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jooniperbonsai · 14 days

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I'll Give You the Sun (jhs) | Part One

Pairing: SunDeity!Hoseok x MoonDeity!Reader (afab)

Rating: 18+

Part One Length: 10.6k

Release Date: Fri, April 19, 2024

Genre: Smut, fluff, angst, fantasy au, royalty, mythology

Summary: Fated to fulfill an ancient prophecy claiming he will ascend into a curse-breaking hero on the day of his kingdom’s first total solar eclipse, Hoseok is jaded and cynical over his lack of choice in becoming the king and god of the Solar Kingdom. He’s even less pleased that his coronation is to be shared with the future king of the Lunar Kingdom, whose clear obsession with power is already a sign of trouble ahead.

But when the moon fully overtakes the sun and bathes everything in darkness, the ascension of gods and kings doesn’t seem to be all that the fates prophesied. With you now coming out of the shadows to claim your rightful title, the pressure is on for the two of you to break this curse together, before it completely destroys your two kingdoms.

Warnings: Swearing, physical aggression, low self-esteem, implied emotional and physical abuse, dirty talk, grinding/thigh riding, dom! hoseok already making himself known

a/n: yayyyyy welcome to the new series! may sun deity hobi be as adored by you as he is by me. You can look forward to Part 2 where we meet our y/n very soon. -h

He can hear her shuffling down the hall. His mother. No doubt draped in the silky, long golden cape that shines as she passes by every sunny window. He doesn’t need to look at her to know that she’s wearing it. That, or her crown, pointed at all sides in honor of the many ancestral deities who have served the stars before, whose power and strength created the very particles of the universe. He also doesn’t need to look to know she’s heading directly toward his chamber, seeking Hoseok out.

He knows she is, because he was supposed to be in the Great Hall an hour ago to go over his coronation and is instead sitting out on his balcony, looking up at the moon high in the sky despite it being one in the afternoon.

“Hoseok,” his mother echos from his doorway, breathless and exasperated.

“I know,” he calls back. He knows he’s due for a lecture, but because his mother is impatient, because the entire palace and kingdom and evidently the entire fucking universe is impatient for their prince to become a king, and with that title, a god, there’s no time for a lecture.

He takes one last look up at the sky, the pebbled moon inching ever closer, and scowls before retreating back indoors.

If Hoseok had things his way, he would seek out whichever god before him who uttered his prophecy to ascend to the throne and burn him with all the power of the Sun he is so called the god of. Apollo, Ra, Helios, Tsohanoai, Sol, Tai Yang Xing Jun, whoever it was who caused this, who murmured his message before the fates, he is probably laughing at Hoseok as his mother clucks at him and pinches away invisible specks of lint from his pristine suit.

“Your father wants to see you before we begin.”

“I thought the party was already under way,” he mutters, his mother cocking an eyebrow at him.

“It is, which I now take it you are staunchly avoiding instead of simply losing track of time like I was prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt for.”

“Eomma, you know I don’t want to do this. I have told you so for years. I don’t want to be king. I don’t want to be a god.”

“Yes, but the fates decided it so. They chose you over your sister, and this means whether there’s a party or not, it’s going to happen. You might as well enjoy the food and music and make the best of it.” With a sigh, she adjusts the heady gilded crown pinned to her head and strolls out of Hoseok’s chamber, leaving behind the faint note of her jasmine perfume.

Hoseok knows he can’t hide here forever. He knows that once the total eclipse occurs in a matter of hours, he will be thrust into a life of duty. And not soon after he ascends, he also knows that he will be expected to begin courting someone. That is another matter entirely, one he is not going to even entertain today.

He’s not opposed to marriage or courting, not in the slightest. His elder sister married a few years ago, a marriage that gives structure and stability. Her husband clearly loves her, and Hoseok enjoys when he sees his brother-in-law when they visit during the summer months, when the days stretch into nights and for a little while, the state of things feels less cursed and oppressive.

They often have long, decadent dinners in the back garden, surrounded by the low hum of the bees as they move from sunflower to sunflower (his mother’s favorite). The summer months are coming, which means soon Hoseok will feel a little bit more like himself. Why wouldn’t he want to spend time with someone, to enjoy strawberries straight from the garden and walk along the river with the one he courts?

All of these things are exactly what he wants.

Or he used to, anyway. He glances at the mirror above his vanity, his black hair already losing some of its hold despite only being styled a handful of hours ago. Normally, it doesn’t do that. Normally, once set into place, he appears as the precise and put-together person in the room.

But today, he realizes, is not normal.

In his lifetime, there has never been a total solar eclipse over his kingdom. Which is why in many ways, today is the beginning of the end, as today he will fulfill his destiny within the prophecy:

On the Eve of day, the day of night,

when the moon fully captures the sun’s light

over the House of the ones who worship the rays,

will an alliance occur that pleases the fates:

Two kingdoms will gain what they most need

after long years of suffering from past gods’ greed.

From the cliffs off the shore where the sky hangs low,

will come the fated one crowned with a moonlit halo.

And from the flowering valleys where the rolling hills run,

will come the destined one crowned with the beams of the sun.

The shadows shattering during the fifteenth hour

shall bestow these two souls with ultimate power.

The moon stepping forward with nothing to hide

is burdened not by the sin of pride

nor the sun is he plagued by the darkness above,

but balanced with allegiance, passion, and love.

United these two the fates will regard

with the highest of honor among the stars.

What was once divided now becomes one,

with the all sacred moon and almighty sun.

And together these two blessed by the heavens’ ring,

will end the curse of the promised false king.

He can recite the entire thing by heart. It is a prophecy that echoes in his oldest memories, ones when he could scarcely understand the phrases coded within, but recognized the cadence of over time as it swirled into words he one day understood. It was read on his tenth birthday as he watched the red wax of his “10” candle slide down the pillar and onto the buttercream frosting of his cake, the red upon white almost looking like blood. It was read at weddings, graduations, all a reminder of the great hope that is to come.

Even then he knew it to be less of its intended blessing and more of a curse dooming him to follow its guidelines, to be “balanced with allegiance, passion, and love”. Hoseok doesn’t deny that these are traits he has, but he isn’t entirely sure if these are traits he was destined to have, or if through the power of suggestion and pressure over the years, he has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He looks back in the mirror, scooping a curl off of his face, memorizing the rich brown of his eyes, the even slant of his nose. He knows his ascension isn’t technically supposed to change him, at least not in the ways that are noticeable. All of the royal advisors and lesser gods on the council have assured him, reassured him, and if it’s even possible, over-assured him as such.

Even his parents have dipped their toes into the conversation, despite always and forevermore being mortal.

It’s not like you’re going to sprout a second head and start devouring the souls of mortals. You are just going to feel different. More powerful. Rightly so. You will be.

And that’s what concerns him. Not the sprouting of another head or bloodthirst.

How can things still be the same–how can he still be the same–if he is about to be given power? Not just any power either. This is enough power to end the long-standing drought that wiped out the southeast corner of the Solar Kingdom. A drought so severe that the only thing left in that part of the kingdom is abandoned homes and stories from the Elder gods that prove it was once a vivid place full of diverse life, with lush flora that bore plump, juicy fruits, art, and culture.

The Elder gods have been around for, well, no one quite knows how long, including them. When asked, they often click their tongue, sipping whatever sparkly alcoholic concoction that fancies them that day before dismissing the curious soul who asks. After a while, time just rolls itself together. You mortals are so obsessed with it. Relax, take it all in. Hundreds, even thousands of years may have passed, but still we eat and drink and dance.

And from all that eating and drinking and dancing came the many stories about the parts of the kingdom that Hoseok had never heard of, and some he is still sure don’t really exist. How on this planet were there once waterfalls that fell up instead of down, or vines that could bear grapes the size of his head? Over time, he has learned to take what the Elder gods say at face value; they are bored and ancient and looking for something to entertain them. The only reason he knows the southeast corner once had any of these things is because of the ruins.

When he was young, he was taken there by the royal council and his parents to help him understand the weight of his place in all this, how crucial it was that he rise and grow to end the drought that forced thousands to become displaced and desperate. How better was he to understand the importance of the power he would one day be given than to see how selfishly wielding it only resulted in strife and suffering for all?

The drought is expanding, leeching more from his kingdom by the year. By his twenty ninth birthday, the Great Forest of Solaria, a region two hours south of the capital, known for its tall redwoods and cypresses, has had three sizable forest fires, forcing its people, including Hoseok’s best friend Namjoon, to flee north. Namjoon and his family have been living in the palace for almost a full year.

But because of this curse, this reign of the nefarious king Mang Shin, who tore down Hoseok’s people and the land around it for his own selfish gain, because of his cruelty that angered the fates, the Solar Kingdom has been managing a worsening drought. How much longer before the capital city can no longer sustain any of its people, when it is no longer a refuge?

His kingdom is not the only one impacted by the cruelty of Mang Shin. The Lunar Kingdom to the northwest is half underwater after high tides that led to flooding. While the capital city of the Solar Kingdom has not directly suffered from the curse of Mang Shin, the Lunar Kingdom’s capital city has not been so lucky.

A month ago, a large tidal wave capsized the northern end of the city, drowning thousands and destroying a major sea port that was essential to the booming trade industry of the north. From the rumors Hoseok heard, the crown prince was set to be in the district that morning on official business, but was running behind after spending a night out drinking and occupying the brothels in the southern corridor. He would have been washed away in the sea if he were on time.

Which means all this, all that Hoseok has been procrastinating on attending, has stopped seven times in the short hallway over, would have been for nothing. There would be no end to this curse, only the slow suffering of his actual fate.

No. The crown prince is in the Great Hall waiting for Hoseok to get his shit together and help restore balance to both kingdoms. A dual coronation. Two princes to become kings of their own kingdoms. The Lunar Kingdom exists as the Solar Kingdom exists. Both need each other now to ensure the longevity of the other. There’s no other destiny than this.

He pauses in front of the door to his father’s study, grazes his knuckles against the wood of the door. He sighs.

You have to do this. There’s no other way.

And just as he thinks to turn, to run, to flee his home and this kingdom and go everywhere and nowhere all at once, the door to his father’s study opens.

He expects to see the firm set frown of his father, to be given his final lecture and coronet before his father abdicates and Hoseok is the owner of the hefty, ornate crown he has come to despise.

He is not expecting to hear a soft feminine gasp that is very different to the sounds his father makes. Nor is he expecting to see you staring right back at him.

You’re wearing a long navy gown flecked with what looks like stars shimmering in the glow of the study’s dim light.

You should be wearing a tiara, or at least some kind of diadem like your mother, whom Hoseok saw this morning when he snuck into the kitchen after skipping the official breakfast. He should have been embarrassed, but she seemed even more so for being there and helping herself to custard cakes that were meant for today’s celebration.

I won’t tell if you won't, she'd said, her voice tight, possibly from speaking between bites of the creamy custard. Her diadem encrusted with diamonds in the shape of what looked like the constellation Cygnus gleamed in the sunlight that leaked into the kitchen.

She didn’t care that he hadn’t given your family a proper greeting, and she seemed unbothered by his unwashed and unshaved state. She looked at him like he was just a boy. So he didn’t say a word, just stole a cake for himself and locked himself in his chamber until his mother hunted down Namjoon to let him in and at least convince him to bathe.

Even informally dressed, your mother wore her head adornment, which is why it is not only odd to see you striding out of his father’s study, but to also see you walking around without anything to signify you are more than just a palace advisor or lady of the court.

Then again, you were always odd. While your families were not close by any means, their strained allyship and understanding of their dependency on one another meant that Hoseok’s family and your family had met a few times over the years, and each time he was in the vicinity of you, he couldn’t help but notice how out of place you were.

While your brother commanded the attention of everyone in the room, demanded the world stopped to hear the new song he composed on guitar or rambled on and on about diplomacy and trade relations over a feast, you instead faded into the background of every place you entered, a shadow that cast itself behind the path of her brother’s radiant glow.

So maybe not wearing a crown isn’t so unexpected when it comes to you. A crown is the opposite of a shadow. It demands everyone look at it, too. And even if you wanted to be looked at– which he assumes is not true given the fact that you’re practically shrinking away from Hoseok as he looks at you now– it doesn’t seem as though your brother would be willing to share the spotlight long enough to even give you the chance.

He realizes he doesn’t even need to ask what you are doing in his father’s study, he already knows: you are doing what you always do when he sees you, what he suspects you do when he isn’t around too: you made yourself invisible. You often snuck off during your visits here to the library or the palace gardens, returning late in the day with dirt on your skirts or charcoal on your hands. He notices the object that confirms his suspicions: a sketchbook nestled between your fingertips that is staining your inner fingers black.

“I was just–” you begin, eyes wide as you stammer. “Your father, he said I could be in here. I didn’t touch anything, I was drawing!” You hold the book out in front of you like a shield.

Hoseok raises his hands up. “Hey, hey, relax. I’m not accusing you of anything!” Your eyes soften a little, but you still remain frozen in the doorway, the sketchbook acting as if it's made of steel, not paper. “Speaking of my father, have you seen him? He said he wants to talk to me before, y’know…the thing.”

“The thing…” you repeat, finally lowering the book as you knit your brows together. You give him a puzzled look before answering. “Uh, I did. I was sketching him, actually. But he left to go to the Great Hall about ten minutes ago to deal with something urgent. But he said if I saw you to tell you to get your coronet on. It’s in here, on his desk.”

With a flurry, you twirl, heading back into the soft glow of the office behind you. As you turn, a puff of air leaves Hoseok’s chest as he sees the effect your dress has in the shifting light. It’s as if millions of stars are swirling around you, centering you as their moon in a night sky.

Whoa.

For a moment, he’s stunned, not entirely sure what he just saw. But then he remembers what he is supposed to be doing, and he follows you like a sailor follows the stars, letting you guide him into the cold room.

Sure enough on his father’s desk is the coronet, a small box of pins to fasten it into place beside it, and a handwritten note from his father.

Be extraordinary.

Or be nothing at all, he finishes mentally. Hoseok’s father has spent all of his life uttering that phrase, placing his very soul behind the words that are supposed to be inspirational. He had learned it from a book at the university he attended when he was a young scholar, coming across it and deciding it suited his philosophy: excel beyond ordinary leadership and be a great ruler to his people. If not, what was the point in being a leader at all?

This was a phrase that always unsettled Hoseok, because extraordinary measures mean one-upping himself in the process, and that is something his father seemed to push in his youth. Top marks in his class? He then needed to be the top of his class and on the student council. Developed a grant for young dancers to encourage a stronger relationship to the arts from a younger age? He must establish an entire foundation for performing arts within the next five years. Higher and higher he has always been forced to climb, until the clouds once above him are nothing more than wisps of air at his feet.

And he’s afraid of heights. Of falling from this place where he is held so high in regard and duty he might as well live among the stars.

He swallows a knot in his throat, taking the note with his father’s message and crumpling it in his fist.

You, who have been curiously watching him this entire time, raise an eyebrow. Hoseok suddenly feels particularly defensive and on edge from his father’s notice. The king has written it on official letterhead, technically making it Royal business and not familial. It’s not a phrase of encouragement for him to be extraordinary, but an order.

“What,” he snaps, and immediately regrets it as he watches your face cloud slightly before you regain composure.

“It’s a pretty morbid saying, isn’t it?” you say thoughtfully after a moment, nodding your head to the balled up piece of paper in his hands. “This idea that if you aren’t always beating yourself then you’re not successful or good enough to rule. But it’s so damning. How can you win when part of you must always lose?”

Hoseok inhales sharply, the words hitting him hard. But before he can even think to respond, you are scrambling.

“Exactly,” he says darkly. He takes the coronet in hand. “The thing is, either way you spin this, it’s a loss.”

You chew your bottom lip for a moment before stepping toward him, reaching for the box of hairpins. “I’m sorry,” you mumble and pluck a pin from the box, gesturing for Hoseok to bend down.

He isn’t the tallest man in the kingdom by far, and you’re not much shorter, but next to you, he somehow feels huge. Do you have horrible posture or something? He glances over at you, but then he notices that while your head would rest above his shoulder if you moved closer, and your back is perfectly straight–straighter than even he has been trained to stand– it’s not your height that makes you feel so small. It’s everything else. You are a walking optical illusion. In his memories, he had always placed you as half his size, and he finally understands why: it lets you fly under the radar.

He sighs, placing the coronet upon his head at last, turning over the idea of being under the radar in his mind. Something in him sours, a prick of jealousy flaring up at how you will inevitably spend the rest of the night after the coronation. “Not like you had any part in this. Soon this will all be over and you can go back to hiding in rooms with your sketch pads and books and be invisible to everyone again.”

You flinch at his words, the pin you have begun fastening to his head to steady the crown snags into his scalp.

“Ouch! What the fuck was that?” Hoseok yelps, and you jolt back, tears brimming your eyes as if you were the one who was just stabbed in the head.

“Oh, I get it. So you think this is the end of the world for you and the rest of us are just going to go about our merry way like the savior gods have solved all our problems.” Your voice is sharp, unlike anything he has ever heard come from you, and he can see the fury burning into your eyes as tears begin to spill.

“Have you ever fucking thought about how the rest of us are going to cope with these changes? Yes, I understand the ascension is damnation in its own way, and that this awful fucking curse has plagued our kingdoms for centuries but you’re so selfishly focused on yourself when there are two of you who will share the burden. And the power. Yes, you are vain and self-absorbed but your drought will end. The forest fires will have paved the way for nutrient rich soil and things here will thrive better than they ever have. Your friend Namjoon? He can return to his community and rebuild. And you, Jung Hoseok, you will live on forever in the glory of all that you saved and your stupid ego will be smoothed over with godly power. Power that who knows what the hell you’ll do with. In another thousand years you too will be bored and sighing with the other Elder gods talking about the time you saved us all and embellishing your stories to bring new life into them.

“And the rest of us? We will be doing all that work for you as you sit on your throne and watch us break our backs to continue to pay for what Mang Shin did. And then we will die. My own best friend died in the floods we had a month ago. And I will die, having only lived a life that is in service to another god. Mang Shin or you or my fucking awful brother–”

You freeze, realizing your mistake. But Hoseok is seeing red at your accusation.

“You think I’m just going to be like all those other lazy gods? I want to be nothing like them! Unlike them I care about my home, my people, and family! And you have the audacity to stand in my father’s office and claim that I won’t do the right thing? That I’m in this and moping because of my ego? Oh, fuck you, Y/N! You don’t know the first thing about me. When I walk out of this room and into the Great Hall, I am no longer me. I am the pawn they raised me to be in some game I never want to play. And you, you’re free.” He spits those words at you with a sneer.

Your nostrils flare and you close the distance between you two. He can feel the heat of your body as you shove it against him, backing him into his father’s desk so he can’t escape. The soft flurry of your gown grazes the back of his left hand.

“Free?” you say low, your voice dripping with disgust. “Let’s get one thing straight. I am not free. I am invisible. And not by choice, by necessity.” You reach down between you, grabbing one of his wrists and pinching your fingers around it. Then, you grab the other with the same motion and hold them both up to him. “One shackle for being born without the fates’ blessing. That would have been damning enough. An outcast compared to my brother. At least your sister was given some response from the fates upon her birth. Some gift.”

You tighten your hand around the other wrist, your nails digging small crescents into Hoseok’s skin. “The other for being born into a life where I will always be cleaning up the messes of a tyrannical ruler, be it a king who lived a millennia ago or my own brother or a beloved god like you.”

Hoseok’s stomach drops as you hiss the last word out and he tugs at his wrists to try to free himself from you. He feels as though he’s going to explode. Who the hell do you believe yourself to be? Royalty or not, you know there are rules in place that forbid you both from touching, though those rules were mostly enforced during the time of puberty for the both of you, but there was never an official retraction. If he thinks about it, this is the first time the two of you have ever even touched. And it’s probably for the best.

He feels like he’s burning under your gaze, a fire hotter than anything he’s ever known. Your fingertips digging into his skin, feel like needles and iron weights under him. In one moment you have gone from being small and frail to fierce and terrifying, the radiant glow of royalty your entire family wears breaks from you as your raw emotion unravels your smooth exterior.

You are in this moment the furthest thing from invisible and Hoseok’s heart beating wildly as you shift even closer to him tells him so. But Hoseok has trained his entire life for combat, knows how to put mind over matter. So he focuses and with an exhale composes himself, a devilish smirk spreading across his face.

Your brows knit together, but your hold remains firm.

“My sister can hold her own. The fates knew that. She was not suited to be a ruler when she had much better skills with people and commerce. That, and they probably knew that she too would lead with some kind of bias.” He snorts. “But you, that really is a shame. Maybe the fates were wrong about you. Maybe they made a mistake in forgetting to give you a gift.”

You gasp, and he jolts, releasing your hands from his wrists. “Don’t say that. You shouldn’t say that.”

He knows he shouldn’t. To speak ill of the fates could lead to serious punishment. When born, everyone is visited by the fates during their first long slumber. For most people of good standing, the fates bless them with some type of gift, be it physical wealth, talent, status, or some other quality or characteristic that solidifies them in society.

While there is no set pattern in who the fates often deliver gifts to, in the last few generations, most blessings from the fates are given to those born into nobility. At least for Hoseok, everyone in his family as far back as his great grandfather was given a blessing. His mother had received the precise skill of archery, picking up a bow and arrow as early as seven years old and shooting the target nearly dead center. The only reason she was off was because the bow was too heavy for her. His father was given his intellect, leading to him being a great scholar and general. His sister was given a hand mirror embedded with large rubies.

All the gifts are left in a pouch tied to the baby’s bassinet. If the gift is not physical, a small note is often attached with an explanation or hint for what will be fulfilled. Some larger gifts may just be laid next to the bassinet, but rarely is it larger than the size of one’s hand.

For Hoseok, the fates’ gift was a scroll with the prophecy copied to it, along with a gold ring engraved with a sun that he is wearing now. Not too cryptic to interpret. His parents knew from the start who he was.

Your family, however, is another story. From what Hoseok understands, when your older brother was born, he did not receive such a literal interpretation of the prophecy. Rather, his gift was a monocular that for years people thought was broken. It wasn’t until he once used it while stupidly looking up at the sun that your brother realized the monocular wasn’t broken.

Instead, it provided a very important film over the lens that allowed him to stare for hours at the sun and not go blind. During the sporadic partial solar eclipses over the years that gave Hoseok chills down his spine, your brother was often on the cliff banks, gazing at the sun flares and embracing his future.

A monocular meant for solar eclipses. What else could that mean but that he is a fated one?

As for you, Hoseok heard that the evening of your birth a handful of years later came and went with no blessing. When your parents had woken to find nothing in the pouch or the areas around your bassinet, had asked every palace worker thrice to see if anyone had entered the nursery that evening and everyone had assured that no one had entered and the door that separated the bathroom between you and your brother’s rooms had remained locked, your brother sound asleep, there was nothing left to do but accept that for the first time in generations, your family had ended its line of fated ones with your brother.

In a way, did it matter? Whether you are blessed or not if your brother is the one who will finally end the curse? Perhaps not. But either way, Hoseok can’t help but feel pissed at the fates today, and wants to poke at them a bit and let him know he isn’t happy with the gift they gave him.

Sure, no one is supposed to insult them. There are many tales told to children about what happens to those who test their authority, cautionary lessons that warn them not to misbehave or they will suffer greatly. It is, after all, the result of Mang Shin’s own challenging and disrespecting the fates that caused all of this anyway.

But right now Hoseok doesn't have a single fuck to give about what they decided anyone is destined for. How they “always choose wisely.” That doesn’t make sense to him. The fates can’t be perfect, can they? In all things. Including you.

Especially you, he realizes. Because he would be foolish to write you off as a boring nobody, even if that is the mask you wear.

“Why not? Why shouldn’t I be pissed at them and question them? If they have decided this is a burden I must shoulder forever, then let me have my doubts! I’m actually disgusted by the fact that no one has ever questioned my role in this. A savior of an entire kingdom! Me? The one who broke into the armory and stole fireworks to launch on my eighteenth birthday?”

Which, had been an awful idea. The fireworks had been locked away because of their tendency to cause fires. And with that winter having much less snow than ever before, the farmland he had drunkenly lit those fireworks in was full of dead, dry brambles. The perfect kindling.

His transgression cost the kingdom millions. He was lucky there was no wind that day to carry the fire across the creek the farm jutted up to. But the fire did enough damage to burn that entire farm’s crops for that year.

You snort. “Yes, well I think your accidental arson doesn’t alter your favor with the fates.” You gesture for him to bend again to finally pin on his coronet. The angry steam trapped inside his chest is starting to lessen. In some way, it just feels good to have said it out loud.

So he obeys and lets you change the subject as you work. “Why did you want the fireworks anyway?”

Hoseok stills, wanting to avoid another stabbing. Your fingers are more nimble this time, sweeping gently through his scalp before securing the pins. As you make your adjustments, your pinky skims the shell of his ear.

It’s that tenderness that prompts him to answer honestly. “I was sad, or rather mad that in an entire ballroom full of people celebrating, I had never felt so alone in my whole life. It didn’t feel like they were celebrating me, but this idea of us getting closer to the end of the suffering. Another year passing means another year closer to when we could more accurately predict the eclipse, if it was actually going to be a total one and pass directly above us. So my birthday became this symbol of hope I guess.”

You hum in response, a quiet prompt asking him to continue. He feels your fingers adjusting the pins in the back, gentle, oh so gentle. His eyes fall closed, trying to focus instead on his story.

“I should be happy about that, right? To be this symbol of hope for everyone. But I didn’t want that. I never wanted to become a symbol of something over being a person, and that seems to be what all this ever is. I had come to realize it at the time, and wanted to rebel, to do something for myself for my birthday instead of being in service to others.

“So I broke into the armory while everyone was dancing, said I needed a moment to relieve myself. The guard was easily bribed by a strong glass of whisky I claimed wasn’t to my taste and the smell of the feast in the hall. I told him I would find the captain to have him guard his post while he went to enjoy the celebration.”

He hears you chuckle, an infectious, feathery sound that piques his interest. He wonders how often you laugh at things. He doesn’t think he’s ever heard you do so before.

He smirks. “Yeah, he didn’t think twice about that. Why would the well-behaved, diplomatic prince try to break into the armory during his birthday celebration? Once he was out of sight I walked right in and grabbed what I was looking for. Ditched the ball, grabbed a bottle of whisky and went to drown my sorrows. The rest was history. I barely got to look up and enjoy the fireworks before I saw the fire begin. And by that point I was too drunk to walk straight to even know what to do. I couldn’t run fast enough to stomp it out and I didn’t have any water with me. So I just stood and watched it all burn before me.”

Your fingers stroke the coronet in Hoseok’s hair and then he feels them fall, your fingertips combing through it, nails sometimes scraping against his scalp. It’s so soothing, grounding to him, and he inhales deeply as your hands weave around him, one side and then the other, as if you are guiding every hair, every part of him back into place.

“That’s when I started to really wonder if the fates got it all wrong with me. Because I can cause so much damage so quickly if I’m not careful. And selfishly too. What I did, that was because I couldn’t let people see me as this symbol of something that I’m not even sure I represent And if I have power? What if I use it wrong?”

“You’re right. I am vain and selfish to be complaining about this stuff when I’m lucky. I got to go on a bender and blow up a bunch of illegal arsenal and the most I got was a stern finger waggle because I’m a ‘fated one’. And once this is all over, I don’t know. I’m probably not going to be the king everyone thinks I’m going to be. And I’ll fight like hell but I’m terrified that I’m going to be different. That somehow the second I’m blessed with this power I’m going to wield it to hurt others, to be that same selfish asshole of a child that I was.”

He feels your hand pause, and opens his eyes. Your eyes meet, and your hand falls from his head, returning into your orbit as you cross your arms in front of you.

“But you didn’t mean for that to happen, Hoseok. None of that. I don’t think the fates are going to fault you for a mistake like that, and I don’t think they made the wrong choice for a human acting as a human. And even when you’re a god, I don’t know. You’ll probably make mistakes too, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be cruel.”

You sigh. “I’m sorry I said that about you. I…you’re not like him, Mang Shin. You aren’t going to be this lazy ruler or probably even a bad one. Because you care. Didn’t you repair the damage to the barn yourself?”

He nods.

“That really speaks more to your character than whatever air of diplomacy you think you need to have. And the same for your power that you’ll receive. The ascension doesn’t make you invincible, but it just amplifies the qualities you have. And you don’t have malice in you to burn down an entire farm.

“My brother however? I think if he was in your position, he would have argued the fire was the farm’s fault for not sprinkling the crops with a fire retardant or something. Or, if he wasn’t getting the attention he wanted, that might have made him so furious that he spread the fire beyond the farm on purpose. One time when we were younger, he received awful marks on an exam he admittedly did not study for, and when our tutor scolded him for it and wagged his finger in his direction, he bit the tip of his finger clean off. And he smiled as he did it.”

Hoseok blanches. He has heard that your brother wasn’t the most savory of people, some of the people of the Solar kingdom having encountered him during the royal family’s visitations. Hoseok himself knows that he’s rude and narcissistic, often interrupting during their different conversations to talk about himself or scowl at the palace workers as they try to serve his meals. Particular, they always describe the Lunar Prince. He is not a bad man, just very particular.

More like entitled, and borderline ruthless, Hoseok thinks to himself.

“Your brother sounds very...particular,” he says instead of what he’s actually thinking.

You roll your eyes. “I hate that fucking word,” you mutter, uncrossing your arms and stepping back to look at Hoseok. You click your tongue once and then nod in approval. The coronet must be even.

“What word would you use instead?” Hoseok whispers, taking a step toward you.

This conversation feels private, and no matter how private his father’s study feels, he doesn’t want the physical distance between the two of you as you share more intimate thoughts.

You hesitate. Your eyes flash to his, and then he can see the well of tears brimming up into your eyes once more. “Does it really matter anyway? A monster, a tyrant, an asshole. He’s going to be king, a god, regardless of how I describe him. And it would be treasonous, not to mention unwise, to question the decision of the fates. If he hears what I think, I’ll suffer worse. But everyone chooses to see something in him clearly that I do not, gifted him that monocular and wrote him into the prophecy to seal it. He is a fated one. And regardless of what you think or what I think, that’s how it’s going to be. I wasn’t gifted with anything. I’ll admit that I’m not looking forward to this transition and how messy it'll be. I spent most of my youth cleaning up his small messes and I’m sure I’ll be doing the big ones now. But I’m trying to make peace with it, I don’t have much of a choice.”

A renewed anger boils in Hoseok. “So your way of handling and accepting all of this, the fact that your brother is about to receive hoards of untapped power that might teeter your kingdom into oblivion, is by being invisible? By throwing your life away? How is that supposed to be helpful?”

You jerk away, the small distance between you growing larger as your dress glitters in a spotlight, casting refractions of it onto the walls and bookshelves all around you. In every pocket of the dark room, there’s a part of you shifting yourself onto everything else, including Hoseok. He opens his palm where the refraction casts, almost as though he’s holding a part of your light in his hand.

But just as soon as you’re in the light, you’re out of it, the refraction gone, and you into the shadows.

He steps forward, tries to cross the distance once more, but the intimate moment of secrets is gone, and stops him in his tracks. He can tell he has struck a wound by the sharp laugh that blares from your chest. It sounds nothing like the one he heard before.

“What am I supposed to do exactly? Go waltz in there and scream to the fates that he’s the wrong choice and we are all doomed? Demand he surrender his title and not accept this gift? Do you think anyone would even listen to me if I were to raise such doubt? I would be exiled before the eclipse reaches totality.

“I’m no one Hoseok. Not to my kingdom, certainly not my parents or brother. I’m simply here to put as much of a wedge between the blows my brother deals and the people of my kingdom who will receive it. And as far as how I’ll handle it, I have two options: I can continue as I am now, cleaning up the mess. Or I can re-enter the shadows of life and marry the Duke of Nebula and leave the Lunar Kingdom forever. Didn’t you say so yourself that I am free because of my position? That I am unburdened with the sense of duty that you are? Maybe you should think less about me and more about what you’re going to do after all this is over.”

You turn away from him, the skirt of your dress rustling as you try to make your escape, to leave him without the last word.

No, he thinks. Not like this. He has spent enough of his life not having the last word when it comes to matters about him.

Fury licks through his veins. He feels heat rush through his face, the tips of his ears, the tingling part of his scalp you were touching mere minutes ago. No, this conversation isn’t over until he says it is. He stalks over to you as you reach for the door handle, grabbing your wrist in his palm, tugging it over your head as he shoves your back against the door, trapping you.

You release the air in your chest with a huff, your other hand coming to fight him off. But he’s faster. Again, he’s trained his whole life to do this. He easily pins your other wrist above you.

“So that’s it? Your two choices are to marry some old wrinkled Duke or stay as your brother’s punching bag.”

He scoffs. You struggle against his hold.

“That’s none of your business! Let go of me!” you growl, tugging, ragged breaths heaving your chest.

“No,” Hoseok says. “I’m not done. If I’m going to walk out of here and take on the burdens of the world, then I’m going to at least spend the last moments of my mortal life ensuring you don’t waste yours. You have a choice in all of this freedom and you’re choosing wrong. The worst fucking things you can possibly choose. Consider it my first act of diplomacy as king.”

You angle your head up to him, your brows furrowed. “Then please, your majesty, enlighten me as to what you would choose for me, since you feel so inclined to do so.”

Your body is just as heated under Hoseok as he is now, a sheen of perspiration blooming in your décolletage. Both of you are boiling in your anger. Yet you take it a step further, widening your stance and looping one leg behind him to try and find the weak spot behind his knees.

You succeed, his leg slipping and tangling itself in the skirt of your dress. Rather than break the hold he has on you, however, he falls forward, his forearms falling to either side of your head, his body now fully leaning into you.

Under any other circumstance, Hoseok would immediately untangle himself, apologize, blush at the embarrassment of his body colliding with another, especially with it being taboo in the law. But this time he doesn’t. And as you struggle against him, he can feel your soft thigh brush against the front of his trousers, sending a lap of heat to his cock. It’s almost dizzying how hot it is in the study now. The room is kept at a cool temperature to ensure the books don’t warp from humidity.

Which means the heat that is scorching through his veins is from the two of you creating it. He pulls a deep breath into his chest, trying to focus on finishing this conversation, on his frustration with you for being so careless with yourself.

“If I was free like you, without the universe waiting for me outside my door, I wouldn’t be hiding in the cold shadows hoping no one noticed me. I would be out in the world, discovering all the things I’ve been denied.”

He adjusts himself against you, and as he does so, his thigh lands between your legs, resting at the crook of where they meet. A sharp intake of breath crests from you, and your eyes meet, your gaze hard.

“Like what?” you ask. “What exactly would you be chasing instead of denying yourself?”

Hoseok smirks, knowing he’s trapped you in this conversation. He really has been trained well. “Pleasure,” he says, and your eyes widen.

“What?”

“You heard me, Y/N. Pleasure. You think you’re going to find that with the Duke of Nebula? He’s so ancient, I doubt he could even get it up. And even if he still can, god what a bore he would be. He’s sired enough children in his lifetime, and can't be expected to run around and play with or care for any of the ones you would give him.

“So you would either be sitting around just the two of you for the rest of his life–gods hoping it wouldn’t be much longer–or you would be raising his children practically by yourself. They would have no status either, too far down on the family chain to have any standing. Which means you would rot in that place until you found another man to marry. And that would be your life. What a waste of your potential. You’re young, beautiful, intelligent, and throwing your life away.”

He clicks his tongue. “Pleasure you wouldn’t find with him. Maybe even the next guy. So why sign yourself up for any of that when you don’t have to? When you can feel alive while you’re alive and feel good. Know ecstasy, your joints coming loose in your body, fuc–”

“I’m not a virgin, Hoseok. I know what pleasure feels like,” you spit. Hoseok’s eyes flash. He licks his lips.

“Do you really?” he whispers. “Do you know how it feels to really fuck for the sake of pleasure, Y/N? Of letting someone else hold the reins of your undoing and pulling them so taught you think you’re going to snap, only to finally give you what you truly need and set you free over the edge?”

You shiver underneath him, closing your eyes. Good, he thinks. You’re listening, separating yourself from the rule-bound life you shouldn’t be bound to.

“What is it you really want, Y/N? What is it that you’re denying yourself of having? Of taking?”

“Nothing,” you whimper.

“Liar,” Hoseok grins. “You want so much more than this. You’re too much of a dreamer. Tell me, what do you want?”

“It’s none of your business,” you pant, though he can feel it, your resistance of your hold slipping.

“No, it’s not. But I’ll trade you. Your secret, your dreams for mine.”

You meet his gaze again, and Hoseok sees the shimmer in your eyes, curiosity blooming as you fall foolishly into his trap.

“Fine,” you yield. His grin spreads even further. He knows he probably looks deranged, but he can’t help it. He’s come this far. If the world is ending after this, he wants to know he at least spent his last moments of humanity trying to help someone else hold onto theirs.

“I want things that don’t matter. To be a mother someday. I want to write and sketch and sit in an open garden where I can stare at the sky from morning to night, counting all the stars over and over again and laughing when I lose count. I want laughter the most. For someone to pull it from me in the darkness. To bottle the feeling he gives me and fall asleep in his arms. I want to feel warm, like this, because it always feels so cold and lonely out here. And I’d miss home, but I want to leave it because it’s just as cold there during the summer winds than it is on the most mild winter days. And I want pleasure. Fuck, I need pleasure. I would divide up the universe for it. I want to feel alive as I do at this moment. Electricity, fire and ice all at once. I want to be taken and held, fucked, devoured as if I matter.”

You drag your hips up, and Hoseok gasps as you move yourself against his thigh, against what is now his throbbing erection.

He feels it too. Electricity. Fire. Ice. All at once. So he grinds his hips back down into you, giving you more pressure as he releases some of his. This is humanity, he thinks to himself. This is what I fear losing when I ascend.

He stops that thought there, buries it under the mountain of stability and refinement he’s been trained to put in its place.

“Fuck,” you hiss.

Hoseok releases your wrists, looking at your blown out pupils. He expects you to move away, but as your arms fall from over your head, they find hold on his biceps, steadying yourself as you move with each other.

“You owe me yours,” you say breathlessly and Hoseok laughs, his voice light and airy in his chest.

“You just want to know my dirty thoughts,” he teases and you dig your nails into his biceps, pinching him in warning.

More. I need more. Before all of this is gone.

He laughs again at the challenge. “Okay, okay, fine. If I dream of freedom like you, I dream of excitement. Sailing away to cities we know nothing of, learning about the people there. Dancing different dances in the street and eating foods I never would have thought I would taste. Losing days to pleasure instead of deciding what treaty needs to be signed, what law approved. Lazy mornings where I lick every inch of my lover.”

Hoseok leans in then and as if he is pulling you into his dream, licks a long strip down your neck, the salty dampness thrusting his hips sharper into yours. You moan.

Something in him shifts, a desperate need to hear it again. So he lathes his tongue along your neck and collarbone, sucking sharply on the skin after.

“Shit,” you rasp.

“Yes. That’s it. This is what you are missing out on, Y/N, pleasure.” He ruts against you. “I bet under those skirts you’re absolutely dripping, aren’t you? Isn’t this what you want?”

“Yes.”

“Then take it honey. Give yourself what you want.” He pulls back slightly, enough to keep his thigh firmly for you to use, and he sees the lust in your heavy eyelids, welcoming more of him into your orbit. He dips his head again, this time his tongue exploring the cleft between your breasts that peeks out over your dress. He hears you sigh, and hums in satisfaction.

He feels alive, not like those dinners with his family or sunsets in summer. This is different, a type of freedom he has never experienced before. Yes, he’s fucked people, he’s had fantastic sex in scandalous places, has known the thrumming of his pulse under his skin as he worked his body over another. But that was sex, and the two of you are still clothed, just exploring each other’s bodies.

It dawns on him. Is this what freedom is supposed to feel like?

He chases after the feeling, addicted now, teeth grazing along your breasts as you shiver below him, your hands leaving his biceps to pull through his hair, to cup the back of his neck to keep him steady.

“It could always be like this, if you wanted. Those sweet sighs, long days where you lie back and stare at the clouds and stars while coming undone on my mouth.” He presses back and you let him rise, where he fixes his gaze on your mouth.

You lick your lips, drawing him forward.

“We could forget the whole world and just be free,” he says, his lips resting mere millimeters away from yours.

And just as he moves in to claim them, Hoseok feels your hand on his chest, shoving him back. He recoils, pulling himself away to see your incredulous stare.

“We can’t just forget the whole world,” you say, and Hoseok takes a deep inhale, feeling the natural cold of the study quickly overtaking the heat in his body.

What happened? Weren’t you both on the same page?

“Why,” he asks. “Why not for a little while?”

“Why? Hoseok, look around us. What are we doing?”

He obeys, the gray walls of the study a dull reminder of reality. He looks back at you.

“I thought we were giving each other what we wanted,” he argues. “I thought you were finally understanding how much better things can be if you don’t keep pretending you don’t matter. Because you do.”

He takes a step forward again but you push him back again, harder.

Your face falls. “But I don’t.” You take a deep breath, pushing off the door and adjusting your dress. “Because what you are describing isn’t real. You said so yourself. It’s a dream. When we walk through those doors, you will be seated on the dais, waiting for the sun and moon to converge and to take your rightful place as a leader. And I will be standing in the crowd, watching you and my brother ascend and break this curse. I will not have the power to divide the universe for pleasure or anything else. I will go back to my kingdom, stare out at the cliff’s edge. Marry someone, maybe not the Duke, but someone and I’ll try to be happy. To live within my means. This is what the fates decided.”

Another jolt of reality slaps against him.

“Fuck the fates!” Hoseok roars, slamming his fist into the nearby bookshelf, toppling a few onto the floor. “Stop giving them this much power over us! To decide everything, to rip away the things we want!”

“Stop trying to assume you know what I want!” You yell back. “You don’t! You don’t know me! Stop trying to blame the fates for the world we live in! This is it! This is what we have. And we can’t play pretend that it could ever be any different. There are too many factors, too many risks. You said so yourself you care too much about your people to not do anything, so this feverish, desperate attempt at divorcing yourself from your reality needs to end.

“I’m sorry I fed into it even for a moment. I should have known better. I know it’s scary! I know this is fucking awful. A half an hour ago you were ready to dig your own grave over the reality of things. But that doesn’t mean we just…run from it!”

“I’m not running! Gods, I’m sorry I just wanted to find some other way to make our bleak reality feel better. So that when I walk into the Great Hall and stand before your monstrous brother, as I let my entire world shift beneath me, I could have something to ground me from what is to come. Do you feel it, too? That feeling of hope that things could be different? Of feeling alive? There’s hope in these dreams we have and–”

“And they’re dreams, Hoseok! They aren’t real!”

He feels like he’s been flayed open and then dragged through a pile of glass. He can see you drawing the curtain on yourself, going back into that hiding spot that he only just coaxed you from.

You scoff. “What, you fucking me in a field will somehow fix all of this? Suddenly I will be healed and you won’t become an immortal god slated to stop the end of the world as we know it?”

Hoseok sucks in a breath. His cheeks heat with embarrassment. Why did he let it go this far?

No, no you were just as much a part of this as him. “You didn’t seem to mind the idea of me fucking you a few minutes ago as you grinded against my thigh,” he says through gritted teeth.

“Don’t try and act like you didn’t want this too.”

“Stop! Stop assuming you know what I want!”

“Stop pretending that no one could ever understand what you want! Stop denying yourself of a life you could be living!”

Your hands clench into fists, and you close your eyes, drawing breath in and out.

“You know what Hoseok? I feel bad for you. Truly, I do. This is going to be a long road ahead and I know you feel like you don’t have a choice. But that doesn’t mean you get to choose for me. We are both imprisoned by something greater than us. Damned to be pawns in the universe’s game. But you need to get it through your head. This is fate. Like it or not. It’s time we stop dreaming about things that will never be real.”

His stomach sours, the music echoing down the hallway flooding his ears with an awful tinny ring. Somewhere inside me, the steady mountain of rock he’s steeled himself under cracks.

“Don’t say that.”

You are looking down, though he can hear from the shakiness in your voice you’re on the verge of crying again. “Dreaming is nice, isn’t it? It’s a break from reality. A moment we get to feel alive. But at some point, we have to wake up.”

“Stop.” He feels the fight leave him as the words lance from his throat, all the heaviness of the world that he’s been fated to carry bursting from him, toppling pillar after pillar, rock after rock among him.

“I’m sorry,” you cry. “This is just how it is. You have to be extraordinary. I have to be invisible.”

That goddamn phrase is like pouring acid on his open wounds. You’re doing this on purpose, he realizes. Adding to his agony and he doesn’t know why.

“Fuck you,” he spits, a knot forming in his throat as he tries to hold back his tears. “Fucking get out of my sight.”

You reach for the door handle, turning it and opening it a crack.

Bright light bursts forward, almost knocking Hoseok down. He can no longer see your face in the shock of it, just the glimmer of your gown as it captures the beams of the sun, using the very thing he will soon rule to blind him.

“I know you think you’re not worthy of this. Or that you can’t do it. But you can. I was there on your birthday. Maybe I was too good of a shadow or you were too drunk to remember. But you saw me as you snuck out, begged me not to say anything. So I didn’t. And I watched the fireworks from the window. Saw the spark that caught the fire. And Hoseok,” he can hear a smile in your voice. “At no point did I ever stop thinking it was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”

If there were any more rocks left in the mountain, they’ve now buried Hoseok alive under them. The fury and fight left extinguishes. With his eyes finally adjusting to the brightness, he watches you walk out of the dark study, toward the Great Hall, never looking back.

The rage that licks at him starts to fall away, the dullness of the room now more familiar and steadying.

After a few moments, he composes himself, sliding the mask of allegiance, passion, and love back into place over his crumpled spirit. You are right. This is just how it is.

When he steps into the light, a flicker of something on the wall catches his eye, and he realizes it’s a refraction of light like the ones you caused in the study. But you’re nowhere to be found in the hallway. Puzzled, he looks down at himself, his chest tightening at the realization.

The glitter of your dress has transferred onto him, a large concentration of it along his crotch, but it’s everywhere, even in his hair. In a flurry, he tries to brush it off, to not draw suspicion from other party goers about you two humping like wild animals in his father’s study. But he realizes it’s useless.

You’ve left your mark on him and he can’t get rid of it. As he catches his glimmering reflection in the window, Hoseok can’t help but think that he looks like he’s covered in stars.

#bts fanfic #bts smut #hoseok #hoseok smut #hoseok fanfic #hoseok x reader #jhope #jhope fanfic #jhope x reader #jung hoseok

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honeylikewords · 1 year

Text

penumbra. (jack russell)

jack and his wife are separated during the full moon. (set in the events of the pregnancy arc!)

(warnings: descriptions of food and eating, non-descript vomiting, scenes of fear and anxiety; first ever attempt at writing slightly angsty, potentially hurt/comfort fic(?), everything works out so don’t worry! word count: 6k.)

“Beaver moon,” Jack says, hands in his pockets. He’s staring at a patch of clouds that are skating rapidly across the icy blue sky, nose high in the air. Smelling the wind for what’s to come.

His eyes flick to the side to catch a glimpse of her as she comes to stand next to him, arms crossed over her waist to brace against the chill, and he extends a hand to invite her to stand closer. She does, and she is instantly met with the radiating warmth of Jack’s feverish body temperature as he pulls her into his side; he rubs a hand along her upper arm in soothing arcs, and the heat of his touch comforts her.

“Beaver moon?”

When he’s distant, lost to her, she’s found that pressing him with innocuous questions can help draw him out. An easy opportunity to explain something can warm him back up to talking, and one hapless conversation may branch into a more expository one, and she hopes that getting him to talk about this will help him talk about that. It’s on the horizon, and, presumably, the driving force behind his shift in mood.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “November’s moon. That’s what they called it in, eh, the Farmer’s Almanac.”

He chuckles a little and shakes his head, gaze returning to the skies, and she watches his face as his eyes wander farther and farther away. His thumb creates slow circles on her elbow as he holds her close, and when he does speak again, he mumbles.

“They re-named all the moons of the year. Borrowed--” --he says the word with some sourness-- “--From the people already here. Made up new names for old things. I remember when they started. But there are names, real ones, that people do use.”

Jack turns to look back at her, and she can see something dark hiding in his bright eyes. She knows the expression that has come to linger all too well, from the severity of the lines between his eyebrows to the way he pulls his lips taut, chewing the inside of his cheek. The crease over the bridge of his nose gets more pronounced, and the darkness under his eyes brings a haggard weight to his gaze. A hardness of muscle, a thinness of blood, a lack of color. He’s afraid of something. She feels the knot of fear growing in her belly, too.

She should be used to it, by now. Sometimes, she feels like she is. But every month, like clockwork, when the atmosphere will become tense, Jack’s anxieties become her own, no matter how much she tries to assuage them.

“This month’s a total lunar eclipse,” he adds.

“A blood moon.”

Jack never tells her exactly where it is he goes, and he insists that she doesn’t tell him where she’s planning to go, either.

“Just make it deep into the city,” he reminds her. “The deeper you go, the harder it will be for me to get there.”

“Jack, you wouldn’t--”

He puts a hand up, firmly halting the conversation, and finishes putting the last of his clothes in the duffel bag. As he zips it up, he glances at her and sees the hurt in her face, a downcast expression coming over his own. They’ve had this conversation before, but repetition it doesn’t make it any easier.

“I’m sorry, bebé. I know. But… we can’t risk it.”

Jack rounds the edge of the bed to come to her side, cupping her face in his hands. Regret and longing shadow him as he pets her cheeks, and she doesn’t like the way he’s studying her face; she’s afraid he’s looking at her for what he believes to be the last time. They’ve done this before, dozens of times, so why does this one feel so different? Shaking off the thoughts, she steels herself and holds his hand to her face, meeting his eyes.

“We have our systems,” she reminds him. “You’ll be alright. You’ll come back, all in one big, hairy piece.”

He wrinkles his nose at that. She can’t tell if he’s trying not to laugh or if he’s just uncomfortable, but whatever the reality, it doesn’t seem that her attempt at a joke broke much of the tension in him at all. Damn.

Instead of replying, Jack pauses, then bends forward and kisses her on the crest of her hairline. As his lips warm her, he draws in a deep breath through his nose, his eyes faltering shut as he takes in her scent. He inhales so deeply that she feels a few of her hairs lift off her head; it tickles, and she can’t help the small bubble of noise that escapes her. After a long moment of him standing completely still, nose pressed to her scalp, she feels Jack shift, turning to rapidly kiss every inch of her face.

“I,” he mumbles, kissing her temple, “love,” a kiss to her nose, “you,” a kiss to her cupid’s bow, “so,” now one on the corner of her jaw, “much.”

He plants another dozen across her cheeks and chin and ears and hair, until she’s certain he’s gotten each individual centimeter of surface area her face has, and then pulls back, hands remaining cupped around her face and keeping her in his view as long as possible.

“I will come back to you.” His voice is low, tired. But the promise is powerful. “And we will be alright.”

“I know,” she replies. “I’m going to miss you.”

“It’s only one night,” shrugs Jack, trying to seem blasé. “You might like the break from me. Get a little ‘you’ time in. Watch something you know I’d hate. Eat something with mushrooms.”

“Sounds fun.” It comes out more mournful than she meant for it to.

Out in the yard, branches snap: the cue. Jack frowns, the lines of his face deeper than ever and she thinks, in that moment, that all the hundreds of years have abruptly caught up to him. Wordless, he sighs, presses his nose to her cheek, and gives her one last, long kiss, savoring the plushness of her lips and the scent of her skin, before pulling away.

He grabs his bag off the bed and then takes her hand, the two of them walking in tandem through the house until they reach the back door, where Jack opens it and sees Ted squatting in the bushes. The massive creature waves sweetly at the two of them, and she waves back.

“Take care of my husband,” she smiles. Ted nods his tentacled head.

Jack hesitates in the doorway. The hand that grasps hers guides their encircled fingers to her belly, and he lets go of her with a trail of his fingers across it. His eyes hold there before he scratches at one ear, surprisingly aggressive, and breaks himself from his reverie.

“I end up having to take care of him, you know,” grumbles Jack, a hint of a smile pulling at his lips.

Ted makes an elephantine grunt and Jack rolls his eyes.

“Ay, I’m coming, man.”

Finally, Jack takes the step to go. He walks across the yard, towards the treeline that leads into the forest, where Ted holds open a gap in the bushes. As he crosses the barrier into the woods, Jack looks back at his wife, and the two of them do their best to be the one to look away first.

It’s only one night.

She breaks first, wiping her eyes on the back of her hand, and when she manages to clear her throat and look back up, both men are long gone.

Paying in cash at the hotel is always extremely embarrassing.

Jack insists, every month, that cards can’t be used-- “They leave a paper trail, querida,” he admonishes-- so he gives her a massive pile of bills to use at her discretion for the night. It always garners looks.

The concierge had raised both eyebrows and quirked his lips to the side before remembering his job and her presence, penitently smiling at her as he counted out the hundreds for the room, and she’d stood at the counter in a haze of discomfort while he made the key card.

She wonders idly if this one would spread rumors of a “lady of the night” or a “woman on the run” in the break room to his coworkers, then continues unpacking her toiletries on the bathroom counter, dismissive. It doesn’t really matter what he says so long as he and all the other people in this city make enough noise and light and stench to keep the wolf at bay.

That was the hope Jack had each month, sending her into the city: the hope that the chaos of human civilization would scare the wolf away from wherever she might be. That their secrecy would keep any memories, even subconscious, out of the wolf’s mind. That he wouldn’t know where to find her, even if he did hunt for her. That was the system.

So far, it has worked.

She does her best to whittle down the hours as sunset begins. Television, phone scrolling, reading, folding and unfolding her clothes for the night and following morning. None of it sufficiently puts to rest the images in her mind; Jack, locked in a cage somewhere, waiting for the agony to begin. Jack, alone. Jack, transformed.

Getting up from the edge of the bed, she moves to sit in the stiff, polyester-upholstered armchair by the window and stares out at the skyline. The city seems to be burning to the ground as the sun sinks between the skyscrapers and streets, dipping lower and lower into the horizon, before being extinguished as moonrise begins. Blue-black night stretches over the land, and thousands of streetlights and windows and signs flare to life, filling the darkness, pushing it back.

The room is too quiet, even with the television running for background noise. She fidgets with a loose thread on the arm of the chair as her stomach churns. She can’t stop thinking about Jack, and how his attitude had been so foreign; he was always withdrawn and anxious before the full moon, but he’d seemed more frightened than usual this time. Her gut contorts when she thinks to herself that he may have been giving her a goodbye, somehow, as if this was the end of something, and all of a sudden--

She bolts up from the chair so violently it rocks over, and rushes to the bathroom, collapsing on her knees in front of the toilet.

“For the love of God,” she moans, voice echoing in the now-full bowl. “Really?”

Nobody answers, but she stands on shaking legs and wipes her mouth with a tissue, flushing the whole affair down the toilet as she brushes her teeth and tongue forcefully. When she’s done, she kicks at the wastebasket in the bathroom and glares at her stomach as it makes a loud, wet growl.

“Seriously? Now you’re hungry?”

The sudden pang, both of pain and hunger, shoots through her and she narrows her eyes further, sighing in frustration and moving to get her coat.

Jack normally instructs her that once the moon is up, she cannot leave wherever it is that she’s hiding. Staying behind doors and walls and out of the open air creates interference, he says, and that interference is key to keeping the beast confused. “If he can’t smell you, he can’t find you.”

Well, wherever he is, she reasons to herself, he’s not going to smell her deep in the heart of the city, much less in the few minutes it will take her to get from her room to the nearby pizza place. The jacket is shrugged on and she opens the suite door, a cold thrill running through her as she breaks one of the rules of the full moon. So much for the system.

She breaks it further still as she leaves the hotel lobby and ambles into the restaurant a block westward, gazing at the menu blearily before ordering two slices: one of her standard order, the second a surprising combination of mushrooms, peppers and pineapple that makes the man behind the counter scoff as he jots it down on the pad. Another fistful of loose bills is tendered, this time to no surprise.

She takes a bite her familiar pizza, first, sitting at a sticky plastic table in the far corner of the restaurant, closer to where the cooking is happening. She figures that if she’s going to break the rules, she might as well balance it out by doing them safely by masking herself in the hot, smelly din of the kitchen. The pizza is a warm meal on an empty stomach, so it tastes better than usual, and she scarfs the first piece down quickly before turning her attention to this new order.

The mushrooms had originally been a little joke-- as one of Jack’s least favorite foods, they seldom turned up in any meals they shared, so she would order them when he was away-- but the other toppings had been ordered on impulse, all of them individually hungered for. Pineapple for its tart sweetness, peppers for their verdant crunch, mushrooms for their earthy meatiness; she piles a massive amount of the tinned parmesan cheese atop her slice and dives in ravenously.

It is a little strange at first, she admits, but scratches an itch she doesn’t quite understand, and she soon finds herself chewing through the crust, the piece decimated and digested. She marvels at herself for housing it that fast and wonders if she might have forgotten to eat earlier today, lost in all the stress of Jack’s departure. Not quite satiated by both pieces, she returns to the counter, orders another slice of the mixed-topping pizza, and takes it to go.

She walks out the front door with the piece in hand, clutched in a slightly oily napkin, and begins to walk through the cold streets of the city, watching through windows as businesses shutter for the night and families turn out the lights in bedrooms and dens. The world is getting ready to sleep, and she feels restless.

Midway across the street that would take her onto the block her hotel sits on, she decides that she can’t go back to the room right now. The stillness is too intimidating, too constricting. She knows that if she locks herself in that suite, she’ll sit, motionless, on the edge of the bed, cycling through the same thoughts that had led her here, making herself sicker and sicker. The mere idea of being in that sterile, dimly home-like room sends a clench through her abdomen, so she chooses to keep breaking the rules.

She takes a left and crosses another street, meandering into the city park that spans multiple blocks. She’d seen it coming in towards the hotel, and knows where the hotel sits in position to it, so she won’t get lost, she figures, passing through the low gates of the park and following the paved paths past a bed of trees and unpetaled rose bushes.

The grass underfoot crunches dryly, almost entirely dead, as she works on her piece of pizza and wanders aimlessly through the park. Now that she’s had about two and a third of these large slices, she’s beginning to feel full, and the remaining two-thirds slice in her hand is becoming less and less appetizing as it gets colder and she thinks more on her worries. She doesn’t want to vomit again, so she decides to give herself a break from it and moves to sit on an empty bench overlooking a glass-smooth pond.

It’s a calming sight: the park is entirely empty, the water features all turned off, and all that she can hear is the wind through the trees and the distant sound of traffic, muffled by the foliage. The night sky is dim, starless thanks to the city’s light pollution, but the moon, enormous and luminous, cuts through the darkness, viciously bright. It glows orange-red, the penumbra of the earth edging in; the blood moon.

She thinks of him as she stares at the moon, mindlessly picking at the food in her hands. The wind gusts a cluster of leaves down from the tree tops and they rain down onto the surface of the pond, sending ripples flowing across the water, reflecting red moonlight in arcs and waves. Somewhere, a dead limb cracks off a tree and falls to the earth with a heavy thud, and she jumps a little, nails digging into the mushroom she’d peeled off the pizza and was ripping apart on the napkin.

It occurs to her, now, that she is a woman alone in a major city, in a park, at night. She checks her surroundings carefully, noting no sign of other people, and tries to remember which way the hotel is; after a moment’s consideration, she decides that it’s to her right and that she’ll follow the path out to the nearest street, which she should be able to cross and get back to the hotel via.

As she begins to stand, another crack issues through the silence of the park, this one less heavy but nearer than the first. It sounded more like something crunching through shrubbery, something with enough mass to disturb leaves and snap branches. Human? Animal? She isn’t sure; do coyotes come this far into the city? She’d heard that they sometimes wandered the suburbs, attacking dogs; now isn’t the time to remember things about coyotes, she thinks. Now is the time to move. Her heart is pounding, dread setting in around her, and she moves as quietly as she can towards the path that leads right, staring at the space she thinks the sound came from. Unfortunately, it works: she sees what she’s looking for.

In the light of the red moon, she sees it.

Something massive, much bigger than any coyote could ever hope to be, rises from a span of bushes a few yards away from the bench, hunkered low but coming up taller and taller and taller. Every inch it rises is another dagger in her heart, her ears slamming with the sound of her blood, and if she had half a wit left in her, she’d scream: scream until whatever it was went deaf, scream until all the city knew where she was, scream until her throat bled. But all she can do is stumble backward, unable to take her eyes off the indistinct thing in the darkness, her body begging her to move back, into the light, into the safety of numbers, into anywhere but here, as everything else shuts down.

She keeps taking rapid, wobbling steps back, faster and faster, eyes transfixed, as the shape pushes out from the bushes and begins moving across the grass, shadowed and faster than anything she’s ever seen before. It races at her as she tries to turn around and run, and she begins scrambling up the path when whatever it is lets out an inhuman screech that crescendoes into an unearthly howl, so loud it rings her ears and makes her start dry-sobbing, trying, still, to run.

Before she can get anywhere close to the edge of the path, the creature is behind her, arms around her chest, yanking her backward into the night, and she finally manages to let out a belting scream before--

She is laying on her back, in the grass, at the side of the pond, and the thing is over her, staring down. Her body is pinned under the creature, with its knees on either side of her abdomen, one of its hands under the backside of her head and the other supporting the small of her back. The arms holding her still must be enormously strong, as she feels that her weight is not resting against the earth, but rather solely in the grasp of the beast.

It tilts its head from side to side as it inspects her closely, and she takes advantage of the moment to do the same. In the full, bright light of the moon, it’s much easier to see what exactly this thing is; it’s certainly humanoid, to be sure. Wide shoulders covered in a dense pelt of fur block out the sky behind it, and its bare chest is similarly hairy, tapering into a manlike waist. It’s all bare, actually, excepting a shredded pair of sweatpants that fit tightly against the creature’s lean legs and that are torn below the knee, making room for its massive calves. The hair seems to be densest around the thing’s face and neck, where it splays out in a dark mane, backlit by the moon to create a halo of red-brown tendrils that shift with every breeze. Its nose is long, flared into a wide, brown snout that clefts into two distinct curves of cartilage; every breath drawn through it rankles its top lip, curling it into a snarl. Twin sets of razor-sharp incisors glint wetly in the light, framed by lips that hang open as it breathes, hard, through its mouth.

Most noticeable, however, are its eyes.

They glow from underneath massive eyebrows, peering at her through the darkness, twin sparks of the aurora borealis. Green. They’re green.

Her own eyes swim with tears and her throat closes up, unable to make any sound but little sore gulps, and the creature bends down to rub its canine nose against her jaw, whimpering in the back of its throat sympathetically.

No, she corrects, not its: his. She would know him anywhere.

Jack pushes his face along the underside of her chin, whining into her neck, and uses the hand cradling her head to push her into the crook of his, rubbing her in. At first, the action confuses her, and she rankles her nose at the strong scent of his sweat against his damp, musky fur, but it dawns on her that the smell is, in fact, the purpose of the gesture: he needs her to smell him as he is smelling her. The wolf wants her to know that she is with her mate, and believes the scent is key to convincing her. She settles for winding her fingers into the matted span hair that covers his back and shoulders and crying, equal parts relieved and frightened, into his pelt.

She shakes and sobs as the wolf presses her to his chest, and Jack lets out pained, short barks, baying and howling pityingly. He pushes her as close to his skin as he can get her, and his skin is so hot it burns her cheeks, already sore from crying; if she didn’t know better, she’d think he was on death’s door with a fatal fever. As her breathing starts to lull and the sobs mellow into hiccups, Jack shifts her weight closer to him, rising to his feet with her in his arms.

The shock sends her scrambling in his hold, gripping onto his shoulders and yelping in fright. Jack lets out a huff and bumps his nose against her temple, a silent attempt to calm her, and he begins moving back towards the trees, seeming intent on going deeper into the park. Tentatively, she puts a hand on his chest and pushes, and he stops, head jerking back in confusion. She watches his huge eyebrows knit together and he bares his teeth; it’s not a threat, but a question, his familiar eyes searching her face for an explanation.

“Jack, we have to get you out of here,” she rasps. “You’re not safe in the city.”

If he understands, he doesn’t show it; Jack decides to keep walking toward the trees, and she has to push again to get him to stop. This time, he lets out a growl, his hold on her tightening, but he does relent and holds still, waiting in the shadow of a tree.

“Where’s Ted? Why aren’t you in your…”

Her voice trails off as she realizes she doesn’t know what to ask, and that even if she did, Jack probably isn’t capable of responding. He cocks his head at her and frowns, again pushing his nose into the side of her face and nuzzling against her skin, and she melts under his touch. For as long as she’s known him, Jack has been firm with her that this part of himself is too hideous, too deadly for her to see, but, now, all she can see is her husband, vulnerable despite the power of his transformation.

She takes a moment to do some mental math, weighing her options. She can’t let Jack out of her sight for the rest of the night, that much she knows, but how she’ll get him to safety is the truly unknown element. Getting back to their house wouldn’t be entirely feasible, as she’d taken a taxi to get here, and getting him back to wherever he chose to hide during his transformations was out, since she both did not know where it was and knew that wherever it was, it was not in any condition to hold him: he’d gotten out, after all.

That left two options: try to sneak Jack out through the city on foot, or…

“Jack? Baby?”

His ears perk and he pulls his face out of her neck, head cocked like a dog listening for instructions. Jack’s pink tongue slips out and wets his lips and teeth and he flashes her something that she tries to interpret as a smile, but that reads more closely to a grimace. It endears her all the same.

“You need to come with me, okay?”

Jack stirs with a groan, his eyes blurry and unfocused. Everything is scaldingly bright, burning his retinas, and he covers his face with a large hand, rubbing at his sore lids and wiping away the crust of a heavy, pained sleep.

“Morning, Puppy,” he hears.

Oh, still dreaming. That’s frustrating. Jack hates it when he dreams that she’s near, only to wake up alone. It’s like barreling headlong into a glass door. He rolls over on his side and throws an arm over his head, snarling through his teeth at the world.

Of course he’d have a dream like this after a night like that. Dream that she’s rubbing his back, dream that she’s pressing her lips to his hands, dream that her scent is wrapped all around him, filling the room.

He tries to burrow his face into the pillow and block out the light, only to find that his pillow is hot. Solid. Not at all fabric, but certainly plush. He growls in frustration, wondering if he fell asleep on top of a deer carcass again: that'd be hell to wash out of his hair. But the pillow smells like her… painfully so. He pushes his face in deep and moans in misery.

"Are you still hurting?"

"Yes," he says, voice rough and cracking. "Everything hurts. Miss you."

"...You miss me?"

Jack opens one eye and stares up at the fuzzy, dark shape hovering at the periphery of his vision. From a certain angle, and with just the right amount of blinked clarity, it does sort of look like her. He figures getting it all out of his system in a dream is as good an option as any, and he rubs his rough-stubbled cheek into his warm, rising and falling pillow, sighing.

"I hate being away from you, amorcita," he rumbles. "Makes me feel like complete shit. I already feel like shit, then I come out of it, and you're not there, and I become, uh, doubleshit."

"Doubleshit?"

"Mm."

"You're not doubleshit," she purrs. A hand strokes the exposed curve of his face and he tilts his chin to meet it; this is certainly one of his more indulgent dreams. Lusciously detailed. It'll be hell to wake up from. "You're alright, now."

Jack wrinkles his brow and scrunches both eyes tightly before reopening them, rolling on his pillow to face upward. His gaze clears and focuses: her face is now visible, looking down on him from above. He squints at her.

“...What are you doing?”

At his question she knits her brow and smiles, shaking her head in amused confusion.

She looks so beautiful that it takes Jack out of his mind and into a purely animal place: all he wants to do is stare at her, at the angles of her face, the slope of her nose, the curvature of her lips. He wants to ingrain this thought in the forefront of his mind and forget everything else; the pain in his body, the ravages of the night before, the wild haze of unclear memories. All that matters is this.

One of her delicate hands reaches down and scritches at his chin, right in his favorite spot, the one that always sends his leg twitching, and he’s too worn to hold back the relieved moan that issues out of him, his whole body oozing into languid comfort. His eyes flutter shut, and he revels in the sensation of her. Oh, she really knows how to get him.

When her nails catch on a rough patch of stubble that tugs a little, it occurs to Jack that he is not, in fact, dreaming. That accidental scrape of nails feels too organic to have been generated by his fuzzy mind; his eyes flash open, staring up at her.

She pulls back briefly, and Jack leans up, cocking his head. This is not a dream. She is there, sitting above him. His mind goes blank.

Jack pushes himself onto his elbows and looks around at his surroundings, bewildered, heart racing. This is not his safe room. These are not concrete walls. They’re wallpapered, with tacky, directionless paintings glued on. He’s laying on a completely destroyed mattress, body between her legs, instead of on the cold floor of his cell. He’d gotten out, somehow, and--

“Jack, baby, it’s okay,” she says, reaching around to wrap her arms about his chest and tug his back flush to her body. He trembles a little in her grasp, feeling her pressing reassuring kisses all along his face and shoulders, but the sound of her voice and the touch of her hands brings him back down to earth, bit by bit. “It’s just me. You’re alright. We made it through the night.”

“We…?”

“You… found me, remember?”

A low series of curses in a mixture of languages seep from his lips as he turns on the bed, taking her face in his hands. He paws at her, tugging clothes aside and pushing her limbs this way and that as he anxiously studies every inch of her, checking her face and body for wounds, bandages, scars: any sign that the wolf had harmed her. He’d gotten loose? And, worse yet, he’d managed to get to wherever she was?

“Did I--”

“You didn’t hurt me, Jack,” she reprimands. His eyes rise up to hers; her gaze is firm, unyielding in its promise. “You were looking for me.”

“I… I don’t know how I got out,” he admits, stroking one of her cheeks. “I’ve never done that, before.”

“Well, it’s certainly a first, but… as far as I can tell, all you did was come to find me. I think you wanted to take me home, actually.”

He looks at the room. This is definitely not home.

“But I, uh, didn’t let that happen.”

Jack frowns. This just keeps getting more and more mystifying.

“You fought the wolf?,” he asks. When she rolls her eyes and shakes her head, he frowns even more deeply and presses further. “Then… what?”

“I just… asked you to follow me. I took you back to the hotel.”

“We’re at a hotel?!”

Reeling, Jack holds onto her shoulder for support and stares out at the room. Of course. Her hotel room. He recognizes all the telltale signs-- the chipped wooden furniture, the clunky black plastic amenities, the pale orange lighting-- but sees all of it in disarray. Claw marks line the overturned armchair by the window. Stuffing leaks out of the loveseat. All the sheets are shredded, the mattress beneath them carved with long, hard gouges. He thinks he sees bite marks on the legs of the writing desk.

The idea that the wolf was in a hotel room at all flummoxes Jack; that he could pass dozens, maybe even hundreds of opportunities to hunt, all sitting quietly in their little, individually-wrapped rooms seems impossible. Surely, he must have left a wake of destruction behind himself... right?

Jack peers down the entryway and notes that the front door of the suite is shut, with the desk chair shoved under the handle at such an angle that the door is, essentially, barricaded. He wonders if she put that there to keep others out, or to keep him in; either way, it seems to have worked. He can’t smell blood, nor decay, though there’s a minor tinge of stomach acid. She must have gotten sick rather recently, at least within the last hour, and Jack lets out a frustrated whimper at the idea of her being ill and his being unable to help her.

He collapses into her, pulling them both down onto the mattress, and exhaustedly moves his head to lay on her body. He isn’t even particularly conscious of his movements, just letting his instincts take over and guide him, and he ends up curled around her, his head firmly pressed into her belly, hands gripping her sides as she pets his hair to comfort him. Everything washes over him in a depleting wave, and he surrenders to her wholly, burrowing his face into her and kissing mindlessly into her tummy.

“This is actually how you slept for most of the night,” she remarks, playing with the patch of hair over his right ear. “Just like this.”

Her belly must have been the pillow he mistook for a deer carcass. If he wasn’t so drained, he might have been a little embarrassed by the error. It doesn’t matter, now. All that matters is getting her home, safe and sound, and making sure that none of this follows them back. Pay all this off. Get out without being seen. Find Ted. Repair and re-structure the safe room. The list keeps growing.

But he’ll straighten all of that out later. In the moment, Jack just wants to lay still and revel in her: it’s the first time he’s woken up from a transformation with her right there, by his side, and it fulfills some emptiness he had only dreamed of easing. She’s here. She’s holding him. He’s safe in her arms. What more could a man ask for?

His hand straggles up and he lays it next to his face on her tummy, tracing intricate patterns into the skin under her shirt. The texture of her skin is so familiar and grounding that he nearly is lulled back to sleep, his eyes drifting shut, palm splayed across her belly, but he manages to fight through and stir himself awake, blinking heavily up at her.

“You’re incredible,” he manages. “I don’t know how you do it, but you’re, you know, just… I love you.”

He’s not quite aware of his words, more cognizant of the feelings behind them than of their actual structure, and relents: maybe he can’t express himself like that right now. Still too frazzled. Instead, he settles for leaning in, and presses a kiss deep and hard into the softness of her belly. She pets the hair at the nape of his neck, mumbling her response distantly.

“I didn’t really do much of anything, I don’t think,” she says. “I just asked. You listened.”

The idea of the wolf listening to anyone should surprise Jack. But instead, he blinks, pensive, and nods into her stomach; if ever there was a voice that could compel him, both halves, wholly and completely, it would be hers.

“And I love you, too. All of you, by the way.”

“I tore apart a mattress,” Jack moans. “You sure you love that part?”

She laughs, the sound softening every line in Jack’s face as he relaxes into her, and she rubs his shoulders with a doting firmness that makes his heart sing.

“I do, actually; it was kind of cute. I think you were just trying to make a bed pile for us.”

“Leave it to you to,” he mumbles, trailing off, “to find something cute in a werewolf.”

“‘S not my fault. You’re the one who’s a cute werewolf. I’m just an impartial observer, making a statement of fact.”

Jack doesn’t have nearly enough energy to play-argue with her, but he has enough that he manages to open his eyes and stare up at her. Something looks different about her, now: a glow to her features, not quite new, but more pronounced. He wonders if she’s just his guardian angel, come to care for him, and that what he’s seeing is her halo; that must be it. Her halo.

Her light outshines the moon; the wolf bays for her, now.

links to previous fics in this series:

cubs.

familia.

thank you for reading! comments and replies are always appreciated, and give me immense motivation to continue these stories! feel free to let me know what you thought and what you’d like to see next!

#werewolf by night #jack russell #jack russell x reader #wwbn #wbn #marvel #jack russel #jack russel x reader #ALRIGHT so. lot to unpack here. Implications of things. Things Yet To Come. Tropes. much to discuss. i will not give it away here tho #i also wanted to post this before the blood moon so >:3 get a load of that #this was all written in less than 24 hrs in just about one sitting without any proof reading or editing from outside sources so.#if you see any spelling or grammar errors no you didnt. you did NOT.#ghdhghgh anyway i hope you all enjoy!!!#i wonder if you guys will be able to Figure Out some of what this is Indicating gkdhgkhg #ANYWAY BYE GO CHECK THE MOON LATER

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