnance drops heavy between you. You step over it, joining him on the landing, and you don’t look back. Just at Minho, who watches you carefully for a reaction; whose tension leaves his muscles when the slight, upward curve of your mouth says, I understand.

Together, you climb the remaining flight until you reach the thick, steel door leading out to the roof. It’s barely functional, like the vast majority of the factory, and can’t shut all the way. With more force than is even remotely necessary, he kicks it fully open. The thick, rubber tread of his boot thuds against the metal. It’s quickly drowned out by the strangled squeak of its hinges.

You’re at least slightly thankful that those hinges don’t explode into a cloud of rust.

On his way to the ledge, Minho grabs two empty buckets from the pile of discarded odds-and-ends near the doorway. The rest of the pile — mainly two-by-four planks too busted to rehab and similarly spent range targets — threatens to collapse without its foundation, but neither of you stops to fix it. He leads, and you follow, ultimately coming to a stop near the ledge.

“So?” 

His insufficient question is underscored by the two buckets landing mouth-down on the concrete with twin thunks.

You’re still blinking through your confusion when he unceremoniously drops himself on the furthest bucket and when he stretches out his leg to tap the remaining one with the side of his boot. Coincidentally, you’re still waiting for the rest of his inquiry when you sit — much more gently — next to him. This time, it’s you who moves, nudging your chrome knee against his flesh-and-bone.

Minho finally takes the hint and continues, pulling out his flask as he does. “How was your day?”

The whiplash makes your neck ache.

Remind me again about the last thing you said to me.

After taking a swig without incident, he passes the flask to you. You take your sip — small, cautious — and immediately let out some clownish, choking noise when the strong notes of wooden barrel hit your taste buds.

“Oh, that’s —” You cough, nose scrunching. Whisky-laced breath slips out of your teeth in the form of a hiss. “Absolutely wretched, I fear.”

For the first time all night, Minho’s mask cracks, and a full-fledged laugh tumbles out of his mouth, high and clear as it cuts through the otherwise dead air.

“It’s not,” he counters. Without taking his eyes off your pout, he lifts a hand to catch the flask that you toss at him. “You’re just childish.”

In recompense, you swat his arm. 

He lets you.

“Shut up.” Your distinctly childish comeback is breathy because, like always, your laughter isn’t something you can successfully hide. “Am not.”

Another swig, no further incidents.

“Think you need to be demoted. Maybe I should start calling you baby instead of Spider.”

The violent flutter in your chest doesn’t seem to care that what it heard isn’t at all what he meant. For now, you let it happen. You focus instead on his creased eyes and barely-crooked smile; drink them in as quickly as you can, knowing that your window is closing.

As rare as it is, levity looks perfect on him.

While your laughter ebbs, the wind kicks up slightly, bringing a chill with it. You pull your jacket tighter around you as you watch browned leaves spin in pirouettes near your feet. Their presence here is surprising, given how devastating the War was to the ecosystem, but it’s welcomed. It’s a reminder sorely needed: nothing’s ever truly fucked beyond repair.

Minho pipes up suddenly, “You never answered me, you know.” And even though his voice is low, it startles you.

He’s too busy fiddling with the cap of his flask to see it when you turn your head to look quizzically at him. He probably missed the way you jolted just then, too, which is fine by you. Your goldfish brain is still trying to recall what he asked that went without a reply.

When you remain quiet, he supplies, “Your day.” 

As it turns out, you’re just as stunned by his question the second time he poses it. Part of you wants to remind him that he could be murdered by the state tomorrow, just in case he wants to reclaim his wasted time. The rest watches as his absentminded fidgeting stops, and his head lifts to look at you — not impatiently, not sardonically, but with the tiniest bit of insecurity scribbled into his slightly furrowed brow.

Oh.

Now, you’re frozen into silence for an entirely different, entirely devastating reason: he wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t genuinely want to know.

A self-effacing laugh serves as a smokescreen for how fucking flustered that realization makes you. 

“Well, I had plans to go phishing, but they fell through.”

“Beach advisory?” He feigns a frown, making your lips curve upwards at the corners. “Those hypocrites at Thanotech really need to stop dumping their shit into the reservoir.”

At this, you laugh outright. 

This is the Minho that no one but you could pick out of a lineup: the one that will take a bit and run with it, who lets his guard down and catches you off yours. This one may not be yours — you know he isn’t, not really — but at times like this, when it’s just the two of you alone, it feels like he is.

“I’ll make sure to tell them you said so.” You pat his thigh, which tenses slightly in the second your palm rests on it. Redirecting your thoughts from where they’re headed, you pull your hand back and tuck it into your jacket pocket. “I really think they’ll listen if they know Lee Minho’s the one asking.”

His eyes roll in response, but the amused smirk he wears doesn’t dissipate. It’s still there when he slowly leans closer, making your breath hitch. His hand shifts closer, too, and your pulse hammers harder with every millimeter that’s cast aside.

There’s an old saying about where the shame should fall when a person gets fooled twice. You practically feel it collide with your thick skull when, for the second time, Minho turns the tables. He nearly turns your pocket inside out in the process, hand snatching the yet-untouched packet of honey crisps before you even know what’s happening.

Just like last time, you put up no fight when he settles back into his own makeshift chair with a smug glint in his eyes. A forlorn sigh is covered by the racket of plastic ripping, followed soon after by a faint crunch.

“Speaking of bait,” he snickers once he’s swallowed. “What are you dangling?”

You really want to hate him for that segue, along with all the rest of his committed atrocities, but you can’t. So, you offer up the only thing you still have: 

Technobabble.

“The plan is to sneak in a program to mine data. So long as nobody interrupts me —” You pause to shoot him a pointed look. “— I’ll finish coding it tomorrow and fire it off at some grunt in Ulsan’s fiscal department using a cloned, corporate email account.”

“You think they’ll fall for it?” Minho asks, curiosity piqued.

You flash a grin. “I know they will. Nothing spooks a low-level employee quite like an overdue, mandatory, cybersecurity compliance attestation.”

If you didn’t know better, you’d swear he looks almost proud when he hears about the form of your Trojan horse. It’s certainly what you feel blooming in your chest, especially when you pluck the crisp from between his unsuspecting fingers and pop it into your own mouth.

“Once the program installs, it’ll start reaping what they have access to,” you explain. “I’m sure it’ll be limited at the start, quarterly budget reports and such.” 

You shrug dismissively, then look down at your hands. There’s no way this is interesting to someone that isn’t you, but he asked, and you’re answering, and you can’t seem to stop talking. 

“But those point me in the direction of invoices and their line items, which gets me to payment accounts, recipients, and other shit they don’t want me to know. It’s a paper trail leading to a paper trail, honestly, but it’s —”

“— how you weave a web.”

It stops your brain in its tracks, leaves your would-be sentence to peter out. You can’t remember the last time anyone followed where your explanations led, let alone saw the importance of all the tiny, tedious steps you take. All the intricacies of your carefully plotted architecture.

With you stalled out, Minho finishes that thought where he left off. “Strand by strand.”

“Yeah,” you exhale, warmth creeping from your chest to your cheeks. “Strand by strand.”

You sit on that bucket on the roof for however long it takes for your ass to go numb, and then you sit some more. Hours, maybe a day or two — irrelevant, as far as you’re concerned. You have Minho next to you and a burgeoning sunrise ahead; and you’ll bask in the glow you’ve found there for as much time as you can.

Minho, it seems, has other plans.

He sighs and flattens his palms against his knees before standing, causing the bucket he’d been occupying to scrape against the concrete. The noise is what gets your attention, not the movement. You turn to look up at him. Your disappointment is more than likely broadcasted all over your face.

“Stay with me,” you whine before you can stop yourself.

Needy isn’t normally a word you’d use to describe yourself; you’re far from it. Now, though… In this moment, it might be written in blaring red letters on your forehead, judging by the extremely brief flash of surprise you see in front of you. It’s gone as quickly as it came. The twinge of embarrassment you feel sticks around to keep you warm.

Minho is quiet for a beat, like he’s got something to consider. Whatever he decides on, it makes his head tilt to the side. A devilish look takes over his features, washing from his narrowed eyes to his tilted lips. All mischief, he counters, “Fuck me.”

Why do those things have to be mutually exclusive?

You don’t voice your question out loud, even though you kind of want to scream it, because he holds his hand out to help you up, and instant gratification together feels so much better than waiting through a delay alone. So, you take his hand, just like he knew you would, and you follow. 

Back to the door, back down to the second level of the factory, back to your room in an otherwise unoccupied wing, until the door is shut softly behind you.

Every single one of your rendezvous has been different from the last. The time, location, everything varies, not unlike the version of himself that Minho lets you see. Even though the steps change completely from tryst to tryst, they still feel like they’ve been choreographed and rehearsed ahead of time.

For example, he’s never caged you against a wall and pinned your wrists one-handed above your head before, but your body reacts as if this is the sole position it was made to occupy in life.

His teeth nip at the side of your neck, and your head falls back instinctively. You don’t give a shit about the muted thump of your skull against the brick, but Minho seems to. 

“Watch yourself,” he murmurs, lips fluttering against your throat. Despite the muted volume, his tone carries an authority to it that makes even your chrome knee weak. “If you wind up with a concussion, I’m not explaining it to Doc.”

You gasp when his tongue flicks out to soothe the sting his teeth leave behind. Beyond desperate, you push up on your toes to bring yourself closer to his mouth. It’s further out of reach than you remember — it shouldn’t be. Barely a week has gone by since he last had you like this. 

Embarrassingly breathless already, you ask, “Have you gotten taller? What have they been feeding you?”

His knee comes forward slowly to nudge yours apart. You make room, letting his thigh press into the gap created. If his left hand wasn’t keeping you stretched up to your full height, you’d be riding that thigh by now.

“You know what I eat.”

Your eyes roll back. You’re not sure if that’s a reaction to his line or the way he clenches his thigh, shifting it further into the space between your spread legs. Either way, that taut muscle is only millimeters away from your cunt now; the low hum that rumbles from his chest says that he can feel the heat rolling off you in waves.

You want so badly to be able to touch him, cling to him, scratch your nails across his scalp and pull him in by his hair. You want him to touch you — really touch you — not just to tease you the way he is, threatening to mark you up with his mouth without following through. 

If you try to tug your arms down, will he let you?

Part of you hopes that he doesn’t. 

At least, not without consequences.

Minho can tell how fucking restless you are. You’re not surprised; you vibrate with want at a frequency he’s always been attuned to. Speaking any of it out loud would be redundant, so you save your breath. His fans warmth over the shell of your ear, pulling the hammer back: “What’s the matter, Spider? You don’t like being the one in the trap?”

You can’t help but tremble at that.

“Fine,” he tuts, finger on the trigger.

Your eyes widen in anticipation when his hand drops its hold on your wrists; and your arms fold slowly back down when he retracts. There’s a muted ache in your muscles from the strain they’d been put under. You can’t say that you mind.

His hands move next to his belt buckle, deft fingers making quick work of the metal before the two pieces dangle on either side of his zipper. That’s the image burned into your brain when he leans in close enough to kiss you. He doesn’t kiss you — he never does — but he finally fires at point blank range:

“Turn around.”

Bang!

It’s so unexpected that you don’t register it as real at first. Neither does Minho, whose demanding gaze stays glued to you. The noise comes again, louder than the first, and you hear the cry that comes with it through the door.

“Spider, are you there?”

Hyunjin.

It’s his voice, you know, but it doesn’t sound right at all. The air of self-assuredness he usually carries is long gone. Whatever’s replaced it sounds completely unlike him in a way that makes your stomach turn.

Minho puts distance between your bodies in the time it takes Hyunjin to push open the door. You notice that he forgot to address his belt buckle, but you suppose it doesn’t matter. The youngest among you is too visibly shaken to see it as he stumbles inside with red-rimmed eyes.

Oh, fuck.

Panicked, you shoot a quick glance at Minho, hoping he’ll see your alarm and know what to do with it. His eyes are locked onto Hyunjin, who comes to a stop in front of you; Minho’s expression is the definition of illegible.

Your hand lifts instinctively to Hyunjin’s shoulder. Apparently, that reassuring touch is all it takes to break the dam; to break him down into sobs.

“Hey!” You gasp, knitting your arms around his frame and hauling him towards you. His face slots into the space where your neck meets your shoulder, allowing his hyperventilated breaths to hit your skin directly. “Hey, it’s —”

You know better than to lie and say it’s okay. 

Minho may be fearless, but it’s Hyunjin that’s the least flappable in the entire group by a long shot. If you were to search back through the last decade, you wouldn’t be able to find a single moment where he seemed annoyed or anxious, let alone fucking devastated to the degree he currently is.

This is the farthest from okay things could possibly be.

You can’t tell if it’s heartbreak, nausea, or both that swells when you fill your fists with the back of his jacket and hold on tight.

From his spot two meters away, Minho cuts to the chase. “What happened to you?”

Hyunjin can’t answer, not at first. 

Maybe, you think, saying whatever it is out loud will confirm the reality of the situation. You don’t push him. Instead, you stop holding him long enough to pull him over to the far corner of your makeshift bedroom, where he drops down to sit on the mattress held off the floor by two wooden pallets. Despite his wiry frame, the force of his collapse makes the wood clatter against the concrete floor below.

When you take a spot beside him, it’s much less quickly, no more graceful. Hyunjin doesn’t mind the hand you place on his shoulder to keep yourself steady. If he hears the click at your manufactured joint over the sound of his own barely-regulated breathing, he doesn’t say so.

Still standing where he was left — where he left you, more like — Minho’s narrowed eyes hone in again on Hyunjin. The expression on his face is just as unreadable as before, and he still won’t look at you.

As much as that bothers you, your own feelings are never your first priority. You turn your head to look from Minho to Hyunjin, whose hands grip the black denim of his jeans like a lifeline. When the latter finally does speak, the explanation hemorrhages out of him, spilling and flooding until there isn’t much air left in the room to breathe.

Three things in particular hit you like a train:

The Bliss Beta is infinitely more insidious than you could’ve imagined — even for Ulsan — and its mass rollout is closer than you ever would’ve guessed.

You now have the data you need to find the servers running the Beta, which means there’s a chance that the way things currently are is the worst they’ll get.

There’s a guillotine blade looming over the Professor’s neck, and it’s your hand on the rope, obligated to let go. It’s your scale that’s tasked with weighing lives.

Nausea, you realize, almost too late.

You grab hold of the wastebasket near the foot of your mattress and squeeze your eyes shut while your honey twists leave you in a hurry.

He loves her.

He loves her, he loves her, he loves her, and there are fifty-one-million faceless reasons why he can’t have her. You feel the weighted stares of every single one of them on you when he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small, silver datashard. It’s thin, flat with sharp edges, but it’s a bullet if you’ve ever seen one.

When Hyunjin places it in your hand, your fingers don’t close around it. You can’t even look at it without feeling faint; your body won’t accept the weight of it in your palm. You avert your eyes, praying that your object permanence disappears along with it. 

And then that reflex kicks in again, craving some semblance of safety.

Minho is already watching you intently when you turn your head his way. The relief you feel is immediate, and you don’t have the energy left to pretend that’s not the case.

You love him.

You love him, you love him, you love him, and this goddamn horror show you’re living through feels survivable while he’s around, even if it isn’t. 

Maybe, you think, if you live to see the end, his presence will help you hate yourself less for the things you’re about to do to get there. That’s been the case so far, anyway. You’ve got a decade’s worth of scorched bridges behind you, and the ash on your face has never made him see you any differently.

Hyunjin clears his throat, dragging you back into the moment you don’t want to be a part of. 

“She said there’s multi-level encryption on this thing,” he mumbles, voice weak. His hand envelops yours and gently folds your fingers over your palm, as if he knows damn well you won’t do it yourself. “I don’t have to tell you this, but be careful, Spider. One move too many, and we’re all dead.”

You freeze; he stands, wiping invisible dirt from the front of his jeans. Nothing he attempts will make him feel clean, you know, but you don’t fault him for trying.

Before he can take a single step back towards your door, you reach out and grab his hand, preventing him from leaving.

“Keys,” you croak.

His eyebrows knit together.

“Cryptographic keys — characters. Numbers, usually.” You shake your head to realign your thoughts. It doesn’t do much; your explanation still comes out sputtering. “Each encryption is going to have a different algorithm altering its data, and it’ll be faster if I don’t have to write a separate program to try and find the strings I need.”

Judging by his face, the explanation makes sense, but he still looks as if he has no fucking idea what the answers might be.

For the first time in nearly an hour, Minho speaks. The suddenness of his participation makes both you and Hyunjin flinch.

“Dates,” he offers gruffly. “Ones that are significant to the two of you, maybe.”

The suggestion cracks against your skull like a baseball bat. 

Of all the things you could’ve expected him to say in the presence of someone other than you, something sentimental didn’t even come close to making the list. Hyunjin, it seems, is just as startled by this — by the appearance of your invisible friend, who’s spent ten years refusing to let this side of him be seen.

You make a note to ask Minho where this idea came from. If there are any dates he holds onto, with no one the wiser.

Hyunjin’s brow furrows for a moment while he thinks. Then, the light bulb behind his eyes flashes.

Eureka.

Dashing now towards the door, he calls out to you over his shoulder. “I’ll make you a list,” he promises breathlessly before he disappears altogether.

Without Hyunjin’s voice to fill it, the silence of your room roars in your ears. You need to shrug it off you, physically; move around so that you stop feeling like you’re being hydraulically pressed. 

In a wordless request for help, you hold your hand out to Minho. The jury’s still out as to what you want when he takes it: to drag him down to you, to be hauled to your feet, or to simply have it held. 

For the first time — possibly ever — he doesn’t take it.

Well-practiced hands drop to his belt buckle instead of reaching out to you. He re-fastens it quickly, and over the clink of metal, he grunts, “Stop looking at me like that.”

You blink rapidly when that sucker-punch statement hits you. “Looking at you like what, Minho?” You ask gently, as if your excess will make up for his lack.

“Like I’m your future.”

And just like that, he’s gone without another word or a backwards glance.

Eleven days crawl by without you seeing or hearing from Minho. You struggle to keep count as they pass. You’re so preoccupied that there’s no real difference between them, leaving them all to bleed together. It doesn’t help that all ten nights so far have been more or less sleepless.

While you’d love to say that all your time awake has been productive, you’d be lying. Sure, you spend the vast majority of it with the bright light of your monitors boring into your retinas, but that doesn’t mean you’re actively engaging with the shit displayed there. Between your program and your spent brain, it’s your neural pathways that are most in need of re-writing.

“Goddammit,” you hiss when a shock jolts through your upper right thigh for the umpteenth time today alone. 

Halfway crazy from frustration, you glare down at your quad and see the remaining muscles there twitching violently. And even though it’s been over a year, your brain is still surprised to find that the source of your pain doesn’t exist at all.

That outburst from you certainly isn’t the first, yet it’s the one that catches Chan’s attention. Like you, he’s spent an unhealthy amount of his time in the Hub over the past week and a half, pouring over who knows what. It’s safe to assume that’s how he’d describe your work, too.

“Been especially bad lately, hasn’t it?” He asks, head popping up from behind a stack of files.

He probably doesn’t expect you to squeak out a laugh at the sight of him, but you can’t help yourself. 

“You look like a meerkat when you do that.” The frown you get in response only makes you giggle more, despite yourself. “Like an overworked, overtired, under-caffeinated meerkat.”

Chan works overtime to control his expression, steel himself. It doesn’t work. It never does, no matter how obnoxious you and your comrades are around him because at the end of the day, all he ever is, is fond.

He sighs as he sits up fully in his chair. “Spider.”

It’s funny, you think. He sounds just like your father when he takes that tone with you, although the name he uses is nowhere near the same.

“Talk to Doc.” Realizing he sounded more stern than he meant to, Chan’s mouth softens from a thin, straight line to a slight smile. He adds, “Please.”

And because you’re the best behaved of all his pseudo-children, you don’t put up a fight. You don’t roll your eyes the way Seungmin does, or do the exact opposite of what you’ve been told, like —

Don’t go there.

You just get up, ignoring the strong urge you feel to buckle at the knees and hit the floor, and push your chair back with the underside of your thighs. Chan sees the pained look on your face immediately and moves to stand up and help you. You wave him off.

“All good,” you lie through gritted teeth, bearing weight on your palm as you maneuver your way around your desk. 

Chan may not believe you, but he listens, nonetheless. While you guide yourself from your workstation on the far side of the room towards the door, you try very hard to ignore the thought that keeps ricocheting around your skull like a bullet, shredding whatever grey matter gets in its way.

There’s one person that line wouldn’t have worked on. 

It takes a considerable amount of time to hobble to Doc’s clinic, which is clear on the other side of the compound, but you eventually make it there without breaking too much of a sweat.

In a past life, the space was an employee locker room that featured shower stalls and toilets on one side, and numerous lockers and benches on the other. Jeongin tried his best, but the plumbing was fucked beyond repair; all the utilities were scrapped. Whatever useful parts remained were repurposed elsewhere, while the broken bits wound up in that pile of assorted garbage on the roof.

Don’t.

Due to the size of the space, there’d been a multi-day debate on what to use it for. In the end, the decision was made to give it new life as a makeshift field hospital because Minho was right. The tile and drainage system is ideal for —

Stop it.

When you push through the swinging, double doors and stagger inside, you learn that you’re not today’s only patient. On one of the cots up ahead, Doc’s nimble fingers work to stitch Scraps’ left eyebrow back together, while Felix paces in the background with his hands in his hair.

“I’m so —”

“Felix!” 

Scraps slaps her hands down onto her thigh. The sound echoes off the tile walls like a thunderclap, but she doesn’t flinch at the contact. Doc does, however. She freezes solid, needle-holder in hand.

If Doc is frustrated, she doesn’t show it. That bedside manner of hers is unparalleled. Her gentle voice sounds suspiciously like Chan’s when she pleads, “No violence until I’m done holding a needle near your eye.”

Scraps nods in acknowledgment, which only contributes to the panicked look on Doc’s face. You bite your lips to hold your laughter in as you amble closer and dump yourself onto a nearby cot.

“Seriously — stop apologizing,” Scraps calls over her shoulder. 

If it wasn’t for Doc’s gentle hold on her chin, you suspect that she’d turn her head to look at Felix outright. 

“I told you to raise the stakes, and you did. So, I owe you a gold star for being a good listener, I guess.”

The way he looks at her when she can’t even see him kind of makes you want to sob. That ache only grows when he puts his hands on either side of her head, leans down, and plants a kiss on her hair.

Meanwhile, Doc is muttering, “Please stop moving, please stop moving, please stop moving,” like those are the only words she knows. You feel as guilty as you do grateful; her distress is a sufficient distraction from your own.

“Done!” She chirps moments later. Relief washes over her in a heartbeat, releasing tension from every single muscle cell she has — like she’s successfully disarmed a bomb, rather than sutured a minor injury.

And even though she’s too polite to say it, you swear you can hear her thinking it:

Please leave now.

And they do. They fall into lockstep, with Scraps tucked under Felix’s arm and hers wrapped around his waist.

And you’re still staring at the door once it swings shut again, so lost in all your conflicting thoughts that Doc has to call your name twice to get your attention.

“You’re not due back in for another month or so.” She frowns. “What’s on your mind?”

As usual, you don’t know where to start. You don’t know how to turn the faucet on without overflowing the bathtub, either, so you just let it all pour out.

“Everything was fine — perfect, probably. Or the closest it’s going to get, I guess. Then — I don’t even know what happened, but he won’t fucking look at me now. Won’t talk to me, walks out of a room when I walk in, like he can’t even stand to ignore me in my presence.”

You suck in a breath through your teeth to make up for all the ones you skipped out on while you rambled on. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean you stop rambling.

“And I think it might be breaking my heart. I don’t know. I don’t — I don’t know what to do now. It’s very distracting,” you mutter, frowning. 

A laugh slips out to signal how uncomfortable you are with the sudden intentional vulnerability. It sounds more like the sort of hiccup that precedes a sob. 

“Stupid thing to fixate on when the world’s on fire, isn’t it?”

To say that Doc is taken aback would be an understatement. Her eyes go wide; her lips purse. She pauses for a moment before she ultimately whispers, “I meant your leg.”

You’d go dig your own grave out back if you could walk that far.

“Oh.”

Doc does you the favor of averting her eyes. She focuses instead on her lap, eyes widening without blinking, as if she’ll be able to see her way out of the conversation more easily that way.

Self-conscious now to the point of nausea, you play with the frayed edge of denim that lays over the end of your residual limb. You can’t help but wonder how many right-side pant legs you’ve chopped off over the last twelve months, and what those bits of fabric ended up being used for.

Maybe they’re in that pile on the roof.

“Is mirror therapy helping at all?”

You glance up at Doc. “Not as much as it used to,” you sigh. “I think my brain figured out I was trying to bamboozle it and threw another wall up. Those are all it has at this point — walls and holes.”

It’s quiet for a few moments. Now, you wonder if you’ve taken Doc out of her depth. You were her first — and thankfully remain her only — amputation. If anyone’s gonna stump her, it’s you.

You snicker at your own unspoken joke.

Get it?

“How much do you remember?” She asks, catching you off-guard. It was the fact that she asked you anything that surprised you, not the question itself, but she assumes she’s offended you. Quickly, she apologizes. “I’m sorry. You don’t need to talk about it.”

The truth is, the before and during are both incredibly vague. You know that you went with a small group to Ilsan, planning to fuck up one of WraithCo.’s supply lines, and that their ghouls caught wind of your plans. 

Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. The audio underscoring this montage in your mind is warped to all hell; the faces and voices are blurry, as if they’ve since been censored. Deleted, just like the lower two-thirds of your leg.

As for the after… All that comes to mind is pain, in one form or another.

Fighting off an infection, which left your waking hours in some fever-filled daze that only stopped when the various meds worked their magic and knocked you back unconscious.

Being bed-ridden for an eternity after that fever broke and the infection cleared, too exhausted and depressed to keep your eyes open. 

Aching all over as you forced your body to remember how to walk, too obsessed with your newfound crumb of independence to let anyone see you stumble.

Self-imposed isolation to hide the toll it’d all taken on you, and the frustration that came with knowing what you were doing but being unable to stop yourself.

“Nothing I wouldn’t mind forgetting” you finally say.

Doc hums thoughtfully but offers nothing beyond a tiny frown. The part of you that wants to know why she’s asking is overrun by the part of you that fears what she’ll tell you; clearly, she’s similarly torn.

Add this to the list of things you’ll have to learn to live without.

Time continues to both slip and crawl by. Days are gone before you can blink; nights encase you in cement, trap you in place. You know it’s not a coincidence. You’re only alone after dark.

Still, it’s not all bad. You’ve certainly been more productive lately, whether or not you truly want to be. That’s not a coincidence, either. You’re capable of accomplishing quite a bit when the only person you truly want to talk to has no interest in listening.

If he did want to listen, you might tell Minho that he was right about the keys to the encryption being linked to dates. You could thank him, if he’d hear you out. Maybe you’d finally summon up the courage to ask where the idea came from.

What if…?

These little hypotheticals of yours only get more painful, the longer you steep in them, and you’re no good at reining your mind in when it starts wandering. It runs off in the same direction every time it goes — back to the night you finished peeling back all the layers.

You know there’s no point in imagining the ways Minho would’ve distracted you then because he didn’t. He was nowhere to be found; and you cried alone in your room, overwhelmed by both the relief of having answers and the all-consuming guilt of knowing what — and who — it cost to get them.

A familiar, prickling feeling at the corners of your eyes pulls you back to the present. You tilt your head back and blink rapidly to keep the dam from breaking. Part of you is proud. This might be the first time you’ve ever managed to keep your feelings to yourself.

“My halmoni always said that holding back your sneezes like that takes a year off your life.”

With a jolt, you snap to attention. Your neck does the same, head falling back down so quickly that your teeth click painfully against one another. The surprise — and the inadvertent scowl it prompts — melts away when you register Jeongin in the doorway.

You frown, although you laugh a little. “That’s horrifying, kid.”

If Jeongin sees you swipe the back of your thumb over your cheekbones, he doesn’t say so. He simply ambles into the Hub and finds his usual spot at the far side of the central table. 

“She said the same thing about being under streetlights when they burn out,” he tuts, taking a seat. He blinks through thoughtful silence for a moment before re-focusing newly-widened eyes on you. “Now that I think about it, she did die young...”

You would’ve loved to hear that theory play out, but the opportunity flies out the door as soon as Hyunjin walks through it. The comment you want to make about his surprising punctuality is swallowed down just as quickly as it bubbles up. His expression tells you that he’s not up for much of anything, let alone teasing. With a cursory nod, he acknowledges that he is, at the very least, capable of noticing his surroundings.

Unfortunately, you’re not capable of looking at him — seeing the state of him — without your bleeding heart cracking right in half.

Chan serves as a sufficient distraction, thankfully. He enters shortly after Hyunjin with both Seungmin and Doc in tow. He ignores the former’s nagging about who knows what and ushers the latter to the chair next to the head of the table. He doesn’t sit, though you wouldn’t have expected him to; he never does. Instead, he stands at the back of his chair with his eyes flicking expectantly over to the door.

In the time it takes you to cross from your workstation to your usual folding chair, the guest list doubles. Holding up the wall in the corner, Jihoon stands with his arms crossed loosely over his chest. To his right, Scraps sits on a rare patch of free space on Chan’s desk, legs swinging idly as they dangle; and to his left, you spy the cat-eyed girl whose name you still haven’t learned. All you know about her is that she works under Hyunjin, and they’re so in-sync that people have taken to calling them siblings.

You see no similarities between them now, however. She has light left in her eyes.

Several others filter in as the minutes pass, most of whom you haven’t yet crossed paths with. Well, you might have. Your days all run together; your short-term memory isn’t firing on all cylinders. You don’t take the opportunity to register their faces now, though. Your eyes only linger for the second it takes to confirm who they aren’t.

Chan turns his head to you, earning your attention. “Where’s —?”

Doc shoots him a look that interrupts his question before he can finish it. She knows what he doesn’t, after all: You’re currently the worst person to turn to for information on Minho’s whereabouts, even though you used to be the first.

Behind you, a heavily-accented voice chimes in, “He’s with little Yongbokie on an errand. They should be back soon.”

You don’t have to turn around to know who’s speaking. Sierra, as she’s known within the collective, has the sort of presence you can feel, even when she can’t be seen. It’s still unclear to you how she wound up a world away from the island she grew up on, but you’re glad that she did, and that she’s on your side. If she wasn’t —

Well…

Suffice it to say, there’s a reason why this foreign mercenary is called what she is — two reasons, actually, according to her native language — and neither bodes well for enemies. Specifically, there’s a mountain of bodies behind her, all of them hacked to bits by those blades she’s so fond of. 

Yeah, you think. Definitely better to keep her close.

“Just start without them,” she snaps at Chan, eye roll evident in her tone. 

Despite outranking her, Chan can’t hide the uneasiness that comes with being addressed by Sierra directly. You watch him swallow the lump in his throat before he clears it fully. “Everyone, listen up,” he says with the sort of gentle authority only he’s capable of. 

You can’t help the smile that tugs at the corner of your mouth. It’s such a stark contrast to the tone that goaded him to speak in the first place.

Still, a hush falls over the Hub immediately.

“I know some of you have heard whispers about this. I don’t necessarily trust that the rumors swirling are accurate —” 

Pointedly, Chan looks at Jeongin, who’s often the point in the relay where things go horribly wrong. The youngest never intends to pass on off-base gossip, but his attention span is about as poor as his audio processing. Jeongin ducks his head down; the tips of his ears go a dangerous shade of red.

“— so I’d like to make sure our record is straight.” Chan claps his hands, and as he rubs his palms together, he turns on his heel towards your side of the table. “Take it away, Spider,” he sings, beaming.

You turn your head quickly to the left and then to the right, searching for whoever the hell he’s truly cold-calling because it simply cannot be you. He knows better; he has to. For the decade you’ve worked together, you’ve hidden behind your screens because you don’t have the stomach for this leadership shit — especially not public speaking. It’s why you nominated him to run the show.

Eyebrows disappearing into your hairline, you stare incredulously back at him, silently begging him to pick the gauntlet back up.

Meanwhile, at least twenty pairs of eyes burn holes into you, like sun rays through a magnifying lens.

Fitting.

“Well,” you eventually manage to squeak out. “I — um… I spent the last month or so spelunking into confidential files relating to the — uhh — the Bliss Beta?”

It’s not a question. You don’t know why you made it sound like one.

Collapsing in on yourself, you knot your fingers on the table in front of you and stare down at your hands. “There’s a facility, it turns out, in — umm —”

“Is this going to take long? If it is, I can go and grab snacks.” Seungmin, from his spot across the table, smirks at you in such a way that you might — for the first time in your life — choose violence. 

That is, if his jokes at your expense didn’t have your nervous stomach churning even harder, sending bile up your throat.

That is, if a cold voice didn’t fly out of nowhere, primed to eviscerate Seungmin before you can even process your own reaction. 

“It’ll be a bit hard for you to chew after swallowing all your teeth, don’t you think?”

You hadn’t noticed Minho enter, but you find him easily now that he’s given himself away. He leans casually against the door frame with his hands in his pockets, leaving his tone as the only indication that he is, in fact, bothered. Everyone that had previously been standing near the door must’ve cleared a perimeter at some point — undoubtedly without being told to.

In response, Chan’s warning look is bifurcated, shot off to both men with equal, albeit subtle force. Seungmin’s face gives way to something apologetic. You can see it in his eyes that he thought he was being funny; that there’s no malice, only an inability to read a fucking room. To the contrary, Minho’s expression is pure venom, jaw set so tight that his teeth could crack.

He may have just interjected on your behalf, but he doesn’t look at you for more than a split second, as if he didn’t mean to concede even that much time.

And even though it feels illegal somehow, you keep your eyes fixed on him, as if you’ll catch another sliver of acknowledgement.

“In Cheongju,” you continue shakily. Your voice barely registers above a whisper, like you’re speaking to a single person, rather than a room full of them. “There’s a facility in Cheongju. All the servers currently associated with the Beta are operating out of there.”

Despite your anxiety, you manage to laugh. “They’re sitting ducks, really. Terrible planning from a security standpoint — either stupidity or arrogance.”

“Both,” Jihoon adds gruffly. If you’re not mistaken, he directs his next line at Seungmin. “Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.”

You know it wasn’t his intention, but you crack a tiny smile, nonetheless. “Comorbidities, aren’t they?” 

As soon as you say it out loud, your cheeks set to burning. You send a panicked glance to Doc and duck your head, like your fear of looking stupid isn’t on full display. “Please tell me I used that term correctly,” you mutter, feeling instant relief when she nods and a profound sense of comfort when she pats your still-clenched hands.

“So, what are we going to do about it?” Sierra cuts to the chase, as she often does. “Arson?”

Her eyes sparkle at the suggestion. You find yourself surprised that she’s offered something so tame. Only a week ago, her response to seeing a cockroach in the canteen was to shoot at it.

Not for nothing, you’re also surprised by how endearing you still find that little anecdote — but maybe you shouldn’t be. It’s not the first time you’ve developed a soft spot for someone so sharp.

Reflexively, you look over at Minho. You see his eyes flicker, like he’d averted them just in time to miss yours. It’s the only reason you have to believe that he’d been watching you, save for the inexplicable warmth you’d felt crawling up your neck.

You don’t know what to do with any of that.

“Destroying the servers would only be a bandage,” you sigh. “I want to fully eradicate the program itself, which means those servers need to remain intact — for now.”

“So, we do it like Daegu, then?” Felix suggests. Judging by his sudden participation, he’s overjoyed to have something to contribute to a conversation he wouldn’t normally follow. “We broke in and set up that…. thing for you, in that room that was like an…. air-conditioned microwave?”

You bite down on your lips to keep from laughing. It’s a miracle that he remembers the Thanotech raid at all with the concussion he sustained in the process. It’s even more incredible that he remembers the non-technical explanation you gave for the server room within that data center.

Shaking your head, you frown. “I need to be on-site for this one.”

“Absolutely not. Fuck no.”

Across the room, Minho now stands fully upright. His hands are no longer in his pockets; they hang at his sides, clenched tightly.

You can’t help the incredulous scoff you let out. Bold of him, you think, to write you off completely and then attempt to dictate where and when you get to exist. That slap in the face still stings, but you keep your tone as light as possible. 

“If something goes wrong, or if things have changed from the schematics I was able to access, I won’t be able to handle it remotely. I need to be there to troubleshoot.” And even though it goes without saying, you remind him anyway: “We’re not getting a second crack at this.”

“I know you don’t remember Ilsan, but I do,” Minho glowers, tone as dark as his eyes. The rest of the room falls into a charged silence; everyone is too tense to breathe, let alone speak. “I remember carrying three-quarters of your body out of Ilsan and spending weeks at your bedside.”

Just like that, the air in your lungs turns to cement. 

How do you admit to not knowing he was even there? 

And what the hell are you supposed to do with this information now that it’s reaching you for the first time — a year after the fact — in front of an audience? 

You try to start somewhere. “Minho —”

“No.” His voice is sharp when it cuts you off, but there’s a crack in the blade, so microscopic that you wonder if you’re imagining things. He clears his throat to try and keep himself even. “You don’t get to make that call.”

Here comes that prickling feeling again, causing tears to spring up at the corners of your eyes. You clench your jaw and try to wish them away.

It’s Chan that speaks next. “You’re right. Spider doesn’t get to make that call,” he concedes. Then, his expression turns to stone. “I do. She said there’s no way around it, so she’s going —”

Minho seeks to interrupt, but Chan raises his hand and stops him in his tracks. You want to argue, too, because you’re right here and don’t need to be spoken about, as if you’re not in the room. The leader plows through, unaffected.

“— and because you know what the stakes are, your only job is to keep her safe.”

If the anguished look on Minho’s face says anything, it’s that he wants nothing to do with the burden of keeping you — what’s left of you — in one piece. 

The briefing continues after his outburst, but Minho doesn’t hear a word of it. It all flows past him, waterlogged and warped, without sinking in. He finds it hard to give a shit about that fact, though. 

Clearly, his input doesn’t matter. Worse, the sole order that’s been made of him is fucking redundant. He can’t imagine that the rest of them would mean much, so what does it matter if he didn’t pay attention?

He’s halfway out the door by the time Chan wraps up. Dodging eye contact, Minho turns to leave outright, to disappear somewhere and lick his wounds. One last lash manages to hit him as he goes: 

When you cross the room, you’re not headed his way. No, your quick steps take you straight to Jihoon.

Minho knows that he has no right to feel this bitter. He should be grateful that his pushing you away is having the intended effect — that you might’ve found someone other than him to lean on — but the relief he’s been waiting to feel is nowhere to be found.

It never is.

The quick fixes he’s gotten of you in back rooms and shadows didn’t satiate him, either. Cutting you out completely has only proven to be more of the same ache.

Unwilling to watch the consequences of his own actions unfold, Minho turns sharply out of the doorway. Automatically, his feet carry him down the hall, up the stairs towards the roof. His brain might tell him otherwise if it wasn’t currently swimming, but his body acts on its own, seeking out the last place and time where he didn’t feel like this.

It’s a bad call, he realizes as he ascends.

He’ll never be able to recreate a scene with half the cast absent. The stage directions are fucked now. There’s no reason to take the steps one at a time now that he’s alone, but he still does. Without context, his motivations make no sense; and his hands don’t know what the hell to do without a belt loop hooked underneath one of his fingers. They twitch in the absence of denim. 

With every step, he repeats his only line:

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

And when he reaches that busted fucking door and kicks it with everything he has, no one looks at him with amused disapproval.

It’s all wrong.

Steel hits cement with a sickening clang that’s still ringing out as he stalks over to the ledge and drops himself down on a familiar, overturned bucket. Its counterpart sits unoccupied at his side. Minho can’t look at it, can’t get up to throw it off the fucking roof, can’t do anything except simmer in his rage because —

Your only job is to keep her safe.

He tilts his head back, closes his eyes, and shouts into the void above, “Fuck!”

As if he needs to be told. 

As if he hasn’t been trying to do exactly that for all the years he’s known you, driving nails further into his own goddam coffin with every second spent in your web.

Elbows come to rest on his knees. His face falls, too, until it drops into his palms. No matter how hard he tries to control his breathing, it comes out through gritted teeth, seething.

The fucking audacity.

Even if Minho hasn’t given you a reason to know better, Chan should. He’s seen better, firsthand.

Every time Chan stopped by the clinic to check in on you, he found Minho already sitting next to your glorified cot, watching your sleeping form like a hawk for any sign of distress. 

Chan didn’t need to ask how your hair ended up in poorly-executed braids because the unskilled hands that made them were wringing themselves at your side. He never needed to ask why, either. When you finally stopped thrashing through nightmares, you didn’t wake up to find yourself tangled in inescapable knots.

Keep her safe.

That’s the fucking problem, isn’t it? 

When his candle gets snuffed out — and he knows it will, can feel it in his bones that this is it — who’s going to keep you safe? 

Hyunjin doesn’t have the capacity — not anymore. Minho was there with you the night Hyunjin’s whole world exploded into pieces. You saw love, but Minho saw your future. He sees it every time he looks at Hyunjin, who’s still listless, still lingering on the periphery like a fucking ghost. Hyunjin will never be the same, and if Minho lets himself get any closer to you than he already has, you’ll wind up just as empty.

Then who?

Chan is too busy. Doc is just as preoccupied, and as kind as she is, she’s never understood you — not really. Felix and Scraps can barely manage themselves; you’ll fall through the cracks amidst their bullshit shenanigans. Neither Seungmin nor Jeongin can be trusted with anything —  or anyone — this important. They’re both fucking disasters in their own right, although Jeongin may eventually grow out of that. Changbin is too reclusive, and so is Jihoon; Jisung’s an anxious mess. Sierra is, at absolute minimum, insane.

And Minho may be the worst of them, but he tried his best for you. He’s still trying, even though that means keeping you as far away from him as possible.

“Fuck,” he repeats, albeit much less strongly.

That pathetic, choked-out word hits the air and dissipates quickly, leaving Minho alone in self-imposed exile. He stays there until sunrise, when the unoccupied bucket to his left becomes too visible to tolerate.

The next time Minho steps foot in the Hub, it’s much less crowded than the last. In fact, for what might be the first time ever, he’s beaten everyone else in. It’s no wonder; his stomach has been churning for hours now, and it was useless to keep laying in a bed he couldn’t sleep in.

Because life is far from fair, you’re the second to arrive. He doesn’t have to see you enter to know it; definitely doesn’t need to look up to confirm that it was your deliberate, slightly uneven footfalls he heard coming up the hall. It’s a reflex, though. His gaze lifts just in time to meet yours.

“Oh,” you peep, eyes bright despite the dark circles below them. “Hi.”

You seem startled to find Minho here ahead of you. Warranted, he thinks. The sunshine you cast on him isn’t, but you don’t try to withhold it — or maybe you can’t. As much as he loves that about you, it confuses the shit out of him and scares him just as badly. You either didn’t get the memo when you chose this life, or you don’t feel the crushing weight of it yet: 

Sparks like yours can’t last forever.

His voice sounds like gravel after last night’s anxious reflux, but he echoes you, nonetheless, “Hi.”

And then Chan walks in. He stops short when he sees the two of you, eyes flicking from your face to Minho’s with barely-hidden intrigue. Somehow, he misses the daggers Minho shoots at him with eyes alone.

“I re-routed everyone else to the vans and told them to load their shit. You ready?” Chan poses the question to both of you, but his focus is fixed solely on you. It lingers for a moment, like there’s some secret, second question hidden between the lines. 

Minho doesn't know what’s going on, but he does know that he hates whatever it is.

You nod. Whether that’s in response to what was asked or what wasn’t, he can’t say. Your mouth sits in a tight, straight line. That, Minho can easily translate to feigned confidence. You’re not ready; you’re not good at bluffing, either. 

He sees his window in that bit of doubt and tries to leap through it. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

It doesn’t sound as firm as he wants it to. If you listen closely — and you always do — it probably sounds like he’s pleading, which feels both alien and illegal to Minho. He clears his throat. “We can do this without you, Spider. I’m serious. Tell me how to get you set up for remote access, and I’ll —”

“I don’t know how many more times I have to say this for you to understand: You can’t do this without me. You need me.”

Despite what you say, there’s no heat in the way you say it. It sounds like you’re pleading, too; scratching at the door to be let in. He knows you well enough to catch the subtext; to know that you’re not just talking about the job. But Minho can’t make his mouth move. Likewise, he can’t turn away.

Stop looking at her like she’s your future.

Chan doesn’t have time for the thousand of things going unsaid, so he interjects with an exasperated grunt, “Vans.” He points to the clock before gesturing between you and Minho. “Ten minutes, or you’re both walking to Cheongju.”

Neither of you moves once he clears the threshold and disappears again. Say something, he tells himself. Say anything.

He doesn’t.

“You didn’t sleep last night,” you muse, eyes narrowing slightly with concern. It’s not a question. There’s no uncertainty in the way you look at him, although that’s nothing new. “I read somewhere that peppermint gum helps with reflux.” 

You shrug, like it’s simply a fact you’re sharing. It’s not. It’s the millionth way you’ve found to say “I love you” without using those words.

Minho slips off the empty workstation desk he’s been sitting on, dusts off the back of his jeans once he’s back at his full height. With a nod of his head, he gestures to your workstation. “Take what you need,” he advises quietly.

When he moves towards the door, you move forward into the room. Your paths cross in the middle, but Minho keeps his distance, too aware of that magnetism of yours to take any risks now. Upon reaching the door, he pauses and looks back over his shoulder to call out your name. As if you were anticipating it, you look up from the desk drawer you’re combing through.

He freezes for a moment, although he doesn’t mean to. You might be the only person capable of catching him off-guard. Once his brain stops lagging, he says only half of what he wants to: “Don’t forget your mask.

Hurriedly, like you really would’ve forgotten, you pull open a drawer and fish out a black gaiter, which you then tuck into the zippered pocket of your jacket. Instantly, Minho’s posture gets a little less rigid. Not for nothing, yours does, too.

“Thanks,” you sigh. The corners of your mouth raise slightly. From what he’s been hearing lately, this might be the closest you’ve been to smiling in weeks. Your reaction stops when you notice the way he’s halfway out of the room. “No need to wait on me. I’ll meet you in the loading dock in a minute.”

Minho stalls, feet unwilling to move, until you go back to gathering items. He nods once, as if you’ll even see his acknowledgment, then slips off into the hallway without you.

The loading dock he’s headed for is on the opposite side of the factory, but his anxiousness propels him there in half the usual time. His team is loitering around the two vans when he reaches them: one unmarked, one branded, both stolen.

Felix grins from the hood of the primary vehicle, where he sits cross-legged. He slaps his hands on the white metal below and proudly states, “I told you it would work.”

“Let me guess.” Minho looks over at Scraps. “You were the one who hot-wired them.”

She glances apologetically at Felix, then turns back to Minho with a shrug and a sheepish smile. “He tried his best,” she sighs. “If we had all day, he probably would’ve succeeded.”

At this, Felix’s grin droops into a cartoonish frown. “What do you mean probably?”

Minho rolls his eyes. “Enough — and go put a hat on, or you’re getting a full balaclava.” He points to the mess of blue hair spilling onto Felix’s shoulders. “If your fashion statement gets us pinged on a security camera, I’ll kill you myself —”

A laugh rings out behind him. He turns on his heel to find Sierra snickering at Felix’s reddening cheeks, both tattooed hands covering her mouth as she does.

“— and you know better,” Minho snarks, pointing straight at her. “Gloves. Now.”

Scraps’ eyes are as wide as the moon when Minho swivels back towards her. She doesn’t give him the opportunity to say it; she’s already shoving her decorated arms into the sleeves of a plain, black jacket and zipping it up as high as it’ll go. He hears relief leave her in a quiet sigh when his focus finds who he’s truly been looking for.

A few meters away, Jeongin is buried so far under the hood of the secondary van that his feet barely touch the ground. With his target now acquired, Minho crosses to the neighboring bay.

“Well?” He demands, “Did you find them?”

The younger one startles at the sudden questioning; there’s a dull thud when he smacks his head on the underside of the hood.

Jeongin groans, “Aigo,” and carefully ducks his head until it clears the obstacle above him. His cheeks are pink and smattered with both dirt and grease — and the mess only gets worse when he mindlessly wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his semi-blackened hand. 

“Behind the radiator on this one.” Jeongin then thumbs over his shoulder to the van Felix sits on. “That one was attached to the undercarriage, near the fuel tank.”

With a grunt, Jeongin exhumes himself from the engine compartment and hops to his feet. It’s completely unnecessary, but he drops the tracker he just detached onto the concrete and smashes it under his steel-toed boot. 

“You won’t need the GPS blocker anymore, so make sure to turn it off,” he advises. And he clearly didn’t learn his lesson thirty seconds ago because he taps one of his temples, leaving a dirty fingerprint behind. “Otherwise, it’ll interfere with your comms.”

Jeongin then blinks up at Minho like he’s expecting a pat on the head. 

Over my dead body. 

Minho instead points at the shards of plastic littering the ground. Affect flat, he tells his junior to clean that shit up, which is the closest he will ever fucking get to you did good, kid. The second Minho steps away, Jeongin drops down to hurriedly scoop the broken bits into his palm.

While he waits on the rest of the group — namely you — to roll up, Minho busies himself with checking supplies. 

The unmarked van will carry the backup team to a rendezvous point half a kilometer away from the Ulsan facility, just in case. For this reason, it’ll also carry the big guns, which — like the vans themselves — were nicked from corpo rats. The seats inside were gutted immediately to clear out a cargo area. The trip sure as shit won’t be comfortable, but six people and a few ammo bags will fit inside without much issue. 

Most importantly, there’s enough room for Minho’s crown jewel: a goddamn, motherfucking anti-tank gun. He’s been dying to try it out since the WraithCo. raid that brought it into his possession, but he has a sinking feeling that he never will.

Moving on to the primary van, Minho notes the logo emblazoned on the side. This one was harder to steal than its counterpart, but you stressed the necessity, and he made it happen. Now, when the infiltration team drives up to the facility, it’ll be under the guise of the outsourced IT company that Ulsan uses for routine maintenance. 

According to the data you managed to reap, Ulsan’s made two glaring security errors, likely because they assume they’re infallible — not handling their own shit in-house, and scheduling their tech contractors to pop by on the same dates every month. Both details were barely footnoted in the reports; anyone but you wouldn’t have thought twice about them.

Something twinges in his chest when his thoughts start wandering in your direction, so Minho shakes his head to clear them. It doesn’t work. Instead, it seems to summon you. You step onto the loading dock a few seconds later.

You’ve changed since Minho left the Hub. The lapse in time makes sense now that his eyes sweep over your frame. The black jeans you’re wearing now aren’t chopped halfway up the right side. In order to conceal that highly recognizable part of you, you struggled through the significant extra time it takes to get your artificial foot through the openings — and he didn’t have to tell you to do any of this, unlike the rest of the team.

It’s been so long since you’ve been one of the boots of the ground that he underestimated you. Clearly, he shouldn’t have because you haven’t skipped a single detail. The treads of your boots have been filed down; but the platform sole remains intact, concealing the brand and size, as well as your true height. Specially-designed black gloves cover your hands, so you can utilize whatever touchscreens and keys you come across without leaving your trace behind. Likewise, the gaiter you grabbed at the last minute rests just below your chin, ready to cover your mouth and nose.

His breath catches in his throat when he sees the long-sleeved black top hanging loosely and hiding your figure. He wants to ask if you remember, but he doubts you do. You borrowed it from him so many years ago that it might as well be yours now.

To stop himself from staring, Minho starts to address the group. “Now that our guest of honor has shown up —”

“We still need Jihoon,” you interject with one finger raised, gently asking Minho to wait.

“What?” Minho can’t keep the confusion off his face, and he can’t wrap his head around this curveball you’ve thrown. Incredulously, he scoffs, “It’s a covert break-in.”

There isn’t a single reason he can think of to include the demolitions expert in something requiring finesse.

You don’t respond with words; your eyes flick to Chan, which is enough of a hint. The two of you are planning something — keeping him in the dark about something — but Minho can’t figure out what or why. The leader doesn’t provide much in the way of explanation. All he offers is, “We need a driver and an extra pair of eyes,” as if that’s the whole truth.

Whatever.

The second Jihoon finally walks through the door, Minho immediately starts his briefing.

The main team — including you, Chan, Felix, Sierra, Jihoon, and Minho himself — will head straight to the facility. The reinforcements — Scraps, Changbin, Eunjae, Sunwoo, Hongjoong, and some fucker from Texas known only as “Cowboy” — will wait just outside the property line with range weapons, ready to party with any gatecrashers.

On site, Felix and Sierra will take out security at the gate; only two men guard that post at any given time. Meanwhile, you’ll slip in and disable the remaining security measures: cameras, mainly, although the alarm system is your biggest priority. To get everyone inside, you’ve cloned the badge of a mid-level researcher who, like the Professor, has authorization beyond the front desk.

From there, the interior group will divide into watchdogs and infiltrators. Given the relatively small size of the building, it shouldn’t take long to get you to the control room, where you’ll take a crack at the main computer housing the Beta’s program. If everything goes as planned, you’ll be in and out within 30 minutes.

Nothing ever goes as planned, though. That Ilsan mission was simpler with significantly lower stakes, and it was a fucking nightmare. Minho can’t think about anything else when he crawls into the back of the van next to you.

For over two hours, Minho has been sitting cross-legged on the floor of this godforsaken van. His brain, unlike his body, is wholly fucking incapable of staying still. No matter how hard he tries to ground himself, he can’t shake the chill running down his spine or the voice in his head. It just keeps repeating the same thought, over and over: 

This van will be missing passengers on the drive back.

“It’s your turn, Minho.”

His head snaps up. Instead of Atropos and her scissors, it’s Felix staring back at him, smiling curiously. Warmly. Minho’s pulse should ease up at the realization, but it doesn’t.

He clears his throat, although his voice still comes out jagged. “My turn?”

“He’s asking everyone what they’re going to do with their lives when this is all over,” you explain. Minho turns his head to look at you. For once, he can’t decipher the look on your face. You laugh when you squeeze his bent knee gently, adding, “Don't worry. I didn’t have an answer, either.”

But it’s not an answer that he lacks, it’s time.

Don’t you know that I’m already dead?

The van slows considerably, shifting from paved roads to gravel. Then, it stops entirely. Jihoon turns in his seat and squints through the holed, metal divider between the cabin and the back of the van. 

“Spider?” He calls out over his shoulder, and it’s no wonder he struggles to identify you. Everyone sitting in this unlit area is cloaked in black from head to toe. 

To help him out, you raise your hand and wave. Even if the dark gloves you’re wearing aren’t visible, your smile is. Your voice is just as bright when you chirp, “Over here!”

Minho sees Jihoon smile for the first time in all the years he’s known him. If he was anyone else, that flicker at the corner of his mouth wouldn’t count for shit; but Minho’s no stranger to steel or your uncanny ability to bend it. He knows your impact when he sees it.

“End of the line,” Jihoon reports. “The next time I stop, you’ll need to sneak out the side. I can see a camera positioned directly above the security vestibule, pointing downward from the left. The van will create a blind spot if you stay low to the ground.”

Now, Jihoon’s involvement is starting to make sense. He’s one of only four people who joined the Black Screen within the last year — after the Ilsan disaster, which led to the incorporation of masks into all field ops. Out of the entire organization, his face is one of the only ones that won’t tip off the guards.

Until the next news cycle, Minho thinks ruefully.

Once the driver is satisfied that the passengers are on the same page, he turns around and sets the van back into motion. Every dip in the uneven road below throws your shoulder against Minho’s; and every time you collide, he wants to wrap his arm around you to keep it from happening again. He doesn’t. Eventually, the opportunity disappears along with the faint crunch of gravel beneath the tires.

The brakes squeak slightly when the van stops a second time. Minho can’t hear the conversation Jihoon is making with the security staff from where he sits, just the slow-motion movements of you, Felix, and Sierra as the three of you inch the side door open and spill onto the driveway like molasses.

All Minho has left to do is wait — for you to come back or for shots to be fired. His pulse picks up when seconds slip by without either of those options playing out. 

It’s funny, he thinks as he pulls his rifle into his lap, that the thing bringing him comfort now is designed to take it away. His thumb hovers over the selective fire switch, flexing in anticipation. Any second now, all his best laid plans will explode. 

It’s only a matter of time until —

“All clear,” comes your voice through static.

Minho flinches. In all the tense silence, he’d completely forgotten about the earpiece he’s wearing. The breath he’d unknowingly been holding leaves him in a hurry, taking the tension in his shoulders with it as he deflates.

“Meet us at the fire exit on the northeast side. I shut off the emergency alert system, too, so we shouldn’t have any issues getting into that stairwell.”

Jihoon is already pulling the van around by the time you finish speaking. In a matter of seconds, he pulls up to the door in question and shifts gears to park. 

You’re standing in the doorway when Minho’s feet hit the ground, eyes crinkling when you see him with a smile he can’t otherwise see. He doesn’t know what to do with that, so he addresses Sierra first. She’s got blood on her temple, and Minho can’t tell whose it is. 

“You didn’t make a mess, did you?” He asks, frowning slightly.

“This is business, not pleasure, so no.” She rolls her eyes. The sigh she lets out reeks of disappointment. “Wrung out their necks like chickens and shoved their bodies into cabinets.”

Glancing quickly at Minho, Felix figures out where his leader’s eyes are focused. “Not hers,” he clarifies, nodding to Sierra. With the back of his sleeve, he reaches over and gently wipes the blood from her face, like he’s cleaning gochujang off a child. “Didn’t leave a trace, though.”

That’s all Minho cares about, so he asks no further questions. Instead, he checks his watch before looking up to check on you. He doesn’t pose the question, but you answer him, regardless; and when you do, you accompany it with your thumb raised.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

“All good!”

You then gesture with that thumb to the stairwell over your shoulder and ask, “Shall we?”, as if you’re inviting him to dance.

“You two —” Minho points to Felix and Sierra respectively, drawing their attention. “Station yourselves along the main hallway. If anyone so much as pokes their head out of a doorway, blow it the fuck off. No witnesses.”

Both nod in acknowledgment, but it’s not enough, not when your life is in his hands. He glares expectantly at them, waits in silence until they get the hint.

In tandem, they repeat, “No witnesses.”

Good enough.

Wordlessly, Minho waves his hand and sends them on their way to the second floor. He doesn’t budge until he sees the tops of their heads through the window, disappearing past the landing. Seconds later, Felix’s voice sounds off in Minho’s ear to advise him that the area is clear.

He turns back to the three people standing behind him to ensure they’re ready to move in. The second he sees the pistol in your grip, his stomach lurches so violently that he really might vomit on his boots. 

It’s categorically fucked — so fundamentally, intrinsically wrong — that you’re standing here now with lethal force in your hands. Over ten long years, you’ve never fired a single shot in combat; never stolen the light from someone’s eyes while you’re staring into them. Still, no matter how nauseous the image makes him, the irony of it all can’t be ignored. 

You only know how to shoot because he taught you.

“Let’s move out,” Chan says when Minho doesn’t.

Minho takes point with you close behind him. Behind you, Jihoon follows with an inexplicable duffle bag strapped to his shoulder. By now, Minho knows better than to question what’s going on here. He wouldn’t get an honest answer if he did; and Chan makes no excuses for it as he trails after Jihoon up the stairs.

At the top of the landing, you tap Minho’s shoulder, prompting him to stop. When you gesture up ahead, his eyes follow, gaze sweeping down the long corridor towards the southwest side of the building. Near the end of the hall, a pair of glass doors interrupts the path to the server room, which sits further down on an intersecting corridor. Somewhere between that server room and the bulletproof barrier in front of you is your target: the main computer running the show.

All the signage he can spot declares the area secure and for authorized personnel only. You’re neither safe nor sanctioned, but the badge you pull from inside the neck of your — his — shirt will let you pretend to be. 

Lim Namseok, it reads.

That poor bastard will probably be dead before sunrise for the things you’re about to do. Minho doesn’t have any higher hopes for himself, but he wonders whether or not you’ll be able to sleep when this is over.

No, he ultimately decides. You won’t.

You keep glancing down at that man’s photograph, swallowing hard like you’re choking down an apology. Committing those features to memory, as if you’re obligated to remember each one of the creases in his forehead.

It’s not a question of if that face will pop up in your nightmares but when.

Minho’s both unwilling and unable to let you keep torturing yourself, so he shifts his assault rifle to his non-dominant hand and reaches out to you. Neither of you says a word as he gently removes the badge from between your fingers and lets the lanyard unfurl. You watch the ID flutter downwards until it rests against your chest; his eyes don’t leave your face.

“Come on,” he says softly. “There are fifty-one-million Namseoks out there that still need their asses saved.”

You don’t want to laugh. Your furrowed eyebrows inform him that you’re trying very hard not to, like your half-hearted glare will override the muted chuckle that slips through your mask. His attempt at levity worked, though. You start moving again when he does.

On the way to the first set of security doors, the four of you pass both of your lookouts, who’ve taken up posts half and three-quarters’ way up the corridor, respectively. Not for nothing, both look bored by the lack of action.

When Felix sees Minho, he complains, “Why is it always unpaid fucks like us who have to work on weekends? Shouldn’t these goons be here to justify their salaries?”

He’s not wrong. This place is a fucking ghost town, and although the datashard you combed through said this would be the case, the emptiness still makes the hairs on the back of Minho’s neck stand up. Whether or not he can put his finger on it, something feels off.

“Wouldn’t mind a desk job,” Chan muses, more to himself than to the rest of the group.

Minho leans into the assumption that he wasn’t meant to hear it. If he was, he’d have no choice but to point out that Chan hardly leaves his fucking desk as it is. So, to keep the peace, he keeps his smart mouth shut.

When several more meters come and go, the four of you reach the security checkpoint. With the badge back in hand and nerves evident in your tone, you hold it to the scanner and mutter, “Here goes nothing.”

Nothing is precisely what you get. No sirens wail, no trap doors give way to swallow you all down. The glass panels simply part with a click before sliding outwards along their respective tracks. Your shoulders sag with relief, unlike Minho’s. He carries tension in every single one of his muscle cells; and he only grows more rigid with each passing second.

To keep his pulse down, Minho counts each step he takes towards the control room. It’s an exercise in futility, of course. He’s a goddamn mess, no matter how hard he tries to hide it.

16…17…18…

Present moment excluded, he can only think of one other in which he’s ever experienced fear. Real fear, that is; the kind that begs his limbs to lock. It’s no coincidence that he can barely function now. How could he, with the common denominator trailing behind him like a shadow?

19….20…21 —

Suddenly, you hiss, “Shit!”

By the time he wheels himself around, you’re frozen in place with your pistol aimed through a doorway that wasn’t open when he passed it. A woman in a lab coat stands there with her hand still on the handle, eyes doubling in size when they land on you. Immediately, the coffee mug in her hand drops, sending both liquid and shards of ceramic flying. Both of her hands are in the air before the pieces can settle at her feet.

You fire once, panicked, and strike her in the upper arm. It’s a shit job, one that’ll give her time to call for help before she bleeds out on the floor, so Minho’s instinct takes over.

“Turn around,” he tells you. 

You do. 

From her knees, the woman clutches her bicep and begs Minho to lower his weapon. She still wants to have kids someday, she tells him, sobbing. She’s too young to die.

Unaffected, Minho aims at the space between her brows. “Aren’t we all?”

Bang!

Her body drops to the floor like a bag of cement, lifeless. Although the shot still echoes, it’s otherwise dead silent until you whisper, “I’m sorry.”

Stepping to the side to look at you, Minho furrows his brows. “Don’t be. We can’t leave witnesses.”

“I’m sorry that I didn’t do it right,” you clarify, voice wavering but louder than before. “You taught me better than that.”

For a minute, he forgets where he is; loses track of the two people standing on eggshells behind you both. There’s definitely still a corpse lying two meters away, but all he sees in his peripheral vision is proof: You may have chosen this life, but this life hasn’t chosen you.

Despite the bullets and the viscera making a mess of the tile nearby, you’re still the person he met a decade ago — someone with the instincts to do what’s needed but too much heart to be swallowed by them.

He hopes you never change.

“There may be more people that we haven’t accounted for.” Chan’s reminder forces three pairs of eyes to focus on him. He urges, “We need to get this done. Spider, where’s the control room?”

With his gun and without a word, Minho gestures to an office several doors down from where the group currently stands. In giant, black letters, it states, “CONTROL ROOM”. Your answer would be redundant at this point, so you don’t bother giving it. Moreover, Chan can fucking read.

“Oh,” is all the leader says before the group presses onward.

You swipe the badge again when you reach the control room. As was the case with the previous door, this one opens without any theatrics. All four of you slip inside before they close on their own, several moments later.

As soon as he steps foot inside, Jihoon whistles. “Damn.”

Damn is right.

The room feels even larger than the dimensions he saw on the blueprints; and with the forced air flowing from the overhead vent, it’s far less welcoming than Minho expected. Halfway between an operating theater and an airplane, the crisp whiteness of his surroundings seem both sterile and stale. He’d wash the feeling off himself if he could, but he can’t, so his skin continues to crawl.

Consuming the back half of the room, a U-shaped desk boasts multiple monitors, keyboards, and switches. Minho has no fucking clue what any of this equipment is supposed to do — he doesn’t give a shit, either — but he sees your eyes go wide with that childlike wonder he’s always been stupefied by.

Your hands twitch, likely from a desire to touch every surface they can find, so you hold them close to your chest while you look around. After studying all the options at your disposal, you take a seat behind the monitor at the left end of the desk.

Jihoon asks what everyone else is wondering: “Is the main computer not the one in the middle?”

Normally, this is the sort of thing you'd laugh at. You don’t, though; you barely seem to have heard it. Transfixed, you simply mumble something about that computer being hardwired to the server room. Minho doesn’t catch the rest of your explanation, but he hears the words “temperature control” and “ventilation” before concentration makes your voice peter out mid-sentence.

The next few minutes pass by without you noticing. Nobody speaks, nobody breathes too loudly for fear of interrupting your train of thought. That’s not to say it’s silent; far from it. Your rhythmic typing takes over the room, and the effect it has on Minho is borderline hypnotic.

A siren song, sort of.

In response to its call, Minho’s mind picks up and races from the room you’re in — back to the Hub, where this all started; to the countless hours he’s spent just like this, watching you work. As mundane as those moments might be in the grand scheme of things, they’re still his happiest.

Maybe he’d count this moment among them if the Sword of Damocles wasn’t swinging so blatantly overhead.

Out of nowhere, you slam your fist down on the desk, startling everyone else enough to flinch. It’s not just the noise that has Minho, Chan, and Jihoon on high alert; it’s the fact that none of them have ever seen you explode like this.

“Goddamn it!”

Immediately, Minho rushes over to where you’re sitting. His eyes dart from your face to the screen, then back again, finding no obvious answers for your distress. 

“What?” He demands, “What’s wrong?”

Eyes glued to the monitor, you continue to mutter, “No, no, no —“

“Spider, talk to me. Tell me what’s going on, so we can fix it.”

“They fucking —” You smack the desk again, like hitting something will knock your thoughts loose. “Fuck!”

For a second, you let the rage simmer. Then, the defeat you still haven’t articulated settles in. You slump down in your chair with your face in your hands, forcing your breathing to slow. 

“They must’ve added it after the Professor defected. I can’t — It wasn’t referenced anywhere on that datashard, Minho. There was nothing.” 

All your panic is funneled directly into the palms of your gloves, making it difficult to decipher what you’re saying. Minho leans closer just in time to hear you cry, “They built a failsafe.”

Minho is out of his fucking depth. In fact, he’s drowning. 

“A failsafe?” He asks, “What, like a back-up program?”

“No, as in, any attempts to delete or alter the program data will invalidate the study.” 

Based on your phrasing, Minho assumes you’re quoting something directly. Swallowing back the acid rising in his throat, he opens his mouth to ask you what the fuck that means. Before he can hurl his question out, you look up at him with abject hopelessness in your eyes; and suddenly, he can’t speak.

“All of their research subjects will be purged,” you spit.

On the other side of the desk, Chan and Jihoon exchange a look — a grim one, but not one of surprise. They’ve arrived at the conclusion before Minho can leap to it, and they’re still talking without saying a single goddamn thing out loud. 

Minho can’t take it anymore. He shouts, “What the fuck does that mean?”

“If Spider wipes the beta, everyone with that chip goes with it,” Chan sighs. He scrubs his hands over his face until it’s red. “If they don’t drop dead immediately, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that their brains will be permanently and irreparably fucked as a result.”

Now what?

Now what?

Minho’s legs grow less steady by the second. He presses his palm flush against the desktop to keep his knees from buckling. He knows damn well it won’t make a difference; his spinning head will bring him down if his body doesn’t. Everything — including the pulse hammering in his ears — is simultaneously too quiet and too loud.

What the fuck was this all for? The time, the energy, the lives everyone keeps sacrificing to this fucking cause — any of it. 

All of it. 

What’s the point of fighting this hard if Ulsan will always be ten steps ahead?

“Minho!”

His head snaps in your direction only to see that you weren’t the one calling his name. He blinks, confused. Who —?

“Minho, they’re coming! Lim Namseok — terminated yesterday. His badge — it flagged —” 

Scraps’ voice comes shrouded in gunfire. The weak connection makes it even harder to hear her; whatever isn’t exploding is crackling due to the distance. Each word fizzles at the end, as if lit by a fuse.

“— to get out —”

Hand flying to his left ear, Minho presses down the button at the center of his ear piece. “Who’s coming?” He barks, “Scraps, what the fuck is going on?”

When she doesn’t respond, someone else takes over.

“It’s the fucking retention team. A sniper took Eunjae out before any of us even saw them coming,” Hongjoong yells. “They’ve got a unit on the ground and one in the air. I’ll try to shoot the chopper down, but you need to get out of there now.”

“Hongjoong, do as much as you can to tear them up, but don’t push your luck. If you’re outnumbered, fall back before we lose anybody else. Do you copy?”

He doesn’t get a response.

Jihoon moves closer to the door to listen for any incoming footsteps. Hearing none, he growls, “Who the fuck called the boogeymen? Don’t they only deal with defectors?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Chan waves him off, “They’re here, and we need to be anywhere else.”

Despite what he just said, the leader doesn’t move; doesn’t budge a centimeter in any direction. Chan simply glances across the room at you, and when you stare back at him, it’s with the same, eerie calmness. Some quiet resignation that makes no fucking sense under the circumstances.

“If I can’t kill the program entirely, I can make it inoperable long enough for the existing chips to be removed,” you say, like you’ve already had this idea in your pocket. “Force quit, so to speak.”

You don’t elaborate, leaving Minho’s frustration to drive him halfway out of his goddamn mind. Worse, you ignore the way he’s staring so fucking desperately at you and address the person standing several meters behind him. 

“Jihoon, did you bring the party favors?”

In response, Jihoon slips the duffel bag off his shoulder and holds it out to you. Only then do you move. Chan follows behind as you cross towards the door; neither one of you says a thing when you pass Minho, who’s still cemented in place.

“What the fuck are you planning?” He demands, although his voice shakes. “What fucking secrets have you been keeping, and why?” 

Once you secure the duffle bag on your own shoulder, you finally bring yourself to look at him. Above your mask, your eyes soften. They crinkle at the corners, as if you’re smiling, but there are tears brimming at your lash line, threatening to fall.

Please don’t look at me like you don’t have a future.

“For what it’s worth,” you start. Then, you sniffle, breath hitching as you try to get the rest out. “You’ve always had my heart. All of it — every stupid piece.”

And with nothing more than a nod to Jihoon, you’re gone, running out the door with Chan towards the server room before Minho can say a single word to you; before he can even think of chasing after you. 

In the blink of an eye, biceps wrap around him like a vice, pinning his arms behind his back and gripping tighter with every kick he tries to use for leverage.

“Spider!” Minho yells.

He fights with all he has to break free of Jihoon’s hold, to throw one or both of them to the ground, to get to you, but the older man doesn’t bat an eye. As if Minho weighs nothing at all, Jihoon begins hauling him back down the hallway towards the fire exit.

“You’re going the wrong way,” he grunts as he thrashes. “Let me — go —” 

Jihoon doesn’t say a word, doesn’t waste a breath, doesn’t stop pulling. Whatever strength he has left in the reserves, it’s wielded against Minho, not on making apologies. 

Minho bucks again, throwing all the weight from his legs to his back. It does nothing apart from exhaust him, but he can’t stop. He’ll never stop. 

“Spider!”

Close to feral, his anguished shouts devolve to desperate, growling noises. “I swear to god, I’ll bury you for this, Lee —”

He digs his heels into the ground to slow the older man’s momentum. His knees could snap at the force with which he’s resisting. He doesn’t give a shit if they do; he’ll crawl to you if he has to.

“I’ll splatter your brains against the fucking wall when I get my hands on you,” Minho spits. “I’m your commanding fucking officer!”

The next time he kicks, someone grabs him by the ankles to help carry his restless body down the stairs. Felix, judging by that pathetic, apologetic look in his eyes. Minho resolves to kill him, too, when he gets his limbs back. He’ll burn the whole goddamn compound to the ground for standing in his way; for letting you do this.

It should be me.

You’re the best of them, and they’re letting you die. 

It should be me.

They’re going to stand here, watching while you —

A sob he wasn’t prepared for bursts out of his chest in the form of your real name. With it, his threats dissolve into pleas, so goddamn pitiful in comparison to the violent way he still flails.

“Please!” He cries, voice raw. Making himself louder doesn’t make him heard. Incapable of doing anything else, he begs, “Please don’t let her do this. She’s all I have — All I want — Goddamnit, please! I need to get her out of there —”

So useless.

“I have to get her out,” he sobs with one final burst of energy rattling through otherwise spent limbs. 

The arms and hands around him still don’t relent. Over and over, he repeats his only thought in rapid succession until his voice gives out: 

“I have to get her out.”

Two seconds before they drag his body over the threshold, the whole facility shakes, like the earth below has opened up to swallow it down. Even from the opposite side of the building, Minho can hear shattered glass hitting the ground like sheets of rain. With the heavy, black cloud swirling over the southwest section of roof, he might’ve believed in some storm.

He might have.

But now, Minho sees the flames licking at the sky above, and he no longer believes in anything.

There are 244 kilometers between Cheongju and Changwon. By car, the distance flies by in fewer than three hours, assuming the expressways aren’t clogged with corporate commuters. All things considered, it’s not a trip that disrupts a person’s day. It’s straightforward, and above all, it’s easy.

What isn’t easy is crawling on your stomach underneath a blanket of smoke, only to drag half of someone else’s body weight with you down a flight of stairs.

There’s nothing straightforward about slipping through alleyways and ditches, trying to avoid nearby police blockades as they pop up; or attempting to conceal clothes that are singed in some places and actively smoking in others.

That distance does not fly by in three hours, even though the expressways aren’t clogged, because there’s disruption after disruption: 

Starting on foot, only to steal — and later dump — a car when the walk becomes unbearable. 

Wandering blindly without a working mobile, unable to access assistance or a map, and learning that your best guesses are wrong turns more often than not.

Avoiding phones in general due to the localized surge in cell surveillance, knowing even a coded message could wind up with you and any recipients dead.

Stopping repeatedly with burning lungs to check on someone in far worse shape than you, pretending not to hurt for their sake.

No, the estimates are all fucked. 

It takes twenty-one hours to travel the 244 kilometers between Cheongju and Changwon; and you feel the weight of every single one of them when you hobble through the front doors of the factory just to drop, exhausted, onto the floor.

News of your survival spreads like dandelion seeds throughout the compound. Within minutes, it seems, everyone you’ve ever made eye-contact with swings by the clinic to pat you on the back. 

One of them — Sierra, of all people — does you the greatest kindness of all: bringing you a change of clothes and then refusing to stick around for a chat. 

Half of them have never spoken to you before now, though you try not to hold that fact against them. 

Almost all of them throw the word “brave” around like it’s weightless. 

You know better.

What you did was useless in the grand scheme of things, and knowing that is heavy. Crushing, even, so much so that you find it hard to catch your breath. No, you’re sure, what you did was peak cowardice.

You need to get out of this clinic. You need all of these well-wishers to stop looking at you like some tragic hero. You need —

You push off the cot you’re occupying without giving it a second thought. The lightheadedness threatens to take you right back down again, but the feeling passes as quickly as it comes. You stay on your feet, even though you sway, by sheer force of will.

That’s it. There you go.

Doc gave you a once-over when you were first hauled in. Neither one of you truly felt like you were a priority. She may have been justifiably distracted, but in forming her expert opinion, she saw your bruised — not broken — body and declared you “good enough”. You take that glowing assessment at face value now and promptly discard the bit about “needing to stay for observation”.

Her primary concern is that you shouldn’t sleep with your concussion. Baseless, you think ruefully. You’ve been awake for two days and don’t see that changing any time soon.

Before you attempt to make a break for it, you glance at the far end of the clinic. There, a white screen stretches longways across most of the area for privacy, leaving two exits on either side. You don’t see the point of it; it doesn’t hide a thing. Two work lights shine so brightly from their spots by the wall that every movement in front of them is broadcasted on the thin, nylon divider.

As expected, the shadow puppet you’re looking for is still hovering around an unmoving mass in the center of the screen.

Chan.

He’s alive, even though he doesn’t look it. He’s talking, too, which is a marked improvement from the state he was in just a few hours ago. The morphine drip must be helping, you figure. Until now, he had a belt between his teeth to quell the pain, which would’ve kept him quiet.

Otherwise, there’s only one explanation for the corner he’s turned over the past few hours: The love of his life hasn’t left his side since he was carried into the clinic; and he knows she’s there. 

You’ve learned the hard way that both of those conditions must be met to make a difference. 

One without the other isn’t enough.

You can’t hear what they’re murmuring to each other, and you don’t want to. It’s theirs. Thankfully, their hushed tones give you the only confirmation you need: neither of your pseudo-parents will catch and scold you for leaving against medical advice. They’re oblivious; they’re fine; they have each other. You have —

Do you, though?

The person you want to see is coincidentally the only one in the entire compound that hasn’t come by seeking proof of life.

At first, you feared the worst; ripped your cuticles to shreds when the faces passing by weren’t his. No one mentioned his name or asked you if you’d seen him, as if there was no him left to see.

Then, you saw Jihoon walking around with his cheekbone stitched together. There’s some sick comfort in knowing that Minho at least lived long enough to beat his knuckles bloody. You’ve apologized to Jihoon three times now for the effect you caused, but he’s shrugged off every single one of them, like yesterday was just another day at the office.

Wasn’t it?

You creep out the door undetected and make your way to the nearest stairwell. The quiet throughout the halls in the factory isn’t comforting in the way it used to be. No part of the deeply familiar landscape is. 

It should be.

It’s the only real home you’ve ever known — one you thought for sure you’d never see again.

But every empty doorway you pass may as well have a body in it. You still see that woman and her unspent aspirations everywhere you look. You still hear the way she begged for her life before she lost it.

And when the stairs ahead finally come into view — ones you’ve taken a million times — they’re insurmountable. Your body aches automatically, like you’re still pulling Chan’s phantom weight out of the fire. That memory is muscle-deep now, you fear. There’s no getting rid of it.

At the landing, you force yourself forward. The siren song only you can hear is far stronger than the call of your own bed. It lures you around the corner whether or not you’re ready to follow it.

You aren’t, you realize as your steps continue automatically. The guilt threatens to eat you alive, and frankly, you’re prepared to let it. You deserve it. 

Somehow, despite your bullshit insanity and your numerous violations of trust, you still managed to skate through with a life left to live. Considering what you did, you figure it’s only fair that you pay this price — feel this fucking awful — for the rest of your unearned years.

Maybe. 

You don’t know. 

You’re in uncharted territory now because your plan didn’t include an after. 

As your footsteps draw closer to Minho’s room, it dawns on you that you don’t have a plan at all now. You don’t know what the fuck to say to him, let alone where to start. You wonder whether or not you should bother at all. 

If Minho knows you’re back at the compound, that means he made a choice not to find you. You have no right — none whatsoever — to take away his options a second time.

He’ll never forgive you, you tell yourself. If the roles were reversed, you’d do the same.

Maybe.

You don’t know.

You can’t take those hypotheticals and draw conclusions because Minho has never — would never — put you in the position you stranded him in. He wouldn’t hijack a mission you created or exclude you from a half-baked, shittily-executed contingency plan. He’d never force a friend to make some destructive, deathbed promise; wouldn’t have you dragged out of blast radius, kicking and screaming and fighting and spitting, just to drop you in a front-row seat.

He’s the best of all of you, and you did your absolute worst to him.

It’s selfish, walking up to his door now. You know it is. Despite that, you can’t make your body stop moving now that it’s started; can’t keep that boulder from rolling down hill. One last look, you tell yourself. That’s all you need. 

Even if he never looks you in the eyes again, this can be enough.

You raise your hand and reach out to the scraped-up wood with your knuckles leading the way. They’re dirty, you note, caked with soot in every crease. They shouldn’t be. You scrubbed them raw to get the blood and plasma off your skin. It’s possible — likely, even — that your brain is fried beyond fixing, and that you’re imagining things.

Maybe.

You don’t know.

You don’t hear an answer when you finally bring yourself to knock. No, you correct yourself, that’s an answer in and of itself. Acting selfishly once again, you don’t heed that silent reply. You don’t knock again, either. Heart hammering against your ribs, you wrap your hand around the knob and twist.

Part of you wants to laugh. Of course, his is the only door in the whole fucking factory that doesn’t squeak horrifically on its hinges. His tolerance level for annoyance has always been low.

Inching your way over the threshold, you call out, “Minho?” 

And once again, you don’t hear a response.

Standing now inside his room, you don’t see him — not at first. He certainly doesn’t see you. His back leans against the window frame while he slumps on the ledge, presumably staring off in the opposite direction through the glass. His defeated posture is as telling as the position he’s in. 

The Minho you know never sits with his back to a door. It’s too big a risk and too broad a target; an invitation for a nasty surprise. He’s said it a thousand times: whoever kills him needs to look him in the eyes.

This is what it looks like when a person’s given up, you think. 

This is what you did.

Throat thick, you call his name again. This time around, it barely qualifies as a whisper; all your breath is caught up in that tangle in your chest. There’s no way he heard it because you barely did. Really, you should —

“Fuck off,” Minho growls without turning around. “I won’t tell you a third time.”

His words don’t carry the same venom they usually do in circumstances like this. He just sounds hollow, and it devastates you so completely to hear the emptiness that tears start falling without your permission. You don’t move from where you stand, too overwhelmed to process both ambulation and falling apart at the seams.

The lack of footsteps tips him off to your ongoing, unwanted presence.

“When will you people give up? ” After slamming his left fist against the window frame, he pushes himself abruptly off the ledge to his feet. “I don’t want your goddamn sympathy. All I’ve ever fucking wanted is —” 

He wheels around then, fists clenched and ready to swing. All the air in his lungs leaves him when he sees you standing there. The rest of that thought is strangled, and it drops lifeless on the floor.

“You.”

You can’t guess what comes next: screaming, blame, silence, violence. You don’t even know which of those things would be worst — just that he’s entitled to all of the above, and you’ve earned the lot.

What you end up with isn’t an outcome you ever would’ve anticipated. It’s him, his quivering mouth, and his exhausted, red-rimmed eyes taking several steps forward on shaky legs. It’s a desperate bid to close the distance, and a look built on so many conflicting emotions that you can’t even begin to take inventory.

At first, your hammering heart tells you to back away; that he may hate you enough to hurt you. 

But he doesn’t.

He falls to his knees in front of you when his legs ultimately give out. Boneless, he crumples forward onto his palms until his head hangs low between his arms. From where you’re standing, it almost looks like he’s praying. That is, until you notice the way his shoulders shake.

Of all the people you’ve met in your life, Minho is the only one who seemed to be incapable of crying. Nausea swells now that he proves you wrong. It feels like a violation to see him this way, especially knowing that you’re the reason for the state he’s in.

Through a clenched jaw, he begs for answers you didn’t anticipate needing to give: 

“I’m hallucinating, aren’t I? I’ve finally lost my fucking mind?”

Oh.

Without a second thought, you fall to your knees, too. Chrome and carbon fiber scrape against concrete as you scoot yourself closer, and you pray that your proximity will be proof enough that you’re here.

It’s not.

“I left you for dead, and now I’m seeing ghosts. Is that it?”

Heartbroken, you try your best to get through, “Minho, no.”

Tentatively, you reach out to touch his shoulder, thinking that you might be able to ground him, even if you can’t comfort him. Before your fingertips find him, he senses your movement and lifts his head. Your hands automatically reroute to claim either side of his face, fingers sliding into unkempt hair. To your surprise, he doesn’t pull away. Instead, Minho studies your features intently, like he’s ruling out translucence; like his sanity is on the line.

Maybe it is.

More desperately than you ever have before, you drink down the sight of him. Beautiful, you think, even like this. 

Now that you’re able to see his face in full, you find it tear-streaked. Somehow less alarmingly, his right temple is scraped to hell and back, while his left is black-and-blue. It’s a perfect portrait of the fist that struck him. The darkest shades of indigo demarcate where the knuckles dug in deepest; and the scabbed, scarlet lines on his other side illustrate the state of the ground he fell to.

Gravel.

You have to stop yourself from asking who hurt him. After all, it doesn’t fucking matter whose name he’d drop. You already know who’s to blame. 

Nevertheless, Minho sees the question in your eyes, and he tells you, “I tried to run in after you once the bomb went off. After the fire started.”

Of course he did. What did you expect?

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, as if that’ll ever be enough. It doesn’t and won’t erase what you did, yet you repeat it anyway, “I’m so sorry.”

Opening your mouth was a mistake, you quickly realize. The dam breaks, and you can’t keep the words from spilling out. They all pile up, overlapping in time and urgency. 

Every word you say comes out in one breath; sputtered, as if your head has finally broken through the surface of rushing water. “I should’ve told you about the contingency plan, but I knew you’d try to take my place, and I couldn’t —”

“I couldn’t leave you there,” he swears, as if you left him with any other choice. “Even if I was too late to save you, I needed to bring you home.” 

Minho suddenly shifts, prompting your hands to fall from his face. To erase the distance he’s created, he sits back on his knees and pulls you into the space between them. You melt into his body when his arms wrap around you. Just as easily, you give in to the thousandth conflicting reason you’ve found to cry:

He’s never held you like this before.

With his cheek pressed to the side of your bowed head, you can feel his runaway tears. Though his voice wavers, his intentions are rock solid. “I fought like hell to get back to you. They had to knock me out just to get me into the fucking van. I didn’t want to leave you. I swear, I wouldn’t —”

“I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t stop the rollout,” you cry. “Keeping you in the dark was the only way to keep you safe.” You bury your face into the front of his shirt and repeat it even more emphatically, “Minho, I’m so fucking sorry.”

For a moment, he stays quiet. As curious as you are about his silence, you don’t pull away to look up at him. You think you’d rather actually die than sacrifice a single second of the closeness you walked through hell and back to find.

Eventually, without prompting, Minho does speak. His voice is so soft that his question hardly reaches you. “Why did you do it?”

You pause, unsure of which part of your explanation he wants repeated. If he’s truly asking you to start over from the top, you will. You’re prepared to rake yourself over those coals forever, but you doubt he has the time. 

“In the control room,” he explains when you don’t arrive at the point yourself. “You told me that you love me, and then you ran off to blow yourself up. Why did you leave without letting me respond?”

Once again, you’re thrown; so disoriented that you can’t find the starting line. There were several reasons for running out the way you did: fear that he’d stop you if he caught on too quickly, or that he’d follow before Jihoon could drag him to safety. More than anything, as you sheepishly admit, “I didn’t think you’d say it back.”

He goes silent again. His arms pull you even closer, though you didn’t think it was possible. 

“I think Medusa had it easy,” he confesses, sounding almost self-conscious for the first time in his life. 

Though you’re caught off-guard, you don’t interrupt him. 

He hesitates for a moment, then adds, “I think my curse has it all backwards. I turn to stone when people look at me, not the other way around.”

At this, you finally unearth your face from where it’s buried in his t-shirt. His body goes slightly slack without your frame to hold him up; the look on his face is just as deflated. 

Turning in your spot to face him, you frown, but you tell him the truth. “I’m not as good at reading you as I thought I was.”

“Say it again.” 

You blink.

Minho lifts his hand and cups your cheek. “Please,” he begs, thumb brushing over your skin. “Say it again, so I can get it right this time.”

You lean into his palm, allowing the warmth of it to radiate until you feel it everywhere — feel him everywhere. From there, as is always the case, the reflex takes over. “I love you. I think I always have.”

“I love you,” Minho echoes emphatically. “And unfortunately for you, I think I always will.”

It strikes like a pickaxe, sending cracks through a well-built wall. You swear you can hear the pieces of it falling. If you look closely, you can see the light as it rushes in.

There you are, you think. I knew you were in there somewhere.

He kisses you then, scrambling your brain so thoroughly that you almost forget it’s the first time he ever has. But he’s no stranger to you, and he proves it. Calloused hands maneuver you into his lap without resistance, without interruption, and lean arms snake around you as you straddle him, pinning you against his chest.

In an instant, you thread your fingers through his hair, hellbent on clinging to whatever parts of him you can get your hands on. That desperate grip of yours has always made him lose his mind; tonight isn’t any different. He groans into your mouth when you tug those strands now, proving that you’re no stranger, either.

His tongue flicks over your bottom lip, like he’s scratching at the door to be let in. You let him, let out some needy, mewling sound as he licks into your mouth to claim it.

Yours, you think. Yours, yours, yours.

When he unexpectedly pulls away from you, those little whines of yours only get louder. Kiss-bitten, Minho’s lips flatten into a thin line that indicates he’s fighting off a smile. 

“Spider, I know vulnerability is your thing,” he sighs. His left hand releases its hold on the bottom of your thigh. With it, he gestures to the other side of the room. “But did you mean to leave the door open for this?”

Whipping your head around, you confirm that you did not, in fact, close the door behind you. Heat rises to your face before you can stop it. No matter how thoroughly you rack your brain, you come up short. There’s no excuse— not even a bad one — for a cybersecurity expert being this abysmally accessible offline.

You’re in the middle of questioning your qualifications for the role you occupy when Minho gently pats the side of your leg, wordlessly asking you to leave his lap. With great difficulty and a dash of awkwardness, you do. Just as soon as you’re back on your feet, your body riots. All the exhaustion and soreness you’ve been ignoring screams for acknowledgement.

Minho must hear it. 

“Bed,” he murmurs, punctuating his instruction with a quick kiss to your temple.

Also a first, you note. 

Despite your long history of entanglements, you’ve never once ended up in his sheets. Your heart flutters involuntarily at the prospect; the fever-grade burning in your cheeks only gets worse. Thankfully, with his back now turned to you, Minho doesn’t see how eagerly you stagger towards the stolen bed frame in the corner. You hope he doesn’t hear the relieved moan you let out when you collapse in an aching heap on his mattress.

Across the room, the lock clicks. Footsteps follow so quietly that you would’ve missed them if you didn’t have his gait committed to memory. The person walking back to you looks unfamiliar, though — somehow. There’s no trademark sharpness at the edges now. There’s no want darkening his eyes, but something delicate that softens them.

It’s need, you realize when he comes to drape himself over you. It’s gentle, the way he compensates for your strained muscles and takes it upon himself to shed your clothes, layer by layer. And it’s trust, finally letting him see the way you exist on your own — with your artificial leg removed from the equation and set carefully off to the side.

After positioning himself between your thighs, Minho pauses. His forearms rest on either side of your head, caging you in against the pillow below. Time doesn’t seem to pass while he gazes down at you, and you certainly don’t mind the delay. Of all your moments, this one — here, with him —  is your happiest.

“In case it doesn’t go without saying,” he murmurs, nudging the tip of his nose against yours. “I forgive you for doing what you had to do.”

Blinking quickly doesn’t do much to dispel the tears prickling in the corners of your eyes. You bite your bottom lip and nod to the extent that you can. “Thank you,” you whisper.

“Do me a favor, though?”

“Anything.”

“Kiss me,” he requests, and you do.

When your mouth is finally on his, he rolls his hips forward with deliberate precision, length sliding through your arousal until he enters you, groaning. He maintains that slow, careful pace; coaxes you open for him until the stretch melts from pain to pleasure.

Eloquent as ever, you mewl with your lips still pressed to his. It’s muffled, of course, but there’s no context to miss. “Oh, my god.”

Once you acclimate to his size, Minho could ramp up the intensity if he wanted to. He doesn’t. He takes his time, grinds against you so perfectly that you’d never dream of rushing through this. 

At this pace, every stroke hits deeper than the last; each languid drag of his cock along your walls converts more and more of your thoughts to static.

It’s such a change-up from every other time you’ve wound up underneath him. Part of you wishes that you could scrap all those trysts and pretend that this is your first. In a way, you suppose, it is. There’s a drastic difference between being fucked by Minho and being loved by him. For obvious reasons, you don’t plan on going back to the way it was before.

His length grazes your g-spot, pulling a whimper out of you. Dizzy from the sensation, you don’t notice the way your cunt clenches down on him until he curses under his breath.

“Shit,” he moans, “Wish you knew how perfect you feel wrapped around me. I swear, I’m not leaving this bed as long as you’re in it.”

Another stroke hits you exactly where you crave him most. 

“Please,” you gasp, back arching off the bed. He leans in to capitalize on the length of neck you’ve left exposed; the heat of his tongue on your flesh drives you absolutely insane. “R-right there, Minho. Please, I’m so close.”

Other people have described Minho as defiant, but you have to disagree. He does precisely what you beg of him, angling each thrust to get you gushing around him. And even after he has you shaking underneath him, he refuses to slack off.

The orgasm he pulls from you is so overwhelming that you feel it tingling in your scalp, resonating down your spine until every nerve in your body is a live wire. You’re still somewhere in the stratosphere when Minho unravels, twitching and spilling inside of you until he’s got nothing left to give.

Spent, he pulls out of your heat, maneuvers himself carefully around you, and collapses at your side to catch his breath.

His eyes are closed when you regain enough motor function to turn your head his way. Across his forehead, stray strands of black hair stick to a thin veil of sweat. The slow rise and fall of his chest says he’s halfway to sleep, and with how hypnotic you find it all, you’re nearly there yourself.

Just a few more minutes, you tell yourself. It’s too hard to look away from him. You’d never had the chance to see him this way before, and you know better now than to waste it. 

“Please don’t ever stop looking at me like that,” he mumbles with his eyes still closed.

Your quiet laughter doesn’t prompt him to look at you, but it does spark the hint of a smile. “Like what, Minho?”

“Like I’m your future.”

while likes are appreciated, comments/tags/reblogs with your thoughts are really what make my brain go brrrtt.

series taglist:

@saintriots, @mal-lunar-28, @dabiscrustyfeet @ldysmfrst @obeythemasters @moni-logue

stray kids permanent taglist:

@variety-is-the-joy-of-life @sourkimchi

multi permanent taglist:

@jihopesjoint @bahng-chrizz, @/variety-is-the-joy-of-life

resources used

regarding prosthetic limbs: tiktok users @/bren_hucks @/footlessjo @/alex1leg @/bionickick; amputee coalition regarding hacking + world-building: gurps: cyberpunk guidebook by loyd blankenship

#stray kids #skz #lee know #lee know x reader #minho x reader #minho fic #minho smut #minho angst #lee know fic #lee know smut #lee know angst #lee minho #lino #stray kids fic #skz fic #stray kids smut #stray kids angst #skz smut #skz angst #stray kids series #skz series #jade writes #re: force quit #kvanity

[taeiun]

just a little sick with love.

synopsis: it spills out too fast; hard to contain this blurted confession about you (in other words, txt when asked about you during an interview)

who: txt's choi line x gn!reader

categories: a little smth extra fluffy, interview style scenarios

warnings: might be ooc here? reader is referred to as "pretty" and "beautiful" a few times (not in a physical appearance context really), love and babe and jagiya are used as petnames, use of "yn" in the fic, mentions of food and drinks

word count: 0.9k

interviewer: ...but, while we’re on the topic of romance, i’ve heard through the grapevine that you’re currently in a relationship. now, i’m just dying to know, and i’m sure the viewers are too, about who you’ve been seeing so, what can you tell us about them?

✧ YEONJUN !

yeonjun: well to start, they’re the love of my life. [he laughs and runs a hand through his hair with a hum] they understand me in ways no one else would, not even the other members. i can be choi yeonjun with them, you know? not just an idol on stage, not just yeonjun of tomorrow x together. being with them… it’s like walking into a cold room after being out in the sun all day. 

interviewer: aw, that’s sweet! how did you get to meet them? 

yeonjun: i spilt my drink on them. [he smiles sheepishly] i was in a rush and wasn’t looking where i was going. we bumped into each other and i ruined their shirt. i offered to pay for a new one but the thing about yn is that they’re stubborn. they refused so i asked if could take them out lunch instead. things kind of went from there.

yeonjun: now, they send me tiktoks and reels that remind them of me when we’re away on tour. they surprise me with roses after a show win and always welcome me with a smile, no matter how tired they are. yn is the best thing that’s happened to me and i can’t see myself without them. 

interviewer: wow sounds like i might need to sweep them off their feet for myself! [the interviewer laughs]

yeonjun: [he lets out a tense chuckle that ends in a sigh] ah… yeah no, tough luck buddy. they’re mine and always will be.

✧ SOOBIN !

soobin: hmm [he takes a moment to choose his words carefully] where do i begin? [the interviewers laughs] yn is my other half. i don’t really know how else to explain it other than that. they’re effortlessly kind and the nicest person i’ve ever met. they never fail to cheer me up after a long day and are so understanding of my needs. sometimes i think they know me better than i know myself. [he laughs]

interviewer: when did you know they were the one?

soobin: i think i knew we were going to work out for sure when the group and i first went on tour. yn took care of odi for me and sent me video updates. they don’t like recording their voice so i asked them why they sent videos instead of pictures and messages. they replied, “because i know you can’t sleep soundly without hearing my voice, soobin.” i was already in love before then but i think that only grew after hearing those words. 

interviewer: if you had to pick between your partner and your career, which would you choose?

soobin: i think that’s an unrealistic question to ask. yn made it clear that they’d never make me pick between our relationship and my idol life. they said i deserved to be happy, to receive the good things in life. for the longest time, i thought i could only have one or the other, a relationship or a successful career, and it wasn’t until i met them that i realized those things could coexist. they’re my biggest supporter and i couldn’t be more grateful for that.

✧ BEOMGYU !

beomgyu: oh, y/nnie! [he visibly brightens] it’s crazy. even though we’ve been dating for a while now, sometimes i wake up and i’m like [beep]... i’m actually dating them. they’re so sweet to me. i’m starting to get cavities from just how kind they are. [he and the interviewer laugh]

interviewer: why them? what is it about your partner that caught your eye?

beomgyu: oh it had to have been their smile. they have the prettiest smile i’ve ever seen and their eyes crinkle in the corners when they do. their laugh is the most beautiful thing i’ve heard. i’d play it on loop twenty four seven if i could. their happiness is infectious. i’ll let you in on a little secret [he leans in, forearms resting on his thighs as he moves to fake whisper to the interviewer] sometimes, they’ll dance and sing around the kitchen when they think im not watching. [he laughs, leaning back in his seat] they probably have way more blackmail on me though. 

interviewer: would you say you’re happy?

beomgyu: i’m the happiest i’ve ever been. yn… they make everything i do worth it. i don’t know what i’d do without them. i wish they could see themselves through my own eyes because i think they’re the most stunning and beautiful, in every meaning of that word, person on the planet.

bonus:

interviewer: is there anything you’d like to say to your partner back home?

yeonjun: hey, babe! i hope you haven’t forgotten about our one year anniversary coming up. [he says in a teasing voice] you better be taking care of yourself properly while i’ve been gone. [he smiles warmly] i miss you. tour is almost done, love. i’ll be seeing you very soon. 

soobin: i hope you’re doing well, love. you better be asleep when this program is airing and i don’t want to see a single text message from you until it’s morning in your time zone. you can get more work done when you’re well-rested. [he smiles] just a little longer, dear. i’ll be home soon.

beomgyu: yn! i can’t wait to see you again, jagiya. there’s so much to tell you and i miss stealing the blanket from you when we sleep. [his expression drops to a serious, but playful one] i’m cashing in that cuddling coupon you gave me for my birthday last year when i get back and expect top tier service.

^ . _ . ^ !? hehe was inspired by a couple cute insta reels that came up on my for you. next txt post will be for ot5 hopefully as long as i have the time

© taeiun 2023. all rights reserved. do not copy, repost, translate, modify, or claim any of my writing as yours.

#txt x reader #txt x gender neutral reader #k-labels #kflixnet #yeonjun x reader #soobin x reader #beomgyu x reader #txt fluff #txt comfort #yeonjun x gn reader #soobin x gn reader #beomgyu x gn reader #txt scenarios #txt imagines #📹 . . by jun ! #txt headcanons #txt reactions

[shanastoryteller]

Happy Pride, Shana! 🏳️‍🌈☺️💕

Please, I need more of your Jim and Sybok buddy fic!

a continuation of 1 2 3 4

Sybok double checks Jim's numbers, then triple checks them, and normally that would get him a some sarcastic indignation, but instead Jim just paces and rubs his hands against his thighs and simultaneously looks his age and at the same time far too old.

"The ion storms are unpredictable," he says finally. "It's possible we'll be able to get a signal out to Starfleet before the spring."

"Well, anything's possible," Jim agrees. "Seventy three years of ion storm data says it's not fucking likely, though." He runs his hands through his hair. "The season just started, if I'd started a few weeks ago, we could have got a message out before the storms rolled in-"

"Hey," he says sharply. "We're lucky you discovered it this early. We can start conserving food now, and maybe - maybe we'll get lucky again."

Fall has just started, the season of harvest that gets them through the austere winter. Tarsus IV doesn't get cold, not like it can on Earth, but it does get dry. Sybok had actually been looking forward to the winter, since the climate would more closely resemble what he grew up with on Vulcan.

That had been when he'd though food would be abundant, if a combination of heavily salted and flash frozen.

Jim gives him a look that reminds him, horribly, of his father. "What's the official Vulcan stance on luck again?"

He glares. "It is illogical to ignore the possibility of survival just because of a low probability."

"That's not it and you know it," he laughs, humorless.

"Maybe we can develop some sort of pesticide to save the remaining crops.

Jim's reaction is pure offense, which is at least an improvement on hopelessness. "Okay, I didn't graduate from the VSA, but I did run these experiments myself, you know. It's all already infected almost all of our crops. They're a goner, and everyone is going to figure that out in a couple of weeks when everything rots from the inside out."

Yeah. They can probably synthesize something to counteract these parasites for the next planting season, but that depends on them being around come spring.

"We won't all die," Sybok says quietly, because many planets have endured similar circumstances in their past, however distant. "There are always survivors."

Jim presses his lips together. "Yeah. Because Vulcans' strict vegetarian diet really lends itself it to cannibalism."

Sybok's stomach rolls but he keeps his face neutral. "Technically, as I am the only Vulcan on planet, it would not be cannibalism."

There are always survivors, but their survival comes at a price. He already knows that it's a price he's unwilling to pay.

He should have listened to Amanda.

#prompt answers #prompts are closed #asks #anon #star trek

[svltzmans]

jealousy, jealousy (part ii) - h.m.

a/n: hi! i got a request for a jealous hope fic and i thought i'd continue the one i posted a while ago that i really had fun writing! i hope you all like it <3

warnings: smut (18+), dominant! hope, edging, rough sex, just some kinky stuff ok, forgive me for i have sinned 😭, also platonic reader and lizzie bc i love her, i didn't edit this so hopefully there are no mistakes?

y/n and lizzie sit across from each other at a table in the library, both engrossed in a biology textbook.

with exam season fast approaching, studying became top priority for almost everyone around them.

through conversation, lizzie and y/n had realized they both could use a study buddy.

y/n never considered herself to be close with lizzie. she always viewed the witch as an acquaintance. a classmate.

but ever since the two had started studying together, they developed a genuine friendship.

a friendship that involved hours in the library after class, laughing and talking despite the subject matter they were supposed to be reviewing.

y/n didn't feel the need to tell her girlfriend, hope, about her budding friendship with lizzie. hope wasn't the type to worry about y/n's friendships, and their relationship was built on trust.

however, when hope walks into the library and sees her girlfriend and lizzie laughing together, her blood suddenly runs cold.

maybe it was because another girl was making y/n laugh so much, or because lizzie was conventionally gorgeous.

either way, she felt the jealousy growing in her lungs.

before she can act on her feelings, she leaves the library, making her way back to her own bedroom.

hope springs up when she hears a knock at the door, and a smile creeps across her face when she realizes it's y/n.

"hey," y/n leans in for a kiss on the cheek, bringing an instantaneous blush to hope.

hope steps to the side, gesturing for y/n to come in.

once y/n is inside and the door is closed behind her, hope takes hold of her wrist in a way that makes y/n's heart drop to her stomach.

"hope, what's up?"

"what's going on with you and lizzie?" hope replies, blankly staring into y/n's eyes.

"lizzie? lizzie saltzman? hope, nothing is going on-"

hope cuts y/n off with a kiss, threading her fingers through strands of her hair.

y/n pulls away momentarily, a puzzled expression on her face.

"what was that for?"

"it just seems like you need a reminder that you're my girl."

"what, i can't study with someone els-"

hope cuts her off again, gently pushing her toward the bed as they kiss.

when hope lays y/n down, she makes sure her hands are wrapped tightly around her wrists to restrict her movement. she hovers above her girlfriend, their lips still attached.

y/n instinctively spreads her legs as her and hope continue to make out, hoping for any kind of touch from the girl above her.

as soon as hope notices, she moves her knee to y/n's still clothed core, putting more and more pressure until she earns a loud moan against her lips.

"mmph, hope, more," y/n mumbles between kisses, trying to grind into hope's leg.

"more, huh baby?" hope taunts, pressing harder with her knee.

y/n can't believe how close she already is, considering that her and hope are still both fully clothed. yet, the pressure in her stomach continues building until she feels like exploding.

"oh my god, hope," y/n practically screams, grabbing onto hope's shoulders.

just as y/n is seconds away from falling over the edge, hope pulls her leg away.

y/n can't help but whine at the loss of contact, and she looks up at hope with a pout.

"you didn't think it was gonna be that easy, did you?" hope teases, pulling y/n into another rough kiss.

hope moves to undo y/n's pants, running her hands up and down her legs slowly.

something in hope wanted to make this as tantalizing as possible for y/n. she wanted to see her writhe and beg, completely at her mercy.

but she also desperately wanted to fuck her.

and that desire only skyrockets when y/n is bare in front of her.

"so wet, y/n. just for me, huh?"

"god, yes hope, just for you."

y/n is growing desperate, and her first denied orgasm wasn't helping. she was flushed, lightly sweating as she continued to sink into the sheets below her.

hope gently rubs y/n's clit with her finger, knowing that she wasn't doing nearly enough for her.

"harder, more, please hope. want more," y/n arches her back, trying to encourage hope to apply more pressure.

it's then that hope effortlessly slides two fingers into y/n, the girl above her letting out a guttural moan.

"fuck hope, just like that baby," y/n praises, her hands both tightly gripping the blanket under her.

"this is what you wanted, huh pretty? you wanted me to fuck you with my fingers?"

y/n can't help but loudly whine at her girlfriend's words, growing dangerously close once again.

"gonna cum on your fingers, hope, so close."

when hope hears those words come from y/n's mouth, she stops moving completely.

"please don't stop hope, please. please make me cum," y/n begs, making eye contact with her girlfriend.

hope's eyes are dark with desire as she looks back at y/n, her finger lazily rubbing circles on y/n's clit.

"please, hope. gonna be a good girl for you."

with that, hope continues fingering y/n at a quickening pace, determined to finally bring her over the edge.

"right there hope. my god, please let me cum."

"cum for me, y/n. you've earned it."

y/n's whole body shakes, her hands desperately trying to find something to grip. the intensity of her orgasm wasn't something she had ever experienced before, the new sensation making her shamelessly scream in pleasure.

when y/n comes down from her high, hope has moved to lay next to her.

"you look so pretty," hope coos, tucking a strand of y/n's hair behind her ear.

"hope, you know there's nothing going on with me and lizzie, right?"

"i trust you, y/n. wholeheartedly. i love you," hope smiles, resting her hand on y/n's cheek.

"i love you more."

before hope knows it, y/n is peacefully asleep next to her.

she wraps her arms around her girlfriend, pulling a blanket over the two of them.

"goodnight, my love."

#hope mikaelson #hope mikaelson x reader #legacies #wlw #legacies x reader #hope mikaelson x fem reader #the originals x reader #hope mikaelson x fem! reader #hope mikaelson headcanons #hope mikaelson smut #hope mikaelson imagine #hope mikaelson fic

[findafight]

Ohhh fic where Steve and Robin and Dustin and Erica all casually make funny little haha jokes with each other about getting tortured/almost caught by the Russians under Starcourt because they all have that shared trauma and had many a long late night calls reassuring each other they're alive and playing dnd together and fulfilling lifetime supply of icecream obligations.

They do this because sure the rest of the party knew there were Russians under Starcourt but everything they went through in that basement was sorta...forgotten in the aftermath of literal flesh monster. And with Hopper dead and the Byers moving, there's so much happening that whatever happened to Steve's face (lost another fight...) and why he and Robin went from mildly antagonistic co-workers to codependent goobers who couldn't go literally a day without seeing the other or what made Dustin always ask if Erica was going to come for party hang outs are all sort of brushed under the rug. Not a big deal, really. Bigger things happening after everything.

And they cope together and scoops troop is a weird little section of the party no one but them really understands. Robin and Steve are attached at the hip and to a lesser extent so are Erica and Dustin (but they'll never admit it), and they all have mini gatherings together.

So, the casual mentioning of starcourt and specifically what went down with the Russians is commonplace for them. (Erica is quick to remind them she saved their asses, and are they so lame they need her help again? but she smiles and Steve and Robin just laugh and give her a big hug.) And somehow, they forget that not everyone really knows what went down before July 4th 1985.

And I want them to do it in front of everyone. I want them to have their stupid "this was so fucked up but we're alive and we got through it so now we have to laugh or we may never stop crying about it" banter at a big "we saved the world again!" Barbecue. I want the rest of the folks there to go silent and them not to notice.

I want someone to mention Steve not getting a black eye this time, congrats! and Robin going "the only reason why I didn't get one last time was because the Russians said-"

And Steve, who is lying with his head in her lap, reaches up to gently cup her cheek and says in a terrible Russian accent "don't worry, we will not ruin your pretty face!" (everyone is quiet around them, they do not notice)

She laughs. "And punched me in the gut a few more times. I peed blood for like, three days."

Steve goes "ewwww" only to be pinched by robin.

"you peed blood too, dingus. You got it worse than me and my pretty face."

He giggles and opens his hand up for a high five "pissing blood buddies, hell yeah!" And shifts in her lap. "But they bruised my pretty face. Rude."

"aww. It's okay, Stevie, your face is still so pretty. Prettiest boy in Hawkins."

"thanks Robin."

"at least Dustin and Erica got us out before they started ripping out fingernails." She shudders.

"or used the bonesaw"

"mmm. Unfortunately not before we got funky truth serum drugs though."

He leans up, looking at the two "y'all couldn't have been a bit faster?" But he's smiling, teasing. A well worn joke.

Dustin and Erica respond simultaneously with "I'm missing bones, Steve, what do you want from me?" And "I was ten and my legs were short as shit. Beggars can't be choosers." Respectively.

It is at this point an Actual Grown Up butts in.

"what. What do you mean ripping out fingernails?"

Robin and Steve look towards Joyce, who asked.

"like. To interrogate us? Because we just kept saying we worked for scoops even with the truth serum."

"because they thought we had to be superspies to get into their creepy lair and not a bunch of kids."

"mmhmm"

Hopper jumps in "wait. You were tortured by them?"

Robin and Steve give him eerily similar looks that express how obvious the answer to that is.

"yeah, duh."

"I don't go looking to get brain damage every year, you know."

Hoppers eye twitches. "Why didn't you say anything?"

#steve Harrington #robin Buckley #erica sinclair #dustin henderson #scoops troop #the party #stranger things #platonic stobin #stobin #i want eddie to be the only one who knows bc they were assigned to fill him in on the upsidedown so obvs it came up #and he is like that is so fucked up but i guess it works for you? hopefully? #steddie #mayhaps....if i ever write more of this lmao #finda writes stuff #finda's rambles

[acewritesfics]

FIREFLIES | Tommy Shelby

⚠️ THIS IS A REPOST FROM MY MAIN BLOG @/DLMLUFICS. UNFORTUNATELY, I HAVE TO DO IT THIS WAY. MORE INFO IN MY PINNED POST.

Pairing: Tommy Shelby x Reader

Request: No but I was encouraged by @runnning-outof-time to write this. This is a extended version of my Fireflies mood board.

Fic Type: Imagine

Warnings: Death. Grief. Swearing. Murder.

Word Count: 1,922

TOMMY SHELBY MASTERLIST || TAG LIST SIGN-UP

"You're late," Y/N says as she senses Tommy walking towards her.   

"Late for what?" he asks as he reaches her.   

"To see the fireflies," she says turning her head to look at him. "But I guess there will be other nights that we'll get to see them. They aren't going anywhere, and neither am I."   

"I wish I could take you anywhere that you wanted," he tells her.   

"But I like being here," she smiles softly, turning her body to stand in front of him. "It's peaceful and the view is beautiful and even more so when you're here with me."   

"I'm sure it gets lonely," he sighs sadly, hating that his first love will always be tethered to this spot.   

"Maybe for a second but then the fireflies come out and I'm reminded of you," she tells him. "You were always my light in the darkness."   

"I was never the light, sweetheart," he says cupping her face in his hands. "You were always the light."  

"If you think that because of the man you've become, then think again, Thomas Shelby," she says placing her hands over his. She turns her head, kissing one of his palms before resting her head on it. "I knew you before the war and before you had blood on your hands. You were the only good thing in my life. And I know that man is still inside you."  

"He died with you," he tells her. "That man doesn't exist anymore."  

"Yes, he does," she smiles. "He'll be back, once you learn that despite everything that's happened, you're allowed to be happy and live the life you wanted back then."  

"I'll be living it without you," he sighs.  

"One day, you're going to meet someone and all I'll be is a distant memory," her voice is soft, but her words were loud in his ears.  

"Do you remember when we met?" Tommy asks, changing the direction of their conversation. Their surroundings blurred out and was replaced with the night they met.  

Tommy could see his 17-year-old self, sitting on a log in front of a campfire. Arthur Shelby Snr and a few of his buddies decided to take their families camping one weekend. It was there that Tommy met Y/N, daughter of one of his father's associates.   

The 16-year-old version of Y/N was dancing as a group of teenagers to the left were making music with the few instruments they owned. A very young Ada had taken her hands as she skipped and leaped and danced around the fire. The sky was pitch black; the moon bright in the sky but in the moon light and the glow from the fire, to Tommy, it made her look like an angel. Tommy had fallen in love for the very first time that night.  

Him and Y/N watched as the younger versions of themselves came together. 16-year-old Y/N had let go of Ada's hands telling her she needed a rest and that she'd be back shortly. She'd left the campfire and walked past the campers. 17-year-old Tommy whispered something to Arthur before following her.  

Tommy and Y/N follow them down to the creek that ran through the campground.   

"You're a good dancer," they listen to the younger Tommy tell her, causing her to jump slightly. He quickly apologises. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you."  

"Apology accepted," she smiles, lifting her skirts up to her knees and dips her toes into the cold water. "And I wouldn't call myself a good dancer. The rhythm of the music does all the work, I just follow it."  

"It wasn't the music that had me captivated," he admits.  

"I'm sure it wasn't my dancing either," she chuckles, stepping into the cold water and kicks it around until it starts to feel warm.  

“I’m Thomas Shelby, but you can call me Tommy,” he introduces himself.  

“Y/N L/N,” she tells him her name. “It’s nice to meet you, Tommy.”  

From that moment the two of them were inseparable. You couldn’t find one without the other. They were both the happiest they’ve ever been. Everyone could see and feel the love the two held for each other. They were the king and queen of their own world, and they treated each other as such. Tommy gave her everything that he could with promises that one day, they’d be so rich that money wouldn’t be an issue and he could give her the grandest of all things. She would assure him that, even though those things would be nice, that all she needed was him.   

The scene in front of Tommy and Y/N is blurred out again and replaced with the original scene but this one was slightly different.   

It was the night he realized he wanted to marry her.   

On the anniversary of the day they met, they would come out to the field their families camped at and spent the night under the stars.   

Their first anniversary, Y/N, now 17, arrived at their spot earlier than Tommy. She starts the fire and sets up the picnic she had packed. As she sat waiting for Tommy, she thought about the trouble she would be in for sneaking out this late to meet the boy she’s been with for a year. It was worth it, being with Tommy.   

17-year-old Y/N’s been there a few minutes when the tree in front of her starts lighting up. There must be close to 50 of the little lightning bugs scattered along the tree. She’d read about fireflies and was always curious about them, but she wasn’t sure if she’d ever see them like this. The scene in front of her brings a certain warmth to her and her mind goes to Tommy.  

“I’m sorry, I’m late,” she faintly hears Tommy say as he approaches her. Y/N’s too focused on the bugs to reply.   

It isn’t until Tommy’s arms wrap around her that he finally gets her attention. That night she had fallen pregnant.  

The scene changes a little, everything looks the same, except the two of them are a little older, Tommy being 20 and Y/N being 19. Their relationship was going well, and their daughter was happy and healthy, but their family lives had taken a turn for the worse.   

Tommy’s mother had fallen ill not long after having Finn. After she died his father, Arthur Sr, had taken off, leaving Tommy and Arthur Jr to raise their younger siblings with their Aunt Polly’s help and deal with the debts his father owed. Not only that but they had the illegal betting den that needed a major up heave after the state their father left it in.   

Y/N’s father had become more paranoid, believing everyone was playing a part in some ploy to ruin his life. Her mother, who had enough of her husband’s behaviour had left, only leaving a note to explain her departure. She never bothered to tell Y/N about it either, only finding out when her father stormed into the store she worked at, yelling and shouting about how she was a part of her mother’s plan to leave. Once she managed to convince him that she had no part in it, her father seemed to calm down for a while.  

This was when Tommy new he couldn’t wait any longer to marry her. He wanted nothing more than to call her his wife. In the last year they had been coming more to their spot, needing to get away from everything for a moment. His proposal hadn’t been planned. They’d been sitting on a log, watching the fireflies fly around the tree, creating trails of light behind them. He turned to her, looking at her with so much love and said, “I think it’s time we get married.”  

She looked back at him, a soft smile on her lips. With all that love he was looking at her with reflected in her eyes, she says, “I also think it’s time.”   

As if Tommy knew where his mind was going with this, the scene changed. It once again was the same scene set at a different time. Tommy was late to meeting her at their spot. It was something he regretted to this day. Because instead of finding her sitting there waiting, with her smile that was only reserved for him, he found her by the creek, her closed soaked with water, her skin a ghostly shade and cold to the touch, her lungs filled with water instead of air and yet she looked so peaceful.   

Tommy still feels the pain as he broke down as if it were only yesterday. He doesn’t recall how long he stayed with her out there before bringing her to the hospital. He soon found out she’d been out to their spot hours earlier than they were supposed to meet. Her and her father had a massive fight and she needed to get away. Their spot was always a place she could spent hours at, reading, drawing, and just being with herself, clearing her head.   

Unfortunately, this time, her father had followed her out to the creek. Things got physical and he overpowered and drowned her in the creek. Instead of taking her to the hospital, he left her there for Tommy to find in some sick twist of paranoia, blaming him for taking his daughter away from him.  

Police ruled her drowning accidental despite all the evidence pointing to it not being that. It would be almost ten years later when justice would finally be served by Tommy’s own hand, what he had been through during the war, adding to the feeling of nothing as he put a bullet through Y/N’s father’s head.   

The scene shifts once more but this time they’re back to the first scene, her body is no longer laying on the creek bed.   

“Can you do me a favour?” Y/N asks him, breaking the somber silence that had fallen between them  

He nods and she stands on her tip toes to whisper something in his ear, before she shoves him into the cold water.  

Tommy wakes up from the dream with a jolt. He’s had the same dream almost every night since her death but this time the ending had changed. She had asked something of him, and he promised to fulfil it.  

Later that night, Tommy made his way to the field where their spot is. He could never bring himself to come back out here after she died. This is his first time back but this time he wasn’t alone. Sitting beside him on the log, is his 13-year-old daughter, Sophie.   

He pulls out the photographs that he has of Y/N. “See this place Sophie, this place is a very special place to me and your mother. Not only did we meet here, we also had many special moments here.” He starts handing her the photos, she’s seen many times of Y/N. Sophie had only been 2 when her mother was killed. That day, Sophie had been with Polly. “Your mother loved this spot, especially at night,” he continues as the tree begins to light up. “This is the reason why.”   

“The fireflies?” she asks, seemingly just intrigued by them as her mother was. 

In the faint glow of the fireflies and the moon above, he can see Y/N, smiling that smile reserved only for her little family. She blows them a kiss before she turns around and disappears into the darkness. 

“The fireflies,” He confirms, smiling down at his daughter. 

TAGGED: @chapter-in-my-old-diary - @hanawrites404 - @goblinjnr - @halsteadbrasil - @alexxavicry - @rainydayteacups

BOLD means your profile didn't come up when I tried to tag you. Sometimes it links when the post is posted but I don't know if you still get the notifications. Let me know if you get the notification. Here is a post that could help: WHY OTHERS CAN'T TAG YOUR BLOG

#acewritesfics repost #thomas shelby x reader #tommy shelby #thomas shelby #peaky blinders #peaky blinders x reader #tommy shelby x reader #peaky blinders imagines #tommy shelby imagines

[foundmywei]

Buddie Fanfic Recs 1

Here are my favorite buddie fics! This post includes 40 of them, go to Part 2 for more~

10k words or under

the wood marked for your fire by hattalove

(10,264 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

“Chim. Weird question?” Chimney’s chair creaks. Buck cranes his head over the back of the couch and watches him straighten up, pop his back, close the folder. “You only ever ask me weird questions,” he says, and then crosses the loft to sit in one of the armchairs. He levels Buck with a look that’s way too knowing for the amount of words they’ve exchanged. “What’s up?” He takes a breath. “What does it feel like to be a dad?” in which buck is used to wanting things he's not allowed to have; it's just that he never thought being a father would be one of them.

but, baby, watching you blush by calvingseason

(10,100 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

Eddie opens his mouth. Closes it. Finally, he settles on, “You told your parents you’re married? To a man?” Chimney and Hen both glance at him with twin looks that clearly mean he’s on his own with telling the rest of the story. Which—they had no problem teasing and joking about it three seconds ago, but now that Buck has to really get to the heart of the issue, they’re leaving it to him? Go fucking figure. “I told my parents,” Buck says, rubbing at the bridge of his nose with closed eyes, “that I’m married to you.” or, buck and eddie go to hershey for buck's high school reunion. the only problem? everyone thinks that they're married.

take my hand (take my everything) by cnomad

(10,307 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

When Buck has another near death experience, he decides the smartest thing to do is update his will. It's not a big deal, really—he just wants to take care of the people who matter most to him: Eddie and Chris. But to Eddie? To Eddie that's a pretty huge deal.

for all the perfect things i doubt by extasiswings

(5,199 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

Evan Buckley is really good in bed. Sometimes he wishes he wasn’t.

it was you, love by hammersmiths

(6,673 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

Eddie doesn’t realise the pattern until Karen says, “You’re collecting us like Pokémon.” “What, Wilsons?” Eddie says. He’s mostly distracted by Christopher on the couch, who is with Denny showing Miles, Hen and Karen’s newest foster, how to play Animal Crossing on his Switch. Miles is already developing the same starry-eyed look in his eyes Christopher himself gets around Buck. “You certainly don’t make it hard.” “Not Wilsons, dummy,” Karen says. “Lesbians.” Which is—not what Eddie was expecting her to say. “Uh. What?” or, Eddie befriends May and Linda at dispatch. Then realises some stuff.

you remind me of home (oh, baby, merry christmas) by catchingpapermoons

(7,247 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

“Buck, just come here,” Eddie says, and Buck feels his heart start to pound. “Do you need me to come get you?” “Oh.” He takes another deep breath. “You’re sure?” Eddie laughs. “Like Christopher won’t be over the moon that you’re here.” “For a month, Eddie.” “So?” -- or, Buck has to live with Eddie for a month, which would be fine if he wasn't in love with the guy.

one of the few things by thatnerdemryn

(7,222 words | General Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

“I want someone who’s going to take care of him, love him just as I would without babying him or making him feel like he can’t do things, you know? I want someone who is going to fight for him, not against him, who would literally go through hell for him because he deserves it--” Eddie cut himself off, but Hen didn’t need him to continue. “You want it to be Buck.” Maybe she should’ve been more surprised or she should’ve asked the question instead of saying it so surely and causing the bit of panic that erupted in Eddie’s eyes, but it was obvious in everything Eddie was expressing. Or five times that Eddie tells someone else that Buck is Christopher's legal guardian plus one time he finally tells Buck.

someday soon i'll make you mine by lecornergirl

(2,710 words | General Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

"I didn't raise him to be this dramatic, you know," Eddie mutters as they listen to Christopher making his way down the hallway to make his entrance. "He gets this from you."  Eddie doesn't seem to think there's anything unusual about what he's just said, but something warm blooms in Buck's chest. He gets this from you. His artificial, arbitrary line in the sand between parent and not is blurring once again. 

you can start a family who will always show you love by fleetinghearts

(8,185 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

“Yeah, yeah, he’s—he’s my kid, he’s my kid,” Buck tells her, tripping over his words in the effort to get this whole process to hurry the fuck up so he can see Chris. There’s the sound of something hitting the floor from behind him, followed by what might be plastic bouncing off the shiny hospital tiles. The person at the desk looks up in surprise, over Buck’s shoulder, and he turns to look too. Eddie’s standing there, Styrofoam cup rolling at his feet, coffee splattered all down the bottom of his faded blue jeans. The plastic lid of the cup skitters over the tile before coming to a stop a few feet away. He looks like someone punched him in the gut, absolutely shellshocked, something Buck can’t quite read behind the startled expression on his face. or, buck's looking for something, and the diazes let him know he already has it

can't see anyone but you by allyasavedtheday

(4,967 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

“Besides,” he says, clearing his throat. “Once I’m on the date, there’s no beating me. I know how to treat a date right.” Buck tilts his head to the side, his cocky smirk re-emerging as he appraises Eddie. “Wanna put your money where your mouth is, cowboy?” “What?” “Let’s go on a date,” Buck says like it’s obvious. Eddie splutters through some attempt at a response but Buck carries on speaking before he can come up with something to say. “You show me your best date moves and I’ll show you my best date moves and whoever’s better doesn’t have to pay for dinner.” * Post 6x17, Buck and Eddie decide to go on a practice date. It goes exactly how you think it would.

something to hold onto by foxwatson

(5,185 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

There’s about a palm’s width of distance between Eddie’s knee and Buck’s thigh, where they’re both sitting on Eddie’s couch. It would barely take any movement at all for Eddie to just nudge his leg over a little further, press their knees together and let his rest there. or the one where frank tells eddie he should work on letting himself want things, and eddie starts by cuddling with buck

accidents happen ( but i will love you on purpose) by withmeornotatall

(4,425 words | General Audiences | Chapters: 171)

"Buck..." Eddie says lowly. "Did you already put a load of laundry in?" "I had nothing to do whilst Chris was doing his math homework," he explains himself, turning back to Eddie. "And my workout stuff smelt so bad, Eddie. I almost cried." "Buck, let me do the groceries then—" "No, Eddie, its fine." Buck shakes his head resolutely. "You know I love shopping, especially with Chris. And beside, you still have to do the light load and then fold it all up. Even split of chores, I promise." Buck wonders if Hen and Chim ever split their errands on their days off, before Karen and Maddie. (OR: buck kisses eddie, goes grocery shopping with christopher, then realises he's in love with eddie, in that order)

I-10 by sunryder

(6,997 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

Instead of taking the 1-40 through Nashville back in 2012, Buck took the I-10 along the southern border. But once you were in West Texas, all roads led to El Paso. There was no getting out of the state without passing through it. Evan considered inevitability a pretty damn good analogy for Eddie Diaz. (Where Buck literally takes a different road and meets Eddie a few years early.)

baby, you were my picket fence by spaceprincessem

(6,179 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

Buck is all in. He’s one-hundred percent, give em everything he’s got, will do anything Maddie asks— “You can’t tell anyone,” Maddie suddenly becomes so serious Buck feels like he has whiplash. He blinks a few times, brow furrowed, “Well, yeah I know that.” “No, Buck,” Maddie leans forward covering his hand with her own, “I mean it. No one else is allowed to know about this.” Buck opens his mouth, but Maddie reads him like the traitorous sister that she is and cuts him off by saying, “That includes Eddie.” “Maddie,” Buck whines, and he’s very well aware at how pathetic it sounds, “that’s not fair! It’s — he’s — it’s Eddie!” [or Maddie wants to propose to Chimney. She gets Buck involved. Buck can't tell anyone. He somehow proposes to Eddie instead.]

all i know since yesterday by sibylsleaves

(6,082 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

Buck knows what he’s doing might be constituted as ‘a bit creepy,’ but he can’t really help it. He has a book in his lap, so it’s not like he’s just staring at Eddie, but—ok, so he hasn’t actually read a page in over twenty minutes, and in the meantime he has watched his best friend chop like six different kinds of vegetables to go in Bobby’s ragu. “How’s it going, Buck?” Hen asks, flinging herself into the adjacent arm chair. “Fine,” Buck says, barely looking at her. “But something’s up with Eddie.” or, Eddie flirts. Buck worries.

Break Glass in Case of Emergency by Beforeastorm

(2,894 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

Eddie’s mind wandered to the red folder, tucked high up in the back of his closet. He recalled back to a conversation he had with Buck, almost a year ago at this point:

“It’s an insurance policy; a break glass in case of emergency. A trump card.” “One I really hope we’ll never have to use.” “But if we have to, we’ll be really glad we did this.” When hospital policy doesn't allow Chris, as an unrelated minor, to visit a comatose post-lightning strike Buck in the ICU, Eddie has a solution. Unfortunately, that involves sharing some pretty personal information in a waiting room filled with the 118.

like a heartbeat racing by elisela

(3,600 words | General Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

Buck can do this. He can totally do this, it’s just a favor for Maddie, and what’s he good at if not helping out his sister? Sure, doing a cake tasting when you’re neither the bride nor the groom is a little … unorthodox … but it’s cake. He loves cake, he specifically ate fewer carbs all week so he could pig out to his heart’s content on cake, delicious, fluffy cake, and he can do this. “I can’t do this,” he blurts out the night before, pacing the apartment with Eddie on speakerphone. “Maddie said she told them I would be coming so at least I don’t have to pretend to be Chim, but how pathetic is it to show up to a cake tasting alone?”

you were the wilderness I crossed into by rowan_wood

(9,218 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

“Truth.” “How many times have you fallen in love?” The table was quiet, but Eddie didn’t take long to think it over. “Three times.” “With who?” Lucy asked. “Nope, not part of the question,” he smiled at Lucy, easy as anything. Buck tried to count quickly in his head, the math not adding up. “My turn, right?” Eddie asked the group. “Chim. Truth or dare.” or: the 118 has a 24 hour shift, and zero calls. The firefam spends it playing games, and everyone takes the opportunity to tell Buck just how much they love him.

11k - 40k words

The Family We Choose by maybeamystery

(20,468 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

“Hey, bud!” says the scowling man, suddenly all smiles. The smile changes his face into something beautiful; Kelly realizes that this kid has not one but two hot dads. As he’s swept into the arms of his other dad and they start off in the direction of the nearest ice cream shop, Kelly says to the curly-haired man, “You two have an adorable son.” [10 times Buck is mistaken for Christopher's dad and 2 times it's not a mistake. Contains major spoilers for 5x14]

a leaf falls on loneliness by iimpossible_things

(11,163 words | Not Rated | Chapters: 1/1)

Buck doesn’t think that if he were to say, “I’m in a bad place”, that anyone would turn him away. Really, he doesn’t. The 118 has too many good, kind people for that. But every time he wants to open his mouth, to say something, to reach out to Eddie or Bobby or Hen or Chim, he hears Eddie yelling, “you’re exhausting.” —you’re exhausting, you’re exhausting, you’re exhausting— So each day he does his job and he laughs and he jokes and he pretends he’s the care-free goofball he’s always been. And each day he packs away his bruises and his worries, takes them home to his empty loft with its quiet rooms, and licks his wounds in silence.

Buy Back the Secrets by allyasavedtheday

(18,808 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 3/3)

He casts his gaze to the right, to the voice he’d heard a minute ago and the hand still on his shoulder. And, well. Okay. So Buck may have just been unconscious for an indeterminable length of time but he doesn’t think he’s exaggerating when he says the guy leaning over his bedside is one of the most attractive people he’s seen in a long time. Especially when his face splits into a smile that rivals the brightness of the hospital lights that almost just fucking blinded Buck a second ago. “Welcome back, hotshot,” the guy says and it sounds fond – familiar – and Buck honestly has no idea who this guy is. His brown hair is dishevelled on top of his head and his eyes look tired but then Buck notices the LAFD t-shirt so- alright. Someone from the firehouse, maybe? But he’s pretty sure he’d remember a face like that. * After getting hurt on a call, Buck wakes up thinking it's 2018. AKA Buck can't remember who Eddie is but he's pretty sure everyone's lying when they say they're "just friends."

you're my whole house by hammersmiths

(11,958 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

Eddie shrugs. “Christopher mentioned to Daniel that Buck and I are partners. I mean, sure, it’s a little weird that she invited him over as well, but—” “Partners,” Hen interrupts, “like work partners?” Eddie and Buck glance at each other. “Uh, yeah?” Eddie says. “What other type of partner?” Hen stares at them for a moment, before she bursts out laughing. “You dumbasses. She thinks you’re together.”

the distance to the stars by cloudydaisies

(27,258 words | General Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

“Didn’t know you were seeing someone.” Buck just laughs. Like, honest to god giggles. Eddie is stuck fighting off doubly massive waves of butterflies and confusion, all while Buck just gazes down at him. “That’s cute,” he hears Buck mumble, just before climbing into the truck, calling Eddie after him. - or, everyone knows eddie is dating buck except for eddie, literally.

The Definition of Love and All Things Ineffable by ElvenSorceress

(29,351 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 3/3)

Maddie asks him, like she’s been waiting to ask him, “Does Christopher call you ‘Uncle Buck’?” It’s… it sounds so casual. Nonchalant. Maybe even reasonable? And like there’s something she’s trying to figure out, but why would Chris ever call Buck his uncle? He’s Jee-Yun’s uncle. “No,” Buck answers. “Why?” “He called me Aunt Maddie.” She tips her head curiously, brows knit together. “You’re far closer to him than I am. I thought if I’m his aunt, you’d have to be his uncle. Why wouldn’t you be Uncle Buck?” There are pieces of chicken mushed into Jee’s fingers and carrots sticking to the bib draped over her front and what might be peas caught in her hair. And Buck doesn’t really have an answer. It’s just. It’s wrong. He’s not Chris’ Uncle Buck. Maybe he should be? Maybe he’s supposed to be? Or maybe Chris doesn’t call him that directly because he’s always been BFF Buck or His Buck. He shrugs and uneasiness settles in his stomach. What more could he ever be to Chris but an uncle? ~~~ In which Buck processes his breakup, learns his place in his family, has a huge crisis of sexuality, and finds the truth about love beating in his own heart.

Didn't think you meant it by EtoileGarden

(33,519 words | Explicit | Chapters: 12/12)

“Y’know,” he said. Shrugged again. “That last call? I kind of thought I’d have that by now.” “What,” Eddie raised his eyebrows at him. “A roof collapsing on you?” Buck grunted, elbowed Eddie. Lightly, because he did appreciate the humour in Eddie’s voice. “No,” he said. “Just - married.”

drink the river dry by Rianne

(32,215 words | Explicit | Chapters: 1/1)

It wasn’t until they were discussing his discharge paperwork and painkiller schedules that it really sunk in for Eddie that Buck would be staying with him and Christopher. That he would be around 24/7 except for his shifts at work. That he’ll sleep on the couch, where he’s been sleeping for days now to look after Christopher. The worst part is that it’s necessary—Eddie isn’t going to be able to do a damn thing for himself for the next couple of weeks. He’s lucky if he can put a shirt on by himself a month from now. Yeah, that’s going to be a problem. Or: Eddie gets shot, breaks up with his girlfriend, and pines like there’s no tomorrow.

Despite it all, Because of it all by kitkatpancakestack

(23,747 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

He puts the truck in park in front of Eddie’s childhood home. Christopher shifts in the back, already unbuckling his seatbelt. Eddie is frozen with his jaw set, eyes hard and unblinking as they bore holes through the windshield. Buck was here once before, after that relief trip to Texas, but he is under no illusions that this time will be similar. For one, he doesn’t have the buffer of other firefighters to hide behind. This isn’t a visit that will last a couple hours, and so the sugary, superficial niceties will eventually crumble when it’s mid-way through the week and he’s still hanging around. There is also the shadow of everything that has happened since the wildfires skulking behind them, waiting to be found out. But, this is Eddie and Christopher, needing him to have it together, so he paints on a smile and squeezes Eddie's knee and slides out of the truck. * Eddie's dad gets sick. Buck goes with him and Christopher to El Paso.

you light the spark in my bonfire heart by woodchoc_magnum

(22,669 words | Mature | Chapters: 2/2)

A post-5b fic, in which Buck slowly realises that he's been in love with Eddie this whole time.

some day i'll fall into you by allyasavedtheday

(13,467 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

I got you. I got you. I got you.

“You said that,” he says, clearing his throat around the emotion clogging his windpipe. “In the firetruck. I heard you.”

Buck leans back enough that they’re looking at each other. The hand he’d had on the back of Eddie’s head moves to the side of his neck, his thumb pressing lightly against the hinge of Eddie’s jaw.

Eddie swallows around the lump in his throat and meets his gaze. “I believed you then.”

Buck sighs like the breath has been punched out of him and leans forward to press their foreheads together. “Believe me now,” he murmurs and Eddie’s not sure if it’s a plea or a request but he finds himself nodding anyway.

“Okay.”

*

A look at how Eddie deals with his recovery post-4x14.

I Know a Place We Can Go by maybeamystery

(15,580 words | Explicit | Chapters: 1/1)

“Well, that was heartwarming,” Chimney says loudly. “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s go save some lives. In WeHo. Where Buck goes to gay bars because he is apparently a bisexual now.” “I’ve always been a bisexual,” Buck sniffs. “You just didn’t notice.” “There are gay bars outside of WeHo,” Hen adds. “Just saying.” [5 times Buck and Eddie get hit on in West Hollywood and 1 time they definitely do not]

Tick Tick Boom by ChasetheWindTouchtheSky

(30,439 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 1/1)

“Did you know if you put a frog in water and slowly bring it to boiling, it won’t hop out?” Chris is chattering as Buck makes a quick dinner while Eddie argues with his gas company on the phone. He can hear the occasional swear word in Spanish as his voice raises. Eddie doesn’t like to raise his voice around Christopher – the very thought makes Buck want to kiss him full on the mouth – so he decided to take it to the living room while Chris sits with his homework in the kitchen and Buck cooks. “Hmm?” Buck asks, unable to fully pull himself out of Bobby’s baked mac and cheese recipe. It took him years, but he finally convinced the man to write it down. Bobby’s handwriting was juvenile at best on a good day, but this was nearly unreadable. Buck wonders if he did that on purpose. “Frogs?” “Yeah!” Chris states. “My teacher said that if you put a frog in a pot, you have to make sure it’s not immediately boiling. You put them in water and then slowly raise the temperature and they won’t realize what’s happening. Then once they realize, they have no place to go. They can’t jump out.” * S6 Spec: Buck decides he doesn’t need therapy, reverts to some bad habits, and explodes. Or, the Breakdown Fic.

40k+ words

To Build a Home We Deconstruct Our Rituals by letmetellyouaboutmyfeels

(44,248 words | Explicit | Chapters: 11/11)

After the shooting, Eddie realizes he needs to put some things in place. Like who will get his assets if he dies. Who will speak for him if he ends up in a coma. What might happen if his family contests Buck's guardianship. Luckily, he's got a simple easy-peasy solution that won't result in insanity, catastrophe, or heartbreak:

Marry Buck.

the mortifying ordeal of being known by Polish_Amber

(60,866 words | General Audiences | Chapters: 7/7

The thing was, the 118 was full of gossips. Eddie had been at the station less than a week before Hen and Chim wrangled details about his “hot young thing” from him (“Buck is only 4 years younger than me, he is not a ‘hot young thing’!” Eddie complained.) And Bobby was open about his worries for his son’s lack of direction and the secrets he appears to be keeping (“I just wish I could help Evan find the thing that gives him purpose,” Bobby lamented.) It just made it all the more ridiculous (and horrifying) when Eddie realizes he’s been dating his Captain’s son this whole time (“Defiling his baby,” Chimney cackled, because he clearly wanted Eddie murdered.) -- Or, the AU where miscommunication abounds as Eddie seeks advice about his new relationship, Bobby despairs over his adopted son's career prospects and his refusal to talk about it, and Evan Buckley-Nash juggles training at the fire academy, building a family with his new boyfriend, and trying to work out how to tell his overprotective dad that he's already chosen the life he wants, actually. It takes a goddamn tsunami, of all things, to get the story straight.

Stuck on Fast Forward (Throw Away the Blueprint) by extasiswings

(42,884 words | Explicit | Chapters: 9/9)

“Sounds like the problem is you think casual sex with a stranger or finding someone new to date are your only options.” Eddie’s brow furrows. “Aren’t they?” “I mean, there’s always…someone you already know. Who you’re already comfortable with.” “Because my pool of male friends who are single and who would be interested in having sex with me has so many options?” “Well, I don’t know about many, but you only need one,” Buck points out. “And who would that be?” “Me, of course.” [Or: Frank gives Eddie therapy homework, Eddie misunderstands the assignment, and Buck is just a really supportive friend...right?]

Don't Take My Sunshine Away by SevenSoulmates

(113,785 words | Mature | Chapters: 21/21)

Eddie is in a coma, and Buck blames himself. He should've been there to protect Eddie. The least he can do now is to be there for Christopher, even if Buck doesn't know if he has it in him to be a parent without Eddie. Buck makes Eddie a deal: he'll fight for Christopher in the real world, while Eddie fights to wake up. Eddie's come a long way since those bleak days in El Paso, listening to his parents comments about how he's not fit to be a father. How Christopher doesn't deserve to be dragged down by the likes of Eddie and Shannon. Eddie thought after moving to LA, he and Chris had escaped that. When he wakes up and finds Buck neck-deep in a legal battle with his parents for custody of Christopher, Eddie must face his own mistakes, and find the confidence to stand up for himself against his absolute worst nightmare.

i think i belong to you (hope you feel the same) by Ran

(41,111 words | Teen And Up Audiences | Chapters: 4/4)

Buck’s taking him to therapy, where he knows Eddie’s therapist’s name and Eddie’s entire history with him; Buck, who let himself into Eddie’s house with food from Eddie’s favorite coffee shop with coffee crafted perfectly for Eddie’s tastes; Buck, who apparently has a book on Eddie’s coffee table with so many dog-eared pages it’s like any interruption at Eddie’s house is worth putting it down. Buck, who touches him with a devotion as palpable as all the little pieces of himself scattered throughout Eddie's home. Eddie thinks he might have solved his own question, but he’s afraid to look at the answer too closely—because he’s fairly certain his best friend is in love with him, and Eddie can’t remember a single thing about him. Or, the one where Eddie wakes up from the shooting only to think he was hurt in a certain 7.1 earthquake years prior and learns to appreciate the life he's created for himself since then.

Overcome by Spicysauce

(53,697 words | Mature | Chapters: 10/10)

“I’m not leaving you, Buck.” Eddie says with a tired sigh, like he’s struggling with the weight of the world and Buck’s the one who put it there. “Just switching jobs, that’s all.” That’s all?, Buck wants to scream, because every relationship he has is tied to the job in some way, and first Maddie left, and then it was Chimney, and now it’s Eddie. But he doesn’t scream, because that would be a little bit too tragic, even for him, and nods instead. Bites his tongue. Pretends that he isn't falling apart where he's stood. *** Or, set post season 5A, where Buck is alone, and angry, and exhausted, but mostly terrified that everyone he loves is slowly slipping away from him.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Buck by sunryder

(50,287 words | Mature | Chapters: 13/13)

Red is dying and Buck is fucked up about it. Not just about losing a friend, but about ending up like Red: dying alone without the people who used to be his team. Buck doesn’t want to go out like that. It might take him a few panic attacks, a road trip, and a book recommendation, but Buck is going to tidy his life up.

let the world have its way with you by fleetinghearts

(54,477 words | Explicit | Chapters: 1/1)

“It’s just that—I died,” Buck continues, voice unsteady enough that Eddie wonders if this is the first time he’s acknowledged that out loud. “I died, and there’s so much more. There’s so much more I want to do, things I don’t even know I want to do yet, and I almost had the chance to have and live them taken away. I don’t want to die and regret missing out on everything else, Eddie.” “So let’s make a list,” Eddie says. “Let’s do them.” or, a bucket list that’s really about buck needing to make a change and an eddie who’s ready to do anything to see him fall in love with life again. it takes some crossing off for eddie to realise—the thing at the top of the list in his own heart? it’s been right here all along

you and me by woodchoc_magnum

(55,411 words | Mature | Chapters: 2/2)

An alternate ending to Season 6, where Buck realises that what he's been searching for has been right in front of him the whole time.

#buddie #evan buckley #eddie diaz #christopher diaz #9 1 1 #911 abc #911 fanfic #buck x eddie #buddie fic rec

[loganbcrnes]

you are the bane of my existence and the object of my desires

pairing: Captain Syverson x fem!reader

Summary: Feral Alpha Sy moves to a cabin owned by one of his old army buddy Logan. over time a relationship with his Omega neighbor blossoms. One morning hes thrown into a rut and you help him through it.

Tags: 18+, ABO, feral Alpha Syverson, Omega fem!reader, smut, dom/sub, knotting, orgasm, angry feral Sy, hard sex, pussy eating, oral, language, slightly connected to the MCU, mention of The Red Room, though a different interpretation of it, mention of Logan Howlett (Wolverine)

words: 3.9k

Authors note: hiii, finally written an abo sy oneshot. there isnt enough abo fics in the Henry Cavill universe, but there should be imo. this is pure filth just so yall r warned. A bit of backstory on my version of Captain Syverson. Hes originally born in Norway, but moved to Texas, USA  when he was 2 years old when his father got a good job offer. hence why his name is Bjørn Syverson, though throughout this fic he just goes by Sy. It is mentioned that he has brothers which are August Walker, Walter Marshall, Sherlock Holmes and Clark Kent, all were separated from birth, but after the death of Sy's parents, he united with them. hopefully in future fics, i can delve more into their backstory. :)

Readers ethnicity and body type isn't mentioned as i want everyone to feel included, just that she is European.

For a few passing seconds, you’re frozen with fear. It was drilled into you at a young age that a feral alpha in rut were dangerous. That you should never let yourself be alone with one, in case the unthinkable happened. But this isn’t just some feral alpha, this is Sy, who takes care of you with a gentleness you never thought you would get, a gentleness you never thought anyone could posses, let alone a feral alpha.

Feral alphas weren’t rare, but they weren’t exactly common either. Feralness mostly only occurs in male Alphas that have experienced traumatic events in their life, mostly veterans. And unfortunately governments are unable to equip the right tools to help these men. Since WW2 they have become more and more common, but scientists are never able to find the right cure and treatments to help them.

They say the only thing that would reduce the symptoms are compatible omegas, preferably mated. betas can too, but not to the extent omegas can. Eventually they end up going rogue if they are apart of a pack, if not, well they distance themselves from society, they seek out to the wilderness where they can be in their true form.

Now with Sy, being a veteran and POW, made him more prone to go feral. When he was saved from an old unit he was apart of, he began his recovery in a hospital for vets and feral alphas.

Things weren’t easy in the beginning, losing a leg and not having his own independence put him on edge all the time, but once he got released, he didn’t hesitate to move to the mountains in Canada. An old army buddy and alpha mate to his brothers, Logan, owned a couple of cabins and lent one to him. His brothers were against it, continually reminding him that their pack could take care of him and his needs. They didn’t mind Sy being with their mates, but it wasn’t them he didn’t trust, it was himself.

Sy would hate himself for evermore if he hurt them, he didn’t want to risk it. When Sy moved to the small cabin, he noticed he had a neighbor not so far away. He avoided you as much as possible in the beginning, but over time he started chatting with you, walking past each other on morning runs with their dogs, and in the end they became friends.

He learned that you moved out here because you wanted to start over. You had a difficult childhood from losing your mother to cancer and moving to a foreign country not knowing anyone nor the language. And when you thought your life was getting a better hold of itself, everything came crumbling down when you were kidnapped and taken into human trafficking.

It took 4 years before you were free from The Red Room. A place where they would experiment on Omegas. You spent a year in a mental hospital for omegas to recover. You were alone with no friends and family. You were in a state of depression and hopelessness. You wanted to get away from everything, so you discovered an ad of cabins for sale in Canada and set foot.

That was now 2 years ago, and don’t regret your decision for a second. You both took solace in each other, having similar experiences made the connection between you even stronger. It was nice having someone that wouldn’t tiptoe around you or took pity in you.

It was hard getting close to Sy in the beginning. Some days he was more closed off than others, but you understood it, and remained patient. Over time friendly feelings turned into romantic and you knew that Sy would never hurt you and had to remind him that occasionally.

His brothers came for a visit one time to give him a talking, convincing him to let himself feel love for once.

—

“Sy?” You whisper, trying to shift in his arms once more. The scent of leather and wet forest reeked throughout the room, has slick already wetting your underwear, far more than you’re used to, and you know straight away hes gone into rut. You’ve never shared your heat with anyone before. The idea of being so vulnerable around another person always filled you with dread especially after what happened, but even with the looming rut of the Alpha that holds you in his strong arms, all you can feel is a sense of belonging.

“Alpha, wake up.”

Despite your soft tone, Sy wakes with a harsh gasp and digs his fingers into your soft flesh on instinct like he’s trying to drag you impossibly closer to him. A surprised moan falls from his lips as he grinds up against your ass. “Oh, god -”

“Shh, it’s okay, Alpha.” You coo, reaching back to carefully run your fingers through his shaved head. “It’s okay, I’m here.” “Fuck, ya’ smell so good…” Sy groans at your scent of sweet ripe peaches and you give a discontented cry at the idea of not getting to help your Alpha through his rut. “If I continue, I won’t be able to stop ‘mega.” He growls. “I don’t want you to stop,” You whine, carefully pressing back against him. There’s nothing more to Bjørn Syverson than his careful, shielded control over his instincts, and as much as you love that about him, you want nothing more than for him to let go and pound you mercifully into your bed. “Let me take care of you, Alpha. Please?” “I could claim you.” He grits out, his words and actions stark contrasts of each other as he keeps rolling his hips in sharp movements. “I-I can’t take that choice from you, sweet ‘mega.” “This is my choice, you’re my choice.” You’ve never heard yourself sound so sincere and desperate at the same time, but you can feel the tightening need curling low in your belly. His scent is singing through your veins, lighting up your inner Omega in a way you’ve never felt. “I’ve never wanted anyone before you, but this… this is right." You’re on your back before you can even blink, Sy’s strong hands pinning you beneath him. The expectation was for him to rush into a devastating kiss but he sat back slightly and simply… looked at you. He studies your face intently, looking at your beautiful reddened cheeks splattered with freckles and the odd spots from your unbalance hormones, an issue that has been bugging you for the past few weeks. He watches as your hips grind up in search of relief. When he finally leans down, you try to meet him halfway but he dodges your kiss to bury his face in your neck. A groan vibrates through his chest and into yours as he inhales deeply, and you happily curl your fingers in his hair to hold him there. “Oh, honey…” Sy kisses your pulse and nuzzles against you, his beard the perfect rough contrast to the soft press of his lips. “You goin’ into heat, ‘mega? Just needed you’re Alpha, didn’t ya?” “Yes, please!” You beg, your nails clawing his head, dragging him down to slot your lips with his in a sloppy kiss. Every touch, every hint of his scent, every breathy groan that came from his lips makes that warmth spread through your entire body. Sy kisses you eagerly, caging you underneath him. He feels impossibly bigger above you and your inner Omega blooms with comfort and love. So you let yourself revel in it, no longer fighting off the instincts that beckon for you. Sy almost yelps in surprise when your thighs hook around his waist to drag him down closer but he follows your lead happily and goes to grind his clothed cock against you - just like you were expecting. Mischief soars through your chest as you twist and grapple until he’s underneath you, your mind egging you to make him prove his strength. A flash of concern darts through those pretty blue eyes of his, as if he’s worried you’ve suddenly changed your mind, but the sight of your playful grin just makes him smile in return. He lets you grab at him for a moment, barely bothering to bat your hands away as you try - and fail - to pin his arms at his sides. Amusement rolls through him. Oh, his sweet, fierce Omega. If you want him to show you his true worth as your Alpha, he’s going to deliver. Sy grabs you by your waist and drags you beneath him once more, a low growl ripping through his lips as you erupt into excited laughter. Both of your wrists are secured in one of his hands where he pins them to the mattress above your head and you feel so… helpless. The man above you is the picture of Alpha - chest heaving with every breath, eyes wild with need yet perfectly in control, gray briefs tented with his impressive thick length. He exudes power and you can’t get enough. “Gonna be good for me, Omega?” Sy rumbles. “Yes! So good, I promise.” You’re on the verge of begging, but before the honeyed words can drip from your lips, Sy quickly and carefully strips your pajamas from your body before ripping his off as well. There’s no stopping the garbled groan you give at the sight he makes above you. With your newly freed hands, you let your fingers trail down his hairy chest and stomach, watching enraptured as goosebumps follow your touch. “Good girl,” He guides your hand to his thick engorged cock and rolls his hips to thrust into your fist, not bothering to hide the way he practically purrs. You can see the bright intensity that burns through his entire being in each clench of his jaw and ripple of his muscles. He’s holding back, though, tempering his movements like he’s afraid he’ll scare you. Feral alphas don’t have a good reputation, they have little control over themselves. They take what they want, leaving nothing behind. But you trust Sy, and you don’t trust easily, especially with alphas, but Sy is different. You watch him as he slowly climbs down your body, his lips never leaving your skin as he trails his hot kisses on you all the way down. He parts your legs further so he could get more comfortable between them, then when he presses a kiss at your nether lips, his fingers parting your folds so he could find your slick entrance and give a long, hungry lick right at where your desire is centered until you cry out. “Taste so fucking sweet ‘mega”. Sy growls as he licks your clit.

“So fucking hot, Darlin’.” Sy growls. “Been wanting to taste this sweet pussy since the day I met ya’. Kept holding myself back for so long, but not anymore ‘mega.” He said looking up at you.

You moan at the intensity of his words. “Yes!, please alpha don’t stop” you desperately beg him. Sy doesn’t waste any more time and goes down on you once again. His whole body is stretched out, his feet planted on the floor to hold himself in his position. You have never seen anything more beautiful.

You hear him moan and you open your eyes to look down at him, to see that his eyes are closed, totally blissed out as he sucks on your cunt, licking your entrance as if it’s the last meal he eats. You feel the hard tips of Sy’s fingers right at your opening, you moan when you feel two fingers parting your hot pussy, your walls instantly begin spasming around them, sucking them inside your depth.

He continues to tease you with his fingers for a few more seconds and then the warm rasp of his tongue sends a series of shivers trembling through your body. He licks across your sensitive bud leisurely, biding his time with his eyes on you to take in every single reaction you are giving him through every lick, every swirl of his tongue. He flicks his tongue from around your clit, down to your slit, moving back and forth as he continues to plunge his fingers into you. You begin to shake as you are nearing the edge. He must have felt it, because he continues to lick at your cunt, slick pouring out as he slurps it all up, growls deeply against your pussy. “Come for me, little ‘mega” You let out a whimper at his command but feel helpless to resist him. You can’t hold it in anymore as you come to your release. “Alpha!”. You moan out as you arch your back, Sy continues to milk through your orgasm and makes sure to gather every drop of cum.

It took a few minutes to come down from your intense orgasm. Sy moves up pressing soft kisses to your cheeks and down to your neck. “You did so good for me, Honey.” He praises as you. “Mmmm” you hum, keening to the praises.

After a few more moments, you’re a whimpering mess again, grinding your clit against Sy’s muscular thigh. Sy growls as he pulls back, “Alpha,” You whisper, cupping his jaw gently to get him to meet your eyes and drawing him close for one last soft kiss before you guide him to scent your neck. The pheromones that pour off of you has his breath stuttering. “Don’t hold back.” A desperate growl fills the air as Sy manhandles you onto your hands and knees, He doesn’t even have to say the words before you’re already presenting yourself for him, your back arching with your face buried in the sheets, and two big hands settle on your thighs to spread you out even more for him with your ass and pussy on full display. Your smell consumes him; all that he can think about is the taste of your arousal on his lips and how badly he needs to be inside you now. “Oh, pretty girl…” Sy groans, trailing his fingers along your slick cunt and smirking at the way you chase his touch with a needy whine. Two thick fingers tease your entrance in slow circles before sinking into you to the knuckle and Sy chuckled darkly as you writhed beneath him. “Gonna feel perfect ‘round my cock, aren’tcha?” “Pl-ease,” You stutter out and Sy seems to take pity in the desperation your voice holds for him. He hushes the disappointed sound you give at the loss of his fingers, his hands massaging at your hips soothingly. The scent of your heat and his rut permeate the air and curl around each other until they’re one, a combination of you both hanging in the air with a sense of finality. Of destiny. Sy knew he was right where he belonged, where he was always supposed to be. He just had to reach out and take it. Twin groans fall from you both when he finally presses his cock against you, only pausing a moment before pushing into you in one long, slow thrust. Fuck, you knew he was big, could tell by the way he fit in your hand alone that it would be a stretch to fit him inside of you, but you didn’t expect… this. To feel so full, like you could feel him in your stomach. Instinct has you arching further into him, enticing him to move, to fuck you quick and hard. A warm hand settles at the nape of your neck and squeezes, holding you firmly to the bed, and your body and mind both melt into a submissive haze. If the authority that he holds in that one simple movement wasn’t enough to have you following his every command, his words that follow definitely would’ve. “Stay still, little Omega.” He growls out, his chest plastered to your back as he settles his large frame over you. The sharp nip of his teeth against your shoulder makes you shudder. “I’ll give you what you need, don’t you worry. Gonna knot this pretty pussy, make you mine.” Sy fucks you just like that - towering over you with his hand clamped on your neck, kissing and licking and biting his fill of your soft skin. You were expecting him to fuck you rough and fast right from the jump, but his first thrusts are slow and precise, and it takes a moment for your heat crazed mind to realize he’s savoring this. He’s taking the time to memorize how your cunt feels around him while he still can, before his rut fully takes him from his careful and calculating self to a pussy-drunk and needy Alpha that wants nothing more than his sweet Omega underneath him. Slapping sounds fill the room as he quickens the pace, your slick coating his cock and making it easy for him to slide in and out of your velvety walls. You can feel his heavy balls slapping against your pussy, you let out pornographic moans and he continues to force your face into the bed by your neck. You’ve always wanted this, craved it ever since you were a hormonal teen, just wanting to be taken apart by a strong alpha. his fingers find your clit. A groan falls from his lips at the way your cunt flutters around him at his stimulation and you feel the first signs of his control crumbling in the way he thrusts into you sharply. “Alpha,” You whine, your voice low and pleading so very softly for him. “Please, I need you, need your knot -” The world falls out from under you as Sy pulls out suddenly, the exact opposite of what you were searching for, but you can’t voice your disdain before you’re on your back, blinking surprised up at a wild feral looking Sy. He doesn’t waste time slamming back inside you, fucking you hard without warning. “Perfect fuckin’ Omega,” Sy spits out like he’s enraged, but you keen beneath him nonetheless, pressing your legs to your chest as pleasure sparks across your skin. “Lettin’ me fill you up, takin’ me just like your s’posed to.” He growls, making you succumb deeper to a submissive state, making it known to Sy he can do whatever he wants, your body is his. Sy bends down sucking on one of your nipples, you moan as even more pleasure fills your body from the sensitivity of your nipples. You look down, watching as his fat cock thrusts in and out of you, his pubic hair getting wet from your slick. His balls tightening with each thrust. Thoughts of him rubbing his balls over your face fills your mind, but was quickly interrupted as Sy slightly changes the position. He holds your body closer, your tits pressed against his sweaty hairy chest. His tip is repeatedly hitting against the sensitive spot deep inside of you, you know he’s not ready to let up just yet, but you’re too on edge to hold on. “Sy, I-I’m gonna–” “I can smell it,” he groans, mouth your neck just above where your bond mark would be as he sucks harshly on it.  A string of cuss words falls from your lips as your eyes clamp shut, relishing in your release as your pussy spasms around his cock. His movements don’t slow either – his pace is still erratic, plummeting into you at an ungodly rate. His hand grips your jaw suddenly, not enough to hurt but enough to get your attention through the haziness overtaking your mind. “Gimme those eyes, thaaaat’s it… you love this, don’tcha? All cock drunk and pretty for me, huh?” The praise washes over you like a salve to your aches and you open your mouth when his thumb drifts over your bottom lip, watching the way his eyes darken as you lick the tip of his thumb. Sy eagerly lets you draw it between your lips, even sliding it in and out like he would if he were fucking your mouth, and he lets out a low, “ah, fuck,” You can feel the flare of his growing knot catching with his every thrust. “Cum for me again, Omega,” His voice carries the undeniable thread of Alpha dominance, a command that cannot be denied even if you wanted to. Your body shakes beneath him as his fingers threaten to send you directly into over-stimulation, unable to keep your eyes open under the fire of pleasure blazing through your body. Sy’s face falls to your neck where your head is thrown back into the pillows and he greedily takes in your pleasure-drenched scent. “That’s my good girl, so fuckin’ good for me. Fuck.” “Sy,” You whimper his name so sweetly as you tangle your fingers in his hair and it sends him over the edge into a devastating orgasm. His growl is more animal than man as his knot locks him inside of you. He buries his head and finds the crook of your neck, breaking the flesh as his sharp teeth sink into your skin, claiming you as his. Screams blow past your lips, your chest tightens in pain, loving and hating the sensation all at once. Relief takes over once his tongue meets the small incisions made on your skin, his saliva filling the holes and alleviating the wounds as he licks up the blood. “That’s it ‘mega. Doing so good for me. So perfect for your Alpha.” Your heart flutters at his claim, have never felt as close to anyone as you do right now. You start to get overwhelmed with emotion as tears begin to fill, the connection between you and Sy binding stronger than ever and you couldn’t be happier. It felt like you were floating in thin air. Your body is unable to focus on any pain right now. Sy sucks the bond mark, easing the pain. “C’mon, ‘mega, bite me. Gotta mark me, too, Darlin’, c’mon,” He urges and for a moment you think your muddled mind is making you hallucinate. It isn’t exactly unheard of, an Alpha accepting their Omega’s mark, but it isn’t common, either. An alpha accepting a bite mark showcases an alpha submission and devotion to their omega. Your heart flutters in your chest as you lean up to kiss his neck before giving him a matching mark, right above his collarbone. Sy lets his mind run on that primal instinct of cleaning and caring for his mate, carefully licking the mark he left seared into your skin. It takes a moment’s shuffling, but Sy shifts until he’s got you settled on his chest to wait out his knot. It’s endearing, the way his hands rub up and down your bare back soothingly. His balloon size knot spurting out warm cum inside of you, you moan at the sensation and Sy growls lightly. Soft kisses slowly turned into licks, you were a little confused “what are you doing?” “Cleaning you up,” he answers calmly, his even more heightened senses finding nothing strange with this method of aftercare. You’re too immersed in your thoughts to question him any further; if this is what his alpha side was telling him to do then so be it. It goes on like that for a few days. In between the desperate bouts of fucking and sucking, Sy insists you let him feed you. Little bites of fruits and the protein rich heat snacks you kept around for this very scenario, held up to your lips by your insistent Alpha. The one time you tried to sneak from your bed while he slept ended with you fucked and knotted over the kitchen island. And even though it was a slightly uncomfortable position to be stuck in… It’s everything you want, everything you’ve ever wanted without even realizing it.

#captain syverson #captain syverson smut #captain syverson fanfiction #captain syverson x reader #alpha captain syverson #captain syverson x fem!reader #henry cavill #henry cavill fanfiction #henry cavill smut #henry cavill x reader #henry cavill x you #henry cavill abo #alpha henry cavill

[seresinhangmanjake]

Birthday Boy

Dad!Jake “Hangman” Seresin x female reader

Summary: It’s Jake’s birthday and you have a very special gift for him.

Warnings: this is just a mega fluff monster (i think, anyway). Jake’s all happy being a dad and being in love with his lady and everything. Maybe cursing. Didn’t double check. Allusion to eventual smut that is not in this fic. Just to be safe:18+

Notes: can be read alone, but contributes to the Oh, Baby world as well. 

Words: 2422

Oh, Baby Masterlist

Masterlist

*turn on notifications for this blog or @seresinhangmanjake-library if you would like to keep up with my writing*

------

Thirty-four. The number was speckled throughout his house. It was strung together as part of a lengthy banner that was taped to his wall; scribbled in green icing across the center of the vanilla cake you’d baked him with an equal number of rainbow-colored candles sticking out the top; and in the form of two massive shiny, floating balloons in the corner of the living room—Rooster’s addition to the decor, supposedly meant to tease Jake but were obviously brought for your daughter, Eve’s, amusement. And the little girl loved them, immediately crawling across the carpet to stare up at the mirror-like mylar that reflected her fascinated face. 

Jake had joked two weeks prior that he was getting old, so you’d taken it upon yourself to plan a party that reminded him of his younger days…his very young days. You’d gone all out, including everything for a kiddie party but the clowns and ponies. 

Initially, you weren’t sure how he’d take the surprise—he could see the worry in your twisted features when you observed his wide eyes and gaping mouth—but Jake only grabbed you around the waist and kissed you until everyone grew bored of watching a couple so lost in themselves. No one had ever quite done anything like this for him before. He’d had birthday parties, sure, plenty as a child, but not a single one after his mid-twenties, and never thrown by a woman he loved.

You’d still kept it small. Inviting your shared friends, a few other pilot buddies, Penny and Mav and a couple of the Hard Deck bartenders—one of whom was the pretty blonde Rooster had yet to completely get over despite the year that had passed since first meeting her. Clearly you knew something the rest of them didn’t when it came to the woman because you spent a good bit of time trying to push her and Rooster together. And if Jake could tell by the occasional glances he shot the two, it looked like some progress had been made. Good, Jake thought. He wanted his friends to have what he had.

By far, it was the best party he’d been to, fully surpassing the unknown number of wild nights he'd dedicated to getting hammered in college. Jake liked the intimacy of it all, even more so after it had died down and most guests returned to their own homes, leaving just you and his team remaining.

“Well,” Rooster began after taking a sip of the beer that you’d made sure to pour into a polka-dotted plastic cup, “I hope you enjoy being old, Hangman.”

Phoenix tucked her finger under the elastic band holding the cone-shaped hat to Rooster’s head and pulled it a good few inches away from his face before releasing it. It slapped harshly against his skin and with a frown, he rubbed his palm over the fresh sting.

“If he’s old, we’re all old,” she scolded. “And you should be nice to the birthday boy.”

“The birthday boy’s got enough nice things. He’s got his lovely lady.” He winked at you and you rolled your eyes with a chuckle. Then he extended his finger to lightly tickle Eve’s cheek. “And he’s got this little nugget.” 

When his daughter giggled in his arms, Jake pressed a gentle kiss to the top of her hair. He smiled contently before turning his head to connect his lips with yours. You both grinned into the kiss, that usual fluttering blooming in his stomach as you placed your hand on his cheek to draw him in closer. 

“Ok,” Payback just short of shouted, trying to pull your and Jake's attention back to the surface. “You know other people are here, right? And you’ve got a child in your arms.”

Separating from Jake, you looked back to your group of friends. “That was an innocent kiss.”

Fanboy snorted and took a bite of his cake. “It was no peck,” he mumbled around a mouthful of sponge and frosting. 

Jake reached behind you to rest his hand against your lower back, but it lasted there all of five seconds before traveling lower to settle on your ass. "Well, that’s as innocent as we get," he said.

“Pathetic,” Rooster playfully scoffed. “Be less in love with each other.”

“Not a chance, man.”

Everyone released a mocking groan at the sappiness, but Jake only snickered and leaned over to kiss your temple. It wasn’t the first time his teammates had joked about your supposed ‘nauseating’ obsession with one another, but underneath, their love for the two of you together was more than supported. 

“We should probably go,” Phoenix said. They all nodded in agreement, hugging you and Jake before giving extra special goodbyes to your daughter. Then they were gone—so much like a herd of wild animals or a school of fish migrating in one giant mass. 

Jake blew out a breath. He wasn’t old, but it didn’t mean the man didn’t feel the exhaustion of the long evening. 

“Tired?” you asked, extending your arms for Eve. 

He handed the girl over to her mother and shook his head. “No, I’m fine.”

“Good, because your night is not over yet.” 

Jake’s eyes followed the movement of your finger drawing a line down the row of his shirt buttons. He looked up at you. “Is that right?”

You winked, and as you turned on your heel to go put Eve to bed, Jake began to throw forgotten used cups and plates into the trash. They littered the area but he expected no less. His friends had a habit of bringing a tornado with them just to vanish when time to deal with the aftermath. 

“You don’t have to do that, baby,” you said, stepping back down the stairs. He felt your arms snake around his waist a moment later and squeeze. “Come with me instead.” 

Taking his hand, you led him to sit in a dining chair and settled yourself onto his lap. 

He knew his gaze was burning as it roamed over the features of your face. The only time it wasn’t was when he made sure to tamp down his desire in front of his daughter. But his baby girl was asleep now, and nothing stopped him from unveiling the entirety of what he felt for you. 

He was fully prepared to capture your lips in a kiss, but you stopped him when you said, “I got you a birthday present.”

Jake cared; he did. But you’d already given him so much and his neediness for you blocked out any ability to think of what could possibly be more important than you on top of him; he inside of you. 

He hummed lowly. “Does it happen to be lacy?” he asked. His fingers slid along the smooth skin of your thigh, pushing up the hem of your dress. “And under here?”

“Yes,” you grinned as you tilted your head down to brush your nose over his. “But I got you something else, too. Something better.”

You hopped up, slipping from his grasp before he could blink and disappearing around the corner into the hall. He instantly felt the gaping hole of your absence; the chill now coating his skin from the sudden loss of your warm body. He wasn’t a fan.

“Honey, I’m not sure there’s much better than you all dolled up in lace,” he called after you. 

You returned with your hands tucked behind your back, a sweet smile on your face as you once again took your seat atop his thighs. Jake rose a brow at your barely contained excitement when you whipped an envelope out and held it in front of his face. He leaned back a bit to get a good look, but the crisp, white folded paper was blank. 

“What is this?”

“You have to open it and read.”

He did as told and took it from your hands, lifting the unsealed flap and pulling out another folded sheet of paper. One of his arms snuck around your waist, holding your body flush against his again—tighter this time so you had no chance of escape—as he began to read aloud. 

“Petition for a change of name of a mi—” Jake’s voice caught on the syllable. His whole body, organs and all, briefly froze within him. A swallow strained his throat. “Minor,” he finally finished. He let the word settle on his tongue and when his brain regained functioning and fully processed the weight of its meaning, his eyes flicked over to yours. “Are you serious?”

Nodding with surety and cupping his cheek, you said, “I want to change her name. You just have to agree and we’ll sign some papers.”

The tears began to cloud his vision, fuzzing the words on the page as he read them again and again. “So, she’d…”

“She’d be Eve Seresin.”

Jake had imagined it before, dreamed about it. His sweet family—a small unit of Seresins that might one day grow into a decent sized bunch. You and he outnumbered by a group of little ones. But since your baby girl was such a surprise and you’d had Eve without him there—without him even in the picture at the time—her name was yours. Jake was fine with that. Of course, he was. It only made sense, and he wasn’t going to demand his daughter take his name just because you and he were officially together. But he couldn’t deny how the thought of his baby girl being a Seresin in name delightfully tightened his chest. He wouldn’t be too terribly upset by his woman sharing his name, either.

With your free hand, you brushed away the escaped salty droplet that slipped down his cheek. He met your eyes again.

“Honey, are you sure? Just because she doesn’t have my name, doesn’t mean—”

You shook your head. “I know, but your family name means something to you,” you said. “Besides, I imagine we’d be doing this sooner or later, and with Eve starting daycare in a couple of months it’s really the perfect time.”

You’re amazing, you know that? He thought about saying it every time he looked at you. Every time he saw you walk through the door, or take care of your daughter, or when you crawled into bed and cuddled up to him. And moments like this, when you expressed your devotion in such wonderful, unexpected ways. 

Jake put his hand on the back of your neck and pulled you down for the kiss he’d been desperate to give you. It was a pattern of long kisses between short kisses, with some kisses making their way to cheeks and jawlines, and eventually, his lips found the sweet, delicate skin of your neck, sucking red marks into the flesh. He liked those marks—made sure to give them to you often—a new one for every old one that disappeared. He was especially adamant about it once you’d started back to work at the bar, remembering all too clearly the wide range of drunk men that went far out of their way to hit on you. But you were his now. You shared a daughter, you had a future, and he didn’t need other guys thinking they were going to get lucky with his lady. And though you didn’t give him the satisfaction, he knew you secretly loved it, too.

You moaned, your head naturally falling to the side to open access to more of your skin, and Jake gripped your neck a bit harder, holding you still as he took a gentle bite.

“I love you,” he whispered against your neck, licking over the fresh mark to soothe the tenderness before lifting his head. “And you gave me a wonderful gift.”

The glimmer in your eye—he lived for that glimmer. That little shine of pride. “Yea?”

“Yea.” He smiled softly. “Any chance you want to get your name changed, too?” 

That smile morphed into a pout, his bottom lip slightly puckering.

“Don’t puppy-dog-eyes me, Seresin.”

“But Honey, I can get a wedding together so fast.”

You rolled your eyes and shook your head, but your lips were struggling to stay in a straight line. They begged to curve upwards; to part and bare your white teeth in the perfect smile that had taken him to his damn knees the first time he saw you. 

Jake loved when he could get your smile to break through any emotion you were feeling or trying to portray. He was convinced that was one of the reasons you worked so well together. Crying, irritated, exhausted—didn’t matter what it was, he could find some way to get you to crack a smile. Now was no different. 

He knew you weren’t going to say yes; your relationship was officially only six months old and you’d always lived by a hard line of being with a man for a year before getting married. He knew this before you even slept together, back when you were friends exchanging innocent thoughts about potential futures. But that didn’t mean he didn’t enjoy hinting at the subject every once in a while. 

“We’ll talk about it,” you said, moving one of his stray blond locks back into place. “But let's start with our daughter’s.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

He accepted your kiss—your promise that when he asked you that question for real, you would say yes. That was enough for him. When you were ready, he would get down on his knee and present the ring he’d had made a month ago, and you would start another chapter. But for now, everything he had was enough. More than enough. More than he could’ve dreamed of. 

“Would you like to have your other present now?” you asked. 

Your finger slowly traced the neckline of your dress, pulling down just a bit to reveal the lacy trim of your bra.

Jake took in a deep inhale through his nose and let the exhale fill his cheeks as it left his body. Just under that dress was a layer of thin, intricate material in a deep shade of red just barely covering some of his favorite parts of you. Swallowing hard, he replaced your finger with his and pulled the front of your dress lower to expose more of the garment. The lace barely contained the swell of your breasts, and he instantly hardened beneath you, cock straining against the zipper of his jeans. 

With his eyes still glued to your cleavage, he nodded. “I would absolutely love to have my other present now.”

#jake seresin #jake seresin x reader #jake seresin x female!reader #dad!jake seresin #dad!jake seresin x reader #jake hangman seresin #jake hangman seresin x reader #jake serein fanfic #jake seresin fic #top gun hangman #top gun maverick #jake seresin x you #tgm #tgm fic #jake seresin fanfiction #jake seresin fluff #jaks seresin imagine #jake hangman seresin x you #jake hangman x reader #jake hangman fic

[seullovesme]

Hi I saw you write for nmixx so can I request a childhood friends to lovers fic with Sullyoon? Thanks!

enchanted » seol yoona

pairing ⥬ sullyoon x childhood bff!reader

genre ⥬ fluff at the end

summary ⥬ after making a new friend, sullyoon slowly starts to spend more of her time with her rather than with you. "please don't be in love with someone else.."

warnings ⥬ slight angst, reader is lowkey jealous

WC ⥬ 1.9k

you sigh at your phone, yet another message was left on read by the one girl you looked forward to messaging each day. you shut it off, flipping it over to look at the polaroid of the two of you.

you were cheek to cheek, smiling as wide as possible as you hugged her tightly. it was taken by her mother right after your 17th birthday that you had spent with her, and it was one of your most treasured pictures together as it was also the day you realized you had fallen for her. it was both a blessing and a curse to have noticed her effect on you.

after discovering your romantic feelings for yoona, every moment felt like it was magnified times ten. every hug, every touch, every laugh, you felt every second of each moment in the depths of your heart, and even quiet times where nobody would say anything was enough to make you want to cry in happiness. she felt closer than before.

the downside is now you're too aware of her distance.

just a couple of weeks ago, she had mentioned that she had met a girl at her part-time job at the cafe and she was introduced to you a few days later. her new friend was gorgeous. her name was kim minji and she was also working at that cafe, still under training by your best friend.

you had a nice time meeting her, which you had told yoona afterwards when she was bugging you about your thoughts on her new buddy. minji was nothing but kind and fun to talk to. maybe that's why yoona began to talk to her more than she did with you.

after that week, she would tell you all about the funny things that happened during her time training minji and how much she loved to spend time with her. you listened to every word she said with a smile on your face, trying to ignore the way your heart wavered at her words. she was allowed to have friends, so you weren't going to tell her you were just jealous because she had fun with someone else.

over time, it only got worse for you. you reminded yourself that you weren't jealous of kim minji every time your best friend had told you she was already going out with her whenever you asked to hangout, but her time was always spent with her new best friend. "sorry, not this friday, me and minji are gonna go shopping!", "omg you won't believe what minji did at work today!", "do you think minji would like the cafe we always go to?", it was always her.

there was a point where you couldn't handle the pain anymore and started to return the energy by ignoring her messages, turning down all her hangout invites, and you stopped visiting her house. you were hoping that she would ask what was wrong, or at least acknowledge that something in your friendship changed, but she didn't seem to even notice. probably distracted by that kim minji..

but how could you hate her? she was only ever kind to you and you could tell that your shy best friend had so easily opened up to this girl, so why did you want to hate her so badly?

you screamed into your pillow, punching it over and over, letting your heart pour out every emotion that was tearing away at it. you yelled and cried, freeing the bottled up frustration, and it was starting to kinda relieve that straining ache in your chest. you calmed down and sat there with a hand over where your heart sits, feeling how fast it was beating as your chest rose and fell.

loud footsteps thundered from behind your room door. before you had any time to react, a troubled yoona bursted through, panting heavily. "y/n!" she called, worried laced in her tone. she dashed to you and cupped your face in her hands. you barely had time to process and the fact that your cheeks were a thousand degrees didn't help. she moved your face to observe every inch, her eyebrows tensed in concern.

"yoona, what are you doing.." you asked shyly. she stopped moving you and just looked into your eyes as if she was searching for answers in them.

she let go and sighed loudly. "you were screaming, and i thought you got hurt. why are you crying?"

"when did you get here, or why are you here?" you ignore her question, confused on why she randomly decided to show up at your home. she just nervously tapped her knee as her eyes darted around your room. she pulled out her phone for a moment, seeming to be reading over something. she set her phone down onto your side table.

"i'll be right back, don't go anywhere. i have something for you." she says quickly before leaving your room at the speed of light, leaving you no time to clear up your confusion. she really never gives you any time to react at all.

you hear a buzz come from your nightstand and you look to see yoona's phone screen shining brightly, still open from when she was using it. another buzz was heard. you contemplated on picking it up, not knowing if she would be okay with it, but you two always shared your phones. your curiosity got the best of you and you picked it up.

3 notifications from "minji 🤩🤩🤩"

you clicked on the notification, opening their text messages together.

your hand hovered over your mouth, covering the way your jaw fell after reading through the most recent texts. you dropped yoona's phone onto the floor, the crash echoing through the silent room. yoona stood at the doorway and watched as the phone hit the ground. she knew you saw something you shouldn't have.

she ran to the phone and flipped it, seeing that her dms were open. she looked up at you and tried to decipher what that face meant. were you happy? mad? sad? she couldn't tell if you being so flabbergasted was a good thing or a bad one. "listen y/n–"

"you like me? wait no, you're in love with me?" you asked at a whisper level. yoona felt like crawling into a shell. she wanted to hide from the confrontation, but she had to do it eventually.

she inhaled. "yes, i'm in love with you. i've known that since we were 13." she sighed and hid her face into her palms. "i didn't mean for you to find out like this, i wanted to confess with flowers and a beautiful dinner, maybe even see the sunset together. not in your bedroom with you accidentally finding out because i was stupid and left my phone here. i.. love you and i will keep loving you, so don't be afraid to tell me you don't feel the same. we'll always be the best of friends and i can learn to–" she stopped talking to catch you as you jumped into her, wrapping your arms around her neck.

"we're so silly.. yoona, i had no idea that you even thought of me romantically, i thought that.." you paused to look away, a little shy to admit it out loud. "i thought you fell for minji." it was her turn to be the surprised one. you pulled onto your bed, seating her right beside you, shoulder to shoulder. her head turned to you and she realized how close the two of you really were, getting a bit red.

"minji? why minji?"

"well, you always spent more time with her after you met her. even when you weren't with her, you would talk about her. it just seemed like kim minji was the only girl who clouded your mind." you muttered the last sentence, feeling shy saying that straight up. the corner of yoona's lips started to curl up.

"you've got it all wrong. you are the only girl who clouds my mind, not minji. she's just one of my closest friends and besides, i'm pretty sure she has a girlfriend."

"then why do you always talk about her like she's the only thing you ever think about?" you complain, huffing as you cross your arms. your jealousy is only adorable to yoona because you're acting like a sad puppy, which makes her giggle.

"i was always worried that if i didn't talk about minji, then i would end up thinking about you and how much i just want to hold you."

"why? did you not want to?"

"what? of course i did, but i didn't want you to see it wrong. after that night of your 17th birthday, my feelings were only growing stronger and we were so close, i didn't want to ruin years of pure happiness with you just because of my dumb heart." she put her hand over her heart, trying to calm it down. "i wanted to kiss you that day, every second i was with you i thought about doing it. you were glowing and just so happy, and seeing you be so vibrant because we spent the day together.. it gave me hope that you loved me the way i loved you."

when she finished, you remained silent, looking into her eyes. tell her you love her, tell her you love her, tell her you–

"well i do, i love you the same way you love me."

the girl was speechless. yoona felt like she was floating, pouncing on you the moment your words settled in. you laughed as she hugged you tightly. you laid back on your bed and kept her in your arms, cuddling her into your side. she let go to sit up, staring at your lips.

as soon as you smiled, she leaned down and kissed you. you melted into the kiss you had been dreaming about for so long, loving how her lips felt on yours. you only stopped because you both needed to breathe, otherwise you would have continued. nothing about the kiss was sexual, but instead felt like every feeling, emotion, and desire you both had been holding in for so long.

"i've been waiting for that." she says while catching her breath. "it feels good to be near you, it feels like forever since i last saw you."

"and whose fault is that?" you raise an eyebrow at her, clearly accusing her of being the reason. she gasps in offense.

"me?! you're the one who's been turning me down!" she shoots back in a lighthearted manner.

you scoff. "okay, the hypocrisy is insane, you've been turning me down to hang out with minji!"

yoona opens her mouth to say something, but closes it when she realizes that she has been doing that. she lays back down and places her arm around your torso, pulling you into her. "alright, alright. you're right, i have been doing that, but it was within reason. the one where i didn't want to ruin everything." you let out an airy laugh at how dumb that sounded. you both were so clueless that avoiding your love for each other was actually the thing keeping you apart.

"i know, it's okay. don't do that anymore. from now on, let's be 100 percent honest with each other about things like this." yoona nods in agreement, snuggling against your neck.

it was nice to finally be able to love the girl of your dreams, your best friend, your soulmate, and call her yours.

#seullovesme » posted! #sullyoon #sullyoon x reader #seol yoona #nmixx x reader #nmixx #nmixx sullyoon #kpop idol x reader #kpop imagines #kpop fanfic #kpop